The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

‘I expect you’d like a drink. Have we got any ice, Clary?’

  ‘I expect so. I’ll go and get it.’

  ‘Clary doesn’t look well,’ Rupert said.

  And Archie replied, ‘She’s been a bit under the weather.’

  ‘She says she hasn’t found another job yet.’

  ‘Time enough for that.’ He was busy with the drinks cupboard. ‘Like a gin and tonic?’

  ‘That would be lovely.’

  The french window on to the balcony was open and Rupert went towards it. ‘How was France?’

  ‘It was the same and not the same, if you know what I mean. I didn’t stay long.’ He went to the open door of the sitting room. ‘Clary! I think there’s a lemon somewhere about. Could you bring it? And a knife?’ He took off his jacket and threw it on the sofa. ‘God, it’s hot out!’

  ‘Is your office as hot as mine?’

  ‘It’s not so much hot as completely airless. Their lordships don’t believe in windows that actually open.’ He went to his shopping bag, which he’d put by the door when he’d come in. ‘I’m afraid the tonic will be distinctly tepid.’

  Clary came back with a bowl of ice in one hand and a lemon and knife in the other. She gave these things to Archie and then went and sat in front of her jig-saw puzzle. Archie made the drinks and asked after Zoë. He said she was still at Home Place with Juliet and Wills, but that when she got back they would start house-hunting, as it looked as though they had a buyer for Brook Green at last. ‘And how’s Poll?’ he said – to Clary.

  ‘All right as far as I know.’

  The feeling of unease prevailed. When Archie offered him one for the road, he suggested taking them both out to dinner, but Clary instantly said: ‘I don’t feel like going out.’

  Archie said that he had bought a pork pie and a lettuce, and he could share that with them if he liked, and he accepted, feeling rather desperately that if he spent more time with them, things would get back to normal, and also because he thought then that he would drive Clary home and find out what was the matter with her. Something was, he was sure, and Archie knew what it was.

  At supper he and Archie talked about impersonal things, chiefly the situation in India – there had been three days of bloody fighting in Calcutta and they had a prolonged but not very heartfelt argument about whether there would be less of a bloody mess if the Muslims had their own state in Pakistan, which branched out to a division between him and Archie about British power, casting off the Empire, and generally taking a back seat from the point of view of international politics. He thought this was a mistake; Archie thought it right. Clary, who did not eat her dinner, nibbled a lettuce leaf and said nothing.

  ‘We’re boring you,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you aren’t, actually, because I wasn’t listening.’

  ‘Why aren’t you eating?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You’ve got awfully thin.’

  ‘I expect that’s because I’m not hungry.’ She was blocking him and he felt defeated by her.

  ‘Look here,’ he said, when Archie went to the kitchen to make coffee, ‘I feel I’m spoiling your evening.’

  When she did not reply, he said, ‘Clary! What’s up? If you’re angry with me, I wish you’d say why. When we’ve had our coffee, I’ll drive you home and perhaps I could come in and we could have a proper talk.’

  ‘I’m not going home,’ she said. ‘I’m staying here. At present.’

  He stared at her and she stared back. ‘Why?’ he said at last. ‘What’s been going on?’ Looking into her eyes, which now seemed so enormous in her uncharacteristically white and bony face, he saw that for a moment they came alive – with a shocking misery. Then they clouded again to the deadness that he realized he had seen at intervals all the evening. She had gravitated back to her jig-saw; he pulled a chair opposite her at the table. ‘My darling girl, what is it? I know you’re very unhappy. I love you and you always used to tell me things. What is it? What can I do?’

  ‘You can’t do anything.’ She looked up from the puzzle. ‘I will tell you if you like. I fell in love with someone and I got pregnant. And then I had an abortion – killed the baby. But Archie’s seen me all the way through it.’

