Four

ARCHIE

1946–47

Until now, he had always thought that if one could not make up one’s mind about what to do, it was because one was not sure what one wanted. How untrue that is, he thought, as he drove down the familiar lane, away from the cottage, through the wooded bit and then past the drive leading up to the station. Three miles away … He could still turn back, but he knew that he would not. He would continue the boring, well-known, dull road all the way to the suburbs of London and thence to his empty ill-kempt flat. Six weeks was not so very long, he said, as though to someone else. It seemed interminable. But this morning had been the last straw. Seeing her naked in the kitchen with her burned hand – the imagination of a body in no way impaired the impact of a first sight of the real thing – had brought home to him as nothing else had seemed to do, that he could not continue this life with her which had become so beset by dishonesty.

If he tried to think about it, he could not pin down the moment when he had begun to love her. Certainly, when he had come back from France and found her so wrecked and desperate, he had dropped everything to care for her, had managed to put aside or at least conceal his fury and loathing for the wretched man who had caused her such anguish. Was this love? Or was it simply that he knew her – her intense, whole-hearted capacity for love, and the deprivation she had already endured? He could think of no one less equipped to withstand total rejection and pregnancy. The first thing that he had known about her, before he had even seen her, was that she had lost her mother. He remembered how, on one of those long walks in France with Rupert, shattered by Isobel’s death, there had come a moment when he had been able to suggest to him that the daughter, the little girl, Clarissa, wasn’t it?, must also be very bereft and needing his love. And Rupert had said: ‘There’s the boy as well, two of them.’ And he had said, ‘The boy is a baby. The girl is old enough to grieve. You must go back and see to her.’

Which Rupert had done, clearly to much effect, because when Archie did actually meet her, she was sixteen and suffering very much from the loss of him, whom everyone, including Archie himself, thought probably dead. Not she. Her faithful love had touched him then, had transcended her childish, unkempt appearance. She had always been careless of that; had no vanity. He remembered his first sight of her, tidied up for dinner his first evening at Home Place, in a shirt with odd buttons sewn on it, and her hands, bitten nails and ink stains almost, but not quite, obliterating their shapeliness, and the ill-cut fringe just above those amazingly expressive eyes. He had observed these things with no more than a professional eye and friendly interest. This was his best friend Rupert’s daughter. And as he became embraced by the whole family – he had the Duchy to thank for that – and he had had time to know all of those children, as he thought of them, she seemed always to be the odd one out. She had none of the Cazalet good looks – the blue direct gaze, the fair to fairish hair, the clear complexion, the height, the long arms and legs; she was small and sturdy, round-faced, with her mother’s eyes and heavy brows and fine dark hair, which was always untidy and needing a wash. He had not loved her then. But when that little Frenchman had arrived with his tale and the message for her and he had seen its effect – her eyes like stars, her utter joy that had been dashed (momentarily) by Pipette saying that the message was eight months old, how after a moment she had looked up at him and said that it was ‘just a question of time – waiting till he comes back’. He had been touched by her, because by then he knew something of the intensity of her love and longing. After he had broken his leg, she would come to his room, because, he thought, he was the only person who let her talk about her father and he had been amazed – and sometimes amused – by her detailed imagination of his exploits. And then there had been the diary she wrote for Rupert. One day, she had showed him a few pages and he learned much more of her. She had a graceful mind, even though she was clumsy in everyday life, knocked things over, tore her clothes; she was passionate about quite small things. The night after Pipette had come, he had found that he actually respected her, recognized her knowledge of what it was to love, and he thought now, but could not remember, that it had been then that he had felt anxiety that it might get wrongly bestowed.

After that, he supposed wryly, he had tried to be a father of sorts to her. Little did he know how that would rebound. When the girls had come to London, he had taken them out, sometimes together, but later separately … Why? At the time he had told himself that it was hard on her always being with the beautiful, immaculate, charming Polly. He remembered that pathetic time when Polly had had a perm, and so she thought she should too, and how deeply unbecoming her frizzy hair had been – like the make-up that she attempted, when in no time her eyes would get ringed like a panda with mascara that always ran because she either cried or rubbed her eyes, or laughed too much, and her lipstick would be eaten off in a trice. She would still spill food on her clothes, she was still, at seventeen, unconscious of her appearance. But this was not true. He remembered one evening when he had taken her to Lyons Corner House and she had asked him if beauty mattered – by now she had cut off the awful perm and her hair was short and straight again, and whatever it was that he had said had upset her and he had made it worse by saying that he liked her as she was, and she had tried to be rude to him which she always did when she was afraid of crying, and then she had told him that Rupert had once said that she was beautiful and how it had made her seem less ordinary. She would have to fall back on character, she had said. And she had told a story about herself and Neville and the discovery that she just wanted to be pretty. And he had then – suddenly – because she seemed so vulnerable, been overwhelmed with affection for her, trapped by what she thought of as her unpleasing appearance, and also by her unerring honesty. He had wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her with any old nonsense that had enough truth in it to conceal the lies, and she had mercifully prevented this by saying he looked soppy. Did he love her then?

