All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (20 page)

The men were still talking about business. She caught Joseph saying that perhaps Edward’s brother might be consoled by the fact that going private would take at least two years, during which property would have to be sold off to pay back the bank and trading would need to return to profit – otherwise nobody would want to buy shares when, eventually, they came on the market. ‘But I do urge you to think seriously about this. Now is the time. If you leave it much longer, it might be too late. In the meantime, in spite of our delightfully urbane prime minister, one cannot be sure how long anything will last. Busts tend to succeed booms, although people never seem to think they will at the time.’

The wine waiter arrived with his trolley, and another with their coffee.

‘Brandy? I prefer Delamain myself, but do choose what suits you.’

Edward said that Delamain would be fine.

‘Dad, you’re not driving all the way to Hawkhurst, are you?’

‘I told Diana I’d be back.’

‘Oh.’

‘What about you?’

‘Jo will drop me off. Couldn’t you stay the night with Uncle Rupe?’

‘I expect I could, but I’d rather get back. The roads are clear at this time of the evening – it will be easy.’ He finished his brandy and stood up. ‘I have to thank you for the most delicious and helpful evening.’

‘Not at all. If you ever want any more advice of the kind I can help with, just let me know.’ He pulled a card out of his wallet and handed it to Edward. ‘That will find me.’

Edward stooped to kiss his daughter, who put an arm round his neck to kiss him back.

‘Drive carefully, won’t you?’

‘Like a racing snail,’ he said, and then he was gone.

‘Did you like him?’

‘Darling, what a silly question. Of course I liked him, and I can see that the poor chap is caught in the usual trap of small family set-ups. A clash of personalities between a group of people who aren’t really cut out to be in business anyway. But if I’d loathed him, would you seriously have expected me to say so? Would you, my foolish little rabbit?’ He signed the bill, and they were shown out by the
patron
who still kept offering Louise a free lunch every day if she would sit at the window table to eat it. ‘But I can’t possibly eat by myself in a restaurant!’ and Joseph had laughed and said of course she couldn’t.

They drove back to Blandford Street, and he was undressed and in her bed before she had finished removing her make-up. She felt strongly that going to bed with any of it on was squalid, so every night he contained his impatience and watched until she, too, was naked.

CLARY AND ARCHIE

Clary found herself crying over the washing-up of last night’s supper and that morning’s breakfast. She was alone, as usual. The children had gone to school, and Archie had one of his teaching days. She wiped her eyes crossly on the already sopping teacloth and sat down at the kitchen table to try to sort things out. Why on earth was she crying? On the face of it, things had got much better: Archie taking the teaching job at Camberwell meant that a little money was reliably coming in. She could cut down her freelance proofreading and get on with her novel. The trouble with that was that she wasn’t getting on with it: she was stuck, bored with the people she was writing about and fed up with their silly antics. She was ground down by the endless household chores that seemed to need redoing as often as meals had to be prepared and demolished. The children were doing fairly well at school, although Bertie had had to have an expensive brace for his front teeth, which had to be adjusted. She had taken to giving him a treat of some sort after each dental visit, but this meant taking Harriet as well, which made it more unfair than ever, according to Bertie. Harriet resorted to sore throats as a way of qualifying for the treat. But this was all minor stuff; the children were fine, really, and Archie was a good, involved father.

Archie had begun at Camberwell by saying how much he loathed teaching, but lately he had come back after his teaching days apparently much happier, although he told her less and less about them. She had asked him once whether he thought any of his students were promising, and he had answered shortly that one or two might be. He came back from those days too tired, he said, to fuck, but wanted a really good cuddle in bed, and she enjoyed that.

It was Monday, a day when he was teaching, and the day when she went every week to clean and clear up his studio; he was a very messy painter and left everything not where he had found it. Afterwards, she would go and have coffee and a sandwich at a nearby café.

It was a bright day, with a cool wind, and she noticed at once that he had left his leather jacket hanging on the back of the easel.

When she had finished the cleaning, she pulled the jacket off the easel – it got stuck, she tugged it, and as it came free, an envelope fell to the floor. The envelope said ‘Melanie’ on the outside, and had not been stuck down.

Although a part of her knew she should not do so, she pulled out the letter inside and read it.

Half an hour later, she was sitting in the café with coffee and a sandwich that she found she could not face with the letter, open, beside her. She felt dizzy, and her cup shook in her hand so that she kept spilling it. Phrases from the letter kept repeating themselves in her head: ‘the most difficult letter I have ever had to write’, ‘your incomparable beauty – you have a face that Holbein would have delighted in’, ‘you are twenty, my dearest, at the beginning of your life, and I am an old man in comparison, a married man with two children, quite the wrong person – though, God, how I wish it was otherwise . . .’ And then a whole paragraph about how their love for one another must stop, ‘for Clary’s sake and the children’s’. She must transfer to another class, must never come to the studio again, must not write to him. He would keep faithfully to his side of the bargain, and he knew, with her tender heart, she would understand and comply. Believe him, she would get over it, and however hard the struggle was, he would do the same.

She had read the letter so many times that she almost knew it by heart. Heart! She felt as though it had been stabbed so many times that it was like some great bleeding bruise, unable now to withstand repeated blows.

She left the café and walked to Hyde Park to find some quiet bench where she could cry and try to get over the shock.

