The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (3 page)

If anyone had ever asked him if he was in love with his wife, Edward would have said of course he was. He would not have added that, in spite of eighteen years of relative happiness and comfort and three splendid children, Villy did not really like the bed side of life. This was quite common in wives – one poor fellow at the club, Martyn Slocombe-Jones, had once confided to him late at night after a game of billiards and rather a lot of excellent port that
his
wife hated it so much that she’d only let him do it when she wanted a baby. She was a damned attractive woman, too, and a wonderful wife, as Martyn had said. In other ways. They had five children, and Martyn didn’t think she was going to wear a sixth. Rotten for him. When Edward had suggested that he find consolation elsewhere, Martyn had simply gazed at him with mournful brown eyes and said, ‘But I’m in love with her, old boy, always have been. Never looked at anyone else. You know how it is.’ And Edward, who didn’t, said of course he did. That conversation had warned him off Marcia Slocombe-Jones anyhow. It didn’t matter, because although he could have gone for her there were so many other girls to go for. How lucky he was! To have come back from France not only alive, but relatively unscathed! In winter, his chest played him up a bit due to living in trenches where the gas had hung about for weeks, but otherwise . . . Since then he’d come back, gone straight into the family firm, met Villy at a party, married her as soon as her contract with the ballet company she was with expired and as soon as she’d agreed to the Old Man’s dictate that her career should stop from then on. ‘Can’t marry a gal whose head’s full of something else. If marriage isn’t the woman’s career, it won’t be a good marriage.’

His attitude was thoroughly Victorian, of course, but all the same, there was quite a lot to be said for it. Whenever Edward looked at his own mother, which he did infrequently but with great affection, he saw her as the perfect reflection of his father’s attitude: a woman who had serenely fulfilled all her family responsibilities and at the same time retained her youthful enthusiasms – for her garden that she adored and for music. At over seventy, she was quite capable of playing double concertos with professionals. Unable to discriminate between the darker, more intricate veins of temperament that distinguish one person from another, he could not really see why Villy should not be as happy and fulfilled as the Duchy. (His mother’s Victorian reputation for plain living – nothing rich in food and no frills or pretensions about her own appearance or her households had long ago earned her the nickname of Duchess – shortened by her own children to Duch, and lengthened by her grandchildren to Duchy.) Well, he had never prevented Villy from having interests: her charities, her riding and skiing, her crazes for learning the most various musical instruments, her handicrafts – spinning, weaving and so on – and when he thought of his brothers’ wives – Sybil was too highbrow for him and Zoë too demanding – he felt that he had not done too badly . . .

Louise’s cousin, Polly Cazalet, arrived half an hour early for lessons because she and Louise had been making face cream out of white of egg, chopped parsley, witch hazel and a drop of cochineal to make it pinkish. It was called Wonder Cream and Poly had made beautiful labels which were to be stuck onto the various jars they had collected from their mothers. The cream was in a pudding basin in the garden shed. They were planning to sell it to the aunts and cousins and to Phyllis at a lower price because they knew she hadn’t got much money. The jars had to be different prices anyway as they were mostly different sizes and shapes. They had been washed by Louise and were also in the garden shed. It was all kept there because Louise had stolen six eggs from the larder as well as the egg whisk when Emily was out shopping. They had given some of the yolks to Louise’s tortoise, who had not liked them very much, even when mixed with dandelions (his favourite food) from Polly’s garden.

‘It’s looks funny to me.’

They looked at it again –
willing
it to be nicer.

‘I don’t think the cochineal was a very good idea – it was a bit green.’

‘Cochineal makes things
pink,
you fool.’

Polly blushed. ‘I know,’ she lied. ‘The trouble is, it’s gone all runny.’

‘That won’t stop it being good for the skin. Anyway, it’ll go stiffer in time.’ Polly put the spoon she had brought for potting into the mixture. ‘The green isn’t the parsley: it’s got a sort of crust on it.’

‘You get that.’

‘Do you?’

‘Of course. Think of Devonshire cream.’

‘Do you think we should just try it on our faces before we sell it?’

‘Stop
fussing.
You stick on the labels and I’ll pot. The labels are awfully good,’ she added and Polly blushed again. The labels said ‘Wonder Cream’ and underneath, ‘Apply generously at night. You will be astonished at the change in your appearance.’ Some of the jars were too small for them.

Miss Milliment arrived before they had finished. They pretended not to hear the bell, but Phyllis came out to tell them.

‘No good selling
her
any,’ Louise muttered.

‘I thought you said—’

‘I don’t mean her. I mean Miss M.’

‘Lord, no. Coals to Newcastle.’ Polly often got things wrong.

‘Coals to Newcastle would mean Miss M was as beautiful as the day.’ This made them both double up laughing.

