Casting Off

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 news-vendor 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.

He finished reading and signing the letters that Miss Pearson had brought in when she gave her notice. She would collect and pack them into their envelopes while he was at lunch. He buzzed her to call a taxi for him and to say that he might be late returning.

He was lunching with Rachel – at least it was not going to be one of those alcoholic business lunches that he always found particularly trying after his headaches. He found that he was constantly reassuring himself with small mercies of this kind.

He was meeting her at a small Italian restaurant in Greek Street – chosen because it was quiet and likely to proffer food that Rachel would accept. Like the Duchy, who absolutely never ate out of her own house, Rachel had a profound distrust for ‘bought food’ – it was either too rich, or too elaborate, or else menacing in some other way. But on this occasion it had been she who had suggested lunch – she was going to be in London for the night anyway as she was going to a concert with Sid. ‘I simply must talk to you about Home Place and Chester Terrace and all that,’ she had said. ‘They each keep talking to me about it and saying what they want to do, but they don’t want the same things. It’s hopeless trying to talk at weekends – we’re bound to be interrupted.’

But when he arrived at the restaurant he was greeted by Edda, the elderly proprietress, who said that the ladies were upstairs, and when he reached the table there was Rachel – with Sid.

‘Darling, I do hope you don’t mind. Sid and I had sort of arranged to spend the day and I’d forgotten about our lunch when I made the plan with her.’

‘Of course not. Lovely to see you,’ he said heartily. Privately, he thought Sid a bit odd: in her rather bulky tweed suit that she seemed to wear all the year round with a shirt and tie, her unfashionably short hair and her face with the complexion of a nut, she looked like a little old boy, but she was darling Rachel’s best, if not her oldest and only friend and therefore merited his goodwill. ‘I always think of you as practically one of the family,’ he added, and was rewarded by the faint colour that came and went on his sister’s anxious face. ‘I told you,’ she was saying to Sid. ‘I had to persuade her to come,’ she was now saying to him.

‘I know you have family matters to discuss – didn’t want to be in the way, you know. I promise I’ll sit as quiet as a mouse. I won’t say a word.’

This turned out to be quite untrue. They did not get down to things at first: food had to be chosen. Rachel, having perused the menu, eventually asked whether she could simply have a plain omelette – just a small one? This was after he and Sid had decided upon minestrone and braised liver and he and Sid were drinking Martinis that Rachel had refused.

They smoked while they were waiting for their food: he had bought a packet of Passing Clouds for Rachel, which he knew she liked best after her Egyptian ones that were hardly ever to be found.

‘Oh, darling, thank you! But Sid has magicked my old brand from somewhere – I don’t know how she does it.’

‘There’s just one place that sometimes has them,’ Sid said offhandedly, as one for whom small triumphs made up for their lack of size by their frequency.

‘Well, keep them anyway – as a reserve,’ he said.

‘I feel very much spoiled.’ Rachel put them in her bag.

When the minestrone arrived, he suggested that she start on the parents’ problems. The Brig wanted to move back to Chester Terrace so that he would be nearer the office, ‘although the poor old boy can’t do much when he gets there’, but the Duchy, who had always hated the house, describing it as gaunt and dark and too large for them anyway, wanted to stay in Home Place. ‘She doesn’t really like London at all, poor darling, she wants her rock garden and her roses. And she thinks it would be bad for the grandchildren if they didn’t have the house for holidays. But he gets so restless there, now that he can’t ride or shoot or do any more building . . . And they keep telling me what they want, but they don’t talk to each other about it. So you do see . . .’

‘Couldn’t they just go back to what they did before the war? Keep both houses and then the Duchy could be in the country as much as she liked.’

‘No, I don’t think they could. Eileen really wouldn’t be up to the stairs in London any more, and the Brig has promised the cottage over the garage to Mrs Cripps and Tonbridge when they’re married – it seems unfair to move them. Chester Terrace would need at least three servants, and I’m told that it’s almost impossible to get anyone reliable. The agencies say that girls simply aren’t going into service any more.’ She stopped and then said, ‘Oh dear! I do hope I’m not spoiling your soup – it looks so delicious.’

‘Like to try it?’ Sid held out a spoonful.

‘Oh, no, thank you, darling. If I have any soup, I wouldn’t have room for anything else.’

‘What would you like to do?’

‘Good question,’ Sid said at once.

Rachel looked nonplussed. ‘I hadn’t thought. Whatever would make them happiest, I suppose.’

‘He wasn’t asking you that. He was asking you what you would like.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to be in London?’

‘Well, in some ways it would be rather nice.’

While the soup plates were being removed and the main course brought and served Rachel explained that it would be easier for her to do a third day in the office if she was in London. She could not really keep up with the work in the two days she was now working. By the time she had listened to everybody’s troubles . . . and she was off with the latest hard luck story: Wilson, whose wife had to go into hospital – no grandparents to look after the children, and they’d been bombed out, lived in two damp basement rooms, and his sister – who might have taken the children, was being divorced – her husband, shortly to come out of the Navy, wanted to marry a girl he’d met in Malta . . . anyway, she was so upset that she was in no state to look after anyone . . .

Her omelette was congealing on the plate.

‘Oh dear,’ she said, taking a tiny mouthful, ‘I’m boring you both with my silly office troubles . . .’

But they weren’t her troubles, he thought, they were other people’s. He wondered, for a moment, what on earth the staff had done before she joined the firm. Officially, her job had been to deal with salaries, insurances and holiday dates for the staff, together with petty-cash accounts and office supplies. In fact, she had become the person to whom everyone went with their problems – either in the office or out – and she now knew far more about everyone who worked for the Cazalets than he or his brothers had ever done.

Sid said, ‘But none of this has anything to do with what you would like to do.’ There was an edge to her voice, Hugh thought; she sounded almost accusing.

‘Well, of course it would be nice in other ways, but one can’t make this sort of decision for purely selfish reasons.’

‘Why not?’ There was a short, charged silence and then Sid repeated: ‘Why on earth not? Why are everybody’s feelings more important than yours?’

It was almost as though she was talking about her feelings, he thought – he was beginning to feel out of his depth somehow, and certainly rather uncomfortable. Poor Rach! She simply wanted everything to be right for everyone; it wasn’t fair to bully her about it. She had gone rather pale, he noticed, and had given up even a pretence of eating her omelette.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it seems to me that Chester Terrace should go. It’s far too big, and it would be better to sell the lease while there’s a reasonable amount of it left, and then they won’t be liable for the repairs. So what about keeping Home Place and getting a flat for you and the Brig when he wants to be in London? Then the Duchy could stay in the country. You’d only need one servant and a daily to run a flat, wouldn’t you?’

‘A flat. I don’t know whether either of them would consider a flat. The Brig would think it was poky, and the Duchy would think it was fast. She thinks flats are for bachelors until they get married.’

‘Nonsense,’ Sid said. ‘Hundreds of people will be taking to flats in the same way that they will have to learn to cook.’

‘But not at the Duchy’s age! You can’t expect someone of seventy-eight to start learning to cook!’ There was an uncomfortable silence, and then she said, ‘No. If anyone has to learn to cook, it should be me.’

Sid, looking contrite, put out her hand to touch Rachel’s arm. ‘Touché! But it’s your life we’re talking about, isn’t it?’

Hugh felt obscurely irritated at her trying to include him. In spite of what she had said about not saying a word, she was interfering in what he felt was none of her business. He signalled the waiter to get a menu, and said, to Rachel, ‘Don’t worry, darling. I’ll have a word with the Brig about an alternative to Chester Terrace and you and I can hunt for a suitable place. If the worst comes to the worst, you could always move in with me as an interim. Now, who would like an ice or fruit salad or both?’

When Rachel, who immediately said that she couldn’t possibly eat any more, had been persuaded to have some fruit salad and he and Sid had settled for a bit of both and he’d ordered coffee for everyone, he raised his glass and said, ‘What shall we drink to? Peace?’

Rachel said, ‘I think we should drink to poor Mr Churchill as we seem to be letting him down so badly. Doesn’t it seem extraordinary that they should want to chuck him out the moment the war’s over?’

‘The war isn’t completely over. There’s another good two years’ fighting in Japan, I should think. I suppose one has to say that at least the other lot are used to government – at Cabinet level anyway.’

Sid said, ‘I’m rather in favour of the other lot. It’s time we had a change.’

Hugh said: ‘I think what most people want is to get back to normal as soon as possible.’

