Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (14 page)

‘I had it made,’ Louise said. ‘Michael brought the silk back from Paris when he went there and I found this tailor in Soho called Mr Perfect. He can make anything – you just tell him what you want. He has an enormous wife who is corseted from just below her neck to just above her knees – she looks like a torpedo, but she is very nice as well. And Dad gave me these earrings. He simply loves buying jewellery, but I expect you know that.’

She suddenly remembered driving away from Lansdowne Road with him, and Villy’s jewel box falling open on her knees and how sick with jealousy she had felt. This feeling was interrupted by Louise, who, with a far friendlier smile, offered to give her Mr Perfect’s address and telephone number.

Edward looked at them fondly. ‘My two favourite women,’ he said.

What really broke the ice was talking about the theatre and asking Louise what plays she had acted in. Louise became animated and told her about the student rep, and the extraordinary house they had lived in and how they had all managed on one meal a day and had lain down in the road to get a hitch to the theatre in the mornings – it was three miles and if they couldn’t afford the bus they had to walk it.

Edward said, good heavens, he’d no idea it was as spartan as that, and she had turned to him and said, ‘But you never came to see. You were the only parents who never came, even when I was playing the lead in
Granite
,’ and Diana saw that this hurt his feelings. He shifted in his chair and muttered something, but Louise went on, ‘My mother thought I should be doing something to do with the war, you see, and of course Dad agreed with her. Well, you didn’t
dis
agree, did you, Dad?’

From the way Louise said, ‘My mother’, Diana divined that there was a good deal of tension there. She said, ‘One so
wants
one’s children to fulfil themselves, to be happy and to do what they want. But so often they don’t
know
what they want. I think it’s wonderful that you were so sure.’

And Louise – she was really hardly more than a child, after all – positively glowed.

She went on to talk about the current theatre in London. Had she seen Coward’s new play
Blithe Spirit
? It had a marvellous actress called Margaret Rutherford in it as the medium, and Kay Hammond was delicious as the spirit. Edward said he really liked
her
: she’d been in a frightfully funny play called
French Without Tears
. She had ‘oomph’, he said, and Diana made a little conspiratorial face to Louise that meant men would confuse ‘oomph’ with acting ability. Edward said he’d take them to
Blithe Spirit
if they liked. He did not seem to mind, or notice, that she was ganging up on him with his daughter – seemed only delighted that they were getting on.

By the time they were having coffee and brandy, Louise was calling her Diana – at her request – and had accepted a second brandy. She had drunk a good deal before, during and after dinner, and Diana was surprised at her capacity. Wrongly, as it turned out. When Louise disappeared to go to the lavatory Edward congratulated her. ‘Darling, she loves you. You hit just the right note with her. I can’t talk to her about Shakespeare and performances and all that sort of thing.’

‘What have you told her exactly?’

‘Oh. That you are the only woman in the world for me – that kind of thing.’

‘And about Susan?’

‘Well – no. I haven’t mentioned that. I did tell her that it had been going on for a long time. She asked if you had a husband, and I told her about that.’ There was a slight pause, and then he said, ‘You
do
like her, don’t you, darling?’

‘I think she’s lovely. She looks very like you.’

‘Nonsense,’ he said, but he was clearly pleased. ‘She thinks it would be better to get Villy into a house before I tell her.’

‘Oh, does she?’

‘Well, when I talked about it, she agreed.’

Which was not really the same thing, she thought, but did not say so.

The waiter came round for last orders for drinks – they were back in the ladies’ room – and Louise was still absent. She said she would go and see if she was all right. She had to ask the way from the drinks waiter, who explained that it wouldn’t be upstairs because only members were allowed to use them, and pointed out a passage at the back of the hall.

She found Louise hanging over a basin laving her face with cold water. She looked up as Diana came in; her face was white and glistening. ‘I should never have tried lobster,’ she said. ‘I might have known it would make me sick.’

Diana handed her a towel. ‘You poor girl!’ but as Louise took it, she said, ‘Oh, God! It’s starting again!’ and retired to the lavatory.

