Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (24 page)

THE FAMILY

December 1943

‘Darling! Are those the only trousers you’ve got?’

‘Sort of. I’ve got some breeches for work.’

‘But you must have had those for years! They’re about six inches too short.’

Christopher looked down his legs to the gap between the end of his trews and the beginning of his socks – full of holes, but he hoped his mother wouldn’t realise that – to his uncomfortable shoes that he’d also had for years, hardly ever worn and that were now far too tight.

‘They are a bit short,’ he said, hoping that agreement would end the matter.

‘You can’t possibly go to Nora’s wedding in them! And your jacket’s too short in the sleeves.’

‘They always
are
with me,’ he said patiently.

‘Well, it’s too late to
buy
you anything. I’ll see if Hugh has something he could lend you. You’re about the same height.’ But nobody could be thinner, she thought, as she went downstairs to find Hugh.

They were in Hugh’s house, which he had kindly made available for any of the Castle family (Polly and Clary had gone to stay with Louise) for the night before the wedding. All the family, that is, excepting Raymond, who had rung to say he couldn’t make it, but would take an early train in the morning. Angela had not arrived yet, but she was coming out to dinner with them – all arranged by kind Hugh. Which was a godsend, because she certainly couldn’t have relied upon Villy to be of the slightest help. She suspected that it was Villy who had persuaded Raymond to take such a hard line about her returning to Frensham instead of remaining in London. The excuse that the house was needed for Louise seemed to her absurd: Michael Hadleigh had quite enough money to rent or even buy a house for Louise and had no need of the Rydal house, but it had been left jointly to her and Villy, and Raymond had said he was simply not prepared to deal with the upkeep of two houses. She had wondered, after an acrimonious telephone conversation with him, whether Raymond had somehow got to hear about Lorenzo, but really she didn’t see how he
could
have: they had been pretty careful on the whole, she thought, although Lorenzo had once admitted that he could not bear to burn her dear letters. After that, she had been more careful about what she put in them, and she had kept all his notes – he never wrote more than a note – in the secret compartment of her sewing box. Since going back to Frensham, she had spent a good deal of time in the train going back and forth to London, but from now on this was going to be tricky, since Nora and her husband were coming to live in the house with her, and Nora had plans to turn the place into some sort of nursing home. Perhaps then she would be able to get a very small
pied-à-terre
in London which would be better: Lorenzo was often working so hard, and so busy, that sometimes, recently, she had made the journey to London in vain. She could tell Raymond that it was better for Nora to have the house to herself because, after all, hers could not be an easy marriage, although this would not be in the least true, since Nora was hell-bent on turning the house into some sort of institution with other people in the same state as poor Richard to look after. If need be, she could suggest that either Villy or Michael Hadleigh bought her share of Mama’s house which would give her enough, surely, to lease a small flat. She would be forty-six this year and she had spent over twenty years living for others, bringing up the children, cooking, washing, cleaning the series of horrible little houses that they had had to live in until Raymond’s aunt had died and left them the house in Frensham and a fair amount of money. She had not
wanted
to live in the country, let alone in that Victorian museum, but Raymond had insisted. Coming into some money, being able to have servants like other people did (like Villy had always had), being able to buy decent clothes, have her hair done at a hairdresser, drive a new, instead of a second-hand car – things of that kind, and there were so many of them, had been quite miraculous at first. But as she had grown less chronically tired – God! she realised that she had always been exhausted all those years – and now having Raymond out of the way so that there were none of the tensions of being a buffer between him and the children, something had snapped in her, as though a butterfly had emerged from this chrysalis of domesticity: all she wanted was to have fun, to cease making do with anything that did not please her. The children, with the exception of Judy who they could now afford to send to a boarding school, were launched upon their lives. She knew that Villy thought her frivolous, and would intensely disapprove, well,
did
, so far as she knew the situation. Villy thought that either she should be making a home for Raymond at Woodstock, or be doing some war job. If Villy knew about Lorenzo she would go through the roof. She had said that once to him, and he had replied that she was a cold woman, who, he suspected, was a very English type where sex was concerned. (One of the things she loved about him was his almost feminine perspicacity.) When the war was over, she supposed she would have to go back to being Raymond’s wife, whatever that then might involve, but meanwhile she would make the most of what she described to herself as an Indian summer.

Hugh, listening to the six o’clock news in his rather dusty drawing room (three Germans had been hanged at Kharkhov for war crimes), stubbed out his cigarette and said he was sure he could find something to fit Christopher, and why didn’t she leave it to them to kit him out and would she like a drink?

‘You are an angel. I’d love a drop of whisky if you have any.’

‘Help yourself. Where is Christopher?’

‘Right at the top of the house, I’m afraid. But give him a shout – he’ll come down to your room.’

But she had hardly started to pour herself a cautious tot from the half bottle of Johnnie Walker when she heard the wail of dismay that undoubtedly came from Judy, sent earlier to have a bath.

‘Mum!
Mum!
Oh, please come, Mum!’

‘I’m in here.’ She opened the bathroom door and, the moment that Jessica stepped inside, locked it behind her. ‘I don’t want Uncle Hugh or Christopher to see me.’

She was half in, half out of her yellow net bridesmaid’s dress, struggling to pull the bodice down amid ominous splitting noises.

‘It’s too
small
, Mummy, I can’t get
in
to it.’

‘Stand
still
. Silly girl, you probably didn’t undo the back. Stand
still
.’

But even when she had levered it back over Judy’s head, undone the hooks and eyes at the back and tried again, the dress was palpably too small.

‘It’s
stupid
! It’s not my fault! I hate yellow, anyway.’

‘It must be the dress made for Lydia, which means that she has got yours. Don’t worry. I’ll ring up Aunt Villy and we’ll get them changed over. We’ll have to mend it, though. I wish you’d waited and not tried to cram yourself into it.’

