Marking Time (73 page)

‘Give her a kiss, Poll,’ her father said, ‘and then go, darling, if you would.’ He was sitting on the other side of the bed holding one of her mother’s hands, which
rested, palm upwards, against his black silk stump. She stooped and kissed the dry, tepid forehead and left the room.

Outside it was Clary who took her by the hand and led her to their room, flung her arms around her and cried and cried, but she was so full of rage that she could not cry at all. ‘At least
you could say goodbye to her!’ Clary kept saying in her search for comfort of some kind. But that was the point – or another of them – she
hadn’t
been able to say
goodbye: they’d waited until her mother was past recognizing or even seeing her . . . She had extricated herself from Clary, saying that she was going for a walk, she wanted to be alone, and
Clary had agreed at once that of course she would want that. She had put on her gum boots and mac and walked out into the steely, drizzling dusk, up the steps in the bank to the little gate that
led into the copse behind the house.

She walked until she reached the large fallen tree that Wills and Roly used for some mysterious game and sat upon a piece of the trunk nearest the torn-up roots. She had thought that here she
would cry, would give way to ordinary grief, but all that came out of her were loud, gasping sighs of fury and impotence. She should have made a scene, but how could she have done that in the face
of her father’s misery? She should have insisted upon seeing her that morning after Dr Carr had left and said that he would come back in the afternoon – but how could she have known
what he would do when he came?
They
must have known but, as usual, they had not told her. She should have realized that her mother was going to die at any moment when they got Simon back
early from school. He had arrived that morning, and
he
had seen her, then she had said that she wanted to see Wills and they had said that that was enough until later in the day. But poor
Simon hadn’t known that it was the last time for him either. He hadn’t realized; he simply thought she was terribly ill, and all through lunch he had told them about one of his
friends’ mothers who had almost died of an appendix and miraculously recovered and after lunch Teddy had taken him out on a long bicycle ride from which they hadn’t yet returned. If I
had spoken to her – if I had said
anything
, she thought, she might have heard me. But she would have wanted to be alone with her to do that. She had wanted to say that she would look
after Dad, and Wills, and most of all, she had wanted to say, ‘Are you all right? Can you bear to die, whatever it means?’ Perhaps they had cheated her mother as well. Perhaps she would
simply not wake up – would never know her own moment of death. This awful likelihood had made her cry. She had cried for what seemed a long time, and when she got back to the house they had
taken her mother away.

Since then, she had not cried at all – had got through the first, awful evening when they had sat through a dinner that nobody had wanted to eat, watching her father trying to cheer Simon
up by asking him about his sports at school until Uncle Edward took over and told stories about
his
school; an evening when everyone seemed to be searching for safe ground, for wan and
innocuous little jokes that you weren’t meant to laugh at, but were rather to get them through from minute to minute with the trappings of normality; and although underneath this she could
detect the oblique and shallow shafts of affection and concern, she had refused to accept either. The day after the funeral, Uncle Edward had taken her father and Simon off to London, Simon to be
put on a train to go back to school. ‘Must I go back?’ he had said, but only once as they had said of course he must, it would soon be the holidays and he mustn’t miss the
end-of-term exams. Archie, who had come down for the funeral, proposed after dinner that they play Pelman Patience on the floor in the morning room, ‘You too, Polly,’ and of course
Clary joined them. It was freezing cold because the fire had gone out. Simon didn’t mind – he said it was just like school, everywhere except the san, which you only got into if you
were covered with spots or nearly dead, but Clary fetched cardigans for them, and Archie had to be dressed in an old overcoat of the Brig’s, the muffler Miss Milliment had made that had not
been considered up to standard to send to the Forces and some mittens that the Duchy used for practising the piano.

‘The office I work in is boiling hot,’ he said, ‘it’s turned me into an old softy.
Now
, all I want is a walking stick. I can’t sit on my haunches like you
lot.’ So he sat in a chair with his bad leg stretched out stiffly, and Clary turned the cards he pointed at.

