Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (54 page)

Michael had been very nice about it. The turtles had to be moved every day for them to have baths and she used a dress box from one of her numerous shopping expeditions to house them. She fed them on chopped-up greens, which she ordered every day for breakfast: ‘A green salad with no dressing.’ Her plan was to take them back to England on the boat, and give them to the zoo. Michael had pointed out that the more she bought, the more the street vendors would procure, and although she recognised the logic of this, she simply couldn’t bear to pass the trays of the miserable little creatures and do nothing. Anyway, cleaning them passed the time.

They had come to New York for Michael’s show at a gallery on East 57th Street. The show had been a success: portrait drawings of well-known people had been bought, and commissions placed for oil portraits. Michael was out all of every day fulfilling some of them (he was going to have to return to do them all). Today, he was painting Mrs Roosevelt on behalf of a charity that she sponsored. In the mornings, Louise stayed in bed until after breakfast, and then got up very slowly. She felt ill most of the time because the food was so rich. Even if she asked for a boiled egg for breakfast, two arrived, and it seemed a fearful waste not to eat them. Then, most evenings, they were invited out – to large dinner parties chiefly full of people at least twenty years older than she, where enormous meals were presented: great steaks dripping over the plate, fish in rich creamy sauces, elaborate and delicious ice creams. All this would be eaten after at least an hour and a half of Martini drinking, and, she had noted with surprise, many of the men would accompany their dinner with huge glasses of creamy milk. Unlimited butter had contributed to her ill health. It seemed so wonderful and extraordinary to have as much as she liked – and what was called French bread to spread it on. There were amazing salads for one accustomed to a few limp lettuce leaves, a slice of cooked beetroot and half a tomato. These salads had little pieces of fried bread in them, and dressings made of blue cheese or mayonnaise. She ate an avocado pear for the first time in her life, stuffed with prawns and covered with a thick pink sauce. She ate aubergines, which she found delicious and tasting like nothing else. Best of all were the plates of oysters or cherry-stone clams with which many dinners began. For the first two or three days she had eaten everything put in front of her, but after that she was forced to be more prudent. But she still felt sick, and her back ached. Michael had been incredibly generous; he had given her
carte blanche
to go shopping, and she had made a list in England of people’s sizes, and was buying everyone presents. Nylon stockings, lovely idler shoes made of kangaroo hide, beautiful underclothes, trousers, innumerable pretty cotton shirts, clothes to last Sebastian at least two years. The stores, as they were called, were intoxicating; not being bounded by clothes coupons made choice far easier, and things seemed incredibly luxurious and cheap. She knew that there were five dollars to the pound, but the money seemed quite unreal – like playing Monopoly, it hardly counted. She bought herself a black velveteen raincoat, and a pale pink oilskin – and one for Polly, trimmed with dark blue corduroy. There were leather belts in every imaginable colour; she had bought them for all the people she could think of. She bought yards of soft thin raw silk for Aunt Zoë and Polly and Clary, and one length for herself. She bought cotton quilted housecoats for the girls and herself. Every morning she staggered back with boxes and bags of these things and entered the appropriate gifts against her list. She bought pyjamas and shirts for Michael. She walked and walked until she was exhausted. People were very nice to her. Her accent seemed to amaze people. ‘Can’t you speak English?’ a bus conductor had said, after trying to understand where she wanted to go, and when she said no, he seemed convulsed and said lady, she sure was something.

She had gone on like this for about ten days, although sometimes somebody she met at the gallery or at dinner took her out sight-seeing: to Radio City, in a ferry to Ellis Island, where the immigrants had once been landed and sorted out, to the Frick Museum, where the pictures were shown so that each one was like a jewel. The bookshops were full of books printed on white paper – as white as the bread. It was spring, the sky was blue and the air was sharp and exhilarating, and when she walked down the narrower streets, the towering buildings made it very cold. Often she stopped at a drug-store for lunch and drank large tumblers of pure orange juice, which seemed to her the height of luxury.

She did not remember about her cousin Angela until two days before they sailed home. She had never been particularly close to Angela but, still, she felt she should see her. She looked her up in the telephone book; there were pages of Blacks, but she found them – ‘Earl C. Black’ – and the address was Park Avenue, which she had been in New York long enough to know was smart.

