‘Presents are always in the drawing room.’
‘Well, I want to put mine there.’
‘I don’t need to do that because everything I’ve bought is for everyone. I thought it would be a good idea.’
Simon knew that Neville hadn’t bought anything: he’d simply wrapped all the things that rich clients had given him in newspaper – a side of smoked salmon, two boxes of extremely expensive chocolates, a bottle of champagne and another of apricot brandy, toilet waters from Floris and Penhaligon, a Smythson diary, a python-upholstered travelling clock and, finally, no fewer than six ties from Florence – he never wore a tie. All those expensive presents without his spending a penny, Simon thought enviously, as his own wretched contributions flitted through his mind: socks for Dad, a very small chiffon scarf for Jemima, a Mars Bar for Laura (then he had bought the same for each of the children), a little bottle that said ‘lavender water’ on the label but smelt of something quite different for Aunt Rachel … All of these things had come from Woolworths, and at that point his money had run out. Well, he would drown all these discomforts with cold turkey and all the delicious things that went with it. And when it got to New Year resolutions he would resolve to get frightfully rich and next year he would give everyone presents like fur coats and motor-cars, even the odd aeroplane or two, and they would all be amazed and he would be everyone’s favourite person. He went into lunch feeling quite cheerful. It was lovely knowing exactly how everything was going to turn out when they were reassuring things like a Christmas-time feast.
It would be the same old things – like getting the day-old drumstick of the turkey and trying to hide the chestnut stuffing and there not being enough bread sauce and the children all talking about their wretched presents and Laura crying because her Red Indian feather headdress fell into her plate (last year it had been a gold-paper crown with pretend jewels) – all that old hat.
But it wasn’t like that at all, not in the least, because on looking up from his plate, Neville saw opposite him – or, rather, he was struck by – a vision of such perfection, of such amazing beauty, that for an unknown amount of time he was paralysed; it was like being hit or stabbed to the centre of his heart.
After the unknown amount of time, he realised he hadn’t been breathing, and then became anxious that some of the others, at least, would have noticed what had happened to him. The fog, the mist, that had shrouded them, sitting each side of her, now cleared and he could see Simon and one of the twins. He looked round the table, but everyone was busy eating and talking. The only person he didn’t feel sure about was Sid, who at one moment (was it when he wasn’t breathing?) caught his eye across the table and then smiled – a small smile, as though they shared a secret.
He had always been secretive. All his life he would never forget the black despair that had taken hold of him when his father had been a virtual prisoner in France and had sent a message to Clary and not to him. From that time, he had cultivated an indifference coupled with a desire to shock. He had never known his mother, as she had died giving birth to him, and really he hadn’t missed her because he had had Ellen, his nanny, and he had quickly discovered that being motherless made people want to be kind to him. After school, he had refused to go to university, choosing boring but well-paid jobs in order to buy whatever clothes he liked. He had also bought a camera, quite a modest affair, and begun taking photographs. He had instantly found that he enjoyed that, and talked his way into employment at a magazine by pretending he had worked in the States. His expensive clothes and his easy assurance, coupled with an entirely misleading air of modesty, had got him to the point at which he could choose what work he would do. He was reliable, creative and altogether professional, never out of his depth, and skilled, when necessary, at skating over thin ice. Country Life was running a series on ‘How The Other Half Lives’, which he was due to start in the New Year; he was looking forward to photographing the castles and grand houses that would doubtless come his way.
His social life was as full as he cared to make it. Girls were almost always attracted to him; sometimes men were, too. He had experimented with both, but had not got on with either. He hadn’t enjoyed the sex and had nothing to say about it. It was just something he felt he didn’t need.
And suddenly – out of the blue – here was Juliet. It must have been at least a year since he had seen her, and during that time she had grown from being just another gangly, round-faced schoolgirl, with unfortunate spots, he remembered, and her hair in tight pigtails, to someone altogether rich and strange: her hair was now styled so that its dark brown with reddish lights could be seen, drawn back and tied with a peacock velvet ribbon that showed her delicate ears; her face was transformed, with high cheekbones, her skin flawless, pale with a hint of rose, her long narrow eyes still Cazalet blue. He used to think her eyes were her one good feature.
