Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (62 page)

Of course, she knew that they were part of the enormous family that Kitty had married into, but that did not help about their precise relationship. And most of all, and this was nearly all the time, to pretend not to be tired. This was a fib if ever there was one: she felt tired nearly all the time; she often woke up tired. Oh, yes, and to being able to digest anything. When she was young, Flo had always said she had the digestion of a horse. This had not been very kindly meant at the time, but it was infinitely better than not having a digestion at all, which she felt had become the case. But, ‘Away with care,’ she said aloud, and Kitty looked at her and said, ‘Yes, away with it. We shall both feel the better for a little country air.’

She was glad when they arrived, and they had tea on the lawn, although it seemed a bit chilly to her, but Kitty got Eileen to fetch her thicker cardigan, on which she unfortunately dropped some strawberry jam but she knew she had another cardigan in one of the cases.

After tea, she insisted on doing her own unpacking, although Eileen offered to help her. It tired her but she felt that she would learn where things were. There were no other people there, excepting the servants, of course, and so she insisted upon dining with Kitty who would otherwise have been alone. But soon after it she said she thought she would go up to her room to settle in. Kitty accompanied her, which meant that she had to take the stairs faster than she would have wished, and when she had been kissed she subsided on her bed, quite breathless. She had made a very good meal: Mrs Cripps had produced a roast chicken – which had always been a treat when she was a girl – and new potatoes and spinach from the garden. This had been followed by a rhubarb tart, and she had always been partial to rhubarb and forgot that it did not any longer seem to agree with her. She had a touch of indigestion. She sat on her bed for a few moments’ rest. The window was open, and the sky was the lovely soothing colour of lavender; it was still quite light. She was really quite fagged, as dear Papa used to say, but a trip to the bathroom was essential and she got up to make it. When she had been unpacking, she had thought there was something missing about her room, although she could not think what it might be, but when she returned from the lavatory she knew at once. Flo’s bed was gone. It had been by the window, and now there was simply a space where it had been. This distressed her: it was as though whoever had moved the bed was denying Flo’s existence. Not her existence now: she knew that Flo had gone – to her Maker, to Papa and Mama and their dear brother killed in the war – but her existence at
all
. She had always shared this room with Flo, and her bed being gone made her feel much more alone. Then she had a very good idea. She would move
her
bed to the window and sleep where Flo had slept. It would not matter if there was a gap where her bed had been because, after all, she knew
she
existed. She looked at the bed and wondered whether she would have the strength. ‘Nothing ventured nothing won,’ she said aloud, and set about it. The bed was on casters, so sometimes it moved quite easily although sometimes it got stuck by a ruck in the carpet, but she persisted, moving it a bit one end at a time until with one last heave, it was exactly where Flo’s bed had been.

She sat suddenly on it. She had a frightful twinge of indigestion high up in her chest and shut her eyes tightly to endure it. When she opened them, the room seemed to be full of tiny flies – coming in, no doubt, from the open window. She turned her head to look. The light, which had become a greyer, darker lavender, seemed without flies, but her chest still hurt, and she turned to prop up her pillows so that she could sit upright, but when she leaned back against them, it was as though someone was pushing her chest, a painful shove with a heavy weight that was going to crush her if she didn’t look out . . . She heard a distant, rather gasping voice telling her to keep calm (could it be Flo?) and turned again to the window, but the dusky lavender had become quite dark – no colour at all – and was then succeeded by a light so white and blinding that with a cry – of fear and recognition – she fell towards it . . .

‘Are you awake?’

There was no answer from below. No wonder – it had been a momentous day for her as well as for Rachel. But it had been Rachel who had borne the brunt of the most tiring part of it. When she had seen the Duchy and Dolly off to Home Place that morning, she had had her own packing to do. She had had to shut up the flat, and then she had come round to Abbey Road to help
her
do the same things. She still had to rest in the afternoons and she had begged Rachel to do the same but, of course, she hadn’t – had spent that time tidying everything up, throwing away food that would go bad in their absence, washing out the tea-cloths, going to the local newsagent’s and paying the bill for papers. She brought tea at five just when she awoke from a long, refreshing sleep. That was when she had told her about the Duchy’s possible future plans. To begin with, she had thought that this would mean that Rachel would be incarcerated at Home Place, and had waited, with a sinking heart, to be told what little snatches of privacy would be afforded. But Rachel had said that the Duchy was perfectly happy to be in Sussex on her own, with the family coming at weekends, and that Rachel could either keep the Carlton Hill flat if she liked, or sell it and buy somewhere else. She still felt so weak that any strong feeling made her want to weep, and Rachel had most tenderly forestalled this by sitting on the bed and putting her arms round her. ‘We’ve got lots of time to talk about it,’ she had said. ‘Now let’s concentrate on catching our train.’ They were going to Scotland, by night sleeper, putting the car on the train to Inverness, and once there – they had made no plans – were simply going to explore and stay where they pleased for two whole weeks. Rachel had taken them out to dinner in a very charming restaurant in Charlotte Street that she said Rupert had recommended, and they had sat at a table with a little red-shaded lamp and had a most delicious French meal. She still had to be very careful to eat things with as little fat as possible and she was not allowed to drink, but she did not care in the least. She felt intoxicated with the senses of adventure and freedom, and her darling looking as happy as she. ‘My friend has been ill,’ Rachel had said to the waiter, ‘so we want a very
simple
meal.’ And he had understood and helped them choose: consommé julienne, grilled sole and raspberries. Then they had driven to King’s Cross, seen the car on to the train and repaired to their sleeper. There had been just time to prepare for bed before the train started.

And now she lay in the dark, listening to the regular rhythmic rocking, thinking how extraordinary life was.