By the time she finally emerged, Diana had repaired her face, considered and rejected going to tell Edward that they might be some time.

‘It’s kind of you to wait. Sorry to be so revolting.’

‘It’s horrid for you. Bad luck.’ She saw the reflection of Louise’s wan face in the mirror above the basin – saw also, then, that her eyes had filled with tears.

‘I used to
have
to eat lobster when I was pregnant,’ she said, ‘and I used to feel dreadfully sick then. It was silly of me to have it at all.’

Diana said nothing. It seemed a very unlikely story, but she also remembered that when young she had intensely resented the idea that she might have drunk too much.

‘Oh dear, I seem to have gone a sort of greenish colour.’

‘I’ve got some rouge if you’d like it.’

‘Oh, thanks. Then I won’t have to tell Dad. And then he won’t ask me if I’m having another baby.’

It had just occurred to Diana that pregnancy rather than drink might be the trouble. ‘Are you?’

‘Oh
no!
I couldn’t be. God forbid!’

She had finished with the rouge and was now dragging a comb through the damp strands of tangled hair. ‘Do you love him?’

There was something so urgent, as well as unexpected about the question, that she was taken aback – found herself looking at the girl in the mirror whose eyes met hers with a direct curiosity that was irresistible.

‘Yes,’ she heard herself say, and then, relieved that she could say it, ‘yes, I do. Very much.’

‘Oh, well, then. You should go ahead.
Nothing
should keep you apart.’

Diana saw that there were still, or again, tears in her eyes.

When they rejoined Edward, he seemed neither to have noticed how long they had been nor that Louise looked ill. At Diana’s insistence, he drove Louise to Edwardes Square before they went back to the flat.

‘You’re not to worry about me. I shall be perfectly all right.’

But as the taxi drove away from the cottage and she turned in her seat to see her mother standing at the garden gate waving, with a gesture that looked as though she was warding off flies, Zoë felt pretty sure that she would not be. Maud’s death had been so sudden that her mother was clearly still in shock. She had gone to the island in response to the telegram – ‘Maud passed away last night. Very sudden. Mummy.’ She had set out immediately, having tried and failed to get through to her mother on the telephone. She had arrived at Cotter’s End to find the door locked, but just as she was going in search of a telephone to see if she could ring the Lawrences or Fenwicks, the latter turned up, Miss Fenwick driving a battered old Vauxhall, the front of which was entirely full of Mrs Fenwick. In the back was Zoë’s mother.

‘There!’ Miss Fenwick exclaimed. ‘What did I tell you? I knew your daughter would turn up.’

‘We just came back to see if things were all right,’ she explained, as she helped Mrs Headford out of the car. ‘But I had the strangest feeling that you might be here. Isn’t that a wonderful piece of luck?’ Her excruciating cheeriness changed sharply to a tragic undertone as she said to Zoë, ‘It’s been a terrible shock for her. I don’t think she’s been able to take it in. All right, Mother, I’m just coming. Mother didn’t really want the outing before her lunch, but I couldn’t leave her to herself.’

Her
mother walked slowly round from the car. She wore her old camel-coloured coat and a black woolly turban that was not quite straight.

‘Have you got your key, Cicely?’ Miss Fenwick called from the car.

‘I thought you had it.’

‘I put it in your purse, dear. Have a look, just to make sure.’

Mrs Headford fumbled in her stiff, glossy handbag, which opened suddenly. A bottle of pills, a pink comb, a small hand mirror and half of a fountain pen skidded across the frosty path between them. ‘Oh dear!’ Zoë, who had been going to kiss her mother, stooped to retrieve everything.

‘Have you found it, dear?’

‘What? Oh – the key.’ She fumbled again and produced an imitation snakeskin purse with a zip fastener. The open bag hung drunkenly on her arm while she battled with the zip on the purse.

‘Let me do it.’ Zoë took it. The zip was stuck because its teeth had caught the lining, and she had to wrench it open. The purse contained a ten-shilling note and sixpences, but no key.

