Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (59 page)

So, that first week passed surprisingly quickly and then there was Archie again and the weekends were lovely. He always brought some kind of treat: chocolate biscuits, a poster of Madame Bonnard in her bath (the cottage had no pictures), a new record, the desk that Polly had given her years ago that he had collected from Blandford Street. ‘She’d love to see you,’ he said. ‘I thought you might come up with me one Monday and spend a night or two with her?’ She might.

Just before Christmas, she did. They went on Sunday evening, so that Polly would be there when she arrived: she couldn’t face going there alone. Polly, looking wonderful, received her with open arms. ‘Oh, it’s so lovely to see you,’ she kept saying. She was wearing a scarlet corduroy skirt and a raspberry-pink shirt, and a very flashy ring of smoky blue with what looked like diamonds round it.

‘They are,’ she said. ‘Gerald gave it to me. That’s what I’ve been dying to tell you. I’m in love with him and we’re going to be married.’

It was a shock.

‘Are you sure, Poll? Really
sure
?’

‘People keep saying that. Of course I am. I don’t think it’s something one is unsure about. Either you are or you aren’t.’

‘Are what?’

‘In love.’

She was silent. She knew then that it was the kind of untruth that everyone had to discover for themselves. But perhaps Polly would never have to do that. She was the kind of person who got things right, she thought, seeing Polly’s shining eyes and air of joy.

‘I’ve asked him to come after supper to meet you,’ she was now saying. ‘He knows you’re my best friend as well as my cousin.’

All through supper Polly told her about him. About his enormously ugly house, and how she’d nearly not met him, and how they were to be married in July and he was going to take her to Paris for her honeymoon, and how good he was at imitating people, and how he wasn’t conventionally good-looking (that probably means ugly, she thought; people’s appearance and the consequences of it were her profession these days), and the more Polly talked about him, the more she thought about Noël and the worse she felt.

Goodness, she thought, love can make people rather boring.

‘I’d rather not,’ she said, when Polly said she wanted her to be a bridesmaid.

When Polly began asking her about herself, she could find little or nothing to say. ‘Yes, it’s a good place to work,’ she said of the cottage.

The book was getting on. (What could one say about a less than half-written book? She didn’t want to say anything about it at all.) Talking to Archie about it was different.

Yes, she said in answer to the most serious question. Yes, she was over Noël. ‘But that’s what I mean,’ she added, suddenly finding something to say. ‘I am over him – more or less – and once I thought I never would be. I thought I was completely in love. Don’t you see?’

‘See what?’

‘That it isn’t as simple as you think. You are in love with Gerald now, but how do you know you’ll go on feeling like that?’

‘I see what you mean. But I
do
know, Clary. I really do. It is awfully difficult to explain—’

‘What about Archie? You
thought
you were in love with him, didn’t you? It went on for ages.’

‘That was different.’

‘You didn’t think so at the time.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Polly said again. ‘I suppose everyone has to go through falling in love with the wrong person, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t find the right one. If they didn’t nobody would be married.’

‘That might be a very good thing.’

‘Don’t be silly! Of course it wouldn’t be.’

‘Well, I’m not going to marry anyone.’

‘I think you’re just saying that because you’ve had such a rotten time. I do admit it was far luckier to fall in love with Archie than with Noël.’

At this point the doorbell rang and Polly rushed down to let Gerald in.

Clary had felt divided about whether she wanted to like him or not. Of course, in a way she did, but there was a stubborn, contrary part of her that resented having to fall in with Polly’s complacency and happiness. ‘I know you’ll like him,’ she had said, more than once. How could she know that? Why should she, Clary, like people just because Polly thought she would? But she had to admit to herself that he did seem all right; moony about Polly, of course, but very nice to her as well. When Polly told him that she didn’t want to be bridesmaid, he looked quite disappointed, and then he said, ‘I can’t blame you. I should hate to be one myself.’ And he asked her about her cottage much more than Polly had, so that Polly said, ‘Why don’t we come and see you there? One weekend?’ and she heard herself saying – quite rudely, ‘Oh, no! I can’t have people there. It’s far too primitive, especially for you, Poll. She’s always wanting to do things to houses, decorate them and all that.’

