Four

THE OUTSIDERS

January–April 1946

If anyone during the seemingly endless six years of war had suggested that he would actually miss it when it stopped, he would have been affronted and thought they were simply trying to provoke him. Now, however, living aimlessly in the toy house that Jessica thought was so convenient, he had to admit that he did miss it – in more ways than one. The first crunch had been in the autumn, when he had gone back to see what was going on in his house at Frensham. Of course, he had been delighted when Nora and Richard had gone to live there after their marriage: it had stopped the house being requisitioned, because of Nora’s intention to run it as a home for disabled ex-servicemen. But this he had seen as simply a wartime project: he had always imagined himself reinstalled there – the squire of the village, living, for the first time in his life, in the way to which he felt himself suited. Jessica had warned him that he might find the place changed, but he had not taken her seriously. In the train, he had begun to form plans to make some sort of flat in the house for Nora and Richard (Jessica had also said that it would be very hard on Nora to turn them out).

He had sat in the train on the familiar journey thinking fondly of Aunt Lena whose house it had been, and of how often he’d taken this particular train – the three thirty-five – when he had been sent there for a week of his holidays. He had loved those visits: Aunt Lena had spoiled him – she was childless. He would be met at the station by Parkin, who had called him Master Raymond and agreed with everything he said. When he arrived, he would go and kiss his aunt’s pillowy cheek. There would be a large coal fire at all times of the year and, within ten minutes, the maid would start bringing in an enormous, wonderful tea. Egg sandwiches, scones with strawberry jam and delicious butter that had beads of water in it when you cut it, mustard and cress sandwiches, gingerbread, fairy cakes, and to crown all, apart from a seed or a cherry cake, a wonderful iced affair that said, ‘Welcome to Raymond’ in contrasting piped icing. The cups were very shallow with dragons on them. Aunt Lena always said she was not hungry, but she usually ate some of everything, and he was encouraged to do the same. After tea, when the maid had cleared everything away, Aunt Lena would read to him from The Water Babies or a thin battered book about the exploits of a brownie, a kind of mischievous but well-meaning fairy. When he was older they played draughts, and Halma and Letterbags. There was an enamelled clock on the chimney-piece that struck the quarter hours with delicate silvery chimes, and at six o’clock Aunt Lena would ring for Barker, the lady’s maid, who would come to fetch him for his bath, after which he was conducted to what was unaccountably called the schoolroom where a bowl of bread and milk and brown sugar and a boiled egg awaited him. When he was in bed, Aunt Lena would come and say good night to him. She would have changed into black silk with a white cashmere shawl and long, elaborate, seed-pearl earrings that were shaped like baskets of flowers. She would make him say his prayers and kiss his forehead, and sometimes send for Barker again: ‘The boy’s hair is damp from his bath – it should be dried – see to it, will you, Barker?’ And then he would hear her painful, uneven retreat and the tap of her stick as she descended the stairs. Thus would begin a halcyon seven days of being petted, the centre of attention both with Aunt Lena and her servants for whom his visit provided a minute but welcome change from the stultifying regularity of their lives. He was given his favourite food, taken out for little treats, the best being a journey to Guildford with Aunt Lena to choose his Christmas and birthday presents, but most of all he enjoyed being the centre of utterly uncritical attention. Everything he did was clever and good; he was ‘such a good child’, he would hear Aunt Lena telling everyone, and he revelled in living up to this entrancing reputation. It had been utterly unlike home, where his father ruminated publicly and at length on his dimness – his mediocre reports from school, his paralysing inability to come up with the right answers to terrifying questions headed as ‘elementary’ general knowledge that were his father’s favourite lunchtime conversational ploys. ‘Can’t think what they teach you,’ he’d end up by saying. ‘Never known such an ignoramus in me life.’ His mother did not criticize him, she simply took as little notice of him as possible. Her interest was entirely centred upon his older brother, Robert – the one who was killed in the war. Robert had once accompanied him on a visit to Aunt Lena, but had professed himself bored; he had also been exceedingly naughty in some unspeakable way (at least he could never get anybody to speak of it). ‘Not, I am afraid, a good child,’ Aunt Lena had said the evening after he had been sent home in disgrace (he, Raymond, had been allowed to stay).

Thereafter he had the monopoly of Frensham and Aunt Lena and, bless her heart, she had left him everything when she died: the house that he had become so fond of, that had, in fact, felt like his real home, all its contents and what had seemed at the time to be a staggering number of most conservatively invested shares. He, who had never succeeded in making any money to speak of, was suddenly comparatively rich. But before he could really settle down in the house to enjoy everything, the war had come, he had felt bound to offer his services and the job he had got precluded his living at home. He had been banished, as it were, to Woodstock, and subsequently Oxford for the duration. As Jessica did not want to live at Frensham on her own, the house had been shut until Nora’s marriage to that poor chap Richard, and when she had suggested running a sort of nursing home for paraplegics it had seemed the answer. All very well, but now that the war was over he wanted to get back to normal. He was perfectly prepared to convert the stables and coach house into a home for Nora and Richard, but he wanted his house back, whatever Jessica thought or said about it. She wanted to keep that doll’s house in Paradise Walk, which, as he had pointed out to her, was barely big enough for the two of them, and impossible when Judy came home for the holidays. And giving Angela any decent sort of send-off there was out of the question.

At the thought of Angela he sighed – audibly, he realized, since the passenger opposite him looked up suddenly from his book, and, embarrassed, he averted his gaze to the window. Angela’s impending marriage had been a shock to him as well as to Jessica, but in quite different ways. She had objected to her fiancé’s being nearly twenty years older than Angela; this did not seem to Raymond a bad thing, Angela needed looking after. She objected to the fact that he had been married before – he partly agreed with that, but pointed out that if Major, or Dr Black as he presumably now was, had reached the age of forty-five without being married there might be other things to be said against him. She had also said that he was far from glamorous (Black had gone back to the States before Raymond had the chance of meeting him), and remembering bitterly her liaison with that slimy little worm Clutterworth, he thought she was a fine one to talk about that. Black being a psychiatrist was certainly a bad mark: he had a profound distrust for head doctors and all that mental stuff, but still he was a doctor – and had been a major in the American army, which was respectable. He had certainly felt upset when he discovered that the wedding would not take place here, either in London or at Frensham which, of course, was how it should be. It was not even that Dr Black was unwilling to come over for the wedding, it was Angela who insisted that she did not want a big wedding – a family do – she wanted to go over to New York and be married quietly there without any fuss, as she put it. So, in a couple of weeks’ time, she would be sailing in the Aquitania – entirely on her own – sailing away to a life which probably meant, he felt, that he would never see her again. That was what shocked him. It meant that there would now never be any chance of his repairing their awkward, uncomfortable relationship, something that he had craved ever since that disastrous lunch at Lyons Corner House – five, no, six years ago, that last time he had been alone with her. After it, he had been so discouraged by her indifference and boredom; he had made two or three attempts to see her and been put off – immediately, or worse, at the last minute – until he had lost his nerve. He had never had the opportunity to explain that he understood that she was grownup, that he was no longer simply a parent, but that he wanted to be her friend, an equal in some sort, that all he asked was affection and trust, that he could not bear being treated as a stranger who, he felt, she felt, she would dislike if she knew him any better. But this was how it was with them – or had become. He remembered now when the full realization of his failure with Angela had flooded upon him: it had been the summer of ’43, the evening after he had had that awful lunch with Villy to try – hopelessly, as it turned out – to get some help from her about Jessica’s perfidy. The shame and misery he had endured when he had first discovered that his wife was having an affair! It would have been awful whoever it had been, but her choice of that dreadful little man had been the utmost humiliation. His Jessica lying to him – not once, but repeatedly – for months, for the best part of a year. The fool she must have thought him, the terrible fear that she could never have cared two straws for him, that he had imagined her love, that she had simply countenanced his adoration, had merely endured his love without returning it. He had descended then to a black pit of despair and isolation: his bluster, his rage at her when he was alone did not for one moment sustain him. He felt his failure as a husband and then, immediately, as a parent as well, and what on earth else was he if he was neither of these?

He had got off the train at Oxford and sat the whole hot, airless evening in a pub that he had never been to before, that he rightly assumed would not be frequented by his colleagues. He had sat there nursing the two small whiskies that was all the landlord was prepared to sell to a stranger, until his newly acquired ulcer caused him such pain that he knew he must go somewhere to eat.

The weeks that followed were the worst in his life. He had arranged the luncheon with Villy because he simply had to talk to someone, to share some of his rage and shock and the only possible person had seemed to be Villy, who he was sure would be as outraged at her sister’s behaviour as he. Then, on his way to meet her, the dreadful thought had occurred to him that she already knew, and from there it was a short step to the nightmare possibility – likelihood – that everybody knew, that not only Jessica but the world was laughing at him behind his back. But she clearly hadn’t known; seemed suitably, mercifully shocked. Then, as he was telling her what he felt about it all, he had the idea that perhaps he could get Villy to talk to her, something that he shrank from doing. But after lunch with Villy, and that first, awful evening in the pub, he had rung her the next day and asked her after all to say nothing. ‘It may all blow over,’ he had said, trying to sound hearty and optimistic. She had agreed to silence (he was pretty sure that she would have been silent anyway), and that was that. Of course, he played endless scenes to himself when he confronted Jessica, told her exactly what he thought of her monstrous behaviour. But here, always, after the first flush of exhilaration that the idea of doing this induced, he came up against her unknown response. Supposing she was in love with this frightful cad? Supposing she wanted to have a divorce – leave him and go off with Clutterworth? The thought paralysed him: the idea of Jessica leaving him was quite simply more than he could bear. Divorce would be a public humiliation that he felt he could never recover from, but beyond that, his private anguished contemplation of his life without Jessica made him too terrified not only to confront her but to give her the slightest inkling that he knew.

He took to giving Jessica as much notice as possible of his coming to London, and claimed that Wednesdays were the only day he could get off – and that not every week. The visits caused him a different kind of pain from that which he endured the rest of the time. He took her to the theatre and to restaurants – the latter with other people if possible – in order that they should not be alone. Once, when he stayed the night, he had tried to make love to her and failed. He had claimed that he had drunk too much because he’d felt he was catching some sort of bug and she had seemed to believe him – been extraordinarily nice about it. Afterwards he had turned away from her, had lain, tense and miserable in the dark: tears had run down his face until his neck was cold with them. After that, he made excuses about having to catch the last train back to work, and started having spasmodic pains in his stomach that the doctor diagnosed as a threatened ulcer. He was supposed to lay off drink and to smoke less, but he was so miserable that he did neither of these things and the ulcer got worse. He was irritable at work, aware that none of his colleagues liked him but he hardly cared about that. Work became his best solace: he plunged himself into it with, unexpectedly, some success. He discovered that he had a capacity to think about and explore certain problems that promoted, and in one case achieved, their solution. Crumbs of self-respect occurred but they seemed only to emphasize his otherwise vast and despairing sense of failure.

And then, out of the blue, something happened that began to make a difference.

One morning he received a memo so badly typed that it was almost without sense. It was not for the first time that week, and he blew up, went in search of the perpetrator to bawl him or her out.

It was a girl. She sat in the semi-basement, in what must once have been a scullery, which now looked like a cell with its heavily barred windows and stone floor. She was hunched over her typewriter and she was crying. She looked up as he stormed into the room, but anything he was about to say left his mind at the sight of her. Her face was blotched and shiny with crying, and one side of it was swollen like someone with mumps. She looked revolting.

‘What on earth is the matter with you?’

She had toothache, she said, really awful toothache.

‘Better go to the dentist, hadn’t you?’

She’d made an appointment, but in the end she hadn’t gone.

‘Why on earth not?’

She hadn’t been able to face it.

‘Better ring him up and tell him you’re sorry you’re late but you’re on your way.’

That was last Monday.

‘Do you mean you’ve had toothache for’ – he calculated – ‘over a week?’

She’d kept hoping it would go away. A fresh burst of tears. ‘I know I’m an awful coward, but I just can’t bring myself to go. I sort of know I must – and I can’t!’ She tried to blow her nose on a sopping handkerchief, and winced. She touched the bad side of her face and gave a little moan.

He asked her where her dentist was and she said Oxford.

‘I’ll take you,’ he said. ‘I’ll borrow a car and take you.’

And that was what he did. Ordinarily he would have found it embarrassing and difficult to ask anyone for the use of their car – petrol was short and he had no allowance himself as Jessica had their car, but now he found himself powerfully resolute: the wretched girl had to be got to the dentist and he was organizing it. He rang the deputy head of his department and said that one of the secretaries had been taken ill and he was taking her to a doctor, went and collected the keys and returned to collect her. She was still sitting at her desk.

‘Got your pass?’

She nodded. ‘In my bag.’ She was shivering. In the car, she said, ‘It’s awfully kind of you.’ Then a moment later: ‘You won’t leave me there, will you? You’ll stay with me?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘It’s really most awfully kind of you.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Veronica. Veronica Watson.’

The dentist was off the Headington Road in North Oxford. They had to wait for some time, as the disapproving receptionist said that Mr McFarlane had a patient with him, and another patient at two thirty and before that he would be having his lunch hour. At this point, Veronica asked if she might go to the lavatory, and in her absence he managed to soften up the receptionist with an assurance that secretly amazed him.

The indirect result of this was that when the time came he was allowed by the dentist to accompany Veronica into the surgery and subsequently to sit holding her hand while the offending tooth was extracted. ‘You have a whopping great abscess. You should have come last week, you know. Then we might have been able to save the tooth.’ When he had finished, and was washing his hands, he remarked, ‘You’re a lucky young woman to have your father come with you.’

He saw her about to deny this and put his finger on his lips: together they both looked towards Mr McFarlane, his back was turned and he was drying his hands on a towel.

In the street, she said, ‘I’m sorry he thought that. I hope you didn’t mind.’

‘Not at all. After all, I’m old enough to be your father.’

‘You’re not in the least like him, though.’

‘Feel better?’

‘Golly, yes! It’s a bit sore, but it’s stopped throbbing.’

He drove her home. She couldn’t possibly go back to work, he said, she should take a couple of aspirin and go to bed, and she said, all right, she would.

Her room turned out to be in the same building as his.

‘I’m so awfully grateful to you,’ she said as she got out of the car. ‘I don’t know how to thank you.’

‘My dear, it was nothing.’

‘Oh, but it was!’ She had turned back to him, her small velvety eyes glowing. ‘It feels as though you’ve saved my life!’

Driving back to Woodstock he felt happier than he had for weeks – for months, really. He was not simply a brain; he was somebody who, faced with a sudden emergency, could deal with it, could do the right good turn to somebody else with verve and assurance. Remembering those glowing eyes in her pear-shaped face, he glowed: it had not been that she was pretty, that his help had come out of some second-rate reason like being attracted to her, it had been pure kindness. The poor little thing had needed someone to take charge and he had done so. Her father, indeed!

Two days later he found a parcel on his desk. It was a box of Meltis New Berry Fruits with a card attached. ‘I didn’t know how to thank you for your kindness, but hope you will like these. Yours ever, Veronica.’

Really! There was something touching about the present and the card that had a little blue bird sitting on a twig in the right-hand top corner. She had large, rounded, rather childish writing. He opened the box, selected a green berry and ate it: gooseberry – it was actually rather good. He decided to go and thank her.

That had been the beginning of their friendship, which on her part, with a rapidity that slightly unnerved him, became a great deal more. In short, she fell madly in love with him, and he was touched, and quite soon more than touched. She was so young: it was flattering to be adored by someone so young – and really not bad-looking. Her face, when it subsided, proved to be rather round with rosy cheeks. She had dark curly hair that she wore short with a wavy fringe, and a small, full mouth that seemed always a little pursed. Her eyes were her best feature; their habitual expression was one of anxiety, but when she was with him they melted to adoration. She was like a small dark velvet pansy, a little spaniel, he told her when they reached the delightful stage of discussing themselves.

To begin with, he thought of her almost as a daughter: she gave him a kind of affectionate trust, looked up to him in the way that he had always hoped Angela would grow up to do. But when it dawned on him that she was actually in love with him, of course he told her that he was married – he wasn’t a cheap little cad like some he could mention. ‘I thought you must be,’ was all that she said, but he sensed that it was a shock to her all the same. He thought then that he should have told her before, but it hadn’t come up somehow. It changed things, whether for the better or not he really couldn’t say. It added a dimension to her attitude towards him: she was no longer assuaging his sense of failure as a father, she was beginning to affect how he felt as a husband, as a man. It was immensely comforting to be regarded as a romantic figure: it shifted Jessica to the middle distance of his consciousness and his miserable jealousy receded, leaving him with more distaste than despair. He told Veronica how fond of her he was, how much he enjoyed her company (they were now spending practically every evening together, going for walks by the canal, spending hours in various pub gardens, drinking cocoa in her room). At work there was the delicious game of pretending hardly to know one another, of being formal, using a code to arrange their meetings. His ulcer troubled him far less, and in the end not at all. She had a birthday, her twenty-first, and he gave her a Jacqmar scarf, yellow with red hammers and sickles printed all over it – Russian motifs were fashionable – and a silver bracelet with ‘Veronica’ engraved upon it. She had been thrilled; only sad that she had to go home to her parents for the celebration. She asked him to come too, but he declined. She had returned with the car, a bright red MG that her parents had given her. This had been wonderful: he managed to wangle petrol, and it meant that they could get further away from Oxford or Woodstock to places where they would be safe from meeting anyone they knew.

