When she knew that Hugo was dead, after the first few awful days—when both Polly and Clary had been really good to her; indeed Polly had cried that first evening almost as much as she—she came out of it heartless, as though she had literally lost her heart. This made one thing seem very like another—she could not put a value upon anything more significant than having an amusing evening, or people flirting with her. And so, when Rory turned up at her house one day on leave and made clear how much he had wanted her ever since their first meeting after her flu, she went to bed with him without a qualm. She found, also, that really not caring at all beyond the mild satisfaction of being admired and having attention paid to her, she became better at the bed side of life, as she put it. Rory had the added attraction of not knowing anything about Hugo, of not, indeed, knowing anything much at all about her. He also did not seem to notice that she was acting. For a few months she pretended to be someone who was having an exciting affair with a dashing, courageous young man who certainly amused her. They could not meet often, and usually not for long, and then, shortly after the night she had spent in his friend’s flat, she met a girl at the Arts Theatre Club who had said she believed Louise knew Rory Anderson.
“I only asked, because the girl who shares my flat is mad about him. He’s taking her to Scotland for his leave. I have the feeling he’s a bit of a philanderer, and she’s so serious. What do you think?”
And that was the end of that. He never even wrote to her, but she did not really care. Her vanity was dented, but she felt it was hard to see what she had to be vain about. She had been available and he had availed himself. “Can’t even keep a lover,” she said to herself in the jeering, worldly voice she now used for internal dialogue.
In the morning they gave her an injection and soon she felt wonderfully carefree and even more irresponsible. By the time she was wheeled to the theatre and put into some sort of reclining chair she felt as though she was going to a party.
Mr. Farquhar leaned over her: the bottom of his face was covered, but his eyes looked full of merry bonhomie. More anaesthetic—she felt herself drifting away—could scarcely determine his face above her and then there was one terrifying instant of shrill scorching agony—and then nothing.
When she came to she was back in bed and her throat hurt so much that she longed to pass out again. In the evening, Polly and Clary came to visit her, bringing The Diary of a Nobody and a bunch of grapes.
“It’s a nice little book you can read lying on your back.” Clary said. They said that peace had been signed. “Eisenhower signed it. I must say I thought it ought to have been Mr. Churchill, but there you are,” Clary said. “Anyway, the Germans have surrendered—unconditionally.”
“Well, they couldn’t have any other way,” Polly said. “And tomorrow there’ll be Victory celebrations. It’s making people awfully jolly and nice in the streets—as though it’s everyone’s birthday.”
“It’s jolly bad luck to be in hospital, poor Louise.”
As she really couldn’t talk much at all, they didn’t stay, but said they’d come the day after tomorrow.
“Oh yes. Some people called Hammond rang and they wanted to come to see you. I told them where you were, and they said they would come tomorrow and hoped you’d be well enough to see them.”
“Hammond?” she whispered, and then she remembered the agent, and Myfanwy and the baby. She had almost forgotten them, because Myfanwy’s mother had taken her and the baby away with her the next day and she’d never seen them again. She wondered why they wanted to see her.
“Well, if you feel too ropy, I’m sure they will understand.”
After they had gone, Sister came in and said that Commander Hadleigh had rung to ask how she was, and to send his love.
“I told him you were doing very well,” she said. “You can have a little jelly or ice cream for your supper.”
On her own again, and not up to reading, she felt feverish and horribly depressed. For years the end of the war had been a time to look forward to, when everything would be better and, indeed, wonderful. Now its immediate prospect seemed to her to hold the most dreary alternatives: becoming an MP’s wife (she saw this as sitting on hard chairs at meetings for hours while people talked about mining, or having endless careful teas with strange people), or she would have to live on her own in a house with Sebastian and a nanny, waiting for Michael to come back from the Japanese war … She realized now that she did not want either of these. For the first time she faced the frightening possibility of not being married to Michael … She was not the right wife for him—no, that was a weak way of putting it, she wasn’t up to being anybody’s wife … She didn’t love him: he seemed at once too old and too young for her and she found his relationship with his mother both despicable and frightening. Perhaps she was not capable of love—but this reached something so painful in her that it blocked any further thoughts. Somehow, somewhere, she seemed to have gone wrong, to have made a mess of things that could not now be unsaid or undone …
After lunch—ice cream—the next day, the Hammonds arrived. The nurse who brought them in said she would fetch another chair and a vase for the bunch of pink tulips that Myfanwy laid upon the bed. She looked very pretty in a brown dress with a cameo brooch on her white collar, and her hair—that Louise remembered as lying in disordered profusion on the pillows—was now piled neatly on top of her head.
“We were in London for a couple of days and felt we must see you,” he said. His name was Arthur, but he was so much older than Myfanwy that she thought of him as Mr. Hammond.
