Casting Off (40 page)

He remembered that evening in July, a year and a half ago, when he had taken the train back to London from Southampton and gone to have dinner with Archie, and told him about Miche and how he felt. They were sitting in a small restaurant near Archie’s flat; it called itself French, but it produced a poor imitation of French food. Archie had remained silent while he told him all about it, how hard the parting had been, and how much harder it was now than he thought it would be.

‘That’s why you stayed on,’ he had said at last.

‘Yes. It was probably the wrong thing to do, but I felt I had to do it. I owed my life to her, you see, and she had risked so much for me. It was the only thing she ever asked.’

‘Yes. Hard on everybody else, though. Hard on Clary.’

‘Harder on Zoë, I should have thought.’

‘Have you told her?’

‘Nothing. I don’t know how to.’

Archie looked at him thoughtfully: he was filling his pipe. ‘I suppose you would start at the beginning and go on from there.’

Rupert stared at him to detect any sarcasm or other critical response, but Archie looked calmly back. ‘How are things with Zoë?’ he asked.

‘Sort of constricted. Of course, it’s not easy for her.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose I mean that I’ve been away so long . . . She told me she had thought I was dead.’

‘You can’t blame her for that.’

‘I’m not blaming her for anything. It’s just – well, if I told her it seems like a kind of betrayal of Miche. Also, if I did, she would ask me – Zoë, I mean – if I still loved Miche and the answer would be yes.’

‘Are you in touch with Miche?’

‘Absolutely not. When I left her, it was the end.’

‘“. . . It’s cruel to be kind,

So leave my body now

As you will leave my mind.”’

‘What’s that?’

Archie had shrugged. ‘Something I read somewhere. Can’t even remember the beginning of it. But if you really leave someone – go away and never see them – they do eventually leave your mind. I mean, you cease to think of them; or think of them in a different way.’

‘You’re thinking of Rachel.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve got some idea now of what it must have been like for you.’

‘That’s well over, you see.’

As they were walking back to Archie’s flat, he remembered telling Archie how the Duchy had once said to him that part of bearing the responsibility for one’s actions entailed not unburdening them to other people and making them unhappy also. ‘Oho!’ Archie had said with distinct irony. ‘So that’s where the Cazalet withholding syndrome stems from! I did wonder.’

‘You don’t agree with it?’

‘No. I can see why she thinks that, but I think that not telling people things is a cop-out.’

They had spent the rest of the evening telling each other that they really ought to make time for painting.

Just before they retired for the night, Archie said, ‘Have you read Clary’s journal?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Not yet? She spent hours writing that for you – for years.’

‘Well, she’s decided she doesn’t want to show it to me. So I can’t, can I?’

‘I think you might be meant to beg for it a bit. You know what writers are.’

‘I don’t. Never known one, unless you count the Brig. Do you think she’s got it in her?’

‘I rather think she might.’

‘You were awfully good to her while I was away. She told me.’

‘I’m very fond of her.’

There was a tap on his door, and Rupert started guiltily. He had simply been sitting there, drinking tea, not making his telephone calls, not reading his messages . . .

‘Come in.’

John Cresswell put his head round the door, and his heart sank. He knew now that Cresswell was Diana’s brother, recently booted out of the Army on grounds of ill health. Edward had got him a sort of clerical job, nobody was very sure what he was meant to be doing but he sat in a small office battling with figures which, it became quickly clear, he did not understand. He was currently engaged upon checking the previous month’s tallies of softwood delivered to the London wharf. He came to Rupert when in difficulties, largely, he thought, because he was more patient with him than anybody else would be.

‘Terribly sorry to bother you,’ he began, as he always did, and laid a piece of paper covered with shaky figures on the desk, ‘but when I’d done all this, it struck me that possibly what had been wanted was the actual profit to be made on softwoods, rather than what it cost us to buy them. But I’m not absolutely sure. I did make a start on the latter here,’ he laid a tobacco-stained finger half-way down the page, ‘but then it struck me that when we sell very large quantities the price is different, and I wasn’t absolutely sure whether you wanted me to average it out. Or what.’