He had taken the opportunity while she was with her family to go to London, and there, because for once he had not given notice of his visit, he had come face to face with Clutterworth. He was apparently simply having tea with Jessica, but he suspected that a good deal had gone on before that. He was shocked by how dreadful this made him feel: he had found himself almost unable to speak, to utter more than a few words to the effect that he had simply come back to collect some important papers he’d left before. He had stumped upstairs, gone into the room in which he slept and noisily opened and shut drawers there. Her room was at the end of the landing. The door was open, the bed immaculate. Obviously tea came first. He went down the stairs and out of the house and left them to it. He walked to the tube and took the first train that came in for Piccadilly, went to a news theatre and sat in it for two repeats of its programme. Then he went to the nearest restaurant he could find and ordered a meal: food made him feel sick, but he drank a bottle of wine and a glass of Spanish brandy. By the time he got to Paddington to catch the last train he felt feverish and drunk. Back at his digs there was a message: ‘Your wife rang. Please would you ring her.’ Would he hell! He went to bed and woke a couple of hours later with his mouth like a sandpit, stomach cramps and a pounding head. For the rest of the night, as he tramped back and forth from bedroom to lavatory, and after an abortive search for aspirin, he lay with fragments of dialogue repeating: ‘Do you think he suspected anything?’ ‘Oh, good heavens, no! He hasn’t the faintest idea!’ ‘Are you sure? Sure he won’t come back?’ ‘Honestly, dear Raymond, he isn’t very bright about that kind of thing.’ And then weary smiles or sniggering laughter at his lack of brightness …

Veronica returned in the evening of the following day, was waiting at the bus stop in her car when he got back from work. ‘It’s mine,’ she said, ‘my twenty-first birthday present. Isn’t it marvellous? I’m going to take you for a drive now – we could go to the Three Pigeons and have a drink there. Oh, I’m so glad to be back though – What’s the matter?’ By now he was in the car. ‘You look awful!’

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of town.’

But when they had reached a secluded piece of lane, and she had turned to him again and asked with real anxiety what was the matter, and he started to try to tell her, he couldn’t – he simply broke down. All his anger and hatred, of himself as well as of them, and his despair came uncontrollably out. He put his hands over his face and sobbed and couldn’t say anything at all.

She was so sweet! So gentle and concerned, so much on his side. For he did tell her – the whole thing in the end: it was such an enormous relief to tell someone who cared about him, who seemed as utterly shocked as he. ‘How simply awful for you! How could anyone do that to you?’ were two of the things she said.

‘I’m sorry to burden you with all this,’ he said later, but he wasn’t sorry at all, just incredibly relieved to have got it off his chest, and to relax in the balmy atmosphere of her concern and devotion. For this was when he recognized that she really did love him. ‘Poor darling! I do love you so much. I’d do anything to make you happier. I think you’re the most marvellous person I’ve ever met in my life.’

‘Do you? Do you really?’

‘Of course I do. Oh, darling, no wonder you’re shattered. Anyone as brave and sensitive as you would be.’

Brave, sensitive. Nobody had ever called him either of these things. But he had been brave – years ago, in France, in the trenches, when that mad major had spent six weeks trying to get him killed. He’d done every single sortie that that dotty shell shocked bugger had commanded him to do and he’d survived. And he was sensitive, really; it was just that none of his family seemed to notice the fact. But she did. This very young girl had the perception to see him as he was. He put his arms round her. ‘I love you too,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I should have done without you.’

It had been a turning point in their relationship, although he hadn’t realized it at the time. When, after leaving several messages at his digs, Jessica finally reached him at the office, he found it easy to say that he had had a train to catch and he thought he’d explained that.

That autumn had been a kind of halcyon renaissance for him. His times with her were entirely pleasant, angst-free; he basked in her reflected excitement at being in love. She wasn’t beautiful like Jessica, or desirable in remotely the same way, but he liked her: she was sweet and attractive, always good-natured and eager to please him – this last an experience that was quite new to him. With Jessica, he had been the supplicant, suing for her admiration and respect; with Veronica it was the other way round. Remembering what it was like to be the most vulnerable, he was very careful with her; he was determined to be both responsible and kind. This entailed not actually going to bed with her. To begin with, he had not found this very difficult: he kissed and petted her and enjoyed it, and throughout the autumn he had thought that this state of affairs suited her as well as him. But when she came to him one day with the tale of someone breaking into her room – at night, when she was about to go to bed – and admitted that this was not the first time she had been so harassed, he decided to take action and found them digs out of Keble, where most of the staff lived, a flat on the other side of Oxford. She had been thrilled. The flat, the upper floor of a small terrace house, consisted of two bedrooms, a bathroom and a small sitting room with a kitchenette tacked on to it. It was furnished with bare and drab essentials. Money had to be put into meters for the gas fires and hot water; the beds were the sort to be found in boarding schools, narrow, made of iron and wire and horsehair, with blankets that had a rigid feltiness that did not promise warmth. The carpets were dirty and worn and most of the chairs were of the kind that made it unwise to sit on them without thought.

Veronica seemed unaware of any of these disadvantages. ‘I’ll be able to cook meals for us!’ she had exclaimed when she saw the Baby Belling and the small cracked sink. ‘Oh, I do think it’s wonderful of you to have found somewhere so cosy!’

That first evening they had unpacked, and eaten a picnic meal of Scotch eggs and beetroot salad, procured from a pub that they frequented, which they ate in the sitting room before the gas fire. He occupied the battered armchair, she sat on the floor beside him and they were both slightly intoxicated by the sense of adventure and whisky, and he with the feeling that he had rescued her, and she was prattling on about how she had never dreamed that he would find such a solution to her problems so quickly …

She had fallen suddenly silent.

After a moment, he put his hand on her dark, curly hair. ‘And?’

‘Nothing – really.’

‘Now, now,’ he said, gently reproving. ‘You don’t have secrets from me. You were just about to say something – I know you.’ He put his hand round the side of her head and tilted her face towards him.

‘What I was thinking,’ she said, as though this had in no way entailed her saying it, ‘was that now we are really alone.’ Her eyes were fixed upon his, and she began to blush. ‘I mean, now it would be perfectly all right for you to sleep with me. Nobody would know.’

Somewhere, at the back of his consciousness, a warning bell sounded: commitment, total responsibility, divorce, another family, losing Jessica entirely …

‘Now, my pet, it’s time we had a serious talk.’

It was serious indeed. He told her that as he was married – never mind the circumstances – he could not possibly take advantage of her, it would be unkind, utterly wrong, since she was so much younger than he, with her whole life before her (he was beginning to believe himself, gathering strength and argument). His wife would never divorce him, he said, and therefore he could not dream of them becoming lovers when there could be no future to it. It was not (her eyes were full of tears now) that he didn’t love her – she must understand that (she nodded, and the tears trickled down her face); there were some things that people such as himself did not do. However much they wanted to, he added, however hard it was for him …

She knelt upright and flung her arms round him. ‘Oh, Raymond, darling! I didn’t mean to make it harder for you! You’re so good – and sincere. One of the reasons I love you is that I admire your character so much. It’s not just a question of sex with you, like it is with so many men. You’re different, I know you are.’

While he was mopping up her face with his handkerchief, she said, ‘I’m lucky to have you at all!’

They must both be strong, he said. He felt an immense relief.

But there was no doubt that a darker note had been introduced that, in one way or another, changed everything. Not completely, of course, and by no means all the time; it was more as though territory had been laid round their hitherto innocent playground that was a kind of no man’s land. They still met for lunch most days and – it was winter by then – went to the cinema and to pubs and occasionally out to dinner in between the quiet domestic evenings when she cooked stodgy meals and they played bezique or Racing Demon, or he listened to the radio, or wrote letters, while she did the ironing and mended her stockings. But now when he kissed and touched her small pointed breasts that were, he knew from more carefree times, of an engaging whiteness, she would become unnaturally still, and if he went on, would start to tremble and further persistence resulted in tears. Then she would apologize, protest her love and say how much she respected his self-control. There was now some of that to respect, since once he had decided that he must not have her he found her more desirable. In a way, he was grateful for this: it was somehow better than having to employ gestures and language simply to protect her pride. Nonetheless, a kind of theatrical streak had crept into their behaviour with one another, a scene of dialogue between them about what they wanted if only things were different, and what they could have as they were not, that became worn and to him irritatingly familiar with its frequent use. It was irritating, because she never seemed to tire of it; could hardly allow more than a day or two without reverting to the hopeless anguish of their situation. He discovered two ways to stall these scenes. One was to make love to her by talking rather than touching, and if, as on one or two occasions, this simply inflamed her into taking the initiative – flinging herself into his arms, taking his head in her hands and pressing her fresh red pouting mouth upon his – he could become, in his turn, agonized and beg her to refrain before it all became too much for him.

When he returned from one of his visits to London – requested by Jessica – with the news that Nora was to be married, she had seemed quite sulky and uninterested. ‘Oh, that was all she wanted you for,’ was one of the things that she said. She did not ask anything about the engagement and altogether behaved in an uncharacteristic manner, refusing to meet his eye and disappearing into the kitchen where she made rather a lot of noise with pots and pans. He supposed she was getting her period, she sometimes had a bad time of it, but by the time he had changed out of his suit into the corduroys and thick polo-necked sweater that helped to keep him warm – the gas fire was too small for the room with its ingenious draughts – she returned from the kitchen and apologized. ‘I thought, you see, that she might have asked you to come up for something quite different.’

‘Did you? What?’

‘Well, you know – about the marriage.’

‘But that’s what it was about.’

‘I didn’t mean Nora’s. I meant yours.’ She had gone rather pink. ‘Silly of me. I just sort of hoped—’

‘Oh, darling, I’ve told you, she’ll never do that.’ He put his arms round her and gave her a hug. Whenever he made the future impossible for her, he found he could be indulgent about the present.

She had made a large, rather watery rabbit stew, and while they ate it, he told her about Nora’s fiancé.

‘Does that mean that they won’t be able to have any children?’

‘I’m afraid so. It apparently means that they won’t be able to have anything.’

‘Do you mean he won’t be able to sleep with her?’

‘That’s about it.’

‘Oh, how awful for her!’ She thought for a moment. ‘She must be an amazing person.’ After that she enquired tenderly after Nora and was intensely interested in her wedding.

During the following year, he became aware somehow that Jessica’s affair had waned and eventually finished. His feelings about her were confused. There was an immense relief when one day she referred with perceptible disparagement to ‘poor Mercedes’, Clutterworth’s wife. What was poor about her? he had asked. Oh, she seemed constantly to have to put up with students and girls in choirs falling in love with her husband. ‘It must be a frightful bore for her.’

Aha, he thought. He’s deserted her. It was a moment of triumph. But the triumph did not last or, rather, it quickly became adulterated with other, less celebratory feelings. If Jessica had been left, as from her listless manner he thought most probable, ought he not to re-establish himself with her? But if he did that, what was he to do about Veronica? Supposing he left Veronica and resumed married life with Jessica who then found someone else? Or supposing she didn’t get anyone else and he tried to live with her and, well, it turned out like the last time? What would he do then? She would most certainly despise him if he proved impotent. In the end, he decided to do nothing, except to go to London more often to keep an eye on things up there.

Some months later, Jessica had announced that she and Villy had decided to sell the Rydal house in St John’s Wood, and that she was going to rent a much smaller one with her share of the proceeds. She had found one, she said, in Chelsea.

Life with Veronica in Oxford continued ostensibly to be the same, but as his confidence gradually came back about Jessica, he found less pleasure in Veronica’s adulation – sometimes it was even slightly irritating. She was so young! he thought, but the inference of this had become different. Whereas it had been balm to his vanity that someone so youthful should find him attractive, now he found her youth something that required his patience. She was so predictable! It was as though he knew what she thought and felt and was going to say about everything, which made everything not quite worth talking about. Poor little thing! She could not help any of it: she was slipping back into being his daughter.

Throughout that year, he consoled himself with the idea that the end of the war would bring about every kind of change – for the better. His job would come to an end, which would make a natural severance of his Oxford life. He would go home and Jessica would be unable to stray because he would always be there. Indeed, he would take her back to Frensham and they would settle down to a stable and sedate country life …

None of this had come to pass. He was, in fact, moved to London by the War Office, a curious job that took place, rather surprisingly, in Wormwood Scrubs. This entailed, of course, some unhappy scenes with Veronica. ‘Couldn’t you come back at weekends?’ ‘Couldn’t you ask for me to be moved?’ But he could not, or would not, do either of these things. It was time to say goodbye, he felt, and set about it as carefully and kindly as he was able. Of course she wept, he had known she would do that. (He spent one sleepless night holding her in his arms on her narrow bed while she sobbed and slept and woke again to cry.) He explained, again and again, that he could not leave his wife. He would always love her – Veronica – but as there was no future for them, it was essential that she start her own life when she would, he was sure, find someone and be very happy with him.

A few days later, when he returned from a night in London, where he had told Jessica about his new work, with the intention of packing up his things to move from the Oxford flat, he found Veronica lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, unconscious. She had cut the veins in both wrists, but had not, most fortunately, been efficient about it. Nonetheless, he experienced moments of panic and horror on a scale that reminded him of the First World War. She lay face downwards, and at first he thought she was dead, but when he managed to lower himself on to one knee (his other refused to bend) and, pulled at her shoulder until he had turned her over, he realized that she was still breathing. Her face was a frightening grey-white colour; one wrist was clotted with drying blood, but from the other it was still weakly pumping out. He bound the wrist tightly with his handkerchief and rang for an ambulance. Then he fetched a couple of blankets from her bed and waited. He felt like a murderer: if she died he would be responsible. Those minutes, until the ambulance then arrived, were the worst in his life.

They were wonderfully professional and reassuring. In no time at all they had put her on a stretcher, had undone his bandage and fixed a tourniquet. ‘She’ll be all right, sir. She hasn’t lost all that much blood. It always looks more than it is. You can come along with us, if you like.’ He went. In the ambulance they said that they would have to inform the police, who would want a statement from him. ‘She’s your wife, is she?’ He said no.

In the hospital she was wheeled away and he was put in a small room where he sat and worried about what on earth the police would ask him. Of course it would all come out, that he had been living with her. They would discover that he was married and they would assume that she was his mistress. Her parents would have to be told, Jessica would find out and he would probably be sacked from his job. Had she meant him to find her? Of course she must have meant that, but whether she knew that he would find her in time was uncertain. He always returned from London on the same morning train, and almost always went first to the flat before going in to work. He began to think that she had simply meant to give him an awful fright, had not meant actually to kill herself. He began to feel a dull anger with her. By one stupid, irresponsible act she had mucked everything up. Then the really awful thought occurred that, if she hadn’t meant him to find her in time, she might do it all over again. This made him feel utterly trapped, and unable to think at all clearly.

The police came, and he made his statement. He stuck to the truth about the fact connected with finding her. What else could he do? But when he was asked if he could think of any reasons why she might do such a thing, he became ingenious. They went away with the idea, if not the actual knowledge, that she was highly strung and impressionable, had conceived feelings for him that he had been unable to reciprocate, but that in view of the disparity in their ages, he had tried to be paternal and patient with her. He had had absolutely no idea that she would do such a thing. ‘She always knew that I was married,’ he had said. He explained that the War Office was moving him to London, and added that he supposed that this had upset her more than he had realized. He implied, as delicately and in as many ways as he could think of, that she was not and never had been his mistress, but he wasn’t sure they believed him.

They finally let him go home. She was sleeping, quite comfortable, they said. He could see her later in the evening if he liked.

He got back to the flat with its bloodstained floor and a sixpage letter she had written to him laid upon his bed. He had a stiff whisky and spent half an hour mopping up the blasted lino before he read it.

But even after reading the letter twice, he was no clearer about what her intentions had been. You could say that she wouldn’t have written it if she hadn’t meant to kill herself; on the other hand, if she had simply meant to frighten, or blackmail him into doing what she wanted, she would still have written a letter because she would have wanted him to think she was serious. Well, in either case, it hadn’t worked, he thought grimly. All he wanted now, was out. His feelings for her, whatever they had once been, had now diminished to a sense of angry responsibility. He poured himself another whisky. The shock had worn off, and what he described to himself as enlightened self-interest took over.

He took her car and went to work, where he requested an interview with his boss to whom he gave a brief – and, he felt, fair – description of the situation. Anstruther was a man with an incisive mind and a distaste for emotion of any kind. He was briskly sympathetic. ‘Nasty situation. Hysteria, I suppose. Bit unwise to set up with her, wasn’t it? Have you got hold of her parents? I should advise that, because the police or the hospital are likely to and it might be better if you got there first.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, I’d better.’

‘Not pregnant or anything, is she?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’ He explained again, without delicacy, why she couldn’t be.

At this, Anstruther became incredulously impatient, said that he had no wish to go into details, and would take Raymond’s word for it.

‘I’ll arrange for Miss Watson to have extended leave, and perhaps you would arrange for her parents to fetch her. We don’t want any more trouble. When do you start in London? Next week? Well, you’d better take a few days yourself.’

He said something about not wanting to upset his wife.

‘Naturally not.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

He rang the parents, got the mother, and told her the most emollient version he could muster. Veronica had been overworking; he was afraid she had become a little too fond of him, in spite of her knowing that he was married with four children, and when she had learned that he was being sent elsewhere for work, she had done this foolish and unfortunate thing. She was going to be perfectly all right, he repeated (he had begun the conversation by saying that), but her boss thought it best if she had a long leave at home. Would they come and fetch her as soon as possible?

