Oliver waited until he had blown out the candle, and then settled himself in his usual position against his friend, back against his belly, head on shoulder, a bulwark against what would otherwise have been entire despair.
All morning the removal men, wearing aprons, had tramped back and forth from their van with the furniture for the new maisonette and Sid had been helping Rachel with its disposal. By eleven o’clock all the larger pieces were in – one of the pianos, the grandfather clocks (two), the vast mahogany wardrobes (three), the Duchy’s bureau, the Brig’s huge kneehole desk, the beds, the dining-room table, the dressing-tables, what seemed to her an incredible number of chairs, a sofa, the Duchy’s sewing machine and gramophone, the Brig’s glass-fronted bookcases of laurelwood. She wanted Rachel to sit and rest while the men drank tea and ate buns in their van, but Rachel wanted her to see the garden with a view to tidying it up a bit before the Duchy’s arrival, so out they went into the bitingly cold wind. The garden was so small that she felt they could just as well have surveyed it from the house. It was a small rectangle; a square of lawn – now sodden, high grass – edged by a weed-ridden gravel path, and with narrow black beds that contained the remains of Michaelmas daisies, blackened by winter frosts, a few ferns and an old pear tree. It was bounded by low black brick walls, and there was a rotting shed crazily perched in the far corner.
‘If we could just cut the grass before they come,’ Rachel said. ‘Do you think I could borrow your mower?’
‘You could, but it wouldn’t cut this. It needs scything first. Let’s go in, darling, I can see that you’re freezing. There are some daffodils – look!’
The Duchy said they were King Alfred, and she hates them. Oh, darling, I do hope I’ve done the right thing! It does seem rather small now that the furniture is in. Still, it’s lovely and near to you.’ She tucked Sid’s arm in hers with that smile that melted her heart.
The afternoon was spent unpacking the tea-chests that arrived in such a fast, steady stream that Rachel was reduced to telling them to put them all in the sitting room. This meant that those containing linen and bedding had all to be carted upstairs in armfuls. The flat consisted of a large sitting room, a dining room, a study and a small kitchen and cloakroom on the ground floor, and two large and two small bedrooms and a bathroom on the floor above. Needless to say, Rachel had designated the two larger bedrooms for her mother and Aunt Dolly, the south-facing smaller room for the Brig, and had taken the smallest room (not more than a boxroom, Sid thought angrily) for herself. ‘It’s quite large enough for me,’ she had said. ‘I have too many clothes anyway, and they’re all as old as the hills. It’s high time I gave them to the Red Cross.’
They had unpacked the tea-chests, kitchen stuff, china – ‘Where are we going to put everything?’ Rachel had said. ‘I’m afraid the poor Duchy is going to feel dreadfully cramped’ – until she could see that Rachel was absolutely ‘done up’, as she would put it.
‘Darling. We must stop. I’m going to take you home and give you an enormous gin and then you can have a hot bath and supper in bed.’
And in spite of some protest, that is what they had done. Sid had cut up the pork pie she had bought and made a salad, but when she carried the tray up to Rachel’s room, she found her lying in her dressing-gown, flat on her back asleep. She put the tray on the dressing table, moved the, armchair to where she could see Rachel, and sat down to wait.
