‘It may make them a bit sleepier than they would otherwise be,’ Archie remarked. He was tired from the long drive and his bad leg ached. He stretched it out gratefully in front of the large wood fire. She’ll be in Surrey with her family, he thought. He need not think about her. ‘You have made this room nice, Poll.’ It was warm, with lamps that cast a friendly light, the huge windows curtained in green velvet, one wall covered with books, and the rest in a sea-green jasper paper.
Gerald said he was going to brave the dark to get ice. ‘We could all do with a stiff drink before their bedtime.’
Clary said, ‘I’m doing bedtime, darling Gerald. You can confine yourself to a goodnight kiss.’ She had been kneeling on the floor by the window and she and Polly were unpacking the cardboard boxes that contained the decorations.
But when Gerald returned from ‘a positively polar expedition’ with the ice and had mixed them a strong reviving concoction, they all sat by the fire to enjoy it. There ensued a long, comfortable silence, and Gerald thought how good it was to have even more children in the house, how charming Polly looked with the firelight flickering on her copper hair, and wondered whether the tree nursery he had planted with Simon would yield some sort of income, since hiring out the house had so far barely broken even …
Polly thought how lovely it was to have Clary and Archie, and how sad it was that their lives were so distant that she almost didn’t know Clary, which was largely because she, Polly, could never get away: she could not leave the children with Nan any more and Gerald – whatever he said – could not cope alone with the house, the children and his plans for improving the grounds. She thought, as she often did at this time of year, of Christopher in his monastery, and hoped that he was happy with his life. She remembered the time with him in his caravan when he had had his beloved dog, and had also wanted to be in love with her. Luckily that had come to an end quite quickly, as he had never mentioned it again. She thought of her father and how careworn he had seemed when he came. Jemima had told her about the subsequent dinner with Edward and Diana: at least some progress had been made for a reconciliation …
Clary was thinking how lovely it was not to be the main person responsible for Christmas. She would help, of course she would, but she would only have to do as she was told. Polly was amazing. She organised everything while looking as though she did nothing. She has real glamour and it’s such bad luck for darling Archie that I don’t have a scrap of that, she thought. She had put her hair up at home that morning, but pins kept dropping out, and the more she tried to push her hair back, the more strands kept falling. Just as another pin fell out, Archie leaned over and gently pulled the whole lot down. ‘That’s how I like it,’ he said, and she felt such a surge of love for him that she blushed.
It was a little like the old Christmases at Home Place – only no Mrs Tonbridge or Eileen to bear the domestic brunt. We have to do that now for ourselves. Which is probably very good for us but must be very hard on the older generation, people like poor Aunt Villy and even Zoë. It was one of those apparently small changes that had come about together with the welfare state and a Labour government. Having Mr Macmillan didn’t bring any of that back, although if you were rich, of course, you still had the old advantages. She wondered whether all the people who had been in domestic service were having nicer lives out of all that. Both Archie and her father had always been left-wing, although Dad had never said very much about it; he was so awfully good at seeing the other person’s point of view that he often agreed with the people who weren’t on his side, and Archie hardly ever talked to her about politics, although he read the Observer and the Manchester Guardian every week. Life was supposed to be getting better for women. He had pointed out to her that there were going to be life peers in the House of Lords. ‘Baroness Clarissa Lestrange took her seat last week, and her maiden speech about children’s education was warmly received …’ But no: she was going to be a playwright; she was going to join what Archie called the Club, which only practising artists could join …
Archie gratefully acknowledged his glass being refilled by Gerald. He was the perfect host, seemed to anticipate everything. And he so clearly adored Polly. He was also, Archie thought, secretly in love with the hideous old pile he had inherited. He remembered Polly talking about how she wanted to make a house entirely beautiful – she could never have bargained for this but she had made pockets of luxury and comfort. His and Clary’s room, for instance. It had been painted and papered, had a moss-green carpet and rose-coloured curtains that matched the roses climbing up the wide trellis on the walls – a French paper, by the look of it. Polly had explained that it was the bedroom they had chosen to be the brides’ dressing room, but meanwhile it was the best guest room. ‘I had to try and do it to suit them,’ she said. She had hung what she described as furnishing pictures, blameless meticulous sea- and landscapes, and one of the less sinister family portraits, Lady Agatha Barstow, wearing a blue taffeta evening dress, with an agonisingly tiny waist. Her face – the china complexion, the slightly protuberant blue eyes, the tiny dark red mouth and the faintest indication of a double chin – gazed upon the room utterly without expression. ‘The agent people love it because she’s got a title,’ Polly had said. ‘And the room has a loo and a basin en suite, which is more than we have.’