Mrs Watson seemed unable to take things in. ‘I can’t understand it,’ she kept saying. ‘Veronica’s such a sensible girl. Cut herself. With a knife? I can’t understand it!’

He said how sorry he was, and repeated Anstruther’s verdict of hysteria. Mrs Watson said that they would both come to Oxford the next day. That was that.

He went back to the flat in her car and packed up. He decided to leave no trace of his having lived there so this took some time. He dismantled his bed leaving it with its bare striped mattress, took his socks and shirt off the washing line in the kitchen, leaving her pink fluffy jumper that always got up his nose hanging on the line. He even went through her chest of drawers, discovering a small bundle of notes he had written to her. These he burned, together with her letter. By now he was feeling quite fugitive: the thought of going to see her in hospital unnerved him. He was afraid of what she might say – of what people might hear her say. ‘After all, I never went to bed with her,’ he kept saying to himself. By the time he had packed and called a cab, the whole thing was beginning to feel hardly his fault.

He didn’t go and see her.

Thereafter, when he thought of ‘the episode’, as he came to call it, he was subject to unease, a certain amount of guilt which he became adept at rationalizing. A large number of the staff at Woodstock had engaged upon extra-marital activities – there were rumours of pregnancies, abortions, even an eventual remarriage or two. He had not behaved differently from any of them, except that he had behaved better. It had been just his bad luck to land up with someone who had refused to take him at face value, who had insisted upon reading more into the affair than was ever there. He heard on the grapevine that she had gone home and had not returned, had been discharged. He went back to London and to Jessica with whom he resumed an (almost) chaste marriage. Sex with each other did not seem rewarding or to enliven either of them. He decided that it was because of his job, which took a lot out of him, and the awful little house that she had insisted upon them living in: a doll’s house, no room to turn round. It would be different – and better – when the war came to an end and they got back to Frensham.

The war did come to an end, but the visit to Frensham had been discouraging, to put it mildly. Nora had sent John, the old man who had always worked in the garden – a gardener’s boy in Aunt Lena’s day – to meet him at the station. He seemed to have aged about twenty years since Raymond had last seen him, and now shuffled in a rheumaticky way and seemed not to hear much that was said to him. ‘You’ll find the place changed,’ he remarked more than once during the short journey.

He did indeed. From the moment they arrived on the gravel sweep before the house, it was dear that changes had occurred. The lawn below was now a tract of frozen mud, punctuated by the shabby spikes of Brussels sprouts. The Virginia creeper that had so charmingly clothed the front façade was gone, and the mellow brick had been covered with some frightful yellow paint. The stained glass in the waisted front door had gone, and in its place was some white opaque stuff commonly used, he thought, in bathrooms.

Inside was worse. He stood in the hall staring at the dark green linoleum that now covered the floor and the bright yellow painted walls where Aunt Lena’s Morris willow-pattern paper had always been. Odours of Jeyes fluid, Irish stew, carbolic soap and paraffin reached him.

Nora appeared. She wore a dark blue overall and tennis shoes with ankle socks, her sturdy legs were otherwise bare. ‘Hello, Dad. I do hope you aren’t expecting tea because it’s over. But supper is at half past six so you haven’t got long to wait. We have it all together, because it takes a long time to get some of the chaps to bed. I’ll take you up to your room, and then you can come and talk to Richard.’

‘I can find my way to my room.’

‘Can you? Oh, fine. It’s at the very top, the little attic on the right.’

Wordlessly, he picked up his case and limped upstairs. Attic? Why on earth did he have to sleep in an attic? It was where the servants had slept, two in a room. A large chromium-plated stair rail had been installed on the wall side of the staircase. Nora had certainly been taking liberties with the place: he would wait till they were having drinks and then find out what on earth she thought she’d been up to.

His attic contained the maid’s furniture. A small battered chest of drawers, an iron bedstead and the old black-out blinds that had not been removed. It was icy cold up there – next to the roof, it would be. He had imagined tea in front of the drawing room fire with Nora and Richard. This did not seem unreasonable at half past four. He left his suitcase on the bed and limped downstairs in search of the bathroom. This, too, had been substantially altered, with a heightened seat for the lavatory and steps into the bath that also contained a seat. A row of bedpans filled with some milky substance were ranged on the window shelf.

Nora was standing in the hall. ‘I was afraid you’d got lost.’

How could he get lost in his own house, he thought testily, but he decided to wait until they were settled with a drink before tackling her.

This proved far more difficult than he thought. She didn’t settle anywhere, she rushed about the place either because someone came and asked for her or simply, he thought, because she imagined herself wanted. For half an hour before dinner he sat with Richard in what had been the morning room, now described by Nora as ‘our own little haven’. The room was stuffy, and smelled strongly of the paraffin stove that flickered sulkily, emitting the minimum of warmth.

‘Why don’t you have a fire? There’s a perfectly good fireplace.’

‘Nora says it’s too much for the staff. It’s awfully difficult to get people at all. She says.’

Richard sat in his wheelchair. He wore an open-necked flannel shirt with a heavy cardigan, the empty sleeves pinned neatly to the sides. A tray placed over the arms of his chair contained a Bakelite mug with a straw in it. Every now and then he bent his head to suck his gin and tonic. ‘Sorry there’s no ice,’ he said. ‘Still, a gin and tonic is something of a treat, I can tell you.’

‘Is it still difficult to get gin in the country?’

‘I don’t think it’s difficult. I think it is considered not to be affordable.’

‘Oh.’

‘While you’re up’ – he wasn’t – ‘I wonder if you’d give me a refill? Before the boss gets back?’

He did as he was asked, and refreshed his own glass.

‘If I was in control,’ Richard said, when he’d had another suck, ‘there’d be unlimited gin. But there you are. I’m not known for my control. Over anything.’

A silence, while Raymond felt ripples of uncomfortable pity that somehow pre-empted his being able to think of anything to say.

‘Still,’ Richard said, ‘I suppose we’re a good deal luckier than the other poor blighters. Don’t mention the gin to them. Because, unless their relatives visit them, they don’t get a drop.’

There was another short silence.

‘I wonder whether you’d be so good as to get the packet of fags which you should find behind that dictionary behind you on the bookshelf and light me one? Have one yourself if you feel inclined. Only be quick about it, before she gets back.’

He found the nearly empty packet and a box of matches beside it and lit the cigarette, which he placed between Richard’s lips. He inhaled deeply twice and then indicated that he wanted it taken out.

‘Sorry, if you pulled your chair over to me, you wouldn’t have to stand up to do this. Shove it in again. Do have one yourself, and put the packet back, if you wouldn’t mind.’

Nora returned before the cigarette was over.

‘Poor Leonard! He’d fallen out of his chair and Myra couldn’t get him up off the floor on her own. I thought I heard a thump so it was a good thing – Darling! Where did you get that cigarette?’

‘Raymond gave it to me.’

‘Oh. He’s not supposed to have them, Daddy. I thought you knew that.’

‘Might as well finish it,’ Richard said, his eyes fixed upon Raymond with such determination that Raymond put the fag back between his lips. Richard inhaled again and started to cough.

‘I told you, darling!’ She twitched it away and stubbed it out. ‘It only makes you cough. He has to be careful of his lungs because they don’t get enough exercise.’

‘And as you can see, it’s vital to keep me in good nick.’

There was no mistaking the irony. Raymond watched Nora mistake it. ‘Of course we must,’ she said cheerfully. She picked up his mug and shook it. ‘Goodness! You haven’t even finished your drink.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t take that away.’

‘You know I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Nora said gently, ‘but drink it up, darling, because supper is ready.’

Supper took place in the old dining room, now furnished with a long trestle table round which the five wheelchairs could be placed, interspersed with ordinary chairs for the helpers – there were two besides Nora. Nobody was so incapacitated as Richard, Raymond noticed: mostly they were able to feed themselves, though two of them used a spoon. Nora helped everybody to Irish stew, from which, she said, the bones had been removed, and fed Richard. The carpet had been removed from the floor, which was just as well because a good deal of food got dropped on it. Conversation was constrained and spasmodic. The patients did not talk much to one another, and did not seem to find anything that anybody else said of much interest. They concentrated upon the food: the stew was followed by a weighty treacle sponge.

It was not until some time after the meal that he was able to get Nora to himself. The patients had been installed in the old drawing room: another room that had been stripped of its Victorian contents and now had very lurid, he thought, posters drawing-pinned to the walls (‘the paper was so dingy, we had to do something’), linoleum-covered floor spattered with small, baize-topped tables so that cards and board games could be played alongside the wireless, which seemed to be permanently switched on. After he had been shown all this and Richard had said that he would stay to listen to the nine o’clock news, Nora consented to return to the ‘haven’ so that he could, as he had told her he wanted to, talk to her.

The outcome of the talk was deeply depressing to him. He discovered that Nora had been led to believe by Jessica that she could continue in the house, running it as a home for the present inmates. ‘Mummy said you wouldn’t want to live here now we’re all grown-up – except for Judy, of course, and she’ll soon be on her way. She thought it was a marvellous idea for me to run this. And it does do a lot of good. If it wasn’t for this, my patients would be in a large institution and here we do try to make it more like family life.’ It transpired that she had raised a considerable sum of money for what she described as the ‘improvements’ to the house. ‘It really wasn’t at all suitable for them as it was. But of course I got the money on the understanding that we were staying here.’

He said he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t consulted him first.

‘I was so afraid you’d say no,’ she said. She had gone rather pink. ‘The thing is, Daddy, that when one feels really called to do something, one must not let anything stand in the way. Of course you could always come and stay here. Absolutely whenever you liked. It depresses Mummy, but that’s because she has got a bit of a selfish side. I don’t think she stops to think what it’s like to be in Richard’s position – or any of them. Richard is my life now. It’s my job to look after him. And I do feel that it’s good for him to have other people around who are more or less in the same position as he is. It gives him a sense of proportion about things.’ These were some of the things she said. Then she had to go and put Richard to bed.

When she returned from that, he asked if there was any whisky.

‘There might be a bit left. I keep it for very special occasions.’ She found a nearly empty half-bottle, poured an extremely small drink into his before-dinner gin glass, and handed it to him with a jug of water.

‘After all, we are paying a rent for here,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, I’ve been paying it to Mummy. It isn’t much, I know, but it’s what we can afford.’

The water had dust on it.

‘And Mummy’s bought a house in London anyway. And she says you have lots of money to buy another one if you want. I’ve put all the furniture and stuff in the coach house. If you don’t mind, I must go to bed now. I have to get up for Richard in the night.’

He asked what time breakfast was.

‘Well, I have it at six, because of getting it for everyone else. They have it in their rooms.’

‘We’ve really got to talk a bit more about all this.’

‘I can’t tomorrow because I’m taking Albert to the dentist quite early. Anyway, Dad, I don’t think I’ve much more to say. I think you ought to talk to Mummy, she knows all about it. Would you put out the lights when you go up?’

That was it. She took his breath away. She seemed completely unaware of the outrageousness of the situation. He gulped down the whisky and gave himself another. He’d buy her another bottle, but he needed a proper drink to calm his nerves. He limped up the two flights of stairs to bed (how on earth did she get the poor chaps up even one flight?) to his freezing room. It was so cold that he wore his pyjamas on top of his vest and pants. He lay awake for most of the night with angry, circular thoughts. It seemed to him that he was facing a well-planned conspiracy to deprive him of his house and home. Jessica’s part in it enraged him, but it also made him feel frightened. If she really refused to leave London, how could he live here? He couldn’t contemplate it on his own.

He left as soon as he could the next morning, and on the train rehearsed various ways of tackling Jessica and her perfidy. Although Nora’s calm assurance that she almost had a right to the house had rendered him at the time almost speechless, he could not altogether blame her. It was clear to him that Jessica was largely responsible. He alternated between wanting to vent his rage upon her, ‘to put her in her place’, and wondering rather tremulously how he could coax and prevail upon her to want to live in the country. For, he now realized, she had in various ways intimated to him that she wanted to stay in London. He hadn’t taken a great deal of notice of the hints, casual remarks, that had been thrown out. Frensham was their home and of course they were going back there. But now he saw that she had always, in fact, been decided, and was afraid of her determination.

‘You might have told me what was going on,’ was what he did manage to say.

‘Oh, darling, I knew you had a lot on your mind. I was really trying to make things easier for you.’

‘The things she’s done to the house!’

‘Only things that were necessary for the poor patients.’

‘She’s taken the Virginia creeper right off the front. That can’t have made much difference to them.’

‘There was appalling damp, darling. The walls had to be rendered with some damp-proof stuff.’

‘But I did have a good idea,’ she said some minutes later.

‘When was that?’

‘I thought why not convert the coach house into a little weekend retreat? Don’t you think that would be rather fun? It could be quite small and cosy and easy to run.’

‘I don’t want to live somewhere small and cosy and easy to run.’

‘Raymond, I do. I’ve spent most of my life struggling with places and having to do everything, and now, just when I might have expected to stop doing that and have some servants to do things, there aren’t going to be any. So I do think you might look at things from my point of view.’

That was the only way he was going to be allowed to consider them, he thought resentfully. He was silenced, while she told him that he wasn’t going to do the housework or the cooking, and that she was absolutely sick of doing that. ‘I want to have things as simple as possible, so that at least there’s some time for other things.’

When, some weeks later, he said what a pity it was that they couldn’t have Angela’s going-away party at Frensham, she retorted, ‘That would have been out of the question even if we had been living there. We couldn’t begin to put enough people up for the night. It would always have had to be London.’

She usen’t to be like this, he thought. Before that little worm Clutterworth had come along she had always tried to fit in. Now she had joined the Bach Choir and was also having singing lessons.

‘Where does Angela want her party to be?’

‘She doesn’t mind. I thought Claridges would be nice.’

‘How many people does she want?’

‘She’s going to make a list. About twelve, she thinks – not counting the family, of course. I should think we shall be about fifty, counting the children. And then just a few of us for supper afterwards.’

‘Shouldn’t we give them all supper?’

‘It would be awfully expensive.’

‘Never mind that. I’d like to give her a really good send-off.’

‘All right, darling. Whatever you say.’

She leaned forward to allow the servant to put her pillows into a sitting position – Mamma had always said one must try to make servants’ lives easier for them in every way possible – and waited until her breakfast tray was placed on the bed table in front of her. She was so excited.

‘Did you know I’m going to India, Harrison?’

‘No, darling, I didn’t. Who with?’

It wasn’t Harrison: it was Kitty’s little daughter, what was her name, Beryl? Barbara? It began with a B she was sure … Rachel, that was it. How she had grown! Shot up, as Papa used to say, to quite an unbecoming height for a girl. She looked at the tray again. ‘They have coddled my egg, haven’t they? Coddled eggs are far more digestible than boiled. I must make a good breakfast because …’ But she could not remember why she should, although she knew there was a very good reason.

‘Lady Tregowan!’ she cried triumphantly. It was all coming back to her. ‘Mamma’s friend, Lady Tregowan, is chaperoning me. I really think, you know, that I should have more than one egg before such a journey.’

‘Darling, we haven’t got many eggs. I know the war is over, but it’s still difficult.’

War? What could war have to do with eggs? Sometimes, she felt, people fobbed her off with the flimsiest of excuses. However, it did not do to make a fuss. In this spirit, she allowed her niece to help her into her bedjacket and to tie a napkin round her neck.

‘Actually, we’re going to London, Aunt Dolly. Don’t you remember?’

She smiled to conceal her irritation. ‘First. My dear, I am not so foolish as to suppose one could board a ship – any ship – here. Naturally we are going to London first. Then we may well go to Liverpool or’ – she searched for other places by the sea – ‘or Brighton, possibly. That is something I do not know. Because nobody has told me!’

‘Shall I butter your toast for you?’

‘That would be most kind.’ She accepted a thin triangle with the crusts cut off – very little butter, she noticed, but when she mentioned this, ever so tactfully, Rachel made some incomprehensible excuse about rations. Perhaps Mamma was worrying about her figure. Ah! Give her time and she should solve any mystery.

‘Maud Ingleby is a very good sort of girl, but Papa described her as plain as a pikestaff. Between you and me, I think it most unlikely that she will marry well – even in India.’ Seeing that her niece looked mystified, she explained, ‘Maud is Lady Tregowan’s daughter.’ She had picked the shell off the top of her egg and was cutting the faintly translucent white dome. It was one of those eggs with a very small yolk, you could see.

‘Flo is very cross, you know, not to be coming too. But Lady Tregowan would only take one of us and Papa said it should be me. “With Kitty getting married, you will be holding the fort,” I said to her, but I fear hers is not a happy nature as she shows no sign of making the best of it.’ She put down her spoon. ‘You know, I am afraid something has happened to Flo.’ She looked searchingly at Rachel to see whether she was concealing anything.

‘She seems to be avoiding me.’

There was a silence. Rachel had gone to the window, and was drawing the curtains. ‘Rather a dreary day, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to drink your tea, darling, before it gets cold,’ she said, as she left the room.

When she was alone, her mind filled suddenly with disturbing thoughts. Something was not right; she knew it. She was not at home: this was not Stanmore – she was somewhere quite else. Staying with Kitty! That was it. But where was Flo? She remembered someone – a man she most certainly did not know – saying something about Flo having gone to her father, but what on earth could that mean, and who was he? Everybody had listened to him – you could have heard a pin drop. Flo’s father was her father, of course. Anyway, Flo could not have gone to him because he was dead; he died in the winter and she was not able to go to India after all – she had to stay at home with Flo and help look after poor Mamma. It was still a fearful muddle. If she had not been able to go to India then she couldn’t be going to India now … The bubbling excitement had all died away and she felt nothing but disappointment and dread. ‘It was the worst disappointment of your life,’ she told herself. But at least that meant that Flo had no reason to sulk, to keep away in this cruel manner; she would get Mamma to speak to her about it. But that was no good because she could now remember as clearly as anything that Mamma was dead too.

