Marking Time (33 page)

‘Poor Mummy!’

‘Yes, indeed. Poor Mummy!’

‘I must say, it makes me see the point of voluntary euthanasia.’

‘Except that in Mummy’s case she’s not
compos
enough to make that sort of decision.’

Recognising the logic that all her life had irritated her about her sister, Villy remained silent.

They were sitting in a tea shop, drinking grey coffee with a plate of Marie biscuits, untouched, between them. There had been an urgent summons from the nursing home, as Matron had thought that
Lady Rydal was possibly on the way out, as she had put it on the telephone to Villy yesterday (Thursday) evening. But when they had arrived at the nursing home that morning – Jessica from
Frensham, Villy from Sussex – Matron had met them with the, as it turned out rather distressing, news that Lady Rydal seemed a little better. ‘She’s holding her own,’ she
had said, rustling down the passage before them. ‘Of course, she has a very strong heart, but I can’t hold out
too
many hopes.’

They had spent a miserable hour with their mother, who lay flushed and somewhat shrunken on her pillows, her restlessness reduced to moth-like movements of her spectral fingers onto which the
large diamond rings had been taped with Elastoplast. ‘She won’t be without them,’ Matron had said, ‘and they keep slipping off and getting lost in the bedclothes. Lady
Rydal? Here are your daughters come to see you!’ But her cheery tones of one announcing a great treat were unheeded. She had not seemed to know them, or to care who they might be. Only once
during the hour, when they had been conversing quietly and pointlessly to each other, she had suddenly said quite clearly, ‘After the fall, when my horse had refused, they came and cut my
laces – and oh! the exquisite relief! But, of course, one needs the support, and quite soon my back began to ache.’

‘When was that, Mummy darling?’ But she had taken no notice of the question.

Jessica sipped her coffee and made a face. ‘I suppose soon there won’t be any coffee at all. That will be particularly awful for you because you love it so much.’

This was an olive branch – or rather, twig; it had only been a minor irritation, and Villy was glad to take it. ‘You’ll come back with me, won’t you? I mean, it seems to
me that anything might happen, and it’s such a long journey for you.’

‘Thank you, darling. Well, just for the weekend, anyway. Then I must go back to shut Frensham up. Store everything, and see if I can find a tenant.’

‘Really? What does Raymond say?’

‘He doesn’t seem to mind which is surprising, but he’s actually got this job at Blenheim and he’s so thrilled that he can’t think of anything else.’

‘Jess! How wonderful! What’s he doing?’

‘He says it’s terribly hush-hush and he can’t say. That friend of his mother’s – old Lord Carradine who was always nice to him when he was young – mentioned
his name and, of course, being disabled, a desk job’s just right for him. He didn’t want me to tell anyone until he’d had his interview, which apparently he sailed through.
It’s just so
wonderful
that he’s found a niche.’

‘So what will you do?’

‘Well. I was wondering whether Judy could join your lot with Miss Milliment. I don’t like her going to a boarding school and she does love being with Lydia.’

Remembering Lydia’s remarks about Judy, Villy replied, ‘It’s a lovely idea, but of course I’d have to talk to the Duchy. And Miss Milliment too, I suppose.’

‘
She
won’t mind. She was worrying in the summer about not being useful enough.’

‘
Wa
s she? When was that?’

‘When we came over at the beginning of the holidays. She said she felt she ought to take herself off for a few weeks, but she didn’t know where to go. I couldn’t offer to have
her because Raymond finds her difficult.’

‘What will you do? Do you want to join the clan?’

‘It’s awfully sweet of you, darling, but I rather thought I’d perhaps take over Mummy’s house in London. We can’t just leave it closed down with everything in
it.’

‘Bryant’s still there, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, but we ought to do something about that. I mean, with the nursing home, I don’t think Mummy can afford to go on paying wages to servants whom she’s never going to need
any more. I know it’s awful,’ she added as she saw Villy’s face, ‘but I thought we ought to agree what kind of settlement we could make, with Bryant particularly, who has
been jolly faithful and is really too old to get another job.’

‘Yes, we should. But why London for you especially?’

Jessica answered vaguely that she was thinking of getting some job or other, ‘some kind of war work, even if it’s only cooking in a canteen’, but after that, there was
constraint between them. Jessica knew, and Villy suspected, that war work was not the only reason. To change the subject Jessica said, ‘Any news of Edward?’

‘He’s coming tomorrow. He was coming tonight, but then he rang to say he couldn’t get leave until tomorrow.’

‘I suppose one must be grateful for small mercies.’

‘Oh, one must. Otherwise there would be nothing to be grateful for.’ Her tone was almost dramatically bitter, and Jessica decided not to reply.

In the car, when Jessica was driving them back, Villy said, ‘Isn’t it a bit unwise to set up in London just now? Won’t Raymond want you to be safer – to find somewhere
near him? Oxford?’

‘Oh, no! He’s delighted to be away on his own. And I think it’s good for him to be with entirely new people, who don’t know a thing about the chicken farming or dog
kennels or any of those things that didn’t work out. And, quite frankly, I’m glad to get him away from Frensham, because it proved to be in the most awful state – Aunt Lena had
done nothing to it for years, and he was in a fair way to spending every penny we’d got repairing it. If I’m in London, it will be easy for him to pop up when he’s free . .
.’ There was another silence while both of them thought about the same, quite different thing.

‘And how’s Sybil doing?’ Jessica asked with a kind of bright concern.

‘She’ll be home in about a week.’

‘Did she have to have—?’

‘Everything out? Yes, she did, poor dear. She’ll need a longish convalescence. But they said it was the only thing to do. Of course, we all thought she’d got cancer –
including her. She was frightfully brave – just desperate that Hugh shouldn’t know.’

