Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (17 page)

‘I don’t see much point in that. They’re both too old for sex, I should have thought.’

‘You don’t
know
that. Do you think Archie’s too old for sex, then?’

There was a dead silence during which she noticed that Clary’s forehead had become pink before she answered, ‘Archie’s different.’

He was, she thought, of course he was. He was the most different person she had ever met.

13 March 1943

This is Saturday afternoon, Dad, and it is raining and quite cold as well, so I’m sitting on my bed at Home Place with the eiderdown over me writing to you. It’s awful: I realise that I haven’t written anything since before Christmas. That is partly because of us moving to London – Poll and me to Uncle Hugh’s house which has meant such a change in our lives that I don’t seem to have had much time. That isn’t true: there
has
been time – only I haven’t felt like writing much at all. Christmas was OK, I suppose. Roly and Wills and Jules loved it and so did Lydia and Neville, but I think I am beginning to feel a bit bored of it. Neville tried to give me a rat he has got tired of at school. Who could possibly want a rat
brought up by him
? I said that. He gave Polly a jig-saw which we knew had five bits missing. He simply won’t use his pocket money on presents and all
he
wanted was money. Some people gave it to him, but there was quite a lot of disapproval in the air.

Well, after Christmas we went to London as we have to go to an Intensive Course in Typing and Shorthand at Pitman’s so that we shall be of some use when we are called up. I was looking forward madly to us having our own flat, but in the end we had to go to Uncle Hugh because Poll said he was so wanting us to, and she feels he is frightfully lonely without Aunt Syb. I saw her point . . . If it had been you, Dad, I would have felt just as Poll did, so of course I had to agree. We have a room each on the top floor and our own bathroom, but we have to cook in the basement so by the time we have carried food up to our lairs everything is cold. But we can make tea in the bathroom which is something. Uncle Hugh was very kind about letting us paint the rooms
and
he had some bookcases made for me which go all along one wall which is a good thing because I got my room the wrong kind of yellow and can’t be bothered to paint it again. Aunt Rach said we could have some curtains from Chester Terrace as Aunt Syb never got around to having any on the top floor, and she took us to Chester Terrace to choose some. She said she would make them fit the windows which is jolly decent of her. It was odd going back there, Dad. Everything is covered up – all the furniture – and the shutters are down and there are hardly any lights to put on. When we went in there was a faint damp, darkish smell, like wet prayer books. The curtains were all packed in tea chests in the Brig’s study with labels on them saying which they were, but of course I could only remember the drawing room ones – the huge white roses on dark green shiny chintz and the oatmeal ones with blue birds on them that were in my bedroom when I stayed there while you were marrying Zoë when I was nine. I didn’t tell you, Dad, but honestly that was the most miserable time of my life. I didn’t believe you were coming back to fetch me, you see: I thought they were simply trying to soften the blow when they said you were. I stole half a crown out of the Duchy’s bag to get bus tickets to go home, but then I remembered that Ellen had taken Neville to stay with her family and that there would be nobody to let me in. I thought all this in the hall just as I was going – and then I realised that there was nowhere to go
to
. That was the worst of all. I felt so furious I wanted to break everything up and I got the Brig’s swordstick out of its walking case and I bashed through the iron scroll grid at the glass on the front door to break it. I did break one bit, but I was crying and they came and found me. Aunt Rach came and I kicked her and shouted that I was trapped and there was nowhere to go and I wished I was dead. I can see now how good she was about it all. She didn’t punish me although I slightly wanted her to because I wanted everything to go on being simple and bad. She took me into the Brig’s study which was the nearest room and held me till I stopped crying and talked to me about you getting married and about people having honeymoons which meant being on their own for a bit, and then she gave me a calendar – I remember it had
Timber Trades Journal
at the top of it – and she marked the day it was on it, and then marked the day you were coming home and gave me a red chalk to mark off the days – ten more of them – and I couldn’t
not
believe her then. That afternoon she took me to a very grand tea at Gunter’s with ices and hot chocolate and she bought me a bag of their special lemon drops to take home. I remembered all this because the curtains we were to choose were in the Brig’s study, and all the glass had gone from the front door and there was wood instead. That evening – after the treat at Gunter’s – the Duchy cut out a piece of linen for me to embroider a pyjama case for you, but I was rotten at embroidery and it never got finished. Anyway, I certainly didn’t want the blue bird curtains and Poll, who chose the white roses, suggested that I have blue velvet ones. It’s funny, Dad, you were in France then, but you did come back. And in the end, of course, you’ll come back again. But it
is
a long time that you’ve been gone this time, isn’t it? It’s no good my having a calendar because it might easily be more than another year. I go on writing this just as much for me as for you, because it helps me to remember you – I mean
more
of you. One of the difficult things about it being so long since you went – two years and nine months now – is that although, of course, I do think about you a lot, I seem to remember
fewer
things about you. I go over them again and again, but I keep feeling that there are other things I no longer remember. It’s as though you were walking slowly backwards from me into the distance. I
hate
it. If this is what people mean about their grief getting less, I don’t want it. I want to remember you as completely and sharply as I did the evening the man rang up to say you were missing; as much as when Pipette brought the amazing note you wrote me which I keep in the secret drawer of the desk Poll gave me. Do you remember when you took the skin off my hot milk and ate it? I often think of that.

