Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (18 page)

Here, she paused. Quite suddenly, the gap between the kind of day she had spent with Archie and how she felt about it seemed enormous. It had not seemed like that at the time; if it had, she would not even have got this far in her description of it to her father. It was now, sitting in her bed at Home Place writing very fast with her mind racing ahead of the words on paper, that she had got past those serenely happy hours browsing and searching through the rows of battered books propped against one another on the rickety tables in the bookshops, past the visit to the Redfern Gallery where Archie had made her look at pictures by a painter called Christopher Wood whom he very much admired, and lunch, spaghetti in an Italian restaurant where men ate with napkins tucked into their collars below their chins, to the moment when Archie opened a new packet of his cigarettes, started to take one and then said: ‘I’m so sorry, darling Clary, want one?’ And she had looked up from the proffered packet to the friendly attention of his eyes, had shaken her head and said: ‘Uncle Hugh has promised Poll and me gold watches if we don’t smoke before we’re twenty-one.’

‘That’s that then,’ he had answered. ‘How old are you now?’

‘I’ll be eighteen in August.’

‘Three and a half years to go. I keep forgetting how young you are.’

‘Seventeen and a half isn’t particularly
young
.’

‘Of course not. Well, I think you’re absolutely splendid for your age.’ He made his curious little suppressed croak of laughter which meant, she knew, that he was amused, but before she could feel hurt he pushed it over the top, teasing her.

‘Splendid,’ he repeated. ‘I mean, on your feet all the morning, got your own teeth, hearing unimpaired – you’re a
wonderful
old thing for your age.’

So. If she remembered
just
that it was the old Archie teasing the old Clary that would be familiar and simple. But what she discovered now, when she remembered it, was that other things seemed to have arrived, to
keep on
arriving with increasing density each time she went over that scene. They couldn’t be memories, because she hadn’t noticed them at all at the time – they must be her imagination – she was turning something real that had happened into something else. ‘I’m so sorry, darling Clary, want one?’ and then looking up from the cigarettes to his eyes, pale grey, affectionate, intent upon her. This was the bit that she kept returning to and each time his exact tone of voice, the expression in his eyes, the way that his long, narrow mouth twitched but did not quite smile became more sharply imprinted, bringing with it a shaft of happiness so unalloyed, so brilliant, so complete, that she lost all other senses. Recovering, she would reflect of this pure, violent happiness that it was entirely new to her; in all her life she could not remember anything comparable, and yet sometimes she had thought herself happy, or else she had not thought about it at all. But then she would want more of it and play the scene again. At the time, she had not felt anything, or anything very much; affection for Archie, gratitude for being treated as a grown-up and given the chance to choose whether she had a cigarette or not. But as the weeks went by, since that weekend, she began to recognise that she
had
been aware of something new and strange at that moment; it was as though, for a split second, she had sensed something approaching to knock her out, as swift and powerful as a tidal wave, and somehow managed to avoid it.

I got some jolly nice books [she wrote], all secondhand, so you might have read them. Novels:
Lost Horizon
by James Hilton – about Tibet –
Death of a Hero
by Richard Aldington – about the First World War –
Sparkenbroke
by Charles Morgan and
Evelina
by Fanny Burney. Then I got
Grey Wolf
in a Penguin edition about someone called Mustafa Kemel and Keats’ letters and a very
thin
book of poems by Housman. I had to stop there because I couldn’t carry any more and Archie, who was in his uniform, says that there is a law against naval officers carrying paper parcels. I suppose you knew that, Dad.