He remembered, and she must have been nearly nineteen by then, how Lydia saying she’d like to go to France with him had given him the idea that perhaps he might take Clary there – to get over Rupert’s death, if need be. At more or less the same time, it had been he who told her not to give up hope about her father. It had been a very hot night in May, and she had arrived in a linen tunic, terribly hot, but even so, when he had said how pleased he was to see her, he noticed that she blushed with pleasure. And it had been then that she had seemed to see him as somebody in his own right. ‘I feel amazed at how little I know you,’ she had said. It had felt almost like a compliment.

They had talked about her having stopped writing and he had been hard on her about it. She’d gone off – to cry, he guessed – to the lavatory. When she came back, he’d tried to cheer her up about Rupert, and at once she’d thought he believed as she did, a trap he might have seen, but he had lumbered out of it somehow.

And then VE night. She’d arrived at the restaurant looking unexpectedly soignée: she was growing up, her hair was better cut, the black skirt and a man’s shirt suited her, and her hair was wet, so at least she had washed it. They’d had a good and extraordinary evening, had stayed with the crowds outside the Palace longer than he’d intended because she was enjoying it so much, and he knew his leg was going to give him gyp on the long walk home. They’d stopped and sat on a bench in Hyde Park, and it was then that he’d realized how old he must seem to her. She told him that she knew about Polly falling in love with him, and said how ridiculous it was that she should be in love with somebody of his age. When he had said he must seem incredibly ancient to her, she had given herself away by saying, not incredibly; he didn’t seem to have aged since she met him. Then she understood that she had upset him, and said she was sorry. She hadn’t meant that he was old, she’d meant he was too old for Polly. (Polly and she, he reflected, were the same age.)

She’d stayed the night with him because she could never have got home, and sat up in bed wearing his pyjama jacket and he had brought her cocoa. And she’d told a story about her father eating the skin off her cocoa, which showed, she said, that he loved her, and immediately, not to be outdone, he’d done the same thing. If Rupert was dead, she would need his love.

And then, without warning, she had touched him to the core. It began about Zoë trying to give her Rupert’s shirts, and how she’d only taken the worn ones, because to take the others would have been like giving in. But she thought she should make a pact with him that if Rupert didn’t return a year from now she would have to accept that he never would. And then she told him how her love had changed about her father; from missing him so much, to wanting him to be alive for his own sake. He found it very difficult to say anything back to that. But he managed, and by the time he came to say goodnight, she had become almost a child again, turning her face up to him to be kissed. ‘After all, darling Archie, I’ve always got you,’ she had said. And lying in bed that night, it occurred to him that what she had said about her father had moved him so much because a part of him wished she would say it of him. Love of a kind began, he thought now, that night. He had made a pact with himself then that if Rupert was dead, he would do everything possible to take his place. The possibility of his return, however, might mean that things could be very different. Yes, that had been the beginning or, at least, the moment when he had acknowledged that he did not want to be her father.

Rupert had returned, and he had thought then that this would radically alter his relationship with her. It did not, and he blamed Rupert for it: he was so absorbed by his own problems, which were, he thought crossly, entirely of Rupert’s own making. But then, of course, people’s problems were usually home-made, he had thought wryly, so why not his own?

He had gone to France, and been dissatisfied; he had not clearly known what he was missing, except that the prospect of living alone there did not seem desirable. It was when Polly sent the telegram, and he tried to speak to her, and she said that Clary was in trouble, that he realized thoroughly that he loved her.

Seeing her, when she let him in at Blandford Street, had been a fearful shock. She looked dreadful, as though she had been dealt a mortal blow. But, then, she had looked pretty ropy for months now – she had, as might have been expected, taken to being in love with exhausting intensity, and his instinctive dislike of the man she had chosen, the whole dreary squalid setup, had filled him with ill temper. But now, something had gone wrong. For a minute he thought that it had simply come to an end, that she would need comfort and support through the stock sad time that people endure in those circumstances. He had not thought of her being pregnant – still less, that the couple would unite in abandoning her. When he had discovered that Number One did not want to have anything to do with her he felt rage as well as relief, but that left the question of her pregnancy, he felt, to him. He would not, did not, influence her. He calmed her down, and made her have a rest. She had been being so sick that she needed an evening meal, and he felt that it would be good to do something with her. Of course he didn’t want her to have this ghastly man’s child, and he soon discovered that Polly felt the same. But they agreed that she must not be influenced, must choose herself.

