Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (45 page)

‘Rubies and diamonds,’ he said, ‘and it’s nine carat gold.’

It was a real engagement ring and quite took her breath away, but when he tried to get it on her finger it was too small – wouldn’t go above her second knuckle. ‘I’ll have it enlarged,’ he said, but she could see he was disappointed.

‘It’s really lovely,’ she said. ‘Frank, you shouldn’t have. It’s ladies that have engagement rings.’

‘And you are a lady,’ he said, ‘if ever I saw one.’

Perhaps it would go on her little finger, she suggested, just for the time being, but it wouldn’t even do that. Don’t put it away, she said, she wanted to look at it, and she laid it on the palm of her hand with the diamonds winking if you caught them right in the light.

‘Are they
real
, then?’ she asked; she did not think they could be, but he said of course they were.

‘They must be ever so valuable.’

‘Well, they’re not exactly . . . cheap,’ he had answered in tones that showed he agreed.

She was entranced. It was the most valuable thing she’d ever
touched
in her life, and he’d gone and bought it for her.

‘Oh, Frank!’ she said. ‘Oh, Frank!’ There were tears in her eyes, and she gave a series of short, sharp sniffs. ‘I’m so pleased! I’m
ever
so pleased. I really am!’ And then she told him – quickly while he was on the crest of her gratitude.

He didn’t seem to mind at
all.
‘I knew – really,’ he said. ‘I mean – that you might not be quite the age you said you was. No self-respecting lady would tell a gentleman
exactly
her age.’ He looked at her with his mournful brown eyes that were now far less mournful than usual – were almost glowing with satisfaction at his generosity. ‘For me,’ he said, ‘you will always be young.’

He picked up the ring and put it back in its box. ‘It is only,’ he said, ‘a small token of my esteem.’

After all the trouble that she had taken to get away to London at such short notice, Jack had only stayed for Saturday night; he had left to fly to Germany very early on Sunday morning. There was nothing new about this situation: it had been going on more or less ever since D-Day nearly a year ago. He was abroad practically all the time, returning only for the odd night, or sometimes two or three days, usually at short notice, although not as short as this last time when he had literally rung up on Friday afternoon to ask if she could come up that evening. In spite of the fact that he had come through these last months unscathed, she could not get rid of or in any way diminish her sense of anxiety about him, so that each parting had a kind of double-edged anguish about it. Their meetings were still charged with excitement and joy, and for the first few hours they could be entirely engrossed by each other; the world and the war seemed hardly to exist, but somehow, always, something – often small – happened that breached their magic circle and brought them back to a dreary, and to her nerve-racking, reality. In the winter after the invasion it had sometimes been the V-2s. Even when they fell miles away you could not ignore the explosion – it shook the stomach as no other bombs seemed ever to have done, although she had not experienced very many of any of them. Her association with Jack brought her face to face with the war in a way that nothing had, excepting Rupert’s disappearance, and that had happened so long ago now that it had become like a piece of sad history. Sometimes Jack would say, ‘I must call my office,’ and listening to him talk to unknown people whom clearly he often knew well, but whom she had never met, made her realise that nine-tenths of his life was unknown to her.

She did slowly discover more about him. Once, a few weeks after the invasion, he brought her back a box that contained a set of exquisite embroidered silk underwear – a camisole, a petticoat and French knickers all in pale turquoise silk edged with creamy lace; she had seen nothing like it since before the war. ‘The shops hid them,’ he said. ‘They kept them for when we would come.’ But later that time, when they were having dinner and she had asked him about Paris and whether it had been fun to go there, he had said no, it hadn’t been fun at all.

He had been cutting up some meat before eating it with his fork and, feeling her attention, he looked up, and for a fleeting moment she saw a look of utter despair in his eyes – two black fathomless wells. This disappeared so quickly that she wondered whether she had imagined it. His mouth smiled, he reached for his glass and drank. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘There was nothing I could do about it.’

In bed, when it was dark, she put her arms round him. ‘What happened in Paris? I really want to know.’

He said nothing, but just when she began to think she shouldn’t have asked, he said, ‘My best friend in New York – he was a Polish Jew – told me that if I ever got to Paris, I must look up his parents who had been living there since nineteen thirty-eight. They’d sent him to America, because he had an uncle there, but his sister had stayed with his parents. He wrote the address down for me, and I kept it, although I didn’t know if I’d ever get the chance to use it. Well, I went to his street, to the house where they used to live, and they weren’t there. I asked around and I discovered that they’d been taken off to a camp a few months before the invasion. All three of them. They were collected one night and nobody ever heard anything more.’

‘But if they went to a camp in Germany, you’ll still be able to find them, won’t you? I mean, we’ve nearly got to Berlin.’

It was odd: she could not remember what he said in reply, but the next day he had been withdrawn, in one of his unreachable, sombre moods that she did not understand, and that made her feel vaguely frightened.

There came to be a kind of tacit censorship of what they talked about: once she had tried to find out about his marriage, but he had only said, ‘She wanted me to bully her, make all the decisions, order her about – no, correction, she wanted a
rich
bully and that bored me. We brought out the worst in each other. Will that do?’ And after that Elaine, she was called, was never mentioned again. They never talked about Rupert, although he always asked after Juliet. They talked about their own brief past with each other but never, since that time on the bench by the Serpentine, about the future. They talked about books that he had given her to read, and films they saw, discussing the characters in these as though in lieu of the mutual friends that otherwise they did not have. Bed became the safest place. There was no censorship there: familiarity enhanced pleasure and the smallest discovery about the sensuality of either became an added joy. Sex was not so much taking off one’s clothes as getting into one’s body, she said to him one night.

