The moment he rang off, she remembered that she had meant to ask Hugh what would happen to Eileen and the Tonbridges. This had been worrying her ever since the bombshell had fallen. They were too old to get new jobs and as Eileen slept in the house, and the Tonbridges had the cottage above the stables, she was afraid that they would be not allowed to stay there. After their years of service to the family, she felt responsible for them. Eileen had a younger sister, a retired lady’s maid, who lived in a flat in Hastings, and they occasionally had holidays together. But the Tonbridges! She wanted to buy them a cottage and she had already pledged to pay for Mrs Tonbridge’s operation. She must find out how much money she had in her account.
She rang her bank, and found that she had nearly fifteen thousand pounds. Greatly cheered – it seemed an enormous amount – she rang Villy and asked if, sent a key, she would be kind enough to get a house agent round to value the Abbey Road house. As she lived so near, she might know which agent to go to, but not if it was too much trouble. Villy sounded so low, so unhappy, and at the same time so grateful to be asked that Rachel changed her mind, and ventured to wonder whether Villy could put her up for a night. ‘Of course! Oh, Rachel, I’d simply love to see you!’
And so, dreading more bitter recriminations about Edward and ‘That Woman’, she went.
Villy looked awful. She wore cyclamen lipstick that made her complexion seem sallow and the dark circles under her swollen eyes look worse. They kissed warmly, and Villy led the way into the sitting room, which had a fireplace and drinks on a table in front of it.
‘Something’s the matter?’ Rachel said, accepting a large drink.
‘Yes. Miss Milliment has died.’
‘Oh dear! I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s much worse than that. She died in a nursing home – I had to put her there because it got too dangerous to leave her on her own in this house, even for half an hour. She was demented, you see, hardly knowing me in the end. But she loathed it in the home, and she blamed me my cruelty, my being uncaring for putting her there. Every time I visited, she cried and railed at me for my wickedness. The last time I saw her she recognised me and said, “Viola, you have betrayed me. I have loved you all my life, and I was wrong. You have never loved me. I do not know how to bear it. I cannot bear it.” She was sobbing, and when I tried to hold her in my arms, she tore herself away. “Don’t touch me – you devil. No love – no love at all. Go away, don’t ever come back!”’
Tears were streaming down Villy’s face, and Rachel knelt before her and held her shaking shoulders. ‘She was demented, darling. You said that. And you were angelic to her. You gave her a home and looked after her. Of course she didn’t mean all those horrible things she said. Of course you loved her and somewhere inside her she knew that. Oh, darling Villy, how awful for you!’ And then, somehow, the thought flashed across her mind: supposing Sid had been demented, had said such things to her? Poor Villy, to be rejected for the second time in her life! And she was not bitter – she was only sad. How much easier that made it to try to comfort her. But where was the comfort? Miss Milliment was dead; there could be no reconciling conversation – and, in any case, if someone was out of their mind, it was almost impossible to get them back into it. However, she tried to make Villy feel better, and in some part succeeded.
‘Oh, Rachel! You’re such a tower of strength! Enough about me. Tell me your news.’ She had taken a paper handkerchief out of a box lying beside her chair and Rachel noticed that the wastepaper basket was already full of them. Villy offered her a cigarette, and she took it, in spite of only liking her Passing Clouds. ‘You’ve decided to sell Sid’s house.’
‘Yes. As you know, I went back, and I discovered that I could not bear to live there. It was too full of sad things – the beginning of Sid being so ill and the time when we weren’t talking about it. I don’t know – I found that I just wanted to escape from it.’
‘I do understand, darling. You want to stay in Home Place where you have always been happiest—’
‘It seems that I cannot do that. I suppose you haven’t heard what is happening with Cazalets’?’
A trace of the old bitterness: ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ she said coldly.
So Rachel told her. And Villy, always practical and intelligent, seemed to understand at once. ‘Are they all losing their houses?’
‘No. Luckily some lawyer or accountant advised my brothers to put their houses in their wives’ names. But Home Place was bought by the Brig in the firm’s name. I have to get out in the New Year.’ Her voice was trembling as she tried to smile.
