The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (7 page)

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘I’m a little tired, but yes, darling, of course I’m all right. Did you break up today?’

‘No, it’s tomorrow. But we finished
Othello
today. Are you going out tonight?’

‘I told you we were. The Queen’s Hall.
Othello
seems an extraordinary play for children of your age. I should have thought
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
would be far more suitable.’

‘We’re reading all of him, so we’re bound to get to the extraordinary ones, Mummy. Louise chose to. We each choose something, you see.’

It was funny how with grown-ups you had to say the same things again and again. Perhaps that was why babies were born with such big heads: the head stayed the same and the person got larger, but it meant that there was the same amount of room in your brain to remember things, so the longer you lived, the more you forgot. Whatever she said, Mummy was tired, anyway, she had bluey marks under her eyes and the rest of her face was a kind of greeny white and her stomach looked like a balloon under her dress. It would be much better if babies were like eggs, but she supposed people weren’t the right shape for sitting on them. You could probably do it with hot water bottles . . .

‘Polly! I’ve asked you twice!
What
is in the dirty newspaper?’

‘Oh! Just some stuff I got from the shop next to the animal shop.’

‘What
did
you get?’

Polly unwrapped the plate and showed it. Then she unwrapped the candlesticks and showed them. They weren’t a success as she knew they wouldn’t be.

‘I can’t think why you keep buying all these odd things. What are you going to do with them?’

Polly was incapable of lying, so she couldn’t answer.

‘I mean, darling,
I
don’t mind, but your room is stuffed with junk. Why do you want them?’

‘I think they’re pretty, and I’ll need some things of my own for when I’m grown up. Louise bought a catfish. What did you buy when you were my age, anyway?’

‘Don’t say “anyway” like that, Polly, it’s rude.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I bought furniture for my dolls’ house. The one you never play with.’

‘I have played with it, Mummy, honestly.’ She’d tried to like it but everything was made and done, there was nothing to do but arrange the same old bits of furniture and tea things; even the dolls already had names so they didn’t feel hers at all.

‘And I kept it all those years for when I had a daughter.’

She looked so sadly at Polly that Polly couldn’t bear it.

‘Perhaps the new baby will like it.’

‘That reminds me, I wanted to have a little talk with you about that.’

Half an hour later, Polly trudged upstairs to her room with her china. Her room! She was being turned out of it for the blasted baby.
That
had been the little talk. It was the largest, sunniest room on the top floor and now some awful nanny and the baby were to have it, and she was to be turned out to the little one at the back: hardly room for anything. She wouldn’t be able to see the lamplighter or the postman or the milkman or any of her friends. She’d be stuck in the back of the house with nothing but chimney pots. Simon had to keep the attic because he was a boy (why did that make any difference, for heaven’s sake?). And it wasn’t as though it was just her; it was Pompey as well, and he couldn’t be expected to understand that. ‘It’s not
fair
,’ she muttered. This seemed so true and so awful that tears began to run down her face. Simon was away nearly all the time at school so what did he want with a room with slanty ceilings and sweet little windows? She and Pompey might as well be living in the linen cupboard. No wonder Mummy had made a fuss about her china. There was no room for anything in the spare room which was all it was. She was a spare child too, she supposed. The thought made her sob. That was it. Not wanted in the family. She cast herself down on the floor beside Pompey who lay in a dress box on a blanket that it had taken her ages to knit for him. He’d been asleep. When she woke him up to tell him, his eyes, which opened at once, went to slits of pleasure as he stretched luxuriously under her hand. But when she cried on him he sneezed and got up at once. She had noticed before that he did not seem to care for other people’s feelings. If only they had a proper garden, there’d be a wheelbarrow and then she could load all her stuff up and go and live with Louise whose house was much larger, anyway. When her parents had gone to their concert, she would telephone Louise and see if she could borrow their wheelbarrow. She heard the front door downstairs which meant that Dad had come home.

Hugh Cazalet usually drove himself. It hurt his eyes to read in a car and with nothing to take his mind off the way in which anybody else was driving him, he fretted, with various degrees of irritation and nerves, at the way in which they were doing it. Today, however, he got one of his ‘heads’ just before lunch, which he couldn’t cancel as both Edward and the Old Man were already pledged and couldn’t take his customer – a rising young architect employed (rather too much, Hugh thought) by the Board of Trade – out to lunch for him. So he had taken a taxi to the Savoy and picked at a meal with a total stranger whom he found early on he did not very much like. Boscomb contrived to be bumptious at the same time as calling him sir, which made Hugh feel an old fuddy-duddy although there could not have been more than six or seven years between them. He also wore a bow tie – something Hugh would never have dreamed of doing without a dinner jacket, and co-respondent’s shoes in caramel and white: a bit of a bounder, really. But he was shopping for veneers for the lifts of a large office building he had designed – or at least was overseeing – and Cazalet’s had an unrivalled stock of hardwoods which it was Hugh’s business to sell. Food revived him, but the drink was a problem. Courtesy demanded that he drink with his guest: a dry sherry before lunch that he (as usual and mistakenly) thought might do him some good, some white burgundy with the fish and port with the cheese. He managed to avoid the port but by then his head was hammering. Arrangements were made for Boscomb to visit the wharf where he could view samples that were larger than four by four inches and finally Hugh was able to sign the bill and escape. Another cab and he was back at the office and could take some more of his dope. He told Mary, his secretary, to take his calls and leave him until the meeting – timed for three thirty – lay down on his chesterfield in the office and slept heavily.

