The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (35 page)

‘I’ve got to have all my teeth out,’ she said. ‘The dentist wrote to me last week.’ But before he could even take her hand, she gave an awful little artificial smile and said, ‘Oh, well! It will all be the same a hundred years hence!’

Pity shrank in him. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

‘Don’t let’s talk about it any more.’

He made one last effort. ‘No, but that’s awful for you!’

‘I shall get used to it.’

‘Have you – have you told Edward?’

‘Not yet. I don’t suppose he’ll mind. After all, he’s had most of his out.’

‘It’s different for women,’ Rupert began. He was trying to imagine how Zoë would respond to such a letter. God! She’d think it was the end of the world!

‘Everything’s different for women,’ Villy said. ‘I wonder why?’

They had reached the top. No more was said and she never referred to it again.

In the evenings they had dined and danced. Both the girls loved dancing and never wanted to stop, although he was so full of fresh air and exercise that he wondered how they – Edward, particularly – kept it up. By midnight, he was dropping, but Zoë always wanted to stay until the band stopped. In the end, they would all four trail upstairs to their adjoining rooms on the first floor of the hotel and would stand outside them: Edward would kiss Zoë, Rupert would kiss Villy; the sisters-in-law would unite their cheeks for the glancing second that family protocol required, and then finally separate for the night. Zoë, who was enjoying everything so much that her pleasure had begun to feel like a reproach (if this was what made her happy, why couldn’t he give her more of it?), would kick off her shoes, unzip her new scarlet dress and drift about in her pale green cami-knickers and the new paste drop earrings he had given her for Christmas, sitting on the end of the bed for a moment to take off her stockings, wandering to the dressing-table to tie back her hair with a large tortoiseshell clasp preparatory to creaming her face, chatting, reminiscing happily about the day, while he, in bed by now, watched her, glad that she was so merry and content.

‘Aren’t you glad I made you come?’ she said one evening.

‘Yes,’ he said, but he scented danger.

‘Edward suggested this morning that we might all go to the South of France next summer. He and Villy went for their honeymoon and I’ve never been. What do you think?’

‘It might be lovely.’

‘You sound as though we shan’t go.’

‘Darling, I don’t think we can afford two holidays abroad. Anyway, we can’t leave the children again.’

‘They’re perfectly happy with your family.’

‘You can’t expect Hugh and Sybil to do all the work.’

‘I should have thought the South of France would be a wonderful place for you to paint.’

‘Yes, it would be. But not affordable this year. Anyway, if I have a painting holiday, it has to be just that. Not what you would call a holiday at all.’

‘What do you
mean
, Rupert?’

‘I mean,’ he said, already weary with his own resentment, ‘that I’d want to
paint
all the time. Not take you to the beach, go for picnics, dance all night. I’d want to
work
.’

‘Oh, Lord!’ she said. ‘Trust you to be so
earnest
about it.’

‘That’s exactly what I’m not. If I was earnest, as you put it, I’d do it anyway. I wouldn’t be deflected by you or anyone else.’

She swung round on the dressing-table stool, ‘What do you mean “anyone else”?’

‘You don’t like me painting, Zoë.’

‘What do you mean “anyone else”?’

There had been a short silence: her stupidity was beginning to frighten him. Then, as he could see that she was about to reiterate her idiotic question, he said, ‘I mean that nothing would deflect me. Neither you nor any
thing
else. But it’s all right. I’m not earnest, I’m hardly earnest at all.’

‘Oh, darling!’ She came swiftly over and sat on the bed. ‘Oh, darling! You sound so sad, and I love you so much!’ She put her arms round his neck and her scented, silky hair fell each side of his face. ‘I don’t mind us being poor – honestly! I don’t mind anything as long as I’m with you! I could get a part-time job, if you like – if it would help! And I think you’re a marvellous painter: I do – really!’ She lifted her head to gaze at him, adoring and sincerely contrite.