‘I don’t think we shall be going back to anything,’ Rachel said. ‘I think it’s all going to be different.’

‘You mean the Welfare State and a brave new world?’

He saw her face puckering in a little flurry of frowns and remembered suddenly how he and Edward had called her Monkey when they wanted to tease her.

‘No, what I meant is that I think the war has changed people, they’ve got kinder to one another.’ She turned to Sid. ‘You think that, don’t you? I mean, people have shared things more – particularly the awful ones, like being bombed and separated and all the rationing and men getting killed—’

‘I think there isn’t the same kind of arrogant indifference,’ Sid said, ‘but if we don’t have a Labour government there jolly soon will be.’

‘I’m absolutely no good at politics, as you well know, but surely both sides are saying the same things, aren’t they? Better housing, longer education, equal pay for equal work . . .’

‘They always say that sort of thing.’

‘We’re not saying the same thing. We aren’t going to nationalise the railways and the coal mines, et cetera.’ He glared at Sid. ‘That’s going to cause chaos. And, from our point of view, it means that we shall be faced with only one customer instead of a comforting number.’

The waiter brought their coffee – just as well, he thought: he really didn’t want to have a political argument with Sid – he was afraid he might be rude to her and that would upset Rachel.

Now she was saying, ‘What are you going to do? About your house, I mean. Are you going to stay in it? Edward and Villy are selling theirs and looking for somewhere smaller, which seems sensible.’

So that he can afford a second place to put that woman in, he thought. He said, ‘I don’t know. I’m fond of it. Sybil said she never wanted to leave it.’

There was a short silence. Then Sid said she would join them in a minute.

‘Miss Pearson is leaving me,’ he said, to deflect their thoughts.

‘Oh dear. I was afraid she might. Her mother’s become such an invalid. She told me she got back last week and found the old lady on the floor. She’d fallen trying to get out of her chair, and she couldn’t get up.’

‘I shall miss her.’

‘I’m sure you will. It’s pretty awful for her because she won’t get her full pension. I was going to talk to you about that. I’m afraid she’s going to be rather hard up.’

‘She must have saved a bit – she’s been working for us for at least twenty years.’

‘Twenty-three, actually. But her mother’s only got a very small widow’s pension that dies with her. Except for the house, Muriel won’t get left anything, and I should think that by the time her mother dies she’ll be too old to get another job. Don’t you think, in the circumstances, that perhaps we ought to see that she gets her full pension?’

‘The Old Man would say that it was setting a dangerous precedent. If she gets it, everyone else will think they’re entitled to the same treatment.’

‘That’s absurd,’ she said – quite sharply for her. ‘He needn’t know, and nor need any of the staff.’

He looked at her; her expression was uncharacteristically ferocious – an expression so ill-suited to her that it made him want to laugh. ‘You’re absolutely right, of course. You’ve completely melted my stony Tory heart.’

She smiled then, wrinkling her nose in the way she always did when she wanted to add affection to a smile. ‘Your heart isn’t in the least stony, dear old boy.’

Then Sid returned; he called for the bill, and Rachel said that she would go and find the ladies’.

As soon as she was gone, Sid said, ‘Thanks for the lunch, it was very good of you to have me.’

He looked up from writing the cheque; she was fiddling with the coffee sugar and he could not help noticing her strong, elegant, but somehow mannish hands.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘that I know I should have shut up about what are, from your point of view, purely family matters, but she never gives herself a chance! She’s always worrying about other people – never gives herself a thought. And I supposed that now the war is over – here anyway – at last she might consider some life of her own.’

‘Perhaps she doesn’t want one.’

For some reason, although he couldn’t for the life of him think why, this quite harmless remark seemed to go home. For a split second she looked positively stricken; then she said so quietly that he could barely hear her, ‘I do hope you’re not right.’

Rachel returned. They parted in the street outside, he to go back to the office, and they for a shopping spree in Oxford Street, at HMV for records, and Bumpus for books – ‘It’s so handy that they’re practically next door to each other.’ There was a faint, mutual atmosphere of apology.

Much later, in the early evening when he’d finished at the office, had caught a 27 bus back to Notting Hill Gate and walked down Lansdowne Road to Ladbroke Grove and let himself into his silent house, he remembered Rachel’s remark about his heart not being stony. To him it seemed not so much a matter of the texture of his heart, more a question of whether it still existed at all. The effort of trying to turn grief into regret, to live entirely on past nourishment, even to keep the sharper parts of nostalgia credible (he found himself beginning to doubt and struggle with the intricacies of the smaller memories), and, most of all, the fearful absence of anything that could begin to take their place, had worn him down. Feeling had become an exercise that no longer enhanced the present; he slogged from one day to the next without expectation that one would be different from another. He was capable of irritation, of course, with small things like his car not starting, or Mrs Downs failing to collect his laundry, and anxiety – or was it simply anger? – at Edward’s behaviour over Diana Mackintosh (he had refused point blank to meet her); since the time when he had failed to get Edward to see that he must give her up, Hugh had refused even to discuss the matter. This resulted in it being very difficult to discuss anything with Edward in the old, easy way that they had used to do, and left them in a state of mutual disagreement and irritation about things like the Southampton project, which he thought thoroughly ill-advised, a dotty way to use their capital and something which, if there had not been this other profound, private rift, he might have been able to reason Edward out of. At any rate, he missed their old intimacy and affection, compounded by the fact that in the old days it was exactly the kind of thing that he would have been able to resolve by talking it over with Sybil, whose attention and good sense he had come to value even more now that they were no longer available. He tried to have conversations with her about it, but it was no good – he missed her precisely because he could not become her in the duologue. He would have his say – and there would be silence while he battled with his failure to imagine how she would have responded. He had never had the same intimacy with Rupert – his being six years younger had been crucial. When he and Edward had gone to France in 1914, Rupert had been at school. When he and Edward had gone into the firm together, Rupert had gone to the Slade and had been determined to be a painter and have nothing to do with the family business. When he had come in, it had been after a lot of dithering, and had been largely, Hugh now felt, because he wanted more money to please Zoë. Then, since his amazing reappearance – long after (although it was not voiced) everyone had given up hope of it – he had seemed, after the initial family celebration, to be curiously withdrawn. Hugh had had one good evening with him – had taken him out to dinner the evening after the Navy had relinquished him, and before it they had drunk a bottle of champagne together at home. Rupert had asked about Sybil and he had told him about those last days when he and Sybil had talked and talked and discovered that they had both known that she was going to die and had each tried to shield the other and the sweet relief when this was no longer something that either of them felt the need to do. He remembered how Rupert had stared at him without speaking, his eyes filled with tears, and how, for the first time since her death, he had felt comforted, felt some of the rigid, blocked grief begin to dissolve from this silent, complete sympathy. They had gone out together afterwards to dine, and he had felt almost light-hearted. But it had never been like that again; he sensed that there was some mystery about Rupert’s long time away and his reticence about it, and after one tentative attempt, he did not pry. He imagined that if one had been so isolated for so long, a return to ordinary family life must be difficult and left it at that.

There were the children, but his affection for them was beginning to be tainted by anxiety and feelings of inadequacy about them. Without Sybil, he felt that he was losing his nerve. For instance, with Polly – he was fairly sure that she had fallen in love, some time about last Christmas was when he had noticed this, but she hadn’t told him, had brushed off his (probably clumsy) attempts to give her openings for confidence. Nothing seemed to have come of it; for months she had been listless, polite, without her usual spirit. He worried about her, felt shut out, was afraid of boring her (this was the worst thing because if that was true, or became true, she would only spend time with him from pity). When he had discovered that Louise and Michael were giving up the house in St John’s Wood, he had thrown out a very casual suggestion that she and Clary would always be welcome to take up their old rooms at the top of the house, but Poll had only said, ‘That’s jolly kind of you, Dad,’ and changed the subject, so he was pretty sure that she wouldn’t. And that made staying on in this house absurd. He only used his bedroom, the kitchen and the small back drawing room; everything else was shut up and probably getting filthy dirty, as Mrs Downs could not possibly clear the whole place in the two mornings a week that she came. The place needed some staff, a family – above all, a mistress . . . The thought of moving appalled him: it was something he had only ever done with Sybil. With her it had been an exciting adventure each time. They had begun married life in a flat in Clanricarde Gardens – all they could afford. It wasn’t a nice place at all, being the ill-converted floor of a huge, tall stucco house whose owner needed the income. It had enormously high ceilings with paint-encrusted friezes, huge, draughty sash windows and a gas meter for the fires that swallowed shillings as voraciously as the wide cracks in the floorboards devoured Sybil’s hairpins or the buttons off his clothes. Poll had been born there, but soon after they had moved to the house in Bedford Gardens. That had been a wonderful move. Their own little house with its tiny front and back gardens and a wisteria that reached the iron balcony outside their bedroom. He remembered their first night there, eating their first Bellamy pork pie and drinking the bottle of champagne that Edward brought when he came to fetch Poll to stay until they had got her room decorated. Hugh had taken a week of his holiday, and he and Sybil had painted the house together, had picnic meals and slept on a mattress in the sitting room while he laid the hardwood floor in their new bedroom. It had been one of the happiest weeks of his life. Simon had been born in that house, and they had only moved where he was now when Sybil became pregnant for the third time.

