Marking Time (51 page)

18 May

The Lorenzo weekend has got put off, because this evening Lady Rydal died. They rang in the middle of dinner; Aunt Rach answered the telephone, and came back and said that
Matron would like to speak to Mrs Cazalet or Mrs Castle, so they both went to talk to her. When they came back, Aunt J. said she thought it was really a merciful release. I can’t see
anything very
merciful
about it; mercy would have been her not having to go through all that miserable time in the nursing home in the first place. Anyway, they said there would be a
lot to do – arranging the funeral, and putting it in
The Times
. Then they both wanted to ring up Lorenzo to put him off, and in the end, Aunt Jessica won (there is definitely
something funny going on about all that – what a pity there isn’t going to be the chance to find out what) and she came back after rather a long time, and said he sent his love and
was frightfully sorry. They are going to Tunbridge Wells tomorrow, and Aunt J. rang up Uncle Raymond, but she couldn’t get him, and Aunt Villy tried to ring Uncle Edward, but
she
couldn’t get
him
and I could see the Duchy worrying about the extravagance of all these toll calls. She was only sixty-nine, but if you’d told me she was eighty, I would
have thought it more likely. I do wonder what it is like to die. Whether you know you are, or whether it just happens, like the lights fusing, and whether it is actually rather exciting. I
suppose it depends very much on what you believe happens to you, if anything. Polly and I had a long talk about it. Polly thinks we may have other lives, which is what Hindus believe. Miss
Milliment says that all the great religions take what happens to you after death very seriously, although, of course, they don’t agree. But I don’t have a great religion and nor
does Polly. We spent a bit of time trying to think what we would like to have happen, and I thought being a sort of interested ghost might be good. Then she said that she supposed that what
happened to you might be whatever you
did
believe. And since Lady Rydal was a very Victorian Christian, her heaven would be a harp-playing-long-white-clothes-wearing affair, we both
think. And, of course, being reunited with her husband. Well, she never seemed very happy when she was alive, so perhaps being dead will be more enjoyable for her. I wished I’d been there
when she died, because I’ve never seen a dead person, and I feel I need the experience. Still, at least they might let me go to the funeral.

When Lydia was told in the morning about her grandmother, she burst into racking sobs which Polly and I thought was rather affected as she never seemed to like Grania very much. When we
confronted her with this, she said, ‘I know, but you
ought
to cry when people die – they like it.’ I said how on earth did she know that, and she said that if
she
died, she’d want everyone who knew her to cry like mad. ‘To show how sad they are that I’m not there,’ she said. This was at the beginning of lessons, and
Miss Milliment said there was something in what she said. She’s
always
sticking up for Lydia and making excuses for her because of her being younger than we are. Nobody ever
stuck up for me when I was Lydia’s age. Except for Dad – he did.

The funeral is to be in Tunbridge Wells. Uncle Raymond is coming, and Nora from her hospital, but Christopher can’t, and I’m not sure about Angela. Judy is coming from her
boarding school where, thank God, she is all through terms. We are allowed to go as well, although it isn’t our grandmother. It is to be a cremation, but I don’t think you actually
see
that.

22 May

We went yesterday and it was horrible. A horrible little chapel with Grania on a kind of table at the end, and someone played an organ and the clergyman got her names wrong.
She is Agatha Mary, and he called her Agartha Marie, and suddenly some curtains beyond the table opened and poor Grania simply slid away to be burned to smithereens. Then we all stood outside
for a bit, and then we came home. The only person who wasn’t family was someone called Mr Tunnicliffe who was Grania’s lawyer. Apparently you go back and collect the ashes and strew
them somewhere that you think the person would like. But I don’t imagine anyone asked her where she would like her ashes strewn – it isn’t an easy question to ask people,
because I suppose it sounds a bit as though you might be looking forward to them being dead. But it
did
feel sad to think that someone who talked and was about the place is suddenly
turned into ashes. I keep remembering her in the nursing home, all wild and muddled and unhappy, but still alive, and it has made me feel extremely sorry for her.

