Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (37 page)

The music began again. She turned to him, ready to rise, but he put out his hand to make her stay. ‘This is when I court you,’ he said. ‘I haven’t told you how beautiful you are because you must know it. You dazzle – you
blind
me, but you must be used to all that. I’ve been falling in love with you since about eleven o’clock this morning – and that’s a long way down. I got past your appearance hours ago in the restaurant, when you told me about Rupert. You look like the kind of girl who plays games, who tries to turn men on to comfort her vanity. But you don’t do it. I’ve been waiting all evening for any of that and you simply don’t do it.’

‘I used to,’ she said, suddenly recognizing the change. ‘I used to.’ She stopped – the recollection struck her with a kind of confounding violence. Once, she remembered, her whole satisfaction in such an evening would have rested upon her partner’s responses to her appearance. If these had not been frequent enough to satisfy her vanity, she would have put out little hooks to catch more extravagant compliments. Thoughts of this now revolted her.

‘. . . so, will you? I didn’t mean to ask you like this, but I just have to know.’

She started to say that she didn’t know how she felt, whether she was in love, that they had only just met, but the words crumbled, became meaningless as she uttered them. She fell silent and simply gave him her hand.

When she woke, the next morning, it was light, the telephone was ringing, and there was no sign of Jack. She was drowsy and her limbs ached from so much dancing and making love. She turned to the empty pillow beside her and there was a note: ‘The telephone will be me. I had to go to work.’ Getting out of bed to answer it, she found she was naked, but he had left his dressing gown draped over the chair by the telephone.

‘I hate to wake you, but I thought you might need to know the time.’

‘What is it?’

‘Just after ten. Listen. Can I call you at home?’

‘Call? It’s miles away – Sussex, I told you.’

‘Telephone – ring, as you say.’

‘I think that might be difficult. The only telephone is in my father-in-law’s study and he’s nearly always in it.’

‘Can you call me, then?’

‘I might be able to. There’s a telephone box in the local pub, but it’s not very private.’

‘Can you spend next weekend with me? We can establish communication arrangements then. Could you, do you think?’

‘I could try. I’ll have to let you know.’

‘This is my number at work. Might have to be rather formal. I’m Captain Greenfeldt in case you have to ask for me. Isn’t this ridiculous? Having to behave like a spy or a wicked child.’

‘But we do have to.’

‘Are you wearing my dressing gown? I put it there for you.’

‘Yes, I am, over my shoulders.’

‘Please come for the weekend. I don’t often get them free.’

‘I will try. I’ll think of something somehow.’

‘You
are
the only girl in the world,’ he said – and then, ‘I’ve got to go.’

