‘Darling, you’re the one who has had a rotten time.’
She got up and poured some more crisps out of the packet into the little bowl beside him, and almost before she had finished pouring, he had started to eat them.
‘Supposed to eat little and often,’ he said with an apologetic laugh. ‘I don’t have much of a problem with the often side of it.’
‘If you’ve been starving for years, I’m not surprised.’
‘Bit of a greedy pig, I’m afraid.’ He picked up the bowl. ‘We used to get a bowl just about this size of rice each day.’
‘Was that all?’
‘Well, sometimes there were some vegetables, if we managed to grow any or if we had anything to barter for them. Mostly it was just rice. And the water it was boiled in. People used to try and grow things, you know, but quite often the Japs used to drive a jeep over them – plough them up. Used to wait sometimes, until the stuff was nearly ready to harvest, and then bingo!’ He saw her face, and said, ‘They didn’t always do it. It was one of the punishments if they thought anyone overstepped the mark.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a gleaming new pipe. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘Of course not, darling.’
While he was unwrapping his oilskin pouch and tweaking out the oily shreds of tobacco, stuffing the bowl of the pipe with unsteady fingers, the thought recurred that perhaps Edward might have some sort of job for him, and she prayed that they would get on with each other. The trouble would not be with Edward, it would almost certainly be with John. Her brother’s ideas and opinions were hard to come by but, once acquired, he tended to stick to them. She had not dared to tell him that Edward had ‘helped’ her acquire the short lease on the mansion flat overlooking Regent’s Park where she and Jamie and Susan now lived. And she certainly had not revealed Susan’s parentage. She had explained all this to Edward, in case he dropped a brick of any kind. God! How she longed to feel free of all this hole-in-the-corner business, to have a proper house, large enough for all four children, with servants and possibly even her own car. Edward had still not told his wife of his intentions, and she would not feel safe until he had, although she knew that it was useless to push him. But she was also deeply worried about her brother, who seemed to have returned from four years of hell totally unequipped for peace-time life. He had always been in the Army, who now, after an extended leave, were chucking him out. In the weeks that he had been back, she had realized how poor his health was: attacks of malaria and some obscure stomach bug that came and went periodically prostrating him. Although he was not very communicative, she sensed that he was lonely and utterly at sea. If only he was married! But he wasn’t. The one or two girls she remembered him going out with before the war had never lasted, but with a mass of surplus women there must now be around perhaps she might find him a wife. He was not bright, but he was kind and honourable; he might bore the woman he married but he would look after her. She knew that as he was so lonely she ought to have invited him to stay in the flat, but that would mean that Edward would never be able to stay the night. Or – anything.
‘Supposing his wife won’t give him a divorce?’ He thought for a moment, and then added, ‘I mean, one couldn’t blame her. Divorce is a bit orf, isn’t it? Shouldn’t care for it myself.’
‘Oh, Johnnie, I don’t know! Edward seems to think she will.’
The door-bell rang (‘Good for him, he’s remembered he hasn’t got a key’) and as she got up to answer it, she said, ‘Don’t let’s talk about all that tonight. I just wanted you to meet him. He’s going to take us out to a lovely dinner. Let’s all just have a nice time.’
Edward was wonderful with him; when he wanted to be charming, there was nobody to beat him …
‘Let’s have a bottle of champagne as it’s my birthday,’ he had said when they got to the Ivy.
‘Is it really? Many happy returns.’
‘He always says it’s his birthday when he wants champagne,’ she had explained.
‘You mean they wouldn’t serve it to you if it wasn’t your birthday?’
‘Oh, Johnnie, of course they would. It’s just a joke.’
‘A joke.’ He thought for a bit. ‘Awfully sorry. I seemed to have missed the point.’
‘He feels he has to have an excuse,’ she explained.
‘And any excuse is better than none.’
‘Ah.’