‘Well, darling, I really do see how awful that is for you, but if you sell Abbey Road you’ll be able to buy a little house in Sussex, and with all your shares you’ll be able to live comfortably.’
‘There won’t be any shares. The firm is bankrupt. I shan’t have an income from it – I’ll have to get a job of some sort. But who is going to employ a woman of nearly sixty, who can’t drive, or cook, or type?’ She was silent for a moment, trying to quell the panic she always felt when she thought about it – which was almost always now.
Villy reached out and took her hand. ‘Well, we must see how much you can get for the house. And you know you can always stay here as long as you want.’
The ‘stay’ hit her: she would still have nowhere to live, which was entirely different. But she said thank you, it was really kind.
They sat for a while with a second gin, which Rachel did not want, and while compassionate for each other, their own plight seemed worse now to each of them. Villy was grieving about Miss Milliment and lonely: Lydia had left some weeks ago to tour in Clary’s play, so she was alone again, struggling to think how she might make Christmas less boring for Roland. And I’m sixty-two, she thought, too old for anything interesting to happen.
Rachel felt – although, of course, she was glad of it – that at least Villy had her own house and the income to live in it. And she had Roland, which must be lovely. She had lost the person she loved most in the world (and Sid had been only fifty when she died), whereas Villy’s anger and resentment about Edward leaving her seemed the result of pride, rather than love.
But these thoughts were entirely concealed. They ate macaroni cheese and stewed pears by the fire, and were kind to each other, as they smoked a last cigarette.
The next morning they went to Sid’s house, and Villy, appalled by its abandoned state, tactfully suggested that she should ask her daily, Mrs Jordan, to clean it before showing it to an agent. Meanwhile, she also thought that it might be a good idea for Rachel to clear the house of things that she wanted and that then they could decide what to do with the residue.
‘The rest of Sid’s clothes,’ Rachel said. ‘I’d be awfully grateful if you would stay with me while I do that. There’s one old suitcase upstairs and I’ll take it back to Home Place.’
So that happened. Villy asked her to stay another night, but Rachel said she had arranged to be met at Battle and so must catch the four thirty at Charing Cross. Villy said that she would deal with the house-cleaning and appoint an agent.
She could not have been kinder, Rachel thought, as she settled into her train. The main reason she wanted to get back was because she had the enormous Christmas party to deal with, and she felt very sad that Villy would be excluded from it.
Villy, emboldened by Rachel’s courage, spent an awful evening clearing out Miss Milliment’s clothes and few possessions: her lock-knit knickers, her woollen vests, washed until they were stiff and prickly, her battered egg-stained cardigans, her two smart outfits – bottle-green silk jersey and her fearful banana jacket and skirt. She packed her mac, which had not kept out rain for decades, and her pathetically jaunty hats adorned with pheasant’s feathers or artificial poppies, her sensible stockings that never stayed up, and her lace-up shoes, some with holes in their soles. Her possessions consisted of her wristwatch, an album full of photographs – there was a bearded tyrant who was clearly her fathe
r, her brothers, in sailor suits, in Oxford bags and V-necked pullovers, in army uniform; and then, by itself on a page, a tiny faded picture of a very small man with a fine head of hair and an anxious expression … She had no idea who he could have been. Then there were her books – poetry collections: Tennyson, Keats, Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, Blake and Housman. ‘Eleanor Milliment’ was written in each of them. Her prayer book contained notes of all the children she had taught, their birthdays and subsequent marriages, and sometimes their deaths, all written in a tiny black-ink hand.
