‘Your back hurting?’
‘Mm.’
He put her in the car, and she said, ‘Just drive – out of this place.’
He did. He drove up a road leading on to Hampstead Heath until he found a quiet place to stop. When he turned to her she was sitting rigidly, staring ahead. ‘Darling Rachel, does your back hurt dreadfully?’
‘Everything hurts.’ Then she began to cry. She cried as though the act of crying was inexpressibly painful. Of course, it’s her father as well, he thought. It’s been quite sudden – a shock – and on top of that she’s worn herself out nursing him.
‘You looked after him so well. You couldn’t have done more.’ Then he realized that it was better to say nothing, to let her cry. He kept his arm round her – how easy it was to do that now! Once it would have caused him both ecstasy and anguish. After a time he sought for and gave her his handkerchief.
‘Oh, Archie, you are a blessing. There’s nothing like an old friend.’ But for some reason this made her cry afresh.
‘He did have a very happy and successful life, didn’t he?’ He felt now that some talk might steady her.
‘Oh, yes! You should see the letters the Duchy has had! Some of the nicest are from the people who worked for him. And the day of the night before he died he told me that he’d been afraid he might die without knowing about Rupe. And he wasn’t really ill for long …’
She continued in this vein for a while, assembling small, comforting facts, but somehow they were not comforting her. She had stopped crying; although he sensed that she had not reached the end, that there was something else, or more to come.
‘Do you think that we should perhaps be getting on to Hugh’s?’ There was to be a gathering at his house with tea and drinks.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I really can’t face it.’ It was said with an intensity that surprised him, and it occurred to him that she might be starting some kind of breakdown.
‘I’ll take you home, then,’ he said, with all the calm and good cheer he could muster.
‘Thank you, dear Archie. Do you mind if I smoke?’
‘Course not.’
‘You know,’ he said, as they reached Hampstead, ‘what I think you need is to send the Duchy and Dolly back to Home Place and have a good long holiday. Wouldn’t Sid be able to take you somewhere restful and nice?’
‘Oh no!’ she began to say, but was prevented by a fresh flood of tears, of sobs that racked her and made her gasp with pain as she cried.
‘Darling Rach. I’m just going to get you home and put you to bed.’ A doctor, he thought: at least he might give her something for her back and she might sleep.
He reached the house, found the key in her bag and came round to her side to help her out of the car. This hurt very much. Somehow he got her up the steps to the front door and into the sitting room and thence to what looked like the most comfortable armchair – ‘Upright is best.’ She asked him to fetch her some aspirin from her dressing table upstairs. Her room was very cold and bare, a nun’s cell, he thought. She asked him to ring Hugh and he did. He suggested ringing her doctor and she said no, what she needed was her osteopath: ‘There hasn’t been time to get to him – or even make an appointment.’ He rang and, using all his powers of persuasion, managed to get Mr Goring to agree to see her at six that evening. ‘I’ll take you,’ he said. He went to the kitchen and made some tea. She had started to worry about smaller things: was not six o’clock after people like Mr Goring stopped work and, if it was, wasn’t this rather unfair on him? And what about the Duchy’s supper? She liked to eat early, ‘and I’m afraid it takes me ages to make anything’.
He rang Hugh again to explain about the osteopath and Hugh said he would look after the Duchy. ‘Jolly good you’re looking after Rach,’ he had added.
He had tried to get Rachel to have a tot of whisky with her aspirin but she had absolutely refused: ‘Whisky on an empty stomach and I’ll arrive at poor Mr Goring roaring drunk.’ Now he realized that with Rachel this meant that she had not only had no lunch, she had probably had no breakfast either. He questioned her, she was evasive, but in the end admitted to a cup of tea at breakfast, and not having felt like any lunch. She agreed to his lighting the gas fire and toasting some bread which she said she and the Duchy always did at tea-time.