The trouble was not that she could not remember things – she had too much to remember, more than most, she supposed, and this made it difficult to sort out their order. For instance, she was perfectly certain that when she had stayed here before, with Kitty, Flo had slept in a bed over there – by the window, because she had always had a passion for fresh air. Mamma had died from getting a chill, so perhaps it ran in the family. It had been quite a small funeral, she remembered, only Flo and Kitty and herself, the family doctor and his wife and, of course, the servants. She had been to much larger funerals in her day – she could not remember when it was; in one way it seemed to have happened a long time ago, and in another it felt as though it had happened yesterday. Yesterday must be nonsense, because yesterday she had been packing, sorting things out and packing. So – and this was what was so confusing – one did not pack things unless one was going away.

Her egg had got cold but she persisted in eating it because to go on a journey without a proper breakfast was, as Papa used to say, sheer folly. I have my common sense, she thought, as she scraped the inside of the shell for remaining scraps of white. Perhaps she was simply ending her visit with Kitty, and going home. And perhaps Flo had gone ahead of her to get the house ready. She was the one with common sense, but Flo had always been the practical one, and who knew what those wretched Zeppelins might have done to the house? Of course! That was what little Rachel (only she wasn’t so little nowadays, more of a beanstalk one might say) meant when she was chattering about shortage of eggs, although what eggs had to do with Zeppelins, she really couldn’t think. ‘I really cannot think! she repeated to herself, glad to have found something so absurd to account for this loss. But things were falling into place. There had been a terrible war (this was a terrible war? she wasn’t quite clear about that) and so many gallant young then had been killed that no odium could any longer attach to being unmarried: there were simply not enough men to go round. In any case, she had always thought that whereas she would rather enjoy being engaged to someone, marriage might be rather—

‘I suppose Flo has simply gone before me?’ she said to Rachel when she came to collect the tray.

Rachel stooped and kissed her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that’s it.’

‘Just look at me for a moment, would you? No, don’t move your head – just your eyes. That’s perfect.’ He smiled admiringly. Lady Alathea stifled a yawn and smiled back.

Her eyes were small, pale blue, but mercifully fairly far apart. He could make something of them. He had made them darker, of course, and larger, and he had substituted their vacancy with an alert, enquiring expression – as though Lady Alathea was about to ask an intelligent question. The trick was a likeness, but a flattering likeness. She had a rather pudgy nose, and he had sharpened it – he had even managed to give her face some shape by heightening the colour high up under the eyes. But her mouth defeated him. It was small and thin, more like a slit in her face with narrow edging than a mouth, and this tricky state was compounded by her painting quite another mouth in dark red lipstick round it. During the sittings, she usually licked most of the lipstick off, which was the case now. It was midday, and he was due to lunch with his mother.

‘I think you’ve had enough for today,’ he said. ‘I know how tiring it is sitting.’

‘I’m afraid I’m not a very good sitter,’ she said as, hitching her pale blue satin skirts, she climbed down from the dais. ‘May I come and look?’

‘If you like. It isn’t finished yet.’

‘Goodness! My dress looks wonderful. And you’ve painted Mummy’s necklace marvellously. I should think diamonds are quite difficult to paint, aren’t they?’

‘You’re very modest,’ he said. ‘What about you? Do you think it’s a good likeness of you?’

She looked again at the picture. He could see that she was fascinated by it. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know that sort of thing. I should think my parents will be pleased.’

Which is the main thing, he thought, while she was changing in a curtained-off end of the studio. He was charging two hundred guineas, and for that it was necessary to please. There were three daughters and so far only the pretty one had married. He had hopes of painting the other two. Mummy had helped him buy the house in Edwardes Square on the understanding that he paid her back, but the household cost quite a lot: Sebastian’s nannie and a cook and the daily woman, not to speak of the girl he employed to act as a part-time secretary, coffee-maker and general factotum at the studio, which he rented. And, until recently, there had been the fees to pay to the psychiatrist Louise had been going to. But only last week she had stopped, said it was pointless, and she was never going to him again. He sighed. She was actually being quite difficult and he was afraid that Mummy was beginning to notice this and would ask awkward questions about her.

Lady Alathea emerged in her twinset and flannel skirt. He was glad that he had not been called upon to paint her legs, he thought, as he put her into a taxi, kissing her hand and saying, ‘By the way, you’re a wonderful sitter,’ as the right kind of parting shot.

Outside it was freezing and dirty snow lay in ruts and ridges on the pavement. It had been filthy weather, either fog or rain or frost, and keeping the studio warm enough for sitters had cost a fortune. The stove that he had had installed was virtually useless since it was impossible to get enough coal for it. At least he’d get a better lunch with Mummy than at home. Mrs Alsop was a dreadful cook – the meals were all grey mince and boiled cabbage and potatoes filled with intractable grey lumps. Louise didn’t seem to care. Oh, well, he supposed it was good for his figure as he had an unfortunate tendency to put on weight far too easily.

His mother was lying on her usual sofa by the window that looked on to the small formal garden. She was wearing what she called her Russian jacket – dark red velvet with black fur round the high collar and cuffs of the loose sleeves. ‘How nice!’ she exclaimed, as he leaned down to kiss her. ‘What a lovely treat to have you all to myself! Give yourself a drink, darling, and then come and tell me what you’ve been up to.’

There were decanters of sherry and gin on the table with a small silver jug of water. He helped himself to a gin and pulled up a stool near her sofa. ‘I’ve spent the morning painting Alathea Creighton-Green,’ he said. ‘Rather hard going.’

His mother smiled with sympathy. ‘Poor lone! To have three daughters and no son! And only one daughter was presentable. Is Alathea so very plain?’

‘Yes. So very.’

They smiled at each other. Occasionally, he went to bed with his sitters; somehow, he knew that she knew this although it was never mentioned. Her enquiry about Alathea’s plainness was her way of asking about that and his answer the denial.

‘Any minute now, one of us will say that beauty is not everything.’

He sensed that this was the most delicate probe towards discussing Louise and headed her off. ‘How’s the Judge?’

‘Embroiled in his committees. And as if they were not enough, in other people’s committees. Horder came to dinner last week. The British Medical Council want to launch a fund to fight the proposed National Health Bill. They want Peter to back them. And there’s another committee that wants MPs’ salaries to be increased to a thousand a year. Quite a step up from four hundred. Perhaps you should think again, darling. I’m sure I could get you a nice safe seat to nurse.’

‘Luncheon is served, my lady.’

‘Good morning, Sarah.’

He smiled at the solemn old parlour-maid, who smiled discreetly back. ‘Good morning, sir.’

As he helped his mother off the sofa, she said, ‘One thing I can promise you. We are not having squirrel pie.’

‘Squirrel pie?’

‘Darling! Do you never read the newspapers? The Ministry of Food has decreed that we should eat squirrels and to this end has issued a recipe for squirrel pie. Doesn’t it sound horrid?’

During their cheese soufflé she asked him about his future commissions for portraits and what arrangements he was making for an exhibition, and he felt himself expanding, basking in her lively, detailed interest, her assumption that he was a highly gifted painter with an important future ahead of him. Outside, enormous white flakes fell slowly from a darkened sky, but in the dining room she created another climate, both cosy and exciting; her obvious pride in him, her certainty of his worth rekindled his assurance – he caught self-satisfaction from her like a delightful fever.

She had provided a bottle of hock for him, although she drank only barley water, and by the time they reached the pudding, he discovered that he had drunk most of it. It was arranged that she should come to his studio to help him pick the pictures for a show, or in some cases to look at photographs of them. ‘It doesn’t matter if up to a quarter of the pictures are already sold,’ she said. ‘The point of the show is to get more commissions.’

‘We shall have to offer the gallery a cut on them.’

‘We shall have to negotiate that. Now for a treat!’ Sarah had cleared the plates and returned with a silver platter on which something mysterious steamed.

‘It smells of bananas!’

‘It is bananas. Our very first. I kept them for you. And Peter was given a lemon from the Admiralty.’ She said this as though that was where one would naturally acquire such a thing.

‘Darling Bubbles James gave it to him. Wasn’t that sweet? So we have fried bananas with brown sugar and lemon!’

They were delicious. She ate very little, which meant that there were two helpings for him.

But when they returned to the drawing room for coffee before the fire and she was installed again upon her sofa, the atmosphere changed. She began by asking about her grandson, ‘whom I have not seen for far too long’.

‘Sebastian? He’s fine. Talking quite a lot now. Which I suppose he should be – he’s nearly three. Shall I get Nannie to bring him to tea with you?’

‘Do, darling.’ She picked up her embroidery. After a moment, she asked lightly, ‘And how is Louise?’

‘She’s all right. She read some poetry for the BBC last week, which thrilled her.’

‘And what else is she doing?’

‘How do you mean, darling?’

‘Well, I don’t imagine that reading some poems on a single occasion can have occupied her entire time for the last two months. I haven’t set eyes on her since Christmas.

‘You frighten her, you know.’

‘I do not know. Oh no! I don’t frighten her, she dislikes me.’ And before he could protest, she added. ‘She dislikes me because I can see through her.’

‘Mummy darling, what do you mean by that?’

She put down her sewing and looked at him steadily. ‘I have been trying to make up my mind whether to talk to you about this or not. But we have never had any secrets from each other, have we?’

‘Of course not,’ he said untruthfully, and with haste.

‘Of course not.’ The only secrets she had had about him had been concealed entirely for his own good.

There was another silence crowded with things unsaid.

‘I’m afraid – how can I put this? – that Louise has been a very naughty little girl.’

‘Oh, Mummy, I know you don’t think she’s a good mother, but she’s still very young—’

‘Old enough to behave unforgivably.’

‘What are you trying to say?’

So then it all came out. Louise had been unfaithful to him. When he protested that he was certain that she had not been to bed with poor Hugo – his death had somehow softened the anger that he had felt about that affair – she said no, no, it was after Hugo, when he had taken her to Holyhead, some naval officer she had encountered there and subsequently met in London. She mentioned his name and he recognized it.

‘But how do you know that she—’

‘Had an affair with him? My dearest boy, they were seen going into a flat late one evening and then leaving it – separately – the following morning.’

Then she said, ‘For all I know, it may still be going on.’

‘I know that isn’t so. Rory got married about eight months ago. We were asked to the wedding.’ But she had shaken him badly. It was another shock: something that he had thought would never happen after the miserable business with Hugo.

‘Oh, darling. I can see it’s a shock to you. I am so very sorry. And angry as well. What have you done to deserve it?’

‘God knows. I don’t.’

She put out her hand and he grasped it. Memories of Louise’s unresponsiveness in bed, something he had never really thought about before, were filling his mind. ‘It’s over anyway, whatever it was,’ he said, with difficulty and at last.

‘What is over?’ There was a sharpness in her tone, that made him look at her.

‘That – affair. With Rory. They’ve gone to live in Cornwall.’

‘Ah.’

‘What did you think I meant?’

‘I thought you were talking about something else. Never mind.’

‘She – she was going to this doctor. This psychiatrist chap.’

‘Was? She’s stopped?’

‘Last week. I don’t know why. But she says nothing would induce her to go back.’

‘Why don’t you have a word with him?’

‘I can’t see that that would do much good. I did meet him once and I must say I didn’t take to him.’ Something she had said earlier was worrying him. ‘Mummy, how on earth did you hear about Rory – the flat and all that?’

‘Oh, darling, someone told me. That doesn’t matter now. What matters is your happiness, your well-being. And Sebastian’s as well. I do worry about him. Louise isn’t simply a bad mother, she isn’t a mother at all.’

Then she suddenly burst out. ‘Oh, Mikey darling! I blame myself. I feel I am greatly at fault.’

‘Nonsense, Mummy. You didn’t make me marry Louise, I wanted to.’ But even as he said it, he realized that he had fallen into one of her little traps.

‘No, but I encouraged you. And it is you who have to suffer. I thought she was simply young and malleable. How could I know that she would turn out to be so utterly selfish and self-absorbed?’

‘Oh, come! It’s not as bad as that. You must remember that we had a rotten start. I was away nearly all the time and completely taken up by my ship. I do see now that she had a rather thin time of it.’

‘She had Sebastian.’

‘Yes, well, she didn’t want to have a baby quite so soon.’

‘How extraordinary! You might have been killed, and she with no son!’

‘Not everyone is a mother like you.’

The little carriage clock on the chimney piece struck a silvery three. ‘God! I must go, darling. I’ve another appointment.’

He bent over to kiss her and she folded him in her arms. ‘Mikey! I do want you to know one thing. Whatever you decide to do, I’ll back you all the way. And if that includes Sebastian, so much the better.’ She gazed at him with her penetrating eyes that he had once told her were the colour of aquamarines. ‘You won’t forget that, will you?’

‘No, of course I won’t’ Again he felt at that moment comfortingly enfolded by her love.

But in the car outside and during his journey across London, he felt dispirited and confused. There were a number of things he had not told his mother, such as the fact that Louise refused to go to bed with him, something which had caused him to sulk and her to pretend not to notice that he was sulking. He still found her immensely attractive – in fact, she had grown during the last four years from being a rather gawky, leggy, charming young girl into someone whose glamour was wildly noticeable. If not exactly a classical beauty, she was someone who made people’s heads turn when she came into a room. She was an asset, and he felt aggrieved that she was not more, as he put it, on his side. If, for instance, he was invited to Sandringham, which was possibly on the cards (he had drawn one of the young princesses and had hopes of drawing their mother), she would not be simply thrilled and do everything in her power to help him, as most young women, he felt, would: she was just as likely to appear in the wrong clothes, say the wrong things and behave generally as though she was totally unaware of the importance of the occasion. And if he was to go there at all, he desperately wanted to make a success of it. Perhaps it would be better to go without her. He should have asked Mummy’s advice about that. It would certainly be easier. Another thing he had not told Mummy was that Rowena was back in his life. They had met some months before in the King’s Road, when he was coming out of his framers. She was walking along on the opposite side of the street, with a champagne-coloured poodle on a lead.

He called her name and she stopped. ‘Michael!’

He dodged a bus and crossed the road to her. She was wearing a short fur jacket over a black skirt and a black velvet beret over her blonde hair. She looked very pretty.

‘How lovely to see you! What are you doing here?’

She blushed the palest pink. ‘I live round the corner. In Carlyle Square.’

‘It’s really nice to see you.’

Her pale, wide-apart eyes regarded him, then she bent down to the dog who was straining on his leash. ‘Shut up, Carlos! I saw you coming out of Green and Stone. I didn’t think you’d see me.’

‘I was leaving some pictures to be framed. I suppose you wouldn’t invite me back for a cup of tea?’

She looked nervous. ‘Oh! I don’t think—’

‘Oh, please do! It’s such years. I’d really like to hear what’s been happening to you.’

‘Nothing very much. Oh – all right. Yes, do come.’

Her rather flat, girlish little voice, which did not alter whatever was happening to her or whatever she said about it, came back to him. Poor little Rowena, as Mummy called her. She had wanted to marry him so badly; he supposed now that perhaps he hadn’t treated her very well. But, as Mummy had said, it wouldn’t have done. ‘A very amiable nonentity,’ Mummy had called her, but that was all six or more years ago; she must have changed.

Her house was rather impressive; large and filled with good furniture. She put him in the drawing room and went away to make tea. When she had taken off her gloves, he saw her rings – a wedding ring and one with a large sapphire and diamonds. Of course, she had married: he vaguely remembered Mummy mentioned it.

‘I married Ralph Fytton,’ she said, when she had brought the tea tray and he had asked her.

‘The scientist?’

She nodded. ‘He died last year. He got all the way through the war and then he died of pneumonia.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Yes, it was very sad for him.’

‘But not for you?’

‘Oh, yes, it was sad for me too. In a way. But it wasn’t working out. As a marriage, I mean. I wanted children, you see, and he didn’t.’ She poured the tea and handed him a cup.

‘How odd!’ he exclaimed.

‘I know. But he thought the world wasn’t a fit place for children any more. He knew about the bomb, you see – long before it was used, I mean. He got awfully depressed. He used to say it was time for the human race to come to an end. I couldn’t argue with him. I never could argue with him about anything, he was so terribly clever.’

‘It sounds rough on you.’ He wanted to say, ‘Why did you marry him?’ but thought better of it. Instead, he said, ‘He was a good deal older than you, wasn’t he?’

And she answered in her flat little voice, ‘Nearly thirty years.’

She was, he knew, thirty-five; only three years younger than him, and another argument that his mother had employed against his marrying her had been her age, too old, Zee had said.

‘So,’ she said, not looking at him, ‘how are you? I saw that you nearly got into Parliament. That was bad luck.’

‘Not really. I don’t think it was what I really wanted to do.’

‘And you have a little son! I saw that in The Times. How marvellous for you.’ There was a slight pause, and then she said, ‘Your mother very kindly asked me to your wedding. But it didn’t feel right to go actually.’

