Marking Time

HOME PLACE

September 1939

Someone had turned off the wireless and, in spite of the room being full of people, there was a complete silence – in which Polly could feel, and almost hear, her own heart thudding. As long as nobody spoke, and no one moved, it was still the very end of peace . . .

The Brig, her grandfather, did move. She watched while – still in silence – he got slowly to his feet, stood for a moment, one hand trembling on the back of his chair as he passed the other slowly across his filmy eyes. Then he went across the room and, one by one, kissed his two elder sons, Polly’s father Hugh and Uncle Edward. She waited for him to kiss Uncle Rupe, but he did not. She had never seen him kiss another man before, but this seemed more of an apology and a salute. It’s for what they went through last time there was a war, and because it was for nothing, she thought.

Polly saw everything. She saw Uncle Edward catch her father’s eye, and then wink, and her father’s face contract as though he remembered something he could hardly bear to remember. She saw her grandmother, the Duchy, sitting bolt upright, staring at Uncle Rupert with a kind of bleak anger. She’s not angry with him, she’s afraid he will have to be in it. She’s so old-fashioned she thinks it’s simply men who have to fight and die; she doesn’t understand. Polly understood everything.

People were beginning to shift in their chairs, to murmur, to light cigarettes, to tell the children to go out and play. The worst had come to the worst, and they were all behaving in much the same way as they would have if it hadn’t. This was what her family did when things were bad. A year ago, when it had been peace with honour, they had all seemed different, but Polly had not had time to notice properly, because just as the amazement and joy hit her, it was as though she’d been shot. She’d fainted. ‘You went all white and sort of blind, and you passed out. It was terribly interesting,’ her cousin Clary had said. Clary had put it in her Book of Experiences that she was keeping for when she was a writer. Polly felt Clary looking at her now, and just as their eyes met and Polly gave a little nod of agreement about them both getting the hell out, a distant up and down wailing noise of a siren began and her cousin Teddy shouted, ‘It’s an air raid! Gosh! Already!’ and everybody got up, and the Brig told them to fetch their gas masks and wait in the hall to go to the air-raid shelter. The Duchy went to tell the servants, and her mother Sybil and Aunt Villy said they must go to Pear Tree Cottage to fetch Wills and Roly, and Aunt Rach said she must pop down to Mill Farm to help Matron with the evacuated babies – in fact, hardly anybody did what the Brig said.

‘I’ll carry your mask if you want to take your writing,’ Polly said while they hunted in their bedroom for the cardboard boxes that contained their masks. ‘Damn! Where did we put them?’ They were still hunting when the siren went again, not wailing up and down this time, just a steady howl. ‘All Clear!’ someone shouted from the hall.

‘Must have been a false alarm,’ Teddy said; he sounded disappointed.

‘Although we wouldn’t have seen a thing buried in that awful old shelter,’ said Neville. ‘And I suppose you’ve heard, they’re using the war as an excuse not to go to the beach, which seems to me about the most unfair thing I’ve ever heard in my life.’

‘Don’t be so stupid, Neville!’ Lydia said crushingly. ‘People don’t go to beaches in wartime.’

There was a generally quarrelsome feeling in the air, Polly thought, although outside it was a mellow September Sunday morning, with a smell of burning leaves from McAlpine’s bonfire, and everything looked the same. The children had all been sent away from the drawing room: the grown-ups wanted to have a talk and, naturally, everyone not classed as one resented this. ‘It isn’t as though when we’re there they make funny jokes all the time and scream with laughter,’ Neville said as they trooped into the hall. Before anyone could back him up or squash him, Uncle Rupert put his head round the drawing-room door and said, ‘Everyone who couldn’t find their masks bloody well go and find them, and in future they’re to be kept in the gun room. Chop chop.’

‘I really resent being classed as a child,’ Louise said to Nora, as they made their way down to Mill Farm. ‘They’ll sit there for hours making plans for all of us as though we were mere pawns in the game. We ought at least to have the chance to object to arrangements before they’re faits accomplis.’

‘The thing is to agree with them, and then do what one thinks is right,’ Nora replied, which Louise suspected meant doing what she wanted to do.

‘What shall you do when we leave our cooking place?’

‘I shan’t go back there. I shall start training to be a nurse.’

‘Oh, no, don’t! Do stay until Easter. Then we can both leave. I should simply loathe it without you. And anyway, I bet they don’t take people of seventeen to be nurses.’

‘They’ll take me,’ said Nora. ‘You’ll be all right. You’re nothing like so homesick now. You’re over the worst of all that. It’s bad luck you being a year younger, because it means you’ll have to wait to be really useful. But you’ll end up a much better cook than me—’

‘Than I,’ Louise said automatically.

‘Than I, then, and that’ll be terribly useful. You could go into one of the Services as a cook.’

A thoroughly uninviting prospect, Louise thought. She didn’t actually want to be useful at all. She wanted to be a great actress, something which she well knew by now that Nora regarded as frivolous. They had had one serious . . . not row, exactly, but heated discussion about this during the holidays, after which Louise had become cautious about her aspirations. ‘Actresses aren’t necessary,’ Nora had said, while conceding that if there wasn’t going to be a war it wouldn’t matter so much what Louise did. Louise had retaliated by questioning the use of nuns (Nora’s chosen profession, now in abeyance – partly because she had promised not to be one if there hadn’t been a war last year, and now ruled out in the immediate future because of the need for nurses). But Nora had said that Louise had no conception of the importance of prayer, and the need for there to be people who devoted their lives to it. The trouble was that Louise didn’t care whether the world needed actresses or not, she simply wanted to be one; it put her in a morally inferior position vis-à-vis Nora, and made a comparison of the worth of their characters an uncomfortable business. But Nora always pre-empted any possibility of covert criticism by hitting a much larger and more unpleasant nail on the head. ‘I do have awful trouble with priggishness,’ she would say, or, ‘I suppose if I ever get near being accepted as a novice, my wretched smugness will do me down.’ What could one say to that? Again, Louise really didn’t want to know herself with the awful familiarity employed by Nora.

‘If that’s what you think you are, how can you bear to be it?’ she had said at the end of the row/heated discussion.

‘I don’t have much choice. But at least it means that I know what I’ve got to work against. There I go again. I’m sure you know your faults, Louise, most people do, deep down. It’s the first step.’

Still wanting to convince Nora of the worth of acting, Louise had tried her with the greats like Shakespeare, Chekhov and Bach. (Bach she’d added cunningly – he was known to have been religious.) ‘You surely don’t think you are going to be like any of them!’ And Louise was silenced. Because a small, secret bit of her was sure she was going to be one of them – or at least a Bernhardt or Garrick (for she had always hankered after the men’s parts). The argument, like any argument she had ever had with anyone, was quite unresolved, making her doggedly more sure of what she wanted, and Nora more determined that she shouldn’t want it.

‘You judge me all the time!’ she had cried.

‘So do you,’ Nora had retorted. ‘People do that with each other. Anyway, I’m not sure that it is judging exactly; it’s more comparing a person with standards. I do it to myself all the time,’ she had added.

‘And, of course, you always measure up.’

‘Of course not!’ The innocent glare of denial silenced Louise. But then, looking at her friend’s heavy beetling eyebrows, and the faint, but unmistakable, signs of a moustache on her upper lip, she had realised that she was glad that she didn’t look like Nora, and that that was a judgement of a kind. ‘I judge that you are a much better person than I,’ she had said, not adding that she would still rather be herself.

‘Yes, I suppose I could be a cook somewhere,’ she said, as they turned into the drive at Mill Farm where, until two days ago, they had been living. On Friday morning it had been decreed that all the inhabitants move to the Brig’s new cottages, now made into a quite large house and called Pear Tree Cottage because of one ancient tree in the garden. It had eight bedrooms, but by the time it had housed Villy and Sybil, with Edward and Hugh at weekends, Jessica Castle, paying her annual visit with Raymond (who had gone to London to fetch Miss Milliment and Lady Rydal), there was only room left for Lydia and Neville and the babies, Wills and Roland.

The shift to Pear Tree Cottage had taken all day, with the older children being moved into Home Place, where Rupert and Zoë were also ensconced, together with the great-aunts and Rachel. On Saturday, the Babies’ Hotel had arrived: twenty-five babies, sixteen student nurses, with Matron and Sister Crouchback. They had arrived in two buses, one driven by Tonbridge and the other by Rachel’s friend Sid. The nurses were to sleep in the squash court, now equipped with three Elsans and an extremely reluctant shower. Matron and Sister occupied Mill Farm with the babies and a rota of student nurses to help out at night. On Saturday afternoon, Nora had suggested that she and Louise go and make supper for the nurses, an offer most gratefully received by Aunt Rachel who had been up since dawn and was utterly exhausted with efforts to make the squash court a place in which people could not only sleep, but keep their personal effects. The cooking had proved extremely difficult, as the kitchen utensils from Mill Farm had been moved to Pear Tree Cottage, and the Babies’ Hotel equipment – brought down in a Cazalet lorry – had lost its way and did not turn up until nine in the evening. They had to make the meal at Pear Tree Cottage and Villy took it down with them in a car. This meant cooking under the almost offensively patronising eye of Emily, whose view of ladies and their children was, of course, that they couldn’t boil an egg to save their lives; she was also unwilling to tell them where anything was on the twofold grounds that she didn’t know whether she was on her head or her heels with all the upset, and didn’t want them using her things anyway. Louise had to admit that Nora was wonderfully tactful and apparently insensitive to slights. They made two huge shepherd’s pies and Louise a batch of real Bath buns because she had just learned how to do them and was particularly good at it. The supper had been most gratefully received and Matron had called them two little bricks.

Babies could be heard crying as they reached the house. Nora said that they must have had their morning sleeps interrupted by the air-raid warning and having to be carried into the air-raid shelter that the Brig had had built. ‘Although how the nurses are going to get there from the squash court in time if there are raids at night, I can’t imagine,’ she added. Louise thought of bombs dropping from nowhere in the dark, and shivered. Could the Germans do that? She thought probably not, but she didn’t say anything, not wanting really to know.

Matron and Aunt Rach were in the kitchen. Aunt Rach was unpacking kitchen things from tea chests. Matron sat at the table making lists.

A student was measuring out feeds from an enormous tin of Cow and Gate and another one was sterilising bottles in two saucepans on the cooker. An atmosphere of good humour in a crisis prevailed.

‘Needs must when the devil drives,’ Matron was saying. She had a face like a sort of outdoor Queen Victoria, Louise thought: the same rather protuberant pale blue eyes and little beaky nose, but her plump and pear-shaped cheeks were the colour of flowerpots crazed with little broken veins. Her shape, on the other hand, was pure Queen Mary – upholstered Edwardian. She wore a long-sleeved navy blue serge dress and a crackling white apron and cap with starched veil.

‘We’ve come to help with lunch,’ Nora said.

‘Bless you, darlings,’ Aunt Rachel said. ‘There is some food in the larder but I haven’t really sorted it out. A ham, I think, somewhere or other, and Billy brought down some lettuces.’

‘And there’s the prunes Sister put in to soak last night,’ said Matron. ‘I do like my girls to have their prunes – it saves such a fortune in Syrup of Figs.’

‘They’ll need stewing, though,’ Nora said. ‘I don’t know if they’ll get cool in time for lunch.’

‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ Matron said, clipping her fountain pen into the top of her apron and creaking to her feet.

Louise said she would stew the prunes.

‘Don’t take those bottles off the heat yet. If they’ve had their twenty minutes, I’m a Dutchman. Where should we be, Miss Cazalet, without our little helpers? Oh, don’t do that, Miss Cazalet, you’ll get a hernia!’ Rachel stopped trying to move a tea chest out of the way, and let Nora help her. More babies could be heard crying.

‘We’ve had our routine upset by Mr Hitler. If he goes on like this I shall have to send him a p.c. The morning’s a ridiculous time to have an air raid. But there you are – men!’ she added. ‘I’ll just see if Sister has anything to add to this list – of course, it’s Sunday, isn’t it? No shops open. Oh, well, better late than never,’ and she glided out of the room, to be met in near collision at the door by a student carrying two pails of steaming nappies. ‘Look where you’re going, Susan. And take those outside when you soak them or nobody will be able to fancy their dinner.’

‘Yes, Matron.’ All the students wore short-sleeved mauve and white striped cotton dresses and black stockings.

‘See if you can find Sid, my pet, would you?’ said Aunt Rachel. ‘We must get as many tea chests out of the kitchen as we can before the nurses’ lunch. She’s upstairs, doing blackout.’

The blacking out of all the windows of all three houses and the inhabited outbuildings – which included the roof of the squash court – had been occupying the Brig for some days now, with the result that Sid and Villy had been put to making wooden battens onto which blackout material could be nailed. Sybil, Jessica and the Duchy, who each possessed a sewing machine, were set to making curtains for those windows that precluded battens, and Sampson, the builder, had lent a long ladder from which the gardener’s boy was to paint the squash court roof, but he had quite soon fallen off and into a huge water tank which McAlpine had described as a slice of luck he wasn’t entitled to, dismissing Billy’s broken arm and loss of two front teeth as mere cheek. Sampson had been told to deal with the squash court roof along with so much else that it had not made much progress by Saturday morning, the day that the Babies’ Hotel was due to arrive. Teddy, Christopher and Simon were all roped in to help one of Sampson’s men with the scaffolding and then to cover the sloping glass with dark green paint while inside the stuffy and darkening scene, Rachel and Sid erected camp beds with Lydia and Neville watching sulkily from the gallery (they were supposed to be messengers but Aunt Rachel was letting them down by not thinking of enough messages). Everybody worked hard on that Saturday, excepting Polly and Clary, who slipped off in the morning on the bus to Hastings . . .

‘Who did you ask?’

‘Didn’t ask anyone. I told Ellen.’

‘Did you say I was going too?’

‘Yeah. I said, “Polly wants to go to Hastings, so I’m going with her.”’

‘You wanted to go too.’

‘Of course I did, or I wouldn’t be here, would I?’

‘Well, why didn’t you say we wanted to go?’

‘Didn’t think of it.’

This was Clary being slippery, which Polly didn’t like, but experience had taught her that saying so only made a row, and if this was going to be the last day of peace she didn’t want to have a row or anything to spoil it.

But somehow, it wasn’t a good day. Polly wanted to get so fascinated by what they were actually going to do that she wouldn’t have the chance to think of what might be going to happen. They went to Jepson’s, ordinarily a shop that she loved, but when she found Clary was taking ages over choosing which fountain pen she was going to buy (part of the outing was to spend Clary’s birthday money) she felt impatient and cross because Clary could take something so trivial so seriously. ‘They’re always squeaky and hard at first,’ she said. ‘You know you have to use the nib to get it good.’

‘I know that. But if I get a wide nib now, it will probably get too wide, but the medium one doesn’t feel as though it will ever get right.’

Polly looked at the assistant – a young man in a shiny worn suit – who was watching Clary while she licked each nib before she dipped the pen in a bottle of ink and scribbled her name on small pieces of paper on the counter. He did not seem impatient, only bored. He also looked as though this was his most usual expression.

They were in the stationery department of the book shop – rather a backwater since it only sold writing paper, and printed things like addresses on the paper, At Home cards and wedding invitations, and sold fountain pens and pencils. ‘It’s very important to lick new nibs before you use them,’ Clary was saying, ‘but I expect you tell people that. Could I try that Waterman – the maroon one – just to see?’ It cost twelve and six and Polly knew she would not buy it. She watched the man while Clary tried pen after pen, and he ended up just looking into the distance. He was probably worrying about whether there would be a war.

‘What do you see,’ Polly asked him, ‘in your mind’s eye, I mean?’

‘I haven’t got a mind’s eye when I’m trying pens,’ Clary said quite crossly.

‘I didn’t mean you.’

They both looked at the assistant, who cleared his throat, passed his hand over his heavily Brylcreemed hair and said he didn’t know what she meant.

‘I don’t blame you,’ Clary said. ‘I’ll have the Medium Relief—’

‘That’ll be seven and six,’ he said, and Polly could see he was looking forward to being shot of them.

Outside they quarrelled mildly about what Clary described as Polly’s idiotic remark. ‘At the best, he thought you were patronising him,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t.’

‘He thought you were.’

‘Shut up!’

Clary looked at her friend – well, more of a cousin, really; she wasn’t feeling like a friend . . .

‘Sorry. I know you’re feeling het up. Look here, Poll. It could still be all right. Think of last year.’

Polly shook her head. She was frowning; she looked suddenly like Aunt Rach when she was trying not to cry over Brahms.

‘I know what,’ Clary said gently, ‘it isn’t just that you want me to understand you, you just want me to feel the same. Isn’t it?’

‘I want someone to!’

‘I think both of our fathers do.’

‘Yes, but the trouble with them is that they only count our feelings up to a point.’

‘I know what you mean. It’s as though our feelings were simply the size of our bodies – smaller. It is idiotic of them. I suppose they can’t remember being children.’

‘Not at their age! I shouldn’t think they can remember more than about five years back.’

‘Well, I’m going to make a point of remembering. Of course, they cash in by saying that they’re responsible for us.’

‘Responsible! When they can’t even stop a ghastly war that might kill us all! That seems to me to be about as irresponsible as people can get!’

‘You’re getting het up again,’ Clary said. ‘What shall we do now?’

‘I don’t mind. What do you want to do?’

‘Get some exercise books and a present for Zoë’s birthday. And you said you wanted to buy some wool. We could have doughnuts for lunch. Or baked beans?’ They both loved baked beans because Simon and Teddy had them quite a lot at school, but they never got them at home, as they were regarded as rather common food.

They had been walking towards the front. There were not many holidaymakers about although there were some on one bit of beach, sitting uncomfortably on the pebbles with their backs to silvery wood breakwaters, eating sandwiches and ice creams and staring out at the grey-green sea that heaved back and forth in an aimless, surreptitious manner.

‘Do you want to bathe?’

But Polly simply shrugged. ‘We didn’t bring our things, anyway,’ she said, although Clary knew that that wouldn’t have stopped her if she’d wanted to. Further along – past that bit of beach – some soldiers were hauling huge rolls of barbed wire out of a lorry, and positioning them at regular intervals along the shore where they could see that what looked like concrete posts were sunk in a line at intervals half-way up the beach.

‘Let’s go and have lunch,’ Clary said quickly.

