Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (58 page)

So she said she would do that. And next morning, he saw her off at Paddington. He gave her money for a cab to the cottage and three more pounds for food. ‘I’ll be down in two days,’ he said, ‘and we’ll stock up with everything for the next week.’ He was standing on the platform and she’d pushed down the window. ‘Headlong people usually have a lot of courage,’ he said.

When the train began to move, she waved quickly and he turned at once and started walking back down the platform. She was in an empty compartment so she could have had a good cry, but she decided not to. She sat with her notebook on her lap making lists of things to do so that she wouldn’t mind being alone too much.

It had been very hard at the beginning. When the cab deposited her at the end of the lane that led to the cottage and she’d paid him and he’d backed out and gone, she stood for a moment where he had left her at the small gate that opened on to the mossy little path that led to the kitchen door. It was very cold: there had been a heavy frost. An October sun, belyingly flushed for it seemed to give no heat, was poised in the sky beyond the beech trees and willows, and the only sound she could hear was the curious metallic chinking of coots on the canal. Inside, the cottage seemed colder, and the silence was complete. She dumped her cases and set about lighting the fire in the sitting room, filling the log basket with armfuls of logs from the lean-to shed outside. Two days ago she had been here by herself when Archie had left on Monday morning. She had stuck it out until tea-time and then suddenly decided that she could not, would not stay there alone. The cottage had no telephone, so she had simply turned up at his flat. He had been cooking, but everything had come to a halt. She had burst into tears and said that she couldn’t bear it, she couldn’t cope with being alone. She didn’t want anything to eat so it didn’t matter about supper – she would have a bath and go to bed; he needn’t worry about her. And then, the next evening, Dad had turned up – out of the blue.

And now, here she was, back, and she had to stick it out this time or Archie would despise her. She lit the fire, and then went up to the bedroom and made her bed which she had left in a mess. There were two bedrooms, one large and one smaller, and Archie, who had found and rented the cottage, made her have the large one, which she had liked because it had two ace-of-clubs windows in it.

She made a sandwich with a hard-boiled egg and tomato for lunch, and while she ate it, she looked at her list.

Make a bonfire of all the garden stuff Archie cut down.

Look in Mrs Beeton for a stew to make for Friday evening.

Housework all the cottage [two bedrooms, the sitting room and the kitchen]. Clean bath, clean windows [they had got very smoky].

Make a shopping list.

Start novel.

There it was. At the bottom of the list – a bland little note. It sounded no harder than cleaning the bath. But the moment she stopped doing physical things, like collecting wood or dusting, and sat down at the small table with a kitchen chair and the blank paper in front of her, thoughts and feelings that had nothing whatever to do with what she planned to write overwhelmed her: the last time she had seen Noël; his voice, which she now recognised had been as full of self-pity as the hostility that had struck her at the time.

‘You know enough about my own childhood to know perfectly well that I am not cut out for parenthood, never have been, never will be.’ The dinner with Archie after he had come back from France when she had said that she should not have the baby. The ensuing night when she had wept about the awfulness of not having the baby, had tried to take in the fact that Noël was not only out of love with her now but could never have been much in love in the first place. Then Archie taking her for the operation. Just walking through the streets with him, being taken away and leaving him in the waiting room, and lying on the hard high table while a small, obscenely merry little man assaulted her deftly in his rubber gloves. And then – blood and tears at the end of it. Going back to Blandford Street and not being able to bear being there. Not really wanting to be anywhere, she had told Archie, who had said that if it didn’t matter to her, he would make the choice. He had taken her to the Scilly Isles, and made her go for walks with him, had taught her six-pack bezique; had made them take turns reading aloud from
Mansfield Park
, had pretended not to notice when she picked at her food, when she suddenly wanted to cry, when she withdrew or snapped at him. He made her talk about Noël – and Fenella. Quite soon he called Noël ‘Number One’ and she found herself following suit. It distanced him, but this seemed to increase her senses of humiliation and failure. She moped, and he let her. He had, indeed, been her friend, she thought now, as she looked at the bland white page on which anything might be written. She had even told Archie what she did want to write. ‘It is sort of Miss Milliment’s childhood and youth,’ she explained. ‘I mean, what it must have been like to be plain and have nobody who actually cared about you. She had a brother who everybody thought was marvellous. And even
he
was awful to her about her appearance.’

