The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (5 page)

Lydia said, ‘Nan’s mother has bad legs. She has to keep them up all the time in case they drop off. They’re
unusually
bad,’ she added after thinking about it.

‘That’ll do, Lydia. We don’t talk about people’s legs at mealtimes.’

Which just makes us all think about them, Polly thought. For pudding there was gooseberry fool, which Polly didn’t like but didn’t dare to say so. Lydia had no such compunction.

‘It smells of sick,’ she said, ‘greeny, hurried sick.’ Nan picked her off her chair and carried her out of the room.

‘Strewth!’ said Louise, who was given to what she thought of as Shakespearean oaths. ‘Poor old Lydia. She’ll be for it now.’ And indeed they could hear muffled wails from above.

‘I don’t want any.’

‘I’m not surprised, I don’t like it much, either. We’d better finish off the Wonder Cream. You did suck up to Nan.’

‘I didn’t, honestly.’

When they had finished potting and labelling the cream they took it up to Louise’s room. Then they lay on the lawn in the back garden until the Walls’ man came round with his tricycle and cabinet of ices. They each had a lime Snofrute and lay on the lawn again and talked about the holidays and what they would do when they were grown up.

‘Mummy wants me to be Presented.’

‘What – be a deb?’ Louise could hardly contain her contempt. ‘Surely you want a proper career?’

‘What could I be?’

‘You’re pretty good at painting. You could be a painter.’

‘I could be Presented and
then
be a painter.’

‘It doesn’t work like that, Polly – honestly. You’d go to all those dances with stupid people proposing to you all the time and you’d agree to marry one of them out of sheer kindness. You know how bad you are at saying no.’

‘I wouldn’t marry anyone I didn’t love.’

‘Even that’s not enough sometimes.’ She was thinking darkly of John Gielgud and her endless dreams of saving his life in ways so spectacular and brave that he would have to marry her. They would live in a mansion flat (the height of sophistication – she only knew one family who lived in a
flat
) and play opposite one another in all the plays and have lobster and coffee ices for supper.

‘Poor Lou! You’ll get over it!’

Louise smiled her special sad, heroically vulnerable smile that she had practised in front of the bathroom mirror. ‘I shan’t. It isn’t the kind of thing you
get
over.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Actually,’ Louise said, ‘I sometimes rather enjoy it. You know – imagining what it would be like. And I don’t think about it
all
the time.’ This, she knew was partial honesty: sometimes she didn’t think about it for days on end. I’m the kind of dishonest person who can’t bear to be completely dishonest, she thought.

She looked at Polly, who was lying on her back with her eyes shut against the sun. Although Polly was twelvish, a year younger, she did not seem it. Polly was utterly direct, without guile. Tactless, it often got called: if you asked her what she thought, she told you – if she
knew
what she thought, but her honesty caused her much indecision and sometimes pain. She would look at you with her rather small dark blue eyes if you asked her things like could she bear to go in a submarine, or shoot their pony if its leg was broken, or die for her country without spilling any beans if she was a spy and got caught, and you would see her milky-white forehead furrowed by little glancing frowns as she went on staring at you while she struggled for truth – often failing. ‘I don’t
know
,’ she would frequently say. ‘I wish I did, but I’m not sure. I’m not
sure
, like you.’ But Louise secretly knew perfectly well that she simply made decisions according to her mood, and that Polly’s indecision was somehow more serious. This irritated her, but she respected Polly. Polly never acted, never played to the gallery as Nan said, and could not see the beach for the pebbles. And she was incapable of telling any kind of lie. Louise did not exactly tell
lies
– known to be a serious crime in the Cazalet family – but she spent a great deal of her time being other people who naturally thought and saw things differently from Louise so what she said at those times did not count. Being an actress
required
this kind of flexibility, and although Polly sometimes teased her about her variable reactions and she teased Polly back about being so serious and not knowing things, that was where the teasing stopped. Their worst, their most real, fears were sacrosanct: Louise suffered from appalling homesickness (could not stay anywhere except with the family – dreaded being sent to a boarding school) and Polly was terrified that there might be another war when they would all be gassed to death and particularly her cat Pompey who, being a cat, was not likely to be issued with a gas mask. Polly was an authority about this. Her father had a good many books about the war; he had been in it, had emerged with one hand gone, over a hundred pieces of shrapnel in his body that they couldn’t get out and he got frightful headaches – the worst in the world, her mother said. And all the people in the photograph on his dressing-table – all soldiers in yellowy baggy uniform – were dead, except for him. Polly read all his books and asked him little casual trapping questions that simply proved to her that what she read – the slaughter, the miles of mud and barbed wire, the shells and tanks and, above all, the awful poison gas that Uncle Edward had somehow managed to live through – was all of it true, a true and continuing nightmare that had lasted over four years. If there was another war it could only be worse, because people kept saying how warships and aeroplanes and guns and everything that could make it worse had been improved by scientific development. The next war would be twice as frightful and go on for twice as long. Very secretly indeed, she envied Louise for only being afraid of boarding school; after all, she was already fourteen – in another two or three years she’d be too old to go to one. But nobody was too old or too young for war.