They had baked beans and toast and lovely strong Indian tea (they didn’t get that at home either) and a jam doughnut and a cream horn each. This seemed to cheer Polly up, and they talked about quite ordinary things like the sort of person they would marry. Polly thought an explorer would be nice if he would explore hot parts of the earth as she loathed snow and ice and would naturally accompany him, and Clary said a painter because that would fit with writing books and she knew about painters because of her dad. ‘Also, painters don’t seem to mind so much what people look like; I mean, they like people’s faces for quite different reasons, so he wouldn’t mind mine too much.’

‘You’re fine,’ Polly said. ‘You have beautiful eyes, and they are the most important feature.’

‘So have you.’

‘Oh, mine are far too small. Awful really. Little dark blue boot buttons.’

‘But you have a marvellous complexion – frightfully white and then pale pink, like a heroine in novels. Have you noticed,’ she continued dreamily as she licked the last remnants of cream off her fingers, ‘how novelists go on and on about how their heroines look? It must be frightful for Miss Milliment when she reads them, knowing she could never have been one.’

‘They aren’t all beautiful as the day,’ Polly pointed out. ‘Think of Jane Eyre.’

‘And you’re tremendously lucky with your hair. Although coppery hair does seem to fade with age,’ she added, thinking of Polly’s mother. ‘It gets more like weakish marmalade. Oh, Jane Eyre! Mr Rochester goes on like anything about her being so fairylike and small. That’s an ingenious way of saying that she looked charming.’

‘People want to know that kind of thing. I do hope you aren’t going to get too modern in your writing, Clary. So that nobody knows what is going on.’ Polly had pinched Ulysses from her mother’s books and found it very hard going.

‘I shall write like me,’ said Clary. ‘It’s no good telling me what to write like.’

‘OK. Let’s get the rest of our things.’

Lunch cost four and sixpence, which was more than they had bargained for, and Clary handsomely paid it all. ‘You can pay me back when it’s your birthday,’ she said.

‘I think Miss Milliment must be used to all that by now. Wanting to marry people wears off quite young, I think.’

‘Gosh! Does it? Well, I don’t suppose I shall marry, then. I don’t feel at all strongly about it now, and women over twenty age very rapidly. Look at Zoë.’

‘Grief ages people.’

‘Everything ages people. Do you know what that drawly lady, Lady Knebworth, Aunt Villy’s friend, said to Louise?’ When Polly was silent, she added, ‘She told her never to raise her eyebrows ‘cos it would put lines on her forehead. Quite a good thing for you to know, Polly: you’re always frowning when you try to think.’

They were outside the tea shop by now, and Clary said, ‘What shall I get her for her birthday?’

‘Aunt Zoë? I don’t know. Soap, I should think, or bath salts, Or a hat,’ she added.

‘You can’t buy people hats, Poll. They only like the awful ones they choose themselves. Isn’t it odd?’ she continued as they wandered back from the front towards the shops again, ‘When you see people in shops choosing their clothes and shoes and stuff, they take ages – as though each thing they choose will be amazing and perfect. And then, look at them. They mostly look simply terrible – or just ordinary. They might just as well have chosen their clothes out of a bran tub.’

‘Everyone will be wearing uniforms of one kind or another any minute,’ Polly said sadly: she was beginning to feel rotten again.

‘I think it’s an interesting observation,’ Clary said, rather hurt. ‘I expect it could be applied to other things about people – and turn out to be a serious reflection on human nature.’

‘Human nature’s not much cop, if you ask me. We wouldn’t be in such danger of having a war if it was. Let’s get the wool and things and go home.’

So they bought their things: a box of Morny Rose Geranium soap for Zoë, and the exercise books, and Polly bought some hyacinth-blue wool to make herself a jersey. Then they went to wait for the bus.

After lunch that Saturday, Hugh and Rupert had gone on an expedition to Battle armed with a formidable list of shopping. Rupert had volunteered for the job and then Hugh, who had had what nearly amounted to a quarrel with Sybil, offered to accompany his brother. Lists were collected from all three houses of the many and varied requirements and they set off, with Rupert driving the Vauxhall that he had acquired since joining the firm the previous January.

‘We shall look pretty bloody silly if it’s peace after all,’ he said.

After a short silence, he looked at his brother, and Hugh caught his eye. ‘We shan’t look silly,’ he said.

‘You got one of your heads?’

‘I have not. I was just wondering . . .’

‘What?’

‘What you had in mind.’

‘Oh. Oh – well, I thought I’d try for the Navy.’

‘I thought you might.’

‘It’ll leave you holding the fort on your own, though, won’t it?’

‘I’ll have the Old Man.’

There was a short silence; Rupert knew from his months in the firm that their father was both obstinate and autocratic. Edward was the one who could manage him; Hugh, when he disagreed with an edict, confronted his father with direct and dogged honesty: he had no capacity for manipulation, or tact, as it was sometimes called. They had rows that ended, as often as not, in an uneasy compromise that benefited no one – least of all the firm. Rupert, who was still learning the ropes, had not been able to be much more than an unwilling witness and this summer, when Edward had been away on a volunteer’s course, things had seemed much worse. Edward was back, temporarily, but he was simply waiting to be called up. Rupert, whose decision to go into the firm had been made just about the time that Zoë had become pregnant, still wondered whether it had been the right choice. Being an art master had always seemed a stopgap – a kind of apprenticeship to being a full-time painter; becoming a businessman had turned out to preclude his ever doing any painting at all. The imminent prospect of war, providing the opportunity for escape, excited him, although he could hardly admit that – even to himself.

‘But of course I’ll miss you, old boy,’ Hugh was saying, with a studied casualness that suddenly touched him: Hugh, like their sister Rachel, always became casual when he was most moved.

‘Of course, they might not take me,’ Rupert said. He did not believe this, but it was the nearest he could get to comfort.

‘Of course they will. I wish I could be more use. Those poor bloody Poles. If the Russians hadn’t signed that pact, I don’t think he’d dare to be where he is.’

‘Hitler?’

‘Of course Hitler. Well, we’ve had a year’s grace. I hope we’ve made good use of it.’

They had reached Battle and Rupert said, ‘I’ll park outside Till’s, shall I? We seem to have a hell of a lot to get there.’

They spent the next hour buying four dozen Kilner jars, Jeyes Fluid, paraffin, twenty-four small torches with spare batteries, three zinc buckets, enormous quantities of green soap and Lux, four Primus stoves, a quart of methylated spirit, six hot-water bottles, two dozen light bulbs, a pound of half-inch nails and two pounds of tin tacks. They tried to buy another bale of blackout material, but the shop had only three yards left. ‘Better buy it,’ Hugh said to Rupert. They bought six reels of black thread and a packet of sewing-machine needles. At the chemist they bought gripe water, Milk of Magnesia, baby oil, Vinolia soap, Amami shampoo, arrowroot and Andrews’ Liver Salts and Rupert got a tortoiseshell slide for Clary, who was growing out her fringe and spent much of her time looking like a faithful dog, he said. They picked up two boxes of groceries, ordered by the Duchy and Villy respectively that morning. They bought Gold-flake and Passing Cloud cigarettes – for Villy, again, and Rachel. Rupert bought the Tatler for Zoë, and Hugh bought a copy of How Green Was My Valley for Sybil – she loved reading the latest books and it had been well reviewed. Then they consulted the list again, and realised that the shop hadn’t included the order for Malvern water for the Duchy.

‘Anything else?’

‘Something that looks like ships bras?’

‘Sheep’s brains,’ Hugh said knowledgeably. ‘For Wills. Sybil thinks he’ll die if he doesn’t have them once a week.’ So they went to the butcher, who said that Mrs Cazalet Senior had just rung and wanted an ox tongue of which he happened to have one left and he’d only just put it in the brine so it wouldn’t need much soaking, tell the cook. ‘If you don’t mind, sir,’ he added. He was used to Mr Tonbridge coming in for the meat if the ladies didn’t come themselves, which was seldom. If anything was needed to make him feel that things were in a funny old state, it was gentlemen doing the shopping, he thought as he wrapped the brains in greaseproof paper and then brown. The boy was sweeping the floor – they’d be closing soon – and he had to speak sharply to him not to get sawdust on the gentlemen’s trousers.

Outside, the street was fuller than usual: several pregnant mothers with pasty-faced children in tow were wandering up and down, staring disconsolately into the shop windows, and then moving on a few yards.

‘Evacuees,’ Rupert said. ‘I suppose we’re lucky not to have any of them. The Babies’ Hotel is a much easier bet. At least babies don’t have nits and lice, and don’t complain about it being too quiet and not being able to eat the food.’

‘Is that what they do?’

‘That’s what Sybil says Mrs Cripps says that Mr York says Miss Boot says.’

‘Good Lord!’

When they got into their laden car, Hugh said, ‘What do you think about the children staying where they are?’

Slightly startled, Rupert said, ‘You mean our lot?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, where else can they go? They certainly can’t be in London.’

‘We could send them further into the country. Away from the coast. Suppose there’s an invasion?’

‘Oh, honestly, I don’t think we can look that far ahead. Light me a cigarette, would you? What does Sybil think?’ he went on when Hugh had done so.

‘She’s being a bit awkward about it all. Wants to come to London herself to look after me. I can’t have that, of course. We nearly had a row,’ he added, surprised again by the awful, unusual fact. ‘In the end, I shut her up by saying I’d live with you. I never meant it,’ he said, ‘I knew you wouldn’t be in London anyway. But she didn’t. She’s just a bit on edge. Much better for the family to stay together. And I can get down at weekends, after all.’

‘Will you keep your house open?’

‘Have to see. It depends whether I can get anyone to look after me. If not, I can always stay at my club.’ Visions occurred of endless dreary evenings eating with chaps he didn’t really want to spend the evening with.

But Rupert, who knew his brother’s home-loving habits, and briefly imagined poor old Hugh on his own in a club, said, ‘You could always come up and down in the train with the Old Man.’

Hugh shook his head. ‘Someone’s got to be in London at night. That’s when they’ll drop their bombs. Can’t leave the blokes to cope with the wharf by themselves.’

‘You’ll miss Edward, won’t you?’

‘I’ll miss both of you. Still, old crocks can’t be choosers.’

‘Someone has to keep the home fire burning.’

‘Actually, old boy, I think people will be keener on me putting them out.’

A moment later, he added, ‘You’re the only person I’ve ever met who actually hoots when he laughs.’

‘It’s awful, isn’t it? I was called Factory at school.’

‘Never knew that.’

‘You were away most of the time.’

‘Oh, well, the position is shortly to be reversed.’

Hugh’s tone, both bitter and humble, touched Rupert, who instinctively glanced at the black stump that rested on his brother’s knee. God! Think of going through life with no left hand because someone else had blown it off. Still it is his left hand. But I’m left-handed – it would have been worse for me. Slightly ashamed of his egocentricity, and wanting Hugh to feel better he said, ‘Your Polly is a pearl. And she’s getting prettier every day.’

And Hugh, his face lighting up, said instantly, ‘Isn’t she just? For the Lord’s sake don’t tell her.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of doing that, but why not? I always tell Clary things like that.’

Hugh opened his mouth to say that was different, and shut it again. It was all right in his book to tell people they were beautiful when they weren’t; it was when they were that you had to shut up. ‘I don’t want her getting ideas,’ he said vaguely, and Rupert, knowing this was Cazalet for getting above oneself, the only-pebble-on-the-beach syndrome with which he too had been brought up, deemed it better, or easier, to agree.

‘Of course not,’ he said.

Raymond Castle sat with his eldest daughter in Lyons’ Corner House at Tottenham Court Road.

‘Daddy, for the hundredth time, I’m perfectly OK. Honestly.’

‘I dare say you are, but your mother and I would prefer you to be in the country, with us and the rest of the family.’

‘I do wish you would stop treating me like a child. I’m twenty.’

I know that, he thought. If he’d been treating her as a child, he’d simply have told her she was bloody well packing her bags and getting into the car with him and the old trout and the governess. Now he was reduced to preferring . . .

‘And anyway, I couldn’t possibly come today: I’ve got a party tonight.’

There was a silence during which, in going through the familiar, and often unsuccessful, motions of not losing his temper, he recognised wearily that he had no temper to lose. She defeated him – by her appearance, a confusing blend of Jessica when he had married her but missing the romantic innocence and sheer untried youngness that had so enthralled him. Angela’s golden hair, that a year ago had hung so engagingly in a long page-boy bob, was now drawn back severely from her forehead, with a centre parting and secured by a narrow plait of her own hair (he assumed) exposing her face with its perfectly plucked eyebrows, smooth, pale make-up and poppy-red mouth. She wore a pale grey linen fitted coat, and a wisp of amber chiffon scarf at her white neck. She looked fashionable (he called it smart), but utterly remote. That was the other way in which she defeated him: by her manner of completely and indifferently withdrawing from any communication with him at all beyond the meaningless, well-worn clichés in response to any questions. ‘I’m fine’, ‘Nobody you’d know’, ‘I’m not a child’, ‘Nothing much’, ‘What does it matter?’

‘Good party?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t been to it yet.’ She replied without looking at him. She picked up her cup and finished her coffee, then looked pointedly at his. She wanted them to go – to put an end to what he felt she saw as merely idle curiosity. He called the nippie over and paid their bill.

The idea of calling on her in the flat that she shared with an unknown girl friend and taking her out to lunch had occurred to him as he drove over Waterloo Bridge on his mission to collect Lady Rydal and the governess. ‘Your good deed for about a week, I should think, old boy,’ Edward had said that morning, but he had been quite glad to take on the task: he did not like situations where he was not in control, and in Sussex it was the Old Man who ran the show. If he just turned up, he might find out what was going on because he could not see for the life of him why she would be so secretive unless there was something to be secretive about. He’d wondered whether he’d better telephone first, but decided that that would defeat the object. Which was . . .? Well, he was her father and really she shouldn’t be left in London on her own in the circumstances. He must try to get her to come down with him. That was why he was going to see her. He’d feel pretty bloody terrible if he’d come all this way, and then simply left her in town with the chance of getting blown up. Virtue succeeded the slightly uncomfortable feelings; he was somebody for whom self-righteousness was often a boon. He’d rung the top bell of the house in Percy Street and waited an age, but nobody came. He put his finger on the bell and kept it there. What the hell was going on? he kept asking himself as various hellish on-goings occurred to him. By the time a girl – not Angela – stuck her head out of an upper window and shouted ‘Who is it?’ he was feeling quite angry.

‘I’ve come to see Angela,’ he shouted back, as he limped down the steps in order to see the girl.

‘Yeah, but who is it?’ she replied.

‘Tell her it’s her father.’

‘Her father?’ An incredulous laugh. ‘OK. Whatever you say.’ He was just about to mount the steps again – trying, because of his leg – when he heard the girl’s voice again. ‘She’s asleep.’ She made it sound as though that was that.

‘Well, let me in and wake her up. In that order,’ he added.

‘OK.’ The voice sounded resigned now. While he waited, he looked at his watch as though he didn’t know the time. Well, he didn’t, exactly, but it was well after twelve. In bed at noon? Good God!

The girl who opened the door to him was young with straight brown hair and small brown eyes. ‘It’s quite a long way up,’ she said as soon as she perceived his limp.

He followed her up two flights of stairs that were covered with worn linoleum and smelled faintly of cats, and finally into a room that contained, among much else, an unmade bed, a tray on the floor in front of the gas fire that held the remnants of a meal, a small sink with a dripping tap, a sea-green carpet covered with stains and a small sagging armchair in which crouched a large marmalade cat. ‘Get off, Orlando. Do sit down,’ she added. The gas fire, filled with broken and blackened elements, was roaring. ‘I was making toast,’ the girl said. She looked at him doubtfully, not supposing that he would want any. ‘It’s all right. I’ve woken her. We went to a party last night and were jolly late, only I got up early because we hadn’t any milk, and, anyway, I was starving.’

There was quite a long silence.

‘Do go on with your meal,’ he said.

At once she began hacking at the sloping loaf of bread. Then, without looking up, she said, ‘You really are her father, aren’t you? I recognise you now. Sorry,’ she added. For what? he wondered. For the incredulous laugh? For Angela, having this old crock of a father who turned up without warning?

‘Do a lot of mock fathers come flocking to the door?’

‘Not exactly flocking—’ she began, but was interrupted by Angela, miraculously – it seemed to him – made up and with her hair elaborately done. She wore a dressing gown and her feet were bare.

‘I’ve come to take you out to lunch,’ he said, trying to sound assured and festive about it.

She allowed him to kiss her, then, looking at the room with a certain distaste, said she would just get dressed and they could go.

In the street, he said, ‘Where shall we go?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t want any lunch. Anywhere you like.’

In the end they walked down Percy Street and along Tottenham Court Road to Lyons’ Corner House, where he worked his way through a plate of roast lamb, potatoes and carrots, while she sipped coffee.

‘Sure you couldn’t fall for a Knickerbocker Glory?’ he asked. When she had been goodness knew how much younger, these fearful concoctions had been her greatest treat. But she simply looked at him as though he was mad, and said no thank you. After that, he chatted feverishly, telling her about collecting her grandmother and Miss Milliment, and it was when her face cleared at the mention of this last name that he realised how angry she had been throughout the meal. ‘I did like Miss Milliment,’ she said, and some indefinable expression crossed her face and was gone almost before he saw it. It was then that he apologised for turning up without warning.

‘Why did you come, anyway?’ she said. It was some sort of faint acknowledgement of the apology, and he launched into it having been on the spur of the moment, and thence to his wanting to get her out of London. Now they were about to go, and the whole meeting had been a wash-out. When they reached his car, parked outside her house, he said, ‘Well, perhaps you’d ring Mummy up, would you? She’s at the new house. Watlington three four.’

‘We’re not on the phone, but I’ll try. Thanks for the coffee.’ She presented him with her cheek, turned and ran up the steps to her house, turning in the doorway only, he felt, to be sure that he was really going to get into his car and leave. Which he did.

