The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (39 page)

Lunch was in the dining room because so many of them were at the beach, which meant washing properly, a great fag, but on the other hand meant second helpings were hotter – good. They had rabbit pie and castle puddings, which fortified them nicely for the immense bicycle ride Teddy had planned for them. They were going up past Watlington to Cripps Corner, then Staplecross, out on the Ewhurst Road, then right down a narrow lane and right again onto the Brede Road and back to Cripps Corner where they stopped for Snofrutes and choc bars – they were pretty hungry by then, but it was mostly downhill on the way back, and Teddy made them go past Home Place to Mill Farm to see if his father was back because he’d been promised a rabbit shoot before dinner. Simon was not considered old enough to shoot, but Teddy had said that he might come with them if he liked. Aunt Villy annoyingly suggested that he might like to play with Christopher instead, but although Christopher was older he was no good at games because his glasses steamed up and he couldn’t see the ball. Anyway, they couldn’t find him. So Simon said he had promised to get home for tea and went back to Home Place by himself. But it had been a wizard day, and there was Monopoly to look forward to with Teddy after dinner. When he got back, Mum was playing with Wills on the lawn, putting him on his tummy with a toy just out of reach to get him to crawl. Wills was wearing his nappy: his back was a pinky biscuit colour.

‘Should he have all that white fur down his spine?’

‘It’s not fur, darling, it’s tiny golden hairs. They’ve got bleached by the sun.’

Considering he was rather fat – he just had creases where his wrists and ankles ought to have been – only had one tooth and couldn’t say a single word, Wills was rather a nice baby, he thought. He picked up the teddy bear and moved it gently up to Wills’s face. Wills looked up at him and smiled as he grasped the bear’s ear and brought it to his mouth.

‘He’ll never learn to crawl if you do that.’ Sybil took the bear and put it just out of Wills’s reach. Simon thought he was going to cry as his face went a dark pink and he started to make heavy breathing noises. But then he suddenly stopped, and looked as though he was thinking hard about something. Then he looked very pleased and there was a ghastly smell. Simon withdrew in disgust. ‘I think he’s
done
something.’

‘I’m sure he has. Clever boy!’ She picked him up. ‘I’ll take him in and change him. Oh, darling, you’ve torn your shorts
again
!’

Simon glanced down. They’d been torn since before lunch – on a nail on the greenhouse door. He was surprised she hadn’t noticed sooner, but Wills seemed to take up all her attention these days. How she could cuddle somebody who was stinking like that he didn’t know.

‘Go and change them before tea. And put them in my room and I’ll mend them.’

Simon groaned. It was a point of honour with all the cousins to object to having to change, on the grounds that if they didn’t they would be made to change more than ever. ‘Oh, Mum, I could change when I have my bath. I can’t possibly be expected to change
twice
in one day,
three
times if you count putting on my clothes in the mornings.’

‘Simon, go and change.’ So he went. Outside his grandfather’s study he heard his father’s voice, and stopped. Perhaps Dad would give him some tennis practice after tea. But his father’s voice went on and on; he was reading something – the boring old
Times
, probably. Grown-ups seemed devoted to newspapers, read them and talked about what was in them every day at meals. The poor old Brig could hardly see, so people had to read to him an awful lot. He shut his eyes to see whether he could find his own room if he was blind, and it took ages, even with him cheating a bit at the top of the stairs. When he reached his bedroom door, he bumped into Polly coming out. I’ve just put a notice on your bed,’ she said. ‘Why are your eyes shut?’

He opened them. ‘Nothing. I was just experimenting.’

‘Oh. Well, the notice is about the museum meeting. It’s at five o’clock in the old hen-house. You are cordially invited to attend. You can read the notice. It’s on your bed.’

‘So you said. Anyway, you’ve told me so I don’t need to.’

‘Are you coming?’

‘I might. I might not. I’m going to have tea now.’

She followed him into his room.

