All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (4 page)

‘What are you sorry about?’ Her voice was muffled. By now he had turned her round to face him.

‘You do have the most outsize tears, my darling. And you are my darling, as I have been telling you for at least the last ten years. Is it starting to sink in?’

She flung her arms round his neck; he was far taller than she. ‘You wouldn’t rather have married Polly?’

He pretended to consider. ‘No – I think not.’

After he had kissed her, she said, ‘Or Louise?’

‘You seem to forget that she got snapped up before I could even think about it. No – I just had to make do with you. I was looking for a writer, a rotten cook, a kind of untidy genius. And here we are. Except that you’ve got much better at cooking. No, darling, I’ve got to go. Some pompous old Master of the Worshipful Company of Sardines will be sitting at the studio waiting for me to paint his ghastly old face. I can’t wait any longer to debase my art.’

‘I suppose,’ she said, watching him pack up his brushes, ‘you could just make a good picture of him? Just paint what you see.’

‘Out of the question. If I did that, they wouldn’t take it. It would be a thousand pounds down the drain. Then we’d be lucky to spend our holiday in a caravan somewhere off the Great West Road.’

We’ve had both those conversations a hundred times, he thought, as he walked to the bus in Edgware Road. Me reassuring her, she always wanting me to paint only what I want to paint. He did not mind this. Clary was worth anything. It had taken him time to recognise that the desperate insecurities of her childhood – mother dying, father missing in France for most of the war, very possibly dead – could safely manifest themselves only in retrospect. Ten years of marriage and their two children had naturally wrought a sea change: from their first months together, comparatively carefree, the years when they had travelled or lived in a studio with their bed in a gallery, when money was tight but had been of no consequence, when he was seeking commissions and painting landscapes – which were occasionally included in mixed exhibitions at the Redfern, and once a Summer Exhibition at the Academy – when she had written her second novel and John Davenport had praised it – it had been a wonderful start. But with the arrival of Harriet, closely followed by Bertie – ‘I might just be a rabbit!’ she had sobbed into the kitchen sink – they had had to find somewhere larger to live, and with two babies, Clary had had neither the time nor the energy to write at all. He had resorted to part-time teaching.

For summer holidays they had gone to Home Place, and to Polly for several Christmases, but Clary was a haphazard housekeeper and they had become chronically short of cash and behind with bills. Since the children had started primary school, Clary had taken a job as a part-time proofreader, work that she could do mostly at home, and Mrs Tonbridge had kindly taught her to make a corned-beef hash that used only one tin of corned beef, cauliflower cheese, and a bacon roly-poly that used very little bacon. She had bought a book by Elizabeth David on French cooking, and garlic (unknown until after the war) had certainly cheered things up. Garlic, and the return of bananas, which Harriet and Bertie regarded as the equal of ice cream, had widened the range; the real trouble was how much things cost. A shoulder of lamb was thirteen shillings and only lasted for two meals with a few scraps left over to mince. And she earned three pounds a week for her proofreading, while Archie’s work was always uncertain – for weeks he might be paid nothing and then a lump would come in. Then they would pay for a babysitter and have a night out at the cinema and the Blue Windmill, a very cheap Cypriot restaurant where you could have lamb cutlets and dolmades and delicious coffee. They would come back on the 59 bus, her head on his shoulder. She often fell asleep then – he could tell because her head and his shoulder became perceptibly heavier. We should have splashed out on a taxi, he often thought on the longish walk down the street to their home. They would get back to find Mrs Sturgis asleep over her knitting and he would pay her while Clary went to see the children, who shared a small bedroom. Bertie slept wedged between fourteen woolly animals lining each side of his bed, and one – his favourite monkey – with its paw in his mouth. Harriet lay flat on her back. She would have undone her pigtails and pushed all her hair to the top of her head, which she usually did ‘for coolth’, she had once explained. When Clary kissed her, a small secret smile would flit across her face before it was again abandoned to the stern tranquillity of sleep. Her darling, beautiful children . . . But those were rare days and usually ended in the often temperamental flurry of children’s supper and bathtime.

