Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (67 page)

‘You’ll keep in touch, won’t you, darling?’ she was now saying again – she had said it several times during lunch.

‘I expect he’ll be back with us before you know where you are,’ his father said then. ‘Do you want a taxi?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll get a bus.’

‘What station are you going to? Because if it’s Victoria, we could give you a lift.’

‘It’s Marylebone, Mummy. I’m fine, really. Thank you very much for the splendid lunch. It was splendid,’ he repeated. He shook hands with his father, and put his arms around his mother’s bony shoulders. ‘Of course I’ll write to you. I’m not going to the ends of the earth, you know.’ He smiled and then kissed her as he saw her eyes fill with tears.

‘Darling! I do hope you will be happy. All right, at least?’

‘I shall.’

‘Come on, now,’ his father said. He put his arm round her protectively. ‘I’m going to take you to a nice film to take your mind off it.’

Everybody said goodbye again, and he turned and walked away down the street to the nearest bus stop. It was done.

On the bus that eventually went down Baker Street, he could not help thinking of Polly whom he had loved so much. After that weekend in the caravan, he had suffered
for
her as much as about her: she, too, was enduring the pain of unrequited love. When Oliver fell ill and, in the end, in spite of all the vet could do and his nursing, had had to be put down, he had returned from the vet with the body which he had buried in the wood behind the caravan. It felt as though he had lost his only friend. He had held Oliver in his arms for the last moments of his life, feeling his poor body, his ribs like a toast-rack, his fur dull and staring, and then Oliver had looked up at him, his brandy-snap eyes still glowing with entire trust and devotion as the vet put the needle in. Seconds later he felt the body go slack. He had managed not to cry until he had got Oliver in the back of the car.

The caravan seemed awful without Oliver. He mourned and withdrew from the Hursts who kept inviting him for meals.

Then one day, Mrs Hurst – Marge – asked him whether he would take an old infirm neighbour to church in the car. ‘Tom takes him usually, but he’s got a terrible cold. I don’t want him going out.’

So he did. He was a widower, a very old man with arthritis. All his movements were full of pain and he used crutches.

‘It’s good of you,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to miss my Sunday prayers.’

As he was in the church, he thought he might as well try to pray. He prayed for Oliver, and afterwards he felt calmer and much better about him.

That evening, he decided that he would take the plunge and ask Nora if he could be of any use in her establishment. Might as well try to be some use somewhere, had been what he had thought.

Yes, she would be delighted if he would come. There was plenty to do. ‘I’m run off my feet,’ she had written. ‘You could be a great help.’

It had not been at all what he had expected. He did not have to nurse people, Nora said, when she fetched him from the station, except for lifting them sometimes – her back had got quite bad doing it. ‘And there’s the garden,’ she added. ‘It would be wonderful if you could grow the vegetables. And you could talk to Richard sometimes. He gets rather bored because I’m so busy.’

It was Richard who shocked him. Outwardly, he looked much as he had at the wedding – a bit puffier in the face and his hair was thinner – but it was the rest of him, his frightful unhappiness, which it took time to perceive. To begin with, he thought that Richard was rather spoiled and peevish; he also seemed to take an almost infantile delight in irritating Nora. His main objects in life were to get cigarettes and smoke them when she was absent and to drink anything he could lay his hands on. He recruited Christopher to help him in both these ploys. ‘You don’t have to tell
her
. I only want a bit of fun, which, God knows, is in short supply in this place.’ When Nora discovered that he had been enlisted, she gave him a tremendous talking-to. ‘It’s bad for Richard,’ she said. ‘People who can hardly move have trouble enough with their lungs anyway – and smoking would be the last straw.’ And ‘We simply cannot afford drink here. And it would really be most unfair if Richard had some and the others didn’t. I do want to be fair.’

So the next time that Richard asked him to buy cigarettes, he said he thought he should not, and explained why. He was naïve enough to think that that would be that, but, of course, it wasn’t.

It was winter, and he spent a good part of the day sawing wood into logs for the communal day-room fire. One late afternoon, he went into the small sitting room that Nora kept for her and Richard’s use, with a basket of logs, and found him slumped sideways in his chair. It was in its usual position in a corner of the room so that he could look out of the window, which Nora said that he liked to do. When he went to help him upright, Richard said, ‘Been trying . . . no bloody good . . . not a thing I can do.’

