Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (28 page)

‘. . . and Daddy is
so
pleased that we are going to be at Frensham. If it had been requisitioned, goodness knows what would have happened to it, and anyway he thinks our ideas for it are far better than the Government’s.’

They were back in the hotel where he had spent the night, and Nora was to occupy the room that had been his parents’. The hotel had sent up flowers. Scarlet and pink carnations with gypsophila rioted in a cut-glass vase. There was also a plate of grapes, most of which they had eaten. Tomorrow they were to be driven to Frensham.

‘You’re tired,’ she said, before he could. ‘I’ll settle you now.’

Half an hour later, when that was done – his back rubbed with surgical spirit, his teeth cleaned, his pee collected in a bottle, his dope taken, his short-sleeved nightshirt on, much easier than pyjamas, she had rightly said when she bought it for him, his pillows, including his special one, comfortably arranged – she bent over and gave him a light kiss.

‘I’ll come in at three to turn you,’ she said, ‘and I’ll leave my door open so you can call. I’ll always hear you.’ When she had turned out the light and gone next door and he could hear her preparing to go to bed he was suddenly, overwhelmingly touched at the way she behaved exactly as though nothing new had happened.

Tony waited until Richard left the reception with Nora in a limousine that he could lift Richard into. He watched with the rest of the crowd until the car turned a corner and was abruptly out of sight, then he went back to the hotel cloakroom, collected his duffel coat, left the hotel, and found a pub where he got extremely drunk.

PART THREE

THE FAMILY

January 1944

The house seemed horribly empty without Polly and Clary. He noticed it from the moment that his alarm went off in the morning. He would lie in bed listening to the silence; no thumps or crashes from above, no laughing, no imprecations, no light steps running down the stairs. He got up quickly, putting on his old blue dressing gown – the one Sybil had given him the first Christmas after the war had begun – and his leather slippers. Even so, the cold was very noticeable. He had had an Ascot installed in the bathroom on the half landing above his bedroom because there was nobody in the house to keep the range stoked. The Ascot unwillingly let him have a small bath, but the water ran into it so slowly that in winter it was warm rather than hot. He had to boil a kettle for shaving. By the time he had bathed, shaved and dressed, he could turn the lights off, undo the blackout and reveal the bleak grey day without. He would descend to the basement, stopping on the way to collect the half pint of milk that was delivered every other day, and the newspaper that always came. 2,300
TONS OF BOMBS DROPPED ON BERLIN
was this morning’s headline. He tried to imagine 2,300 tons of bombs, but the mind boggled. When you thought of what
one
bomb could do . . . He ate breakfast at the kitchen table: it was handier, and he kept the gas grill on for warmth after he had made his toast. Toast and tea was what he had, with margarine whose foul taste was partly concealed by some of Mrs Cripps’s jam or, failing that, Marmite. In the old days, he and Sybil would have breakfasted in the dining room next door, eating things like melon and boiled eggs and sometimes – his absolute favourite – kippers. Sybil had always sat with her back to the French window onto the garden, and on sunny mornings small tendrils of her hair had glowed against the light. Memories of this kind were no longer quite so agonizing, but they were essential: he couldn’t get through the days without thinking about her, reminding her of some small, private joke, remembering things she had said or thought or liked or worried about. Each time, he experienced a little surge of love for her that was momentarily untainted by the despair of loss. It kept him going, he said to himself. There did not seem to be very much else to do that. The business certainly used up the days, all right, but with the Old Man out of it – virtually, although he came up twice a week and sat in his office waiting for people to come and talk to him – and he and Edward at loggerheads about the new wharf in Southampton, it was hardly fun. It was Edward who had insisted upon buying it; the property was going very cheaply, it was true, but it still meant ploughing back not only the money they had got from war damage payments but using every bit of spare capital they possessed as well. Edward had argued that after the war there would be a building boom, and that with more premises they would be in a much better position to house and process the hardwoods that had made their name, but it seemed to Hugh unlikely that they would have accrued the money to buy the huge amount of stock that would justify a second wharf. They had had a row about it – well, several rows – but the Old Man had taken Edward’s side and so the new wharf had been bought and was going ahead. And then there was this large and now empty house. He supposed it would be sensible to sell it, or at least close it down, but he had to live somewhere, and this had been his house with her. If only Poll had stayed! But it had been he who had insisted that she should not. Louise had asked them both to share her house. Clary had wanted to go; Poll had demurred. ‘I’ll stay with you, Dad,’ she had said. But he had known at once that she had not wanted to, even though she had said again and again that she did. In the end, he had taken her out to dinner to tackle her about it on her own. He took her to his club because he felt it was a better place to talk, and a little bit because he was so proud of her and enjoyed introducing her to his acquaintances there. ‘My word!’ they would say, ‘What a stunning daughter!’ and things like that. She
was
stunning. Her hair was like Sybil’s had been when he had met her, a deep, glossy coppery colour, the same white complexion, and short upper lip with the same flat, curving mouth that was as charming as Sybil’s, but her high forehead and her dark blue eyes were pure Cazalet, very much like Rachel’s who in turn was like the Duchy. That was curious, he thought: one would not have said that she had the Duchy’s eyes, rather her aunt’s, but one would certainly attribute Rachel’s eyes to her mother. But unlike her mother or her aunt, Polly had a way with clothes: she contrived to make glamour out of neatness. She had come out with him straight from work in a white jersey and a dark skirt with pleats in it. The jersey had a high rolled neck and she’d pushed the sleeves up to just below her elbows so that the wide silver bracelet he’d given her last Christmas was visible on her wrist. She looked as smart as paint. She had sat in a large leather chair opposite him sipping the Bristol Cream sherry that he’d got her and telling him about her and Clary going to be interviewed for joining the Wrens.