That had been a kind of respite; Archie played with such ferocious determination to win that they all became infected, and when Simon did win a game he flushed with pleasure. ‘Damn!’
Archie said. ‘Dammit! One more go and I’d have cleaned up.’

‘You’re not a very good loser,’ Clary had observed lovingly; she was no good at that herself.

‘I’m a wonderful winner, though. Really nice about it, and as I usually win hardly anyone sees my bad side.’

‘You can’t win
all
the time,’ Simon said. It was funny how Archie behaved about games in the kind of way that made them say grown-up things to
him
, Polly had
noticed.

But later, when she was coming out of the bathroom, she found Simon hanging about in the passage outside.

‘You could have come in. I was only cleaning my teeth.’

‘It’s not that. I wondered if you could – could you come to my room for a minute?’

She followed him down the passage to the room that he usually shared with Teddy.

‘The thing is,’ he said again, ‘you won’t tell anyone, or laugh or anything, will you?’

Of course she wouldn’t.

He took off his jacket and began loosening his tie.

‘I have to put something on them, otherwise they hurt against my collar.’ He had unbuttoned his grey flannel shirt and she saw that his neck was studded with pieces of dirty sticking
plaster. ‘You’ll have to take them off to see,’ he said.

‘It will hurt.’

‘It’s best if you do it quickly,’ he said, and bent his head.

She began cautiously, but soon realized that that wasn’t kind, and by the time she’d got to the seventh piece, she was holding down the skin of his neck with two fingers and tearing
quickly with the other hand. A crop of festering spots was revealed – either large pimples or small boils, she didn’t know which.

‘The thing is, they probably need popping. Mum used to do it for me, and then she put some marvellous stuff on them and sometimes they just went away.’

‘You ought to have proper plasters with a dressing under them.’

‘I know. She gave me a box to go back to school with, but I’ve used them all up. And of course I can’t pop them – can’t see them to do it. I couldn’t ask Dad.
I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind.’

‘Of course I don’t. Do you know what she put on them?’

‘Just marvellous stuff,’ he said vaguely. ‘Vick, do you think?’

‘That’s for people’s chests. Look, I’ll go and get some cotton wool and proper plasters and anything else I think might be good. Won’t be a sec.’

The medicine cupboard in the bathroom had a roll of Elastoplast that had yellow lint on one side of it, but the only stuff she could find to put on the spots was friar’s balsam with hardly
any left in the bottle. It would have to do.

‘I’ve got another stye coming as well,’ he said when she got back to him. He was sitting on his bed in his pyjamas.

‘What did she put on that?’

‘She used to rub them with her wedding ring and sometimes they went away.’

‘I’ll do the spots first.’

It was a disgusting job, made worse because she knew she was hurting him; some of the spots were oozing, but some simply had hard, shiny yellow heads that eventually spurted pus. He only
flinched once, but when she apologized, he simply said, ‘Oh, no. Just get all the stuff out you can.’

‘Wouldn’t Matron do these for you?’

‘Lord, no! She hates me anyway, and she’s nearly always in a bate. She really only likes Mr Allinson – the PT master – because he’s got muscles all over him, and a
boy called Willard whose father is a lord.’

‘Poor Simon! Is it all horrible there?’

‘I loathe and detest it.’

‘Only two more weeks and you’ll be home.’

There was a short silence.

‘It won’t be the same, though, will it?’ he said and she saw his eyes fill with tears. ‘It’s not my foul school, or the beastly war,’ he said as he ground his
knuckles into his eyes, ‘it’s my wretched stye. They often make my eyes water. I often get that with them.’

She put her arms round his stiff, bony shoulders. His awful loneliness seemed to be boring a hole in her heart.

