‘She only pretends,’ Wills said. ‘She doesn’t do it properly – she’s too young for that sort of thing.’
‘I’m not too young for anything! I may not look it, but inside I’m older than I look. Like you, Mummy. Ellen says you’re older than you look.’
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ Wills said, very slowly indeed. ‘Would you like to see my tooth?’
‘She wouldn’t. I saw it and it was quite boring. Do you know what the Duchy told us? When her teeth were loose when she was a child they used to tie a piece of string to it and the other end to the door handle and slam the door and the tooth just jumped out at them and then she got a penny for being brave.’
‘I’d charge a lot more to let people do that to me,’ Wills said, and she said she agreed with him.
‘Oh, Mummy! Don’t agree with Wills, agree with me! She’s my mother!’ And she flung her arms round Zoë’s legs and glared challengingly at Wills, whose face, Zoë saw, became suddenly blank.
‘I’ll carry your case, Aunt Zoë,’ he said.
A few days later, she found herself alone with the Duchy. They had finished picking the sweet peas – a job that needed doing every two or three days – and were sitting on the seat by the tennis court. The Duchy took a cigarette out of her shagreen case and was returning it to the pocket of her cardigan.
‘Could I have one?’
‘My dear, of course. I didn’t realize that you were a smoker.’
‘I’m not really. At least, every now and then I have one.’
Silence, because she could not think how to start. She looked at the calm, frank face of her mother-in-law. One was supposed to find that relationship difficult, but she felt nothing but a profound gratitude for the Duchy’s steady, perceptive kindness, right from the beginning when Rupert had brought her into this family, a spoiled, self-regarding girl, through the guilt and depression after that first baby’s death, and then all the war years when Rupert was missing. It had been the Duchy who had encouraged her to go and work in the convalescent home at Mill Farm, the Duchy who had never criticized her inability to deal with Clary and Neville. But, above all, although she was sure that the Duchy had been aware that she went to London so much because she had a lover, and then, when he turned up, that it was Jack, she had neither confronted her with it nor betrayed her afterwards. She found herself trying to say some of this now. ‘You have always been so good to me, even at the beginning, when I must have seemed incredibly selfish and irresponsible.’
‘My dear, you were simply very young. You were only a year older when you married than I had been when I did.’ After a pause, she said, ‘I found it difficult enough adapting my romantic attitude to reality. Husbands do not spend their lives constantly on their knees before one, offering bunches of flowers, but girls in my day had silly notions of the kind put into their heads – one read novels that contained a good deal of that kind of thing, and, of course, one’s parents never told one what marriage and parenthood were really like. People did not consider it necessary or desirable to inform the young of anything that lay ahead.’
When the Duchy shifted so that she was facing her, Zoë had a sudden fear that, at last, here was coming an indictment, the forfeit of her mother-in-law’s good opinion, but it wasn’t that.
‘I’ve always thought that you had a difficult time – inheriting two children, particularly Clary, who missed her own mother so much. And then the grief about the first baby – and, most of all, Rupert’s long absence with all the miserable uncertainty attached to it. I think you’ve done well – very well indeed.’
At the mention of grief about the first baby, she felt herself beginning to blush. A brief affair with her mother’s doctor, its humiliating dénouement and dreaded consequence was something that she had managed almost to expunge from conscious memory. Now she knew that it lay there, like an iceberg in the centre of her conscience, and at that moment it came to her that although she felt she could never bring herself to confess about Philip, she might, perhaps, manage to tell Rupert about Jack. And here was the Duchy, wise, kind, unexpectedly understanding – the best person for advice on such an explosive and delicate matter.
She did ask her.
‘Oh, no, my dear! No, no! You must understand that I do not blame you for anything to do with that poor young man, but part of your responsibility now is to bear that experience by yourself. Do not burden your husband with it.’
She felt her hands being taken, pressed, but the Duchy had met her eye and held it.
