All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (41 page)

‘You have the most beautiful speaking eyes that I have ever seen.’ He picked up her hand and kissed it. ‘Eat your oysters,’ he said. ‘Or we shall spoil our Dover sole.’

Eating steadied her. ‘Do you have the same lunch every day?’ she asked. She had noticed that there had been no menu and no ordering.

‘When I come here, I do. Of course I presumed that you like fish.’

She nodded. ‘But I’m not very hungry.’

‘That is a very good sign.’

‘Of what?’

He looked at her with so much affection that she felt faint. ‘For me, love always makes me fiendishly hungry.’ He had finished his oysters and now he laid two fingers caressingly against her cheek. ‘Eat, my darling Clarissa, to keep up your strength.’

She remembered two things at once: Lydia saying he would be the new fiend, and his laying his fingers against her cheek when they had first met, and Clary felt herself blushing. His affection trapped her more than anything he said or did.

‘You have the most enchanting blush,’ he said. ‘A heroine’s blush.’

‘What are the other kinds?’ She was actually proud of this sophisticated response.

‘Oh, you know, people talk about blushing to the roots of their hair, and looking as though they have just played fifteen games of squash – sweaty stuff, adding up to a general shortage of romance. But not you, sweet Clarissa – you are not like that, at all.’

The fish arrived.

He said they would have to eat quickly because of getting back to the theatre on time. In the taxi on their way back, he put an arm round her waist, turned her towards him and kissed her. A few seconds of panic, as one about to drown, assailed her, and then the extraordinary sense of freedom, as she sank blissfully into this new experience that assuaged her wildest dreams: she locked her hands behind his neck and kissed him back until the kisses became one.

It was he who parted them, who paid the driver and said he would go back through the front of the theatre, and that she should go to the stage door. ‘And you will be able to put your hair up again, and it will be our secret. I’ll meet you at the same corner with a cab when we finish rehearsal, and we’ll go to my hotel where there is a very nice quiet bar.’ He said all this very fast, then left her collecting hairpins from the cab seat.

They were rehearsing the two final scenes of the play: when Anthony has to tell Marigold that they must part, and then his final scene with Martha, his wife.

They were playing on the stage now, and she sat, by herself, in the darkened stalls. She needed to be alone. Halfway through that interminable afternoon, she rang Archie to tell him she would be late, and could he give the children supper?

‘How late?’

‘I’m not sure. Have supper with the children. I’ll probably get a sandwich here, with the cast.’

‘OK. Time for a chat?’

‘’Fraid not. You are angelic to do the children.’

‘Angels usually come in groups. See you soon.’

If one was behaving as she was now, telling lies about it seemed like nothing, she told herself. But she had to make herself watch those last scenes, and the short coda that followed them, where the kiss-and-make-friends scenario did not actually work, where the permanent damage done to all three became apparent. She had done this by placing each character on a chair downstage while a record player played what people who didn’t know about them thought. It was Marigold’s turn first. A flurry of voices: ‘You’ll get over it’; ‘You’ve been working too hard’; ‘Staying up till all hours, all you need is a little fresh country air – put the roses back in your cheeks’; ‘You’ll have to learn about men, dear – they can be very trying’; ‘She needs a nice, steady young man – none of this art nonsense. Somebody with a good job and prospects.’ Marigold starts up from the chair and runs off the stage. Then Clary began to watch Martha – herself – but could not bear it and fled to one of the unused dressing rooms.

Here, she was confronted by a realisation: what the whole thing must have been like for Archie, something she believed she had thought about enough to understand it. But now, in the throes of her passion for Quentin, she realised she had dismissed it as something that could be dealt with by a little willpower. She remembered, with shame, that she had even been impatient with him, that in her own unhappiness she had belittled his.

She knew that Quentin’s arrangement for them to go to the ‘nice, quiet bar’ at his hotel was only the prelude to being seduced. And she had been aching for it. She had not thought of Archie at all: she had simply longed for Quentin to make love to her, to be in love with her, to fuck her until she wept.

Archie must have felt something like this, but he had not succumbed to bedding Melanie. He had told her that, and Clary had believed him. But then, to her, it had seemed the very least he could do. Now she recognised that ‘the very least’ was a contemptuous and patronising response. It was why most people didn’t want to do the least if they could help it. Sacrifices, if they are known to another person, need acknowledgement and support – gratitude, even. But self-pity breeds a ruthlessness that pre-empts any of that. And she had certainly been sorry for herself, had played the betrayed wife who would never have behaved as he had.

And here she was, behaving even worse, without a thought for the consequences. She must not do it.

