The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (46 page)

‘If you were on a desert island, there wouldn’t be a dentist. We’ll just have to pull the bad teeth out. Better take some string for that.’ Simon thought of Mr York who only had three or four teeth – although they were extra long in his upper jaw – but then he was old; it would take them years to get like that.

‘What if there’s a war?’ he said when they had crammed the potatoes into the now crowded tent.

‘I shall become a conscientious objector.’

‘Wouldn’t you have to go to London to do that? I mean, how would people know, otherwise?’

‘Oh, I expect you just have to send in your name somewhere. I shall cross that bridge when I come to it,’ he added rather grandly. They had fallen into the relationship where he was the leader and knew everything, a role to which he was not accustomed, and he was enjoying it too much to want his authority eroded.

‘Perhaps schools stop if there is a war?’ Simon suggested as they trudged back.

‘I doubt it. Do you want to go through the wood today, or shall I?’

‘I will.’

In order to fox possible spies about their whereabouts, Christopher had decreed that they should return to the house separately and from different directions. So far as he could see, nobody seemed in the least bit interested, but Simon ran up the east side of the wood behind the house, sat on the stile that was its entrance there, and obediently counted to two hundred before he walked – slowly – through it. In the afternoon, he would have to play squash with Teddy who was beginning to notice that he wasn’t available for bicycle rides. Teddy did not very much like Christopher, whom he described as a bit weird, he was the person Christopher said must certainly have no idea of their plan. Simon had explained to Christopher that he couldn’t get out of playing squash and sometimes tennis, and Christopher said quite right, and spent those times making bows and arrows for them and reorganising the list. Actually, he enjoyed playing squash – which he would soon be giving up for ever – but today he felt that what he would really like would be to have two helpings of everything for lunch and then go to sleep.

Every morning when she woke up, Angela stood by the window of the bedroom that she now, mercifully, had to herself. By leaning out, she could just see the blue smoke that came out of the kitchen chimney of Home Place three hundred yards up the hill – she had carefully paced the distance. Then she would pray – fervently – aloud, but under her breath. ‘O God, don’t let her come back today,’ and so far God hadn’t. Five days ago, she had been a completely different person; now she had utterly changed, and would never be the same again. Now, sometimes, when absence and longing were locked together, she could almost sense the nostalgia of the old feelings of boredom, the endless weeks and months – years, even – she had been through of waiting for something, or attending to stupid little details because she could find nothing worth being serious about. The old, recurrent daydream where Leslie Howard, Robert Taylor or Monsieur de Croix (the French family doctor in Toulouse) had knelt at her feet, or towered over her, their undying passion wrenched from them while she sat in various romantic dresses that she did not wear in ordinary life, gracefully accepting their homage, bestowing her hand (her
hand,
simply!) whereupon the dream dissolved with their speechless, reverent gratitude –
that
old dream withered to a ridiculous and embarrassing myth. She could remember all that, and remember, too, that then she had eaten and slept and gone through her days in the tedious serenity of ignorance. She could not regret that infantile past when she had not had the faintest idea of what life was about. But now its whole meaning was feverishly clear; she existed for every second of every day in a trembling, humble delirium that she contrived, almost with brilliance, utterly to conceal. Jessica had noticed that – thank goodness – her eldest daughter had seemed to have stopped sulking and, at Home Place, where Angela spent as much time as possible, the Duchy found her manners and general desire to please quite charming. The first day she had walked slowly up the hill to Home Farm she had hung about on the front lawn, just waiting to see what might happen. Teddy and Clary and Polly were playing the overtaking game on their bicycles round and round the house. The third time round, Clary fell off trying to overtake Teddy.

‘Ouch! It’s not fair!’ she called after Teddy. ‘You squeezed me against the porch!’

Angela looked at the large dirty graze that was beading with blood. ‘We’d better go and find your father. You ought to wash it.’

‘He’s out. He’s taken Zoë to the station ’cos her mother’s ill.’

‘Honestly, Clary, we’d better get some iodine. I’ll do it for you.’

This was Polly, who had arrived on the scene. ‘It’s kind of you, but you wouldn’t know where the things were,’ she said to Angela, as she led Clary into the house.

So Angela was free to leave. She started walking down the hill, past Mill Farm towards Battle. She walked slowly, as she didn’t want to get too hot and have a shiny nose. All the same, she was quite tired by the time Rupert’s car slowed up and he hailed her.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Just going for a walk.’

‘Hop in. Have a drive instead.’ He pushed open the door, and she stepped demurely in. It’s easy! she thought that first morning.

They drove back up the hill in silence, but when they reached the gates of Home Place he said, ‘I don’t feel like going back to the house now. Why don’t we go a bit further? But I’ll let you out if you have better things to do.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, making it sound like a concession.

He seemed to take it as such, because he said, ‘That’s good of you. Actually, I’ve a problem and I could do with someone to talk to.’

This was so unexpected and so flattering to her that she could think of no answer mature and offhand enough. She gave him a sidelong glance: he was frowning lightly, eyes fixed on the road. He wore a dark blue flannel shirt open at the neck so that she could see his long bony throat. She wondered when he would start to tell her whatever it was, and what on earth it might be that he and Zoë—

‘I’m taking you to see a cracking view,’ he said.

