Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (8 page)

CLARY

Summer 1942

‘Don’t you think, Archie, that politicians particularly say very silly things? I mean, nobody would think for a moment that you’d
train
people to play tiddlywinks – certainly not millions of grown-up American men. I have my doubts about public utterances generally. They are a bit like shouting something boring to extremely deaf people, aren’t they?’

It was being a thoroughly grown-up evening, and she didn’t want him to think that she didn’t know about conversation – particularly as Polly wasn’t helping at all: she simply smiled and chose things to eat and ate them. She looked awfully pretty in a pale yellow dress with a lace collar and a little black taffeta bow with streamers.

‘But, then, Harry Hopkins is a very unserious name for a politician, isn’t it? He sounds much more like somebody from
Ridg’way’s Late Joys
.’

‘He does, indeed. That was fun, though, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh,
yes
! It was. Was it really like Victorian music hall?’

‘Well, even I am not old enough to have been to that, but yes, I think it’s probably a fair imitation. Who did you like best, Poll?’

She thought, and a strawberry fell off her spoon. But not into her lap like it would have with me, Clary thought, just onto her plate again.

‘I am so fond of pleasure that I cannot be a nun,’ Polly said. ‘I thought Nuna Davey was wonderful and it was a really funny song.’

‘We have a rather ghastly cousin who wanted to be a nun once,’ Clary informed him. She had spilled strawberry ice cream – that went with the strawberries – down the front of her dress just above where her napkin was, of course, and before that, during the hors d’oeuvres, a bit of Bismarck herring had slid off her fork and landed on a different bit of the plain dark blue velveteen that Polly had advised her to wear: ‘You look your best in plain things,’ she had said, but it was now
un
plain in a most unfortunate way. She found it very difficult to think
and
talk
and
eat at the same time, and whereas at home one could do these things in comfortable turn, out to dinner in a posh restaurant she felt one was meant to manage all three. But I just haven’t had the practice, she thought.

‘I thought Leonard Sachs was marvellous, too. Making things up to say all the time, and answering people back and being funny. I should like to go every night.’

‘But since she’s been nursing, she’s reputedly fallen in love with a frightfully wounded patient, and of course if she marries him, being a nun will be out of the question.’ She gave Polly a severe glance for changing the subject. Polly smiled apologetically and stroked her hair. They had both had perms – their first – when Archie had invited them to London. Polly’s had been a terrific success, Clary thought – she had set it in a thick page-boy bob with a delicate little fringe curling round her forehead – but hers had gone into awful ripples like a cheap doll’s and she hated it. It was funny: she had never minded about anything like that before. She looked up from her plate, and found Archie regarding her.

‘I suppose you feel I’ve changed the subject,’ she said, ‘but you didn’t seem awfully interested in American politics.’

‘Let’s
not
talk about the war,’ Polly said. ‘People do all the time and it doesn’t make it any better. One of the reasons why we wanted to see you without the children was that we wanted to have a very serious conversation with you.’

She agreed with this. ‘And it would have been impossible with
them
.’

‘Of course, Simon isn’t exactly a child, but he’s away at school. Anyway, his interests are different. But Neville and Lydia . . .’ Polly left their hopeless immaturity to his imagination.

‘It would have been simply a children’s outing, and
we
take
them
on those,’ Clary finished. ‘It’s absolutely no fun for us, I can tell you.’

‘Right,’ Archie said. ‘Let me just order the coffee and then we shan’t be interrupted. Would anybody like a Grand Marnier?’

‘Yes, please,’ they both said, and then Clary added, ‘You see, a case in point. If you’d offered us that in front of them there would have been an awful rumpus with them saying it wasn’t fair and why couldn’t they have one when, of course, they are far too young.’

‘
Far
too,’ Polly agreed.

When the coffee and liqueurs had arrived, and Archie had offered them both a cigarette, which they both refused – Polly because she had promised her father not to smoke until she was twenty-one, and Clary because she had tried one and need never try one again – Polly said, ‘You explain, Clary, you’re far better at it than me.’

