Marking Time (28 page)

‘I see,’ Polly said hopelessly.

‘You see what?’

‘What you mean about people in books.’

‘Oh. Well, it’s OK – you don’t have to placate me.’

‘I wasn’t. I just said I see what you mean. I didn’t say I agreed with you.’

‘That’s something.’ But she said it nastily, Polly thought.

She made one more effort. ‘I prefer you to anybody in a book,’ she said.

Clary glared at her. ‘That sounds to me like a really sucking-up remark.’

This was too much. Polly seized the rope and swung herself to the ground.

‘What I mean is that if you read more you’d easily find someone preferable to me.’

Polly recognised that this, though mildly insulting, was intended as an olive branch. ‘All I meant, you fool,’ she said, ‘was that I’m actually quite fond of you. You
knew I meant that. Why can’t you just take that sort of thing in your stride?’

‘I never take anything in my stride,’ Clary answered, but she said it sadly, as though it was a shortcoming.

‘Don’t forget tea, then,’ Polly called as she left and Clary answered, ‘I won’t, but what can there possibly
be
for it?’ There had been an accident
with the butter that morning. (The accident had actually been Flossy, the kitchen cat, who had swiped what suited her and so besmirched the rest with her own hair and the juxtapositioning of an
exceedingly dead shrew that she had turned out not to fancy that none of the pound packet could be used, and that was half the ration for the household for a week.)

‘I don’t know. Bread and dripping like Victorian winter teas.’

But actually, Mrs Cripps, on her mettle, had made drop scones and some kind of currant loaf and there was plenty of last year’s raspberry jam. Everybody now had tea in the hall as the
Duchy considered that there were not enough staff for separate teas. This cut both ways, Polly thought: it meant that conversation was no longer dominated by nursery manners – a string of
clichés punctuated by the sort of silence where you could hear people drinking their milk, as Clary had once remarked; on the other hand,
if
you were hungry, you had formidable
competition with the great-aunts whose capacity to eat enormous amounts of food while apparently hardly touching it was truly awe-inspiring. The virtuosity had been acquired through years of them
trying to thwart one another: the last sandwich, the slice of cake with icing
and
a cherry, the most buttery piece of toast – these were things of which Flo wished to deprive Dolly,
and equally, they were things that Dolly felt that Flo should not have. Like most Victorian ladies, they had been brought up to display no interest in food: their greed was surreptitious –
hence the sleight of hand to mouth which meant that many people didn’t get their share of anything to which you could help yourself.

The Duchy doled out the main courses at luncheon and dinner; it was tea and breakfast that provided the main battlegrounds. Now, because she wanted to keep things for Christopher, who was often
late for meals, Polly made a plate for him with all the best things on it but when he eventually turned up, he wasn’t hungry.

She went for a walk that evening with him, across two fields to the wood with a stream in it. The fields were rich with buttercups and ox-eye daisies and papery poppies, and grasshoppers kept
springing aside from their knees. A cuckoo sounded from the wood, which stood fringed with foreshortened, dappled shadow. Christopher had been silent, and walked with long strides in a fast
abstracted manner almost as though, she thought, if he was on his own, he would have been running. She had wanted to talk about the prisoners – to ask him what had happened in the church hall
– to tell him about Clary but he seemed so preoccupied that she felt that anything she might say or ask would sound trivial. All the same, she had come for conversation rather than exercise,
and once they were in the wood, she asked where they were going. He stopped and said, ‘I don’t know. Wherever you like.’ So she said she wanted to see the place where he and Simon
had had their escaping camp last year. She had actually visited it with Clary in the Easter holidays when they had gone primrosing, but decided not to say this. Then she thought how odd it was that
when one
wanted
everything to be good with somebody, one started not telling them everything. Like my parents, she thought, although it seems to have worked quite well with them. All the
same, she didn’t want to be that kind of person with Christopher, for whom she had great respect. So she mentioned that she thought she had been to the camp at Easter, but she was walking
behind him and he seemed not to hear and, from the honesty point of view, at least she had
said
it.

When they got there, you would hardly have known that there had ever been a camp except for faint traces of charred sticks and ground left bare by ash from the fire. Christopher seemed uneasy
there, and suggested that they walk on to the other side of the wood, ‘Where there is a pond,’ he said.

But when they finally arrived at the pond that gleamed in the evening sun like black treacle and exuded a swampy, faintly malicious odour, she found that it was just as difficult to start a
conversation sitting on a bank as it had been walking. Christopher sat, with his long bony arms wrapped round his knees, staring at the water. She was still watching his rather convulsive
Adam’s apple and wondering if he’d mind being asked about the prisoners when he said, ‘What I hate most is having to be
against
something all the time. But if
you’re in a minority, that’s what you have to be. I can’t be
for peace
; I have to be
against war
and then have to put up with people thinking I’m mad or a
coward or something. And that’s another thing!’ he exclaimed as though she had just reminded him of it. ‘The people who think war’s a good thing—’

‘They don’t think that!’

