Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (20 page)

But there was worse to come.

‘Tell me,’ he said, leaning over the table towards her. ‘Tell me, how on earth can
any
decent woman – I nearly said
lady
– think for a moment of falling in love with a greasy little worm like that? Let alone . . .’ here his complexion became suffused with embarrassment, ‘let alone contemplating getting – physically involved with such a creature? Can you at all understand it? I mean, am I being obtuse, or what?’

Fortunately, he did not seem to expect an answer, was so immersed in angry rumination that any question was rhetorical; all she had to do, she thought, was sit and endure the floodgates of his rage and shock – for beyond all his clumsy, cliché-ridden language she could sense, as her Red Cross experience had taught her, that he
was
in shock – until somehow lunch would be over. She stopped trying to eat, lit a cigarette, stared at her plate and tried to let the ultimate humiliation of hearing somebody who she at least
thought
she had loved being described in terms that were compounded of coarseness and brutal reality wash over her. This numb, mindless reverie came abruptly to an end because he seemed to be asking something . . .

‘. . . what you think I should do?’

‘
Do?
What do you mean?’

‘I mean, about talking to her. I must confess that I really don’t know what would be the best way to tackle it.’

She looked at him in astonishment. His anger seemed to have evaporated; he had now a nervously furtive, conciliatory air. Before she could reply, he exclaimed, with wholly unconvincing spontaneity: ‘I know! Well, that is, if you feel you could . . . have a word with her?’

He stuck at it throughout all protestations: what should she say? What did he want her to say? What, in fact, did he want? He thought she might find out what Jessica really
felt
– perhaps she might even talk to the feller’s wife – get her to remove him from the scene or something. Beneath all the earlier bombast of which there was now no sign, she recognised that he was anxious, craven, and very much afraid. In the end, and in order to escape, she said she would have to think about it, and he wrote out his address and telephone number at Woodstock so that she could get in touch with him. By the time they parted outside the Arts Theatre Club it was four o’clock and she had to run to Charing Cross to catch her train.

Neville and Lydia, who had most mistakenly complained of not having anything to do, had been sent to fill up the drinking trough for the horses in the field. This entailed filling two buckets, one each, from the hose outside the stables and staggering through the arch in the wall, along the narrow cinder path past the potting shed, the compost heap and the broken-down kennel, along a grassy track that had huge sun-baked ruts in it to the trough just inside the gate that led to the horses’ field – it was a long walk. They had done four journeys and the trough was still only half full.

‘It’s partly because Marigold is drinking it all up behind our backs,’ Neville complained.

They had had their usual, almost mechanical grumble about the task immediately after they had been told to do it – gone through the unfairness of being made to work in their holidays, especially on such a hot afternoon when nobody else was, they betted. They went contemptuously through the grown-ups’ indolent and paltry activities: the Duchy machining, Aunt Zoë reading to ill people at the nursing home, Aunt Rachel sewing, Aunt Dolly (Bully)
having a rest
– they rolled their eyes at each other in a paroxysm of sarcastic amusement – Aunt Villy off in the
car
somewhere to fetch something or other . . . ‘They’re all sitting
down
,’ Neville said.

‘Hardly exhausting, my dear,’ Lydia agreed. ‘Why doesn’t Mr Wren do this? Wait for me, I’ve got to change arms.’

‘He doesn’t do anything except chop a tiny bit of wood and go to the pub in the evenings. Tonbridge has to fetch him home sometimes because he can’t walk properly.’

‘He’s intoxicated with drink,’ Lydia said.

‘But what does he do all day? I think we ought to find out.’

‘Oh, Nev! He can be quite frightening – especially if you wake him when he’s asleep.’

‘Well, he can’t run as fast as we can on his spindly little legs.’

They had reached the field again. The old chestnut was drinking from the trough. She put up her head suddenly and knocked Lydia’s bucket over so that the water ran into the hard-baked ground and disappeared at once.

‘Oh, God!’

‘You should have got her head out of the way first. We shall have to do this practically the whole afternoon and you’ll have to do an extra one.’

‘I might not have to.’

‘We’ll see,’ Neville said in Ellen’s voice.

They had begun trailing back, easier with empty buckets, and they were free to notice other things; the old buddleia by the kitchen garden gate, for instance, that was swarming with butterflies; Flossy, asleep on a most unsuitably narrow piece of wall with her tail hanging down, ‘like the Speckled Band,’ Neville said – he had become very keen on Sherlock Holmes. When, at last, they got back to the stable door with the hose that had been wired onto the tap beside it, they both simply went and sat on the mounting block for a rest.

‘Well, this afternoon settles one thing. When I’m grown up I shall be a freelance.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It means you don’t have to do anything you don’t like.’

‘But what does it
mean
?’

He hadn’t the slightest idea, but he was damned if he would let her know that.

‘There is a South American snake,’ he began in his lecture voice, ‘extremely poisonous called a fer de lance. It comes from that. The snake only bites people if he feels like it, you see.’

She knew that he was extremely interested in snakes and read everything he could find about them, so she accepted this at once. ‘I expect in France a freelance would actually
be
fer de lance,’ she said. ‘I shall ask Miss Milliment.’

‘I shouldn’t, if I were you. Miss Milliment’s knowledge of reptiles has always struck me as rudimentary.’ He was using another voice now – a master at his school, probably. She wanted to point out to him that copying unknown people’s voices wasn’t very funny, but she wanted to keep on the right side of him because then he might waive her doing the extra bucket.