Just over a year ago, soon after Rachel had come to London with her parents and the Brig had died, she had thought that there was no future of any kind in their relationship. Rachel seemed to avoid her, to be almost frightened of her, and at the same time had seemed so desperately unhappy. She had suffered tortures watching this and being unable to do anything about it but make it worse. She had finally written to Rachel saying that she thought perhaps that they should not meet at all for a while. It had cost her much to do this, and it had been a last resort, but Rachel’s ravaged face, and her frequent oblique allusions to her own worthlessness, which she, Sid, seemed unable to alleviate, so distressed her that she felt it was all she could offer. It was accepted in a short, but still incoherent letter. Rachel said that she agreed it might be better ‘for a while’; she hoped that with time she might be able to ‘deal with things’; she doubted whether she had ever been worth a moment of Sid’s time, and she was deeply sorry for the distress she could now see she must have caused her – ‘I am simply not worth it!’ she had exclaimed at the end. ‘I am not. I am so
ashamed
of myself.’

So then, all through that spring and summer, she had seen nothing of Rachel – excepting for one glimpse of her in the street. She worked, she taught, she eventually found an oldish woman to come and clean the house, which had become very shabby without the ministrations of Thelma from whom she mercifully heard nothing. Then, in the autumn, her sister Evie had suddenly descended upon her. Her latest relationship had crumbled and she was at her exasperating and exacting worst. Sid had to help her to find a job. For a short time she worked at HMV, selling records in Oxford Street, but she never ceased to reproach Sid for making her do such a menial job, and soon took refuge in various ailments that precluded her going to work, which, of course, in the end resulted in her being sacked. Then she got indisputably ill, with jaundice, and Sid had to nurse her through it. Then just as Sid was despairing of ever getting rid of her (she owned half of the little house in Abbey Road and there was no way that Sid could buy her out), she got left a small sum by the conductor who had briefly engaged her affections at the beginning of the war. She was transformed. Five thousand pounds! She would go to America where there were so many more orchestras and musicians she might work for. She bought herself a new wardrobe – using all Sid’s clothes coupons as well as her own – and went. The relief!

That first evening, when she had the house to herself, when there was only the faint though pungent aroma of Evening in Paris to remind her of her sister’s existence, she had had three enormous gins and indulged in an orgy of Brahms on the gramophone. Before going to bed – without supper, she couldn’t face doing anything about that – she opened the windows on the first floor to disperse that scent that made her feel positively queasy. It was February, and freezing. She had to get up in the night to close the windows.

She had got so tired, working and coping with the house and dealing with Evie, that she decided to have a late morning and lay in bed listening to the news. Evie had insisted on having the wireless in her bedroom when she was ill, and Sid had moved it into her own room when Evie got better. The main news was the announcement that Britain would quit India by June 1948. There had been stormy scenes in the House of Commons due to Attlee’s decision to remove Lord Wavell and appoint Lord Louis Mountbatten in his place to oversee the transfer of the Indian dominion to self rule. Mr Churchill, as leader of the opposition, had been furious, but he failed to get any change out of Mr Attlee. She wondered if the latter knew what he was doing. In spite of the coal mines being nationalised, there was an acute shortage of coal; food rations had effectively been cut again – unless you counted being allowed twopence more corned beef per week. It had been a winter of strikes and power cuts and altogether a good deal of hardship for a victorious nation.

All that day, when she braved the awful weather to do the shopping, stuffed yet more newspaper into the cracks of the old window frames to keep out the worst of the draughts, made a succession of hot drinks to warm herself up, she wondered why she wasn’t feeling brighter with Evie gone at last. She should be rejoicing, but in fact she felt more and more depressed, and also unable to eat. At least, she kept thinking she was hungry, but when she actually tried to eat anything, she couldn’t manage it. She felt sick, and by the evening had a raging headache and a temperature. She retired to bed and the next day felt very much worse. In fact, so ill that she could not face going down to the kitchen in the basement, and spent the day on glasses of water from her tooth glass in the bathroom.

Later – she was not sure how much later, but something like two or three days – she heard the doorbell ringing more than once. The mad thought that it might be Rachel got her out of bed and she lurched down to open the front door, to find the Duchy wrapped up to her chin and carrying a bunch of snowdrops.

‘I was passing this morning,’ she said, ‘and I saw the milk bottles outside your door and thought perhaps you might not be well, as you hadn’t fetched them in. My dear Sid!’

For the sight of a familiar face, and the kind, calm voice that became full of concern, was too much for her. She collapsed on the hall chair. She managed to say that she was not very well, and then she must have passed out, for the next thing she knew was that her head was between her knees and she could hear the Duchy telephoning.

‘I’ve rung the doctor,’ she said. ‘Do you think if I helped you, we could get you back into bed? My dear, you should have rung us, we are so near and we could have been round in a trice.’ Even then, she noticed that the Duchy did not use Rachel’s name.

She stayed until the doctor came, who said that Sid had jaundice. The Duchy went down to the kitchen and made a pot of very weak tea. ‘No milk, I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘but a hot drink would do you good.’

She had left, saying that she would be back tomorrow. ‘Only give me a key,’ she said, ‘then I won’t have to get you out of bed.’

But it was Rachel who arrived, and not the following day but later that evening. She came with a tin of soup and some fruit, and there was no dramatic reunion. Sid felt too ill to express either surprise or delight, and she – Rachel – seemed intent upon looking after her exactly as though they had been meeting every few days for the last months. She got clean sheets and made her bed; she brought her a basin of hot water to wash; she gently combed her hair. She heated the soup and encouraged her to drink it. ‘Don’t try to talk, darling,’ she said. ‘I know how weak you must feel. One of the nurses at the Babies’ Hotel had jaundice and she felt terrible. I have made you some barley water: the doctor says it’s good for you to drink as much as possible.’