‘Simon, it’s no good having a museum if people aren’t interested.’

‘It’s more of a Christmas holidays thing to me.’

‘You can’t shut a museum for nearly a whole year every year. All the exhibits will get in a terrible state.’

He thought of the pieces of slipware from the kitchen garden, the rusty nail and bit of stone picked up at Bodiam and the Georgian penny donated by the Brig and said, ‘I don’t see why they would. If they’ve lasted till now, they can last a few more years without people looking at them. Anyway, I know them by heart.’ He undid his snake belt so that his shorts fell to his ankles and shuffled over to his drawer for the other pair. ‘Why don’t you ask Christopher? He could be Curator of Natural History.’

‘Good idea! I’ll ring up Mill Farm and get him.’

But she got Aunt Villy who had no idea where Christopher was.

Christopher had sat through a lunch he had not in the least wanted as he still felt sick. Car journeys were always bad: if he took off his specs he got a crashing headache, if he kept them on he was sick. At least it had been Mum driving. When it was Dad it was far worse, because Dad made him feel such a mutt and always made a fuss about stopping, so Christopher got frightened of being sick
in
the car, which would make a fearful row. Sometimes he actually hated Dad so much he imagined him falling down dead or just struck by lightning so that although he might not be actually dead, he couldn’t speak another word. This, of course, made him feel wicked and ashamed of himself. But most of the time, he imagined himself doing amazing things – or perhaps quite ordinary things to most people, but things he was hopeless at – frightfully well, so that his father would say, ‘I say, Chris, old boy, that was superb. I’ve never met
anyone
who could do that let – alone you!’ He would bask in the glow of admiration, and sometimes his father would even throw a careless arm around him which, as they were men, implied deep affection – possibly, although it would never be mentioned, love. Sometimes, he would imagine his father making sarcastic, funny remarks not about him but somebody else, and inviting him to laugh at them with him. This was a kind of disgusting luxury: he was instantly ashamed of it, and then felt really awful. How could he agree to be an audience or party to something that he knew was so painful just because he wasn’t the victim? And he would go back to hating his father, and hating himself for wanting approval from such a foul person. He must be loathsome too, which, in turn, made it quite reasonable for Dad to go on getting at him. And it was true that he was rotten at all the things Dad thought important, sports, games, even things like making model aeroplanes and maths. And he couldn’t tell stories or make jokes and he was always knocking things over – namby-pamby bull in a cheap china shop, his father had said last week when he’d broken the sugar basin. In the last three years he’d developed a stutter which was always worse when people asked him questions, so nowadays he’d just go on trying to do whatever his father wanted, like packing the car this morning and not say anything at
all
. He was used to being a complete failure and only wished they’d leave him alone, but Mum was always trying to make him feel better by asking him about things she knew he was interested in, and that made him want to cry so he’d taken to not saying much to her either. He knew she must love him a lot to bother and despised her for it: it was stupid to love someone hopeless just because they were your son when there was nothing else to be said for them. But now, in spite of feeling queasy and having a bit of a headache, he was completely conscious of a kind of lightness, of feeling both free and safe – a funny mixture. Getting away from London from Dad and from school was enough to make anyone happy, he thought. After lunch, he had put on his sandals and sneaked off, and nobody saw him go.