By now he had changed his shoes, washed, made himself a whisky and soda and settled down to listen to the six o’clock news. It was even more depressing than he had expected. Churchill, who had not been opposed by either Labour or Liberal candidates, had lost over a quarter of the poll to an independent – a man he had never heard of. He leaned over and switched off the wireless. Silence invaded the room. He sat for some minutes, trying to think of something that he could do, could have, to distract himself. He could go to his club where he would probably find someone to dine with and perhaps have a game of billiards, but everyone would be full of election talk, and collective depression was not an inviting prospect. He could ring up Poll – he could, but he knew that he wouldn’t. He rationed himself to ringing her once a week, did not want her to feel that he was interfering with her life or being a burden. Simon was off somewhere with his friend Salter – a bicycling holiday in Cornwall. He realised now that Simon had worked so hard this last year at school in order to get into Oxford because that was where Salter was going. Well, why not? He knew that Sybil would have been keen on it, partly, of course, because it deferred his being called up, and now might even mean that when he was, he would not actually have to fight. And she would, anyway, have approved of Simon going to a university, attaching far more importance to education than the family did. The Brig thought it was a waste of time and Edward was pretty dismissive, but then he had hated his school life and had been delighted that their war had curtailed it. Whenever universities were mentioned, Edward would bring up the pre-war debate in the Oxford Union where there had been some ghastly pacifist vote, which had showed, Edward had repeatedly said, how degenerate the young had become, the implication being that places like Oxford simply filled the young with decadent ideas. Of course, the war, when it came, had utterly disproved this, but it had not really allayed the male Cazalet view that education should stop as soon as possible in order that real life could begin. That Simon was to read medicine had made the whole project more respectable: the Duchy, Villy and Rachel were deeply in favour; it was really only the Brig and Edward who passively disapproved, and that, he knew, was because they thought that all male Cazalets should go into the family firm. Anyway, Simon was not available for company. Tomorrow he would be going down to Sussex, and he’d think of things to do with Wills who, he felt, suffered from too much female company. Tonight he could not be bothered to go out. He made himself another drink and descended to the basement, where, after some searching, he found a tin of Spam, the rather stale remains of a loaf from which he had been making his morning toast all week, and a couple of tomatoes brought up from Home Place last weekend. He put these things on a tray with the tin opener and went back to the drawing room. A quiet evening at home, he told himself, would do no harm.

They were running late, Edward reflected, although he ought to have known they would be. Whenever he went to Southampton unexpected problems came up, and today had been no exception. He’d gone down to interview a couple of blokes to be assistant wharf manager, and he’d taken Rupert with him because Rupert hadn’t even seen the place and – as it was beginning to look as though he would be the only candidate for running it – it was high time that he was put in the picture. He’d meant just to interview the chaps and then they’d have a jolly good lunch and he would show Rupe round and generally enthuse him with the project. But it hadn’t turned out like that. The first bloke had been hopeless – far too full of himself and of pointless breezy little anecdotes that were meant to show him in a good light but actually put them off him – and pretty cagey about his previous experience. The second man was late, on the old side and very nervous, clearing his throat every time before he spoke and sweating, but his track record was good: he’d run a softwoods sawmill throughout the war and was only leaving because the firm was taking somebody back out of the Army who had had the job before. Edward had the impression that he was older than he said he was, but he didn’t push that one, and when the interview was over he asked Rupert what he thought.

‘He seemed all right, but I wouldn’t know whether he could do the job.’

‘Well, it’s all we’ve got to choose from.’

‘Now it is. But any moment there’ll be hundreds – or dozens, anyway – of men wanting a job.’

‘But we need someone now. Unless you think you could do it as a stop-gap.’

‘Good God! I couldn’t begin to! I don’t know the first thing about it.’ He looked appalled. After a pause, he said, ‘And it would mean living here, wouldn’t it? Zoë has set her heart on London.’

This was not at all what he wanted to hear. He knew that Hugh would not consider running the place as he was dead against it – had been all along – and his own private life was far too complicated for him to conduct it so far from London. But there ought to be a Cazalet on the spot.

‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘let’s sleep on it. I want to show you round, but let’s get some lunch first.’

Lunch – at the Polygon Hotel – had taken ages. The place was unusually full, and the bar, where they had a drink while they waited for a table, was full of men poring over the election results in the early edition of the local evening paper. The banner headlines could be read across the room. LABOUR SWEEPING TO VICTORY! CONSERVATIVES ROUTED!

‘There’s not much to drink to,’ he said, when their pink gins arrived, but Rupert said that he thought it was probably a good thing. They had a bit of an argument. Edward was shocked. ‘Get rid of Churchill?’ he said, more than once. ‘It seems to me sheer bloody-minded madness. After all, he got us through the war.’

‘But the war’s over. Or over here, anyway.’

‘The other lot are only bent on running down the Empire, ruining the economy with their blasted Welfare State. It’s simply because people want something for nothing.’

‘Well, they’ve put up with nothing for something for quite a while.’

‘Really, old boy, you’re turning into some sort of Red!’

‘I’m not turning into anything. I’ve never been much of a Tory, but that doesn’t make me a communist. I’d just like things to be a bit fairer.’

‘What do you mean by “fairer”?’

There was a short silence; his brother seemed intent upon twisting a bit of the foiled paper from his packet of Senior Service.

‘Bodies,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t mean dead ones. I noticed it when I was Number One on that destroyer. Men used to strip down, swabbing decks or in the engine room, or I just saw them when I was doing the rounds. I noticed that most of the Ordinary Seamen’s bodies were a different shape: narrower shoulders, barrel-chested, bandy legs, scrawny-looking, terrible teeth – you’d be surprised how many of them had false ones. They just looked as though they’d never had a chance to grow to what they were originally meant to be. Of course, there were exceptions – husky chaps who’d been stevedores or dockers or miners – but there were a hell of a lot who’d come from cities, from indoor jobs. I suppose it was mostly them I noticed. Anyway, compared to the officers they looked very different. It seemed to me then that except for our uniforms, we should have looked the same.’ He looked up at his brother with a small smile – like a silent and mirthless apology. ‘There were other things . . .’

Perhaps he’s going to tell me about France, Edward thought. He’s never talked about that – at all. ‘Things?’

‘Er – well, like if you haven’t got much to lose, it’s far worse when you lose it. One of our gunners lost his house in the bombing. If we lost a house, we’ve got another one, haven’t we? Or we could get one. He lost his house and his furniture, everything in it.’

‘That could happen to anyone – has happened—’

‘No doubt – but it’s what happens afterwards that’s different.’

He wasn’t going to talk about it – get whatever it was off his chest. Edward felt relieved when the waiter came to tell them that their table was ready.

But even when they got their table, the service was very slow and they didn’t get back to the wharf until after three. He’d decided to do a quick tour with Rupert and then get away as he’d promised Diana he’d be at her place in time for dinner and spend Friday night with her before going on to Home Place. But when they got back the man who was overseeing the building and repairs to the sawmill said that the borough surveyor wanted to see him with a list of changes to be made for fire precautions. This meant going over the list on site, and one way and another it took nearly three hours. Rupert left him after a bit, and said he’d have a prowl round on his own.

A good many of the modifications should have been done during the rebuilding of the sawmill – it was going to be far more expensive to do them now. He told Turner, the man in charge, to send him a copy of the list and said he would tackle their own surveyor about why he hadn’t called the borough surveyor earlier. Then he couldn’t find Rupert, and after he sent someone to go and look for him, he rang Diana to tell her that he wouldn’t be able to make it in time for dinner. ‘I’m still in Southampton. Got to get Rupert back to London before I come down to you – sorry, sweetie, but it can’t be helped.’