Sometimes Archie cooked supper while Clary read proofs. Occasionally her father, Rupert, and Zoë came to supper, bringing treats like smoked salmon and Bendicks Bittermints. Rupert and Archie had been friends since the Slade – well before the war – and Clary’s marked hostility towards her pretty stepmother had mellowed into friendship. Their boys, Georgie and Bertie, were both seven and despite their different interests – Georgie’s menagerie and Bertie’s museum – they had good times together at Home Place in the holidays. What a blessing that house had been, with the Duchy and Rachel always pleased to see them! So, on the morning that Archie had gone off to paint his City worthy, while she was sorting out the children’s clothes for the coming week in France, it was a shock to be rung by Zoë and be told of the Duchy’s death. Everyone in the family had known that she had been ill, but telephone calls to Rachel had always elicited a stalwart response, ‘She’s doing well’, ‘I think she’s on the mend’, that kind of thing. She hadn’t wanted to worry them, Zoë said Rupert had said.

No, Clary thought, Aunt Rachel would say those things. It was odd how, when people didn’t want to worry each other, they worried them more than ever. Poor Aunt Rachel! She felt sadder for her than for the Duchy, who had had a long, serene life and had died at home with her daughter beside her. But I feel sad for the old lady as well. Or perhaps I just feel sad for myself because she was there all my life, and I shall miss her. Clary sat at the kitchen table and had a small weep. Then she rang Polly.

‘I know. Uncle Rupert told Gerald.’

‘Do you know when the funeral will be?’

‘I should think they’ll arrange all that at the weekend.’ Polly seemed faintly shocked.

‘I know it sounds awful, but we’re supposed to be going to France, and of course we won’t go if it means missing the funeral. I just wondered . . .’ Clary tailed off to silence.

‘Well, you’ll be able to go later, won’t you? Sorry, Clary, but I’ve got to go. Andrew’s on the loose. It’s one of his days for not wearing clothes. Gerald has taken the girls to school and then Nan to the dentist to have a tooth out. See you soon.’ And she rang off.

Clary sat looking at the telephone. She wanted to tell Archie, but he hated being interrupted when he had a sitter. She felt besieged by guilt. Someone she loved had died and all she was doing was worrying about the holiday and the financial implications. Archie would have had to pay for the caravan and probably their tickets on the ferry. They almost certainly wouldn’t be able to pay for all that a second time. And going to Home Place would stop: she couldn’t imagine Aunt Rachel living there alone . . . It seemed both frivolous and greedy to be thinking of money at a time like this. She never used to think about money at all, and now she seemed to think about it all the time. Her eyes filled again, and she had another weep, this time about her rotten character.

Going to task with the children’s clothes, she discovered that Bertie had a hole where his big toe came through his sand shoes and this meant he probably needed a larger size in his other – more expensive – ones. There it was again. Shoes cost money. Everything cost money. She blew her nose and decided to make some fishcakes for the children’s tea. The recipe said tinned salmon, but she only had a tin of sardines. If she put quite a lot of mashed potato with them, and a splash of tomato ketchup and an egg to bind the mixture, it ought to make four quite large and unusual fishcakes; and then she would ring Archie just after one, when his fat sitter had gone off for lunch. The thought of talking to him suddenly cheered her.

VILLY

And of course I shan’t be able to go to the funeral because That Woman will be there.

Such thoughts – bitter and repetitive – buzzed in her head like a disturbed wasps’ nest.

It was nine years now since Edward had left her, and she had carved out some sort of life for herself. The dancing school she had started with Zoë had faltered and finally shut down. Zoë’s pregnancy, the fact that she and Rupert had moved so far away and that Villy was then unable to find a new business partner who came up to her standards, had finished it off.

