The Family

December, 1943

“Darling! Are those the only trousers you’ve got?”

“Sort of. I’ve got some breeches for work.”

“But you must have had those for years! They’re about six inches too short.”

Christopher looked down his legs to the gap between the end of his trews and the beginning of his socks—full of holes, but he hoped his mother wouldn’t realize that—to his uncomfortable shoes that he’d also had for years, hardly ever worn and now far too tight.

“They are a bit short,” he said, hoping that agreement would end the matter.

“You can’t possibly go to Nora’s wedding in them! And your jacket’s too short in the sleeves.”

“They always are with me,” he said patiently.

“Well, it’s too late to buy you anything. I’ll see if Hugh has something he could lend you. You’re about the same height.” But nobody could be thinner, she thought, as she went downstairs to find Hugh.

They were in Hugh’s house, which he had kindly made available for any of the Castle family (Polly and Clary had gone to stay with Louise) for the night before the wedding. All the family, that is, excepting Raymond, who had rung to say he couldn’t make it, but would take an early train in the morning. Angela had not arrived yet, but she was coming out to dinner with them—all arranged by kind Hugh. Which was a godsend, because she certainly couldn’t have relied upon Villy to be of the slightest help. She suspected that it was Villy who had persuaded Raymond to take such a hard line about her returning to Frensham instead of remaining in London. The excuse that the house was needed for Louise seemed to her absurd: Michael Hadleigh had quite enough money to rent or even buy a house for Louise and had no need of the Rydal house, but it had been left jointly to her and Villy, and Raymond had said he was simply not prepared to deal with the upkeep of two houses. She had wondered, after an acrimonious telephone conversation with him, whether Raymond had somehow got to hear about Lorenzo, but really she didn’t see how he could have: they had been pretty careful on the whole, she thought, although Lorenzo had once admitted that he could not bear to burn her dear letters. After that, she had been more careful about what she put in them, and she had kept all his notes—he never wrote more than a note—in the secret compartment of her sewing box. Since going back to Frensham, she had spent a good deal of time in the train going back and forth to London, but from now on this was going to be tricky, since Nora and her husband were coming to live in the house with her, and Nora had plans to turn the place into some sort of nursing home. Perhaps then she would be able to get a very small pied-à-terre in London which would be better: Lorenzo was often working so hard, and so busy, that sometimes, recently, she had made the journey to London in vain. She could tell Raymond that it was better for Nora to have the house to herself because, after all, hers could not be an easy marriage, although this would not be in the least true, since Nora was hell bent on turning the house into some sort of institution with other people in the same state as poor Richard to look after. If need be, she could suggest that either Villy or Michael Hadleigh buy her share of Mama’s house which would give her enough, surely, to lease a small flat. She would be forty-six this year and she had spent over twenty years living for others, bringing up the children, cooking, washing, cleaning the series of horrible little houses that they had had to live in until Raymond’s aunt had died and left them the house in Frensham and a fair amount of money. She had not wanted to live in the country, let alone in that Victorian museum, but Raymond had insisted. Coming into some money, being able to have servants like other people did (like Villy had always had), being able to buy decent clothes, have her hair done at a hairdresser, drive a new, instead of a second-hand car—things of that kind, and there were so many of them—had been quite miraculous at first. But as she had grown less chronically tired—God! she realized that she had always been exhausted all those years—and now having Raymond out of the way so that there were none of the tensions of being a buffer between him and the children, something had snapped in her, as though a butterfly had emerged from this chrysalis of domesticity: all she wanted was to have fun, to cease making do with anything that did not please her. The children, with the exception of Judy who they could now afford to send to a boarding school, were launched upon their lives. She knew that Villy thought her frivolous, and would intensely disapprove, well, did, so far as she knew the situation. Villy thought that either she should be making a home for Raymond at Woodstock, or be doing some war job. If Villy knew about Lorenzo she would go through the roof. She had said that once to him, and he had replied that she was a cold woman, who, he suspected, was a very English type where sex was concerned. (One of the things she loved about him was his almost feminine perspicacity.) When the war was over, she supposed she would have to go back to being Raymond’s wife, whatever that then might involve, but meanwhile she would make the most of what she described to herself as an Indian summer.

Hugh, listening to the six o’clock news in his rather dusty drawing room (three Germans had been hanged at Kharkhov for war crimes), stubbed out his cigarette and said he was sure he could find something to fit Christopher, and why didn’t she leave it to them to kit him out and would she like a drink?

“You are an angel. I’d love a drop of whisky if you have any.”

“Help yourself. Where is Christopher?”

“Right at the top of the house, I’m afraid. But give him a shout: he’ll come down to your room.”

But she had hardly started to pour herself a cautious tot from the half bottle of Johnnie Walker when she heard the wail of dismay that undoubtedly came from Judy, sent earlier to have a bath.

“Mum! Mum! Oh, please come, Mum!

“I’m in here.” She opened the bathroom door and, the moment that Jessica stepped inside, locked it behind her. “I don’t want Uncle Hugh or Christopher to see me.”

She was half in, half out of her yellow net bridesmaid’s dress, struggling to pull the bodice down amid ominous splitting noises.

“It’s too small, Mummy, I can’t get into it.”

“Stand still. Silly girl, you probably didn’t undo the back. Stand still.”

But even when she had levered it back over Judy’s head, undone the hooks and eyes at the back and tried again, the dress was palpably too small.

“It’s stupid! It’s not my fault! I hate pink, anyway.”