During the rest of that arduous day – which he mismanaged in a number of stupid ways: fetching his mother-in-law before Miss Milliment was the first (Lady Rydal seemed to feel that even being driven in a motor car to Stoke Newington was some kind of insult) and getting Miss Milliment, whose luggage was singularly difficult to pack into the car with Lady Rydal’s (he had to fix up the roof rack which took ages), and then running out of petrol before he even got through the Blackwall Tunnel, and then getting a puncture on the hill just before Sevenoaks (not his fault this, but regarded by Lady Rydal who was an authority on them, as the last straw) – during all this awful, cumbersome day, he ruminated on the miserable encounter with his eldest daughter. In her behaviour to him he saw a reflection of himself that he could neither bear nor discountenance: a middle-aged man, irascible and disappointed, good for nothing that interested him, bullying people in order to infect them with his discomfort – particularly, he knew, his own children. Jessica he did not bully; he lost his temper with her, but he did not bully. He loved her – adored her. He was always contrite on those occasions, would spend the ensuing hours, or even days, paying her small, devoted attentions, castigating himself to her about his wretched temperament and luck, and she, bless her angelic heart, would always forgive him. Always . . . How alike these occasions were to one another now struck him; there had become something ritual about them. If either had forgotten the next line the other could have prompted. And had he not noticed, in the last year or so, that there was something mechanical about her responses to him? Did she really care? Had he, perhaps, become something of a bore? All his life he had been afraid of not being liked: he hadn’t been brainy enough for his father, and his mother had only adored Robert, his older brother, killed in the war. But when he had met Jessica, fallen instantly and wildly in love with her, and she had returned his love, he had not cared at all about whether other people liked him or not: he had been entirely fulfilled and overwhelmed by this beautiful, desirable creature’s love. Dozens of people would have wanted to marry Jessica, but she had become his. How full of dreams and ardour to succeed for her sake he had been then! What schemes he had had to make money, to give her a life of luxury and romantic ease! There was nothing he would not have done for her but, somehow, nothing had worked out as he had planned. The guest house, the chicken farm, growing mushrooms, a crammer for dull little boys, the kennels venture: each plan had become smaller and wilder as it succeeded the previous failure. He was no good at business – simply hadn’t been brought up to it – and, he had to admit, he was not very good with people, with anyone, excepting Jessica. When the children had come along he had been jealous of them for the time they took away from him. When Angela was born, only a year after he was invalided out of the army, Jessica seemed unable to think of anything else; she had been a difficult baby, never sleeping for more than an hour or two at a stretch throughout, which meant that neither of them got a proper night’s sleep, and then when Nora arrived, Angela resented her so much that Jessica could not leave them alone together for a minute, and of course they’d never been able to afford a nurse, or more than a bit of daily help. When Christopher was born, he thought, at least he had a son, but he’d turned out the worst of the lot – always something wrong with him, bad eyesight, a weak stomach and he’d nearly died of a mastoid when he was five, and Jessica had spoiled him so he’d become more namby-pamby than ever, afraid of everything – and nothing he did made any difference. He remembered how he’d staged a fireworks show for them when they were small, and Christopher had howled because he didn’t like the bangs, and how he’d taken them to the zoo and for a ride on an elephant, and Christopher had refused to get on the animal, made a frightful scene – in public. Jessica kept saying he was sensitive, but he was simply a milksop, which brought out the worst in Raymond. Somewhere, in the depths, he knew that he had bullied Christopher, and hated them both for it. The boy asked for it: his shaking hands, his clumsiness, his white-faced silences when gibed at provoked Raymond to irresistible fury that he could only temper to irritation. When his father had got at him, for not being brainy, he’d just gone off and done something else – damn well. He’d got his blue for rugger and for rowing; he’d been a first-class shot, the best diver in his school, so there had been plenty of things for his pater to be proud of if he’d cared to. He never had, of course, had simply continued to make him feel a fool about not knowing things he hadn’t cared about. The army had been a wonderful way out for him. He’d done jolly well, had become a captain by the outbreak of the war, then become a major, got decorated, married Jessica and had a heavenly fortnight’s leave in Cornwall with her – and then Ypres, the third battle, which was when he lost his leg. That had felt like the end of the world; it had certainly been the end of his career. He’d fought endless battles about not being sorry for himself and, on the whole, he thought he had won, although he supposed it had made him harder on other people – all those fortunate chaps with two legs who could do what they liked; he had never felt that any of them had the slightest notion what it was like to be him. They hadn’t meant to have Judy at all: he’d had to take a job in the school to bring down the school fees (school-masters got very reduced rates) and it had helped with Christopher, at least. Aunt Lena had helped a bit with the girls from time to time; the only trouble about that had been that she never told him in advance what she was going to do, so he and Jessica never knew where they were. At least now, with Aunt Lena dead, they’d got some money and a far nicer house, but it was a bit late in the day to make the difference it would once have made. His children who, when younger he realised now, had been afraid of him, were becoming indifferent.

They did not behave in the same way about this: Angela snubbed him, made it clear that he bored her; Christopher avoided him whenever possible and was studiously polite when he could not; Nora and Judy both had special voices for talking to him, bright accommodating voices – he suspected Judy of copying Nora, and both of them of imitating Jessica, who employed a kind of determined serenity whenever he became at all touchy. The effect was to make him feel isolated from the family life that they had with each other, and which he seemed excluded from sharing. By now he had changed the tyre and wedged the punctured one into the overcrowded boot and got back into the car with its silent occupants. Miss Milliment smiled at him and murmured something about being sorry not to have been of any use, and Lady Rydal, to whom the idea of being of use to anyone had never occurred in her life, said crushingly, ‘Really, Miss Milliment! I do not think that mending the puncture of a car can be said to be part of a governess’s repertory.’ After a pause, she added, ‘A puncture is nothing to what we must expect to put up with.’ All the remaining journey he wished, with savage hopelessness, that he was on his own, driving to Aunt Lena’s house in Frensham, where Jessica (and no one else) would be waiting with tea for him on the lawn, instead of chauffeuring the old trout and a governess back to the Cazalet Holiday Camp.

By four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Sybil and Villy had to stop their blackout activities as they had run out of material. Sybil said she was dying for a cup of tea, and Villy said she would brave the kitchen to make some.

‘Brave was the right word,’ she said some minutes later as she brought a tray out onto the lawn where Sybil had put two deckchairs for them. ‘Louise and Nora are cooking a vast supper for the nurses and Emily is simply sitting in her basket chair pretending they aren’t there. They’re really very courageous; I don’t think I could stand it. I’ve already told her it was an emergency, but she simply looks at me as though I make it up.’

‘Do you think she’ll give notice?’

Villy shrugged. ‘Quite possible. She’s done it before. But she adores Edward so she’s always changed her mind. But, of course, Edward won’t be here, and I doubt if a combination of the country and cooking for a whole lot of women and children will have much lasting appeal.’

‘Edward really will go?’

‘If he possibly can. That is to say if they’ll take him. They won’t take Hugh,’ she added as she saw her sister-in-law’s face. ‘I’m sure they will say he’s needed to run the firm.’

‘He says he will be living in London, though,’ Sybil said. ‘I’ve told him I won’t let him live in that house alone. I should go mad worrying about him.’

‘But you couldn’t have Wills in London!’

‘I know. But Ellen could look after Wills and Roland, couldn’t she? And you’ll be here, won’t you? Because of Roland?’ The idea that anyone could leave a six-month-old baby seemed out of the question to her.

Villy lit a cigarette. ‘I honestly haven’t thought,’ she said. Which was not true. She had thought, constantly, during the last weeks, that if only she hadn’t saddled herself with a baby, she could now do all kinds of useful – and interesting – things. She loved him, of course she loved him, but he was perfectly happy with Ellen who was delighted to have babies to look after, instead of Neville and Lydia who were becoming too much for her in some ways and nothing like enough in others. To spend the war being a grass widow and ordering a household seemed both dreary and absurd to her. With all her Red Cross experience, she could easily nurse, or train VADs, or run a convalescent home or work in a canteen . . . It would be far better if Sybil held the domestic fort: she had no ambitions beyond looking after her husband and her children. Villy looked across the tea table at Sybil, who sat, with the blue socks she was knitting on her lap, twisting a small white handkerchief in her fingers.

‘I can’t leave Hugh in London by himself,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like clubs and parties like Edward, and he can’t manage in the house on his own, but when I try to talk to him about it, he just gets shirty and says I think he’s useless.’ Her rather faded blue eyes met Villy’s and then looked away as they filled with tears. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘I’m about to make a fool of myself.’ She stabbed at her eyes with the handkerchief, blew her nose, and drank some tea. ‘It’s all so beastly! We’ve almost never had a row about anything. He almost accused me of not minding enough about Wills!’ She shook her head violently to negate such an idea, and her untidy hair started to fall down.

‘Darling, I’m sure there will be a solution. Let’s wait and see what happens.’

‘There’s not much else we can do, is there?’ She picked some hairpins from her lap and out of her head and began twisting the tail of her hair into a bun.

‘What makes it worse,’ she said, through a mouthful of hairpins, ‘is that I can perfectly well see that it’s a trivial problem compared to what most people are going to have to endure.’

‘Thinking of people worse off than oneself only makes one feel worse,’ Villy said; she was familiar with this situation. ‘I mean, you simply feel bad about feeling bad, which doesn’t help at all.’

Louise came out of the house with a plate on which were two steaming Bath buns.

‘I thought you might like to try my buns,’ she said. ‘The first batch has just come out of the oven.’

‘I won’t, thank you, darling,’ Villy said at once. Since Roland, she had put on weight.

‘I’d love one,’ Sybil said: she had seen Louise’s face when her mother refused. She should have taken one, she thought.

She shouldn’t eat buns, Villy thought. Sybil had also put on weight after Wills, but she did not seem to mind – just laughed when she couldn’t get into her frocks and bought larger ones.

‘Goodness! How delicious! Just like the shop ones, but better.’

‘You can have them both if you like. I’m making masses for the nurses. Emily wouldn’t have one either,’ she added, putting her mother firmly into Emily’s category which she hoped would annoy her. ‘She can’t bear me being able to make them. She’s being horrible to Nora about her shepherd’s pies, but Nora has the back of a duck. I wish I did. She doesn’t notice people being horrible to her at all.’

‘You will clear up properly, won’t you?’

‘We’ve said we would.’ Louise answered with the exaggerated patience that she hoped was withering and went back into the house, her long, glossy hair bouncing against her thin shoulders.

‘She has shot up in the last year, hasn’t she?’

‘Yes, she’s outgrown practically everything. I’m afraid she’s going to be too tall. She’s dreadfully clumsy. Apparently she broke the record for smashing crockery at the domestic science place.’

‘That’s part of shooting up so fast, isn’t it? They aren’t used to the size they have suddenly become. It’s different for you, Villy, you’ve always been so small – and neat. Simon is just the same: accident prone.’

‘Oh, well, boys! One expects them to knock things about. Even Teddy breaks things a bit. But Louise is simply careless. She’s always been difficult with me, but she’s even rude to Edward now. It was quite a relief to get her away to school, although whether that place will be much use to her, I don’t know.’

‘Well, the Bath buns are a triumph.’

‘Yes, darling, but when have you ever been expected to make Bath buns? At least they teach them how to interview a servant, but things like goffering a surplice – I mean, really! When could that be said to be a useful accomplishment?’

‘Invaluable if you married a clergyman.’

‘I feel that Nora is the most likely to do that.’

‘She would be wonderful, wouldn’t she? Kind and good and so sensible.’ They could at least be in agreement about all other virtues being accorded to plain girls.

‘But Louise would be far too selfish,’ Villy finished. ‘Where do you think those children can have got to? I told them to be back for tea.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Lydia and Neville. They seem to spend all their time at Home Place; they’re hardly here at all.’

‘Well, they were furious at being put here with the babies’ Sybil began, but Villy interrupted, ‘Yes, I know. But I didn’t want there to be room for Zoë and Rupert because I thought being with our babies would be so hard on Zoë.’

‘You’re quite right. Poor little Zoë. I must say having the Babies’ Hotel evacuated onto us isn’t exactly going to help, though, is it?’

‘No. But perhaps she’s—’

‘Do you think so?’

‘I don’t know. But Edward told Rupert that the best thing would be to get on with having another one, and Rupert seemed to agree, so it’s possible.’

‘Oh, good.’ Sybil did not say that Rupert had asked Hugh what he thought, and that Hugh had advised a six-months gap to give Zoë time to get over her loss, and that Rupert had seemed to think that this was a capital idea.

But Villy caught her eye and said, ‘I expect he asked Hugh, who told him exactly the opposite?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘Darling old Rupe,’ said Villy as she collected the tea things.

‘All the same, I think it would be better if he simply asked Zoë,’ Sybil said.

Zoë had been given the task of picking the quantities of ripe Victoria plums of which there was a glut. ‘But they mustn’t be wasted,’ the Duchy had said that morning. ‘So, Zoë dear, if you strip the kitchen garden trees, we can have plum tarts and bottle the rest. Do mind the wasps.’ She had found the largest trug there was in the greenhouse, and the small ladder which she had lugged to the kitchen garden wall and methodically stripped each espaliered tree. It was better than sewing with the aunts, and better than trying to write her weekly meaningless letter to her mother who was paying a visit of indefinite duration to her friend in the Isle of Wight. Since last year, Zoë had tried to be kinder to her mother, to pay her more attention, but the most she seemed able to manage was not to be unkind. Ever since June when she had lost the baby she had been sunk in an apathy so entire that she found it easier to be alone. Alone, she did not have to make any effort to be ‘bright’ as she called it; she did not have to contend with sympathy or kindness that either made her feel irritable or want to cry. It seemed to her as though for the rest of her life she was going to have to endure undeserved attentions, to attempt insincere responses, to be seen continuously in the wrong light and also, she could foresee, be expected to ‘recover’ from what everybody excepting herself perceived as a natural tragedy. Pregnancy had been quite as arduous as she had imagined; nothing they predicted happened as they said it would. The morning sickness that was supposed to last only three months persisted throughout, and did not confine itself to the mornings. Her back ached for the last four months so that no position was ever comfortable, and her nights were broken every two or three hours by trips to the lavatory. Her ankles swelled and her teeth developed endless cavities, and for the first time in her life she experienced both boredom and anxiety in equal proportions. Whenever she was feeling really bored, not well enough to do anything that interested her, the anxiety began. If it was Philip’s child, would it look like him? Would everybody immediately see that it was not Rupert’s child? How would she feel about a child whom she would have to pretend was Rupert’s if she knew that it wasn’t? At those times, the desire to tell somebody, to confess and be berated, even not to be forgiven, but simply to tell someone, became overwhelming, but she managed never to do that. She was so depressed that the notion that it could as well be Rupert’s child hardly ever struck her. And Rupert had been so sweet to her! His tenderness, his patience and affection had continued throughout her sickness, her frequent tears, her withdrawals into sullen bouts of self-pity, her irritability (how could he understand her when he knew nothing?), her reiterated apology for being so hopeless at the whole thing (this when her guilt was its most oppressive) – he seemed willing to contain anything that she was through all those months, until at last she’d had the baby, at home with the midwife that the family always used for their births. Hours and hours of agony, and then Rupert, who had stayed with her, had brought the bathed and wrapped bundle to lay in her arms. ‘There, my darling girl. Isn’t he beautiful?’ She had looked down at the small head with its shock of black hair, at the tiny wizened yellow face – he was born badly jaundiced – framed by the lacy white shawl the Duchy had made. She had stared at the high forehead, the long upper lip and known. She had looked up at Rupert, whose face was grey with fatigue, and unable to bear the innocence of his anxiety, and concern, and love, had shut her eyes as scalding tears forced their way out. That had been the worst moment of all: she had not imagined having to accept his pride and joy. ‘I’m dreadfully tired,’ she had said. It had come out like a whine. The midwife had taken the baby away and said that she must have a nice rest, and Rupert had kissed her and she was alone. She had lain rigid, unable to sleep due to the thought that she would never now be free of this consuming lie: that little, alien creature would grow and grow, and become more and more like Philip, whom by then she had begun to hate, and the thought that only its death would have released her had horribly occurred. Or mine, she had thought: it had felt slightly better to wish for one’s own death rather than someone else’s. And then, in less than a week the baby was dead. It had always been sickly, had never thrived, either would not feed from her abundance of milk, or if it did, threw up, hardly slept because it was always crying weakly – from colic, they said – but afterwards the midwife had said something about a twisted intestine, and that it had never had a chance. It had been Rupert who had told her that it had died (she had refused to think of a name for it); his distress for her had been the last piercing thing before a great bleak calm descended upon her. It was over. A terrible thirst and pain for days until the milk went, leaving her with stripes all over the beautiful breasts she had once prized so much. She had not even cared about that; she had not cared about anything at all. Her relief was too dangerous for her to accept it – had she not wished it to die? – and so she remained in the isolation of withholding the only things that she wanted to say to the only person who loved her. She took a long time to recover – was tired all the time, slept long nights and heavily in the afternoons, waking exhausted by her stupor. She was surrounded by kindness from the whole family, but curiously it had only been Clary who had reached her. She had woken from a sleep on the sofa one afternoon in their drawing room to find Clary carefully setting a tray of tea on the table beside her. She had made some scones, she said, her first scones actually; she wasn’t sure that they were much good. They hadn’t been: rock hard and surprisingly heavy. ‘It’s the thought that counts,’ she had said mechanically.

The atmosphere had been full of rather watery good-will, but Clary had answered, ‘Yes, but it only counts for the person who thinks it, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s a good thing other people don’t know a lot of one’s thoughts. I used to wish you were dead, for instance. It’s quite all right, I don’t any more. It was pretty bad for me thinking that – just sometimes, of course – but it would have been worse for you if you’d known. I hated you for not being my mother, you see. But now I’m awfully glad you never tried to be her. I can think of you as a friend.’

Her eyes had filled with tears – and she hadn’t cried for weeks – and Clary had sat quite still on the stool by the low table, and the silent warmth and steadiness of her gaze were a wonderful relief. There was no need to try to stop crying, nor to explain or apologise or lie about it. When she had finished, she couldn’t find a handkerchief, and Clary slid the tray cloth from under the tea things, spilling the milk a bit, and handed it to her. Then she said, ‘The thing is that with mothers and babies, they can go on having them, but with children and mothers they only get one.’ She put a finger on one of the beads of milk on the table and licked it. ‘I hope you don’t think I’m trying to minimise your bereavement. All I mean really is that one can get better from almost anything. It’s just one of those amazing things. That’s why people like Hamlet were so frightened of hell. It not stopping, and personally, that’s why I don’t believe in it. I think everything changes while you’re alive, and simply stops when you’re dead. Of course I may change my mind in the years to come, but there’s plenty of time. Even you have quite a lot of time, because if you really are only twenty-four, you’re only ten years older than me.’

She got called by Ellen soon after that, who told her to come and clear up the mess she’d made in the kitchen.

‘Sorry about the scones,’ she said, as she collected the tray. ‘They tasted quite nice before I cooked them. The metamorphosis was unsatisfactory, I can’t think why.’

After Clary had gone she lay thinking about what had been said – and not said – but when she reached the point where Clary had said, ‘I can think of you as a friend,’ she found she was crying again. She had no experience of friends.

