That had been the beginning of it. He had told her that things were not good between him and Louise; she had been unmaliciously sympathetic – she had always been good-natured, he could never recall her speaking ill of anyone. She bore him no resentment which, as their intimacy increased, he began to see she had the right to do. He had treated her badly. The moment on their last walk together at Hatton when he had tried to excuse himself by saying that he had never intended to marry her now made him feel ashamed and in the end he told her so. ‘It was selfish and pompous and altogether crass of me,’ he said, and she had answered: ‘Oh, Mike! You always overdo that kind of thing, to make people disagree with you.’
The truth of this and the fact that she did not often say anything that surprised him by its perception made him feel – for a moment – just a little in love with her. And she was lovely. She had always been so with each feature perfectly in place, a broad forehead, large wide-apart eyes, which were neither grey nor blue nor green but, at different times, the palest version of those colours, a small nose and a wide mouth that drooped at the corners, like small commas, giving her expression a gravity that enhanced it and made incident in the broad sweeping planes of her face. He had explored all these things in his drawings when they had first become lovers; now he was rediscovering them with the minute changes wrought by time and her experience – both of which seemed to have added to her attraction. She had poise now and more animation, and she did not invariably agree with him.
They did not meet often: he was working very hard, and, as the daylight hours gradually increased, for longer, and most evenings he had engagements with Louise. But there were times when Louise announced that she was spending the evening with her cousins Polly and Clary or her friend Stella, whom he had never really taken to, or she wanted to go to some play that he knew he would not enjoy, and then he would ring Rowena from his studio and make a plan with her. She seemed always to be free, and when, on one of these occasions, he remarked upon this and said that surely she must have other friends, she had answered that she put them off. That was the evening when he first went to bed with her, and it was a great success. She had always been easy in bed and he was able to enjoy himself, as well as his effect upon her, with no trouble at all. She combined passivity with obvious sexual satisfaction – the perfect combination, he thought.
Afterwards they lay in her bed and had a serious (stock) conversation about the fact that he was married and did not want to rock the boat – the child and so forth – and she listened and accepted everything he said in just the right way. ‘I’m so happy,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about anything else. I’m here if you want me.’
His marriage seemed to be at an impasse. However, a gallery in New York who had shown some of his pictures before the war had written asking him whether he was interested in another show. He had discussed the matter with his mother, who thought it an excellent idea, although she had advised him to be firm about a date sufficiently far off for him to accumulate enough portraits. If this did come off, he decided to take Louise with him: a complete change of scene might also improve their marriage. It would get her away from her preoccupation with the theatre and give them a chance to be really alone together. Sebastian and Nannie could go to his mother at Hatton. It would be a kind of second honeymoon, and Louise, who had never been abroad in her life, must surely be excited at the prospect. Rowena did not come into these plans – how could she? – but the knowledge that she was there, in the background, gave him a new kind of assurance that he badly needed. The spring of ’47, he thought, would be the right time to go to America, and he wrote to this effect.
As Christopher tramped back down the cart track from the farm to his caravan he noticed with satisfaction that the wind had dropped, not completely, to that stillness that usually prefaced rain at this time of year, but to a kinder, more domestic breeze. Perhaps it would be a fine weekend – he passionately hoped so. He had had his weekly bath and supper with the Hursts, a day earlier because tomorrow Polly was coming to stay. She had never been before; indeed he had never had anybody to stay in the caravan with him and his excitement at the prospect was beginning to congeal into anxiety. Although it was dark, he didn’t need a torch – knew the way blindfold. But Polly would need one. He must be sure the battery was working on the old one he had – come to that he must find it, must add that to his list. Lucky he’d asked for the day off tomorrow because there was a hell of a lot to do before Polly arrived.
