“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to go.”
“Where? Where are you going?”
“Somewhere east of Bremen. A place called Belsen.”
It didn’t really matter where he was going, she wept, it was the fact that he was going at all. Why hadn’t he told her?
He hadn’t been sure: he was substituting for someone else at the last minute; he’d pulled strings not to go this day in order to see her. He would be back. The war was nearly over, and, anyway, he would be back.
He left at five in the morning to catch a plane. She hated the flat without him. She got up and tidied everything and wondered what on earth to do. She couldn’t go back to Sussex so soon (she was supposed to be returning on Monday). Then she suddenly thought of Archie, and rang him, but there was no answer. It was awful, the way she could think of nobody, not a single person, she could go and see. She spent the day walking about the streets as sometimes she used to do with Jack, eating some spaghetti in the small Italian restaurant that they used to go to together and afterwards returning to the flat where she lay on the bed to read, but almost at once fell asleep.
When she woke, it was nearly seven o’clock. There did not seem to be much point in getting up, since she had nowhere to go. She longed for someone to talk to about Jack, and started to dial Archie’s number, but then changed her mind. He was Rupert’s best friend, after all. She got up in search of food. There was half a packet of biscuits and some of the powdered orange juice that Jack drank in the mornings. She made herself a glass of this, and ate the biscuits, and went to bed again where she lay for hours, wakeful, worrying about where he was and whether he was in a safe place, and when he would return.
Early on Monday morning she rang Home Place and said she was catching the early train back so that Tonbridge would meet her.
She heard nothing from him that week, and then the following Friday he rang—at lunch-time, thank goodness, because it meant that the Brig was not in his study. Rachel had answered the telephone. She did not say who it was, but Zoë knew somehow that it would be Jack.
“Sorry to call you at lunch-time. I was wondering whether you could get away for tonight?”
“Oh, Jack! Why can’t you give me more notice? I’ve just said I’ll look after the children so that the nurse can have the weekend off.”
“It wouldn’t be for the weekend. Just for tonight.” There was a pause, and then he said, “I’d really like to see you.”
“You make it so difficult. You know I want to come. I can’t, though. I really can’t.”
“OK. That’s it, then.”
There was a click, and she realized he had rung off. She rang his office, but they said he was not there; had not been there for some days. She rang the flat, and there was no reply. She went back to the dining room and pretended to finish her lunch.
All the afternoon, when, after their rests, she walked the children up to the shop in Watlington and back, she felt sick with anxiety. Now, if he were able to ask her, she would have dropped everything, and simply caught the next train—walked to the next station, if need be. Why had he rung off like that? It was not like anything she knew of him. But he had sounded strange: as though he knew something, or was concealing something—was angry—with her? Oh, God! Why had he rung off like that?
“We want to go back through the fields,” Wills was announcing. They had reached the gate that opened onto the road from the field where the Home Place land began.
“No, we’re going by the road today.”
“Why are we? Why, Mummy? What good will it do?”
“We want to go back to the field with the charabanc tree.”
This was a fallen pine tree where the passengers sat on the branches while one person drove holding the upturned roots as a steering wheel and the other walked precariously up the trunk dispensing tickets (oak leaves).
“Clary let us last weekend,” Roly said.
“Yes, and she played with us. She didn’t just stand about like Ellen talking about clean hands and meals.”
“Grown-ups,” scoffed Wills. “I’m just not going to be one, they are so boring.”
“When you’re a hundred, you’ll be an awfully old child.”
One of them was climbing the gate now. She’d either have to give in or stop them.
“I shall. The oldest child in the world. People will come for miles to see me. I shall be quite small but extremely wrinkly with specs. And a white beard.”
“You’ll be a dwarf, then,” Roly said.
“No, I shall not. I hate them. I hate their pointed red caps.”
She gave in. It seemed easier at the time.
“You can have ten minutes playing charabancs,” she said, as they trudged through the long wet bright green grass.
