Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (25 page)

‘It’s a pity Nora couldn’t have been with us,’ his sister was saying.

‘Oh, Susan, you know it’s bad luck for the bride and groom to meet on the eve of their wedding.’

‘I do, but it is still a pity. It’s all very well for you, Dad, you’ve met her – I haven’t.’

‘She’s a wonderful girl,’ his father said, not at all for the first time.

Wonderful to marry an old crock like me, Richard thought, when they had finally got him to bed. But
how
she had wanted to! He had met her when they had first started trying to operate on his back. She had come on duty one evening when he was sleepless and the pain was driving him mad and he was counting the minutes – a hundred and ten of them before he could have his next dose. She had known at once that he was desperate, had brought him a couple of pills with a hot drink, and propped him up while he drank it. Then she had rearranged his various pillows so that when she lowered him down again it all felt different and far more comfortable. ‘I’ll be back when I’ve done the round,’ she said. ‘Just to see if we’ve got the pillows right for you.’ She had been gentle, assured, deft and wonderfully
un
cheery. A first-rate nurse. She never seemed in a hurry, as many of them did, and nothing was too much trouble. That had been the beginning of it. Months later, he had asked her how she had managed to give him a dose of painkiller out of hours, as it were. ‘They weren’t painkillers,’ she said. ‘It was just some arnica in pill form. You needed to feel that something was being done.’

By then, they knew each other quite well. When, after months, the time came for him to be moved to another home – that’s what it was called, but really it was a hospital – and he told her, she went completely silent. She’d been pushing his chair round the grounds: it was her day off and they often spent it that way. He sensed, although he could not see her behind him, that she was upset, and when they reached the huge tree that had a wooden seat round it, she stopped the chair and sat down – sort of collapsed.

‘I’ll miss you,’ he said. This was true.

‘Will you, Richard? Will you really?’

‘Of course. I can’t imagine what it will be like without you.’ This was not quite true: he could, but he felt she needed to hear it.

‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, so quietly that he could hardly hear her. Then she proposed to him, the last thing he expected or wanted, come to that. He was both touched and appalled.

‘Dear Nora. I’m not the marrying kind,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t give you what you wanted.’

‘I could look after you!’

‘I know you could. But that wouldn’t be a marriage.’

She started to speak, but then she suddenly put her face in her hands and wept. That was awful, because he couldn’t put out a hand to comfort her – he couldn’t do a damn thing.

‘Don’t,’ he said after a while. ‘Don’t. I can’t bear you to cry – just sit here and watch you cry.’

She stopped at once. ‘Sorry. I see it’s not fair. Not fair to you, I mean. I had to tell you, though. Because you might have felt – well, even if you had thought it was a good idea, you might have thought I wouldn’t – anyway, I wanted you to know that I do love you.’

That was the first conversation about it. He went to the new place, and she came to see him on her days off. The funny thing was he
did
miss her. She always seemed to know what he needed: she would read to him for hours if he wanted; she asked him about his childhood, his family, and one day she met his parents when they made the long journey to visit him. After they had left she asked him who was Tony. (They had asked whether Tony had managed to visit him, and he had said yes, but very seldom.) He was just a friend, he had said.

‘I thought it might be an old girlfriend. You know, people sometimes call girls called Antonia Tony.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, well,’ she said, and he sensed how hard she was trying to be light about it, ‘I haven’t got a rival, then.’

He could never tell her about Tony. She knew after that that Tony visited him occasionally – took trouble not to come on the same day. ‘Nicer for you to space your visitors out,’ she had said. Tony could hardly ever come, anyway. His work took him all over the country: since he’d been invalided out of the Army, where he’d been trained as an electrical engineer, he’d got the job of servicing plant in factories. He had told Tony that there was no point in his writing, because his letters had to be read to him, but he did send postcards, and when he
did
come, he pushed the chair through the grounds and well out of sight so that they could feel as much as possible alone together. It was ironical, really, that they’d met because they were both such good athletes, that they were either in the same top team or competing, although differences emerged: Tony, for instance, was a sprinter, and he was long distance. Tony had copped it before he did, but he had ended up with comparatively minor damage: he now walked with a pronounced limp and had trouble with his lungs. When he was better they had spent Richard’s leave together – ten unforgettable days in North Wales. It had rained almost all the time and even now he regarded rain with affection.

Shortly afterwards, he’d had his crash – prang, they called it in the RAF. Anyway, he’d crashed after being attacked by fighter aircraft, and a bullet had got him in the spine, so he couldn’t use his parachute. All his other injuries had been from the crash; it was a miracle he had survived at all, they had said. He’d been unconscious – came to in a hospital bed, full of dope, disembodied; to begin with he thought he was dead and that this was the beginning of something else. It was some time before he realised, and they told him, how badly he had been hurt, and much longer before he had a chance to tell Tony. That was the first time that he understood what a lot hands had to do with affection and love: he could not touch, comfort or reassure Tony – just had to lie there and tell him. It would make no difference, Tony had said at once, none at all. At twenty-three, Richard believed that he would have said the same. But he was ten years older and, even then, the full implications of his state had not come home to him. He had been able to think that when he was better, he would need less nursing – would become more independent somehow or other. It was only as the months dragged by that he recognised this would never be so to any significant degree. Even so, he had not been able to disillusion Tony, or had not been able to bear to, since he was terrified that this might mean he would never see Tony again. But when they had discharged him from the original place and moved him to the second hospital, he knew what his options were. His parents wanted him to go home: his mother said she would look after him, ‘I’m sure they would show me what I need to do,’ she had said, ‘and your father would help me with the lifting.’ But he had known that this was out of the question. He would not, could not expect Tony to take it all on: he would be prevented from having any career, any job, even, any friends, any fun, and, last, but by no means least, any sex. He could not allow someone of twenty-three to commit themselves to that, could not condemn that faithful and loving heart to such an inevitable betrayal. Tony had been a Dr Barnardo’s boy: he had lived in institutions all his life, had never had family affection, let alone love – until he had met him, Richard. It was his first love – he would get over it. These resolutions had coincided with Nora’s proposal. At first he had dismissed the idea as preposterous: he did not love her; he was not in a position to contract to a partnership of any kind with anyone. Much safer to stick to the institutional life, where nothing was expected of him, and where people were paid to see that he got from one day to the next. But his views, his opinions, his resolutions, seemed to make as little difference to Nora’s feelings as they did to Tony’s. There began to be a pattern to Tony’s visits. Tony would talk about their future, and argue with him when he said that they wouldn’t be having one – sometimes this would get to be nearly a row. Then he would make an effort to change the subject; there would be silences, filled inexorably by intense longing, by memories of fulfilment, which was all, he realised, that now they could ever have, and they would look at each other and there was nothing to say. And then, one afternoon at one of these times, Tony said: ‘There’s one thing I’d like. Just once.’