“It must be the dress made for Lydia, which means that she has got yours. Don’t worry. I’ll ring up Aunt Villy and we’ll get them changed over. We’ll have to mend it, though. I wish you’d waited and not tried to cram yourself into it.”

“If I had, it would have been too late to change. Lydia would have gone off to church in mine, and I would have had to go in my beastly school uniform! It is unfair.”

A great deal of Judy’s conversation was conducted as though she was a child actress in a melodrama, Jessica thought, trying not to be irritated. Judy was going through a difficult phase, as her mother used to say. The school diet, presumably largely carbohydrate, had turned her into a pudding—a rather spotty one at that. She had grown a great deal during the last year, but that had not stopped her being podgy; her hair was always greasy, the down on her upper lip which had upset her so much in the summer had since been treated with peroxide by her faithful friend Monica with the result that it now glinted like brass shavings above which acne rioted. Of course, she would outgrow all these little disadvantages, Jessica thought, and meanwhile it was so lucky that, by and large, she seemed unaware of them.

“Put on your Sunday dress,” she said, “and do tidy up the bathroom. It looks like a cross between an old clothes shop and a swamp.”

“Mummy, you sound just like Miss Blenkinsopp at school. My Sunday dress is tight under the arms as well,” she added.

“I’ll see if I can let it out, but I can’t do that for this evening. Now, mop up the floor and take all your clothes and put them in your room. Leave the bathroom as you would wish to find it.”

“All right. Did you remember to bring my seed pearls?”

“Yes.”

“And my christening present brooch?”

“Yes. Now get on.”

Questions of this kind pursued her as she made her escape upstairs to change for the restaurant dinner.

Of course she was glad that Nora was getting married: she had thought for a long time that this would be unlikely. In fact, she had thought that of her four children it was Nora who would end up an old maid—matron of a hospital, perhaps. But seeing Christopher after rather a long gap—he seldom came home, and had never come to London when she lived there—she wondered about his future as well. He was desperately thin and did not look happy. He had not been called up, partly because of his earlier breakdown and the electric shock treatment he had undergone, but also because he had turned out to be very short-sighted and now wore glasses with very thick lenses. He had a high colour from working so much out of doors and his face always had minute scars where he had cut himself shaving. Almost his first question when he arrived had been “Is Dad here?” and when she had told him that he would not be arriving until the next day he had nodded, but she had seen the instant gleam of relief. Raymond had not been much of a success as a father: the three older children, although they did not feel the same, in their various ways had written him off—Angela despised him, Nora patronized him, but Christopher still dreaded and feared him. Only Judy was able to turn him into darling Daddy, doing very secret and important war work; Jessica could easily imagine that a certain amount of competition went on at school about fathers, and Judy’s best friend Monica’s father was a squadron leader and, vicariously, the source of all Judy’s information about the war. “Monica’s father says they had no business releasing Oswald Mosley from prison,” she had written last term from school. “He says it is absolutely outrageous.” To compete with this sort of thing, Judy had probably turned her father into a secret agent. She must tell Raymond that, it might amuse him.

Three miles away, Richard Holt was having what his best friend, his doctor, his parents and his sister kept calling his “stag night.” Probably the most sedate affair of its kind there had ever been, he thought a trifle wearily. His back was hurting: the dope he’d had before dinner had worn off and he longed to be lying down flat, but they were just about to embark upon the dessert. He looked across the table to Tony, who instantly met his eye, so he smiled, and Tony smiled back, the sweetest smile—it made Richard feel better just to look at him.

“Richard would like chocolate mousse,” his mother was saying.

“I’d like to choose, though,” he said, making an effort to sound greedy and interested.

“Of course, darling,” and she laid the menu in front of him.

“Creamed rice, apple pie, cheese and biscuits,” he read.

“And chocolate mousse.”

“And chocolate mousse. You’re right. I’m a customer for that.”

His chair was next to his mother’s so that she could feed him. From tomorrow, Nora would be doing that, he thought, three times a day for ever. Before he was wounded, he had enjoyed food: in Suffolk, where his parents lived, they had a farm and the food had been plain but good. Apart from their own lamb, he used to go wild fowling; duck and geese had been on the menu and, in winter, hares that his mother had jugged or roasted or put into pies. In the Army he hadn’t thought about food; it was simply fuel and a time when you could take the weight off your feet. But eighteen months of being fed everything with a spoon, food that was half cold anyway by the time it reached the ward, by a succession of nurses for whom the practice seemed to bring out latent, maternal and bossy feelings—whenever he said he had had enough it was “one more to please me” stuff—had really put him off food (although it was supposed to be an event in the patient’s day). Drinks were OK because he could have them through a straw and not be dependent upon anyone.

They were a small family party, just his parents, his sister—widowed early in the war, but left with the twins (not present)—and Tony, who was to be his best man. He would not have asked him, but Tony had offered. The offer had been the last—golden—straw of his generosity and love.

The chocolate mousse had arrived. His mother was smoothing the napkin spread over his knees.

“I’m not very hungry,” he said, meaning please don’t make him eat all of it.

“You just have what you want,” she said comfortably. “There’s no sense in cramming food down you that you don’t want.” Her eyes, which had bleached from an intense blue to something paler than forget-me-not, had the same expression that he remembered as a child, a blend of wisdom and innocence that somehow went well with her weatherbeaten face—all fine wrinkles, like a brownish apple. Described by herself and his father as something of a tomboy when young (although in those days it had probably not meant more than not liking to ride side-saddle and refusing to wear stays), she looked as though she had made the most of what she knew and had learned, but her very innocence had always regulated the knowledge. Now in her early sixties, and with what she described as only a touch of angina, she was retiring gently from her hitherto active life. He could not possibly have imposed himself upon her.

