He had a charming easy manner, although he didn’t look a bit like Dad. ‘It’s bloody cold in here,’ he said. ‘There’ll be drinks quite soon, so come down as soon as you’re ready. I missed you in the south of France last summer. Susan and I turned up after you left. I must say that was a pity.’ His admiration was open and she felt cheered by it. ‘Sorry you’ve got such a dud room. I’d have given you mine if I’d known. Hope you’ll get warmer soon. By the way, my sister Susan is absolute hell at the moment. Mum says it’s just a phase, but it sure is a long one. She’s fifteen, and she’s been like it for nearly two years.’
But before Louise could ask what sort of hell, he’d gone.
She changed her jersey for a white silk shirt, brushed her hair, put on some lipstick and went downstairs for the drink and the welcome log fire.
That was the beginning of the three days she and Teddy spent in their father’s house, where everyone ate and drank too much, exchanged presents, spent embarrassing interludes when Susan regaled them with her ghastly well-known-speeches-from-Shakespeare and, worse, speeches she had written for herself, the latter requiring much tedious explanation to set the scene. She was going through the unfortunate stage of adolescence where she bulged out of her clothes, had acne on a face that was pear-shaped with puppy fat, and adopted a voice for her acts that was a nauseating blend of martyrdom and self-righteousness. They sat through these pieces because Diana explained that it was important for her to express herself, and Edward, though he was clearly both embarrassed and bored, said nothing. At one point Jamie suggested that they should play charades but no one seemed enthusiastic. By the evening of Boxing Day they all picked at pieces of cold turkey and mince pies with a certain relief that Christmas was nearly over although, of course, nobody said as much.
‘Phew!’ Teddy said, when they were safely in the car. They had left immediately after breakfast on the grounds that Louise had to be in London by lunchtime.
‘We needn’t ever do it again.’
‘What were your best moments?’
‘Do you mean what were my best worst moments?’
‘OK, them, and then your truly best ones – if you had any.’
Louise thought. ‘Seeing my awful little room. Having to sit through Susan’s dreaded displays—’
Teddy interrupted: ‘They don’t count. We know about them, and they went on all the time.’
‘All right. They weren’t moments anyway – they were hours. Having to seem pleased with Diana’s present. A tin of talc, a tube of hand cream and a cake of soap – all done up in a gift box from Boots. And the real joke about that is that she gave Mrs Patterson exactly the same.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’
‘It was on the kitchen table when I went to get some more ice for Dad. He only said “my two favourite women” once, but you should have seen her face. Those awful unmerry meals! And every time she said, “Quite frankly”, you knew some whopping lie was coming.’
‘Yes, several times she said, “To be quite honest with you,” to me and then something disparaging came out – usually about Dad. Poor Dad! He was far better off being unfaithful to Mum. Better for both of them, actually.’
‘Who’s the cynic now?’
‘I’m not a cynic, I’m a realist. Our father is simply not given to fidelity. Few men are – look at your Joseph. And the funny thing is they mostly seem to think that other people ought to be. Dad told me to get married and settle down. He didn’t, did he?’
There was a short silence, and then Louise said, ‘I suppose if you were really in love, you wouldn’t want anyone else.’
He took a quick look at her. ‘Yes, I’m sure there are people like that. I also think women want to be in love far more than men. I’ve come to the conclusion that I really don’t know much about it. I agree with you about our bedrooms. Mine was larger but just as cold and nobody produced a heater. I slept in my clothes. And Diana gave me a completely horrible tie. So I’m with you about not going back if I can help it. One good thing. I thought I was going to dislike Jamie, for being sent to Eton and then going on to Cambridge. I thought he’d be snotty and superior, but he’s actually very nice. He told me that Dad wanted him to go into the firm, but he’s refusing. He wants to do some kind of medical research, you know, finding out how to eradicate disease. He’s leaving today to stay with a friend who’s set up an experiment. He didn’t say anything, but I got the feeling that he’s fed up with home. I must say, though, that I don’t think he is Dad’s son. He doesn’t look in the least like him. Another of Madam’s traps, perhaps.’