It was dark by the time she finished, tired, dispirited, but also relieved; she would keep the books, and the album, but the rest had to go. The house was silent, so quiet that, from Miss Milliment’s room, she heard a log fall from the fireplace in the sitting room. She missed Lydia very much: her theatre gossip, her excitement about the success of Clary’s play. She had bought two chops for herself and Rachel, in case she had agreed to stay; she shut the door of Miss Milliment’s room, with its chilly stale air, and went to the kitchen to grill her chop, which she decided to eat with bread and butter, and turned on the wireless for company. They were talking about Britain’s first motorway, just opened by Mr Macmillan – an eight-mile bypass of Lancaster, ‘a token of what was to come’. And the Queen, in Bristol, made the first trunk call, to Edinburgh where the Lord Provost was waiting to speak to her. The weather was expected to get colder, with periods of light rain and frost in some areas. There was just enough gin left for one small drink and she improved it with some dry Martini.
The news was followed by a concert of Mahler and Shostakovich; she did not care much for either of them, but it was better than silence.
PART TEN
NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1958
EDWARD
On Monday morning the news about Cazalets’ was out.
‘I’ve asked for them to come to my office at eleven o’clock,’ Hugh said to Edward. ‘I was hoping you’d do the wharf in the afternoon. You’re much better with the men than I am. Remember that strike you stopped when you went and talked to them? The powers that be have given us five weeks from now and I have negotiated three months’ salary for senior staff. In the case of the staff at the wharf, I think you could tell them that there is a fair chance of some of them at least being taken on by whoever buys that set-up.’ There was a pause, and then he said, ‘I had young Teddy in here at nine o’clock. He seemed to know that things were on the blink and was angry that he had not been told. I’ve sent him off to Southampton with a note for McIver. I’ve told our accountant to come for this meeting in case there are questions about finance that we can’t answer.’
‘Right.’
The poor old boy looked dreadful – as though he’d been up all night. Which was almost true. His weekend with Diana had been a nightmare. It had taken until Saturday for her to understand that he had no money in the bank, and had only his salary – which he was also about to lose – to live on. In the end he had taken her by the shoulders and literally shaken her, yelling, ‘I’ve got no money left! None!’ The penny had finally dropped then. She had shrugged his hands off her shoulders – not difficult since he at once felt ashamed of assaulting her – and said coldly, ‘Well, you’ll have to get another job, won’t you? And pretty damn quick.’
‘Of course I’ve got to. But it won’t be so easy at my age. I’m afraid we’re going to have to sell this house and find somewhere more modest.’
‘You seem to forget that this is my house, and I have no intention of selling it.’
A bombshell. Something awful that he had never expected, and the implication chilled him to the bone. ‘Diana! You can’t mean that. We’re a partnership – married! If you refuse to sell this house, I shall become bankrupt.’
There was a silence. She had walked away from him to the French windows that looked onto the garden. Then, in a much softer, despairing voice, she said, ‘I simply cannot understand how you have got into this awful mess so suddenly. It frightens me. It feels as though nothing is safe any more.’
He wanted to say, ‘We have each other,’ but the words died in his throat. That did not feel safe any more. Nevertheless, it was up to him. ‘Darling,’ he said carefully, ‘I know this is an awful time for you. I know how much you love this house. I am determined to get another job. But I have debts to pay off – an overdraft at the bank, which is entirely my fault. I don’t see how I can do that and pay for the upkeep of your house. I have wanted to give you everything, you see, and I’ve overreached myself.’
And, at that moment, the telephone rang, and Diana answered it.
‘For you,’ she said. ‘A woman for you.’ Her voice was dangerously calm.
‘It’s Rachel,’ he said to Diana, who indicated that she knew. She helped herself to a cigarette and settled down to listen to the telephone conversation. This, he could sense at once, was going to be deeply embarrassing. Rachel always talked louder on the telephone than she did at any other time; she dropped her gentle drawl and became quite military.
‘It’s about Christmas! This house belongs to the firm, so I shall have to leave it in the New Year. So we’ve decided to have one last family Christmas, and I was wondering whether you and Diana would like to join us.’ He glanced at Diana: it was clear that she had heard every word.
‘That’s extraordinarily sweet of you, darling. Could I think about it and let you know?’
‘Well, yes, but could you not be too long about it? I have another idea I should like to put to you.’
‘Of course. I’ll ring you tomorrow morning.’ The moment he had rung off, he realised that he had said nothing sympathetic about her having to leave Home Place. It must be horrible for her, and the least they could do would be to rally round.