He had asked her on the spur of the moment at the party given for his sister Angela before she left for America. After Nora’s wedding he had decided that family parties were not for him; they only made him feel depressed and isolated, something which in his ordinary life he did not feel at all. But he was very fond of Ange, she was his sister and he felt he might never see her again. Mindful of the fiasco of the very old suit that he had tried to wear to Nora’s wedding (his mother had made him borrow something from Uncle Hugh, which hadn’t fitted either but in a different way), he had bicycled into Hastings and bought himself a dark suit and a utility shirt. Then he remembered that he’d used his tie to bind the splint on the vixen’s leg, and bought himself another: green with blue spots on it. It wasn’t silk, which meant it wouldn’t tie very well, but it didn’t matter as he didn’t expect to wear it much. Mrs Hurst had knitted him some socks for Christmas. He hadn’t enough coupons left to buy shoes, so he would have to wear the awful old ones that were far too tight, or his boots. In the end he chose his boots. He didn’t look at people’s feet, so he didn’t think they would be noticed. He’d have to stay in London on the night of the party, and he absolutely didn’t want to have to stay with Mum and Dad, so although he hated the telephone, he rang up Ange at her house and asked if he could stay with her because she knew how he felt about Dad. She was nice about it, and said if he didn’t mind the floor he could. ‘Anyway, there’s no room in their tiddly little house because Judy will be there,’ she had said.
So that stormy Saturday he took Oliver over to the Hursts and bicycled against a violent headwind to the station. It was bitterly cold and hail fell with little stinging blows on to his face: he was glad of his oilskin jacket.
Journeys always made him anxious; the train was all right because all he had to do was to sit in it until it finally stopped in London. But then he had to find the right bus stop for the right bus that would take him to a stop by Lyons Corner House in Tottenham Court Road, and then he had to walk on until a turning to the left, which was Percy Street where Ange lived. But it was nice when he finally got there. Ange seemed really pleased to see him and made him tea and toast. She had her hair in curlers and she was wearing her dressing gown, but the main thing was that she looked happy. This made her look so different that he realized that she must have been pretty unhappy before.
When they were sitting as near to the small electric fire as they could get and drinking the tea, he said, ‘Do you remember when I met you in the drive at Mill Farm after we all knew there wasn’t going to be the war and you were so unhappy and you couldn’t tell me about it?’
‘Yes. I could now. I thought I was in love with Rupert—’
‘Uncle Rupert?’
‘Yep, I thought it was the end of the world. I thought he loved me back, you see. Well – I suppose I sort of imagined he did. And, of course, he didn’t.’
‘Poor Ange!’
‘Don’t worry. It’s completely over. Everybody has to have a first love and I expect they mostly go wrong.’
‘Did good things happen after it?’
‘Not much. I fell in love with someone else and that was far worse. He was married too.’
‘Was that the person you nearly did marry?’
‘Yes – no. It was the person Mummy thought I ought to marry. For the obvious reason.’ She looked at him to see if he knew what she meant, and just as he was about to ask her why their mother thought she ought to marry someone who was married already, she said: ‘I was pregnant.’
‘Oh, Ange! Did you lose the baby?’
She hadn’t answered at once, then she had said, gently, almost as though she was comforting him, ‘I’m glad I didn’t have it.’
She offered him a cigarette, but he didn’t smoke.
‘But now,’ he said, ‘you’ve got Lord Black, haven’t you? I didn’t know Americans had lords.’
‘He’s not a lord! That’s his name. Earl. I shall be Mrs Earl C. Black. And live in New York. I can’t wait.’
He could see she was happy, which was the point. But it did feel a long way away. She said she must get ready for the party – ‘the probably awful party’ – and told him where the bathroom was.
‘Do you think I ought to shave again?’
She felt his face. ‘Well. Did you shave this morning?’
‘Yesterday. I only do it every other day usually.’
‘You are a bit bristly. And you’re bound to have to kiss people. Better.’
So he did, and managed not to cut himself.
