Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (42 page)

‘I haven’t got anything white,’ she said. She’d given in. She’d gone in her old lemon-peel-coloured dress that she’d first worn for VE-Day and dinner with Dad, but it felt different because she’d added a collar of large, peacock paste stones that Dad had bought for her from Cameo Corner. And there she was in the large room of the Belgravia mews (two mews made into one, in fact) that was now a symphony of blue and brown, the tobacco walls enhanced by a carpet of gentian blue ‘
à l a
Bakst’, as Caspar said, with thirty or forty people, a few of whom she knew by sight. Part of the deal was that she should hand round dishes of canapés sent in from Searcy – they hired a waiter to deal with the champagne. When she was introduced by Gervase or Caspar it was as ‘our wonderful Polly who looks after us in the shop’. This seemed somehow to stop anyone from wanting to talk to her: they would ask the sort of questions that royalty employed, where courtesy and lack of interest cancelled each other out. As usual, she was even more bored than she remembered being when she wasn’t at the parties. She’d been handing things round for nearly an hour and been subject to increasingly dismissive smiles from the company, who didn’t want to eat any more. She’d just put down the dish and was looking for the waiter to give her a glass of champagne when one of the elderly blue-haired crêpe-de-Chined ladies tapped one of her bare arms. ‘I know who you are because Hermione Knebworth told me. I wonder if you’d take pity on my nephew? He’s over there. He’s lamentably shy and he doesn’t know anybody.’ Without waiting for an answer she took Polly’s arm and steered her to the far corner of the room where a man stood by the window seat, clutching a glass and staring at the ground. ‘Gerald! This is Polly Cazalet who works for Caspar come to talk to you. Mind you talk back.’ And she withdrew.

They looked at each other, and he blushed from his cheekbones to his forehead, but he was wearing a very old tweed coat in which she thought he was probably far too hot anyway. She tried to remember afterwards what had been her first picture of him, but had only a blurred vision of a not tall, rather square figure, with blond hair, very straight and fine, and a wide mouth that turned up at the corners (that was, in fact, the first thing she noticed, because Archie had once said that it meant that the person had a sense of humour, but she’d never been able to test the theory because nobody after he’d said it had turned out to have that sort of mouth). His eyes bulged slightly like a friendly frog.

‘Do you know anybody here?’

‘Only my aunt. I don’t suppose I know her. Aunts are sort of landscape, aren’t they?’ Then he seemed uncomfortable about having talked so much and looked at her with something like panic.

The waiter came by and offered Polly a glass.

‘I should have got you one,’ he muttered, and she saw him going red again. ‘Would you like to sit down?’

‘Yes.’ She sank gratefully on to the window seat.

It seemed extraordinary to her now, but she remembered that then she had felt distinctly sorry for him. She invited him to sit beside her which he did, at a distance, eyeing the gap between them as though he was measuring it. She elicited some information: he had been in the Army, before that had lived in the country with his family, he had one sister, who was married, and his family had recently sent him to London where he was supposed to read law and eat his dinners and become a barrister. He did not sound enthusiastic about this prospect. He’d got himself a flat – in Pimlico. When she asked him what it was like, he said it was awfully small. He said that as though it was the best thing about it. In between these questions and answers – it was a conversation – he kept looking at her intently, and when he saw that she noticed this, looking away.

Eventually his aunt came back to them and said that they must be going or they would be late for dinner with the Laytons. ‘I’m afraid I must tear you away. Have you asked Miss Cazalet to advise you about your flat? He’s bought the most awful little flat. I was telling Caspar – I said if you can do anything with that you’re a genius.’

‘Go and have a look at it, dear,’ Caspar had said next day. ‘Lady Wilmot is not short of the readies, and he’s her only nephew. A touch uncouth, though, wouldn’t you say?’

‘I don’t think so. I think he’s just rather shy.’ And a bit of a weak character, she thought to herself, but she didn’t say anything like that to Caspar. An appointment was made, and a few days later she found herself going down the area steps of a house in Ebury Street.