But before she could begin to deal with renunciation, she had to look at the plot. She was already halfway into the trap, and how to get out of it without upsetting Quentin’s ego was a serious problem. His vanity was involved: two women had turned him down, and it was clear he felt that, the third time, all was going his way. He would be angry, he might even leave the cast in a tantrum but, no, he wanted the part, he almost certainly would not go to such lengths. But because of the play, they would perforce have to go on seeing each other -awful thought. She realised then that she was – subconsciously, perhaps – trying to make a case for going ahead this evening, then writing him a letter saying that her husband had found out and was threatening both of them. Shame again. That would be the worst of both worlds and utterly despicable.

Perhaps she could simply tell Quentin the truth. That she loved Archie, had never been unfaithful to him, but that she had been momentarily swept away and flattered by his attention to her. But she was pretty sure that truth, if uncomfortable, was a foreign language to him; he would not understand a word of it; he would simply redouble his efforts to seduce her (horrible excitement at such a thought occurred and had to be quenched). So she passed the seemingly interminable afternoon.

‘What’s the matter, darling? You’re nervous, aren’t you? Nothing escapes me. But you don’t need to be, my little one.’ And he laid two fingers against her cheek caressingly.

‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Drink some of your nice champagne first, then.’ And he smiled indulgently.

She took a swig – for courage. ‘I’m afraid you’re going to be angry at what I’ve got to say.’

‘I could never be angry with you.’

So then she told him. That her husband had found out about them; he was an exceedingly jealous man, and he was furious, was threatening to beat him up. He had made her promise to break things off – at once – or he would see to it that she would suffer as much as he. She watched his face darken, become wary.

‘How the devil did he find out? You must have told him!’ His eyes were hard, like marbles.

‘No! Of course I didn’t tell him. But he found a picture of you that I kept in my purse. He was suspicious anyway because of my coming to so many rehearsals – we’d had a row about my neglecting the children. I couldn’t help it, Quentin, really I couldn’t!’ Her voice was trembling because she was frightened, really afraid that he would not believe her . . . She had seen how he had reacted to the idea of being beaten up, and when she mentioned that a second time, he flinched. ‘The last time he did that, the wretched man had to go to hospital to be stitched up.’

‘I can’t think why you didn’t tell me any of this before.’ He was still angrily accusing, but she could see he was also frightened.

‘It’s all my fault!’ she exclaimed. ‘I know it is. But I wasn’t used to a glamorous and famous man being attracted to me. It was all too much. You swept me off my feet, and of course I had no idea that he would find out.’ Relief, the feeling that she was nearly off the hook, made it easy for her to burst into tears, making no effort to be discreet about the scene.

He looked uneasily round the bar – it was filling up now with drinkers – and handed her the purple silk handkerchief he had used in rehearsal with Marigold and eyed her with anxious distaste as she used it. ‘I think you’d better be off,’ he said, ‘and don’t you dare tell that husband of yours that I made a pass at you. Savvy?’

‘Oh – I promise I won’t.’ Clary was shaking so much that getting to her feet was difficult, but she managed it. She took one last look at him: no longer the angry lover in any way, he had reverted to the cocky, spoiled child, only this time he had been thwarted, which made him even more unlikeable. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, then ran out of the bar and into the street.

Three hours later, Archie sat alone at the kitchen table. She had told him everything he hadn’t wanted to hear. Perhaps I’d have felt worse if she hadn’t, he thought. She had kept saying that now she really understood what he had gone through in giving up Melanie, but this had not only forced him to go through what it had felt like again, it had engendered a shock of such raging jealousy that he had wanted to beat that shabby little actor within an inch of his life. The idea that she had even wanted to go to bed with anyone else was too much. He had never imagined her being such a person and found it unbearable: her penitence, her desperate efforts to equate their situation simply hammered it home. If she had really wanted this little worm, it must have diminished her feelings for him and this opened up an abyss of anxiety in which the difference in their ages became a stark fact. He had loved and married her, but had never been able to give her the fun and pleasure that her youth deserved. Perhaps he had never been the lover she should have had . . .

Now he was exhausted by the violence of his emotions, had reached the point where all good memories are swallowed whole and disappear while bad ones recur and loom to be tasted again and again.

This would not do. He suddenly remembered Bertie, aged four, setting fire to a wastepaper basket because he had made some sausages out of Plasticine and wanted to cook them, and how he had arrived on the scene just too late to rescue his roll of special rag paper used for landscape painting but in time for him to chuck the basket into the kitchen sink and douse it. Of course he had been cross with Bertie, but in no time he was cuddling him, wiping his sooty tears and loving him just as much as ever. I love her like that, he thought, and felt an uncertain peace descend upon him. She’s had a shock, poor darling, and I must help her over it.

PART NINE

AUTUMN 1958

EDWARD AND HUGH

They had, at last, agreed upon one thing, Edward reflected, as he settled back in his Bentley and let McNaughton take him home. They had stopped, as they always did, for the news-vendor at the Strand end of Waterloo Bridge, and exchanged the right coins for an
Evening Standard
thrust through the driver’s window.