“It’s a pity Nora couldn’t have been with us,” his sister was saying.

“Oh, Susan, you know it’s bad luck for the bride and groom to meet on the eve of their wedding.”

“I do, but it is still a pity. It’s all very well for you, Dad, you’ve met her—I haven’t.”

“She’s a wonderful girl,” his father said, not at all for the first time.

Wonderful to marry an old crock like me, Richard thought, when they had finally got him to bed. But how she had wanted to! He had met her when they had first started trying to operate on his back. She had come on duty one evening when he was sleepless and the pain was driving him mad and he was counting the minutes—a hundred and ten of them before he could have his next dose. She had known at once that he was desperate, had brought him a couple of pills with a hot drink, and propped him up while he drank it. Then she had rearranged his various pillows so that when she lowered him down again it all felt different and far more comfortable. “I’ll be back when I’ve done the round,” she said. “Just to see if we’ve got the pillows right for you.” She had been gentle, assured, deft and wonderful, uncheery. A first-rate nurse. She never seemed in a hurry, as many of them did, and nothing was too much trouble. That had been the beginning of it. Months later, he had asked her how she had managed to give him a dose of pain-killer out of hours, as it were. “They weren’t pain-killers,” she said. “It was just some arnica in pill form. You needed to feel that something was being done.”

By then, they knew each other quite well. When, after months, the time came for him to be moved to another home—that’s what it was called, but really it was a hospital—and he told her, she went completely silent. She’d been pushing his chair round the grounds: it was her day off and they often spent it that way. He sensed, although he could not see her behind him, that she was upset, and when they reached the huge tree that had a wooden seat round it, she stopped the chair and sat down—sort of collapsed.

“I’ll miss you,” he said. This was true.

“Will you, Richard? Will you really?”

“Of course. I can’t imagine what it will be like without you.” This was not quite true: he could, but he felt she needed to hear it.

“I’ll miss you,” she said, so quietly that he could hardly hear her. Then she proposed to him, the last thing he expected—or wanted, come to that. He was both touched and appalled.

“Dear Nora. I’m not the marrying kind,” he said. “I couldn’t give you what you wanted.”

“I could look after you!”

“I know you could. But that wouldn’t be a marriage.”

She started to speak, but then she suddenly put her face in her hands and wept. That was awful, because he couldn’t put out a hand to comfort her—he couldn’t do a damn thing.

“Don’t,” he said after a while. “Don’t. I can’t bear you to cry—just sit here and watch you cry.”

She stopped at once. “Sorry. I see it’s not fair. Not fair to you, I mean. I had to tell you, though. Because you might have felt—well, even if you had thought it was a good idea, you might have thought I wouldn’t—anyway, I wanted you to know that I do love you.”

That was the first conversation about it. He went to the new place, and she came to see him on her days off. The funny thing was he did miss her. She always seemed to know what he needed: she would read to him for hours if he wanted; she asked him about his childhood, his family, and one day she met his parents when they made the long journey to visit him. After they had left she asked him who was Tony. (They had asked whether Tony had managed to visit him, and he had said yes, but very seldom.) He was just a friend, he had said.

“I thought it might be an old girl-friend. You know, people sometimes call girls called Antonia Tony.”

“No.”

“Oh, well,” she said, and he sensed how hard she was trying to be light about it. “I haven’t got a rival, then.”

He could never tell her about Tony. She knew after that that Tony visited him occasionally—took trouble not to come on the same day. “Nicer for you to space your visitors out,” she had said. Tony could hardly ever come, anyway. His work took him all over the country: since he’d been invalided out of the Army, where he’d been trained as an electrical engineer, he’d got the job of servicing plant in factories. He had told Tony that there was no point in his writing, because his letters had to be read to him, but he did send postcards, and when he did come, he pushed the chair through the grounds and well out of sight so that they could feel as much as possible alone together. It was ironical, really, that they’d met because they were both such good athletes, that they were either in the same top team or competing, although differences emerged: Tony, for instance, was a sprinter, and he was long distance. Tony had copped it before he did, but he had ended up with comparatively minor damage; he now walked with a pronounced limp and had trouble with his lungs. When he was better they had spent Richard’s leave together—ten unforgettable days in North Wales. It had rained almost all the time and even now he regarded rain with affection.