Edward ordered dinner: oysters for them, but John had smoked salmon, partridges, John had a plain grilled steak, and chocolate mousse – John did have that. When they reached the coffee and liqueurs stage, John asked if he might have a crème de menthe frappé. ‘One of the things we used to talk about in the camp,’ he said, ‘you know, go round the hut and each of us say something we looked forward to when we got home.’ He stirred the mixture with its straw. ‘Partly the ice – it was so damned hot, it seemed like a marvelous luxury.’
‘I know just what you mean,’ Edward said. ‘We used to talk about hot baths in the trenches.’
‘Pretty difficult to have a hot bath in one of them—’
‘No, I meant when we were in the trenches, we used to dream about hot baths. And linen sheets, you know, that sort of thing. Of course,’ he added, ‘it was different for me. I got leave from time to time You poor beggars had to stick it out.’
‘But more people died in your war, didn’t they, darling?’ she said.
‘Dunno. I read that fifty-five million died in this one.’
‘And they say that people are still dying from those terrible atom bombs,’ she said.
John, who sat between them, had been turning his head from one to the other during this exchange – like someone watching tennis.
Now he said, ‘Made the Japs surrender though, didn’t it? Don’t know how many more people would have died if we hadn’t.’
‘But it does sound such a horrible way to die!’
She noticed that the two then looked fleetingly at each other and then away, but it was as though some unspoken, unspeakable message had passed between them. Then Edward said: ‘Well, at least the war’s over, thank God. We can turn our minds to something more cheerful – like the bloody dockers.’
Then, as John was beginning to wonder what was cheerful about – what was it? forty-three thousand of them on strike, Edward said, well, income tax. Who would have thought that a socialist government would reduce income tax, although heaven knew it was high time; one up to Mr Dalton, whom he’d met briefly when he’d been President of the Board of Trade – nice, unassuming bloke, he’d thought him. Then he’d turned almost affectionately to John and asked what were his plans.
‘Haven’t really thought. Been sort of getting used to normal life. Got six months’ leave, then I’ll have to find something.’
‘You’re not staying in the Army?’
‘I’d like to, but they don’t want me, I’m afraid.’
‘I say, that’s bad luck! Have another of those things?’
‘No thanks. One’s enough for me.’
‘Thanks very much for that wonderful dinner,’ he said, when they dropped him at his club. ‘Be in touch,’ he said as he kissed her cheek, in tones that were uncertainly poised between a command and a plea.
‘Of course,’ she had said.
They watched him mount the steps, turn to wave at them and then go through the outer doors to be received by the hall porter.
‘Poor old bloke,’ he said.
‘You were sweet to him.’
He put his hand on her knee. ‘Isn’t it a bit lonely – living in his club? Couldn’t you put him up in one of the boys’ rooms?’
She said at once, ‘Oh, I think he’d rather be on his own – for a bit, anyway. He’s told me that there are a lot of things to get used to.’
But she felt guilty (and angry) that her lack of generosity had been exposed – also depressed that he hadn’t considered the implications. It was all very well for him to be generous with the flat … Then she thought that perh
aps he had worked out that it would mean they could see less of each other and felt frightened. Of course, Edward had no idea of John’s Victorian opinions about divorce, but they were the last thing she wished to expose him to at the moment.
‘How’s the house-hunting going?’ she asked, when they were back in the flat and he was pouring them a nightcap.
‘Pretty slow. The trouble is that so many houses are war-damaged that you have to have very careful surveys, and the bloke I’ve been advised to employ quite simply has too much on his plate. And, of course, one doesn’t want to find another house while one is waiting for a survey. Villy found one she liked, but it turned out to be riddled with dry rot, which is rampaging because of spore being blown all over the place from bombed buildings.’
