The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (42 page)

He unlaced his tennis shoes and lay on the bed. The conversation at lunch with Edward was still knocking about in his mind. There
was
a danger of war: everything that Edward had said about it seemed reasonable and was, after all, as he knew perfectly well, what most people said, but it didn’t convince him at all. Most people, of his generation at least, so much didn’t want a war that they refused to think about it. And younger people couldn’t be expected to know a great deal, since when the last war ever came up – at the club, or at City dinners – it was discussed in a manner both cheery and heroic: old songs, camaraderies, the war to end wars; there was this girl in a café at Ypres – The one with the little brown mole on her lip? Yes, that was the one! But no earthly idea of what it had been
like
was ever passed on. Even he, when he had his war nightmares – less often these days, but still occasionally recurring – never told Sybil what they were actually
about.
No, the long silence on the subject continued, and he, in his own way, was a party to it. But silence about that war was one thing, the general refusal to consider the facts of what was happening now was another. Germany had had conscription for several years, nearly four, and people didn’t seem to think that there was anything odd about that. And Hitler: he was laughed at, called Schickelgruber, which they thought extremely funny, although it was his name – called a mere housepainter, which he had been, and written off as not only absurd but mad, which somehow enabled them to refuse to take him seriously at all. But it was clear that the Germans took him seriously all right. When Hitler had simply walked into Austria last spring, he had been almost glad because he thought that now, at last, other people would have to take notice of him. But it didn’t seem to have made any difference at all. There was one bloke in politics who’d had a go at the Nazi regime, but that simply meant that he was kept out of the Cabinet. And Chamberlain, although of course he had a good political family background, did not strike him as a leader who would be much good at getting people’s heads out of the sand.

On their drive back from Rye, he had made another attempt to get Edward to consider the matter – asked him what he thought was going to happen in Czechoslovakia where there was a German minority that looked like being the Nazis’ next target. Edward had said that he knew nothing about Czechoslovakia except that they were supposed to be good at making shoes and glass, and if the country contained a whole lot of Germans it was perfectly reasonable of them to want to ally themselves to the rest of their race, it really wasn’t anything to do with Britain or France. When Hugh, who realised then, for the first time, the degree of his brother’s ignorance in the matter, pointed out that Czechoslovakia was a democracy whose borders had been determined by England and France at the treaty of Versailles and that, therefore, it could reasonably be said to be something to do with them, Edward had replied almost irritably that Hugh obviously knew far more about it than he did, but that the main point was that nobody
wanted
another war, and it would be foolish to get involved with Hitler, (who seemed rather an hysterical chap), about, something that clearly had more to do with Germany than it did with Britain, and, anyway, they’d probably have a plebiscite as they had with the Saar, and the whole thing would straighten itself out. No point in getting jumpy, he had added, and had immediately started to talk about how they could deter the Old Man from buying the vast quantity of teak and iroko that seemed to be far in excess of the firm’s requirements and was tying up far too much capital. ‘There’s another shipload lying in bond at East India now. All those logs are going to take a hell of a lot of space not to mention the West African mahogany at Liverpool. I can’t think where we’re going to put them all. Have a word with him, old boy. He won’t take a blind bit of notice of me.’

As you won’t of me, Hugh thought, but he did not say so.

He had shut his eyes and must have dozed off as, without his hearing them, he found Sybil sitting on the bed beside him with Wills, wrapped in a bath towel in her arms.

‘One baby,’ she said, setting him on the bed. Hugh sat up and took Wills in his arms. He smelled of Vinolia soap, and his hair, long and straggly at the back – like an unsuccessful composer, Rachel had said – was damp. He smiled at Hugh, and thrust his fingers with surprisingly sharp nails into Hugh’s face.

‘Just hold him while I get his night clothes.’

Hugh removed the hand. ‘Steady on, old boy, that’s my eye.’ Wills looked at him reproachfully for a moment, and then his gaze wandered to the signet ring on his father’s finger, which he grabbed and drew powerfully up to his mouth.

‘Isn’t he
clever
?’ said Sybil returning with nappies.

Hugh looked at her with relief. ‘Enormously,’ he said.

‘He’s laughing at us,’ Sybil told the baby as, having folded the Harrington square, she laid him back in the appropriate position. He lay watching both his parents with benevolent dignity while his loins were wrapped and pinned for the night.

‘He hasn’t a care in the world,’ said Hugh.

‘Oh, yes, he has! He lost his duck in the bath, and he simply loathes brains and Nanny makes him have them every week.’

‘It doesn’t seem very bad to me.’

‘Other people’s troubles never do,’ Sybil replied, adding, ‘I don’t mean just
you,
darling, I mean anyone. Can you keep an eye on him while I get his bottle?’

‘What’s Nanny up to?’

‘She’s in Hastings with Ellen. It’s their day off. They’ve gone to the
Fol-de-Rols
on the pier. Then they’ll have a terribly rich tea with éclairs and meringues and Nanny will have a bilious attack tomorrow.’

‘How on earth do you know that?’

‘Because it happens every week. Nannies have to have their childish side or they would be no good at playing with children. She’s a very good nanny in other ways.’