‘I remember now. I put it in my coat pocket to be more handy.’

Zoë put all the things back into her mother’s bag.

‘I’ll bring over your night things after Mother’s had her rest,’ Miss Fenwick called, and the car moved off with a convulsive leap.

‘I should have told her there was no need. I have other night things and I don’t want to be a burden.’

They had walked up the path to the front door, which her mother failed to unlock. ‘Maud always had the key,’ she said, as she stood aside for Zoë to do it.

‘It opens anti-clockwise, Mummy, that’s why you couldn’t do it.’

The house had the dank, silent air of a place abandoned for far longer than twenty-four hours. It was extremely cold.

‘I think we’d better light the fire, Mummy, before we have lunch.’

‘Do you, dear? Maud used to leave it until after tea.’

‘But isn’t it rather cold?’

‘Well, it
is
cold weather, dear, so it would be.’

They had gone down the passage to the small sitting room. Two glasses and a sherry decanter stood on the rickety table by the window, whose curtains were drawn. Zoë opened them and the increased light seemed mostly to reveal a kind of ashy dust everywhere. Her mother’s crochet lay splayed on her usual armchair. The fireplace was full of ash; a vase of dead chrysanthemums stood on the mantelpiece, which had Christmas cards leaning against the china rabbits and bottles of striped and coloured sand.

‘I think we’d better both have a glass of sherry.’ Her mother went to the glass-fronted cupboard that contained glasses and teacups. ‘It was good of you to come,’ she said, and her eyes, which were puffy from crying, filled with tears. Zoë put her arms round the soft, stiff body and her mother broke into convulsive, wailing little sobs. ‘She was quite all right yesterday morning. At breakfast we had a little piece of fried bread because somebody had given Maud a tin of mushrooms and we were finishing them up as they were too rich for one meal. She was going shopping after – she always went on Tuesdays – and she was going to change my library book, but I’d left it upstairs. She
would
go – she wouldn’t let me fetch it. I heard a crash and I thought she’d fallen down, and I went out and there she was – just lying there!’

For a moment she was speechless, and covered her face with the handkerchief Zoë gave her. ‘I thought she’d fainted and I went to get a glass of water, but you know how it is when something unexpected happens – I couldn’t find a clean glass and then I had to let the tap run because the pipes are funny here and she always said let the tap run. When I went back to her, I realised – I realised that she wasn’t breathing. I went and rang the doctor and then I went back and sat on the stairs with her. Oh, Zoë! It was such a dreadful shock!’

Zoë settled her in her chair and poured out the sherry. ‘Then what happened?’ She felt it was good for her mother to tell the whole story.

‘I took off her hat.’ She looked at her daughter as though appealing for approval. ‘It seemed wrong for her to be lying there in her hat.’

‘Drink some sherry, Mummy, it will do you good.’

During the rest of the sherry – there was enough left for two drinks each – she had learned that the doctor had come and said that Maud had had a heart attack. He had arranged for her to be taken away, and he had rung Miss Fenwick who had come and fetched
her
: ‘They didn’t think I should be alone, you see. Everyone was very kind – very thoughtful.’ She had come back this morning to collect some clothes and to see if the cat was all right. ‘I sent you the telegram, because I thought you ought to know.’

She had lit the fire and then gone to the kitchen to find something for them to eat. They had lunched off a small tin of baked beans with toast.

During the next few days before the funeral she had learned: from the doctor that, in fact, Maud’s heart had been in what he described as a dicky state, ‘But she never wanted it mentioned or known because she didn’t want to worry your mother’; from a lawyer in Ryde, who came out to see them, that Maud had left the cottage and its contents to her mother, together with what he said would amount to a few thousand pounds, ‘Her pension, of course, stops at her death’; and from her mother that she had every intention of staying on in the cottage. Zoë had suggested that she might like to return to London, but her mother had said, ‘No, dear. I have
friends
here. Cotter’s End is my
home
. And, after all, I’m used to being on my own.’