All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (5 page)

‘No, Miss Milliment. I’m doing photographic modelling – for magazines. You know – like
Vogue
.’ And Miss Milliment, who thought that magazines (excepting the Royal Geographic Society’s) were generally for people who found reading difficult, murmured that it must be most interesting.

‘Do they pay you?’ Villy had asked then, and Louise had answered – had almost retorted – ‘Of course. Three guineas a day. But when you’re freelance you never know how much work you’re going to get. I must go, I’m afraid. Dad has asked me to go to France with them. Two weeks, and he’s paying for everything. He’s taken a villa not far from Ventimiglia and there’s a beach.’

It was a careless parting shot. She can have no idea of how that makes me feel, Villy thought, as she lay sleepless, far into the night, struggling with bitterness and rage. Their honeymoon had been in Cassis, west along the coast, in those far-off post-war pre-war days.

Except for the difficulty of so much sex that she had neither wanted nor understood, it had been a golden time. Then there had been those skiing and sailing holidays with a mixture of family and friends. She had excelled at skiing, and was a good sailor. By then, she had learned to pretend about sex – always said it was lovely – and, incurious, he had seemed easily to believe her. Her pregnancies had also provided welcome relief, then the drab, anxious, interminable years of war when she had been incarcerated in Sussex, and he had been seeing to the defence of Hendon Aerodrome until the urgent need for timber had put him back in the firm. It was he who had made clear that their London house, which she had loved so much, had to be sold. It was he who, after the war, when she had thought that a good ordinary life together would at last return, had urged her to find a smaller house, and she had chosen this odd little place with only one upper floor that faced north and south so that only three of the rooms got sun . . . and then abandoned her in it. And for months, years, he had been carrying on with That Woman. Divorce had followed, which her mother would have considered unthinkable. And Louise had known about it and had never told her. Darling Roly, when she had told him, had promised, with tears streaming down his face, that he would never leave her. Teddy and Lydia had been shocked too; they had not been part of the conspiracy. But she saw little of Teddy and virtually nothing of Lydia, who had gone through an acting school and now had a job with a repertory company in the Midlands. It was a weekly rep, which meant, as Lydia explained in one of her rare, sprawling letters, that you performed one play while rehearsing play number two in the mornings, and learning your lines for play number three in bed at night. She said that it was very hard work, but she loved it and, no, she hadn’t the faintest idea when, if ever, she would get a holiday. Villy sent this daughter ten pounds each birthday and Christmas; she was grateful that she could feel natural, untainted love for her.

After Zoë’s telephone call about the Duchy, she went to tell Miss Milliment, who was in the sunny sitting room seated in her usual chair by the open French windows that looked out onto the garden. Here she read
The Times
every morning, and did the crossword, which she completed in less than half an hour. Usually she also spoiled
The Times
for Villy by telling her the stories that had struck her most. This morning, though, she had reverted to the unfortunate Ruth Ellis, arraigned last year for the murder of her lover. ‘I really do think, Viola, that whatever a person has done they should not be executed for it. It is one of our most uncivilised laws, don’t you agree?’

And Villy, not replying to this (people who murdered other people should surely not be allowed to get away with it), instead told her about the Duchy, ending with a bitter tirade about not being able to go to the funeral because of That Woman.

‘But you do not know that she will be there. Might it be possible to find out before you distress yourself so much?’

‘Well, Edward will certainly go.’

‘Yes, but she may not. Perhaps you could ask Louise or Teddy.’

‘I could ask Teddy, I suppose. Rupert has gone down to Home Place, and I don’t suppose anyone will know when the funeral is to be until after the weekend.’

‘Viola! My dear, I’m afraid I have a confession to make. I knocked over the cup of tea you so kindly brought me. I was asleep, and I have no idea why, but I thought it was the afternoon, and I was feeling for the switch of my bedside lamp and, of course, if it had been the afternoon, the tea would not have been there. I’m afraid I have not made a very good job of clearing it up, but in any case, it will dry during the day and I shall not mind it at all. But I felt I should tell you.’

A light rattling of the newspaper in her hands showed Villy that poor Miss Milliment was nervous. Her compassion for her companion, for the years of nasty landladies that she must have endured, filled her heart now with real feeling, and she put her arm round the bulky shoulders. ‘You mustn’t worry. Anybody can spill a cup of tea.’

In the bus later, on her way to the dreary office in Queen Anne Street, she realised that this was already the third episode of tea-spilling in a month.

DIANA AND EDWARD

‘Oh, darling! How awful for you! Poor Duchy!’

‘She had a very good life.’

‘Of course she did.’

‘Although people always say that, as though it makes everything all right.’

‘She didn’t suffer any pain, though, did she?’

‘Rachel said not, according to Hugh. Let’s have the other half, shall we?’

She walked across the room to pick up the cocktail shaker that stood, with a large array of drinks, on the ebony table. She was wearing a crêpe dress of an electric blue that careless people might have said matched her eyes.

‘But it doesn’t alter the fact that she’s gone – no longer there.’

‘Of course it doesn’t, my poor darling.’

As she bent down to refill his glass he could see the immensely comforting size of her breasts. ‘I’ll have to go down tomorrow.’

She was silent while he lit a cigarette. ‘Want to come with me?’

Diana seemed to consider. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Of course I’d love to, but I think Rachel should have you to herself.’

‘That’s what I love about you. You’re such an unselfish person. Well – one of the things.’

‘Also, we had promised to take Jamie out to lunch on Sunday. I don’t want to let him down.’