At this moment of his reverie, she leaned across the table and smiled at him.
The thought occurred to him then that if one was in love one could not be anything else. This frightened him. He smiled hastily back – the sort of casual smile he would give a bus conductor or a waiter when they provided him with a ticket or a menu …
Best to concentrate on food, although he discovered that he was not in the least hungry. Instead he heard fragments of the many conversations round the table … ‘Well, if the Astronomer Royal says the idea of space travel is bilge, it probably is.’ Almost certainly Uncle Hugh.
‘But we’ve planned to go into space. We’ve planned to go to the moon.’ Tom and Henry.
‘It’ll be frightfully cold and you won’t know a soul there.’ Archie.
She wore a turquoise heart on a gold chain round her slender neck …
‘And I can’t help feeling very sorry for her.’ Aunt Rachel.
‘Who, darling?’
‘Princess Margaret.’
Her dress was very dark green velvet, the bodice cut with a low square, the sleeves tight and finishing just below her elbows …
‘Please don’t say anything.’ It was Georgie, who was sitting next to him. Rivers had escaped from his pocket and was trying to climb onto him, his nose twitching at the delightful smells. Neville instantly leaned over him, and wiped his face with his napkin, which shrouded Rivers long enough for Georgie to cram him back.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, thank you, Uncle Neville.’ He had picked a piece of turkey off his plate and thrust it into his pocket. They exchanged glances – bland with conspiracy.
He wondered whether she had noticed, and thought that she had, since she smiled at him again.
The twins were told to collect the plates and put them on the sideboard, and Eileen appeared with the pudding plates.
He managed to eat his pudding at the same time as looking at her – unobtrusively, he thought, until his father, from across the table, asked him if he was all right. This made other people look at him, so he said he was fine, if a little drunk – on food, he added quickly. ‘You should see what Simon and I live on when we’re working. Tell them, Simon.’
‘Baked beans, the odd pork pie, rather old eggs and spongy bread. Oh, and HP sauce on pretty well everything.’
But if Simon expected sympathy for this, he was mistaken.
‘Nearly all my favourite foods,’ Harriet said. ‘But we hardly ever have them.’
‘Are the old eggs Chinese?’ Tom asked. ‘Because Henry read in a book that they wait a hundred years until they’re pitch black.’ Henry did most of the reading for Tom and himself. Tom did the remembering. ‘Because that would mean unless you lived to be a hundred and one, you’d never eat your own eggs. So your eggs can’t be very old.’
‘What’s HP? I’ve never had it. Is it something wicked if it doesn’t have a proper name?’
‘It’s a sauce. You wouldn’t like it, darling.’
Laura turned to her mother. ‘Bet I would. You said I wouldn’t like black olives and I did. You don’t know al
l my likes at all.’
‘Time for crackers,’ Hugh announced.
And while people were crossing their arms to take their own and a neighbour’s cracker, Neville noticed that Georgie nipped some almonds from a dish on the table, thrust them down into his pocket and shoved his napkin on top of them. ‘He might be frightened by the bangs,’ he muttered to Neville, ‘but he simply loves almonds.’
The crackers were really grand ones. They were large and beautifully decorated and, best of all, they contained extremely acceptable surprises. Things like little pencils with coloured tassels, a proper Dinky toy, necklaces and rings, a tiny red leather purse and so forth, plus, of course, the terrible jokes on thin folded paper that they all read aloud to a lot of contemptuous laughter. Some people got the contents of two crackers, some none, and this had to be smoothed out by parents. A certain amount of swapping went on. Neville was one of the lucky ones. He got a scarlet linen handkerchief and a ring with a large green stone in it. Luckily for him, Juliet had been one of the losers: he rolled the ring across the table to her; she gave him an enchantingly grateful glance and put it on at once. A surge of pure joy possessed him. His first present to her and she had taken it.