Shortly afterwards, he’d had his crash—prang, they called it in the RAF. Anyway, he’d crashed after being attacked by fighter aircraft, and a bullet had got him in the spine, so he couldn’t use his parachute. All his other injuries had been from the crash: it was a miracle he had survived at all, they had said. He’d been unconscious—came to in a hospital bed, full of dope, disembodied; to begin with he thought he was dead and that this was the beginning of something else. It was some time before he realized, and they told him, how badly he had been hurt, and much longer before he had a chance to tell Tony. That was the first time that he understood what a lot hands had to do with affection and love: he could not touch, comfort or reassure Tony—just had to lie there and tell him. It would make no difference, Tony had said at once, none at all. At twenty-three, Richard believed that he would have said the same. But he was ten years older and, even then, the full implications of his state had not come home to him. He had been able to think that when he was better, he would need less nursing—would become more independent somehow or other. It was only as the months dragged by that he recognized this would never be so to any significant degree. Even so, he had not been able to disillusion Tony, or had not been able to bear to, since he was terrified that this might mean he would never see Tony again. But when they had discharged him from the original place and moved him to the second hospital, he knew what his options were. His parents wanted him to go home: his mother said she would look after him; “I’m sure they would show me what I need to do,” she had said, “and your father would help me with the lifting.” But he had known that this was out of the question. He would not, could not expect Tony to take it all on: he would be prevented from having any career, any job, even, any friends, any fun, and, last, but by no means least, any sex. He could not allow someone of twenty-four to commit themselves to that, could not condemn that faithful and loving heart to such an inevitable betrayal. Tony had been a Dr. Barnardo’s boy: he had lived in institutions all his life, had never had family affection, let alone love, until he had met him, Richard. It was his first love: he would get over it. These resolutions had coincided with Nora’s proposal. At first he had dismissed the idea as preposterous: he did not love her; he was not in a position to contract to a partnership of any kind with anyone. Much safer to stick to the institutional life, where nothing was expected of him, and where people were paid to see that he got from one day to the next. But his views, his opinions, his resolutions, seemed to make as little difference to Nora’s feelings as they did to Tony’s. There began to be a pattern to Tony’s visits. Tony would talk about their future, and argue with him when he said that they wouldn’t be having one—sometimes this would get to be nearly a row. Then he would make an effort to change the subject; there would be silences, filled inexorably by intense longing, by memories of fulfilment, which was all, he realized, that now they could ever have, and they would look at each other and there was nothing to say. And then, one afternoon at one of these times, Tony said: “There’s one thing I’d like. Just once.”

“You say.”

“I could lift you out of your chair and put you on the ground.”

“It would be no good, darling. I can’t—”

“I know that. I just want to lie with you, hold you in my arms—be your loving and friendly lover.”

He’d taken off his jacket to make a pillow, and then he’d lifted him up out of the chair and laid him down as gently as a leaf coming to rest. Then he’d put his arms round him over his shoulders with the miserable stumps that were what remained of his arms and cried until Richard felt that both their hearts would break. “That’s it, then,” he said, when he had stopped. He wiped his own tears from Richard’s face before he kissed him. Then he had lifted him back into his chair, picked up his jacket and taken him back to his room. That was when he realized that Tony had at last accepted that there was no future for them. A month later, he agreed to marry Nora.

But now, with the wedding so near, he felt afraid. Not for Nora: nobody could know better than she who she was marrying; she was practical, she had nursed him for months, she could have no illusions about the prognosis. She said she loved him and he had come to believe her. They had had some pretty difficult conversations about no children, no sex, et cetera, and she had repeated steadily that she knew all that, she understood, it didn’t matter to her. “Probably harder for you,” she had said. No, he had replied: my libido seems pretty torpid. The one thing he could not bear to tell her was what he felt, still felt, for Tony. She simply thought Tony was a university friend; she was like his parents in this respect. In marrying Nora, he was doing, he hoped, the thing that would be best for everyone, but he would not betray Tony, who had continued to visit him, to care for him and about him, and who had accepted the news about his marriage with such gentle goodwill. “I do understand,” he had said. “She sounds just the right person for you. I’m glad she loves you.” He smiled then and added, “I’d have to win the pools to keep up with her.” (By then he’d been told about her family and the house at Frensham and all that.) And even that, though it could have been, was not bitterly said. Later, he said, “You’ll need a best man, won’t you?”

“I suppose I shall.”

“I’ll be your best man,” he said. “If you like.” He smiled a second time; and Richard wondered yet again whether he was more beautiful when he was smiling, or when he was not.

“You’ll always be my best man,” he said before he could stop himself. “That sounds corny, doesn’t it?”

And Tony, in their least favourite tutor’s voice, replied: “I’m very much afraid, Richard, that it does.”

Tony was not staying in the hotel, thank goodness. His parents had taken Richard upstairs and put him to bed. This meant that he was going to have to stay in one position all night—usually someone turned him, but he hadn’t mentioned that. “You get a good night’s rest,” they said and, again, he knew that if he had gone back to live with them, they would never have had one. He lay, for what seemed like hours, making resolutions to be good to Nora, but in the end he gave up and went back to Wales with Tony.

Christopher had been standing for about twenty minutes just inside the church where the biting cold outside was taken over by a marginally warmer, but more compelling darkness. The lights from the brass chandeliers looked yellow in the twilight dusk. It was just after two, and already the day seemed nearly over. He was the only usher; it was not a large wedding and, indeed, it looked as though the attendants would be lost in the cavernous church. He had put Mr. and Mrs. Holt in the front seats on the appropriate side. It was strange how awkward most people looked in their best clothes, he thought. Even he could see that Mrs. Holt was not given to wearing a hat, nor Mr. Holt a dark suit. The bridegroom, in a chair, was wheeled steadily up the aisle by a marvellous-looking young chap with red-gold hair, dark eyes and a limp. Compared to him, the chap in the chair—his future brother-in-law—looked rather ordinary; his face, that is: the rest of him could certainly not be called that. Aunt Villy arrived with Wills, Lydia and Neville. Lydia threw her arms round him: “I’m wearing scent,” she said; “I’m letting you smell it.” She wore a winter coat over a long yellow dress. Neville had walked purposefully up to the top of the church, while Aunt Villy, with Wills trying to squirm out of her grasp, kissed him and said how nice it was to see him again. Neville returned.

“I suppose Nora knows he’s got no arms,” he said. “His coat is sort of draped, but you can see he hasn’t got either of them.”

“That is a personal remark, Neville,” Lydia said in her most crushing voice.

“Children, children. No more talking.”