She had made various resolutions after that: to look for a new house (they had not moved after all, partly because of her pregnancy and partly because although Rupert was paid more by the family firm than he had earned as a schoolmaster, it was not yet enough to finance a move), to entertain for Rupert; but here she ran into the difficulty that Ellen, who had taken over the cooking since the children were now both at school all day, was not really up to more than plain nursery food, ill-suited to the sophisticated occasions she had in mind. Somehow, nothing came of any idea or plan and it did not seem to matter very much that it didn’t. She sometimes thought that perhaps there were other more serious or difficult resolutions to be made, but they seemed at once so far-reaching and amorphous – intangible to her mind – that she was afraid that if she even understood them they would turn out to be possible only for someone quite different from herself. Some things were better. She no longer resented Clary and Neville, who in any case seemed to need less of Rupert’s time and attention. Neville, who was now at a day school, kept her at courteous, breezy arm’s length – it was Ellen he talked to or his father. With Clary it was different. She sensed that Clary did try, had good intentions, never failing to notice and admire any new clothes that she wore. She responded by trying to help Clary with her appearance, but, except for one party dress that she made herself for her, Clary had no interest. When she took her shopping, Clary never wanted the things she chose: ‘I just feel silly in it,’ she said when Zoë had found her a perfectly sweet serge sailor suit with brass buttons. In any case, she tore, split, got ink on and outgrew everything. She was hard on her clothes, Ellen said, as she endlessly washed and ironed and mended them.

With Rupert, she was in limbo. All the feelings that he had had for her, she had accepted without question. He thought she was beautiful and desirable, so of course he loved her. But all last year she had been neither of those things and, humiliated by her gross appearance and the nauseating symptoms that had gone with that, she also felt humiliated by his kindness. She wanted him to adore her, but this – no one knew it better than she – was impossible: nobody who was pregnant could be adorable. She had not even wanted him to make love to her, and as soon as he realised this he had desisted: ‘It does not matter in the least,’ he had said. In the least?

She had agreed to come to Sussex for the children’s holidays, had not even minded very much that Rupert, due to his new job, no longer had the same free time but, like his brothers, was only able to take two weeks off and come down at weekends. It was easier to be alone. She read a great deal: mostly novels – G.B. Stern, Ethel Mannin, Howard Spring, Angela Thirkell, Mary Webb, Mazo de la Roche – and some biographies chiefly, when she could find them, of kings’ mistresses. She read Agatha Christie, but could not get on with Dorothy Sayers. She read Jane Eyre and quite enjoyed it, tried Wuthering Heights but could not understand it at all. Since being in the country, the person she found it easiest to be with had surprisingly turned out to be the Duchy, who asked her one day whether she would do the flowers. Up until then, her relationship with her mother-in-law had consisted of calm courtesy and her own slightly over-careful politeness, but this summer she had sometimes found the Duchy’s eye upon her with a look of reflective kindness that was not in the least intrusive since it seemed to need no response. She had recognised that the offer for her to do the flowers was a gesture; she tried very hard and found that she enjoyed doing them and was actually good at it. From there, she picked with the Duchy and began to learn the names of different roses and so forth, and later, at her request, the Duchy taught her how to smock – another skill which she acquired. The Duchy never mentioned the baby – Zoë had been afraid that their increased intimacy might lead to that, and that she would have to say things she did not feel or mean under that direct and honest gaze, but this never happened – nor did the Duchy, by any remote implication, suggest that she should have another baby. Because the thought of this, which sometimes seemed her only future, hung heavily over her, unmentioned but somehow implicit. In the Cazalet family, wives had children – several of them – it was normal and expected. Neither Sybil nor Villy appeared to have the horror that she felt about the whole business; they seemed to her blessed with the full set of maternal feelings, disregard for their own bodies or discomfort or pain and, what was more, they seemed invariably delighted by the results, whereas she found babies mildly disgusting, and most children, at least until they reached Clary’s age, a nuisance. It was these feelings that held her in thrall; she was not like them, and while a year ago she had felt superior, more beautiful and therefore interesting, now she felt inferior – a coward, a freak, somebody they would all be horrified to have in their midst if they knew. So she clung to her convalescence, her lack of energy and the attenuated relationship with Rupert, whom she was alternately afraid of loving her too much or not at all. At least so far he had not asked her whether she wanted another baby.

By lunch-time (on Saturday), Neville and Lydia had both become bored with watching the squash court roof painted and had given up being messengers. ‘They don’t give us anything to messenge,’ Neville complained. They decided that when they went to Pear Tree Cottage for lunch, they simply wouldn’t go back. ‘That means getting well out of reach of all of them,’ Lydia remarked as they trudged homewards for their meal, ‘they’re in a very bossy frame of mind.’

‘When aren’t they?’

‘Of course, there’ll be Ellen trying to take us for a walk with boring Wills and Roland.’

‘We’ll tell her we’re wanted at Home Place. She won’t know.’

‘What shall we actually do?’

‘I’ll tell you after lunch. As soon as we can get down, say you’ll race me to Home Place.’

Later, and full of fish pie and marmalade pudding, they went through the act, but as soon as they were out of sight, Lydia wanted to know the plan. Neville hadn’t got one which annoyed him. ‘I was thinking of cutting your hair,’ he said.

Lydia clutched her pigtails. ‘No! I’m going to grow it to the ground.’

‘You’ll never reach that.’

‘Why not, pray?’ said Lydia, imitating her mother at her most formidable.

‘Because every time your hair gets longer, you’ll get taller. It’ll sap your strength,’ he warned. He had heard Ellen saying that. ‘Ladies have been known to die of having too long hair. They get weaker and weaker and on the fifth day they are dead.’

‘You didn’t make that up, I know where it comes from. It’s Augustus not eating in that frightening book. I know. Mr York has got evacuees. Why don’t we go and see them?’

‘We might as well. We can’t go back past the cottage. They might see us. We can go on our stomachs through the corn in front, or through the wood and round the back.’

‘Quicker round the back.’ Lydia knew that going through corn any old way made people cross.

‘What are evacuees?’ she asked, as they trotted through the small copse and into the field at the back of Pear Tree Cottage.

‘Children from London.’

‘But we’re children from London.’

‘I should think children from London whose parents can’t be bothered with them in a war.’

‘Poor them! You mean their mothers just – let them go?’

‘I don’t know. I should think policemen take them away,’ he added vaguely. He knew that Lydia could be boring on the subject of mothers. ‘I manage perfectly well without one,’ he offered. ‘I have all my life.’

There was a pause, and then Lydia said, ‘I don’t think I’d like to be looked after by Mr York. Or horrible housekeeping Miss Boot. Although they have got a sweet little outdoor lav.’

They climbed the five-barred gate that led into the farmyard. It was very quiet excepting for two or three brown hens who were walking about eating very small things they suddenly found. A large tortoiseshell cat was crouched upon one of the posts of the smaller gate that led into the farmhouse garden. The gate was shut; they looked over it into the garden, which was full of cabbages and sunflowers and white butterflies and an apple tree so drooping with fruit that its branches were hunched like someone carrying heavy shopping. There was no sign of the evacuees.

‘They must be in the house.’

‘Go and knock on the door.’

‘You go.’ Lydia was rather frightened of Miss Boot, who always looked to her as though she might really be somebody else.

‘All right.’ Neville lifted the latch and walked softly up the narrow brick path to the white latticed porch. He knocked on the door. Nothing happened.

‘Knock louder,’ Lydia said from the other side of the gate.

He did; the door flew open and Miss Boot stood there – like a jack-in-a-box.

‘We heard you had some evacuees,’ Neville said politely, ‘and we’ve come to see them.’

‘They’re out. I told them to stay out till I call them to their tea.’

‘Do you know where they’ve gone?’

‘Gone? It won’t be far. They don’t go far. I shouldn’t go worrying after them. I’d go home to my mother if I was you.’

‘I don’t have one,’ Neville said gravely. He knew from experience that this always made a difference with ladies. It did: she suddenly looked much nicer, and went and fetched him a piece of cake.

‘But I can’t eat it,’ he said to Lydia, as they walked back into the yard. ‘It’s got seeds in it. And – she’s got a seed growing out of her face. It must have fallen onto her when she was making the cake.’

‘It can’t be a seed.’

‘Yes! It was a sort of brown blob with little sprouts. It was a seed, you bet. Want some?’

‘I’m not hungry. Let’s give it to the hens, but round the cowshed in case she sees.’

In the cowshed they found the evacuees – two boys and a girl. They sat huddled in a corner, quite silent, and apparently doing nothing at all. They stared at each other for a bit, then Lydia said, ‘Hallo. We’ve come to see you. What are your names?’

There was a further silence. ‘Norma,’ the girl said at last; she was clearly the oldest. ‘Tommy, and Robert.’

‘I’m Lydia, and this is Neville. How old are you?’

‘Nine,’ the girl said. ‘And Robert’s seven and Tommy’s six.’

‘We’re both eight.’

‘We don’t like it here,’ Norma said. Tommy started to snuffle. She boxed his ear, and he was instantly quiet. She put a protective arm round him.

‘Nah,’ Robert said. ‘We want to go ’ome.’

‘Well, I don’t suppose you can,’ Neville said. ‘Not if there’s a war. You’d be bombed. I expect in a few years you’ll be able to go back.’

Tommy’s face contracted. He took a deep, shuddering breath and turned bright red.

‘Jeepers!’ the girl said. ‘Now you’ve ruddy well gone and done it.’ She banged Tommy on the back and a wail burst from him. ‘Want to go ’ome now,’ he wept. ‘Want my mum.’ He drummed his heels on the ground. ‘I want her now!’

‘Poor boy!’ Lydia cried, as she flew to him.

‘Mind,’ Norma said, ‘he bites people. When he’s upset.’

Lydia withdrew a little. ‘I’m sure it won’t be years,’ she said. ‘Neville, where’s the cake?’

Neville held out his hand, but before he could get it anywhere near Lydia, Robert had snatched it, and seemed literally almost to swallow it whole. Norma looked at him with disgust. ‘You got worms,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

‘’Aven’t.’

‘You ’ave. I shall tell Miss in the ’ouse.’

‘Worms?’ Neville said. ‘Where? I can’t see a single worm.’

‘They’re in his stomach,’ Norma said. ‘’E never stops eating. ’E needs a good dose.’

Tommy, who had watched the appearance and disappearance of the cake, had now put his head into his sister’s lap which muffled his sobbing.

‘What a pity they’re inside you,’ Neville said to Robert. ‘It means you can never get to know them.’

‘’E got stung by a chicken,’ Norma said, ‘trying to take an egg off of a nest.’

‘Chickens don’t sting,’ Lydia said. ‘It must have been a bee. What does your father do?’ she added, feeling she should change the subject.

‘’E drives a bus.’

‘Gosh! Does he really?’

‘I said ’e did.’ She pulled up her dress which was made of blue shiny stuff, like satin, and wiped Tommy’s nose on her knickers. ‘What do you do down ’ere, then?’ she said.

‘We go to the beach and have picnics and swim—’ Lydia began.

But Robert interrupted her. ‘I bin to the seaside,’ he offered. ‘I bin, and I touched the sea with both ’ands.’

‘Yes, and you was sick in the bus on the way ’ome,’ Norma said crushingly. She had been absently picking at bits of Tommy’s very short tufted hair; it was extremely short, almost like mown grass, Lydia thought. Robert’s was just the same. She caught Lydia looking at Tommy’s head. ‘Nits,’ she said. ‘Miss in the ’ouse said they ’ad nits, so she cut it and then she washed them in some ’orrible stuff – didn’t ’alf stink.’

‘You ’ad them as well,’ Robert said, and she flushed.

‘I never,’ she said.

‘What are nits?’ Neville asked. He squatted down beside Norma. ‘Have you got any left? Can I see one?’

‘No, you can’t. They’ve all gone. You’re rude,’ she added.

‘You’re rude,’ Robert echoed; they both glared at Neville.

Lydia said, ‘He didn’t mean to be, did you, Neville?’

‘I’m not absolutely sure,’ Neville answered. ‘I might have, and I might not.’

‘Shall we play a game?’ Lydia said; things didn’t seem to be turning out too well.

‘There ain’t nowhere to play,’ Robert said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ain’t no pavements. No canal – no nothing. Just grass,’ he finished with intense scorn.

‘What do you do at a canal?’

‘We go up on the bridge and when the bargees go through underneath we spit. We call them and they look up and we spit right in their eyes.’

‘That’s rude,’ Neville said triumphantly. ‘That’s in believably rude.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Norma said. ‘Mum says they’re only diddies. Serve ’em right. It’s a boy’s game, anyway. I don’t do it.’

‘What’s diddies?’

‘Gypsies. I thought everyone knew that. Don’t you know that?’

‘We know different things,’ said Neville. ‘We know an enormous amount of different things.’

‘Let’s go to the pond,’ Lydia said desperately; she couldn’t think why they couldn’t all be friends.

They agreed, rather reluctantly, to go to the pond which lay at the bottom of a steep slope in the field next to Mr York’s house. It had rushes growing round it, and at one shallower corner the earth was encrusted with the hoofmarks of the cows coming to drink.

‘Look, there are dragonflies,’ Lydia said rather hopelessly: she had a feeling that they wouldn’t much like them.

‘If they come near me I’ll kill ’em,’ Robert said. He scratched a scab off his knee and ate it. The rest of his legs were as white as fish, Lydia thought, and they were so thin that his black boots looked too big.

‘Is your father going off to fight in the war?’ Neville asked.

Robert shrugged, but Norma said, ‘’E might and ’e mightn’t. Mum says if ’e does it’ll be good riddance. Never trust a man. They’re only after one thing.’

‘One thing?’ Neville said as they trudged home later for their tea. Miss Boot had called the evacuees in for theirs and it had been quite a relief. ‘What one thing? I want to know, because when I’m grown up I suppose I’ll be after it too. And if I don’t like the sound of it, I’ll think of some other thing to go after.’

‘I can go after things just as much as you.’

‘She didn’t say ladies went after it.’

‘I don’t care. I shall.’

They quarrelled gently all the way home.

‘What do you want with your grouse, darling?’

Diana looked down at the large hand-written menu. ‘What are you going to have?’

‘Cauliflower, French beans, broccoli, peas—’ the waiter towering above them intoned.

‘French beans, I think.’ It was awful: here was Edward giving her a slap-up lunch at the Berkeley, probably the last she would have for ages, and she wasn’t in the least hungry. It would not do to say that, though: Edward, like Louis XIV about whom she had been reading recently, liked his ladies to eat and drink heartily. Ladies! During the last year she had felt a chilling certainty that someone called Joanna Bancroft, whom she had met at a dinner party, had been one of Edward’s flirtations, if not an actual affair. When Edward’s name had come up during dinner, the young woman – younger than Diana, hardly more than a girl – had said, ‘Oh! Edward! He would say that!’, as though he was a very old friend, but when they were powdering their noses in their hostess’s bedroom and she had asked her if she knew Edward well, the girl had answered rather distantly that she had simply met him during a weekend at Hermione Knebworth’s, and the reply, elaborately casual, had roused her suspicion. When, later, she had asked Edward about Mrs Bancroft, she had recognised at once that he was lying. He had been suave and hearty, and had not met her eye. She had had the sense to shut up about that, but it had exacerbated her feelings of insecurity which had been thoroughly kindled by his revelation, a few weeks before the Bancroft episode, that Villy was having another child. Up until then, he had given her to understand, or rather had not stood in the way of her understanding, that all intimate relations between him and Villy had finished long ago. Her jealousy had been such that she had not been able to stop questioning him about it: had, she realised afterwards, more or less driven him into saying that it had been Villy who had wanted another child, and that he had felt unable to deny her. It was then that she had understood that he could not bear confrontations of this kind – of any moral kind, she suspected – and as her respect for him diminished (his attitude about the new baby and his wife continuing to be presented to her in a light she knew not to be true) so, curiously, her conscience shrank, and her intentions, her determination, emerged. If he was a poor thing, she had more right to call him her own.

She raised her glass of champagne cocktail to touch Edward’s.

‘Happy?’ he was saying.

‘What do you think?’

Their caviar arrived – a prim, thick-lipped pot nestling in a bed of chipped ice, accompanied by thin triangles of toast that came warm and shrouded in a napkin, and a young waiter served them with chopped egg, onion and parsley, while the wine waiter poured vodka into tiny glasses from a frosted bottle.

‘Darling, I shall be utterly tipsy!’

‘Never mind, I shall be driving.’ This, she knew, did not refer to their journey to Sussex later in the day, but to the interlude before it at Lansdowne Road. As though he sensed her – faint – anxiety about this, Edward said, ‘I really swear we shall be perfectly safe there. The family are all in Sussex, immersed in getting ready for the Babies’ Hotel arrival. Villy is in charge of the blackout. Anyway, she has . . . other things to look after.’ This, she knew, was a tactful reference to Roland, the new baby, born in April, precisely two months after she had first heard of his existence.

‘Of course I trust you,’ she said, and he smiled and took her hand.

‘I know you do,’ he said, giving it a little squeeze. ‘You’re a marvellous girl, and I’m the luckiest man in the world.’

While they finished their caviar, they watched a neighbouring couple being served with canard en presse – an oldish couple who hardly spoke to each other. The man screwed his monocle into his eye to watch the carving of the duck breast, while the woman looked distastefully at her mouth in a tiny mirror. The pieces of breast were laid on a silver dish over a spirit lamp. Edward said, ‘Do you know the story of the woman here who was wearing a very décolleté dress?’ Diana shook her head. ‘Well, one of her, you know, breasts fell out, and a young waiter saw it and popped it back.’

‘What savoir faire.’

‘Oh, no, it wasn’t. The head waiter came up to him and hissed, “In this restaurant, we use a slightly warm tablespoon.”’

‘Darling! You made that up!’

‘I didn’t. A chap I know saw it all.’

The juices of the carcass had now been pressed and were being heated in a silver sauceboat over another spirit lamp.

‘Supposing everybody ordered that,’ Diana said, ‘what would they do?’

‘They’d be up a gum tree. I don’t much care for it myself – it’s too rich. I like plain food.’

‘Plain food! You really can’t call caviar and grouse plain food! It’s party food!’

‘Well, this is a very small private party. It’s my birthday.’

After a second of horror that she might have forgotten, she said, ‘Your birthday’s in May!’

‘I have one every month.’

‘It must make you frightfully old.’

‘Yes, I’m marvellous for my age.’ The wine waiter brought the claret and poured a little into Edward’s glass; he thrust his nose into it, and nodded. ‘That’s fine. Pour some now, would you?’

‘What is it?’ She knew he liked her to be interested in wine.

‘Pontet Canet ’twenty-six. I thought it would suit our grouse.’