It was customary for everyone – or practically everyone – to go for a swinging walk after Boxing Day lunch. The exceptions were Rachel and Sid, Zoë, Laura and her mother. Laura made such a fuss about this that in the end Jemima compromised with a very short walk to the stables with food for McAlpine’s ferrets (Laura loved feeding any animals). Archie, Rupert and Hugh took the older children up the road to Whatlington, then back through the fields and woods of Home Place. Tom and Henry, who had heard Simon and Teddy talking about the camp they had once made with Christopher, begged to see it.
‘I shouldn’t think there’ll be anything left by now. It was ages ago,’ Teddy said. He felt vaguely uncomfortable when he thought of it.
‘You fought Christopher. It was his camp, really. And he was against people fighting.’
‘Did you kill him?’ Henry was fascinated: he had never met anyone who had gone in for murder.
‘Good Lord, no. It was just an ordinary scrap.’
They had reached the hedge that bordered the wood; Simon found the familiar gap in it and all four of them climbed through. They soon reached the little stream, and Simon stared at it. It was just the same, winding its way between mossy banks interspersed with stretches of wider, shallower water and flat, sandy beaches. If you looked long enough, you could imagine it being a great river: the ferns on the moss would be vast tropical trees, the sandy beaches would have people lying on them …
‘Come on, Simon, let’s find the camp. We both want to see it.’
That was the trouble with twins, he thought. They always seemed to want the same things, and when it came to choosing or voting for anything, they had a head start. He turned right by the stream and in a few minutes he reached the place where the camp had been.
‘It was here,’ he said doubtfully. The grassy patch where the tent had been was now overgrown with brambles; the place where they had made the fire still had a few blackened bricks – Christopher had tried to build an oven – and clumps of stinging nettles were thriving … ‘It hasn’t lasted at all.’
‘It can’t have been very well built,’ said both twins, of course.
‘It was a long time ago,’ Teddy said. He wanted to be shot of it. He was remembering Christopher’s white and desperate face as he had tried to defend the camp.
‘It was Christopher’s and my camp,’ Simon said. He was remembering with some discomfort that he hadn’t helped Christopher with the fight.
‘Who’s Christopher?’
‘He’s a cousin. He became a monk.’
‘Oh. No wonder.’
‘No wonder what?’
‘Well, I don’t think you’d get a single monk to be much good at building anything.’
‘What do you know about monks? Either of you?’ That was meant to pre-empt the twin thing.
Henry turned to Tom. ‘What do we know?’
Tom thought. ‘Well, they had a rotten time with the Tudors. They got turned out of their monasteries and burned at the stake, and the Catholic ones had to hide in cupboards in people’s houses.’
Teddy, now thoroughly bored, suggested they all went home for tea and, in spite of the twins arguing about buildings and how long they could last if properly built – Stonehenge came into it, ‘But you couldn’t possibly live there!’ – they sped through the fields, ending up in a race, won, of course, by the twins.
The jigsaw puzzle had been cleverly towed away on its blanket to the kitchen end of the hall, the table laid for tea, and some people were already attacking the sandwiches. ‘I have coffee and tea in my milk, please don’t forget,’ Laura was saying. She now wore a gold-paper crown that sat uneasily upon her Red Indian feathers.
‘I think that’s about everyone,’ Archie said. ‘We can all have a swig now. That was some walk!’
‘It was too much for me,’ Bertie said. ‘I’ve got a sore heel.’
‘That’s because you wouldn’t wear your socks.’
‘Where’s Juliet?’ Zoë suddenly said. ‘Didn’t she go with you, Rupe?’
‘I thought she went with Teddy and Simon.’
Henry said, ‘And us. No, she didn’t.’
Zoë, who had opted for a rest rather than a walk, now felt guilty. ‘Honestly, Rupert, I thought you said you would take charge.’
