Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (2 page)

She had announced her intention of clearing out her mother’s things when that question had been mooted, had refused absolutely any help in the matter – ‘at least I can do that,’ she had said – and Aunt Rach, who was beginning to seem marginally better than the rest of them, had said of course.

The dressing table was littered with her mother’s silverbacked brushes and a tortoiseshell comb, a cut-glass box containing hairpins that she had ceased to use after having her hair cut off, and a small ring stand on which hung two or three rings, including the one Dad had given her when they were engaged: a cabochon emerald surrounded by small diamonds and set in platinum. She looked at her own ring – also an emerald – that Dad had given her in the autumn last year. He does love me, she thought, he simply doesn’t realise how old I am. She didn’t want to hate
him
. All these things on the dressing table couldn’t just go to jumble. She decided to pack them in a box and keep them for a bit. The few pots of cold cream and powder and dry rouge had better be thrown away. She put them in the waste-paper basket.

The chest of drawers had underclothes and two kinds of nightdresses: the ones Dad had given her that she never wore, and the ones she bought that she did. Dad’s ones were pure silk and chiffon with lace and ribbons, two of green and one of a dark coffee-coloured satin. The ones she had bought were cotton or winceyette, with little flowers on them – rather Beatrix Potter nightdresses. She ploughed on: bras, suspender belts, camisoles, camiknickers, petticoats in locknit Celonese, all a sort of dirty peachy colour, silk stockings and woollen ones, some Viyella shirts, dozens of handkerchiefs in a case Polly had made years ago with Italian quilting on a piece of tussore silk. At the back of the underclothes drawer was a small bag, like a brush and comb bag, in which was a tube that said Volpar Gel and a small box with a funny little round rubber thing in it. She put these back in the bag and into the waste-paper basket. Also in that drawer was a very flat square cardboard box inside which, wrapped in discoloured tissue paper, lay a semi-circular wreath made of silver leaves and whitish flowers that crumbled when she touched them. On the lid of the box was a date, written in her mother’s hand. ‘12 May 1920.’ It must have been her wedding wreath, she thought, trying to remember the funny picture of the wedding on her grandmother’s dressing table with her mother in an extraordinary dress like a tube with no waist. She put the box aside, it not being possible to throw away something that had been treasured for so long.

The bottom drawer contained baby things. The christening robe that Wills was the last to have worn – an exquisite white lawn frock embroidered with clover that Aunt Villy had made – an ivory teething ring, a clutch of tiny lace caps, a silver and coral rattle that looked as though it had come from India, a number of pale pink unworn knitted things, made, she guessed, for the baby that died, and a large, very thin yellowing cashmere shawl. She was at a loss; eventually she decided to put these things away until she could bring herself to ask one of the aunts what to do with them.

Another afternoon gone. Soon it would be tea-time, and after that, she would take over Wills, play with him, bath him and put him to bed. He is going to be like Neville, she thought – only worse, because at four he’ll remember her for a long time, and Neville never knew his mother at all. So far it had not been possible to explain to Wills. Of course they had tried –
she
had tried. ‘Gone away,’ he would repeat steadily. ‘Dead in the sky?’ he would suggest, but he still went on looking for her – under sofas and beds, in cupboards and whenever he could escape, he made a journey to this empty room. ‘Airplane,’ he’d said to her yesterday after repeating the sky bit. Ellen had said she’d gone to heaven, but he had confused this with Hastings and wanted to meet the bus. He did not cry about her, but he was very silent. He sat on the floor fiddling listlessly with his cars, played with his food but did not eat it and tried to hit people if they picked him up. He put up with her, but Ellen was the only person he seemed to want at all. In the end he’ll forget her, I suppose, she thought. He’ll hardly remember what she looked like; he’ll know he lost his mother, but he won’t know who she was. This seemed sad in a quite different way and she decided not to think about it. Then she wondered whether not thinking about something was the next worst thing to not talking about it, because she certainly didn’t want to be like her awful family who, it seemed to her, were doing their damnedest to go about their lives as though nothing had happened. They hadn’t talked about it before, and they didn’t now; they didn’t believe in God, as far as she could see, since none of them went to church, but they had all – with the exception of Wills and Ellen who stayed to look after him – gone to the funeral: stood in the church and said prayers and sung hymns and then trooped outside to the place where the deep hole had been dug and watched while two very old men had lowered the coffin into the bottom of it. ‘I am the Resurrection and Life,’ said the Lord, ‘and he who believeth in me shall not die.’ But she
hadn’t
believed, and nor, as far as she knew, had they. So what had been the point? She had looked across the grave at Clary who stood staring downwards, the knuckles of one hand crammed into her mouth. Clary, also, was unable to talk about it, but she certainly did not behave as though nothing had happened. That awful last evening – after Dr Carr had come, and given her mother an injection and she had been taken in to see her (‘She is unconscious,’ they said, ‘she doesn’t feel anything now,’ announcing it as though it was some kind of
achievement
), and she had stood listening to the shallow, stertorous breaths, waiting and waiting for her mother’s eyes to open so that something could be said, or at least there could be some mutual, silent farewell . . .

