Casting Off (6 page)

‘I was only asking whether you wanted a whisky.’

‘No thanks.’ He’d had one before dinner with his father, and discovered that he’d lost the taste for it.

‘What were you going to say?’

‘Oh!
I
was wondering what you thought of Pipette.’ That story had come up at dinner, but Zoë then, as during the whole evening, had hardly said anything.

‘I never met him. I was visiting my mother when he came. On the Isle of Wight. She still lives with her friend Maud Witting.’

‘How
is
your mother?’

‘Quite well, really.’

There was a short silence. Then he said, ‘Do the family always go to bed as early as this?’

‘Not usually. I think they’re trying to be tactful.’

Her timid smile made him recognize that she was used to deprivation, sadness, the absence of any lightness. He said involuntarily, ‘It has been far harder for you.’ He pulled a stool nearer to sit before her. ‘Even after you got the message. You must have thought that I had died. But you couldn’t be sure. That must have been so –
difficult
. I’m so sorry.’

‘It couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t your fault. Any of it.’

He saw that her hands, folding the white muslin, were trembling.

She said, ‘Your family have been wonderful to me. Especially your mother. And I had Juliet.’ She looked quickly at him and away. ‘Seeing you walking towards me in the lane was such a shock. I can still hardly
believe
you. Believe you’re back, I mean.’

‘It seems extraordinary to me too.’

‘It must.’

They had come to another full stop. Exhaustion hit him like a freak wave. ‘Shall we turn in?’

‘Perhaps we’d better.’ She put her sewing on the table.

He held out his hand to pull her to her feet and saw a faint blush: she was paler than he remembered; her hand was very cold.

‘Time,’ he said. ‘We both need some time to get used to one another again, don’t you think?’

But in the bedroom – astonishingly unchanged, with its faded wallpaper of monstrous, mythical birds – there was the business of undressing in the uncompromising presence of the small double bed. Had she kept any of his pyjamas? Yes: most of them had been passed on to Neville, but she had kept one pair. The clothes he had been wearing, a pair of cotton trousers, a fisherman’s sweater that had belonged to Miche’s father, a threadbare shirt that she had washed and patched and ironed for his journey back – had now been discarded. He undressed while Zoë went to the bathroom – gathered the shirt to his face to conjure the hot, peppery, baked smell that had permeated the large kitchen when Miche was ironing . . . He rubbed his eyes with the shirt and then put it on the chair that he had always used for his clothes.

When Zoë returned, she had undressed. She was wearing the very old peach-coloured kimono that the Brig had given her years ago, soon after they were married. She put her clothes almost furtively on the other chair and went to the dressing table to unpin her hair. Usually, he remembered, this had been the beginning of a long evening ritual, when she would clean her face with lotion, put some cream on it, brush her hair for three minutes, massage some special lotion she used to have made up at the chemist into her hands, take off her jewellery – it could all take what had seemed to him ages. He went to find the bathroom.

That, too, was just the same. The same dark green paint, the same bath with its claw feet and viridian stain from the leaking taps, the window-sill covered with toothpaste-encrusted mugs and contorted tubes of Phillips Dental Magnesia. There was a new clothes-horse covered with damp bath towels. From habit, he opened the window, now stripped of its blackout blind. The fresh soft air revived him. Away from Zoë, even for a few minutes, he was able to consider
her
, and he recognized now that in her presence he was encapsulated by guilt, unable to perceive anything but his own responses. She felt shy with him, unsure of herself and uncertain of him. One would think, he thought wearily –
anyone
outside the situation would presume – that after this long enforced absence their coming together again was the happy ending, containing nothing but delight and relief. He remembered the old chestnut that fellow officers had quoted on the destroyer about the rating who had written, ‘I hope you are getting plenty of fresh air because once I get back you won’t be seeing nothing but the bedroom ceiling.’ Reunions were regarded as occasion for sexual abandon and unconfined joy. He shut the window. I was in love with her, he thought. She is beautiful, that hasn’t changed, she is the mother of my daughter and she has spent five years waiting for me to come back. Somehow or other, I’ve got to make a go of it. But even as he reached this last resolution he remembered that it was not new: it had lain in him during most of the marriage, unvoiced for years before he had gone away.

When he got back to the bedroom, she was in bed, lying on her side and turned away from him: she seemed asleep and, grateful for this deception, he kissed her cold cheek and turned out the light . . .

He was not used to walking – and particularly not on pavements. His feet hurt: he was not used to wearing English leather – he’d lived for so long in canvas shoes. He decided to go back along Jermyn Street, down St James’s and into the park where he could find a bench to sit down.

Clary. When Archie had said, ‘She bloody well deserves it,’ he had suddenly remembered Clary face down on her bed sobbing her heart out because he was going to take Zoe on holiday to France. He had sat on the bed and tried to comfort her – it was only for two weeks.
‘Two weeks!
It doesn’t feel like that to me at all. You’re just