‘Well,
necessary
– can’t be helped. Whatever it is, they are allowed to be moral about it – chock full of principles and integrity and all that. But people like
me are supposed to be against war because we’re afraid a bomb might drop on
us
or we can’t stand the sight of blood—’

‘I don’t think everyone’s like that . . .’

‘Tell me somebody who isn’t.’

‘I’m not. I mean, I don’t agree with you, but I accept—’

‘Why
don’t
you agree with me?’

‘Because,’ she said at last, after some furious thinking, ‘because I don’t see what else we could do. I don’t know when this whole thing really started, but now
it’s here and we have to deal with it somehow. I mean, Hitler and all that. Nothing we can say will stop him going on with the war now. So it doesn’t seem to me like the sort of clear
choice you say it is. We have to make the best of two not very good choices.’

‘Which are?’

Trying to ignore the hostility in his voice, she said, ‘Well, having a war, as we are. Or letting Hitler just overrun everywhere.’

‘You sound exactly like everybody else.’

Tears stung her eyes. ‘You asked me.’ She decided to go, but with dignity. ‘I think I’d better get back to Wills,’ she said. ‘I promised Mummy I’d give
him his supper and bath him tonight.’

When she was out of sight, she heard him call something and stopped to listen. It sounded like ‘lollipop’.

‘What?’ she shouted.

‘I said, I’m sorry, Poll.’

‘Oh. OK.’

But really, she felt, although it might be OK in a sort of personal way the fact remained that she had failed to have a calm disagreeing conversation with two of the people she was most attached
to, and she, who had often watched with contempt her parents and their peers saying things to one another that they did not mean found herself wondering uneasily whether concealment and deceit were
a necessary part of human relationships. Because if they were, she was going to be pretty bad at them.

But when she got to Pear Tree Cottage, human relations seemed to be even worse. Lydia was having a row with her mother who seemed crosser, as Polly had noticed grown-ups often did, than whatever
it was that they
said
they were cross about.

‘I can’t help it. You
asked
me! You said, wouldn’t it be fun for me to have Judy to play with and it wouldn’t be so I said it wouldn’t.’

‘You used to
love
playing with her.’

‘No,’ said Lydia consideringly. ‘I never
loved
it. I put up with it.’

‘I can’t think why you’re being so nasty about her.’

‘Would you honestly
enjoy
spending your time with a copy-cattish goody-goody who is completely unfunny all the time and never stops boasting about awful friends with swimming
pools and steals other people’s eau-de-cologne to put on her spots? Her breath smells of drains,’ she added. ‘And if I’ve got to put up with bad breath I must say I’d
prefer something more interesting – like a tiger.’

‘Lydia, that will do! I don’t want to hear another word about Judy.’

‘Well, I don’t either.’ And so it went on.

Polly picked up Wills and hugged him. He fluttered his eyelids and a conspiratorial smile flitted across his face leaving it majestic and bland.

‘Lydia! Leave the room! I mean it! At once!’

When she had gone, Aunt Villy said, ‘Jessica could have come any other weekend! It doesn’t make the slightest difference to Mummy
when
either of us visit her. She hardly
knows who we are! No! She can’t stand the idea of her friends coming here without her!’

Sybil, to whom these remarks had clearly been addressed, stopped ironing Wills’s rompers and said, ‘I suppose it
might
just be that it was a weekend that suited Raymond? If
you are going to bath Wills, get on with it, Polly.’

When she was young, she would have gone reluctantly because this meant that the grown-ups were going to have a really
interesting
conversation. Now, however, she went with merely
ostensible reluctance; it didn’t do to let them think they could order one about, but on the other hand, she knew that the sort of conversation they were going to go on having was simply dull
in a different way. It wasn’t the
subject
matter that altered in private conversations, it was that they actually said what they
felt
about things, and their feelings, for
some reason incomprehensible to her, were supposed to be concealed from children. It was quite a relief to be with Wills, even though he made it immediately clear that he did not wish to have a
bath. He tore off his clothes and chucked them into the water, and then climbed onto the lavatory seat and pulled the plug. When, having cleared the bath of his tiny grey socks, his romper suit
– the pockets of which proved to be full of fir cones and their mother’s hair pins – his Aertex shirt and his stubby-toed sandals, she tried to lift him into the bath, he drew up
his legs and wrapped his arms round her neck in a stranglehold. ‘No water!’ he shouted. ‘Me dirt! Good dirty Wills!’ His breath smelled of caramels. ‘Not a
bath,’ he said more quietly in an explanatory sort of voice. In the end, she had to have it with him and they sat opposite each other; she washed bits of him surreptitiously, while he sat,
apparently lost in thought, occasionally striking the water with the palm of his hand and nearly blinding her. He made her sing ‘The Lambeth Walk’ about eleven times while she was
trying to dry him. By the time their mother arrived with his supper, Polly was worn out.