‘Oh, good,’ she answered, and smoothed her apple-green voile over her knees.

When they got there, it was much what she had expected. She could never see the point of views: they simply seemed to mean an awful lot more of whatever you could see when there wasn’t one, in this case miles of hop fields, and ordinary fields and woods and a few old farmhouses. He parked the car on the verge, and they walked to a gate that had a stile beside it. He invited her to sit on the stile, and he leant on the gate beside her and stared and stared. She watched him staring.

‘Marvellous, isn’t it?’ he said at last.

‘Yes, marvellous.’

‘Want a cigarette?’

‘Please.’

When he had lit them, he looked at her, and said, ‘You’re a very composed person, aren’t you? Very restful to be with.’

‘That depends,’ she answered. She did not wish to be restful to be with; yet she longed for him to go on talking about her – to discover the fascinating person she was planning to be for him.

‘The thing is, that my father wants me to chuck teaching art and go into the firm. And, of course, if I do that, it would be rather burning my boats from the painting point of view. On the other hand, the teaching seems to take up so much time and energy, that I don’t get much painting done anyway so it seems a bit unfair, to everybody, not to opt for a much more comfortable life. What do you think?’

‘Goodness!’ she said at last, after trying to think about it and utterly failing. ‘What does Zoë think?’

‘Oh,
she’s
all for it. Of course I can see her point of view. It’s certainly not much fun for her being the poor relation, and she’s never been particularly interested in painting. And then there are the children . . .’ His voice tailed off and he looked deeply uncertain.

‘But what about you? I mean, what do
you
want?’ Her self-possession had returned, and one thing was quite clear to her: she wasn’t going to be on Zoë’s side.

‘That’s it. I don’t seem to want anything very much – or, at least, not
enough.
That’s why I think I ought to—’

‘Do what other people want?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Then you’ll never find out, will you? And, anyway, how do you know you could keep it up?’

‘Wise girl! Of course, I don’t.’

‘Couldn’t you stop teaching and simply be a painter?’

‘No, not possibly. I’ve sold precisely four pictures in my life and three of those were to the family. I couldn’t keep three people, not counting me, on that.’

‘And you couldn’t join the family firm and paint in your spare time?’

‘No. You see, the trouble about being a Sunday painter is that Sundays are for the children – and Zoë, of course.’

‘If I was Zoë,’ she began carefully, ‘I’d look after the children on Sundays. I’d want you to paint. If you love somebody, you want them to do what they want.’ As she heard herself saying that, she felt that it was probably true.

But he simply threw away his cigarette stub and laughed. Then, when he saw those enormous blue eyes turning reproachful, he said, ‘You’re a perfect sweetie, and I’m sure you mean it, but it isn’t as easy as that.’

‘I never said it was
easy,
’ she retorted; she did not like being called a sweetie.

But Rupert, in a situation more familiar to him than she could possibly know, felt he must make amends.

‘I’m sorry. I really didn’t mean to sound patronising. I think you are a wonderfully clear-headed person, wise beyond your years, and on top of that,’ he touched her face lightly, ‘you are remarkably beautiful. Will that do?’ He looked searchingly at her with a small apologetic smile.

It was like a thunderbolt – she felt literally struck by love. Her heart jolted, and stopped, then made some wild, irregular rapid movements; she was breathless, dizzy, unable to see, and when his face became clear again, she felt a sense of unutterable weakness – as though her limbs were dissolving and she would fall from the stile and melt into the grass and never be able to stand at all again.

‘ . . . don’t you think we should?’

‘Yes. What?’

‘Go back to lunch. You didn’t hear me, did you? You were miles away.’

She got carefully, clumsily, off the stile and followed him to the car. Her face, where his fingers had touched it, burned.

Driving home, he remarked that it had been jolly nice of her to listen to his boring old problems and what about her? What was she planning to do? It was the opening that earlier she had craved, in order that she might fascinate and impress and entrap him. Now it was too late: she was unable to be anything but her new self, about which there seemed to be nothing she could, or ever would, dare to say.

‘Let me see . . . it’s the fifteenth, you were due on the first?’

‘On the second, actually. But, of course, I missed the one before. And honestly, Bob, I really don’t feel that I
can
—’

‘Now, now, we don’t want to cross that bridge till we get to it. You pop behind the screen and divest yourself of your nether garments and we’ll have a look at you. Mark you, it’s probably too early to be sure.’

But I
am
sure, Villy thought, as she did as Dr Ballater had suggested. The family joke among the sisters-in-law that if they were in doubt about being pregnant a drive with Tonbridge would settle the matter, since he invariably drove them at twelve miles an hour approximately five weeks after conception, proved not to be a joke to her that morning. Tonbridge had driven her with such a lugubrious slowness that she had been afraid of missing the train. All the same, she lay down on the hard little high bed with feverish hope. And if the worst came to the worst, Bob was not only a very good GP, who had delivered both Louise and Lydia, but a
friend
: Edward and he played golf in the winter on Sundays, and they dined regularly in each other’s houses. If anyone would help, surely he would?