The Family

April–May, 1945

Tonbridge got back from fetching Mrs. Rupert from the station in nice time for his elevenses with what he described to himself as “my intended.” He had tried to pass a few interesting remarks to Mrs. Rupert on their way back from Battle, but she hadn’t seemed interested. He’d mentioned the American President passing away and the Allies liberating Vienna—not that that could be expected to interest British people much, and he had added that it was his considered opinion that the war could not last very much longer, but Mrs. Rupert hadn’t really conversed with him about any of it. She had been looking very pale lately—peaky, Mabel had said when they discussed it—and he wondered whether she was not feeling herself but naturally he passed no remark about that.

Anyway, when he had carried her case in for her, and put the car back in the garage, he walked across the courtyard to the back door and through the kitchen to the servants’ sitting room, but although there was a tray set with some drop scones and two pieces of gingerbread and the miniature toby jug full of top of the milk, she wasn’t there. That was funny, because she hadn’t been in the kitchen either when he passed through.

He went back to the kitchen where Lizzie was up to her elbows washing spring greens in the sink. She was the kind of girl who always gave a start when you spoke to her and then you couldn’t hardly hear what she said. She didn’t know where Mrs. Cripps was. This was annoying, because he had something very important to tell her and he’d been saving it up for the appropriate moment of peace and hot tea that they usually enjoyed in the morning. He went back to the sitting room and sat down in his usual chair to wait for her.

Mrs. Cripps had been having a very unusual morning. Dr. Carr, who was paying his weekly visit to poor Miss Barlow upstairs, had been taking a look at her legs. They had hurt her something awful lately, and matters had come to a head after one of the morning sessions with Miss Rachel, as Mrs. Cazalet Senior was feeling a bit under the weather. She had stood, as she always stood with Mrs. Senior, while the day’s meals were discussed—not that there was very much choice these days, but Madam had always ordered the food and there was such a thing as standards, so she had stood as usual—taking the weight off her feet by leaning one elbow on the back of a kitchen chair. But that morning, when she had shifted to give the other leg a rest, the chair-back had given way, just splintered to the floor, and she had gone with it. This had hurt her so badly that she had not been able to help a shriek of pain, and what with that, and the fact that she couldn’t, at first, get up from the floor, she had altogether given way. She had cried, in front of Miss Rachel who had been ever so kind as indeed she always was. She had helped her up and taken her into the sitting room and made her sit down with her feet up and told Lizzie to make a cup of tea, and it was when her legs were up on a stool with the cushion on it that Miss Rachel had noticed them. She was ashamed for anyone to see them, and she was only too glad that Frank had had to take the car to the garage for the morning and was safely out of the way.

Anyway, the upshot was that Miss Rachel said Dr. Carr must look at them, and meanwhile she had gone to Battle and bought her some heavy elasticated stockings that had been a great comfort. Dr. Carr had seen her in her own bedroom, as she had told Miss Rachel that the men might come into the servants’ hall at any minute and it wouldn’t be right. Dr. Carr had said that she should have come to him before, and she really needed an operation, and she hadn’t worried too much about that at first because, being on the Panel, she didn’t think they did them. But then, when Miss Rachel came in she had said that she would pay for it, and then she had felt really frightened, because the only time she had been to a hospital in her life had been when her father was dying. And then Dr. Carr had asked her how old she was, and telling him—fifty-six in June, she would be—she was suddenly overcome with shame, with remorse, because she had not told Frank this at all. She had told him that she was forty-two when he asked, and she’d stuck to it. He’d believed her, of course, in spite of her saying she was over ten years younger than she really was. Naturally, she wouldn’t tell a lie to a doctor, but telling him the truth made her suddenly feel that it was very wrong to conceal it from Frank. She’d been afraid he wouldn’t want to marry her if he knew—hadn’t even been sure whether he envisaged children, but when she had told him forty-two, he had said, “Well, it doesn’t sound as though our troubles will be little ones,” and he’d gone red when he said it, and they’d changed the subject. Well, she might have an operation in a hospital and die, but she did want to be married first, and she didn’t want to die with a lie on her lips to her husband. So she would have to tell him.

He was waiting for her in the servants’ hall—wondering where she had got to, he said. Then, just as she was going to tell him, Lizzie brought in the tea, and then, when she had let it stand and was pouring it out, he pulled a brown envelope out of his pocket and said that he had had a letter from the lawyers saying he had got a Decree Nice Eye, whatever that might mean. It was to do with the divorce, but it wasn’t the end of it, oh dear no. After the Nice Eye you had to wait for something called the Absolute. Then it was over. But that, he said, was only a matter of weeks …

She was opening her mouth to tell him, when he stopped her again, by producing a small box, pressing a little knob on the lid which flew open to expose a ring—two, what looked like diamonds, not large, of course, you wouldn’t expect it with diamonds, each side of a smaller dark stone.

“Rubies and diamonds,” he said, “and it’s nine carat gold.”

It was a real engagement ring and quite took her breath away, but when he tried to get it on her finger it was too small—wouldn’t go above her second knuckle. “I’ll have it enlarged,” he said, but she could see he was disappointed.

“It’s really lovely,” she said. “Frank, you shouldn’t have. It’s ladies that have engagement rings.”

“And you are a lady,” he said, “if ever I saw one.”

Perhaps it would go on her little finger, she suggested, just for the time being, but it wouldn’t even do that. Don’t put it away, she said, she wanted to look at it, and she laid it on the palm of her hand with the diamonds winking if you caught them right in the light.

“Are they real, then?” she asked: she did not think they could be, but he said of course they were.

“They must be ever so valuable.”

“Well, they’re not exactly … cheap,” he had answered in tones that showed he agreed.

She was entranced. It was the most valuable thing she’d ever touched in her life, and he’d gone and bought it for her.

“Oh, Frank!” she said. “Oh, Frank!” There were tears in her eyes, and she gave a series of short, sharp sniffs. “I’m so pleased! I’m ever so pleased. I really am!” And then she told him—quickly while he was on the crest of her gratitude.

He didn’t seem to mind at all. “I knew—really,” he said. “I mean—that you might not be quite the age you said you was. No self-respecting lady would tell a gentleman exactly her age.” He looked at her with his mournful brown eyes that were now far less mournful than usual—were almost glowing with satisfaction at his generosity. “For me,” he said, “you will always be young.”

He picked up the ring and put it back in its box. “It is only,” he said, “a small Token of my Esteem.”

After all the trouble that she had taken to get away to London at such short notice, Jack had only stayed for Saturday night; he had left to fly to Germany very early on Sunday morning. There was nothing new about this situation: it had been going on more or less ever since D-Day nearly a year ago. He was abroad practically all the time, returning only for the odd night, or sometimes two or three days, usually at short notice, although not as short as this last time when he had literally rung up on Friday afternoon to ask if she could come up that evening. In spite of the fact that he had come through these last months unscathed, she could not get rid of or in any way diminish her sense of anxiety about him, so that each parting had a kind of double-edged anguish about it. Their meetings were still charged with excitement and joy, and for the first few hours they could be entirely engrossed by each other; the world and the war seemed hardly to exist, but somehow, always, something—often small—happened that breached their magic circle and brought them back to a dreary, and to her nerve-racking, reality. In the winter after the invasion it had sometimes been the V-2s. Even when they fell miles away you could not ignore the explosion; it shook the stomach as no other bombs seemed ever to have done, although she had not experienced very many of any of them. Her association with Jack brought her face to face with the war in a way that nothing had, excepting Rupert’s disappearance, and that had happened so long ago now that it had become like a piece of sad history. Sometimes Jack would say, “I must call my office,” and listening to him talk to unknown people whom clearly he often knew well, but whom she had never met, made her realize that nine-tenths of his life was unknown to her.

She did slowly discover more about him. Once, a few weeks after the invasion, he brought her back a box that contained a set of exquisite embroidered silk underwear—a camisole, a petticoat and French knickers all in pale turquoise silk edged with creamy lace; she had seen nothing like it since before the war. “The shops hid them,” he said. “They kept them for when we would come.” But later that time, when they were having dinner and she had asked him about Paris and whether it had been fun to go there, he had said no, it hadn’t been fun at all.

He had been cutting up some meat before eating it with his fork and, feeling her attention, he looked up, and for a fleeting moment she saw a look of utter despair in his eyes—two black fathomless wells. This disappeared so quickly that she wondered whether she had imagined it. His mouth smiled, he reached for his glass and drank. “Never mind,” he said. “There was nothing I could do about it.”

In bed, when it was dark, she put her arms round him. “What happened in Paris? I really want to know.”

He said nothing, but just when she began to think she shouldn’t have asked, he said, “My best friend in New York—he was a Polish Jew—told me that if I ever got to Paris, I must look up his parents who had been living there since nineteen thirty-eight. They’d sent him to America, because he had an uncle there, but his sister had stayed with his parents. He wrote the address down for me, and I kept it, although I didn’t know if I’d ever get the chance to use it. Well, I went to his street, to the house where they used to live, and they weren’t there. I asked around and I discovered that they’d been taken off to a camp a few months before the invasion. All three of them. They were collected one night and nobody ever heard anything more.”

“But if they went to a camp in Germany, you’ll still be able to find them, won’t you? I mean, we’ve nearly got to Berlin.”