Wills, having failed to remove his hand from Villy’s, tried to sit on the ground. “When are we going to leave this place?”

“Where’s Roland?” Christopher asked.

“He had a sore throat and I brought Wills instead to relieve Ellen. The Duchy sent her love to you, and said you must come and stay when you have a chance to get away. We’ll find our way. You stay with Christopher, Lydia.”

The organ began a rather meandering piece of Bach, and suddenly quite a lot of people arrived. Nurses who’d looked after Richard, his sister, who was fat and looked sad, and then the three cousins, Louise and Polly and Clary, all looking very grown-up in hats that tilted over their faces. It was lovely to see them and made him think of summers at Home Place. Then Mum with Judy, also in a dress like Lydia’s. “I’m the bridesmaid.”

“You’re just one of them,” Lydia said.

They eyed each other.

“I’m wearing my seed pearls. And I’ve had a perm.”

“I can see.” Lydia’s hair, straight and shining, the colour of dark honey, hung down to below her shoulders, held back over her forehead by a yellow velvet snood. On this perched the narrow wreath of buttercups and daisies like a natural crown. On Judy the same thing looked embarrassingly inappropriate. But Nora had chosen the colours, and decreed what the wreaths were to be made of. Feeling sorry for her, he gave Judy a clumsy hug.

“Mind my dress,” she said.

Mum returned to unpack the bride’s bouquet from a cardboard box.

“She’ll be here any minute,” she said.

Angela arrived. It was ages since he’d seen her. She wore an emerald green jacket that made her shoulders look very wide, and a very short tight skirt that showed her lovely long legs in film star stockings. She had stopped plucking her eyebrows so much, so now she looked far less disdainful, and her mouth, which was so like Mum’s, was now painted a rosy pink instead of the pillar-box red she had worn when he had last seen her.

“You smell lovely,” he said when she kissed him (Lydia’s scent had been lavender water). “I wish you’d come last night.” She had not appeared.

“I’m sorry, Chris. Something—came up. Where do I sit?”

“Anywhere along that side. I’ll join you in a minute.”

He turned back to the door, and there was his father, with Nora in her long white dress and a veil that very nearly obscured her face. He exchanged an uneasy, social smile with his father. “I say, Nora, you do look terrific!”

She nodded—he could see her eyes glittering with excitement behind the veil. A pause, while Mum arranged the bridesmaids behind Nora, she took her father’s arm, and the organ struck up with the expected music. He could see the clergyman standing on the steps before the altar. Mum took his arm and they slipped round the side aisle to their seats, he with Angela in the second row, his mother in front.

During the service, he wondered if she knew what she was doing. He remembered the time when she had wanted to be a nun, a “bride of Christ.” He hoped that she did not feel she was making a sacrifice—a lesser one, he supposed it would be—since Richard was not God, but possibly a sacrifice all the same. The idea of sacrifice made him feel uneasy: he felt that he would only be able to sustain a short sharp one, and Nora’s would certainly not be that: it would continue until either she or Richard died. This made him think of Oliver—now probably about eight years old, and dogs didn’t live much above twelve or fourteen. It was no good thinking about that. Often, when he had worried about things for ages they were not as bad as he’d imagined, or sometimes they did not happen at all. Like being called up: the moment he’d decided that he ought to agree to be a soldier or something, they hadn’t wanted him. His eyesight wasn’t good enough, apart from having had all that shock treatment. So then he’d gone to work for a farmer, who was more of a market gardener really. He grew acres of vegetables, some salads and some soft fruit, and he let Christopher have the caravan he used to use for holidays to live in for a very low rent. He and his wife had got quite fond of Christopher and offered him a room in their house, but he really liked the caravan, which he had turned into a home for himself and Oliver. The farm was just outside Worthing, and he had a bike to go and buy food and anything else he needed. He lived mainly on vegetables from the farm, plus potatoes and bread. He’d become a vegetarian, as he’d decided that you couldn’t like animals as much as he did and then eat them, so he gave Oliver his meat ration. Once a week he had supper with the Hursts, otherwise he cooked on a Primus. He had an oil lamp and paraffin stove and a sleeping bag so it was quite cosy, even in winter, and Mum had given him a wireless for Christmas. He was all right. He worked hard and he didn’t mind being alone, although he realized when he saw her today, that he did miss Polly rather. Gosh, she did look marvellous walking into the church just now! Louise, whom he’d never really talked to much, looked quite old in a grey squirrel fur coat (which he didn’t approve of—it must have taken a frightening number of squirrels to make it), and Clary looked much the same as she always had only taller, and a bit silly wearing a hat, but Polly, in a coat the colour of dark blue hyacinths and with a blue straw hat tilted over her white forehead and coppery hair looked unapproachably glamorous—she had suddenly grown up so much that he felt he wouldn’t know what to talk to her about.

Dad had left Nora now, and was walking back to sit in the front pew with Mum. It must be awful to be Richard, he thought, not having any hands and having to be grateful to people all the time. He looked at his own hands, spread out over his knees to keep his legs warm—he wasn’t used to wearing such thin clothes. Mum had exclaimed about them when she was trying to get him kitted out in Uncle Hugh’s clothes. They did look like hands that spent most of their life out of doors and did a lot of work: he couldn’t get the earth thoroughly out from under his nails, and he’d had chilblains quite badly—on his feet as well, but he was used to them by now. They got better in the spring; this was the worst time of year for them. When he’d started at the farm, he used to get blisters too, but they soon stopped. Still, they weren’t exactly hands for a party …

They had both said their vows: he could hardly hear Richard, but Nora’s voice was clear and steady. He wondered if he would ever marry anyone; on the whole, he thought not. He couldn’t imagine that anyone would want to marry him, but he was pretty bad at imagining the future altogether—he couldn’t even think what it would be like when the war was over, if it ever was. Getting married if you didn’t believe in God would probably be wrong. And he was pretty sure you couldn’t marry a cousin.