As he put his arms round her and drew her into bed, he discovered, with a sad, but grateful amazement, that loving her did not depend – as he’d been afraid it did – upon his admiration. Later, lying awake while she slept, I married her, he thought, and she has always given me all of herself. It was I who invented some other part of her that she would not give. But I was wrong: there was nothing to withhold. The discovery was painful and astonishing; then it occurred to him that if he loved her enough, she might change. He was not yet able or willing to accept that this was unlikely, or even impossible: he clung to the more welcome idea that though a person might be transformed by love they could not be transformed without it.

Since that night, he had discovered that insights do not, in themselves, alter either attitudes or behaviour: that it was more a matter of small – sometimes very small – constant effort, but sometimes, in the last months, when she bored or irritated him, facts of their relationship that he had hitherto been unable to accept, he could also feel some tenderness for her, and he had become very protective towards her with other people. Sometimes, often, like that evening, he had reverted to resentment of her for her limitations, and anger with himself for not having recognised them sooner.

‘Dad! Jolly good sandcastle, Dad. Dad, would you possibly be a sea-lion to show Polly? I don’t mean now,’ Clary added quickly. ‘I know you need a sofa to dive off and we haven’t any socks to make fish. But after tea?’

At Christmas, when they gave the grown-ups marks out of ten for funniness, generosity and being non-spoilsports, Rupert had come top for funny, a fact of which Clary was immensely proud; his sea-lion and his gorilla, which had graduated to King Kong, were deeply admired, and repetition, as Villy had remarked, was the soul of wit so far as the children were concerned.

‘Polly has seen my sea-lion.’

‘Not for ages, Uncle Rupe. Honestly, I’ve almost forgotten.’

‘OK. After tea.
Once.
Time to go home now, I think.’

‘Oh, good. And can we stop for ices on the way home?’

‘I should think there’s a distinct possibility that we might. Who’ll pack up the picnic things?’

‘We will,’ they both said. Rupert sat by the sand dune and smoked a cigarette and watched them do it. He was glad that Clary had become such friends with Polly, and the lessons with Miss Milliment seemed to have worked out very well. Now that she had Polly as a friend, she was much easier at home, less jealous of Neville, less prickly with Zoë, and far less possessive of himself. She was growing up. Although she was the same age as Polly one would not think so to look at them. They had both grown in the last year but whereas Polly seemed uniformly a larger size and was now something of a beauty, with Sybil’s coppery hair, a milk and roses complexion, rather small, brilliantly dark blue eyes and long, thin, elegant legs, Clary had simply shot upwards, was thin as a rake. Her dark brown hair, still with a fringe, was dead straight, her face sallow, often with dark smudges under her eyes – which were startlingly like her mother’s, sea-grey, candid, searching eyes – her best feature. She had rather a pug nose and when she smiled there was a gap where she had had one of her top teeth out; the dentist had said she had too many, and now she wore a painful brace that was to eliminate the gap. Her arms were like sticks, and she had the long bony Cazalet feet. In the last year she had become clumsy: tripped up, knocked things over, as though she was not used to her size. ‘Clary! Come here a moment. Just want to give you a hug,’ he said.

‘Oh, Dad! I’m boiling already!’ But she returned the hug and planted a kiss on his forehead so firmly that he could feel the metal of the brace.

‘Boiling!’ he jeered. ‘You’re always boiling, or freezing, or starving or dropping from fatigue. Don’t you ever feel ordinary, like the rest of us?’

‘About one in a million times,’ she said carelessly. ‘Oh, don’t let Neville bring that jellyfish back! It will only stink and die, or slop over in the car and hurt itself.’

‘And, anyway,’ Polly said, ‘it’s not a
pet
! You couldn’t, by the wildest stretch of imagination, turn a jellyfish into a
pet
!’

‘I could,’ Neville said. ‘I shall be the first person in the world to do that. I shall call him Bexhill and
live
with him.’