She was obviously very upset, and by the time he’d finished talking to her, and swivelled round in his chair to put out his cigarette, Rupert was standing in the open doorway to the office.

‘Look here, I’d no idea I was putting you out. I can easily get back on a train.’

‘It’s all right, old boy.’ He felt intensely irritated: Rupert must have heard every word he’d been saying – probably given the whole show away . . .

‘I didn’t realise that you were going on somewhere – much better if you put me on a train.’

If he drove straight from the station to Diana’s he could get there in an hour and a half . . .

‘Well, if it’s all the same to you . . . Let’s have a quick one first. There’s quite a nice little pub up the road.’

While they were having the drink he told Rupert about Diana, about how long the affair had been going on, about how he really didn’t feel ‘that way’ about Villy any more, about Diana’s husband having died leaving her with practically not a bean and four children. ‘It’s a hell of a mess,’ he said, ‘I don’t know what to do.’ It was an enormous relief, he discovered, to have someone to talk to about it.

‘Do you want to marry her?’

‘Well, that’s the problem, you see.’ As he said this, he realised that he did want to very much indeed. ‘You know, if you’ve had somebody’s child—’

‘You didn’t say that—’

‘Didn’t I? As a matter of fact, she’s almost certainly had two of mine. You can see how it is – it makes you feel responsible – difficult just to walk out – leave her and all that.’

Rupert was silent. Edward began to be afraid that he was going to start disapproving of him – like Hugh. He couldn’t bear the idea of that: he desperately wanted someone on his side. ‘I really do love her,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t have gone on so long if I didn’t love her more than anyone I’ve ever met. And, anyway, how do you think she’d feel if I simply walked out on her?’

‘I don’t suppose Villy would feel too good if you left her. Does she know about it?’

‘Good God, no! Not a thing.’

As Rupert remained silent, he said, ‘What do you think I should do?’

‘I suppose you feel that whichever you did would be wrong.’

‘That’s it! That’s it exactly.’

‘And I suppose that she – Diana – wants to marry you?’

‘Well – we haven’t actually talked about it, but I’m pretty sure that she does.’ He gave a small, embarrassed laugh. ‘She keeps saying she adores me – that kind of thing. Do you want another?’ He’d noticed that Rupert had been staring into the bottom of his glass for some minutes now, but he shook his head.

‘I suppose you’ll just have to decide one way or the other.’

‘It’s a hell of a decision to make, though, isn’t it?’ It was all very well for Rupert to say that – he was not exactly known in the family as a decision-maker. ‘I thought,’ he said, ‘that perhaps I ought to wait until Villy’s found a house that she likes – get her installed in it, you know – before I – do anything. We ought to be off. I’ll just give her – Diana, I mean – a ring to tell her I will be back for dinner.’

On the way to the station he said, ‘I would love you to meet her.’

‘All right.’

‘You will? Hugh has absolutely refused to.’

‘Hugh knows about her, then?’

‘He sort of knows, but he refuses to understand the situation, simply buries his head in the sand, whereas Diana and I have agreed it’s much better to talk about things quite openly and frankly.’

‘Except to Villy?’

‘That’s different, old boy, you must see that. I can’t exactly discuss it with her until I’ve made up my mind to take the plunge.’

As he let Rupert out of the car he said, ‘Nobody else knows about this, by the way.’

Rupert said all right.

‘I’m really grateful to you letting me go off like this.’

‘I’m not letting—’

‘I mean, taking the train so that I don’t have to let Diana down.’

‘Oh, that! That’s OK by me – I’ve got all the time in the world.’

It was a clear, sunny evening and Edward drove east with the sun behind him, on his way to have dinner and stay the night with his mistress. The prospect, which usually made him feel excited and carefree – as he always felt on the nights before his holiday – seemed now to have other dimensions: the watertight compartments in which he had kept his two lives throughout the war were no longer sound; guilt was leaking steadily from one to the other. He supposed that talking to Rupert had somehow made everything seem more urgent. When he had said that Diana and he had not actually talked about marriage, he had rather simplified the point. Although she never said the word, she managed to bring all kinds of conversation to the outskirts of marriage. She couldn’t go on in the cottage, for instance. Well, that was fair enough: it was cut off and a mean little place where she was hopelessly isolated. But what should she do? she had asked – more than once – her lovely eyes fixed on his face. She also asked many small, trapping questions about whether Villy was to continue in the country or go back to London. He hadn’t told her about selling Lansdowne Road as he’d been afraid she would jump to conclusions. It was dreadfully hard on her, poor darling, having all this uncertainty. But, after all, he had it too. There was nothing he would like better than to have settled Villy comfortably, so that he needn’t worry about her, and then be free to start a wonderful new life with Diana. Perhaps, he thought, reaching for his snuff box (marvellous stuff if you got sleepy driving), perhaps I should tell her this, and resolved that he would.

So, after dinner when they were drinking brandy, he did tell her, and she was overcome, said, ‘Oh, darling, how wonderful!’ and was awfully understanding about the terribly difficult problem of Villy. ‘Of course I understand! Of course you must think of her first. We must both put her first, darling.’

When he had bought his ticket and discovered that the next train to London would be in twenty minutes, he wandered up and down the platform, past the news-stall – closed – to the station buffet. He went in: they might have some cigarettes and he was running out. They hadn’t. The place was disconsolately dirty and smelt of beer and coal dust; the walls, once decorated in pale green high-gloss paint, were cracked and blistering, and the long counter had heavy glass domes that contained sandwiches writhing with antiquity. Just as he was wondering how on earth anybody could face them, a sailor came in and bought one with a bottle of Bass. Rupert left the buffet and walked to the very end of the platform. It was a beautiful evening full of tender yellow light and moth-coloured shadows; moth was a cop-out – they were all kinds of colours, really. He stopped looking: he was not a painter, he was a timber merchant. Like the rest of his life now, that seemed a completely unreal statement – he’d better think of something else. He thought about his brother, his older, once glamorous brother, whom he had felt was a kind of hero, or at least an heroic figure, although that, originating from when he was still a schoolboy during the First World War, had simply congealed into a habit. Poor old Edward! he now thought. He has got himself into a mess. Whatever he does now will make someone miserable . . . He suddenly found that he couldn’t think about that, either. ‘I suppose in the end she will get used to it,’ came into his head – he might even have spoken it aloud; the cat’s mother must be Villy. He knew, somehow, that Edward would do what he thought was the easier thing. He might well be wrong about what that might be, but when he did it that was what he would think. If whatever one did made one unhappy, might it not be best for Edward to do the harder thing? The harder thing was implicitly right, he knew, but that did not, he also knew, often provide much comfort. After all, Edward had been having it both ways for years; it was high time he had to face the music, make a decision one way or the other. His life must, for years, have been a tissue of lies, evasions, a withholding of essential truths.

He was no good at anger. Any resentment or disapproval he manufactured against Edward evaporated as fast as he put words to it; it wasn’t just a question of deciding, it was living afterwards, according to the decision, dealing with the lifelong consequences . . .

His train had arrived; he did not know how long it had been there, and hurried to catch it. He found an empty compartment and settled himself in a corner of it to sleep. But the moment that he closed his eyes his head was full of familiar, silent images that seemed waiting to become animate in his dreams – to speak, to repeat themselves, to re-enact the key moments of the last three months: Michèle’s head, sinking back upon her pillow after he had kissed her, then (he imagined) lying motionless as she listened to his departing footsteps – he had looked back once at the house to see if she had come to the window but she had not; the interim in the boat, which had seemed so painful and now seemed an almost blessed interlude when that image of her recurred and he could indulge in pure grief. He had wanted to stay one night in London on his own before embarking upon the last leg of his journey home, but he had no money except for the rail fares borrowed from the captain of the boat. He had not thought to ask for more – as it was, he walked from Waterloo Station to Charing Cross. The shabby, battered appearance of London appalled him. So he had bought his ticket and watched the familiar countryside and smoked his last cigarette from the packet they had given him on the boat and tried to imagine meeting Zoë.

He had not been able to imagine that. Nothing that came to his mind on the journey to Battle had any life, any credence at all. She might be disaffected, overjoyed, not even there: he knew nothing and, least of all, how he would feel at first sight. In fact, when he finally reached Home Place, in the middle of the afternoon, she was out. He walked through the old white gate that led to the front of the house, and there was his mother on her knees by her rock garden. Just as it occurred to him that his sudden appearance would be too much of a shock for her, she turned her head and saw him. He went quickly to her then, knelt down and put his arms round her; the expression on her face brought tears to his eyes. She clung to him, speechless, then put her hands on his shoulders to hold him away from her. ‘Let me look at you,’ she said, she was laughing – a little high-pitched gasping sound; tears were streaming down her face.