“Myfanwy’s never been to London,” he said. “And I always promised her we’d come. We’ve certainly picked the right time for it. Awful bad luck for you being laid low on VE-Day.”
Myfanwy seemed very shy, although she smiled whenever she caught Louise’s eye.
Mr. Hammond asked after Michael, and then her child. Then Myfanwy said, “I never knew you had a baby. No wonder you were so good with Owen.”
“How is he? Is he with you?”
“He’s fine. He’s with my mam—just for these few days.”
Her husband said, “Myfanwy was so sorry not to see you again, but her mother took her home to look after her and the baby and there was no chance. But she wanted to thank you.” He paused and looked at his wife, who blushed and then suddenly took Louise’s hand.
“I do indeed thank you. You were so good to me. And the doctor said he thought you may have saved Owen’s life. He told me afterwards how very poorly he was. There is no way I can thank you enough for that.”
Soon after that, they left.
“I can see it tires you to talk,” he said. “We shall never forget you.”
“No, indeed. It’s very glad we are to have seen you.” She took Louise’s hand again. “I am so grateful,” she said, “for your goodness.”
When they were gone, she lay looking at the two chairs. It was she who was grateful, because if they hadn’t come to tell her that she would have continued to feel completely worthless.
When he was sure that Clary was safely tucked up in his bed and asleep, Archie limped painfully back into the sitting room and took off his shoes. He had taken Clary to see the celebrations outside Buckingham Palace, Polly having gone with her father. “I can’t see why we can’t all go together,” Clary had said, “but Poll didn’t want to.”
“You’ll just have to make do with me,” he had replied, and she had said: “It won’t be making do. You’re not a making do sort of person, Archie, much more people’s first choice.” A remark that, coming from her, had given him inordinate pleasure.
He turned off the ceiling light. Then he fetched himself a whisky and decided to have it on his balcony where there were two chairs. He could put his bottom on one and his feet on the other. He was completely done in: not surprising, really, as they’d walked miles that evening. All the way to the Palace and then, eventually, back. And before that … One way and the other, he’d been on the go since
Friday, which seemed a very long way away now. On Friday morning, he’d been at his desk, the office buzzing with the news of the Germans’ imminent surrender in Holland, Denmark and northern Germany when the Wren who brought his post had come in with it.
“And this was delivered by hand just now,” she said. It was an envelope with something else in it—money, or a key, he thought, as he slit it open. Before he read the letter which was written in pencil, he looked at the signature. Jack Greenfeldt. Greenfeldt? Oh, yes, the American, Zoë’s young man. She had brought him once to the flat for a drink, a saturnine, rather haunted-looking fellow, but he’d liked him. The object, wrapped in paper, proved to be a key. Oh, Lord, he thought, when he’d unwrapped it, I bet now the end is in sight he’s hopping it back to the wife and kids at home and hasn’t got the guts to tell her himself.
It was headed Dachau 2 May.
Then he read the letter. It was quite short, and he read it twice.
I am sorry to bother you with this [it began] but I couldn’t think who else to ask. I have made several efforts to write to Zoë, but I couldn’t find any way of telling her.
Anyway, by the time you get this I shall be dead. I have two days’ work to do here taking pictures, then I shall put the film with this letter on a plane on Thursday morning and then I shall come back here and put a bullet through my head. She will ask you why. Tell her I couldn’t live with what I’ve witnessed in the last two weeks—I can’t be a survivor of what has been, literally, a holocaust. I’d go crazy, out of my mind at not being with them in it. I couldn’t make her happy—not after the days here, and at Buchenwald and at Belsen. The key is to the studio I rented, and she may want to collect things from there. Rent paid until the end of this month and perhaps you would give the key back to the agent in Sloane Street—Chestertons I think it is. Tell her I loved her and thank her for that—oh, hell—tell her whatever you think best. I know you’ll see her through it—and maybe that husband of hers will come back?
Jack Greenfeldt
When he had read the letter a second time he found himself folding it up and putting it back into its envelope. He felt stunned by it—which meant, initially, that he had no feelings at all. Early in the war he had had to face up to the possibility of losing his own life, but the idea of taking it was so alien to him that he was completely unable to imagine the state of mind that might lead to such an act. Then he thought, Supposing he wrote this letter and then, when he got back to the camp, changed his mind, or someone found him in time to persuade him against it? Telling Zoë would be bad enough, but telling her and then discovering that it wasn’t true would be worse. Or would it? Perhaps he ought to try and find out. He took the letter out of its envelope and read it again. This time it engendered hostility, respect and finally, pity—in equal quantities—what a shocking waste and selfish, too—what courage to do such a thing in cold blood and poor chap, what he must have seen and heard and experienced that could drive him to such an act … but he did not doubt it. He picked up his telephone and asked for a line.