By midday at Mill Farm the sun had gone, it was breathlessly still and very hot; the sky was like lead and the birds were quiet. Edie, bringing in a basket of washing off the line, said there would be thunder she shouldn’t wonder, and Emily, who was cross from the heat of the range and the fishmonger not calling, which meant no ice so the butter was oily and the milk was on the turn, said, ‘What could you expect?’ She hated the country and regarded thunder as yet another rural disadvantage. The kitchen had been painted a dull pale green, a colour that Villy had insisted was soothing to a cook’s temper, but it didn’t seem to have done much good. The kitchen had had their dinner, but Phyllis had one of her headaches and hadn’t fancied it – a nice Irish stew and treacle tart – and one thing Emily could not stand was people picking at her food. A nice drop of rain would clear the air, Edie said, and the cows were lying down in Garnet’s field out back so it was likely, and should she change the fly papers in the larder? Madam had forgotten to order more papers, Emily replied – they would have to stay as they were; but Phyllis said, oh, no, they couldn’t
really
– they turned her stomach every time she went in there to fetch anything, and she clapped her hand to her mouth as though worse might follow. So Emily followed Edie into the larder to inspect the papers. They hung, motionless, like Victorian bell-pulls heavily encrusted with jet and, as Edie remarked, were no longer any use to man nor beast. ‘This has always been a terrible place for flies,’ she said. ‘There’s papers up at the shop. I’ll pick up a packet on my way in the morning, shall I?’

‘You might as well have that lot down, then,’ Emily replied. Edie’s good nature staggered her (she seemed prepared to do all kinds of things that weren’t her place) and she could only respond grudgingly. ‘Them flies!’ she muttered to Phyllis. ‘You never get flies like that in London!’

But over the years, of pain and distaste for what her mother had once called ‘the horrid side of married life’, of lonely days filled with aimless pursuits or downright boredom, of pregnancies, nurses, servants and the ordering of endless meals, it had come to seem as though she had given up everything for not very much. She had journeyed towards this conclusion by stages hardly perceptible to herself, disguising discontent with some new activity which, as she was a perfectionist, would quickly absorb her. But when she had mastered the art, or the craft, or the technique involved in whatever it was, she realised that her boredom was intact and was simply waiting for her to stop playing with a loom, a musical instrument, a philosophy, a language, a charity or a sport and return to recognising the essential futility of her life. Then, bereft of distraction, she would relapse into a kind of despair as each pursuit betrayed her, failing to provide the
raison d’être
that had been her reason for taking it up in the first place. Despair was what she called it to herself; her sensibilities – never aired – had become a hot-house full of exotic species labelled tragedy, self-abnegation, a broken heart and other various heroic ingredients that were being forced to constitute her secret martyrdom. As she saw herself as one thing and all other people as another, she could have no friends close enough to explode this unhappy state of affairs. But, well beyond common misfortune herself, she could acknowledge its existence for other people, and be full of real active and useful kindness towards them. She was like someone with a broken back who would gladly do the washing up for someone with a headache. Accident, illness or poverty released her generosity: she had sat up all night with Neville during an asthma attack so that Ellen might get some sleep, it was she who drove Edie’s brother, an epileptic, to Tunbridge Wells to a specialist, who every year contrived to buy a suit or dress that would become Jessica who could never afford anything new for herself. For the rest, she wondered, uneasily sometimes, why she could not be like the Duchy, content with her garden and her music, or like Sybil, revelling in her baby and her new home, or even like Rachel, who seemed fulfilled by her charitable work and by being the perfect daughter. But the utter impossibility of being a perfect daughter to
her
mother now occurred. Lady Rydal was famous for standards of behaviour that no one living had ever been able to achieve, least of all a daughter. Jessica, who had looked like breaking that record, had, of course, spoiled it all by marrying an impoverished nobody – albeit good-looking and gallant, but given her beauty and her compliant disposition, Lady Rydal had set her sights far higher than a commoner with charm and medals. She had regarded the marriage as yet another of the personal tragedies encompassing her life – ‘Poor darling Jessica has thrown herself away’ – and nobody but Lady Rydal would ever understand the anguish this cost her as she frequently said to Villy and anyone else who got trapped into having tea with her. No, it was all very well for
Rachel
– after all, she didn’t have anything much else to do.