‘What about her mother?’ Archie had asked.

‘Oh – she died. She had an aunt who brought them up, but then she died too.’

‘Oh.’ She noticed Archie looking at her intently, and said, ‘Of course, poor Miss Milliment isn’t really like me. I had Dad and he did love me.’

‘I should think he’s still at it.’

She agreed that he did, of course, in a way, but privately she thought that what with Zoë and Jules, he could hardly have much time for someone like herself. She had changed the subject back to Miss Milliment and her Victorian youth. It was not that she planned to write about what happened to Miss Milliment, which would have been extremely difficult since she knew only the bare outline of her life, it was more that she needed to know about the mid to late nineteenth century during which she had grown up. Practical things, like the times of meals and what was eaten, and clothes and what houses looked like and what people did in their spare time. Archie had suggested that she go and talk to Miss Milliment about that sort of thing, but she felt this was out of the question. She was not
really
writing about Miss Milliment but she was afraid that Miss Milliment might think she was. In fact, she said, she had the idea of writing about Miss Milliment’s time and her own, with, roughly speaking, the same character living in both of them. ‘I don’t worry about making the main person,’ she had said. ‘I know how to do that.’ But for days, weeks even, that was about all she did know. The bones of the story jangled about in her mind without seeming to knit themselves together.

Today she decided to stick to getting the cottage straight, washing her other jersey and cleaning the sitting room, which got very dusty with wood ash.

Cleaning was made more arduous by lack of utensils. The carpet-sweeper hardly worked until she found that the small wheels each side of the brushes were tightly encased in long red hairs that had to be unwound one by one. The duster was itself so dirty that it seemed to transfer a different kind of dirt to whatever she used it on. In the end she used the only tea-cloth. The place had been more or less furnished when Archie found it, but that really meant that you could sleep in a bed, fry an egg on the old electric stove and sit at a rickety table to eat it. There was a battered old sofa and armchair in the sitting room, one standard lamp, a threadbare carpet and a small shelf of books that kept falling sideways as there was nothing to prop them up. It was when she was dusting these that she made the discovery. A dark red book, larger than the others and therefore the one to put at the end of the row, she thought. It was called
A Book With Seven Seals
, the author anonymous. She opened it, and was lost. It was the account of a mid-Victorian clergyman’s family in Chelsea and she became so absorbed in it that she read till it was dusk and she discovered that she was cold because the fire had gone out.

Mindful of her promise to Archie, she opened a tin of baked beans and ate them cold from the tin with a teaspoon, while she read in her overcoat – she couldn’t be bothered to relight the fire. Eventually, she made herself a hot-water bottle and took it, with the book, to bed. She fell asleep before she finished the book and slept all night without a dream.

The next day she began to write.

When Archie arrived on Friday, she had cleaned the cottage and made an Irish stew. ‘And you’ve even washed your hair!’ he exclaimed, after she had hugged him. ‘Am I glad to see you!’ he said. ‘Looking almost human. Well done.’

He had brought a load of things in the car: more blankets, bath towels, his gramophone and a box of records and another box containing books, ‘I got you some Victorian novels. Thought they might be a help,’ as well as two bottles of wine, his painting equipment and his bezique packs. The stew was the best bit of cooking she’d ever done. They both had two helpings, drank a bottle of wine and played two records – ‘We take turns to choose and then there can be no ugly scenes,’ he had said. She told him about the book and he asked her about her own work and she felt suddenly, nervously, shy, and said she might have made a start but it was probably no good.

On Saturday they went shopping, for food and things for the cottage, and paint because he said he thought the walls of the sitting room should be yellow. They had lunch in a pub and after they’d got back and unpacked the car, he made her go for a walk along the towpath the other side of the canal. ‘We’ll do five bridges and then we’ll turn round,’ he said. It was a mild, grey afternoon and the towpath was thick with livid leaves that had fallen from the trees growing on the steep banks. The grey, still water was speckled with them. A pair of coots that lived on the water just outside the cottage swam ahead of them towards the first hump-backed bridge. The stone coping that edged the towpath was broken in places, leaving muddy inlets with rushes. Every now and then they heard the explosive, raucous sound of a pheasant.