His secretary woke him with a welcome cup of tea and the still more welcome news that the meeting was off. ‘Mrs Cazalet rang to remind you about the concert tonight. Oh, and Mr Cazalet senior said that Carruthers will drive you home.’

He thanked her dismissively and she went. The whole damn office was like a bush telegraph, treating him as an old crock just because he had a bit of a headache. His rage and humiliation about his wretched body vented itself upon anyone who acknowledged it – his father for presuming to order him a chauffeur, his secretary for letting everyone know that he was having forty winks. Why couldn’t the silly woman keep her mouth shut? He could have got a lift home with Edward,
if
he wanted one, and taken Sybil to the concert in a cab. He lit a Gold Flake to calm himself, and went to his desk to buzz Edward. But Edward had left, his secretary informed him, had left half an hour ago. There was a picture of Polly and Simon on his desk. Simon stared steadily at the camera with a look of sturdy bravado, smiling in his grey school-uniform shorts and shirt, a model yacht on his scarred, experienced knees. But Polly – his dear Polly – sat cross-legged in long grass looking away from her brother into some secret distance. She wore a sleeveless dress that had slipped a little over one bony shoulder and her expression was both stern and vulnerable. ‘I was thinking,’ he remembered her saying after he had taken the snap and asked her what was up. Polly! She was like a secret treasure to him. Whenever he thought of her he felt lucky. He never told anyone how much she meant to him – not even Sybil, who really, and sometimes he had to speak to her about it, made rather too much fuss of Simon. Well, a third child would balance things up. He stubbed out his cigarette, collected his hat and went in search of Carruthers.

She had wandered down to the hall where the
Evening Standard
had come through the letter box, and she took it to her perch on top of the boxed-in dining-room lift shaft – a good position, since it enabled her to collect Mummy the moment she got home and was out of Lydia’s reach supposing she came in search of her. Papers usually turned out to be boring except for theatre reviews and a page by someone called Corisande, who seemed to go to a lot of grand parties and described people’s dresses in a breathless admiring way. She looked for a picture of John Gielgud for her collection, but there wasn’t one. The house seemed awfully quiet – just the grandfather clock ticking in the dining room. It would be no good unlocking the drawing-room bookcase to read a bit of one of the novels that Mummy said were not suitable for her age, because she, Mummy, might come back any minute. Otherwise, she could only think of things she
didn’t
want to do: draw the map of the British Isles for homework, try and sell Edna a pot of the face cream before it went too runny, spend any more time with her catfish (Lydia’s remark had slightly spoiled him for her), reread
Black Beauty
and have a good cry, or go on making Mummy’s Christmas present – a needlecase in tiny cross-stitch and a rather dull pattern that she was sick of. It was her life and here she was wasting it, minutes ticking by, and all that was happening was that she was breathing and getting older. Supposing nothing at all happened for the whole of the rest of her life? She simply stayed here on the lift shaft getting older? They would have to hand her up larger clothes and sandwiches and how would she go to the lavatory? People did live on pillars, rather dirty saints had done it. She couldn’t, because she’d have to feed Ferdie and the fish – except, if she could go away for holidays and leave them to Emily or Phyllis, she
could
be on a pillar. Anybody would be glad to feed the birds and fish that belonged to a saint. The trouble about being a saint was that it didn’t seem to be very nice for them at the time, only afterwards, for other people, after they’d died. Working a miracle would be marvellous – being martyred would not. But supposing you could be a saint without being a martyr?

She heard a taxi. ‘Let it be her. Please, God, let it be her.’

He did please and it was. She jumped down from the lift shaft just as Mummy opened the door. She was carrying three enormous cardboard boxes that looked as though they would have frocks in them. She rushed for a hug and knocked one of the boxes out of Mummy’s hand.

‘Darling! You’re so clumsy!’

Louise’s face burned. ‘I know,’ she said carelessly. ‘I seem to have been born like it.’

‘It’s because you don’t look what you’re doing.’ This remark seemed to Louise so meaningless (How could you
look
what you were doing? Either you were doing something or you were looking) that she stumped upstairs with the dress boxes without a word.

Villy was taking off her gloves and looking on the hall table for messages. ‘Madam, Mrs Castle rang. No message.’

‘Louise! Don’t unpack those boxes until I come! Louise!’

‘Yes. No, I mean, I won’t.’

Villy went to the dark little study where she paid the household bills and where there was the telephone. Her sister never left messages when she rang, generally because what she had to say was too depressing and complicated to be put into a message. She gave the operator the number and while she waited for Jessica to answer wondered with an apprehension that she felt to be selfish what would turn out to be the matter now. There wasn’t much time before she should change, and there were Edward’s things to be laid out . . .