The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (13 page)

Breakfast was in the small parlour in the cottage part of the house. The Duchy was Victorian about her drawing and dining rooms, using the latter only for dinner and the former not at all, unless there was company. Rachel’s parents sat now at the gate-legged table on which the Duchy was making tea from the kettle that boiled over a spirit lamp. William Cazalet sat with a plate of eggs and bacon and the
Morning Post
propped up against the marmalade. He was dressed in riding clothes that included a lemon-coloured waistcoat and a wide dark silk tie with a pearl pin in it. He read his paper with a monocle screwing up the other eye so that his bushy white brow almost touched his ruddy cheekbone. The Duchy, dressed much as her daughter but with a mother-of-pearl and sapphire cross slung on a chain over her silk blouse, filled the silver teapot and received her daughter’s kiss, emanating a little draught of violets.

‘Good morning, darling. I’m afraid they are all going to have a very hot day for their journey.’

Rachel dropped a kiss on the top of her father’s head and sat in her place, where she saw at once that there was a letter from S.

‘Ring for some more toast, would you?’

‘Iniquitous!’ William growled. He did not say what was iniquitous, and neither his wife nor his daughter asked him, knowing very well that if they did, he would tell them not to worry their pretty little heads about
that
. He treated his newspaper as a recalcitrant colleague with whom he could always (fortunately) have the last word.

Rachel accepted her cup of tea, decided to enjoy her letter later, and put it in her pocket. When Eileen, their parlourmaid in London, arrived with the toast, the Duchy said, ‘Eileen, would you tell Tonbridge that I’ll want him at ten to go to Battle and that I’ll see Mrs Cripps in half an hour?’

‘Very good, m’m.’

‘Duchy dear, wouldn’t you like me to do Battle for you?’

The Duchy looked up from scraping a very little butter on her toast. ‘No, thank you, darling. I want to speak to Crowhurst about his lamb. And I have to go to Till’s: I need a new trug and secateurs. I’ll leave the bedrooms to you. Did you make a plan?’

Rachel picked up her list. ‘I thought Hugh and Sybil in the Blue Room, Edward and Villy in the Paeony Room. Zoë and Rupert in the Indian Room, Nanny and Lydia in the night nursery, the two boys in the old day nursery, Louise and Polly in the Pink Room, and Ellen and Neville in the back spare . . .’

The Duchy thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Clarissa?’

‘Oh, Lord! We’ll have to put a camp bed in the Pink Room for her.’

‘I think she’d like that. She’ll want to be with the older girls. Will, shall I tell Tonbridge about the station?’

‘You tell him, Kitty m’dear. I’ve got a meeting with Sampson.’

‘I think we’ll have lunch early today, so that the maids will have time to clear it and lay tea in the hall. Will that suit you?’

‘Anything you say.’ He got to his feet and tramped off to his study to light his pipe and finish his paper.

‘What will he do when he’s finished all the building here?’

The Duchy looked at her daughter and answered simply, ‘He’ll never finish. There’ll always be something. If you’ve time, you might pick the raspberries, but don’t overdo it.’

‘Don’t
you
.’

But with seventeen people coming to stay, there
was
a great deal to do. The Duchy spent a businesslike half hour with Mrs Cripps. She sat in the chair pulled out for her at the large, scrubbed kitchen table, while Mrs Cripps, arms folded, leant her bulk against the range. While the menus for the weekend were being arranged, Billy, the gardener’s boy, arrived with two large trugs filled with peas, broad beans and Cos lettuces. He set them down on the scullery floor, and then stood speechless staring at Mrs Cripps and the Duchy.

‘Excuse me, m’m. What do you want, then, Billy?’

‘Mr McAlpine said to bring back the trugs for the potatoes.’ He spoke in a whisper; his voice was breaking, which embarrassed him. He had also lately taken to staring at ladies.

‘Dottie!’ Mrs Cripps used her most refined shout. When Madam wasn’t around, she screeched. ‘Dottie! Where is that girl?’

‘She’s out the back.’ This meant the lavatory, as Mrs Cripps well knew.

‘Excuse me, m’m,’ she said again, and made for the scullery.