He opened the door to her; he was wearing the same tweeds, and, she thought, the same shirt. He seemed deeply confused at the sight of her. ‘I thought one of them was coming,’ he said. ‘You know, one of those men who gave the party.’ He led the way down an extremely narrow dark passage into a room that was also dark since its one window faced north and was heavily barred and looked on to the black-brick wall and the steps up to the street. Excepting two kitchen chairs and a piece of carpet the colour of mud, the room was empty. Without saying any more he led her back to the passage, at the end of which were a clutch of doors. ‘This is the other room,’ he said. It was smaller than the first one, but lighter since it faced south with a similar barred window. There was a camp bed along one wall. The other doors introduced a minute kitchen that contained an ancient gas cooker, a stained porcelain sink and a water heater bracketed to the wall. It smelt of gas. The third door was the bathroom: small, stained bath, basin and lavatory with another water heater, placed, she noticed, so that one would hit one’s head if one stood up in the bath. It, too, smelt of gas enhanced by damp. Taps dripped and linoleum curled upon the floor. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘It’s amazing what you can get in a tiny space, isn’t it? It’s what drew me to it.’

It was probably all he could afford, she thought. ‘It has possibilities,’ she said – one always had to say that. They went back to the first room, and she got out her tape measure and notebook.

‘I have to measure first,’ she said, ‘and see which walls are structural, things like that.’

‘It’s awfully good of you to go to so much trouble.’

‘Not at all. It’s my job.’

‘I thought you would just advise me about colours of walls and curtains – that sort of thing.’

‘Well, we do do that, of course, but I think there are some things that need doing before that here.’

‘I’m sure you know best. It’s my first place, actually, so I don’t really know the form.’

He helped her measure, which made it much quicker, and during it, she found that he had been living in the flat, ‘Sleeping here, at any rate,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit difficult to do anything else.’

They had coffee in a place round the corner that she knew. She suggested it. ‘I say! Would you really? I was wondering whether you’d mind if I asked you.’ As well as coffee, he had a poached egg on toast and baked beans. ‘Best thing about the Army was the baked beans,’ he said. ‘We never had them at home. Not that I’ve spent very much time there.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, boarding schools since I was seven and then the war and the Army – you know how it is. And then, after Charles, my older brother, was killed, my mother found it difficult to have me about – she said I reminded her too much of him, you see, which is funny,’ he added, as though he had just thought of it, ‘because I was never really in the least like him.’

‘What was he like?’

‘He was terribly brainy as well as being good-looking and awfully good with girls and that sort of thing.’

Then, looking at her and as though he knew what she was about to ask, he said, ‘No. As a matter of fact, he rather despised me. I wish,’ he added hurriedly, ‘that you would tell me a bit about yourself.’

‘What would you like to know?’

‘Oh, anything! I would like to know anything about you.’

She told him about her family and living at Home Place throughout the war. ‘Gosh, that sounds fun!’ he said. ‘Go on.’ She told him about her mother dying of cancer and how unhappy it had made her father, and saw his slightly bulging eyes become moist. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he said. She told him about Simon, now at Oxford, and Wills just gone to his prep school, and about her sharing a flat with Clary. It was surprising how much she had told him, she thought afterwards, but he was such an attentive listener that it was somehow enjoyable to tell him. Eventually, when it was extremely clear that the waitress thought they should leave or have another meal, and she pointed this out, he said, ‘That’s all right. I’ll simply have another poached egg. Wouldn’t you like one by now? I mean, my first was my breakfast; yours could be an early lunch.’

So they both had poached eggs and while the eggs were coming, Polly said they really ought to talk a bit about the flat. ‘What made you choose it?’

‘It was the first one I saw. It seemed about right – nice and small – so I got it. Do you think it was the wrong choice?’

‘I think it needs quite a bit doing to it. How much do you want to spend?’

‘Whatever you say.’

‘No, I mean seriously.’

‘What do you think?’

‘Have you got any furniture?’

‘Those chairs. And the bed.’

‘Well, I think you’ll probably need to spend about three to five hundred pounds on building and heating repairs, and dealing with the damp. Did you have a survey?’

He hadn’t.

Without thinking, she said teasingly, ‘You’re not very practical, are you?’