‘Who
is
coming for the weekend, Mummy?’

‘Some musician friends of Jessica and Villy. Clutterworth. He’s called Lorenzo, I
think
; I don’t know her name.’

‘He
can’t
be called Lorenzo
Clutterworth
! It sounds like someone in a book!’

‘It does rather, doesn’t it? Or a bad play. Darling, when did you last wash your hair?’

‘Why on earth do you want to know that?’

‘Please don’t answer back. I wanted to know because it doesn’t look very clean to me.’

By the time she had finished that wrangle she badly needed Clary, but when she got back to Home Place she could hear what she recognised as Beethoven being played on the gramophone, which meant
that Clary was having her music time with the Duchy. She would not be wanted there. Aunt Rach was not back from London yet. She could hear the wireless in the morning room, which meant that it was
full of the great-aunts, who listened to every news bulletin and then argued with each other about what had been said. She certainly didn’t want to get mixed up with them. She wandered
upstairs, along the landing to the bedroom she shared with Clary. Clary was extremely untidy and somehow this made it much more
her
room, although Polly did make them have tremendous
clear-ups from time to time. If only Oscar hadn’t died! she thought. She seemed to be peculiarly unlucky with cats – in fact, she felt at the moment, not only with cats, but people,
with absolutely everything. In between being frightening, the war made everything very boring. Here she was, simply getting older and older with nothing happening to her; she didn’t even have
a room of her own as she had had in London. If anyone had told her a year ago that she would be bored to tears living here, she would have laughed at them. Now, definitely not. The future yawned
before her, like a huge incurious question mark. What was to become of her? What on earth was she to do with all the years that presumably lay ahead? All these years she’d simply been marking
time – she hadn’t acquired any sort of vocation, unlike Clary and Louise who had always seemed to know what they were for; all she had ever imagined was having her amazing house, which
was going to be so full of things she had collected and made that it would be unlike any other house in the world. And then she had imagined that she would simply live in it with her cats. The
thought
had
occurred to her that she might quite like to have Christopher in it: once, when they had been drawing together, she had thought he would be a good person to live with, and she
had moved her house from Sussex to somewhere wilder, where there would be more animals. But she hadn’t mentioned it to him in case he said that he definitely wouldn’t want to. And after
this evening, ‘You sound just like everyone else’, it would be pointless to mention it. Usually, when she felt rotten and depressed like this, her house was a comfort: she could fly to
it in her mind, and become engrossed in its decoration. This evening, when she transported herself through the shiny black door with its white pediment and pilasters into the small square hall that
had black and white tiles laid chequerwork with a border on the floor (she had recently redone the floor) and admired her lemon and orange trees that lived in a pair of black and white tubs placed
each side of the Russian stove, even before she reached the table she had made of marble mosaic with a border of shells on which stood the Victorian glass jug that had an ingenious way of keeping
lemonade cool, picked up at a church bazaar last Christmas, this evening she was halted, struck suddenly by the dreariness of living quite alone (albeit with cats) for the rest of her life.
Eventually the house would be finished, unable to hold another picture or table or rug or thing of any kind, and then what would she do? I was only going to live on sandwiches, she thought, because
they wouldn’t take long to make. And the cats were going to have lived on the
insides
of sandwiches. There would be hours and hours when she wouldn’t have anything to do,
because in spite of what Christopher had said about drawing, she really only wanted to draw enough pictures for the house – she hadn’t wanted any drawings left over so to speak; the
point of drawing would be over when she had enough. When Oscar died, Aunt Rach had brought her a tortoise from London, but he had soon got lost in the garden, so the very pretty shell-encrusted box
she had designed for his hibernation would be useless. Children meant that you had to marry someone, and who on earth could she find to marry? Anyway, after bathing Wills, she wasn’t
absolutely sure that she would enjoy having children; she had noticed that her mother had become far more boring to talk to since she had had Wills – although it might just be having felt
rotten for ages that made her so nagging in a watery kind of way. That, and worrying so much about Dad. Or perhaps it was what Louise had once said to her, that mothers didn’t actually like
daughters, but as the public expected them to, all their feelings got very twisted. She had asked rather anxiously whether fathers
actually
liked daughters, but Louise had got quite snappy
then and said she hadn’t the faintest idea.