Marking Time (65 page)

‘You can’t keep a rabbit in your bedroom!’ Louise said, snubbing her.

‘I think you could if you really wanted to,’ Neville said. ‘
And
,’ he became inspired, ‘we could collect its little pellets every day, and you could paint
them, Lydia, and Christopher could make us very
small
solitaire boards for the shop.’ But nobody agreed with that.

‘You think of nothing but
gain
, Neville,’ Clary scolded. ‘You are becoming so grasping and horrible that it’s quite difficult to like you.’

‘
I
do,’ Lydia said. ‘In fact, I love you. You can marry me if you like. In due course,’ she added in case anyone thought she was silly enough to think that
people married at her age.

‘If you try to marry me,’ Neville said, ‘I shall shoot you. Or put you in the very middle of an air raid. Or take you to the vet.’ The Brig’s very old Labrador
Bessie had recently gone there to be put down.

Lydia was unmoved. ‘You’re not old enough for a gun,’ she said, ‘and there aren’t any air raids here.
And
I know the vet. He wouldn’t
think
of putting me down.’

By the end of November it was really cold. Washing on the line became stiff with frost; Miss Milliment had the most unfortunate recurrence of chilblains. The pipes froze, Clary and Polly put
Plasticene round the edges of the window in their bedroom to stop the draughts of icy air and begged Villy not to tell the Duchy. Ellen’s rheumatism was so bad that she could not start the
day without four aspirin and a cup of strong tea, and everybody kept saying that at least it was slowing the Germans down in their advance on Moscow although that seemed to Polly as though it must
mean that the war would simply last longer.

Archie Lestrange felt the cold too. He slipped and fell on the icy path outside the front door one morning, and when he tried to get up, the pain was so excruciating that he simply lay there;
Clary, running out of the front door moments later to see if there was any post for Louise, nearly tripped over him.

‘Archie! Oh, poor Archie!’

‘Do you think you could help me up?’

‘I could, but I don’t think it would be wise. First aid says never move a patient until you know what’s wrong with them. What’s wrong?’

‘It’s my gammy leg.’

‘Oh. You may have broken it again. You need hot, sweet tea for shock.’ And sped away before he could stop her. There was always tea in the kitchen at that hour, and she was back very
quickly, with Polly carrying a blanket.

‘I don’t see how we give him tea lying down,’ she said.

‘Look,’ Archie said. ‘Just help me up, you two. I’m perfectly all right, really,’ and he made another attempt to move, but he couldn’t make it.

‘You’ll make it worse. Get Aunt Villy.’ She propped up his head and put the cup to his mouth. He obediently swallowed some and scalded his tongue.

When Villy came, she told them to get Christopher. ‘Must get you in the warm,’ she said. ‘I expect you’ve just jarred everything.’

In fact, he turned out to have done rather more than that. He had to go to Hastings for an X-ray, and proved to have cracked his already damaged bone. He was sent home in the ambulance, and told
to lie up. He had been thinking that really he ought to make a move – have another go at the Admiralty for a desk job of some kind and find himself somewhere to live. Now he was confined to
bed. This delighted the children, who had started to like him when he told them they could all call him Archie. ‘Even
Wills
?’ Polly had said; hierarchy died hard with them, but
he had said everyone – even Oliver. They took turns to bring up his meals, played chess, dominoes, Monopoly and bezique with him, acted charades for him, told him about their Christmas
presents – the ones they were making or giving, and the ones they hoped they’d get. They confided: Christopher, about his pacifism and his hostile father; Louise, about Michael and her
not wanting to stop acting; Clary – there was a great deal of this – about her ideas of what her father was doing; Polly, about her mother and what she
had
feared and no longer
did since her mother seemed so much better; Neville, about being bullied at school (something that nobody else knew at all); Lydia, about how much she wanted a dog of her own. Wills brought him a
very large and random selection of toys and often any other portable object he came upon that he could reach. Oliver brought him his bones, rolled-up newspapers – he was not fussy about their
date – and once what Archie described as a fantastically dead rat. Mrs Cripps made him treacle tart. The maids took turns to do his room because they both thought he was so lovely. The adults
came too, of course. Sybil saw that his dressing gown was torn, and after she had mended it, suggested going through his clothes to see if anything else needed doing. ‘I’m afraid you
may find that everything does,’ he said. ‘Now that sailors no longer make sails, they aren’t so handy with a needle.’ Zoë brought Juliet. The Duchy paid a daily visit,
often bringing tiny vases of berries and, occasionally, a spectral rose that had survived the frost. Even the Brig arrived one day and told him a quite frightening amount about elephants in Burma.
Only Rachel, he noticed, never came by herself, but always with a child or Sybil or Villy. She was kind, as always, and solicitous, brought him a special pillow to prop up his leg, and a better
bedside lamp. She also persuaded the Duchy that he needed a coal fire in his room which made it extremely cosy. Lydia and Neville roasted chestnuts on it and burned the carpet.