She had chosen to have an abortion, and he had taken her, waited, and collected her. After it, she seemed to fall into a different despair. He had taken her away to the Scilly Isles, to a small beautiful island, and made her walk a lot, made her learn to play complicated card games, and take turns reading a novel – and, most of all, talk about Number One and his wife. But although all these things seemed in some ways to help, in others they made her feel worse. He quickly found that ridiculing Noël, although it made her less in love with him, made her feel more deeply humiliated. He dropped that, and tried to get her interested in her writing – which Number One had also virtually destroyed. She snapped at him, refused to eat properly, and often withdrew into intractable silence for hours, but eventually one day, when he snapped back, she had said: ‘What shall I do? I don’t want to be like this, but what shall I do?’

So, when they returned, he got the cottage, rented via an acquaintance who was glad to have it inhabited – ‘Hardly any mod cons and it gets fearfully damp in winter.’ The rent had been twenty-five pounds a year. He’d settled her into it and gone back to his dreary job from which he had already taken too much leave. He would spend weekends with her, he had said, but she’d confounded him by turning up on the Monday evening following the first weekend after barely a day without him. And then, the next evening, to top it all, Rupert had turned up, and there had been that awful scene when Rupert had thought him responsible for the pregnancy. What had struck him, and by God, it had struck him, was the way in which she seemed to think it so absurd that Rupert should think such a thing. And then he, Rupert, had twisted the knife when he’d said on leaving that there was no point in her turning him into a father when she had a perfectly good one already! He’d wanted to yell then that he damn well didn’t want to be her father, but caution had prevailed. And I am nothing, he thought bitterly, if not cautious.

It was that evening that his battle for her independence had really begun. They had had a row, and he’d said that he treated her like a child because she behaved like one. He’d told her to stop being sorry for herself and much more. The trouble was that when he was managing to do that quite sternly, she would say or do something that turned his heart over, and he would have to keep a tight hold on himself to hang on to being sensible and firm. Because that worked. He sent her back to the cottage on her own, and when he went down the following Friday, she’d cooked a proper meal and he sensed was full of her new book, although she didn’t want to tell him about it.

He told Rupert what he had done about her, and Rupe, who was having mother-in-law trouble, said, ‘Thanks awfully, old boy. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.’

All that autumn he went every weekend. He remembered now, it seemed such a long time ago, how agonized he’d been about sending her back to the cottage that first time. He’d very nearly driven down to see if she was all right, but that would obviate the point of everything. She had to learn to fend for herself.

Getting her to go and see Polly in London had not been a success. When he discovered the following morning that she was not at Blandford Street – or, at least, was not answering the telephone – he’d rung Poll at work in a panic. When Polly had told him she’d gone back to the cottage he’d been relieved, at first, but then he had started to worry about her, and in the end, he’d got up at six and driven down to find her in a fever. He’d woken her from a nightmare and he’d been on the point of taking her in his arms and telling her he loved her but at first she’d thought he was her father, and that had stopped him cold.

She was in no state for that: she was sick, and frightened, and when he took her in his arms it was for her to cry and tell him the jumbled fragments of the bad dream. He’d stayed and nursed her and told his office a string of lies. By now, he’d given his notice, and was working it out, and he really didn’t care a damn.

She was beginning to grow up. She had come to and realized that she had no money, and although part of him enjoyed being responsible for her in that way, at least, he recognized that it was a step for her in the right direction. If she needed money now while she was writing the book, it was her father she should ask. So he sent her off, and she came back with two hundred pounds, in a temper about something. It turned out to be about the possibility of his going back to France. He had told her he was giving up his job, and he had mentioned France then, but now she thought he’d arranged to go without telling her.

To begin with he had thought, Here we go again. She’s still expecting me to be there to support her.

The trouble was that, although he hadn’t decided, he had to keep France as an option; he had to have some sort of long shot – or maybe not long at all, some necesssary resort – if things went wrong. Which they showed every sign of doing. She’d called him her second father just before she’d gone to see her real one. But it was clear that the idea of his going away filled her with fear – something like panic. When she said that she couldn’t stay in the cottage alone without him, he very nearly blew it, was touching her before he pulled himself together. He’d been brisk and tough with her, even telling her she’d fall in love with a nice man like a normal grown-up person. She sulked then, which he could deal with more easily than her fear.

But during that afternoon he’d thought it was wrong for her to feel he would make major plans behind her back – and apologized.

He’d reached his flat by now, got out his case and went in. The place seemed infinitely dreary. What was she doing now, he wondered. It was a good thing he hadn’t even tried to get a telephone installed, because he knew that the temptation to ring her would have been too much for him.

Anyway, talk of people standing on their own feet, what about him? He had to decide what to do, how to earn a living beyond his small inheritance and what he had saved and any pictures he might sell. Rupert knew a good deal about how to survive and try to paint, he thought. He would start there.

His relationship with Rupert had undergone a considerable change. This had been largely because he had taken the plunge with him when they’d been at the weekend at Home Place designed to welcome Diana into the family. ‘I should be so grateful if you would be there,’ the Duchy had said. ‘You know us all so well, and you are such a diplomat.’ So he had gone, and then there had been a chance of going for a walk alone with Rupe, as Zoë had a headache and the others didn’t want to come.