Everything seemed to be getting calmer. She talked with affection and an only reasonable degree of emotion about the Brig and how funny he had been about her awful cooking, about the problems that Dolly, with her distinctly patchy grasp of reality, posed for all of them (she had had to be sent to stay with old Sister Crouchback – now retired – when the Brig became ill, but would, no doubt, be returning soon).
‘But, darling Rach, can you really cope with the two old ladies and no living-in help? Ought you not to consider getting a cook?’
‘Oh, no. It will do me good to do something for a change.’
‘A woman to clean, perhaps?’
They had had a Mrs Jessup, but she had only stayed for a fortnight and then disappeared without trace.
‘Sid must have someone, and even if they couldn’t come to you they might know someone who could. Or you could put a card in the local newsagent’s? That often works.’
‘Oh, no!’ He had been stooping to put the toasting fork back into its niche on the hearth but the sheer misery of this cry made him turn to her. She was frowning, biting her lips, rigid with the effort not to break down. When she met his eye, she said: ‘I did. Put a card. Someone came …’ Her voice died away and she started to shake. Then before he could reach her she put her face in her hands and began to weep – a soft, heartbroken sound that pierced him more than anything that had gone before.
He drew up his chair so that he could sit close to her. ‘Rachel, tell me. You must tell someone what is making you so unhappy.’
‘I think I must, I don’t know how. Such horror – such dreadful things!’
In the end she did tell him. Or rather, from what she said, and what she left unsaid in a confused, circuitous account, he thought he came to understand what had happened.
A girl had come in response to the advertisement in the newsagent. She had come in the afternoon; mercifully the Duchy and Dolly had both been having a rest and the Brig was out. Rachel was alone. At least she had been alone. She had seemed a nice, quiet, suitable girl, and also vaguely familiar. Then, after she had asked the appropriate questions and received the right answers, just as she had been about to accept her for the job, the girl suddenly said that really she had come about something else. ‘I had no idea what that could be, but for some reason I felt frightened.’
Then it had all come out. The girl knew Sid: hadn’t Rachel heard about her? Of course: she’d met her once in Sid’s house. She had been in Sid’s life, oh – for years! ‘She said something about knowing that I was a friend of Sid’s but she had thought just a friend. I said that that was true; we had been friends for a very long time – since before the war.’
The girl had said that friends were one thing, but Sid had lied to her, had pretended that she – her name was Thelma – was the only love in her life. ‘And then she said – she said – so dreadful – that the moment I came to London, she had been turned out of Sid’s house, out of her life without any warning at all. I couldn’t understand any of it, why she was so upset, and worse, what had made Sid be so unkind to her. But when I said that there must have been some reason – I didn’t like her very much but I did feel sorry for her – she suddenly shouted at me, “You! You’re the reason!”’
Then she had looked at him and he could see what it cost her to continue. ‘She started to talk about herself and Sid, things they had done together …’ A slow and painful blush suffused her. ‘I can’t speak of that. It was too horrible. I asked her to go, but she didn’t go. I was sitting down and I was afraid to stand – I mean I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand if I got up …’ Her voice died away and she was silent, swallowing as though nauseated. She
kept swallowing as she stared down at her lap.
He wanted to say that he knew jealousy was a terrible feeling, that he was sure Sid loved her, that the girl sounded a bitch and was also possibly a liar, or at least was exaggerating, but something warned him to say none of these things. Instead he asked: ‘How did you get rid of her?’
‘My mother called from upstairs. When the girl realized we were not alone in the house, she got up and said she had felt she had to tell me, to warn me – presumably I didn’t want my life to be ruined by Sid as hers had been. She actually said’ – and here her disgust was tinged with contempt – ‘that she was sorry to have upset me. I don’t think she was, at all. She said she would see herself out, but I went with her to the front door and I said, “Never come back,” and shut it after her.’ Her eyes filled again with tears. ‘But you can see why I cannot see Sid – can’t talk to her at all.’
Then it was time to take her to the osteopath.
In the car she said, ‘Thank you for letting me tell you. I think it will be a relief to have told. But only you. Nobody else.’
