The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (53 page)

‘My precious, you’re making a whole lot of fearful suppositions.
If
there is a war—’

‘You know if the Czechs don’t accept Hitler’s ultimatum there
will
be. You said that yourself.’

‘Darling, they’re digging air-raid shelters. It was in the news.’

‘That won’t help against gas. Hugh said that gas—’

‘They’re going to issue everybody with gas masks—’

‘It’s not any of that. If we
are
all going to be killed, I want to be with you. So I beg you to ask Evie to come down here, only you must do it
now.
The next thing will be a state of emergency, and they probably won’t
let
people travel—’

‘Probably not. There may well be an invasion—’

‘Oh, don’t! Surely not that! We are an island.’

‘We’re also, so far as I can make out, totally unprepared for war. And I find it hard to believe that Hitler doesn’t know that. He’s calling the tune, and making the terms.’

‘Sid, don’t go on! Stick to the point. Stick to getting Evie down.’

‘The little parochial point—’

‘It’s all we can do, isn’t it? And it may not be for long. It may be the end – of everything.’

There was a silence, and when Polly, trembling, leant down to look, she saw that kind Sid had her arms round Aunt Rach and was kissing her to make her feel better.

‘Courage, my darling, we do have each other. All right, I’ll ring Evie. If you are sure the Duchy wouldn’t mind.’

‘She won’t in the least. She just doesn’t want us to talk about it in front of the children. She doesn’t want them frightened.’

They began to walk away, and were almost immediately out of sight.

Polly stayed quite still. Her heart was thudding so hard that she felt it was trying to get out of her body. When she did start to come down out of the tree, she miscalculated the well-known route and scraped her shin badly in preventing herself from falling. She wanted to spit on the blood, but her mouth had gone quite dry. Terrible pictures were surging across her mind: this orchard, the trees blackened stumps, the ground a sea of mud, at night you would hear poor wounded people moaning – only I wouldn’t, she thought, I’d be dead by then from the bombs and gas. London might be more dangerous – well, obviously it was or Aunt Rach wouldn’t have been in such a state – but they could easily drop bombs by mistake in other places. But London – Dad –
Oscar!
– she would have to get Dad to bring Oscar down with him tomorrow evening – if there was a tomorrow evening. Oh, God, she should make them come down
now
– at
once
! She got to her feet and began mindlessly running towards the house.

She had tried to ring Dad at his office: he wasn’t in, and she asked them to tell him to ring Miss Polly Cazalet back. She thought of telling Clary and asking her what she thought, but Clary’s spots were itching and all she seemed to want was for people to play Pegotty with her and the situation was far too bad for playing games. Anyway, the children didn’t know, it
hadn’t
been talked about in front of them. It was the grown-ups she must test. The responses she got were neither helpful nor reassuring. She tried Mr York when he brought up the evening milk from the farm, and he said he’d never trusted Germans and he wasn’t starting now – not at his time of life. She tried Mrs Cripps because she seemed to be reading a newspaper in her creaky basket chair, and she said that she thought wars were just a waste of everybody’s time and she had better things to do. When pressed about whether the newspaper was saying things about war, she said she never believed a word she read in newspapers. Perhaps, Polly thought, war wasn’t talked about in front of the servants:
'pas devant les domestiques'
, as Mummy and Aunt Villy sometimes said about things. So she tried her mother, who was sewing name-tapes into Simon’s school clothes in the day nursery with Wills sitting in a pen who was dribbling a lot and frowning at two coloured bricks that he was grasping. Polly had got more skilful at asking by now, so she started with why wasn’t Mr Chamberlain going off to see Hitler again, and Mummy said that there were a lot of things to be sorted out. And if Hitler wanted a war very badly, he could just have one, couldn’t he? Mummy said that it wasn’t as simple as that – but Polly noticed that she was beginning to look rather trapped – and then said, almost thankfully, what on earth had Polly done to her leg? Go and wash it in the bathroom and bring her the iodine and some Elastoplast. Extraordinary, to fuss about a detail like a leg when there might be a war any minute, Polly thought wearily, as she did as she was told. Then she thought that perhaps men, who after all made the wars and fought in them, didn’t talk about it in front of the ladies. The only person left was the Brig. He was in his study, which, as usual, smelled of geraniums and cigar boxes and he was poring over a huge book on his desk with a magnifying glass.