Tears of frustration were rolling down his face, and mucus from his nose. Christopher got a paper handkerchief to mop him up.

‘Blow my nose,’ he said as, at the same time, they both heard Nora coming.

‘Goodness, it’s cold in here!’ she exclaimed. ‘Christopher, you might have kept the fire up. We don’t want poor Richard getting pneumonia.’ (He had just sneezed.)

‘I’ve only just got in,’ he said, as he knelt to make up the fire.

‘Soon it will be tea-time,’ Nora was saying. ‘Mrs Brown has made some lovely scones and there’s that rhubarb jam you like so much.’ Richard sneezed again. ‘Oh, darling! Are you getting one of your colds?’

‘Oh, I think I’m
aiming
at pneumonia,’ he answered, in the special tone, both childish and sardonic, that he used so often with her, and to which, Christopher had noticed, she seemed impervious.

‘Well,’ she said comfortably, ‘we’ll do everything we can to prevent that, but if you should get a touch, even of bronchitis, the doctor says there is a brilliant new drug that kills the bug off. So, there’s no need to worry. I’ll go and get the tea.’

When she had gone, Richard, without any expression, said, ‘I don’t
want
the bug killed off. I want to die. It’s about the only thing I do want.’ He had met Christopher’s eye at the end of saying this. There was no doubt that he meant exactly what he said, and Christopher was appalled.

He went and sat by him. ‘Isn’t there
anything
I can do?’

‘Well, you could help me to drink myself to death, which would be marginally more pleasant than pneumonia. I don’t think that Dr Gorley has a new drug to cure one of that. And I think there’s a fag left behind the books up there. You could light that for me. There’s just time before the Angel of Life returns with the exhilarating scones.’

He fetched the cigarette. It was the last in the small packet. He lit it for Richard and put it between his lips. He inhaled deeply and nodded for Christopher to remove it. Then he smiled. ‘You’re a good sort of chap, I know you are. One of the worst things about being me is other people knowing all the time what’s best for me. They don’t. I’ll be the judge of that. Another drag, please.

‘I begin to see what polar bears must feel like in a zoo,’ he said, after the second inhalation. ‘Trapped. Unable to do any of the things that normal polar bears would do if they weren’t kept prisoner. Of course, I’m supposed to have resources unavailable to bears so far as we know. Intellectual, spiritual resources – or so Father Lancing would say. But unfortunately,’ he smiled again and, for a second, Christopher saw how charming he must once have been, ‘they seem to have passed me by. I can’t even
read
. I’d be better off if I was a
dog
.’

At once he thought of Oliver’s death, of holding him while the fatal injection was delivered.

‘I think I see what you mean,’ he said, as he administered the cigarette for the third time. ‘She does
mean
well,’ he added: he felt sorry for Nora too.

‘Oh, yes. I don’t think,’ he said wearily, ‘that I ever forget
that
. One more drag. She’ll be back in a minute. And then put it in your mouth if you wouldn’t mind. She always smells the smoke, and she’ll think it’s you. Do you believe in God?’ he asked, after his last drag.

‘I’m – wondering about that.’

‘You’re an honest sort of chap, aren’t you?’

‘Do you?’

‘I do my damnedest not to. If he exists, and therefore is responsible for my condition, the implications are too bloody terrifying—’

‘Here we are!’ Nora barged open the door with the tray. ‘Oh, Christopher! It’s not very kind of you to smoke in front of Richard.’

‘Sorry.’ He threw the butt into the fire and caught Richard’s eye; he had been watching Christopher, and winked.

The next time Christopher saw Father Lancing – he had taken to visiting him after supper sometimes – he told him about this occasion. ‘He is so desperately unhappy. When he told me he wanted to die, I could quite see why.’

‘Yes.’

‘And while I can see that Nora is wonderfully selfless, I do sometimes feel that she is wrong.’

‘Not incompatible.’ Father Lancing was packing his small black pipe.

‘And I can see why he doesn’t want to believe in God.’

‘So can I.’

‘Nora does. She once told me that her greatest comfort was being able to talk to God.’