“Ten minutes! Ten hours is what we want.”
“Ten days.”
“Ten weeks.”
“Ten hundred years,” said Juliet, pre-empting any further crescendo.
She looked at her pretty daughter, who was wearing a tweed coat, cast off by Lydia some years ago as too small for her, black Wellingtons and a scarlet beret that was currently her favourite thing, and for the first time, the thought that in some unknown distance of time they might be in America together lingered in her mind. It seemed so extraordinary, and yet, what else could happen? One day, she thought, I shall look back on this house and the family as distant landmarks, which she supposed was how she now thought of Rupert. Then she thought of the family—particularly the Duchy—of how completely they had taken her in and made her one of themselves, of how this place, and she used to be bored in the country, had become her home in a way that no place she had lived in with her poor mother had ever been. She would have to leave her, too—and curiously, although she had endured three further visits to the Isle of Wight since the one she had returned from to meet Jack—“Don’t you dare speak to any strange man you may meet on that train,” he had enjoined her the first time she went after they had become lovers—curiously, that seemed hard, because she knew it would be hard on her mother, whereas leaving here would be harder for her than for any of the family. She would take Jack to see her mother, for her sake. And, of course, they would return to England to visit.
“How far are you going, madam?”
“America,” she said without thinking.
“America? America? We don’t go there, madam. We go to Hastings and then we go to Bexhill. You can go to both of them if you like.” A damp leaf was thrust into her hand.
When she felt that everybody had had a turn at being the driver, the conductor and a mere passenger, she said it was time for tea. The person who was the driver—Juliet—said it wasn’t fair, she hadn’t been driving nearly as long as the other two, but the other two, having had their turn, sided with Zoë about tea.
“Yes, you have,” they said brutally, “long enough for your age.”
Tea had begun by the time they got back. It took place in the hall where the long table was spread with a cloth and the Duchy presided at one end with the teapots. Jack was sitting at her right hand.
“Here she is,” the Duchy was saying as she came in with the children, tearing off their coats and boots to get at the tea. “Captain Greenfeldt has called on us, darling. Your friend, Margaret, told him where we were and as he was passing by he thought he would call. Isn’t that nice?” And as she met her mother-in-law’s frank and penetrating eye she knew that the Duchy knew.
Jack had risen as she came into the room. “Just a quick call,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.” Her mouth was dry, and she sat, almost collapsed, into a chair opposite him at the table.
“If you were a proper American,” Lydia said, “you’d have rushed round and pulled out her chair for her. That’s what they do in films. But we don’t do it here. Perhaps you knew that.”
“Mummy, my socks have come off with my boots so could I just be in my feet for tea?”
“He is
American,” Wills said. “You can tell by his uniform.” He was eight and very interested in soldiers.
“Don’t talk about people in front of them as ‘he,’” Rachel said. She was pouring mugs of milk.
“Is this your daughter?” Of course he knew that she was.
“Yes.”
Juliet had slipped into the seat beside her and was now gazing at Jack with unblinking intensity.
“Captain Greenfeldt was telling us that he is just back from Germany,” the Duchy was saying as she passed Zoë a cup of tea.
She suddenly remembered him saying “a place called Belsen” which, during the last ten days, had been much and horribly in the news.
“Did you go to take photographs at the Belsen camp?”
“I did.”
“Oh,” said Villy, “that must have been simply horrifying. Those poor, poor people!”
“I think,” the Duchy said, “that perhaps pas devant les enfants.”
“Not in front of the children,” Lydia said. “We all knew that ages ago.”
Wills, who often quoted him, said, “Tonbridge said it was a death camp. But he said it was mostly Jews in it. What are Jews?”
Jack said, “I am a Jew.”
Wills looked at him gravely. “You don’t look at all different,” he said. “I don’t see how they could tell.”
Lydia, who did not read newspapers or talk to Tonbridge, now said, “Do you mean it is a camp for killing people? What happens to all their children?”