He remembered their last walk, after the lunch at Hatton when eventually he had told her that he thought he was going to marry Louise, and how she had said at once, ‘I know. I knew the moment I came into the room and saw her. She’s very beautiful and I could see she’s awfully clever.’ And then she had wept. He had tried to put his arms round her but she had pulled away from him to lean against a tree and continue crying. All the while she was crying she kept apologizing. ‘I’m so sorry – be all right in a minute – sorry to be like this—’ and he, embarrassed and uncomfortable, had said, ‘I never said anything about – that I would—’

‘I know,’ she had said. ‘I know you didn’t. I just – sort of hoped …’ Her flat, childish voice had died away at this point. He had offered her the cliché handkerchief then and she had mopped up and said she would go home now. He remembered telling her how fond of her he was, and saying what good times they had had. They had gone back to the house, and Rowena had thanked Zee for lunch, and he had taken her to her car. He had kissed her face and said how sorry he was. He had really not thought of her again. But now earlier memories of their times together flooded back: the first time she had taken off her clothes – God, what a lovely body she had! – and her always agreeable admiration, how, even in those times she was always beautifully dressed (she made her own clothes), the eager interest she took in everything he did …

He leaned forward and took her hands. ‘We did have fun, didn’t we?’

‘Not fun,’ she said. ‘I never thought of it as fun.’

He did not see her for some weeks after that. Then he ran into her on his way to his gallery in Bond Street. It was then that he discovered that she worked three days a week in another gallery. He took her to the Ritz for a drink where they had two martinis each, followed by a longish lunch. She said that she had to go back to work, was already late, and on an impulse, and because Louise was in Sussex seeing her family, he asked her to have dinner with him. ‘And we might go dancing somewhere,’ he added. She had always been a good dancer, could follow him on the floor whatever he did.

That had been the beginning of it. He had told her that things were not good between him and Louise; she had been unmaliciously sympathetic – she had always been good-natured, he could never recall her speaking ill of anyone. She bore him no resentment which, as their intimacy increased, he began to see she had the right to do. He had treated her badly. The moment on their last walk together at Hatton when he had tried to excuse himself by saying that he had never intended to marry her now made him feel ashamed and in the end he told her so. ‘It was selfish and pompous and altogether crass of me,’ he said, and she had answered: ‘Oh, Mike! You always overdo that kind of thing, to make people disagree with you.’

The truth of this and the fact that she did not often say anything that surprised him by its perception made him feel – for a moment – just a little in love with her. And she was lovely. She had always been so with each feature perfectly in place, a broad forehead, large wide-apart eyes, which were neither grey nor blue nor green but, at different times, the palest version of those colours, a small nose and a wide mouth that drooped at the corners, like small commas, giving her expression a gravity that enhanced it and made incident in the broad sweeping planes of her face. He had explored all these things in his drawings when they had first become lovers; now he was rediscovering them with the minute changes wrought by time and her experience – both of which seemed to have added to her attraction. She had poise now and more animation, and she did not invariably agree with him.

They did not meet often: he was working very hard, and, as the daylight hours gradually increased, for longer, and most evenings he had engagements with Louise. But there were times when Louise announced that she was spending the evening with her cousins Polly and Clary or her friend Stella, whom he had never really taken to, or she wanted to go to some play that he knew he would not enjoy, and then he would ring Rowena from his studio and make a plan with her. She seemed always to be free, and when, on one of these occasions, he remarked upon this and said that surely she must have other friends, she had answered that she put them off. That was the evening when he first went to bed with her, and it was a great success. She had always been easy in bed and he was able to enjoy himself, as well as his effect upon her, with no trouble at all. She combined passivity with obvious sexual satisfaction – the perfect combination, he thought.

Afterwards they lay in her bed and had a serious (stock) conversation about the fact that he was married and did not want to rock the boat – the child and so forth – and she listened and accepted everything he said in just the right way. ‘I’m so happy,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about anything else. I’m here if you want me.’

His marriage seemed to be at an impasse. However, a gallery in New York who had shown some of his pictures before the war had written asking him whether he was interested in another show. He had discussed the matter with his mother, who thought it an excellent idea, although she had advised him to be firm about a date sufficiently far off for him to accumulate enough portraits. If this did come off, he decided to take Louise with him: a complete change of scene might also improve their marriage. It would get her away from her preoccupation with the theatre and give them a chance to be really alone together. Sebastian and Nannie could go to his mother at Hatton. It would be a kind of second honeymoon, and Louise, who had never been abroad in her life, must surely be excited at the prospect. Rowena did not come into these plans – how could she? – but the knowledge that she was there, in the background, gave him a new kind of assurance that he badly needed. The spring of ’47, he thought, would be the right time to go to America, and he wrote to this effect.

As Christopher tramped back down the cart track from the farm to his caravan he noticed with satisfaction that the wind had dropped, not completely, to that stillness that usually prefaced rain at this time of year, but to a kinder, more domestic breeze. Perhaps it would be a fine weekend – he passionately hoped so. He had had his weekly bath and supper with the Hursts, a day earlier because tomorrow Polly was coming to stay. She had never been before; indeed he had never had anybody to stay in the caravan with him and his excitement at the prospect was beginning to congeal into anxiety. Although it was dark, he didn’t need a torch – knew the way blindfold. But Polly would need one. He must be sure the battery was working on the old one he had – come to that he must find it, must add that to his list. Lucky he’d asked for the day off tomorrow because there was a hell of a lot to do before Polly arrived.

He had asked her on the spur of the moment at the party given for his sister Angela before she left for America. After Nora’s wedding he had decided that family parties were not for him; they only made him feel depressed and isolated, something which in his ordinary life he did not feel at all. But he was very fond of Ange, she was his sister and he felt he might never see her again. Mindful of the fiasco of the very old suit that he had tried to wear to Nora’s wedding (his mother had made him borrow something from Uncle Hugh, which hadn’t fitted either but in a different way), he had bicycled into Hastings and bought himself a dark suit and a utility shirt. Then he remembered that he’d used his tie to bind the splint on the vixen’s leg, and bought himself another: green with blue spots on it. It wasn’t silk, which meant it wouldn’t tie very well, but it didn’t matter as he didn’t expect to wear it much. Mrs Hurst had knitted him some socks for Christmas. He hadn’t enough coupons left to buy shoes, so he would have to wear the awful old ones that were far too tight, or his boots. In the end he chose his boots. He didn’t look at people’s feet, so he didn’t think they would be noticed. He’d have to stay in London on the night of the party, and he absolutely didn’t want to have to stay with Mum and Dad, so although he hated the telephone, he rang up Ange at her house and asked if he could stay with her because she knew how he felt about Dad. She was nice about it, and said if he didn’t mind the floor he could. ‘Anyway, there’s no room in their tiddly little house because Judy will be there,’ she had said.

So that stormy Saturday he took Oliver over to the Hursts and bicycled against a violent headwind to the station. It was bitterly cold and hail fell with little stinging blows on to his face: he was glad of his oilskin jacket.

Journeys always made him anxious; the train was all right because all he had to do was to sit in it until it finally stopped in London. But then he had to find the right bus stop for the right bus that would take him to a stop by Lyons Corner House in Tottenham Court Road, and then he had to walk on until a turning to the left, which was Percy Street where Ange lived. But it was nice when he finally got there. Ange seemed really pleased to see him and made him tea and toast. She had her hair in curlers and she was wearing her dressing gown, but the main thing was that she looked happy. This made her look so different that he realized that she must have been pretty unhappy before.

When they were sitting as near to the small electric fire as they could get and drinking the tea, he said, ‘Do you remember when I met you in the drive at Mill Farm after we all knew there wasn’t going to be the war and you were so unhappy and you couldn’t tell me about it?’

‘Yes. I could now. I thought I was in love with Rupert—’

‘Uncle Rupert?’

‘Yep, I thought it was the end of the world. I thought he loved me back, you see. Well – I suppose I sort of imagined he did. And, of course, he didn’t.’

‘Poor Ange!’

‘Don’t worry. It’s completely over. Everybody has to have a first love and I expect they mostly go wrong.’

‘Did good things happen after it?’

‘Not much. I fell in love with someone else and that was far worse. He was married too.’

‘Was that the person you nearly did marry?’

‘Yes – no. It was the person Mummy thought I ought to marry. For the obvious reason.’ She looked at him to see if he knew what she meant, and just as he was about to ask her why their mother thought she ought to marry someone who was married already, she said: ‘I was pregnant.’

‘Oh, Ange! Did you lose the baby?’

She hadn’t answered at once, then she had said, gently, almost as though she was comforting him, ‘I’m glad I didn’t have it.’

She offered him a cigarette, but he didn’t smoke.

‘But now,’ he said, ‘you’ve got Lord Black, haven’t you? I didn’t know Americans had lords.’

‘He’s not a lord! That’s his name. Earl. I shall be Mrs Earl C. Black. And live in New York. I can’t wait.’

He could see she was happy, which was the point. But it did feel a long way away. She said she must get ready for the party – ‘the probably awful party’ – and told him where the bathroom was.

‘Do you think I ought to shave again?’

She felt his face. ‘Well. Did you shave this morning?’

‘Yesterday. I only do it every other day usually.’

‘You are a bit bristly. And you’re bound to have to kiss people. Better.’

So he did, and managed not to cut himself.

The party was in a large room in a very grand hotel. All the family were there – well, it felt like all. His family, at any rate. Dad was wearing a dinner jacket and Mum had a long floaty blue dress. They put Angela between them to talk to everyone as they arrived. Judy had got rather fat and was wearing the bridesmaid’s dress she’d worn for Nora’s wedding. She rushed about the room eating things off the plates on the tables as well as things that were handed to her. He felt very proud of Angela who wore a red velvet dress that just reached her knees and marvellous stockings that she said Earl had sent her. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she had long red and gold earrings. ‘You look absolutely terrific,’ he had said before they left her home, and she kissed him. She smelt like a greenhouse full of flowers.

Nora arrived a bit late wheeling Richard, whom she placed beside her parents. ‘So that he has a chance to see everyone as they come in,’ she explained. Everybody who arrived was given a glass of champagne and Nora held Richard’s up to his mouth to give him little sips, but Christopher noticed that she did not do it very often.

He stood a little way off from his family and watched the Cazalets arrive. He had not seen any of them for three years – since Nora’s marriage, in fact. First were Uncle Edward and Aunt Villy who looked as though she had shrunk inside her dress. They brought Lydia, who looked very elegant in a dark dress that made her waist look tiny (the opposite of Judy, he thought sadly), and Roland in grey flannel shorts with matching jacket and hair spiky from brilliantine, and Wills, dressed exactly the same. He saw Wills and Roland confer, and then descend upon Richard in his chair, whom thereafter they fed steadily with the little bits of food that were being handed round. Then Uncle Rupert and Aunt Zoë arrived and Aunt Zoë looked nearly as terrific as Ange in a dark green and white striped dress with dangling diamond earrings. He watched as Uncle Rupert kissed Ange, but she didn’t seem to mind. Then the Duchy came with Aunt Rachel, both dressed as he always remembered them, in misty, bluebellish blues, but with long skirts. Uncle Rupert got the Duchy a chair and Aunt Rachel went at once to talk to Richard. Some other people arrived whom he didn’t know – friends of Ange’s, he supposed. Some of them knew each other, but they didn’t seem to know the family. Then – and this was what changed the whole party for him – Clary arrived with Polly. Clary looked like he always remembered her, but Polly, although of course she was not unrecognizable, looked so extraordinarily beautiful that he felt he was seeing her for the first time in his life.

They came up to him at once. ‘Christopher! Hello, Christopher,’ was what they severally said. In a daze he allowed himself to be hugged by them. Polly’s dress was the colour of autumn beech leaves: she smelt of some indefinably rich scent.

‘You do smell extraordinary,’ he found himself saying.

‘It’s a scent called Russian Leather,’ Clary said, ‘and I keep telling her she puts far too much of it on. She only wants to smell like one very expensive leather chair, not a whole row.’ She added, ‘It’s French, actually. It’s called Cuir de Russie in France.’

‘If I had a scent, I’d choose one called Fried Bacon.’ Someone very tall loomed behind the girls.

‘Neville, you can’t choose scents like that. You can only choose from what there is.’

‘Not if I was a scent inventor, which might be a very good way of getting rich: they must have used up all the soppy flower smells by now. Also, sometimes people might like a scent that put people off. Essence of Grass Snake would be good for that. Or Burglar’s Sweat could be another – oh, hello, Christopher.’

Neville was now as tall as he.

‘Don’t be silly and disgusting,’ Clary advised. ‘This is a party. It’s meant to be fun for people.’

She went with Polly to be greeted by Ange. Neville stayed.

‘I must say I think parties are vastly overrated. You’re not meant to have a proper conversation at them, but you are meant to kiss the most awful people and exchange platitudes with whoever is the most dull. Do you agree with that?’

‘Well, I don’t go to parties much. At all.’

‘Really? How do you manage that?’

There aren’t parties where I live.’ As he said that, he felt panic. He did live cut off from people: apart from the Hursts and Tom, the other chap who worked for them, he didn’t live with people. Of course, he saw people in shops, when he went to them, but otherwise he lived with Oliver, a half-wild cat who made use of him when she felt like it, and intermittently with other creatures whom he looked after when they were in the wars, like the vixen last autumn found in a horrible trap, various hedgehogs weak from fleas, birds that fell out of nests, and the young hare that Oliver brought him, one of whose eyes had been pecked out when it lay in a stupor – from some kind of poison he had suspected. But all these cousins, whom years ago he had spent holidays with, who had all once been part of his landscape, they all seemed to know one another, had continued to grow up together, while he had been cut off. Cut myself off, he admitted: in his intense determination to have as little to do with his father as possible he had isolated himself from everyone else. He looked at Neville, who had been choosing a sausage roll off a plate with great deliberation. He remembered him as a boy.

‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen. And a half. But I’m working on being old for my age. It’s largely a matter of vocabulary and never being surprised by anything.’

He bent his head to take a bite out of the roll, and a lock of reddish-brown hair fell across his bumpy white forehead, but at the crown, Christopher noticed, his hair grew upright in two tufts.

‘Are Teddy and Simon coming?’

‘Teddy’s still in America, although he’ll soon be back, with a girl called Bernadine who he’s married. Simon’s swotting for his finals.’

He didn’t know whether he was sorry or glad about this.

At this point Christopher’s father called for silence and made a fairly long, not always audible speech about Ange. He stopped listening to it almost at once because Polly came over to him and again her incredible beauty struck him so forcefully that the room seemed to contain only her. She was listening to his father’s speech, so he was able to look at her – at her shining coppery hair that had been cut so that it stood out inches from the back of her slender white neck, and when his father made some sort of joke and there was laughter – not the real sort but polite – she turned to him and there was an eddy of the rich scent: she wrinkled her white nose, just like Aunt Rach used to do, he remembered, when she wanted to share something funny with anyone, and her dark blue eyes shone with conspiracy. What? That she knew that they both knew that his father was not funny? That she was simply pleased to see him?

Anyway, when his father had stopped speaking and there was applause, and before Ange began to say anything back, he took a deep breath and asked if she would come and stay a weekend in his caravan.

And now she was coming. He had warned her that he didn’t have things like baths and electric light. He’d said it was only a caravan. But he hadn’t said that there was only a sort of outdoor privy that he’d constructed just inside the wood, or that there was only a wooden bunk in the tiny bedroom at one end of the caravan. He’d put her in that, and he could sleep on the floor in the main part.

He spent the whole of the next day cleaning things and tidying up, and making a vegetable soup. Mrs Hurst, who had been extremely helpful, had made him a fruit cake and a baked custard with her own eggs and milk, so they would do for puddings. He decided upon a macaroni cheese for the main course, which he could cook in his little Dutch oven. He collected plenty of wood for the stove, cleaned the windows, which were always dim with woodsmoke and condensation, and his outdoor larder – a box with a zinc mesh door that was hung from the roof of the caravan. This was to house most of the food for the weekend. On one of his many borrowing trips, in this case for extra bedding, Mrs Hurst had suggested that his cousin might like to sleep at the farm, but he felt that it would spoil things. As the day drew on, however, and it was nearly time to go to the station to fetch Polly, he began to wonder whether he was wrong; perhaps she would prefer to sleep in a proper room in a proper bed.

He need not have worried. It was dusk when he met her on the platform. She was wearing trousers and a dark jacket and a scarf tied over her hair. They kissed in a family way and he took her small case.

‘I didn’t know you had a car!’

‘It’s not mine, it belongs to the farm I work for. He lent it to me to fetch you.’

‘It’s all pretty rough,’ he warned her as he drove carefully out of Hastings – he didn’t drive much and, anyway, felt he had to be extra careful with Polly: her face had felt like cool china when he kissed it.

‘I know it will be lovely,’ she said, with such a warm assurance that he began to feel that perhaps she would like it.

But when he had parked the car in the farmyard and begun to lead Polly up the track in the dark, all his anxiety surged back. He should have lit the oil lamp so that there was a welcoming glow ahead, he should have brought the torch … ‘You’d better hold my hand,’ he said, ‘the track has rather deep ruts.’ Her hand felt very soft and cold in his.

‘You’ve still got Oliver, haven’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. I left him to guard things.’

She stood quietly in the dark while he fumbled with matches, and the soft yellow light bloomed.

‘How pretty! What a lovely light!’

