All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (12 page)

Her face, which had never known any emollient, had settled to a weatherbeaten uniformity: she looked as though she had spent much of her life in a high wind, or at sea. Only her lively pale brown eyes had never changed, and when she smiled, she charmed.

‘It would be so sad for the children if we gave up the house.’ This was the kind of thing Rachel said when she wanted to stop talking about it.

They had finished lunch, and Sid had lit their cigarettes with the pretty tortoiseshell lighter that Rachel had given her for her last birthday. ‘You know what I’d like, darling.’

Rachel had been lying back in her basket chair, but now sat up. ‘What?’

‘I’d like to take you away somewhere for a quiet holiday. The Lake District, or anywhere you would like to go.’ Then she added, with some cunning, ‘I feel the need for something of the sort. To throw off this bug for good and all.’

She saw that this was having some effect. A flurry of little frowns puckered Rachel’s face; she bit her lip and looked at her anxiously. ‘How awful! Of course we must have a holiday – you need one. It really is bad to have a reputation for thinking of others and then not doing anything about it.’ She actually nearly smiled as she said that. ‘Where would you like to go, my darling?’

Sid wanted to get up and throw her arms round Rachel, but at that moment Eileen appeared with the trolley to remove the lunch.

‘That was delicious,’ Rachel said. ‘Will you tell Mrs Tonbridge?’ And Eileen said that she would. ‘I ought to find out when the children want to come before we make any plans.’

Oh, Lord! Sid thought. If I’m not careful she’ll say she can’t go because of the family. ‘They always come with parents,’ she said carefully, ‘and they know the whole place inside and out. I’m sure you could leave it to them to sort things out.’

‘Well, I’ll have to ask them.’

‘Of course you will. And now, my dearest, it’s time for you to have a snooze. Do you want it out here, or do you want to go to bed?’

‘I think out here.’

When Sid had fetched the rug and tucked her up, Rachel said, ‘We need to pick the sweet peas. You haven’t forgotten?’ Every evening, since her mother’s burial, Rachel had picked a fresh bunch of the Duchy’s favourite flowers and taken them to her grave.

‘Of course I haven’t. We’ll pick them after tea and I’ll come with you.’ She stooped to kiss Rachel’s forehead. ‘I’m for my bed. I’ll wake you at teatime.’

I’m almost back to square one, Sid thought sadly. She had spent one night in bed with Rachel during the last week, and Rachel had clung to her and wept and sobbed in her arms, until, eventually, she had cried herself out and fallen asleep. Physical contact of any other kind had been clearly out of the question.

When we go away, she thought, if we go away, things will get back to how they were before. It is simply a question of patience and love. Although why either of those things should be regarded as simple was not clear to her at all.

POLLY AND GERALD

‘If we sold another picture, we could.’

‘We can’t keep selling pictures.’ His newly filled pipe had gone out, and he examined it despondently.

‘We don’t keep selling them. We’ve only sold six, one for each of the children and three to make our bit of the house comfortable. You wanted to give each of the children the proceeds of a Turner, and we needed to make the house OK to live in. But none of that means any income. If we did up one or two of the big reception rooms, we could do weddings and birthday parties.’

He muttered something about not wanting people tramping all over the house, and she simply looked at him and started laughing, so he laughed as well.

‘Oh, Poll! How do you put up with me? Of course they wouldn’t be tramping, and it wouldn’t be all over the house. But do you honestly think that people would want to have their wedding party here?’

‘Yes. Most people hire somewhere for that. I’ve made a rough plan of what we’d need to do.’

‘You have? You’ve thought it all out. Darling, you are a marvel. How do you manage it?’

‘Well, with Nan hounding me to put my feet up every day, it was something to do.’

She was lying on the yellow sofa, wearing her peacock-blue kaftan with her small white bare feet crossed at the ankles. It was evening and the room was suffused with violet shadowy light, excepting the lamp at her end of the sofa, which illuminated her hair. She looked, he thought, like a charming French painting.

‘I’ll just read you what I thought and you say what you think. We could use the big drawing room and the old library that leads off it for receptions. The old morning room could be turned into a kitchen or at least somewhere for the caterers to put their stuff. The dining room could have all the food and drink in it. We’d have to put some lavatories in, but if we do them on the north side, that fits with the plumbing. The guests could come in through the old front door. That’s about it, really, but of course we’d have to get Mr Cossey to come and see what it would cost. What do you think?’

Of course he thought it was an amazing idea, but he still wasn’t sure how many people would actually want to hire the place and what he and Polly might charge. Also, what about a car park, and facilities for the bride to change before going away?

They could park in the forecourt, she said, but he was quite right about having a place for the bride to change. ‘We might be able to use that funny little room where Nan gave us our first lunch.’

‘Supposing by a staggering chance that it’s not raining or icy cold, won’t they want to have drinks, et cetera, outside?’

‘Oh dear, of course they would. But the garden’s a wreck on that side of the house. We’d have to sort all that.’ She sighed, then yawned.

‘It’s time for bed,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put a cloth on the parrot’s cage.’ He had once called her pretty Polly and she had said she certainly wasn’t a parrot any more than he was a frog.

He helped her off the sofa and they went upstairs holding hands.

‘I warn you, I’m getting fatter by the day.’

‘Of course you are. We want a full-grown baby . . .’

Later, when they were lying side by side, he murmured, ‘The parrot and the frog. It sounds like some ghastly craft shop kept by amateurs. Or a horribly twee story for kiddiwinks.’

‘But it’s all right for us – so long as it’s private.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘All the best things about us are private.’ He put his hand on her neck and turned her to face him. ‘I’ve just thought of another private thing. How would you feel about that?’

‘Happy to oblige.’