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the very person I wanted. Which one of you is that?’

‘Polly.’

‘Polly. Right. Just read me what I wrote here about the export of teak logs from Burma between 1926 and 1932, would you?’

So, of course, she had to. Then he told her a long story about elephants in Burma, how they could judge precisely where to pick up a log with their trunks, which would not, she must understand, necessarily be in the middle at all, and how they would all stop work, drop their logs at the same moment in the afternoon, when they knew it was time for their bathe in the river. It was a much more interesting story than the ones about people he’d met in strange, or the same, places, but she was not in the mood for stories of any kind. When he stopped for a moment, and was clearly thinking of something else to tell her, she asked him quickly whether he thought there would be a war starting this weekend.

‘What makes you ask that, my duck?’ She saw he was trying to see her with his rather filmy blue eyes.

‘I just – sort of feel – there might be.’

‘Well, I’m damned!’

‘Do you think so?’ she persisted.

He went on trying to look at her; then he gave a very small nod. ‘Between you and me,’ he said.

‘Dad’s in London,’ she said; her voice was trembly and she didn’t want to cry. ‘And Oscar.’

‘Who the devil’s Oscar? Damn silly name. Who’s Oscar?’

‘My cat. It isn’t a silly name for a cat. He’s named after a famous Irish playwright. I don’t want him bombed to death. I want Dad to bring him down. I can have him here, can’t I?’

He pulled a huge silk handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘you sound as though you need to blow your nose. Of course you can have your cat.’

‘Could you make Dad come down today?’

‘No need for that. There may be another meeting next week and, who knows, that might just do the trick. Who’s been putting the wind up you like this, my duck?’

‘No one really,’ she lied. She had an instinct not to betray her aunt.

‘Well, don’t you worry your pretty little head any more.’ He was fishing in yet another of his numerous pockets and produced a half-crown. ‘Run along, my duck.’

As if half-a-crown would make her feel all right! Anyway, Dad had rung her up and he said he would bring Oscar. Today, Friday, the same great weight of doom lay on her heart, but at least, in ten hours at the most, Dad would come, and she could spend the morning arranging Oscar’s food and make a bed for him to sleep in. She knew that he wouldn’t sleep in it, but he would resent trouble not having been taken.