Polly had certainly done her best, he thought, but the major part of the vast, sprawling house was unoccupied: the upstairs passages led off to rows of bedrooms in various states of disrepair. The place had been built to entertain huge idle house parties attended by a battery of staff. Polly had told them that Nan was the only person who really knew her way around it.
A little while after Polly and Clary had gone to get the children to bed, Gerald said that he was going to see if more help was needed. Archie was left by the fire with his replenished drink, and she came into his mind yet again. A shit and a bastard was what he had been, and Clary’s play had brought it all home to him. The play had impressed him: she had certainly dealt fairly with the three people involved – she had a real talent for dialogue – and she had kept the tension right to the end, which, Archie supposed, they were all living through now. It was all very well for him, he thought. He had never stopped loving Clary, but the girl had been left with nothing. The play certainly revived all these guilty feelings, and he repeated for the hundredth time that she was very young, she would get over it, most people began their love lives with an unhappy affair – look at him and Rachel, whom he had cared for for so long and so much. All in a peaceful past.
It was the future that was less certain – particularly for old Rupe. He had confided that the firm was losing money. He had never wanted to join the family business anyway, had done it because he wasn’t earning enough teaching art and selling hardly any pictures, and he felt that Zoë deserved a better life. He had told Archie about the affair he had had when he was in France and how difficult it had been to adjust to the old – new – life. Much as Archie longed for someone in whom he could confide now, it was not possible to tell Rupe. He had married Rupert’s daughter, was several years older than she, and to admit to any kind of infidelity was out of the question. It was awful, he thought, how everything seemed to depend upon money. And fear.
Fear made people greedy and therefore selfish; that small minority who honestly did not care for themselves in that way, who could sincerely say that money was unimportant to them, almost always had no dependants. When he and Rupert had been students they had thought like that; they had been admirably high-minded and scorned those who did not agree with them. Hardship and poverty were romantic, and when either occasionally touched them, they put it down to the cause of Art …
‘They want you to say goodnight.’ It was Clary. She looked hot and she had tied her hair back with a piece of string.
‘Where are they?’
‘Harriet is with Eliza and Jane. Bertie is with Andrew. You’ll hear them if you just go upstairs. Polly’s getting supper. Hot soup and smoked-salmon sandwiches.
We’re going to have it in here, then do the tree and the stockings. It’s all lovely, don’t you think?’
She had a smudge on her forehead, but below it, her eyes sparkled with pleasure: he could never resist their beautiful candour.
LOUISE AND TEDDY, WITH EDWARD AND DIANA
‘Do you think anyone has Christmas where they want to?’
She was in a bad mood, Teddy thought. He had come to pick her up to drive them both down to Hawkhurst. The flat reeked of burned feathers, and the shop below her ghastly flat was crammed with dead dressed turkeys. ‘I’m used to it,’ she said, when he remarked on the smell. She had kept him waiting and he’d sat in her small, bare sitting room.
There was a bookshelf and a small gas fire, but most of the elements in it were broken so it gave out uneasy blue flames and no perceptible heat. Come on, Louise, he begged silently. He didn’t want to say anything that might make her crosser.