Which was a lengthy way of saving that nothing had changed. It was curious, these days, how they seemed to collude in conversations that were really sort of coded messages. She no longer dared to say, ‘Have you told Villy? If not, why not?’ And he was equally unable to say, ‘I’m letting everything slide because I can’t face telling her.’ So she would ask about the house-hunting and he would tell her how difficult it was to find one. Occasionally the messages did become en clair – like the time when she had burst into tears and told him that she could not stand another winter in that cottage. He had been amazed: he seemed honestly to have had no idea how much she had endured there in terms of isolation and cold. Also it had been so awfully cramped when the older boys were home for the summer holidays that in the end she had had to capitulate and go to Angus’s parents in Scotland for a week to leave Ian and Fergus – where they were, in fact, far happier – for the rest of the summer. But the outburst about the cottage had resulted in his helping her to lease this mansion flat, and this had meant that she had been able to afford Norma, a girl she had found in the country who was fond of the children and who longed to come to London. She still had to do the cooking, which she loathed, but the children ate simple nursery food and she, who seemed nowadays to put on weight at an alarming speed, tried to eat as little as possible except when she was with Edward.
‘Bed?’
He put his arm heavily round her shoulders. ‘You are my favourite woman,’ he said.
‘I do hope so, darling. It would be really worrying if I wasn’t.’
They walked quietly down the long, narrow passage, past the children’s rooms and the room where Norma slept: everyone was peacefully asleep. Norma knew that Edward stayed the night sometimes; she had been told that there was to be an eventual marriage, and the illicit romance clearly thrilled her. She adored Edward, who gave her stockings and often told her how they could not do without her.
Romance, Diane thought, as she was taking off her make-up while Edward was in the bathroom, she was romantic; she would never have dreamed of having an affair with anyone if she was not desperately in love with them. The trouble was that she had begun to ache increasingly for security, for knowing that the children would be all right, that bills could be paid, and romance and security did not seem to go easily together. Of course, if Edward was not married, she could have had the romance and the marriage. Then Johnnie could be staying with them – she refused to feel selfish about that because she was not really a selfish person, not deep down. Edward had once said that she was the most unselfish person that he had ever met, excepting his sister; she remembered how much she had minded there being an exception. Because the other thing that was happening to her was that she had to recognize that she was capable of jealousy, an emotion that she had always despised, thought unworthy of any really good person. Again, she knew that she did not really possess a jealous nature; it was the situation that was provoking these unwelcome feelings – for instance, Edward’s apparent inability to tell Villy that he was leaving her must surely have something to do with feelings beyond moral compunction? And then there was his daughter, the older one that was married to Michael Hadleigh. He was very anxious that she should meet Louise, to whom, he said, he was devoted, and he’d told her that Louise had seen them, him and her, at the theatre one night and had been violently upset and that things had never been right between them since. ‘If we could all three meet, I’m sure everything would be fine again,’ he said. But he seemed nervous of actually making the plan. It was almost as though the meeting was to be a kind of test, and she felt that the idea of being judged as suitable or not for her father by a young girl – she was only twenty-two, for heaven’s sake – was distinctly humiliating.
