Confusion

POLLY

March 1942

The room had been shut up for a week; the calico blind over the window that faced south over the front garden had been pulled down; a parchment-coloured light suffused the cold, stuffy air. She went to the window and pulled the cord; the blind flew up with a snap. The room lightened to a chill grey – paler than the boisterous cloudy sky. She stayed for a moment by the window. Clumps of daffodils stood with awful gaiety under the monkey puzzle, waiting to be sodden and broken by March weather. She went to the door and bolted it. Interruption, of any kind, would not be bearable. She would get a suitcase from the dressing room and then she would empty the wardrobe, and the drawers in the rosewood chest by the dressing table.

She collected a case – the largest she could find – and laid it on the bed. She had been told never to put suitcases on beds, but this one had been stripped of its bedclothes and looked so flat and desolate under its counterpane that it didn’t seem to matter.

But when she opened the wardrobe and saw the long row of tightly packed clothes she suddenly dreaded touching them – it was as though she would be colluding in the inexorable departure, the disappearance that had been made alone and for ever and against everyone’s wishes, that was already a week old. It was all part of her not being able to take in the for-ever bit: it was possible to believe that someone was gone; it was their not ever coming back that was so difficult. The clothes would never be worn again and, useless to their one-time owner, they could only now be distressing to others – or rather, one other. She was doing this for her father, so that when he came back from being with Uncle Edward he would not be reminded by the trivial, hopeless belongings. She pulled out some hangers at random; little eddies of sandalwood assailed her – together with the faint scent that she associated with her mother’s hair. There was the green and black and white dress she had worn when they had gone to London the summer before last, the oatmeal tweed coat and skirt that had always seemed either too big or too small for her, the very old green silk dress that she used to wear when she had evenings alone with Dad, the stamped velvet jacket with marcasite buttons that had been what she had called her concert jacket, the olive-green linen dress that she had worn when she was having Wills – goodness, that must be five years old. She seemed to have kept everything: clothes that no longer fitted, evening dresses that had not been worn since the war, a winter coat with a squirrel collar that she had never seen before . . . She pulled everything out and put it on the bed. At one end was a tattered green silk kimono encasing a gold lamé dress that she dimly remembered had been one of Dad’s more useless Christmas presents ages ago, worn uneasily for that one night and never again. None of the clothes were really nice, she thought sadly – the evening ones withered from hanging so long without being worn, the day clothes worn until they were thin, or shiny or shapeless or whatever they were supposed not to be. They were all simply jumble sale clothes, which Aunt Rach had said was the best thing to do with them, ‘although you should keep anything you want, Polly darling,’ she had added. But she didn’t want anything, and even if she had, she could never have worn whatever it might have been because of Dad.

When she had packed the clothes away she realised that the wardrobe still contained hats on the top shelf and racks of shoes beneath the clothes. She would have to find another case. There was only one other – and this time it had her mother’s initials upon it, ‘S.V.C.’ ‘Sybil Veronica’ the clergyman had said at the funeral – how odd to have a name that had never been used except when you were christened and buried. The dreadful picture of her mother lying encased and covered with earth recurred as it had so many times this week; she found it impossible not to think of a body as a person who needed air and light. She had stood dumb and frozen during the prayers and scattering of earth and her father dropping a red rose onto the coffin, knowing that when they had done all that they were going to leave her there – cold and alone for ever. But she could say none of this to anyone; they had treated her as a child about the whole thing, had continued till the end to tell her cheerful, bracing lies that had ranged from possible recovery to lack of pain and finally – and they had not even perceived the inconsistency – to a merciful release (where was the mercy if there had been no pain?). She was not a child, she was nearly seventeen. So beyond this final shock – because, of course, she had wanted to believe the lies – she now felt stiff with resentment, with rage at not being considered fit for reality. She had slid from people’s arms, evaded kisses, ignored any consideration or gentleness all the week. Her only relief was that Uncle Edward had taken Dad away for two weeks, leaving her free to hate the rest of them.

She had announced her intention of clearing out her mother’s things when that question had been mooted, had refused absolutely any help in the matter – ‘at least I can do that,’ she had said – and Aunt Rach, who was beginning to seem marginally better than the rest of them, had said of course.

The dressing table was littered with her mother’s silver-backed brushes and a tortoiseshell comb, a cut-glass box containing hairpins that she had ceased to use after having her hair cut off, and a small ring stand on which hung two or three rings, including the one Dad had given her when they were engaged: a cabochon emerald surrounded by small diamonds and set in platinum. She looked at her own ring – also an emerald – that Dad had given her in the autumn last year. He does love me, she thought, he simply doesn’t realise how old I am. She didn’t want to hate him. All these things on the dressing table couldn’t just go to jumble. She decided to pack them in a box and keep them for a bit. The few pots of cold cream and powder and dry rouge had better be thrown away. She put them in the waste-paper basket.