In the evening Archie took me to dinner with the sculptor and his Spanish wife. She isn’t actually his wife, but they live together. He is quite old (I mean, older than you and Archie) and he’s Jewish, which is why he left France. He had to go to the Isle of Man at first and so did Teresa because they were foreign. She is dark and not thin at all, but rather glamorous in a fruity sort of way; she reminded me of a black cherry with long dangly earrings. I do think earrings are pretty; it’s a pity people don’t wear them more. She cooked an amazing dish of mussels and rice and chicken: the rice was yellow and smelt and tasted delicious and we had wine. They live in one huge room that had a stove with glass doors to it. Louis, he’s called. Louis Kutchinsky. The most interesting thing about them is that they’re Communists which was very exciting as I’ve never met one before. He belongs to something called the Peace Pledge Union, but in spite of that, he’s quite keen on having us joined up with the Russians. Archie teased him about war being all right if the Russians were in it, and he said his opinions had changed since the news about what the Germans are doing to Jews in Poland, and everywhere else, he said. He said they were trying to exterminate them but they couldn’t be doing that, could they? I mean you can’t kill off a whole race of people – there must be thousands and thousands of them – how could they possibly do it, even if they were so wicked as to want to? I asked him if he was a religious Jew, and he said no, but that that didn’t stop him feeling Jewish any more, he said, than an English person would stop feeling English if they weren’t a Protestant. But mostly he and Archie talked (and he talked a jolly sight more than Archie), and I simply listened and Teresa sewed. He had a bad leg, like Archie – he got his in Spain – Archie said that between them they could run a three-legged race but he didn’t know what that was. Archie asked him what he was working on, and he said he’d given up sculpture because he had no commissions and the materials were difficult to come by so he had taken to drawing. ‘An encyclopaedia of hands,’ he said. He showed us a whole collection of drawings, mostly done with charcoal, of hands – clasped, clenched, praying, playing the piano, just lying on a table, sometimes the backs, sometimes palms, not the same person’s hands doing those things, but all kinds. They weren’t all in charcoal; some were in pencil and some in inks of different colours. There were dozens of them, and sometimes he’d had several goes on one page. Archie looked at them for ages and he didn’t talk while Archie was looking, but I noticed he watched him all the time to see what Archie thought and I could see he minded. Occasionally, Archie asked him whose hands they were and ‘a pianist’, ‘a surgeon I knew’, ‘the woman at the paper shop’, ‘a neighbour’s child’, ‘anyone who will lend me their hands,’ he said. At the end of looking, Archie said he admired them
profoundly
and it was a new kind of portraiture. When we left – which was pretty late – Mr Kutchinsky hugged Archie and then gave him a sort of terrier shake and said: ‘You should come to dinner at least once a week – my audience of one.’

Here she stopped again, remembering Archie taking her arm in the black street, walking to the King’s Road in search of a cab which did not materialise until they’d got so far, Archie said, it was easier to walk the whole way. He had told her about Louis, who he said was Hungarian, and Teresa, who he said was not married to him because she had been married when Louis met her, but her husband used to beat her up, so Louis had kidnapped her and brought her to France. They had had a child but it had died, and she couldn’t have any more, but he said they were happy together and well suited. Louis could be a demanding partner and she liked to look after him. Half of her had listened to this and half of her simply enjoyed the walk in the dark, empty streets with Archie limping beside her. ‘So there are your first Communists,’ he said. ‘Not so very different from other people.’

She wrote, ‘Oh, by the way, Dad, he
hadn’t
met you. He was very sorry that he hadn’t. He said he was looking forward to meeting you after the war. I thought that was nice of him.’

That wasn’t quite what she meant, she realised: it wasn’t nice of him to want to meet Dad, what had been – more than
nice
was the way in which he had accepted that after the war Dad would be there to meet. Sometimes about this, her heart failed her: it now seemed so long since he had vanished – and so long until the war could possibly come to an end. People talked about a Second Front, which meant invading France, but nothing ever happened about it, and even if it happened, it wouldn’t be the
end
of the war, although it might be the beginning of the end. What was it Mr Churchill had said some time ago? ‘Not the beginning of the end, but perhaps the end of the beginning’? She couldn’t remember exactly. The awful thing was that a lot of the time she got absolutely
sick
of the way the family listened to every news bulletin, and read the paper from cover to cover and then talked about what they had heard and read.