‘Not that I’m a marvellous walker,’ he had said, ‘but I really wanted to talk to you on our own about something.’

‘Fine.’

‘Actually,’ he said, minutes later, ‘I think I’d find it easier if we were sitting down.’

So they sat on the old tree that the children had always played on in the copse behind the house.

‘You look worried about something. What’s happened? You know that you can trust me.’

‘What do you think?’

Rupert had looked at him, and then he smiled slightly, and said, ‘I think you’ve fallen in love with somebody and you’re not sure if it’s a good thing. I bet it is, though.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’

‘I’m right, then?’

‘Yes. I have. It’s Clary,’ he said quickly. ‘Hang on a minute. I haven’t said a word to her. She has no idea.’

‘Clary! Good God! You don’t mean that!’

‘Of course I mean it. I’d be bloody daft to say that to you if I didn’t.’

There was a silence. Then Rupert, clearly trying to tread carefully, said, ‘Don’t you think you’re a bit old for her?’

‘I knew you’d say that. Zoë is a good deal younger than you, though, isn’t she?’

‘Twelve years. But you’re – you’re the best part of twenty years older than she is. That’s different, surely?’

‘It’s certainly different, but I don’t think it’s necessarily worse.’

There was another silence. Then Rupert said, ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Nothing’s been going on. How long have I been in love with her? God knows. Since she was about eighteen, I should think – only I didn’t realize it.’

‘And how does she feel about you?’

‘That’s the trouble. I sort of stood in for you all that time you were away, and she still thinks of me like that.’ He looked at him – he could feel his eyes pricking. ‘One doesn’t choose exactly about this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘You know that. It – strikes you.’

‘Yes. Archie, I don’t know what to say. It must be awful for you. All this time – after Rachel, and all that – to have it happen again—’

‘Look. Nothing’s happened.’ He added wearily, ‘I don’t think she has the faintest idea.’

‘Well – wouldn’t it – I mean, well, I suppose it might be better for you if you did talk to her. Then at least you’d know.’

‘I can’t – now. I just know it’s not the right time. And anyway, I don’t think I can face it. If I talk to her and it’s absolutely no good, it’ll be the end of everything for me with her – I know that, and I can’t face it.’

‘Why are you telling me?’

‘I suppose I sort of hope that at least you would not feel bad about it. My intentions, I mean. Entirely honourable.’ He had tried to smile – and broken down. Until that point, he hadn’t known what a strain the whole thing had been for so long and how isolated he’d felt trying to deal with it. He tried to tell Rupert this, and he’d been really good about it. He’d sat by him and let him say all these things – and more – without interruption or argument. ‘The stakes seem so high,’ he had said. ‘I really do love her – everything about her – but she’s got to grow up, be in charge of her life and make a choice, you see, which isn’t based on being dependent on me and all that.’

At the end of it Rupe had said, ‘You’ve made me see that you do love her. That’s what matters. We’re the same age. I think if I were in your position, I’d feel the same.’

He could have kissed him: they did embrace. Rupe swore he would not tell anyone. ‘Even Zoë?’ Not even Zoë, he had said …

He would ring Rupe now and see if they could meet à deux.

He did this, but Rupert was not able to help much about what he could do about painting and earning some money. ‘I always found it was one or the other,’ he said, ‘and with a family, I thought I’d better opt for the other. You could see if there’s any supply teaching at any of the art schools, I suppose.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

He had explained how he was leaving her on her own for six weeks – on purpose – and that they would not meet until Polly’s wedding. ‘Then, I expect, I’ll have to risk it, but I’ll wait and see.’

And Rupe, who he knew found it difficult to make up his mind about anything, said he could see it was a good thing to give her time on her own and to wait. By now Rupe – possibly because he thought the situation was hopeless – seemed to be fairly on his side.

He’d gone back to the cottage after that weekend at Home Place somewhat lightened by having told Rupert and not been lectured or rejected – not, he knew, that that would have changed things about how he felt about her, but it was good that Rupert knew.

And there she was, really into her book, and wanting him to read some of it. Of course he had – and been surprisingly disappointed with the first chapter: it had not seemed like her at all, was more self-conscious and convoluted than he’d expected. But then she’d said how many times she had written it, and he’d seen her first attempts and that was her, and clear and simple – and gifted. How marvellous it was to be able to say sincerely that he thought it was good. But again (even in this context!) he had had to warn her not to take too much notice of what he – or anyone else – said about her work.

It was soon after that he’d taken some of his own work to London in the hope of interesting a gallery. No dice. Or, rather, two miserable little dice. His old gallery said they would take a couple of landscapes for a mixed show.