‘Well, even if you think that, you shouldn’t say it to anyone – ever. I’m serious, Ted, promise you won’t.’
‘I was only telling you. All right, I won’t.’
She sensed he didn’t like being told not to do things, and after a silence, she said, ‘My date is at a party this evening. Would you like to come to it? There’ll be lots of girls.’
‘Really nice girls?’ Teasing her.
‘Awfully, awfully nice. You might find one to marry.’
‘OK. I would like to.’ He realised then how much he didn’t want to go back to Southampton.
RACHEL AND SID, WITH THE TONBRIDGES
‘A little steamed fish, Miss Rachel, with some mashed potato and a purée of spinach?’
Rachel hesitated. Asking Sid what she would like to eat had proved unprofitable. She would simply ask for Brand’s Essence, which came from the chemist in Battle, and would only take a few teaspoonfuls and then say it was too rich. The cancer had invaded her liver, and the nausea and the pain that the tumour near her spine was causing her made food of any kind an ordeal.
She insisted upon getting up every day, but for the last week she had agreed that there was no need to dress, and spent the daytime lying on the sofa that Rachel had imported from the drawing room, wearing her winter dressing gown over her pyjamas. The morning room, being small, was much easier to heat and she was always cold these days.
‘I think we might try the fish,’ she said. ‘And I can have the same.’
‘Miss Rachel, it is Christmas dinner we’re talking about. I’ve got a nice roasting chicken for you and a little Christmas pudding made specially. The job you’re doing, nursing and that, you need proper meals. You look really worn out. Even Eileen passed a remark about it at yesterday’s dinner: “Madam looks really fagged,” she said, and although, of course, I told her not to be so forward, it’s the plain truth.’ Here, she – fortunately – ran out of breath.
‘All right, Mrs Tonbridge, I’ll have whatever you give me.’ It was true: she was so tired that she hadn’t the strength to argue about anything. The last two nights had been ghastly. Sid had insisted upon them sleeping in separate rooms – ‘I want you to have a proper night’s sleep, my darling,’ she had said – but this had simply meant that she had spent the nights with her door open and therefore still heard the heartrending sounds from Sid’s room. The painkillers she had been given no longer made much difference. The nights were worse than the days, and she supposed this was because they contained no distraction. Neither of them had slept much and she had rung their local doctor and asked him to come. ‘Please don’t ring the bell, just come in and I’ll see you in the study to the right of the front door.’
He came, as she asked, and shut the study door as requested.
‘I wanted to see you alone, because my friend is in such pain most of the time, especially at night. There must be something that could be done to help her?’
‘I should see her first, of course, but it sounds as though the time has come for morphine.’ He gave her a penetrating look. ‘You look pretty rough yourself. Have you thought any more about our local hospital? The nursing is good there and you could visit as much as you wanted.’
‘She begged me not to put her in any hospital, and I promised I wouldn’t.’
‘Right. Well, perhaps I’d better see her.’
‘She’s still in bed. I�
�ll take you up.’
There was no need for her to do this, as he knew the house, had attended her mother when she had had her last illness, but he let Rachel escort him. He had thought the National Health an idealistic and admirable idea, but he very much doubted Aneurin Bevan’s belief that people would become healthy because of it and end up needing far less medical attention.
And he still clung to the old ways of a country GP, visiting seriously ill patients at home, generous with his time and resigned about the hours he was called out.
‘Do you mind my being here, or do you want to see her alone?’
‘That’s for the patient to decide. I don’t mind in the least.’
Sid was sitting up in bed sipping her tea and lemon. The pieces of dry toast that were meant to accompany it were untouched. She had clearly lost weight since he had last seen her: her naturally round face was bony and diminished and there were dark circles under her eyes. Almost all of her hair had gone – the few tufts that remained only accentuated her baldness. The effect had something of the pathos associated with clowns.
Rachel asked whether she minded her staying and she said no.