There was a general movement. Richard, with Nora, was being wheeled into the back somewhere and Mum and Dad and Richard’s parents were all following them. Soon they would all be going to some hotel for the reception, and then Nora and Richard were going to Frensham, till the end of the war, anyway, and Nora was going to earn money by nursing one or two other wounded chaps. It was quite a big house, but he supposed they’d have to live on the ground floor.

They were coming back. He hoped it would soon be over, because it was so cold and he was extremely hungry.

“Why wasn’t Archie there?”

“He wouldn’t have been asked. Nora doesn’t know him, and even Aunt Jessica hardly knows him.”

“Oh.”

“Are you feeling sad too? It’s funny how sad weddings make one feel. I even felt sad after Louise’s, and that was a much starrier affair.”

“I think this was a particularly tragic one, if you ask me.”

“Clary, it wasn’t tragic. Nora didn’t have to marry him. She never used to do things she didn’t want, so she obviously isn’t now.”

“Isn’t what?”

“Sacrificing herself.”

“Oh, Poll, she is! She wants to and she is. Don’t you remember, Louise said she wanted to be a nun?”

“That was just a phase, as the aunts say. The female equivalent to wanting to be an engine driver.”

“Neville was awful,” Clary said, following that train of thought. “He asked Richard what he did if he had an itch.”

“He didn’t!”

“Oh, yes, he did. I told him he was both callous and tactless and he said if he was like that, he’d rather people asked him questions about it than pretended he was just like everyone else. But, of course,” she ended loftily, “he can’t have the slightest idea what it’s like to be Richard.”

“Well, I haven’t. If I try to think about it, my thoughts just black out. I can’t imagine that life would be worth living at all. Poor Richard! Goodness, isn’t it lucky that something like that didn’t happen to Archie?”

“I think crashes out of aeroplanes must be the worst. Look at that poor chap Zoë used to look after at Mill House.”

“Does she still do it?”

“I don’t think so. I think he may have gone back to his other hospital. What shall we do this evening?”

“We’d be warmest in a cinema. I’m not hungry after all those sandwiches and things. We could ring up Archie,” she said, as though it was a thought that had just occurred to her.

Clary looked at her consideringly. “We could … I expect he’ll be busy though—probably not worth it—”

“We could at least try,” Polly said as Clary knew she would.

So they rang up Archie who said it was far too cold to go out, but as his flat was nice and warm, why didn’t they come and have supper in it? “I know how awful it is after weddings,” he said. “One does so need cheering up about ordinary life.”

“Honey, the best thing you could do is to stop crying and tell me about it.”

He handed her a glass of bourbon and a handkerchief.

She blew her nose gratefully. “I really don’t know why I am. It was a wedding, after all.”

“Find out,” he said comfortably, settling beside her on the sofa.

“Of course,” she said, “people often cry at weddings. And it isn’t even as though I’m particularly fond of Nora. We never got on very well. She thought I was frivolous, and I thought she was a prig. She was awfully bossy, too. She told me once (it was supposed to be a secret) that she was going to be a nun and I just thought what a relief not to have her about criticizing my character all the time. The only times we ever ganged up were when Daddy was really awful to Christopher. He used to bully him and nag Mummy. I come from an awful family, I can tell you. Snobbish, and always trying to keep up appearances. But my father never earned any money much, and poor Mummy had to do the cooking and everything, which wasn’t at all what she was brought up to. And by the time Dad’s aged aunt died and left him the house and quite a lot of money, she was too old to enjoy it. Anyway, Dad expected Christopher to be a war hero and Nora and me to make good marriages.”

“And what would that mean? Marrying into your Royal Family, that kind of thing?”

“Not quite that. But a title, or someone like my cousin Louise married—you know, famous.”

“Golly! Well, I suppose parents are always ambitious for their children—”

“It didn’t work in our case. Christopher works on a farm, and Nora has married a paraplegic—”

“And you are having an affair with an American who is old enough to be your father.”

“Oh, they don’t know that!” she said. “I mean, it’s not because you’re American, or anything, it’s the having an affair part that they wouldn’t like. People of their generation simply don’t have affairs.” She had begun to blush.

He put a bear-like arm round her thin shoulders.

“American people of their generation sometimes have affairs, as you know,” he said. “It’s possible you don’t know everything about them.”

She leant back against the warm wall of his shoulder. “I’m sure it’s different in America. And the war and everything.”

“You haven’t told me why Nora’s wedding made you cry.”

“Oh! No. I suppose—it was really all the things that it wasn’t. She wore a white dress and veil, and Judy and Lydia—that’s another cousin—were bridesmaids. But when it was over, and she was walking down the aisle, she tried to wheel his chair, but the best man wouldn’t let her. He was right, of course, it really would have looked like a nurse with her patient if she’d done that. But it was so sad! Her eyes filled with tears. I mean, she’ll never be able to—to have children. She’ll always just have to look after him.”

“Perhaps she loves him,” he said. “Perhaps she loves him and knows he needs her and she wants to be needed.”

“You always look on the bright side.”

“No. I’m just pointing out to you, honey, that there may be one.”