He got through the first week without her by various abortive attempts to find work – teaching no good, a few more galleries, no good. One of the bad things about his flat was that he could not paint in it. The weekend was awful. He missed her, he worried about her, he wanted to be at the cottage. He was lonely and he didn’t want to see anyone. He went to Annie Get Your Gun! by himself and kept wondering what she would think of it; he went to the pubs where, when he talked to people, he seemed always to get into some futile argument about whether the Government was dealing with the severe dollar shortage – rumours were that rations were to be cut yet again, they were putting a tax of ten pounds a year on cars, and who was behind the letter bombs that the Foreign Secretary and his opposite number had received? ‘It’s the Reds or the Jews,’ one morose and slightly drunken man had kept on repeating, until he knew that he’d have to hit him or leave. And then there was India. People in pubs seemed to consider that the whole idea of India becoming independent was (a) a crime and (b) didn’t matter a tinker’s cuss because they were only bloody foreigners anyway.

He stopped going to pubs on his own. He read, and ate out, and went to bed tired from walking: why did his leg seem worse in London? And on Sunday evening, he thought, it might not only be six weeks of this, it might be for ever. In bed he thought, Here I go, keeping on about her being independent of me, when perhaps it ought to be the other way round.

So, when Rupert rang him on Monday to say that old Aunt Dolly had died and would he feel like going down to Sussex and giving the Duchy some support, he said of course he would.

But he had been right to go away from her, he thought the next morning, as he drove down to Home Place. He could not go on being avuncular, giving the impression of calm disinterest when he felt none of these things. That moment in the kitchen recurred – again and again. It had been when her beauty, her shock from the burn and her utter unawareness of him had hit him so hard that he simply couldn’t take any more. If he stayed, he’d blurt everything out, and his chance of that being a success would, he felt, be nil. He had to go.

It was soothing to be in the old house. The Duchy was really pleased to see him. ‘I think she died quite suddenly,’ she said, ‘a heart attack, or a stroke, but I don’t think she had any pain.’

‘But you will miss her,’ he suggested.

‘Well, you know, I don’t think I shall, really. She had become so dependent. It is difficult to maintain a connection with somebody when that is the chief ingredient, don’t you think?’

‘Very difficult.’

When those of the family who had come down for the funeral had gone their various ways, and he was preparing to do the same, the Duchy had said, ‘Rupert told me that you had given up your job, and were going back to painting. Where are you going to do that?’

He said he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t paint in London, he added.

‘You’re returning to France? You have a house there, I think you said?’

‘A sort of house. The top two floors over a café. I don’t know. I thought I’d stay here until after Polly’s wedding anyway.’

There was a pause. The Duchy was scraping a very small amount of butter on her toast. ‘If you would like to spend that time here and paint, we can make you a room for it, and I should very much enjoy your company in the evenings.’

So he did. He made one journey to London to collect his painting gear and went back. All the weekdays there was just the two of them; the Duchy gardened and he painted outside when the weather permitted; there were frequent thunderstorms, but after them the peculiar beauty of country deluged from violent rain, reviving, glistening in the returning sunlight. There was heavy dew in the mornings, as though the lawns were inlaid with tiny diamonds that dissolved to show daisies opening flat and unwinking in the sun. In the evening, if there had been enough heat, a pearly mist shrouded the ground. All day it seemed to him that everything he saw was changing, on the move. He took to working on two or three pictures at once, for different times of the day and the changing weather. For the first time in his work he became sharply aware of what he was not seeing. It reminded him of the countless times he had tried to draw her without once achieving anything that satisfied him. It was something, he now thought, to do with the first look at anything that had to embrace the whole view and not simply record part of it. He said something of this – about landscape – in response to the Duchy’s enquiry about how he was getting on, and found her unexpectedly understanding of his dilemma.

‘It is something to do with trusting that first sight, isn’t it?’ she had said. ‘One gets embroiled in a part of what one has seen and then forgets the rest.’

He was so surprised that he could not help saying, ‘How do you know that? You used to paint?’

‘Oh – everyone painted a little when I was a girl. It was very much the done thing. But I wanted to do it more seriously. I wished to go to an art school, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. And after I was married it was somehow easier for me to play the piano, you see. It was regarded as a more useful accomplishment.’

She played in the evenings, and he drew her, and then, one day when it rained a great deal, asked her if he might paint her while she was practising. So the drugget that protected the drawing-room carpet from sun was brought, and he put his easel on it.

But what she had said about the first sight remained with him, and one day he drew Clary from memory – quite quickly. The next day when the Duchy brought him his jug of flowers – she felt all rooms in use should have flowers – she saw the drawing (he’d used charcoal on a darkish paper) and said, ‘Clary! That is Clary to the life! When did you do that?’

‘Not long ago,’ he had answered, as casually as he was able.

No more was said. But a few days later, when they were having tea, she said, ‘You seem to be profiting from this rest, although I know you are working. I feel that you were much in need of respite of some kind. Is that right?’

‘I think so.’

‘My dear, I don’t wish to probe, but for so many years it seems to me that this family has leaned on you – for love and support of many kinds. I should be sad if when you needed those things you did not get them from one of us.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Oh. I feel that you are not very happy, and I cannot help wondering whether you need to be.’

