Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (51 page)

But in all these random speculations, it was Zoë that he kept coming back to and with the most anxiety, because, he realised, it was the part of homecoming that would exact most from him, and it was also the part where he was afraid he had least to give. There was, of course, another child, a son or a daughter, provided all had gone well, which it hadn’t last time for her, he thought, with a pang of guilt. It was odd how he had not been as miserable when that baby had died as he felt he should have been, but then, nor had she. That was when he had found it most difficult to love her: whatever he did, or said, however he was with her seemed wrong, rousing no more in her than small sparks of irritation . . . Motherhood had not come easily to her, he had thought then; perhaps she was not cut out for children at all. Then, when she had started the second baby, she had seemed different, excited, the symptoms of pregnancy that she had complained about so much before had been lightly borne that second time. But he had never known the outcome, and when he had sent the notes to her and to Clary by Pipette (and, of course, he did not know whether they had ever received them), he had not dared to mention the baby in case she had lost it.

There was no sun now; the breeze had died down, the sea and the sky were all a dusky dark; rain fell, as lightly as mist, and he put on the oilskin. One of the crew walked past him to the bows to empty a pail of potato peelings – the wind, what there was of it, was still on their quarter. I suppose I’m still officially in the Navy, he thought, and wondered how long it would take for him not to be. Then he wondered whether they would consider him, for the last ten months or so, to have been a deserter – a confusing thought. But it was not the Navy he had deserted during those months, it had been Zoë. And now, as the boat took him further and further away from her, it was
she
who was to be deserted – for good. He could not think of her without such senses of loss and longing that he knew he must not think of her at all, and so escaped again into sleep, or rather, patches of sleep.

He was woken at dawn by spray: the wind had backed round to north-east, but the sea, a livid pewter from the rising sun, was calmer, a heaving surface with only the occasional wave slapping at the starboard quarter.

They brought him a mug of cocoa and said they would soon sight land. He lit his last cigarette and watched for it. The low bank of cloud on the horizon that seemed to separate the sea from the sky resolved itself into a paler streak of mist. He watched as the mist solidified to swathes of brownish green above the chalk white of cliffs and then the small blocks and rows of darker detail presented themselves suddenly as buildings that became steadily paler as the sun rose, until the scene resembled a very distant stage set. He was cramped from being in the same position for so long, and damp from the showers and spray. He continued to watch and his heart felt as cold as ash from a fire deliberately put out. It was possible to do that, he thought; it was the rekindling that seemed insurmountable. But if one knew anything about love, he supposed, it should be possible. He picked up his mug. God! How he
loathed
the skin of hot milk! He took it off with his fingers and then, without knowing why, he ate it before he drained the mug. Somehow, he thought, I must find it in me to make a start.

If you enjoyed
Confusion
, you’ll love
Casting Off
, volume four in the Cazalet Chronicles

Home Place, Sussex, 1945.

The English family face a new era . . .

The slow dawning of a new time of freedom shapes the destinies of the Cazalets in the fourth part of this magnificent family saga, as we find the older cousins, now in their twenties, trying to piece their lives back together in the aftermath of the war.

Louise’s father Edward is desperate for her to like his mistress, and her mother is beside herself with pain at Edward’s betrayal. Clary needs to understand exactly why her beloved, now withdrawn, father chose to stay in France so long after it was safe for him to return home. Meanwhile the girls’ own affairs are far from straightforward: both Polly and Clary have fallen madly in love with much older, wildly unsuitable, men. And Louise, stuck in a loveless marriage, is candidly considering her options, as well as tending to her own, very private, grief.

‘A dazzling historical reconstruction . . . much more than most novelists, she is interested in the quality of happiness . . . superb’

Daily Telegraph

An extract follows here . . .

THE BROTHERS

July 1945

‘So I thought if I stayed until the autumn, it would give you plenty of time to find someone suitable. Naturally I wouldn’t want to put you out.’ In the silence that followed, she sought and discovered a small white lace handkerchief in the sleeve of her cardigan and unobtrusively, ineffectively, blew her nose. Her hay fever was always troublesome at this time of year.

Hugh gazed at her in dismay. ‘I shall never find anyone remotely as suitable as you.’ The compliment struck her as a small stone, and she flinched: one of the things she had been dreading about this conversation was his being nice to her.

‘They say nobody is indispensable, don’t they?’ she returned, although when it came to the point, like now, she did not feel this to be true at all.

‘You’ve been with me so long I shall be lost without you.’ When she had first come, all the girls had had shingled hair; hers was now grey. ‘It must be over twenty years. Goodness, how time flies.’

‘That’s what they say.’ This, she thought, was not true either. But in all of the twenty-three years she would never have dreamed of arguing with him. She could see now that he was upset: a small pulse at the side of his forehead became noticeable, and any moment now he would run his hand fretfully on to it and up into his hair.

‘And I suppose,’ he said, when he had finished rubbing his head, ‘that there is no way that I could get you to change your mind?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s Mother, you see. As I said earlier, she can’t manage on her own all day any more.’

There was a short silence as he recognised that they were back at the beginning of the conversation. She moved his laurel-wood cigarette box towards him – she had filled it that morning as usual; it was so much easier for him with one hand than struggling to open packets – and waited while he took one and lit it with the silver lighter that Mrs Hugh had given him the year of the Coronation. That had been the year that the firm had supplied the elm for all of the stools for the Abbey; she had seen the one that Mr Edward had bought afterwards – lovely it had looked with its blue velvet and gold braid. She’d felt proud that it was
their
wood that had been chosen for a piece of history. Her retirement would be full of memories.

‘I was wondering,’ she said, ‘whether you would care for me to assist you in finding a new person?’

‘Do you know somebody who might do?’

