Read The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) Online
Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (10 page)
‘Try some Wonder Cream.’
‘I will. I gave Edna a jar. What’s Simon’s treat dinner?’
‘Roast chicken and meringues. What’s Teddy’s?’
‘Cold salmon and mayonnaise and hot chocolate soufflé. I
loathe
mayonnaise. I have my salmon dry.’
Their supper trays variously arrived, but they talked on and on, so in the end it was quite a nice evening.
‘Hey! I say! Are you awake?’
Simon didn’t answer. He was fed up with Clarkson. He lay rigidly still because the dormitory wasn’t really dark and Clarkson would be watching.
‘Listen, Cazalet minor, I know you
are
awake. I only wanted to ask you something.’
It was jolly bad luck to be stuck in a dormitory of three, especially when Galbraith was the third. He was the senior, a sixth-form boy, but he was keen on owls and used to go off after Lights Out to watch them. Simon didn’t actually mind because he’d given them quite a decent bribe, not only the Crunchies but some wizard swaps for cigarette cards – Galbraith only collected the natural history ones. Still, it left him stuck with Clarkson who went on and on about things that Simon simply didn’t want to talk about.
‘I mean, how do they know that pee won’t come out – instead of the other stuff?’
‘
I
don’t know.’
‘I mean – I’ve looked and there is only one place. Do you think Davenport got it wrong?’
‘Why don’t you ask him if you’re so keen?’
‘He wasn’t talking to me, he was telling Travers. I can’t ask him – he’s a prefect. As if you didn’t know,’ he added.
‘Well, it wasn’t any of your business, then, was it? Why don’t you just shut up?’
‘Why don’t you just boil your head? Why don’t you just tie two rocks round your feet and jump in the swimming pool? Why don’t you . . .’ He was on to a good vein now and would go on for hours, thinking of things that Simon might just do, if Simon didn’t stop him.
‘Psst!’ he said. ‘Someone’s coming!’
They weren’t, but it shut him up because what Galbraith had said he’d do to both of them if Matron came and found he wasn’t there (cut off very small – unnoticeable to Matron – bits of them with his penknife to feed to his rat was the latest) had cowed them into perfect loyalty: Clarkson had bored (and frightened) Simon the whole term with his ruminations about what bits would hurt most and how long it would take them to die. So they both lay and waited a bit and Simon had just begun to have a lovely think about what he’d do the moment he got home – undo the crane he’d made with his Meccano last hols and start on the swing bridge like Dawson said he’d made (he’d let Polly help him undo the crane but not actually make the bridge), chocolate cake for tea with walnuts and crystallised violets on it and Mum would see to it that he got a walnut with his slice . . .
‘You know the other thing Galbraith said?’
‘What?’
‘He said he’s got an aunt who’s a witch. And he could get her to cast a spell on us if we sneak on him. Do you think she could? I mean, could she actually turn us into something? I mean, look at
Macbeth
. . .’ They were going to do
Macbeth
as the play next term so everyone had been reading it in English. There was a pause while they both contemplated this possibility – much more frightening, Simon thought, than cutting bits off them which would be bound to show in the end. Then Clarkson said nervously, ‘What would you most like
not
to be turned into?’
‘An owl,’ said Simon promptly, ‘because then I’d have Galbraith watching me every night.’ Then as Clarkson let out a hoot of laughter, he added, ‘Look out. You’re beginning to sound like one!’ This reduced Clarkson to helpless giggles and Simon had to get up and hit him quite a lot with his pillow to get him to shut up. After Clarkson had pleaded
pax
a good many times, Simon let him go on condition that he shut up for the night. He wouldn’t have, but they heard Galbraith coming back up the drainpipe and at once both feigned sleep. Simon, however, lay awake for hours, wondering about Galbraith’s aunt . . .
In a much larger dormitory at the other end of the house, Teddy Cazalet lay on his back praying, ‘Please, God, let her
not
come to the station to meet me. But if she does come, at least let her not kiss me in front of everyone. At least let her not do that. And don’t let her be wearing that awful silly hat she wore for Sports’ Day. Please, God. Best of all – just let her not come.’
‘Comfy?’
‘Mm.’ She felt his moustache feeling for her face in the dark. He made no attempt to kiss her mouth, but to be on the safe side she added, ‘Awfully sleepy. Delicious dinner Mary gave us, didn’t she? Didn’t she look lovely?’
‘She looked all right. Play was a bit wordy, I thought.’
‘Interesting, though.’
‘Oh, yes. He’s a clever chap, Shaw. Mark you, I don’t agree with him. If he had his way, we’d probably all be murdered in our beds.’
She turned on her side. ‘Darling, I warn you, I’m off.’ But after a moment she said, ‘You haven’t forgotten about Bracken fetching Teddy? I mean, I’ll go, of course, but it does help to have Bracken with the trunk.’
‘Better if you don’t. I told Hugh we’d pick up Simon as well and that means twice the clobber.’
‘Teddy’ll be frightfully disappointed if I don’t meet him. I always do.’
‘He’ll be all right.’ He put his arm round her, stroking the tender skin on her shoulder.
‘Eddie – I
am
tired – truly.’