‘But it’s a patterned one, it just looks like a bit of blackish pattern,’ Lydia said. ‘I don’t think we need to mention it, do you?’

‘I think not,’ he said. It was this kind of thing that made him so popular.

At the beginning of December Zoë left for her visit. She had decided to go before Christmas, after all, influenced by pleas from the nursing home – and particularly Roddy, who had
been away for another operation and returned to recuperate. She had been surprised as well as touched that they counted on her so much. And Juliet, she felt, ought to spend Christmas at home. She
went to say goodbye to Archie on the morning that she left. She looked very pretty in a dark green cloth coat with a black fur stand-up collar and a hat to match.

‘You look like a Russian heroine,’ he said.

‘Rupert bought me this outfit,’ she said, ‘when he joined the firm. I’ve hardly worn it, but trains sometimes are freezing, and I expect the boat will be as
well.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘In about ten days, I think. Before Christmas, anyway.’

‘Have you left people a telephone number? I mean, so that we can get hold of you—’

‘I have, but there won’t be any news,’ she said. ‘It’s only Clary who thinks that one day there’ll be a call from him, or he’ll just walk through the
door.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘I
pretend
to – but I— Sometimes I wish we
knew
that he was dead. I know that’s awful of me, and please don’t tell Clary that. I don’t want
her to feel let down by me. I have Juliet, you see. She has nothing.’

‘She has you,’ he said.

‘Oh, Archie! You don’t know how selfish I was or you wouldn’t say that!’

‘She has you
now.’

Unable to respond to that, she said, ‘What do you think? Do you think there’s any chance?’

‘There’s a chance, but a very small one, I’m afraid.’

‘It’s too long for him to have been taken prisoner?’

‘Far too long.’

There was a silence. Then she said, ‘It isn’t that I wish he was dead. I just wish I
knew.’

‘I know. Of course I know that.’

She tried to smile at him then; there was something piteous in the attempt. He was moved.

‘Kiss the poor invalid, then,’ he said.

She bent and kissed his cheek; she smelled of rose geranium and he felt a completely unexpected frisson.

‘Get better,’ she said, and was gone.

‘Mummy, he can’t not come
now
! I can’t get hold of him. It’s only for two nights anyway.’

‘I simply can’t understand why you didn’t come and ask first!’

Louise hadn’t because she had been afraid that they would say no.

‘It was a long-distance call, and I was afraid of getting cut off,’ she said. ‘I should have thought you’d have wanted him to come. You always say you want to meet my
friends.’ To vet them, she privately added.

‘It has nothing to do with not wanting to meet him,’ Villy said, exasperated. ‘It’s a question of where on earth he is to sleep. You seem to have forgotten it’s the
weekend the Clutterworths are coming. The house will be bursting at the seams and it will upset the Duchy.’

‘Can’t he have Zoë’s room?’