But when she finally emerged, she looked so marvellous that he felt better at once. She wore jeans, boots, and a navy blue fisherman’s jersey, her shining blonde hair dressed in a French plait and small silver rings in her ears. ‘Don’t you agree?’ she said. ‘We all have to do duty visits at this jolly time of year.’
‘Well, I’m just glad to get away from Southampton. And we’ve never been to Dad’s new house: it might be fun.’
‘Not with Diana in it.’ She had lugged her heavy suitcase into the room. ‘It’s all yours. Sorry it’s so heavy.’
‘Why do you hate her so much?’
‘I suppose because she hates me. And Dad’s so tactless about it – he keeps calling us his two favourite women. She can’t stand that. Are we going to have lunch first?’
‘If we do, the traffic will be even worse.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s nearly two now. But we will if you really want to.’
‘I don’t care. I can’t afford to care too much about meals in my job.’
When he’d stowed her case and they were in the car, he said, ‘I went to Mum’s last night.’
‘Oh, well done you. I went at the weekend. Poor Roland. It must be so dreary for him.’
‘Pretty bad for all of them, I should think. Miss Milliment didn’t seem to know who I was. That’s hard on Mum.’
‘I think she likes things to be hard.’
‘You seem to have got rather cynical in your old age.’
There was a pause, and then she said, ‘Sorry, Ted. I’m not really cynical – just a bit sad.’ Silence. ‘Sometimes it’s not much fun being a woman.’
‘You’re in love with somebody?’
‘I think so. Yes, I must be.’
‘And he doesn’t love you?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose he does, in a way.’
‘But he’s married, is that it? So you can’t marry him.’
‘I don’t know if I’d want to marry him. But I can’t anyway. He spends five evenings a week with me, and goes back to his wife at weekends. Oh, yes, and for long holidays in the south of France – weeks and weeks. While I stew down in London.’ She made an effort to laugh. ‘I’m the icing rather than the cake.’
‘I can see that’s difficult.’ It’s quite difficult being a man, he thought, recalling Ellen and the frightful mess he’d made of that. She had got pregnant, after that one day on the Isle of Wight – had told him six weeks later. He’d been trying to see her only in the pub, had made no plans for time off with her although he could see that she was unhappy. He told himself that it was just as difficult for him, but really he knew it wasn’t. He couldn’t face marrying her, had begun to realise how little they had in common, so one evening when she had served him his pint and very quietly said she wanted to talk with him in private, he had agreed, and waited for her to emerge from the pub after closing time. He had thought that she was going to ask him what was wrong, why they weren’t seeing each other, so her news was a bombshell.
‘Are you sure?’
She had missed two periods and she felt sick in the mornings – threw up sometimes – so, yes.
‘Couldn’t you go back home to have it?’
She could not. Her family would throw her out; she’d land up in some home run by nuns who would force her to get it adopted. ‘It’s your baby, Teddy. I couldn’t let that happen.’ She was speaking quietly, but her eyes were bright with silent pleading.
‘I have to tell you, I can’t marry you, Ellen. My family wouldn’t hear of it.’ As he said that, he was sharply aware of what a coward that made him.
But she seemed to accept his rejection. ‘That’s what families are like,’ she said, a single pear-shaped tear falling from one eye. There was a sad, resigned silence.
‘I think the best thing would be for you not to have it.’
‘That would be a wicked sin. It’s what my friend Annie did and she may well burn in Hell for it.’
‘She won’t, you know. I’m sure she won’t.’ Desperately, he began improvising about religion, of which he knew very little. ‘God doesn’t punish people who repent. At least, my God doesn’t. He’s merciful, and – and—Well, there it is.’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course. Why don’t you ask Annie what she did? I’ll pay. It’s the least I can do.’
And that, in the end, was what had happened. Annie did know someone. They wanted four hundred pounds for it so he had pawned his watch and his gold cufflinks, and just about scraped up enough to give Ellen. She was not in the pub for a week after the abortion, and when she returned to work, she was pale and seemed much older. ‘I’d rather not see you any more,’ she said. So he stopped going to the pub, but he didn’t stop feeling bad about her.
