Marking Time (18 page)

When all that was done, Aunt Rach said, ‘Darling, of course she doesn’t hate you. But you must remember, she’s having a difficult time with your dad away. Married people are
meant to be with each other, and when they can’t be it is often harder for the woman because she is left at home and doesn’t know what is happening to her husband. You must try and
understand that. When people get as old as you, they do begin to realise that their parents are not just their parents, but people, with troubles of their own. But I expect you are noticing
that.’

And Louise, who hadn’t been at all, said yes, she did see. And she had tried to think about them like that, and now, as she fastened the cream silk shirt that Aunt Rach had
made
for her, she thought that it must be pretty rotten for her mother to have
her
mother practically going off her head and having to be taken to a nursing home. And living practically on her
own at Lansdowne Road never knowing when Dad would get leave, which didn’t seem to happen very often – her father was organising the defence of an aerodrome at Hendon. He had only spent
two days with them at Christmas, which was better than Uncle Rupert, though, who hadn’t got leave from the Navy at all.

She enjoyed the concert more than any she had ever been to. This was partly, she thought, because she
knew
the pianist (at least, she’d had lunch with him), and partly because,
the Duke’s hall being full of parents and relatives and friends of the performers, there was an unusual air of excitement and it was full.

There was an overture, and then a pause while the piano was moved into position and then the conductor returned with Peter, looking almost swamped by his tail coat. It was the third concerto of
Rachmaninoff – the one with the amazingly long and mysterious opening melody. The moment he began to play, Peter seemed transformed. At lunch he really had not looked as though he had such
powers – of technique, of rapt attention to the music as a whole. She felt slightly in awe of him after that.

Next day they went shopping.

‘Do you see your parents as people?’ she asked Stella.

‘Sometimes when they’re with other people, I do. Not much when I’m alone with them, though. But that’s because they
like
being parents so much. They don’t
seem to notice my age, at all.’

‘But don’t you notice what they’re like with each other?’

‘Yes, but their relationship is playing mothers and fathers. That’s what they do with each other all the time.’

‘A pretty poor look-out for them when you and Peter are completely grown up.’

‘It won’t make the slightest difference. Even Aunt Anna concentrates now on being an aunt.’

‘Has she always lived with you?’

‘Good Lord, no. She came to stay one summer; her husband couldn’t come with her for some reason – Uncle Louis is a lawyer in Munich – and then she got a telegram from him
just saying, “Don’t come back.” And then she was going to all the same, but he rang up my father and after that my father said she must do as she was told.’

‘So she’s been here ever since last summer?’

‘Since the summer before that. It’s awful for her, because her daughter got married that year, and now she’s had a baby, and Aunt Anna has never seen it.’

‘But
why
?’

‘My father knows why, but he won’t talk about it. He’s been trying to get Uncle Louis here, but so far no luck. She cooks for us because she hasn’t got any money, and
Father says it’s good for her to have a lot to do.’

‘It doesn’t sound as though he’s trying very hard to come here. Your uncle, I mean.’

Stella began to deny this, but then bit her lip and was silent.

‘You don’t want to talk about it?’

‘How brilliant of you! I do not.’

‘I don’t mind.’ She minded Stella’s sarcasm very much.

They were on top of a bus, in front, on their way to Sloane Square and Peter Jones. Louise felt that the expedition was going to be spoiled if they didn’t make it up before they got there.
Just as she was thinking this, Stella laid a hand on her knee and said, ‘Sorry! I didn’t mean to be beastly. The main reason he doesn’t come is that he has parents – awfully
old – and a sister who looks after them. See? Now, what are we going to buy?’

And they reverted to a conversation that had been recurring for some weeks now. They could only buy one decent garment each and had been measuring themselves against the bedroom door at school
all the term to see if they had stopped growing, and Stella had, but Louise had not.

‘You could buy a skirt if it had a decent hem.’

‘They don’t nowadays.’ Louise thought of clothes when she’d been a child, frocks with enormous hems, and even bodices that would let out for when you grew. ‘I
wouldn’t mind a nice jacket that would go with everything.’

‘We’ll go over the whole shop first before we buy anything.’

They were so long in the shop that Stella had to ring home to explain that they would not be back to lunch. It was clear that she dreaded doing this, but luckily she got Aunt Anna. The
conversation was conducted in German, so Louise did not know until afterwards that Stella had said they had met a school friend and her mother, who insisted on them going back to their house for
lunch. ‘So now we won’t get any lunch unless we buy some,’ Stella said when she had finished. They were both quite hungry, but neither wished to spend their precious allowance on
food. ‘And Pappy will give us a wonderful dinner,’ Stella said. The shopping took so long because they could not make up their minds, and were scrupulously fair about letting whoever
was trying on try on as much as they liked. In the end, Louise bought a light woollen dress the colour of pale green leaves, and Stella bought a blazer with brass buttons. And then Louise decided
that, after all, she would buy the pair of deep terracotta linen trousers she had found earlier that were only two pounds as they were left over from the winter sale. ‘They’re Daks,
from Simpson’s,’ Louise said proudly. She did look very nice in them, Stella thought enviously.
Her
father would have a fit if he saw them: he would not countenance any woman
in trousers. When she said this, Louise said that her mother would think they were ridiculous too, but they were extremely suitable for someone who was going to be an actress. Stella then decided
to buy the shoes she had seen that she longed for – scarlet sandals with huge cork wedges. ‘
They
won’t go down well at home,’ she said. By now extremely hungry,
they bought half a pound of Rowntrees’ Motoring Chocolate and ate it in the buses on the way home.

‘What a heavenly outing. You’re the best person in the world to go shopping with, Louise.’