They walked for a while in comfortable silence, and then he said, ‘I’ve decided to give up my dreary old job.’

‘And go back to painting?’

‘I’m not sure. Probably. If I can make a living at it.’

‘You were before the war, weren’t you? Of course, you were in France then. I suppose that’s different.’

‘I still have to eat food and live somewhere. I’ve still got my place there.’

‘Are you going back there to live?’

‘Don’t know. Haven’t decided anything.’

The faint stirrings of alarm in her subsided. ‘I should think you’d be jolly lonely if you went back there now,’ she said, and felt him glance at her before he answered.

‘Perhaps I would.’

Later, when they were toasting crumpets, she asked him when he would be leaving his job.

‘Christmas,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to stick it out until then.’

Christmas seemed a long way off. She was content to leave it at that.

It was hard when he left very early on Monday morning. He brought her a cup of tea in bed at half past six, kissed her forehead and said he was off.

‘Work hard, eat a lot and get the lawn mowed,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back on Friday. I shall
notice
all those things.’

She listened to his car start and then to the engine noise becoming fainter until she couldn’t hear it. It would be five days and four nights entirely alone. She got up and looked out of the little window. There was a white mist rising from the canal and a lumpy thrush was hauling a worm out of the grass with short, irritable tugs. She decided then that the best way of not thinking about him driving back to London was to get her work and read over what she had written before the weekend. This became a routine. She would get up, make a mug of tea and go back to bed with it and her novel, which she read aloud to herself because she found that this was a good way of hearing uneasy passages, repetitive words or sounds, or simply finding out what she had left out. Miss Milliment – she decided to call her Marianne rather than Eleanor – was now seven, rather fat with skimpy pigtails. Then she thought that perhaps girls in those days didn’t have pigtails but flowing hair streaming down their backs, and poor Marianne’s hair was not the kind that flowed – any more than her own had been.

After her breakfast – porridge and more tea – she got a mirror and had a long, careful look at her face. Her forehead was broad but rather low, with a widow’s peak off centre. ‘Low forehead, greasy hair growing to a point,’ she wrote. Eyebrows. Hers were quite thick and Polly had made her pull bits out towards the middle so that there was more of a gap between them. ‘Sparse eyebrows growing too close together,’ she wrote. Eyes. Her own eyes, large, grey and calculating, she critically surveyed them, were really just ordinary eyes. ‘Small, grey, rather beady eyes,’ she wrote. Nose. Pudgy. ‘Pudgy.’ Noses were very boring to describe. Shape of face. She seemed to have wide cheekbones above a round face and a firm-looking chin. ‘Pudgy face with chin and sub-chin,’ she wrote. When she had finished she read the notes again. The funny thing was that they didn’t really give a picture of a face – they stayed stubbornly being bits of a face. She shut her eyes and started remembering Miss Milliment’s
now
– in her extreme old age. (It was very difficult not to call her Miss Milliment; she decided to change Marianne to Mary Anne – much better for a plain child.)

Remembering her old was much better: her vast face, the colour of grey custard, her surprisingly soft skin, her eyes like tiny pebbles behind the small thick water of her glasses, her descending arrangement of chins, her strained-back, oyster-shell-coloured hair, the intricate network of wrinkles like crazed china all over her face, her expression of gentle anxiety born of a lifetime of not being absolutely sure at first what she was seeing, punctuated by a glance minutely penetrating and kind that somehow made one forget any or all of her separately unattractive features. I think my eyes are my best feature, she thought, but I suppose most people’s are. She could not remember looking either penetrating or kind, but there it was. One knew less about oneself than other people realised, although one couldn’t consider other people in a novel without considering oneself. This seemed to be because one could never be
quite
sure about getting other people’s feelings right unless somehow one
became
them. And this in turn meant that one was pulling things out of oneself; it was a maze and she felt lost in it, but extremely interested.