She remembered at their beginning that she had hardly been able to believe that he really loved her, how long it had taken to restore her trust, and how patient, how gentle he had been about that, and how her pleasure and joy in the general affections of family life had finally beaten her rotten opinion of herself, and her uncertainties had receded to periodic shortages of money, worrying about her novel and having to cook so much.

And now – this. This ambush; this monstrous, horrible cliché. Middle-aged married man falls for young girl whose breasts would not have sagged from breastfeeding two babies, whose (no doubt) flawless complexion would not have fine lines or blue shadows under her eyes from months of sleepless nights, who was probably overwhelmed by the attention of an older, attractive man, who most likely regarded her situation as uniquely romantic, who had possibly been egging him on to run away with her . . . How long had it been going on? He might well have been writing letters of this kind for months, letters in which the resolution was easily broken down by her pathetic frantic replies . . . Which meant that he had been lying to Clary for months . . .

When she had sobbed herself dry she began to feel angry; very, very angry. He couldn’t love her and write that sort of letter. She appeared in it simply as a duty – a responsibility, with the children. The thought of them further enraged her. How could he do this to them?

By now, she had convinced herself that he would leave her to cope for the rest of her life with two unhappy children, not enough money to do more for them but scrape by, trying to mask her broken heart from them, trying always to speak well of their perfidious father. Life would be lived alone once the children were old enough to leave her. But the future, however terrible and bleak, was nothing compared with the present. For how long had she been so bloody certain that he loved her when he had really loved someone else and lied to her about it? How long had she been humiliated in this way? Did the whole class at Camberwell know – or, at least, guess – what was going on? How could she have been so insensitive not to feel the change in him? And how did she now feel about him – about Archie?

Saying his name to herself brought on a fresh agony of tears – Archie, Archie; repeating it made her realise that she still loved him. Of course! That’s why it hurts so much. I still love him – have no idea how to stop that. He’s selfish, a liar, he’s despicable, he’s not thinking for a moment about poor Harriet and Bertie – or me, come to that: how can I love him? She had run out of paper handkerchiefs and had to use her long cotton scarf. She got up from the bench and started to walk north up Park Lane. She would have to confront him as soon as he came home, but it couldn’t be in front of the children. She walked as far as Marble Arch and, when she had found a shop, bought herself a packet of cigarettes. It was noon, and he would not be back until after six.

Archie, who had been dreading it, had a day that had lived well down to his expectations. For a start, it was surprisingly chilly, and he had left his only warm jacket yesterday in the studio. Then, when he walked into the studio where he taught, she was there. His heart gave a little jump at the sight of her, which he quelled to an ersatz irritation. Either she had disobeyed his instruction, or she had not got his letter.

He had oh so painfully prepared himself for her absence that seeing her - in her paint-bespattered blue overall, with her lovely red-gold hair tied severely back into a ponytail – was almost more than he could bear. Two whole hours of it, during which he must concentrate on teaching the rest of the little buggers. He felt her eyes upon him, and gave her one stern, unforgiving glance. He posed the model and told them what he wanted them to do.

When, after the first break, he did the rounds, he left her until last. He bent down, as though to examine her drawing more closely, and said, ‘Why are you here? Didn’t you get my letter?’

‘What letter? No. What letter?’ She looked very frightened.

‘I can’t explain that now. But no coffee this evening. I have to get back.’ And, as he said this, he suddenly remembered quite clearly that he had put the letter in his leather-jacket pocket, meaning to post it yesterday on his way home. And, of course, he had forgotten the jacket. It had not been posted. What a fool! ‘You mustn’t worry,’ he said more gently. ‘I simply needed to write to you. I’m afraid I forgot to post the letter.’ He was feeling deeply ashamed of himself now. It was surely a cowardly way of saying goodbye to her – but it had had to be done somehow, and it had cost him so much agony of mind to make the decision, then to write it down. There was no kind or good way of ditching someone, he kept saying to himself, as he struggled through the afternoon.

He had written because he simply didn’t trust himself to stick to his decision if she was there – weeping, no doubt, arguing, wanting to talk about their love – throwing her arms round him, imploring him to think again, saying that she didn’t care about marriage, would be content with so little, provided she could be with him sometimes. These last promises he knew to be untrue, knew also that she did not know that.

He was her first love, and he knew – or could remember – how potent, how unique that situation was for those so entrapped.

She would get over it – probably a good deal sooner than he.

But at least, by this decision, by putting it down on paper, he had spared his darling Clary any pain. Because, of course, he loved her, too.

It was all nonsense that people were unable to be in love with more than one person at a time; possibly this might be true for a woman, but clearly not for a man. ‘I wasn’t searching for someone to be in love with; it simply struck me – out of the blue.’ Part of him longed to tell Clary this - to show her how much he must love her to sacrifice so much for her. But this would be a mistake: Clary’s equilibrium was too fragile for even mild shocks – after all, the whole point of the letter was that the affair (which it had never physically been) was over. All he had to do now was to try to stop thinking about Melanie until she faded into the past. This made him think about her the whole of the long bus ride home. He decided to stop at the pub in Abbey Road before facing the family. A drink would warm him up; he felt perished, and the pub would provide a kind of no man’s land between Melanie and Clary.