Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (51 page)

The letter from Avril Fenwick arrived promptly – she must have replied by return of post, Zoë thought, as she took it in on her mother’s breakfast tray.

When she went to fetch the tray, she found her mother still in bed, the letter spread before her and her breakfast untouched.

‘Oh, Zoë!’ she cried. ‘Such news! Such a wonderful letter! I’ve never had such a letter in my life. Poor Avril! She didn’t want to tell me because she thought I would be so upset, but when
I
wrote to her she says she saw her way clear at once! And she
was
ninety-six, after all. As Avril says, it was a good age and she had a wonderful life. But it’s so
kind
of her! I can’t get over it!’

‘Mummy, perhaps I’d better read the letter.’

‘Do, dear. It’s such a wonderful letter, do.’

She did. She had gathered that old Mrs Fenwick had died, and read through the paragraph that enumerated her many – Zoë felt hitherto well-concealed – virtues. Her courage, the way she always spoke her mind, never mind to whom or the circumstances, her zest for life – and here there was a menu of the foods she had most enjoyed – her high standards about other people’s behaviour, her wonderful endurance of a difficult marriage, to a man who was always either working or obsessed by his collection of butterflies and whose early death had proved a blessing in disguise – Mother had never really seen the point of men . . . Zoë gave up at this point and went on to the next page. Here, Miss Fenwick suggested at some length that Mrs Headford might like to ‘team up’ with her, share her cottage and ‘stick it out’ together. She said how much she would enjoy looking after her, what a lot they had in common, how, if they pooled their resources, they would have more money, and all kinds of little trips might be arranged, and finally what a kindness it would be if Cicely were to accept, since she contemplated living alone, after all these happy years with Mother, with such dread. Finally, she begged Cicely to think it over carefully without hurrying about her decision, and meanwhile she would be delighted to get Cotter’s End ready for her return. The letter ended ‘with ever so much love, Avril’.

‘Isn’t it wonderful of her? When she had her own grief to bear, to think of me.’ She was trembling with excitement. ‘If you don’t mind, Zoë, I shall send her a telegram. I should go at once. To think that she’s gone through the funeral weeks ago and I never knew! So the sooner I go the better.’

‘Would you like to speak to her? You could ring her up.’

‘I couldn’t, dear. She’s not on the telephone. Her mother didn’t like the idea. They had one for a bit, but her mother said that Avril talked on it too much.’

The telegram was sent, and in it she arranged to leave in two days’ time.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Oh, no, dear. Avril will meet me. Either at Ryde, or she will come over on the ferry and meet me at the station in Southampton.’

All day, she talked about Avril and her letter. She had no hesitation about her decision, she said. It was the most wonderful opportunity. And then came out – streamed out – how frightened she had been at the prospect of living alone: the long evenings, the noises at night, the absence of anyone to talk to, the fear that she might not manage if anything went wrong – the gas cylinders, for instance: they were so heavy and could be dangerous, they could leak without you knowing it – and the shopping when she didn’t have a car and could not drive and so on. All of it made Zoë feel she had felt so unwelcome in London with them – with
her
.

When Rupert got back from work and was informed, he made Martinis and entered into her mother’s spirit of festivity. He listened to an account of the letter, was given it to read and then told its contents all over again; throughout, he was patient and charming to her, while she, Zoë, was virtually silent. When Ellen sent Juliet up to say goodnight, her grandmother said: ‘I’m going back home, Juliet. I’m going back to the island. Will you come and visit me in the summer?’

‘Will there be other people on it?’

‘Oh, yes, dear. All my friends. It’s a big island. You’ve been there, you remember.’

‘I don’t because I was a baby.’ She shut her eyes tightly to kiss her grandmother and escaped.

‘Well!’ Rupert said, when Zoë’s mother had gone to bed and they were on their own in the drawing room. ‘All’s well that ends well. Are you taking her down?’

‘No. She wired her friend, and she’s coming
here
to escort her home. She seems to want to, and that’s it.’