When she left, Wills frowned and began to get red in the face, so Hugh picked him up and showed him how the electric light switches worked, which cheered him at once. Hugh found himself wondering whether Wills would grow up to be a scientist. He might be anything, even a timber merchant, but the great thing was that Wills should be allowed to choose and not simply drift into the family business as he felt he had done. The war again. It seemed to him as though that war had been his youth; before it had been his childhood – life measured by wonderful holidays and terms at school that could be endured for the regular bouts of family life and, best of all, the reunions with Edward (they had been sent to different schools on some mysterious principle that he had never understood). He had done quite well and hated it; Edward had done badly and had not minded at all. And then the last term and not only the glorious summer stretching ahead, but the even more glorious prospect of going to Cambridge – all dashed in August.

He had joined the Coldstream Guards in September; Edward, wild to go with him, had tried to do the same but, at seventeen, they had told him he must wait a year. So he had gone off to the Machine Gun Corps and lied about his age and got in. In a few months they were soldiers in France taking their own horses from home. In those four years he had seen Edward only twice: once in a muddy lane near Amiens when their horses had neighed in greeting before they caught sight of each other; and once when he had been wounded, and somehow Edward had contrived to visit him in hospital before he was shipped back to England. Edward – a major at not quite twenty-one – had breezed into the ward, captivating the VADs and telling the gaunt battleaxe of a matron, ‘Take extra care of him because he is my brother,’ and she had smiled, looked twenty years younger, and said, ‘Of course, Major Cazalet.’ ‘How did you get a pass?’ he had asked. Edward winked. ‘I didn’t. I said, “
Pass
? I’m an E.D.W.A.R.D.!” And they said “Sorry, sir,” and let me through.’ And Hugh had found himself starting to laugh but, in fact, crying helplessly, and Edward sat on the bed and held his remaining hand, and then mopped him up with a silk handkerchief that smelled of home. ‘Poor old boy! Did they get the shrapnel out of your head? And he’d nodded, but of course they hadn’t – some of it was too far in, they had told him after, he’d have to live with it. Funny thing was that what had
hurt
most at the time had been his two broken ribs – his stump, after they had amputated his hand, had been more an agony of the mind. It had hurt, of course, but they’d given him a lot of morphine then, and the worst thing had been when they dressed it. He couldn’t bear them to touch it, or rather, the only way he could bear it was by never looking to see what they were doing. In between being dressed, it ached and twitched and itched and often felt as though his hand was still there. Well, none of that was much compared to some of the things he had seen. He looked now at the black silk stump with the small pad at the end and thought how incredibly lucky he had been.

When Edward had got up to leave he’d kissed him – something that they did not usually do – and said, ‘You look after yourself, old chap.’ ‘And you,’ he’d said, trying to sound casual. Edward had smiled, winked again and said, ‘You bet.’ He’d walked away down the ward without looking back. And he had lain there watching the doors at the end of the ward still swinging gently after Edward had passed through them and thought, It’s a bloody awful world, and I’ll never see him again. Then he’d realised that Edward’s handkerchief was stuffed in his left hand.

They’d got him back to a hospital in England – some large country house that had been turned into a convalescent home – and his ribs and the stump had healed and the Godawful headaches, the nightmares and sweats had abated somewhat and he was sent home, weak, irritable, depressed and feeling too tired and too old to care about anything much. He was twenty-two. Edward, of course, did come back, with nothing worse than rocky lungs, from living in trenches where the gas hung about for weeks, and frostbite that had caused him to lose a toe, but the funny thing was that
he
didn’t seem changed at all, seemed to be just as he had been before they had both gone to France, was full of energy and japes, would stay up all night dancing, and go to work all day as fresh as a daisy. Girls fell for him easily – he was always having little gold pencils and bracelets engraved with Betty and Vivien and Norah, was always going off for weekends to play tennis or shoot or go to country dances, must have met more parents of girls he readily got engaged to than most and always came off with flying colours. He never mentioned the war: it was as though it had been like a particularly nasty boarding school where death and mutilation rather than mere bullying had been the norm, but now he was out the other side of it into eternal holidays. The only time Hugh remembered him as having been at all out of his depth was when he fell for a young married woman whose husband had been so badly shell-shocked he was a permanent invalid. He had been really smitten by her – Jennifer something she had been called – but then he had met Villy and that had, but not immediately, been that. But then
he
had met Sybil and fallen so much in love with her that he had ceased to notice anything else that was going on. Sybil! She had changed his life: meeting her had been the most incredibly—

‘Sorry to have been so long. It had got much too hot and I had to cool it down.’ She squirted the teat onto the back of her hand. ‘You’d better give him to me or he’ll get cross.’ Hugh kissed the back of his baby’s neck – his hair was drying into little tender curls – and then in the middle of handing him over, he kissed his wife on the mouth.

‘Darling! What’s all that about?’ She took the protesting baby and settled herself in a chair.

‘I was remembering when I first met you.’

‘Oh! That!’ She gave him a glance half appraising, half shy.

‘The luckiest day in my life. Listen, in this heat, you don’t want to come up to town – just for a night?’

‘Of course I do!’ She had been wondering whether she should get out of it. Not that she didn’t want to see him, but she did hate leaving Wills, and London was so hot and smelly after the country.

‘Sure? Because I’m perfectly happy on my own.’

‘Sure.’ She knew that he wasn’t.

‘I’ll take you to see the Lunts. Or would you prefer the Emlyn Williams play?’

‘I’m happy with either. Which would you like?’

‘I don’t mind in the least.’ He would have preferred to dine quietly with her and not go anywhere. ‘Oysters will have started. We can go to Bentley’s first. We’ll have a great night out.’

So far as the unselfishness game went, it was checkmate.