It was odd: she could not remember what he said in reply, but the next day he had been withdrawn, in one of his unreachable sombre moods that she did not understand, and that made her feel vaguely frightened.

There came to be a kind of tacit censorship of what they talked about: once she had tried to find out about his marriage, but he had only said, “She wanted me to bully her, make all the decisions, order her about—no, correction, she wanted a rich bully and that bored me. We brought out the worst in each other. Will that do?” And after that Elaine, she was called, was never mentioned again. They never talked about Rupert, although he always asked after Juliet. They talked about their own brief past with each other but never, since that time on the bench by the Serpentine, about the future. They talked about books that he had given her to read, and films they saw, discussing the characters in these as though in lieu of the mutual friends that otherwise they did not have. Bed became the safest place. There was no censorship there: familiarity enhanced pleasure and the smallest discovery about the sensuality of either became an added joy. Sex was not so much taking off one’s clothes as getting into one’s body, she said to him one night.

A second Christmas apart. “Oh, I wish I could ask you home,” she had said, and had then been afraid that he might say why didn’t she? But he didn’t. He would be working then anyway, he said, “sending pictures of the boys at Christmas to the folks back home.”

After that, she didn’t see him for nearly a month. And after that, their times together became fewer and further apart. So that, in spite of the terribly short notice, she had managed to get Clary down to look after Jules and gone to London on the Saturday morning as early as possible, and they had spent the day and the night together. He hadn’t told her that he was going away on Sunday morning until after they had made love for the first time.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I have to go.”

“Where? Where are you going?”

“Somewhere east of Bremen. A place called Belsen.”

It didn’t really matter where he was going, she wept, it was the fact that he was going at all. Why hadn’t he told her?

He hadn’t been sure: he was substituting for someone else at the last minute; he’d pulled strings not to go this day in order to see her. He would be back. The war was nearly over, and, anyway, he would be back.

He left at five in the morning to catch a plane. She hated the flat without him. She got up and tidied everything and wondered what on earth to do. She couldn’t go back to Sussex so soon (she was supposed to be returning on Monday). Then she suddenly thought of Archie, and rang him, but there was no answer. It was awful, the way she could think of nobody, not a single person, she could go and see. She spent the day walking about the streets as sometimes she used to do with Jack, eating some spaghetti in the small Italian restaurant that they used to go to together and afterwards returning to the flat where she lay on the bed to read, but almost at once fell asleep.

When she woke, it was nearly seven o’clock. There did not seem to be much point in getting up, since she had nowhere to go. She longed for someone to talk to about Jack, and started to dial Archie’s number, but then changed her mind. He was Rupert’s best friend, after all. She got up in search of food. There was half a packet of biscuits and some of the powdered orange juice that Jack drank in the mornings. She made herself a glass of this, and ate the biscuits, and went to bed again where she lay for hours, wakeful, worrying about where he was and whether he was in a safe place, and when he would return.

Early on Monday morning she rang Home Place and said she was catching the early train back so that Tonbridge would meet her.

She heard nothing from him that week, and then the following Friday he rang—at lunch-time, thank goodness, because it meant that the Brig was not in his study. Rachel had answered the telephone. She did not say who it was, but Zoë knew somehow that it would be Jack.

“Sorry to call you at lunch-time. I was wondering whether you could get away for tonight?”

“Oh, Jack! Why can’t you give me more notice? I’ve just said I’ll look after the children so that the nurse can have the weekend off.”

“It wouldn’t be for the weekend. Just for tonight.” There was a pause, and then he said, “I’d really like to see you.”

“You make it so difficult. You know I want to come. I can’t, though. I really can’t.”

“OK. That’s it, then.”

There was a click, and she realized he had rung off. She rang his office, but they said he was not there; had not been there for some days. She rang the flat, and there was no reply. She went back to the dining room and pretended to finish her lunch.

All the afternoon, when, after their rests, she walked the children up to the shop in Watlington and back, she felt sick with anxiety. Now, if he were able to ask her, she would have dropped everything, and simply caught the next train—walked to the next station, if need be. Why had he rung off like that? It was not like anything she knew of him. But he had sounded strange: as though he knew something, or was concealing something—was angry—with her? Oh, God! Why had he rung off like that?

“We want to go back through the fields,” Wills was announcing. They had reached the gate that opened onto the road from the field where the Home Place land began.

“No, we’re going by the road today.”

“Why are we? Why, Mummy? What good will it do?”

“We want to go back to the field with the charabanc tree.”

This was a fallen pine tree where the passengers sat on the branches while one person drove holding the upturned roots as a steering wheel and the other walked precariously up the trunk dispensing tickets (oak leaves).

“Clary let us last weekend,” Roly said.

“Yes, and she played with us. She didn’t just stand about like Ellen talking about clean hands and meals.”

“Grown-ups,” scoffed Wills. “I’m just not going to be one, they are so boring.”

“When you’re a hundred, you’ll be an awfully old child.”

One of them was climbing the gate now. She’d either have to give in or stop them.

“I shall. The oldest child in the world. People will come for miles to see me. I shall be quite small but extremely wrinkly with specs. And a white beard.”

“You’ll be a dwarf, then,” Roly said.

“No, I shall not. I hate them. I hate their pointed red caps.”

She gave in. It seemed easier at the time.

“You can have ten minutes playing charabancs,” she said, as they trudged through the long wet bright green grass.

“Ten minutes! Ten hours is what we want.”

“Ten days.”

“Ten weeks.”

“Ten hundred years,” said Juliet, pre-empting any further crescendo.

She looked at her pretty daughter, who was wearing a tweed coat, cast off by Lydia some years ago as too small for her, black Wellingtons and a scarlet beret that was currently her favourite thing, and for the first time, the thought that in some unknown distance of time they might be in America together lingered in her mind. It seemed so extraordinary, and yet, what else could happen? One day, she thought, I shall look back on this house and the family as distant landmarks, which she supposed was how she now thought of Rupert. Then she thought of the family—particularly the Duchy—of how completely they had taken her in and made her one of themselves, of how this place, and she used to be bored in the country, had become her home in a way that no place she had lived in with her poor mother had ever been. She would have to leave her, too—and curiously, although she had endured three further visits to the Isle of Wight since the one she had returned from to meet Jack—“Don’t you dare speak to any strange man you may meet on that train,” he had enjoined her the first time she went after they had become lovers—curiously, that seemed hard, because she knew it would be hard on her mother, whereas leaving here would be harder for her than for any of the family. She would take Jack to see her mother, for her sake. And, of course, they would return to England to visit.

“How far are you going, madam?”

“America,” she said without thinking.

“America? America? We don’t go there, madam. We go to Hastings and then we go to Bexhill. You can go to both of them if you like.” A damp leaf was thrust into her hand.

When she felt that everybody had had a turn at being the driver, the conductor and a mere passenger, she said it was time for tea. The person who was the driver—Juliet—said it wasn’t fair, she hadn’t been driving nearly as long as the other two, but the other two, having had their turn, sided with Zoë about tea.

“Yes, you have,” they said brutally, “long enough for your age.”

Tea had begun by the time they got back. It took place in the hall where the long table was spread with a cloth and the Duchy presided at one end with the teapots. Jack was sitting at her right hand.

“Here she is,” the Duchy was saying as she came in with the children, tearing off their coats and boots to get at the tea. “Captain Greenfeldt has called on us, darling. Your friend, Margaret, told him where we were and as he was passing by he thought he would call. Isn’t that nice?” And as she met her mother-in-law’s frank and penetrating eye she knew that the Duchy knew.

Jack had risen as she came into the room. “Just a quick call,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Of course not.” Her mouth was dry, and she sat, almost collapsed, into a chair opposite him at the table.

“If you were a proper American,” Lydia said, “you’d have rushed round and pulled out her chair for her. That’s what they do in films. But we don’t do it here. Perhaps you knew that.”

“Mummy, my socks have come off with my boots so could I just be in my feet for tea?”

“He is American,” Wills said. “You can tell by his uniform.” He was eight and very interested in soldiers.

“Don’t talk about people in front of them as ‘he,’” Rachel said. She was pouring mugs of milk.

“Is this your daughter?” Of course he knew that she was.

“Yes.”

Juliet had slipped into the seat beside her and was now gazing at Jack with unblinking intensity.

“Captain Greenfeldt was telling us that he is just back from Germany,” the Duchy was saying as she passed Zoë a cup of tea.

She suddenly remembered him saying “a place called Belsen” which, during the last ten days, had been much and horribly in the news.

“Did you go to take photographs at the Belsen camp?”

“I did.”

“Oh,” said Villy, “that must have been simply horrifying. Those poor, poor people!”

“I think,” the Duchy said, “that perhaps pas devant les enfants.”

“Not in front of the children,” Lydia said. “We all knew that ages ago.”

Wills, who often quoted him, said, “Tonbridge said it was a death camp. But he said it was mostly Jews in it. What are Jews?”

Jack said, “I am a Jew.”

Wills looked at him gravely. “You don’t look at all different,” he said. “I don’t see how they could tell.”

Lydia, who did not read newspapers or talk to Tonbridge, now said, “Do you mean it is a camp for killing people? What happens to all their children?”

Villy, in a voice of icy authority, said, “Lydia, will you please take all three children upstairs to the nursery? At once!”