So she told him how it was felt that they were getting too old simply to do lessons any more with Miss Milliment, but that although there was general agreement about that, there was no agreement at all about the alternative. ‘The Duchy thinks we could perfectly well stay at home and help with the children and have French lessons with a ghastly person who lives quite near whose breath smells and who laughs at absolutely everything, and Aunt Villy and Aunt Rachel think we should go to the same cooking place that Louise went to to learn cooking and household management when neither of us is in the least interested in any of that, and Polly’s father thinks we should learn shorthand and typing so that we can be useful when we’re called up, and Miss Milliment thinks that we ought to work frightfully hard and try to get into a university – at least that’s something she wished
she
’d done, instead of like the others, just making us do things they’ve
had
to do – and Aunt Dolly thinks we ought to get married to some nice man—’ She started to giggle. ‘I
ask
you! Of course, she only got asked what she thought out of politeness . . .’ she had run out of people, ‘and that’s what
they
all think,’ she finished.

‘And what do you both want to do?’

She looked at Polly who said at once. ‘You go first, Clary.’

Not for the first time that evening, she wished that she had Archie to herself, because she didn’t feel that Polly wanted the same things. However, she did her best.

‘What I
want
is to get a huge lot of
experience
. I’m just running out of any at home, you see. I mean, anything new I learn is nearly always from books, which is interesting but it isn’t the same, because if those things happened to me I don’t know if I would have agreed that that’s how it was. Polly says she doesn’t know what she’s here
for
, and I’m coming round to agreeing with her. About me, I mean. We’re not like Louise, you see. She’s always wanted to be an actress.’

‘You could be a writer,’ Polly reminded her. ‘You used to say that was what you wanted to be.’

‘Well, I’m not so sure now. I have the uneasy feeling that people have already written everything. I do write, of course, but Louise does that too. She’s always writing plays, but it’s not her main thing. So I feel extremely muddled about it all. But
not
knowing doesn’t mean I want to be frog-marched into some boring enterprise that they think would be good for me. What they mean is that it would be safe and dull and wouldn’t actually be bad. I’m not very interested in safety.’

‘One thing we thought,’ Polly said, ‘would be for Clary and me to have a little house in London where we could live on our own.’

‘What would you live
on
?’ Archie enquired.

‘Oh, easy! We both have allowances now. Forty-two pounds a year each. If we didn’t buy clothes and things, we could easily pay for food and electric light and all that sort of thing. And if it wasn’t enough,’ Clary added, seeing Archie’s face, ‘we could get jobs in a shop.’

‘Or,
you
said,’ Polly reminded her, ‘that bus conductors get two pounds ten a week and with the war going on like this they would probably take women to be them.’

‘And Poll says she wants to go to parties because we never have much since we were children.’

‘Well,
you
want to go to them too.’

‘Only to meet people in more walks of life,’ she said.

Afterwards, she thought that Archie had been a very good listener. He never interrupted, or pooh-poohed anything. He made them go through the cons of each idea that had been presented: ‘You’ve only told me the pros,’ he said, ‘and they might be because you haven’t noticed the cons.’

So they went through it all. It was agreed that they didn’t want to stay at home, but learning French would be a good thing wherever they were. They agreed that it
might
be useful to learn how to cook, but it wasn’t only cooking, it was learning how to interview servants and ironing ghastly complicated clothes they would never have. ‘Anyway, Polly doesn’t want servants in her house when she has one, and I may easily become a socialist because they are keener on being fair to people, and we can always eat out of tins or make sandwiches which we both adore.’ They could neither of them see much of a pro in the domestic science school. When it came to learning shorthand and typing they were on weaker ground. Archie pointed out that when they
were
called up, having some skill like that would almost certainly give them a better chance of an interesting job. ‘Although,’ she had said, ‘I don’t think women are allowed to
do
any really interesting jobs. They’re allowed to get killed in a war, but not to do any of the killing back. Another injustice for you.’

‘You know perfectly well, Clary, that you would absolutely loathe to kill anyone.’

‘That’s not the point. The point
is
that if women had an equal responsibility about wars, we probably wouldn’t have them. That’s my view.’

‘She half wants to be a pacifist – like Christopher – and I agree with that in a way,’ Polly said. ‘But she also wants to be able to fly aeroplanes and be in command of a submarine, which, you must agree, Archie, isn’t very logical.’

‘All the same, I do sort of see what she means,’ Archie replied.

Clary glowed: the most understanding person she had ever met. ‘One can have contingency wishes,’ she said; she was trying to lick her fingers in an unnoticeable manner, but she saw them both watching her. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary how Grand Marnier gets on the outside of the glass? It’s surprising there’s any left inside at all.’