That was the beginning. It was the beginning of lies, inventions (she fabricated an old school friend with three children who constantly invited her to stay). The Duchy looked at her kindly and said she thought the change was doing her good. It was the beginning of coded telegrams, calls made to his office where he was sometimes chillingly formal, but after the first time, he had said he would always call her John when there were other people in his room. She wrote to him at the studio when the gaps between them meeting became unbearable – he wrote back only once. His energy was astounding to her. He worked hard – he frequently went for trips in planes to visit American troops dispersed about the country. When they met, for the rare weekend, they would fall into bed desperate for each other: she realised how starved she had been for love as well as sex. Then they would bathe and dress and he would take her out – occasionally to the theatre, but more often to dinner and then on to dance until three or four in the morning. Back in the studio, a bare place with a piano, a low, rickety divan, a table and two chairs and a huge north window that was always half blacked out, he would undress her slowly, take the pins out of her hair, stroke her and talk to her about making love until she was mad for him. She had forgotten, or perhaps, she thought, she had never known, that aftermath when the body seemed becalmed, its weight so evenly dispersed on the bed that it seemed weightless and sleep took her with such an insidious stealth that she was gone before she knew it. Waking on Saturday morning was a voluptuous business; the one who woke first would watch the one asleep with such tender intensity that they could not remain unconscious of it. Lovemaking on those mornings had a different quality – it was light-hearted, playful, full of the intimacies of affection, they felt rich with the prospect of two whole days together – it was the time of purest happiness for her. As autumn became winter, the studio was very cold: there was a stove, but no fuel for it – he grumbled cheerfully about the lack of heating or a shower; there was a small bath with an Ascot that reluctantly provided small quantities of hot water at uncertain intervals. They lunched off tins that he brought from the PX – beef stews, corned beef, turkey in tins, Hershey bars. On fine days they walked all over London while he took pictures – of bombed churches, bombed houses, abandoned shops with sandbagged windows, airraid shelters, camouflaged anti-aircraft gun sites, the cabmen’s Gothic hut at Hyde Park Corner, where, he said, the cabmen went to gamble – he was a mine of information in that kind of way. ‘They go to Warwick Avenue if they want a good meal,’ he said, ‘and here to play cards.’ And he took pictures of her, dozens and dozens of them, and once, because she said she wanted it, he allowed her to take one picture of him. It wasn’t very good; her hand wasn’t steady enough, and his eyes were screwed up against the sun, but when he had it printed, she kept it in an envelope in her bag. In the afternoon they would go to a movie, she learned to call it, holding hands in the dark. At weekends, in the daytime, he would wear mufti, but in the evenings he put on his uniform. Gradually, she brought clothes up from the country to keep in the studio. They spent Sunday mornings in bed with the papers and he made coffee which he also seemed able to procure. But on Sundays, the shadow of parting was there, and this always seemed to lead to a tension. He was capable of black moods when he became very quiet, agreed with anything she said, but seemed to have withdrawn from her. Once they had a row, about her daughter. He wanted her to bring Juliet up for a weekend with them, but she would not. ‘She’s too old. She would talk about you – I couldn’t stop her.’

‘Would that be so terrible?’

‘I think it would be difficult. I can’t tell them about you. They would be shocked.’

‘They wouldn’t like the idea of your being in love with a Jew?’ It was the first time he had referred to his race.

‘Jack, of course not. It isn’t that.’

He said nothing. They were walking by the Serpentine. It was a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon, and suddenly he flung himself down on one of the iron benches facing the water.

‘Sit down – I want to get this clear. Can you honestly tell me that if I were some British – lord or earl or whatever you have here, you wouldn’t take me home to meet your family? By now? We’ve known each other for nearly three months and you’ve never once suggested it.’

‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ she said. ‘It’s because I’m married to Rupert.’

‘I thought you loved
me
.’

‘I do. It’s
because
I love you. They’d know that at once, and – and, can’t you see? they’d feel I was betraying him. They would feel I ought to wait in case Rupert
does
come back.’

‘I see. And if he does, that’s the end of us, is it? You’re trying to keep your options open—’

‘You aren’t
trying
to understand me—’

‘I’m afraid to. Either it
is
that – and faced with the choice you’d settle for your upper-class life in a large country house with all those servants rather than risk your luck with a middle-class Jew who doesn’t own anything except a classy camera – or you’ve already got some alternative arranged. You’d marry that friend of his, Archie whatever, and your precious family would approve of
that
.
He
goes to stay, doesn’t he? You’ve told me that – and what a member of the family
he
already is.’

She was shaking with cold, and fear; she had never seen him like this, so angry and bitter and implacable, and, she felt, wrong.

She said, ‘When I told you about Rupert that first evening, you seemed to understand – exactly what it was like – the situation I was in. What has changed?’

He turned and seized her hands in a painful grip. ‘I’ll tell you what has changed. Or what I thought has changed. We’ve fallen in love. I
thought
. Really in love. That means not just now, today, it concerns the whole of our lives. I
thought
. I want to marry you. I want your children. I want to live with you, for you to be mine. I can’t bear the idea of anyone else
touching
you. You’re not a child, Zoë. You’re a grown woman – you can make your own choices – you don’t have to go through life doing what other people expect of you. Or isn’t any of this true for you? I really need to know.’