‘Lovely.’ One of the differences between her husband and Edward, she thought, was that Angus kept behaving as though he was rich when he wasn’t, and Edward behaved as though he was only a little richer than he was. It was wonderful to be with somebody where a treat of any kind didn’t involve pinching for weeks on everything else. It was also lovely to be with somebody who didn’t pretend to be bored by the good things in life. Angus thought it was the thing to seem weary about any pleasure or extravagance, as though he had really had too much of it all, whereas Edward, who seemed to have a pretty good life all the time, never stopped enjoying it and saying so.

‘This is fun, isn’t it?’ he was now saying, as he attacked his bird. ‘It was rather bright of me to have to spend the morning at the wharf. A really cast-iron alibi. And then, of course, I have to collect all kinds of stuff from Lansdowne Road for Villy, and then the traffic will be dreadful getting out of London.’

‘It probably actually will be.’

‘Well, we’ll worry about that when we get to it. The great thing is to enjoy the present and let the future take care of itself.’

But it doesn’t, she thought, several hours later, lying on her back in the bed in Edward’s large dressing room; or, rather, perhaps it does, but it doesn’t take care of me. Her own future stretched drearily before her and she felt she was simply being keel-hauled in its wake. If there was a war, and even Edward seemed to think that there would be, she would spend the winter and beyond stuck in that damp, oaky little cottage in Wadhurst with Isla and Jamie. She loved Jamie, of course, but her sister-in-law bored her beyond belief. The alternative was spending the winter – or, indeed, the whole war – in Scotland with Angus’s parents, who had never liked her and where she would be miles away from the slightest chance of seeing Edward. Angus, who was as usual staying with them till he brought the other boys back down south for their prep school, had said that he was joining the army, which would keep him out of the way most of the time, but then Edward might be away too. He had already tried for the Navy and been turned down, but he’d get into something. She remembered feeling like this last year, but last year there had been a wonderful reprieve; it was too much to hope that that would happen again. Edward was asleep. She turned to look at him. He lay, turned towards her, his left arm thrown across her, his hand loosely clasping her right breast – his favourite, he called it. She had unfashionably large breasts, but he liked them: his lovemaking always began there. His face, in repose, had a kind of simple nobility: his wide forehead with the widow’s peak that was just off centre; the rather large and beaky nose, whose nostrils were each adorned by one silky, even more voluptuously curling hair, only visible if his head was thrown back; the faintly purple bloom below his cheekbones (he shaved twice a day if he was going out in the evenings); and the chin with a faint cleft above which the neat and bristling moustache, kept as carefully clipped as a little hedge, barely concealed the long, narrow upper lip that contrasted so oddly with the full lower one. One saw people who were asleep quite differently, she thought. It was the open eye that distracted one from being able to be sure what the person was. Now, because they were soon to part, and the sex had been good – the best ever for him, he had said – and he lay, handsome and defenceless beside her, she felt a surge of love that was both romantic and maternal. ‘Wake me up if I drop off,’ he had said earlier. ‘If we are too late getting off, I’ll be in hot water the other end.’ A boy’s remark.

She moved and touched his face. ‘Wake up, old boy,’ she said, ‘it’s getting late.’

But later still, in the car going down, they quarrelled. By the time he had loaded the car, it was half past five, hours later than they had meant; he had opened the front door for her to get in, and then said, ‘Good Lord! I’ve forgotten Villy’s jewellery,’ and gone back into the house. When he returned, he had been carrying a large Victorian jewel box. He got in beside her, couldn’t find the car key and in order to feel in his pockets, shoved the box onto her lap carelessly. It was not locked and the contents spilled onto her skirt and the floor. ‘Dear me, how careless!’ he said, as he pushed the key into the ignition. For what seemed like hours, she retrieved pieces of jewellery, much of it in little battered leather boxes that also opened since many of them had broken clasps. Silently she put garnet earrings, paste necklaces, brooches and an entire set of topazes and pearls back into their places – all Villy’s stuff, that he had given her; not stuff that she wanted to see or even to know about at all. The box had a small Bramah key attached to its handle by a red ribbon. She untied this and locked it, and then twisted round in her seat to put the box in the back. She was conscious of ungovernable envy and fear, and was unable to stop herself asking, ‘Which did you give her for the last baby?’

‘The topazes,’ he answered shortly. Then, ‘Good Lord, Diana, what on earth made you ask that?’

‘I was curious.’

‘Well – don’t be. It has nothing to do with you. With us,’ he added in a more conciliating tone.

‘It has, rather, hasn’t it? I mean, you told me that you only had the baby because Villy wanted it so much. So it seems rather odd to give her a whole lot of jewellery for it as well.’

‘I always gave her a piece after each of the children. I couldn’t very well change about that.’ After a silence, he said, ‘Could I?’

‘Obviously not.’

Her sarcasm was either lost on him or he ignored it, as he said, ‘Well, I bet Angus gave you things after you had the boys.’ Then, with what seemed even to her incredible stupidity, he added, ‘Let’s close the subject, shall we?’

Pictures of Angus, drunk and maudlin after their first-born, and the idiotic fur coat he had bought her occurred, and she said bitterly, ‘Oh, yes. After I had Ian, he bought me a fur coat – a full-length skunk that I had to take back to the shop as soon as I could go out.’

‘Why on earth?’

‘Because he did not have the money to pay for it. The cheque had bounced by the time I got it back.’

‘How perfectly beastly for you. Poor sweet!’ But then he added, ‘I expect he meant well, though.’

‘He didn’t mean anything. Except that he wanted to be the kind of man who gave his wife a fur coat. He’d told masses of our friends, and when people asked to see it, he told them that he had had to send it back because I had ridiculous principles about not wearing fur.’

Edward did not reply. They were driving down White-hall, and lorries loaded with sandbags were being directed by police into Downing Street and to the doors of the government offices. There was not much other traffic.

‘And so,’ Diana continued – she felt both nettled and reckless – ‘of course he gave me nothing after Fergus. Or Jamie.’ This is idiotic, she thought. Why am I saying such unattractive, unimportant, stupid things? She began to feel frightened. ‘Edward—’

‘Since you brought the subject up,’ he said, ‘it seems rather funny to me that you should make such a fuss about Villy having a child while we are going to bed together, when you did exactly the same thing yourself.’

‘I never told you that I didn’t ever go to bed with Angus! I told you that I didn’t want to! And, anyway, it was different about Jamie.’

He did not want to pursue the difference. ‘Well, come to that, I can’t remember ever telling you that I never went to bed with Villy. I didn’t talk about it because—’

‘Because what?’

‘Because it simply isn’t the kind of thing one talks about.’

‘You mean, it might be embarrassing?’

‘Yes,’ he said doggedly, ‘it certainly might.’

Outside Waterloo Station there was a queue of buses all full of children waiting to get into the station. As they drew alongside one of them they could hear the shrill voices in a kind of singing shout: ‘Jeepers creepers! Where d’yer get those peepers? Jeepers creepers! Where d’yer get those eyes?’ over and over again.

‘Poor little beggars,’ Edward said. ‘Some of them must be going to the country for the first time in their lives.’

This touched her; she put a hand on his knee. ‘Darling! I don’t know what came over me! I’ve been feeling so blue. And it’s the end of our lovely time. I suppose I’m terrified that you’ll be sent away somewhere and I’ll never see you. It’s ridiculous to quarrel when everything’s so awful, anyway.’

‘Darling! Here – have my hank. You know I can’t bear you to cry. Of course we won’t quarrel. And I promise you one thing.’

She took her nose out of the voluptuous handkerchief that smelled so deliciously of Lebanon cedar. ‘What?’

‘Whatever I do I’ll find a way of seeing you. Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away.’

She blew and then powdered her nose.

‘Keep the handkerchief,’ he said.

‘Really, you encourage me to blub,’ she said; she felt lightheaded as people sometimes do after a near accident. ‘You always tell me to keep your splendid handkerchiefs. I have quite a serious collection.’

‘Have you, sweetie? Well, I like you having them.’

They were all right after that, discussed how they could meet. Diana had found a girl in the village who would look after Jamie for a day sometimes: if he telephoned and got Isla, he would pretend to be an old friend of her father’s who, since widowed, lived in the Isle of Man with a gigantic clockwork railway apparatus which he played with from morning till night. ‘Well, not too old a friend,’ Diana said. ‘Daddy’s seventy-two, and you wouldn’t sound like a contemporary of his. You’d better be the son of his oldest friend.’ Edward said he could sound old if he tried, but when challenged to try sounded, as Diana said, exactly like someone of forty-two, which he was. Why would the son keep ringing her up? They invented an ingenious but totally unconvincing fantasy about that, and everything became far more light-hearted. ‘And, of course, we could write to each other,’ Diana eventually said, but Edward made a face, and said writing was not much in his line.

‘I did so many lines at school,’ he said, ‘that I invented a system of tying ten pens together, not in a bunch but in a string, so that I could write ten at once. But they caught me and I had to write more than ever.’

‘I can’t imagine you at school.’

‘Nor can I. I loathed every minute of it. Never out of hot water.’

They parted at the gate of Plum Cottage. A hurried embrace in the car.

‘Look after yourself,’ he said.

‘And you. God bless,’ she added, she was feeling tearful again, but determined not to cry.

When she was out of the car and had walked round it to the gate, she turned, and he blew her a kiss. This made her want to rush back to the car, but she smiled as brightly as she could, waved, and walked up the brick path. She heard him start the engine and go, and stood listening until she could no longer hear the car. ‘I am in love with him,’ she said to herself. ‘In love. With him.’ It could happen to anyone, but once it did, they had no choice.

That Saturday evening, all the grown-ups from Pear Tree Cottage – that is to say, Villy and Edward (only he was late), Sybil and Hugh, Jessica and Raymond, and Lady Rydal – dined at Home Place, as the Brig had decreed that they should. Only Miss Milliment was left there to dine with the older children, some of whom had been swapped from Home Place for the meal. By the time Edward arrived, the adult party were starting upon their roast veal, with Mrs Cripps’s delicious forcemeat balls and paper-thin slices of lemon, mashed potatoes and French beans. They were fifteen round the long table that had had its fourth leaf put in for the occasion, and Eileen had got Bertha to help hand round the vegetables. Sid, who realised that she was the only outsider – a situation in which on different levels she often found herself – looked round at them with an affection that apart from her usual irony had something of awe. Everybody had worked hard all day in preparation for war, but now they all looked – and talked and behaved – as though it was just another ordinary evening. As they were either talking or eating or both, she could rove round the dark polished table. The Brig was telling old Lady Rydal some story about India – frequently interrupted by her: both considered themselves to be experts on that subject; he on the strength of a three-months visit with his wife in the twenties, she for the reason that she had been born there, ‘a baby in the Mutiny’. ‘My ayah carried me out into the garden and hid me in a gardener’s hut for two days and thereby saved my life. So you see, Mr Cazalet, I cannot consider all Indians to be unreliable, although I know that that is a view that those less well informed might take. And,’ she added to put the finishing touch to this munificence, ‘I cannot believe that the Indian nature has changed. There was a great deal of loyalty that was most touching – my father, whose experience was unrivalled, always said that he would trust his sepoys as he would his own brother.’

This both made Jessica and Villy exchange a glance of suppressed amusement – only they knew that Lady Rydal’s father had quarrelled so fiercely with his brother that they were not on speaking terms for at least forty years – and gave the Brig the opening he needed: armed with the slightest coincidence, he could breach a small gap in anyone’s conversation, and now he was in with how interesting that she should mention sepoys, because a remarkable man he had met on the boat – extraordinary thing – both going over and coming back had said . . . Sid moved on to the great-aunts, who sat side by side in their bottle-green and maroon crêpe-de-Chine long-sleeved dresses placidly sorting out the food on their plates: Dolly regarded forcemeat as indigestible, and Flo could not bear fat, while each deplored the other’s fussiness. ‘In the last war we were grateful for anything,’ Flo was saying, and Dolly retorting, ‘I have not the slightest recollection of you being grateful for anything; even when Father gave you that nice holiday in Broadstairs after you had to leave the hospital you weren’t grateful. Flo was useless as a nurse, because she simply could not stand the sight of blood,’ she remarked rather more loudly to anyone who might be listening. ‘She ended up with other VADs having to look after her which, of course, was not at all what the doctor ordered . . .’

Sybil, wearing a rather shapeless crêpe dress – she had put on weight since having Wills – was telling the Duchy how worried she was about him.

‘It’s only a phase,’ the Duchy said placidly. ‘Edward used to spit whenever he lost his temper as a little boy. He used to have the most ungovernable rages, and, of course, I worried about him. They all have tantrums when they’re babies.’ She sat, very straight, at the end of the table, dressed, as she always was, in her blue silk shirt with the sapphire and mother-of-pearl cross slung upon her discreet bosom – breasts, Sid thought affectionately, would not figure in her anatomy or her language – her frank and unselfconscious gaze directed now at her daughter-in-law. Now she began to laugh, as she went on, ‘Edward was the naughtiest of the lot. When he was about ten, I suppose it was, he once picked every single daffodil in the garden, tied them in bunches with his sister’s hair ribbons, and sold them at the end of the drive. He had a notice that said “Help the Poor” on a board, and do you know who the poor were? Himself! We had stopped his pocket money for some other crime, and he wanted a special kind of spinning top!’ She took the tiny lace handkerchief from under the gold strap of her wrist-watch and wiped her eyes.

‘And did he get it?’

‘Oh, no, my dear. I made him put it all in the box on Sunday at church. And, of course, he got a spanking.’

‘You must be talking about me,’ Edward called from across the table. He had been listening to Jessica.

‘Yes, darling, I was.’

‘I was hopeless at school, too,’ Edward said. ‘I don’t know how you all put up with me.’

How self-confident he must be to say that, Sid thought, but any further thoughts were interrupted by Jessica saying, ‘I wish you’d tell that to Christopher. He feels he is such a failure at school.’

‘He feels that because he is,’ Raymond said. ‘I’ve never known a boy muff so many opportunities.’

‘He is good at Latin,’ Jessica said at once.

‘He likes Latin. The test is whether a boy works at anything he doesn’t like.’

‘And natural history. He knows a lot about birds and things.’

‘I don’t think anyone works much at things that they don’t like,’ Villy remarked. ‘Look at Louise. I really think that all those years with Miss Milliment all she did was read plays and novels. She has the most rudimentary idea of maths and Latin. And Greek.’

‘Does Miss Milliment teach them Greek?’ Rupert asked. ‘She is an amazing old thing, isn’t she? Who educated her, I wonder? She knows a hell of a lot about painting.’

‘I suspect she largely educated herself. But I expect you know, don’t you, Mummy?’ Villy turned to Lady Rydal, who looked at her in some surprise before she answered.

‘I haven’t the slightest idea. She came from a respectable family, and Lady Conway said she had been very good with her girls. Naturally, I didn’t enquire into her personal life.’

‘Well, I think whoever it is, it’s better for girls to be educated at home,’ Hugh said. ‘You hated your boarding school, didn’t you, Rach?’

And Sid, at once directed towards Rachel, saw her flinch at the memory before she said, ‘I did, rather, but I expect it was very good for me.’ She was almost too tired to eat, Sid saw, and longed to say, ‘Darling, give up for the day – go to bed, and I’ll bring you anything you feel like on a tray,’ but it’s not my house, she thought, and she is not supposed to be my love, or anything near it, and I have no power at all. After that, she could observe and think of nothing but Rachel. She realised that the Duchy was bringing Zoë into the conversation, drawing attention to the centrepiece of roses on the table that apparently Zoë had done, but all the time she saw Rachel trying to eat what was on her plate – the family did not approve of people picking at their food, and the Duchy deplored waste. She saw Rachel cutting off a sliver of veal and putting it into her mouth and then, eventually, swallowing it, picking at the mashed potato with her fork, crumbling the piece of bread on her side plate and eating tiny pieces between sips of water. Rachel had not only had endless and arduous administrative problems in moving her Babies’ Hotel, she had borne the brunt of her parents’ conflict about it, although that part of it had been considerably worse last year when there had been no accommodation for them but the squash court. Practical considerations had not then, as now, impaired the Brig’s patriarchal generosity, but they had offended, and still to some extent did offend, the Duchy’s sense of what was sensible and proper. Rachel, who hated conflict, had had the unenviable task of carrying messages about all this between her parents, softening them en route from the arbitrary and sweeping plans of her father and the awkward, not to say unanswerable questions from her mother, which, as Sid could see, suited both parties: the Brig would brook no interference of his arrangements, and the Duchy would never actually oppose them; the presence of a daughter therefore enabled them to continue a bland relationship in public. But this, as so much else in her filial life, was at Rachel’s expense, and in this case, it was her charity that was at stake and so naturally she was even more driven and dutiful. What is to become of us? Sid thought, and could find no answer. At least Evie, her sister, was out of the way, safely ensconced in Bath, being the secretary for yet another musician she had fallen for – at least, that was what it had sounded like the last time she had telephoned. But what was she, Sid, to do when the war finally started? She could not simply continue teaching music in schools, surely? She should join some women’s service, but every time she thought of that, as she had been doing with increasing frequency in the last few weeks, she had also to think that this would mean leaving Rachel, completely and for an unknown amount of time, a prospect so chilling and awful as to paralyse her. So far she had been able to retreat from this dilemma because it still lay precariously in the future, a possibility, a last and uncertain resort, but since yesterday with the news that the Germans had invaded Poland, had knocked out the Polish air force and immobilised their railways, she knew that it was on the brink of not being the future any more. She ached to talk alone with Rachel, if she needs me, she thought, but Rachel did not acknowledge need in relation to herself of any kind, would only consider her – Sid’s – duty as earnestly and sincerely as she would her own. Anyway, tonight was out of the question. Tonight, at the Duchy’s instigation, they were to play the Pastoral Symphony, her beloved Toscanini’s performance, on her splendid new gramophone. ‘I think we need that kind of music tonight,’ she had said before dinner, the only allusion made by any of them to what lay in store. And after the Beethoven, Rachel would be utterly worn out, even supposing she stayed the course. She looked across the table now to catch Rachel’s eye, but she was talking to Villy, and as she looked away, it was Zoë’s eye that she caught, and Zoë gave her a small, hesitant smile – almost as one outsider to another, Sid thought, as she returned it. She had used to evade Zoë, distrusting the extraordinarily pretty but, she thought, vacuous face, but Zoë’s habitual expression had changed: it was as though before she had known everything she thought she needed to know, and now knew nothing. The effect was to make her mysteriously younger, which was odd, because Sid had thought that sorrow – and she had, after all, only recently lost her baby – made people look older. She had observed that the family treated her differently from a year ago; they seemed now to have accepted her, as, in a way, they have me, she thought, but, then, that is only because they don’t know my secret, and she looked at Zoë again, as the (bizarre, surely) notion that she, too, might have a secret occurred. What nonsense, she then thought, she simply looks a little lost because she has lost something, but at least her deprivation can be known and acknowledged – it is a respectable loss, however severe.

