Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (21 page)

‘Actually, they would have found out because Edie takes him a plate of dinner with a lid on it every day. She would have noticed the plates piling up,’ Lydia said. She was wondering what happened to the
body
part of people. But I shan’t ask Neville, she thought. She bet he wouldn’t know, and would simply
make
something horrible
up
. By mutual consent, they went through the green baize door to the kitchen, where they regaled the servants – a most satisfactory audience – with an extremely dramatic account of the affair.

‘. . . and what we were both wondering,’ Neville said when eventually they could think of nothing more to tell, ‘is how do you
shut
a dead person’s eyes?’

Mrs Cripps said that she didn’t think that was a very nice question, but Lizzie, in her rather hoarse whisper, used when she (rarely) conversed in front of Mrs Cripps, said that you put pennies on their eyelids.

A really useful thing to know, Lydia said, when they were washing their hands for supper, but Neville said not awfully, because they didn’t come across dead people very often.

‘I’m thirteen,’ he said, ‘nearly, and this is the first one I’ve ever met. And Clary hasn’t ever. She
will
be mad with jealousy.’

Lydia, who had been feeling it for some time, said that she was shocked by how heartless he was being about poor Mr Wren.

‘I’m not actually heart
less
, but I have to admit that I don’t feel very heart
ful
about him. I’m sorry for
him
he’s dead, but I don’t feel sorry for
me
, that is.’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ Lydia said. ‘He did go about in a sort of silent bad temper most of the time. But Mummy says that he was awfully sad about the Brig having a car instead of horses to go about on. Especially when the Brig got too blind to go riding. I can see that those sort of things blighted his life.’

His funeral happened a week later, and the Brig and the Duchy and Rachel and Villy all went to it.

In September, it was time for Zoë to make the visit to her mother in the Isle of Wight again. She went every three months, stayed three or four days, or a week if she could bear it. In the spring and summer, she took Juliet, but as Juliet grew older, taking her became more of a problem. Her mother could not deal with a small, active child for more than about half an hour, and Jules, at three, was far too young to be left to herself, so Zoë found it increasingly difficult to divide her time between them to the satisfaction of either.

This time, Ellen had agreed to look after her, and Villy was going to be there to keep an eye on things.

‘I’ll only stay three days,’ Zoë said.

The Duchy had once suggested that Zoë might like to have her mother stay at Home Place, but Zoë – appalled at the idea – had quickly said that her mother couldn’t travel so far alone, and that if she, Zoë, was going to fetch her, she might as well stay with her, and the Duchy, who understood perfectly that for some reason Zoë did not want her mother to come, and also knew that the older one got the less one wanted to move from familiar surroundings, had immediately desisted.

Now she had packed – winter nightdress because Cotter’s End, the cottage that she was going to, owned by Mummy’s friend Mrs Witting, was always cold, hot water bottle because the bed she slept in there seemed most of the year to be damp – she had never got over her first visit when steam had risen from it after she had put her bottle into it – a packet of ginger biscuits since meals were dainty in the extreme, and a mac in case any of the windy walks she went for when she felt the need to escape were wet. She had also a box of marshmallows for her mother whose favourite sweet they had always been. She took sewing and knitting and
Anna Karenina
, a novel that Rupert had introduced her to just before he had been called up and that she had, to her surprise, enjoyed very much. She always took some such book with her on these occasions to absorb her during the long evenings after her mother and Maud had gone to bed. She took a bottle of sherry for Maud, as every time she went a small sherry party was arranged so that she could be shown off to neighbours and friends. This occasion entailed a dress and a precious pair of stockings – she only had two unworn pairs left.

The case, when full, was horribly heavy and, with the war, there were hardly any porters, but Tonbridge carried it for her onto the train to London.