‘Oh, my darling boy!’

‘Now!’ she said later. ‘We must be sensible. Zoë’s taken Juliet to Washington to the shop. You will want a little peace and quiet together.’ She had taken the small white handkerchief from its place under her wristwatch to wipe her eyes, and he noticed with a pang of affection the strawberry mark on the back of that hand.

‘Is she all right?’

She met his eye, and as he was rediscovering the familiar simple frankness of her gaze, it seemed to falter.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s been a very hard time for her. I have become very fond of her. Your daughter is a pearl. Why don’t you walk to meet them?’

So he had done that – had walked back down the drive and up the steep road and at the top of the hill he met them by a gate into their fields. Juliet was sitting on the gate, and Zoë stood beside her and before he could hear what they were saying he recognised an argument.

‘. . . always go back this way. Even Ellen knows it’s my best way . . .’

He quickened his pace.

‘I just don’t feel like playing charabancs today.’

‘You never feel like it!’ She was wearing a scarlet beret but her head was turned away – he could not see her face.

‘Well, I—’ Zoë began, and then she saw him, stood motionless as he came up to her.

They stared at one another; she had gone white. When she spoke, she sounded frightened, husky and incredulous: ‘Rupert! Rupert? Rupert!’ The third time she put out a hand and touched his shoulder.

‘Yes.’ I should put my arms round her, he thought, but before he could do that, she had moved to Juliet.

‘This is your father,’ she said.

He turned to find her gazing at him.

‘She has a picture of you in her nursery.’

He went to lift her off the gate, but as he drew near, she clutched it with both hands.

‘Will you give me a kiss?’

She looked at him consideringly. ‘If you had a beard I wouldn’t. Because of birds. It’s in a poem.’ She was incredibly pretty – a miniature of Zoë with Cazalet eyes.

‘As you can see, I haven’t got a beard.’

She leaned towards him and gave him a smacking kiss. Her mouth was pale red and translucent, like the skin of a redcurrant. He kissed her back and she turned her head away and shut her eyes.

‘Do you want to get down?’

She shook her head and renewed her grip on the top bar of the gate. He turned to Zoë: she was wearing an old riding mac with a green foulard scarf round her neck. She was still very pale.

‘I didn’t mean to give you such a shock.’

‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘I know you didn’t.’

‘Are we going to play? I really want to play charabancs. I really want to.’

So they did what Juliet wanted and went to play on the fallen tree in the wood near the house. He thought afterwards that they had both been grateful for her presence: it postponed intimacy or, rather, excused the lack of it – he sensed that Zoë, too, felt awkward and intensely shy. The first time he touched her was when he helped her down from a branch of the tree after she had called a halt to the game. She blushed when he took her hand.

‘I can hardly believe – it seems so extraordinary—’ she began, in a low, hurried voice, but she was interrupted by Juliet who was standing precariously on the higher bit of the fallen tree, shouting, ‘Someone catch me when I jump!’

He caught her and she wriggled from his arms to the ground and said, ‘Now we’ll all hold hands for going home.’ So they walked back through the wood separated by their daughter who marched between them. It was during that walk that he learned that Sybil had died, that his father was blind, that Neville was at Stowe and that Clary was living in London and working for a literary agent and living in Louise’s house – oh, yes, she had married Michael Hadleigh, the portrait painter . . . Telling and hearing the family news seemed to make things a little easier between them. Archie had been wonderful, she said – finding the right school for Neville after he had tried to run away, looking after Clary and Polly, coming down for weekends and cheering them all up. For a moment, he wondered whether she had fallen in love with Archie, then dismissed it as an ignoble thought; but when it returned later that same evening, he discovered that what frightened him about it was his lack of concern . . . It was true that when he walked into the house for the first time and was assailed by all the deeply familiar scents – of woodsmoke, damp mackintosh, the wall-flowers that every year the Duchy put in a large bowl in the hall, the warm vanilla of a freshly baked cake on the large table now laid for tea – he felt a rush of simple, recognising pleasure, could for a moment feel himself home, and glad of it. He realised that he was ravenous, almost faint with hunger – he’d eaten nothing since the boat, which already seemed an immense, an almost unreal distance away – but he had only to say that he was looking forward to tea for a succession of dishes to be brought to him. Two boiled eggs, a Welsh rarebit, a chicken sandwich, two slices of cake. All this he ate, watched with joyful indulgence by the Duchy, Villy, Miss Milliment and Ellen, and with growing envy and insurrection by the children: Lydia, Wills – no longer a baby, a boy of eight – Roland and his own daughter. It was the children who underlined the length of his absence. ‘We only get boiled eggs for tea on our birthdays,’ one of them said. ‘We don’t get eggs. We get one miserable little egg. Once a year,’ and so on.

It was the children who fired a series of direct questions at him. What was being a prisoner like? How had he escaped? Why hadn’t he escaped sooner when the war stopped? Lydia wanted to know, but Villy told her that her uncle was tired and didn’t want to be cross-examined the moment he got home. Villy’s hair had gone completely white, he noticed, but her strong eyebrows had remained dark.

To deflect curiosity about himself he had asked about Clary and Neville, but before any adult could answer him Lydia said: ‘Neville’s voice has changed, but I can’t honestly say his character has improved at all. He’s simply awful in slightly different ways. He gambles with money and he hardly ever plays any decent games with us. Clary’s much nicer. You ought to ring her up, Uncle Rupert, she’ll be so frightfully pleased. She always thought you’d come back – even when everybody else thought you were dead.’

‘Lydia! Don’t talk such nonsense!’

‘I wasn’t. I’m not.’ She looked at her mother defiantly, but she didn’t say any more.

He had glanced involuntarily at Zoë, seated beside him, but she was staring at her empty plate. It had been then that he had been assailed by senses of guilt and unreality – both so violent and so evenly balanced that he was paralysed. His decision to stay on in France all those months after he could legitimately have left, a decision that had seemed romantically moral at the time, now seemed mere self-indulgent folly, selfish in the extreme. And he was not even returning with a pure, undivided heart . . .

The train was slowing down for a station – Basingstoke. He hoped that nobody would get into this compartment; he spent much of his life hoping to be left alone these days, not because he enjoyed the solitude but simply because he found it less demanding. He felt tired all the time, kept thinking he wanted to sleep, but usually the attempt simply provided a replay of small, disparate, disturbing pieces of his life. The only person he felt comfortable with was Archie, to whose flat he was now bound. He had rung Archie that first evening at Home Place, and somehow Archie’s pleasure (‘I say! What a thing!’) had felt completely all right – he hadn’t felt guilty or inadequate or dishonest at all. It was Archie who had said that he should not ring Clary, he should see her; he had also, after he’d heard about the fishing boat, asked immediately whether the Navy knew he was back, and when he’d said no, they didn’t, had said, ‘Well, you’d better come up at once and I’ll fix an appointment for you at the Admiralty. I warn you, they won’t be pleased.’

They hadn’t been. He’d gone up the next morning, met Archie at the Whitehall entrance and been taken by him to see a Commander Brooke-Caldwell by name, who was distinctly hostile. He’d had to go over the whole thing. Why hadn’t he got in touch with any of the British services still in France? Why had he waited so long? What the hell had he been up to and who did he think he was? Who had been concealing him all these years? Was she a member of the Maquis? Did MI6 know anything about her? Why hadn’t she tried to move him on? She hadn’t been a member of anything, he’d said. Well, that could be checked out – and would be. It was a good thing, he’d finished grimly, that Lieutenant Commander Lestrange was able to vouch for his identity. He’d read the relevant action report from Rupert’s captain, so the first part of the story was accredited. But he still hadn’t accounted for his delay in returning, had he? A stony glare from the overgrowth of black bushy eyebrows. Personal reasons, sir, he had eventually admitted. Commander Brooke-Caldwell had snorted.

‘Personal reasons come second in this service, a fact which I am quite sure you are well aware of.’

Yes, he was.

‘Report back here in two days. Ask my secretary on your way out what is a convenient time for me.’

