The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (2 page)

‘Louise might come in.’

‘Nonsense. She’ll be out with the dog.’ Before she could say anything else, he put his mouth, edged on its upper rim with his bristling moustache, upon hers. After a moment of this, she pulled up her nightdress and he was upon her. ‘Darling Villy,’ he said three times before he came. He’d never been able to cope with Viola. When he had finished he gave a deep sigh, took his hand from her left breast and kissed her throat.

‘China tea. I don’t know how you manage always to smell of violets and China tea. All right?’ he added. He always asked that.

‘Lovely.’ She called it a white lie to herself, and over the years it had come to have an almost cosy ring. Of course she
loved
him, so what else could she say? Sex was for men, after all. Women, nice women anyway, were not expected to care for it, but her own mother had intimated (the only time she had ever even remotely touched upon the subject) that it was the gravest possible mistake ever to refuse one’s husband. So she had never refused him and if, eighteen years ago, she had suffered some shock accompanied by acute pain when she discovered what actually happened, practice had dissolved these feelings into those merely of a patient distaste, and at the same time it was a way of proving her love which she felt must be right.

‘Run me a bath, darling,’ she called as he left the room.

‘I’ll do that thing.’

She tried a second cup of tea, but it was cold so she got up and opened the large mahogany wardrobe to decide what to wear. She had to take Nanny and Lydia to Daniel Neal for summer clothes in the morning, and then she was lunching with Hermione Knebworth and going back to her shop afterwards to see if she could pick up an evening dress or two – at this time of year Hermione usually had things that she was selling off before everybody went away for the summer. Then she
must
go and see Mummy because she hadn’t managed it yesterday, but she wouldn’t have to stay long because she had to get back to change for the theatre and dinner with the Warings. But one could not go to Hermione’s shop without at least trying to look smart. She decided on the oatmeal linen edged with Marina-blue corded ribbon that she’d bought there last year.

The life I lead, she thought (it was not a new idea, rather a reiteration), is the one that is expected for me: what the children expect, and Mummy always expected, and, of course, what Edward expects. It is what happens to people who marry and most people don’t marry someone so handsome and so nice as Edward. But removing the idea of choice – or choice after a very early date – in her conduct added the desirable dimension of duty: she was a serious person condemned to a shallower way of life than her temperament could have dealt with (if things had been very different). She was not unhappy – it was just that she could have been much more.

As she crossed the landing to her husband’s large dressing room that contained their bath, she heard Lydia on the top floor shouting at Nanny, which meant that her pigtails were being done. Below her, a C major exercise of von Bulow began on the piano. Louise was practising.

The dining room had french windows that looked onto the garden. It was furnished with the essentials: a set of eight beautiful Chippendale chairs, given to them by Edward’s father when they married, a large koko wood table at present covered with a white cloth, a sideboard with electric heaters on which were kidneys, scrambled eggs, tomatoes and bacon, cream-coloured walls, some pictures made of coloured wood veneers, and sconces (mock Adam) with little half-shell lampshades, a gas fire in the fireplace and a battered old leather chair in which Louise loved to curl up and read. The general effect was ugly in a subdued kind of way, but nobody noticed it at all, except Louise who thought it was dull.

Lydia sat with her knife and fork poised like Tower Bridge opening while Nan chopped up tomato and bacon. ‘If you give me kidney, I’ll spit it out,’ she had remarked earlier. A good deal of early-morning conversation with Nan consisted of threats from either side, but since neither called one another’s bluff it was difficult to know what the consequences might ever have been if either had gone through with them. As it was, Lydia knew perfectly well that Nan wouldn’t dream of cancelling the visit to Daniel Neal, and Nan knew that Lydia would not dream of spitting out kidney or anything else in front of Daddy. He, Daddy, had bent over her to kiss the top of her head as he did every morning and she smelled his lovely woody smell mixed with lavender water. Now he sat at the head of the table with a large plate of everything in front of him and the
Telegraph
propped against the marmalade dish. Kidneys were nothing to him. He slashed them and the horrible awful blood ran out and he mopped it up with fried bread. She drank some of her milk very noisily to make him look up. In winter he ate poor dead birds he had shot: partridges and pheasants with little black scrunched-up claws. He didn’t look up, but Nan seized her mug and put it out of reach. ‘Eat your breakfast,’ she said in the special quiet voice she used at mealtimes in the dining room.

Mummy came in. She smiled her lovely smile at Lydia, and came round the table to kiss her. She smelled of hay and some kind of flower that made Lydia feel like sneezing but not quite. She had lovely curly hair but with bits of white in it that were worrying because Lydia wanted her never to be dead which people with white hair could easily be.

Mummy said, ‘Where’s Louise?’, which was silly really, because you could still hear her practising.

Nan said, ‘I’ll tell her.’

‘Thank you, Nan. Perhaps the drawing-room clock has stopped.’

Mummy had Grape Nuts and coffee and toast for breakfast with her own little tiny pot of cream. She was opening her post which was letters that came through the front door and skidded over the polished floor in the hall. Lydia had had post once: on her last birthday when she was six. She had also ridden on an elephant, had tea in her milk and worn her first pair of lace-up outdoor shoes. She thought it had been the best day in her life, which was saying a lot, because she’d already lived through so many days. The piano-playing had stopped and Louise came in followed by Nan. She loved Louise who was terrifically old and wore stockings in winter.

Now Lou was saying, ‘You’re going out to lunch, Mummy, I can tell from your clothes.’

‘Yes, darling, but I’ll be back to see you before Daddy and I go out.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘We’re going to the theatre.’