‘Give her a kiss, Poll,’ her father said, ‘and then go, darling, if you would.’ He was sitting on the other side of the bed holding one of her mother’s hands, which rested, palm upwards, against his black silk stump. She stooped and kissed the dry, tepid forehead and left the room.

Outside it was Clary who took her by the hand and led her to their room, flung her arms around her and cried and cried, but she was so full of rage that she could not cry at all. ‘At least you could say goodbye to her!’ Clary kept saying in her search for comfort of some kind. But that was the point – or another of them – she
hadn’t
been able to say goodbye: they’d waited until her mother was past recognizing or even seeing her . . . She had extricated herself from Clary, saying that she was going for a walk, she wanted to be alone, and Clary had agreed at once that of course she would want that. She had put on her gum boots and mac and walked out into the steely, drizzling dusk, up the steps in the bank to the little gate that led into the copse behind the house.

She walked until she reached the large fallen tree that Wills and Roly used for some mysterious game and sat upon a piece of the trunk nearest the torn-up roots. She had thought that here she would cry, would give way to ordinary grief, but all that came out of her were loud, gasping sighs of fury and impotence. She should have made a scene, but how could she have done that in the face of her father’s misery? She should have insisted upon seeing her that morning after Dr Carr had left and said that he would come back in the afternoon – but how could she have known what he would do when he came?
They
must have known but, as usual, they had not told her. She should have realised that her mother was going to die at any moment when they got Simon back early from school. He had arrived that morning, and
he
had seen her, then she had said that she wanted to see Wills and they had said that that was enough until later in the day. But poor Simon hadn’t known that it was the last time for him either. He hadn’t realised; he simply thought she was terribly ill, and all through lunch he had told them about one of his friends’ mothers who had almost died of an appendix and miraculously recovered and after lunch Teddy had taken him out on a long bicycle ride from which they hadn’t yet returned. If I had spoken to her – if I had said
anything
, she thought, she might have heard me. But she would have wanted to be alone with her to do that. She had wanted to say that she would look after Dad, and Wills, and most of all, she had wanted to say, ‘Are you all right? Can you bear to die, whatever it means?’ Perhaps they had cheated her mother as well. Perhaps she would simply not wake up – would never know her own moment of death. This awful likelihood had made her cry. She had cried for what seemed a long time, and when she got back to the house they had taken her mother away.