They were on to the plum tart now, and Rupert, at the Duchy’s instigation, was telling his story of Tonks at the Slade. ‘He used to walk very slowly round the room, peering at each student’s work in silence, until he came across a particularly inept piece of work – done by one of the girls. He would stare at it, and the silence became so awful you could hear a pin drop. He would say, “Do you knit?” He was next to Villy and addressed the question to her, whereupon Villy who, of course, knew the story, instantly became the awestruck student and, with the perfect nervous giggle, agreed that she did. “Well, why don’t you go home and do that?”’

‘How awful!’ Jessica cried. ‘Poor girl!’

‘He was a wonderful teacher, though,’ Rupert said. ‘He just couldn’t be bothered with people who were absolutely no good.’

‘He liked your work, though, didn’t he, Rupe?’ Zoë said.

‘Well, he didn’t ask me whether I could knit.’

‘Just as well, old boy,’ Edward said. ‘You’d make a rotten knitter.’

Here Flo gave one high-pitched little scream of laughter, and choked, whereupon Dolly hit her, quite viciously, on the back, with the result that some plum tart shot out of her nose onto the table.

‘Edward, give her your handkerchief,’ Villy cried, as Flo stopped coughing and began to sneeze.

Edward felt in his pockets. ‘Can’t seem to find it.’

Raymond proffered his; Villy got up with a glass of water and ministered to Flo, whose face had suffused from mulberry to beetroot.

‘You’ll be lucky if you ever get your hanky back,’ Dolly remarked. ‘I’ve never known Flo return a hanky. In her entire life.’

‘At least I have some sense of humour,’ Flo returned between sneezes, ‘which is more than could be said for some.’

Rachel caught Sid’s eye then and winked; to Sid it felt like a caress. She winked back.

At dinner, or rather supper, in Pear Tree Cottage, however, the war – beside much else – was discussed with varying degrees of anxiety and cheerful abandon. In this last camp were Teddy, Simon, Nora, Lydia and Neville (Lydia and Neville had wheedled themselves dinner in the dining room on the twofold grounds that it would be less trouble for the servants, and that they hadn’t had a treat for weeks). Their presence was deeply resented by Polly and Clary who had only recently been promoted to supper downstairs and that not always. ‘They haven’t got a shred of justice in their bodies,’ Clary had said earlier of her father and Aunt Villy. Christopher and Polly were united in their disapproval and dread of war; Louise was poised uncertainly between all of them: disapproval of war was one thing, having one’s career utterly wrecked was another; on the other hand, it was all being, or feeling as though it was going to be, terribly exciting. Miss Milliment, who had earlier sensed that Villy would be relieved if she did not seem to expect to go out to dinner with the rest of the family and had said how much she should like to have supper with the children, preserved an interested equanimity. She sat now in her dark brown stockinette skirt and cardigan – which she had that morning discovered right at the back of her wardrobe; she could not have worn it for at least two years, and it had been casually attacked by moths, but fortunately only in places that did not show very much – her small grey eyes glinting with amusement behind her steel-rimmed spectacles.

‘If only Hitler could have waited another three years,’ Teddy was saying, ‘I could have gone slap into the RAF and had a wizard time dropping bombs on him.’ His voice had broken during the summer term, and now sounded too loud, Louise noticed.

‘I thought you said you wanted to be a fighter pilot,’ she said.

‘I do, really, but I might have to be a bomber.’

‘And what does Christopher want to do?’ Miss Milliment enquired; she thought he was being rather swamped by Teddy.

‘Oh – I don’t know,’ he muttered. ‘Christopher’s a cautious objector,’ Simon said. ‘You mean conscientious,’ Nora snubbed.

‘What is that? What do you do if you are it?’ Neville asked.

‘Object, of course, you fool.’

‘Don’t say “you fool” to Simon. I agree with him anyway, Miss Milliment.’

‘Do you, Polly? I didn’t know that.’

‘You mean you object to war? What an extraordinary thing to object to!’

‘It isn’t. You don’t know anything, Neville, so shut up.’

‘I think Neville is trying to find out,’ Miss Milliment said mildly.

‘Well, you could drive an ambulance, or something boring like that,’ Teddy said.

‘Or you could simply be an evacuee,’ Neville said. ‘We met some this afternoon.’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Lydia and me.’

‘Lydia and I,’ Clary corrected him.

‘They were rather disgusting,’ Lydia said. ‘One of them ate a scab off his knee.’

Neville turned on her. ‘I’ve seen you do that,’ he said.

‘You never have!’

‘I certainly have. It’s not a thing I’ve often seen,’ he explained to Miss Milliment. ‘So I wouldn’t be likely to forget it, would I? In your bath!’

Lydia went pink. ‘I simply didn’t want it to fall off into the water and go back into blood,’ she said.

‘Who’s being disgusting now?’ Nora said.

‘It’s difficult not to be disgusting about things that are that,’ Lydia said.

‘If you simply weren’t here,’ Clary said, ‘we wouldn’t be talking about disgusting things. We’d be having a far more interesting conversation.’

There was a silence while everyone ate their fish pie and runner beans.

‘When is Judy coming back?’ Clary asked at last. She didn’t much want to know but felt she had to show that other conversation was possible.

‘Dad’s fetching her tomorrow. She’s at Rottingdean with a school friend. She had her tonsils out at the beginning of the hols, and Mummy thought some sea air would do her good.’

‘And Angela?’ Miss Milliment enquired.

‘Oh, she’s got some sort of job and she lives in a flat with a friend. We hardly ever see her. She simply hates it at Frensham. Mummy wanted her to be a deb now we’ve got some money, but she wouldn’t.’

‘Do you call that interesting conversation, Miss Milliment?’ Neville asked.

‘One of the evacuees had worms,’ Lydia said, before Miss Milliment could reply. ‘And they had to have their hair cut because little animals lived in it. Medically speaking, they weren’t much cop.’

‘They were a lot of cop,’ Neville said. ‘I should think doctors would far rather have a few people with a lot of things wrong with them than everyone with one wrong thing. Supposing you got chicken pox and measles and mumps all at once,’ he added, warming to the subject, ‘you’d be so spotty you’d just be one large spot – they wouldn’t show because there’d be no skin in between. And,’ he added, ‘the other good thing would be that then you could just be well for the rest of your life. If I was a doctor, I’d give people all the things they hadn’t got—’

‘Shut up! I knew it was a mistake having them down for supper—’

‘That is the principle of inoculation,’ Miss Milliment said. ‘That is why people in this country, at least, do not get smallpox any more. You were all given a little dose of smallpox when you were babies.’

‘Well, that’s something,’ Neville said. ‘All our side has got to do is give all the Germans smallpox and they’d be too ill to fight. Can you die of it?’

‘People used to die of it, yes.’

‘You see?’

‘Don’t put your plum stones on the table, Neville,’ Clary said crossly; she could see that Polly became tense every time the war was mentioned, and perhaps Miss Milliment noticed that too, because she launched into an account of Dr Jenner and his experiments with cow pox.

This impressed Christopher very much. ‘It must have saved thousands of people’s lives,’ he said, his spectacles misting up as his face became red with excitement. ‘I wish I could invent something like that!’

‘Discoveries of that nature usually come about from sharp observance,’ Miss Milliment remarked. ‘There is no reason why you should not discover something, Christopher, if that is what you most want to do.’

‘Rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief,’ Lydia muttered. She helped herself to another plum, gouged out the stone with her spoon and went through the ritual again. ‘Rich man!’ she exclaimed with artificial surprise.

‘I don’t do my stones like that,’ Neville said. ‘I do them quite differently.’

‘How?’

He screwed up his eyes and held his breath.

‘Engine driver, pirate, zoo-keeper, burglar,’ he announced at last. ‘I don’t cheat about stones like you, because I wouldn’t mind being any of them.’

‘You always miss the point,’ Clary said. ‘The whole point is that there are some things you wouldn’t like.’

‘Like being married to a thief,’ Lydia said.

‘I don’t know, that might be quite exciting,’ Polly said. ‘They’d come home in the evening with all kinds of things you’d never thought of. If it was a thief with the same taste as you, you could furnish your whole house.’

Teddy, who had eaten his share of pudding, and there wasn’t anything else, said could he and Simon please go back to Home Place now as they were in the middle of something they had to finish. ‘All these women and children,’ he explained to Simon as they ran back, ‘give me the pip,’ and Simon said he quite agreed. He didn’t actually feel like that about the older girls, but he recognised that it was a bit feeble of him, and knew that it was only a matter of time before he’d feel like Teddy.

‘What are we in the middle of?’ he asked. He was worrying a bit about Christopher being left out of whatever it was.

‘You’ll see.’

They reached the end of the track and emerged onto the road. It was nearly but not quite dark. When they reached the drive to Home Place, Teddy did not go in but continued to run along the road up the hill. Then he slowed down, and started to explore the hedge that bounded the little wood by Home Place. ‘There’s a place through here somewhere,’ he said, ‘Christopher showed me last year.’

‘It’ll be jolly dark in the wood.’ Simon began to feel a bit nervous.

‘No, it won’t. You’ll see. Ah! This is it.’ He plunged through a gap in the hedge and Simon followed, through brambles and old man’s beard and the rattling seeds of old cow parsley. Just as he began to feel that he would rather be with Christopher looking through his collection of Peter Scott cigarette cards or feeding his owl, Teddy stopped.

‘Here we are,’ he said, and sat down. Simon sat beside him; they didn’t seem to be anywhere much. He watched while Teddy produced a night light and a box of matches. ‘You make a flat bit of ground for it,’ he said, and Simon obediently scraped away at leaves and twigs until he’d cleared a small bit of ground. I hope it’s not going to be witchcraft, he thought, but he didn’t say anything.

‘Now, then.’ Teddy next pulled out his bulky and businesslike penknife.

‘What are you going to cut?’ He was beginning to be afraid that Teddy might be going to cut them and mix their blood like Red Indians in pacts.

‘This.’ It was a rather battered cigar.

‘Where did you get that?’

‘Easy. The Brig left it in the ashtray. I think he’d forgotten it. It wasn’t stealing, it was just taking.’ He put the cigar on his knee and began sawing it in half. ‘I thought it would be more fun if we could both smoke at once,’ he said, and Simon was torn between pride at being included, and dread of what he was being included in.

‘You suck one end and get it really wet,’ he said as he handed Simon his half. Then he struck a match and lit the night light which lay between them. Simon could see Teddy’s face which was hot from the run. ‘You light yours first,’ Teddy said, handing him the box of matches. Simon tried: he used three matches, but it didn’t seem to light, and the bit in his mouth felt crumbly and like very old leaves with a bitter taste.

‘Here, I’ll do it for you. Give it to me.’

When he had handed back Simon’s half, now glowing, he said, ‘You’ll have to keep smoking or it’ll go out. Now, for the best of all.’ From under his flannel shirt he pulled a small bottle. Simon could see the label that said ‘Syrup of Figs’ on it. He put it carefully on the ground and pulled out another bottle that Simon recognised as tonic water. Then he produced one of the Bakelite picnic mugs.

‘We’re going to smoke and drink,’ he said. ‘And propose some toasts. That sort of thing.’

Simon felt immensely relieved: no witchcraft, no blood-letting.

‘Although actually,’ Teddy went on, as he poured equal quantities from each bottle into the mug, ‘it isn’t tonic water – I couldn’t find any, they’d drunk it all. So I mixed up some Andrew’s Liver Salts with water. It’ll come to much the same thing.’ He lit his cigar, took a drag on it and was momentarily speechless. Simon realised that his had gone out. While he relit it, Teddy took a deep swig from the mug, and handed it to him. ‘It’s a bit warm,’ he said, ‘being next to my chest and, of course, I couldn’t manage ice.’

Simon took a cautious drink. It was nothing like as nice as orange squash or, indeed, any other drink he could think of.

‘I’m afraid the fizz has rather gone out of it,’ Teddy said. Simon couldn’t reply. He had taken a drag on his cigar which made him feel as though he was falling off something.

‘Now. Here are the toasts. Death to Hitler.’ He drank, and handed Simon the mug. ‘You have to say it as well before you drink.’

‘Death to Hitler,’ Simon said. It came out like a croak, and it felt as though the first drink was surging up his throat to meet the second. He swallowed several times, and things settled down.

‘Don’t we have to drink healths as well?’ he said.

‘Good idea. Strangways Major.’

Strangways Major was a prefect and captain of rugger, and altogether so exalted that Simon had never spoken to him.

‘You’re not taking very big swigs – go on, there’s lots more.’

He had another go, hoping he would have got to like it, but he hadn’t.

‘I think I’ll stick to smoking,’ he said, but Teddy said don’t be silly, took back the mug and filled it up again.

He went on with toasts. They drank to Laurel and Hardy, Bobby Riggs, Mr Chamberlain, Cicely Courtneidge and, finally, the King, but when they got to him, Teddy said that they must stand up, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult. Teddy was swaying about and laughing. ‘I think I’m a bit drunk,’ he said. He helped Simon up, but the moment he let go of him, Simon found himself sitting down again very suddenly and hard, and then he was terrifically sick which made his eyes stream although he wasn’t crying as he told Teddy. Teddy was wizard about it, said it was probably something he ate, ‘The fish, I expect – it comes all the way from Hastings in a van,’ and that it didn’t matter in the least. ‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ he said. ‘In fact, I don’t think anything matters very much.’ When Simon felt better, they blew out the night light and went home.

‘It’s a funny old world.’ He sounded as though he was trying to be as nice about it as possible, but it was clear that he thought it could do better if it tried. Mrs Cripps, who was never quite sure when he was referring to personal matters, about which she had fervent curiosity and interest, or world matters, about which she had neither, trod warily.

‘Well, there it is, I suppose,’ she answered. She poured a little tea into her cup to see if it had stood long enough, and it had.

‘It isn’t as though they’re anything to do with the Empire, after all.’ He watched as she filled his cup; the dark liquid mixing with the creamy milk turned it the colour of beech leaves. His chauffeur’s hat, a smart grey with a black cockade, lay on the table beside a plate of Bake-well tarts.

‘Mind you, I’ve nothing against Poles. As such.’

Her heart sank. What did he mean? There was a silence while he stirred three lumps of sugar into his tea – he always made a proper job of that; he never left any sugar wasting in the cup like some.

They were in the very small sitting room off the kitchen, where she sometimes put her feet up in the afternoons. By common but unspoken consent, it was not used by the other servants, excepting Eileen who sometimes took tea with her there. The dining-room dinner was over, and she could hear distant sounds of Madam’s gramophone and, nearer, the sounds of the girls washing up in the pantry.

‘Would you fancy a tart, Mr Tonbridge?’ she said.

‘Seeing as it’s your pastry, Mrs Cripps. After you.’ He handed her the plate and she took one, just to be sociable.

‘Close was it, in London?’ she asked. It was London she wanted to hear about, and what had happened to him there.

‘In more ways than one,’ he replied before he could stop himself. He drank some of his tea – she did make a nice cup of tea – while he endeavoured to overcome the sudden urge to tell her the awful things that had been going on. But no, he still felt too shocked and humiliated – tell her anything of that and it might be the end of her respect.

‘There’s no doubt we’re on the brink, Mrs Cripps, like it or not, that’s where our politicians have landed us – Polish Corridor or no Polish Corridor.’

The poles he had earlier alluded to now became people instead of something to prop up the hops, but the corridor defeated her. How on earth could a corridor have anything whatever to do with starting a war? She composed her features to cautious concern. He’d been sent to London for the day to collect some things from the London house, and there’d been a rumour (gleaned from Eileen waiting at breakfast) that he’d been invited to bring her and the child back down with him, but he hadn’t or he wouldn’t be sitting here now.

She fell back on one of his favourite statements. ‘It’s my belief, Mr Tonbridge, that you can’t trust politicians.’

‘Now there I agree with you.’ He moved his cup a fraction nearer to her, and she at once rinsed the tea-leaves out of it into the slop bowl and poured him another one.

‘And half the time, they don’t know what they’re doing.’

‘They do not, Mrs Cripps, and that’s a fact. They don’t tell us the half of it either, if you ask me.’ She pushed the plate of tarts towards him and his hand reached out for one, but he paid no attention to it and therefore did not have to thank her. ‘But when, as they say, the balloon goes up, Mrs Cripps, who pays the tune?’

She flashed him a smile so that he could see her gold stopping, which, like other things about her seldom seen or not seen at all, he found definitely attractive.

‘You tell me,’ she said as she leaned towards him and her bust shifted slightly under her overall.

A fine figure of a woman, he thought – not for the first time either. ‘You have a remarkable mind. For a woman. And I tell no lie,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to tell you. You know it all. It’s a real pleasure to converse with you. Unlike some.’

This glancing, but gratifyingly uncomplimentary allusion to Mrs Tonbridge was the nearest she came to appeasing her curiosity, but from it she guessed that there had been a visit, and that it had not turned out well. And if there was a war, which naturally she wasn’t in favour of in itself, it would mean that the family would stay down here, which in turn would mean more work, but would also mean that Frank (as she privately called him) would be about. So it would be worth having a perm to her hair, she thought later, as she eased her aching legs between the sheets – her veins were really bad at the end of the day with all the standing she did at work.

But Tonbridge, after he had hung his uniform carefully on the back of the chair in his dark little bedroom next to the gun room, unstrapped his leather gaiters, and unlaced his boots, found himself standing in his vest and drawers by the small casement window after he had shut it for the night, frozen with the terrible memories of his day. Naturally, he’d done his work first, hadn’t got to Gosport Street till well after two. The house had seemed very quiet, and he’d noticed that the curtains upstairs were drawn: it had struck him with sudden hope that she might be away visiting her mother. He’d let himself in, but after he slammed the door behind him, he heard sounds from above. He’d started to go upstairs but the bedroom door opened and there she was – not dressed – just pulling her dressing gown round her, her mules clacking on the lino. ‘It’s you!’ she said. ‘And what do you want?’ He’d told her straight of Madam’s kind offer for her and the kid, and she had launched into her sarcastic ‘Oh, thank you so very bloody much for condescending to consider me’ type of thing and stood barring his way on the stairs. ‘What’s going on?’ he had said – not wanting to know but he had to say something.