And Lydia, after one glance at her mother’s face, did as she was told, the others following her with surprising meekness. The tension in the room lessened—but not very much. Villy offered Jack a cigarette and while he was lighting his and hers for her, Zoë, who discovered that she had been pressing the palms of her hands onto the carving of her chair so hard that she had nearly broken the skin, looked mutely at Jack as though to implore him to help them to escape.

The Duchy said, “Zoë, why don’t you take Captain Greenfeldt to the morning room for a little peace and quiet?”

“Your daughter is very like you.”

The small room, with its gate-legged table, had four chairs ranged round it. He had sat down in one of them. Now she could look at him and was shocked. She had wanted to fling herself into his arms, tell him how sorry she was that she hadn’t immediately said she would come to London, but instead she sank into the chair opposite him. He was reaching in his pocket and drew out his packet of cigarettes to light one from the Goldflake that Villy had given him. She noticed that his hands shook.

“It was all in front of the children there,” he said. “They were playing round an enormous pit—eighty yards long, thirty feet wide—piled high with the bodies of their mothers, grandmothers, aunts—naked skeletons piled on top of each other—four feet high.”

She stared at him aghast, trying, and failing to imagine such a scene. “Would you like me to come back to London with you?”

He shook his head. “I have to go back very early tomorrow morning. It wouldn’t be worth it.”

“Back to that camp?”

“No, another one. Buchenwald. Our troops are there. I’ve been once, but I’ve got to go back.” He stubbed out his cigarette.

She said, “But when you rang, when you called me from London, you wanted me to come then.”

“Ah, well. I had a sudden urge to see you. Then I thought that I’d like to see you in your home—with your family—before I went.”

“When will you be back?”

He shrugged. Then he tried to smile. “Your mother-in-law is one nice lady. You’re in good hands.” He lit another cigarette. “But thanks for offering to come.”

There was a kind of bleak courtesy about him that frightened her. Searching for anything that might comfort either of them, she said, “But those poor people will be all right now, won’t they? I mean they are safe now and people will look after them and give them food.”

“Some of them. Six hundred are dying and being buried every day at Belsen. And they say over two thousand will die at Buchenwald—too far gone. And those aren’t the only camps, you know. We haven’t reached all of them, but they’ll be like that. And millions have died.”

There did not seem to be any comfort.

He looked at his watch, and got to his feet. “My cab will be here by now. I mustn’t miss that train. I’m glad I’ve seen Juliet, at last.”

“Are you really going to be away a long time?”

“Yep. Better count on that.”

She was standing now, facing him, between him and the door.

“Jack! You’re not angry with me, are you?”

“What makes you think that?”

She wanted to cry, “Everything!” but all she said was, “You haven’t kissed me. You haven’t touched me, even.”

For the first time, his black, bleak eyes softened in the old way: he took a step towards her and put his hands on her shoulders. “I am not angry with you,” he said. He kissed her gently on her lips. “I’ve gotten rather out of touch with love,” he said. “You’ll have to bear with me about that.”

“I will, I will! But it will come back, won’t it?”

Still holding her shoulders, he pushed her a little away from him. “Sure. Will you say goodbye to them for me? And thanks, for everything? Don’t cry.” It was a command rather than a plea. “I left my cap in the hall.”

“I’ll get it.” She didn’t want the intrusion of other people. But the hall was empty, and the cap lay on the table. When she returned with it, he had already gone the other way to the front door, which he had opened. He took the cap and put it on. “I’m glad I came.” He touched her cheek with two fingers.

“Look after yourself and—Jules, you call her, don’t you?” He bent and kissed the cheek he had touched—his lips were as cold as his fingers. Then he swung away from her and walked, very fast, to the gate and out of sight. She stood, listening to the taxi’s engine starting, the door slamming and then the sound of it going down the drive until she could not hear it at all.

Villy, in town for a day and a night, was having lunch with Jessica in the little house in Chelsea she had rented in Paradise Walk. They were better friends again now that it was common knowledge that Laurence (they no longer called him Lorenzo) had left his wife to live with a young opera singer. They had even had a cautiously commiserating talk about poor Mercedes and what was to become of her, and had come to the uneasy conclusion that although she was desperately unhappy, she was probably better off without him. (Of course, Villy thought, Jessica did not know about her frightful evening.)

It was a Monday. Villy had spent the morning at Lansdowne Road and apologized for arriving dishevelled.

“The news is so good, you’ll soon be back there, won’t you?” said Jessica as she showed her the tiny bathroom.

“Edward thinks it’s too big for us now that Louise is married and Teddy is launched, so to speak. I shall be very sad.” She had taken off her watch and was rolling up her sleeves. “I’m so filthy, I really ought to have a bath.”

“Darling, do, if you want to. Lunch can wait—it’s only a sort of pie.”

“I’ll just wash.”

“What a pretty house it is!” she exclaimed as she came down the stairs again to the sitting room.

“It is rather a doll’s house, but it suits me beautifully. So easy to keep. All I need is a daily for the housework.”

“Has Raymond seen it?”

“Not yet. It seems to be more and more difficult for him to get away. But he so loves being important, and he seems to have made friends in Oxford and, of course, I go to Frensham at weekends to help Nora.”

“How is that going?”

“Very well, I think. I don’t find him very easy to know, but she seems utterly devoted. It’s rather a weak gin, I’m afraid. I’ve run out and my local grocery rations everybody—one bottle a month.” She took her gin and sat with it in the second armchair.

“The news is good, isn’t it?” said Villy. “We’ll be in Berlin any day now.”

“Except for those awful, dreadful camps. I simply couldn’t believe it! It’s obscene!”

“It seems so extraordinary that it could all have been going on and people didn’t know.”

“I’m sure they knew. I’ve always loathed Germans.”

“But Daddy had such a lovely time there when he was a student. Do you remember how marvellous he said it was? Even the smallest provincial town had its concerts.”

“I agreed with Mr. Churchill. Words can’t express the horror.”

“Yes.” They could neither of them think of anything else to say about the camps, and there was a short silence while Villy smoked and Jessica watched her. She had got much older: her hair was nearly white now; her skin had become weatherbeaten and dry, the slate blue veins on the back of her hands much raised, her neck an old woman’s neck. She is only a year older than me, Jessica thought, only forty-nine, but she does look older. The war has taken its toll of her, she thought, whereas for me it marked the time when I suddenly had more money and far fewer chores. And, of course, the affair with Lorenzo (she still called him that to herself), even if he was rather naughty in the end, was fun while it lasted. Actually, she was quite dreading the peace with Raymond about all the time wanting regular meals and having nothing to do. On her own, she hardly ever cooked—even the pie in the oven at the moment had been bought, and when Judy came home for the holidays, she either stayed with school friends or at Frensham. Nora was fully occupied, and Christopher seemed to like his strange hermit-like existence. Angela … That was the reason that she had wanted Villy to come to lunch, to have the chance to air some of her feelings about Angela. She waited, however, until they were sitting at the small table laid for lunch at the far end of the room.

She began by asking about Louise, who, Villy said, seemed rather under the weather. Dr. Ballater, to whom Villy had made her go, said that she really ought to have her tonsils out—she was in fact going into hospital some time this week. Teddy, in Arizona, had finished his training as a fighter pilot, but had been kept on there, thank goodness. “With any luck, he won’t have to be in the war, and Lydia—” And then, realizing from her sister’s face that she was bursting to tell her something, she stopped and said, “Come on, Jess. What is it? You’re looking quite tragic.”

“I feel it. I really want your advice. I simply don’t know what to do!”

“What is it, darling? Of course I’ll help in any way that I can.”

“It’s Angela. She rang me last week and told me that she was going to get married.”

“Well, darling, isn’t that rather—”

“Wait! He’s American!”

“Well, that seems to me perfectly—”

“And he’s nearly twenty years older than she is, and he’s been married before. He’s got a daughter nearly the same age as Angela who is a tap dancer! And when I asked what he does in peace time, she said he was psychiatrist!”

“Have you met him?”

“She brought him here last week for a drink. He’s a funny little square man with a face like a pug and very hirsute. He calls her Hon.”

“You mean, as though she was German?”

“No, short for honey. And she calls him Earl.”

“Why does she do that?”

“It’s his name! Earl C. Black. She wants to become Mrs. Earl C. Black. The Second.”

Her distress was so operatic and she reminded Villy so much of their mother that she nearly burst out laughing.

“Darling! Don’t you think you are being a tiny bit narrow-minded?” (Snobbish, she wanted to say.) “Does Angela love him?”

“She says so,” Jessica replied, as though this did not make it more likely to be true.

“Well, then, I can’t see what you are worrying about. I mean, of course, it will be sad that she will be so far away, but you will go and visit her. And you’ve always worried that she wouldn’t get married at all.”

“Oh, but, Villy, you know what I mean! She was such a lovely girl and I must confess that I had pinned my hopes on her making what Mummy would have called ‘a good marriage.’ You know, as your Louise has done. It does seem such a fearful waste. Mummy would have been appalled!”

“Darling, we can’t choose who our children marry, and Mummy was simply appalled at both of our husbands, don’t you remember? I think you should stop worrying, and be glad for Angela. When is it to be?”

“She wants it to be at once, but he wants to wait and see whether when the war here is over, he gets sent to the Pacific to finish off the Japanese.”

