So here she was a week later, jolting along in the local taxi-cab to catch the train for the ferry and then the train to London.
In the London train, crowded because it was nearing Christmas, she was assailed by the memory of her meeting with Jack. She had thought then that she was unhappy enough – guilty about her mother, despairing about Rupert’s still being alive … and then, out of the blue, had come Jack to transform her life, it had seemed at the time.
Now, although the quality of her unhappiness had changed – the only familiar part of it being her guilt about her mother – she felt that nothing could come from anywhere that could possibly transform it. The difference, she thought – she felt too weary to read – was that before Jack she had had some kind of right to her unhappiness, with a husband missing and presumed (at least by her) to be dead. Now it was Jack who was missing: his death, and the manner of it, was something that she was still, after all these months, unable to contain in her consciousness for more than a few seconds. Every time she thought of him – a dozen times a day or night – the same shocked imagination of his last bleak day replayed itself, his efforts to write to her and his abandonment of them in favour of writing to Archie (what would have happened if she had not taken him to see Archie that evening which now seemed so long ago, who else could he have written to, and, if nobody, how would she even have known of his death?), his driving back from some airfield to the terrible camp and finding some place where he would be alone for those last minutes of his life before he put an end to it, an act that implied courage and despair on a scale that she could not bear to consider.
She had gone back to the studio to clear out her clothes before she returned the key to the agent. It had been something she had dreaded – had nearly not done – but in the end she had felt it was necessary. She had trudged up the dark dusty stairs with her empty suitcase, resolving to spend as little time there as possible, to pack up and leave. But when she opened the door she realized that he had stayed there since their last time together: the bed was unmade and an ashtray full of stubs lay on the table beside it. She walked through to the tiny kitchen to open a window and there was a jug with coffee grounds in it and an upturned mug on the draining board. His dressing gown hung on the back of the bathroom door and there was a used razor blade in the soap dish of the basin, which had a high-water mark of greyish dried soap foam. She touched this with a finger and could see the dark bristles from his shave. All these things continued to exist.
As she went back to the studio, the loss of him struck her like a heavy cold tide that threatened to drown or suffocate her, and unable to stand, she collapsed upon the rickety divan. The pillow was still dented. She put her face where his head had lain and actually screamed.
Some time later, when she had cried herself out she sat up and set about the packing up. In his dressing-gown pocket was the usual packet of Lucky Strikes. She smoked one before throwing the rest away, but even the familiar smell of the burnt caramel taste in her mouth evoked nothing. She had felt light and empty – as dry as a dead leaf. She had finished the packing, washed up the coffee jug and the ashtrays, cleaned the basin and folded the bed linen into a neat pile, had left the place which had contained their life together and taken the key back to the agents.
After that, the fact that he was dead was no longer a shock, but the manner of his dying continued to haunt her, and she could neither understand, nor accept, nor come to terms with it. Sometimes it seemed to her that his giving of his life was an heroic gesture of courageous love, sometimes it seemed that his taking of his life was an utter rejection of her with no love in it. Always the difficulty of the act terrified and appalled her: how could anyone make such a decision and live through the hours before carrying it out?
And then, an ordinary afternoon with Juliet determined to get her own way – the fruitless argument about going back through the woods or not – she had turned her head and there was Rupert walking towards her. She had thought he was an apparition, a ghost, had put out her hand to touch him, to ward him off, but when he spoke a different kind of fear invaded her and she took refuge in Juliet, had watched their meeting, so simple, she felt, compared to hers with him. Juliet had eased things between them: they had played her game with her; it was only when he helped her off the tree trunk that she saw that he felt as shy, as nervous as she. She had chattered about the family all the way home, faltering only when she came to Archie as she remembered how kind he had been about Jack, and she had fallen momentarily silent … They had not really been alone together until after dinner. She had sat trying to sew Juliet’s frock while he talked about Pipette and her mother. Then he had tried to say something about his being away and what it must have been like for her and she was overwhelmed with confusion and guilt – wanted to flee and then was ashamed that she was not welcoming him, brushed it off with the excuse that his sudden appearance had been a shock (this, at least, was true).
She had undressed in the bathroom and it was while she was unpinning her hair that the turquoise heart, lying in the hollow of her throat, caught her eye. Jack’s present to Juliet. She had been keeping it for when Juliet was older, but after Archie had come to tell her that he was dead, she had slung it on an old chain and worn it ever since, as a kind of talisman, or mourning, she was not sure which. She unfastened it and put it but of sight. She had got into bed and lain rigidly waiting for him. But when he had simply kissed the side of her face and turned out the light she had had the sudden and most violent urge to turn to him, to tell him all that had happened with Jack, to weep in his arms (for Jack) and to be absolved by him. But she did not. Once, she thought, she would have been so selfish, so absorbed in her own pain that she would have been unable to consider what he might feel. Much later – not that night – she knew she had to recognize that telling him about Jack would put him further in the past than she was ready for. Rupert’s reappearance had not only interrupted her grief, it had made her feel guilty about it.