She had folded her arms across her bony chest and begun to laugh. Then she’d called, ‘George! You’ll never guess who’s here!’ The bedroom door opened again and out came one of the largest men he’d ever seen in his life. Well over six foot he was – he had to stoop coming out of the bedroom – with curly ginger hair and a moustache. He wore a sleeveless singlet and was buttoning his flies over a beer belly, but his arms were like two legs of mutton with tattoos all over them. ‘George is looking after me now,’ she said, ‘so you can vamoose.’

‘Spying on us, is ’e?’ George said. ‘A Peeping Tom, is ’e?’ He took a step forward, and the floorboards creaked. ‘I’m here to take her away from the bombs. And the kid,’ he said, but his voice came out weak.

‘The kid’s gone. I sent him off with his school.’

‘Where?’

‘Never you mind where. What’s it to do with you?’

He started to say something about it being his kid, but she laughed again. ‘Your kid? You must be joking! Why did you think I married you – a little runt like you?’

It was out. Something he’d always wondered about, and shied away from as a wicked notion he shouldn’t believe in.

‘I’ll just get my clothes, then,’ he said, and moved blindly up a stair but his legs were shaking and he had to get hold of the banisters.

‘Don’t you dare lay a finger on me!’ she cried, and George moved down to her and laid a hand like a bunch of pork sausages on her shoulder.

‘Get ’im his clothes, Ethyl,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have no use for them, would I? ‘E’ll go outside and wait for them as quiet as . . .’ he paused and his light blue eyes were full of considering contempt, ‘a mouse,’ he finished.

So that was it. He’d gone down the stairs and into the street, and she’d opened the upstairs window and just flung the stuff down at him – socks, shirts, two pairs of shoes and his winter uniform – all thrown onto the pavement and the street, in the gutter, and he’d gone about, picking them up and putting them into the back of the car while George stood massively in the doorway and watched him. He’d never felt so humiliated in his life; the whole street might be watching, so all he could do was collect everything as quickly as possible, get into the car and drive away. But as soon as he’d got to the end of the street and turned a corner, he had to stop, because he found he was sobbing, he couldn’t see a thing, and one thing he’d always been was careful with Mr Cazalet’s cars. He always says there’s no one to touch you for care of your vehicle. ‘I’d trust you with a brand new Rolls if I had one,’ that’s what he’d said and not so long ago. He remembered this twice. He’d been with Mr Cazalet for twenty-one years now, and few could say the same. It wasn’t only the driving, it was the upkeep, and he’d defy anyone – anyone at all – to find any dirt, anything wrong with the engine, any polishing neglected. He blew his nose, and felt with trembling fingers in his pockets for his packet of Weights and lit one. And with Mr Cazalet losing his sight, he depended on him more than ever. ‘I depend upon you, Frank,’ he’d said not so long ago – last summer it had been when it had first looked like war – ‘I know I can always rely on you,’ he said. A gentleman like Mr Cazalet wouldn’t say that for nothing. And even when he’d had that trouble with Mr Cazalet driving on the right-hand side of the road because that’s how he rode his horses, ‘I put my foot down,’ he said aloud. ‘Either you drive on the left, sir, or I’ll do the driving.’ Now he always drove him, and Madam, and Miss Rachel, who was a really nice lady, not to mention Mrs Hugh and Mrs Edward. ‘You’re part of the family,’ Miss Rachel had said when she visited him in hospital after that trouble with his ulcer. ‘I think you’re very brave,’ she had said. Very brave. Miss Rachel would never tell a lie. He’d glanced into the back of the car; he’d have to get a box or a case or something to put his stuff in – couldn’t turn up at Home Place with the car looking like that; he had his pride, after all.

He was sniffing loudly now by the window. He flexed his biceps and looked at his arm to see if it made a difference, but it didn’t much. Scrawny, she’d called him. ‘You’re bow-legged,’ she’d said on another occasion. He had such narrow shoulders, Mr Cazalet had had his uniform made. We can’t all be the same, he thought miserably. He looked at the case with his stuff in it lying on the floor still not unpacked. He’d do that tomorrow. He wouldn’t think about any of that, except, now, he was glad he hadn’t told Mabel – as he privately called her. She respected him, looked up to him, as a woman should; it felt quite natural when he was with her. As he got into bed he realised that he hadn’t got a home any more – not with that man in it – and then he thought this was his home, where the family was; always had been. He thought he’d lie awake, with his insides churning, but the Bakewell tarts had settled his stomach, and he was asleep before he knew it. And that was the last day before the war.

When Mr Chamberlain had finished, and the children had been sent out of the room, the Brig suggested that he and his sons – and Raymond, of course – should repair to his study to discuss plans, but the Duchy said no, if plans were to be discussed she thought that everyone should be present to discuss them. She said it with such surprising asperity that he gave way at once. Everybody settled down; Miss Milliment wondered quietly whether they would like her to leave, but nobody seemed to hear her, so she crossed her ankles and looked rather anxiously at her shoes, the laces of which had already come undone. The Brig, who had lit his pipe very slowly, now said that obviously everybody should stay put: the London houses could be closed, or possibly all but one . . . ‘What about the children’s schools?’ Villy and Sybil said at once. Surely they would remain open – they were in the country, after all, and it would be a pity to interrupt their education. It was decided that Villy should ring Teddy’s and Simon’s school, and that Jessica would find out about Christopher’s school and whether the domestic science establishment attended by Nora and Louise was to continue or not. There was then a pause, eventually broken by Villy, who said what about the Babies’ Hotel? She didn’t think the nurses could get through the winter in the squash court: the glass in the roof would make it perishing cold, apart from the fact that the poor things had no real facilities for washing or keeping their clothes, ‘Or even anywhere to be when they aren’t working,’ she added. The Brig said that he’d been considering modifications to the squash court that would deal with all that, but the Duchy said sharply that it was out of the question to modify a place that people were having to sleep in. There was a silence; everyone recognised that she was upset, but only Rachel knew why. Raymond then announced that kind though they all were, he and Jessica and their brood had a perfectly good house of their own at Frensham which they would repair to, as they had always been going to do, in a week’s time. Rupert said that he was going to have a crack at joining the Navy, and he knew that Edward had made his arrangements; Hugh would be in London, the older boys and girls at school, so why couldn’t they let the nurses have Pear Tree Cottage and all live here at Home Place? This idea, while it seemed to have no valid objection, met with covert resistance. Neither Sybil nor Villy relished the idea of having no household of their own; the Duchy had serious misgivings about whether Mrs Cripps would stand the numbers to cook for; Rachel felt anxiety about turning her sisters-in-law out of their house for her – Rachel’s – charity, and the Brig did not wish to be baulked of his ingenious schemes regarding the squash court. Nobody voiced their reservations, and when the Duchy had said that they would cross that bridge when they came to it, some of them felt able to acknowledge the scheme as a good idea. Rachel then said that she and Sid must get back to Mill Farm where they had been in the midst of unpacking and settling in Matron and the babies. Then Edward said he thought they should all have a drink, and he and Rupert went off to arrange that.

‘You’ve been very quiet, darling,’ Rupert said to Zoë, as she followed them out of the room.

‘I couldn’t think of anything helpful to say,’ she replied, ‘but, Rupe, are you really going to join the Navy?’

‘If they’ll have me. I’d have to do something.’ He looked at her, and then added, ‘Of course, they may not have me.’

‘But what shall I do?’

‘Darling, we’ll talk about that. We’ve got a lot of plans to make.’

Edward handed him a tray of glasses at this point, and he repeated, ‘Don’t worry, we will talk about all of it – but later.’

Zoë, without replying, turned on her heel and ran down the hall and upstairs. Edward raised his eyebrows and said, ‘I expect all that talk about the Babies’ Hotel upset her, poor little sweet. Everyone’s feeling a bit jittery.’

Except you, Rupert thought with resentful admiration. He felt that Edward was capable of turning anything – even war – into an exciting personal adventure.

After lunch, it was decreed that the children were to go blackberrying, as the Duchy said that as much jelly as possible should be made while there was still sugar. ‘Much better to give them something sensible to do,’ she said, and the aunts and mothers agreed. Louise and Nora were put in charge, and told Neville and Lydia to wear their wellingtons which made them cross.

‘You aren’t wearing yours,’ Lydia said to her sister, ‘so why should we?’

‘Because you’re much smaller, and your legs will get scratched.’

They’ll get scratched above our wellingtons just as much.’

‘Yes,’ Neville said, ‘and the blood will run down into our boots and mingle with our sore heels.’

‘I think everyone should wear them, or no one,’ Clary said. It was rather sickening, she remarked to Polly, how those two pretended to be grown up when they weren’t.

‘And why aren’t Teddy and Christopher being made to do it?’ Clary demanded, as they waited in the scullery while Eileen provided them with receptacles.

‘Because the Brig wants them to do things to the squash court,’ Louise said.

‘And it’s none of your business, anyway,’ Nora said. Neville put out his tongue, but Nora saw him. ‘That’s extremely rude, Neville, you should apologise at once.’

‘It just happened to come out,’ he said, retreating from her. ‘I don’t think I need to apologise for something which simply happened.’

‘Yes, you do. Apologise.’

He thought for a moment. He had put the large colander that Eileen had given him on his head so that it was not possible to see his expression.

‘I’m so frightfully sorry that I can’t come,’ he said at last. ‘That’s what people say when they don’t want to do something,’ he added.

Clary saw his eyes gleaming through the holes in the colander. ‘It’s no good,’ she said to Louise. ‘Much better to pretend he never said it.’

Louise entirely agreed. She felt Nora often got far too bossy, but she was also obstinate and would never give way in front of the other children. ‘Look, Neville, just say you’re sorry. Quietly.’

He looked at her; she was much nicer than Nora. She saw his lips move.

‘I said it,’ he said. ‘So quietly that I should think I was the only person who could hear.’

‘Well, that’s that,’ Nora said, slinging her basket over her shoulder. ‘A lot of fuss about nothing.’

‘Mincemeat out of a molehill,’ Neville agreed. He had taken off his colander, and his face was bland.

‘Oh, come on!’ Clary cried. It was awful how long people took to get started on anything.

The best blackberry place was at the far end of the large meadow beyond the small wood at the back of the house. The grass was high and bleached, as it had not been cut for hay; the few large trees were turning, the Spanish chestnuts laden with their yellowing spiky balls. This year, Polly thought, they would really be able to roast chestnuts; last year they had thought they would, but in the end they had all gone back to London the same as usual. ‘What’s going to happen to us, do you think?’ she asked Clary.

‘I should think we’ll stay here and have lessons with Miss M. They wouldn’t have got her down here if we weren’t. But the boys will go to school, I should think – after all, their school is in the country, and I suppose they will go to their domestic science place. Neville ought to go to a boys’ school as well,’ she added. ‘He’s getting awfully spoilt.’

‘But – if we’re here, and our fathers are in London or somewhere else, what happens when we’re invaded?’

‘Oh, Poll! Our fathers will be in London. They’ll come down for weekends. And we won’t be invaded. We have a navy. They’ll stop all that sort of thing.’

Polly was silent, not from conviction, but from the hopeless sense that the more people tried to be reassuring, the less you could trust their views. They had reached the wide sloping bank that inclined towards the next wood – the one where she had imagined the tank blasting through towards her and Dad last year. The brambles festooned the clumps of hawthorn that were scattered on this piece of land, which also contained many rabbit holes, molehills and in one place the end of a dewpond, now simply a dampish declivity surrounded by a few disconsolate rushes. In the Easter holidays it was a good place for primroses which clustered round the clumps, and in the early summer they had found little purple orchids. Now the large trees in the wood were burnished in the golden, windless light, and the clumps glistened with bramble, briony and hawthorn berries, and there were swags of old man’s beard.

‘Everybody spread out and start picking!’ Nora called. She made it sound like a school outing, Louise thought, as she noticed the others moving quickly as far from Nora as possible, which left her, Louise, feeling that she’d have to stay with her cousin or it would look rude. They put up a cock pheasant between them, but before it flew, it ran, with its drunken, stilted gait, a few yards away; then, when Lydia ran after it, it rose in the air and whirred away.

Neville soon got tired of picking and upset his colander, which discouraged him even more. He went exploring the rabbit holes: he had a secret desire to see the inside of a warren, and thought that if only he could widen the entrance, he’d be able to slip in. He did not even want to tell Lydia this plan; it would be far more fun to mention it casually when they were having their baths. ‘I went into a warren today,’ he would say. ‘It was just like Beatrix Potter – little frying pans hung up on sticky-out roots from the walls, and the floor all smooth and sandy. The rabbits loved me coming to see them.’ He imagined them hopping onto his knees, all soft and furry with their lovely ears lying down on their backs and their bulging eyes looking up at him in a trusting way. But he couldn’t make any headway with the digging at all. He tried with the colander, but it simply wouldn’t dig, and then he tried scooping earth up with one of his wellingtons, but it was too floppy. And then when he put the wellington on again, it seemed to be full of little sharp sandy pebbles, so he took it off again. He’d have to pinch a trowel out of McAlpine’s shed, he thought, as he limped towards the others thinking of what he would say about not having any blackberries, and then, of course, he trod on a bramble and thorns went into his foot, and when he tried to go on walking it really hurt.

This made everyone not notice about his not having any blackberries and Nora was really nice to him. She made him sit down and took his foot and found where the thorns were, and squeezed and squeezed and got two of them out, but the last one was too deep. ‘It could be sucked out,’ she said, and everyone who was standing round looked doubtfully at his grimy foot. ‘He’s your brother,’ Nora said to Clary who did not seem very keen.

‘Although if he’d been bitten by an adder and would die if I didn’t, of course I would,’ she said, ‘but just a thorn . . .’

‘It’s only a bramble,’ Louise said.

‘No, it’s a rose thorn and quite a big one. It’s broken off. If he walks on it, it’ll simply go in deeper and deeper.’

‘Then it might come out the other side,’ Lydia said, ‘come sprouting out of the top of his foot.’ They were full of unhelpful suggestions.

‘All right,’ Nora said. ‘Give me your foot again.’ She sat down opposite Neville and took his foot in her hands. Then she spat on it and rubbed it with her dress, which wouldn’t show, Louise thought, because it was a rather nasty mixture of orange and black in sort of stripes and blobs – a cross between a zebra and a giraffe. Then she sucked for a bit, and then squeezed, and finally the thorn, black and quite large, came out.

‘You should have worn socks inside your wellingtons,’ she said mildly. ‘There you are. Has anybody a sock to lend him?’

Lydia obliged. ‘Although if there’d been an air raid, I bet you could have run,’ she said.

‘Let’s go home,’ Polly said at once, and Clary could see that this idea hadn’t occurred to her, but that now that it had she was definitely nervous.

‘Thank Nora,’ Clary said.

‘I was just going to,’ Neville said sulkily. ‘And now you’ve spoiled my thanks. I’ll thank you on the way home,’ he said to Nora, ‘when I start to feel like it again.’

An ordinary afternoon, Polly thought, as they made their way back. How many more of them would there be? She looked at Clary trudging beside her. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I was trying to describe that pheasant. You know – exactly how it looked – you know – like a bird in fancy dress – a bit military, and the way it ran – a sort of swaggery stagger . . .’

‘Why? I didn’t think you were interested in birds.’

‘I’m not, particularly. But I might want to put one in a book, and I have to keep remembering things for that.’

‘Oh.’

Aunt Rach weighed the blackberries and altogether they came to eleven pounds three ounces, and the Duchy gave them each a Meltis Fruit after tea, and Dottie cried because Mrs Cripps said she hadn’t cleaned the preserving pan properly, and that now it might catch. In the early evening, the nutty fragrance of the hot seething blackberries seeped into the large hall and could even be detected on the top landing by Great-Aunt Dolly as she went to the bathroom to put water in her tooth glass for soaking her senna pods.

Everyone was summoned to hear the King broadcast at six o’clock, and remained motionless and silent listening to his strained and halting speech as he battled with his stammer. ‘Poor King!’ Lydia said. ‘To have to speak when you hardly can!’ And Louise said how lucky it was that he hadn’t wanted to be an actor, because that would have been a tragedy; he would just have to walk on in plays carrying a spear. Then there was someone called J.B. Priestley who read from something he’d written, and just as there was wonderful Sandy Macpherson on the cinema organ, the maids were told to get on with laying dinner which they felt was very bad luck, and the children were told to go off and have their baths, whereas the grown-ups, who didn’t have to do anything, switched off the wireless and didn’t even listen to him.

‘They won’t let us listen to what they don’t even want,’ Clary complained. She had once seen Sandy Macpherson coming up out of a pit playing his organ in a large cinema in London and had been looking forward to boasting about it. ‘And we have to listen to them playing for hours. Sometimes,’ she added, as she recognised that this was not quite true.

‘Anyway, France has come into the war,’ Teddy remarked cheerfully. ‘Oh – sorry, Christopher, but you know what I mean. It makes it all more friendly.’ They were watching Christopher, who was kneeling on the floor wrapping small pieces of liver round bits of rabbit fur. The owl, a tawny, sat on the top of the wardrobe watching him. Christopher had found him as a baby on Hampstead Heath: he had a broken leg and had been in a poor way. Christopher had put the leg into splints and nursed him back to health and now he was very tame. Simon longed for one, but he knew that he wouldn’t be allowed to keep it at his school. The owl suddenly flew down and landed on Christopher’s shoulder with a papery thud. Christopher held up a piece of food on the palm of his hand, the owl took it and flew back with it to the wardrobe: its expression of inscrutable outrage did not change.

‘Do you ever let him out?’ Teddy asked.

‘I tried once, but he just flew into a tree and stayed there all day. And in the evening, when I brought him his food, he flew down and came back into the house with me.’ He did not add that he had only done that once, as a token towards the owl’s freedom; secretly he wanted him to stay for ever. But now, he’d been boarding at his school ever since they moved to Frensham, and his school might be evacuated into another school, and he knew that this might make keeping an owl difficult, although somehow he’d have to manage it. The owl flew down for another piece: this time he nearly lost his balance, and dug his talons in to get a firmer hold on Christopher’s shoulder. Christopher had permanent claw marks, Simon had noticed, but he didn’t seem to mind.

The first evening of the war was spent like so many other evenings: the succession of bedtimes mechanically contested by each child as a matter of pride. ‘Any minute now we’ll be going to bed before Wills and Roland,’ Lydia grumbled, ‘and Wills is only two, and Roland is nought.’

‘Yes,’ Judy said, ‘and at Berkeley Court Monica and I didn’t have our baths until after supper which made it about nine o’clock.’

