The Cazalet Chronicles Collection

by Elizabeth Jane Howard

  She stayed until the doctor came, who said that Sid had jaundice. The Duchy went down to the kitchen and made a pot of very weak tea. ‘No milk, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘but a hot drink would do you good.’

  She had left, saying that she would be back tomorrow. ‘Only give me a key,’ she said, ‘then I won’t have to get you out of bed.’

  But it was Rachel who arrived, and not the following day but later that evening. She came with a tin of soup and some fruit, and there was no dramatic reunion. Sid felt too ill to express either surprise or delight, and she – Rachel – seemed intent upon looking after her exactly as though they had been meeting every few days for the last months. She got clean sheets and made her bed; she brought her a basin of hot water to wash; she gently combed her hair. She heated the soup and encouraged her to drink it. ‘Don’t try to talk, darling,’ she said. ‘I know how weak you must feel. One of the nurses at the Babies’ Hotel had jaundice and she felt terrible. I have made you some barley water: the doctor says it’s good for you to drink as much as possible.’

  The next morning when Sid woke up she was there, and it transpired that Rachel had stayed the night in Evie’s room.

  ‘You shouldn’t be left alone,’ she said.

  Rachel nursed her for weeks. She, Sid, had turned the unbecoming yellow that accompanies the disease, and she felt so weak that she would lie for hours wondering whether she had the strength to push her hair from her forehead. Rachel had been a wonderful nurse. Nothing was said about their recent separation, only one day when she had tried to say how grateful she was, she saw Rachel begin her painful blush as she answered, ‘You don’t know how much pleasure it gives me to be able to do anything for you.’

  She accepted, she basked in the affection and care. When she was better, Rachel would go back to her home in the afternoons. Then, eventually, Sid was up and about and able to sit in the garden on fine days and the Duchy sent bunches of tulips and bottled fruit she had brought back from Home Place. Then she actually went there for a blissful week in April with the Duchy and Rachel. They went by train and Tonbridge fetched them from the station. The Duchy gardened all day, and sometimes in the evenings Sid would play the familiar sonatas with her while Rachel lay on the sofa, smoking and listening to them. They slept in separate rooms, and when they had retired for the night, she would sit by her window with the scent of wallflowers rising up from the beds on the front lawn and feel the stirrings of her old longing for Rachel’s arms, for her kisses, for her endless presence, and wish that her lover were a Juliet, for if she were … ‘the more I give to thee, the more I have for both are infinite’ was a line that recurred during those solitary spring nights. And then the Duchy had suddenly to go back to London three-quarters of the way through their week. The person hired to look after old Aunt Dolly could not stay the course: she had some family trouble and rang in distress to explain this. And she had thought that that would be the end of it. Rachel would have to go back with her mother. But the Duchy would not hear of it.

  ‘You are to stay and finish your week,’ she had said to Sid. ‘It is doing you so much good. It is doing you both good,’ she had added, still looking at Sid with that frank, direct gaze that seemed to see so much.

  That night Rachel came to her room, sat on her bed, trembling. ‘I want to spend the night with you,’ she said. ‘I always have, but I’ve been selfish about it.’

  ‘My darling, you are the least selfish person I’ve ever met in my life—’ she began to say, but Rachel had put her hand over her mouth and said, ‘I mean, if one loves somebody – there are things …’ Her shaky small voice had tailed away. Then she took a breath and said, ‘I think you ought to show me, because I don’t know. I honestly and truly never knew – but whatever I thought about it is probably wrong, you see.’ And she could see what it cost Rachel to look straight at her, as she said, attempting a casual little laugh: ‘Of course, I shall probably turn out to be absolutely no good at it …’

  It was then that she had realized the meanness of not accepting this offer – this most loving gift. If she stood upon her pride – she did not want to be presented with any sort of sacrifice however lovingly offered – nothing would change. Rachel had had the courage to risk, and so must she. As she pulled back the bedclothes and Rachel was beside her, Sid put her arms round her shaking shoulders, and said, ‘I love you, and if nothing comes of this I shall continue to love you till I die. We are both afraid, but we need not be afraid of that.’

  Afterwards she thought of the Ice Maiden, the Sleeping Beauty – the single kiss was not enough, but they had made a beginning.

  ‘You said you had something important to tell me.’

  She told him.

  ‘But – where will you go?’

  She told him.

  ‘But what will you do? How will you earn your living? I mean, you won’t be able to afford to pay Nannie.’

  ‘I thought it would be best if I left Sebastian and Nannie with you. I could look after him on Nannie’s days out.’

  He thought for a moment. ‘It’s all rather a shock, darling,’ he said, ‘but I suppose you’ve thought about it all. The implications. Couldn’t you live with one of your parents for a bit? Think it all over?’

  ‘No. My stepmother or whatever she is wouldn’t want me, and I certainly don’t want to live with Mummy.’

  ‘I see. I can’t afford two establishments, you know.’

  ‘I know. I’m not asking you to keep me.’

  He looked at her. It was a hot grey day, and she wore a sleeveless coffee-coloured linen dress and white sandals and her long silky hair was held back by a brown velvet snood. She was twenty-four, they had been married for five years, and her appearance still gave him pleasure, but almost everything else about her was unsatisfactory.

