Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (40 page)

After the front door had shut, she heard the garden gate click. She could not hear his receding footsteps, and the house was silent. She went upstairs to the little room that had been his, flung herself on his bed and cried until her throat ached.

But that was only the beginning of what turned out to be the blackest time in her life.

When Michael came back, she knew, without being told, that he had discussed things with his family – with Zee. He had a kind of cold schoolmasterish resolve now. She was to join him in the port where he was taking command of a new destroyer. She would stay in an hotel there and he would sleep ashore. They would be leaving on Sunday afternoon. And he required only one undertaking from her. She was not to write to or to communicate with Hugo in any way at all. That was to be that. She was so stunned by these arrangements that she agreed – and then realised that when Hugo rang her on Monday evening, she would not be there. She asked if she might write just one letter to him explaining what was happening, but he said no. ‘The Judge will make clear to him what is happening,’ he said. ‘It is quite unnecessary for you to do anything about it at all.’

And so, just over twenty-four hours later, she found herself standing in the dark and cavernous hall at the reception desk of the Station Hotel, Holyhead, waiting with listless patience while Michael signed the register and the key to their room was found. The porter then conducted them into the lift, onto the second floor, along a wide, dark passage studded with doors, until eventually he stopped in front of one of them, fumbled with the key and opened it. When he had dumped the cases and received his shilling from Michael, he went. They were alone again – more so than in the train where there had been other people and noise.

‘I’ll leave you to unpack,’ he said when he had washed (it sounded like a concession). ‘Meet you in the restaurant in half an hour.’ The door clicked heavily shut after him. For a moment she simply sat on the side of her bed. Already the place felt like a prison. Her head ached from the long journey in a close, smoke-filled carriage; she had slept some of the way because she had not slept the previous night – Michael had insisted that they go out to dinner with another naval officer and his wife. The men had talked naval shop during dinner and the wife had talked about babies and how lucky she – Louise – was to be going to stay in an hotel with her husband safe and sound every night. Then they had gone dancing for what seemed to her hours. She had thought she would be glad that this interminable, awful day was to be over but by the time that Michael, with wordless, perfunctory speed, made love to her (why did people call it that? she wondered) she was unable to sink into oblivion – something she had been looking forward to all evening. She had lain in the dark, rigid and wakeful; she had not stopped thinking of Hugo since the moment that he left, but it was as though the shock of their sudden separation had frozen her heart, had paralysed her thoughts so that all day, all the evening, the pain had seemed distant – she knew that it was painful, but she was out of earshot, as it were. But with Michael asleep, the thaw, the misery began. She missed him, she loved him, she could not imagine how she would get through life without him – it was very like the consuming homesickness that had dominated her childhood. If I could just be with him, she thought, I wouldn’t mind anything else. During that day, and the day after, Michael managed somehow to make her feel guilty about what he called her behaviour; alone, the guilt was easily overwhelmed by her misery. It seemed extraordinary and awful that she should find out about love too late.

Dinner, in the dining room that had such enormous windows and such a high ceiling that there was no way it could ever be warm. They sat at a table with one carnation and maidenhair ferns and had tinned tomato soup, cold ham and potatoes and pickled beetroot followed by a choice of apple pie or a prune mould. Michael said the breakfasts were the best meal there. The dining room was about half full with naval people and others who, Michael said, were catching the midnight ferry. After dinner, they went and sat in another enormous room where, after lengthy periods of waiting, people could have coffee or afternoon tea or gins and tonics brought to them. They had coffee and Michael talked about his new ship, and she thought about Hugo ringing Hamilton Terrace and finding she was not there. She had managed to leave a note for Polly and Clary in which she said that Michael had suddenly insisted upon her leaving with him on Sunday, that Hugo had also had to leave but that he would be ringing, and would whichever one of them answered the telephone explain to him where she was? This was better than nothing: she knew that Hugo would know that she had not
wanted
to go away, and if he knew where she was, perhaps he would write her just one letter, even if she could not reply to it.

She got through the evening by pretending she was acting in a rather dull play, and she noted, with a kind of objective interest, that Michael responded to her performance as though it wasn’t one at all. He expected her to be as interested in everything to do with his ship as he was himself, therefore, she thought, he would have been more surprised if she had been bored. By the time they retired for the night, he had become far less schoolmasterish, and altogether warmer and more expansive. There was the usual performance in bed but, after initial repugnance, she decided to continue her performance and discovered that this meant that she did not need to feel anything at all. But afterwards when she could feel alone because he was asleep, the tide of homesickness, of longing for Hugo engulfed her: recalling his voice – from the first day, ‘I say, you really are distractingly beautiful . . .’ ‘What I should really like would be a lobster . . .’, the day he brought the table and they spent all the afternoon polishing it together with proper beeswax, the day he found the glass dome – ‘Miss Havisham’s wedding bouquet,’ he had cried, ‘we simply must have that!’ His kindness to her when she had stuck her throat-painting brush too far down and had been sick and was so miserable – nobody in her life had been as kind as that: her mother had always seen that she was nursed, but the implication had usually been that if only Louise had been less careless, she might not have caught whatever it was in the first place; her father had always visited her when she was ill in bed – and as far back as she could remember she had felt both ungrateful and uneasy at the attention . . . but Hugo had been there when she woke in the night, after reading to her for hours, that extraordinary book about an ordinary man becoming Pope, a very interesting exposition of the writer’s personal fantasy, Hugo had said, when he told her about the strange author who called himself Baron Corvo. He had found
Hadrian the Seventh
on a secondhand book-stall; he was always finding books – never ones that she had ever heard of – bringing them home and reading bits to her. Then his telling her that he loved her, ‘the person that I love most that I’ve ever met’; he’d said it twice, the second time in their last few seconds together. Then ‘It’s a hell of a mess, isn’t it?’ He had never been in love before, he had told her once, when he was helping her to wash her hair. ‘I’ve liked girls, and sometimes I’ve thought they were far from plain, but my feelings about them were quite minor.’

