Casting Off (8 page)

‘We can give him the easy bits to do.’

‘He actually asked me if we were going to pay him for working. My own brother!’

‘Oh, Clary! He was only joking. Are the sausages done?’

‘They must be. They’ve been in the pan for ages.’

‘If you’ll have a go at the potatoes, I’ll test them.’ Her arms were aching and the potatoes were still lumpy.

‘Poll, I think you’re meant to put butter and milk into mashed potatoes.’

‘We can’t. We’ve finished the butter, and we’ll need the marge tomorrow for sandwiches for Neville as well as us. And there’s only half a pint of milk left. We’ll have to stop having Grape Nuts for breakfast.’

‘And have black toast and bright yellow marge.’

‘It doesn’t have to be black if you watch the grill all the time.’

‘It seems to me,’ Clary said, when they’d doled out the sausages and lumpy mash and were sitting at the little kitchen table, ‘that cooking only works if it’s the
only
thing you do. Like Mrs Cripps.’

‘I expect we’ll get better at it as the years go by. And there’ll be more food to get good with.’

‘Not for ages. There are thousands of starving Germans.’

‘Noël says that masses of food that might have come to us has to go to them, and so rationing will get worse, not better. He says that bread will be rationed any minute.’

‘Oh dear.’ The pronouncements of Noël, Clary’s employer, relayed as gospel by Clary, were invariably gloomy. ‘Anyway, we have got our own house.’

‘Yes. Do you think it will stop smelling so queer, or shall we just get used to it?’

‘We’ll get rid of the smell. The whole place will be wonderful when we’ve finished with it.’

The ‘house’ was, in fact, six rooms, two on each floor, of a small eighteenth-century house off Baker Street. On the ground floor was a grocer’s shop and in the basement an unknown region where the Green Brothers, who owned the shop, plucked and cleaned poultry. The feathers drifted up to the first floor of their part of the building together with a smell of singeing that added a dimension to the general odour of the place, a damp, rotting sort of smell. It had been in an appalling state when they took it, with plaster crumbling and old paint blistering off the window bars. Someone had written wild messages in pencil on various bits of walls and doors. ‘Hole house rotting,’ said one, ‘Hopless place’ another. ‘Damp and durty’, and so on. All true in a way, but six rooms for a hundred and fifty pounds a year seemed a bargain and what they could afford. The family was helping. Polly’s father was giving them coconut matting for the three flights of stairs and the Duchy had donated a large quantity of old carpet from Chester Terrace that was to be cut and fitted for their rooms. Clary had the first floor to herself, Polly the second, and the top floor was to be the kitchen and dining room. There had been a lavatory in a kind of passage built out at the back, in which it had proved just possible to put a very small bath. This had been done, and a sink installed in the kitchen. They had bought a secondhand gas cooker, and three secondhand gas fires for their sitting rooms and the dining room. They had paid to have some replastering done and the most damaged walls relined. There remained the decoration. Polly, who now worked for a small, rather grand interior-decorating firm, said they must have wallpapers, and that she could get them slightly cheaper. Clary, who had no faith at all in her own taste, let Polly decide such things. But before the papering there was all the painting, and this they had to do for themselves. It was a warm August Friday evening, and they sat each side of the table with the crooked sash window open to let in the brown dusty air from the street.

‘Is there anything else to eat?’

‘Some sort of stewed apple. I peeled them and chopped them up and put them in the pan with quite a lot of water so they didn’t burn – like last time.’

Polly cleared the sausage plates and doled out the apple into their breakfast cereal bowls.

‘Is it all right?’

‘OK. A bit sour.’ Clary didn’t mention what seemed like finger-nails, but Polly said she was sorry, getting the cores out and leaving any apple was much harder than you’d think. ‘Louise’s house had an apple corer,’ she said. ‘I suppose we should get one.’

‘We seem to have got worse at cooking.’

‘I don’t think so. I think it’s just that we have to
do
it all the time. And I don’t suppose we’ll ever have a cook. Noël says that the whole of society will never be the same.’

‘As before the war? In my job it looks as though it’s going to be
exactly
the same. I’m constantly being sent to enormous houses where people are putting their kitchens on to the ground floor so that it won’t be far for the servants to walk.’

‘But only rich and grand people
have
interior decorators. Thousands of people are going to be living in prefabs because of all the bombing.’

‘Oh, well,’ Polly said peaceably. ‘Perhaps Noël is right about most of society. Perhaps it will be the same for my little lot – a minority, I do agree – and better for everybody else.’

‘He doesn’t say anything is going to be
better
. He never thinks that anything is going to be that!’