When she had emptied the trugs and thrust them at Billy with instructions to bring back tomatoes with the potatoes, she returned to the business of meals. The Duchy inspected the remains of a boiling fowl that Mrs Cripps did not think could be stretched into rissoles for lunch, but Madam said that with an extra egg and more breadcrumbs it could be made to do. They fought their regular battle over a cheese soufflé. Mrs Cripps, who had got her place as a plain cook, had, none the less, recently mastered the art of making soufflés and liked to make them on any serious occasion. The Duchy disapproved of cooked cheese at night. In the end, they compromised on a chocolate soufflé for pudding as they would only be nine at night in the dining room. ‘It will be eleven for luncheon tomorrow, as two of the children will be with us, and that will mean eight in the hall.’

And ten in the kitchen, thought Mrs Cripps.

‘And the salmon for tonight? Is that standing up to this weather?’ (William had been given a salmon by one of his friends at the Club.)

‘It’ll have to be cold, m’m. I’m poaching it this morning, to be on the safe side.’

‘That will be very good.’

‘And I’ve put cucumbers on the list, m’m. McAlpine says ours aren’t ready.’

‘How tiresome! Well, Mrs Cripps, I mustn’t keep you: I know you have a great deal to do. I’m sure everything will be quite satisfactory.’

And she went, leaving Mrs Cripps to make four pounds of pastry, poach the salmon, get two huge rice puddings into the oven, mix a Madeira cake and a batch of flapjacks and strip and mince the chicken for the rissoles. Dottie, who emerged as soon as she heard the Duchy leave, was scolded and set to shelling peas, scraping ten pounds of potatoes and cleaning out the vast churn that would hold the eighteen pints of fresh milk to be delivered from the neighbouring farm. ‘And mind you scald it when you’ve cleaned it out or we’ll have the milk turning on us.’

Upstairs, the housemaids, Bertha and Peggy, were making up the beds – the two four-posters for Mr and Mrs Hugh and Edward, the smaller double for Mr and Mrs Rupert, the five little iron beds with thin, sinewy mattresses for the older children, the nurses’ beds, the large cot for Neville, and the camp bed for Lydia. Rachel came upon them in the Pink Room and told them that another camp bed would be needed for Miss Clarissa. She then doled out the requisite number of bath and hand towels for these rooms, and settled the question of how many chamber pots would be required. ‘I think two for each of the children’s dormitories, and one for each of the other rooms. Have we enough?’ she added with a smile.

‘Only if we use the one that Madam doesn’t like.’

‘You can put that in Mr Rupert’s room. Don’t give it to the children, Bertha.’

The day nursery and the Pink Room had linoleum on the floor, and gingham curtains made by the Duchy on her ancient Singer on rainy afternoons. The furniture was white painted deal, the light was a single ceiling bulb with a white glass shade. They were children’s rooms. Those of her brothers and sisters-in-law were better appointed. Here were squares of hair-cord carpet with a stained and polished wood surround, and in the Paeony Room, a Turkey carpet with the same. The furniture was mahogany; there were dressing-tables with wing mirrors and white crocheted cloths and marble washstand tables with china pitchers and bowls to match. The Blue Room had a
chaise-longue
Rachel had put Hugh and Sybil there so that Sybil could put her feet up if she felt inclined. The thought of a new baby was tremendously exciting. Really, she adored babies, particularly when they were new. She loved the underwater movements of their hands: the fastidious pursing of their cherry pink mouths, their slaty eyes that tried to see you, and then became aloof. They were darlings, all of them. Rachel was Honorary Secretary of an institution called the Babies’ Hotel that cared for temporarily or chronically unwanted babies up to the age of five. If parents, mainly musical or theatrical, went on tour, they could leave their baby there and the payment was modest. The babies who simply turned up, wrapped in blankets or sometimes newspaper in a cardboard box, were looked after free: the hotel was a charitable organisation with a full-time sister and matron. To provide staff and further augment their slender finances, they trained young girls to become children’s nurses. She loved the work and felt it to be useful, the thing she wanted to do more than anything else in the world, and, as she would never have children of her own, it gave her access to a steady stream of babies, all in need of love and attention. Part of her work was to help the unwanted babies to be adopted, and it was awful to watch how, as they got older, their chances went down. It was sometimes very sad.

She was going through the grown-ups’ rooms, looking to see that the drawers had clean lining paper, that the quilted biscuit boxes by the bedside table contained Marie biscuits, that the bottles of Malvern water were full, that the hanging cupboards had a fair number of coat-hangers – all things that, when she returned from Battle, she could tell the Duchy had been done and thus save her from fussing. The biscuits had become quite silent, crumbly and unappetising. She collected the boxes and took them down to the pantry to be refilled.