The party was in a large room in a very grand hotel. All the family were there – well, it felt like all. His family, at any rate. Dad was wearing a dinner jacket and Mum had a long floaty blue dress. They put Angela between them to talk to everyone as they arrived. Judy had got rather fat and was wearing the bridesmaid’s dress she’d worn for Nora’s wedding. She rushed about the room eating things off the plates on the tables as well as things that were handed to her. He felt very proud of Angela who wore a red velvet dress that just reached her knees and marvellous stockings that she said Earl had sent her. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she had long red and gold earrings. ‘You look absolutely terrific,’ he had said before they left her home, and she kissed him. She smelt like a greenhouse full of flowers.
Nora arrived a bit late wheeling Richard, whom she placed beside her parents. ‘So that he has a chance to see everyone as they come in,’ she explained. Everybody who arrived was given a glass of champagne and Nora held Richard’s up to his mouth to give him little sips, but Christopher noticed that she did not do it very often.
He stood a little way off from his family and watched the Cazalets arrive. He had not seen any of them for three years – since Nora’s marriage, in fact. First were Uncle Edward and Aunt Villy who looked as though she had shrunk inside her dress. They brought Lydia, who looked very elegant in a dark dress that made her waist look tiny (the opposite of Judy, he thought sadly), and Roland in grey flannel shorts with matching jacket and hair spiky from brilliantine, and Wills, dressed exactly the same. He saw Wills and Roland confer, and then descend upon Richard in his chair, whom thereafter they fed steadily with the little bits of food that were being handed round. Then Uncle Rupert and Aunt Zoë arrived and Aunt Zoë looked nearly as terrific as Ange in a dark green and white striped dress with dangling diamond earrings. He watched as Uncle Rupert kissed Ange, but she didn’t seem to mind. Then the Duchy came with Aunt Rachel, both dressed as he always remembered them, in misty, bluebellish blues, but with long skirts. Uncle Rupert got the Duchy a chair and Aunt Rachel went at once to talk to Richard. Some other people arrived whom he didn’t know – friends of Ange’s, he supposed. Some of them knew each other, but they didn’t seem to know the family. Then – and this was what changed the whole party for him – Clary arrived with Polly. Clary looked like he always remembered her, but Polly, although of course she was not unrecognizable, looked so extraordinarily beautiful that he felt he was seeing her for the first time in his life.
They came up to him at once. ‘Christopher! Hello, Christopher,’ was what they severally said. In a daze he allowed himself to be hugged by them. Polly’s dress was the colour of autumn beech leaves: she smelt of some indefinably rich scent.
‘You do smell extraordinary,’ he found himself saying.
‘It’s a scent called Russian Leather,’ Clary said, ‘and I keep telling her she puts far too much of it on. She only wants to smell like one very expensive leather chair, not a whole row.’ She added, ‘It’s French, actually. It’s called Cuir de Russie in France.’
‘If I had a scent, I’d choose one called Fried Bacon.’ Someone very tall loomed behind the girls.
‘Neville, you can’t choose scents like that. You can only choose from what there is.’
‘Not if I was a scent inventor, which might be a very good way of getting rich: they must have used up all the soppy flower smells by now. Also, sometimes people might like a scent that put people off. Essence of Grass Snake would be good for that. Or Burglar’s Sweat could be another – oh, hello, Christopher.’
Neville was now as tall as he.
‘Don’t be silly and disgusting,’ Clary advised. ‘This is a party. It’s meant to be fun for people.’
She went with Polly to be greeted by Ange. Neville stayed.
‘I must say I think parties are vastly overrated. You’re not meant to have a proper conversation at them, but you are meant to kiss the most awful people and exchange platitudes with whoever is the most dull. Do you agree with that?’
‘Well, I don’t go to parties much. At all.’
‘Really? How do you manage that?’