Angela answered the telephone and immediately invited her to lunch.

‘Today?’

‘If you’re free.’ The flat – she was learning to call it an apartment – was in an imposing building. ‘Take the elevator to the eleventh floor,’ Angela said, when she had pressed the buzzer marked ‘Black’. She was there at the open door. She wore a narrow black skirt and a scarlet smock. ‘What a lovely surprise! Yes, it’s due in a couple of weeks,’ she said, as Louise, embracing her, encountered her stomach.

She led the way into a large, long sitting room, with windows all the way down one side. A pale carpet covered the floor; one wall had an enormous glass-fronted cabinet filled with blue and white porcelain, and at the far end, over the mantelpiece, hung a portrait of Angela, in a man’s green shirt, sitting in a chair with her hair down, that was somehow familiar.

‘Rupert’s picture of me,’ Angela said, seeing her look at it. ‘He gave it to us for our wedding. I don’t care for it much, but Earl’s mad about it. So.’ She gave a happy shrug, implying that anything went that he was mad about. ‘You look lovely, Louise.’

‘So do you. I’ve never seen you look better.’ It was true. Her pale skin glowed faintly with health, her hair shone. She wore no make-up excepting a pale pink lipstick.

‘I’ve never felt better. I feel as big as a house, but it doesn’t seem to matter.’

She wanted news of the family, and Louise, in trying to give it, realised how much she had cut herself off from them. ‘You know that the Brig died,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes. Mummy wrote me about that. And Christopher’s given up his farm job and gone to live with Nora and Richard. How’s your baby? Only I suppose he isn’t a baby any more – he must be about three?’

‘Yes. He’s fine. Walking and talking and all that.’

‘Oh, I can’t
wait
! I must show you the nursery I’ve made. Earl let me do it just as I liked, and I’ve finished it just on time. We’re having a chicken salad for lunch. I hope that’s OK. Earl thought I might like to have you to myself,’ she explained, as they went to collect the lunch laid out on trays in the kitchen. ‘He sent you his love and hopes you’re enjoying New York.’

‘Is he out of the Army?’

‘Oh, yes – ages ago. He’s back in practice.’

‘Of course – he’s a doctor.’

‘He’s a psychiatrist. He has a small apartment on the ground floor of this block where he works. He has so many patients now that he has to keep referring people. He says we’ll be rich enough to buy a cottage out in the country so that the baby will get to have a nice open-air life. I feel so lucky, Louise.’

‘I think you were awfully brave to come out here by yourself and get married without your family about.’

‘I had a funny trip out, I can tell you. The worst crossing they’d ever had, according to the captain, and everyone threw up practically, except me. I didn’t miss a single meal. There were four hundred of us.’

‘How do you mean “us”?’

‘GI brides. Except, of course, I wasn’t one. I was just a fiancée. It was an awful trip. But then Earl met me on the quay and brought me back here, and we got married the following day. It was wonderful. No, I wasn’t brave. I knew I wanted to marry Earl. I
knew
I was in love with him.’

Later, when she had shown the nursery – ‘I made it blue, because it would be silly in pink if it’s a boy’ – she said, ‘I didn’t think I
could
be happier until I got pregnant. Did you feel like that?’

‘Not exactly.’

Angela gave her a quick look and fell silent. She had asked about Michael earlier, and Louise had told her about the exhibition being a success. ‘Would you like to bring Michael to dinner?’ Angela asked – with some diffidence.

‘We’re leaving in two days, and he’s made plans for the last two evenings. I’d much
rather
come to you.’

Then, because she was in a strange country, and because she was leaving so shortly, and perhaps, most of all, because so much of her life seemed unreal, she said: ‘I don’t feel like you at all. I didn’t want my child when I had him. So now I’ll never know whether I would ever have wanted him. I don’t think I love Michael. I think I may have to leave him.’ And then, the enormity of what she had just said was too much for her, and she burst into tears.