He blushed. ‘No. The awful thing is that unpractical people are supposed to be very clever or artistic or something of the sort, and I’m not. There’s really nothing to be said for me at all.’

But there was something to be said for him, she thought, as she caught her bus to go back to the shop. She knew about her capacity for feeling sorry for people, and he seemed, on the face of it, a prime candidate, but it wasn’t all, or even the first thing she felt.

She was given the work on his flat, as Caspar and Gervase were much taken up with the decorating of three large hotel suites and a very grand house in the country where the owners wanted to move their kitchens from the cavernous basement to the ground floor. ‘You do it, dear girl. It will be very good practice, and with such a little henhouse you can hardly go wrong.’

A week later, when she had done her drawings, assembled an electrician and a plumber, she decided that she must see him again to get his approval, and rang him early one morning. ‘Oh, good. When?’ On the spur of the moment (she told herself), she asked him to supper in her flat. ‘It’s most awfully kind of you,’ he said. He sounded very pleased.

She bought some smoked haddock and made a kedgeree, one of her best things, the night before, and a fruit salad of grapes and bananas. Clary was away and she had the place to herself as Neville, who had spent a good many weeks there, had now gone back to school. That, too, was a kind of relief as Neville was just as untidy as Clary, but also ate any and all of the food in the house, and had filled up Clary’s room with a set of drums, a double bass, his trumpet and a portable piano and held interminable rehearsals with his friends every evening until late into the night, which interfered with any social life she wanted to have. Not that she’d had very much. Christopher had been going to come, but at the last minute he had cried off: Oliver had suddenly become ill, and couldn’t be left. ‘He’s got cancer,’ Christopher had said. ‘The vet says he may have to be put down if the operation doesn’t work.’ So she’d offered to go down to him for a weekend, but Christopher had said that he’d be better on his own. She’d been relieved because his loving her made her feel sad and uncomfortable with him, and she was afraid if she was with him he might ask her about her hopeless love and that she might lie about it, because she knew that she would never love Christopher, and if he knew that there was nobody else on the horizon he might have hope.

Gerald arrived exactly when she had asked him, and he brought a very beautiful fern as a present. ‘I didn’t know what you’d like,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never liked cut flowers myself, and there wasn’t much choice of things in pots. It’s funny,’ he went on, as they tramped up the stairs to her room, ‘but I kept wanting to bring you a cat as a present. Then I thought you might have one anyway. Have you?’

She said no, but she missed having one. ‘I haven’t got a garden.’

‘Oh, well, then. It’s yet another drawback to London: the lack of good gardens for cats.’

‘There are quite a lot, but not so many where you’ve got your flat.’

‘Are there? I hardly know London. But you do like cats, don’t you? I was right about that?’

She told him about Pompey and how much she’d loved him, and he told her about a cat he’d had when he was seven, which had always slept on his bed and went for rides in his bicycle basket.

‘What happened to him?’

‘It was a her. She had kittens and then my parents had her put down while I was at school.’

‘How awful for you!’

‘They didn’t like cats, you see. I’d hidden her from them but, of course, when I was sent to school, they found out.’

Pretty difficult to hide a cat in a house from your family, she thought, but she didn’t say so.

He sat in the Victorian chair in her room looking round him and not saying anything.

‘Do you like it?’

‘I knew I would. It’s – elegant and charming. Suits you.’

He was very appreciative of everything: the dark green dining room, the kedgeree – he had two helpings – and the fruit salad. At one point he said, ‘I say! I am having a lovely time!’ and the slightly bulging eyes met hers with such a frank and grateful pleasure that she was infected by it.

After supper, she fetched the drawings she had made and laid them out on the table. He was far quicker than most of the clients at understanding them, and when she remarked on this, he said, ‘Well, it’s a bit like map-reading, isn’t it? And I had to get very good at that.’

‘The war?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you?’

‘Moved about. Got dropped into places. From time to time.’

‘You were a paratrooper?’

‘That’s it.’

She stared at him, trying to imagine having to jump out of an aeroplane into nothing. ‘I know I don’t look the part,’ he said apologetically, ‘romantic heroes and all that stuff. I look more like a frog, really, which is not much good unless you are one.’