All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (21 page)

‘But you weren’t going to tell me, were you?’

‘I wasn’t going to tell you because it’s over, finished, done with.’

‘So all these weeks of lying don’t count for anything.’

‘They count, of course, to me. But I desperately didn’t want to upset you.’

‘Upset me!’ She tried a hard little laugh that turned into a sob. She wasn’t wearing her usual house clothes but the grey corduroy pinafore dress with a shirt of a paler grey. And she had brushed her hair. She must have been waiting all day to confront him, he realised, and she had clearly been crying a good deal. He felt a rush of pity for her. She had sent Bertie and Harriet away for the night so she had had hours alone with the bloody letter. He, more than anyone, knew what she had already suffered.

‘Dearest Clary – I know you may find it impossible to believe, but I do love you. I am so, so sorry that I have exposed you to all this. It’s my bloody carelessness—’

But she interrupted: ‘Upset! It’s not your bloody carelessness – it’s what you’ve done. You’ve fallen in love with someone else and lied about it. Surely you can see what that means . . .’

‘But you can see from the letter that I’m giving her up! You don’t seem to have taken that in.’

There was a pause, and then, with some difficulty, she said, ‘Being responsible, duty and all that, doesn’t change your heart. You are in love with her “incomparable beauty – a face that would have delighted Holbein”. You do love her.’

‘And I love you, dearest girl.’

‘There you go again! You cannot have two dearests.’ She picked a cigarette out of the nearly empty packet and lit it with shaking fingers.

‘It’s something I’ve discovered,’ he said, speaking awkwardly – everything he said seemed to have a double edge to it. ‘Actually, you can love two people. I didn’t know that until now.’

She met his eye as she answered steadily, ‘I couldn’t. I could never love two people at once. I don’t believe that.’

No, she would not. He realised then that she would want to know something desperately important to her, something that she would be too proud to ask. ‘You might like to know that I have never slept with Melanie. Nothing like that.’

He saw the tension in her shoulders relax a little, as she replied, ‘There isn’t anything “like that”.’

‘No,’ he agreed. ‘But I thought you might like to know.’ He wanted to take her in his arms, but she was not ready to be touched. Instead he said, ‘Shall we have a glass of wine?’

‘If you like.’

When he came back to the table with a bottle and glasses, she had packed the letter into its envelope. He poured the wine. ‘By the way, nobody knows anything at all about this.’

Much later, he said, ‘Why do we always sit at the kitchen table when we have a lovely studio looking onto our nice wild garden?’

‘It began when Bertie started walking. He was fascinated by your paints and pulled your palette down one day and did an extensive finger-painting all over our old sofa.’

‘You never told me that.’

(A faint smile.) ‘I didn’t dare.’

‘Bring your glass.’ He tucked the bottle under one arm and took her hand. ‘I’m leading you – I don’t want you to lose your way. You know what you’re like with maps in cars.’ He felt her hand trembling in his. He thought, I’m glad I love her so much.

They sat side by side but with a gap between them on the battered old red velvet
chaise longue
. The bottle and their glasses were perched upon his painting stool.

‘Well, at least we’ve got some daffodils in our garden.’

‘I don’t really like daffodils. They seem to me rather heartless flowers – except the very small timid ones.’

‘I’ll get you some of the cowardly little creatures to plant for next year.’

‘Next year. Oh.’ She glanced at him, then quickly looked away.’ Her poor face was ravaged by her prolonged weeping: unlike heroines in books, she had a sort of greyish white pallor, with a bright pink nose and her lovely eyes red-rimmed. Usually, he could have made her laugh about this, but not now. Now she wanted comfort, reassurance, and he was unsure how to give it. Time – she needed time.

‘What are we having for supper?’

There was a pause, and then she said, ‘I was trying to think. I’m afraid there isn’t anything. I was so busy packing the children off to Dad and Zoë – and I didn’t think . . . You might not have been coming back—’ Her eyes were filling with tears again, and again he realised, with fresh humility, how much she had been through, how much she did, in fact, love him.

Love, for Clary, had always been a wholehearted and serious matter. Losing her mother, then her father, Rupert, being missing all those war years, not just missing, presumed by the family to be dead: everyone had supposed that excepting her.

‘I could take you out to dinner,’ he said. ‘Would you like that?’ But she shook her head.

In the end, he went to the small Indian restaurant near Maida Vale tube station and got them chicken curry, dhal, rice, and some poppadoms that broke into pieces in their paper bag. During the walk, wait, and walk back, he decided a dozen times not to think about how Melanie was feeling, which made him – each time – think about her more.

She certainly knew that all was not well; she would be fearful, anxious and miserably imagining what the dreaded letter might contain.

He had addressed, sealed and stamped the letter – had had to ask Clary for a stamp, which she had produced without looking at him. (The letter was now safely posted.)

I’ve behaved like a shit to her, and I suppose that means in a way that I am one. Turning over a new leaf was so difficult because one never knew what would be on it. He thought again how glad he was that he loved Clary so much. At least he was sure of that. This made him think how completely awful it must be for husbands who fell in love with someone they weren’t married to and who didn’t love their wife in the first place. He couldn’t think long about that, but his incredible luck made him feel humble.