Sometimes, in the weeks that followed, she wondered whether Rupert sensed something. Certainly he seemed different – withdrawn, tentative, almost apologetic. He was tired, he said, and there was a lot to get used to again – life was so different, although he was uncommunicative about what it was different from.
At the Duchy’s suggestion, they had gone away for a weekend in Brighton. This had been after Rupert was officially out of the Navy, in August. She was never very clear why Brighton had been chosen: the Duchy had suggested it, and Rupert had looked at her and said, ‘Would that be OK for you?’ She had answered that it would. There had been a lack of enthusiasm about the venture that had unnerved her; her own part in this made her feel guilty (the least she could do was to agree to whatever was suggested), but when she realized that, for reasons unknown to her, Rupert felt much the same, she felt frightened. What should they do, she wondered. What should they talk about? And then there was the business of going to bed together with the uncertainty about whether he would make love, or try to make love to her – both these things had happened at widely spaced intervals, and the occasions had been like meeting someone you hardly knew wearing no clothes at a party and pretending there was nothing unusual about it. Pretence certainly came into it. She pretended to feel what she thought he wanted her to feel; in a curious way, she felt responsible for their lovemaking, which had never happened in the old days, but she also felt responsible to Jack – going through the motions was not betraying him, but getting pleasure from it would be, in some way, despicable. Once, she had imagined someone telling the story of her and Jack – one man telling another – and when the teller reached the point of Jack’s death, the listener, after the appropriate pause, would ask, ‘And what became of the girl?’ ‘Oh, her! She simply went back to the husband as though nothing had happened.’ Smiles of worldly contempt for such a vapid, unfeeling creature.
But Jack in his letter to Archie had said, ‘Maybe that husband of hers will come back to her?’ so he must have envisaged tha
t as a kind of solution. And there he was, sitting opposite her in the train to Brighton, a kind and gentle man, looking much older, more gaunt – indeed, as though he had been through a good deal during those interminable four years. But now he no longer seemed so much older than she, as he had done when she married him, then in her early twenties. He would always be twelve years older, but now, at thirty, she felt as old as anyone – too old for that age gap to have any significance.
He looked up from his paper, caught her eye. ‘Your hair looks very pretty.’
She remembered how – in the early years of their marriage, when she had been jealous of the time he spent with his children, and their mother, the dead Isobel, had seemed an even worse threat because he never talked about her – he would coax or reassure her by admiration for her appearance, homage that she would only notice if it was absent, and how she had longed to be admired for other things, her intelligence, her character, aspects of her that now, she felt, had not been worthy of remark.
She smiled at him, and said nothing.
Their hotel was enormous – mahogany and dark red carpets, ancient porters with waistcoats like wasps, endless corridors dimly lit. Eventually, at the end of one, the old man carrying their cases stopped in front of a door that was next to the fire escape, wheezed and fumbled with the key, and displayed their room. It had a small double bed, she noticed at once, and net curtains that did not conceal that their view consisted of another wall of hotel bedroom windows.
Rupert said, ‘I asked for a room with a sea view.’
‘I wouldn’t know about that, sir. You could ring down to reception.’
He did, and after some argument was offered a room two floors up. They would send up a boy to meet them at the lift with the new key.
When they got to the new room, it proved to have twin beds. Rupert did not seem to have noticed this. He had given the porter half a crown and gone straight to the window. ‘That’s better, isn’t it, darling?’
She joined him to look at the sea heaving onto the stony beach like molten lead in the sunset, with black breakwaters and the pier on its spidery stilts. The sky was streaked with narrow clouds of apricot and violet.
He put an arm round her. ‘We’ll have a nice time,’ he said. ‘You jolly well deserve a hol. Shall we have a bottle of champagne up here?’
Yes, she had said, that would be lovely.
He turned to the telephone and saw the twin beds. ‘Oh, Lord! They never said – shall I have another go at them?’
But she said, don’t. They could push the beds together – she couldn’t face another move. She thought, but was not sure, that he was relieved, and she remembered with some shame how she had used to make minor scenes if things were not absolutely to her liking. She said she would unpack and have a bath and he said fine, he would go for a walk by the sea and come back with the champagne in half an hour.
That first evening during which they both drank a lot – a bottle of burgundy after the champagne and then brandy with the grey-looking hotel coffee – he said: ‘Zoë. We really ought to talk.’
Terror, and somewhere at the back of it relief – something like it – invaded her. He knew about Jack. Or knew something – or wanted to know? At any rate if he asked, she would have to tell him and having to tell was different from choosing to tell him – it felt like the difference between honesty and the wilful infliction of pain. She finished her brandy and reached for one of his cigarettes.
‘You never used to smoke!’
‘Oh, occasionally. I’m not really a smoker.’ Nor really unfaithful, she thought. You can’t be unfaithful to someone whom you thought was dead. She meant him, but then she realized that this could equally apply to Jack.