‘Of course.’
While she was with Mr Goring, he rang Nancy to tell her that he would not, after all, be able to keep their date. She was very nice about it.
While he sat in the drab waiting room – four upright chairs and a pile of old copies of Punch – he tried to imagine being either Sid or Rachel, and failed. He could not think what had induced Sid to betray Rachel over such a long period of time, and he could not think how, or why, Rachel had felt so utterly unable to confront her about it. He knew that Rachel had had a terrible shock; that she felt desperately humiliated by the inference of so much lying and deception on Sid’s part. And, given Rachel’s description of the girl, what on earth could Sid, loving Rachel, see in that creature? But he knew that this question was one that could never be answered. Rachel, he thought, was such a frank, whole-hearted and somehow innocent person, that concealing her only love affair from everybody must have been a very great and continuous strain. And then, as soon as circumstances permitted the prospect of more time together (he was sure that Rachel must have had a hand in getting her parents to choose a house so near to Sid), to be betrayed, and to hear of it from a total stranger, was indeed shocking. No wonder she was so upset. It would have been bad at any time, but to have it practically coinciding with her father’s death was really a bit much. Yet if Sid had sent the girl away, it must be because she loved Rachel, and if that was so, the only chance of a reconciliation lay with Rachel being prepared to talk to Sid, who, from her expression and behaviour at the funeral, clearly did not know what Thelma had done. He resolved that he would try, if he could, to help Rachel to see that talking to her lover was necessarily the best thing to do. ‘I don’t ’arf live vicariously,’ he said to himself, acknowledging that kind of intimate contempt that had gone with much of his soliloquy.
He could see that the treatment had been a success. She walked differently and looked more relaxed.
‘I have to go back in a week,’ she said, ‘but he’s done marvels. I had put something out and he’s popped it back.’
‘Has the pain gone?’
‘Quite a bit, but he says I’ve pinched a nerve and that will take time to settle down. I just feel a bit sore, but so much better. Bless you, Archie, for making me go and taking me. I’d never have made it on my own.’
‘Have you got anything to eat at home?’
‘Oh, yes. Heaps. I’ve got quite good at baked eggs. And the Duchy likes them so that is what we shall have. Perhaps you’d like some supper?’ She looked anxious, and he was fairly sure that there were only two eggs.
‘I was thinking of taking you out,’ he said, ‘for a slightly squarer meal.’
She refused this on the grounds that she could not leave the Duchy alone, but when they got back to Carlton Hill, there was a red MG parked outside.
‘Sid!’ she exclaimed. ‘She must have brought the Duchy back from Hugh’s.’ Her immediate level of distress was alarming. ‘I can’t! Archie, I really can’t face her. Oh, what shall I do?’
He took her to the nearest restaurant he could find – a rather dubious little place it turned out to be – and rang the Duchy from there to say what he was doing. Then he added that Rachel was awfully tired after her treatment and didn’t want to see anyone, wanted simply to have something to eat and then to go to bed. He had no idea what all this would mean to the Duchy – he never knew how much she knew of what was going on in the family – but he hoped that the message would somehow get through to Sid and that she would take the hint.
He managed to get two stiffish gins down her before they ate and he kept the conversation deliberately light and untaxing. She responded – ate nearly half of her boiled chicken and rice and all of a crème caramel – and some colour returned to her face.
It was not until he was waiting for the bill that he touched on what he knew had been in both their minds throughout the meal. ‘I know it seems awfully difficult,’ he said, ‘but you might find it cleared things up a lot if you could talk to her. It won’t get any better if you don’t.’
‘But what could I say?’
‘You could ask her about it. Tell her you know, and that it has made you very unhappy. You might,’ he added, discovering this, ‘even find that it is not true, or not all the truth. The girl may have been exaggerating – from jealousy. Many people, even if they have only been to bed with somebody else once, feel that they have, or ought to have, a kind of ownership. I’m sure you can understand that.’