After a pause, during which he wondered wildly whether to confide in her, she said, ‘You have been so good – to Rupert and his family particularly, to him and to Zoë, to Neville about his school and to Clary. I shall never forget any of that.’

So he told her – some of it. That he was in love with a girl so young that he did not know how to approach her. He was very careful to keep her anonymous – was very general, and lame.

She put down her teacup and regarded him thoughtfully.

‘I was far too young when I married,’ she said. ‘I knew nothing. I suppose you could have described me as an overgrown child. And William seemed incredibly old to me then. He was only seven years older than I, but it seemed like a generation.’ A faint smile, and she added, ‘It has done me no harm. I grew up in the due course. I have even achieved old age.’ She was still looking at him with that disarming frankness; then her eyes gleamed in a way that reminded him of Neville, although he had never before perceived a likeness between them, as she said: ‘You don’t value yourself enough. In my day you would have been described as a great catch.’

That night he went to sleep feeling better than he had for weeks.

He was nearly late for the church, and by the time he got there it seemed almost full. He looked to see whether she was sitting with Rupert and Zoë, but she wasn’t.

‘There’s a bit of pew next to Neville,’ Teddy said: he was being an usher. When he had found it and Neville had greeted him – ‘We wouldn’t have weddings if girls were allowed to dress up in ordinary life’ – he saw her sitting with Louise and a thin dark girl diagonally across the church from him.

‘We’re this side because Lord Fake hasn’t got so many friends as Poll,’ Neville said, lowering his voice because the organist had begun the entrance of the bride – not Wagner, thank goodness, he thought. Then everybody stood up and he could not see her at all.

Afterwards, as she walked down the aisle Polly saw him, and he got a quick little smile and he thought that anyone who was clearly as happy as that would look dazzling.

‘Do let’s get out,’ Neville was saying. ‘You never know how much food there’s going to be at parties these days.’

He waited, outside the church while the photographs were being taken, for her to emerge.

‘Have you got your car?’ Neville was asking.

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll come with you, then.’

‘Well, you’ll have to wait, I might want to give other people a lift.’

She came out with Louise and the other girl. She was wearing a green dress with a rounded neck and tight sleeves to her elbows, the slightly full skirt falling well below her knees, and what looked like brand new, pretty but rather painful shoes. The outfit was spoiled by a ridiculous hat – a small boater with green ribbon in a streamer at the back. There was nothing wrong with the hat, it was just that hats did not suit her. She seemed to know this, because as soon as she got outside she pulled it off, looked round and deposited it on the spike of a railing. He saw Louise laugh and pick it off. Then they all seemed to see him at once. He knew from the Duchy that Louise had left her husband. ‘I fear she may be embarking upon a desert,’ the Duchy had said, ‘and, as we know, they are full of wild tribesmen.’

So he greeted Louise first, who introduced the thin girl as Stella Rose. ‘We’re going to share Polly’s old flat together,’ she said. All the while, she stood a little behind the other two, and when he caught her eye, he sensed that she had been looking at him.

‘Hello,’ he said, nerving himself to go and give her a noncommittal kiss. ‘You’re looking pretty splendid, I must say.’

‘Zoë chose it for me. But she made me wear the hat.’ She had gone faintly pink, and now he was near her, she didn’t look at him. Pride, he thought, she’s not going to admit that she’s missed me.

‘I missed you,’ she said in an off-hand voice. ‘But I must say it has been very good for work. You know – no distractions like cooking and all that.’

‘Oh, come on!’ Neville was saying. ‘Honestly, we really ought to get there.’

He took all four of them squashed in his car. Neville sat in front, because Louise said if he sat with them he would spoil their clothes.

There will be plenty of time, he thought, as he drove to Claridges Hotel, for us to talk after the reception. And he began to imagine driving down to the cottage with her that evening. So he made no particular effort to talk to her while they were at the reception, and neither did she.

After he had been received and met Gerald for the first time, he concentrated upon doing the rounds, or covering the ground or whatever they called it.

Miss Milliment was arrayed in a jersey suit the colour of blackberry fool, which did not look its best backed by the salmon pink damask of the large chair she had been parked upon. ‘What a happy day!’ she said, when he greeted her. ‘It’s Archie, isn’t it? My eyes are not quite what they were.’ And later, ‘Oh Archie, I fear a little piece of bridge roll, or possibly just the filling of it has escaped my clutches and may perhaps be visible to you down the side of the chair? Thank you so much. I was pretty sure I was right.’

Lydia – in a bridesmaid’s dress – and Villy.

‘Mummy, if it’s at all possible I want never to see Judy again in my life. Hello, Archie! Do you like my dress? I was just telling Mummy about my ghastliest cousin. She’s furious because she’s not a bridesmaid and if you ask me she’s most unlikely ever to be a bride because I can’t think of anyone stupid enough to marry her.’