He went through the routine physical examination. She was running a temperature, he knew that by looking at her, and for the rest, he had discovered that the routine was vaguely comforting to the terminally ill – creating a glimmering hope of recovery that helped them through the last painful weeks. At the end he told her that he was going to give her some morphine for pain and a prescription that would control her sickness. ‘But you must promise me that you will try to eat more – keep up your strength. I’ll be back this evening to give you another shot.’
‘She might want to stay in bed to have a good sleep,’ he said to Rachel, on his way out. ‘And it wouldn’t be a bad thing if you were to follow suit.’
By the time she had arranged for Tonbridge to drive to Battle to get the prescription and gone upstairs, she found Sid asleep. She told Eileen to keep the fire in the morning room burning well, and then, because it was the nearest to Sid’s room, she went to her own; her back ached, and she decided to lie on her bed for a while to rest it, and almost at once she, too, slept.
‘Well, all I can say is that I’ve never known a Christmas like this one.’ Mrs Tonbridge was attacking her slab of puff pastry with angry vigour, cutting knobs of butter and dotting the rolled crust, folding it and rolling it again. Tonbridge did like his mince pies and she was famous for her pastry. Steaming two bits of fish and mashing potato hardly showed off her talent as a cook.
‘The house is ever so quiet,’ Eileen agreed. She was standing on a chair putting up the paper chains she had made, as Miss Rachel had said she didn’t want them in the morning room. Outside, it was beginning to snow; large, reluctant flakes kept colliding with the kitchen windows and melting. ‘It seems such a waste to have a white Christmas without the children.’
‘You get on with peeling the potatoes, girl, and don’t comment on matters that don’t concern you.’ She was trussing the bacon hock they were to have for lunch. ‘And I want celery, carrots and an onion from the larder.’
She treats me like a kitchenmaid, Eileen thought resentfully. She was in her late forties and could hardly be described as a girl. But she climbed down from the chair and did as she was told.
By elevenses, Mrs Tonbridge was in a better mood. She had rolled out her pastry, chopped parsley and made a sauce for the hock, and she now sat at the table with Eileen while they both drank a strong cup of tea and finished off the flapjacks. ‘Tonbridge won’t be back for his. I will say one thing for him, he’s a slow shopper but he had quite a list. Your decorations look quite nice, though I say it myself.’ She rolled her sleeves down over her fat white arms, and then vigorously polished her glasses on a corner of her apron.
‘You’d best go up to Miss Rachel and see when she would like lunch served.’
Rachel woke with a start to find Eileen standing in the doorway, speaking in what Rachel described to Sid as her doomed voice: ‘I’m ever so sorry to disturb you, but Mrs Tonbridge would like to know when you want lunch.’
‘What is the time? Oh – a quarter to twelve. I should think half past one, Eileen. Is the morning room nice and warm?’
Eileen said it was, and Rachel asked her to wait a minute while she found out whether Sid wanted to get up.
She was sitting up in bed and looked far better. ‘I’ve had a wonderful sleep and the pain has almost gone. Of course I want to get up.’
Lunch was much more animated than usual. Sid ate at least half of hers, and afterwards they did the crossword together. But some twenty minutes later, she said apologetically that she was afraid she was going to be sick. Rachel gave her the basin kept for this purpose and fetched a towel for her. ‘It’s my fault, darling. I forgot to give you the anti-sickness pill. I’m so sorry.’ Seeing anyone being sick used to make her feel the same, but she had got used to it now, and could help clean up with scarcely a tremor. ‘You’re meant to have one half an hour before each meal. What a rotten nurse I am.’
‘You’re the best nurse for me in the world.’
‘Why don’t you lie down on the sofa and we could go on with Emma?’ She had found that Sid liked being read to, and Austen was a good choice.
‘Yes, I would like that.’
Rachel settled her down with a cushion for her head and a blanket wrapped round her permanently cold feet. ‘We’ve reached the insufferable Mrs Elton’s visit to Emma.’
But after she had read for a few minutes, she saw that Sid was restless, shifting about as though she could not get comfortable.
‘Are you in pain?’