He lit her cigarette for her, and one for himself. ‘I mean the house, for instance. Do you think we want to keep it, or would you rather we looked for one that was nearer a park? Or we could get a flat. I don’t think poor old Ellen is up to all the stairs in Brook Green. Edward wants me to go and run Southampton. I’ve told him I don’t feel remotely up to it, but if you wanted to live in the country, I’m willing to have a go. And Hugh – I want you to have all the options – did say that if we wanted to share his house, we would be more than welcome. I think he was partly thinking of Wills, and how it would be nice for him to go on being under the same roof as Ellen. I don’t expect you would like that, but I thought you ought to know it was on offer.’
Another relief, this time coupled with the kind of irritation that accompanies being given a fright and the consequent expenditure of needless courage. There was nothing to be brave about; she fell back upon being accommodating. ‘What would you prefer?’
But, of course, he didn’t know: decisions had never been his strong suit. She knew that if she had advocated any one plan, he would have fallen in with it, but she could only think of what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to lose Ellen, she didn’t want to go back to the house in Brook Green that had always struck her as dreary, and in any case had once belonged to Isobel, but after that …
They spent the rest of the evening in polite and fruitless discussion.
In the night she woke and it came to her that perhaps Rupert was so indecisive because he didn’t want any of it. Perhaps, now, he should go back to painting and/or teaching, and their having less money would mean that she might find some sort of job that would fill her life. Perhaps they could go and live in France with Archie. A completely new life: in the night it seemed to be the answer.
But when she had suggested this to him, he seemed appalled. ‘Oh, no! I don’t think so. I think it’s a bit late to be thinking of that sort of thing.’
‘But you often said how much you love France—’
‘France? What’s France got to do with it?’
‘I thought you specially liked painting there—’
But he interrupted her, coldly. ‘I haven’t the slightest desire to live in France.’
There was an almost sullen silence.
‘Is it – is it because you had such an awful time there?’
‘No. Well – partly. I just wouldn’t want to.’
They had been walking along the beach – the shingle hurt her feet and they had sat down with their backs to the breakwater. When he fell silent again, she turned to look at him. He was staring at the sea, preoccupied, withdrawn. He swallowed as though to rid himself of something painful, but he didn’t look at her.
‘Wouldn’t it help to tell me about it?’
‘Tell you what?’
‘What happened to you. What it was like. I mean – why couldn’t you come home some time after D-Day? Why did it take so long? Were you kept as some kind of prisoner?’
‘No – not exactly. Well, yes, in a way. It was a very remote place – the farm …’ There was a pause, then he said rapidly: ‘They’d sheltered me for so long, looked after me when it was dangerous for them and there was a fearful shortage of able-bodied men. I felt I had to stay on a bit to help – you know, the harvest and so on.’
After a moment, she said, ‘But harvests are in the autumn!’
‘For God’s sake, Zoë, stop trying to trap me! I made a promise to stay as long as I did. Will that do?’
Resentment, anger that she had not known was there, possessed her. ‘No, it won’t. You could at least have sent a message, written. What do you think it was like for your mother? For Clary. For me. Not hearing anything after the Allied landing meant that we thought you must be dead. You made everybody suffer when there was no need. Don’t you see how incredibly selfish that was?’
He didn’t answer – simply put his head in his hands with one racking sob. Before she could do anything, he took his hands from his face and looked at her. ‘I do see. I do realize. There’s nothing I can do about it now. I can’t excuse it – it was just another life, different problems, difficulties. I can only say, that, mad though it may seem to you, it seemed the right thing to do at the time. I don’t expect you to understand that. But I am sorry
– ashamed to have caused you so much distress.’
He was trying to smile; there were tears in his eyes. To put her arms round him, to kiss his face was not difficult. The rest of the weekend was spent in a kind of emotional calm: they were kind to each other; they finished their walk, had lunch in a bad restaurant, went to a cinema, browsed in second-hand bookshops, dined in the hotel, decided to give up the house in Brook Green, but got no further. ‘You know what I’m like about decisions,’ he had said. ‘One is quite enough.’ Through it all they were careful of each other. She was relieved both that he seemed to want no more from her than that, and also for those random hours in the day – in the bookshop where he found her a first edition of Katherine Mansfield that she was delighted to have, and during a long talk about whether Juliet should be allowed to have a puppy, currently her dearest wish – when she discovered that time had passed when she had not been thinking of Jack.
On Monday they had gone back to London: he had stayed there and she had returned to Home Place.
The Duchy had welcomed her affectionately. ‘You look as though you have had some rest,’ she said, and then Juliet and Wills, clattering down the stairs, had intervened.
‘Mummy! While you were away Wills sleepwalked! He sleepwalked down the stairs into the dining room! They put him back to bed and in the morning he said he didn’t know he had sleepwalked at all! The next night I sleepwalked only I nearly fell down ’cos you can’t sleepwalk downstairs at all well with your eyes shut and they put me back into bed and I can perfectly remember it. And Wills said I can’t really have sleepwalked ’cos when you sleepwalk your eyes are open! They can’t be, can they? Anyway, when I sleepwalk I sleepwalk with my eyes shut. I do it like this.’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 157