‘You smell of apples,’ she had said to him one evening when they were lying together, and she remembered how, after he had gone, and she had flung herself onto the bed he slept in, the pillow had that same – faint – scent. Every night she lived with him during those hours and when she finally slept she would hold her own hand and pretend that it was his.

The dreary and aimless regime of living in an hotel with nothing to do was quickly established. In the ensuing weeks, she went for lonely – and usually wet – walks, she lunched alone with a book, sometimes – because in spite of doing nothing she felt perpetually tired – she would go up to the room and lie on the bed and cry and then fall asleep. Before dinner, there would often be drinks parties aboard one ship or another: she struggled down slimy iron ladders set into the dock walls onto the faintly rocking decks of gunboats, Michael’s old refitted destroyer, or either of the frigates that were also there. Down other ladders to saloons of various sizes, but always smelling of diesel fuel, cigarettes and damp jackets. Then back to the hotel for dinner; she knew the menus by heart quite soon. In the evenings, Michael would draw – fellow officers, sometimes their wives if they were staying for a day or two, and, failing that, herself. And night after night he established his possession of her, without, it seemed, any particular pleasure, more as a necessary ritual.

The whole of January went by; Hugo did not write. At weekends, when he did not go to sea, Michael went shooting at a nearby estate. The owner, with whom he had been at school, was away at the war, but he had told his agent to look after Michael if he wanted any sport. She met the agent, Arthur Hammond, one evening when he brought Michael back after a day’s shooting. He was a gentle, dark, melancholy man with an old-fashioned, drooping moustache. Louise liked him; his wife was having a baby, he said, which surprised her because he looked as though he was at least fifty. She thought then that this was a childish notion, but she often had ideas of the kind. The last few weeks of living in the hotel with Michael seemed somehow to have turned her into a child living with a grown-up (Michael, too, seemed to have changed, or perhaps she was seeing him for the first time), a great deal of whose behaviour and conversation was incomprehensible and therefore dull; he seemed to be in charge of her life and she was too unhappy to question or resist.

So when he returned one evening after a day’s rough shooting and said that Arthur had been summoned to London by his employer, who was too briefly on leave to get to Anglesey, that he was worried about leaving his wife alone for the night and had wondered whether Louise would be so awfully kind as to stay with her, her response had been to ask Michael whether he thought she should go.

‘Yes, I think you should. The poor chap is beside himself with worry. She’s had the baby, but she doesn’t seem to be at all well.’

‘All right. Of course I will.’ She started to say that she wasn’t much good at babies, but stopped.

‘Oh, good! Well, you pop up, darling, and get whatever you’ll need for the night and I’ll tell him. He’s telephoning a neighbour of her mother’s. If he can get hold of her, he’s sure she’ll come tomorrow. But be quick, because he’s got to drive you there and then come back to catch his train.’

Ten minutes later, she was sitting in the car beside Arthur, driving through dark, narrow, winding roads.

‘Baby was premature and she’s had some kind of fever, you see. Very depressed. Don’t know what it is. But the doctor will come tomorrow. And her mother’s coming, so it’s only for the one night. Awfully good of you, I must say.’

‘I don’t know very much about babies,’ she said.

‘I don’t know
anything
about them,’ he said. ‘Married rather late in life. This is her first.’

‘What is her name?’

‘Myfanwy.’

He stopped the car beside large iron gates at the entrance to a drive. Without the car lights, everything was pitch dark, and he took her arm to guide her through a side gate and into the small lodge. The front door opened straight into a sitting room with an open fireplace; the logs in it had almost burned out, but there was light from a small lamp on a stool. As they entered there was a slight whirring sound from a very large grandfather clock, whose height was almost that of the ceiling, before it broke into its stately quarter-hour chime.

‘She’s upstairs,’ he said.

She followed him up the steep and narrow staircase that opened onto a square landing on which there was barely room for both of them to stand. A door on the left was ajar, and he knocked upon it gently before they went into a bedroom almost entirely furnished by an old brass-headed double bed, the room lit by another lamp placed on the floor beside it.

‘Myfanwy, I’ve brought Louise. She is going to stay with you.’

The girl, who had been lying with her back to the door, turned to face them with a sudden, restless movement.

‘You said to get my mam!’ she said. Her face was flushed and her eyes glittered with tears. She tried to sit up, then threw herself back on the pillow. ‘I want her to come, I told you that!’

He went up to the bed and stroked her tangled dark hair.

‘She will come. She will be here tomorrow morning. Louise is going to look after you tonight. You remember? I told you I had to go to London for the night.’

‘To see his nibs,’ she said. She pushed the bedclothes from her and one strap of her nightdress fell down her white arm exposing one breast, round and taut with milk, and also a tiny baby tightly wrapped in a shawl that lay as silent and motionless as a doll beside her.

It won’t be able to breathe under the bedclothes, Louise thought, and the awful notion that it was already dead occurred to her.

The girl seemed to notice Louise for the first time. ‘He won’t take anything. He doesn’t want me,’ she said and the tears began to slide slowly down her face.