Mrs Cripps, balancing a large pie dish on the flat of her left hand, was slashing surplus pastry from the edges with a black knife. When Rachel gave her the message for Eileen, she said that the old biscuits would do for the girls’ middle mornings. The kitchen was very hot. Mrs Cripps’s remarkable complexion – a greenish yellow – was shiny with sweat, her straight greasy black hair was escaping in strands from outsize kirby-grips and the way in which she squinted at the pie down her long pointed nose made her look more like an overblown witch than usual. Pastry lay in moony slabs on the floured table, but her sausage-coloured fingers were not white beyond the knuckles: she had what was known as a very light hand. Seeing the pie reminded Rachel of the raspberries and she asked for a container to put them in.

‘The fruit basket is in the larder, miss. I’ve sent Dottie out for some parsley.’ She meant that she did not want to fetch the basket, but knew that Miss Rachel should not have to.

‘I’ll get it,’ Rachel said at once, as Mrs Cripps knew she would.

The larder was cool and rather dark with a window covered with fine zinc mesh, in front of which hung two heavily infested fly papers. Food in every stage of its life lay on the long marble slab, the remains of a joint under a cage made of muslin, pieces of rice puddings and blancmange on kitchen plates, junket setting in a cut-glass bowl, old, crazed, discoloured jugs filled with gravy and stock, stewed prunes in a pudding basin and, in the coldest place beneath the window, the huge, silvery salmon, its eye torpid from recent poaching, lay like a grounded zeppelin. The fruit basket was on the slate floor, the paper that lined it red and magenta with juice.

As she opened the front door and stepped into what had been the old cottage garden she was assailed by the heat, by the sound of bees and the motor mower, by honeysuckle and lavender and the nameless old-fashioned climbing rose of ivory peach colour that was thickly wreathed round the porch. The Duchy’s rockery, her latest pride and joy, was blazing with little mats and cushions and sparks of flowers. She turned right and followed the path round the house. On the west side was a steep bank that ended in the tennis court that McAlpine was mowing. He wore his straw hat with a black band, trousers as round as drainpipes, and, in spite of the heat, his jacket. This was because he was in view of the house; he took it off in the vegetable garden. He saw her and stopped, in case she wanted to say anything to him. ‘Lovely day,’ she called and he touched his forehead in acknowledgement. Lovely for some, he thought. He was fond of lawns, but a tennis court got messed up in no time with them all trampling about on it. He couldn’t trust Billy with the mower, she seized up as soon as look at him, but was worrying about his leeks and grudged the time plodding up and down emptying grass clippings into his barrow. He approved of Miss Rachel, however, and did not mind her picking his raspberries as he saw from her basket she was about to do. She never left the cage open, like some he could mention. She is a nice, straight lady, although too thin; she ought to have married, unless it was just not in her nature. He looked at the sun. Nearly time to get a good cup of tea off Mrs Cripps;
she
was a sharp one, make no mistake, but she made a tidy cup of tea . . .

Billy, crouched on the path that ran between the main herbaceous borders, was clipping the grass edgings. He was awkward with the shears, opening them too wide and slashing with fierce ineptitude. He had to clip the same place several times to get it neat, but Mr McAlpine would be after him if he didn’t. Sometimes he caught a piece of turf that came away with the shears, and then he had to jam it back and hope he wouldn’t notice. He had a rubbed blister – the skin clean off on his right hand; every now and then he licked the salty dirt off it.

He’d suggested doing the mowing but it was no go after that time when the thing packed up on him – wasn’t his fault, it needed servicing, but he got the blame. Sometimes this job was worse than school, and he’d thought that the minute he left school, his troubles would be over. Once a month he went home and Mum made a fuss of him, but his sisters had gone into service, and his brothers were much older, and Dad kept telling him how lucky he was to learn his trade under Mr McAlpine. After a few hours he didn’t know what to do with himself and he missed his friends who were all working in different places. He had been used to doing things in a crowd; at school there’d been a gang of them who’d gone fishing, or picked hops in the season for cash. Here there wasn’t anyone to do things with. There was Dottie, but she was a girl so he never knew where he was with her and she treated him like a boy when he was doing a man’s job – sort of – earning his living, anyway, same as her. Sometimes he wondered about going to sea, or he might drive a bus; the bus would be better because ladies took buses; he wouldn’t drive, he’d be a conductor, so’s he could see all their legs . . .