Miss Milliment – with an excitement that made her
most
inefficient – was packing. On receipt of dear Viola’s kind letter she had, as requested, gone to a public telephone box and rung Mill Farm. She hardly ever used the telephone and was terribly anxious about not hearing properly on it, but dear Viola was very clear: catch the four-twenty from Charing Cross to Battle on Friday afternoon and she would be met. Now, on Friday morning, she had her father’s largest suitcase – unfortunately, the mildew seemed to have penetrated the lining – laid on her bed and was filling it with clothes. She did not possess summer clothes as such, simply wore less of whatever she had in winter. But not having to make this kind of choice did not prevent the utmost confusion. Pale grey and coffee-coloured lisle stockings resolutely unpaired, lay in surprising quantity on the only chair. She had no idea she had so many, and was also daunted by there being so few that matched. Pairs of enormous lock-knit bloomers were piled in one heap, and some short-sleeved woollen vests (they were uniformly pale grey) were put in another. Someone had told her years ago that when packing one should start from the skin and work outwards. But every now and then she forgot this in agonised contemplation of the choice between her bottle-green jersey ensemble or the heather-mixture tweed. There was also the problem of a cardigan – the steel grey one seemed infested with what looked like bits of dried porridge and the fawn one showed distinct signs of moth. Her best mustard and brown foulard she must certainly take for the evenings. Garters! She was always mislaying them, so better take all she could find, They did not really keep her stockings up, but they prevented them from entirely falling down. Her nightdresses – one really needed washing, but the other she had only used for a few days – were draped across the iron bedhead. There were also two Viyella shirts that had been made for her by the landlady’s cousin; they were not a very good fit, but perfectly serviceable under a cardigan. Her sponge bag was rather a disgrace. Again, it had belonged to Father and she had the distinct impression that it was not waterproof; she decided to wrap her flannel and toothbrush in newspaper before putting them into it. She would not take many books as, doubtless, the Cazalet family would possess a delightful quantity and she was sure that they would let her borrow from them. Her other pair of shoes, brown lace-ups, needed soling, she could see a hole in one of them, and they had worn dreadfully thin. How on earth was she to get all this into one case? She began cramming things in, first laying the foulard over the bottom in hope that it would not then be utterly crushed, and then stuffing everything on top. It was soon overflowing, and she could not get it shut. She did not like to ask Mrs Timpson to come and help her as there had been a distinct atmosphere ever since she had announced that she was going away for a while. Mrs Timpson seemed to feel that she should have been given more notice, which was nonsense, really, since she would still be paying for the room. It became clear that the case would only be shut if she did not take her cardigan. Or she could wear it? But she did tend to
perspire
rather and she must, of course, travel in her better coat, which was quite thick. There was nothing for it: she would have to take two cases, and this, she feared, would mean a cab, which, from Stoke Newington to Charing Cross might easily come to two pounds. Or even more. Well, she had summoned up all her courage and cashed a cheque that morning for ten pounds. ‘I am going on a journey,’ she had explained to the cashier before he could say too much. She was on her knees trying to pull the other case out from under her bed. It seemed intractably heavy, and she remembered that it was full of papers, photographs, and a few pieces of china that she had kept from home: a teapot with cowslips on it and a pair of fruit plates, with grapes and cherries in the centre and a dark blue and gold rim. All these things would have to go into the chest of drawers and this, she knew, meant that they were not safe from Mrs Timpson’s prying eyes. Well, she would take Eustace’s letters – they must remain private – and the rest would have to take pot luck. Going on a journey! How extremely fortunate she was! And the invitation had come at the end of a long summer when she had to admit that she had become a little tired of her own company. It was not so much the days when she was quite able to interest herself in galleries, but the evenings, when her eyes were tired and she could not always read as much as she would have liked. A little conversation would have been pleasant then, if there had been anybody to converse with.

To be going to the country! She did miss the country. They would be hay-making and, perhaps, in that part of the country, picking hops, and they were only nine miles from the sea! She had not seen the sea for years. However, she must not forget that she was going to work, to teach the girls; she had thought so much about them all the summer – so different, but each with qualities that she endeavoured to bring out, and little faults that she feared she was not strict enough to correct. Louise, for instance, her eldest pupil and now fifteen, needed to be made to work harder at the subjects she did not care for, but she was very clever at getting her own way, would prolong the discussions after their morning Shakespeare reading in order not to start upon her Latin or mathematics. In this last year, Miss Milliment had begun to feel that Louise was outgrowing the situation of being taught with Polly and Clary, neither of whom presented a challenge to her. Of course, they were two years younger which was a great deal at their age. Louise had become aloof and indolent, and Miss Milliment had noticed during her Friday luncheons that her relationship with her mother seemed a little strained. She was growing up, whereas Polly and Clary were still little girls. Polly caused her no anxiety. She seemed content to read Shakespeare without wishing in the least to become an actress, to listen to Clary’s compositions with wholehearted admiration and no desire to compete, to have no airs and graces about her appearance although she was a very attractive child with the promise of beauty. She was full of frankness and fervour; moral questions that Louise would evade neatly and with flashes of wit, and that would incense Clary to almost tearful diatribes, were chewed over by Polly with a kind of anxious honesty that Miss Milliment found most endearing.