“But supposing she finds someone else, some time in the future and falls in love with him?”

“That can happen to anyone.”

“Oh, darling, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—”

“That was all a long time ago, and I know you didn’t.”

But at different intervals during the rest of the evening—while they got ready to go out to dinner, while they were dancing (he was a very good dancer), while they stood outside in the freezing cold waiting for the taxi he had ordered, when she fell asleep in the cab while he was holding her, when they were standing in the small lift on their way to his fourth-floor flat, when he had opened the door and they were assailed by the (to him comfortingly familiar, to her delightfully exotic) odours of the Chesterfield cigarettes that he chain-smoked and the Mary Chess scent of “White Lilac” that he had had posted to her from New York, when they had got to bed and he had made love to her, when he had given her a final kiss and reached out to switch off the bedside lamp that he put on the floor to make the light more cosy and romantic and she had turned her smooth bony back to him for sleep—during that whole evening Elaine Black thrust her way out of the past to confront them. Angela saw her as a large, dark-eyed woman with raven black hair and dazzling white skin, bosomy and with a low husky voice. He knew her to be small, red-haired, short-sighted and shrill. “A good girl,” his mother had said when he had brought her home. “A well-brought-up girl.” Her very plainness had appealed to his mother; certainly her appearance in no way prepared him for her going off with another man, a man he had never met or even heard of, a step she had taken with no warning or intimation even of dissatisfaction with her married state or with him as a husband. And then, two years afterwards, he heard that she had died—so suddenly that he thought it must have been an automobile accident, but in fact it had been a sudden and violent onset of diabetes. It wasn’t until she died that he realized that he had never loved her and began to feel guilty. Eight years they had been together, and he had never known what she really thought or felt about anything, except that she had minded being unable to have children. He had been working his ass off during those years, first as a medical student, and then, after he’d qualified, in the big hospital in the Bronx. She’d worked as a receptionist for a psychiatrist but, even so, they’d been very short of cash. After Elaine had left, he’d decided that he didn’t know enough about people and that was when he’d decided to qualify in psychiatry. Analysis had taught him how much of his life had been dictated by being his mother’s son, and it was only when she died—just before Pearl Harbor—that he’d been able to accept that she’d done her best for him according to her lights. Her death had released him from the relentless campaign she had waged to find him another, more suitable, wife (Elaine’s shares had dropped dramatically with her failure to produce a grandchild). By then, he was going quite well: had moved to a larger apartment in a better part of the city, shared a receptionist with two colleagues and enjoyed one or two unmemorable affairs (though never with patients). But Elaine’s departure continued to haunt him: if she had not died, he might have been able to seek her out and talk to her, though he was never sure whether he would have taken the considerable trouble involved to find her and, if he had, whether she would have agreed to such an amiable post-mortem. As it was, the thought of her always provoked the sensation of unfinished business between them, and this, for reasons he could understand but not quell, induced guilt. Joining the Army, coming to England with the prospect of invading France, had made him feel free, isolated, and to begin with, and outside the context of the job, irresponsible. At first, although London seemed to be full of girls, he remained lonely. He went out on evenings with fellow officers where they ate the terrible food and watched couples dancing. Sometimes the others brought girls, and once a girl for him, but they hadn’t hit it off: she told him dirty stories that made him feel embarrassed and sorry for her. Then, one evening, he’d gone out with John Riley who was in his outfit, and after dinner they’d gone on to the Astor (he realized afterwards because John knew a girl he was interested in was going to be there) and, sure enough, John located his lady and got her to dance with him. He’d watched them for a bit, and then just as he was thinking of going, he’d noticed that shit Joe Bronstein dancing with a tall thin girl in a green silk dress and a long page-boy bob. As they came round the floor nearer his table he could see that Joe was bawling her out and she was enduring it. He’d been in the same ship as Joe coming over and had disliked him as a bully who went for anyone weaker than himself. When they were about two yards away he saw that Joe was drunk, that the girl was precariously managing to keep him on his feet. For a second, she seemed to be looking at him, and her face, white, with a dark red mouth and eyes heavily fringed in black had all the mournful vulnerability of a clown … Then the music stopped and Joe, grasping her arm above the elbow, was lurching with her towards their table. Once there, he pushed her down onto her chair: he saw that she said something and rose to her feet, whereupon he seized her again and shoved her back so violently that she missed the chair and fell upon the floor. That was enough. He got up and went over to them. “Time you went home, Lieutenant,” he had said, but he hadn’t had to do much more, because the bouncers arrived and removed him. That was how he had met Angela. He had asked her whether she wanted a drink, and she had said, no, she just wanted to go home. Close to, she was younger than he had thought her. She started to thank him in her pretty, clipped English accent, but in the middle of it was overcome by an enormous yawn that she could hardly cover by her hand. She apologized and said she was rather tired. By then the cab he’d ordered had come. When she realized he was coming with her, she had shrunk into her corner and given her address in a voice that attempted distance, but sounded afraid. He would just see her safely home, he said, and she apologized again for being tired. (By the time they reached her flat, she had apologized four times.)

The next day he had sent her some roses with a card saying he hoped she’d had a good sleep and would she call him? He’d been faintly surprised that she had. He’d taken her out on New Year’s Eve, and they’d drunk a lot, ending in a night club where her gin had been the worst hooch and she’d passed out.