‘You say.’

‘I could lift you out of your chair and put you on the ground.’

‘It would be no good, darling. I can’t—’

‘I know that. I just want to lie with you, hold you in my arms – be your loving and friendly lover.’

He’d taken off his jacket to make a pillow, and then he’d lifted him up out of the chair and laid him down as gently as a leaf coming to rest. Then he’d put his arms round him over his shoulders with the miserable stumps that were what remained of his arms and cried until Richard felt that both their hearts would break. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said, when he had stopped. He wiped his own tears from Richard’s face before he kissed him. Then he had lifted him back into his chair, picked up his jacket and taken him back to his room. That was when he realised that Tony had at last accepted that there was no future for them. A month later, he agreed to marry Nora.

But now, with the wedding so near, he felt afraid. Not for Nora: nobody could know better than she who she was marrying; she was practical, she had nursed him for months, she could have no illusions about the prognosis. She said she loved him and he had come to believe her. They had had some pretty difficult conversations about no children, no sex, et cetera, and she had repeated steadily that she knew all that, she understood, it didn’t matter to her. ‘Probably harder for you,’ she had said. ‘No,’ he had replied, ‘my libido seems pretty torpid.’ The one thing he could not bear to tell her was what he felt, still felt, for Tony. She simply thought Tony was a university friend; she was like his parents in this respect. In marrying Nora, he was doing, he hoped, the thing that would be best for everyone, but he would not betray Tony, who had continued to visit him, to care for him and about him, and who had accepted the news about his marriage with such gentle goodwill. ‘I do understand,’ he had said. ‘She sounds just the right person for you. I’m glad she loves you.’ He smiled then and added, ‘I’d have to win the pools to keep up with her.’ (By then he’d been told about her family and the house at Frensham and all that.) And even that, though it could have been, was not bitterly said. Later, he said, ‘You’ll need a best man, won’t you?’

‘I suppose I shall.’

‘I’ll be your best man,’ he said. ‘If you like.’ He smiled a second time; and Richard wondered yet again whether he was more beautiful when he was smiling, or when he was not.

‘You’ll always be my best man,’ he said before he could stop himself. ‘That sounds corny, doesn’t it?’

And Tony, in their least favourite tutor’s voice, replied: ‘I’m very much afraid, Richard, that it does.’

Tony was not staying in the hotel, thank goodness. His parents had taken Richard upstairs and put him to bed. This meant that he was going to have to stay in one position all night – usually someone turned him, but he hadn’t mentioned that. ‘You get a good night’s rest,’ they said and, again, he knew that if he had gone back to live with them, they would never have had one. He lay, for what seemed like hours, making resolutions to be good to Nora, but in the end he gave up and went back to Wales with Tony.

Christopher had been standing for about twenty minutes just inside the church where the biting cold outside was taken over by a marginally warmer, but more compelling darkness. The lights from the brass chandeliers looked yellow in the twilight dusk. It was just after two, and already the day seemed nearly over. He was the only usher; it was not a large wedding and, indeed, it looked as though the attendants would be lost in the cavernous church. He had put Mr and Mrs Holt in the front seats on the appropriate side. It was strange how awkward most people looked in their best clothes, he thought. Even he could see that Mrs Holt was not given to wearing a hat, nor Mr Holt a dark suit. The bridegroom, in a chair, was wheeled steadily up the aisle by a marvellous-looking young chap with red-gold hair, dark eyes and a limp. Compared to him, the chap in the chair – his future brother-in-law – looked rather ordinary, his face, that is, the rest of him could certainly not be called that. Aunt Villy arrived with Wills, Lydia and Neville. Lydia threw her arms round him: ‘I’m wearing scent,’ she said, ‘I’m letting you smell it.’ She wore a winter coat over a long yellow dress. Neville had walked purposefully up to the top of the church, while Aunt Villy, with Wills trying to squirm out of her grasp, kissed him and said how nice it was to see him again. Neville returned.

‘I suppose Nora
knows
he’s got no arms,’ he said. ‘His coat is sort of draped, but you can see he hasn’t got either of them.’

‘That is a personal remark, Neville,’ Lydia said in her most crushing voice.

‘Children, children. No more talking.’

Wills, having failed to remove his hand from Villy’s, tried to sit on the ground. ‘When are we going to leave this place?’

‘Where’s Roland?’ Christopher asked.