‘Well, that seems to me a good thing,’ he said tiredly. ‘Obviously this Avril person is fond of your mother.’

‘She said – Mummy, I mean – how nice it would be for us to be on our own again.’

‘And will it?’

‘I don’t know, Rupert. Will it?’ She looked at him; there was a moment when they both seemed frozen. It came to her that that was how it had been for a very long time, and also that they could stay like that, or move on to something better or worse.

She said, ‘We’ve never talked about what it was like for either of us all those years that you were away. I want to now. I have to tell you something.’

He had been standing by the fireplace fiddling with the fire. Now he straightened up, looked quickly at her and then sat on the arm of the chair opposite – almost, she thought, as though he was poised for escape.

‘You sound very serious, darling,’ he said, and she recognised the voice that he used when he thought she was about to make a scene.

‘Yes. While you were away, I fell in love with someone. An American officer I met on a train coming back from seeing Mummy on the island. He asked me to have dinner with him – and I did. It was the summer of 1943: I’d heard nothing from you for two years – not since the note that the Frenchman brought. I thought you were dead.’ She swallowed; that sounded like an excuse, and she didn’t want to make any excuses. ‘Anyway, that’s not the point – I think I would have fallen in love with him anyway. We had an affair. I used to go to London to be with him, telling all sorts of lies to the family. Only for short times – he was taking war pictures for the American Army, so he was often away. When it got to the Normandy landing, he was away a lot.’ She thought for a moment; she was anxious now not to gloss anything over, leave anything out. ‘He wanted to marry me. He wanted to meet the family – and particularly Juliet. We had our first – row – well, really the only one we ever had – about that. Because I wouldn’t agree—’

‘To marry him?’

‘No. I wanted to do that. But to tell the family about it when we didn’t know whether you would come back or not. And then, the following spring, nearly a year after the invasion and still we heard nothing from you, he had to go to photograph one of the concentration camps, I think it was Belsen. About a week later, he suddenly rang me at Home Place to ask me to go to London that night, and I couldn’t because I’d said I’d look after the children while Ellen had a weekend off. By then the war was so nearly over and I was – I was imagining going to America with him. I got back from taking the children for their afternoon walk and there he was, sitting next to the Duchy at tea. The Duchy was wonderful. I think she knew but she never said anything. She told me to take him into the morning room after tea so that we could be on our own. He was different – unreachable, somehow. He said he had to go back to London at once as he was flying the next morning. He was going to another camp. He said,’ for the first time she felt her voice trembling, ‘he said he was glad he’d seen Juliet. He said he was going to be away for a long time. Then he went.’ She stopped. ‘I never saw him again.’

‘He went back to America without a word?’

‘No. He died.’ It was a great effort to tell him how Jack had died, but she managed it. ‘About six weeks later, you came back. Oh. There was one important thing I’ve left out. He was Jewish. That’s why. Why he killed himself.’

There was a long silence. Then he got up and came over to her, took her hands and kissed them. ‘You’re still in love with him?’

‘No. I don’t think I could have told you if I was.’ Then she became anxious that some element of truth would elude her. ‘I shall always have love for him.’

‘I understand that,’ he said; she saw tears in his eyes.

‘It’s a great relief to have told you.’

‘I admire you so much for telling me.
Love
and admire you. You have been far braver than I.’

And while she was still trying to understand what he meant, he began to tell her his tale. As he told it, she could not imagine why none of this had occurred to her before. He had been away so long; he had been left by Pipette with this woman who had taken them in, and on whom he had in the immediate future to depend. When, in the telling, he lapsed from Michèle to the diminutive – his pet name for her – she felt a dart of jealousy and was almost glad of it. Then, as he told her about how the woman had gone to so much trouble to get him painting materials, she thought how little she had ever supported him in that, but when he described the visits of Germans to the farm, she realised how potent this isolation plus danger must have been. And then he came to the difficult part. The invasion, and his continued stay at the farm, and the reason for it. For he did not gloss things over, or excuse himself, or pretend that he had not loved her. She had wanted him to stay and see the child, and then she had sent him away. He did not even say that it had been he who had made that decision. ‘I am really trying to match your honesty,’ he said. ‘I can’t match you in anything else. It was not excusable to you,’ he said, ‘leaving you all that time without knowing. I owed Miche a great deal, but not, perhaps, that. But that is what I did. Archie said I should tell you,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t.’