3 June

It is exactly a year since Commander Pearson rang up and told me about Dad. Three hundred and sixty-five days, eight thousand seven hundred and sixty hours, five hundred and
twenty-seven thousand six hundred minutes since I have ceased to know where he is. But he is somewhere – he must be. I’d know, I’d feel, if he wasn’t. If he is working
as a spy, someone must know it. The English might not, but I’ve suddenly thought of General de Gaulle. He’s the head of the French; I bet, even if he doesn’t actually know
offhand, he could find out. So I’ve decided to write and ask him. I’ve also decided not to tell anybody, except possibly Poll, because I don’t want them trying to stop me. I
feel very excited to have thought of such a good thing to do, but as it is going to be a very important letter, I’ll practise it, and only put the final version in this journal.
It’s a pity I can’t write it in French, but I’m afraid I’d make too many mistakes, and General de Gaulle must have learned a good deal of English by now, and anyway,
he’d have lots of secretaries and people who could translate it for him. I’ll write a very polite, businesslike letter, and not at all long, because I feel that Generals probably
don’t like reading much.

Clothes coupons came in yesterday. Polly is lucky, because Aunt Syb bought her a lot of clothes last year, and masses of material to make things. Luckily I don’t mind about clothes
much, but I have been growing a lot, so the trouble is I soon won’t be able to wear a lot of things, although there is nothing wrong with them except for size. Oh well, I can’t see
this family letting me go about naked, so there’s no need to worry.

Dear General de Gaulle,

My father, Lieutenant Rupert Cazalet, got left behind at St Valéry when he was organising troops to be evacuated onto his destroyer last June. He has not been
reported as a prisoner of the foul Germans, so I think it very likely that he is working with the Free French as a spy on our side. He is a painter, and he lived in France quite a bit when he
was young, so his French is so good that the Germans might easily think he was French. Possibly some kind French people are hiding him, but he is awfully patriotic, and he would be more likely
to be working than just hiding. As you must have an unrivalled knowledge of the Free French, etc., I wonder whether you could find out if that is what he is doing? He might be pretending to be
French, but I expect the people he is working with would know that he was secretly English and his name. If you do know, or could find out for me, I should be profoundly grateful, as naturally
I have been worried. He wouldn’t be able to write letters, you see, but I just want to know that he is all right and not dead.

Yours sincerely, Clarissa Cazalet.

Of course I didn’t do what I said; when it came to the point, I wanted to practise the letter in my journal. I think I should put ‘
My
dear General de
Gaulle’ or just ‘My dear General – like ‘My dear Manager’ when you write to the Bank, according to Aunt Villy. And perhaps I should put yours faithfully, as I
should think the General must be keener on faithfulness than sincerity in his position.

Then I had to find out where to send it to, but I did, by asking a few casual questions of Miss Milliment, and there is a Free French headquarters in London. I put private and personal on
the envelope and I read the letter to Polly, who thought I shouldn’t say ‘foul Germans’ but that is just Polly not wanting to be horrible to anybody so I didn’t change
it. He must loathe them just as much as he loathes Field Marshal Pétain who is doing awful things – particularly to Jews – in France. He handed over a thousand of them in
Paris to the Germans and, according to Aunt Rach, who seems to know this kind of thing, he’s arrested many thousands more. I really do think it is filthy to go for people because of their
race.

Louise’s repertory company has come to an end. They’ve run out of money, and two of the boys in the company have been called up, so they’re stuck without enough actors.
Aunt Villy is very pleased, and says that perhaps now she will get down to doing some sensible war work. Polly and I don’t think she will at all. We agree with Aunt Villy about her being
completely selfish, but Polly says that she thinks artists are supposed to be. Miss Milliment said it wasn’t that; it was simply that serious artists tended to put their work first and a
lot of the time this was inconvenient for them, but other people only noticed when it got in
their
way. I must say, Miss Milliment is far broader-minded than our family; as Polly said,
she’s altogether broad – we fell about laughing until Polly said how horrible it was of her to refer to Miss Milliment’s physical bulk. Then I remembered Dad talking about a
charwoman he had before he was married. Whenever Dad wanted her to do anything serious, like scrubbing a floor, she said she was bulky but frail, and then he felt he couldn’t ask her to
do it.