‘If I had, it would have been too late to change. Lydia would have gone off to church in mine, and I would have had to go in my beastly school uniform! It
is
unfair.’

A great deal of Judy’s conversation was conducted as though she was a child actress in a melodrama, Jessica thought, trying not to be irritated. Judy was going through a difficult phase, as
her
mother used to say. The school diet, presumably largely carbohydrate, had turned her into a pudding – a rather spotty one at that. She had grown a great deal during the last year, but that had not stopped her being podgy; her hair was always greasy, the down on her upper lip which had upset her so much in the summer had since been treated with peroxide by her faithful friend Monica with the result that it now glinted like brass shavings above which acne rioted. Of course, she would outgrow all these little disadvantages, Jessica thought, and meanwhile it was so lucky that, by and large, she seemed unaware of them.

‘Put on your Sunday dress,’ she said, ‘and do tidy up the bathroom. It looks like a cross between an old clothes shop and a swamp.’

‘Mummy, you sound just like Miss Blenkinsopp at school. My Sunday dress is tight under the arms as well,’ she added.

‘I’ll see if I can let it out, but I can’t do that for this evening. Now, mop up the floor and take all your clothes and put them in your room. Leave the bathroom as you would wish to find it.’

‘All
right
. Did you remember to bring my seed pearls?’

‘Yes.’

‘And my christening present brooch?’

‘Yes. Now get on.’

Questions of this kind pursued her as she made her escape upstairs to change for the restaurant dinner.

Of course she was glad that Nora was getting married: she had thought for a long time that this would be unlikely. In fact, she had thought that of her four children it was Nora who would end up an old maid – matron of a hospital, perhaps. But seeing Christopher after rather a long gap – he seldom came home, and had never come to London when she lived there – she wondered about his future as well. He was desperately thin and did not look happy. He had not been called up, partly because of his earlier breakdown and the electric shock treatment he had undergone, but also because he had turned out to be very short-sighted and now wore glasses with very thick lenses. He had a high colour from working so much out of doors and his face always had minute scars where he had cut himself shaving. Almost his first question when he arrived had been ‘Is Dad here?’ and when she had told him that he would not be arriving until the next day he had nodded, but she had seen the instant gleam of relief. Raymond had not been much of a success as a father: the three older children, although they did not feel the same, in their various ways had written him off – Angela despised him, Nora patronised him, but Christopher still dreaded and feared him. Only Judy was able to turn him into darling Daddy, doing very secret and important war work; Jessica could easily imagine that a certain amount of competition went on at school about fathers, and Judy’s best friend Monica’s father was a squadron leader and, vicariously, the source of all Judy’s information about the war. ‘Monica’s father says they had no business releasing Oswald Mosley from prison,’ she had written last term from school. ‘He says it is absolutely outrageous.’ To compete with this sort of thing, Judy had probably turned her father into a secret agent. She must tell Raymond that, it might amuse him.

Three miles away, Richard Holt was having what his best friend, his doctor, his parents and his sister kept calling his ‘stag night’. Probably the most sedate affair of its kind there had ever been, he thought a trifle wearily. His back was hurting; the dope he’d had before dinner had worn off and he longed to be lying down flat, but they were just about to embark upon the dessert. He looked across the table to Tony, who instantly met his eye, so he smiled, and Tony smiled back, the sweetest smile – it made Richard feel better just to look at him.

‘Richard would like chocolate mousse,’ his mother was saying.

‘I’d like to choose, though,’ he said, making an effort to sound greedy and interested.

‘Of
course
, darling,’ and she laid the menu in front of him.

‘Creamed rice, apple pie, cheese and biscuits,’ he read.

‘And chocolate mousse.’

‘
And
chocolate mousse. You’re right. I’m a customer for that.’

His chair was next to his mother’s so that she could feed him. From tomorrow, Nora would be doing that, he thought, three times a day for ever. Before he was wounded, he had enjoyed food: in Suffolk, where his parents lived, they had a farm and the food had been plain but good. Apart from their own lamb, he used to go wild fowling; duck and geese had been on the menu and, in winter, hares that his mother had jugged or roasted or put into pies. In the Army he hadn’t thought about food; it was simply fuel and a time when you could take the weight off your feet. But eighteen months of being fed everything with a spoon, food that was half cold anyway by the time it reached the ward, by a succession of nurses for whom the practice seemed to bring out latent, maternal and bossy feelings – whenever he said he had had enough it was ‘one more to please me’ stuff – had really put him off food (although it was supposed to be an event in the patient’s day). Drinks were OK because he could have them through a straw and not be dependent upon anyone.

They were a small family party, just his parents, his sister – widowed early in the war, but left with the twins (not present) – and Tony, who was to be his best man. He would not have asked him, but Tony had offered. The offer had been the last – golden – straw of his generosity and love.

The chocolate mousse had arrived. His mother was smoothing the napkin spread over his knees.

‘I’m not very hungry,’ he said, meaning please don’t make him eat all of it.

‘You just have what you want,’ she said comfortably. ‘There’s no sense in cramming food down you that you don’t want.’ Her eyes, which had bleached from an intense blue to something paler than forget-me-not, had the same expression that he remembered from a child, a blend of wisdom and innocence that somehow went well with her weatherbeaten face – all fine wrinkles, like a brownish apple. Described by herself and his father as something of a tomboy when young (although in those days it had probably not meant more than not liking to ride sidesaddle and refusing to wear stays), she looked as though she had made the most of what she knew and had learned, but her very innocence had always regulated the knowledge. Now in her early sixties, and with what she described as only a touch of angina, she was retiring gently from her hitherto active life. He could not possibly have imposed himself upon her.