Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (36 page)

It was thus that Edward found her (she had not heard his car on the cart track as so many aeroplanes were thundering over the cottage).

‘My dear girl! Darling! Diana! What is it?’

The shock of seeing him, of his suddenly being there, made her cry more. He bent down to help her up, but when she tried to stand, her ankle hurt so much that she gave a cry of pain. He lifted her onto the sofa.

‘You’ve sprained your ankle,’ he said, and she nodded – her teeth were chattering.

‘The water ran out. I couldn’t finish scrubbing the floor.’ This seemed to her so sad that she went on crying.

He fetched her coat, which was hanging on a peg by the door, and covered her with it.

‘Have you got any whisky?’

She shook her head. ‘We finished it last time.’

‘I’ve brought some. It’s in the car. You stay put.’

All the time, while he was getting the whisky, finding a glass, giving her his dark green silk handkerchief and drawing up a chair to sit by her, he was making encouraging, comforting sallies: ‘My poor sweet, you
have
had a rough time of it. I came as soon as I could. By the time I’d discovered the telephone number of that pub –
couldn’t
remember the name of it – you’d gone. I don’t know how we got cut off. I was a
beast
– after all you’d been through. No sleep, and I bet you’ve had no lunch. What you need when you’ve drunk that is a nice hot bath and then I’ll take you out to dinner.’

But she said, almost irritably, ‘I can’t! I couldn’t get into a bath. Anyway, there’s no water left. Not a drop.’

‘Well, then, I’ll put you in the car and take you to an hotel.’

She felt the resentment that had dissolved into a pure relief at his appearance begin to crystallise. He seemed always to think that everything could be resolved by a few, passing, creature comforts. He would take her out, and then bring her back to this desolate place where she would continue, without any adult conversation beyond exchanges with the shopkeepers and the man who would hopefully repair or replace the pump battery. Everything would be as it was before: she would be lonely and poor and increasingly anxious about the future as she got older, and one day, she knew it, he would leave her. She wanted to say, ‘And then what?’ but some innate caution stopped her. She felt she was fighting for her life, and decided there and then upon a false, rather than a wrong move.

She looked up at him, her hyacinth-coloured eyes still swimming, ‘Oh, darling, that would be so lovely, you can’t imagine!’

Ever since their first meeting in the train Zoë felt as though her life had been split – unevenly – into two, not halves, but pieces. There was Juliet, Cazalet family life with its privations, its routine, its duties and affections – and there was Jack. There was far less of Jack – a matter of irregular snatched days and nights but these so crammed with excitement, romance and pleasures hitherto unknown to her that they seemed to occupy most of her attention – could invade her thoughts at any time to the exclusion of anything else. To begin with, of course, it hadn’t been like that; changing her mind about going straight home and staying in London to have dinner with him, an attractive stranger who made his interest so plain, had certainly been exciting and, she told herself, it would be fun – it had been years since she had gone to a restaurant with any man and she had regarded it as a slightly wicked treat. No more. The fact that she was lunching with Archie – something that she had looked forward to for much the same reason – suddenly didn’t seem to count. They
had
lunch, but after she had resisted a passing urge to confide in him about the stranger, she felt
distrait
and could not think of anything much to say. Archie had been kindness itself: he had brought a present for Juliet, and he had been understanding about the boring visit to her mother. When they were drinking bitter little cups of coffee in the coffee room of his club, and there had been rather a silence, he had said, ‘Poor Zoë! You are in an awful kind of limbo, aren’t you? Do you want to talk about it? Because I can quite see that you can’t at home.’

‘I don’t know what to say. Except – you don’t believe that Rupert is alive really, do you?’

‘No, I don’t think I do. It’s too long now. Of course, he
might
be . . .’ He left that in the air.

‘I suppose I feel I
ought
to believe he is. And I can’t. But I wish I
knew
. It makes me feel quite – well – oh,
well
—’

‘Angry, I should think,’ he said. ‘Sorry this coffee’s so awful. Would you like a brandy to wash it down?’

The urge to tell him recurred. She said that she would.

She waited until the waiter had brought the drinks before telling him. ‘I just felt like having dinner with him,’ she finished. ‘You know, it seemed like a bit of an adventure.’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you think that’s bad of me?’

‘No.’

‘The only thing is that I shall miss the last train.’

He fumbled in his pocket and produced a key. ‘You can stay with me, if you like. If you turn out to need to.’

‘Archie, you are kind. You won’t tell – anyone – will you?’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

On the steps of the club, he said, ‘What are you going to do with yourself until your dinner?’

‘Oh – I thought I’d try and find a dress somewhere. I didn’t take one to Mummy’s – a suitable one, I mean.’ She felt she was beginning to blush.

‘And your luggage?’

‘I’ve put it in the cloakroom at Charing Cross. Except a very small case.’ She’d repacked in the ladies’ at the station, so that at least she had make-up and her best shoes.

‘Well, if you want to change at my place, you’re welcome. By the way, do you know my address?’

‘What a good thing you said that. I don’t.’

He took out his diary, propped it against a pillar of the portico and wrote it down for her.

‘Elm Park Gardens. It’s near South Kensington. Keep my key safe, won’t you? Don’t bother to ring. Just come or not, as the case may be.’ He leant down and kissed her cheek. ‘Have a nice time anyway.’

Afterwards, in a taxi going to Hermione’s shop, she wondered at the way in which he seemed to think she might not come. Did he think she was the kind of person who spent the night with a total stranger with whom she was simply going to have dinner? She felt quite indignant at the thought.