Villy, in a voice of icy authority, said, “Lydia, will you please take all three children upstairs to the nursery? At once!”
And Lydia, after one glance at her mother’s face, did as she was told, the others following her with surprising meekness. The tension in the room lessened—but not very much. Villy offered Jack a cigarette and while he was lighting his and hers for her, Zoë, who discovered that she had been pressing the palms of her hands onto the carving of her chair so hard that she had nearly broken the skin, looked mutely at Jack as though to implore him to help them to escape.
The Duchy said, “Zoë, why don’t you take Captain Greenfeldt to the morning room for a little peace and quiet?”
“Your daughter is very like you.”
The small room, with its gate-legged table, had four chairs ranged round it. He had sat down in one of them. Now she could look at him and was shocked. She had wanted to fling herself into his arms, tell him how sorry she was that she hadn’t immediately said she would come to London, but instead she sank into the chair opposite him. He was reaching in his pocket and drew out his packet of cigarettes to light one from the Goldflake that Villy had given him. She noticed that his hands shook.
“It was all in front of the children there,” he said. “They were playing round an enormous pit—eighty yards long, thirty feet wide—piled high with the bodies of their mothers, grandmothers, aunts—naked skeletons piled on top of each other—four feet high.”
She stared at him aghast, trying, and failing to imagine such a scene. “Would you like me to come back to London with you?”
He shook his head. “I have to go back very early tomorrow morning. It wouldn’t be worth it.”
“Back to that camp?”
“No, another one. Buchenwald. Our troops are there. I’ve been once, but I’ve got to go back.” He stubbed out his cigarette.
She said, “But when you rang, when you called me from London, you wanted me to come then.”
“Ah, well. I had a sudden urge to see you. Then I thought that I’d like to see you in your home—with your family—before I went.”
“When will you be back?”
He shrugged. Then he tried to smile. “Your mother-in-law is one nice lady. You’re in good hands.” He lit another cigarette. “But thanks for offering to come.”
There was a kind of bleak courtesy about him that frightened her. Searching for anything that might comfort either of them, she said, “But those poor people will be all right now, won’t they? I mean they are safe now and people will look after them and give them food.”
“Some of them. Six hundred are dying and being buried every day at Belsen. And they say over two thousand will die at Buchenwald—too far gone. And those aren’t the only camps, you know. We haven’t reached all of them, but they’ll be like that. And millions have died.”
There did not seem to be any comfort.
He looked at his watch, and got to his feet. “My cab will be here by now. I mustn’t miss that train. I’m glad I’ve seen Juliet, at last.”
“Are you really going to be away a long time?”
“Yep. Better count on that.”
She was standing now, facing him, between him and the door.
“Jack! You’re not angry with me, are you?”
“What makes you think that?”
She wanted to cry, “Everything!” but all she said was, “You haven’t kissed me. You haven’t touched me, even.”
For the first time, his black, bleak eyes softened in the old way: he took a step towards her and put his hands on her shoulders. “I am not angry with you,” he said. He kissed her gently on her lips. “I’ve gotten rather out of touch with love,” he said. “You’ll have to bear with me about that.”
“I will, I will! But it will come back, won’t it?”
Still holding her shoulders, he pushed her a little away from him. “Sure. Will you say goodbye to them for me? And thanks, for everything? Don’t cry.” It was a command rather than a plea. “I left my cap in the hall.”
“I’ll get it.” She didn’t want the intrusion of other people. But the hall was empty, and the cap lay on the table. When she returned with it, he had already gone the other way to the front door, which he had opened. He took the cap and put it on. “I’m glad I came.” He touched her cheek with two fingers.
“Look after yourself and—Jules, you call her, don’t you?” He bent and kissed the cheek he had touched—his lips were as cold as his fingers. Then he swung away from her and walked, very fast, to the gate and out of sight. She stood, listening to the taxi’s engine starting, the door slamming and then the sound of it going down the drive until she could not hear it at all.