Jamie was in his last year at Eton, which Diana had persuaded Edward to pay for on the grounds that her other two sons had been there, and Jamie was actually his. He was now eighteen, very like his brothers in appearance, and showed no signs of being a Cazalet. What with him, Roly at Radley and Villy’s allowance (he had made the St John’s Wood house over to her and had set up a trust to pay her maintenance), he was pretty pushed, and had used up most of the money the Brig had left him. Diana had set her heart on renting a villa in the south of France, had invited her brother and his wife, so he had had to splash out on that, his only stipulation being that Louise should come with them – ‘My two favourite women,’ he had maddeningly said – and, although she knew that Louise disliked her as much as she disliked Louise, Diana had had to comply.

She had been married to Edward for just over five years, and they now lived in a large, neo-Georgian house in West Hampstead with a housekeeper, Mrs Atkinson, who occupied a flat on the top floor. There was also a cleaner, who came three times a week to do the housework, and so, for the first time in her life, Diana had no money worries and was free to do as she pleased. There had been one setback soon after they moved in and before they were married when Edward had been quite seriously ill after a minor operation; she had been afraid he might die before they were married, and that she would be back to widowhood with three boys, hostile in-laws, living on the pittance that an army pension provided (Angus’s parents had never forgiven her for living with a man she was not married to, a married man who had left his wife for her with the ensuing disgrace of a divorce).

All those thoughts made it sound as though she didn’t love Edward when of course she did. At the beginning she had thought of him with agony and intermittent delight, but as the affair settled to a rut of romantic assignations with no sign that the situation would ever change, she had recognised that excitement and uncertainty no longer satisfied her. She longed for security – a home rather than rented flats or cottages, a husband who earned enough to keep her and the boys in the manner to which her mother had taught her she should be accustomed. And there was Edward. Although, before she met him, she had heard that he had a reputation with women, she was pretty sure that once their affair had begun he’d remained faithful to her. ‘I’ve fallen for you,’ he had said. ‘Hook, line and sinker.’ And the less she felt about him, the more she encouraged the notion that theirs was a great romantic attachment which nothing could destroy.

Much of this was concealed, even from herself – dishonesty of this kind needs to begin at home, as it were – and once he had taken the step of leaving Villy for her, she had done everything in her power to make him feel she had been worth it. Strong Martinis were on hand the moment he came home from work; she encouraged him to talk about what sort of day he had had; Mrs Atkinson learned how to cook the game that he shot exactly as he liked it; she sympathised tactfully with him over the differences he was beginning to have with Hugh about how the firm should be run, and did what she could to ingratiate herself with his family. When he worried and complained about Villy refusing to allow Roland to meet her, she had explained that she entirely understood Villy’s attitude: that it was unwise to split Roland’s affections, and how, had she been in that situation, she would probably have done the same. She expertly skimmed this particular guilt off him with an ease that increased his need for her.

‘Darling! Of course you mustn’t let Jamie down.’ Did she detect some relief in his voice? Possibly, but it didn’t really matter.

LOUISE

‘What I can’t stand is when she looks me in the eye and starts a sentence “Quite frankly . . .” There’s absolutely nothing frank about her at all!’

Joseph Waring regarded her with amusement. Indignation became her, and he told her so. They were dining, as they often did, at L’Étoile in Charlotte Street, where the food was good and, by English standards, unusual and delicious. Louise, her blonde hair scraped back from her forehead and secured by a black velvet bow, wore a black dress that had a low round neck and short sleeves, both finished with scallops made of the same material. In it, she looked very young and ethereal but she had an appetite that never ceased to amaze him, and which was much approved of by the
patron
, who had one day suggested she might like to lunch there every day on the house – provided she was prepared to do it at the window table. ‘But I would feel like those women in Holland – you know, the tarts,’ she told Joseph, and blushed faintly at the very idea.

They had met at a party that Stella had taken her to. Stella had become a political journalist: she was an ardent Labour supporter and had been devastated when ‘stuffed-shirt Eden’ had won the election, ousting her beloved Attlee. She wrote regularly for the
Observer
and the
Manchester Guardian
and occasionally reviewed books for the
New Statesman
. She was popular and got asked, or got herself asked, to a great many parties and sometimes took Louise with her ‘to broaden her mind’. Louise privately thought Stella a bit of a fanatic, and Stella had derided Louise’s Torydom. ‘Of course you’ll vote for them: most Tories don’t have any political convictions at all – they simply vote the way their class always has.’ This silenced her because in her case it was true. Louise wasn’t interested in politics and her family – excepting Uncle Rupert – had always voted Conservative.

The party, which was large, seemed to have every kind of person in it. The room was thick with smoke and the steady oceanic sound of a great many people trying to make themselves heard. She had felt completely at sea, paralysed by a shyness that she now recognised always overcame her when she had to enter a room full of unknown people. Stella had been swept away by the current that always embraces those who know their way around, greeting friends, waving to colleagues, having her cigarette lit, laughing at something somebody said to her, managing to grab a glass of fruit juice (she did not drink), only turning back to Louise when she was practically out of sight . . .

‘I have the impression that you’re not enjoying yourself.’

‘No – I, well – no. I mean yes. I’m not enjoying this party.’

The man who had addressed her had nearly black hair and was wearing a dinner jacket.

‘Shall we go and have a much smaller party somewhere else? Give me your hand.’ And she found herself being led away, out of the hot, noisy room to the hall where the coat-racks were.

‘I haven’t got a coat.’

‘Neither have I.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’ve got a house in Regent’s Park that has some sandwiches in it. And a nice cold bottle of Krug. You can see that I’m not abducting you really.’

She hesitated. Regent’s Park was very near her flat. Stella might – indeed often did – bring friends from a party back to it. She was hungry. She was also intrigued. He was looking at her with frank admiration, but he was also waiting for her to choose. This last decided her.

‘Just for a bit.’

‘Hop in.’

They had been standing in the street beside a sleek dark grey car.