There was a pause while Polly, who found Noël’s opinions and Clary’s preoccupation with them irritating, tried to think of some way of deflecting her.

‘Let’s not do any more painting tonight. Let’s choose our wallpapers. I’ve brought back some lovely books of Cole’s who are easily the best.’

They did the washing-up first, but anything they did in the kitchen depressed them. There were no shelves or cupboards; nearly everything had to be kept on the floor. The sink did not yet have even a draining board, and their two drying-up cloths seemed always to be damp. They kept a list nailed to the wall on which they wrote their needs. It was already hopelessly long. The room was always hot because the window, as all windows in the narrow little house, faced south, and the boiler, a secondhand Potterton, was installed in it.

‘Let’s go to your room,’ Clary said. ‘It’s far the nicest.’ This was not only because Polly had already painted and lined its walls, but, Clary felt, because she had a knack of making places feel comfortable and lived in. It wasn’t just the patchwork quilt on the bed, the fern in a pot on the mantelpiece, the gleaming white paint and the thick brown paper she had taped to the floor; there was the feeling that it was already neat and clean, that the odours of damp and singeing feathers would not dare to penetrate such a place. A door connected this room with the other, small one. This also was clean and painted, with Polly’s clothes hanging neatly on a dress rail.

‘Are you going to make this your bedroom?’

‘No. I’m going to keep my clothes in it and work things, and I’m going to see if I can have a basin put in there. Then I’ll just have this room with the divan and chairs and things. What about you?’

‘I don’t know. I thought, as I’m not nearly as tidy as you, that I’d better make the small room a bedroom and have my desk and things in the big room.’ And never, she thought, let anyone into my bedroom because it will always be such a mess.

‘It’s important to decide before we choose the papers.’

‘I don’t think it matters what I choose.’

‘Oh, Clary! Don’t be so humble. It’s what
you
want that matters.’

They sat on Polly’s bed, side by side with their backs to the wall and the enormous wallpaper book on both their laps.

‘I like red,’ Clary said after a bit. ‘But I don’t want people on horses and harps and things all over it as well.’

‘Our rooms aren’t big enough for that sort of thing.’

After a bit, the harps gave way to stripes of various dimensions, and Clary seized upon a narrow one in two reds. ‘That’s what I want! Just like the Opera House at Covent Garden. All the passages are covered with it.’

‘I didn’t know you liked opera.’

‘I don’t especially – well, I don’t know whether I do, but Noël is taking me to it as part of my education. He says opera is nothing like it used to be, but, still, I ought to know the obvious ones. They nearly always make me cry – they’re so full of doom.’

‘Red is a bit hot for a room that faces south.’

‘You told me to choose. Red is what I like.’

‘And stripes will be difficult on these walls – they’re so bulgy.’

‘What’s the point of telling me to choose if you’re going against whatever it is?’

‘I was only trying to guide you.’

‘Either
tell
me, or let me choose for myself. I hate being guided.’

In the end she chose the red stripes for her smaller room and let Polly advise a pale yellow paper covered with small gold stars for the larger one.

But, she thought, as she lay in bed later, I’m always being guided by someone. Then she thought again, and knew that she meant the Formans – mostly Noël, but Fenella a bit as well, though not nearly as much. This was partly because everything about them was so completely different from anything she knew about other people that when she was with them she kept having to have things explained to her. Fenella had explained quite a lot about Noël to her. He was, or had been, an only child (his parents were dead and when alive they had not been in the least interested in him). He had been brought up in a small house in Barnet, but from the age of three he had been expected to fend for himself. He had learned to read
The Times
when he was four and subsequently all the books in the house, had got his own meals (how on earth had he managed that?), had been sent to a day school in Highgate but had never made any friends since his parents would not let him have them home. In any case, he did not really like men much, Fenella said, only women; he adored the company of women. He had gone to the theatre, the cinema and to concerts by himself from the age of eight (how did he get the money, she had wondered, but she had not liked to ask). He had grown up without any love or care, had been treated as a not particularly desirable third adult in the household. His father had been an unsuccessful architect who had lived largely on a small inheritance, the remains of which had gone to Noël when he died. His mother had made periodic forays into various societies and sects, the Oxford Movement, Gurdjieff, and an Indian with a Japanese wife who gave talks in a house in Bayswater, but none of them lasted, and in between she lay on the sofa reading novels and eating cakes. Then one day she left – simply disappeared, so far as Noël was concerned. His father informed him of this at breakfast one morning, adding that he did not wish to pursue the subject. Her departure did not seem to make much difference to the solitary and separate lives of her husband and son. Somebody who cleaned the house twice a week did some shopping. Noël lived on school lunches and bread and butter and lamb chops in the evenings. A dreadful childhood, Fenella said. One could not treat Noël as one might treat anyone else.