For a while after that, she had had to content herself with the house Edward had bought for her. Roland now went to a public school where he had been disconcertingly happy. At the beginning, she had expected (had she even wanted?) a desperate little boy already deprived of his father (she would not dream of letting him meet That Woman, so he saw his father once a term when Edward took him out to lunch) and then deprived of her, his loving mother. She had envisaged sobbing telephone calls, mournful letters, but the nearest she had got to these was when he had written, ’Darling Mother, I am board, board, board. There is nothing whatever to do here.’ After that the letters were full of a boy called Simpson Major and the amazing crimes he committed without ever being found out. However, Miss Milliment, the girls’ governess, was still with her; on discovering that she had no living relatives, Villy had offered her a home for life. In return she received a steady affection that touched her blighted heart. Miss Milliment’s attempts in the kitchen were disastrous, as her sight was very poor and she had not cooked anything since her father had died a few years after the First World War, so her help was confined to feeding the birds and sometimes the three tortoises, and going to the local shops if Villy had forgotten anything. She was largely employed in editing a work of philosophy written by one of her former pupils. In the evenings they were taking turns to read
War and Peace
aloud. So when Villy took an ill-paid and dull clerical job with a charity that a rich cousin of her mother persuaded her into, it was comforting to come back to a home that was not empty.

The family had been good to her, too. Hugh and his nice young wife Jemima had her to dinner sometimes, Rachel always visited when she was in London, and the Duchy usually invited her to Home Place during term time. Teddy turned up about once a month. He was working in the firm, but found conversation about it tricky as he kept nearly mentioning his father, which he had discovered early was a no-go area. The trouble about nearly all of this was that she felt they only made the effort because they were sorry for her. Like most people who are sorry for themselves, she felt she had to have the monopoly of it. She called it pride.

No. The people she loved were Roland (how could she ever have contemplated not having him?) and dear Miss Milliment – who wished to be called Eleanor, but Villy had only managed that once just after they had discussed the matter.

She must write to Rachel, who had been a wonderful daughter to both of her parents – unlike mine, she thought. Louise made duty visits if Villy was ill – prepared supper, if necessary, and made small-talk, but was utterly unforthcoming about herself, varying evasion with spasmodic efforts to shock. And her mother
was
shocked. When Louise had suddenly announced, ‘But I have a rich lover now, so you really don’t have to worry about me,’ there was a frozen pause before Villy had asked, as calmly as she could manage, ‘Is this wise?’ Louise had retorted that of course it wasn’t but she wasn’t to worry, she was not allowing him to keep her. All of this was in her bedroom, out of earshot of Miss Milliment. ‘Well, please don’t talk about this in front of Miss M,’ she had begged, and Louise had said she wouldn’t dream of it.

Her theatrical career had come to nothing but she was tall and thin, with abundant reddish blonde hair and an undeniably beautiful face – high cheekbones, wide-apart hazel eyes and a mouth that reminded Villy uncomfortably of the sensual depictions so loved of the Pre-Raphaelites. She was long divorced from Michael Hadleigh, who had instantly got married again, to his former mistress. Louise had refused any alimony, and scraped along in a small maisonette over a grocer’s shop with her blue-stocking friend Stella. Villy had been there only once when she had paid a surprise visit. The place smelt of dead birds (the grocers were also poulterers) and damp. The flatmates had two small rooms each, and the third floor had been turned into a kitchen and dining room, with a very cramped bathroom and lavatory built out onto a flimsy extension. On the day that she visited, there was a plate of distinctly high mackerel lying on the dining table. ‘You’re not going to eat those – surely?’

‘Good Lord, no! Somebody we know is painting a still-life, and he wants us to keep them till he has finished.’

‘There, you’ve seen it all now.’ So why don’t you go? It was not said, but she’d felt it.

‘What about your rent?’

‘We share it. It’s quite cheap – only a hundred and fifty pounds a year.’

Villy realised then that she had no idea what her daughter did to earn her living. But she felt miserably that she had clearly been inquisitive enough for one day. Going home on the bus she was struck afresh by her awful loneliness. If only Edward was there to discuss the matter! Perhaps he was paying her rent; it would at least be respectable. She couldn’t talk to Miss Milliment about it – with all the business of lovers and sex, it was out of the question.

But, as it happened, it was Miss Milliment who elicited the facts.

‘And what are you doing these days, dear Louise?’ she had enquired when, later that month, Louise had dropped in for tea.

‘I’m modelling, Miss Milliment.’

‘How very interesting! Are you using clay? Or are you perhaps cutting stone? I always imagined the latter would be very hard work for a woman.’