Villy, in town for a day and a night, was having lunch with Jessica in the little house in Chelsea she had rented in Paradise Walk. They were better friends again now that it was common knowledge that Laurence (they no longer called him Lorenzo) had left his wife to live with a young opera singer. They had even had a cautiously commiserating talk about poor Mercedes and what was to become of her, and had come to the uneasy conclusion that although she was desperately unhappy, she was probably better off without him. (Of course, Villy thought, Jessica did not know about her frightful evening.)
It was a Monday. Villy had spent the morning at Lansdowne Road and apologized for arriving dishevelled.
“The news is so good, you’ll soon be back there, won’t you?” said Jessica as she showed her the tiny bathroom.
“Edward thinks it’s too big for us now that Louise is married and Teddy is launched, so to speak. I shall be very sad.” She had taken off her watch and was rolling up her sleeves. “I’m so filthy, I really ought to have a bath.”
“Darling, do, if you want to. Lunch can wait—it’s only a sort of pie.”
“I’ll just wash.”
“What a pretty house it is!” she exclaimed as she came down the stairs again to the sitting room.
“It is rather a doll’s house, but it suits me beautifully. So easy to keep. All I need is a daily for the housework.”
“Has Raymond seen it?”
“Not yet. It seems to be more and more difficult for him to get away. But he so loves being important, and he seems to have made friends in Oxford and, of course, I go to Frensham at weekends to help Nora.”
“How is that going?”
“Very well, I think. I don’t find him very easy to know, but she seems utterly devoted. It’s rather a weak gin, I’m afraid. I’ve run out a
nd my local grocery rations everybody—one bottle a month.” She took her gin and sat with it in the second armchair.
“The news is good, isn’t it?” said Villy. “We’ll be in Berlin any day now.”
“Except for those awful, dreadful camps. I simply couldn’t believe it! It’s obscene!”
“It seems so extraordinary that it could all have been going on and people didn’t know.”
“I’m sure they knew. I’ve always loathed Germans.”
“But Daddy had such a lovely time there when he was a student. Do you remember how marvellous he said it was? Even the smallest provincial town had its concerts.”
“I agreed with Mr. Churchill. Words can’t express the horror.”
“Yes.” They could neither of them think of anything else to say about the camps, and there was a short silence while Villy smoked and Jessica watched her. She had got much older: her hair was nearly white now; her skin had become weatherbeaten and dry, the slate blue veins on the back of her hands much raised, her neck an old woman’s neck. She is only a year older than me, Jessica thought, only forty-nine, but she does look older. The war has taken its toll of her, she thought, whereas for me it marked the time when I suddenly had more money and far fewer chores. And, of course, the affair with Lorenzo (she still called him that to herself), even if he was rather naughty in the end, was fun while it lasted. Actually, she was quite dreading the peace with Raymond about all the time wanting regular meals and having nothing to do. On her own, she hardly ever cooked—even the pie in the oven at the moment had been bought, and when Judy came home for the holidays, she either stayed with school friends or at Frensham. Nora was fully occupied, and Christopher seemed to like his strange hermit-like existence. Angela … That was the reason that she had wanted Villy to come to lunch, to have the chance to air some of her feelings about Angela. She waited, however, until they were sitting at the small table laid for lunch at the far end of the room.
She began by asking about Louise, who, Villy said, seemed rather under the weather. Dr. Ballater, to whom Villy had made her go, said that she really ought to have her tonsils out—she was in fact going into hospital some time this week. Teddy, in Arizona, had finished his training as a fighter pilot, but had been kept on there, thank goodness. “With any luck, he won’t have to be in the war, and Lydia—” And then, realizing from her sister’s face that she was bursting to tell her something, she stopped and said, “Come on, Jess. What is it? You’re looking quite tragic.”
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 142