‘Course you are.’ He gave her shoulder a little pat and turned the other way. He shut his eyes and fell asleep almost at once, but relief, and guilt at her relief, kept Villy awake for some time.
Miss Milliment sat in bed in her small back room in Stoke Newington. She wore a huge bolster-shaped nightdress of flannel and over it one of her father’s pyjama jackets. She was sipping her usual glass of hot water, made by boiling a saucepan on the small gas ring her landlady had grudgingly allowed her to install for this purpose only, and reading Tennyson. The forty-watt bulb that hung from the ceiling was shadeless to afford her more light. Her hair hung in two oyster-shell coloured plaits each side of her soft meandering chins. Every now and then she had to remove her glasses to wipe the mist from them: Tennyson and the hot water combined to occlude. It was years since she had read the Laureate, as she still thought of him, but he had cropped up in her mind in the middle of supper. Why had stuffed sheep’s heart, or, come to that, stewed apples and custard, made her think of Tennyson? Of course, it hadn’t been the food, it had been the eating alone in Mrs Timpson’s front room, a room so hushed and swathed against use that chewing and swallowing, even breathing the dead-cabbage air, seemed daringly disruptive. She ate there every evening, a relentless rota of menus that recurred every two weeks, but this evening, as she sought to cheer herself with thoughts of tomorrow’s lunch at Lansdowne Road, the thought that next week there would be no Friday lunch, nor for six weeks after that, had assailed her. Panic – as sudden and painful as wind on the heart, from which she also suffered – occurred, and quickly, before it could take hold, she smothered it. Those summer holidays when she had been Polly’s age – at Hastings, had it been? (Nostalgia was comforting, but slippery as an old eiderdown.) Or was it Broadstairs? What she remembered was a walled garden and going into a fruit cage with Jack and eating raspberries, only she had not eaten many because there was a bird trapped in the cage and she had spent most of the time trying to shoo it out . . . but what had the fruit cage to do with Tennyson? Oh, yes, she had left the door of the cage open for the bird and when this was discovered her brother – he was five years older and concise – had told them that it had been she. The punishment had been learning a hundred lines of
Idylls of the King
by heart. It had been the first time that she had realised the amazing gap between people and the results. Tennyson had been a revelation, the punishment had been Jack’s betrayal. Trying not to recall the miseries that Jack had caused her – he would remain a benignly neutral, even amiable, companion for weeks and then, without warning, abandon her – she wondered why betrayals seemed to stick more in the memory than revelations. Because, after all, she had Tennyson still – and Jack was dead. How she had adored him! It was for him that she had prayed to become prettier – ‘Or pretty at all, God, as a matter of fact.’ It was for him that she slowed down her wits, knowing somehow from the earliest moment that he could not bear to be second. But it was years before she had realised that he was actually ashamed of her, did not want her to be evident when his friends came to the vicarage and excluded her from any outside social arrangements that he made.
The first time that she heard herself described as no oil painting had been when she was twelve, trapped reading up an apple tree while her brother and his friend Rodney strolled beneath. She had started by thinking it would be a lark to hide from them, but almost at once it would have been unbearable not to stay hidden. They had not said much, but they had laughed – Jack had laughed, until Rodney made some remark about her face being shaped like a pear and Jack had said, ‘She can’t
help
it. She’s quite a good sort, really, it just means that nobody will marry her.’ Why was she going back over this painful wasteland? It was the sort of behaviour that she would advise any of the young people who had been in her charge against. It was, she supposed, because (when she was tired, of course) she could not help wondering (sometimes) whether there had been any other way for her – anything
she
could have done that might have changed her life. She had begged Papa to send her to university, for instance, but what money that was left after sending Jack had been kept for setting him up in some profession. So she had had to abandon any idea of a serious teaching career. Then, when Aunt May had died, naturally she had had to stay at home to look after Papa. This, of course, was years after she had lost Eustace, one of Papa’s curates who had enlisted and died an army chaplain in the Transvaal. She had never understood how he had got accepted into the Army since he was even more short-sighted than herself. But he had, and Papa had refused to allow an engagement between them on the grounds that Eustace was to be absent for an unknown amount of time. It would not make any difference, she had promised Eustace, but, of course, in the end it had: she was not sent his ‘things’, she had not even the dignity of having been engaged; no ring – just a few letters and a lock of his hair, sandy red . . . The letters had aged, the ink turning a rusty brown on the thin, yellowing paper, but the lock of hair had remained exactly the same sandy red colour, unnaturally bright. Papa had been actually
glad
that Eustace had died, remarking, as though conferring a great accolade, that he would not have liked to share her with anybody. Well, he had been spared that difficulty, had had her to himself well into his late eighties when he became hypochondriac, tyrannical and intermittently senile. Kind friends had described his death as a merciful release, but from her point of view, the mercy came rather late. His pension had died with him, and Eleanor Milliment had discovered freedom a good many years after it could have much practical value to her. Advised by her father’s lawyer, she sold the contents of the cottage since many friends of Papa’s – who were
most
kind – pointed out to her that she could not possibly afford to live in it. His collections of stamps and butterflies proved unexpectedly valuable, but some watercolours – of northern Italy by Edward Lear – fetched little more than the price of their frames.