Marking Time (8 page)

She moved and touched his face. ‘Wake up, old boy,’ she said, ‘it’s getting late.’

But later still, in the car going down, they quarrelled. By the time he had loaded the car, it was half past five, hours later than they had meant; he had opened the front door for her to get
in, and then said, ‘Good Lord! I’ve forgotten Villy’s jewellery,’ and gone back into the house. When he returned, he had been carrying a large Victorian jewel box. He got in
beside her, couldn’t find the car key and in order to feel in his pockets, shoved the box onto her lap carelessly. It was not locked and the contents spilled onto her skirt and the floor.
‘Dear me, how careless!’ he said, as he pushed the key into the ignition. For what seemed like hours, she retrieved pieces of jewellery, much of it in little battered leather boxes that
also opened since many of them had broken clasps. Silently she put garnet earrings, paste necklaces, brooches and an entire set of topazes and pearls back into their places – all
Villy’s stuff, that he had given her; not stuff that she wanted to see or even to know about at all. The box had a small Bramah key attached to its handle by a red ribbon. She untied this and
locked it, and then twisted round in her seat to put the box in the back. She was conscious of ungovernable envy and fear, and was unable to stop herself asking, ‘Which did you give her for
the last baby?’

‘The topazes,’ he answered shortly. Then, ‘Good Lord, Diana, what on earth made you ask that?’

‘I was curious.’

‘Well – don’t be. It has nothing to do with you. With us,’ he added in a more conciliating tone.

‘It has, rather, hasn’t it? I mean, you told me that you only had the baby because Villy wanted it so much. So it seems rather odd to give her a whole lot of jewellery for it as
well.’

‘I always gave her a piece after each of the children. I couldn’t very well change about that.’ After a silence, he said, ‘Could I?’

‘Obviously not.’

Her sarcasm was either lost on him or he ignored it, as he said, ‘Well, I bet Angus gave you things after you had the boys.’ Then, with what seemed even to her incredible stupidity,
he added, ‘Let’s close the subject, shall we?’

Pictures of Angus, drunk and maudlin after their firstborn, and the idiotic fur coat he had bought her occurred, and she said bitterly, ‘Oh, yes. After I had Ian, he bought me a fur coat
– a full-length skunk that I had to take back to the shop as soon as I could go out.’

‘Why on earth?’

‘Because he did not have the money to pay for it. The cheque had bounced by the time I got it back.’

‘How perfectly beastly for you. Poor sweet!’ But then he added, ‘I expect he meant well, though.’

‘He didn’t mean anything. Except that he wanted to be the kind of man who gave his wife a fur coat. He’d told masses of our friends, and when people asked to see it, he told
them that he had had to send it back because I had ridiculous principles about not wearing fur.’

Edward did not reply. They were driving down Whitehall, and lorries loaded with sandbags were being directed by police into Downing Street and to the doors of the government offices. There was
not much other traffic.

‘And so,’ Diana continued – she felt both nettled and reckless – ‘of course he gave me nothing after Fergus. Or Jamie.’ This is idiotic, she thought. Why am I
saying such unattractive, unimportant,
stupid
things? She began to feel frightened. ‘Edward—’

‘Since you brought the subject up,’ he said, ‘it seems rather funny to me that you should make such a fuss about Villy having a child while we are going to bed together, when
you did exactly the same thing yourself.’

‘I never told you that I didn’t ever go to bed with Angus! I told you that I didn’t
want
to! And, anyway, it was different about Jamie.’

He did not want to pursue the difference. ‘Well, come to that, I can’t remember ever telling you that I never went to bed with Villy. I didn’t talk about it
because—’

‘Because what?’

‘Because it simply isn’t the kind of thing one talks
about
.’

‘You mean, it might be embarrassing?’

‘Yes,’ he said doggedly, ‘it certainly might.’