Louise said, ‘How much pocket money have you got?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Look.’

Polly obediently unzipped her little leather wallet that she wore on a string round her neck. Several coins and some rather grey sugar lumps fell onto the grass.

‘You shouldn’t keep your horse sugar with your money.’

‘I know.’

‘Those lumps are probably poisonous by now.’ She sat up. ‘We could go to Church Street and I could come back and have tea with you.’

‘All right.’

They both loved Church Street, particularly the top end, near Notting Hill Gate, for different reasons. Louise haunted the pet shop that had a never-ending supply of desirable creatures: grass snakes, newts, goldfish, tortoises, huge white rabbits, and then the things that she coveted but was not allowed – all kinds of birds, mice, guinea pigs, kittens and puppies. Polly was not always very good about waiting while Louise looked at everything and when she got too bored she went next door, which was a junk shop that sprawled onto the wide pavement and contained everything from second-hand books to pieces of china, soapstone, ivory, carved wood, beads and pieces of furniture, and sometimes objects whose use was utterly mysterious. The people in this shop were not forthcoming: two men – the father spent most of the time lying on a faded red velvet
chaise-longue
reading a paper and the son sat on a gilt chair with his feet up on a huge case of stuffed pike, eating coconut buns and drinking tea. ‘It’s for stretching gloves,’ the father would say if asked; the son never knew anything. Today, Polly found a pair of very tall blue and white candlesticks, rather cracked and with a bit missing from the top of one, but extremely beautiful, she thought. There was also a plate – pottery, with blue and yellow flowers on it, dark delphinium blue, sun yellow and a few green leaves – about the most beautiful plate she had ever seen. The candlesticks were sixpence and the plate was fourpence: too much.

‘There’s a bit missing on that one,’ she said pointing to it.

‘That’s Delft, that is.’ He put down his paper. ‘How much have you got, then?’

‘Sevenpence halfpenny.’

‘You’ll have to choose. I can’t let them go for that.’

‘What would you let them go for?’

‘I can’t do you any better than ninepence. That plate’s Portuguese.’

‘I’ll ask my friend.’

She rushed back to the pet shop where Louise was having an earnest conversation. ‘I’m buying a catfish,’ Louise announced. ‘I’ve always wanted one and the man says this is a good time of year.’

‘Can you lend me some money? Just till Saturday?’

‘How much?’

‘A penny halfpenny.’

‘OK. I won’t be able to have tea with you, though, because I want to get my catfish home.’ The catfish was in a jam jar and the man had made a handle of string. ‘Isn’t he lovely? Look at his little lovely whiskers.’

‘Lovely.’ Polly didn’t like them much, but knew that it took all sorts to make a world.