  ‘I’m sorry you don’t love me,’ he said, and she answered politely, ‘So am I.’

  ‘I suppose it was the war – we should have waited until it stopped. Or don’t you think that that would have made any difference?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ She was lighting yet another cigarette. She smoked too much, he thought.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked. ‘Try to get back to the theatre?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m good enough. I’ll get some sort of job. I suppose we’d better have a divorce.’

  ‘You have no reason for divorcing me. I didn’t ask you to go.’

  ‘I know. I thought you’d prefer to divorce me. I don’t mind. There are two things …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wondered if it would be possible to have a little money, a small allowance for when I am looking after Sebastian. For bus fares and taking him to the Zoo – things like that. Because, at any rate to begin with, I shan’t have much money.’

  ‘What’s the other thing?’

  ‘Well,’ he saw she was beginning to blush, ‘I thought that as I haven’t really got any qualifications for a job, perhaps you would consider letting me buy a typewriter and I could buy one of those books and teach myself to touch-type. I don’t know what they cost, but perhaps I could get a second-hand one.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can see that you won’t miss me,’ he said with some bitterness, ‘but what about Sebastian? It is surely very odd of you to abandon him like this?’

  ‘I expect it is. But I couldn’t possibly keep him in the way he is being kept now. I could never afford Nannie, and how would I earn the money to keep him if I had him with me all the time? Anyway, I’m not much of a mother. I never have been, you know that.’

  He thought of all the things his mother had said about Louise’s lack of maternal feeling and was silent. This was one of the most unsatisfactory – and unnatural – aspects of her.

  ‘I’ll get my secretary to find out about a typewriter for you,’ he said. ‘And of course I’ll give you a small allowance for Sebastian.’

  ‘Thank you, Michael.
I really am grateful. And I’m sorry I’ve been such a failure as a wife. I’m sorry,’ she repeated, less steadily.

  ‘When do you plan to leave?’

  ‘I thought some time this week. Tomorrow, probably. Polly is going to her father’s at the weekend until her wedding, and she will show me how everything works before she leaves.’

  ‘And you will be alone there?’ It occurred to him that that must be a daunting thought to her.

  ‘To begin with anyway. But Stella might be getting sent back to London, and if she is she will share the flat with me, and if she doesn’t, I’ll have to find someone else. Because of the rent. It does seem better, if I’m going, to get on with it.’

  ‘Yes. I think it would be.’

  That was that.

  ‘My poor darling! What a thing for you!’

  ‘Well, Mummy, I think it is really for the best. We weren’t having much of a life together – haven’t for ages.’

  ‘What about Sebastian?’

  ‘She’s leaving him with me.’

  ‘She is the most extraordinary girl! He could come down with Nannie to Hatton for the summer. Wouldn’t that be a good plan? And you, of course, darling, whenever you feel like it.’ She dipped a strawberry into some sugar and then some cream and held it out to him. They were having tea in the small, sunny back garden.

  ‘Of course you will have to divorce her.’

  ‘Yes. She has agreed to that.’

  ‘And she will go back to her mother?’

  ‘No. She’s going to live in the flat that belonged to her cousin – the one who’s getting married next week.’

  ‘To poor Lettie Fakenham’s son? The plain one?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘I haven’t heard of her since I wrote when her elder boy was killed. Poor lady, she was absolutely devastated. To be marooned in that monstrous house with the plain son and that husband who was a howling bore, and she was really rather glamorous – when she was young, at any rate. But, Mikey darling, back to you. What are you going to do about money? Is she being very greedy? She was very haughty and extravagant when you were in New York.’

  ‘I know she was. But an awful lot of that was presents for everyone, and she’d never had a chance to buy clothes – I think all shops and no coupons went to her head. Anyway,’ he added, ‘I told her she could.’

  ‘But what happens now?’

  ‘She doesn’t expect me to keep her. She asked for very little, really.’

  ‘I suppose she has some new lover.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. She says not and I believe her. You mustn’t be too hard on her, Mummy. For Sebastian’s sake, if for nothing else.’

  ‘You’re quite right. I mustn’t be. You’re a much nicer character than I am. I have something of the tigress in me.’

  This made her laugh. ‘Well, my darling,’ she said, when he was leaving, ‘we must look on the bright side. You have the most adorable son, my grandson. I think the most difficult thing I have ever had to face was the possibility that you might not. I am a happy woman. And grandmother.’

  ‘What sort of news?’

  ‘Like most news, I suppose, it depends upon how you look at it.’

  ‘How do you feel?’ she asked, after he had told her.

  ‘I don’t know. In some ways a kind of relief. Of course, a feeling of being a failure as well.’

  They had dined in Rowena’s house, and were still in the dining room. The windows were open, but there was not a breath of moving air; the flames of the candles on the table were motionless and upright. Between them lay a bowl of cream and the palest pink roses voluptuously near their end. The maid had brought the coffee tray and been dismissed for the night. She leaned towards him and he saw her breasts move charmingly in the low-cut dress.