‘Poor Rachel,’ he said. ‘She’s having to give up Home Place, which really has been her home for most of her life. So, you see, we’re not the only ones.’
‘But she has another house in London, doesn’t she? The one that her little lesbian friend left her.’
‘Yes, she has. But Hugh says she doesn’t want to live in it.’
‘Well, there you are. We are the only ones.’
‘Oh, come on, Diana. I’ll make us a Sunday special – it’s nearly lunchtime so I’m calling a truce.’
‘Oh, all right.’ She rang the bell, and a flustered Mrs Atkinson answered it, wiping her hands on her apron.
‘Mr Cazalet would like the juice of two oranges squeezed and some ice. Oh, and two cocktail glasses.’
But when he’d made the drink, he found that he didn’t want it. He felt vaguely rotten, with a distant pain that he couldn’t locate.
Lunch was worse. It was roast guinea fowl with Calvados, a purée of Jerusalem artichokes and creamed spinach. He tried a mouthful and gave up.
‘What’s the matter, darling?’
‘Don’t know. I just feel rotten. I’ll take a couple of Alka Seltzers and lie down for a bit.’
‘Want me to come?’
‘No, no. You have your nice lunch. I’ll have a kip.’
Diana explained that Mr Cazalet was not feeling well, and Mrs Atkinson rushed upstairs with a hot-water bottle and woke him up giving it to him. But he did sleep heavily until about six in the evening when Diana brought him a cup of tea and a ginger biscuit. ‘Poor old boy,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought you a ginger biscuit because you liked them last time you had a tummy upset.’ She was behaving as though there had never been a quarrel of any kind and he was grateful. He fell asleep again, and woke at two in the morning to find a cup of cold consommé by his bed and a note from her: ‘Sleeping next door. Didn’t want to wake you. Alarm set for seven. Love D.’ His pain was gone, thank God, and he settled himself for more sleep. But sleep evaded him, and he began at once to worry. He started to tot up the possessions he could sell that would bring in a fair amount of cash. The Brig’s guns, his Asprey watch, his gold and sapphire cufflinks, the Bentley, and finally his Gagliano violin. If he could find the right place
to sell them, there should be enough money to tide him over. He began to think about what on earth he could do when he stopped being a timber merchant. His strong points, he thought weakly, were getting on well with practically anybody, and selling – he was certainly good at that.
The meeting in Hugh’s office had been exactly as awful as they had expected. The office boy had been deputed to get the requisite number of chairs, but he hadn’t and several of the men had had to stand. Edward had sat beside Hugh behind his desk. They had all filed into the room on time and sat or stood with resolutely expressionless faces.
‘I’m afraid I have very bad news,’ Hugh began. He went on to say that it was with great sorrow he had to tell them that Cazalets’ was forced to go into receivership, which meant that six weeks from today everyone would be out of a job. He explained briefly why this was so. The bank would not honour any further loans and was calling in the money already loaned. Everybody would get one extra month’s salary when the six weeks were up, and those who had been with the firm for more than ten years would get three months’. He could not begin to describe how he and his brothers had tried to avert this disaster, but they had failed. Here his voice nearly broke, and Edward saw that two of the secretaries were in tears. Hugh finished by saying what a wonderful team they had been, and that everyone could be sure of getting an excellent reference. Now, they might have questions and he would do his best to answer them.
There was an uneasy silence. Then Crowther, from Accounts, asked whether Cazalets’ would be bought by another timber firm. Hugh replied that he had no knowledge of this, but that of course it was possible. Miss Corley, the senior secretary, rose to her feet to say that she spoke for everyone in the room when she said what a pleasure it had been working for Mr Hugh, Mr Edward and Mr Rupert. There was a wave of weak clapping – not from all – and Rupert observed that his new secretary, Doris, did not join in. He had spent most of the meeting looking out of the window at the motionless plane trees, and wondering if he could paint the vista: the elegance of the bare branches against the weary grey sky … a sombre picture.
The Cazalet Chronicles Collection Page 236