Archie said that leaving aside how they would like life to be, they had to consider what it was, and perhaps, given the status quo, they might consider a secretarial course useful. The university idea was ruled out. ‘We haven’t even passed School Cert,’ she said, ‘and I have the feeling that for years and years we’ve been learning all the wrong things to get us to pass that.’

‘It’s just poor Miss Milliment wanting us to have what
she
wanted,’ Polly said. ‘She’s far brainier than us. She has
taught
us things,’ she added, ‘it’s just that mostly they aren’t of the kind that would pass exams.’

‘Where are we going now?’ she asked as they walked down the dark narrow street from the restaurant.

‘Home, I thought. Did you have any other ideas?’

‘I slightly – only
faintly
– hoped we might be going to a nightclub.’

‘I’m afraid we aren’t tonight. I don’t belong to one, you see. But if you’re very keen, I’ll join one and take you at a later date.’

‘I’m not all
that
keen. Only Louise went on and on about it, and she went once after going to the Late Joys. I suppose you couldn’t take
two
women to one, anyway.’

‘Why not? I should think it would be twice as much fun.’

‘It would be very awkward for the person you weren’t dancing with,’ Polly said. ‘They might get kidnapped.’

‘That would be me,’ she said at once. ‘I’m rotten at dancing. I can’t really see the point of it.’

‘We didn’t go to a nightclub,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘Just as well, really, as they are reputed to be extremely boring places – only much good for people who want to drink a lot and be in love.’

She looked at this for some time wondering what either of these things would be exactly
like
. It seemed to her that you could do either or both anywhere, you didn’t have to go to a nightclub for them, so there must be something else about NCs that wasn’t mentioned. Oh, well. It was probably all part of the general conspiracy – a club as well, really – that neither she nor Polly seemed able to get into, and probably never
would
get into until they’d had some of the mysterious experiences that were never talked about, except with each other. It couldn’t be simply connected (as they had once thought) with age: they were both seventeen and if that wasn’t grown up, what on earth was?

Archie’s flat is very nice [she wrote]. We spent the night there. He kindly gave Polly and me his bed, and he slept on the sofa in his sitting room, which wasn’t long enough for him, poor Archie, and he said his neck felt like a coat hook at breakfast. I
knew
that Polly and I should have had separate evenings with him, and then one of us could have had the sofa and he could have stuck to his bed. But although it is quite small, and it was a furnished flat, he has somehow made it nice and like he is. He showed us a cupboard in the passage in the hall crammed with the bits of furnishings he couldn’t bear. There was an awful lampshade with ships in full sail on it, all dark parchment and coffee-bean-coloured ships, and a boxful of china rabbits all pale blue and getting larger and larger but otherwise the same, and a carpet with what Archie calls post-Picasso zig-zags all over it in fruit juice colours – things like that. But Archie has put red baize tablecloths over the worst tables and he bought an amazing picture by a painter called Matthew Smith – terrific reds and deep blues of a rather fat person asleep which he’s hung over the fireplace and he painted the walls white himself which makes it all much lighter. The bathroom has a salmon and black bath which apparently was once fashionable. He says the only thing to do is to laugh at it, but there was rose geranium Morny soap and the water was far hotter than at home. For breakfast we had toast and potted meat and tea. Then Archie had to go to his office which is in the Admiralty. So Polly and I washed up breakfast and tidied everything up and then we went shopping and prowling until it was time to have lunch with Uncle Hugh at his club. Clubs again. His is called the In and Out because of it having two openings to the drive in front of the main door. Although there aren’t being any raids on London at the moment, it does look very dusty and
tired
. We decided to go to Piccadilly Circus and see if Galeries Lafayette had anything nice we could afford – Poll bought her lemon dress there for five shillings so it can be a good place. On our way there, we sort of talked about Archie but only in a very superficial manner. For instance, I said I wondered how he ever did any shopping if naval officers aren’t allowed to carry parcels, and Polly said they must change into their civilian clothes, or get their girlfriends to do the shopping for them. I said I didn’t think that Archie had a girlfriend and Polly said how did I know, had he told me? He hadn’t actually mentioned the subject, but of course if he had there would have been signs. Poll instantly said what
sort
of signs and I couldn’t think of them, except pots of cold cream in the bathroom. Anyway, I said, people always talk about the person they’re in love with – look at the way Louise goes on and on about boring Michael Hadleigh, and for all we knew Archie might be too old to have affairs. ‘He’s not too
old
!’ Polly cried. ‘He’s actually, anyway, extremely
young
for his age.’