July

I think it’s about the 4th. I still haven’t had a reply to my letter. Polly says think how long it takes us to write our thank-you letters at Christmas, and
General de Gaulle must get letters on a scale that we can hardly imagine. I can’t see why he would. His own friends and family in France couldn’t write to him, and I shouldn’t
think there are many people in my position.

Louise is back. She has stopped wearing quite so much make-up so she looks better, but she’s remote from us somehow. She spends hours writing letters to get a job in a theatre, and
also to some man in the Navy she met. She’s also writing a play that has a rather good idea. It’s about a girl who has to choose between marrying someone and going on with her
career as a dancer. That’s the first act. In the second act we see what would happen if she went on with her career, and in the third act what happens when she marries the man.
She’s calling it
Outrageous Fortune
which personally I think is rather pretentious. But I do think it’s a good idea. She reads bits of it to us, but she only wants us to
say how good it is. She told me one thing of great interest. Angela has fallen in love with a married man about twenty years older than she is. He works in the BBC with her and he’s
called Brian Prentice and she wants to marry him, but of course she can’t as he is already. I said how sad, but that was that, but Louise said no it wasn’t because Angela has
started to have a baby and the aunts J. and V. are awfully worried about it. Louise saw her in London at poor Lady Rydal’s old house because each of the grandchildren (the girls) had to
choose a piece of Grania’s jewellery. They chose in order of age, so Angela got Grania’s pearls, and Nora had the huge long crystal necklace, and as the aunts were keeping the
diamond rings, there was only some gold filigree earrings left for Louise. I don’t know what Judy or Lydia got – they weren’t even given the chance to choose. But that was
when Louise saw Angela, who she said looked awfully pale and was completely silent. What can happen, I wonder? I suppose she must have gone to bed with him – obviously a bad thing to do
– it must be terrifically enjoyable if that’s what happens. She might not have known that he was married, in which case it must be entirely Brian Prentice’s fault. But, as
Polly says, faults don’t make things nicer for people, or change them. Louise says there is something called Volpar Gel that means you don’t have babies. And even Dutch caps help,
she said, but when I asked what they were and what you do with them, she simply wouldn’t tell me. ‘You’re too young,’ she said. There must, thank God, be a diminishing
number of things I’m too young for, but then, I suppose, before you can turn round there start to be an increasing number of things you are too
old
for. You can’t win.
I’m looking forward to being thirty, which I should think would be the brief interval between those horns of dilemma.

Why doesn’t General de Gaulle
answer
my letter? I think it’s really thoughtless of him, and actually quite rude. The Duchy says you should answer letters by return of
post.

Poor Aunt Rach has spent an awful morning cutting the great-aunts’ toe nails. I heard her saying that they were like the talons of old sea birds – all curving and frightfully
tough. Apparently that’s one of the first things you can’t do when you are really old because you can’t reach them. I warned Polly about this, because it really means
she’d better not live in her house entirely alone. She said what did hermits do, because they were nearly always old and
had
to be alone. I should think they end up with claws
like parrots.

For lunch today we had rissoles from the butcher made to a new formula that means they have hardly any meat in them. Neville said they were like a field mouse after a car accident; they were
actually just extremely boring to eat, but the Duchy said they were only eightpence a pound, and we should be grateful. I don’t think anyone was.

One interesting thing. A friend of Dad’s is coming to stay! He is on sick leave from the Army; he was at the Slade with Dad, and they went to France as students together. He’s
called Archie Lestrange and I do vaguely remember him, but before the war he was mostly in France so Dad didn’t see him much. It will be nice having a friend of Dad’s to stay
because, not being family, he might talk about him a bit. I hope he really does come, unlike the Clutterworths who never seem to get here. Now I’m going to bath Jules, because it’s
Zoë’s day – or one of them – at the nursing home and Ellen has a tummy upset – rissoles, I shouldn’t wonder. I bath her, and I give her her bottle and put her
on her pot and then into her bed and I read to her from
Peter Rabbit
. She keeps interrupting but she minds if I stop.