She was so confounded by his anger and these resentments so suddenly and savagely presented and so confused at being attacked about a future that, she realised, she had most carefully never considered that, for a moment, she simply stared at him, unable to speak.

‘I do love you,’ she said at last. ‘You must know that perfectly well. And it’s true that I haven’t thought about the future – at all. It
isn’t
true—’ Her voice was shaking and she tried again: ‘I
haven’t
had secret options as you call them. I
do
love you. I’m not sure about anything else at all. I suppose I’ve been living on a kind of island with you – I haven’t thought about anyone else.’ She was silent a moment, and then, but hardly audibly, she said, ‘I shall – now.’

He released her hands and she covered her face with them to cry as though she was with a stranger. She wept and wept, as though all the years of pent-up grief and uncertainty and downright anguish was suddenly released in her, as though one world had come to an end and there was now no other to take its place. He put his arms round her and held her through it. At the end of it he was gentle and tender – and contrite – taking her hands from her face, stroking the tears with his fingers, kissing her, asking her to forgive him. They made it up: forgiveness was the easy part, but the pure, unalloyed happiness she had known became fugitive, uncertain, its present leaking into the past, infected by the future. The row made her understand both how much she loved and how little she knew him.

At Christmas she felt especially divided, unable to leave the family, and knowing that he would be alone. ‘Haven’t you got some Army friends you could be with?’ she asked, and he said, yes, he had, but he didn’t want to be with them. ‘Christmas doesn’t mean all that much to me anyway.’ But he bought a present for Juliet – a little turquoise heart on a chain. They had the New Year together and he showered her with presents – stockings and a black evening bag and a scent called Beige from Hattie Carnegie, sent from New York, and a bunch of red roses and a man’s silk dressing gown that she thought must have cost a fortune and two novels by Scott Fitzgerald. She had spent weeks making him a shirt: it took a very long time partly because she found it surprisingly difficult, and partly because she had to make it more or less in secret from the family. ‘You
made
it?’ he said, in amazement. ‘You actually sewed this yourself?’ He was deeply touched and put it on at once.

That seemed to be the right moment to suggest to him that they might go and see Archie. She told herself that she wanted this in order to defuse any jealousy of Jack’s about him, but there was also the desire to show her lover to someone, and Archie was trustworthy and discreet, and, anyway, the only person who knew of Jack’s existence.

And so, later that day, there they were in Archie’s flat (where she had only been once before to change for her first meeting with Jack –
years
ago, it seemed) and Jack and Archie were getting on perfectly well. She didn’t listen to what they were saying because it all sounded like the usual war talk. Instead, she examined Archie’s room – the dead white walls, the large picture of a half-naked woman lying on a sofa beside a bowl of roses, an ugly person, but the colours were marvellous. There was a table with a pot of hyacinths on it and also a lamp made out of some old black glass bottle. The shelves each side of the fireplace sagged from the weight of the books; one short wall by the door was filled by the worm-eaten oak chest in which he’d told her the spare bedclothes were kept. Its top was covered by a piece of silk, purple and green, with embroidery and pieces of glass sewn into it. Opposite, the rather dirty, widely striped curtains of red and cream hung each side of his window with its balcony that looked out onto the square gardens. That evening when she had changed into her black dress, she had noticed none of this.

The meeting broke up because Archie was going out to lunch in Chelsea, ‘a very late lunch as my hostess is Spanish, but even with her, it is possible to be late’.

He had kissed her cheek and thanked them for coming, and she noticed then how he had never, once, alluded to Cazalet family life or Home Place, or, indeed anything that might have made Jack feel left out.

In the street, Jack took her arm and said: ‘I’m glad to have met him. It’s good to see something of your family.’

‘He’s not actually
family
.’

‘He feels like it. Anyway, he’s a good friend for you to have.’

It was a mild new year, dry and bright – it never seemed to rain. Afterwards, she could never remember when they had the first conversation about it – they did not often talk about the war, but the impending invasion of France, the Second Front, was constantly referred to at Home Place, in newspapers and people talking in the train. ‘When do you think it will happen?’ she asked him idly one day.