Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (16 page)

Spring 1943

There was a small, magical patch of time between being completely asleep and becoming awake that she had begun to notice ever since they’d gone to London. It had no prescribed duration, always felt tantalizingly short since it began to fade the moment she became aware of it. Sometimes she thought it was the very end of a dream, since not only her heart and thoughts but her body had a weightless light about them – a kind of serene detachment that still possessed joyous response to something that was already mysteriously slipping into the past, dissolving into distant memory and mist until it seemed either forgotten, or never known at all. Dreams could be like that, she knew. They could be like telegrams, or the most significant lines of a poem – so crammed with a fragment of truth that for a moment they seemed to illuminate the whole of it. But dreams did not always contain joyful messages: they could convey anything from anxiety to nightmare – she knew that. Her recurring nightmare – only once told to Clary – about trying to kiss her mother’s forehead and it simply melting into the pillow, had a kind of rigid horror that no amount of repetition rendered powerless. But this patch was more as though she was flying in some sunlit element, alighting upon her own body, and then entering it to discover that her wings had disappeared. She was ordinary Polly lying flat on her back on the top floor of her father’s house in London. Next door would be Clary, profoundly asleep until physically shaken. Perhaps, she thought, it only happened because she was sleeping alone: at Home Place she had always shared a room with Clary, and sometimes Louise as well. At least Clary had her own room – bed-sitting rooms they were called, but for Polly living in her father’s house, with the kitchen three floors down in the basement, was
not
the same as them having their own flat, which had always been their plan. But when it came to the point and she had discovered that Dad had always thought they would live with him, and when
he
had discovered that they had meant to find their own place and she had seen his intense disappointment congeal to good-natured acquiescence, she knew that she could not persist. ‘
You
can find a flat,’ she had said to Clary, ‘but I simply can’t. It’s the first time I’ve seen Dad at
all
pleased or excited about anything since Mummy died. He so hates being alone in the house without her. You do see, don’t you?’ And Clary, shooting her a look compounded of disappointment, exasperation and love, had said immediately, ‘Course I do. And I wouldn’t dream of having a flat without you in it.’ Her face always showed all of her feelings however careful her voice was about them.

And Dad had been sweet about everything. They were to have the top floor to themselves. ‘You could make bed-sitting rooms as they are quite large,’ he had said. ‘And you have your own bathroom on the half landing. And I’ll have a telephone plug put on the top floor. I expect you’ll want to ring up your friends. And if you want to have a party with them, I can always be out. You must just tell me what you want in the way of furniture. I expect the rooms need painting as well. You must choose the colours you would both like.’ He talked and talked about it, and when Clary said could she bring all her books from home, he said of course, and when he saw how many there were, he’d have bookshelves made for them. It was as though he wanted them to live there for ever.

They got furniture from all over the place. Aunt Rach said they could have curtains from Chester Terrace because the ones that were there were so flimsy and awful and no good for blackout.