‘Of course, if one has been used to getting a letter from the same person every week, and then one isn’t going to get them any more, it stands to reason it would feel a bit funny at
first. I think anyone would feel that,’ he said, with a kind of bracing reasonableness as though he was minimizing somebody else’s trouble. Then he suddenly burst out: ‘But she
never told me
that
! She seemed so much better at Christmas and then all this term she’s been writing and she didn’t say a word!’

‘She didn’t tell me. I don’t think she talked about it to anyone.’

‘I’m not anyone!’ he began and then stopped. ‘Of course you aren’t either, Poll.’ He took one of her hands and gave it a little shaking squeeze.
‘You’ve been wizard about my beastly spots.’

‘Get into bed, you’re freezing.’

He fished in the pocket of his trousers, which lay on the floor, brought out an unspeakable handkerchief and blew his nose.

‘Poll! Before you go, I want to ask you something. I keep thinking about it – and I can’t—’ He stopped and then said slowly, ‘What
happens
to her? I
mean, has she just
stopped
? Or has she gone somewhere else? It may seem idiotic to you, but the whole thing – death, you know, and all that – I can’t think what it
is
.’

‘Oh, Simon, I can’t either! I’ve been trying to think about that too.’

‘Do you think,’ he jerked his head in the direction of the door, ‘
they
know? I mean, they never tell us anything anyway, so it might be just another of those things
they don’t see fit to mention.’

‘I’ve been wondering that,’ she said.

‘At school, of course, they’d go on about heaven because they pretend to be frightfully religious – you know, prayers every single day, and special prayers for any of the Old
Boys who’ve got killed in the war, and the head gives a talk on Sundays about patriotism and being Christian soldiers and being pure in heart and worthy of the school and I know when I get
back he’ll mention heaven, but anything they say about that seems to me so idiotic that I can’t think why anyone would want to go there.’

‘You mean, all the harp playing and wearing white dresses?’

‘And being
happy
all the time,’ he said savagely. ‘So far as I can see, people simply grow out of happiness, and
they
’re against it anyway, because they
keep on making one do things that are bound to make one miserable. Like being sent away to school for most of your life, just when you might be having a good time at home. And then wanting you to
pretend you like it. That’s what really gets me down. You have to do what they want all the time and
then
you have to pretend to like it.’

‘You could tell them, I suppose.’

‘You couldn’t tell anyone at school!’ he exclaimed, aghast. ‘If you said anything like that at
school
they’d practically kill you!’

‘Surely not all the masters are like that!’

‘I don’t mean the masters. I mean the boys. Everybody’s trying to be the same, you see. Anyway,’ he said, ‘I just thought I’d ask you about – you know,
death, et cetera.’

She had given him a quick hug and left him after that.

Now, she thought, even before she played with Wills, she would write to Simon, having silently resolved then to take over the weekly letter to him at school. She pulled down the blinds in her
parents’ room, picked up the box with the trinkets and took it to the bedroom she still shared with Clary. As she walked along the passages to the gallery over the hall, she could hear the
variously distant sounds of the Duchy playing Schubert, the gramophone in the day nursery playing the now deeply scratched record of ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, a work that neither
Wills nor Roly ever tired of, the Brig’s wireless that he used whenever he didn’t have anyone to talk to, and the spasmodic rasping of the old sewing machine, being used, she supposed,
by Aunt Rach sides to middling sheets – an interminable occupation. It was Friday, the day when Dad, and Uncle Edward, now that he was back in the firm, usually came down for the weekend,
only this time they wouldn’t as Uncle Edward, had taken Dad away to Westmorland. Except for that, everybody was getting on with their lives as though nothing had happened, she thought
resentfully, as she searched for some writing paper for Simon’s letter which she decided to write in bed as it was slightly warmer than anywhere else could possibly be (the fire was not lit
in the drawing room until after tea – another of the Duchy’s economies).

She decided that the best thing was to give Simon as much news as possible about everyone. ‘Here is news
of people in order of their age,’ she wrote; this meant beginning with the remaining great-aunt.