The chest of drawers had underclothes and two kinds of nightdresses: the ones Dad had given her that she never wore, and the ones she bought that she did. Dad’s ones were pure silk and chiffon with lace and ribbons, two of green and one of a dark coffee-coloured satin. The ones she had bought were cotton or winceyette, with little flowers on them – rather Beatrix Potter nightdresses. She ploughed on: bras, suspender belts, camisoles, camiknickers, petticoats in locknit Celonese, all a sort of dirty peachy colour, silk stockings and woollen ones, some Viyella shirts, dozens of handkerchiefs in a case Polly had made years ago with Italian quilting on a piece of tussore silk. At the back of the underclothes drawer was a small bag, like a brush and comb bag, in which was a tube that said Volpar Gel and a small box with a funny little round rubber thing in it. She put these back in the bag and into the waste-paper basket. Also in that drawer was a very flat square cardboard box inside which, wrapped in discoloured tissue paper, lay a semi-circular wreath made of silver leaves and whitish flowers that crumbled when she touched them. On the lid of the box was a date, written in her mother’s hand. ‘12 May 1920.’ It must have been her wedding wreath, she thought, trying to remember the funny picture of the wedding on her grandmother’s dressing table with her mother in an extraordinary dress like a tube with no waist. She put the box aside, it not being possible to throw away something that had been treasured for so long.

The bottom drawer contained baby things. The christening robe that Wills was the last to have worn – an exquisite white lawn frock embroidered with clover that Aunt Villy had made – an ivory teething ring, a clutch of tiny lace caps, a silver and coral rattle that looked as though it had come from India, a number of pale pink unworn knitted things, made, she guessed, for the baby that died, and a large, very thin yellowing cashmere shawl. She was at a loss; eventually she decided to put these things away until she could bring herself to ask one of the aunts what to do with them.

Another afternoon gone. Soon it would be tea-time, and after that, she would take over Wills, play with him, bath him and put him to bed. He is going to be like Neville, she thought – only worse, because at four he’ll remember her for a long time, and Neville never knew his mother at all. So far it had not been possible to explain to Wills. Of course they had tried – she had tried. ‘Gone away,’ he would repeat steadily. ‘Dead in the sky?’ he would suggest, but he still went on looking for her – under sofas and beds, in cupboards and whenever he could escape, he made a journey to this empty room. ‘Airplane,’ he’d said to her yesterday after repeating the sky bit. Ellen had said she’d gone to heaven, but he had confused this with Hastings and wanted to meet the bus. He did not cry about her, but he was very silent. He sat on the floor fiddling listlessly with his cars, played with his food but did not eat it and tried to hit people if they picked him up. He put up with her, but Ellen was the only person he seemed to want at all. In the end he’ll forget her, I suppose, she thought. He’ll hardly remember what she looked like; he’ll know he lost his mother, but he won’t know who she was. This seemed sad in a quite different way and she decided not to think about it. Then she wondered whether not thinking about something was the next worst thing to not talking about it, because she certainly didn’t want to be like her awful family who, it seemed to her, were doing their damnedest to go about their lives as though nothing had happened. They hadn’t talked about it before, and they didn’t now; they didn’t believe in God, as far as she could see, since none of them went to church, but they had all – with the exception of Wills and Ellen who stayed to look after him – gone to the funeral: stood in the church and said prayers and sung hymns and then trooped outside to the place where the deep hole had been dug and watched while two very old men had lowered the coffin into the bottom of it. ‘I am the Resurrection and Life,’ said the Lord, ‘and he who believeth in me shall not die.’ But she hadn’t believed, and nor, as far as she knew, had they. So what had been the point? She had looked across the grave at Clary who stood staring downwards, the knuckles of one hand crammed into her mouth. Clary, also, was unable to talk about it, but she certainly did not behave as though nothing had happened. That awful last evening – after Dr Carr had come, and given her mother an injection and she had been taken in to see her (‘She is unconscious,’ they said, ‘she doesn’t feel anything now,’ announcing it as though it was some kind of achievement), and she had stood listening to the shallow, stertorous breaths, waiting and waiting for her mother’s eyes to open so that something could be said, or at least there could be some mutual, silent farewell . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Of course she wouldn’t.

He took off his jacket and began loosening his tie.

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

‘It will hurt.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What did she put on that?’

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

‘I’ll do the spots first.’

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

‘Wouldn’t Matron do these for you?’

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

‘Poor Simon! Is it all horrible there?’

‘I loathe and detest it.’

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

There was a short silence.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Get into bed, you’re freezing.’