When the idea of the older Cazalets moving back to London had first been mooted, she had had a sense of relief that at last and at least there would no longer be such a distance between them. She had even had the fantasy, as now she bitterly called it, of Rachel settling her parents somewhere and then coming to live with her. That was soon exploded: Rachel had explained at some length how she could not possibly leave the Duchy – no longer with the staff she was accustomed to – on her own with the blind Brig. So then it had been a question of where they would find a flat, and the house – or rather half of it – in Carlton Hill had seemed the perfect answer. Now, she wondered how much time, freedom and privacy this would really afford them. Its size precluded ever being alone with Rachel if she went there, which left Rachel coming to her at odd times and when she felt able to get away – the only alternative. And here was the dilemma. Ages ago – it must be nearly two years – she had resolved that if Thelma ever got in the way of her seeing Rachel, Thelma would have to go – for good. Somehow, however, this situation had never actually occurred; her meetings with Rachel had been so occasional, and always so much planned in advance, that there had never been the pressing need that would have precipitated such a decision. And Thelma? She was fairly sure that Thelma guessed or knew that there was someone else in her life, but it was never mentioned. Thelma had all the ingenious flexibility of a piece of ivy determined to conquer a tree or a wall; she clung unobtrusively, she encroached by minute degrees, and if Sid defeated any particular advance, she fell back upon a series of apparently innocuous excuses: she had only thought she would stay an extra night because she planned to wash all the paint on the stairs and to do this in one day meant a very early start; she was only staying that particular evening because she knew Sid got back late from Hampshire where she taught in a girls’ school and would be too tired to cook for herself. Sid had ceased wanting very much to go to bed with her, but in a curious way, which she had not expected, this made it almost easier to do. The fact that she did not enjoy it in the way that she had at first made her feel less guilty. A piece of twisted morality, she now thought, as she gazed at Rachel’s peaceful face. Asleep, she shed years: it was easy to see the beauty she had had as a young girl. Thelma would have to go.
The next day, she set about it.
‘But I don’t understand!’
‘It’s simply that our situation isn’t right for me – any more. I’m very sorry about it, but I must tell you. I can’t go on like this.’
The hot brown eyes peered at her with a look of hurt bewilderment. ‘I still don’t understand. What has happened to change things?’
How could she answer that? She simply no longer felt the same. In any case, it would be much better for Thelma to go. ‘I can’t give you all you want, you are quite young enough to go and find that with someone else.’
This, before it was out of her mouth, she knew to be a tactical error.
‘But I would far, far rather have what little I do have with you than any life with anyone else! Surely you know that.’ The eyes were brimming now and, from much past experience, she knew that they were in for a major scene.
‘Thelma, I know it’s very hard for you, but you’ve simply got to accept this.’
‘That you don’t love me any more?’
‘That I don’t love you.’
‘But you did love me. Something must have happened.’
‘Time has happened.’
Tears, sobs, violent crying: she managed not to touch her throughout all of it, to continue to stand by the piano repeating at intervals that she was sorry.
‘You can’t be very sorry, or you wouldn’t do this to me! You couldn’t be so unbelievably cruel to someone you cared for!’
She had no choice, she said. This was to be the end.
‘You don’t mean that I’m not to come here any more? I mean, even if you don’t want – to spend nights with me – you surely can’t banish me completely?’
A clean break, she said, was the only way.
But Thelma had the indomitable strength of the abject. She would only come once a week. She would clean the house and do the shopping. She would not expect payment for any of this. She would get herself another job that would keep her. She would not expect any more music lessons. She would not ever, ever turn up unexpectedly. She would be content if they simply had coffee together in the kitchen when she had finished cleaning.
Eventually, it got through to her that none of this was to happen, and it was almost with relief that Sid recognized resentment beginning to smoulder in the girl
’s eyes. She said she supposed she would be given time to pack up her things, or would Sid prefer her to return tomorrow for all that? Sid saw this attempt to clutch at a thin edge just in time to thwart it. No, she should pack everything now. She would pay for a cab. While Thelma disappeared upstairs to the spare room, Sid collected her music that lay on the piano and in the music stool and put it all into her music case. She was shaking with shame, the horrid discovery that apart from not loving Thelma she no longer even liked her, and the realization that their natures – hers as well as Thelma’s – combined to make it impossible for her to conduct this ending with any sort of kindness or delicacy. The inch would become an ell, the straw seized would become a rope with which she would certainly get hanged: a brutal, sudden and complete termination was all that she could manage.
