Casting Off (9 page)

‘No, he doesn’t!’ she had retorted. ‘That’s the whole point. He’s just as clean as anyone else.’

‘What about Fenella, then?’ Polly had asked.

‘I don’t know about her.’

She didn’t, she realized: she knew hardly anything. Fenella, when she was alone with Clary – which was not often – talked only of Noël. She seemed to have no family, no discernible background. When Clary asked her what she had done before she met Noël, she had answered vaguely that she had been a private secretary to a more or less retired playwright. But she couldn’t have been
born
doing that, Clary thought, she must have had parents and gone to school and lived somewhere . . . She asked Noël one day about this. ‘Fen’s parents? They weren’t much cop. Her father died of drink and her mother committed suicide. You know what parents are. A mere biological necessity, if you ask me.’

She had remembered then that when her father had come back from France and she had presented them with this amazing news, they had been only politely interested, and after lunch Fenella had said that talking about France depressed Noël and so it was better to avoid the subject. ‘It’s because he wants to go to America, you see,’ she had (hardly) explained. And Clary, who felt that she ought to understand what was meant and didn’t, shut up after that.

Noël’s sensibilities were as numerous as they were extreme, and this meant that conversation was fraught with traps. His favourite theme was how much better everything used to be, and they could be comfortably and nostalgically ensconced in the nineteenth century and he would be advising her to read Lytton Strachey’s
Eminent Victorians
when Cardinal Newman – one of the subjects – would pop into his mind, his face would cloud over and he would fall utterly silent. Anything to do with religion was dangerous, she discovered, because he was afraid that there might, after all, be a God, some vengeful deity who would certainly consign him to Hell. Then Fenella would coax him, would go out and buy teacakes, would, after Clary had been sent home early, settle down to some soothing read of Bertrand Russell, or Mencken, or Erich Fromm.

Noël had been most helpful when she and Polly had been looking for somewhere to live – well, he had not actually been helpful in the end, but he had made some interesting suggestions of a romantic nature such as choosing a street with a name that she liked: Shelley, he said, had chosen Poland Street for that reason; or they might look into the possibility of taking one of the towers of Tower Bridge – think of the amazing view from its windows. But it had turned out that the towers were full of the machinery for lifting the bridge, and, anyway, it seemed to be miles from anywhere and Polly didn’t think she would like it. She had chosen Floral Street in Covent Garden as a desirable name; there was nothing going there, but the agents in Covent Garden turned out to have this house on their books so perhaps he had been helpful in an oblique way.

The best thing about the Formans was that they took her writing seriously. She had shown Noël a half-written story about two people who met as children, and then had separate lives until they were grown-up when they were to meet again and fall in love. It was Noël who pointed out to her that she would not be able to deal interestingly with this idea in a short story but that in the space afforded by a novel she could make all kinds of interesting things happen. ‘For instance,’ he had said, ‘both of them being in the same place at the same time but not knowing it. Turning out to have shared an experience – like some great performance, say – that affects them differently.’ He had also given her a fierce and detailed lesson on her misuse of the pluperfect, and discouraged her use of exclamation marks, quoting Cleopatra to her in the process. This had made her want to call her novel
The Visiting Moon
, but he had said finish it and then see what it is called. She had been struggling on with it in evenings and at weekends, but it had not gone at all well until Dad came back, which had somehow released some block in her and for the last two months she had written nearly half the book. In fact, Noël had been rather disapproving at her sudden output: he spent hours himself battling with abstruse critical pieces for highbrow magazines or, and more surprisingly, semi-amateur specialist publications – he was extremely fond of trams, for instance, and wrote an impassioned piece on their superior merits. He would take one or two weeks to produce a piece and she learned not to boast of having written ten pages in a weekend as Fenella said it depressed him. She spent an evening with Dad every week. He and Zoë were going to move back to London in the autumn and meanwhile he was staying with Archie, so she only ever saw Archie on his own at weekends when she didn’t go home, and even that was tricky, because she worried about Polly still being in love with him. Polly had said that she never wanted to talk about it, a wish that had to be respected, but it also showed, she thought, that Polly still felt pretty shaky. If she was still minding about Archie, it would be far better if she talked about it – but there we go again, she thought, this family is rotten about saying things that matter to them and I suppose Polly’s caught the habit. Still, if they weren’t like that, I probably wouldn’t have thought of making one of my main people like my family in that way, and the other one not. After that, she thought about the novel until she fell asleep.