‘But I don’t—’ she started. She clasped one hand over the other on the table in a vain effort to stop them trembling, as she began to blush again, and then, in a small, unsteady voice, she asked: ‘Do many – most – people – does everybody – want to – to go to bed with people they love?’
‘Darling Rachel, you must know that they do.’
She looked up into his face. The pain, the anguish in her eyes made him shut his own for a second. Not seeing her, he heard her say: ‘I have never been to bed with Sid. Like that. Never.’
There was a silence, then she said: ‘I must be the most selfish person in the world.’
He took her home. She wept silently all the way. Turning to her in the dark, he saw, by the intermittent street lights, that her face, pale again and white as bone, was streaked with tears.
The car had gone and the house was dark excepting for one light in the hall. He helped her out of the car, took her up the steps. ‘Will you be all right? Dear Rachel, shall I come in with you?’
She shook her head. ‘Thank you, though.’ She tried to smile. ‘I really do thank you.’ She let herself into the house and shut the door quietly.
During the journey home, the long whisky that he gave himself, the bath that he thought might calm him, the hours that he lay awake, he thought about both of them – Sid, now, as well as Rachel. The months, even years, in France when he had longed for Rachel and known that he could never have her came back to him. He had endured and survived, and eventually overcome that loss, but he had removed himself from her; he had arranged his life so that he would never see her. But Sid’s situation was infinitely more painful. Rachel had never loved him, but it was clear that she did love Sid, and so there had been no reason for them to part: Sid had spent all these years loving Rachel and not being essentially requited. He could understand how an affair with someone else could come about; he felt nothing but pity for Sid about that. That astonishing, astonishingly naïve, question of Rachel’s – did most people, everybody, want to go to bed with people they love? – now cast a light upon that relationship that he could hardly bear, on Sid’s behalf, to contemplate. And then – and these three things that Rachel had said to him repeated themselves again and again – she had said that she had never been to bed with Sid, followed by her indictment of herself: ‘I must be the most selfish person in the world.’ Rachel, whose life had always seemed to him the epitome of self-abnegation, whose creed had
, ever since he could remember her, been to put other people’s comfort and happiness before her own, had now to live with the knowledge that she had withheld what the person she loved most had most wanted, needed. Had they never talked about this? Clearly not. Why not? He could only suppose that Sid, understanding Rachel’s attitude, nature, had been afraid to risk what she had. But why did Rachel feel, or not feel, as she did? When he had gone first to Home Place to see all of the family again, and he had seen Rachel, with whom he had once been so much in love, with Sid, he had thought that all was clear to him: she loved women rather than men. Now, he could only imagine that Rachel in her incurable innocence had assumed that love with a member of your own sex meant love without it.
He couldn’t sleep. What would she do now – now that she knew how Sid must have suffered (although she couldn’t really know that, since she neither valued nor understood that particular deprivation)? She did love Sid: she had not been wittingly selfish – although he doubted whether she would give herself the benefit of that. But how could Sid accept, supposing it was offered, any gesture that arose from mere apology or sheer unselfishness? There might be, indeed there were, men who could manage that, he thought, as he remembered wardroom tales of single-minded and relatively heartless debauchery, but Sid, apart from her sex, did not come into that category at all.
He got up and made a pot of tea, sat in his kitchen to drink it. I must go away for a bit, he thought. Getting stale. I need some life of my own – something more than this keeping-my-head-above-water existence. He decided that he must straighten things out with Nancy, go back – for a holiday, at least – to his flat in France, have a change.
As he settled in bed for the second time, he thought that he might perhaps take Polly and Clary with him. Neither of them had been abroad in their lives – it would be fun to introduce them to the delights of Provence.
The next day he met Nancy in the canteen and they ate lunch together. He explained why he had let her down the previous night, and she said that she quite understood. She asked how old the widow was and he said seventy-nine. ‘The poor lady!’ she said. ‘It must be awful to be widowed when you are very old.’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 170