He had left feeling distinctly small. It was Archie who had fixed him up with a temporary ration card, who’d got him some money, who’d arranged for Clary to come to his flat for their reunion. ‘She often comes to supper with me, so she won’t think it odd. I’ll see that there’s some food, or you can take her out, whichever you like.’

‘What will you do?’

‘Oh, I can easily make myself scarce. Much better for her to have you to herself. She bloody well deserves it.’

They had been eating a fairly horrible lunch in a café off Leicester Square. Archie had to go back to his desk but said he’d be through by five; Rupert had the afternoon to himself. He walked, aimlessly, for about two hours. The state of London appalled him. Sandbags, boarded-up windows, dirty buildings, blistering paint – there was a general feeling of dinginess and exhaustion. People in the streets looked grey and shabby, tired as they stood patiently at bus stops in straggling queues. The conductors were women, dressed in stiff dark blue serge trouser suits. The queues daunted him – he decided not to take a bus. Every now and then there was another of the posters he had seen at the railway station, ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’, and another that said, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, and a third one that simply said, ‘Dig For Victory’ – all a bit out of date now, he should have thought.

He walked – across Trafalgar Square and up Haymarket and then along Piccadilly. The church there had been bombed; loosestrife and ragwort grew out of its broken walls. He had some vague idea of buying a present for Clary, but he could not think of what to get. Five years ago he would have been in no doubt, but now . . . the gap between fifteen and twenty was enormous; he had not the slightest notion of what she would like or want – should have asked Archie when they were having lunch. He tried to buy her a man’s shirt in one of the shops in Jermyn Street, but when he had finally chosen one, in wide pink and white stripes, it turned out that he couldn’t have it because he hadn’t any clothes coupons. ‘I’ve been away a long time,’ he explained to the very old salesman, who looked at him over his gold-rimmed half-glasses and said, ‘Ah, well, sir, that is the unfortunate situation, I’m afraid. Would you like me to keep the shirt for you until you acquire the requisite coupons?’

‘Better not. I don’t know whether I’m entitled to any.’

He wandered along the street until he came to a stationer’s. He would buy her a fountain pen. She had always loved them. When he had chosen one, he thought he had better buy a bottle of ink to go with it. She had always liked brown ink: he remembered her saying, ‘It makes my writing look nice and old and settled on the paper.’ As he wondered whether she was still writing stories he began to feel vaguely frightened, afraid that he might, in some way, fail her. His record so far, from the reunion point of view, was hardly a blazing success. It had been a relief to have to come to London this morning after the enforced, nervous intimacy of the previous evening. He had been so terrified of not being able to perform with Zoë that he had dreaded touching her. With the old Zoë this would at once have led to passionate declarations, demands, small seductive dishevelments – he remembered how the wide white satin ribbons of her shoulder straps would slip off her shoulders, how the combs would slide from her hair . . . He had not dared to embark upon such a course.

After dinner, they had been left alone in the drawing room. He had been turning over music for the Duchy, who had played at his request. Now he stood, irresolute, by the piano looking across the room at her – his wife. She sat in the large armchair, whose linen cover had been elaborately patched and mended, sewing some frothy white muslin concoction that was to be a summer frock for Juliet. She wore a pale green shirt that made her eyes a darker green and a little turquoise heart slung on a silver chain round her neck. She must have felt his eyes on her, for she looked up as they both spoke at once. Both stopped in mid-sentence waiting for the other.

‘I was only asking whether you wanted a whisky.’

‘No thanks.’ He’d had one before dinner with his father, and discovered that he’d lost the taste for it.

‘What were you going to say?’

‘Oh! I was wondering what you thought of Pipette.’ That story had come up at dinner, but Zoë then, as during the whole evening, had hardly said anything.

‘I never met him. I was visiting my mother when he came. On the Isle of Wight. She still lives with her friend Maud Witting.’

‘How is your mother?’

‘Quite well, really.’

There was a short silence. Then he said, ‘Do the family always go to bed as early as this?’

‘Not usually. I think they’re trying to be tactful.’

Her timid smile made him recognise that she was used to deprivation, sadness, the absence of any lightness. He said involuntarily, ‘It has been far harder for you.’ He pulled a stool nearer to sit before her. ‘Even after you got the message. You must have thought that I had died. But you couldn’t be sure. That must have been so – difficult. I’m so sorry.’

‘It couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t your fault. Any of it.’

He saw that her hands, folding the white muslin, were trembling.

She said, ‘Your family have been wonderful to me. Especially your mother. And I had Juliet.’ She looked quickly at him and away. ‘Seeing you walking towards me in the lane was such a shock. I can still hardly believe you. Believe you’re back, I mean.’

‘It seems extraordinary to me too.’

‘It must.’

They had come to another full stop. Exhaustion hit him like a freak wave. ‘Shall we turn in?’

‘Perhaps we’d better.’ She put her sewing on the table.

He held out his hand to pull her to her feet and saw a faint blush – she was paler than he remembered; her hand was very cold.

‘Time,’ he said. ‘We both need some time to get used to one another again, don’t you think?’

But in the bedroom – astonishingly unchanged, with its faded wallpaper of monstrous, mythical birds – there was the business of undressing in the uncompromising presence of the small double bed. Had she kept any of his pyjamas? Yes: most of them had been passed on to Neville, but she had kept one pair. The clothes he had been wearing, a pair of cotton trousers, a fisherman’s sweater that had belonged to Miche’s father, a threadbare shirt that she had washed and patched and ironed for his journey back – had now been discarded. He undressed while Zoë went to the bathroom – gathered the shirt to his face to conjure the hot, peppery, baked smell that had permeated the large kitchen when Miche was ironing . . . He rubbed his eyes with the shirt and then put it on the chair that he had always used for his clothes.

When Zoë returned, she had undressed. She was wearing the very old peach-coloured kimono that the Brig had given her years ago, soon after they were married. She put her clothes almost furtively on the other chair and went to the dressing table to unpin her hair. Usually, he remembered, this had been the beginning of a long evening ritual, when she would clean her face with lotion, put some cream on it, brush her hair for three minutes, massage some special lotion she used to have made up at the chemist into her hands, take off her jewellery – it could all take what had seemed to him ages. He went to find the bathroom.

That, too, was just the same. The same dark green paint, the same bath with its claw feet and viridian stain from the leaking taps, the window-sill covered with toothpaste-encrusted mugs and contorted tubes of Phillips Dental Magnesia. There was a new clothes-horse covered with damp bath towels. From habit, he opened the window, now stripped of its blackout blind. The fresh, soft air revived him. Away from Zoë, even for a few minutes, he was able to consider her, and he recognised now that in her presence he was encapsulated by guilt, unable to perceive anything but his own responses. She felt shy with him, unsure of herself and uncertain of him. One would think, he thought wearily – anyone outside the situation would presume – that after this long, enforced absence their coming together again was the happy ending, containing nothing but delight and relief. He remembered the old chestnut that fellow officers had quoted on the destroyer about the rating who had written, ‘I hope you are getting plenty of fresh air because once I get back you won’t be seeing nothing but the bedroom ceiling.’ Reunions were regarded as occasion for sexual abandon and unconfined joy. He shut the window. I was in love with her, he thought. She is beautiful – that hasn’t changed; she is the mother of my daughter and she has spent five years waiting for me to come back. Somehow or other, I’ve got to make a go of it. But even as he reached his last resolution he remembered that it was not new: it had lain in him during most of the marriage, unvoiced for years before he had gone away.

When he got back to the bedroom, she was in bed, lying on her side and turned away from him; she seemed asleep and, grateful for this deception, he kissed her cold cheek and turned out the light . . .

He was not used to walking – and particularly not on pavements. His feet hurt: he was not used to wearing English leather – he’d lived for so long in canvas shoes. He decided to go back along Jermyn Street, down St James’s and into the park where he could find a bench to sit down.