Neville arrived just after ten the next morning saying that he’d come to breakfast.

‘You can’t have! You’re far too late. I bet you had some at home before you left,’ she added.

‘Only a snack. Just four bits of toast.’

‘
We
only had toast, and we didn’t have four bits.’

‘Mrs Cripps gave me these for you.’ It was a box containing six eggs. ‘I’ve brought them all the way up, so surely I could have one of them now,’ he said when they had exclaimed over them.

‘Give him one,’ Polly said. ‘Journeys do make people hungry.’

‘It is hard for me to think of anything’, Neville said, ‘that doesn’t make me hungry. Of course some things are worse than others.’

‘You can’t be hungry just after a meal.’

‘After an hour I am,’ he said simply. ‘It’s hardly surprising. Do you know what we’re
supposed
to have each week? One egg, two pints of milk, half a pound of any meat, four ounces of bacon, two ounces of tea, four ounces of sugar, four ounces of sausage, two ounces of butter, two ounces of lard, four ounces of margarine, three ounces of cheese and a small amount of offal. And at school we don’t even get that. I got some scales and did a controlled experiment for a week. The meat was Irish stew and one and a half ounces of it was bones, the sausages are nearly all bread and some foul-tasting herb, the egg tasted of prayer books. I had to go without sugar all the week in order to weigh it up and of course it was nothing like four ounces—’

‘They would have been cooking with some of your ration,’ Polly interrupted, ‘and you aren’t counting the things you can get on points. Who would be eating your rations anyway?’

‘The masters. Mr Fothergill, particularly. He’s unspeakably fat and his sister sends him homemade sweets as well as him reeking of drink. Sometimes.’

‘Here’s your egg.’

‘Jolly good. Much better than the dried ones.’

From this careless remark they discovered that he had had breakfast on the train.

‘Honestly, Neville! You are a cheat!
Two
breakfasts already.’

‘There is a worryingly dishonest streak in you,’ Clary added.

‘There is not. I simply didn’t mention it. I forgot until now. The point
is
that I’m extremely hungry. If you want me to work for you the least you can do is keep me from starving to death.’

In fact, he painted rather surprisingly well and under-coated all of Clary’s larger room so they didn’t grudge him two enormous bacon sandwiches at lunch-time plus two iced buns that Polly had got from the baker. The sandwiches used up all their bacon for the week, but Polly sometimes got extra bits from Mr Southey who kept the shop below. The buns had been meant for tea so they had to go and get more of them for that. ‘He’s grown so terrifically in the last year, we can’t grudge him,’ Polly said. In the evening they took him to
A Night at the Circus
, which was on at a cinema in Notting Hill Gate, and then they had macaroni cheese and cocoa. The whole house now smelled of paint, which made a change from poultry and burnt feathers. On Sunday he said he was going to see Archie, so he’d only be able to paint in the morning. ‘But I might easily be back for supper.’

He loomed over them – a head taller than Clary now – nearly knocking things over, asking for things: ‘I forgot my toothpaste,’ ‘Can I borrow that scarf, then I needn’t wear a tie?’ and so on.

‘It’s amazing that you
clean
your teeth,’ Clary said, as he squeezed two inches of toothpaste in a double row on his battered brush.

‘I used simply to eat it. But ever since I saw Mr Fothergill’s teeth I’ve cleaned them like mad. He never cleans them. They’re like those very old yellowy almonds you get on fruit cakes.’ His voice no longer veered about between squeaking and rumbling. When he raised his head to sloosh his mouth out, she saw that his Adam’s apple was just like Dad’s. He was still in his pyjamas. The jacket had no buttons left on it and his bony elbows stuck out from holes in the sleeves. All of his clothes looked a bit like that: the grey flannel trousers he had arrived in had turn-ups that were well above his ankles which were flimsily covered by a matted network of much-darned socks that in turn were encased in huge blackish shoes. These last he wore as little as possible, removing them on arrival and only wedging his feet back into them to go to the cinema. ‘The laces broke ages ago you see, so I can’t undo
them
. It honestly doesn’t
matter
,’ he said, sensing their disapproval.