She went back to her shop and gave the man ninepence and he wrapped up the plate and the candlesticks very badly in old limp newspapers. ‘Oh, Polly! You’re always buying china. What are you going to do with it all?’

‘For my house when I’m grown up. I haven’t got nearly enough. I can buy tons more. The candlesticks are Delft,’ she added.

‘Gosh! Do you mean like Van Meer? Let’s see. They’ll look better when they’re washed.’

‘I know.’ She could hardly wait to get home and wash them.

They parted. ‘See you tomorrow.’

‘Hope your catfish is OK.’

Villy, who had told her mother at least three times, answered a little too patiently, ‘On Friday.’

‘But that is the day after tomorrow!’

‘Yes, Mummy, I did tell you.’

Making no attempt to conceal her disbelief Lady Rydal said, ‘I must have forgotten.’ She sighed, moved slightly in her craggy armchair and bit her lips from the pain. This was to show Villy that she was in pain, and to show that she suffered in silence, which was also, Villy felt, meant to open up vistas of what else she might be suffering in silence. She was a beautiful and rather dramatic old woman: due to a combination of arthritis and a kind of Victorian indolence (at the first twinge, she had taken to her chair, moving only up – and downstairs once a day, and to the dining room for luncheon and dinner accompanied by a stalwart, rubber-tipped stick), she had become not only shapeless, but chronically bored. Only her face retained its autocratic and arresting appearance: the noble brow, the huge eyes faded from their original forget-me-not, the little swags of porcelain complexion festooned and suspended by myriad tiny lines, the exquisitely chiselled Burne-Jones mouth, all proclaimed her to have once been a beauty. Her hair was now silver white, and she always wore heavy drop earrings – pearls and sapphires – that dragged on the lobes of her ears. Day after day she sat, cast upon her huge chair like a beautiful shipwreck, scorning the frail and petty efforts at salvage that her children attempted with visits of the kind that Villy was now making. She could do nothing, but knew how everything was to be done; her taste in the management of her house, her food, her flowers was both original and good, but she considered that there were no occasions left worthy of her rising to them, and the extravagance and gaiety that Villy could remember was now stagnant, mildewed with self-pity. She considered her life to have been a tragedy; her alliance to a musician was marrying beneath her, but when it occurred her widowhood was not to be trifled with – black garments and blinds were still half drawn in the drawing room although he had been dead two years. She considered that neither of her daughters had married well, and she did not approve of her son’s wife. She was too awe-inspiring for friendship, and even her two loyal servants were called by their surnames. Villy thought that they stayed only out of respect and affection for their dead master, but inertia was contagious and the house was full of it: clocks ticked wearily; bluebottles at the sash windows buzzed and sank into stupor. If she didn’t say or do something, Villy felt that she would drop off.

‘Tell me your news.’ This was one of Lady Rydal’s familiar gambits – difficult to answer since it carried with it studied broad-mindedness together with a complete lack of curiosity. Either Villy (or whoever was the target) would provide answers that palpably bored her mother, or they would come up with something that contained one of the formidable quantity of things of which Lady Rydal disapproved. She disapproved of any reference to religion made by anyone other than herself (levity); she considered politics an unsuitable subject for a lady (Margot Asquith and Lady Astor were not people she would invite to her house); any discussion of the Royal Family’s private life was vulgar (she was probably the only person in London who, from the outset of that affair, had ceased mentioning Edward VIII and who had never pronounced Mrs Simpson’s name); any reference to the body – its appearance, its requirements and, worst of all, its urges – was utterly taboo (even health was tricky since only certain ailments were permissible for women). Villy, as usual, fell back on telling her mother about the children while Bluitt, the parlourmaid, cleared away tea. This was a success; Lady Rydal wore her indulgent smile throughout Lydia’s antics in Daniel Neal, listened to Teddy’s latest letter from school and asked with affection after Louise, of whom she was particularly fond. ‘I must see her before she disappears into the country. Tell her to ring me up and we may arrange for her to pay me a visit.’