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve been wondering that,’ she said.

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

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

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

‘You could tell them, I suppose.’

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

‘Surely not all the masters are like that!’

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

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

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

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

There, she thought. It wasn’t a very interesting letter, but better than nothing. It occurred to her that she didn’t really know much about Simon as he had always been away at school and in the holidays had gone about with Christopher or Teddy. Now, with Christopher working on a farm in Kent, and Teddy having this week joined up with the RAF, there would be nobody for him in the coming holidays. His loneliness that had struck her so hard the evening after the funeral struck her again; it seemed awful that the only things she knew about him were those that made him miserable. Ordinarily, she would have talked to Dad about him, but now this felt difficult, if not impossible: one of the things that had happened in the last few weeks had been that her father seemed to have got further and further away from anyone until by the time her mother actually died, he seemed shipwrecked – marooned by grief. Still, there was always Clary, she thought, she was full of ideas – even if a good many of them were no good, their sheer quantity was exhilarating.

Clary was in the nursery giving Juliet her tea – a long and rather thankless task: crumbs of toast and treacle lay thickly on the tray of her high chair, on her feeder and little fat, active hands, and when Clary tried to post a morsel into her mouth, she turned her head dismissively. ‘Down now,’ she said again and again. She wanted to join Wills and Roly who were playing their favourite game called accidents with their toy cars. ‘Just have some milk, then,’ Clary said, and proffered the mug, but she simply seized it, turned it upside down onto her tray and then smacked the mess with the palms of her hands.

‘That’s very naughty, Jules. Give me a nappy or something, could you? I do think babies are the end. It’s no good; I’ll have to get a wet flannel or something. Watch her for me, would you?’

Polly sat by Juliet, but she watched Wills. She had seen how he had looked up from his cars when she opened the door and his face had changed from sudden hope to a lack of expression that was worse than obvious despair. I suppose he does that every time someone opens the door, she thought – how long will it go on? When Clary returned she went and sat on the floor beside him. He had lost interest in the game and sat now with two fingers in his mouth and his right hand pulling the lobe of his left ear; he did not look at her.

She had been thinking earlier that, really, her mother dying was perhaps worst for Simon because his particular loss had not seemed to be recognised by the family; now she wondered whether it was not worst of all for Wills who was not able to communicate his despair – who did not even understand what had happened to his mother. But then I don’t either – any more than Simon – and they just pretend that they do.

‘I think that all religions were invented to make people feel better about death,’ Clary remarked as they were going to bed that night. This – to Polly rather startling – statement came after they had had a long discussion about Simon’s unhappiness and how they could make his holidays better.

‘Do you really?’ She was amazed to find that she felt slightly shocked.

‘Yes. Yes, I do. The Red Indians with their happy hunting grounds – paradise or heaven, or having another go as someone else – I don’t know all the things they have invented, but I bet you that was why religions started in the first place. The fact that everyone dies in the end wouldn’t make any single person feel better about it. They’ve had to invent some kind of future.’

‘So you think that people just snuff out – like candles?’

‘Honestly, Poll, I don’t know. But the mere fact that people don’t talk about it shows how frightened they are. And they have awful phrases like “passed away”. Where the devil to? They don’t know. If they did they’d say.’

‘You don’t think then . . .’ she felt rather hesitant about the enormity of the suggestion, ‘you don’t think they actually do know, but it’s too awful to talk about?’

‘No, I don’t. Mind you, I wouldn’t trust our family a yard about that sort of thing. But people would have written about it. Think of Shakespeare and the undiscovered bourne and that being the respect that makes calamity of so long life. He knew far more than anyone else, and if he’d known he would have said.’

‘Yes, he would, wouldn’t he?’

‘Of course, he might have made that just what Hamlet thought, but people like Prospero – he’d have made him know if he’d known.’

‘He believed in hell, though,’ Polly pointed out. ‘And it’s a bit much to go in for one without the other.’

But Clary said loftily, ‘He was simply pandering to the fashionable view. I think hell was just a political way of getting people to do what you wanted.’

‘Clary, lots of quite serious people believed in it.’

‘People can be serious and wrong.’

‘I suppose so.’ She felt that this conversation had gone wrong several minutes ago.

‘Anyway,’ Clary said, tearing her rather toothless comb through her hair, ‘Shakespeare probably did believe in heaven. What about “Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest”? – that wretched Jules has got treacle into my hair – unless you think that was merely a courtly way of saying goodbye to your best friend.’

‘I don’t know. But I agree with you. I don’t think anyone else really does. And it has worried me rather. Lately.’ Her voice shook and she swallowed.

‘Poll, I’ve noticed something quite important about you so I want to say it.’