He top-coated both Polly’s windows still in his pyjamas and then disappeared to dress. When he had gone, they discussed him.

‘He’s just like Simon was,’ Polly said.

‘I think he’s worse.’ Clary was thinking of his hopelessly frivolous answers to their questions about what he was going to do when he’d finished school. ‘I’d quite like to own a night-club,’ he had said. ‘Stay up all night and make tons of money.’

‘Is that
all
you want to do?’

‘Not quite all. I want to enjoy myself, of course. I might own a theatre, or be a conductor of an orchestra just for fun.’

‘Don’t you want to do anything for other people?’ As soon as she had said that, she realized how priggish it sounded. Too late. He had looked at her for a moment and then said blandly, ‘I don’t want to do good to people: I want to be done good
to
.’

‘It’s our fault,’ Polly said. ‘We’ve started having the sort of conversations with him that boring old grown-ups used to have with us.’

‘He does love Archie, though.’ Another thing she wished she hadn’t said.

But Polly, who was struggling to open a tin of Spam, simply said, ‘Well, Archie sort of became his father, didn’t he? While Uncle Rupert was away.’

When Neville reappeared, wanting the scarf he’d borrowed from Polly properly tied round his neck, they both became bossy and maternal with him: Clary tried to get him to polish his shoes a bit, and Polly made an effort to comb his extremely thick hair which stood up in tufts round his double crown – useless, the comb broke almost at once and teeth from it and from some alien comb, since they were a different colour, emerged.

‘Your hair is absolutely revolting! What on earth have you been doing to it?’

‘Or
not
doing to it,’ Clary added: she had been watching.

‘I don’t
do
things to it. They cut it sometimes. And I put Brylcreem on it when someone lends me some. There’s no point in trying to comb it. As long as it looks shiny, they don’t make you wash it. We tried that oil you get in a little can for stopping things squeaking but it tends to stink. Brylcreem’s much better. There’s no point in you rolling your eyes at each other – it’s
my
hair.’

He went after that, but all the rest of that day, while they finished the top-coating of Clary’s room, took it in turns to have baths and had boiled eggs and Spam in the hot kitchen, from whose window they watched two men fighting each other with knives in the hot dusty street below, the thought of Archie lay, unmentioned, between them.

‘I think we ought to call the police,’ Clary said. A small crowd had gathered. One of the men had blood on his shirt.

‘There
is
a policeman – look.’

But each time he walked past the men, they threw their arms round each other in a warm embrace: the knives were nowhere to be seen. Eventually, since the policeman did not go away, the men gave up and wandered off in opposite directions.

‘I think they were Cypriot,’ Clary said.

‘How do you know?’

‘Well, there
are
Cypriots about, and English people don’t fight with knives. But it’s quite an interesting street to live in, isn’t it?’

‘Mm. I wish we could see a tree from the house, though.’

‘Can’t we?’

‘Oh, Clary, haven’t you noticed? There’s nothing green to be seen out of any window.’

Neville didn’t come back that night – he didn’t even ring to say that he wouldn’t. They finished the Spam with some tomatoes. The bread was rather stale so they toasted it.

‘We’ll have to have Grape Nuts for breakfast.’

‘There’s no milk left.’

‘Oh,
God
! How do people manage to keep on having meals?’

‘If Neville was right about the rations, I can’t think.’

‘Why isn’t it better now the war’s over?’

‘I told you what Noël said.’

‘At work,’ Polly said pensively, ‘Caspar always seems to have smoked salmon sandwiches for lunch. Or a small pot of caviar.’

‘Does he give you any?’

‘Occasionally. When Gervase is out on a job he does. But often then Caspar goes out to lunch himself and then I have to mind the shop. I have a sandwich and he gives me a bunch of invoices to do. They take ages because I’m not allowed to type them – they all have to be written with a relief pen and brown ink on frightfully heavy white paper. When he comes back, he goes through them for mistakes.’