Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (49 page)

‘You’ll just have to make do with me,’ he had replied, and she had said: ‘It won’t be making
do
. You’re not a making do sort of person, Archie, much more people’s first choice.’ A remark that, coming from her, had given him inordinate pleasure.

He turned off the ceiling light. Then he fetched himself a whisky and decided to have it on his balcony where there were two chairs. He could put his bottom on one and his feet on the other. He was completely done in: not surprising, really, as they’d walked miles that evening. All the way to the Palace and then, eventually, back. And before that . . . One way and the other, he’d been on the go since Friday, which seemed a very long way away now. On Friday morning, he’d been at his desk, the office buzzing with the news of the Germans’ imminent surrender in Holland, Denmark and northern Germany, when the Wren who brought his post had come in with it.

‘And this was delivered by hand just now,’ she said. It was an envelope with something else in it – money, or a key, he thought, as he slit it open. Before he read the letter, which was written in pencil, he looked at the signature. Jack Greenfeldt. Greenfeldt? Oh, yes, the American, Zoë’s young man. She had brought him once to the flat for a drink, a saturnine, rather haunted-looking fellow, but he’d liked him. The object, wrapped in paper, proved to be a key. Oh, Lord, he thought, when he’d unwrapped it, I bet now the end is in sight he’s hopping it back to the wife and kids at home and hasn’t got the guts to tell her himself.

It was headed Dachau, 2 May.

Then he read the letter. It was quite short, and he read it twice.

I am sorry to bother you with this [it began] but I couldn’t think who else to ask. I have made several efforts to write to Zoë, but I couldn’t find any way of telling her.

Anyway, by the time you get this I shall be dead. I have two days’ work to do here taking pictures, then I shall put the film with this letter on a plane on Thursday morning and then I shall come back here and put a bullet through my head. She will ask you why. Tell her
I couldn’t live
with what I’ve witnessed in the last two weeks – I can’t be a survivor of what has been, literally, a holocaust. I’d go crazy, out of my mind at not being
with them
in it. These are, were, my people. I couldn’t make her happy – not after the days here, and at Buchenwald and at Belsen. The key is to the studio I rented, and she may want to collect things from there. Rent paid until the end of this month and perhaps you would give the key back to the agent in Sloane Street – Chestertons, I think it is. Tell her I loved her and thank her for that – oh, hell – tell her whatever you think best. I know you’ll see her through it – and maybe that husband of hers will come back?

And then he had signed it.

When he had read the letter a second time he found himself folding it up and putting it back into its envelope. He felt stunned by it – which meant, initially, that he had no feelings at all. Early in the war he had had to face up to the possibility of losing his own life, but the idea of taking it was so alien to him that he was completely unable to imagine the state of mind that might lead to such an act. Then he thought, Supposing he wrote this letter and then, when he got back to the camp, changed his mind, or someone found him in time to persuade him against it? Telling Zoë would be bad enough, but telling her and then discovering that it wasn’t true would be worse. Or would it? Perhaps he ought to try and find out. He took the letter out of its envelope and read it again. This time it engendered hostility, respect and, finally, pity – in equal quantities – what a shocking waste and selfish, too – what courage to do such a thing in cold blood and, poor chap, what he must have seen and heard and experienced that could drive him to such an act . . . but he did not doubt it. He picked up his telephone and asked for a line . . .

He asked for the Duchy and after struggling with the Brig who neither seemed to know who he was nor could understand how on earth anyone could want to speak to his wife (‘some feller on the line seems to want to talk to you about something or other’) he got her. He said he wondered if he could come down for the weekend? He was always welcome, she said, if he didn’t mind where he slept. He asked whether Zoë would be there, and she said, yes. Then she said in her most level tone, had he bad news? Not about Rupert, he replied. There was a pause, and then she said, Ah. If he came on the four twenty, she added, he could be met with the girls.

So that was what he had done. He had waited until after dinner to tell Zoë, because it was the first opportunity for having her on his own. He took her into the morning room, and made her sit down. She sat upright, with her hands on the table; he saw that she was trembling.

‘What is it? Is it – Rupert?’

‘No. It’s Jack.’

‘
Jack?
How do you know –
that
?’

‘He sent me a letter.’

She looked at him mutely.

‘He died.’

For a moment she stared at him as though she had not heard; then she said: ‘He sent you a
letter
– to say he was dead?’

His mouth was suddenly dry. All day he had wrestled with what he should tell her, how much, and how. ’Tell her whatever you think best,’ Jack had written. When he had finished washing his hands before dinner, and had straightened up to comb his hair in the small glass and had seen his face, weak with indecision and potential evasions, he had suddenly known that only the truth would do. So he told her – as gently as he could, but there was nothing gentle about the tale.

She sat still, upright and silent, until he said: ‘He said to tell you that he loved you and to thank you for it,’ when an expression of extreme pain came and went on her face. She swallowed and then asked if she might see the letter and he gave it to her, saying he was going to get them both a drink and he would be back.

On the table in the hall there was a tray with two glasses and decanters of whisky and water on it. Blessing the Duchy, he waited a few minutes, none the less, to give her some time to herself. When he returned she was sitting just as he had left her, and the letter lay on the table – she was not crying as he had half expected. He poured the whisky and put a glass by her hand. ‘I know this is the most awful shock,’ he said, ‘but I felt I should tell you the truth.’

‘Yes. Thank you. The funny thing is that I sort of knew – not that
this
would happen, but that it was an end, somehow. He came here two weeks ago – without any warning – and after tea we sat in this room. And then he went and I had the thought that I would not ever see him again.’

He put the glass into her hand.

‘My poor Jack,’ she said, as she began to cry.