Now, after barely three months, they had got into a routine. They went to the secretarial course at Pitman’s five days a week, bicycling there four of the days, but on Fridays they went by bus, because of going straight on after work to catch a train for Sussex. Clary wanted to stay in London for the weekends, and sometimes she did, but Polly felt that she ought to go home to see Wills. He was not especially glad to see her, but she felt that if she stuck at it he might get to be. He liked her if she did everything he wanted, and so she spent cold afternoons pushing him on his fairy cycle, helping him build nameless structures with the family Meccano, and reading him
Winnie-the-Pooh
. He had become a disconsolate tyrant, determined upon having everything that he did not really want, using the innumerable gratified whims like leaves to cover the secret body of his loss. So, he would insist upon wearing one red sock and one blue; he would not eat his mashed potato until he had transferred it to his mug; he filled his bed with fir cones, many of which had mysterious names; he had awful bouts of simply opening and then slamming doors. Aunt Villy was teaching him to read, but he would only do it if she let him wear a hat. It was almost a year now, but she knew that he still missed his mother, although the aunts seemed to think he was getting over it. So she went because of him. She went also because of her father. He loved meeting her at the station, buying her a paper to read (when Clary was there he always bought her one as well). He usually went to sleep half-way through the journey while she sat trying to learn her grammalogues. The weekends were always the same. They were met by Tonbridge who told them of any minor misfortunes that had occurred during the week – they sometimes had bets together about who these would be about – and then they would get a few of his opinions, couched as questions, about the war. At the house, the smells – so familiar when she had lived there that she had not noticed them – were of damp log fires, the Brig’s pipe smoke, beeswax and occasional wafts of food cooking as Eileen barged back and forth through the baize door laying the dining room for dinner. Upstairs, the smells changed to lavender, Wright’s Coal Tar Soap, shoe polish, clothes drying in front of the nursery fire, and the sounds were either of children having baths, or of people trying to make them. She would go to her room to get into a warmer jersey for supper: they no longer changed for dinner excepting on Saturday night when she always wore her pale green brocaded housecoat made of curtain material by the aunts for her birthday last year. After supper, they would all listen to the news and then she and Clary would play bezique and racing demon. She always missed Clary when Clary stayed in London, and on top of missing her, she could not help feeling envious: Clary used to go to the cinema with Archie and sometimes the theatre, and got taken out to meals. Apart from the treat side of it, she was alone with Archie which Polly felt was a treat in itself. Of course,
he
came for the weekend sometimes, and you could bet that Clary never stayed in London
then
. What it amounted to was that
she
, Polly, never had evenings alone with Archie but then, she kept reminding herself, she had responsibilities and Clary had none. All the same, the old niggling thing of this not being fair attacked her; of course she knew by now that things weren’t, but that did not in the least prevent her wanting them to be.

Today was Friday, and they were both going home, because Archie was coming, because on the Saturday it would be a year since her mother died – a fact that Dad didn’t mention, but that everybody else in the family was acutely aware of. A kind of opposite of a birthday, she thought, a deathday, but really it was no worse that her mother had been dead for three hundred and sixty-five days than three hundred and sixty-four, or -six. She was glad that Simon would still be at school. ‘But I’m only glad because it would be worse for him if he wasn’t, I’m not really
glad
. I’m not really glad about anything,’ she said to Clary as they waited for the bus to go to Pitman’s.

Clary agreed.

‘Nor am I. I think life is frightfully depressing. If nearly everybody is having a worse time than we are, I can hardly see the point of it.’

‘I suppose it
is
just the war?’ she said.

‘How can we know? We haven’t the faintest idea of what it would be like if there wasn’t one.’

‘We can
remember
it. It is only three and a bit years since peace.’

‘Yes, but then we were children. Subject to all kinds of petty rules made by Them. And now that we’re becoming Them, there simply seem to be more rules.’

‘Like?’

‘Well,’ Clary considered, ‘I mean, neither of us
wants
to get awfully good at typing and shorthand. We didn’t spend our childhood
wishing
we could type at sixty words a minute.’

‘It might be useful to you if you’re going to be a writer. Look at Bernard Shaw.’

‘He invents his own kind, I believe. And that was just because he wanted to. But generally men don’t have to learn typing.’

‘They have to join up and kill people,’ she said sadly. ‘The trouble is that we haven’t worked out what we believe in. We just go on in a dreary, unbelieving muddle.’

The bus came then. When they were on it, Clary said, ‘Disbelieving is different from unbelieving. What don’t we believe in?’

‘War,’ Polly said promptly. ‘I absolutely disbelieve in war.’

‘That doesn’t do any good, though, because we’ve got it.’

‘Well, you
asked
me. You think of something.’

‘God,’ Clary said. ‘I don’t believe in God. Although, actually, it occurred to me that there might be a whole lot of them, and that’s why there’s such a mess – they don’t agree with one another about anything.’