Angela moved to her – they were back in the sitting room – took the coffee cup from her shaking hand and put her arms round her, holding her without saying anything until she had stopped crying. ‘I’m so
sorry
,’ she then said. ‘It must be so awful for you – so difficult and awful. I wish I could help.’

‘Would you like to talk to Earl?’ she said, when Louise had dried her eyes. ‘It can be a help to talk to someone who is outside the situation. And he’s really kind and good.’

‘No. I tried that. You won’t tell any of the family, will you? I mean – I haven’t made up my mind about what to do. I must do that on my own.’

‘Of course I won’t. Will you keep in touch, though?’

She said she would.

At the door, when she was leaving, Angela said, ‘I meant it about keeping in touch. You could come and stay with us.’

‘Thank you. I’ll remember.’

Happiness makes people much nicer, she thought as she went down in the lift. I wonder what that makes me?

She decided to walk back to the hotel so that she wouldn’t have to talk to a cab driver. Angela’s suggestion that she should talk to Earl brought up painful thoughts. Earl was a psychiatrist, like Dr Schmidt had been, and remembering him still made her feel raw. He had seemed such an answer: an old man, with white hair and a moustache and dark brown penetrating eyes with dark marks under them. She had gone to his gloomy ground-floor flat where he practised. It was cold and the daylight that filtered through the dirty net curtains was like fog. But he had seemed so wise, and so kind, and he really listened to her – an experience she felt she had never had before in her life. She sat in a rather hard armchair, and he sat opposite her in its pair, with a small rickety round table between them. Dr Schmidt had come into her life not through Stella, although it had been she who had first suggested such a course, but through Polly and Clary, who had an Austrian friend who knew people like that. So she had asked them to ask ‘for a friend of mine’, and saw Clary shoot a quick look at her, although nothing had been said. But, quite soon after that, one of them had rung her with Dr Schmidt’s telephone number and address. She had told Michael that she was going to see him, and he had seemed quite pleased. ‘Good idea,’ he had said. ‘It might help to sort you out, darling.’

‘Supposing he wants to see you?’ she said.

‘Oh, I don’t think he’ll want to do that. I should think that very unlikely.’

Anyway, she rang up.

‘And how do you hear of me?’ she was asked.

She mentioned the Austrian friend.

‘Ah, so! A dear friend of mine.’ His foreign voice sounded warm. He made an appointment for her at once.

At first she had not known what to say, had sat twisting her fingers in her lap and looking over his shoulder. ‘You are nervous,’ he remarked. ‘It is natural. You do not know me.’

‘I don’t know where to begin.’

‘You may begin anywhere. Tell me how you are feeling with your life.’

And after that, she found it quite easy to think of things to say. To begin with, she was very much afraid that he would think her so worthless and wicked that she would tell him something and then make some remark to pre-empt any adverse judgement. Things like ‘So, you see, I didn’t even want to have a baby although I knew that Michael might be killed.’ And about her affair with Rory: ‘So, you see, I was unfaithful to Michael about two years after we were married.’ She rushed headlong through her misdemeanours, attacking them not in chronological order but, rather, in order of their gravity. She watched him carefully for any reaction, but his expression of attentive interest did not change. She went twice a week for an hour, and after the first two or three sessions, she began to look forward to the time when he would pronounce upon her life and tell her what to do. But this continued not to happen; he occasionally asked a question, but that was all. This was beginning to irritate her, and when, some six weeks after she had started going to him, he asked – out of the blue; it had no reference to anything she had been saying – how she got on with her father, something snapped in her. ‘Why do you simply ask me questions? Why don’t you
tell
me what to do? I don’t care if you think I’ve behaved badly because I know that anyway, so why don’t you say what you think?’

He looked at her for a long time without speaking. Then he smiled. ‘I am not here to judge you,’ he said. ‘There seem to be enough judges in your life, beginning with yourself. I shall not join them.’

‘So what – what do you do?’

‘I am here to listen, so that you can unpack your mind and look at what you find there. If I were to say, “That is good, that is bad,” you might find it difficult to take everything out. I think you find it already hard.’

‘Do I?’ She was beginning to feel frightened.

‘I think you have not yet told me what has made you most unhappy – what has most disturbed you.’