There aren’t parties where I live.’ As he said that, he felt panic. He did live cut off from people: apart from the Hursts and Tom, the other chap who worked for them, he didn’t live with people. Of course, he saw people in shops, when he went to them, but otherwise he lived with Oliver, a half-wild cat who made use of him when she felt like it, and intermittently with other creatures whom he looked after when they were in the wars, like the vixen last autumn found in a horrible trap, various hedgehogs weak from fleas, birds that fell out of nests, and the young hare that Oliver brought him, one of whose eyes had been pecked out when it lay in a stupor – from some kind of poison he had suspected. But all these cousins, whom years ago he had spent holidays with, who had all once been part of his landscape, they all seemed to know one another, had continued to grow up together, while he had been cut off. Cut myself off, he admitted: in his intense determination to have as little to do with his father as possible he had isolated himself from everyone else. He looked at Neville, who had been choosing a sausage roll off a plate with great deliberation. He remembered him as a boy.
‘How old are you?’
‘Sixteen. And a half. But I’m working on being old for my age. It’s largely a matter of vocabulary and never being surprised by anything.’
He bent his head to take a bite out of the roll, and a lock of reddish-brown hair fell across his bumpy white forehead, but at the crown, Christopher noticed, his hair grew upright in two tufts.
‘Are Teddy and Simon coming?’
‘Teddy’s still in America, although he’ll soon be back, with a girl called Bernadine who he’s married. Simon’s swotting for his finals.’
He didn’t know whether he was sorry or glad about this.
At this point Christopher’s father called for silence and made a fairly long, not always audible speech about Ange. He stopped listening to it almost at once because Polly came over to him and again her incredible beauty struck him so forcefully that the room seemed to contain only her. She was listening to his father’s speech, so he was able to look at her – at her shining coppery hair that had been cut so that it stood out inches from the back of her slender white neck, and when his father made some sort of joke and there was laughter – not the real sort but polite – she turned to him and there was an eddy of the rich scent: she wrinkled her white nose, just like Aunt Rach used to do, he remembered, when she wanted to share something funny with anyone, and her dark blue eyes shone with conspiracy. What? That she knew that they both knew that his father was not funny? That she was simply pleased to see him?
Anyway, when his father had stopped speaking and there was applause, and before Ange began to say anything back, he took a deep breath and asked if she would come and stay a weekend in his caravan.
And now she was coming. He had warned her that he didn’t have thi
ngs like baths and electric light. He’d said it was only a caravan. But he hadn’t said that there was only a sort of outdoor privy that he’d constructed just inside the wood, or that there was only a wooden bunk in the tiny bedroom at one end of the caravan. He’d put her in that, and he could sleep on the floor in the main part.
He spent the whole of the next day cleaning things and tidying up, and making a vegetable soup. Mrs Hurst, who had been extremely helpful, had made him a fruit cake and a baked custard with her own eggs and milk, so they would do for puddings. He decided upon a macaroni cheese for the main course, which he could cook in his little Dutch oven. He collected plenty of wood for the stove, cleaned the windows, which were always dim with woodsmoke and condensation, and his outdoor larder – a box with a zinc mesh door that was hung from the roof of the caravan. This was to house most of the food for the weekend. On one of his many borrowing trips, in this case for extra bedding, Mrs Hurst had suggested that his cousin might like to sleep at the farm, but he felt that it would spoil things. As the day drew on, however, and it was nearly time to go to the station to fetch Polly, he began to wonder whether he was wrong; perhaps she would prefer to sleep in a proper room in a proper bed.
He need not have worried. It was dusk when he met her on the platform. She was wearing trousers and a dark jacket and a scarf tied over her hair. They kissed in a family way and he took her small case.
‘I didn’t know you had a car!’
‘It’s not mine, it belongs to the farm I work for. He lent it to me to fetch you.’
‘It’s all pretty rough,’ he warned her as he drove carefully out of Hastings – he didn’t drive much and, anyway, felt he had to be extra careful with Polly: her face had felt like cool china when he kissed it.
‘I know it will be lovely,’ she said, with such a warm assurance that he began to feel that perhaps she would like it.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 164