‘It was so funny, Dad, all the things they asked us – either we’d never done them, like School Certificate, or we
couldn’t
have, like produce references from our last job. When Clary said she was a writer, they simply didn’t count it. But there was an enormous queue and they said the Wrens were nearly full anyway. It was rather a relief, really. I didn’t want to have to go away from – everyone.’

‘So – what’s the next move?’

‘Well, Clary says there are hundreds of boring jobs. She says London is simply full of typing pools, so I suppose we shall be in one of them. Then, if you are fearfully lucky, you get asked to be a temporary secretary for someone because their proper one has got flu or something, and then if you are a success, you become somebody’s permanent secretary.’ There was a pause, and then she added: ‘Archie says I should try to get into art school. They have evening classes. I wouldn’t be a permanent student, just go in the evenings. But I’m not sure yet whether you have to live in a particular part of London to be eligible.’

‘That sounds like a good idea,’ he said. He wished he had thought of it for her.

‘It would only be about two evenings a week,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I’d be at home with you.’

‘I want to talk to you about that.’

‘Oh, Dad! We’ve talked about it.’

‘Yes, but not enough. I’ve been thinking and I’ve come to the conclusion that it is really a bad idea. You should be with people of your own age. Added to which, I may easily have to spend one or two nights a week in Southampton, so I wouldn’t even be there and I’d hate you to be quite on your own at home.’

‘I’d be all right.’

‘The other thing is,’ he improvised, ‘I’m seriously thinking of shutting up the house. It’s far too big for me, or even for the two of us. And if I go to Home Place every weekend, and to Southampton for two nights, it really begins not to be worth it.’

‘Oh! But where would you go, Dad, on the nights when you
were
having to be in London?’

‘I can stay here. Or I might get a small flat. But,’ he added, with cunning bravery, ‘if I have
you
to look after, it all becomes more complicated. You know, a larger flat.’ He could see that he was winning; enabling her to do what he knew she wanted without feeling selfish about it.

‘I do think, Dad,’ she said, trying to sound considering and measured, ‘that
you
ought to go out more. Meet people of your own age,’ she finished demurely.

The implications of this last remark had been made to him before by others who, in most cases, had more or less delicately implied that he ought to marry again, and he felt the surge of irritation that this presumption about his private life – made worse because it was cloaked by generalization – always provoked. Then he looked at his daughter. She was without guile – or, rather, her guile concealing her excitement about going to live with Clary and Louise was so transparently concealed that it amounted to the same thing. She was not worrying about him, he thought, with a pang and with relief, she was just saying what she thought was a grown-up thing to say.

‘I was joking,’ she said. ‘But people say that kind of thing to us, and Clary says that sometimes we should be the sayer for a change. Not that
you
meant it
seriously
, darling Dad.’

‘Well, but one day, you will fall in love and get married, Poll. And you have to meet people in order to find the right one.’

He noticed that the faintest blush was rising to her forehead. ‘Let’s go and have dinner,’ he said.

As they walked down the wide, shallow staircase to the dining room, she said, ‘I think the chances of my marrying anyone are extremely small. Actually.’

‘Do you?’ he replied. ‘Well, I don’t.’

The next week she and Clary had left, and the house seemed inexpressibly dreary without them, but he felt sure that Sybil would have agreed that he had done the right thing. In a way, it had been one of the easier decisions to make; the one about whether to close down this house was much harder. It would probably be
sensible
, but any alternative seemed to him such a business and so unrewarding that he wasn’t sure if he could face it. It would be another link with her gone, because he was fairly sure that if he left the house
now
, he would not want to go back to it after the war. How often that phrase recurred! For years it had been something that everybody was aiming at – a time when a new life would start, when families would be reunited, when democracy would so much have prevailed that the pre-war social injustices would all be put right. Children of all classes would be educated for longer, the National Health Service would care for everybody’s health, thousands of new houses would be built with proper sanitation; there had seemed everything to wish and hope for when peace finally did break out. Only now, for him – selfishly, as he was the first to admit – the zest for all this had gone: he could see nothing but years and years stretching ahead for him without her, and without her he felt he had nothing. In one sense this was nonsense, he would tell himself: he had a job, his family, his own three children who needed his responsible affection more than ever – but somehow above, or beyond, or inside that, a sense of futility prevailed. He felt now much as he had felt at the end of the other war,
his
war, that had lost him his health and a hand. And then he had met her, and everything had changed. That was over, he had had his miracle; then he had been waiting (although, of course, at the time he had not known it) for that amazing, marvellous chance that had brought her into his life. He had been incredibly lucky. But he had had, as it were, his luck. The rest of his life should, ought, to consist of doing the best he could for the children, the business and the rest of the family. Although he missed her so much, he was sure that he had been right to let Polly go. Living with her cousins was a very good interim step for her towards total independence, and Louise, as a young married woman, would be bound to have her husband’s friends to the house, and thereby introduce Polly to more people of her own age. Simon, who was leaving school at Easter, was much more of a worry. Simon had always been Sybil’s, much in the way that Polly had been his. Since she had died, he had made efforts, but somehow they had only served to show him how little he knew his son and how difficult it would be to repair this ignorance. Simon parried any efforts he made by agreeing with anything he said, by a kind of awful docility in falling in with any suggestion that he made about what they might do together and by a distant courtesy that seemed only to underline their lack of intimacy. ‘I expect it is,’ he would say, or ‘
I
don’t mind.’ He was due to be called up this year as he would be eighteen in September, and when Hugh had asked Simon what service he would choose to go into he had simply said, ‘It doesn’t make any difference really, does it? I mean – it’s all the same – learning how to kill people and that sort of thing.’ What would he
like
to do – after the war, Hugh had persisted.