Oliver, who had been standing in the middle of the floor, went up to her and stared up at her with his rich brown eyes. While she was greeting him and his interest in her was speedily progressing from courtesy to affection and then towards passionate devotion, Christopher anxiously looked round his home, trying to see it with her eyes. The table looked nice with its red and white checked tablecloth with a jam jar of berries on it, but the piece of carpet in front of the stove, whose doors he went to open, looked worn and rather dirty, and the one comfortable basket chair – once painted white – looked rather grey and bristled with pieces of cane that had worked loose, and the cushion that concealed the hole in its seat was made of a balding plush of the colour that moss was not. The shelves he had made were littered with china – all odd pieces – and his books, and every hook or peg he had put up was covered with his clothes, all in a state of disrepair. The walls of the caravan and the partition that marked off the bedroom were, excepting for the four small windows, entirely choked up with stuff so that it seemed even smaller and more crowded than he felt it really was. Oliver’s basket occupied a lot of space near the stove. He moved it now and pulled out a stool from under a shelf.

‘Oh, Christopher, it’s lovely! It’s so cosy!’ She was taking off the scarf and then her jacket; her hair looked like conkers just after they’d had their green spiky skins peeled off. He hung up her jacket and made her sit in the basket chair; he took her case into the tiny bedroom, came back and offered her tea, ‘or there’s some cider’ (he’d forgotten about drink; she probably drank things like cocktails), but she said that tea would be perfect. Her presence in this place where, until now, he had always been alone, except for Oliver, elated him; her perfect loveliness filled him with excitement and joy, and beyond this, and perhaps best of all, she was not a stranger – she was somebody, one of the cousins, somebody he had known practically all his life. If he had not known her, he thought, as he pumped up the Primus to boil the kettle, he would never have dared to speak to her at Ange’s party, and even if, by some amazing chance, she had spoken to him, had asked if she could come and stay with him, he would have been so intimidated by her radiance that he would not have been able to say a word.

They had tea, and some time after that the macaroni cheese.

She asked about a lavatory, and he escorted her, with the torch which he left with her.

‘I heard an owl,’ she said, when she returned. ‘It is a lovely wild place, isn’t it? A bit like your camp in the wood at Home Place, but much nicer.’

They had talked quite a bit about the family by then, and she’d told him about her job in what sounded like a very posh shop and about life with Clary in their flat. He asked her if she liked living in London.

‘I think I do. When we were at Home Place in the war I used to long to live there, and have a job and my own place and all that. It’s odd, but things always seem much more exciting when they’re a long way away. I suppose that’s why people like views so much. You know. Something that they can see a lot of but they’re not in it,’ she added.

He thought about that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean, but I don’t in the least feel like that.’

‘You’ve always wanted to get away from things, haven’t you?’

‘Some things.’ He felt guarded.

‘Is it nice now that you have?’

‘I haven’t really thought about it. Shall I make us some hot chocolate? I get lots of milk.’

She said that would be lovely. He went out to fetch the milk and when he came back, she said, ‘What about the washing up? Can I do it if you tell me how?’

‘I’ll do it later.’ He took the kettle for washing-up water off the Primus and began mixing the chocolate powder in a saucepan. He suddenly felt crowded with things he wanted to ask, to discuss, to talk about, to find out what she thought about them.

‘Do you think one’s meant to be happy in life?’

‘What else do you think one should be?’

‘Oh, useful – er – helpful to other people. Trying to make the world better: that kind of thing.’

‘I think being happy would make the world better.’

‘You have to be quite clever to be it, though, don’t you? I mean, it’s not as easy as it sounds.’

‘No.’ She sounded sad; then she suddenly laughed. ‘I’ve just remembered Miss Milliment saying that when she was young there was a saying “Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever”. It used to make her furious. She said even when she was ten, she couldn’t see why goodness should be an alternative to being clever. But it could be an alternative to happiness, couldn’t it?’

‘But if you had to choose,’ he said doggedly. He saw her white forehead marked by little frowns that came and went as she searched for her truth. ‘I was thinking of Nora,’ he said. ‘She’s given her life to looking after Richard – and other people.’

‘Well, hasn’t that made her happy?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think she looks at things like that.’

‘I suppose,’ Polly said, ‘that, in that case, what would matter was whether she was making things happier for the people she’s giving her life for.’

There was a silence, and he remembered Richard sitting in his chair at the party. He had not looked happy; indeed, his face seemed closed to any feeling at all, excepting the glancing animation of (mild) greed when Wills or Roly put little pieces of food in his mouth.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘one could always fail at whatever it is – goodness or happiness or anything.’

‘Not at our ages,’ Polly said. ‘I mean, if we get things wrong, we’ve still got time to try again.’

He searched for an unchipped mug for her chocolate, but he’d used it for her tea, so picked the next best one for her.

‘Drink out of this side,’ he said.

While they were drinking the chocolate, she asked him about his work on the farm. ‘Tell me your whole day.’

‘They aren’t always the same. It depends on the time of year.’

‘Well, now, then.’

‘Now is tomato time,’ he said. ‘Tom Hurst has two large glasshouses for tomatoes and the thing is to get them fruiting as early as possible. I’ve been potting up seedlings for the last week – hundreds of them. Before that I was mixing the potting mixture. In winter, I mostly do repairing jobs – like the chickens’ house – and then the cows are mostly in and have to have hay. We don’t have a lot of stock, just a few of each thing, but that’s mostly because he’s always had that. He makes his living out of the tomatoes and soft fruit and some salad things we grow in spring and summer. He’s got a few sheep – only about a dozen – but he hasn’t got the land for growing cereals. He’s getting on and they don’t have any children – his only son was killed in Burma. In fact, that’s one of my problems.’

‘You’ve become his son?’

He nodded. He loved how quick she was. ‘Yes. Marge, his wife, told me he wants to leave me the farm – the house and everything.’

‘And you don’t know whether you want it?’

‘I don’t. But if he leaves it to me, I’d feel awful if I just sold it and got out.’

‘Have you talked to him about it?’

‘God, no! I couldn’t do that. I’m not supposed to know, you see. She just told me. She thought I’d be thrilled.’

He got up to put the kettle back on the Primus. He still felt he had so many things to say to her, but it had occurred to him that he might be boring her: people who were used to living with other people probably didn’t talk to them so much – or, at least, not all the time as he seemed to be doing.

‘Do read a book if you want to,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to put our supper things in a bowl – you needn’t do anything.’

‘Where do you get your water from?’ She had watched him refilling the kettle from a tap over his small stone sink.

‘I’ve got a cistern outside. It takes the run-off of rainwater from the roof but I top it up about once a fortnight with a hose from the farm. I have my baths there and Marge said you were welcome to have one any time you want.’

‘She’s very kind, isn’t she?’

‘She really is. That’s what makes it so difficult to walk out.’

‘But why do you want to walk out? You like animals and the country and growing things.’

‘It’s not just a question of what I like. It’s – it’s – more … Well, this business of copping out – of being against things. Like being a conscious objector—’ He looked to see whether she remembered Simon’s word for his pacifism and she did. ‘I realized in the end that it meant other people doing the things that they might be just as much against as I was – the dirty work – so then I felt I had to go back into the Army. As it turned out, they wouldn’t have me, because of my being ill – that time when I couldn’t remember anything at all. But at least I tried, and that felt right. But coming here was a kind of copping out as well. It was getting away from – well, mostly Dad, I suppose, and not having to live in London with the family. But then when I saw Richard and Nora I thought, perhaps I ought to offer to go and help her. She’s got several other very disabled people as well, and she was saying it was really difficult to get staff and especially people strong enough to do all the lifting. What do you think, Poll? I really would value your opinion.’

There was a silence. Then she said, ‘Do you want to go and help Nora?’

‘It’s not a question of what I want—’

‘Oh, Christopher! It must be. In some way or other you have to want whatever it is or it simply wouldn’t work. I mean, even if you simply wanted a horrible time – that’s a kind of want. But you can’t just decide on something just because you think it ought to happen, or someone ought to do it. You’d do it awfully badly for one thing.’

‘Would I?’

‘Your heart wouldn’t be in it.’

‘So what can I do? I don’t – seem – to want – anything!’ Something about the way he said this made her laugh. Oliver, however, got to his feet, came over and leaned his head so hard against Christopher’s knee that he dropped the plate he was wiping and it broke.

‘I think Oliver is pointing out that you want him. Or you ought to.’

He put his hand on Oliver’s neck to scratch him gently behind his ear and Oliver gave a small moan of pleasure. ‘It’s mutual,’ he said.

‘Do you remember that day when Dad brought him?’ Polly said. ‘He was so frightened of everything. Excepting you.’

‘He still can’t stand a car backfiring or guns.’

They were back to reminiscence, and soon after finishing the chocolate, began preparations for the night. These took longer than when he was alone. He made Polly a hot-water bottle and explained her bedroom to her. ‘There’s a sleeping bag which you get into and then the blankets to go on top.’ He lit a night-light to put beside her bed, and offered her warm water poured into the large china basin for washing.

‘Where are you going to sleep?’

‘In here, in another sleeping bag in front of the stove. I’ll be fine. I often sleep in here in winter anyway.’ He gave her the torch for another trip to the privy.

‘Goodness! It’s lovely and cosy in here,’ she exclaimed again when she came back.

He took Oliver out for his pee while she was washing. It was a clear night, frosty – a few stars and the moon, like a piece of mother-of-pearl high in the sky. It was lovely having her to stay, and this was only Friday night: there were nearly two full days more.

On Saturday they went for a long walk in the woods and along the narrow steep-banked lanes that surrounded the farm. The day began fine, the sun like a tomato in a thick grey sky, and frosted cobwebs decorating the hedges that still had some berries left. They talked a bit about Angela – now on her way to America with hundreds of GI brides. Polly said she thought it was very brave to set off for an unknown country, leaving all her family and friends behind, and he said that he thought she’d been so miserable for so long that she was happy to have a complete change.

‘She’s been in love twice, and both times were awfully unhappy,’ he said.

‘Poor her!’ She said it in such a heartfelt manner, that he suddenly wanted to tell her about Ange and Uncle Rupert. ‘That must have been awful for her.’

‘It was. I found her being miserable one day and I didn’t know what it was. Of course he didn’t love her back. I think that must have made it worse – at the time.’

She didn’t reply, so then he said. ‘It was better in the long run. Because of his being married and all that. But, anyway, he was far too old for her – it was a hopeless idea, really.’

‘I don’t think he was too old for her at all. Less than twenty years – that’s nothing!’

She said it so vehemently that he looked at her, surprised. She was striding along, with her hands plunged into the pockets of her jacket, her face set in what was for her, he thought, a quite fierce expression.

‘Poll—’

‘His being married, of course, does make it hopeless. But his age has nothing whatever to do with it.’ After a pause, she said, so quietly that he could hardly hear her, ‘His not loving her back is the worst thing. The saddest for her, I mean.’

He opened his mouth to say that, anyway, Ange had fallen in love with someone else quite soon after Uncle Rupert, but it didn’t feel right to tell Polly that as she seemed unaccountably hostile, so instead he said, ‘Well, anyway, that’s all in the past. She’s going to be all right now.’

‘You never met him, did you?’

‘No. But she showed me a picture of him.’

‘What’s he like?’

He thought. ‘Rather furry. He looked kind. He’s much older than her, too.’ He hadn’t thought of that before.

‘You see? It doesn’t matter. I told you.’ But she seemed friendly again. Then she saw some spindle berries and wanted to pick them, and after that, she kept seeing things she wanted to pick. I don’t know nearly enough about people, he thought, and wondered whether, when you didn’t know, the thing was to ask, but then he was afraid that that might make her angry again, and couldn’t bear the idea.

They went back to the caravan and while he heated the soup she made a wonderful arrangement of the berries she had picked. He was afraid that she might be bored and asked her what she should like to do in the afternoon, and she said that she would like to go to Hastings. ‘I haven’t been there for ages.’

This meant borrowing the car again, but the Hursts didn’t seem to mind. ‘You enjoy yourself,’ Mrs Hurst advised.

Polly said that she wanted to go to the old bit that had the antique and junk shops. ‘I do love going round them. Is that all right with you?’

Anything was all right: he simply wanted to be with her, and look at her as much as possible when she wasn’t noticing.

In the car he asked her about her job. He couldn’t imagine what interior decorators did.

‘Well, what we do is listen to people about their houses or flats or whatever, and we go and see them, and then we suggest things, and in the end they sort of choose things and then they pretend they did it all themselves.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Wallpapers, or colours of paint for walls and doors, and carpets and curtains and loose-covers or upholstery for furniture – sometimes, even, all the furniture. Once we had to do every single thing for an extremely nasty house in Bishop’s Avenue – that’s sort of beyond Hampstead. I had to choose the china, a complete dinner service and candlesticks and little silver claws to hold place names. It was for some fantastically rich foreigner. I thought he couldn’t be married if he wanted all these things chosen for him, but he was. His wife simply wasn’t allowed to do anything about it. Gervase said that she was like a prisoner, hardly ever allowed out.’

‘Who is Gervase?’

‘He’s my boss. Or, rather, one of them. There’s Caspar as well. Caspar does the shop part, and Gervase does the designing – you know, curtain drapes or pelmets, and plasterwork and the layout for bathrooms and kitchens, that sort of thing.’

He didn’t know. It seemed extraordinary to him that people did any of that, and even more that there would be people who paid to have it done for them. ‘And what do you do?’

‘Well, I’m sort of learning, which means really that I do the dullest things – anything I’m told.’

‘Don’t most houses have kitchens and bathrooms anyway?’

‘Yes, but often they’re hideous – or there simply aren’t enough of them.’

She was very good at antique shops: found things, seemed to know about them, how old they were, sometimes, in mysterious cases, what they were for. She also bought some things: three silver forks, very plain and heavy. ‘George III,’ she said, although two pounds ten seemed a lot to him for three forks. Then she found four pairs of decorated brass hoops but with a bit open. She said they were curtain ties, ormolu, and that Caspar would be delighted to have them in the shop.

She found a small walnut desk she called a davenport that she said Caspar would also like. This was twenty pounds, and she said that she would telephone from London if the desk was wanted and would they keep it until Monday? Of course they would. She bought a small piece of green velvet that she said she would make into a table cover for her room. Then she absolutely fell in love with a tea service of pink and gold lustre with tiny green flowers on it. ‘Oh, look, Christopher, a teapot – perfect – and seven cups and nine saucers and two cake plates! The prettiest set I’ve ever seen!’

It was nine pounds, nearly two weeks’ wages, but he decided to give it to her. ‘I’ll buy that,’ he said, and saw her face cloud and then clear as she said, ‘Well, it is your turn,’ and turned her attention to an array of mugs. She bought two.

While the china was being packed in yellowing newspaper by the proprietor, she wandered round the furniture. ‘Look! A Regency supper table. Goodness, what an elegant sight! It’s rosewood.’ (Of course, she knew about wood because of her father.) ‘And look at the declivities for each plate and its charming legs.’

He was amazed at how much she knew.

They carted everything into the car. It was dusk and it had begun to rain.

On the way home, she said, ‘The last time I went to those shops was with Dad,’ and fell silent and he sensed some sadness.

This time tomorrow, he thought, I shall be driving back along this road without her.

Over supper, baked potatoes and a wing of chicken for her that Mrs Hurst had cooked and some roast parsnips, she asked whether he still drew. He hadn’t – for ages.

‘You used to be jolly good at it.’

‘So did you.’

‘Nothing like you. I especially remember your owls, how good they were.’

‘You were going to go to an art school.’

‘I did. All it did was make me see I wasn’t good enough. Do you mind if I eat my bone?’

‘Of course not. I live with somebody who eats his bones.’

‘If we were characters in a novel or a play,’ she said sadly, ‘one of us, at least, would turn out to be a frightfully good painter. And if it was a bad novel, both of us would. As it is …’

‘I’m a sort of farmer—’

‘And I work in a shop,’ she finished. She put down her chicken bone and licked her fingers delicately – like a little cat, he thought. He took away their plates and laid two Crunchie bars on the table.

‘Oh! How lovely! Is this our pudding?’

‘I knew you liked them. Do you remember that day when you were sitting on a wall outside the kitchen garden and you gave me some of your bar?’

She thought for a moment, then shook her head. ‘I don’t, actually.’

‘You wore a bright blue dress and a black velvet hair-band, and you offered me some and I took too much, but then you let me have the rest of it because I’d missed tea.’

‘Funny! I don’t remember at all.’

‘I hope you still like them.’ He felt dashed that she’d forgotten.

‘Love them.’

When he suggested making tea, she gave him the two mugs she had bought. ‘One for you and one for your guests.’

‘But I don’t have any guests,’ he said, when he had thanked her.

‘Never?’

‘You’re the first one.’

‘But don’t you have – any friends here?’

‘There are the Hursts, of course. And there’s a boy who works with me, but he’s not exactly a friend.’

‘And you have Oliver,’ she said.

She said it in a protective kind of way, which somehow made him feel worse (obviously she expected him to have friends and why hadn’t he got any?). ‘I suppose I do lead a rather solitary life,’ he said.

‘But you like it?’

‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’ He did now, though. This time tomorrow she would be in London, and he would be eating supper and struggling with his Greek. He was trying to translate some fragments of Menander – Mr Milner, one of his teachers at school, had been particularly fond of Menander, and he was one of the few people Christopher had ever been able to talk to. He had never told anyone about the Greek because he was afraid it would be considered absurd, or pointless, and that then he would not want to do it any more. And if that happened, he would have nothing. But he was dreading Polly’s departure – so much that he almost wished she had never come to stay at all. He went to sleep that night telling himself that it was stupid to wish any such thing.