She did contrive to give Thelma some money, and found her a second case (she turned out to have far more possessions than Sid had been aware of) and rang for a taxi-cab while Thelma was filling it. She was anxious now that there should be no hiatus between Thelma being ready and her going.
The cab arrived and the considerable luggage was stowed in it. There was a final horrid moment when she had to ask Thelma for her latch key; she had nearly forgotten to do this, and saw from the expression on Thelma’s face as she fumbled in her bag for it that Thelma had been hoping she would forget. When Thelma – now tearless and white with anger – was finally ensconced in the cab and driven away, she almost tottered back to the house. To her dislike, she now admitted a certain fear; she had actually become afraid of this seemingly soft and clinging girl, feeling now, with more than a touch of hysteria, that had she retained the key, Thelma might easily have returned to burn the house down or effect some lesser destruction.
It had been early evening. She made herself a stiff drink. Part of her wished passionately that Rachel was in London, but another part felt so besmirched by what she had done that she felt unworthy. She decided to go out, to leave the house for the evening.
Two days later she received an eleven-page letter from Thelma, the ostensible reason for which was that she needed a reference. She supposed that Sid would not grudge her that, at least. It was not much to ask, considering the way in which her love and loyalty had been treated. The rest of the letter consisted of descriptions of this, together with her reactions to them. She had put up with being taken for granted, for being used when convenient with no thought for how she might feel. She had put up with slights, selfishness, a lack of consideration for any of her feelings, with being excluded from the rest of Sid’s social life – she had never, for instance, even laid eyes on any of that family Sid went off and stayed with in Sussex. She felt that a good deal of the time she had been treated like a servant: it had been humiliating, considering the rest of their relationship. On and on it went, lamenting the cessation of a relationship that Thelma seemed to feel had been intolerable. She seemed to regard her love flourishing in such a climate as a particular triumph and could not now imagine how she was to get through the rest of her life, except that she knew that she would be unable ever to trust anyone again.
She had read the letter twice. It seemed extraordinary to her – even after only two days – that she had persisted in putting up with such a dishonest situation for so long after she had recognized it. She had felt responsible, angry and ashamed. She had liked to think of herself as honourable and straightforward, and decisive, and this proved her to be nothing of the kind.
She wrote a carefully generous reference and posted it to the house in Kilburn where Thelma had a room. This sort of thing, she thought, must never happen again. She would never love anyone but Rachel, and therefore had no right to go to bed with anyone else.
‘And this is your room, Miss Milliment. I thought you would not mind being on the ground floor as there is a little cloakroom with a basin next door, and you will only have to brave the staircase when you want a bath.’
‘That is most thoughtful.’ She had found stairs increasingly difficult lately; largely because she could not see where they were.
‘Perhaps you’d like me to put your suitcases on your bed: then it will be easier for you to unpack them. Tea will be ready in about half an hour.’ Viola heaved the cases on to the bed and left her.
Miss Milliment had come up by train that afternoon. It had seemed very strange to be leaving Home Place: it had been such a delightful refuge for so long. Naturally, she was extremely grateful to dear Viola for giving her a home, and had she not sometimes hankered for London and its galleries during those years of war? ‘It is impossible to please you, Eleanor,’ she admonished herself.
The room was rather dark, so she trotted to the door to switch on the ceiling light. Apart from the bed, there was a nice, solid wardrobe in one corner, a chest of drawers, a writing table, one easy and two upright chairs. The walls were pale blue. There was a gas fire with a rug in front of it and a bedside table with a lamp on it. There was also a small open bookcase – she had not seen it at first, because it was on the far side of the wardrobe. She would be able to unpack her books at last, which she had never had room to do at Home Place. They had lain at the back of the garage in the same boxes that had contained them since Papa’s death. She had so much to be thankful for! It was clear to her that the house was not very large, and that she had been given one of the greater rooms: a bedsitting room was what it was meant to be, and she resolved to exercise the utmost tact about how often and how much she used the rest of the house. I must feel my way, she thought. I must never encroach upon dear Viola’s family life. By which she knew she meant her life with Edward; she knew that, where Roly was concerned, she could still be useful: she was preparing him for prep school, and there was talk of Zoë bringing Juliet over for lessons. Lydia was to have her heart’s desire and go to the boarding school where her cousin Judy was. And when the older Cazalets were settled in their flat – which, Viola said, was within walking distance – she would be able to continue to help the Brig with his book. She did not think he would ever finish the work since he so often changed his mind about the course it should take – they were now deeply involved in the historical geography of the forests, when originally the book had been meant as a survey of trees indigenous or imported into Great Britain. However, it gave him something to think and to talk about, and she found the subject, which was new to her, of great interest.