Georgie looked up from his egg sandwich. ‘I think she went with Neville in his car.’
‘Oh, that’s all right, then. She’ll be quite safe with him.’
‘You aren’t worried, are you? You’re quite safe with me. Darling, beautiful Juliet.’
She looked at him quickly, then down to her lap. ‘Darling’, ‘beautiful’ – the words induced a kind of nervous excitement in her. The awful thought that he might be laughing at her occurred. ‘Do you really mean that?’
‘Oh, yes. I mean it. Don’t laugh at me. We could have a pact not to laugh at each other. Yes?’
‘Yes.’ It was a relief to have that clear.
‘But, on the other hand, if someone else metaphorically slips on a banana skin, we can laugh as much as we like.’
‘I don’t think I’d want to. Think of the poor person!’
‘I needn’t, because he isn’t anyone. If you’re hypothetical you don’t exist.’
‘Oh.’
He was silent. Things weren’t going as he had imagined. He had thought that the worst problem would be getting her alone, but that had been the easiest part. ‘You don’t want to go for a freezing walk. Come for a drive in my car.’ She had reached the age where several of her contemporaries boasted of boyfriends, but none of them owned a car. This would silence them when she told them about it.
That was fine. She agreed and together they slipped through the kitchen door and down the cinder path to the courtyard with the stables and garages.
It was when they were in the car and had waited for the crowd of walkers to turn left to go to Whatlington, and he had turned right for Battle, that he began to feel anxious – even shy, now he was alone with her. How could he tell her of the amazing thing that had happened to him? Should he treat the afternoon as just a jolly outing? Or should he try to tell her seriously how he felt? There was something wrong with both of these approaches. Anyway, he decided that he couldn’t do any of it while driving. He would go past Battle to a place where there was a track into the woods. When they got there, he would suggest a short walk, and ask to take some pictures of her.
He told her this and she seemed calmly happy about it.
He started driving faster – he longed to get to the wood.
It was a real winter afternoon, windless, so that many of the leafless trees looked like elaborate armatures waiting for their sculpture of green. The sky was dense and leaden; a faintly orange sun was sinking unobtrusively, leaving a smear of dusk.
He found the op
ening to the wood, and they both got out of the car.
‘If you photograph me, will you put it in a magazine?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. Then, seeing that she looked downcast, he added, ‘I expect I might one day. Give me your hand. Goodness, you’re cold!’
She was wearing her new winter jacket – olive green with a fur-trimmed hood, which made what he could see of her face even more mysteriously beautiful. I’ll take some pictures of her, and then I’ll tell her, he thought.
A few yards along the track there was a large Spanish chestnut that had fallen – or, more likely, been felled since it lay, with no sign of its roots, propped at a slant where the higher branches had been trapped by the branches of its neighbours. He put her on the thicker part of the trunk, got out the little pocket camera that he took everywhere with him and told her to take off her hood. The light was bad, subsiding gratefully into dusk, and he knew the pictures would not be much good, but she would not know that, and he would take many others that were likely to please her.
‘Now, I’m going to be professional and order you about.’
‘OK.’ The great thing was to be cool about it. Most models looked bored, and she tried now to emulate them, but this only made him think she was frightened, and he became gentle and teasing, coaxing her to move her head, to shift her body, to position her hands as he wanted.
He worked until her teeth were chattering with cold and he was overcome with remorse. ‘You should have told me, my darling! When I get stuck in, I don’t notice anything. I’m so sorry.’ He was putting her hood over her, chafing her hands, and then, with an arm round her, he helped her to the feet she could no longer feel, whereupon she stumbled. He picked her up and carried her to the car.
‘Was I any good at it?’ she asked, when she could speak.
‘Good at what?’
‘Being a model.’
‘Oh, that! Yes, of course you were. A marvellous model. Couldn’t ask for better.’
She gave a deep sigh of contentment.
He fumbled in a side pocket and produced a battered packet of Polo mints. ‘They’ll make you feel warmer.’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 211