There was a short silence. ‘You know, talk’s a fine thing but, when it comes to God, listening is probably more important.’ He was lighting his pipe. ‘That is partly what prayer is for. To indicate that you want to listen.’ Then he added ruminatively, ‘People are often dubbed selfless when they do things that we wouldn’t want to do. To be selfless is a high state. Most of us only manage it for a few minutes at a time.’

‘What can I do for them?’

‘Do you love them?’

He thought. ‘No, I don’t think I do. I just feel awfully
sorry
for them.’

‘Try to love them. Then you will have a far clearer idea of what to do.’

By the time this conversation took place, he knew Father Lancing quite well. Father Lancing brought communion to some of the inmates of the house, and there were one or two people who were able to be taken to church – Christopher was assigned this task by Nora soon after his arrival. He had been confirmed at school, but he had not gone to church – except for that one time in Sussex – since the end of his education. After a few weeks, Father Lancing suddenly asked him to tea, and he went. The priest lived in a large, dank house with a small, silent housekeeper, who was like a wispy little ghost, he thought, since when she spoke, which was seldom, it was in a tiny high-pitched whisper. Father Lancing worked extremely hard. Christopher did not at first recognise that the invitation was squeezed between parish duties, and it did not occur to him to wonder why he had been asked; he innocently thought that his host must be lonely, living alone as he did, but he slowly became aware that this was not so: when he was not conducting services, he was visiting, going to meetings; he loved children and music and much of his energy was spent upon promoting his choir and helping the local elementary school with their outings and festivities. He was High Anglican and some people in the village did not like this, and journeyed to another church on Sundays, but his church was comfortably full and he heard confessions there twice a week. The first time that Christopher went to see him, Father Lancing asked what had brought him to Frensham, and he had explained about feeling useless after Oliver’s death, and wanting to be of some use to somebody. During those sessions, he was always encouraged to talk about himself, and quite soon he felt that Father Lancing knew more about him than anyone else and, soon after that, than
he
knew about himself.

Their conversations always graduated to philosophy – or, rather, Christian philosophy. For instance, after Christopher had told him about Polly and the blow of discovering that, after her unhappy love affair, she had found someone else who was not him and she was to be married – ‘So she would never have loved me’ – Father Lancing had said, ‘But you loved her, and that was a gift.’

‘A
gift
?’

‘Surely. Love is a great gift.’

‘Like faith, you mean?’

‘Well, you could say that faith was another kind of love, couldn’t you? How does that strike you?’

And so on.

After the conversation about Richard and Nora, he went back to the house full of determination to love them. It was easier to love Richard, he discovered, than his sister. He tried talking to her about Richard, saying that it might be good for him to be allowed some pleasures even if they were not particularly good for him, but she had talked him down at once. ‘I know you mean well, Christopher,’ she had finished, ‘but, unfortunately, meaning well isn’t the whole story. I’ve worked with these people for years now, and I really do know best what is good for them.’

‘You
mean
well, then,’ he had not been able to resist saying and she had answered blithely: ‘Of
course
I do! How could you think anything else?’

By now, he was going to church because he wanted to. He also suggested to Father Lancing that he go to confession, and the priest said that it was on Tuesdays and Fridays, and gave him a book. ‘That will give you some idea of the form,’ he said.

He went. He had thought to begin with that he had not a great deal to confess but, when it came to the point, there seemed to be a surprising amount. He was also surprised that Father Lancing did not make any moral comment, but confined himself to asking quite practical questions like ‘How many times?’ After it, when he had been given his absolution and penance, he went into the church and prayed, incandescent with good intentions.

He quickly found that they did not last or, rather, that in the wear and tear of daily life, he forgot them. He seemed to be surrounded by sad and unhappy people, and when he found how hard it was to make anything better for them, he resented their unhappiness.

Then one day, when he was in the woodshed, sawing away at a particularly intractable piece of elm, it came to him that he wanted a quite different kind of life, and something that Father Lancing had said that a monk had told him came back. ‘You can put yourself in the centre of the universe, or you can put God. You cannot put another person there.’ At the time, though he had listened politely, he had not thought he agreed, but now, suddenly, it was clear to him. He most certainly did
not
want to be the centre of his universe – and that left God.