Casting Off (5 page)

He had not been able to imagine that. Nothing that came to his mind on the journey to Battle had any life, any credence at all. She might be disaffected, overjoyed, not even
there
: he knew nothing and, least of all, how he would feel at first sight. In fact, when he finally reached Home Place, in the middle of the afternoon, she was out. He walked through the old white gate that led to the front of the house, and there was his mother on her knees by her rock garden. Just as it occurred to him that his sudden appearance would be too much of a shock for her, she turned her head and saw him. He went quickly to her then, knelt down and put his arms round her; the expression on her face brought tears to his eyes. She clung to him, speechless, then put her hands on his shoulders to hold him away from her. ‘Let me look at you,’ she said, she was laughing – a little high-pitched gasping sound; tears were streaming down her face.

‘Oh, my darling boy!’

‘Now!’ she said later. ‘We must be sensible. Zoë’s taken Juliet to Washington to the shop. You will want a little peace and quiet together.’ She had taken the small white handkerchief from its place under her wrist-watch to wipe her eyes, and he noticed with a pang of affection the strawberry mark on the back of that hand.

‘Is she all right?’

She met his eye, and as he was rediscovering the familiar simple frankness of her gaze, it seemed to falter.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s been a very hard time for her. I have become very fond of her. Your daughter is a pearl. Why don’t you walk to meet them?’

So he had done that – had walked back down the drive and up the steep road and at the top of the hill he met them by a gate into their fields. Juliet was sitting on the gate, and Zoë stood beside her and before he could hear what they were saying he recognized an argument.

‘. . .
always
go back this way. Even
Ellen
knows it’s my best way . . .’

He quickened his pace.

‘I just don’t feel like playing charabancs today.’

‘You
never
feel like it!’ She was wearing a scarlet beret but her head was turned away – he could not see her face.

‘Well, I—’ Zoë began, and then she saw him, stood motionless as he came up to her.

They stared at one another; she had gone white. When she spoke, she sounded frightened, husky and incredulous: ‘Rupert! Rupert?
Rupert
!’ The third time she put out a hand and touched his shoulder.

‘Yes.’ I should put my arms round her, he thought, but before he could do that, she had moved to Juliet.

‘This is your father,’ she said.

He turned to find her gazing at him.

‘She has a picture of you in her nursery.’

He went to lift her off the gate, but as he drew near, she clutched it with both hands.

‘Will you give me a kiss?’

She looked at him consideringly. ‘If you had a beard I wouldn’t. Because of birds. It’s in a poem.’ She was incredibly pretty – a miniature of Zoë with Cazalet eyes.

‘As you can see, I haven’t got a beard.’

She leaned towards him and gave him a smacking kiss. Her mouth was pale red and translucent, like the skin of a redcurrant. He kissed her back and she turned her head away and shut her eyes.

‘Do you want to get down?’

She shook her head and renewed her grip on the top bar of the gate. He turned to Zoë: she was wearing an old riding mac with a green foulard scarf round her neck. She was still very pale.

‘I didn’t mean to give you such a shock.’ ‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I know you didn’t.’ ‘Are we going to play? I really want to play charabancs. I
really
want to.’

So they did what Juliet wanted and went to play on the fallen tree in the wood near the house. He thought afterwards that they had both been grateful for her presence: it postponed intimacy or, rather, excused the lack of it – he sensed that Zoë, too, felt awkward and intensely shy. The first time he touched her was when he helped her down from a branch of the tree after she had called a halt to the game. She blushed when he took her hand.

‘I can hardly believe – it seems so extraordinary—’ she began, in a low, hurried voice, but she was interrupted by Juliet who was standing precariously on the higher bit of the fallen tree shouting, ‘Someone catch me when I jump!’

