All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (3 page)

As she prepared their tea – sardine sandwiches and flapjacks she had made that morning – Zoë wondered what would happen to Home Place. Rachel surely would not want to live there alone, but the brothers might share ownership of it, although this almost certainly meant that they would never go anywhere else on holiday and she longed to go abroad – to France or Italy. St Tropez! Venice! Rome!

The front door slammed, followed by the thud of a satchel being dropped on the flagstones in the hall and then Georgie appeared. He wore his school’s summer uniform: a white shirt, grey shorts, tennis shoes and white socks. Everything that was supposed to be white was of a greyish pallor.

‘Where’s your blazer?’

He looked down at himself, surprised. ‘I don’t know. Somewhere. We had games. We don’t have to wear blazers for games.’ His grubby little face was wet with sweat. He returned Zoë’s kiss with a casual hug. ‘Did you give Rivers his carrot?’

‘Oh dear, I’m afraid I forgot.’

‘Oh, Mum!’

‘Darling, he’ll be all right. He gets lots of food.’

‘That’s not the point. The carrot is to stop him being bored.’ He rushed to the scullery, knocking over a chair in his haste. He returned a moment later with Rivers on his shoulder. He still looked reproachful, but Rivers was clearly delighted, nibbling his ear and burrowing under his shirt collar. ‘A mere blazer is nothing compared to a rat’s life.’

‘Blazers are not mere, and Rivers wasn’t starving to death. Don’t be silly.’

‘All right.’ He smiled so engagingly that, as usual, she felt a shock of love for him. ‘Could we start tea now? I’m really hungry. We had poison meat and frog spawn for lunch. And Forrester was sick everywhere so I couldn’t eat it.’

They were both sitting at a corner of the table. She smoothed his damp hair back from his forehead. ‘We must wait for Jules. Meanwhile, I have to tell you something. The Duchy died this morning. Quite peacefully, Aunt Rachel said. Daddy’s going down to Home Place today, and we may be joining him tomorrow.’

‘How did she die?’

‘Well, she was very old, you know. She was nearly ninety.’

‘That’s nothing for a tortoise. Poor Duchy. I feel very sorry for her not being there.’ He sniffed and brought an unspeakably filthy handkerchief out of his shorts pocket. ‘I had to clean my knees a bit with it but it’s only earth dirt.’

A second bang of the front door and Juliet came into the kitchen. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she said, not sounding it at all, wrenching off her crimson tie and school blazer, which fell to the floor with her satchel.

‘Where’s your hat, darling?’

‘In my satchel. There are limits and that hat is definitely one of them.’

‘You’ll have scrunched it all up,’ Georgie said, his tone a subtle mixture of admiration and cheek. At fifteen, Juliet was eight years older and Georgie desperately wanted her to love and be interested in him. Most of the time she alternated between being carelessly kind and sternly judgemental. ‘Guess what?’ he said.

Juliet had cast herself into a chair. ‘God! What?’

‘The Duchy’s dead. She died this morning. Mum told me so I knew before you.’

‘The Duchy? How tragic! She wasn’t murdered or anything?’

‘Of course not. She died very peacefully with Aunt Rachel.’

‘Is she dead too?’

‘No. I meant Aunt Rachel was with her. You’ll have to be far older before you know a murdered person,’ she added.

Georgie was eating sandwiches rather fast, and Rivers was getting fed bits of them.

‘Mummy, must we have tea with that rat?’ And then, feeling that it was rather a heartless remark, Juliet said in her school-drama voice, ‘I feel so upset, I don’t think I can eat a thing.’

Zoë, who knew a good deal about her stunningly beautiful daughter’s ways (had they not been her own when she was that age?), spoke soothingly: ‘Of course you’re upset, darling. We’re all sad because we all loved her, but she was quite old, and it’s just good that she didn’t suffer any pain. Eat something, darling, and you’ll feel better.’

‘And,’ Georgie continued, ‘Dad’s gone down to Home Place, and we’ll all go first thing tomorrow morning if Aunt Rachel wants us to. Which she will.’

‘Oh, Mummy! You were going to take me shopping, to get my jeans! You promised!’ And at the thought of this betrayal, Juliet burst into real tears. ‘We can’t buy them on a weekday because of horrible school and that means I’ll have to wait a-whole-nother week. And all my friends have got them. It’s not fair! Couldn’t we go shopping in the morning and then go on an afternoon train?’