  Archie! Suddenly, everything – all the things that had seemed so odd and uneasy all the evening – became horribly clear. Her being in the flat, her staying there, Archie’s defensiveness when he had remarked on her looking ill, his attempt to get rid of him, ‘one for the road’ – good God, and he was old enough to be her father, only a year younger than himself! It was monstrous! Trusting, loving young Clary – his beloved daughter, being betrayed by his best friend. He wanted to kill him – murder him … He got to his feet with an inarticulate cry of rage and turned to see Archie leaning against the door frame. ‘You bastard! You – bloody – bastard!’ For the first time in his life he knew what seeing red meant. As he launched himself across the room, Archie’s form became obscured in a red haze.

  ‘Steady on! If you’re leaping at me I’m the wrong conclusion.’

  At the same moment there was Clary, grabbing his arm. ‘Dad! Dad – for goodness sake!’

  It took him minutes to believe them, but, of course, he had to believe them: Clary seemed to think it was almost funny – absurd, anyway; he didn’t know what Archie thought but he sensed that he was deeply angry or hurt or both. In his confusion and embarrassment, he thought he had said a number of foolish things. He knew that he said he was sorry – more than once – and that he also tried to make them see how easy it was to make such a mistake. He knew that he had asked Clary why she hadn’t told him, to which she had replied that she had simply thought he would be angry with her. Archie said almost nothing; most of the time he stood on his balcony with his back to them.

  ‘I suppose it was the man you were working for.’ He didn’t make a question of it.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who it was,’ she said. ‘It’s happened now. I’m all right, Dad.’

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  ‘I am. I’m over twenty-one, Dad – I’m not a child.’

  He floundered a bit more in this manner, feeling worse and worse about the whole thing – that this should have happened to her, that he had jumped to crass conclusions, that she had turned to Archie rather than to him, there seemed no end to it. He said he thought he’d better go, and Archie, speaking for the first time, said, ‘I rather think that would be a good thing.’

  Clary came to the door of the flat with him.

  ‘Are you all right for money?’ he said hopelessly. At least, he supposed he would be allowed to do that. But she said, yes, she was. He wanted to hug her and bear her off. She allowed him to kiss her cold little face, but then she stepped backward, eluding his grasp. Attended by Archie, he went. Down the stairs, through the outer door to the street where his car was. It was almost dark. It felt like the worst evening of his life.

  The next day he had rung Archie at work to apologize and was told that he’d gone on leave. He rang the flat at intervals during the day and in the evening, but there was no reply. Since then, his efforts to see Archie – messages left saying that he would really like to see him got no answer – failed, and when he rang the girls’ flat, Polly, when eventually he got hold of her, said that Clary had gone to stay with friends. ‘I think she wants to have a good shot at writing her novel,’ she said, ‘but if she rings me I’ll tell her you called, Uncle Rupe.’

  His own life had overwhelmed him after the problems with his brothers, house-hunting, the move, all that had intervened. Now, however, he would make one last throw to see Archie. By himself, he thought. He was conscious of an uncomfortable jealousy – that Archie should clearly have so much more of Clary’s confidence than he did. And I won’t just turn up, he thought. He knew that he couldn’t cope with them together.

  He got Archie, at his flat, first go. He sounded guarded, but agreed to meet him at the Savile Club to which they both belonged.

  The p
rospect made him feel nervous, but was also a kind of relief.

  Three

  POLLY

  September–December 1946

  Afterwards, many times in the ensuing months, she had thought how very nearly she hadn’t met him. She had almost decided not to go to yet another of the drinks parties that Caspar and Gervase regularly gave and to which they always asked her. But when, on this particular occasion – in September – they had informed her of the next one and she had started to say that she didn’t think she could (would) come, Caspar had said, ‘You must, darling, you really and truly must. I think, my dear one, that you must regard your attendance as part of the job.’ And he had run his hand through his silvery hair and regarded her, head a little on one side with the dispassionate brightness of a bird. He combined a romantic appearance with a shrewd expression that people who did not know him often mistook for sympathy.