‘But if—’ She struggled, uncertain of how much she should say. ‘He – Rupert – isn’t happy. He feels – I think he feels bad about not telling us he was alive when he could have. He didn’t want to talk about it, but if I told him things first, he might find it easier—’
Afterwards, she was never sure but it had seemed to her that the steady gaze had faltered, the sincerity shadowed by something else, but it was gone before she was even sure that it had been there. ‘I think,’ the Duchy said, ‘that you should not try to get him to tell you about France. Leave it to him. If he wants to talk about it, he will.’ She reached down and picked up her basket of sweet peas. ‘You have a great deal of future before you both. My advice to you is that you should pay attention to that.’ She took her arm and gave it a little squeeze. ‘You did ask me.’
She had asked, that had been the advice, and she had taken it.
In the autumn, the house at Brook Green had been put on the market, but London was full of houses for sale in various states of disrepair, and as they could not buy anywhere else until it did sell, they moved in with Hugh, who was delighted to have them.
On the whole, the arrangement worked very well, although whether this was because it was acknowledged to be temporary, or whether she was so used to living with the family that it was easier to continue like that, she didn’t know. The children seemed pleased: Wills, because it postponed his going to a preparatory boarding school, and Juliet, because she loved her morning school and quickly developed a full social life with endless tea and birthday parties with friends she made there. Ellen, installed in a back basement room that Hugh furnished for her, took over most of the cooking, and seemed relieved not to have to keep climbing stairs all day. The children had their nursery meals in the kitchen; Ellen still washed, ironed and mended their clothes, but Zoë got them up in the mornings and supervised their baths after their supper. Hugh had insisted upon giving up his bedroom to her and Rupert, and also spent two nights a week in his club so that they should have some evenings to themselves. Mrs Downs, a large sad lady who described herself, to Rupert’s delight, as bulky but fragile, now came four mornings a week to clean the house. She was one of those people who habitually looked on the black side of everything with a cheerfulness that bordered upon the macabre. When the war came to an end, Hugh had reported that she had said: ‘Well! We’ve got the next one to look forward to, I suppose. You can’t have everything in this life.’ And when General Patton was paralysed from his frightful collision with a truck in Frankfurt and subsequently died, she had remarked that it came to all of us in the end – ‘You’ve only got to wait for it.’ Rupert had started reading out pieces of news in the morning paper and adding Mrs Downs’s comments. During family life, at meals and so forth, Rupert was slowly becoming more like his old self; it was when they were alone together that he was constrained. He was unfailingly nice to her, consulting and considering her wishes about everything they did together, what plays and films they saw, which restaurants they went to afterwards, asking her if she liked what she had chosen to eat, wanted later in the evenings to go dancing (she never wanted to do that). In bed they had achieved a kind of conspiratorial calm: when they spoke it was in hushed voices, as though each was afraid of being overheard, as though they were trespassing on unknown territory. Their speech was mostly questioning about each other’s pleasure, or courteous reassurances. She tried to please him and he said that she did; he asked her if things had been good for her, an
d she said, or implied, small, protective lies.
When the telegram from her mother arrived, he had said, ‘If you think it would be a good thing for your mother to come and live with us, you know I should be glad to have her. I know you find her difficult, darling, but if she can’t manage on her own, I’m sure we could work something out.’
Well, she thought, as she queued on the icy station for a taxi, at least it didn’t look as though they would have to have her mother at the moment, which was a good thing because, apart from anything else, there simply wasn’t room for her in Hugh’s house.
In the taxi just as she was thinking that, after all, her mother was only fifty-five or so, it struck her that in twenty-five years’ time that would be her age. Would she simply become someone who irritated and bored her daughter? Was that all that life was for? She was thirty, and she had done nothing except marry Rupert, have his child and fall in love with someone else. It was not enough. She was going to have to search for and find something that she could do or become that had more to it, that had a life of its own, that would engage her. She could not imagine what that could be, and wondered, there was a certain excitement in the speculation, whether she could search for something quite unknown to her.
‘You always said you liked houses that faced east and west.’