I got interrupted then and a good thing too – rereading the above has made me yawn with boredom. Why is it that so much of ordinary life is crammed with trivial routine? Does it have
to be? Is it the war that makes everything so deeply grey? What on earth will change it? Polly thinks that being grown up will make all the difference, but I honestly think she is wrong: it
seems to me that the grown-ups have, if possible, even greyer lives. I am sure if I had a more interesting mind I should be less bored, and had a talk with Miss Milliment about that, as she has
been in charge of my mind for some time now, so she must be partly responsible. She did at least listen to me which is more than most people do, and then she didn’t say anything for a bit
and then she said, ‘I wonder why you’ve stopped writing?’ and I said I was writing this journal, but it was pretty boring, and she said, ‘No, I mean the kind of writing
you were doing a year ago. You were writing stories. Now you only do whatever homework I set you, which isn’t at all the same thing.’ I hadn’t thought about that, but
it’s perfectly true. I haven’t written a single story – since Dad went away. I said I hadn’t felt like it, and she answered quite sharply that she hadn’t thought I
wanted to be an amateur, but a real writer. ‘Professionals do their work whatever they are feeling,’ she said. ‘I am not surprised that you are bored if you are idle with a
gift. You are boring yourself and that is a dreary state of affairs. Doing the least you can do
is
extremely boring.’ But her small grey eyes were quite kind when she said this.
I said I didn’t see how one could write if one couldn’t think of anything to write about and she replied that I would think of something if I disposed myself to do so. She ended by
saying that if I hadn’t thought of anything within a month, she would start teaching me Greek, which would at least be a new exercise for my mind.

It’s funny. The moment I began to think about writing, I didn’t feel bored at all. I simply felt how difficult it would be to find the time. I made a list of all the things I am
expected to do in a day. For instance, not only are we supposed to tidy our rooms, which we’ve always been supposed to do, we have to make our own
beds
because there aren’t
enough housemaids to do it any more.
And
we have to iron our clothes sometimes because Ellen gets too tired to do it all. Polly is a beautiful ironer, but then she minds about her
clothes; I loathe ironing and I wouldn’t actually mind if my clothes weren’t ironed at all. Then we have to help clear the table after meals.
Then
we have to do some
outdoor job in the afternoons – whatever Heather or McAlpine or the Duchy says, and believe me, between them they think of pretty dull things. We have to collect water in bottles from the
spring at Watlington (I like that unless it’s pouring with rain). Then we have to
mend
our beastly clothes with Bully or Cracks or Aunt Syb or Zoë seeing that we do it
properly. One of us is supposed to go round every single window in the house in the evenings making sure that the blackout is properly done. We take turns. We have to do
all these
things
on top of lessons every morning and homework after tea. There is some time after homework and after supper, but I’ve decided to tidy up my share of our room and that’s
going to take several days, because I haven’t really done that for years: I mean shelves and cupboards and things since I got my stuff from London. It might take weeks. Polly says
I’ll love it when it’s done, but that sounds to me like what people say about cold baths. Starting writing again is a bit like that as well or perhaps that’s more like
swimming in the sea – awful getting in and lovely when you are. Anyway, apart from doing all these things, I have to try and think what to write, but when it comes to writing I find I
can’t think at
all
– it’s only when I’m apparently not thinking about anything, that any sliver of an idea slips into my mind, and even then I don’t seem
able to
think
about it. It seems to be a mixture of remembering things and feeling – sometimes just remembering a feeling, and that often happens when I’m doing something
quite unconnected. All the same, even not thinking about it seems to make it easier not to think about the other thing. What I do now is have a think about Dad every morning when I wake up. I
just wish him a good, safe day and send him my love, and then I stop. It is a tremendous relief arranging it like that. Of course I worry about the General not answering my letter, but that is
somehow a different-
sized
worry. Polly got very worked up about my having to face the fact that he might write something about there being no trace of Dad and that meaning that there
was no hope. She doesn’t understand: it wouldn’t be that. Either the General will know something about him, or he won’t. But his not knowing only means
he
doesn’t know. It won’t mean that Dad is dead. It simply will not mean that.