‘I can be against war,’ she said – she’d been thinking. ‘The fact that we’ve got it is neither here nor there. I’m against the
idea
of it. Like Christopher.’

‘He didn’t last. He went off to join up. It was only because there was something wrong with his eyesight that they didn’t take him.’

‘He went,
not
believing in it, because he thought it wasn’t right to let other people do the dirty work. He had principles.’

‘Ah, now, do you believe in
them
? If so, which ones?’

But they’d reached Lancaster Gate and the peeling, blistered pillars of the stuccoed house in which they were to spend the next six hours pounding their typewriters steadily to what Clary called Hastings pier music, learning to write ‘Dear Sir, Thank you for your letter of the 10th inst.’ in a cabalistic scrawl, and struggling with double-entry book-keeping, which they both simply loathed. ‘It seems madness to me,’ Clary had said after the first day of it. ‘Either one hasn’t
got
any money to put in the columns, or else one has masses, in which case there would be no need.’

‘It won’t be
our
money we’re putting in, stupid, it’ll be our rich, powerful employer’s.’

The day was punctuated by a lunch hour when they consumed Spam sandwiches and cups of pink-brown tea that tasted of the metal pot. There was a basement room in which students could spend the lunch hour and sandwiches were sold there for those who wanted them. So far they had not found any of their fellow students enlivening; they all seemed deeply earnest about the work, and as it was an intensive course there was in any case little time to fraternise. Usually, they managed to go out at lunch-time, taking their sandwiches to eat in the park. This morning, however, a new student had joined the classes who looked very different from the rest. To start with, she was very much older, but almost everything else about her was different too. She was immensely tall – she towered above everyone else – but she had long, narrow hands and feet and elegant ankles. Her iron-grey hair was cut in a careless bob and cut shorter on one side of her forehead, and she wore a black cardigan rather carelessly embroidered with buttercups and poppies. But it was her face that entranced them both. Unlike everyone else, she wore no make-up at all, her skin was uniform olive with very fine, dark eyebrows that arched over eyes of an amazing colour that they could not agree about.

‘Sort of pale greyish green,’ Clary said.

‘Bluer than that. Aquamarine, would you say?’

‘I might
say
it, but it would be no good if one wrote it. It wouldn’t really
describe
them.’

‘I’d know what it meant.’

They decided to eat their sandwiches in the basement room in the hope of getting to know the new student, but she was not there. Her absence whetted their curiosity.

‘I think she’s foreign.’

‘We know that. We heard her say thank you to Miss Halton.’

‘Well, I think she’s minor royalty from some central European court.’

‘Or she could have been imported by some American general. I bet they’re allowed to bring their mistresses abroad with them. You know, like Stanley taking cases of port with him when he was exploring in Africa.’

‘Honestly, Clary, that’s not at all the same thing.’

‘She could be royal
and
someone’s mistress.’

‘I must say she doesn’t at all look like a wife.’

‘She was probably married off in her youth to some frightful Prussian brute. Then all her children died of TB because the castle was so cold and she ran away and escaped.’ Clary had recently come upon a copy of
Moths
for a penny on a second-hand book-stall and had become immersed in Ouida which had affected her observations of people. ‘She journeyed overland for weeks dressed as a peasant and then stowed away on a ship to come here.’

‘I don’t think she’d
stow
very well,’ Polly said. ‘I mean, she’s a bit too remarkable to merge into any background. And large,’ she added, after thinking about it.

When they went back to the classroom for the second typing session, she still wasn’t there.

‘Next time we see her, let’s ask her to supper with us.’

‘All right. Do you think she’d get on with Dad?’

‘You said he said he would be out if we wanted to have our friends.’

‘I know – but—’

‘Oh, Poll, we have to start having our own lives.’

‘OK. But she is pretty old – his sort of age. If she’s really terrifically nice, she might make him a suitable wife.’ And as Clary snorted with disagreeing despair, she added, ‘I don’t mean he should be at the first supper. I just mean if we think she’s OK we might introduce them.’