Outside Waterloo Station there was a queue of buses all full of children waiting to get into the station. As they drew alongside one of them they could hear the shrill voices in a kind of
singing shout: ‘Jeepers creepers! Where d’yer get those peepers? Jeepers creepers! Where d’yer get those eyes?’ over and over again.

‘Poor little beggars,’ Edward said. ‘Some of them must be going to the country for the first time in their lives.’

This touched her; she put a hand on his knee. ‘Darling! I don’t know what came over me! I’ve been feeling so blue. And it’s the end of our lovely time. I suppose
I’m terrified that you’ll be sent away somewhere and I’ll never see you. It’s ridiculous to quarrel when everything’s so awful, anyway.’

‘Darling! Here – have my hank. You know I can’t bear you to cry. Of course we won’t quarrel. And I promise you one thing.’

She took her nose out of the voluptuous handkerchief that smelled so deliciously of Lebanon cedar. ‘What?’

‘Whatever I do I’ll find a way of seeing you. Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away.’

She blew and then powdered her nose.

‘Keep the handkerchief,’ he said.

‘Really, you encourage me to blub,’ she said; she felt lightheaded as people sometimes do after a near accident. ‘You always tell me to keep your splendid handkerchiefs. I have
quite a serious collection.’

‘Have you, sweetie? Well, I like you having them.’

They were all right after that, discussed how they could meet. Diana had found a girl in the village who would look after Jamie for a day sometimes: if he telephoned and got Isla, he would
pretend to be an old friend of her father’s who, since widowed, lived in the Isle of Man with a gigantic clockwork railway apparatus which he played with from morning till night. ‘Well,
not too old a friend,’ Diana said. ‘Daddy’s seventy-two, and you wouldn’t sound like a contemporary of his. You’d better be the
son
of his oldest
friend.’ Edward said he could sound old if he tried, but when challenged to try sounded, as Diana said, exactly like someone of forty-two, which he was. Why would the
son
keep
ringing her up? They invented an ingenious but totally unconvincing fantasy about that, and everything became far more light-hearted. ‘And, of course, we could write to each other,’
Diana eventually said, but Edward made a face, and said writing was not much in his line.

‘I did so many lines at school,’ he said, ‘that I invented a system of tying ten pens together, not in a bunch but in a string, so that I could write ten at once. But they
caught me and I had to write more than ever.’

‘I can’t imagine you at school.’

‘Nor can I. I loathed every minute of it. Never out of hot water.’

They parted at the gate of Plum Cottage. A hurried embrace in the car.

‘Look after yourself,’ he said.

‘And you. God bless,’ she added, she was feeling tearful again, but determined not to cry.

When she was out of the car and had walked round it to the gate, she turned, and he blew her a kiss. This made her want to rush back to the car, but she smiled as brightly as she could, waved,
and walked up the brick path. She heard him start the engine and go, and stood listening until she could no longer hear the car. ‘I
am
in love with him,’ she said to herself.
‘In love. With him.’ It could happen to anyone, but once it did, they had no choice.

That Saturday evening, all the grown-ups from Pear Tree Cottage – that is to say, Villy and Edward (only he was late), Sybil and Hugh, Jessica and Raymond, and Lady Rydal
– dined at Home Place, as the Brig had decreed that they should. Only Miss Milliment was left there to dine with the older children, some of whom had been swapped from Home Place for the
meal. By the time Edward arrived, the adult party were starting upon their roast veal, with Mrs Cripps’s delicious forcemeat balls and paper-thin slices of lemon, mashed potatoes and French
beans. They were fifteen round the long table that had had its fourth leaf put in for the occasion, and Eileen had got Bertha to help hand round the vegetables. Sid, who realised that she was the
only outsider – a situation in which on different levels she often found herself – looked round at them with an affection that apart from her usual irony had something of awe. Everybody
had worked hard all day in preparation for war, but now they all looked – and talked and behaved – as though it was just another ordinary evening. As they were either talking or eating
or both, she could rove round the dark polished table. The Brig was telling old Lady Rydal some story about India – frequently interrupted by her: both considered themselves to be experts on
that subject; he on the strength of a three-months visit with his wife in the twenties, she for the reason that she had been born there, ‘a baby in the Mutiny’. ‘My ayah carried
me out into the garden and hid me in a gardener’s hut for two days and thereby saved my life. So you see, Mr Cazalet, I cannot consider all Indians to be unreliable, although I know that that
is a view that those less well informed might take. And,’ she added to put the finishing touch to this munificence, ‘I cannot believe that the Indian nature has
changed
. There
was a great deal of loyalty that was most touching – my father, whose experience was unrivalled, always said that he would trust his sepoys as he would his own brother.’