“Well, that seems very thoughtful of him.” She continued in this vein until Jessica seemed to have run out of objections. Privately she thought that Jessica should thank her lucky stars. There had been rumours about Angela—Edward said that a friend of his in the RAF had actually picked her up in a bar, but on seeing her uncle Edward, she’d beaten a hasty retreat. It was clear that she had been leading a rather rackety life, and although naturally Villy did not dream of telling Jessica any of this, it made her more robust in her advice than she might otherwise have been.

“I’m sure it will all turn out well,” she said, as she left after lunch to do some shopping before she met Edward at the club for dinner. “Thank you for a lovely lunch. Do keep in touch. And do look on the bright side about Angela, darling.”

She had reason to remember this last admonition with some bitterness when she met Edward in the coffee room for a drink before dinner. She could tell at once that something was up, that he had something—not good—to tell her and for one frightful moment she thought it might be Teddy …

“It’s Teddy,” he said. “No, no, he’s quite all right—oh, darling, sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. But he sent this.” He produced an air mail letter and held it out. “Have a swig of your gin before you read it,” he said.

Dear Mummy and Dad,

This is rather a serious letter and I do hope it won’t be a shock to you, but I have met the most marvellous girl and we want to be married. Her name is Bernadine Heavens and she had to give up her career in Hollywood to marry some brute but he left her quite soon with two children and she had an awful time till we met. She is a really wonderful person, very funny and gay, but also extremely deep and a serious person underneath. You would like her if you saw her. The thing is because of my age we have to have your permission to marry. She wanted me to write to you the moment we got engaged which was the second time that we met, but I felt it might be too much of a shock. She is the most wonderful person I’ve ever met in my life. I honestly never thought of being married until I met her and then—bang! I just fell for her, and she for me. She has had a really sad life as her father left her mother when she was quite small and her mother made her live with an aunt as she couldn’t be bothered. But Bernadine has come through it all in the most wonderful way: she bears no malice to anyone she says. She would write to you only she says she is not much of a hand at letter-writing.

The thing is that actually we did get married last week, only Bernadine can’t get a passport until we’ve been married again with your permission. Isn’t it amazing? If I hadn’t been asked to stay on helping to train other pilots, I wouldn’t have met her. She works in the canteen here, but she only started a month ago so I might have come back to England and we would never have met. It gives us the shivers to think about it, but as she says, it must have been Meant … You see what I mean about her? She is actually frightfully thinking and deep—not a shallow person at all. I do hope you will be understanding and write back to me quickly.

Your loving son, Teddy.

“Good God!”

“I know.” His eyes were like blue marbles, and she could see that he was very angry. “What was his commanding officer up to, for God’s sake? He must have had to give permission.”

“I suppose he may not even have known. They may just have slipped off somewhere. It’s far easier to get married in America, isn’t it? I mean people in films are always waking up Justices of the Peace or getting married in drawing rooms. Oh, Teddy! How could he do it!”

“Completely irresponsible. He’s old enough to know better.”

“I bet it was the girl. I bet she trapped him. She’s clearly older than he is.”

“How much older, I wonder?”

“He doesn’t say how old the children are.”

“I expect he went on about Home Place and the house in London and she thinks she’s on to a thoroughly good thing. Well—she’ll soon find out. She won’t find it fun living on his pay, and when the war’s over, and he does go into the firm, he’ll have to work his passage—like anyone else.”

She had been reading the letter again while he was talking. “He’s completely infatuated. And even so, he manages to make her sound awful.”

“I expect she is awful. Supposing we simply refuse to give permission?”

“He’ll be twenty-one in October. He’s only got to wait until then.”

He snapped his fingers at the waiter.

“Two large martinis, George, if you would. Really large.”

When they were having dinner, she said, “Was that what you said you wanted to talk to me about this morning?”

“What? Oh—yes—yes, it was.”

“I can’t think how you managed not to tell me on the telephone.”

“Oh, well,” he said. “I wanted you to see the letter. And it would only have spoiled your day. How was Jessica, by the way?”

“It’s quite funny, really. She was worried about Angela marrying an American, and I was telling her to look on the bright side of things. It serves me right. I think I’d rather have Earl C. Black than Bernadine Heavens.”

“Good Lord! Is that what he’s called? What a pity we can’t pair them off.”

“Although, darling, she may be very nice. One can’t go on names.”

“We aren’t going on names. I’m going on the fact that although she’s older—probably a good deal older—she married a mere boy behind his parents’ back. At best, she’s a baby snatcher. At worst a gold digger. Probably both,” he ended gloomily.

“It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? We don’t actually know a single American. At least, I don’t. Perhaps you do.” Then she thought of Captain Greenfeldt, whom she had thought rather charming in a haunted way, but decided not to mention him.

During coffee he reverted to the question of moving house. He thought she should come to London for a few days to start looking for something smaller and more suitable. “We can store the furniture at the Wharf and put the house on the market,” he said.

“All right, I will.” For some reason the whole idea filled her with a vague dread, but she did not say so. “It isn’t,” she said as she poured them a second cup of coffee, “it isn’t at all her being American. It’s his marrying the first girl he has anything to do with.”

“It’s funny you should say that. I was just wondering how many parents are sitting over coffee in America reading letters from their twenty-year-old sons saying that they’ve fallen in love with Grizelda Wickham-Painswick-Wickham or Queenie Bloggs and how much they are looking forward to introducing them to the family. I’m sure we’re not alone, if that’s any comfort.”

She smiled at him. He did not often indulge in such flights of fancy: the remark was much the kind that dear Rupert would once have made …

“Now. Whereabouts are you going to look?”

“Look?”

“For your house. This would be a good time to buy, although we’ll need a bloody good surveyor—I should think at least a third of the houses in London have suffered some sort of war damage.”

“Edward, I can’t see that we have to move at all. Lansdowne Road isn’t all that big. Lydia could have Louise’s old room, and Roly and a nanny—I’ll have to get one—can share the top floor with the servants. And Teddy’s room can be a spare.”

But he was adamant and in the end she gave way, and then a friend of Edward’s came to offer them a drink to celebrate Hitler having shot himself, a piece of news that in any other circumstances would have dominated their evening.

Michael took Louise to the hospital on Sunday evening, before catching his train back to Portsmouth. It meant leaving her there rather earlier than originally planned, but he wanted to see her in, and he had to catch the train.

“Shall we go out to lunch?” he said to her that morning.

“If you like.” She did not seem exactly enthusiastic, but, then, she did not seem to be that about anything these days. Mummy had written two immensely long letters about Louise running away in the middle of the weekend at Hatton, and had said in both of them that, of course, she had had no idea that Louise had not known about Hugo’s death, and he was sure that Mummy would not say that if it was not true, although Louise said, “She hates me and she knew perfectly well that I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have gone to stay at all if I’d known,” she had added, but he put all that down to hysteria on Louise’s part. Of course it had upset her; the death of anyone one had known was upsetting. He felt sad about it—in a complicated sort of way. Indeed, whenever he thought of Hugo, which was more often than he liked because it aroused a whole lot of conflicting feelings that he didn’t want to go into, he felt this clash of jealousy, and sadness, nostalgia for a halcyon time of his life before the war when Hugo came to stay in the vac for weeks on end and Mummy treated him like another son, encouraging them to do everything together. They had played tennis and racquets, and shot and gone hacking and taken a boat out on the lake and he’d done one of the best portraits of his life of him. And Mummy had been so sweet—never interfering, only every week or so she seemed to have to have various daughters of friends of hers for lunch or the weekend, and there had been a family joke about how desperately plain/dull they invariably were. It quite put him off girls, but Mummy, kind as always, had said that one must be sorry for them, poor things. She called him and Hugo Ancient Greeks. She had been very kind to Hugo’s poor mother, sending her money quite regularly and Hugo had been very touched by that: he, too, was fond of his mother. He had, actually, fallen a bit in love with Hugo and for a long time he had said nothing about it to anyone, but eventually, it came out. Hugo hadn’t felt as he did, which at the time seemed awful and they’d almost had a row. Of course Mummy knew: she seemed to know everything that mattered to him. “Oh, darling, what rotten bad luck,” she had said: she was wonderfully broad-minded; most mothers would have got tremendously worked up, but Mummy was not like that. After that, Hugo hadn’t come at all to Hatton for a bit, and by the time he had found Rowena and was a bit in love with her he didn’t mind Hugo being there at all. But it had never been the same with him again. But then, Hugo had ensconced himself in his house and seduced his wife—a really dirty trick. And she wouldn’t have another child, although Mummy said really she ought to—a son and a brother for Sebastian. But lately, Louise had even been difficult about bed, said she didn’t want it and she was tired. He thought that that was probably because, poor little thing, her throat had made her really run down. After her operation, he was going to see to it that she had a proper holiday—he thought the Scilly Isles might be good for her. Sea air and a quiet life, if her friend Stella could go with her. He so wanted her to get well and happy again.