In the morning he woke early, as usual, to hear the rain drumming down on the roof of the caravan, and wondered what he could do to entertain her. She had said that she wanted to see the farm, but it would be too wet for that to be much fun for her. The stove had gone out – too much rain down its chimney. He got up as quietly as possible, put on his boots and a mac and went to collect wood from the pile he kept under a tarpaulin outside. When he came back with an armful she was up, wearing her trousers and dark blue jersey with a roll collar, her shining hair tied back with a piece of blue ribbon. He explained about the fire and she said if he would light the Primus she’d make the porridge while he relit it.

It hadn’t gone out for some time, and badly needed cleaning. Clouds of wood ash rose in the air as he riddled and brushed the little grate inside. He got a bucketful of ash to take outside. Then he had to go to the farm to fetch the milk and Mrs Hurst most kindly gave him a small jug of cream. ‘You’re not getting the weather we could wish for and that’s a fact,’ she said. ‘If you’d like to bring your cousin over to dinner you’re welcome.’ He thanked her and said he would see what Polly wanted to do and let her know after breakfast. He was divided between not wanting to waste the time with Polly, and worrying that scrambled eggs would not seem much of a Sunday lunch for her.

When he got back she was not in the van. Making a miserable wet trip to the privy, poor girl. He looked round his home, seeing it this morning with different, outside eyes. It really did look a dingy, drab little place, with last night’s supper things still unwashed in the sink. She had taken the porridge off the Primus and put on the kettle.

When she returned, she looked really cold: her nose was pink and her hair was dark from the rain. But somehow, in spite of the cold and seeing how cold she was, she managed to change the scene: it stopped being drab and dank, and became all right. They had the porridge and she said what a treat it was to have cream. Then, while they were doing the washing up – the supper things and breakfast – she said: ‘As it’s raining, why don’t we spend the morning cleaning your house? I’d love to – I love making everything tidy and neat.’

He began to protest – it was too boring for her, and he didn’t mind doing it later – but she took his finger and wrote ‘POLLY’ in the dust on the shelf by the sink, and said, ‘You see? It really needs doing.’

So that was how they spent the morning, and it turned out to be a good idea in every way. She was not only very good at cleaning things, she had brilliant ideas about arranging them. She took all his books off various shelves and arranged them all on one single shelf where they were not only easier to find, but looked far nicer. ‘You have a lot of Greek books,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know you could read Greek. What’s this one?’

‘It’s the New Testament.’

‘Gosh! Can you read that?’

‘More or less. I was having a go at translating it. Just to see if it came out the same as it does, you know, in the English one we all have.’

‘Does it?’

‘Not always, but of course I’m not very good at it. Some Greek words have several meanings, you see, and it’s a question of which one is what was meant. Sometimes it seems different to me from the published version.’

‘I didn’t know that about you,’ she said. She seemed impressed, and he hastened to tell her that he was only a beginner and just did it for fun in the evenings.

She did other arrangements: with his china, and his kitchen things. She got him to put up hooks on the wall for hanging his saucepans and frying pan. He’d bought the hooks ages ago and never used them. She actually washed the walls before he put the hooks in – something he had never done – and the place looked lighter. He was kept busy getting water and boiling it, and finding her a rag and scrubbing brush, and going over to the farm to beg another bar of soap and to explain that they would not be able to make it for lunch. However, some time after one Mrs Hurst appeared with a basket in which were two covered plates of Sunday dinner.

‘My! You have been working hard! Chris won’t know himself, will you, Chris?’ He could see she approved of Polly. She offered to take the piece of carpet, give it a good shampoo and dry it out in her kitchen. ‘Don’t let your dinners get cold.’

In the bottom of the basket was a small bottle that had obviously once contained medicine, but was now filled with a very dark red liquid and labelled ‘Sloe Gin 1944’. She was always making drinks of this nature, but usually he was only given a whole bottle at Christmas.

They finished the cleaning and fetched a bowl of fresh water to wash in. Her face was smudged with grime, and when he told her so she wetted the drying-up cloth and asked him to clean her up. ‘As you don’t seem to have a looking-glass anywhere.’

He took the cloth and rubbed the marks, at first so gently that he simply seemed to spread the dirt. Use soap, she said, and he rubbed his finger on the cake and massaged it into her delicate skin and then used the cloth again and she stood completely still with her eyes looking not at him, but straight ahead. In the middle of doing it, he had the most extraordinary feeling – that she was his dearest, oldest friend and the most mysterious, unknown creature he had ever encountered. His hand was trembling, he had to swallow to keep his heart down and to quell its knocking. In those few moments he changed and nothing was as it had been before he touched her.

They both tried the sloe gin; he didn’t care for it, and he didn’t think she did either. She said it was one of those drinks that she thought one was only supposed to have very little of ‘which stops it being a drink really – it’s more like having a very rich chocolate, they’re not meant to quench one’s hunger’.

They ate the Sunday lunch, which was by then cold: it was Yorkshire pudding and some roast beef with it for Polly; Mrs Hurst knew that he didn’t eat meat, and always provided him with extra vegetables.

Then she mended one of the leather pads on the elbows of his jacket. He tried to stop her, but she insisted. He made some tea while she packed up her things: her departure loomed.

In the car, she asked him if he ever had holidays.

‘Not really. I had one this weekend because you came.’

After a pause, she said, ‘It might be nice for you to have a change sometimes. Perhaps if you went for a visit to Nora, you’d find out whether you wanted to work there.’

‘I suppose I might.’ He answered mechanically. He was so preoccupied with her – with the duality of his feelings about her – that he almost wished she wasn’t there; when they talked she was his childhood friend – his cousin – when he looked at her, her beauty surprised, assaulted, overwhelmed him each time as though it was the first. Through lunch, and when she was saying goodbye to Oliver and then walking down the track to the farmyard, he had said things to the cousin; things like thanking her for helping him so much and sending his love to Clary and yes he would thank Mrs Hurst for the lunch, but to this new beauty, this perfect stranger, he could find nothing to say.

They got to the station early (how much he wished afterwards that they hadn’t; that there had only been time to carry her case and put it on the train for her). As it was, they stood for a few moments on the platform and then she suggested that they go into the waiting room where it would be warmer. ‘Unless you want to go,’ she said. ‘You can perfectly well leave me.’ Before he could stop it, he heard himself (as though he had nothing to do with it) saying, ‘I don’t ever want to do that.’

They went into the waiting room and sat down. There was a small coal fire that glowed in the grate in a subdued manner, and wooden benches against two walls. They sat on one of these in silence, and just as it was beginning to occur to him with a curious mixture of regret and relief that she had not heard him, she said, ‘What did you mean just now?’

‘We aren’t really cousins,’ he said. He wanted to be able to think, to choose his words with enormous, delicate care, but he couldn’t actually think at all.

‘Because you mean our parents aren’t related to each other? Well, I don’t think that matters. We’ve always felt like cousins.’ She saw his face, and stopped. ‘Sorry, go on.’

‘We could be married,’ he said. ‘Do you think that you could, by any chance, consider that in some way or other? I mean not immediately, but next year – or possibly in a few months? I’d have to think of the right place to live because I wouldn’t let you put up with the caravan – it’s nothing like good enough for you and you probably wouldn’t want to be married to a farmer so I’d have to think of something else. But I would, I promise you. We could even live in London if that is what you wanted. I’d do anything. It is because I love you so much that I want us to be married, if possible,’ he added, and then suddenly came to a stop.

‘Oh, Christopher! Is that why you asked me to stay?’

‘No! I only found out today – this morning – just before lunch. I would have told you.’ He thought for a moment. ‘At least, I suppose I would. But I didn’t mean to tell you now – it just came out. I know I haven’t put it very well, but I suppose it’s the sort of thing that’s so important that that wouldn’t make much difference. Would it?’ He turned to look at her.

‘No.’

‘Perhaps,’ he said quickly before she could deny him, ‘perhaps you don’t feel like it because you haven’t thought about it.’

‘It’s not that. I couldn’t marry you but it’s not because of you. I think you’re one of the most interesting and good people I’ve known. And I think you’re extremely brave – and kind – and …’ Her voice tailed away; she couldn’t think of anything else, he thought miserably.

She put her small white hand on one of his. ‘Oh, Christopher! I don’t want to make you feel miserable, but I am actually in love with someone else.’

He might have known. ‘And you’re going to marry them.’

‘No! No, I’m not. They don’t love me. So it will never be any good.’

‘So do you think you will always love them?’

‘I don’t know. It feels as though I will.’

His eyes filled with tears at her prospect. ‘Oh, Poll! I’m really sorry. I can’t imagine anyone not loving you.’

The waiting-room door opened and a couple came in with a child in a perambulator. ‘It’s not worth it,’ the man was saying, ‘train’ll be here in a minute.’ He was heaving two suitcases that he dumped by the fire. The child wore a pixie hat and had a dummy in its mouth. The woman rocked the pram and the dummy fell out of the child’s mouth on to the floor. It started to wail and the man picked up the dummy and crammed it back.

‘Think of the germs!’ the woman said. She rolled her eyes, including Christopher and Polly in her perfunctory dismay.

‘If you want to be right in front of the train, I think we’d better start moving,’ he said. He couldn’t bear his last few minutes with her to be shared with anyone else.

But in fact they had hardly walked the short way to the end of the platform before the train appeared and he had to put her into it.

She said she had had a lovely time, thanked him, kissed him rather uncertainly, and then he was out of the train and seeing her through the thick glass window that she tried to pull down, but could not. She made a little face, and with her dark blue eyes still anxious, blew him a small kiss. The whistle sounded, the guard got on to the train and it puffed slowly away, then gathered speed so quickly that he lost count of which was her window.

He waited until the train was out of sight, then walked slowly back to the station yard. The rain had stopped; a cold grey dusk had descended.

He drove back, parked the car, and trudged up the track to the van. Oliver was waiting for him with his customary, courteous enthusiasm. He lit the lamp and opened the doors of the stove, then sat in the chair that had been hers. Everything – his books, his china – everything in the van had been touched by her, had been transformed, as she had transformed him from extreme joy to his despair. If only he had not told her, had not blurted it all out in that senseless manner simply because they were early for her train – if only he had not done that, he could have held on to his astonishing happiness, could have continued to feel the new and extraordinary sensation of love that might be returned. In the end, of course, he would have had to know that she loved some idiot who didn’t love her back, but to know it so soon meant that his pure joy had lasted hardly at all whereas he could see no end to his present hopelessness. For what had he got to offer her? All he had been able to say was that he would change things – live somewhere else, do something else, vague, weak promises with no substance to them. He remembered her saying, ‘But don’t you have any friends here?’ and realizing when she mentioned Oliver that she knew he didn’t. He hadn’t been living a proper life: he’d simply run away from things he couldn’t bear, and put very little in their place. How could anyone love that? He was twenty-three and he had done absolutely nothing with his life. He remembered her saying, ‘You have to want whatever it is, or it simply won’t work.’ Well, all he wanted was Polly, to love her, all the time and for ever, to live his life for her. ‘You can’t decide to do something just because you think you ought to – your heart wouldn’t be in it,’ she had said. In a sense, he thought, she had given him his heart – the fact that it hurt so much was probably not the point.

He became aware of Oliver, standing on his hind legs with his front paws on the arm of the chair, licking the tears off his face. When his vision cleared, he saw the cardboard box, with the pink lustre tea-set that he had meant to give her, by the door of the van, perfectly obvious, but he had completely forgotten it. If he gave it now, would she think it a bribe or an attempt at one? Then he thought it didn’t matter what she thought, he had bought it simply because she had loved it and he had wanted to give her something she loved. He would still give it. Oliver was sitting now, with his head resting heavily against him, brown eyes glowing with sentiment. People laughed at sentiment, always dubbed dogs as sentimental, but sentiment was simply a part of their love, he thought as, later, he eased himself into the sleeping bag that he had provided for her, and put his head on her pillow. Sentiment would be not good if that was all, but he knew now for himself, as well as from Oliver, that it was not.

Oliver waited until he had blown out the candle, and then settled himself in his usual position against his friend, back against his belly, head on shoulder, a bulwark against what would otherwise have been entire despair.

All morning the removal men, wearing aprons, had tramped back and forth from their van with the furniture for the new maisonette and Sid had been helping Rachel with its disposal. By eleven o’clock all the larger pieces were in – one of the pianos, the grandfather clocks (two), the vast mahogany wardrobes (three), the Duchy’s bureau, the Brig’s huge kneehole desk, the beds, the dining-room table, the dressing-tables, what seemed to her an incredible number of chairs, a sofa, the Duchy’s sewing machine and gramophone, the Brig’s glass-fronted bookcases of laurelwood. She wanted Rachel to sit and rest while the men drank tea and ate buns in their van, but Rachel wanted her to see the garden with a view to tidying it up a bit before the Duchy’s arrival, so out they went into the bitingly cold wind. The garden was so small that she felt they could just as well have surveyed it from the house. It was a small rectangle; a square of lawn – now sodden, high grass – edged by a weed-ridden gravel path, and with narrow black beds that contained the remains of Michaelmas daisies, blackened by winter frosts, a few ferns and an old pear tree. It was bounded by low black brick walls, and there was a rotting shed crazily perched in the far corner.

‘If we could just cut the grass before they come,’ Rachel said. ‘Do you think I could borrow your mower?’

‘You could, but it wouldn’t cut this. It needs scything first. Let’s go in, darling, I can see that you’re freezing. There are some daffodils – look!’

The Duchy said they were King Alfred, and she hates them. Oh, darling, I do hope I’ve done the right thing! It does seem rather small now that the furniture is in. Still, it’s lovely and near to you.’ She tucked Sid’s arm in hers with that smile that melted her heart.

The afternoon was spent unpacking the tea-chests that arrived in such a fast, steady stream that Rachel was reduced to telling them to put them all in the sitting room. This meant that those containing linen and bedding had all to be carted upstairs in armfuls. The flat consisted of a large sitting room, a dining room, a study and a small kitchen and cloakroom on the ground floor, and two large and two small bedrooms and a bathroom on the floor above. Needless to say, Rachel had designated the two larger bedrooms for her mother and Aunt Dolly, the south-facing smaller room for the Brig, and had taken the smallest room (not more than a boxroom, Sid thought angrily) for herself. ‘It’s quite large enough for me,’ she had said. ‘I have too many clothes anyway, and they’re all as old as the hills. It’s high time I gave them to the Red Cross.’

They had unpacked the tea-chests, kitchen stuff, china – ‘Where are we going to put everything?’ Rachel had said. ‘I’m afraid the poor Duchy is going to feel dreadfully cramped’ – until she could see that Rachel was absolutely ‘done up’, as she would put it.

‘Darling. We must stop. I’m going to take you home and give you an enormous gin and then you can have a hot bath and supper in bed.’

And in spite of some protest, that is what they had done. Sid had cut up the pork pie she had bought and made a salad, but when she carried the tray up to Rachel’s room, she found her lying in her dressing-gown, flat on her back asleep. She put the tray on the dressing table, moved the, armchair to where she could see Rachel, and sat down to wait.

When the idea of the older Cazalets moving back to London had first been mooted, she had had a sense of relief that at last and at least there would no longer be such a distance between them. She had even had the fantasy, as now she bitterly called it, of Rachel settling her parents somewhere and then coming to live with her. That was soon exploded: Rachel had explained at some length how she could not possibly leave the Duchy – no longer with the staff she was accustomed to – on her own with the blind Brig. So then it had been a question of where they would find a flat, and the house – or rather half of it – in Carlton Hill had seemed the perfect answer. Now, she wondered how much time, freedom and privacy this would really afford them. Its size precluded ever being alone with Rachel if she went there, which left Rachel coming to her at odd times and when she felt able to get away – the only alternative. And here was the dilemma. Ages ago – it must be nearly two years – she had resolved that if Thelma ever got in the way of her seeing Rachel, Thelma would have to go – for good. Somehow, however, this situation had never actually occurred; her meetings with Rachel had been so occasional, and always so much planned in advance, that there had never been the pressing need that would have precipitated such a decision. And Thelma? She was fairly sure that Thelma guessed or knew that there was someone else in her life, but it was never mentioned. Thelma had all the ingenious flexibility of a piece of ivy determined to conquer a tree or a wall; she clung unobtrusively, she encroached by minute degrees, and if Sid defeated any particular advance, she fell back upon a series of apparently innocuous excuses: she had only thought she would stay an extra night because she planned to wash all the paint on the stairs and to do this in one day meant a very early start; she was only staying that particular evening because she knew Sid got back late from Hampshire where she taught in a girls’ school and would be too tired to cook for herself. Sid had ceased wanting very much to go to bed with her, but in a curious way, which she had not expected, this made it almost easier to do. The fact that she did not enjoy it in the way that she had at first made her feel less guilty. A piece of twisted morality, she now thought, as she gazed at Rachel’s peaceful face. Asleep, she shed years: it was easy to see the beauty she had had as a young girl. Thelma would have to go.

The next day, she set about it.

‘But I don’t understand!’

‘It’s simply that our situation isn’t right for me – any more. I’m very sorry about it, but I must tell you. I can’t go on like this.’

The hot brown eyes peered at her with a look of hurt bewilderment. ‘I still don’t understand. What has happened to change things?’

How could she answer that? She simply no longer felt the same. In any case, it would be much better for Thelma to go. ‘I can’t give you all you want, you are quite young enough to go and find that with someone else.’

This, before it was out of her mouth, she knew to be a tactical error.

‘But I would far, far rather have what little I do have with you than any life with anyone else! Surely you know that.’ The eyes were brimming now and, from much past experience, she knew that they were in for a major scene.

‘Thelma, I know it’s very hard for you, but you’ve simply got to accept this.’

‘That you don’t love me any more?’