Much later she had said, ‘I expect you think it was very bad of me – to go off like that – to have – an affair.’

And he’d said no, he didn’t, he thought it was very understandable.

But she had answered, ‘Understandable, but not good. But I
don’t
believe that Rupert is going to come back. If that was going to happen, it would have happened by now.’

Later she said, ‘I think
he
came here to make sure I would be all right.’

‘That showed love,’ he said.

‘Yes, it did, didn’t it?’ She cried a bit more, and then she asked him why he thought that he’d done it.

And he had answered slowly, not exactly picking his words, but trying to imagine being Jack: ‘Perhaps he thought it was the only thing he could give those people – to show that he loved them and cared—’

‘His own life?’

‘You can’t give more.’

By the time they parted for the night, the house was dark and silent.

It was half past two and the war had ended officially over two hours ago now. There were still sounds of distant revelry in the streets, outside the nearest pub – people singing, cheering, laughing. He got up from his chairs and went back into the sitting room. His leg ached, as he supposed it always would do from now onwards if he overdid things. So many people had come to stay with him during the last months – the children, mostly – that he had given up the sofa as a temporary bed and bought himself a divan. He undressed, fetched his pyjamas from the bathroom and got into bed.

For a long time, he was unable to sleep. He felt so beset by the quantity of confidences bestowed on him by the family – always on the grounds that he was part of it, or had become so, but really because he was not, would never be quite that. He was anything from a catalyst to a general repository. Hugh, for instance. Hugh had asked him to accompany him to Battle to collect some cases of beer. The moment they were in the car, he had known that this was a pretext, and had hoped that he didn’t want to talk about Polly. But it had been Edward. He was worried about Edward. They weren’t getting on at all well, and the chief reason for that, Hugh thought, was that Edward knew how much he disapproved of what was going on. Archie had long since realised that Edward had affairs and had wondered idly from time to time whether anyone else in the family was aware of this.

‘He’s always been a bit of a –
ranger
,’ Hugh said. ‘But this time it’s more serious. You’re part of the family, really, so I know I can trust you. The thing
is
that he’s had a child by this woman. And in spite of saying he was going to end the whole thing, he hasn’t. And now he’s talking of selling his house in London in order to buy a smaller one. Well, putting two and two together, I don’t like the sound of that at all.’

Why, Hugh had gone on, would he sell a perfectly good house, that he knew Villy was fond of, just to buy a smaller one unless he had no intention of being in it himself? That was what was worrying him. It transpired that he, Hugh, wanted him, Archie, to talk to Edward. ‘It’s no good me even trying any more, old boy. He simply flies off the handle and it makes office life harder. But I thought perhaps you might . . .’

He’d said he’d think about it, but he didn’t think that anything he said would make much difference.

Then, when they had collected the crates of beer – ordered by the Brig for the servants to celebrate the peace when it came – and were driving home in the rain, Hugh had suddenly said: ‘What’s up with Poll, do you think?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, she seems in a funny mood. I wondered whether perhaps she’s fallen in love with somebody.’

He had waited; he had promised Polly silence, and she should have it, however many lies were entailed.

‘I asked her what was the matter, and she said nothing, in the kind of voice she always uses when it
is
something. If I’m right, it’s clearly not going very well, and she hasn’t got Syb to talk to who would have been wonderful with her. I thought, possibly, she might have confided in you. Or you could have asked her.’

‘Better not,’ he had said.

‘Oh, well. I want her happiness more than anything else, and it’s awful to have to stand by and feel so helpless.

‘I hope it’s not that bloody doctor she works for,’ he said as they turned into the drive. ‘I mean, he’s foreign, for a start, and far older, and almost certainly married. Or if not, he certainly ought to be. Just thought I’d ask. I know she loves you.’

‘Eh?’ This had startled him.

‘My dear old boy, we
all
do. You’re one of the family. In a way.’

He could see no way of saying anything at all to Edward that would in the slightest degree influence him. Better keep out of that.

Zoë had not appeared at lunch-time. She had a very bad headache, the Duchy said. After lunch, she had tucked her arm into his and asked him to come and look at her rock garden.

‘Really I wanted to thank you for breaking that dreadful news to poor Zoë,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid she is very unhappy. Of course I’ve known about the man – all those visits to London suddenly. She is so young, and she’s had a very hard time. It seems to me that something must be done about her state.’

‘You mean—’

‘I mean that she cannot continue indefinitely neither a widow nor a wife. Naturally, she will have a home here for as long as she wants—’ She stopped speaking and walking and turned to look at him.

‘Or do you believe,’ she said unsteadily and in a voice that reminded him sharply of Rachel when she was moved, ‘do you believe that he
still
might come back to us?’

He looked at her, unable to say what she wanted to hear. Her gaze did not falter.

‘There is nothing in the world that I want more,’ she said. ‘But I was so fortunate in the last war with the other two coming back—’

He had said that he would find out what needed to be done or found out.

There had been some light relief. Lydia had buttonholed him after tea. ‘Archie, I have one extremely serious thing to ask you. It’s very small really – for you, I mean, to do something about – but for me it may well be life or death.’

‘What now?’

‘You say that as though I ask you things from morning to night. What it
is
is could you explain to my parents that it is absolutely essential for them to send me to a good school? I thought the one that Judy goes to, actually. I know she’s awful, but I don’t think that that is the school’s fault. She learns interesting games like lacrosse and hockey and they do ballroom dancing and a play at Christmas every year. And she’s got a pash for the geography mistress who is simply marvellous – and I know her mother told her it was only a phase but I’m not having a chance to go through it because it really isn’t possible to feel like that about Miss Milliment.’