Marking Time (57 page)

Lydia obediently wielded her large darning needle threaded with black cotton, but the bear’s rather worn skin was very difficult to sew and the more she squeezed some bits of him together,
the more sawdust came out from the rest of the hole. ‘You’re making me do the far most difficult part,’ she complained. But Neville was sawing away at one of Golly
Amazement’s legs which came off with alarming ease. Roland began to cry and, when no notice was taken of him, to yell. This woke Wills up, and wanting to go to Roly, he fell out of bed. In a
matter of moments all three of them were screaming.

‘Give them all some more medicine, Nurse,’ Neville said. He was wrapping Golly Amazement’s stump in one of his socks.

‘I’ve used it all up. Oh, poor Wills! He fell on his head – he’s got a cut!’

‘Sew it up.’

‘I can’t! The thread’s all in the bear. I’m not enjoying myself! Oh, poor Roly! His feet are all blue. You did the bandages too tight. Oh, do
help!’

Mercifully for the patients, Ellen suddenly appeared. She had had her doubts about the children minding her babies, and had been searching for them when she heard distant wails. She seized
Juliet, commanded Lydia to fetch her mother at once, told Neville to undo Roly’s splints while she comforted Wills and Juliet.

Later, there was an awful row. They wanted to know about the medicine, which Neville said Lydia was stupid to mention – he had a row with her afterwards – and they were both sent to
bed without supper. Her mother sewed up the bear and Golly Amazement, but his leg was never the same again.

‘It seems awfully unfair to get punished for something I didn’t even enjoy!’ Lydia wept. ‘Neville made me do all the hard things like sewing and getting the brandy, and
it was
my
bear and
my
Golly.’

‘You gave Golly Amazement to Wills,’ Villy reminded her.

‘I
did,
but I’ve taken him back because Wills didn’t like him enough. I always take my presents back if people don’t love them. Neville got an Appendix out of
the bear and it was just a piece of paper. That’s stupid, isn’t it? People don’t go about with pieces of paper in them.’

‘I
knew
they didn’t,’ Neville immediately said after Villy had agreed that they didn’t and Lydia challenged him. ‘Of course I knew
that!
But if
I’d taken out a real one – an appendix is a kind of wormy root, if you must know – you’d have been screaming all over the place. I was trying to be kind!’ he complained.
‘And
I probably saved your beastly bear’s life.’

The moment he set eyes on Sid, Archie understood what had been a torturing mystery to him for the best part of seventeen years.

Rachel brought her down on a Friday evening; she had had flu badly, and there was nobody to look after her at home, Rachel said, and there was something in her voice of overcasual kindness, that
Archie, extremely sensitive to every nuance of tone, gesture or even expression of hers, picked up at once. Involuntarily, he glanced at Sid – and knew. So it had not been personal, after
all: it had been both a far more serious matter and one which could have had little or nothing to do with him. The anguish, the waste, the sheer
grudge
of being rejected all those years
ago slipped entirely and so suddenly from him that he felt weightless, light-headed with shock. He watched Sid, this small, tired woman in her tweed suit, her cropped hair, her most carefully tied
cravat – saw the Duchy kiss her, lead her to an armchair nearest the fire while Rachel went in search of drinks for them. He was introduced; Rachel returned with a tray, cigarettes were lit,
gin was poured, the family came and went while the past acquired its perspective. Hugh arrived from London saying that Edward was coming in the morning. On Saturdays, Miss Milliment and Heather,
‘the lady gardener’ as the Duchy called her, dined with them, and as he discussed French painting with Miss Milliment – Van Gogh and his pathetic attempts to welcome and please
the churlish Gauguin, and Signac who painted further along the coast and whom he had met once or twice. He could not help watching Sid’s tired face with the brown, very wide-apart eyes, the
wide mouth, the senses of mischief and uncertainty and fatigue that crossed her face, making her look like a noble little monkey, a displaced person, an unutterably weary middle-aged woman by
turns, then turning his covert attention to Rachel whose name would now always hold a double image for him; for at the moment of his discovery she had aged, had ceased to be the ethereally
beautiful, frank and innocent young girl he had loved so much, and become a charming careworn woman in her early forties. It seemed extraordinary that he had not
seen
her till now, but it
was disillusion of an unpainful kind. Her reality somehow reassured him; she was a kind, good, unselfish creature with the same beautiful, frank eyes, but he knew that now, at least, she was not
frank in one respect, and he wondered whether he had been the means whereby she had discovered her own nature – for she had concealed nothing from him, he was sure. When he had taken her into
the garden at the Lynch House – a lovely still June evening – she had not known until he kissed her that she had not wanted to be kissed, but had then broken away from him with a small
sound of revulsion that he had never been able to forget. At the time he had thought it was fear and had held onto her arm, pleading, reassuring, but at the same time, and he never forgot this
either, he had experienced a sense of triumph that he must be the first with her – that if he could win her she would be entirely his, she was wild and he had but to tame her with patience
– no mean conquest since she was so desirable and older than he. But she had told him to let go of her with such cold sincerity that he had lost his nerve. He had been twenty-two at the time.
And the next morning she had sent for him, had told him how much she had liked him and said that she could never marry him. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘I expect I should have known
it before.’