‘That I don’t love you.’

‘But you did love me. Something must have happened.’

‘Time has happened.’

Tears, sobs, violent crying: she managed not to touch her throughout all of it, to continue to stand by the piano repeating at intervals that she was sorry.

‘You can’t be very sorry, or you wouldn’t do this to me! You couldn’t be so unbelievably cruel to someone you cared for!’

She had no choice, she said. This was to be the end.

‘You don’t mean that I’m not to come here any more? I mean, even if you don’t want – to spend nights with me – you surely can’t banish me completely?’

A clean break, she said, was the only way.

But Thelma had the indomitable strength of the abject. She would only come once a week. She would clean the house and do the shopping. She would not expect payment for any of this. She would get herself another job that would keep her. She would not expect any more music lessons. She would not ever, ever turn up unexpectedly. She would be content if they simply had coffee together in the kitchen when she had finished cleaning.

Eventually, it got through to her that none of this was to happen, and it was almost with relief that Sid recognized resentment beginning to smoulder in the girl’s eyes. She said she supposed she would be given time to pack up her things, or would Sid prefer her to return tomorrow for all that? Sid saw this attempt to clutch at a thin edge just in time to thwart it. No, she should pack everything now. She would pay for a cab. While Thelma disappeared upstairs to the spare room, Sid collected her music that lay on the piano and in the music stool and put it all into her music case. She was shaking with shame, the horrid discovery that apart from not loving Thelma she no longer even liked her, and the realization that their natures – hers as well as Thelma’s – combined to make it impossible for her to conduct this ending with any sort of kindness or delicacy. The inch would become an ell, the straw seized would become a rope with which she would certainly get hanged: a brutal, sudden and complete termination was all that she could manage.

She did contrive to give Thelma some money, and found her a second case (she turned out to have far more possessions than Sid had been aware of) and rang for a taxi-cab while Thelma was filling it. She was anxious now that there should be no hiatus between Thelma being ready and her going.

The cab arrived and the considerable luggage was stowed in it. There was a final horrid moment when she had to ask Thelma for her latch key; she had nearly forgotten to do this, and saw from the expression on Thelma’s face as she fumbled in her bag for it that Thelma had been hoping she would forget. When Thelma – now tearless and white with anger – was finally ensconced in the cab and driven away, she almost tottered back to the house. To her dislike, she now admitted a certain fear; she had actually become afraid of this seemingly soft and clinging girl, feeling now, with more than a touch of hysteria, that had she retained the key, Thelma might easily have returned to burn the house down or effect some lesser destruction.

It had been early evening. She made herself a stiff drink. Part of her wished passionately that Rachel was in London, but another part felt so besmirched by what she had done that she felt unworthy. She decided to go out, to leave the house for the evening.

Two days later she received an eleven-page letter from Thelma, the ostensible reason for which was that she needed a reference. She supposed that Sid would not grudge her that, at least. It was not much to ask, considering the way in which her love and loyalty had been treated. The rest of the letter consisted of descriptions of this, together with her reactions to them. She had put up with being taken for granted, for being used when convenient with no thought for how she might feel. She had put up with slights, selfishness, a lack of consideration for any of her feelings, with being excluded from the rest of Sid’s social life – she had never, for instance, even laid eyes on any of that family Sid went off and stayed with in Sussex. She felt that a good deal of the time she had been treated like a servant: it had been humiliating, considering the rest of their relationship. On and on it went, lamenting the cessation of a relationship that Thelma seemed to feel had been intolerable. She seemed to regard her love flourishing in such a climate as a particular triumph and could not now imagine how she was to get through the rest of her life, except that she knew that she would be unable ever to trust anyone again.

She had read the letter twice. It seemed extraordinary to her – even after only two days – that she had persisted in putting up with such a dishonest situation for so long after she had recognized it. She had felt responsible, angry and ashamed. She had liked to think of herself as honourable and straightforward, and decisive, and this proved her to be nothing of the kind.

She wrote a carefully generous reference and posted it to the house in Kilburn where Thelma had a room. This sort of thing, she thought, must never happen again. She would never love anyone but Rachel, and therefore had no right to go to bed with anyone else.

‘And this is your room, Miss Milliment. I thought you would not mind being on the ground floor as there is a little cloakroom with a basin next door, and you will only have to brave the staircase when you want a bath.’

‘That is most thoughtful.’ She had found stairs increasingly difficult lately; largely because she could not see where they were.

‘Perhaps you’d like me to put your suitcases on your bed: then it will be easier for you to unpack them. Tea will be ready in about half an hour.’ Viola heaved the cases on to the bed and left her.

Miss Milliment had come up by train that afternoon. It had seemed very strange to be leaving Home Place: it had been such a delightful refuge for so long. Naturally, she was extremely grateful to dear Viola for giving her a home, and had she not sometimes hankered for London and its galleries during those years of war? ‘It is impossible to please you, Eleanor,’ she admonished herself.

The room was rather dark, so she trotted to the door to switch on the ceiling light. Apart from the bed, there was a nice, solid wardrobe in one corner, a chest of drawers, a writing table, one easy and two upright chairs. The walls were pale blue. There was a gas fire with a rug in front of it and a bedside table with a lamp on it. There was also a small open bookcase – she had not seen it at first, because it was on the far side of the wardrobe. She would be able to unpack her books at last, which she had never had room to do at Home Place. They had lain at the back of the garage in the same boxes that had contained them since Papa’s death. She had so much to be thankful for! It was clear to her that the house was not very large, and that she had been given one of the greater rooms: a bedsitting room was what it was meant to be, and she resolved to exercise the utmost tact about how often and how much she used the rest of the house. I must feel my way, she thought. I must never encroach upon dear Viola’s family life. By which she knew she meant her life with Edward; she knew that, where Roly was concerned, she could still be useful: she was preparing him for prep school, and there was talk of Zoë bringing Juliet over for lessons. Lydia was to have her heart’s desire and go to the boarding school where her cousin Judy was. And when the older Cazalets were settled in their flat – which, Viola said, was within walking distance – she would be able to continue to help the Brig with his book. She did not think he would ever finish the work since he so often changed his mind about the course it should take – they were now deeply involved in the historical geography of the forests, when originally the book had been meant as a survey of trees indigenous or imported into Great Britain. However, it gave him something to think and to talk about, and she found the subject, which was new to her, of great interest.

She was so occupied with these thoughts that she did not notice (until the drawer was so full that she was unable to shut it) that she had simply been putting everything from one case into one drawer. A pretty pickle! Now her stockings were all muddled up with her vests and drawers and even one jersey that needed washing. ‘Really, Eleanor! You are not to be trusted with the simplest task.’ But she decided to leave the drawer as it was for the moment and to unpack the second case. This seemed to contain a daunting miscellany. Summer clothes – her best yellow and brown outfit worn in the evenings, although she could not help noticing that the holes under the arms had, in spite of her cobbling them together, enlarged to a point where she doubted that much more could be done to repair them. Her cardigans – all three of them – were in need of attention; it scarcely seemed worth putting them away. The one with which she had had that unfortunate accident with the golden syrup seemed far stickier than the small mishap warranted and the nice heathery blue one that dear Polly had so kindly made for her, the sleeve of which had most tiresomely caught on some protuberance, had acquired a large rambling hole that she feared it would be impossible to mend. She sighed. Sometimes her uselessness appalled her. She could no longer see well enough to thread a needle, but honesty compelled her to admit that even when her eyes had been better, she was a poor sewer. And here was Viola proposing to do all the cooking for the household! Surely she must be able to help with that! She could peel potatoes, perhaps, she could surely learn to do that or – but here her imagination failed her. She really had little or no idea what one did with food. One presumably washed and chopped and mixed things and then boiled them or put them in the oven. The nearest she had ever come to preparing food was spreading the dripping on hot toast for her father, and, of course, making tea for him. After his death she had eaten in tea-shops, or in lodgings until dear Viola had invited her to Home Place where, of course, there had always been delicious food prepared by Mrs Cripps. Viola was not used to cooking either: she had always had a cook and other servants. This move was going to be a very great change for her. Miss Millament resolved to be as much help as possible and (although it seemed rather contrary) to keep out of the way as much as she could.

When Viola called her to tea, she left the room with some relief. It now seemed such a muddle that she was afraid she would never get it straight.

That evening, however, she was invited to dine with Viola and Edward. ‘Our first night here, you must join us, Miss Milliment,’ Viola had said. Roly and Lydia were absent, as Viola had wanted to get their rooms straight before they came, so it was just the three of them. Edward arrived rather late from the office – she heard Viola greeting him in the hall: ‘Darling! Of course, you haven’t even got a key to your own house yet! You do look fagged. Have you had an awful day?’

‘Pretty bloody.’

Her door had been ajar for the hearing of this exchange; she must remember to keep it shut but, even so, the walls must have been quite thin because, after shutting it, she could still hear them in the kitchen.

She was bidden to join them in the drawing room for a glass of champagne that Edward had brought.

‘Here’s to the new house!’ Viola had said, and they all drank.

It was a strange evening, however. Viola was the one who talked. In spite of her looking exhausted (she had not bothered to change, she said, as she was cooking), she hardly stopped talking throughout the meal. She had certainly worked very hard. A fire had been lit – which was comforting as it was one of those cold spring evenings – and before it she had laid a small round table with dinner. ‘We’ll probably eat in the kitchen on ordinary evenings,’ she said, ‘but I thought we ought to christen the drawing room tonight.’

Edward said, ‘Good idea!’

In spite of his hearty agreement with Viola about all her plans and arrangements, there was something subdued about him – about the whole evening, she thought afterwards. But, then, she had become so used to a large table and at least a dozen of the family round it – on the occasions when she had dined with them – with all the noise of several conversations going on at once, that naturally it felt strange to be in such attenuated, intimate surroundings. She resolved to suggest to dear Viola that she dine in her room in future, in order to allow them time to themselves.

After dinner, a most acceptable stew with rice and an apple pudding, Viola cleared the table and put everything on a trolley to wheel into the kitchen. Left alone with Edward, she felt that this was an appropriate moment to thank him for his great kindness in housing her.

‘Not at all, Miss Milliment. I know how fond Villy is of you, and you will be company for her.’ Then he asked her what she thought of the League of Nations being dissolved, adding that he personally had never thought them much good. When she was beginning to say that she thought that some sort of international organization might be desirable, Viola put her head round the door to ask if they would like coffee.

This seemed to be her cue for retiring, and she did so.

Her room was such a muddle that it took her some time to find a nightdress and she felt too tired to tidy things. She had not lit the gas fire so the room was cold, and the bulb in her bedside lamp was broken. She lay awake for a long time in the dark without her usual hot-water bottle, wondering why, considering how grateful she felt – and ought to feel – she also felt a vague sense of unease.

She had stood by the gate on to the drive to see them all off. Frank had brought out the cases earlier, and they were now strapped on the back of the car. Then he had helped Mrs Cazalet Senior to get her sister into the back seat. Poor old Miss Barlow seemed rather confused: she kept stopping to talk, and then she wanted to pick the daffodils that grew under the monkey puzzle tree, but Mrs Senior was ever so patient with her, and in the end they somehow got her into the back of the car with Madam beside her and Frank was smoothing the old car rug over their knees.

‘Goodbye, Mrs Tonbridge,’ Mrs Cazalet said. ‘I know I can leave everything about shutting up the house quite safely to you.’ Which was no more than the truth. Then Frank went back to get Mr Cazalet and lead him to the front seat. Of course, he didn’t know she was there so she couldn’t expect him to say anything. When he was safely shut in, Frank gave her one of his little sideways nods and a wink. He was dressed in his best grey, with black gaiters and a cockade in his cap. He was to spend the night in London, and then come back for a week’s holiday when they could really get down to making the cottage over the garage into a home. The wind was quite sharp, and she was glad when they left. She stood and waved until the car was out of sight, and then she went back into the house, locking the front door behind her. She wouldn’t be using that again. Tomorrow Edie was coming up from the village to clear the beds, clean out the fireplaces and start the spring cleaning.

She stood for a moment in the hall: the house felt very queer with nobody in it. She couldn’t ever remember it being completely empty of the family. All through the war they’d been there; poor Mrs Hugh had had William in her room upstairs; poor Miss Barlow’s sister had died in the morning room; Mr Rupert had come walking in from the war after all those years … Of course, Mrs Rupert had had Juliet – a sweet little baby she was, always had been. She had only been with the family since the beginning of 1937, and she wouldn’t be moving now. She’d been half afraid that Mrs Senior would want her to go with them to London, which she didn’t fancy as London houses were all stairs and her legs were not up to them, but no, she’d wanted her to stay at Home Place and cook for them in the holidays.

The dining-room lunch would want clearing. A really beautiful rabbit pie she’d made for their last lunch – the rabbit in a nice white sauce with plenty of onion, and puff pastry to mark the occasion. She’d made a nice bread and butter pudding to follow. Edie had served lunch. Not so long ago she wouldn’t have allowed that girl out of the kitchen, but times had certainly changed, and so far as she was concerned, she could not say that they’d changed for the better. She only had to look at the dining-room table to see that. Poor Eileen would have had a fit. No butter knives, only one glass for drinking and the places laid anyhow. Eileen had left last year: her mother was poorly and wanted her home. She’d had the proper training; you wouldn’t get young girls nowadays who’d take the trouble to learn what was what. Dottie and Bertha had gone to London, but not into service, to work in a shop. That left Edie and Lizzie to help when the family came down for holidays. She had not liked to ask what Mrs Senior was doing for staff in London (because she had been afraid she might be wanted up there), but Miss Rachel saying that she was going to do the cooking was clearly some kind of joke. She’d never so much as boiled an egg, which was as it should be seeing as how she was a lady. Frank would tell her what was going on up there when he got back.

She had started clearing the plates on to a tray: no sense in leaving them until Edie came – the food would have dried on them and then they would be harder to clean. She piled them on to the trolley to wheel into the scullery.

When she had put the dishes to soak in the sink, she decided to make herself a nice cup of tea and have it with her feet up in the Servants’ Hall: the small room with a nice coal fire where she and Frank had their middle mornings and tea, and sometimes supper.

The house already felt cold, and the room was the only snug place. She put the pot of tea on the table to draw and eased off her shoes – polished by Frank until you could almost see yourself in them. He wasn’t exactly handy, but he was a good polisher. She kept her slippers, comfortingly large and shapeless, in this room, and now that she was married to him, she wore them in front of Frank.

Marriage, she reflected, had turned out to be very much what she had expected. It made some things easier, and some more difficult. On the one hand, she didn’t have to worry any more – about Frank’s intentions, or what would become of her when she got too old to work; on the other, there was the strain of having to keep up the position of being interested in world events and what Frank thought about them. She had thought that this sort of thing would stop when the war ended, but it hadn’t – it hadn’t at all. He went on about the League of Nations, and nationalization and someone called Cripps (he made a joke about it being one of her relations) going to India to talk to Indian leaders about India (why-ever would he want to do that, she wondered), and how shocking it was to have women diplomats, whatever that might mean. On top of that, there was the nightly embarrassment of getting into bed. She simply wasn’t used to taking off her clothes with another person in the room, and not merely a person, a man, and she had noticed that he seemed to find this difficult as well. They had evolved a method whereby they kept their backs to one another while the undressing went on, and she encouraged him – it was the only time that she did – to talk about the world as much as he liked. Last night it had been a lot about Hitler and Goering and them not knowing about the Final Solution. She knew about them – after all, they’d been in everyone’s lives for years now – and he had explained to her about all the nasty murdering that had gone on with the Jews. They called it all kinds of other names, but what it was was murder, she made no mistake about that. Once he was safely in his pyjamas and she in her nightgown they could get into bed and turn off the light and things became all right. They would have a cuddle that would sometimes – not as often as she would like – turn into something more. But here again, things were not straightforward – far from it. He was so worked up, all his movements were a little nervy, darting stabs at her, like a small boy trying to steal a jam tart, she had once thought, but she had learned that the slightest hint of her playing any active part simply froze him up. She had to lie there, not quite as though nothing was happening, but certainly as though it was nothing to do with her, until, emboldened by her apparent indifference, he could do it to her. When it was successful, she felt downright motherly, but she knew that that was the last thing he wanted. He wanted to be the master, like then they saw at the pictures, and letting him feel that seemed right. She was fond of him, and she put down her boredom and occasional baffled exasperation at his idea of a good conversation to his being a man. Her idea of a good conversation was commenting on people, what they did and why they did it, and whether it was a good or a bad thing for them to do. She had used to have really nice chats of that kind with Eileen, and missed her.

She poured her tea and put her feet up on the other chair – Frank’s – and felt the ache in her legs slowly recede, as it always did if she gave it the chance.

When she awoke it was dark, and the fire was nearly out. She hadn’t even had her second cup, a wicked waste. She hoisted herself to her feet and poured the rest of the pot on to the aspidistra that Frank had given her. The house was quiet. No sounds of bath water running out, or children, or Mrs Senior playing her piano, or the master with his wireless. Nothing. She drew the curtains in the room, and made up the fire. She’d leave the remains of the rabbit pie for her and Frank tomorrow night, and have a nice poached egg on toast for her supper. She would have liked a bath, but she didn’t fancy having one when she was alone in the house. And if I was retired and on my own, she thought, had remained single, every evening would be like this. The great fear that the there thought of this induced was succeeded at once by a warm surging relief that tomorrow there would be Frank, with his little bandy legs and his scrawny arms and his nervous eyes, gazing at her bust and telling her what a good mind she had for a woman.