A second Christmas apart. ‘Oh, I wish I could ask you home,’ she had said, and had then been afraid that he might say why didn’t she? But he didn’t. He would be working then anyway, he said, ‘sending pictures of the boys at Christmas for the folks back home’.

After that, she didn’t see him for nearly a month. And after that, their times together became fewer and further apart. So that, in spite of the terribly short notice, she had managed to get Clary down to look after Jules and gone to London on the Saturday morning as early as possible, and they had spent the day and the night together. He hadn’t told her that he was going away on Sunday morning until after they had made love for the first time.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I have to go.’

‘Where? Where are you going?’

‘Somewhere east of Bremen. A place called Belsen.’

It didn’t really matter
where
he was going, she wept, it was the fact that he was going at all. Why hadn’t he told her?

He hadn’t been sure: he was substituting for someone else at the last minute; he’d pulled strings not to go this day in order to see her. He would be back. The war was nearly over, and, anyway, he would be back.

He left at five in the morning to catch a plane. She hated the flat without him. She got up and tidied everything and wondered what on earth to do. She couldn’t go back to Sussex so soon (she was supposed to be returning on Monday). Then she suddenly thought of Archie, and rang him, but there was no answer. It was awful, the way she could think of nobody, not a single person, she could go and see. She spent the day walking about the streets as sometimes she used to do with Jack, eating some spaghetti in the small Italian restaurant that they used to go to together and afterwards returning to the flat where she lay on the bed to read, but almost at once fell asleep.

When she woke, it was nearly seven o’clock. There did not seem to be much point in getting up, since she had nowhere to go. She longed for someone to talk to about Jack, and started to dial Archie’s number, but then changed her mind. He was Rupert’s best friend, after all. She got up in search of food. There was half a packet of biscuits and some of the powdered orange juice that Jack drank in the mornings. She made herself a glass of this, and ate the biscuits, and went to bed again where she lay for hours, wakeful, worrying about where he was and whether he was in a safe place, and when he would return.

Early on Monday morning she rang Home Place and said she was catching the early train back so that Tonbridge would meet her.

She heard nothing from him that week, and then the following Friday he rang – at lunch-time, thank goodness, because it meant that the Brig was not in his study. Rachel had answered the telephone. She did not say who it was, but Zoë knew somehow that it would be Jack.

‘Sorry to call you at lunch-time. I was wondering whether you could get away for tonight?’

‘Oh, Jack! Why can’t you give me more notice? I’ve just said I’ll look after the children so that the nurse can have the weekend off.’

‘It wouldn’t be for the weekend. Just for tonight.’ There was a pause, and then he said, ‘I’d really like to see you.’

‘You make it so difficult. You know I want to come. I can’t, though. I really can’t.’

‘OK. That’s it, then.’

There was a click, and she realised he had rung off. She rang his office, but they said he was not there; had not been there for some days. She rang the flat, and there was no reply. She went back to the dining room and pretended to finish her lunch.

All the afternoon, when, after their rests, she walked the children up to the shop in Watlington and back, she felt sick with anxiety. Now, if he were able to ask her, she would have dropped everything, and simply caught the next train –
walked
to the next station, if need be. Why had he rung off like that? It was not like anything she knew of him. But he had sounded strange: as though he knew something, or was concealing something – was angry – with her? Oh,
God
! Why had he rung off like that?

‘We want to go back through the fields,’ Wills was announcing. They had reached the gate that opened onto the road from the field where the Home Place land began.

‘No, we’re going by the road today.’

‘Why are we? Why, Mummy? What good will it do?’

‘We want to go back to the field with the charabanc tree.’

This was a fallen pine tree where the passengers sat on the branches while one person drove holding the upturned roots as a steering wheel and the other walked precariously up the trunk dispensing tickets (oak leaves).

‘Clary let us last weekend,’ Roly said.

‘Yes, and she played with us. She didn’t just stand about like Ellen talking about clean hands and meals.’

‘Grown-
ups
,’ scoffed Wills. ‘I’m just not going to
be
one, they are so boring.’

‘When you’re a hundred, you’ll be an awfully old child.’

One of them was climbing the gate now. She’d either have to give in or stop them.

‘I shall. The oldest child in the world. People will come for miles to see me. I shall be quite small but extremely wrinkly with specs. And a white beard.’

‘You’ll be a dwarf, then,’ Roly said.

‘No, I shall not. I hate them. I hate their pointed red caps.’

She gave in. It seemed easier at the time.

‘You can have ten minutes playing charabancs,’ she said, as they trudged through the long, wet, bright green grass.

‘Ten minutes! Ten
hours
is what we want.’

‘Ten days.’

‘Ten weeks.’

‘Ten hundred years,’ said Juliet pre-empting any further crescendo.

She looked at her pretty daughter, who was wearing a tweed coat, cast off by Lydia some years ago as too small for her, black wellingtons and a scarlet beret that was currently her favourite thing, and for the first time, the thought that in some unknown distance of time they might be in America together lingered in her mind. It seemed so extraordinary, and yet, what else could happen? One day, she thought, I shall look back on this house and the family as distant landmarks, which she supposed was how she now thought of Rupert. Then she thought of the family – particularly the Duchy – of how completely they had taken her in and made her one of themselves, of how this place, and she used to be bored in the country, had become her home in a way that no place she had lived in with her poor mother had ever been. She would have to leave
her
, too – and curiously, although she had endured three further visits to the Isle of Wight since the one she had returned from to meet Jack – ‘Don’t you dare speak to any strange man you may meet on that train,’ he had enjoined her the first time she went after they had become lovers – curiously, that seemed hard, because she knew it would be hard on her mother, whereas leaving
here
would be harder for her than for any of the family. She would take Jack to see her mother, for
her
sake. And, of course, they would return to England to visit.