This is Sunday. I don’t think I mentioned that Archie is here this weekend which is good because he seems to get on well with everyone and cheers people up, even poor Uncle Hugh who I think you would find awfully changed, Dad. He’s got rather quiet and fidgety – he’s always picking things up and putting them down again as though he’s surprised to find whatever it is in his hand, and even when he’s smiling or someone has made a joke, his eyes look shocked and a bit haunted. I think his heart is broken but Poll said the other day that she hoped he’d marry again. I should have thought at his age that this was very unlikely. The trouble is that with the war we don’t meet anyone much, and certainly nobody kind and faded which would be best for him I should think.

Once, I didn’t go home – well, several times, actually – for the weekend but one time I spent the whole weekend with Archie. It wasn’t a plan; it just turned out like that. He asked me to go to a film with him on Saturday afternoon. He didn’t
exactly ask
me: it was when he came to supper with Uncle Hugh and Poll and me and I said I was going to see what a weekend in London would be like and I must admit I said it would be fun to go to a film with him, and he said righty-ho, Saturday afternoon. But then on Friday evening when I got back to the house on my own because Poll had gone to Charing Cross to meet Uncle Hugh it all felt rather silent. I was feeling a bit gloomy because I’d forgotten to buy any more bread and there was only a very stale bit to have with my cheese ration, and I was creeping about in the dark putting up the blackout because the air-raid wardens are devilish about anybody showing a light and shout, ‘Put out that light!’ from the street and ring the bell to tell you again. Anyway, the telephone rang and I answered it and it was Archie. He said he supposed he’d interrupted me getting dressed for my party. What party? I said. He said, ‘I didn’t think you’d be staying up for the weekend unless you had a party.’

I told him I didn’t know anybody so I couldn’t be going to one, and he said, ‘Come to a very small party indeed with me then. Get a taxi and come to my flat any time after seven.’ Wasn’t that wonderfully kind and cheering of him? I missed Poll then because she’s so much better than I am at knowing what to wear for going out, but actually I’ve only got one decent dress that Zoë got me for Christmas which is bottle-green velveteen, a bit of a change from the dark blue one that I had for ages and this one has a square neck and sleeves just to my elbows so it is a bit more adult than the old blue one. I cut my hair to get rid of a perm that just went on being frizzy whenever it rained and, anyway, I couldn’t bear sleeping on those awful iron curlers that dig into your head at night so now it’s just straight again like it always was and Polly gave me an old tortoiseshell slide she found in a junk shop for Christmas, which is much nicer than it sounds. Polly usually helps me with my make-up and I had to have several goes at it. In the end I just used some green eyeshadow of Poll’s that doesn’t suit her so she wouldn’t mind, and her dark blue mascara which is very difficult to put on without getting the brush in your eyes and lipstick called Signal Red which it jolly well is only it comes off if I even eat a biscuit. I gave up rouge because my face went so red from rubbing things off – in fact, I had to put out the lights and hang my head out of the window to get my face back to its normal colour; which is actually a sort of khaki-fool colour, I mean, khaki mixed with cream, not really a good
face
colour at all. Poll is really lucky to be so beautifully pretty.