Clary. When Archie had said, ‘She bloody well deserves it,’ he had suddenly remembered Clary face down on her bed sobbing her heart out because he was going to take Zoë on holiday to France. He had sat on the bed and tried to comfort her – it was only for two weeks. ‘Two weeks! It doesn’t feel like that to me at all. You’re just saying that to make it sound bearable.’ He had turned her over so that she faced him. How often he remembered her face covered with freckles and tears and usually dirt because she was always rubbing the tears off. How often he remembered her eyes dark with defiance and grief. ‘How do I know you’ll ever come back?’ she had cried on that occasion. When he did come back she was shy, sulky, unresponsive, until somehow he could break through and make her laugh. Then she would throw herself into his arms and say, ‘Sorry I clang so much.’ And a few days later she would accuse him: ‘Dad! You should have told me not to say clang. You know perfectly well it’s clung. Sometimes you can be very treacherous and unhelpful.’ She had been jealous of Neville, jealous of Zoë. He wondered whether she was now jealous of Juliet. He had always felt protective towards her: of the three girls it was always she whose knees were permanently grazed, whose hair seemed never out of tangle, who invariably spilt things down a new dress or tore an old one, whose bitten nails were always fringed with black, who seemed always either to have comic gaps where milk teeth had fallen out, or heavy wire bars holding in the new ones. She had never had a vestige of Louise’s dramatic glamour, or Polly’s fastidious elegance. He had known also that Ellen, who had been such a tower of strength to him in every other way, had favoured Neville, had always found Clary difficult, and although she had faithfully performed the duties of nanny, had bestowed very little natural affection – Clary had been entirely dependent upon him. So, when he was lying in that ditch with his ankle hurting like hell and all hope of escape with Pipette gone, he had scribbled the note to Zoë and had written another little message for her as the only comfort he could give. But she had been still a child then: children got over things – she had, after all, never once mentioned her mother to him after Isobel had died. Perhaps he, too, would seem like a distant stranger . . . He felt daunted. When it came to getting over things – something he recognised one always hoped other people would do – he wondered how it applied to himself. How long would it take him to get over Miche? He had thought that making the decision to leave her would be the hardest part of it; he had expected, he now realised, to be rewarded for the decision by finding it less painful in practice than in anticipation. Even on the boat he had thought that. He had thought that, once home, he would find it possible to slot into his old life, upheld by the virtue of having made the right decision. But this was not so: not only did it seem to be difficult in ways he had not imagined – sharing a double bed with someone who seemed like an intimate stranger – but the hours without her had simply made his longing for Miche more agonising. Morality, too, had developed horns: he could neither act nor even feel towards one of them without damage of some kind to the other – at least that was how it was beginning to seem. And once out of the Navy, he would be expected to return to the family business, and absence from that had made it clear to him that he had no heart for it. But how could he expect Zoë to go back to complete penury if he reverted to teaching somewhere and trying to sell pictures? He supposed he would have to get over wanting to be a painter as well, but getting over things now seemed to be a shabby, inconclusive way of dealing with them.

In the bus going back to his flat with Archie, he managed to say that he was nervous about the meeting with Clary. ‘Don’t you think it might be better if we had the evening à trois? I mean, it sounds as though she knows you far better.’

‘I think she should be allowed to choose about that.’ Then, after a pause, Archie asked, ‘What was it like going home?’

‘Oh – you know – very odd. Not exactly how I expected.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Amazing to come back to a five-year-old ready-made daughter.’

‘I bet.’ There was another silence in which he noticed how Archie had carefully not mentioned Zoë.

‘I didn’t know what to get her. In the end I bought her a pen. Will that go down well, do you think?’

‘Sure to. She loves anything like that.’

‘Is she still writing?’

‘She’s a bit cagey about it – but probably. She wrote a journal for you during the war. For you to read when you came back. She always believed that you would, you know.’

As he was putting his key in the door of a large, rather gloomy-looking red-brick building, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d better wait and let her tell you about the journal.’ Archie’s flat was small, but it had a balcony looking on to a square garden, now full of may and lilac and laburnum.

‘What time is she coming?’

‘Straight after work. Between half past six and seven. Like a whisky?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Gin, then. I think I’ve got some of that left. Oh, no – it’s vodka. Vodka has become rather a fashionable drink because of our Russian allies. You can have vodka and ice, vodka and tonic, or just vodka. I don’t advise that – it has a sort of oily taste when remotely warm.’

‘I think vodka and ice would be just the thing.’ He didn’t really, but he felt tired and a drink might pep him up.

Archie seemed to sense that he was nervous, because he began talking about the coming election, the end of the coalition and party politics back with a vengeance. ‘They can hardly hear themselves speak in the House,’ he said. ‘I must say, I think it would have been better if they’d waited until we’ve finished off Japan.’

‘Do you want to talk about France?’ he asked a few minutes later, when it was clear he wasn’t getting much response about politics.

‘Not at the moment,’ possibly not ever, he thought, and then wondered whether he would ever bring himself to say even that – even to Archie.

Archie said, ‘When the bell rings I’m going down to fetch her. It’s going to be a tremendous shock for her. I’d like to give her some sort of warning.’

‘You make me sound like a catastrophe.’

‘No, I don’t. Shocks come in all shapes and sizes.’

When the bell rang – at last – they both jumped and Rupert realised that Archie was nervous as well. He put down his drink and limped quickly to the door, where he stopped.

‘Er. One thing. She really has – minded about you. She – oh, well.’ He shrugged and went. His uneven footsteps on the stairs faded; there was temporary silence. He got up and walked over to the balcony, which was further from the door. He heard voices, Archie’s and hers, and then Archie saying, ‘A bit of a surprise for you,’ and hers, ‘Oh, Archie! Another one? I’m not going to guess because last time you got me what I guessed it might be before – if you see what I . . .’

She was in the room, struck motionless at the sight of him, silent, and then, as though released by a spring, she shot into his arms.

‘Only crying because I’m so pleased,’ she said moments later. ‘I always cry about things.’

‘You always did.’

‘Did I?’ She stood in front of him – nearly as tall as he, stroking his shoulders with small uneven movements. Looking at her eyes was like looking at the sun. ‘Wouldn’t it be awful,’ she said, and he saw her luxuriating in the fantasy, ‘if you weren’t actually real? If I’d just imagined you.’

‘Awful. Darling Clary, I have missed you.’

‘I know. I got your note that you thought of me every day. It made a great difference. Oh, Dad! Here you are! Could we sit down? I feel I’m going to break.’

Archie, who had put a drink for her on the table by the sofa, had disappeared.

‘He’s probably having a bath. He spends ages in them doing the crossword,’ she said.

They sat on the sofa.

‘Let me examine you,’ he said. ‘You’ve grown up so much.’

‘Well, up,’ she said. ‘But not sort of – in other ways. Not like the others. Louise has become rather a beauty – it’s generally acknowledged – and Poll is so pretty and elegant. They’re both quite exotic, but I’ve just become a larger caterpillar – or a moth compared to butterflies.’

He looked at her. Her face was thinner, but still rounded, flushed now with excitement and streaked with tears, her eyelashes wet around eyes the frankness of whose love struck him then with an almost painful force.

‘This is the most joyful day of my life,’ she said.

‘You have eyes just like your mother’s.’

‘You never told me that.’ She began to smile, but her mouth trembled.

‘And you’ve lost your freckles, I see.’

‘Oh, Dad! You know I don’t get them properly until the summer.’

He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘I shall look forward to them immensely.’

During the rest of that first evening with her, which they persuaded Archie to share, he saw both how much she had grown up and also how intensely she had missed him: this last was revealed to him obliquely in various things that she asked or said. When Pipette had gone to Home Place and described the journey west, she’d realised that a lot of her imagining about him had been right. ‘Not exactly the same adventures,’ she said, ‘but the same sort of ones.’

‘And after D-day,’ she had remarked later, ‘I thought you might turn up at any minute. I suppose that was rather silly?’ But she had immediately sensed that this was back to dangerous ground: earlier, she had asked him why he hadn’t come earlier and what had been happening to him, and when he had said it was too long a story for now, she had at once desisted; the old or, rather, younger Clary would have continued with a relentless cross-examination, but that first evening she seemed to know that he did not want to talk about that . . .