saying
that to make it sound bearable.’ He had turned her over so that she faced him. How often he remembered her face covered with freckles and tears and usually dirty because she was always rubbing the tears off. How often he remembered her eyes dark with defiance and grief. ‘How do I
know
you’ll ever come back?’ she had cried on that occasion. When he did come back she was shy, sulky, unresponsive, until somehow he could break through and make her laugh. Then she would throw herself into his arms and say, ‘Sorry I clang so much.’ And a few days later she would accuse him: ‘Dad! You should have told me not to say clang. You know perfectly well it’s clung. Sometimes you can be very treacherous and unhelpful.’ She had been jealous of Neville, jealous of Zoë. He wondered whether she was now jealous of Juliet. He had always felt protective towards her: of the three girls it was always she whose knees were permanently grazed, whose hair seemed never out of tangle, who invariably spilt things down a new dress or tore an old one, whose bitten nails were always fringed with black, who seemed always either to have comic gaps where milk teeth had fallen out, or heavy wire bars holding in the new ones. She had never had a vestige of Louise’s dramatic glamour, or Polly’s fastidious elegance. He had known also that Ellen, who had been such a tower of strength to him in every other way, had favoured Neville, had always found Clary difficult, and although she had faithfully performed the duties of nanny, had bestowed very little natural affection; Clary had been entirely dependent upon him. So, when he was lying in that ditch with his ankle hurting like hell and all hope of escape with Pipette gone, he had scribbled the note to Zoë and had written another little message for her as the only comfort he could give. But she had been still a child then: children got over things – she had, after all, never once mentioned her mother to him after Isobel had died. Perhaps he, too, would seem like a distant stranger . . . He felt daunted. When it came to getting over things – something he recognized one always hoped other people would do – he wondered how it applied to himself. How long would it take him to get over Miche? He had thought that making the decision to leave her would be the hardest part of it; he had expected, he now realized, to be rewarded for the decision by finding it less painful in practice than in anticipation. Even on the boat he had thought that. He had thought that, once home, he would find it possible to slot into his old life, upheld by the virtue of having made the right decision. But this was not so: not only did it seem to be difficult in ways he had not imagined – sharing a double bed with someone who seemed like an intimate stranger – but the hours without her had simply made his longing for Miche more agonizing. Morality, too, had developed horns: he could neither act nor even feel towards one of them without damage of some kind to the other – at least that was how it was beginning to seem. And once out of the Navy, he would be expected to return to the family business, and absence from that had made it clear to him that he had no heart for it. But how could he expect Zoë to go back to complete penury if he reverted to teaching somewhere and trying to sell pictures? He supposed he would have to get over wanting to be a painter as well, but getting over things now seemed to be a shabby, inconclusive way of dealing with them.

In the bus going back to his flat with Archie, he managed to say that he was nervous about the meeting with Clary. ‘Don’t you think it might be better if we had the evening
à trois
? I mean, it sounds as though she knows you far better.’

‘I think she should be allowed to choose about that.’ Then, after a pause, Archie asked, ‘What was it like going home?’

‘Oh – you know – very
odd
. Not exactly how I expected.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Amazing to come back to a five-year-old ready-made daughter.’

‘I bet.’ There was another silence in which he noticed how Archie had carefully not mentioned Zoë.

‘I didn’t know what to get her. In the end I bought her a pen. Will that go down well, do you think?’

‘Sure to. She loves anything like that.’

‘Is she still writing?’

‘She’s a bit cagey about it – but probably. She wrote a journal for you during the war. For you to read when you came back. She always believed that you would, you know.’

As he was putting his key in the door of a large, rather gloomy-looking red-brick building, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d better wait and let her tell you about the journal.’ Archie’s flat was small, but it had a balcony looking on to a square garden, now full of may and lilac and laburnum.

‘What time is she coming?’

‘Straight after work. Between half past six and seven. Like a whisky?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Gin, then. I think I’ve got some of that left. Oh, no – it’s vodka. Vodka has become rather a fashionable drink because of our Russian allies. You can have vodka and ice, vodka and tonic, or just vodka. I don’t advise that – it has a sort of oily taste when remotely warm.’

‘I think vodka and ice would be just the thing.’ He didn’t really, but he felt tired and a drink might pep him up.

Archie seemed to sense that he was nervous, because he began talking about the coming election, the end of the coalition and party politics back with a vengeance. ‘They can hardly hear themselves speak in the House,’ he said. ‘I must say I think it would have been better if they’d waited until we’ve finished off Japan.’

‘Do you want to talk about France?’ he asked a few minutes later, when it was clear he wasn’t getting much response about politics.

‘Not at the moment,’ possibly not ever, he thought, and then wondered whether he would ever bring himself to say even that – even to Archie.

Archie said, ‘When the bell rings I’m going down to fetch her. It’s going to be a tremendous shock for her. I’d like to give her some sort of warning.’

‘You make me sound like a catastrophe.’

‘No, I don’t. Shocks come all shapes and sizes.’

When the bell rang – at last – they both jumped and Rupert realized that Archie was nervous as well. He put down his drink and limped quickly to the door, where he stopped.

‘Er. One thing. She really
has
– minded about you. She – oh well.’ He shrugged and went. His uneven footsteps on the stairs faded, there was temporary silence. He got up and walked over to the balcony, which was further from the door. He heard voices, Archie’s and hers, and then Archie saying, ‘A bit of a surprise for you,’ and hers, ‘Oh, Archie! Another one? I’m not going to guess because last time you
got
me what I guessed it might be before – if you see what I . . .’

She was in the room, struck motionless at the sight of him, silent, and then, as though released by a spring, she shot into his arms.

‘Only crying because I’m so pleased,’ she said moments later. ‘I always cry about things.’

‘You always did.’

‘Did I?’ She stood in front of him – nearly as tall as he, stroking his shoulders with small uneven movements. Looking at her eyes was like looking at the sun. ‘Wouldn’t it be awful,’ she said, and he saw her luxuriating in the fantasy, ‘if you weren’t actually real? If I’d just imagined you.’

‘Awful. Darling Clary, I have missed you.’

‘I know. I got your note that you thought of me every day. It made a great difference. Oh, Dad! Here you
are
! Could we sit down? I feel I’m going to
break
.’