There must be someone else, he had said. No, she had answered, there was nobody. He began telling her how
much
he loved her – he had been young enough to feel that that must make
all the difference – he said he would wait, give her any amount of time she wanted to know her mind.

‘I do know it,’ she said. ‘You are only making it worse for yourself. Poor Archie! I’m so sorry.’

He had left the house that day and, soon after, he had gone to France – to get away from Rupert and his family and their friends, who had all gone about together in a close, carefree set.
His father had left him a small amount of money, and he settled in Provence and painted and gave English and drawing lessons and sold some pictures and managed. Rupert and Isobel had spent a
holiday with him.

After Isobel died, Rupert had come for a week to stay with him – a strangely docile, shattered Rupert, who could not even laugh without tears coming to his eyes, who, like an insomniac,
could not keep still from his grief, fidgeted endlessly with pencils and cigarettes, kept leaping to his feet and shambling about the studio knocking into things. After the first awful day, Archie
took him for three-hour walks and fed him with large bowls of stew: ‘You’re treating me as though I was an enormous
dog!’
Rupert had exclaimed after the third day of this
regime, and as he had begun to laugh at himself, he had burst out crying and been able to talk about Isobel without stopping until the early hours, when the stove had gone out, and cocks were
crowing.

The next day when, instead of a walk, they went out to paint together, Rupert said, ‘You really are a friend, Archie. Much more of one than I was to you. I always felt bad about that. But
I suppose you needed to get right away.’

And after a bit, he added almost shyly, ‘But you’re over it now, aren’t you? You don’t mind me asking?’

‘No,’ was all Archie had said, and he
was
over it. Which had been true, in a sense: he no longer ached for her, and days passed when he did not even think of her, only when
he had once or twice seemed to be on the brink of loving someone else, had she intervened and he had drawn back. He had found a succession of girls to paint, and to go to bed with, who cooked for
him, and mended his clothes and were sometimes amiable company, but he never got further than affection and lust.

Archie had returned to England in the autumn of 1939 to volunteer for the Navy. He and Rupert had had one hilarious evening in Weymouth when they both got very drunk and then they had gone their
different ways, he to Coastal Forces, and Rupert to a Hunt class destroyer. When he had heard the news of Rupert he had written to the Duchy, of whom he had always been extremely fond, and she had
replied, saying that if he had leave and wanted somewhere to stay he would be welcome. So then, when he got shot up and they’d done all they could for his leg, he’d taken up the
invitation. He knew Rachel had not married, and he’d wondered how he would feel when he saw her again. After the first evening, he wondered why he had wondered, because he had felt, not
exactly the same, but quite as much. She had only to give him her hand, to look at him with her lovely frankness, to speak in her gentle drawl that was so like Rupert for him to be back in thrall
to her beauty and the astonishing lack of vanity that had always moved him. If she was in the least self-conscious about their last meeting, there was no sign of it. He hardly ever saw her alone:
her job in London – she described herself as ‘a kind of stooge at the office’ – and her duties at home – she seemed always to be unobtrusively doing something for
somebody else – precluded that. It was she who told him how hard Clary had taken her father being missing, and had asked him to deal gently with her determination that he was not dead. On
another occasion she had mentioned how passionately interested in painting Miss Milliment was and how she enjoyed talking about it: ‘Rupe said she was amazingly knowledgeable as well as
perceptive.’ Then there had been the Brig, who so much enjoyed having
The Times
read to him. Their rare duologues were always about somebody else. But he discovered that he enjoyed
taking Rachel’s various hints, and in the autumn weeks that followed, he slipped easily into the family life. His leg still hurt a good deal, especially if he used it much, but he had been
told that it was a long business, and when, in October, he had suggested to the Duchy that perhaps it was time he moved on, she had said, ‘My dear, what on earth for, and where to?’
Unlike the Cazalets, his family was small and far from close knit: after his father died, his mother embraced Gurdjieff and had no time for anyone who did not do the same, and his only sister, far
older than he, had married a Canadian doctor and he had seen her once in the last twenty years. She had had five children who seemed identical except for their size, like so many ring spanners, and
he only knew this because their Christmas card consisted every year of a family photograph. No, there was nowhere to go and, from his point of view, not only no reason to leave, but a growing need
to stay. He had quite decided that he must make one more attempt to get Rachel to marry him but the more he thought about it the more nervous he became about asking her: for once she had said no
–
if
she said no (and his confidence was not strong on this point) – surely that would be the end of his chance of love, of staying on with the family? It was too easy to let
things slide, to postpone the proposal. He told himself that she was getting to know him again, that it was too soon and so on. He told himself a lot of things that he naturally had wanted to
believe.