‘He didn’t?’

Villy shook her head. ‘It never seemed to occur to him, thank goodness. But he’s got so much on his plate with Edward away and having to live in his club and fire-watching at night
as well as working all day that I don’t think he’s had the energy or time to do any more than accept what he’s told. I think he’s just profoundly relieved that they found
out what was wrong and did something about it.’

For the rest of the journey they compared notes on how similarly and differently difficult Angela and Louise were being.

It was funny how like their mother Villy was about other people’s misfortunes, Jessica thought: she behaved almost as though they had been sent personally to try
her
.

And Villy reflected wryly how when Jessica really wanted to do something, she would make out that it would be better for other people that she did it. Just like Mummy used to be about the summer
holidays when they were children. She would say that it was essential for Papa to get away and have a rest from his composing, when all he wanted to do was to be left in London in peace to get on
with it. Generally, these adverse perceptions that they had about each other did not, on the whole, diminish affection, but this afternoon, because they were both withholding what most occupied
their thoughts, there was an edge to them, and they were both formally commiserating and carefully comforting each other about their difficult daughters as recompense. ‘At least she’s
got a good and useful job at the BBC’ (Angela) and ‘I’m sure she’s very talented – after all, she must inherit some of it from you’ (Louise).

Jessica looked her haggard, but these days more elegant, self with a long chiffon scarf of the palest turquoise wound round her long throat, making a contrast of muted bravado with her
yellow-green dress. Even her hands, which last year had looked so ravaged by housework, had become white and smooth, decorated on their backs by veins that matched her scarf, and a large silver Amy
Sandheim ring set with turquoise. Of course, having more money had effected all this, Villy thought, and that idea made her feel some of the old, compassionate affection that she had for her
sister. ‘The scarf’s awfully good on you,’ she said.

‘It hides my awful neck, which is beginning to “go” as Mummy would say.’

‘Darling, you’ll always be fearfully attractive.’

‘I shan’t wear as well as you do.’

Later, Villy remembered that she’d left her car at the station in Battle. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to go there for me to retrieve it.’

This they did, and then drove in tandem the two and a half miles to Home Place.

On her own, Villy reflected that by taking their mother’s house in St John’s Wood, Jessica would be able to see Laurence any time as he and his wife lived quite near in a flat in
Maida Vale. Of course, that’s why she wants to go there, she thought, and I’ll be stuck in the country. She began to wonder whether there was any way in which she could persuade Edward
to reopen
their
house in Lansdowne Road. She had not seen Laurence since his concert at the National Gallery and they had had that wonderful afternoon together, walking along the
Embankment, when he had poured out to her the agonies of living with his insanely jealous wife who did nothing but mope when he was away, locking herself in her bedroom with French novels and
migraines, and emerging on his return to make terrible scenes. His work meant that he had to travel all over the country, and she always imagined him in the arms of every violinist or singer he
accompanied, when what he longed for was a quiet domestic life with somebody who understood that music came first. When she thought of his dark eyes burning into hers, she shivered with a kind of
romantic excitement that she had never felt before in her life. They had had tea at the Charing Cross Hotel, and he had held her hand and told her again and again how lucky he felt to have met her.
When she had said that she must catch her train, he had said, ‘I’ll catch it with you.’ Enchanted by this gesture, she had explained that her sister-in-law and her daughter would
also be on the train . . . ‘We’ll go first class, as first-class people should,’ he had returned grandly. In the end she had made him curtail his journey at Tunbridge Wells, but
that hour had been one of the most charming in her life. She had told him about her early dancing with the Russian Ballet; how Cecchetti had said what an extraordinary talent she had for dancing
– he had not been able to believe at first that she had not started until she was sixteen – and how marriage had put a stop to all that. He had a gift for sympathy that she had never
met before in a man and she was not able to recognise that the life she had led for the last twenty odd years had precluded her having much or any experience of men to whom she was not related one
way or another. He was a very good listener, he asked the right questions, he seemed almost to know in advance what she wanted to tell him. When he left, he kissed her hand, and she looked at the
place as a young girl might – indeed, she felt like Karsavina in
Spectre de la Rose
. Since then, he had sent her two letters – or rather two postcards enclosed in envelopes:
one from Manchester and one from Maida Vale. ‘I think so often of our lovely talk in the train – and indeed elsewhere,’ he had written in the first. In the second he had referred
to ‘our oasis in the desert of our lives’. To each of these communications she had replied with four- and five-page letters in which she had poured out her frustration about the
futility of her life. When she had first used that word, he had stroked the side of her face with one finger and said, ‘You have a Russian soul, you want constantly to go to Moscow. Moscow is
your dream – your great retreat.’ After that they had made tragi-comical Napoleonic jokes about the great retreat
to
Moscow, and she felt that, at last, someone was entering
into the tragedy of her life. So the letters enlarged upon this game – she needed him to see that she was gallant, and employed her lightest touch. Of course she did not send them –
there was nowhere safe to send them to. To believe that he understood her enabled her to admire
his
fortitude, his patient endurance of the yoke of jealousy. She sensed that he had not
gone as far in his profession as he had wished – he had several times said things which implied that: ‘That was when I had just won the scholarship to the college,’ and
‘That was when Professor Tovey actually asked to be introduced to me after a concert, when I won the gold medal for—’ It was amazing how much ground they had covered in that one
afternoon. Before that, she had practically not seen him alone. But since he had been conducting an amateur orchestra and choir for a spring season in Guildford, Jessica, who had, of course, joined
the choir, had seen him a good deal.