Any doubts he might have had were, as it turned out, well founded. She spent the night – or what remained of it – in a studio flat in Knightsbridge. ‘My intentions,’ he had said at dinner, ‘are strictly honourable. I want to seduce you.’

At dinner, that had simply seemed a wild, though flattering, notion; she had had no intention of his succeeding. ‘I don’t go to bed with people the first time I meet them,’ she had retorted.

‘And
I
don’t want to do anything with you that you usually do with people,’ he had replied equably.

After dinner, he had taken her to the Astor, where they had more champagne and danced. The dress she had bought at Hermione’s proved a perfect choice, a sheath of soft black silk, cut to just above the knee with a low square neck and wide shoulder straps; it was cool and glamorous and worth, she felt, every penny of its twenty-two pounds. She had availed herself of Archie’s offer to change in his flat, spent a delicious hour and a half bathing and dressing and making up her face, putting up her hair, taking it down again and finally putting it up with the string of pearls – the only jewellery she had with her – twined into the knot on top of her head. She had no scent, no evening bag and only her winter coat to wear over the dress, but it would have to do. At this point, as much as anything else, she was enjoying the whole business of getting herself up for a party and when Archie turned up she paraded before him as though he was a parent to approve her before her first dance.

‘My word!’ he said. ‘That’s a dress and a half, or I suppose you could say half a dress. You look
extremely
pretty in it, anyway. Do you want a drink before you go?’

But she didn’t. She was due to meet him at seven. She left her overnight case with Archie and took a taxi to the Ritz.

He was waiting for her, rose from a sofa, greeted her with a small, nervous smile.

‘I had begun to imagine you weren’t going to show,’ he said.

‘You said seven.’

‘And here you are.’ He took her arm and led her off for a drink.

During drinks and subsequently dinner he asked her dozens of questions – about her family, her childhood, friends, interests, what countries she had been to, what, as a child, she had wanted to be when she was grown up, but these questions were slipped in between others – What food were they to eat? What about food in Britain in wartime? How did she feel about the war? Had she been afraid of the air raids? No, she had answered, she was far more afraid of spiders and he had laughed – his nearly black eyes that were sparkling when, as nearly all the time, they were fixed upon her, softened, he was silent and she was conscious of a momentary, tender affection that went straight to her heart. This happened several times and each time it created a small, fresh shock of intimacy.

At the end of dinner, he offered her a cigarette, and when she refused, he said, ‘I wasn’t sure whether you don’t smoke, or whether you simply don’t accept cigarettes from strange men.’

‘You
are
fairly strange. You don’t tell me much about yourself.’

‘I answer your questions.’

‘Yes, but . . .’ She knew by then that he was a reporter, a photographer as well, apparently, attached to some part of the American army, and that he had been brought up in New York, that he had been married and was divorced (he’d told her that in the train) and that his parents were also divorced. ‘You don’t
tell
me anything.’

‘What do you want to know?’

But then she couldn’t think. Or, rather, the kinds of things she felt curious about seemed wrong to ask of someone she hardly knew. She felt herself beginning to blush and shrugged.

When the waiter came with the coffee, he asked for a large cup and some hot milk and offered her a liqueur.

‘Now,’ he said, when the waiter had come and gone again and they were on their own, ‘I need to ask you something. Is your husband a prisoner?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘I don’t know. Just a feeling. You don’t talk about him at all. That’s unusual. All the time you were talking about your family, you didn’t mention him.’

‘It’s because I don’t know what to say.’

There was a short silence, and then he said, casually, ‘I suppose you could just say what
is
?’

So she told him. Beginning with Dunkirk, and his getting left in France, and all their hopes of his being taken prisoner, and no word for two years, hopes fading, she had thought he must be dead then, and then the Frenchman arriving with his news and everyone jubilant. And now two more years without a word or a sign.

‘He’s never seen his daughter,’ she said. ‘If he hadn’t twisted his ankle jumping into the ditch because of the German lorry, he would have. So I don’t
know
– anything. I suppose I’ve sort of got used to it.’

She looked up and again met that silent, expressive regard. He said nothing.

‘But really, I suppose I’ve come to think that he is dead.’

He was silent for a moment; then he said, ‘I understand now what you said about getting used to something and still noticing it.’

‘Did I say that?’

‘In the train, this morning. It’s kind of unfinished, isn’t it? You can’t grieve, and I suppose you can’t feel free – it’s a kind of devilish limbo.’

Yes, she had said. She was thinking how odd it was that he should have used the same word as Archie when all these years no one had said it – the situation had somehow never been discussed, let alone defined.

Then he leaned towards her over the table. ‘Zoë! Will you come dancing with me?’ and before she could answer, he had taken one of her hands before saying, ‘Off we go then.’

Much later that night, he said that a nightclub was the only legitimate way he could think of for taking her into his arms.

They danced for hours. They did not talk very much; in the first few seconds, she found that he was a very good dancer and abandoned herself to following him and thence to anticipating every move that he made. She had almost forgotten how much she loved it – she had not danced with anyone since before Juliet had been born. He was barely taller than she – occasionally she felt his breath touch her face – if their eyes met he gave her an absent, dreamy smile. When the band stopped for a break, they went back to their table and drank the champagne that gradually ceased to be cold in its bucket of melting ice. There was a small lamp on their table, on every table, with a dark red shade; it gave enough light for each to see the other but not to discern the features of the people at other tables; it made a kind of romantic privacy as though they were sitting on the shore of a tiny island. Out on the floor the spotlights from the ceiling, which varied in intensity, made the dancers’ faces and the women’s bare shoulders livid; their eyes glittered, diamonds and medals winked and went out as the dancers shifted in and out of pools of smoky light.