All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (16 page)

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 Watlington, 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 Watlington, 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 opening 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.’

‘Would you like one?’

‘I would. Post it to me.’ He slowed the car and turned to her – for a second felt her cold fingers touch his lips.

It was nearly dark, and large snowflakes had begun, with random indolence, to drop slowly out of the sky.

‘How old are you?’

‘Fifteen. Well, nearly sixteen, actually,’ Juliet answered, in her cold, grown-up voice: she hated to be asked about her age, because so often it led to a sickening patronage. ‘How old are you?’

‘I’m twenty-six. A rather young twenty-six.’ God, he thought. We shall have to wait years.

‘You’re ten years older than I am.’ She said it with a quiet satisfaction. ‘That’s quite old. But, actually, you don’t look especially old.’

She was beginning to enjoy his appearance, which, when looked at properly, was both dashing and romantic: his high forehead with the lock of dark hair that fell diagonally across it, his high cheekbones, his eyes that could change in an instant from a kind of teasing charm to something unknown to her. She loved the mystery of this.

The snow had speeded up, the flakes only becoming white as they reached the windscreen, but now they were lying where they fell; the verge, the hedges and the country beyond began to glisten. The windscreen wipers, from doing a casual, reluctant sweep, struggled with a protesting screech. The windscreen began to mist up on the inside from their breath, and they took turns to wipe it with their hands. By the time they were through Sedlescombe and had reached the turning to the left, which ended with the Battle road, a snowstorm had begun.

‘Are you all right, my darling? I’m sorry it’s not warmer.’