And Zoë, not at all feeling like a continuing scene, said weakly, ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’

Georgie said, ‘And we all know what that means. It means we aren’t going to do what you want, but we’re not going to tell you that now.’

POLLY

‘I would start all this at half-term.’

She had been kneeling in front of the lavatory having been wrenchingly sick, as she had been every morning for the last week. It was a very old-fashioned lavatory and she had to pull the chain twice. She bathed her face in cold water and washed her hands just as it was reluctantly turning tepid. There wasn’t time for a bath. There was the children’s breakfast to make – the nauseating smell of eggs frying came immediately to her, but the children could make do with boiled ones.

There was one of those biscuit tins upholstered in padded chintz by her bed, a relic from her mother-in-law, now filled with Carr’s water biscuits. She sat on the bed eating them. Two previous pregnancies had taught her some tricks of the trade. In another eight to ten weeks the sickness would disappear and she would start the fat, backache stage. ‘It isn’t that I don’t love them once they’re here,’ she had said to Gerald. ‘It’s all the trouble of having them. If I was a blackbird, for instance, it would simply be a matter of sitting on lovely tidy eggs for a week or two.’

‘Think of elephants,’ he had replied soothingly, as he stroked her hair. ‘It takes them two years.’ On another occasion he had said, ‘I wish I could have them for you.’ Gerald often said he wished he could do whatever was required for her, but he never could. He was neither good at making up his mind nor at acting upon whatever uneasy conclusion he drew about anything. The only thing that Polly could completely, utterly, unfailingly rely upon was his love for her and their children. At the beginning this had astonished her: she had read about marriage in novels, had thought she knew it progressed from the rapturous being-in-love stage to a quiet settlement of whatever would turn out to be the status quo, but it was not at all like that. Gerald’s love for her had brought out qualities in him that she had neither known nor imagined any man to possess. His even, steady gentleness, his perspicacity, his continuous interest in knowing what she thought and felt. Then there was his secret sense of humour – he was shy and unforthcoming with most people, his jokes reserved for her, and he could be very funny – but perhaps above all his great talent was for being a father. He had stayed with her throughout her first long labour, had wept when the twins were born and had been a hands-on parent, both with them and subsequently with Andrew, two years later. ‘We have to populate this house somehow.’ He would be calm about this fourth baby, she knew that – he had probably sensed it already and was waiting for her to tell him.

By now she had struggled into her shirt, pinafore dress and sandals, and brushed her copper-coloured hair into a ponytail. She no longer felt sick, but a bit shaky about cooking. Thanks to the amazing cache of Turners she and Gerald had discovered during that first tour of the house about ten years ago, they had been able to mend the acres of roof, then convert one wing into a comfortable house, with a large kitchen in which they could all eat, a second bathroom and a large playroom (it had begun as a day nursery). Nan had been offered a warm room on the ground floor, but she had insisted on sleeping next to the children: ‘Oh, no, m’lady. I couldn’t have my babies sleeping on a different floor. It wouldn’t be right.’ Her age, which was considerable, was unknown, and she clearly suffered from what she called her rheumatics, but she hobbled about, her eyes and hearing hardly impaired. A good many adjustments had had to be made over the years. Nan’s notion of the part that parents played in the upbringing of their children (teatime with Mummy in their best clothes and then a goodnight kiss from her and Daddy) had perforce undergone significant change. Gerald had effected this. In Nan’s eyes he could do no wrong, so if he wished to bath his children, read to them, even, in the early stages, to change their nappies, she put it all down to his eccentricity, which she knew the upper classes went in for. ‘People have their little ways,’ was one of her sayings when anything happened that she disapproved of or did not understand.

In spite of all they had done, the very large remaining parts of the enormous Edwardian house still defeated Polly. It required a lot of attention. Rooms had to be aired regularly in an attempt to fight the damp that crept through the building, leaving swags of weary wallpaper, infesting attics and passages with a minute speckled black fungus that Gerald had remarked looked like Napoleon’s disposition of troops before battle. The children, or at least the twins and their friends, played endless games of hide-and-seek, Sardines and a game devised by them called Torchlight Ogres. Andrew minded very much about being left out, and several times Eliza allowed him to join them, but he always got lost and cried. ‘I told you, Mummy, he wouldn’t enjoy it,’ Jane would say. These were everyday arguments and Gerald usually stepped in with a plan that restored goodwill.