Miss Milliment, a kind and exceedingly intelligent woman, had a face, as Louise had once remarked, like a huge old toad. When her mother had reprimanded her for being unkind, Louise had retorted that she liked toads, but she had known that this was a dishonest reply because a face that was perfectly acceptable for a toad was not actually much good on a person. After that, Miss Milliment’s – certainly astonishing – appearance was only discussed in private with Polly and between them they had invented a life of unrelieved tragedy, or rather lives, since they did not agree upon Miss Milliment’s probable misfortunes. An undisputed fact about her was her antiquity: she had been Villy’s governess who had admitted that she had seemed old then and, goodness knows, that was ages ago. She said ‘chymist’ and of course ‘chymistry’ and once told Louise that she had picked wild roses in the Cromwell Road when young. She smelled of stale hot old clothes especially noticeable when they kissed her, which Louise, as a kind of penance, had made herself do ever since the toad remark. She lived in Stoke Newington and came five mornings a week to teach them for three hours and on Fridays she stayed to lunch. Today she was wearing her bottle-green lock-knit jersey suit and a small, bottle-green straw hat with petersham ribbon, which sat just above her very tight, greasy bun of grey hair. They began the morning, as they always did, by reading Shakespeare aloud for an hour and a half.

Today was the last two acts of Othello and Louise was reading him. Polly, who preferred the women’s parts – not seeming to realise that they weren’t the best – was Desdemona, and Miss Milliment was Iago and Emilia and everybody else. Louise, who secretly read ahead of the lessons, had learned Othello’s last speech by heart, which was just as well because the moment she got to

Tears rushed to her eyes and she would not have been able to read. At the end, Polly said,
‘Are
people like that?’

‘Like what, Polly?’

‘Like Iago, Miss Milliment.’

‘I don’t suppose there are very many of them. Of course, there may be more than we know, because each Iago has to find an Othello for his wickedness.’

‘Like Mrs Simpson and King Edward?’

‘Of course not. Polly, you are stupid! The King was in love with Mrs Simpson – it’s completely different. He gave everything up for her and he could have given her up for everything.’

Polly, blushing, muttered, ‘Mr Baldwin could be Iago, he
could
be.’

Miss Milliment, in her oil-on-the-waters voice, said, ‘We cannot really compare the two situations, although it was certainly an interesting idea of yours, Polly, to try. Now I think we had better do our geography. I am looking forward to your map you were going to draw for me. Will you fetch the atlas, Louise?’

‘I think that is rather
you
.’

‘It is lovely. It’s just that I’ve never worn this colour.’

Villy was arrayed in one of Hermione’s bargains: a dress of lime green chiffon, the bodice cut in a low V edged with gold beads and a little pleated cape that floated from the beaded shoulder straps. The skirt was simply cut in cunning gores that lay flat on her slim hips and flared out to a tremendous floating skirt.

‘I think you look divine in it. Let’s ask Miss MacDonald what she thinks.’

Miss MacDonald instantly materialised. She was a lady of indeterminate age – always dressed in a grey pin-striped flannel skirt and a tussore silk blouse. She was devoted to Hermione, and ran the shop for her during Hermione’s frequent absences. Hermione led a mysterious life composed of parties, weekends, hunting in winter and doing up various amusing flats she bought in Mayfair and let at exorbitant rents to people she met at parties. Everybody was in love with her: her reputation rested upon the broad front of universal adulation. Whoever the current lover might be was lost in a crowd of apparently desperate, apparently hopeless suitors. She was not beautiful, but invariably glamorous and groomed and her drawl concealed a first-class brain and a reckless courage in the hunting field or indeed anywhere else that it was required of her. Edward’s brother Hugh had been in love with her during the war – was reputed to have been one of the twenty-one men who had proposed to her during that period – but she had married Knebworth and shortly after the birth of her son, had divorced him. She was good with men’s wives, but genuinely fond of Villy for whom she always made special knockdown prices.

Villy, standing in a kind of trance in the diaphanous frock that seemed to have turned her into some fragile exotic stranger, realised that Miss MacDonald was registering appreciation.

‘Might have been made for you, Mrs Cazalet.’

‘The midnight blue would be more
useful
.’

‘Oh, Lady Knebworth! What about the
café-au-lait
lace?’

‘That’s brilliant of you, Miss MacDonald. Do fetch it.’

The moment that Villy saw the coffee lace she knew that she wanted it. She wanted all of them, and them included a wine-coloured moiré with huge puff sleeves made of ribbon rosettes that she had tried on earlier.

‘It’s utter agony, isn’t it?’ Hermione had already decided that Villy, who had come in for two frocks, should buy three of them, and knowing Villy, it was essential that she should forgo one. Stage whispers ensued.

‘How
much
are they?’

‘Miss MacDonald, how
much
?’

‘The moiré is twenty, the chiffon is fifteen, the lace and the midnight blue crêpe could be sixteen each. Isn’t that right, Lady Knebworth?’

There was a brief silence while Villy tried and failed to add things up. ‘I can’t have four, anyway. It’s out of the question.’

‘I think,’ said Hermione consideredly, ‘that the blue is a bit on the obvious side for you, but the others are all perfect. Supposing we made the moiré and the lace fifteen each, and threw in the chiffon for ten? How much does that come to, Miss MacDonald?’ (She knew perfectly well, but she also knew that Villy was bad at sums.)