Meanwhile, he had his problems. They were very likely to offer him the command of one of the newer destroyers to take to the Pacific which was a pretty exciting thought. It would make a triumphant culmination of his career in the Navy. Not many Wavy Navy officers had got that far. But Mummy, who said she had given the matter a good deal of thought (and, of course, she had discussed this with the Judge), said that this was the moment for him to go into politics. There would be an election once the war was over here, and Mummy said the PM was keen on getting Conservative candidates from the Services, and obviously, with a bit of a name already, he stood a good chance of getting in. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to become a Member of Parliament, but it might be a bit of a lark to go for it and see what happened. He’d told Louise about all this over dinner, which had been rather a dreary affair as so many restaurants were closed on Sunday evenings. But they’d gone to the Savoy.

“If you stayed in the Navy, how long would you be away?” she had asked.

“Darling, I don’t know. Until the Japanese surrender. We’re doing quite well out there now, taking Rangoon and all that, but it could be anything up to eighteen months or so, I should think.”

“And if you went into politics?”

“I’d come out of the Navy, we’d buy a nice house in London and, with any luck, you’d become an MP’s wife.”

“Oh.”

“What do you think?”

“I thought you wanted to be a painter.”

“Darling, I shall never stop painting. But, as you know, I’m a vulgar sort of chap who likes to make his mark in other ways as well.”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to decide. After all, it’s your life.”

“It’s both our lives,” he said, wishing that this had already occurred to her. “The first thing is to get you well again.”

In the train he could minutely recall her face, although, funnily enough, he couldn’t draw her from memory. But he knew how the creases in her eyelids made a pretty curve over her eyes (but also how they were different from one another), how her cheekbones ran into the top of her ears so that her face was almost pointed, how her eyebrows had a sharp angle on them so that they were almost like shallow roots over her eyes, how her hair sprang from a widow’s peak which to her chagrin, was just off centre but, as he had pointed out, would only matter if she had happened to live in the sixteenth century, how she would bite the inside of her bottom lip when she was thinking, and, above all, what an extraordinary contrast her face presented full face, from her profile when her large rather beaky nose predominated. Full face, one had no idea of its prominence (she hated her profile), but this made her most interesting to draw from a three-quarters angle. He loved her appearance, and although she was turning out to be a more complicated creature than he had first thought her, he was glad that he had married her.

When he had left her at the hospital, Louise had felt pretty nervous. The last time he had done that everybody had been horrible, which had been almost as bad as the pain. But the hospital was quite different. She was taken to a bare little room that contained nothing but a high bed, a washstand basin, a small table beside it, a chair and a small wardrobe for her clothes. She was invited to undress and get into bed. Thereafter a series of people came to see her: a nurse to take her temperature and blood pressure, the anaesthetist who asked her if she had any false teeth and finally the Sister, who was both formidable and reassuring. “Sorry we have to starve you this evening,” she said. “But Mr. Farquhar’s operating at eight o’clock. What I should like you to do now is to get a good night’s sleep. There’s a bell there if you want anything.”

“Does the operation take a long time?”

“Oh, no. It’s very quick. You will have rather a sore throat afterwards, but that will soon wear off.”

When she had gone, Louise lay, listening to the distant traffic in Tottenham Court Road. She did not feel nervous any more. These nurses seemed kind and efficient and as for the operation—she did not care about that. She would not, she felt, even care very much if she died from it. Ever since she had learned of Hugo’s death she had felt a little mad: as though it simply wasn’t possible to be responsible for herself, so if a very expensive doctor killed her by mistake she would merely be relieved of the seemingly endless efforts of pretending to be somebody who had interests, opinions and feelings. She was quite good at the pretence; it was, after all, simply acting, something that was becoming second nature to her, and it didn’t matter very much, but it was an effort and she felt tired all the time.

She had not forgiven Michael for destroying Hugo’s letter, but as the weeks had gone by in the Station Hotel, she had come to see that he, Michael, had absolutely no idea about how much it had mattered to her, and although he had done this awful thing, he had not at all known how awful it was, which somehow exonerated him—and made her feel that her resentment was irrational. But when she knew that she would never see him again, that there never could be another letter, then, locked in the impotence of her grief, she raged at Michael, attributing actual malice to his destruction. None of this was apparent: it was her secret life; he did not tell her things—he had not told her about Hugo and it transpired that he had seen the newspaper, though not when it came out. She had been sickened by his attempts to exonerate Zee, and when, one day, he had started to say he was sorry he hadn’t told her about Hugo, she had cut him short saying that she never wished to speak of Hugo with him again in her life. She would not go to Hatton either, she said. He had accepted these strictures with surprising meekness, but he had gone on in bed as though everything was the same.

When she knew that Hugo was dead, after the first few awful days—when both Polly and Clary had been really good to her; indeed Polly had cried that first evening almost as much as she—she came out of it heartless, as though she had literally lost her heart. This made one thing seem very like another—she could not put a value upon anything more significant than having an amusing evening, or people flirting with her. And so, when Rory turned up at her house one day on leave and made clear how much he had wanted her ever since their first meeting after her flu, she went to bed with him without a qualm. She found, also, that really not caring at all beyond the mild satisfaction of being admired and having attention paid to her, she became better at the bed side of life, as she put it. Rory had the added attraction of not knowing anything about Hugo, of not, indeed, knowing anything much at all about her. He also did not seem to notice that she was acting. For a few months she pretended to be someone who was having an exciting affair with a dashing, courageous young man who certainly amused her. They could not meet often, and usually not for long, and then, shortly after the night she had spent in his friend’s flat, she met a girl at the Arts Theatre Club who had said she believed Louise knew Rory Anderson.

“I only asked, because the girl who shares my flat is mad about him. He’s taking her to Scotland for his leave. I have the feeling he’s a bit of a philanderer, and she’s so serious. What do you think?”

And that was the end of that. He never even wrote to her, but she did not really care. Her vanity was dented, but she felt it was hard to see what she had to be vain about. She had been available and he had availed himself. “Can’t even keep a lover,” she said to herself in the jeering, worldly voice she now used for internal dialogue.

In the morning they gave her an injection and soon she felt wonderfully carefree and even more irresponsible. By the time she was wheeled to the theatre and put into some sort of reclining chair she felt as though she was going to a party.

Mr. Farquhar leaned over her: the bottom of his face was covered, but his eyes looked full of merry bonhomie. More anaesthetic—she felt herself drifting away—could scarcely determine his face above her and then there was one terrifying instant of shrill scorching agony—and then nothing.

When she came to she was back in bed and her throat hurt so much that she longed to pass out again. In the evening, Polly and Clary came to visit her, bringing The Diary of a Nobody and a bunch of grapes.

“It’s a nice little book you can read lying on your back.” Clary said. They said that peace had been signed. “Eisenhower signed it. I must say I thought it ought to have been Mr. Churchill, but there you are,” Clary said. “Anyway, the Germans have surrendered—unconditionally.”

“Well, they couldn’t have any other way,” Polly said. “And tomorrow there’ll be Victory celebrations. It’s making people awfully jolly and nice in the streets—as though it’s everyone’s birthday.”

“It’s jolly bad luck to be in hospital, poor Louise.”

As she really couldn’t talk much at all, they didn’t stay, but said they’d come the day after tomorrow.

“Oh yes. Some people called Hammond rang and they wanted to come to see you. I told them where you were, and they said they would come tomorrow and hoped you’d be well enough to see them.”

“Hammond?” she whispered, and then she remembered the agent, and Myfanwy and the baby. She had almost forgotten them, because Myfanwy’s mother had taken her and the baby away with her the next day and she’d never seen them again. She wondered why they wanted to see her.

“Well, if you feel too ropy, I’m sure they will understand.”

After they had gone, Sister came in and said that Commander Hadleigh had rung to ask how she was, and to send his love.

“I told him you were doing very well,” she said. “You can have a little jelly or ice cream for your supper.”

On her own again, and not up to reading, she felt feverish and horribly depressed. For years the end of the war had been a time to look forward to, when everything would be better and, indeed, wonderful. Now its immediate prospect seemed to her to hold the most dreary alternatives: becoming an MP’s wife (she saw this as sitting on hard chairs at meetings for hours while people talked about mining, or having endless careful teas with strange people), or she would have to live on her own in a house with Sebastian and a nanny, waiting for Michael to come back from the Japanese war … She realized now that she did not want either of these. For the first time she faced the frightening possibility of not being married to Michael … She was not the right wife for him—no, that was a weak way of putting it, she wasn’t up to being anybody’s wife … She didn’t love him: he seemed at once too old and too young for her and she found his relationship with his mother both despicable and frightening. Perhaps she was not capable of love—but this reached something so painful in her that it blocked any further thoughts. Somehow, somewhere, she seemed to have gone wrong, to have made a mess of things that could not now be unsaid or undone …

After lunch—ice cream—the next day, the Hammonds arrived. The nurse who brought them in said she would fetch another chair and a vase for the bunch of pink tulips that Myfanwy laid upon the bed. She looked very pretty in a brown dress with a cameo brooch on her white collar, and her hair—that Louise remembered as lying in disordered profusion on the pillows—was now piled neatly on top of her head.

“We were in London for a couple of days and felt we must see you,” he said. His name was Arthur, but he was so much older than Myfanwy that she thought of him as Mr. Hammond.

“Myfanwy’s never been to London,” he said. “And I always promised her we’d come. We’ve certainly picked the right time for it. Awful bad luck for you being laid low on VE-Day.”

Myfanwy seemed very shy, although she smiled whenever she caught Louise’s eye.

Mr. Hammond asked after Michael, and then her child. Then Myfanwy said, “I never knew you had a baby. No wonder you were so good with Owen.”