This both made Jessica and Villy exchange a glance of suppressed amusement – only they knew that Lady Rydal’s father had quarrelled so fiercely with his brother that they were not on
speaking terms for at least forty years – and gave the Brig the opening he needed: armed with the slightest coincidence, he could breach a small gap in anyone’s conversation, and now he
was in with how interesting that she should mention sepoys, because a remarkable man he had met on the boat – extraordinary thing – both going over
and
coming back had said . .
. Sid moved on to the great-aunts, who sat side by side in their bottle-green and maroon crêpe-de-Chine long-sleeved dresses placidly sorting out the food on their plates: Dolly regarded
forcemeat as indigestible, and Flo could not bear fat, while each deplored the other’s fussiness. ‘In the last war we were grateful for anything,’ Flo was saying, and Dolly
retorting, ‘I have not the slightest recollection of
you
being grateful for anything; even when Father gave you that nice holiday in Broadstairs after you had to leave the hospital
you weren’t grateful. Flo was useless as a nurse, because she simply could not stand the sight of blood,’ she remarked rather more loudly to anyone who might be listening. ‘She
ended up with other VADs having to look after
her
which, of course, was not at all what the doctor ordered . . .’

Sybil, wearing a rather shapeless crêpe dress – she had put on weight since having Wills – was telling the Duchy how worried she was about him.

‘It’s only a phase,’ the Duchy said placidly. ‘Edward used to spit whenever he lost his temper as a little boy. He used to have the most ungovernable rages, and, of
course, I worried about him. They all have tantrums when they’re babies.’ She sat, very straight, at the end of the table, dressed, as she always was, in her blue silk shirt with the
sapphire and mother-of-pearl cross slung upon her discreet bosom – breasts, Sid thought affectionately, would not figure in her anatomy or her language – her frank and unselfconscious
gaze directed now at her daughter-in-law. Now she began to laugh, as she went on, ‘Edward was the naughtiest of the lot. When he was about ten, I suppose it was, he once picked every single
daffodil in the garden, tied them in bunches with his sister’s hair ribbons, and sold them at the end of the drive. He had a notice that said “Help the Poor” on a board, and do
you know who the poor were? Himself! We had stopped his pocket money for some other crime, and he wanted a special kind of spinning top!’ She took the tiny lace handkerchief from under the
gold strap of her wrist-watch and wiped her eyes.

‘And did he get it?’

‘Oh,
no
, my dear. I made him put it all in the box on Sunday at church. And, of course, he got a spanking.’

‘You must be talking about me,’ Edward called from across the table. He had been listening to Jessica.

‘Yes, darling, I was.’

‘I was hopeless at school, too,’ Edward said. ‘I don’t know how you all put up with me.’

How self-confident he must be to say that, Sid thought, but any further thoughts were interrupted by Jessica saying, ‘I wish you’d tell that to Christopher. He feels he is such a
failure at school.’

‘He feels that because he
is
,’ Raymond said. ‘I’ve never known a boy muff so many opportunities.’

‘He
is
good at Latin,’ Jessica said at once.

‘He
likes
Latin. The test is whether a boy works at anything he
doesn’t
like.’

‘And natural history. He knows a lot about birds and things.’