‘You’ve gone very quiet.’
‘I was thinking. All the things you’re supposed to do aren’t much fun, and the other things simply seem to end in disaster.’
‘What other things?’
‘You know, going to bed with people, and drinking too much, staying up all night so you’re no good for work the next day, smoking hash – all that lot – and sleeping around—’
‘You said that before. Have you got anyone now?’
So then he told her about Ellen.
‘Oh, poor old Ted. What awfully bad luck.’
He hadn’t thought of it like that. It didn’t seem right, but at the same time it was oddly consoling.
‘You should lay off barmaids, darling.’
‘And you should lay off married men.’
‘Oh dear! It’s so easy to give other people good advice, and so hard for them to follow it. I think you ought to marry someone,’ she said.
They were well out of London now, through Seven-oaks, and there was far less traffic. There had been a long, comfortable silence between them, during which each had had kindly thoughts about the other.
‘I think you should, too, Lou. Just because we chose the wrong person the first time doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a good idea. Think of the future if you don’t.’
‘The future, as far as I’m concerned, is Christmas with Dad. I must say, I’m glad it’s both of us.’
‘So am I.’
The house was difficult to find, and it was dark by the time they arrived. They were met by the Labrador, which seemed vociferously delighted to welcome them.
Her barking produced their father, who embraced them both. ‘Well done! Was it an awful drive? Come and have some tea. Diana’s in the drawing room. Down, Honey!’ The Labrador instantly sat at his feet. He led the way with his arm round Louise. ‘I must say you’re looking wonderful, darling.’
‘Ted’s pretty wonderful, too,’ she said.
‘Of course he is.’
The room was delightfully warm, with a large log fire, and Diana was lying on a sofa with a tea tray on a low table before her.
‘Hello! You must be dying for tea. I’m afraid my greedy two have demolished all the chocolate cake, but there are still some crumpets left, although I’m afraid they’ll be rather cold by now.’
‘Crumpets will
be fine,’ Teddy said. ‘We missed lunch because the traffic getting out of London was so thick.’
‘You must have started very late, then. But I suppose you don’t mind, do you, Louise? I mean, you must have to keep worrying about your figure in order to get into the clothes.’
‘I don’t worry about it too much.’
She and Teddy both started eating crumpets that were slippery with butter then Teddy dropped his on the yellow carpet. He picked it up, but it left a mark.
‘Oh dear! Edward, darling, get some soda water and a cloth. Quickly!’
Teddy apologised, and Diana said it didn’t matter at all, which was clearly untrue.
When Edward returned with the soda siphon and a cloth, she insisted on doing the squirting and cleaning herself, in spite of Teddy offering.
Louise said she would like to unpack, and Teddy offered to take up her luggage. Edward said he would conduct them upstairs.
‘Where are they sleeping, darling?’
‘Oh, Teddy’s in the old night nursery and Louise has the maid’s bedroom at the back.’
A look of embarrassment crossed her father’s face. It’s going to be just like France, she thought, loving him for minding, hating him for being so weak.
‘Here we are,’ he said, opening the door on a bleak little room that was icy cold. ‘I’m afraid the heating doesn’t get as far as this. I’ll see if I can find you an electric fire. Teddy is next door.’
‘Where’s the bathroom, Dad?’
‘At the end of the passage. I’ll go and see if I can track down that heater.’
Teddy dumped her case on the little iron bedstead. ‘Not exactly the Ritz, is it? I’ll come back when I’ve unpacked.’
She hung her two dresses, stored her suitcase with the rest of her things, and decided to explore the bathroom. When she returned, it was to find a tall young man standing outside her door with an electric fire. ‘Hello! I’m Jamie, your half-brother. Sorry about the fire. Susan pinched it, in spite of having a perfectly good radiator in her room. Shall I plug it in for you?’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 223