And he had said, ‘I know. Well, she’s taken on either a life’s work or her Waterloo with mine.’ He had looked at Polly, and they had both smiled. They were continually meeting each other’s eyes and smiling. Once he picked up Polly’s hand and kissed it, and Polly sat looking at that hand with a look of contented bliss that went straight – and painfully – to her heart. Noël had never, at any point, treated her like that.

The atmosphere was so full of this sort of thing, evoking all kinds of painful contrast, that in the end she couldn’t deal with it. She said she was tired and would go to bed.

‘I’ve made up your bed,’ Polly said, after she had insisted upon taking her downstairs. ‘I’m afraid Neville has made rather a mess of your room, but at least the sheets are clean.’

And then the inevitable question.

‘You
do
like him?’

‘Oh, yes, of course I do. I think he’s – jolly nice,’ she finished.

‘Oh, good! I thought you would. Sleep well. See you in the morning.’

But she couldn’t sleep. To be back in this room, where she had occasionally spent nights with Noël – where, in fact, their last meeting had taken place – brought back a weight of misery and anguish that she thought had gone. That she had cared so much for him, that he had never, in fact, loved her, that she had not recognised this until it was too late, engulfed her more painfully than ever before. This was because she now knew all three of these factors, whereas before they had occurred one after the other. Again and again she heard Noël’s cold and irritable response to her saying she was pregnant; again and again, she played her memory record of Fenella’s voice on the telephone with its precise blend of indifference and hostility that had so confounded her – they were not, had never been, her amazing, dear, close friends. She supposed dimly that she had been used, although she did not understand why, but in any case she had been stupid enough to be a willing, an enthusiastic victim. All the events connected with her pregnancy came back, and remembering how she had bled and wept after the abortion, she wept again as pride leaked out of her until she was nothing but her humiliation. The whole night her losses ganged up on her. Her mother who had left her for ever by dying – left her with a single postcard and memories that were not to be talked about because of upsetting her father. And then Dad – going off and leaving her for
years
. He would never know what his absence had cost her. And then, when he did come back, of course he had a new, far more beautiful daughter to look after, and she, now ostensibly grown up, was meant to look after herself. And now Polly was going off to be married which really meant that she wouldn’t want the same kind of friendship any more that they had had all these years. She had reached the stage of misery where she searched for yet more reasons to justify it. And I just don’t look like Polly, so nothing like that would ever happen to me anyway, she thought, as she put on the light to search in her chest of drawers for a handkerchief. But her chest of drawers turned out to be full of Neville’s things – dirty shirts, sheet music, half-eaten packets of biscuits, broken pencils, rolls of film . . . Her chest of drawers! Full of the wretched Neville’s things! And he had not even asked her if he could use her room! She found one of his handkerchiefs – a Cash’s nametape with N. Cazalet sewn on it. I’ll use it and I’ll keep it, she thought. Then she saw that she was behaving like a cross little girl of ten and not at all like a grown-up with tragic events behind her.

At this moment, she heard the front door slam downstairs. So Gerald did not spend the night with Polly. She turned off her light again; she did not want Polly coming in to talk to her.

She must have slept a bit, because when she came to it was beginning to be light. She got up, packed the rucksack she had brought and wrote a note to Polly. ‘Am going back to the cottage to work. Sorry, but I don’t want to be in this place at the moment. Nothing to do with you – it’s other things. Love, Clary.’

She took the note upstairs and put it outside Polly’s room. It was half past six. She let herself out of the house and walked to Baker Street station to catch a train for Paddington and her journey back to the cottage.

It was raining heavily and she was soaked on the walk to Baker Street; she had just enough money to buy the two train tickets, but not enough for a taxi at the other end. This would mean a three-mile walk unless she got a lift. The train was unheated, and she sat in a compartment to herself, wishing that she had a hot drink to warm her up and hoping that the rain would have stopped by the time she reached Pewsey.