All very well, but supper wasn’t easy.

It began all right, because the children had rung up while he’d been out. They were fine, Clary said, except they were hell-bent on having a white rat – two white rats, like Rivers. ‘Georgie says it has changed his life having him. And we want our lives changed.’ They were seizing the telephone from each other in their eagerness to express the idea.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I’d think about it, and Bertie said, “That means you won’t do anything.” I remember how maddening I found that think-about-it stuff – it’s just a weak cop-out. The trouble is, Archie, that I don’t really like rats. In fact, I’m slightly afraid of them.’

She had said his name – a small step?

‘Why don’t we get them a kitten?’

‘Two kittens, they’ll want one each.’

‘Well – two. We could get them when we go to Home Place at Easter. Mr York, that nice farmer, is bound to have some.’

But after that, constraint set in. They were both trying to be normal, but the trouble with normal was that the moment you tried to be it, it wasn’t possible. In the end, bed had to be mentioned: they were both bone tired and longing for oblivion.

In bed, he told her he loved her, and she was still while he said it, but when he tried to kiss her face, she turned away and he only managed the side of her forehead.

He woke in the night because she was crying. He put an arm round her shoulders and soothed her awake. ‘Only a dream, my darling, just a sad dream.’ He felt her trembling – repeating the dream in her wakened mind as one does so often with nightmares. When she had finished, he pulled her close to him. ‘You are my dearest girl.’

And he knew she was better, because she murmured in a soft furry voice, ‘Buttering me up,’ and was instantly again asleep.

PART SIX

SUMMER–AUTUMN 1957

TEDDY

He had been very excited when Uncle Hugh had told him that he was to manage the Southampton wharf and mill. Excited and – although he did not admit it to anyone – very nervous. In London he had always had Dad to ask about things; now there would only be a man called Hector McIver, and although he had been working at the firm for what seemed for ever, he still felt a bit awkward asking an employee – not even on the board – for help.

Add to this the fast-discovered fact that poor-sighted McIver was also extremely deaf – you really had to face him and shout. He spoke so quietly and, with a Glaswegian accent, that Teddy had to repeat nearly everything he said. He was courteous, hard-working, and he worshipped Teddy’s father, which made a good start. He found Teddy lodgings in a house kept by a naval widow, who was prepared to make his breakfast and supper and see to his laundry, all for six pounds a week. This was a piece of luck for Teddy, because although his salary had been increased, he could no longer count on meals with the family, and also they had taken his car, which they’d said he would no longer need. He felt injured by that: it made a huge difference to finding a girl, and having any outdoor fun with her if he did. He determined to save up for one: you could get quite a decent car for five hundred quid. He could get to the wharf by bus or foot and he was expected to be in his office by nine when a Miss Sharples would come in with his mail and, each week when it came out, the
Timber Trades Journal.
He was supposed to read this from cover to cover, and it proved to be diabolically dull. As a result, he did not learn very much from it. Outside, he was struggling to identify and remember the exotic names of the hardwoods that were imported largely to Southampton – pyinkado, Andaman padauk, the endless mass of boxwood, rosewood (nothing to do with roses), laurel, acacia, walnut, lime, cherry, elm, oak of varying kinds, chestnut, ash – not to mention softwoods that arrived in regular batches, and had to be unloaded, then floated in the river until space could be found for them in and around the sawmill. Miss Sharples brought him mail that contained orders, often couched in – to him – unintelligible language. Then there were a rising number of complaints that orders had not arrived on time, or were not supplied in the quantity asked for, and in some cases simply the wrong timber, or no timber at all.

‘We really don’t have the requisite number of lorries, Mr Teddy. That is our quandary. Perhaps you could have a word with your father about that.’ Costs were rising all the time, and orders were not keeping pace with them. Teddy found a great deal of it tedious. And when he thought about the lives that his father and uncles enjoyed, he felt that something was wrong somewhere. He had taken to skipping Mrs Malton’s suppers: they generally consisted of grey oily mince with a great deal of lumpy potato, followed by tinned fruit and custard. He tried several pubs and settled on one that was in walking distance of Commodore Villa – the House of Mince he had come to call it: his hostess minced as much as she made it.

The pub had been half-heartedly made to look old-fashioned, with horse brasses and a large stone fireplace piled with logs that were never lit and sconces that had small shades covered with sailing ships. However, just as he was going to give it up, it proved to have one great asset: a buxom young barmaid, who wore rather carelessly buttoned shirts under her apron, bewitching black stockings and pointed high-heeled shoes. She had red hair that was a riot of curls, a milk-and-roses complexion, and a soft Irish voice that enchanted him. They started to have conversations while she drew his beer, frequently stopping to serve other customers, he soon realised, to prolong them.

She had been in England only for a month, she said; came from Cork where her family had a small farm that her father managed with her uncle but they didn’t hit it off, and her mam was worn out with the children and the fights on Saturday nights. As soon as she could, she had got away to earn some money and see the world. She was eighteen, she said, but later confessed to being a year younger. A friend had told her that work was to be had in pubs and clubs, especially in ports, so she had come over with four pounds and a bed with her friend Louie.

‘Here I am, so.’

He asked her name. She was Ellen. He asked her if she would come out with him.