‘I know, but the garden side will be sunny.’
‘Yes, but at least half the house won’t be. It’s due north this side.’
Just as Villy was beginning to wish that she hadn’t asked Jessica to look at houses with her (she seemed in a bad mood, but it was fiendishly cold) the agent appeared. ‘So sorry, Mrs – Cazalet, isn’t it? My car wouldn’t start.’ He fumbled in the pockets of his Army surplus overcoat and brought out an enormous bunch of keys with dirty labels attached to them. He had a heavy cold. ‘Here we are.’ He fitted a key into the mock Gothic door, which opened to reveal an unexpectedly large, dark hall. The agent turned on a light – a naked bulb that hung from a cord in the middle of a pargeted ceiling revealed a number of doors much like the one they had come through.
‘It’s a house full of features,’ the agent said. ‘Did you bring the particulars with you, Mrs Cazalet? If not I have a spare copy.’ He sneezed and wiped his nose on an overworked handkerchief.
‘I have got them, but I’d rather just look round first.’
‘Of course. Well, I’ll just take you round and then I’ll leave you to poke about on your own.’ He walked across the hall to the furthest door. ‘This is the main lounge. As you will appreciate,’ he said, before they had a chance of doing so, ‘this room faces due south with attractive Gothic windows onto the garden, and a French window that opens directly into it. There is also an open fireplace with tile surround and parquet flooring.’
The room was quite large, she thought; she remarked on this to Jessica who thought it seemed larger than it was because the ceiling was so low.
The agent said would they mind if he just quickly showed them the rest of the house and then left them to spend as much time as they liked in it. He had another appointment, a house in Belsize Park, an awkward distance without his car. ‘I’m sure I could leave you ladies to lock up and pop the key in to us afterwards.’
The rest of the house consisted of one equally large but dark room, a small kitchen on the ground floor, and four bedrooms, two large and two small, plus a bathroom on the floor above.
She said that she wanted to see the garden, and before he went, the agent produced another key.
‘You can see the garden from the house,’ Jessica said.
‘I want to see the house from the garden.’
They shuffled across the small square lawn, thick with rotting leaves, and turned to stare at the house. Like the front, it was faced with roughcast, now a dirty grey from neglect. The slated roof had a pointed gable, which looked as though the upper rooms would be attics, but they weren’t. The whole thing had a kind of rustic romantic air; she thought that was most unusual in London houses, and she knew that she wanted to live in it. She felt resentful at Jessica’s lack of enthusiasm.
‘Why don’t you like it?’
‘It’s just that I simply can’t imagine Edward wanting to live in it. It’s a kind of glorified quaint’ – she made the word sound really horrid – ‘cottage!’
‘That’s what I like about it. Think how easy to manage! No ghastly basement, hardly any stairs. And this garden could be made nice.’
‘But where will you keep the servants?’
‘Oh, darling, don’t be so out of date. I shan’t have any living in. I shall get a really good daily, and do the cooking myself. After all, you used to do that.’
‘I had to, but you don’t. Seriously, Villy, you don’t want to saddle yourself with all the cooking.’
‘Why not? I shall have Roly to look after because Ellen will go with Rupert and Zoë, so I’d be fairly tied to the house anyway. I shall enjoy having something useful to do.’
‘Well,’ Jessica said, as they were going back in a taxi to her house in Paradise Walk, ‘I still cannot see Edward wanting to live here. He likes lots of room for dinner parties.’
‘He told me to choose exactly what I wanted. And he’s going to get a yacht for sailing at weekends. And we’ll still go to Home Place for the children’s holidays.’
Two days later she took him to see the little house. He didn’t say much except that weren’t the front rooms rather dark, but he said that if she liked it, he would get it if the survey was all right. He was also very sweet, she thought, about her plan to have Miss Milliment to live with them. ‘She won’t be dining with us, darling. I’ll make her a bed-sitting room in that large downstairs front room and she can have her other meals with me and Roly.’ He had smiled and said that would be fine. The survey was set in motion and, in the meantime, there was Christmas.