‘Archie? You told
him
?’

‘Only Archie. I told no one else.’

‘Archie knew about Jack. I took Jack to have a drink with him one evening, and it was Archie who Jack wrote to before – he died. He came down to Home Place to tell me.’

‘He certainly has been a repository of family secrets.’

‘But that’s hardly his fault, is it? He’s simply the sort of kind, loyal person who gets told things.’

‘You’re right. Oh, Zoë, how much you have changed!’

‘Do you,’ she said – she was dreading the possible answer – ‘do you keep in touch with her?’

‘No. Oh, no. It was agreed that we should part completely. No letters, no visits, nothing at all.’

‘You must have found that very hard.’

‘It’s been hard for both of us.’

‘For her? How do you know?’

‘For
us
, my darling. Things have been hard for
us
.’

‘I suppose we made them worse than they need have been.’

‘I don’t know. I feel as you do. I couldn’t tell you about Miche until it was over for me. Or over enough.’ He touched her face, stroked her cheekbone with one finger. ‘Oh, the relief! To know you again! And you began it. You were the brave one.’ She wanted to catch his gaiety – his relief – but she could not. She was not finished, and now, what was left to tell him seemed the worst of all. She remembered the Duchy saying that one should not burden other people with the responsibility of one’s experience – or something of the kind. The whole business of Philip had happened to someone she scarcely recognised as herself. But then she had had the baby that had turned out to be Philip’s – and she had put Rupert through all the misery of her pregnancy, labour and subsequent loss, and through all of that he had attended to her, had never once claimed any of the grief or loss for himself. She had to put that right, whatever it cost.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’

She felt herself blushing – with shame and fear – but she made herself look at him.

‘That first baby,’ she began, haltingly, trying to find the right words.

His expression changed, and for a moment it was as though he looked far into her and saw all that was there; then he took her hands again and said in a voice that was both gentle and casual, ‘It was rather a changeling, wasn’t it? I think we should both let it lie. Will you do that with me?’

Tears rushed to her eyes, and with the first spontaneous gesture since his return, she threw herself into his arms.

‘You stay put. I’ll get Mrs Greenacre to bring you some breakfast.’

‘I only want tea. I couldn’t face anything solid.’

‘Poor darling!’ he said heartily. ‘Perhaps you’d better give the doctor a ring.’ He had bathed and shaved and dressed, and was standing in the middle of the room, poised to go for his breakfast.

‘No need – it’s just gastric flu. You go down, darling, or you’ll be late.’

‘Right.’

When he had gone, Diana crept out of bed to go to the lavatory, where she had spent a good deal of the night. He had left the bathroom window open, and the gale had knocked the Bakelite tooth-mugs off the window ledge into the bath. She bent to pick them up and felt a wave of nausea. She shut the window. Grey clouds were scudding across the sky at an unearthly rate, and the garden was full of the tiny petals from the pink may trees. It looked as though it would rain again. She ran a basin of hot water and laved her face. She looked awful. Once, she would never have allowed Edward to see her like this, but now she supposed it was different – or very nearly different. The divorce was in hand, thank God, but she had been warned that it would take months. Villy was divorcing him for adultery; when she had questioned this, he had said that the lawyers had said that it was either that or desertion, which would take a great deal longer. Her face was not even romantically pale; it was more grey with a yellowish tinge, and her hair looked matted and dull. She cleaned her teeth and picked up Edward’s comb, but it was thick with his hair oil. She went back to the bedroom to find her own comb; by then she was shivering.