“How is he? Is he with you?”

“He’s fine. He’s with my mam—just for these few days.”

Her husband said, “Myfanwy was so sorry not to see you again, but her mother took her home to look after her and the baby and there was no chance. But she wanted to thank you.” He paused and looked at his wife, who blushed and then suddenly took Louise’s hand.

“I do indeed thank you. You were so good to me. And the doctor said he thought you may have saved Owen’s life. He told me afterwards how very poorly he was. There is no way I can thank you enough for that.”

Soon after that, they left.

“I can see it tires you to talk,” he said. “We shall never forget you.”

“No, indeed. It’s very glad we are to have seen you.” She took Louise’s hand again. “I am so grateful,” she said, “for your goodness.”

When they were gone, she lay looking at the two chairs. It was she who was grateful, because if they hadn’t come to tell her that she would have continued to feel completely worthless.

When he was sure that Clary was safely tucked up in his bed and asleep, Archie limped painfully back into the sitting room and took off his shoes. He had taken Clary to see the celebrations outside Buckingham Palace, Polly having gone with her father. “I can’t see why we can’t all go together,” Clary had said, “but Poll didn’t want to.”

“You’ll just have to make do with me,” he had replied, and she had said: “It won’t be making do. You’re not a making do sort of person, Archie, much more people’s first choice.” A remark that, coming from her, had given him inordinate pleasure.

He turned off the ceiling light. Then he fetched himself a whisky and decided to have it on his balcony where there were two chairs. He could put his bottom on one and his feet on the other. He was completely done in: not surprising, really, as they’d walked miles that evening. All the way to the Palace and then, eventually, back. And before that … One way and the other, he’d been on the go since Friday, which seemed a very long way away now. On Friday morning, he’d been at his desk, the office buzzing with the news of the Germans’ imminent surrender in Holland, Denmark and northern Germany when the Wren who brought his post had come in with it.

“And this was delivered by hand just now,” she said. It was an envelope with something else in it—money, or a key, he thought, as he slit it open. Before he read the letter which was written in pencil, he looked at the signature. Jack Greenfeldt. Greenfeldt? Oh, yes, the American, Zoë’s young man. She had brought him once to the flat for a drink, a saturnine, rather haunted-looking fellow, but he’d liked him. The object, wrapped in paper, proved to be a key. Oh, Lord, he thought, when he’d unwrapped it, I bet now the end is in sight he’s hopping it back to the wife and kids at home and hasn’t got the guts to tell her himself.

It was headed Dachau 2 May.

Then he read the letter. It was quite short, and he read it twice.

I am sorry to bother you with this [it began] but I couldn’t think who else to ask. I have made several efforts to write to Zoë, but I couldn’t find any way of telling her.

Anyway, by the time you get this I shall be dead. I have two days’ work to do here taking pictures, then I shall put the film with this letter on a plane on Thursday morning and then I shall come back here and put a bullet through my head. She will ask you why. Tell her I couldn’t live with what I’ve witnessed in the last two weeks—I can’t be a survivor of what has been, literally, a holocaust. I’d go crazy, out of my mind at not being with them in it. I couldn’t make her happy—not after the days here, and at Buchenwald and at Belsen. The key is to the studio I rented, and she may want to collect things from there. Rent paid until the end of this month and perhaps you would give the key back to the agent in Sloane Street—Chestertons I think it is. Tell her I loved her and thank her for that—oh, hell—tell her whatever you think best. I know you’ll see her through it—and maybe that husband of hers will come back?

Jack Greenfeldt

When he had read the letter a second time he found himself folding it up and putting it back into its envelope. He felt stunned by it—which meant, initially, that he had no feelings at all. Early in the war he had had to face up to the possibility of losing his own life, but the idea of taking it was so alien to him that he was completely unable to imagine the state of mind that might lead to such an act. Then he thought, Supposing he wrote this letter and then, when he got back to the camp, changed his mind, or someone found him in time to persuade him against it? Telling Zoë would be bad enough, but telling her and then discovering that it wasn’t true would be worse. Or would it? Perhaps he ought to try and find out. He took the letter out of its envelope and read it again. This time it engendered hostility, respect and finally, pity—in equal quantities—what a shocking waste and selfish, too—what courage to do such a thing in cold blood and poor chap, what he must have seen and heard and experienced that could drive him to such an act … but he did not doubt it. He picked up his telephone and asked for a line.

He asked for the Duchy and after struggling with the Brig who neither seemed to know who he was nor could understand how on earth anyone could want to speak to his wife (“some feller on the line seems to want to talk to you about something or other”) he got her. He said he wondered if he could come down for the weekend? He was always welcome, she said, if he didn’t mind where he slept. He asked whether Zoë would be there, and she said, yes. Then she said in her most level tone, had he bad news? Not about Rupert, he replied. There was a pause, and then she said, Ah. If he came on the four twenty, she added, he could be met with the girls.

So that was what he had done. He had waited until after dinner to tell Zoë, because it was the first opportunity for having her on his own. He took her into the morning room, and made her sit down. She sat upright, with her hands on the table: he saw that she was trembling.

“What is it? Is it—Rupert?”

“No. It’s Jack.”

“Jack? How do you know—that?”

“He sent me a letter.”

She looked at him mutely.

“He died.”

For a moment she stared at him as though she had not heard; then she said: “He sent you a letter—to say he was dead?”

His mouth was suddenly dry. All day he had wrestled with what he should tell her, how much, and how. “Tell her whatever you think best,” Jack had written. When he had finished washing his hands before dinner, and had straightened up to comb his hair in the small glass and had seen his face, weak with indecision and potential evasions, he had suddenly known that only the truth would do. So he told her—as gently as he could, but there was nothing gentle about the tale.

She sat still, upright and silent, until he said: “He said to tell you that he loved you and to thank you for it,” when an expression of extreme pain came and went on her face. She swallowed and then asked if she might see the letter and he gave it to her, saying he was going to get them both a drink and he would be back.

On the table in the hall there was a tray with two glasses and decanters of whisky and water on it. Blessing the Duchy, he waited a few minutes, none the less, to give her some time to herself. When he returned she was sitting just as he had left her, and the letter lay on the table—she was not crying as he had half expected. He poured the whisky and put a glass by her hand. “I know this is the most awful shock,” he said, “but I felt I should tell you the truth.”

“Yes. Thank you. The funny thing is that I sort of knew—not that this would happen, but that it was an end, somehow. He came here two weeks ago—without any warning—and after tea we sat in this room. And then he went and I had the thought that I would not ever see him again.”

He put the glass into her hand.

“My poor Jack,” she said, as she began to cry.

Much later she had said, “I expect you think it was very bad of me—to go off like that—to have—an affair.”

And he’d said no, he didn’t, he thought it was very understandable.

But she had answered, “Understandable, but not good. But I don’t believe that Rupert is going to come back. If that was going to happen, it would have happened by now.”

Later she said, “I think he came here to make sure I would be all right.”

“That showed love,” he said.

“Yes, it did, didn’t it?” She cried a bit more, and then she asked him why he thought that he’d done it.

And he had answered slowly, not exactly picking his words, but trying to imagine being Jack: “Perhaps he thought it was the only thing he could give those people—to show that he loved them and cared—”

“His own life?”

“You can’t give more.”

By the time they parted for the night, the house was dark and silent.

It was half past two and the war had ended officially over two hours ago now. There were still sounds of distant revelry in the streets, outside the nearest pub—people singing, cheering, laughing. He got up from his chair and went back into the sitting room. His leg ached, as he supposed it always would do from now onwards, if he overdid things. So many people had come to stay with him during the last months—the children, mostly—that he had given up the sofa as a temporary bed and bought himself a divan. He undressed, fetched his pyjamas from the bathroom and got into bed.

For a long time, he was unable to sleep. He felt so beset by the quantity of confidences bestowed on him by the family—always on the grounds that he was part of it, or had become so, but really because he was not, would never be quite that. He was anything from a catalyst to a general repository. Hugh, for instance. Hugh had asked him to accompany him to Battle to collect some cases of beer. The moment they were in the car, he had known that this was a pretext, and had hoped that he didn’t want to talk about Polly. But it had been Edward. He was worried about Edward. They weren’t getting on at all well, and the chief reason for that, Hugh thought, was that Edward knew how much he disapproved of what was going on. Archie had long since realized that Edward had affairs and had wondered idly from time to time whether anyone else in the family was aware of this.

“He’s always been a bit of a—ranger,” Hugh said. “But this time it’s more serious. You’re part of the family, really, so I know I can trust you. The thing is that he’s had a child by this woman. And in spite of saying he was going to end the whole thing, he hasn’t. And now he’s talking of selling his house in London in order to buy a smaller one. Well, putting two and two together, I don’t like the sound of that at all.”

Why, Hugh had gone on, would he sell a perfectly good house, that he knew Villy was fond of, just to buy a smaller one unless he had no intention of being in it himself? That was what was worrying him. It transpired that he, Hugh, wanted him, Archie, to talk to Edward. “It’s no good me even trying any more, old boy. He simply flies off the handle and it makes office life harder. But I thought perhaps you might …”

He’d said he’d think about it, but he didn’t think that anything he said would make much difference.