Making love to her the first time had been disappointing: there was something both practised and impersonal about her that he found sad, and he sensed damage way beyond Joe Bronstein. She made love like someone who always had to catch the eight-ten in the morning and knew that they would be standing for the whole journey. But for the rest of the time, when he took her around, exploring London which she seemed to know as little as he, going for trips to the country when he could get something to drive, to the movies when the weather was bad, when they spent evenings in his flat eating tins of turkey breast or steak that he could get from the PX and he taught her to play chess, she blossomed. He kept himself very steady and patient and always gentle: he did not want her to confuse gratitude with love. He guessed she’d been in love with a man who’d been killed, but she did not tell him and he did not ask.

He caught the last train back to Oxford and she was waiting for him on the platform when he arrived, as he’d known she would be. It was bitterly cold, the train was late, and he limped along the platform stumbling nearly into her arms. They kissed: her face was freezing and she smelled of peppermint. Inside the battered little MG her family had given her years ago for her twenty-first birthday, they kissed more seriously.

“Oh, Raymond! I’ve missed you so!”

He had only been away for twenty-four hours.

“I came back as quickly as I could.”

“Oh, I know! I wasn’t blaming you!”

It was perishingly cold in the car; their breath was steaming up the windows.

“Let’s get going, darling.”

“Yes, of course. You must be frozen.” She wiped the windscreen with her rather hairy scarf. She loved the way he said darling.

“Did it all go well?” she asked in as light and unconcerned a voice as she could manage. She was dying to hear every detail of the wedding; not that she was jealous or anything so idiotic, it was simply that she was interested in everything about him.

“Very well, I think.”

“Did the bride wear white?”

“Oh, yes. It was all properly done. Bridesmaids, you know, in church and all that.”

“It must have been lovely.” I shall have to forgo all that, she thought. She had so often imagined herself walking slowly down the aisle, her radiance partly concealed by yards and yards of old lace like the end of all her favourite films. But now, when the war was over, and Raymond was able to leave the quite awful woman he was married to, it would have to be a registry office. However, what did a little petty detail like that matter compared to their wonderful, unique relationship?

“It must have been rather agonizing for you, though,” she said. This was much later, after they had parked the car outside the huge dark red-brick Edwardian house in which they both had rooms. To begin with they had been with all the others, in Keble College, but after four people had broken into her room and tried to go to bed with her, Raymond had wonderfully arranged for them to live out. A bus collected them every day and took them to Blenheim. It was widely assumed by their colleagues that they were sleeping together; this, however, was not the case. They lived in a state of virtuous, romantic tension that made her admire Raymond more than ever, since she found it so intolerable. They had come very near consummation, but the value he placed upon her virginity seemed insurmountable. She would have liked him to be just as honourable, but at the same time overcome with desire. Then he could have regrets, make abject apologies, and she would be tender and magnanimous—she had rehearsed every detail of that scene without still, unhappily, having been called upon to perform it.

“I mean—the whole situation,” she went on. They were in her room and she was making cocoa as Raymond’s ration of whisky from the local pub had run out. She had lit the small gas fire, but they both still wore their overcoats. “I suppose you had to pretend to everybody.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well—” She floundered. “I mean, that it was just a perfectly normal situation.” She imagined him standing beside his wife, smiling glassily and shaking hands with the guests.

“Oh, that. Yes.” He suddenly remembered watching the best man lean over to put the ring on Nora’s hand since the bridegroom was not able to do it—a poignant moment that had somehow brought Nora’s future state home to him as nothing else had. In spite of himself, his eyes filled with tears. “It was,” he said huskily.

“Oh, my darling!” She flung herself down on her knees before his chair. “I didn’t mean to upset you! Let’s talk about something else!”

“You know Meccano?” Neville said in the train going back to Home Place.

“Of course I do, stupid. I’ve never cared for it myself.”

“Well, if you made long bits, they could be attached to the top of his stumps—he did have them, I could see from his jacket, and they could have a little motor and you could make sort of hands, claws, anyway and then he would be able to pick things up. A bit like a crane,” he added: Lydia had never been any good at mechanics.

“I think you’re horrible to talk about poor Richard like that.”

“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” he returned. “I’m trying to think of things to help him, which is more than you have. Your mere sorrow isn’t the slightest use to him.”

She was silenced, and he spent the rest of the journey deciding whether or not he would be an inventor.

“… and Daddy is so pleased that we are going to be at Frensham. If it had been requisitioned, goodness knows what would have happened to it, and anyway he thinks our ideas for it are far better than the Government’s.”

They were back in the hotel where he had spent the night, and Nora was to occupy the room that had been his parents’. The hotel had sent up flowers. Scarlet and pink carnations with gypsophila rioted in a cut-glass vase. There was also a plate of grapes, most of which they had eaten. Tomorrow they were to be driven to Frensham.

“You’re tired,” she said, before he could. “I’ll settle you now.”

Half an hour later, when that was done—his back rubbed with surgical spirit, his teeth cleaned, his pee collected in a bottle, his dope taken, his short-sleeved nightshirt on (much easier than pyjamas, she had rightly said when she bought it for him), his pillows, including his special one, comfortably arranged, she bent over and gave him a light kiss.

“I’ll come in at three to turn you,” she said, “and I’ll leave my door open so you can call. I’ll always hear you.” When she had turned out the light and gone next door and he could hear her preparing to go to bed he was suddenly, overwhelmingly touched at the way she behaved exactly as though nothing new had happened.

Tony waited until Richard left the reception with Nora in a limousine that he could lift Richard into. He watched with the rest of the crowd until the car turned a corner and was abruptly out of sight, then he went back to the hotel cloakroom, collected his duffel coat, left the hotel, and found a pub where he got extremely drunk.