‘The Clutterworths are having that. Really, Louise, you are so thoughtless. You think of nothing but yourself!’

‘Well, Clary and Polly and I could sleep in the squash court, and he could have our room.’

‘Well, you
must
go and ask the Duchy before you do anything. I’m not prepared to shoulder your selfish blunders.’

She gets snappier and snappier, Louise thought, as she went to find the Duchy. She said she was sorry, and all her mother had replied was that it was a bit late to be sorry. What was the use of
apologising if the other person didn’t accept it?

However, when she found the Duchy, she decided to start by saying how sorry she was for not asking first, and that worked. The Duchy said that everybody made mistakes, and that she would be most
interested to meet Michael. She agreed to the squash court plan provided they used sleeping bags on the camp beds, which she said should be brought into the house to be aired before they slept on
them. Then she had Clary and Polly to face, and they were nice about it until they discovered that Louise wanted to clear up the room on a scale that suited neither of them.

‘I’m bloody well
not
taking all my things to the squash court for two nights,’ Clary stormed. ‘He can’t need all our chests of drawers for
two nights.
You
can clear yours out for him.’

Polly also hated the idea of her things being disarranged, although she was not so vehement about it. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll notice his bedroom much,’ she said. ‘I
don’t think men do.’

But Louise found herself looking at the room and, indeed, the whole house with new, and severely critical, eyes. She looked at the worn dark green linoleum, the chipped and yellowing white
paint, the absurdly old-fashioned wallpaper that had tulips and Indian birds on it, the black iron bedsteads, and felt that none of it was good enough for Michael. In the end, she pinched (with his
kindly consent) the rug from Archie’s room and put it over the worst worn places on the floor. But the whole house worried her. The loose covers in the drawing room were faded and patched,
the large and ancient Aubusson was in places actually threadbare; even the packs of cards, she felt, let her down. They were dog-eared with use, and frequently the joker was chalked with some
number of a card that was missing. The lampshades, of parchment, had gone coffee-coloured with age, and the hall, where the children ate – the hall! It was full of gum boots, and tricycles,
tennis and squash racquets, and even some of the garden furniture – spiteful deckchairs whose hinges had rusted, and caterpillars pupating on the dusty canvas. Wills’ and Roly’s
toys abounded; one stumbled over pieces of Meccano and bricks (they no longer had a day nursery as it had been turned into their bedroom). The skylight leaked, and enamel buckets and bowls were
placed at strategic spots. The bathroom also caused her despair. Nothing had been altered there since she could remember. The bath contained a long greyish-green streak where water had dripped from
the old brass taps for years. The dark green tongue-and-groove pine walls had blistered and flakes of paint often fell on anyone having a bath. The mirror was spotted with damp and the basin taps,
white china, had been chipped so badly that there was an art to using them without cutting yourself. The lavatory, next door, contained an impassioned note in ink so faded that no stranger would be
able to read it on how to pull the plug. She knew it by heart. ‘Pull sharply down, release, wait and then pull again. The lavatory should then flush.’ Should, but often didn’t.
She began to wish he wasn’t coming. ‘I’ve got forty-eight hours,’ he had said on the sudden, amazing telephone call. ‘And then I have to go to Newhaven. It struck me
that it would be lovely if I could come and stay a couple of nights with you, and then go on from there.
If
that would be all right with your family.’ There had been a noise of
hammering in the background and his voice was faint. When she had said yes, it would be fine, he said, ‘There’s a four-twenty from Charing Cross that I could just catch. Won’t be
a minute,’ he said, to somebody else. ‘Oh, darling, I can’t wait to see you. I have to go,’ and he was gone.

She started to worry about meals. Meals always used to be wonderful, but in the last two years they had got steadily duller. She began with the Duchy.

‘I was wondering,’ she said with what she hoped was pensive sweetness, ‘whether we could possibly have roast goose on Saturday night. As a sort of treat for
everybody?’