She had to agree. His parents sounded like monsters: she could not imagine the awfulness of being abandoned by a live mother – hers, after all, had died when Neville was born, which was completely different, and she could not begin to imagine having a father who did not talk to her. It made her understand Noël’s contempt for family life, his dislike of parents, of children, of the institution of marriage even. When she asked Fenella why, since he so much disapproved of the last, he had married her, she said simply that he was a conscientious objector, and it had been to prevent her being called up. ‘I’ve been reading the papers,’ he had said one morning, ‘and I think I’d better marry you.’ This seemed to Clary to be the most incredibly sophisticated proposal she had ever heard of, and she received the account of it in respectful silence. How had they met? she had asked at last. He had advertised for a secretary for the literary agency, and she had replied to it, gone to see him, and been engaged. He had rented a top-floor flat in Bedford Square, where he lived and worked, and shortly afterwards Fenella had moved in with him. It was hard to see, Clary thought, how he had ever managed without her. She not only did all his typing, she cooked, washed his shirts, cleaned the house (he did not like the idea of anyone coming in to clean it), but she accompanied him on his vast walks about London or the countryside, read aloud with him until well after midnight every night and then made his last meal of the day – yoghurt, bread and butter and a glass of hot milk – which he usually took in bed, where he stayed for breakfast the next morning. He liked to breakfast early. Fenella said, and to read the papers in bed before he got up. This meant, Clary knew, that Fenella did not get much sleep, and indeed she had admitted once that on the occasions when Noël took women friends to the theatre or opera, she usually went to bed early and slept until his return. Unlike Noël, who was small and wirily thin with very thick gold-rimmed spectacles, Fenella was large, with big bones, a matronly figure and huge hazel eyes – her best feature – that sparkled with intelligence. Noël, she had told Clary, was the most remarkable and interesting man she had ever met. If this was true for Fenella, who was middle-aged, at least thirty-five and probably more,
obviously
it must be true for her. Her life was now split into two distinct halves: life with Noël and Fenella, and life with Polly and the family; and sometimes she felt as though she was becoming two different people – the old Clary, who was playing house with her best friend and cousin, who had had the magic joy of Dad’s return from France and who had now got used to it enough to start worrying that he seemed changed and, she felt, was not happy, and the new Clary who was being educated in a thorough, serious manner about practically everything. Each day with the Formans opened up new vistas of her ignorance. Information, about the arts, the paranormal, transport, history, disease – Noël seemed to know what any famous people mentioned had died of – the state of footpaths, canals, railways in England, the cost of Elizabethan sweetmeats, how coracles were constructed, the dying words of an astonishing variety of famous men, the eccentricities of others – Nietzsche and his cream buns, Savarin and his oysters, a millionaire in the Isle of Man who played cargo ships with a map of the world and real ships that he owned . . . Facts, extraordinary, improbable (though she did not question them) streamed from him in an apparently ceaseless flow. He seemed to know perhaps not all but something about everything, and, of course, as she lived with him, Fenella was pretty knowledgeable as well. But what was so wonderful was that, although she knew so little, they treated her absolutely as an equal, a serious adult like themselves – in fact they often evinced an amused surprise when she said that she did not know what Blue John was or who had founded St George’s Hospital or on whose novel
Traviata
was based. All that part of it was exciting, and she enjoyed Noël dictating letters to her as she typed, using amazing words she’d never heard of, like desuetude or flume. At twelve thirty they would send her to the post office for stamps, or the bank with the firm’s paying-in book, and when she returned Fenella would have lunch ready, nut cutlets – deeply unpopular with Noël so she and Clary had them rather often and he ate Fenella’s meat ration, a chop or cutlet of a more desirable kind, with huge mounds of mashed potato and cabbage or carrots, followed by rice pudding, of which he was extremely fond, and then a cup of rather weak grey coffee. This meal was eaten on the top floor in an attic that must once have been a servant’s bedroom. It was the nicest room in the flat, as the room below it had to serve as an office as well as the sitting room. There was a small room at the back of the office in which Noël and Fenella slept, but she never saw it. The lavatory and small, dark bathroom were on a half-landing below – a bath, for Noël, was a rare and rather menacing event, mentioned several days beforehand as a date that pre-empted much else happening on that day. It was interesting to know somebody who hardly ever bathed, but when she told Polly this, her reaction was sickeningly predictable.