‘Oh, no! I just thought that perhaps I could have helped to sort out the people who applied for an interview.’

‘I’m sure you’d do that far better than I should.’ His head was beginning to throb.

‘Would you like me to open the window?’

‘Do. No good being hermetically sealed on a day like this.’

As soon as she had undone the window bolt and heaved up the heavy sash a few inches the warm breeze carried in with it the staccato, raucous cries of the old newsvendor from the street corner below. ‘Election special! Two Cabinet ministers out! Big swing to Labour! Read all about it!’

‘Send Tommy out for a paper, would you, Miss Pearson? It sounds like bad news, but we’d better know the worst.’

She went herself, as Tommy, the office boy, combined being chronically elusive with a capacity for slow motion that would, as Mr Rupert had once remarked in her hearing, do credit to a two-toed sloth. She would miss them
all
, she told herself, trying to spread the awful sense of impending loss. And this was just the beginning of it. There would be a farewell party in the office, everybody wishing her luck and drinking her health, and they might – probably
would
– have a whip-round for a leaving present. Then she would wait for the bus that took her to the station for the last time, walk the twenty minutes from New Cross to Laburnum Grove until she reached number eighty-four, insert the key in the door – then shut herself in and that would be that. Mother had always resented her because she had been born out of wedlock – was no better than she should be, as Mother would say whenever she got really fed up. She
would
get out, of course, to go to the shops and to change their library books and perhaps, occasionally, she might slip out to the cinema, although she was going to have to be very careful with money. By retiring so much earlier than she had meant to she would be forfeiting quite a proportion of her pension that the firm arranged for all its employees. Holidays, in any case, would be out of the question unless Mother’s incontinence cleared up – which she supposed it might do if she was at home all day to prevent it.

It had crossed her mind these last weeks that Mother was doing it on purpose, but it wasn’t very kind to think like that.

When she got back to Mr Hugh with the paper it was clear that he’d got one of his heads. He’d pulled down the top blind on the window so that the sun no longer fell across the desk, winking on the large silver inkstand that he never used. She laid the paper on the desk.

‘Good Lord!’ he said. ‘Macmillan and Bracken out. Landslide predicted. Poor old Churchill!’

‘It does seem a shame, doesn’t it? After all he’s done for us.’ She left him then, but before settling in the little back room where she typed and kept her files, she did feel it right to say that of course she would stay – until September anyway, and longer if he had difficulty in finding the right substitute.

‘That’s really very good of you, Miss Pearson. I don’t have to say how sorry I am that you’re going at all.’

Although he smiled at her, she could tell he was in pain.

In the ladies’ lavatory, where she went for a short, noiseless weep, the thought flashed through her mind of how different everything would be if she was having to leave her job in order to look after someone like Mr Hugh instead of Mother. It was a ridiculous notion; she couldn’t imagine how it had come up.

When she had closed the door behind her in the way that she always did when he had one of his heads (she had a dozen ways of showing that she knew about them that used to irritate him beyond measure, until years of familiarity had bred indifference), Hugh pushed away the paper, leaned back in his chair, shut his eyes and waited for the dope to work. A Labour government – it really looked as though that was the way things would go – was a disturbing prospect. It showed that, when it came to the crunch, ideas
were
more important than people, which, while it might be morally superior, was vulgarly surprising. Churchill was, rightly, a national figure: everybody knew about him – his emotional flamboyance, his oratory, his bronchitis, his cigars – whereas very little, and for most people nothing at all, was known about Attlee. The Service vote, he decided, must be proving the decisive factor. These ruminations were interrupted by the appearance of Cartwright with his report on the condition of the firm’s lorries, which had been causing concern. Most of them had reached a state where they were becoming uneconomic to maintain, but it would be some time before there was any appreciable number of new lorries available. ‘You’ll just have to do the best you can, Cartwright.’ And Cartwright, whose smile was skeletal – exposing a fearsome quantity of yellowing teeth with the minimum of mirth – finished with his usual complaint about the repainting of the vehicles. Cazalet lorries were blue with gold lettering. They were unique in this respect, since the blue faded so quickly that they needed constant attention. Cartwright resented using his budget on this, particularly with the present antique fleet, but the Brig had decreed years ago that the lorries should be blue and thereby distinguishable from any other lorry on the road. Neither Hugh nor Edward felt that this was a tradition that could be broken, more since their father was no longer able to see that they had done so. ‘Don’t start that one, Cartwright, but lay off repainting until I’ve been on to Rootes to see if they can produce anything for us.’

‘Seddons would be better than the Commers, sir, if we have any choice, the price of petrol being what it is.’

‘Yes – right. Good point.’

Cartwright said well, he’d be off then, but showed no signs of doing so. It turned out that he had a nephew due to be demobbed in the near future – his wife’s brother’s son, he explained. The family lived in Gosport and he wondered whether there might be a job going at the new wharf in Southampton. Hugh said that he would ask his brother and Cartwright said thank you very much, sir, he’d be obliged. Then he did go.

The twinge of irritation and anxiety that Hugh always felt whenever Southampton was mentioned occurred, setting off at the same time a larger and more immediate twinge of the same about Miss Pearson leaving. He did not feel at all like breaking in a new secretary after all these years. ‘You don’t like changing
anything
, my darling,’ Sybil had said, when he had exclaimed at her altering the parting of her hair. My God, he wouldn’t mind
what
she did with her hair, if only she was still alive! It was three years now – three years and four months – since she had died and it seemed to him that all that had happened in that time was that he had got horribly
used
to missing her. This was described by other people as getting over it.

At this point he resorted as usual to telling himself that at least she was out of pain – he could never have wanted, could not have
borne
any more of that for her. It was better that she should die and leave him than continue to be so racked.