He went down die farm drive, and up the hill towards Home Place, where they had always stayed before. He found his usual way through a hedge above Home Place drive and skirted the little copse that ran above a bank along the kitchen side of the house. He reached the bridle path that led to the field in which they usually kept horses. There were two of them under the clump of Spanish chestnuts, nose to tail, brushing the flies from each other. He walked slowly up to them to see if they wanted to talk to him, and they did. They had their wonderful warm horse smell and he buried his face in the pony’s neck to take great breaths of it. The old grey whickered softly and looked at him with large eyes that had a bloom like black grapes. He had sunken bits in his forehead above his eyes and yellow teeth: he was quite old. When he left them, they began to follow him but soon gave up. He went across two fields, walking more slowly now because he felt well away from everyone. It was amazingly hot and still, the only sound was the high grasses brushing against his knees, and if he stopped, tiny insects’ noises – minute spurts of zooming or ticking sounds. The sky was a kind of bleached blue, hardly blue at all, and the trees in the wood he was heading for were motionless. In the place where he’d found them last year, he found two enormous mushrooms, which he picked. He took off his shirt and wrapped the mushrooms in it; he might need food if he got hungry. The last field before the wood ended in a sloping bank with a hedge at one end of which was the gate into his wood. He walked slowly down the hedgerow that was crowded with bryony, blackberries, hawthorn and wild rosehips. A few of the blackberries nearest the ground were ripe, and he picked what he could find. The tiny bright green crab apples were not ripe, nor the sloes, nor the hazelnuts, although they were delicious – small juicy kernels that tasted pale green. He collected a few of them for his store. I might never go back, he thought. I might just live here.

A jay announced his entrance to the wood. He had noticed that it was always a blackbird or a jay – usually a jay – that made a sudden flight with noisy warning cries. Knowing this and it happening made him smile.

His little brook was just the same. Never more than a yard wide, it ran crystal clear over pebbles and round small sandy shoals, between banks that were almost flush with the water, and lined with brilliantly green moss, or steeper with wild garlic and ferns. The place where he had made a dam still had a much wider pool, although the dam was broken down and rotting. He sat on a bank, kicked off his sandals and sank his feet into the deliciously cool water. When his feet began to ache with cold, he got up and began to walk upstream till he got to the island. It was too small to live on, or even really to
be
on, but the banks on one side of the stream sloped gently upwards to a sunlit glade. Here, last year, he had tried to build a house by hammering in some old chestnut fencing stakes in pairs, and filling the gap with branches he had cut from the hazel and elder. He had only achieved one wall, and this was now silvery and brittle and, with the dead leaves fallen from the branches, full of holes. He did not feel like building any more of it today; instead he made a little bonfire which he lit with his magnifying glass. When it was going nicely, he got a forked stick and toasted his mushrooms one by one. He peeled them first, licking the rich brown from the spores off his fingers. He was ravenously hungry. The mushrooms did not toast very well, they simply got rather smoky, but at least they had not become all slippery with grease and frying. He chewed them very slowly – they tasted quite magical and might easily effect some great change in him. Then he ate the blackberries, which had become rather squashed in his shirt that was now stained with blue patches from the juice. What was interesting was how different blackberries could taste from each other: some quite nutty, some acid, some reminding him perfectly of bramble jelly. His fire was now a heap of bright grey ash. He got a great wedge of moss which he soaked in the stream and put on the ashes. There was a gentle hissing and the blue smoke changed to white. He was ready for the pond.

The pond lay in a deep hollow at the far end of the wood. It was overhung by branches of enormous trees, some of which were slowly falling into it. The water was black and still: there were bulrushes and two dragonflies. He took off his shorts and waded in the thick oozing mud, which made iridescent bubbles come up onto the water. Just as he was about to throw himself in for a swim, he saw a small adder, its elegant head erect above the water, its body undulating as it swam silently across the middle. He knew it was an adder because of the V on its head; it was funny that it also made a V ripple each side of its neck. He waited till it reached the opposite bank and instantly disappeared. He’d been lucky to see it. Then he threw himself forward onto the soft black water, which was warmish compared to the stream. It was rather a small pond for swimming, and getting out was always awful, because of the mud; he knew he’d have to go back to the stream to wash because of the fuss they’d make at home about a small amount of dirt, which would, anyway, have dried on him by the time he got back. There was a delightful marshy smell – like concentrated bulrushes. He hadn’t seen the heron, which was often there, but the adder was a tremendous bonus. After he had washed off most of the mud, he lay in his glade beside the wall of his house, and went to sleep.