‘What are you going to?’

‘A play called
The Apple Cart.
By George Bernard Shaw.’

‘
Lucky
you!’

Edward looked up from his paper. ‘Who are we going with?’

‘The Warings. We’re dining with them first; seven sharp. Black tie.’

‘Tell Phyllis to put my things out for me.’

‘I
never
go to the theatre.’

‘Louise! That’s not true. You always go at Christmas. And for your birthday treat.’

‘Treats don’t count. I mean I don’t go as a normal thing. If it’s going to be my career, I ought to go.’

Villy took no notice. She was looking at the front page of
The Times.
‘Oh dear. Mollie Strangways’s mother has died.’

Lydia said, ‘How old was she?’

Villy looked up. ‘I don’t know, darling. I expect she was quite old.’

‘Was her hair gone quite white?’

Louise said, ‘How do they know which people who die to put in
The Times
? I bet far more people die in the world than would go on one page. How do they choose who to put?’

Her father said, ‘They don’t choose. People who want to put it in pay.’

‘If you were the King, would you have to pay?’

‘No – he’s different.’

Lydia, who had stopped eating, asked, ‘How old do people live?’ But she said it very quietly and nobody seemed to have heard her.

Villy, who had got up to pour herself more coffee, noticed Edward’s cup and refilled it now saying, ‘It’s Phyllis’s day off, so I’ll do your clothes. Try not to be back too late.’

‘How old do
mothers
live?’

Seeing her daughter’s face Villy said quickly, ‘For
ages.
Think of my mother – and Daddy’s. They’re awfully old and they’re both fine.’

‘Of course, you could always get murdered – that can happen at any age. Think of Tybalt. And the Princes in the Tower.’

‘What’s murdered? Louise, what’s murdered?’

‘Or drowned at sea. Shipwrecked,’ she added dreamily. She was
longing
to be shipwrecked.

‘Louise, do shut up. Can’t you see you’re upsetting her?’

But it was too late. Lydia had burst into gasping sobs. Villy picked her up and hugged her. Louise felt hot and sulky with shame.

‘There, my duck. You’ll see I’ll live to be terribly terribly old, and you’ll be quite grown up and have great big children like you who wear lace-up shoes—’

‘And riding jackets?’ She was still sobbing but she wanted a riding jacket – tweed, with a divided back and pockets to wear when she was riding her horses – and this seemed a good moment to get it.

‘We’ll see.’ She put Lydia back on the chair and Nan said, ‘Finish your milk.’ She was thirsty, so she did.

Edward, who had frowned at Louise, now said, ‘What about me? Don’t you want me to live for ever, too?’

‘Not so much. I
do
want you to.’

Louise said, ‘Well,
I
want you to. When you’re over eighty, I’ll wheel you about toothless and dribbling in a bath chair.’

This made her father roar with laughter as she had hoped and put her back into favour.

‘I shall look forward to every moment.’ He got to his feet and, carrying his paper, left the room.

Lydia said, ‘He’s gone to the lavatory. To do his big job.’

‘That’ll do,’ said Nanny sharply. ‘We don’t talk about things like that at mealtimes.’

Lydia stared at Louise; her eyes were expressionless, but her mouth made silent turkey gobbling movements. Louise, as she was meant to, started laughing.

‘Children, children,’ said Villy weakly. Lydia was killing sometimes, but Nanny’s
amour propre
must be considered.

‘Go upstairs, darling. Now – we’re going out soon.’

‘What time do you want us, madam?’

‘I should think about ten, Nanny.’

‘See my horses.’ Lydia had wriggled off her chair and rushed to the french windows, which Louise opened for her.

‘You come.’ She seized Louise’s hand.

Her horses were tied to the railings in the back garden. They were long sticks of different colours: a piece of plane tree was the piebald; a silvery stick was the grey; a piece of beech collected from Sussex was the bay. They all had elaborate halters made of bits of string, grass mowings in flower pots beside each one and their names in coloured chalks on pieces of cardboard. Lydia untied the grey and started cantering about the garden. Every now and then she gave a clumsy little jump and admonished her mount. ‘You mustn’t buck so much.’

‘Watch me riding,’ she called. ‘
Lou!
Watch me!’

But Louise, who was afraid of Nan’s displeasure and in any case had nearly an hour before Miss Milliment arrived and wanted to finish
Persuasion,
simply said, ‘I have. I did watch you,’ and went – as bad as a grown-up.

‘Morning, Bracken.’

‘Good morning, sir.’

‘The wharf.’

‘Very good, sir.’

After this exchange – the same every morning, unless Edward wanted to go anywhere else – no more was said. Edward settled himself comfortably and began idly turning the pages of his journal, but he was not reading it, he was reviewing his day. A couple of hours in the office, dealing with mail, then he’d have a look and see how the samples of veneer from the elm they had bought from the piles of the old Waterloo Bridge were getting on. The wood had been drying for a year now, but they had started cutting last week, and now, at last, they would discover whether the Old Man’s hunch about it had been right or a disaster. It was exciting. Then he’d got a lunch at his club with a couple of blokes from the Great Western Railway which would, he was pretty sure, result in a substantial order for mahogany. A directors’ meeting in the afternoon, the Old Man, and his brother – sign his letters – and then there might be time to have a cup of tea with Denise Ramsay, who had the twin advantages of a husband frequently abroad on business and no children. But like all advantages, this cut both ways; she was a little too free and was therefore a little too much in love with him; after all, it was never meant to be a serious Thing – as she called it. There might not turn out to be time to see her since he had to get back to change for the theatre.