Then, when they had collected the crates of beer—ordered by the Brig for the servants to celebrate the peace when it came—and were driving home in the rain, Hugh had suddenly said: “What’s up with Poll, do you think?”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, she seems in a funny mood. I wondered whether perhaps she’s fallen in love with somebody.”

He had waited: he had promised Polly silence, and she should have it, however many lies were entailed.

“I asked her what was the matter, and she said nothing, in the kind of voice she always uses when it is something. If I’m right, it’s clearly not going very well, and she hasn’t got Syb to talk to who would have been wonderful with her. I thought, possibly, she might have confided in you. Or you could have asked her.”

“Better not,” he had said.

“Oh, well. I want her happiness more than anything else, and it’s awful to have to stand by and feel so helpless.”

“I hope it’s not that bloody doctor she works for,” he said as they turned into the drive. “I mean, he’s foreign, for a start, and far older, and almost certainly married. Or if not, he certainly ought to be. Just thought I’d ask. I know she loves you.”

“Eh?” This had startled him.

“My dear old boy, we all do. You’re one of the family. In a way.”

He could see no way of saying anything at all to Edward that would in the slightest degree influence him. Better keep out of that.

Zoë had not appeared at lunch-time. She had a very bad headache, the Duchy said. After lunch, she had tucked her arm into his and asked him to come and look at her rock garden.

“Really I wanted to thank you for breaking that dreadful news to poor Zoë,” she said. “I’m afraid she is very unhappy. Of course I’ve known about the man—all those visits to London suddenly. She is so young, and she’s had a very hard time. It seems to me that something must be done about her state.”

“You mean—”

“I mean that she cannot continue indefinitely neither a widow nor a wife. Naturally, she will have a home here for as long as she wants—” She stopped speaking and walking and turned to look at him.

“Or do you believe,” she said unsteadily and in a voice that reminded him sharply of Rachel when she was moved, “do you believe that he still might come back to us?”

He looked at her, unable to say what she wanted to hear. Her gaze did not falter.

“There is nothing in the world that I want more,” she said. “But I was so fortunate in the last war with the other two coming back—”

He had said that he would find out what needed to be done or found out.

There had been some light relief. Lydia had buttonholed him after tea. “Archie, I have one extremely serious thing to ask you. It’s very small really—for you, I mean, to do something about—but for me it may well be life or death.”

“What now?”

“You say that as though I ask you things from morning to night. What it is is could you explain to my parents that it is absolutely essential for them to send me to a good school? I thought the one that Judy goes to, actually. I know she’s awful, but I don’t think that that is the school’s fault. She learns interesting games like lacrosse and hockey and they do ballroom dancing and a play at Christmas every year. And she’s got a pash for the geography mistress who is simply marvelous—and I know her mother told her it was only a phase but I’m not having a chance to go through it because it really isn’t possible to feel like that about Miss Milliment.”

“Why don’t you ask them?”

“I have, and Dad just says talk to Mummy and she says things like ‘we’ll see’—which means we never will. You could say that you were appalled by my ignorance,” she added.

“I could. But am I?”

“Also I’ve been through quite a lot of Who’s Who—it’s a kind of telephone directory only full of famous people you’ve never heard of—and it always says ‘educated at’—and then the name of a school.”

“Are you planning to be famous?”

“I don’t wish to rule it out. Oh, Archie, do talk to them: you’re one of the family now—they’ll listen to you …” And so on.

And then—and not at all light-hearted—Clary. This evening, which they had spent together beginning with supper in a Cypriot restaurant just off Piccadilly that she loved because it always had lamb chops and those little dumpling things fried in honey for pudding and thick sweet coffee. She had met him there and arrived looking unexpectedly smart in a black skirt and a man’s collarless shirt and dark red sandals and her hair glistening.

“It’s wet, I’m afraid,” she said when he kissed her. “I thought I ought to wash it for the peace and there wasn’t time to get it dry.”

“I like your shirt.”

“Zoë gave it to me at the weekend. The collar and cuffs are all frayed, so it wouldn’t be any use to him, but with the sleeves rolled up you wouldn’t notice.”

“You look very nice. Attractive.”

“Do I? I don’t look anything like Poll, though. She’s got a new dress, a yellow one—a kind of lemon peel colour—it looks super with her hair. She’s gone to the Reform Club with Uncle Hugh.” She had looked at him searchingly then and looked away when their eyes met. He had offered her a drink and she had said could it not be gin and lime? “I know it’s what girls all seem to drink, but I’ve always hated it, so I’ve decided to change.”

“What to?”

“What would you advise? Whisky tastes of rubber, if you ask me, and the only time I had vodka it was like an electric shock and I don’t know what else there is. Oh, I know. I like dark brown sherry. I really like that.”

“Did you go to work today?”

“You bet! Noël doesn’t consider that it is a particular day at all. They aren’t even celebrating. They are spending the evening reading somebody called H. L. Mencken aloud to each other. It is a very mature way of dealing with peace, don’t you think?”

“A bit dull, too, I should have thought.”

“Me, too. Are we really going to go to Buckingham Palace and wait for the King and Queen to come out? Will they, do you think? I’ve never actually seen them, except on news reels.”

“I thought we might. It is a night to remember.”

But by the time they’d had dinner (which he had thought they’d had quite early enough), the crowds were so thick that it took them ages to get anywhere near the Palace, although everyone was so good-tempered that it was possible to edge nearer by degrees. Showers of golden stars from rockets occurred in the lavender-coloured sky and the Palace was floodlit, and round the statue of Queen Victoria an enormous snake of people were dancing the hokey-cokey, singing and stamping their feet, and beyond, near the railings, people were chanting, shouting for the King. There were thousands of them, so many indeed and sometimes so tightly packed that they had held hands all evening in order not to get parted, and sometimes they had to shout to each other to be heard, but sometimes they simply sang whatever everyone else round them was singing: “Land of Hope and Glory,” “God Save the King” and bits of the hokey-cokey. When they had seen the Royal Family standing on the balcony and waving, he thought that perhaps they should call it a day, but she wanted to wait for them to come out again, and she was so excited that he had not the heart to refuse her. Eventually, long after it was dark, they did come out again—just the King and Queen this time—no princesses. “I suppose they’ve been sent to bed, poor things,” Clary said. After that, she agreed that they’d better start for home.

“You’d better come back with me,” he had said. “I live nearer than you, and we’ll never get a cab.”

At Hyde Park Corner, he said he would have to sit down for a bit, so they went into the bit of park that ran down to Knightsbridge and found an empty bench, and he smoked, and that was when she told him that she knew about Polly.

“It came up because I couldn’t understand why we couldn’t all spend this evening together,” she had said. “Poor Poll, she made me promise not to laugh. As if I would about anything that was so serious to her. It’s a good thing she told me because I’d known for a long time that things weren’t all right, and tonight I reminded her that we’d made a pact—ages ago—to tell each other things that were important. And, of course, when she remembered that, she had to tell me. It’s funny, isn’t it? You can know that something is completely ridiculous, but if you see it isn’t to the other person, it almost seems not to be.”

“Is that how it struck you?”

“Well. Well, not that somebody shouldn’t be in love with you, but they ought to be more your age, oughtn’t they?”

He had opened his mouth to say a whole lot of things and then shut it again. “I suppose I seem incredibly ancient to you.”

“No, not incredibly, at all. In fact, you don’t seem to have aged at all since I met you.”

“Thanks for that.”

They could not see each other as it was now dark and the nearest street lamp yards away. After a short silence, she said, “Sorry.”

“What for?”

“I don’t know how, but I feel I’ve hurt your feelings. I did say to Poll that I thought you weren’t the marrying kind.”

“Did you?”

“Well, I mean, here you are not married to anybody. It was to help her get over it. Of course she will, but she doesn’t believe that. People do, don’t they?”

“Get over being in love?”

“If it’s hopeless.”

“Oh, yes, I should think they usually do. I’m really sorry about Poll. I’m very fond of her, you know.”

“She knows, but she says it’s the wrong kind of fond … I can see that. I can see that burning antagonism might be a better start.”

A moment later, she said, “You have got a funny croaky laugh, Archie.”

Without thinking, he said, “You have.”

“Have what?”

“Aged since I met you.”

“Oh,” she had said at once. “I see what you were minding. You were minding me implying that you were old. All I meant was that you were far too old for Polly.”

He’d suggested then that perhaps they’d better resume hobbling home.

When, at last, they had got back, she’d wanted to make some cocoa, so he told her to go to bed and he’d bring her some.

She was sitting up in his bed, wearing his pyjama jacket, her face looking as though she had scrubbed it with soap and water.

“I used some of your toothpaste and my finger,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”

He put the mug into her hands and sat on the edge of the bed—to take the weight off his feet.

“Do you know what this reminds me of?”

“Of course I don’t. What?”

“When I was quite young—well, about thirteen—Neville had an asthma attack because he said I’d woken him up because I had a bad dream and went into Ellen. Well. Dad came in with a mug of hot milk and I didn’t want to drink it because of the skin, and he picked it off and ate it for me. That showed love, didn’t it?”

He looked at the crinkling top of her mug, put out two fingers, picked it off and ate it.

“There,” he had said. “You’re still loved.”

“Copycat,” she said, but her eyes sparkled with affection and pleasure. She drank some of the cocoa, then she put the mug aside on the table.