Louise, flushed with pleasure at being so appreciated, answered, ‘So are you.’

Going back to the flat was like entering a sort of foreign cave, Louise thought – it seemed so dark and mysterious, with its gilded mirrors and glinting pieces of coloured glass from the
little Venetian chandeliers with small candle bulbs that spasmodically lit the long passage. Scents of cinnamon, sugar and vinegar, and Mrs Rose’s scent had almost to be brushed aside by
their movements; the airy, rocking sound of Schumann’s
Papillon
came from the drawing room.

‘Pappy is out!’ Stella announced. Louise could not imagine how she knew this, but her glee and relief were evident. ‘We have to show my mother what we have bought.’

‘Everything?’

‘As Pappy is out, I think everything. She adores clothes.’

Mrs Rose was lying on the sofa draped in a black silk shawl embroidered with brightly coloured unlikely flowers. It had an immensely long silk fringe that kept catching in everything – her
long earrings, the kind that most people would only wear in the evenings, Louise thought, the rings on her fingers, the braid edging the sofa and even the spine of the book she was reading. She put
her finger on her lips, and then said, very quietly, ‘Your father is out.’ There was the same kind of gleeful conspiracy in her voice as there had been in Stella’s. ‘And
what did your friend give you for lunch?’

‘Oh – some kind of fish pie – nothing wonderful. And bread and butter pudding.’ She knelt by her mother, threw her arms round her, gave her several kisses and turned the
book from her hands. ‘Rilke again! You must know him by heart!’

Peter stopped playing. ‘And we had hare and Aunt Anna’s red cabbage. And then those pancakes with quince,’ he said. ‘Come on – let’s see what you’ve
bought.’

‘We will have a dress show,’ Mrs Rose said.

‘We haven’t bought all
that
much.’

‘If your mother doesn’t like you to wear trousers, they won’t like me in them,’ Louise said as she pulled the green woollen dress over her head.

‘That’s different. Anyway, it’s my father who doesn’t like that sort of thing. Mutti is far more broad-minded.’

‘You go first.’

‘No, you must – you’re the guest.’

Afterwards Louise thought how extraordinarily different the Roses were from her family. The idea of parading in clothes after a shopping expedition in front of her family – and
particularly her
mother
– made her want to laugh, only she didn’t laugh. About the only person in the family with whom one could possibly do that would be Aunt Zoë, whom
she knew was privately criticised for taking clothes and her appearance so seriously. Mrs Rose had both looked at and then examined each item: she had said, ‘
Very
pretty’ about
the green dress; she had admired Stella’s jacket; she was enigmatic about the trousers. She said that she did not like Stella’s red shoes, but that she would have bought them at
Stella’s age. Peter’s contribution was to play snatches of what he clearly thought were wittily appropriate pieces of music: ‘Greensleeves’ and the ‘Marche
Militaire’ for Louise, Chopin and Offenbach for his sister.

Then everybody dispersed for serious rests before dressing for the theatre, which, Louise discovered to her delight, was to be
Rebecca
, with Celia Johnson and Owen Nares. ‘And
supper at the Savoy afterwards,’ Peter said. ‘I hope you girls didn’t have too much lunch.’

‘Not too much,’ Stella replied. When all was quiet, she sneaked off to the kitchen and got some gingernuts and milk for them. They lay and read the books they had given each other,
and tried to make the biscuits last.

On her bed beside Stella she thought how lucky she was and how the war didn’t seem to be spoiling anything. ‘One of the things I like best about friendship,’ she said,
‘is just doing whatever you want to do with the other person there, but you don’t have to talk to them.’

Stella didn’t reply, and Louise saw that she was asleep. She put out her hand and touched the wonderfully soft dark hair. ‘I love you,’ she said but not aloud. It was wonderful
to be free; to be able to leave her home, to start to find out about other people who were not her family. Anything could happen, she thought,
anything
! And I really want it to –
whatever it is. I shan’t marry – I’ll just concentrate on being the best actress in the world. They’ll all be amazed by me at home. I’ll be the only famous Cazalet.
Really, her family were extraordinarily
ordinary
. They weren’t anything like as interesting as the Roses. They just seemed to muddle along with nothing much ever happening to them:
they never went abroad – in fact, if it wasn’t for them
she
might have been all over the place by now which would have given her useful experience. But no. All they did was get
married, and go to the office, and have children. They weren’t remotely interested in the arts, except, she had to admit, music, but when had her mother last read a Shakespeare play? Or any
other play for that matter? And her father never read anything at all. It was amazing how he got through life so starved of any artistic nourishment. Perhaps she ought to try to rescue Polly and
Clary from this bourgeois desert. She would, when they were old enough. The others were either still just children, or with her parents’ lot, past saving. You couldn’t possibly have a
decent conversation about anything that really
mattered
– like the state of the theatre, or poetry, or even politics – look how much
Stella
knew compared to them! She
bet they never thought about class structure or democracy or what would be fair to people. But if things turned out how Stella seemed to think they would, they would be in for an awful shock.
No
servants! What on earth would they do without them? At least she knew how to cook now, which was more than could be said for any of them. If there was a social revolution, they would
probably starve. She began to feel sorry for them in an angry kind of way; it was all their own fault, but still that didn’t make it any better for them, as she well knew when things were her
own fault. But, then, given the outstanding dullness of their lives, their senses were probably so blunted that they would not notice anything much: for instance, instead of being wildly,
passionately in love like Juliet, or Cleopatra – who
was
old, after all, by the time she loved Antony – they were just fond of each other in a lukewarm unemotional way, so a
giant social revolution would probably seem to them simply rather a nuisance. They seemed to have no experience of extremes, she thought, and that is what I am going to have. That’s the
point.