Archie has changed his flat to a much nicer one in South Kensington. It is in a tall dark red house looking onto a square but inside it is really nice. He has a gramophone like the Duchy’s with an enormous horn made of some black and gold stuff like papier-mâché, I think, and he has those triangular wooden needles that you have to clip to sharpen after each record. Very modern and jolly expensive, I should think. Anyway, he was playing it when I arrived. We had gins – I had lime in mine – while he finished playing that Schubert quartet that the Duchy loves so much. He said I looked very smart when he hugged me, so at least he noticed. He took me out to dinner at what he called his local restaurant: it was a Cypriot one where you get lamb chops and rice and then a delicious pudding of little fried honey balls and Turkish coffee – you have to be careful not to drink the muddy part. But we had a most interesting conversation about a new idea called the Welfare State invented by someone called Sir William Beveridge. It is going to mean that everything is much fairer and OK for everyone with free schools and free doctors and hospitals. I think it is an extremely good idea because charity is so patchy and although our family is rich compared to many, most people hardly have anything. We started talking about it because I said that when I earned money I planned to give half of it away to poor people (when I’d first thought this Neville heard and said I could give it to him as he was always poor). But Archie said that we would all pay more taxes which would mean we would be doing our share. He said he thought that after the war even Conservatives would see that things should be fairer and that if everybody had the same opportunities there would be far more people who were clever and useful. I asked him then if he was a socialist and he said, yes, he was, although he didn’t talk about that much at Home Place, which he described as a hotbed of Tories. He said he had a great respect for Mr Attlee and hoped he would be Prime Minister which I should have thought very unlikely as Mr Churchill is so deeply popular. After dinner, Archie said he’d take me home to Ladbroke Grove, but on the way there he said was I sleeping alone in the house, and when I said yes, he said he didn’t like the idea of that and perhaps I’d better stay with him. Of course it was far more enjoyable to do that, so I collected some things from there while he waited in the cab. We went back and he made some cocoa with dried milk which if you put sugar in was not too bad – well, he said that, but I thought it was delicious – and he asked me whether it was being nice in London. I told him then about it being not what I’d imagined – living with Uncle Hugh which doesn’t feel at all the same as having our own place would be. Also, I said it had made us realise that we didn’t
know
anyone much outside the family and he sympathised with that. I pointed out, for instance, that he was probably the first socialist I’d ever met, which is pretty feeble, considering my age. Then he said he would take me to dinner with some friends of his the next night – the man is a sculptor who lives with a Spanish woman. He met her when he was fighting in the Spanish Civil War against Franco. He’d known them before the war because they used to live in France. I asked if he’d known you, and Archie said he thinks you met once when you were staying with him, but he’s not sure. Then he said we’d better go to bed as we had a lot to do the next day. That was Friday. It was one of the best evenings of my life, and the best thing about it was that it wasn’t
just
that one evening – there was the whole of the next day.

In the morning we had rather burned toast and Marmite and tea and he asked me what I would have been doing if I’d been on my own and I said spend the morning in Charing Cross Road that is absolutely full of bookshops and many of them second-hand ones. Poll doesn’t ever want to do that; she likes shops that have some of everything in them. Archie said what a good idea, and we took a bus and went.