He was shaking, Rupert noticed, and looked distinctly ill. ‘You feeling all right?’

‘Touch of malaria. It’s not what I call one of my really ace attacks – the old brain still functions. Up to a point.’

It took an hour to understand what Cresswell’s problem was, what he had been asked to do and what he had done, and by the time he’d more or less got to the bottom of it, it was time to go home.

There was still enough fog about to remind him that he had done nothing about the tail-lights. He stopped at a garage, but they said there was damage to the bulb sockets. In the end he left the car with them and waited for a bus.

An average day, he supposed it had been, composed of a collection of very small pluses and minuses: in most cases, the pluses were merely palliative, like collecting the car from Priory Road and finding it without further damage, the aspirins Mrs Leaf had brought him that relieved his headache, the fog being better, working at those architects so that their disagreement with one another at least did not mean that the Cazalet brothers lost the contract – a delicate balance that had been, of seeing both points of view with equal charm and enthusiasm, trying to sound what Juliet called ‘strickerly fair’. . . The only plus about Mr Yapp was that he’d done it, and need never do it again. The Brig, who had had splendid teeth, thought that dentists should hurt one, it meant that they were doing their job properly, so tradition had it that all the family had gone to Mr Yapp. They had all been held in thrall by the dear old Brig, he thought, in many ways that they mostly didn’t even notice. Home Place, for instance. Eventually it was going to be one third his financial responsibility. He had gone into the firm originally largely for Zoë’s sake. Then there had been the war and that short interim in the Navy before he’d become a fugitive. Then he’d returned to the fold, this time largely because the Brig expected him to . . . He realized now that he’d made the provision (to himself) that when the Brig died he would review the situation. But he hadn’t. The expansion of the firm to Southampton, his brothers’ disagreements, and his own emotional conflict had kept him running to stay in the same place. He had always found decisions frightening: nothing ever seemed either black or white enough to make any choice easy. The family teased him about this, making an eccentricity of what was, in reality, a fault. I’m a weak character, he thought: it seemed to account for his dissatisfaction. Last night had been a perfect example. He’d agreed to take Zoë to meet Diana and they’d gone through an evening when everybody tried too hard: Edward to show how happy he was, Diana to show what an admirable character she had, and he and Zoë to show how much they appreciated both these things. And then, the other end of the evening, the night in Villy’s house, a bleak place that reeked of bitter despair. He wondered how Miss Milliment coped with that, poor old lady; it was impossible to believe that she did not notice the atmosphere, as it was clear that the little boy did. He was unnaturally quiet and eager to please his mother: breakfast had been full of unease. Rupert had had a foot in both camps – had taken no side, unlike Hugh.

‘But you can’t take sides about something like this!’ Zoë said, when they were mulling over the previous evening. ‘I mean, you might have an opinion about it, but it’s done now, and nothing any of us say will change things.’

He’d got home – it was beginning to rain so he arrived fairly wet – and had seen Jules, who gave him a blow-by-blow description of her day, and then thankfully subsided with a drink in their – still new to him – large, high-ceilinged sitting room that smelled of paint because Zoë had been painting the new fitted bookshelves that ran along the walls of each side of the fireplace.

‘You sound as though you’ve had an awful day.’ ‘Ordinary, I think. I just started it tired.’ ‘Rupe, how would you feel if I got some sort of job?’ ‘I’d feel fine about it, if it’s what you want. What do you want to do?’

‘That’s it. I don’t know what I could do.’ During dinner they talked about what she might do, but came to no conclusion; it seemed that the jobs she might get were too dull, and that interesting ones all required some sort of training. ‘I can’t even type or do shorthand,’ she said, as though providing him with new and unwelcome information. ‘It takes years to train for something. A doctor, for instance. Seven years!’ ‘Do you want to be a doctor?’