It was a relief to be on her way. Leaving Jules was always hard; when she had been smaller, Jules had hardly noticed, it was
she
who had suffered. Now, in fact all of this year, Jules minded if she even went to London for the day, although Ellen said that she settled down very quickly afterwards. And with Wills and Roly, she really wasn’t an only child. Although she will be
my
only child, I suppose, she thought. The prospect of being on her own for several uninterrupted hours on end, practically the only aspect of these journeys that she looked forward to, had begun: she could afford the luxury of thinking only of herself, in terms that various members of the Cazalet family would brand either selfish, or morbid, or both. What was to become of her? She was twenty-eight – she could not spend the rest of her life at Home Place, working as a part-time amateur nurse, looking after Jules, helping the Duchy, making and mending clothes, washing, ironing, looking after the invalids of the house – the Brig and Aunt Dolly – listening to interminable bulletins of news about the war on the wireless. The war, which everyone said was likely to be over in a year or two, would finish some time after the Second Front was launched, although nobody expected that to be before next spring; however, the end, which had once seemed unimaginable, was definitely in sight. What should she do then? Years of adapting herself to the continuous warm throb of family life that her in-laws seemed to find so natural and necessary, had sapped her initiative; the thought of going back to the house in Brook Green on her own with Jules seemed bleak. For she no longer expected that Rupert would come back, and in the train, she felt free to acknowledge this. At home, she was surrounded by people who, even if they secretly agreed with her, could not admit it; if by nothing else, they were all in thrall to Clary’s unwavering faith that he was alive. This could only stop with the end of the war, when he did not come back and even Clary would have to believe that he was dead. She had, of course, felt a wonderful relief when that Frenchman had brought the news of him, and the messages for her and Clary. She had wept with excitement and joy. But that was two years ago – two years without a sign that he was still alive. This summer the head of the French Resistance had been tortured to death by the Gestapo. It had been on the nine o’clock news; nobody had said a word, but the room became full of unnameable anxieties. She remembered wondering how long anyone would continue to hide him if being found out meant that they risked torture before death. Clary had not been present on this occasion.

Since then, she had tried, and usually succeeded, to put all thoughts of him out of her mind. She would never, never have admitted this to any of the family, as she knew they would either not believe her, or would think that she was unnaturally cold and selfish. Perhaps she was, she now thought. But the fact remained that she was in what seemed to her an interminable limbo: she was not a widow, nor what the family, satirizing the Brig, called a splendid little woman whose husband was a prisoner of war. She might be any of these, indeed, must by the nature of things be one of them, but what could she do or feel when she did not know which? So she had taken refuge in the present, the minutiae of daily wartime life that was full enough of mundane problems to occupy and fatigue her. Her escape had become reading novels – preferably long, old ones. There was a number of them to be found in the house, carelessly stuffed into shelves all over the place; they had never been arranged and nobody knew where any particular book might be, except the girls who had their own bookshelves in their room, so each novel she read was a discovery, sometimes deeply enjoyable, sometimes almost unreadably dull. As, to begin with, she had the simple idea that all these books, being classics, must therefore be good, she was confounded by the struggle she had to get through some of them. A conversation with Miss Milliment, however, altered this sweeping view: through her she discovered that the nineteenth century had its crop of pot boilers, books that Miss Milliment described as being like the curate’s egg (did she not know that saying? it meant good in parts), novels that had been admired for their sociological significance, as well as some masterpieces, ‘although, sometimes, masterpieces, as I’m sure you know, can also be boring’. After that, she would ask Miss Milliment about the books she found, before she embarked upon them. ‘One has also to remember,’ she had remarked in her gentle, diffident voice, ‘that even very
good
writers will produce work of varying quality, so you may admire one novel very much and feel nothing for another.’ She wondered whether, if there had not been a war, and if Rupert had not gone away, she would ever have found out that she enjoyed reading novels – probably not.