She was so occupied with these thoughts that she did not notice (until the drawer was so full that she was unable to shut it) that she had simply been putting everything from one case into one drawer. A pretty pickle! Now her stockings were all muddled up with her vests and drawers and even one jersey that needed washing. ‘Really, Eleanor! You are not to be trusted with the simplest task.’ But she decided to leave the drawer as it was for the moment and to unpack the second case. This seemed to contain a daunting miscellany. Summer clothes – her best yellow and brown outfit worn in the evenings, although she could not help noticing that the holes under the arms had, in spite of her cobbling them together, enlarged to a point where she doubted that much more could be done to repair them. Her cardigans – all three of them – were in need of attention; it scarcely seemed worth putting them away. The one with which she had had that unfortunate accident with the golden syrup seemed far stickier than the small mishap warranted and the nice heathery blue one that dear Polly had so kindly made for her, the sleeve of which had most tiresomely caught on some protuberance, had acquired a large rambling hole that she feared it would be impossible to mend. She sighed. Sometimes her uselessness appalled her. She could no longer see well enough to thread a needle, but honesty compelled her to admit that even when her eyes had been better, she was a poor sewer. And here was Viola proposing to do all the cooking for the household! Surely she must be able to help with that! She could peel potatoes, perhaps, she could surely learn to do that or – but here her imagination failed her. She really had little or no idea what one did with food. One presumably washed and chopped and mixe
d things and then boiled them or put them in the oven. The nearest she had ever come to preparing food was spreading the dripping on hot toast for her father, and, of course, making tea for him. After his death she had eaten in tea-shops, or in lodgings until dear Viola had invited her to Home Place where, of course, there had always been delicious food prepared by Mrs Cripps. Viola was not used to cooking either: she had always had a cook and other servants. This move was going to be a very great change for her. Miss Millament resolved to be as much help as possible and (although it seemed rather contrary) to keep out of the way as much as she could.
When Viola called her to tea, she left the room with some relief. It now seemed such a muddle that she was afraid she would never get it straight.
That evening, however, she was invited to dine with Viola and Edward. ‘Our first night here, you must join us, Miss Milliment,’ Viola had said. Roly and Lydia were absent, as Viola had wanted to get their rooms straight before they came, so it was just the three of them. Edward arrived rather late from the office – she heard Viola greeting him in the hall: ‘Darling! Of course, you haven’t even got a key to your own house yet! You do look fagged. Have you had an awful day?’
‘Pretty bloody.’
Her door had been ajar for the hearing of this exchange; she must remember to keep it shut but, even so, the walls must have been quite thin because, after shutting it, she could still hear them in the kitchen.
She was bidden to join them in the drawing room for a glass of champagne that Edward had brought.
‘Here’s to the new house!’ Viola had said, and they all drank.
It was a strange evening, however. Viola was the one who talked. In spite of her looking exhausted (she had not bothered to change, she said, as she was cooking), she hardly stopped talking throughout the meal. She had certainly worked very hard. A fire had been lit – which was comforting as it was one of those cold spring evenings – and before it she had laid a small round table with dinner. ‘We’ll probably eat in the kitchen on ordinary evenings,’ she said, ‘but I thought we ought to christen the drawing room tonight.’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 167