But when he had finished kissing her, he said, ‘No – not tonight, Josephine. You’re whacked. You needn’t be so accommodating, sweetheart. I love you quite enough to be happy simply to have middle mornings with you.’

‘Oh, I do hope not. After a month or two of that, I should begin to feel rather left out.’

‘Spoons?’

‘Spoons.’

She turned on her side away from him and he put an arm round her. They went to sleep holding hands.

HUGH AND JEMIMA

‘She’s agreed to divorce him. Apparently, she agreed over a year ago, and it’s reached the decree absolute. And he’s said nothing about it.’

‘I suppose he just thought that you would try to argue him out of it. After all, Polly said that she’s had two of his children. You can’t really blame her for wanting to be married to their father.’

They were having supper on the small terrace outside the basement kitchen. Jemima’s boys, Henry and Tom, were playing Monopoly in the drawing room, and Laura had been put to bed. An afternoon at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens ‘helping’ Tom and Henry sail their boats had over-tired her, and she had cried at tea owing to an absence of Marmite sandwiches. But Marmite, to Jemima, smacked too much of the years of rationing, and she always tried to make the children’s teas more varied and nourishing. The boys ate everything and always wanted more, like happy dogs, she thought, but Laura liked things to stay as they had always been, with the disastrous exception of the Kit-E-Kat: Laura adored Riley, the cat that Hugh had bought her, and was found trying to feed him and eating all the bits he scorned.

‘I really love his food,’ she had said, licking her greasy fingers, which she then wiped on her spattered frock.

‘How did you stop her?’ Hugh had said, laughing. Everything his daughter did amused and delighted him.

‘I told her that it was very unkind to Riley. I said he had to have special food because of his fur. She stopped after that but, as usual, she had the last word.’

‘Which was?’

‘Oh, that she wouldn’t at all mind growing fur all over her body and then she wouldn’t have to wear clothes.’

‘She’d make a wonderful cat.’

‘I told her you would be miserable if she turned into one.’

Why are we having a light-hearted conversation? Jemima thought, as she removed the plates of fish and salad and fetched the raspberries. I know his head is bad, and he’s awfully upset about Edward and worried about Simon not wanting to be in the firm – not seeming to want anything – and, of course, and probably worst of all, his mother dying. For a moment she thought of the funeral – the church full of flowers, and practically all the family, and Myra Hess coming, quite unexpectedly, to play ‘Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring’ on the awful little upright piano. That was almost the best part; all the Duchy’s children had been so touched and delighted.

Afterwards, they’d all gone back to Home Place where Mrs Tonbridge had made a wonderful spread before attending the service, and an atmosphere of wary jollity had been upheld. All three brothers had made little eulogies in the church. It had been a good send-off. The smaller grandchildren had been left at Home Place – in Polly’s case, at home with her husband. But Teddy and Simon, Louise, Clary and Archie, with Harriet and Bertie, who had had many happy holidays thanks to the Duchy, Zoë with Juliet, Lydia, who had managed a day off from her repertory company, had all come. Only Roland had been absent, as Villy had refused her invitation on the grounds that she didn’t want to see Edward, and she wouldn’t let Roland go without her. Really, Jemima now considered, she had been afraid of meeting Diana, who had mercifully stayed away.

It was odd, she thought, how being content – no, happy – with her own life (Hugh was the most caring and loving husband anyone could have) made her anxious about everyone else. No, that wasn’t – as most things are not – entirely true: her boys (her twins) had accepted the new situation with astonishing ease, no jealousy of their new stepfather, no discomfort about no longer being the centre of her life. They had relished having a father, in fact, and he had been a very good one. They had also been resigned to Laura, first a boring baby and chronically a girl. ‘I suppose, Mum, there’s no hope that she might change – you know, grow into being a boy?’ But, disabused of this idea, they had settled down to her being endlessly rotten at catching a ball, having to be read the same soppy stories again and again, and not really understanding the rules of Monopoly or Racing Demon. They were certainly helped in this by her total, uncritical admiration for everything they did.

No, it was Simon she worried about. He was thirty now, but in many ways he seemed older than that. He had always been withdrawn, silent most of the time, an onlooker. He seemed not to have made any friends at either of the schools Hugh had sent him to or after he had left, and his dutiful letters home told them nothing. Apparently his school reports had been blandly noncommittal, excepting for his music master, who said that he had a talent to which he should pay more attention. Recently he had expressed a wish to stay with Polly – the only person, she had noticed, at the funeral to whom he seemed visibly attached. So that had been arranged and he had stayed almost a month with her.

Then he had asked if he might spend a week at Home Place, and Rachel had said of course he could. ‘After all, it has been his home for most of his life,’ she’d added. But he must have heard talk of the house being given up now and Jemima guessed that this must disturb him.

She wouldn’t talk to Hugh about it this evening: it would only upset him even more. But when she had finally assembled the tray with the fruit and the cheese, Hugh said that he was getting bitten by midges or something, could they finish the meal indoors?

He helped her as much as he could, clearing the supper table (it was astonishing what he could do with one hand), and they settled in the kitchen in a peaceable silence, broken by his suddenly asking whether she wanted another baby. At the same moment she became aware of the twins standing on the bottom step of the basement stairs.

‘We came down very quietly so as not to frighten you,’ Tom said, not meaning it at all.

‘It’s time you were in bed.’

‘We know that. The thing is we don’t think we’ll sleep much as we’re so hungry.’ Henry smiled engagingly.

‘You had an enormous supper.’

‘We had a perfectly ordinary supper ages ago. You shouldn’t exaggerate, Mum. Anyhow, now we’re both starving.’

‘It was only fish pie, and we don’t count fish much as food.’

‘And raspberries and cream are jolly nice, but you can’t count fruit as real food either.’