Since then, she had not cried at all – had got through the first, awful evening when they had sat through a dinner that nobody had wanted to eat, watching her father trying to cheer Simon up by asking him about his sports at school until Uncle Edward took over and told stories about
his
school; an evening when everyone seemed to be searching for safe ground, for wan and innocuous little jokes that you weren’t meant to laugh at, but were rather to get them through from minute to minute with the trappings of normality; and although underneath this she could detect the oblique and shallow shafts of affection and concern, she had refused to accept either. The day after the funeral, Uncle Edward had taken her father and Simon off to London, Simon to be put on a train to go back to school. ‘Must I go back?’ he had said, but only once as they had said of course he must, it would soon be the holidays and he mustn’t miss the end-of-term exams. Archie, who had come down for the funeral, proposed after dinner that they play Pelman Patience on the floor in the morning room, ‘You too, Polly,’ and of course Clary joined them. It was freezing cold because the fire had gone out. Simon didn’t mind – he said it was just like school, everywhere except the san, which you only got into if you were covered with spots or nearly dead, but Clary fetched cardigans for them, and Archie had to be dressed in an old overcoat of the Brig’s, the muffler Miss Milliment had made that had not been considered up to standard to send to the Forces and some mittens that the Duchy used for practising the piano.

‘The office I work in is boiling hot,’ he said, ‘it’s turned me into an old softy.
Now
, all I want is a walking stick. I can’t sit on my haunches like you lot.’ So he sat in a chair with his bad leg stretched out stiffly, and Clary turned the cards he pointed at.

That had been a kind of respite; Archie played with such ferocious determination to win that they all became infected, and when Simon did win a game he flushed with pleasure. ‘Damn!’ Archie said. ‘Dammit! One more go and I’d have cleaned up.’

‘You’re not a very good loser,’ Clary had observed lovingly; she was no good at that herself.

‘I’m a wonderful winner, though. Really nice about it, and as I usually win hardly anyone sees my bad side.’

‘You can’t win
all
the time,’ Simon said. It was funny how Archie behaved about games in the kind of way that made them say grown-up things to
him
, Polly had noticed.

But later, when she was coming out of the bathroom, she found Simon hanging about in the passage outside.

‘You could have come in. I was only cleaning my teeth.’

‘It’s not that. I wondered if you could – could you come to my room for a minute?’

She followed him down the passage to the room that he usually shared with Teddy.

‘The thing is,’ he said again, ‘you won’t tell anyone, or laugh or anything, will you?’

Of course she wouldn’t.

He took off his jacket and began loosening his tie.

‘I have to put something on them, otherwise they hurt against my collar.’ He had unbuttoned his grey flannel shirt and she saw that his neck was studded with pieces of dirty sticking plaster. ‘You’ll have to take them off to see,’ he said.

‘It will hurt.’

‘It’s best if you do it quickly,’ he said, and bent his head.

She began cautiously, but soon realised that that wasn’t kind, and by the time she’d got to the seventh piece, she was holding down the skin of his neck with two fingers and tearing quickly with the other hand. A crop of festering spots was revealed – either large pimples or small boils, she didn’t know which.

‘The thing is, they probably need popping. Mum used to do it for me, and then she put some marvellous stuff on them and sometimes they just went away.’

‘You ought to have proper plasters with a dressing under them.’

‘I know. She gave me a box to go back to school with, but I’ve used them all up. And of course I can’t pop them – can’t see them to do it. I couldn’t ask Dad. I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Of course I don’t. Do you know what she put on them?’

‘Just marvellous stuff,’ he said vaguely. ‘Vick, do you think?’

‘That’s for people’s chests. Look, I’ll go and get some cotton wool and proper plasters and anything else I think might be good. Won’t be a sec.’

The medicine cupboard in the bathroom had a roll of Elastoplast that had yellow lint on one side of it, but the only stuff she could find to put on the spots was friar’s balsam with hardly any left in the bottle. It would have to do.

‘I’ve got another stye coming as well,’ he said when she got back to him. He was sitting on his bed in his pyjamas.

‘What did she put on that?’

‘She used to rub them with her wedding ring and sometimes they went away.’

‘I’ll do the spots first.’

It was a disgusting job, made worse because she knew she was hurting him; some of the spots were oozing, but some simply had hard, shiny yellow heads that eventually spurted pus. He only flinched once, but when she apologised, he simply said, ‘Oh, no. Just get all the stuff out you can.’

‘Wouldn’t Matron do these for you?’

‘Lord, no! She hates me anyway, and she’s nearly always in a bate. She really only likes Mr Allinson – the PT master – because he’s got muscles all over him, and a boy called Willard whose father is a lord.’