  ‘I’m so sorry, darling Mikey. It must have been an awful time for you. For her as well.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it must.’ He had not really thought about how Louise felt about it: she was doing the leaving, so he hadn’t felt the need to consider what had brought her to it.

  ‘What about the child?’

  ‘She’s leaving him with me. My mother is going to have him down at Hatton for the summer.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m glad I’ve told you.’

  ‘Tell me as much as you want to.’

  So he did. He told her how Louise had sprung it on him that morning, how he had gone to his studio but found himself unable to work, how he had called in on his mother and how good she had been about it, and how glad he had been to find, when he telephoned Rowena, that she was free that evening.

  ‘It must have been a shock. I mean, even if one is half expecting something it’s a shock when it happens,’ she said.

  She had got up from the table once while he had been telling her, but only to get the brandy which she poured for them.

  ‘When is she going?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I was wondering … I mean, the thought of going back there for a ghastly last night, I don’t feel I can face it.’

  Her face lit up. ‘Darling Mikey! You don’t have to beat about the bush. You would be very, very welcome.’

  If anyone had told him two years ago that he’d find work the easiest part of his life and almost everything else about it the most difficult, he wouldn’t have believed them.

  He was on his laborious journey back to Tufnell Park from the Wharf, which was near Tower Bridge, at the end of an arduous week. The weather had been alternately stifling and stormy and whatever he wore at work got soaked with sweat. Bernie had said she was sick of washing his shirts and he’d taken to doing them himself. The trouble was, he thought, that whenever he gave way to her about something, she thought of something else. He had the uncomfortable feeling that she was losing respect for him, although she still liked him in bed. That had become, or perhaps it always had been, their best time: when she was demanding without being rancorous – she was even affectionate. But he was beginning to find, or to notice, that the nights were taking a toll. She wanted so much of it, and his saying that he was tired only provoked her into arousing him yet again. She was too jolly good at that. But often now he woke tired, and unless he nipped out of bed pretty fast she would be awake wanting him to do it to her one more time. This had sometimes made him late for work, and more often meant that he left without any breakfast. He had to admit that she was definitely not domesticated. She kept the bathroom clean, though cluttered with make-up, but the rest of the flat was a mess. She loathed cooking, although in Arizona she had boasted of all kinds of American dishes that she could make. Here, her excuse was that she couldn’t get any of the ingredients. She was such a rotten housekeeper that he had taken to doing the shopping on Saturday mornings.

  And she was absolutely hopeless about money. Dad had bailed him out once to pay the main bills, and Mum had also come up with the odd fiver, but he felt wretched about asking them. He had put the rent and a small amount in a separate account which meant, of course, that he had less to give Bernie. She couldn’t understand it. ‘You told me your parents were rich,’ she said. ‘You went on and on about having two houses, and servants, and that means rich-rich, and I come over and you land me in a dump like this!’ He didn’t think he’d gone on about these things. It was only when she questioned him – cross-examined was more like it – about his family and home that he’d told her anything. He was sick of apologizing for the flat, for the lack of money to go dancing or to night-clubs – in taxis, for God’s sake, since she was always wearing shoes in which she said she couldn’t walk a step although she could dance for hours in them. She expected to go to the hairdresser every week, in the West End where, of course, they were more expensive, and she was always buying make-up, and complaining about not being able to buy clothes. ‘You’ve got tons of clothes!’ he had exclaimed.

  ‘I’ve worn all of them. In America, we don’t keep clothes, like a lot of old antiques, we throw them out and get new ones.’ She went
to the cinema a lot on her own because she said she was bored with nothing to do all day. This cost money as well. He’d been reduced to pawning – well, selling really, because he was never able to redeem them – his gold cuff-links that Dad had given him when he was joining up, and a set of fish knives that the Duchy had given him for his wedding present, and several other portable things like that. He had begun to dread getting back to the flat to find her sulking, sometimes not even dressed, with nothing to eat for dinner and having to have an argument about not going out to a restaurant and then having to go out and buy fish and chips.

  Tonight was a Friday and a hot uninviting weekend lay ahead. The flat was awful in hot weather: it faced south and some of the windows didn’t even open. He’d try to persuade her to go to Hampstead Heath with him, and they could take a picnic. She liked lying in the sun and he would be able to go to sleep because she couldn’t expect to be made love to with all the people about.

  He got off his last bus in Holloway Road and tramped up Tufnell Park Road to the street off it where they lived on the top floor of a tall, narrow house. He let himself in at the front door – there was always a smell of cat on the stairs and sometimes of cooking: there were four flats in the building – and climbed to the top and his own front door. How exciting that had been at first! Being married, having a home of his own …

  The flat was quiet. Usually she had the radio on.

  ‘Bernie! I’m back!’

  There was no answer. She was not in the sitting room, which opened on to the kitchenette, which meant that she must be in either the bedroom or the tiny bathroom. But she wasn’t in either of them. It was unlike her to be out, unless she’d gone to a later show at the cinema than usual.

  Then he noticed that the bedroom wardrobe – with its doors open – was empty of her clothes. The bed was unmade, but on the pillow, pinned with a safety pin, was a piece of paper. He pulled it from the pin and read it.