He met Polly at the bottom of the stairs to tell her that the Duchy had died. Rupert had gone down to Home Place, and would tell them, once it had been arranged, the date of the funeral.

RACHEL

‘I poached her an egg. She’s usually partial to an egg.’

‘I can’t help it, Mrs Tonbridge. I put the tray by her in the morning room, and she just thanked me and said she didn’t want nothing.’

The poached egg lay on its bed of butter-soaked toast. Eileen eyed it hopefully. If Mrs Tonbridge turned out not to fancy it out of respect, she wasn’t going to throw it to the birds. ‘I’ve drawn all the blinds on the first floor,’ she offered. ‘And Miss Rachel said Mr Rupert is coming down tonight. She asked to see you.’

‘Why didn’t you say so before? Whatever will she think – me dawdling with Mrs Senior lying upstairs?’ She gave one of her kirby-grips a vicious shove, took off her apron, smoothed her dress over her bust and made off.

The doctor had been and the district nurse would be coming later on. Tonbridge had better go to Battle to do some shopping – more family would be arriving for the weekend. Oh, and Miss Sidney would be coming down on the four thirty so would he please meet her? ‘I’ll leave the housekeeping to you, Mrs Tonbridge – something light and simple.’ She really couldn’t bear to think of food . . .

This produced conflict for Mrs Tonbridge. On the one hand it seemed only right that Miss Rachel should show respect for her mother in this manner, but on the other she was seriously worried by her evident exhaustion and the knowledge that the poor lady had been eating very little for some weeks. This was not right. As cook to the family for nearly twenty years – she had been with them long before she married Tonbridge and had had the courtesy title, enjoyed by all cooks then, of Mrs Cripps – there was nothing she did not know about their eating habits. Miss Rachel, like her mother, preferred plain food and not much of it, but since Mrs Senior’s illness she had only picked at her food.

‘If I was to send you up a nice hot cup of consommé before you have a rest, to be ready for when Mr Rupert comes?’

And Rachel, realizing that it was much easier to consent than refuse, thanked her and agreed.

When Eileen arrived with the consommé she was lying on the stiff little buttoned day-bed that the Duchy had decreed would be right for her back. It had been a considerable concession as the Duchy, who had sat on hard and upright chairs all of her life, had never, in any context, thought much of comfort. The day-bed was, in fact, uncomfortable in an entirely different way, but by tucking a cushion in the small of her back, Rachel had managed to use it.

Eileen, speaking in what the family called her church voice, asked whether she would like the blinds drawn and her crocheted blanket if she wished to put her feet up. Sipping the consommé, Rachel agreed to all of this, and watched while Eileen knelt creakily to undo the laces on her sensible shoes (the maid’s rheumatism clearly hurt her), lifted her legs onto the sofa and tucked the blanket very thoroughly round them. Then, as though Rachel was already asleep, she tiptoed to the window to pull down the blinds, and practically glided out of the room. Affection, Rachel thought. It is all affection for the Duchy. So long as it was an oblique gesture, she was able to accept it. She put down the cup and lay back on the hard buttoned velvet. My darling mother, she began to think, and as a few weary tears slipped from her eyes, she fell into a merciful sleep.

CLARY

‘You really mustn’t get so worked up, sweetheart. It’s only a week, after all. A week in a caravan. It will be a marvellous change – and a rest.’

Clary didn’t answer. If Archie thought that a week in a caravan with the children was going to be remotely restful from her point of view he was either mad or didn’t care what it would be like for her because he had stopped loving her.

‘It will be much cheaper as well. Last time we had to spend a fortune taking the little dears on outings all over London and for endless meals out. And they never wanted to do the same things. In my day you got one treat on your birthday and one at Christmas.’

‘You can’t think that four of us going on the ferry with the car and then hiring a caravan is actually going to be cheaper! You just want to go to France.’

‘Of course I want to go to France.’ His voice was loud with anger. He put down the brush he had been cleaning and looked at her, bent over the sink, trying to clean the porridge saucepan, her hair hanging round her face. ‘Clary! Darling girl. I’m sorry!’