  ‘A woman’s touch,’ Gervase chimed in. He said it as though it were a distasteful necessity. He had just returned from his biannual visit to Tring, where starvation and massage had temporarily reduced his paunch, and he was perpetually sidling towards mirrors to regard the improved profile of his belly. ‘You’re really part of our interior decoration. Mr Beswick has hung the new tobacco-silk paper, chosen with you in mind. Do wear white, darling, when you come.’ They were always redoing their flat, removing to Claridges while the work was being done and getting nearly everything off expenses.

  ‘I haven’t got anything white,’ she said. She’d given in. She’d gone in her old lemon-peel-coloured dress that she’d first worn for VE-Day and dinner with Dad, but it felt different because she’d added a collar of large, peacock paste stones that Dad had bought for her from Cameo Corner. And there she was in the large room of the Belgravia mews (two mews made into one, in fact) that was now a symphony of blue and brown, the tobacco walls enhanced by a carpet of gentian blue ‘à la Bakst’, as Caspar said, with thirty or forty people, a few of whom she knew by sight. Part of the deal was that she should hand round dishes of canapés sent in from Searcy – they hired a waiter to deal with the champagne. When she was introduced by Gervase or Caspar it was as ‘our wonderful Polly who looks after us in the shop’. This seemed somehow to stop anyone from wanting to talk to her: they would ask the sort of questions that royalty employed, where courtesy and lack of interest cancelled each other out. As usual, she was even more bored than she remembered being when she wasn’t at the parties. She’d been handing things round for nearly an hour and been subject to increasingly dismissive smiles from the company, who didn’t want to eat any more. She’d just put down the dish and was looking for the waiter to give her a glass of champagne when one of the elderly blue-haired crêpe-de-Chined ladies tapped one of her bare arms. ‘I know who you are because Hermione Knebworth told me. I wonder if you’d take pity on my nephew? He’s over there. He’s lamentably shy and he doesn’t know anybody.’ Without waiting for an answer she took Polly’s arm and steered her to the far corner of the room where a man stood by the window seat, clutching a glass and staring at the ground. ‘Gerald! This is Polly Cazalet who works for Caspar come to talk to you. Mind you talk back.’ And she withdrew.

  They looked at each other, and he blushed – from his cheekbones to his forehead, but he was wearing a very old tweed coat in which she thought he was probably far too hot anyway. She tried to remember afterwards what had been her first picture of him, but had only a blurred vision of a not tall, rather square figure, with blond hair, very straight and fine, and a wide mouth that turned up at the corners (that was, in fact, the first thing she noticed, because Archie had once said that it meant that the person had a sense of humour, but she’d never been able to test the theory because nobody after he’d said it had turned out to have that sort of mouth). His eyes bulged slightly like a friendly frog.

  ‘Do you know anybody here?’

  ‘Only my aunt. I don’t suppose I know her. Aunts are sort of landscape, aren’t they?’ Then he seemed uncomfortable about having talked so much and looked at her with something like panic.

  The waiter came by and offered Polly a glass.

  ‘I should have got you one,’ he muttered, and she saw him going red again. ‘Would you like to sit down?’

  ‘Yes.’ She sank gratefully on to the window seat.

  It seemed extraordinary to her now, but she remembered that then she had felt distinctly sorry for him. She invited him to sit beside her which he did, at a distance, eyeing the gap between them as though he was measuring it. She elicited some information: he had been in the Army, before that had lived in the country with his family, he had one sister, who was married, and his family had recently sent him to London where he was supposed to read law and eat his dinners and become a barrister. He did not sound enthusiastic about this prospect. He’d got himself a flat – in Pimlico. When she asked him what it was like, he said it was awfully small. He said that as though it was the best thing about it. In between these questions and answers – it was a conversation – he kept looking at her intently, and when he saw that she noticed this, looking away.

  Eventually his aunt came back to them and said that they must be going or they would be late for dinner with the Laytons. ‘I’m afraid I must tear you away. Have you asked Miss Cazalet to advise you about your flat? He’s bought the most awful little flat – I was telling Caspar, I said if you can do anything with that you’re a genius.’