“There is something,” she said slowly, almost as though she wasn’t quite sure what it was, “something—about Dad that I wanted to talk to you about. Well—discuss, you know?” She drew her knees up and clasped her arms round them: holding herself together, he thought, as anxiety stirred in him.

“Right,” he said with an assumption of cheerfulness and calm.

“You needn’t be anxious, Archie. This is what it is.” She took a deep breath and said rapidly, “After the invasion last year, I thought, you see, that he would be bound to come back: I mean there would be no Germans to stop him. And then, when he didn’t I thought that probably he had got some sort of war job—I don’t know what, but something—which meant that he had to stay until the peace. And now, we’ve got that. So what I thought was, that it might be best if I made a sort of date, and if he hasn’t come back by then, I will have to understand that he never will. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and when Zoë tried to give me all his shirts last weekend, I only took the really worn ones, because taking the others would be like giving in. So I thought if I made a sort of pact with you, and set a date, that this would be sensible.” At the word sensible her eyes filled. She cleared her throat. “I thought as this would be an easy date to remember for both of us, a year from now?”

He nodded. “Good idea,” he said.

“It is odd. I used to mind about him so awfully because of me. Because I missed him so much. But it seems to have turned into something different. I do miss him, of course, but I mind it more for him, because I wanted him to have a good life and all of it—not be cut off. It isn’t that I don’t still love him.”

“I know. I know it isn’t. I think,” he said; he was finding it difficult to say anything, “that what’s happened is that you’ve grown up, and your love has grown up with you.”

“You mean, more adult?”

“More mature,” he said, smiling at her favourite word. “I’ve known quite a few adults who weren’t remarkable for their maturity.”

“Really?” He saw her savouring this new and clearly pleasing notion.

He remembered now how, when he’d suggested that he leave her to sleep, she had said, “After all, darling Archie, I’ve always got you,” and turned her face up to him to be kissed good-night—like someone not far off thirteen.

His leg ached—perhaps he was getting old: was he? With the war over, he could go back to the sun, to France and painting: would he? For so long he, like, he supposed, everyone else, had thought of the end of the war as the beginning of a new and wonderful life, or at least the resumption of an old and comfortable one. Now he wondered whether for most people it would be either. He thought of what Hugh had said about Edward, and tried to imagine how Villy would deal with being abandoned if that were to happen; he thought of the Duchy having to leave her beloved garden if they resumed living in London—and surely that house would be too large for them once the descendants had all gone back to their own houses? He thought of Zoë coming to terms with both her husband’s and her lover’s deaths: he had been moved by her courage, but then he thought that they were all a brave lot: the Duchy with her stoic acceptance of losing Rupert, the Brig with his gallant determination not to be beaten by blindness, Polly with her courage in telling him that she loved him and in her response to his rejection … and finally Clary, asleep next door, whose love, unquenched by time or reason, had transmuted from need and fantasy to some purer and more enduring substance that in its turn could only inspire admiration—and love.

Lying in the dark he made a pact with himself. If Rupert did not return, he would pledge himself to taking his place so much as was possible. If Rupert came back, however, he might embark upon a very different course.

He had refused the offer of a bunk in one of the two cramped little cabins below, and now sat forward with his back to the wheelhouse which protected him from the following wind. It had been dark when they left Guernsey (just as well, since he had no papers of any kind and it had been easy to slip aboard with the seaman who had befriended him). “Just keep your head down, and do as I say,” he had admonished. He had been stowed below until the boat sailed, and very stuffy it had been—he’d sat on the bunk, which was covered with a heavy damp blanket in pitch dark in the cabin that reeked of diesel oil, wet oiled wool and English cigarettes. They’d sailed at four o’clock in the morning and when they were well out of the harbour his friend rapped on the door and said it was all clear. It was good to get out into the fresh, salty air, and he watched the small yellow light in the harbour master’s hut twinkle and recede and go out in the increasing distance. After about an hour one of them came round with thick white mugs of tea with milk and sugar in it—he hadn’t drunk tea for nearly five years. When he said that, they smiled: they’d treated him with a kind of patronizing protectiveness ever since he’d mentioned Dunkirk—he wasn’t sure whether they believed him, were sorry for him or thought he was mad. The seas ran slap on their quarter in strong, but not steep waves, and the small boat chugged and plunged steadily forward. Soon after it was light, he fell into a stupor: he had hardly slept since he left, which was thirty-six hours ago now; his skin itched with fatigue. They woke him for dinner at noon: some sort of stew with mushy peas much in evidence and a thick chunk of rather grey bread. The sky was overcast, although far away patches of sea glittered fitfully from distant sunlight. He slept again and woke in the late afternoon to a watery sun and a fresher wind. They had spread an oilskin over him and he realized that it had been raining—his hair was wet. He was ravenously hungry, and grateful for another mug of tea and a huge sandwich with some sort of tinned meat in it. They also gave him a packet of Weights to smoke. They watched him light his first one, and then one of them said, “E’s bin to sea all right. Wouldn’t only use one match else.” They had left him alone after that and he’d been grateful. He thought he wanted to think, to imagine what he was going back to, to envisage a little of the future but he seemed incapable of thought and his imagination ranged wilfully from Zoë’s face at his return to her face when he had left her—lying in the high carved old bed against the big square pillows that were cased in coarse white cotton—her long dark hair combed out after her labour, the baby tightly swaddled beside her. She had tried to smile at him as he stood by the door and that effort had so poignantly reminded him of Isobel when she had been dying after Neville was born, that he had gone back to her, to take her once more and for the last time in his arms. It was she, after kissing him, who had pushed him gently away, had propelled him into this future that he was embarked upon. She had kept her word, had not tried to make him stay: she had simply wanted him to see the child. Leaving had not been easy, and returning, although it had all the trappings of a happy ending, would mean the reunion with a number of people he loved, some of whom must have become strangers. Clary, for instance, would be nineteen? No, nearly twenty! A young woman—far removed from the little girl who had so passionately needed him. And Neville, he must now be at public school, his voice broken, his asthma perhaps outgrown. But Zoë—how would she be? Had she waited for him all these years, or had she succumbed to somebody else? He must not expect too much: and then he remembered that that was what he had always said to himself about her. She would still be beautiful, he was sure of that, but he had learned to discover beauty in other aspects. Would his parents still be alive? Could he bear to go back into the wood business—to the house in London, the dinner parties, the business entertaining, the family weekends, the occasional holiday abroad, to giving up the idea of painting for the second time in his life? She had found him some materials, to draw with, at least, and once a small box of watercolours that he had used until there was nothing left. He would have gone mad during those first years, when she had constantly to hide him and he could not go out or go far or speak to anyone, if he had not been able to draw.

But in all these random speculations, it was Zoë that he kept coming back to and with the most anxiety, because, he realized, it was the part of homecoming that would exact most from him, and it was also the part where he was afraid he had least to give. There was, of course, another child, a son or a daughter, provided all had gone well, which it hadn’t last time for her, he thought, with a pang of guilt. It was odd how he had not been as miserable when that baby had died as he felt he should have been, but then, nor had she. That was when he had found it most difficult to love her: whatever he did, or said, however he was with her seemed wrong, rousing no more in her than small sparks of irritation … Motherhood had not come easily to her, he had thought then, perhaps she was not cut for children at all. Then, when she had started the second baby, she had seemed different, excited, the symptoms of pregnancy that she had complained about so much before had been lightly borne that second time. But he had never known the outcome, and when he had sent the notes to her and to Clary by Pipette (and, of course, he did not know whether they had ever received them), he had not dared to mention the baby in case she had lost it.

There was no sun now: the breeze had died down, the sea and the sky were all a dusky dark: rain fell, as lightly as mist, and he put on the oilskin. One of the crew walked past him to the bows to empty a pail of potato peelings—the wind, what there was of it, was still on their quarter. I suppose I’m still officially in the Navy, he thought, and wondered how long it would take for him not to be. Then he wondered whether they would consider him, for the last ten months or so, to have been a deserter—a confusing thought. But it was not the Navy he had deserted during those months, it had been Zoë. And now, as the boat took him further and further away from her, it was she who was to be deserted—for good. He could not think of her without such senses of loss and longing that he knew he must not think of her at all, and so escaped again into sleep, or rather, patches of sleep.

He was woken at dawn by spray: the wind had backed round to north-east, but the sea, a livid pewter from the rising sun, was calmer, a heaving surface with only the occasional wave slapping at the starboard quarter.

They brought him a mug of cocoa and said they would soon sight land. He lit his last cigarette and watched for it. The low bank of cloud on the horizon that seemed to separate the sea from the sky resolved itself into a paler streak of mist. He watched as the mist solidified to swatches of brownish green above the chalk white of cliffs and then the small blocks and rows of darker detail presented themselves suddenly as buildings that became steadily paler as the sun rose, until the scene resembled a very distant stage set. He was cramped from being in the same position for so long, and damp from the showers and spray. He continued to watch and his heart felt as cold as ash from a fire deliberately put out. It was possible to do that, he thought: it was the rekindling that seemed insurmountable. But if one knew anything about love, he supposed, it should be possible. He picked up his mug. God! How he loathed the skin of hot milk! He took it off with his fingers and then, without knowing why, he ate it before he drained the mug. Somehow, he thought, I must find it in me to make a start.