Archie had asked her to lunch with him on her way through London, but she had some shopping to do for her mother and it had been arranged that she should lunch with him on her homeward journey instead. It would be nice to have Archie to herself, she thought, and really exciting to lunch in a restaurant. She had packed her new green tweed skirt and the jumper she had made to match it for the occasion. She
liked
Archie, although she did not find him attractive – thank goodness, she thought now, because falling in love with one’s husband’s best friend would obviously be a very stupid thing to do and ever since the ghastly incident (it had shrunk, with time, to that) with Philip Sherlock, she had shied away from the very idea of flirting with anyone. No, Archie was almost family now; he knew all about everybody because they all confided in him: he alone knew that she thought Rupert was dead and did not make her feel either guilty or heartless about it.

In order to buy the particular bust bodices and camisoles that her mother wanted, she had to go either to Ponting’s in Kensington High Street, or to Gaylor and Pope in Marylebone. Her mother had said that if one shop did not have what she wanted, the other was almost certain to, presenting the alternative as though this would make the task easier. In fact, the shops were so far apart that without a car she would not have time to visit both; she chose Ponting’s because she could go all the way there on a number nine bus, a long ride that cost fourpence. She left her luggage at Charing Cross. Kensington Gardens looked far larger and more like a country park with all its iron railings gone. She remembered the boring walks that she had occasionally been taken on by a collection of people whose names she could hardly remember who looked after her when her mother was at work, and then wondered whether
she
would take Jules there – to sail a boat, perhaps, on the Round Pond, or to feed birds at the Serpentine. But I expect I’ll have to have a job of some kind, she thought. The parallel between her mother’s life and her own struck her now with a sudden force. There had been glancing blows before, but she had managed to ward them off; now her own life seemed horribly to imitate her mother’s in every respect. Her mother had been widowed in the last war. She, Zoë, had been the only child. When her mother had finally retired from the cosmetics firm for which she had worked for nearly twenty years, she had received three hundred pounds and a silver tray meant for the use of calling cards. She remembered her mother’s pathetic attempts at finding some male companionship (no doubt, with the hope of marriage), and her own stony sabotage of them. Ever since Zoë could remember, her mother had always, as she used to call it, ‘fussed’ over her, making her clothes, brushing her hair a hundred times every night, teaching her to look after her appearance, sending her to schools that, looking back on it, she must have found it a struggle to afford, and then, when Zoë had married Rupert, selling the small mansion flat which had been their home and moving to an even smaller one. And she, who had grown up taking everything her mother gave her for granted, had also grown up as much in love with her own appearance as her mother could ever have been with it. Her mother had brought her up to feel that
she
was the important one, the beauty who would go far. At school, it had been much the same. The other girls had envied her her lovely clear skin, her shining hair that curled naturally, her long legs and her green eyes; they had
envied
her but she had also been adored – spoiled – given the best parts in the plays at the end of term, introduced to parents visiting the school; some besotted girls had even offered to do her maths homework. She must not bring Jules up like that, she thought. Jules must go to a school where she would
learn
things. Four years of living with the Cazalet family had taught her that they counted appearance as nothing at all; it was never referred to, and with the Duchy, at least, there was the inference that vanity about one’s looks or indeed anything else, was out of the question. She thought of Jules, who had the same thick, shining dark hair, the same creamy skin, the same slanting, moth-like eyebrows. Only her eyes were different as they were blue, like Rupert’s, like most of the Cazalets’. She had been, and was now, the prettiest baby Zoë had ever seen, but that made no difference in the family. Ellen called her a little madam when she had her tempers; she was treated exactly the same as Wills and Roly. ‘How would you like it if someone took your teddy and threw it out of the window?’ she had heard Ellen saying one day. ‘You’d be cross, wouldn’t you, and it would make you cry. Well, you mustn’t do things to other people that you know you would not like them to do to you.’ Nobody had ever said anything like that to her. If I hadn’t met Rupert and all his family, I might never have grown up at all, she thought. She felt so different from the spoiled, vain, shallow nineteen-year-old who had married Rupert. Now, in two years, she would be thirty, her youth would be gone and nobody would want to marry a middle-aged woman with a child – thirty had always seemed to her the beginning of middle age.