Although the war was over, it felt like the last Christmas of the war and in some ways it wasn’t very different. Food was no easier, although Archie managed to bring two sides of smoked salmon, but with twenty people (Simon brought a friend from university, who seemed completely speechless except on the subject of Mozart) even that didn’t go very far. Everybody was there, except Louise who had gone to Hatton, and Teddy and his bride, who were not yet back from America. The older children overflowed into Mill Farm, presided over by Rachel and Sid, but everybody converged upon Home Place for meals except for breakfast.
Everybody, she thought, was how they had always been, only more so. The Brig had become unexpectedly tyrannical about things that he had never minded before. ‘I will not have a tree dying in my house,’ he had said, when she had staggered into the hall with the Christmas tree she had bought in Battle.
‘It’s no good, darling,’ the Duchy had said. ‘That will have to disappear and McAlpine will have to dig one out of the nursery.’ She thought of saying that he wouldn’t be able to see it, but one look at the Duchy’s face and she knew that any such subterfuge was out of the question, so she gave the tree away to someone in the village. Then there was some altercation about who merited Christmas stockings. She had thought that the children, from Lydia downwards, should be the recipients; when she announced this at tea-time, the children thought otherwise.
‘I’ve been banking on my stocking for months,’ Neville said. ‘If I don’t have one, people will give me stocking presents instead of real ones. I’m simply not prepared to put up with that sort of lowering of my standards.’
Clary looked at him with scorn. ‘People who want stockings years after they’ve known that Father Christmas is a myth are simply wedded to the material things in life. It’s avaricious to want things so much.’
‘Is it? Don’t you want things? I seem to have noticed that you’re pretty keen on some things.’
‘Of course I want some things. I’m just not so dead set on getting them.’
Neville pretended to consider this. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘That just doesn’t work. What on earth’s the point of wan
ting things if you don’t mind whether you get them or not?’
‘I see his point,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s one of the things we do at school. Have debates on things and try to see the other person’s point of view. Miss Smedley says that’s tremendously important.’
‘When your father was a little boy,’ the Duchy said, ‘he was so greedy about his stocking that one Christmas he hung up a pillow-case thinking that Father Christmas would put more into it.’
Wills looked up with sudden interest. ‘What happened?’
‘In the morning he found it full of coal. Not a single present.’
This shocked everyone.
‘Oh! Poor Dad!’
‘What did he do with the coal?’ Wills asked.
‘That’s not the point. There was nothing he could do about the coal.’
‘Yes, there was,’ Neville said at once. ‘If it had been me, I would have sold it to poor freezing people who would pay pounds for it. Or I would have wrapped up each separate piece and given them as Christmas presents. That would teach people. And please don’t see what I mean,’ he said to Lydia just as she was going to. ‘It’s my point of view; I don’t want you to see it.’
‘Did it do Uncle Edward’s character any good?’ Wills asked.
‘Well, he never hung up a pillow-case again.’
Then Archie, who had been listening to all this, suggested that perhaps people who were being struck off the stocking list should be given a year’s notice, and this was considered a generally popular idea and adopted.
Throughout that Christmas – it still felt like the last one to her – while she coped with the various needs of the family whose ages ranged from Great Aunt Dolly, now approaching eighty-one and whose memory was shakily ensconced in the 1880s when she had been a young girl, and Juliet, now five, who lived firmly in the future when she would be grown up – ‘I shall have twelve children and keep them in bed and just take them out one at a time to keep them clean!’, etc. – she realized that she was actually excited at the prospect of having her own house again, where she could choose what happened, and where there would be opportunities for the indulgence of some solitude. It was years since she had had any sort of holiday: when Edward got the yacht they would be able to have a couple of weeks in her. Zoë had said that she would have Roly and she was sure that Miss Milliment could manage on her own, provided she got a decent daily. She broached this idea to Edward on Christmas Eve when they were undressing for bed.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 158