‘That will do,’ Villy was saying. ‘Go and hand some things round to people.’

‘How are you, dear Villy?’

‘Better, I think. Busy, anyway. Zoë and I are trying to start a small dancing school, as we both have different skills in that field. I’m not sure of it, but it will be very good for Zoë to have something constructive to do.’

Rachel and Sid.

‘The Duchy simply loved having you to herself,’ Rachel said. ‘We suggested going down, didn’t we, Sid, but she wouldn’t hear of it.’

‘No, she wanted you to herself. But we’re taking her down this evening and staying the weekend to soften the blow of your departure.’

‘Sid is teaching me to drive,’ Rachel said, ‘and I’m afraid it has emerged that I don’t know my right from my left.’

‘She’s pretty shaky,’ Sid said fondly, ‘and has about as much sense of direction as a gadfly.’

‘Oh, darling! I think that’s a little unkind!’

But nothing between them was unkind, he thought.

Zoë, looking exquisite in a very pale pink suit with a nipped-in waist and long skirt and a broad pink straw hat that lit her complexion to yet another delicious pink. ‘Archie!’ She kissed him. ‘Isn’t it a lovely party!’

‘I hear you and Villy are starting a dancing school.’

‘A small one. I don’t know if it will work, but the idea of it has cheered Villy, which is the main thing.’

‘Archie, let me introduce you to Jemima Leaf.’ It was Hugh with a very small, neat blonde lady.

When he had asked was she a friend of the bridegroom, ‘She’s a friend of mine,’ Hugh said, before she could reply. He said it, he thought, as though it was extraordinary to have one. Hugh got called away and he stayed talking to her. She had two children, she said, and she was working for Cazalets’ – for Hugh, in fact. He wondered afterwards about that. But eventually Polly went away to change, and fewer people remained, to say what good speeches they had been and how well everything had gone. He had been seeing her out of the corner of his eye for some time: she had been talking to Christopher, wasn’t it, the cousin who’d had the breakdown and who owned a devoted dog? He went over.

‘It’s Christopher, isn’t it? It’s so long since I’ve seen you.’

‘It’s very long since anybody’s seen him,’ Clary said.

‘How’s your dog?’ he asked, after a pause when neither of them said anything and he began to wonder whether he had interrupted something.

‘He died.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

But with a smile of singular sweetness, Christopher, answered, ‘He had a very good life and I’m sure he’s all right now.’

‘Christopher believes in a dog heaven,’ Clary said, ‘but I don’t think they would enjoy it much without their people.’

‘Perhaps one day I’ll have to join him, then. I must go,’ Christopher said a moment later, ‘got a train to catch.’

‘Well,’ he said, when they were alone. ‘Shall we have some supper before we drive down?’

‘We must see Poll off first,’ she said quickly, and began to go to the door of the large room. ‘We have to go outside,’ she called. He followed her.

But when all that was over, when the small crowd of them were left waving and then turning to one another, she said, ‘Could we talk in the car?’

‘Why not?’

He put her in the front seat and went round and got in beside her.

‘The thing is,’ she said, still not looking at him, ‘that I have very very nearly finished my book and I think I’d better be on my own until I have. If you don’t mind?’

He was taken aback. ‘You haven’t stopped working because I’ve been around before. Why now?’

‘Oh, well … The end is quite difficult, and I think I would be better off really concentrating on it. It’ll only be about two weeks.’

‘All right. If that’s how you want it.’

‘It is. If that’s all right.’

‘Don’t keep saying if that’s all right if you know you’re going to do it anyway.’

‘All right. I won’t. What I would like,’ she went on, ‘would be if you could get me a taxi and I’ll be off. I wouldn’t have come at all, only I knew Poll would mind.’

‘I’ll drive you.’

‘I can easily get a cab.’

‘I daresay, but here I am. I’ll drive you.’

The drive was curiously uncomfortable. At one point he said, ‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing’s up. I just want to get back to my work.’

‘Everything all right at the cottage?’

‘Everything’s the same, if that’s what you mean.’

He was almost glad when they got to Paddington. She slipped out of the car, waved to him, said, ‘Thanks for the lift,’ and was turned to go when he called, ‘Clary! How will I know when you’ve finished?’

‘I’ll send you a postcard to the flat,’ she said, and was gone without a backward glance.

So, during that fortnight, he thought almost bitterly, that if he’d wanted her to be independent, he’d certainly got his wish. She hadn’t even seemed especially pleased to see him. She’d always gone for extremes, he thought at intervals: she was an extreme person – nothing happened by halves. Anyway, if he faced up to it, he had to recognize that he would not be proposing to a sick or frightened little girl: she’d acquired poise in the last six weeks and a passion for her work which, though admirable, was slightly daunting.