She had been fetched by her father that afternoon from staying with a school friend, and had been insufferable, the other two thought, about how grand and wonderful it had been. They’d already heard about how Monica had two ponies, and there were éclairs for tea, and a fridge that made ice and a swimming pool, and a lake with a rowing boat, and Monica had had her hair permed and possessed a necklace of real pearls.

‘Swank, swank, swank,’ Neville muttered. He was sitting on the floor of the room they shared seeing whether he could have sucked out the thorn from his foot himself. He could.

‘Whatever are you doing?’ Judy cried.

‘Just biting my toenails. To make a change.’

‘How repellent! Lydia, don’t you think that is simply repellent?’

‘They’re Neville’s feet – he can do what he likes with them,’ Lydia said loftily. She did privately think it both clever and disgusting of Neville, but they were now united in their dislike of and boredom with Judy’s treat.

‘Monica had her very own bathroom,’ Judy went on, as Ellen appeared to say their bath was ready and hurry up.

‘Yes, and I suppose she had her very own head and nose and teeth—’

‘And bottom,’ Lydia finished and Neville burst into hoots of laughter.

At Home Place, the older children had supper in the hall, as they were too old to have milk and biscuits upstairs, and the grown-ups wanted the dining room to themselves, so there was a sense of grievance that no two of them were to have the usual privilege. They were eating mince and mashed potato and runner beans and the sky in the domes above them turned from violet to indigo segmented like a melon by the struts between the glass which, Clary noticed, were dark when the sky was light and seemed pale when the dusky dark began. Upstairs they could hear baths running, doors being opened and shut, general sounds of the grown-ups getting ready for their dinner. Bessie, the Brig’s large black Labrador, lay at Christopher’s feet, her brandy-snap eyes fixed on his face with a terrible greed that she thought she concealed by sentiment. He stroked but did not feed her. A year ago, he thought, he had his camp in the woods, a dream of adventure and escape. It now seemed impracticable, and therefore childish to him, but there also seemed nothing to take its place. The reality of being a pacifist had been brought home at school to him during this last year: the teasing, the downright bullying contempt in which he was held by almost everyone.

Only Mr Milner seemed to understand. Mr Milner was the classics master, and Christopher, who had started by not liking Greek very much, had found he was liking it because he liked Mr Milner, and the way in which he talked about what he thought so much. Christopher was always drawing things, mostly birds and sometimes animals, and he often did it in his exercise books that were meant for homework. When Mr Milner came upon a portrait of Tawny, with some sketches of simply his talons, or an unfurled wing, he hadn’t been sarcastic or condemning about it, had just exclaimed, ‘I say, that’s awfully good, you know, really awfully good! Do you do much of that sort of thing?’ And when Christopher had mumbled, quite a bit, he’d said, ‘Absolutely right. If you want to be an artist of any kind the great thing is to practise all the time – that’s what being a practising artist means. I’ve never been able to abide those slim volumes, that single cello concerto. However good they are, one knows perfectly well that if the chap had done more he’d be better.’ And then, just before the summer holidays and after the exams, he’d suddenly given him a block of the most beautiful paper, very thick and white with a lovely feel to it. ‘I just happened to have it,’ he had said, ‘and you could make far better use of it than I.’ Mr Milner knew he was a pacifist, and was literally the only person who behaved as though that was a perfectly natural thing to be – had simply asked him why he was one, and listened to the reply. Then he had said, ‘Well, Christopher,’ (Christopher had noticed that he only called people by their Christian names if he liked them, otherwise he would have been Castle) ‘principles are very expensive things – or can be . . .’ He was fat and rather bald, which made his eyebrows look even bushier, and had a sort of wheezy voice that cracked when he got excited, which he did about a lot of things. He always wore the same tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows and the sort of boots that were for going up mountains, and his ties were never very clean, and when he laughed it was ‘Ho ho ho!’ followed by more wheezing. Boarding had meant being free from Dad getting at him, but certainly not good in other ways, except for Mr Milner.

My being against it won’t make the slightest difference to it happening, he thought, because I don’t really count, and then he heard Mr Milner’s voice saying, ‘Everybody counts, dear boy, if only to himself. Don’t turn yourself into an abject exception.’

‘What are you smiling at?’ Neville asked.

‘Nothing much,’ he said, and then he thought, That’s a lie and I hardly noticed. He decided to count them up all the next day just to see how often it happened. Only, of course, he thought, if I know I’m counting them up there won’t be so many of them. It was a bit like what Mr Milner had said that somebody had said about the state of mind in which people wrote diaries.

Polly was abstracted: she left a lot of her mince, and when it came to apple amber, she said she didn’t want any. She, too, was thinking of last year, when Oscar had been alive and got lost, and then found, just in time for peace. But Oscar had been found stretched out, stiff as a board at the end of the back garden. He had been run over, the vet had said: his back was broken. Another serious funeral, and after that, she had decided that she had better not have another cat until she had her house and everything. Now, she was glad of that decision. At least she did not have to contemplate whoever she might have had being gassed to death. Dad had wanted to give her another for her birthday, but she said she was too old for a cat. ‘At least, I’ve reached a middle age when it wouldn’t be advisable,’ she had said, and he had said, ‘Well, Poll, you know best,’ and she had wondered afterwards why people always said that when they disagreed with one. Actually, she felt sad about not wanting a cat, but now, she thought, perhaps she had always known that the war wouldn’t go away, had been simply waiting, and looming all the time. And here it was, and everything, on the face of it, seemed to be much the same. If only Dad wasn’t going to be in London, she thought. If only they could all stay together, then whatever happened couldn’t be so awful. At least she didn’t have to go on trying to believe in God.

Bessie was between her and Christopher. She had quickly realised that Polly had food on her plate and had leaned her bulk against Polly’s knee and chair. Christopher had turned to her and smiled and said, ‘Don’t give in to her, she’s far too fat for her age. It wouldn’t be a kindness.’

‘I know,’ she said. Bessie wouldn’t have a gas mask. Human beings were only kind to them up to a point, she thought, they weren’t really kind. Teddy and Simon were talking about cricket. They talked more and more about things that didn’t interest her. If she had children, she’d have them all educated in the same place, then they’d go on knowing each other and doing the same things. This idea cheered her up and she asked Christopher if he agreed, and he did, and then Nora, who had heard them, chipped in saying there was a frightfully modern school like that in Devon called Dartington Hall where the children were all terribly spoiled.

‘What do you mean, spoiled?’ Clary asked.

‘Well, you know, allowed to do what they like all the time. And they do crafts, things like woodwork which doesn’t strike me as an educational subject at all.’

Clary said, ‘I can’t see that doing what you like would spoil you. It makes me far nicer when I do.’

‘Everybody needs discipline,’ Nora said. ‘I know I do.’

‘Well, we can’t all be the same,’ Clary said. Christopher suddenly choked with laughter, but Nora just went rather red.

An evening, just like any other evening, Polly thought, as Aunt Rach came downstairs dressed in her blue moiré dress with a little cape round her shoulders. ‘Hallo, darlings! Having a nice supper?’

Simon said, ‘What would you say if we told you it was horrible?’

‘I should say, “Serve you right, silly old aunt, for asking such a daft question.”’

She was on her way to the drawing room, but the Brig had heard her voice and now called to her: ‘Rachel! The very person I wanted to see,’ and she turned and went to his study.

‘Poor Brig,’ Clary said. ‘Think of not being able to read.’

‘Or ride. Or drive,’ Teddy said, which seemed far worse to him.

‘He hasn’t driven for ages. Tonbridge won’t let him. But he goes on the train all by himself.’

‘Bracken meets him at Charing Cross.’

‘Bracken is getting so huge that Dad says he’ll have to buy a larger car to fit him into. And in the end he’ll only fit into a lorry. I expect he’ll be called up and they’ll have to put him in a tank to drive. Come on, Simon, let’s finish our game.’ They went off to the billiard room.

‘Let’s play cards,’ Clary said, not because she specially wanted to, but she wanted to get Polly’s mind off the war. She looked at her now. ‘Pelmanism?’ she coaxed; she was particularly good at that game. Polly wrinkled her white forehead. ‘Racing demon?’

Louise, who also realised about Polly, said what a good idea, so they went up to the old nursery, where Polly and Clary now slept, and got out the packs of cards and made Christopher join them, but he never won, and so he left, saying that he was going to read.

At dinner, in the dining room, nobody talked about the future; all general ruminations had been exhausted and everyone had withdrawn into their own personal uncertainties which most of them felt, for various reasons, it would sound both selfish and pusillanimous to discuss. They ate their asparagus soup, made from the last pickings from the beds for that year, the Duchy remarked, and oxtail with beetroot in a white sauce and carrots chopped up with peas and mashed potato, followed by charlotte russe, a pudding dear to Mrs Cripps’s heart – she loved arranging all the little upright sponge fingers in the pudding mould – but Edward called it wet cake and thought he would wait for cheese. Even he was at a loss for conversation; the precious hardwood logs had been dumped in the river again, but the men never talked about the business except when they were alone together. He wondered how Diana was doing, and whether she had been joined by Angus, and if she had, whether she would let him sleep with her or not. He hadn’t got a leg to stand on there because, after all, he and Villy . . . but he didn’t exactly relish the idea. He looked at Villy, who was wearing a plum-coloured dress with a sort of draped neck that didn’t suit her at all. They had had the beginnings of a row at Pear Tree Cottage when they were getting ready for dinner because she had said that she wasn’t prepared to spend the entire war tucked away in the country looking after one small baby; she would go mad, she said. If there was to be one London house kept open, she thought it should be Lansdowne Road. ‘Hugh could live in it during the week, and the rest of the family could come up whenever they needed to.’

This had silenced him: he knew that the chances of seeing Diana would be halved if Villy was in London, but he could hardly raise that as an objection. ‘We’ll have to see how things turn out,’ he had said.

He noticed that his father wanted some port, which stood at his right hand, but that he was unsure where his glass was. He got up and went round to pour it for him, and then pushed the decanter round the table to the next person.

‘Zoë, the port is with you,’ he said, and she gave a little start, and moved it on to Hugh. How attractive she looked. She was wearing some sort of housecoat affair, long, pale greeny-blue brocade woven with little apricot flowers, with her hair swept smoothly back from her face into some kind of net so that it looked like a huge bun – a sort of Victorian effect. And she had a complexion that made all the other women look weather-beaten or faded, although these days she was very pale. He wondered whether Rupe had taken his advice about starting another baby as soon as possible.

The Duchy knew perfectly well that the men wanted to talk on their own so as soon as the pudding was eaten (the Duchy disapproved of cheese at night), she suggested that the women withdraw. When they were settled, and Eileen had brought the coffee, Rachel said, ‘Before you start any music, Duchy dear, I think I’d better distribute these. The Brig wants them put on every bedroom door.’ She handed them round.

‘“Instructions in case of an Air Raid,”’ Sybil read aloud. ‘Goodness! Who did all this?’

‘I did. Matron said she must have them for the nurses, and the Brig said they should be for everyone. I’m sorry that my typing is so bad – I type like a two-toed sloth.’

It must have taken her hours, Sid thought, and Villy obviously thought the same, because she said, ‘Wasn’t there even any carbon paper?’

‘There was, but it was frightfully old and, anyway, if you make as many mistakes as I do, it isn’t actually much quicker.’ The instructions were very sensible, and told people what to do either during the day or night. ‘Although, of course, they won’t have air raids in the dark. They won’t be able to see where they are,’ Villy said.

‘As long as we all do the blackout properly.’

They spent a little time deciding which children they would be responsible for, and then there was a silence.

The evening, filled, as in a way it was, by small domestic activity – by Sid and the Duchy playing Mozart sonatas, by the men coming out from the dining room – was, none the less, punctuated by these small, dead moments, when the minute sound of Sybil’s knitting, or a log subsiding in the fireplace, or sugar being stirred into a coffee cup only accentuated those times when each person was engulfed by their private anxieties.

As she was shutting the piano, the Duchy remarked, ‘Do you remember how, in the last war, it became unpatriotic to play German music? Such a ridiculous notion.’

‘Not everybody thought that, surely?’ Sid was putting her fiddle away, but Rachel could hear that she was shocked.

‘Only the sort of people who gave white feathers to men with flat feet or bad eyesight, Duchy dear,’ she said.

‘I’m sure the Germans will be worse about that sort of thing,’ Hugh said.

‘But, then, they will have far less to lose. Composers aren’t our strong point, compared to them,’ Rachel said, then put her hand over her mouth and looked at Villy whose father had been a composer, after all. How lucky, she thought, that Lady Rydal had opted for dinner in bed that night.

But Villy, who had loved her father dearly, perhaps more than anyone else in her life, was suddenly remembering him writing in one of his diaries that going to Germany as a young student, and dazzled by the quantity of music available, had been like being a dog let out into a field of rabbits.

‘Hitler is reputed to like Wagner,’ Sybil said; she had finished the second sock, and pulled its pair out of the bag before handing them to her husband. Thank goodness that pair was finished: she was really bored of knitting socks, but Hugh seemed so pleased with them that she felt she had to keep him supplied.

‘I can well believe it.’ The Duchy disliked Wagner immensely: he went, she felt, too far in directions that she did not like to consider at all.

‘Bed!’ Edward cried. ‘We’ve got an early start.’ He looked at his brothers. ‘Better if you give Rupe a lift, I’ve got a call to make on my way.’

Rupert had been faintly dreading the moment when he would be alone with Zoë in their bedroom. When he had gone up for his bath before dinner, she was sitting at the dressing table doing nothing. He put his hand under her chin and tilted her face up to him; he could see that she had been crying because her eyelids were swollen, their whiteness a faintly translucent blue. To his surprise she smiled at him, took the hand that now lay on the shoulder of her kimono and thrust it under the silk. As he gazed into her astonishing cloudy eyes, that were not, he had long discovered, the green of anything else, she moved his hand from her shoulder to her breast. Startled, charmed, he bent to kiss her, but she put her hand on his mouth and made a little backward, provocative movement with her head, indicating the bed. He felt a sudden surge of light-hearted excitement and pleasure – his old, young Zoë was back.

Now, as they walked quietly up the stairs and along the gallery landing to their room, that brief, idyllic half-hour that had been – perhaps fortunately – interrupted by Peggy knocking on the door and coming immediately into the room to turn down the bed, seemed like a dream, either only to have happened to him or not to have happened at all. Peggy had gasped and blushed with embarrassment, but without her they would never have made dinner on time. They had both dressed with lightning speed, laughing – Zoë had bundled her hair, still faintly damp from being washed, into a chignon and buttoned herself into the housecoat he’d bought her last Christmas. ‘Haven’t even time to do my face,’ she said. ‘Will I do?’

‘You’re so—’ he began, then ‘I love you,’ he said, ‘that’s the long and short of it. You’ll do for me.’

But now, at the end of what had been rather a sticky evening en famille, he began to worry about having said earlier to her that they would talk about the future; his going into the Navy (if he could), and how she felt about things, and he was afraid, because it would lead to an argument. She was no good at arguments, and her inability to understand things that she didn’t want or like usually irritated him to the point where he accused her to himself of wilful incomprehension; aloud he would be aggressively patient and she would sulk. He dreaded ending the day on such a note, and since they had made love, which until the last few months had been the resolution of such times, he felt the outcome might be a tense, sleepless night.

He was wrong. What happened was pretty much the same as before dinner, and this time, because he was not so startled by her light-hearted ardour, he realised how much more enjoyable it all was when he wasn’t either feeling sorry for her because of the rotten time she’d had, or anxious that he was no longer able to give her pleasure. When they were lying quietly in what felt to him the most blissfully companionable silence, she said, ‘Rupert, I’ve been thinking.’

His heart sank, then rallied. He was full of the most tender regard: he would be patient, and gentle, and somehow get her to understand that some things had to be outside and beyond their own wishes. He settled her into the crook of his arm. ‘I’m listening,’ he said.

‘I’d like us to find a desk for Clary for her Christmas present. You know, one with a secret drawer, a beautiful old one that she can have for her writing. I thought we might try that place in Hastings that Edward goes to –’

‘Cracknell.’

‘Yes, him. Don’t you think that’s a good idea?’

‘A marvellous idea,’ he said. Tears came to his eyes. ‘We’ll go next weekend.’

‘But it’s got to be a secret.’

‘Of course. You don’t think I’d tell her, do you?’ He was delighted to be outraged on this scale.

‘It’s a long time till Christmas.’ She wriggled free of him and sprang out of bed.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Putting on some clothes for Peggy in the morning,’ she said, pulling her nightdress over her head.

It was odd, he thought, as he got into his pyjamas, opened the window to let in the cool, misty air, and went back to bed, odd that the piece of future they had talked about should be simply the next weekend. And then, perversely, after he had kissed her and turned out the light, he wished that they had talked – seriously, but without fighting – about what lay ahead, and then cursed himself for always wanting something more, or else, of her than he got.

‘You are. Well, you are to me, anyway.’

Edward and Villy had taken Jessica and Raymond back to the cottage by car as Raymond was so lame, and Sybil and Hugh had said no they would love the fresh air, and were walking back. Sybil had a torch that she shone so carefully in front of Hugh that she stumbled and he put out his arm to steady her. ‘Come round the other side of me,’ he said, ‘and then I can hold your hand.’

‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,’ she said, half laughing at herself for saying it.

‘I don’t think that’s true. Anyway, whatever I think you look like, and whatever you think you look like, I love you – always have – always will. Whatever happens.’ It slipped out, that last bit. Why the hell did I say that?

There was a silence during which he began to hope that she hadn’t noticed. But then she said, ‘I could bear anything that happens if we could all be together. But with Simon miles away at school and you in London by yourself – Hugh, it would make sense if we kept our house open. Wills and Polly can stay here and we could come down at weekends. Don’t you see?’

‘I wouldn’t have a second’s peace all day worrying about you in the house alone and if anything like an air raid happened, I’d be too far from you to look after you. It’s out of the question.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll be down at weekends, regular as clockwork.’

The retort that it was to be she who was not to have a second’s peace all week worrying about what might happen to him nearly escaped and was swallowed down in silence. If one of them had to be anxious, it must be she. She could not bear the thought of him worrying. She shut up.

When they were in bed, he said, ‘But, you know, I think quite possibly it will all be over much sooner than we think. I don’t think that Hitler will find the Maginot Line much fun – it won’t be like last time. And this time, the Americans may join us sooner. That would put the kybosh on it all.’

And wanting him to think that he had reassured her, she said, ‘I’m sure you’re right.’