‘It’s my back. It’s started again. It’s not too bad.’
‘Would you like some lemon tea?’
‘Yes. But I’d like some of my old pills first. Now,’ she said irritably. Rachel fetched them, then went to the kitchen to see about the tea.
When she returned with it, Sid was sitting up. ‘Sorry I snapped.’
‘That’s all right. Are they working?’
‘They are a bit, yes. The tea will be too hot to drink. Anyway, I want to talk to you – seriously. Give me your hand.’
Her heart sank. She knew that Sid was going to talk about her death – which they hadn’t done since before Christmas. Since then it had lain between them like a sword. They both knew it was there, but both felt in different ways that by refusing to acknowledge its presence they were somehow warding it off – Rachel because she could not bear to think beyond it, and Sid because she was desperately anxious about how Rachel would cope.
‘My darling, you know that I’m going to die, and sooner rather than later. I want to talk about you, because the only thing I grieve about now is what will happen to you. I don’t think you should stay on in this house alone. I think you should move to London. I’ve left you my house in case you want to live there. If not, you can sell it and choose somewhere else. I think you should find some work to do. You always want to help people, and perhaps you could find some charity – children, for instance, you’ve always loved them. Think of the Babies’ Hotel.’ She had run out of breath, and reached for her tea.
Tears were streaming down Rachel’s face, and after a moment she said, ‘I can’t bear for you to die. I can’t.’
‘And I don’t want to leave you, but we both have to bear it because it is going to happen. I can’t go on much longer like this – it’s becoming too difficult. I think I shall be quite glad when the time comes, except for you, my dearest Rachel. And I beg you to think about what I have said, about your life. We should be grateful for the marvellous years we’ve had together. Imagine if we had lived in Emma’s time how impossible it would have been.’ She was smiling now and stroking Rachel’s hand.
Rachel wiped her face with her other hand and tried to smile back as she said, ‘There were the Ladies of Llangollen. They brought it off.’ They had visited the redoubtable lesbians’ house, Plas Newydd, on one of their country
walking tours.
‘So they did. That was a lovely holiday, wasn’t it? That amazing waterfall, and the aqueduct carrying that canal over the valley … Now, blow your nose and give me one of those anti-sickness pills and I’ll try to eat some tea. What is the time?’ It was only half past three, Rachel saw. There were hours to go before the doctor would come again, she thought, as she dried her face with one of the Duchy’s elegant, but inadequate handkerchiefs.
She had left the pills in Sid’s bedroom. And she waited a minute or two with the bottle in her hand, before returning to the morning room, while she tried to collect herself. She must stop crying: it would only distress Sid more. At least death had been mentioned – talked about – and it was Sid who had had the courage to do it. Nurses don’t cry all over their patients: they nurse; they try to make things as easy as possible for them. If you love someone, she thought, you can do anything for them.
By the time she returned to the morning room, she felt comparatively calm.
Sid was lying back with her eyes shut, but she was not asleep. Rachel propped her up, and gave her the pill. ‘Would you like a little sleep now before tea, or do you want me to go on reading?’
‘Think I’ll try to sleep. You won’t forget what I said, will you?’
‘Certainly not.’ She pulled the blanket round Sid’s shoulders, then rang for Eileen to stoke up the fire and, when she had done so, followed her out of the room. ‘We’ll have tea at half past four and would like a few honey sandwiches with the crusts cut off.’
‘Very good, Miss Rachel.’ Ladies, she knew, never ate the crusts on their sandwiches; after all these years Miss Rachel should know that she would never send in sandwiches without the crusts off, but there you were. Miss Rachel was not herself. Who would be with this tragedy hanging over them?
For the next hour, Rachel read to herself and sewed. Every now and again she checked Sid. Her eyes were closed, but small tremors, contorting her face, looked like attacks of pain. Nearly at the end of the hour, Rachel was startled by a curious sound – a muted howl – and saw that Sid had crammed her knuckles into her mouth. She flew to her and knelt by her side. ‘Is the pain very bad?’
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 224