‘No. I was just giving you an example. If I did, I’d be too old, I should think, by the time I qualified. I’m probably too old for most things.’ She spooned up some coffee sugar and crunched it morosely.

The old Zoë, he thought. She used always to say things like that, and it used to irritate him. Now he found it endearing; she was only thirty-one, after all, and was still young enough to feel that that was terribly old. He was just about to embark upon a whole lot of sensible advice to the effect that she should think carefully about what she really wanted to do, and then they could discuss how she could set about getting the qualifications to do it, when the telephone rang.

‘I’ll answer it,’ he said. After a few moments he said, ‘It’s for you. Someone called Miss Fenwick.’

‘Oh, Lord! It’ll be to do with Mummy.’

The telephone was in the passage outside the dining room; they had gone to the expense of having two instruments, one on each floor. He could not hear what she said, but the thought occurred that her mother had died. How would she feel about that? Guilty, he supposed: she had always felt guilty about her mother.

‘That was one of Mummy’s neighbours. She found Mummy in a faint on the floor – she says she’s not feeding herself properly. I knew she wouldn’t! I said I’d go down first thing tomorrow.’

He said he’d take her to Waterloo on his way to work, then remembered that he hadn’t got the car.

Then, instead of going peaceably to bed, they had a quarrel about Goering. Goering! Afterwards it seemed utterly absurd. He’d picked up some magazine that lay on the table her side of the bed. It was open at an account of the execution of ten Nazi war criminals the previous month. It described how each of them behaved before being hanged, and there was a picture of Goering taken after his suicide. ‘Rather grim reading,’ he said, when she returned from the bathroom. ‘What on earth makes you want to read that?’

‘It interests me,’ she answered. ‘But it doesn’t say how that brute managed to keep a cyanide pill on him. He must have been searched. It seems extraordinary that they didn’t find it.’

‘It doesn’t matter now, does it? He’s dead, and I should think it’s better to take a pill than be hanged.’

‘I don’t want it to be better for him!’ she exclaimed. ‘I should have liked him to be hanged – to go through all the fear and humiliation in front of people!’

‘Zoë!’

‘Now that we know what those people did, hanging seems to me too good for them!’

He was shocked. ‘Darling, you sound like one of those frightful women who knitted by the guillotine. Anyway, I should think committing suicide is pretty awful when it comes to the point. A coward’s way out, I agree, but not easy.’

‘Not necessarily a coward’s way out at all. It depends on the reason. He was simply doing it for himself.’

‘I shouldn’t think people who kill themselves do it for anyone else—’ he began, mildly enough, he thought, but she turned on him at once.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about!’ Her voice contained so much anger that he was nonplussed. There was a short rather frightening silence. Then she said more quietly but with intense feeling, ‘He was one of the most wicked and horrible men who ever lived. He should have had a horrible death. They all should – every single one of them.’ And he saw that she was crying. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, but before he could reach her she had got up and run into the bathroom; he heard her bolt the door.

He felt completely at a loss. This was a side of her that he had not encountered: in all the years of marriage to her, she’d had her tantrums, but he’d always known what they had been about. Jealousy of Clary and Neville; wanting things that, when he was a schoolmaster, he had not been able to afford, and her first pregnancy when she had certainly been very difficult. But all that had been during the early years; she had grown up, and since his return, there had been nothing of the kind. Bad time of the month? No – that had been last week. Then he remembered her mother. Supposing the poor old girl couldn’t manage on her own and hadn’t got enough money for a nursing home or whatever, she would have to live with them, a prospect that he knew had always terrified Zoë; she had always resisted any offer he had made to have her mother even to stay. But she must be worried stiff now that this might be the only possible course. He knew better than to solicit her through the locked bathroom door. He got into bed and turned off the light on his side, and waited.

He waited until she had come almost noiselessly out of the bathroom and got into bed and turned off her light before saying, ‘Darling! I’m so sorry. I know what all that was really about and I do entirely understand.’ He put out his hand and touched her: she was as taut as piano wire.