He thought everything about her during that time. He thought about her passionate nature, her determination, the way her hair sprang off centre from the widow’s peak, her endless curiosity that could apply itself to anything and hung on until she got some satisfaction, the glimpse he had had of her small found perfectly white breasts, her marvellous eyes, which when he looked into them were such a mirror to her self – only there had been no chance of that at the wedding, so really he did not know what she was feeling. It was as though he’d lost a part of her. The trust? Was that what had gone with her dependence? Or had she changed in some other mysterious way? It even crossed his mind, during those days, that she had fallen in love. God forbid, and who with, after all? They knew nobody down there; there could have been a walker – people did walk along the towpath at weekends – but if she’d been working so hard, she would not have had time to meet anyone. Anyway, she would have told him. She did not tell lies, had never withheld anything that mattered to her from him. It was madness even to think of such a thing.

By the time he got her postcard – a full fourteen days later on a Friday morning, the very day, as his morning paper informed him, that ‘The Sun sets on the British Raj’ – he felt that perhaps he was a little mad.

Deliberately, for reasons not clear to himself, he did not arrive at the cottage until mid-afternoon. It was another hot, sunny day, and when he got out of the car, it was wonderful to smell the warm clean air – a hint of caramel from drying hay, and the peppery sweet smell of the phlox she had planted beside the mossy path to the kitchen door. He called her, once, but there was no answer. He unpacked the car, the food he had bought that morning and his painting gear, and carried it in several trips into the kitchen: the door was unlocked, so she must be somewhere.

The door to the sitting room that led on to the garden was also open, and he could see her now, lying on the lawn with one of the old sofa pillows under her head. When he got near he saw that she was asleep, but nearer, some sound he must have made wakened her, as she sat up with a start. She was wearing her old black cotton skirt and a sleeveless white camisole thing that he’d never seen before.

‘Here I am at last,’ he said, and got down on the grass to give her a greeting kiss. He did not get the customary hug in return, and felt vaguely alarmed.

‘Aren’t you pleased to see me?’

‘I am – in a way.’

‘I’m glad your book’s done.’

‘Yes. So am I. In a way.’

‘How not?’

‘Well, it’s a kind of farewell to the people in it. Saying goodbye to them. I’d got used to them. And I hate saying goodbye to people anyway.’ Her hands were locked round her knees, and he began to feel the tension.

‘There will be other people,’ he said.

‘That is what I knew you would say,’ she said.

‘Well, I have something to say to you that you won’t know—’ he began. He did not feel that the moment was right, but something drove him to say it.

But before he could get any further, she said, ‘There is something I have to say to you.’

He waited, but she was silent, and in the silence he began to feel his heart thudding.

‘I was going to ask you if you’d like a holiday in France,’ he said desperately: a cowardly half-measure, but he was frightened now.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t, I’m afraid.’

She must have fallen in love, he thought as he scanned her hands (clean) nails (unbitten) hair (shining with care). God! She had all the appearance – glowing, charming – of a girl who has just found the right man …

‘Clary, you must tell me – however difficult, you’ve bloody well got to tell me—’

‘ALL RIGHT!’ she cried, so loudly that he could see it even shocked her. She had been staring at the ground, now she looked up and straight at him.

‘You remember what happened with Polly – ages ago?’

He didn’t know what she meant.

He saw her swallow and she began to be very pale.

‘I can’t go to France with you, and I can’t go on living like we have. It’s something I found out when you went away. I had no idea of it before, but now I know.’

‘Darling, do try to tell me what the hell you are talking about.’

‘If you laugh at me, I shall really want to kill you,’ she said, in much more the old Clary way. ‘I found out that I feel like Polly used to – about you. To begin with I didn’t believe myself, because I so much wanted it not to be true. But it is. It truthfully entirely is.’ She sniffed and one very large tear shot out of an eye. ‘I couldn’t manage weekends with you being a sort of uncle or schoolmaster or whatever. It’s—’ Her eyes were full of tears now. ‘It’s really most unfortunate. For me, anyway. When I saw you at the wedding I sort of got an electric shock. You see?’

For a second he thought he was going to laugh – with an hysterical relief. Instead, he took her hands in his and when he could manage to speak said, ‘What an extraordinary coincidence. Because that is exactly what I was going to say to you.’

He thought that would be the end of it, that they would fall into each other’s arms at last; he hadn’t reckoned with her disbelief, her uncertainty that anyone would love her, her suspicion that he was merely trying to be kind, ‘buttering me up’, as she put it. He got up and pulled her to her feet.

‘I love you so much,’ he said, ‘and I’ve loved you for so long.’

Kissing her made him feel faint – light-headed: it was she who said, ‘Wouldn’t we be better lying down?’

They walked slowly, stumbling a little because they had to look at each other, and stopping at the foot of the stairs, because they were too narrow. He took her hand to lead her, then kissed her again. ‘Do you remember the evening that Pipette brought that message from your father? And you said “the second piece of love sent”?’

She nodded and he could see her eyes, clear now of distrust.

‘This is the third,’ he said, ‘the third piece of love.’

‘But as you are here,’ she said, ‘it will be given, not sent.’