But now that was all over. He could stay as long as he liked and it would make no difference. During that curious evening, that brought him feelings both of devastation and release, he thought
he had recognised something that the rest of the family did not. It
was
a secret, and how hard, he thought tenderly, for someone as direct and innocent as Rachel that must be to bear! Sid
seemed accepted in the family: when, after dinner, she had apologised to the Duchy and said that she did not feel up to playing sonatas, the Duchy had said of course not! She should go to bed with
a nice hot-water bottle and a hot drink, and Rachel had instantly got to her feet and gone to procure these things.

In bed that night, he had started to try to examine how he felt: love, it seemed to him, was more painful than it was anything else, and not, he could see, only for him. Rupert’s unknown
fate hung over them all; upon his strange, gaunt, intense little daughter, upon his wife who once Archie had thought such a frightful mistake. He remembered Rupert saying at the end of their week
alone in France after Isobel’s death: ‘Well, I shall have to marry someone – anyone quiet and homely – who will be a mother to the children,’ and then visiting him on
his honeymoon with that amazingly attractive, frivolous little pussy with whom he was clearly infatuated. ‘This is Zoë,’ he had said, as one who is presenting a goddess, a queen,
the beauty of all time, and he had seen at once her narcissism, her childish selfishness, her determination to have always and only her own way in everything. She was not like that now. She was
paler, less sparkling, tentative about almost everything except the baby. He had been touched when he had said how pretty the baby was, and she had answered at once, ‘But she’s awfully
intelligent – like Rupert. She’s going to have a first-class education and a proper career. She’s not going to be at all like me.’ Unlike Clary, she could not speak of
Rupert; one day she had tried, but her eyes had filled with tears, her face contorted, and without another word, she had run out of the room. And the Duchy. When she mentioned Rupert, which he
noticed she only did if she was alone with him, he saw her making a steadfast effort to do so calmly. Alive or dead, Rupert was deeply loved, not least by him, Archie. I seem to have lost the two
people I have loved most in my life, he thought. Then he realised that his leg was hurting too much for him to get to sleep and hoisted himself out of bed to find his painkillers.
‘Maudlin,’ he muttered to himself; Rachel had never been his, so in that sense it could not be said that he had lost her, and as for Rupert – why could he not have Clary’s
faith? Because he knew more about the decrepit, hysterical,
corrupt
uproar that France had become: Daladier and Blum being jailed for life for ‘causing the defeat of France’,
hostages being shot – two hundred of them for the deaths of two German officers – the Vichy Government responsible for the arrest and deportation of thousands of Jews, Pétain
blaming British agents for any insurrection, house-to-house searches for any French ‘disloyal’ to that senile puppet. It would be hard to survive as a foreigner in that, even with very
good French. He would need a great deal of support and protection – the cost of being a loyal Frenchman was already terrifyingly high, yet there were such people. Being shot up on the bridge
of an MTB was nothing to that, he thought, as he dropped into sleep.