He asked for the Duchy and after struggling with the Brig who neither seemed to know who he was nor could understand how on earth anyone could want to speak to his wife (“some feller on the line seems to want to talk to you about something or other”) he got her. He said he wondered if he could come down for the weekend? He was always welcome, she said, if he didn’t mind where he slept. He asked whether Zoë would be there, and she said, yes. Then she said in her most level tone, had he bad news? Not about Rupert, he replied. There was a pause, and then she said, Ah. If he came on the four twenty, she added, he could be met with the girls.
So that was what he had done. He had waited until after dinner to tell Zoë, because it was the first opportunity for having her on his own. He took her into the morning room, and made her sit down. She sat upright, with her hands on the table: he saw that she was trembling.
“What is it? Is it—Rupert?”
“No. It’s Jack.”
“Jack? How do you know—that?”
“He sent me a letter.”
She looked at him mutely.
“He died.”
For a moment she stared at him as though she had not heard; then she said: “He sent you a letter—to say he was dead?”
His mouth was suddenly dry. All day he had wrestled with what he should tell her, how much, and how. “Tell her whatever you think best,” Jack had written. When he had finished washing his hands before dinner, and had straightened up to comb his hair in the small glass and had seen his face, weak with indecision and potential evasions, he had suddenly known that only the truth would do. So he told her—as gently as he could, but there was nothing gentle about the tale.
She sat still, upright and silent, until he said: “He said to tell you that he loved you and to thank you for it,” when an expression of extreme pain came and went on her face. She swallowed and then asked if she might see the letter and he gave it to her, saying he was going to get them both a drink and he would be back.
On the table in the hall there was a tray with two glasses and decanters of whisky and water on it. Blessing the Duchy, he waited a few minutes, none the less, to give her some time to herself. When he returned she was sitting just as he had left her, and the letter lay on the table—she was not crying as he had half expected. He poured the whisky and put a glass by her hand. “I know this is the most awful shock,” he said, “but I felt I should tell you the truth.”
“Yes. Thank you. The funny thing is that I sort of knew—not that this would happen, but that it was an end, somehow. He came here two weeks ago—without any warning—and after tea we sat in this room. And then he went and I had the thought that I would not ever see him again.”
He put the glass into her hand.
“My poor Jack,” she said, as she began to cry.
Much later she had said, “I expect you think it was very bad of me—to go off like that—to have—an affair.”
And he’d said no, he didn’t, he thought it was very understandable.
But she had answered, “Understandable, but not good. But I don’t believe that Rupert is going to come back. If that was going to happen, it would have happened by now.”
Later she said, “I think he came here to make sure I would be all right.”
“That showed love,” he said.
“Yes, it did, didn’t it?” She cried a bit more, and then she asked him why he thought that he’d done it.
And he had answered slowly, not exactly picking his words, but trying to imagine being Jack: “Perhaps he thought it was the only thing he could give those people—to show that he loved them and cared—”
“His own life?”
“You can’t give more.”
By the time they parted for the night, the house was dark and silent.
It was half past two and the war had ended officially over two hours ago now. There were still sounds of distant revelry in the streets, outside the nearest pub—people singing, cheering, laughing. He got up from his chair and went back into the sitting room. His leg ached, as he supposed it always would do from now onwards, if he overdid things. So many people had come to stay with him during the last months—the children, mostly—that he had given up the sofa as a temporary bed and bought himself a divan. He undressed, fetched his pyjamas from the bathroom and got into bed.
For a long time, he was unable to sleep. He felt so beset by the quantity of confidences bestowed on him by the family—always on the grounds that he was part of it, or had become so, but really because he was not, would never be quite that. He was anything from a catalyst to a general repository. Hugh, for instance. Hugh had asked him to accompany him to Battle to collect some cases of beer. The moment they were in the car, he had known that this was a pretext, and had hoped that he didn’t want to talk about Polly. But it had been Edward. He was worried about Edward. They weren’t getting on at all well, and the chief reason for that, Hugh thought, was that Edward knew how much he
disapproved of what was going on. Archie had long since realized that Edward had affairs and had wondered idly from time to time whether anyone else in the family was aware of this.
“He’s always been a bit of a—ranger,” Hugh said. “But this time it’s more serious. You’re part of the family, really, so I know I can trust you. The thing is that he’s had a child by this woman. And in spite of saying he was going to end the whole thing, he hasn’t. And now he’s talking of selling his house in London in order to buy a smaller one. Well, putting two and two together, I don’t like the sound of that at all.”
Why, Hugh had gone on, would he sell a perfectly good house, that he knew Villy was fond of, just to buy a smaller one unless he had no intention of being in it himself? That was what was worrying him. It transpired that he, Hugh, wanted him, Archie, to talk to Edward. “It’s no good me even trying any more, old boy. He simply flies off the handle and it makes office life harder. But I thought perhaps you might …”
He’d said he’d think about it, but he didn’t think that anything he said would make much difference.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 144