She didn’t want to write any more. The next day she and Archie had gone to Richmond Park and then they had made lunch in his flat of tinned steak and kidney pudding – absolutely delicious, she thought. Then Archie took her to a cinema in Oxford Street that showed old French films and they saw
La Fin du jour
with Jean Gabin, who she had never seen before, a marvellous film, and she thought that going to French films might be the best way of learning French. When they reached the Corner House at Marble Arch for an early supper, she asked Archie what he thought of that.

‘I think it would be a good idea if you both learned something else besides shorthand and typing,’ he said. ‘Polly ought to do some drawing. If she went to an art school – in the evenings, for instance – she’d meet some people of her age.’ What about me? she had thought, but she hadn’t said anything about that. Instead she had found herself saying, ‘Polly is so beautiful, she’ll just marry someone, I think. I don’t think she wants to be a painter really.’

And he had answered, ‘She is as pretty as paint, I have to agree.’

She had asked him then if he thought that beauty or prettiness was important, and he had said that it had its place. Then he had paused and looked at her consideringly: ‘But what stops it becoming a lethal kind of
yardstick
,’ he said, ‘is that everybody has different ideas about what constitutes either beauty or prettiness, or whatever you want to call it. It is one of nature’s little tricks for getting people to mate, but on the other hand I can’t imagine going overboard for a lady who had fourteen rings round her giraffe-like neck’ (they had been looking at ‘Believe it or not’ by Ripley in the
Sunday Express
at breakfast that day).

‘That doesn’t count. That’s something people do because it’s fashionable – like tight lacing or people in China having bound feet. I meant just how they are in the first place.’

‘They don’t often stay like that, though, do they? Of course you’re right – the giraffe ladies aren’t an example. Well done, Clary. But you, for instance, permed your hair not so long ago – I must say you look far better with it straight. And while we’re on the subject, I don’t think putting stuff on your face really suits you.’

‘That’s because you’re against make-up.’

‘No. I think it does suit some people—’

‘Polly looks lovely whether she wears it or not.’

‘Yes, I agree she does. But she doesn’t
need
it.’

‘What you mean,’ she said, feeling suddenly rather hopeless, ‘is that there are two kinds of people who it’s not worth doing things to – the fearfully beautiful ones and the ones like me.’

There was a short silence. They were sitting opposite each other at the small marble-topped table and she felt hot and miserable and the horrible beginnings of tears.

‘Clary, I wouldn’t want you to be in any way different. I like you exactly as you are. You look just right to me.’

‘You must have very bad taste in people, then,’ she said as rudely as she could manage.

‘That’s rather hard. Let me remind you – as I’m sure Miss Milliment would have put it because I bet you
haven’t
read him – of what Congreve said, or made one of his characters say, a man to a lady anyhow: “That she should admire him as much for the beauty he commends in her as if he himself was possessed of it.” Put that in your pipe and smoke it.’

She struggled with this for a moment: ‘You mean, she should admire him for having such discrimination? Well, I think you’re just trying to be
tactful
or something. Dad once said I was beautiful, and for a bit I jolly nearly believed him because, as you know, he has terrifically good taste in things – but actually he was just trying to make me feel – less –
ordinary
.’

She looked up and he was watching her.

‘And did he succeed?’

‘I told you, for a bit . . . I wouldn’t like you to think that I
envy
Poll – or grudge her being so marvellous to look at. It’s just that sometimes I wish—’ she shrugged to make it seem trivial, ‘well,
you
know. I mean, people will have to fall back on my character, won’t they, which is no better than Poll’s incidentally – in fact, it’s probably worse – but ordinary people have to have
better
characters to make up for looking ordinary. You know, like you said once about someone with a Cockney accent having to be better than someone without one to become an officer in the Navy. I’m not sure if I feel up to that.’

She fell silent, but he went on listening, so she said: ‘Once, when he was about six, I was playing that game with Neville where you have to say what you would most like to be. And I said I’d like to be kind and brave. And Neville stretched his eyes as though I’d told a whopping lie and then looked at the ceiling and said
he
would like to be rich and pretty. And immediately I felt that that was what I wanted to be, really, I’d just made up the other things to sound good.’