By now she had undressed and put on the midnight blue satin nightgown that Edward had given her for her birthday. It had a low V neck out of which one breast or another was constantly falling. They had not recovered their shape since feeding Susan. Edward had said that the blue was to go with her eyes, but actually it was more of a peacocky dark blue, whereas her eyes were hyacinth. They hadn’t changed, at least, but in a way they only pointed up everything else that had. Her upper arms that were beginning to sag, the tiny broken veins in the middle of her cheeks that had to be covered with make-up, the slight, but perceptible slackening of the skin over her jawbone and her throat, which was no longer smooth and creamy as once it had been … How much more one missed things that one had taken for granted, she thought, and then, almost immediately, ‘Will I ever feel that I have got what I wanted, or will what I want keep changing so that I can’t? She wanted Edward and it was entirely his fault that she had not got him, so it was also his fault that her reasons for wanting him were changing. When she had been so much in love with him, her love and her unhappiness had in no way detracted from her view of herself or of him: he had seemed to her the most glamorous, desirable man she had ever met, and his simple and continuous capacity for enjoyment had charmed her. There was nothing ignoble in being so much enchanted by such a man, especially as all his attributes showed her so clearly what for years she had had to do without with her husband. Edward was not a snob, he was no spendthrift; he spent money with delightful extravagance, but he had it in the first place – he did not use it to show off to people he wished to impress at the expense of paying the household bills. She had been disillusioned about Angus long before she met Edward. But now she had known him for over eight years – had been his mistress for nearly eight of them – had borne him at least one child, Susan, if not two, if Jamie was indeed his, although she noticed that Jamie had the Mackintosh nose, not something she drew to Edward’s attention. She had also, inevitably, learned more about Edward, had recognized that his simplicity involved a lack of imagination where other people were concerned, and that his capacity for enjoyment had also a good deal of selfishness about it, that he also never seemed particularly aware of or interested in what happened to her in bed. These things she had been able, most of the time, to excuse, reason away or ignore. Men were selfish, and lack of imagination was perhaps something that the person suffering from it could not really help – there was nothing either deliberate or considered on their part. But the failing in Edward that she could not ignore was his lack of what she had to call moral courage. He seemed unwilling, perhaps actually unable to say anything to anyone that they might find uncomfortable. To begin with she had called this his kindness, but as this trait began to affect her own life it had ceased to seem kind. Sometimes, she was afraid that he would never bring himself to leave Villy unless she managed to force him to do so. With every week that passed now she felt her respect for him leaking away, which in turn made her desire to marry him less respectable. When he had told her in the summer, one of those last evenings at the cottage, that he was resolved to go ahead with informing Villy, she had felt a surge of such happiness and love for him that she had easily fallen in with the proviso that he must get Villy comfortably settled in a house in London first. But that was months ago, and nothing had happened or showed much sign of happening.
She got into bed and almost at once he joined her. She was not in the mood for being made love to, but after all the hints about Villy’s unresponsiveness to sex she
did, as usual, conceal this with a kind of breathless eagerness that she had discovered he liked. ‘Darling!’ he kept saying until he came. And then, as always, he asked her if it had been all right. Later, and full of amorous contentment, he said: ‘I’ve been wondering whether we couldn’t perhaps find something for your brother to do in the firm. It wouldn’t be frightfully well paid, at least not to begin with, but it would be something.’
‘Oh, darling, that would be wonderful! I know he’d be thrilled.’
‘I’ll have a word with Hugh. It might be at Southampton.’
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t mind that!’
‘Don’t say anything to him in case it falls through. Got to get the other side of the bloody dock strike first.’
‘Of course not. Oh, darling, it would be kind!’ She felt doubly grateful to him; for wanting to help her brother, and perhaps even more for being somebody whom she could admire as well as love.
A fortnight later, Edward announced that he had fixed the evening when she was to meet Louise. It was to be at his club, he said, because it was quieter and would she not come until eight fifteen, as he wanted to prepare Louise first. She was coming on her own, he added, he’d especially asked her to do that. ‘I’m sure you’ll love each other,’ he said twice during the conversation, which made her realize that so far as he was concerned there was a great deal at stake.
While she was dressing for the evening, she remembered that he had once or twice alluded to Villy being hard on Louise. She had already discarded her hyacinth crêpe, caught on one shoulder, as being possibly too tarty, too much – to hostile eyes – redolent of the kept woman. Now she put aside the black moiré with a heart-shaped neckline (with which she had intended to wear Edward’s amethyst necklace) – again it showed her cleavage which she felt struck the wrong note – and opted for her very old black wool with long tight sleeves and a high cowl neck. She was bored to death with it, but it was reasonably smart without being glamorous. For the same reason, she discarded her usual cyclamen lipstick, and used a duller, rose-coloured one. She was aiming at a well-groomed, but slightly maternal appearance as the one that Louise would find most reassuring.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 155