Which, he reflected now as he sat in the train on his way to London and Archie’s flat, had been quite unlike the behaviour both of the Admiralty and the rest of the family. The Admiralty, of course, had a right: he recognised – belatedly – that he had behaved very badly from their point of view, that the four years of isolation and intense intimacy had impaired his sense of reality, or values. Different things had imperceptibly come to seem important: saving his own skin had evolved to continual anxiety about Miche’s – if she was discovered to be harbouring him she would be shot. They had made a number of hiding places and he had become as wary as an animal of any activity near the farm – could hear the sound of a motorbike or any other engine even before she did. For the Germans did turn up from time to time, at infrequent intervals, to extract food from them and other farms. They would take chickens, eggs, fruit, butter if it was to be had, and once, on an occasion that had afterwards caused Miche to sob with rage, one of her three pigs. Sometimes these things were punctiliously paid for, sometimes not. But apart from the major preoccupation of staying alive there had been two other elements to his life then – each unpromisingly begun from the lack of any alternative – that had gradually come to absorb him completely. The drawing had started because he had nothing better, or even else, to do. She had a pad of thin, lined paper on which she wrote the occasional family letter – to her sister in Rouen, to an aunt who was a nun in a convent near Bayeux. Even on the blank side the lines showed through, but he became used to this. He had started by drawing aspects of the kitchen, which was large and accommodated all indoor life except sleep. There, Michèle cooked and washed and ironed and mended, packed up eggs or chickens or rabbits – the last two live – for selling in the market where she went every other week. In season, she would put fruit she had picked into punnets, or preserved into jars, bundle herbs: anything she grew or raised to sell was got ready to carry on her bicycle with the small wooden cart behind it. Here he passed much of his time, idle, unless she found some task for him, but always he had to be poised for flight. The first drawings had been merely pleasant distraction, but quite soon he found himself becoming more serious, more critically responsible about them; he recognised that he was out of practice, and some time afterwards that it had been years since he had done any drawing without feeling faintly guilty and self-indulgent (Zoë had always resented him spending any of his spare time on what she called his Art). Now he had time to practise as much as he liked. And Michèle, once she realised that it was more to him than an idle ploy, went to great lengths to provide him with materials – chiefly paper, some pencils and once some charcoal. These she obtained occasionally on market days – there was not much there, she said, only things for the pupils of the local school, but once she came back with a small box of watercolours.

His second preoccupation had been, of course, Michèle. He had first gone to bed with her after about four months at the farm. It had been a matter of straightforward lust and the comfort it provided. They had had a bad day – in the morning the goat was found mysteriously dead, a disaster since it had recently produced a kid who would now have to be fed by bottle on the precious cow’s milk. She had been deeply upset because she could think of no reason for the goat’s death. She brought the kid into the kitchen and tethered it in a corner, and while they were improvising a teat out of a piece of chamois leather, they heard a car door slam and men’s voices. There was no time for him to get to the concealed cellar (which meant removing floorboards) or out to the loft in the barn. She had pointed to the stairs and he had gone up them just as there was a rapping on the door. He had not dared to mount the second stairway – a mere ladder – to the attics for fear of the noise it might make. Her bedroom door was open, but the large bedstead stood high from the floor with no bedclothes voluminous enough to conceal anyone lying under it. There was nothing to do but to stand behind the open door and hope to God that if they did search the house they would not look behind it. There was an element of murky farce about the whole thing, he felt, before he heard the sounds of their departure, but even then he waited, as Michèle had taught him to do, until she called him.

She was standing in the open doorway of the kitchen, watching the dust settle on the cart track that led to the road. She walked to the sink and spat out the clove of garlic she had been chewing. He knew now that she always put garlic in her mouth when the Germans came. ‘They do not like,’ she had said the first time they had come. There had been three of them, an officer, his driver and another one whom she thought was SS – the only one who spoke any French. They had asked a lot of questions of the usual kind: who else lived at the farm? How did she manage, then, on her own? What did the farm produce? and so on. It had taken so much time, she said, because with Germans she always behaved stupidly. She did not understand what they said, and then she would give stupid answers. Then she turned on him and said it was his business to listen for people coming – she had enough to do. He (foolishly) said something about the car engine being quieter, and then she really went for him. However they came they could kill them, she said – he could not be such a fool as not to understand that. Germans in cars could be more dangerous – officers, people who gave the orders. If he could not take the trouble to listen, he had the choice of spending all his time in the cellar where he would be utterly useless and nothing but trouble for her. For the rest of the day she neither spoke to nor looked at him, made loud noises with pans, set a bowl of soup on the table for him but did not eat herself, and muttered imprecations to the kid that he felt were meant for him. That was the blackest day since the morning he discovered that the destroyer had sailed without him. In the evening, when she called him down from his room, he saw a bottle of Calvados and two glasses on the table. She had washed herself and her hair was coiled neatly on top of her head (she had pulled it down when the Germans came so that it looked thoroughly unkempt). She asked if he would like a drink and he said, yes, very much. When it was poured and she had pushed the packet of Gauloises to him, having taken one herself, and he had lit them, he said that he had been thinking, and had decided that he should not stay. Where would he go? He should try to get a boat from Concarneau. He would not get a boat. It had been discovered that someone had left in that way and now all boats were checked by the Germans before leaving the harbour. He would not get a boat. There had been a short silence. Then he had said that boat or no boat, he ought to leave. Why? Because it simply was not fair on her. If he were not here she would be perfectly safe, would not have this constant anxiety. It was too much to ask of anyone, let alone a – he remembered floundering here – perfect stranger.

She had stared at him for a moment with an expression he could not fathom. A stranger, she had repeated eventually. You have lived here for four months – with a stranger! No, he hadn’t meant that exactly. Just that he did not feel that he had the right to jeopardise her safety.

She ignored that; she supposed it was because he was English that he felt her to be such a stranger. The cold English, people had always said, but she had not known any English person until now. They were facing each other across the table. She pulled her black woollen shawl more closely to her and folded her arms. In any case, she said, if he did leave, he would not get far. His French was not good enough for him to pass as a Frenchman, he had no papers and also it was known that he had some association with her – or it would be if he were caught. He did not understand this, but when he questioned her, she said that, although nobody spoke of it, something was known. Also, there was a record about her after Jean-Paul had been killed. The Germans kept excellent records of such things. So! she finished. So! She shrugged and poured more Calvados. He felt both challenged and at a loss – uncomfortably powerless. It occurred to him then that although he was deeply beholden to her, he did not like her. There was a bitterness, a smouldering resentment about her that was alienating. My bloody ankle, he thought. If that hadn’t happened, I’d have been away from here, might be home by now. And then something strange, that afterwards he could not in any way account for, happened. For a second – he became her: at least his own feelings, responses, needs, anxieties dissolved to be replaced by hers. Alone, having nursed her parents to their deaths, her man taken brutally from her and with him her future of marriage and children gone by a murder where justice had no power, she had been left to do a man’s as well as a woman’s job in this remote place. Lone women were raped by the enemy: it was common knowledge. Every single time they came, that possibility – likelihood – was there. Today she had been through the fear of that. She had got Pipette away, she had harboured himself: in neither case was there the smallest advantage to her. Her outburst about it being his business to listen for vehicles approaching the farm was perfectly reasonable. He had grown careless, and then to say that he must go, and call her a perfect stranger was both chilling and offensive.

‘I’m sorry I called you a stranger. I’m sorry you find that my French is so bad. I’m sorry I suggested going without thinking of the consequences for you—’

He had taken her hand and she now put it over his mouth. ‘Enough! You have said enough,’ she said. She was smiling – he could not remember seeing her smile before and her dark eyes had an expression that was both cynical and tender. They had become different people.

That night after supper – a stew of rabbit cooked with apple and onions – after they had bolted the doors and fed the kid they had gone upstairs and when they reached the door of her room she took his hand and drew him in. He had put his arms round her and kissed her small red mouth. ‘Much garlic,’ she had said and he had answered that he was not a bloody German, just a cold English. She had smiled again. ‘I will warm you,’ she said.

For months he had seen her in her voluminous black skirt – often with an apron added to it, her heavy fisherman’s jersey, her thick cotton blouses, her shawl – naked, she took his breath away. High, separated breasts, an unexpectedly slender waist, below which there was the generous curve of her hips, her limbs muscular and rounded, wrists and ankles delicately articulate – the revelation was a marvellous shock.

Even now, in the dusty train, he could feel his body responding to the memory of that initial sight of her.

After that first night they were no longer Monsieur and Madame, no longer addressed each other as vous, although it was some months before either recognised what was happening to them.

Here he had to stop – some way beyond that was the beginning of pain, the knowledge that there could not be a future with her, that one day this amazing isolation with her would come to an end, and the closer that they became the more completely they would have to part. He had thought, at the beginning of their parting, on the boat and the first few difficult days after it, that he must, he should, banish all thoughts of her; now he knew just how difficult it was to do that for more than a few hours at a time. It was not made easier by his relationship with Zoë, which had, he thought now, all the anxious courtesy of two people trapped between two floors in a lift – a kind of wary limbo that neither seemed able to overcome.

Perhaps, he thought, he would feel better if he talked to someone about it: his thoughts would become clearer, he would be more able to deal with the situation. And the obvious person to talk to would be Archie.