It hadn’t, of course. It seemed set for the day, if not for ever. Only one other person got off the train at Pewsey, and was met by an old man in tweeds with a pipe; he carried her off in an old Morris Minor before Clary had a chance to ask them which way they were going. She would have to walk it. Up to now, the journey had felt like an escape; even shivering and damp in the train she had felt that everything would be different and better when she got off it. But now as she tramped wearily towards the cottage, its emptiness and silence began to weigh upon her. She would be alone for at least four days, and Archie, who had expected to drive her down the following Friday, had not left the usual five pounds for housekeeping. She would not have money to buy food and there was very little in the way of stores. She realised then that for weeks Archie had been providing for her, since she’d had no money of her own once her job had stopped. She simply had not thought about this before, but now it frightened her. She was completely dependent upon Archie turning up when he said he would, and supposing he was cross with her for running away from London (and without telling him – she could have rung him up, she now thought), he just might not come on Friday.

She had reached the wooded part of the road and, although this meant some protection from the rain, great flurries of larger drops fell from the branches, making straight for the back of her neck until she felt sodden – wet to the skin. The only traffic she encountered was a farm tractor coming the other way, whose driver asked whether it was wet enough for her.

The key to the cottage was under a stone near the back door. She felt light-headed with exhaustion, but she was back.

She made a pot of tea. She knew that the next thing was to light the fire, but she felt too tired to do it. She took the tea upstairs and got out of her wet clothes. It seemed easiest to get into her pyjamas and then to bed, but once there, she could not get warm. Her feet were icy and her teeth actually chattering – like people in books, she thought. So she got up again, made a hot-water bottle, dried her hair a bit on her bath towel and found some woollen socks. Back in bed she gradually began to thaw, until she was warm enough to fall asleep.

She woke when it was already dark, very thirsty and, she thought, hungry. But when she sat up, her head ached so violently that she couldn’t face going downstairs. She drank what remained of the cold tea with two aspirin she got from the bathroom and went back to bed. The hot-water bottle was cold, so she got up again and refilled it from the hot tap in the bathroom. These two trips had made her cold again, and it took ages to get warm.

She spent a night full of feverish thoughts and dreams. It was hard to tell which was which – what she was thinking and what she was dreaming. There was Archie saying she’d let him down and he was going to France that day, and there was Noël saying she’d let him down and he didn’t want to see her any more, and Polly saying she was so happy she didn’t need her friends, and somebody whose face was turned away and whose voice she did not recognise who kept saying she didn’t belong anywhere. And then she was running along a street towards a crowd of people but when she reached them the ones nearest threw up their arms in horror as though to ward her off and all the others melted away and there was the empty street again, only it had turned into a lane and at the end of it she thought she saw the cottage but when she got nearer there was just a black place and she fell into it and as she fell it got hotter and hotter until she was burning and there was a drumming, beating sound coming from her head and someone was telling her to open her eyes, but she was afraid that if she did that, it would be just the same – no dream, no difference.

‘. . . it’s all right, darling, wake up. I’m here with you.’

It was Dad. He was sitting on the side of the bed, and he was stroking her forehead with his long thin fingers. She looked at him with terror that it might not really be him, and then with fear that he might be angry at her being in the cottage away from home although she couldn’t remember where that was . . . ‘Oh, Dad!’ she said. ‘Oh, Dad! I’m so glad you’ve come!’ But then as she looked into his face, that had been smiling, she thought, and saw his serious eyes, it wasn’t Dad at all – it was Archie.

‘It’s Archie,’ he said.

‘I know. I can see you now. I was having a dream, I think. Such an awful dream.’

He put his arms round her as she began to cry, and held her with small rocking movements as she tried to tell him – but the whole thing went into jagged pieces and made no sense.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he kept saying, as she repeated hopelessly that there wasn’t anybody – anybody at all – she couldn’t find a single one. ‘I saw some people, but they melted.’