  ‘Go and have a look at it, dear,’ Caspar had said next day. ‘Lady Wilmot is not short of the readies, and he’s her only nephew. A touch uncouth, though, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think he’s just rather shy.’ And a bit of a weak character, she thought to herself, but she didn’t say anything like that to Caspar. An appointment was made, and a few days later she found herself going down the area steps of a house in Ebury Street.

  He opened the door to her; he was wearing the same tweeds, and, she thought, the same shirt. He seemed deeply confused at the sight of her. ‘I thought one of them was coming,’ he said. ‘You know, one of those then who gave the party.’ He led the way down an extremely narrow dark passage into a room that was also dark since its one window faced north and was heavily barred and looked on to the black brick wall and the steps up to the street. Excepting two kitchen chairs and a piece of carpet the colour of mud, the room was empty. Without saying any more he led her back to the passage, at the end of which were a clutch of doors. ‘This is the other room,’ he said. It was smaller than the first one, but lighter since it faced south with a similar barred window. There was a camp bed along one wall. The other doors introduced a minute kitchen that contained an ancient gas cooker, a stained porcelain sink and a water heater bracketed to the wall. It smelt of gas. The third door was the bathroom: small, stained bath, basin and lavatory with another water heater, placed, she noticed, so that one would hit one’s head if one stood up in the bath. It, too, smelt of gas enhanced by damp. Taps dripped and linoleum curled upon the floor. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing what you can get in a tiny space, isn’t it? It’s what drew me to it.’

  It was probably all he could afford, she thought. ‘It has possibilities,’ she said – one always had to say that. They went back to the first room, and she got out her tape measure and notebook.

  ‘I have to measure first,’ she said, ‘and see which walls are structural, things like that.’

  ‘It’s awfully good of you to go to so much trouble.’

  ‘Not at all. It’s my job.’

  ‘I thought you would just advise me about colours of walls and curtains – that sort of thing.’

  ‘Well, we do do that, of course, but I think there are some things that need doing before that here.’

  ‘I’m sure you know best. It’s my first place, actually, so I don’t really know the form.’

  He helped her measure, which made it much quicker, and during it, she found that he had been living in the flat, ‘Sleeping here, at any r
ate,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit difficult to do anything else.’

  They had coffee in a place round the corner that she knew. She suggested it. ‘I say! Would you really? I was wondering whether you’d mind if I asked you.’ As well as coffee, he had a poached egg on toast and baked beans. ‘Best thing about the Army was the baked beans,’ he said. ‘We never had them at home. Not that I’ve spent very much time there.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Well, boarding schools since I was seven and then the war and the Army – you know how it is. And then, after Charles, my older brother, was killed, my mother found it difficult to have me about – she said I reminded her too much of him, you see, which is funny,’ he added, as though he had just thought of it, ‘because I was never really in the least like him.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘He was terribly brainy as well as being good-looking and awfully good with girls and that sort of thing.’

  Then, looking at her and as though he knew what she was about to ask, he said, ‘No. As a matter of fact, he rather despised me. I wish,’ he added hurriedly, ‘that you would tell me a bit about yourself.’

  ‘What would you like to know?’

  ‘Oh, anything! I would like to know anything about you.’

  She told him about her family and living at Home Place throughout the war. ‘Gosh, that sounds fun!’ he said. ‘Go on.’ She told him about her mother dying of cancer and how unhappy it had made her father, and saw his slightly bulging eyes become moist. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he said. She told him about Simon, now at Oxford, and Wills just gone to his prep school, and about her sharing a flat with Clary. It was surprising how much she had told him, she thought afterwards, but he was such an attentive listener that it was somehow enjoyable to tell him. Eventually, when it was extremely clear that the waitress thought they should leave or have another meal, and she pointed this out, he said, ‘That’s all right. I’ll simply have another poached egg. Wouldn’t you like one by now? I mean, my first was my breakfast, yours could be an early lunch.’