He caught her and she wriggled from his arms to the ground and said, ‘Now we’ll all hold hands for going home.’ So they walked back through the wood separated by their daughter who marched between them. It was during that walk that he learned that Sybil had died, that his father was blind, that Neville was at Stowe and that Clary was living in London and working for a literary agent and living in Louise’s house – oh, yes, she had married Michael Hadleigh, the portrait painter . . . Telling and hearing the family news seemed to make things a little easier between them. Archie had been wonderful, she said – finding the right school for Neville after he had tried to run away, looking after Clary and Polly, coming down for weekends and cheering them all up. For a moment, he wondered whether she had fallen in love with Archie; then dismissed it as an ignoble thought, but when it returned later that same evening, he discovered that what frightened him about it was his lack of concern . . . It was true that when he walked into the house for the first time and was assailed by all the deeply familiar scents – of woodsmoke, damp mackintosh, the wallflowers that every year the Duchy put in a large bowl in the hall, the warm vanilla of a freshly baked cake on the large table now laid for tea – he felt a rush of simple, recognizing pleasure, could for a moment feel himself home, and glad of it. He realized that he was ravenous, almost faint with hunger – he’d eaten nothing since the boat, which already seemed an immense, an almost unreal distance away, but he had only to say that he was looking forward to tea for a succession of dishes to be brought to him. Two boiled eggs, a Welsh rarebit, a chicken sandwich, two slices of cake. All this he ate, watched with joyful indulgence by the Duchy, Villy, Miss Milliment and Ellen, and with growing envy and insurrection by the children: Lydia, Wills – no longer a baby, a boy of
eight
– Roland and his own daughter. It was the children who underlined the length of his absence. ‘We only get boiled eggs for tea on our birthdays,’ one of them said. ‘We don’t get eggs. We get one miserable little egg. Once a year,’ and so on.

It was the children who fired a series of direct questions at him. What was being a prisoner
like
? How had he escaped? Why hadn’t he escaped sooner when the war stopped? Lydia wanted to know, but Villy told her that her uncle was tired and didn’t want to be cross-examined the moment he got home. Her hair had gone completely white, he noticed, but her strong eyebrows had remained dark.

To deflect curiosity about himself he had asked about Clary and Neville, but before any adult could answer him Lydia said: ‘Neville’s voice has changed, but I can’t honestly say his character has improved at all. He’s simply awful in slightly different ways. He gambles with money and he hardly ever plays any decent game with us. Clary’s much nicer. You ought to ring her up, Uncle Rupert, she’ll be so frightfully pleased. She always thought you’d come back – even when everybody else thought you were dead.’

‘Lydia! Don’t talk such nonsense!’

‘I wasn’t. I’m not.’ She looked at her mother defiantly, but she didn’t say any more.

He had glanced involuntarily at Zoë, seated beside him, but she was staring at her empty plate. It had been then that he had been assailed by senses of guilt and unreality – both so violent and so evenly balanced that he was paralysed. His decision to stay on in France all those months after he could legitimately have left, a decision that had seemed romantically moral at the time, now seemed mere self-indulgent folly, selfish in the extreme. And he was not even returning with a pure, undivided heart . . .

The train was slowing down for a station – Basingstoke. He hoped that nobody would get into this compartment: he spent much of his life hoping to be left alone these days, not because he enjoyed the solitude but simply because he found it less demanding. He felt tired all the time, kept thinking he wanted to sleep, but usually the attempt simply provided a replay of small, disparate, disturbing pieces of his life. The only person he felt comfortable with was Archie, to whose flat he was now bound. He had rung Archie that first evening at Home Place, and somehow, Archie’s pleasure (‘I say! What a thing!’) had felt completely all right – he hadn’t felt guilty or inadequate or dishonest at all. It was Archie who had said that he should not ring Clary, he should
see
her; he had also, after he’d heard about the fishing boat, asked immediately whether the Navy knew he was back, and when he’d said no, they didn’t, had said, ‘Well, you’d better come up at once and I’ll fix an appointment for you at the Admiralty. I warn you, they won’t be pleased.’