‘What do you think of Mussolini?’

‘I hardly ever think of him and, anyway, now he’s deposed he doesn’t count any more. Listen, I’ve got an idea.’

Her heart sank. She knew it would be to do with Mr Wren. It was.

‘I’m going to creep up the ladder into the hayloft, and if he’s asleep, I’m going to give him a little squirt from the hose and ask him why
he
isn’t carrying water to the horses. You can watch.’

‘Supposing he
isn’t
asleep? He might . . .’ she mouthed the rest of the sentence, ‘he might be
listening
to us.’ She imagined him listening, smiling his grim, tight little smile and getting ready to pounce on Neville as he reached the top of the ladder . . . ‘He might topple you off, ’ she said.

‘I’ll be careful. I’ll call out to him first. If he answers, I won’t go right up the ladder.’

‘Let’s finish our job first.’ Perhaps by then it would be tea-time, and Neville was always hungry so he wouldn’t miss that.

‘You can go on, if you want to.’ He got off the block and picked up the hose. The stable door was ajar. He pushed it open and disappeared into the gloom.

‘Mr Wren! I say, Mr Wren!’

She heard him calling. There was a silence. She got off the block and followed him.

‘Unwind the hose for me, I’m going up.’

She did as she was told, and then her fear prompted her to look in the loose-boxes in case Mr Wren was hiding in one of them. But they were bare except for an old nest in one of the iron mangers bracketed to the wall. The walls were whitewashed and laced with ambitious cobwebs, as big as fishing nets at Hastings; they had not been repainted for a long time. She looked into all four boxes. Each had a small, round window placed high in the wall – no good for a horse to look out – and most of the glass was cracked and dirty; a dusty twilight prevailed. She could hear that Neville had reached the top of the ladder: his footsteps were loud on the boards of the loft above.

‘He’s not here,’ he called. ‘He must be out. Take the hose, could you?’

Going back to the foot of the ladder, she noticed the tack room door. It was shut: he might easily be there. As he took the hose she pointed silently to the tack room and then moved towards the stable door so that she could escape if Mr Wren suddenly pounced out at them. But he didn’t.

When Neville was down again, he regained the hose. ‘I bet that’s where he is all the time,’ he said.

The latch on the door was stiff and creaked as he lifted it.

‘Yes! He’s asleep, as usual.’

She joined him, staying in the doorway. The tack room had a brick floor. There was a small iron grate with a mantelpiece on which was propped a cracked mirror. The walls beside it had faded rosettes pinned to them that Louise would have won in her gymkhana days. The window had a piece of sacking nailed over it, but some of it had rotted so that it only made half of a curtain. The room had a different smell from the rest of the stables: damp leather and musty old clothes. Mr Wren lay on a camp bed in the far corner. He was partly covered by a horse blanket, but his legs, covered in brown leather gaiters and dark toffee-coloured boots, stuck out.

‘Mr Wren!’ Neville said in a teasing voice.

‘Neville, don’t—’ she began to say, but it was too late. He gave her one of his bland, gleaming looks that she knew meant total defiance, squeezed the trigger on the hose and played it lightly over the reclining figure. It did not move.

‘He
is
fast asleep,’ Neville said, but he let her take the hose from him.

But she had gone right up to the bed.

‘He
isn’t
,’ she said. ‘His eyes are wide open. Do you think he’s possibly – you know –
dead
?’

‘Gosh!
I
don’t know. He doesn’t look pale enough. Feel him.’

‘
You
do it.’

He leaned over and put his hand gingerly on the old man’s forehead. There were drops of water on it, but the skin felt cold. ‘I’d better try and feel his pulse,’ he said, trying to sound calm, but his voice was shaking. He pulled the blanket back: Wren lay in his dirty striped collarless shirt, his braces hitched to his breeches; his right hand was clutching a yellowing piece of paper. When Neville picked up his wrist, the piece of paper slipped sideways and they saw it was an old photograph out of a newspaper of their grandfather on a horse whose bridle was held by a young man in a tweed cap. ‘Mr William Cazalet on Ebony with his groom,’ it said. His wrist, just bones with skin round them, was cold as well. When he let go, it dropped back onto the bed so quickly that it almost made him start. Tears rushed to his eyes.

‘He must be dead,’ he said.

‘Oh,
poor
Mr Wren! He must have died awfully suddenly if he didn’t even have time to shut his eyes.’ Lydia was crying, which he was glad of because it stopped him.

‘We must go and tell them,’ he said.

‘I think we ought to say a prayer for him first. I think the people who find people who are dead
ought
to do something like that.’

‘Well,
you
can stay and pray if you like, I’m going to find Aunt Rach.’

‘Oh, no, I don’t think I will,’ she said hastily, ‘I’ll come with you and pray on the way.’

They found Aunt Rach and told her and she and Villy went to see him and then Dr Carr came and then a black van from Hastings took Mr Wren away, and during all this Neville and Lydia were told to keep out of the way, ‘have a nice game of tennis or squash or something’. This infuriated both of them. ‘When
will
they stop treating us as though we were children?’ Lydia exclaimed in her most die-away grown-up’s voice.

‘If it hadn’t been for us he might have stayed there for days and weeks and months. Even possibly
years.
Until he was just a skeleton in his clothes,’ Neville said, and immediately wondered where the rest of him went.