‘What?’ She felt defensive and suddenly extremely tired.

‘It’s about Aunt Syb. Your mother. All this week, you’ve been sad about her for her – and for your father, and Wills, and now for Simon. I know you mean all that because you are kind and much less selfish than me, but you haven’t at all just been sad for yourself. I know you are, but you aren’t letting yourself be because you think other people’s feelings are more important than your own. They aren’t. That’s all.’

For a moment Polly caught the grey eyes regarding her steadily in the dressing-table mirror, then Clary resumed tearing at her hair. She had opened her mouth to say that Clary didn’t understand what it was like for Wills or Simon – that Clary was wrong – before a warm tide of grief submerged any of that; she put her face in her hands and cried, for her own loss.

Clary stayed still without saying anything and then she got a face towel and sat opposite her on her own bed and simply waited until she had more or less stopped.

‘Better than about three handkerchiefs,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it funny how men have large ones and they hardly ever cry, and ours are only good for one dainty nose blow, and we cry far more than they do? Shall I make us some Bovril?’

‘In a minute. I spent the afternoon clearing up her things.’

‘I know. Aunt Rach told me. I didn’t offer to help, because I didn’t think you’d want anyone.’

‘I didn’t, but you aren’t anyone, Clary, at all.’ She saw Clary’s faint and sudden blush. Then, knowing that Clary always needed things of that kind to be said twice, she said, ‘If I’d wanted anyone, it would have been you.’

When Clary returned with the steaming mugs, they talked about quite practical things like how could they – and Simon – all stay with Archie in the holidays, when he only had two rooms and one bed.

‘Not that he’s asked us,’ Clary said, ‘but we want to be able to forestall any silly objections on account of room.’

‘We could sleep on his sofa – if he has one – and Simon could sleep in the bath.’

‘Or we could ask Archie to have Simon on his own, and then us at another time. Or you could go with just Simon,’ she added.

‘Surely you want to come?’

‘I could probably go some other time,’ Clary answered – a shade too carelessly, Polly thought. ‘Better not talk about it to anyone or Lydia and Neville will want to come as well.’

‘That’s out of the question. I’d rather go with you, though.’

‘I’ll ask Archie what he thinks would be best,’ Clary replied.

The atmosphere had changed again.

After that, she found herself crying quite often – nearly always at unexpected moments, which was difficult because she did not want the rest of the family to see her, but on the whole, she didn’t think they noticed. She and Clary both got awful colds, which helped, and lay in bed reading A Tale of Two Cities aloud to each other as they were doing the French Revolution with Miss Milliment. Aunt Rach arranged for her mother’s clothes to be sent to the Red Cross, and Tonbridge took them in the car. When her father had been away with Uncle Edward for a week, she began to worry about him, about whether he would come back feeling any less sad (but he couldn’t be, could he, in just a few days?) and, above all, about how to be with him.

‘You mustn’t,’ Clary said. ‘He will still be very sad, of course, but in the end, he’ll get over it. Men do. Look at my father.’

‘Do you mean you think he’ll marry someone else?’ The idea shocked her.

‘Don’t know, but he easily might. I should think remarrying probably runs in families – you know, like gout or being shortsighted.’

‘I don’t think our fathers are at all alike.’

‘Of course they aren’t completely. But in other ways they jolly well are. Think of their voices. And the way they keep changing their shoes all day because of their poor thin feet. But he probably won’t for ages. Poll, I wasn’t casting aspersions on him. I was just taking human nature into account. We can’t all be like Sydney Carton.’

‘I should hope not! There would be none of us left if we were.’

‘Oh, you mean if we all sacrificed our life for someone else. There’d be the someone else, silly.’

‘Not if we all did it . . .’ and they were into their game, founded on the rhetorical question that Ellen used constantly to ask Neville when he behaved badly at meals. ‘If everyone in the world was sick at the same time it would be very interesting. I should think we’d all drown,’ he had said after consideration, thereby, as Clary had pointed out, neatly making a nonsense of the whole notion. But almost as soon as they embarked upon playing it, they both – separately – recognised that it had lost its allure, their sallies were feeble and they no longer collapsed in giggles over them. ‘We’ve outgrown it as a game,’ Clary said sadly. ‘Now all we have to look forward to is being careful not to say it to anyone else, like Wills or Jules or Roly.’

‘There must be other things,’ she said, wondering what on earth they could be.

‘Of course there are. The end of the war and Dad coming back and being able to suit ourselves because we’ll be too old for them to boss us about and white bread and bananas and books not looking old when you buy them. And you’ll have your house, Poll – think of that!’

‘I do, sometimes,’ she answered. She sometimes wondered whether she had outgrown the house as well, without, so far as she could see, growing into anything else.