They hadn’t been. He’d gone up the next morning, met Archie at the Whitehall entrance and been taken by him to see a Commander Brooke-Caldwell by name, who was distinctly hostile. He’d had to go over the whole thing. Why hadn’t he got in touch with any of the British services still in France? Why had he waited so long? What the hell had he been up to and who did he think he was? Who had been concealing him all these years? Was she a member of the
maquis
? Did MI6 know anything about her? Why hadn’t she tried to move him on? She hadn’t been a member of anything, he’d said. Well, that could be checked out – and would be. It was a good thing, he’d finished grimly, that Lieutenant Commander Lestrange was able to vouch for his identity. He’d read the relevant action report from Rupert’s captain, so the first part of the story was accredited. But he still hadn’t accounted for his delay in returning, had he? A stony glare from the overgrowth of black bushy eyebrows. Personal reasons, sir, he had eventually admitted. Commander Brooke-Caldwell had snorted.

‘Personal reasons come second in this service, a fact which I am quite sure you are well aware of.’

Yes, he was.

‘Report back here in two days. Ask my secretary on your way out what is a convenient time for me.’

He had left feeling distinctly small. It was Archie who had fixed him up with a temporary ration card, who’d got him some money, who’d arranged for Clary to come to his flat for their reunion. ‘She often comes to supper with me, so she won’t think it odd. I’ll see that there’s some food, or you can take her out, whichever you like.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Oh, I can easily make myself scarce. Much better for her to have you to herself. She bloody well deserves it.’

They had been eating a fairly horrible lunch in a café off Leicester Square. Archie had to go back to his desk but said he’d be through by five: Rupert had the afternoon to himself. He walked, aimlessly, for about two hours. The state of London appalled him. Sandbags, boarded-up windows, dirty buildings, blistering paint – there was a general feeling of dinginess and exhaustion. People in the streets looked grey and shabby, tired as they stood patiently at bus stops in straggling queues. The conductors were women, dressed in stiff dark blue serge trouser suits. The queues daunted him: he decided not to take a bus. Every now and then there was another of the posters he had seen at the railway station, ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’, and another that said, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, and a third one that simply said, ‘Dig For Victory’ – all a bit out of date now, he should have thought.

He walked – across Trafalgar Square and up Haymarket and then along Piccadilly. The church there had been bombed; loosestrife and ragwort grew out of its broken walls. He had some vague idea of buying a present for Clary, but he could not think of what to get. Five years ago he would have been in no doubt, but now . . . the gap between fifteen and twenty was enormous; he had not the slightest notion of what she would like or want – should have asked Archie when they were having lunch. He tried to buy her a man’s shirt in one of the shops in Jermyn Street, but when he had finally chosen one, in wide pink and white stripes, it turned out that he couldn’t have it because he hadn’t any clothes coupons. ‘I’ve been away a long time,’ he explained to the very old salesman, who looked at him over his gold-rimmed half-glasses and said, ‘Ah, well, sir, that is the unfortunate situation, I’m afraid. Would you like me to keep the shirt for you until you acquire the requisite coupons?’

‘Better not. I don’t know whether I’m entitled to any.’ He wandered along the street until he came to a stationer’s. He would buy her a fountain pen. She had always loved them. When he had chosen one, he thought he had better buy a bottle of ink to go with it. She had always liked brown ink: he remembered her saying, ‘It makes my writing look nice and old and settled on the paper.’ As he wondered whether she was still writing stories he began to feel vaguely frightened, afraid that he might, in some way, fail her. His record so far, from the reunion point of view, was hardly a blazing success. It had been a relief to have to come to London this morning after the enforced, nervous intimacy of the previous evening. He had been so terrified of not being able to perform with Zoë that he had dreaded touching her. With the old Zoë this would at once have led to passionate declarations, demands, small seductive dishevelments – he remembered how the wide white satin ribbons of her shoulder straps would slip off her shoulders, how the combs would slide from her hair . . . He had not dared to embark upon such a course.

After dinner, they had been left alone in the drawing room. He had been turning over music for the Duchy, who had played at his request. Now he stood, irresolute, by the piano looking across the room at her – his wife. She sat in the large armchair, whose linen cover had been elaborately patched and mended, sewing some frothy white muslin concoction that was to be a summer frock for Juliet. She wore a pale green shirt that made her eyes a darker green and a little turquoise heart slung on a silver chain round her neck. She must have felt his eyes on her, for she looked up as they both spoke at once. Both stopped in mid-sentence waiting for the other.