The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (59 page)

‘I don’t suppose she would.’ Nobody expected anything of her, she thought, forlornly.

‘Well, you can decide after breakfast. I’m off to try my luck with the bathroom. Do you want one? A bath, I mean?’

‘No. I had one last night.’ The tops of her arms were bruised, and she did not want him to see. When he had gone, she got up and dressed quickly in an old pair of slacks and a shirt of Rupert’s and tied her hair back with a bit of black ribbon. Then she simply sat at the dressing-table, thinking that this time yesterday she had been at her mother’s flat packing, trying to think how to face Rupert. And now, twenty-four hours later, she was back to married life as though nothing had happened at all, sitting in this familiar room that, when she had first seen it, she thought old-fashioned and dull, but now the wallpaper of huge imaginary peacocks, the paisley cotton curtains, the thick, white lace runner on the dressing-table, the plain rosewood furniture and the prints of the British Raj in India, the subdued Turkey carpet with the stained and waxed boards surrounding it, all seemed familiar, comforting – even luxurious, in comparison to the pinched gentility of her mother’s flat. How she had always hated it and its predecessor where she had lived until she was married! But now it occurred to her that perhaps her mother didn’t like it much either, that lack of money had prevented her from having what she might have liked, whatever that might be. And her chief reason for there not being enough money had been herself. Her mother had gone out to work in order to send her to a good school, had spent more money on Zoë’s clothes and amusements than she had ever spent upon herself. I just took everything I could get, and then got the hell out, she thought. I’ve never been nice to her – never been grateful, and she realised with a shock of shame that as her mother had become older and more frail she had actually become afraid of her, and that she, Zoë, had known this and had not cared, had complacently, even, found it easier to ration her visits, her telephone calls, any kind of minimal attention. She must change – somehow. But how? She thought of how Rachel or Sybil or Villy and sometimes the Duchy would say of one of the children when they behaved badly, ‘It’s only a phase’, but that was always about one thing, and they were children. She was twenty-three and it seemed that she needed to change everything.

Rupert, back from the bath, announced, ‘I need another shirt. This one’s got three buttons off – I look like Seth in
Cold Comfort Farm
.’

‘I’ll sew them on for you.’

‘It’s all right, darling, Ellen will do it.’

‘Do you think I can’t even sew on a button?’

‘Of course not. It’s just that Ellen always does it, that’s all.’ He was tucking a different shirt into his trousers. ‘You’ve always said how you loathed mending.’

‘I can at least sew on a button,’ she said, and burst into tears.

‘Zoë! Darling, what is it?’ He did not say ‘now’, but she sensed it from the tone of his voice.

‘You think I’m perfectly useless! That I can’t do anything!’

‘Of course I don’t.’

‘When I said I wanted to help with the cottage this morning, you didn’t want me to. And now I can’t even sew a button on your shirt!’

‘I thought you didn’t want to do those things. Of course you can if you want to.’

But this did not suit her new resolution.

‘I might want to do things whether I wanted to or not,’ she said, aware, as she said it, that this did not sound how she meant it to.

‘All right, darling, you do what you don’t want to do if you like,’ he said. ‘You look very sweet and businesslike, I must say. Shall we go and have some breakfast?’

‘You look rather like a horse – but not very—’

‘Like one of those horses that wear things on their faces with just their eyes and nose showing, you know in Crusades,’ Nora added.

‘The thing is, they’re no good for breathing at
all
.’ Neville was wheezing in his chair at the tea table: he had had asthma in the car after they had collected the gas masks.

‘I simply adore mine! I look so different in it.’ Lydia stroked the box hanging on the back of her chair.

‘We all look different.’

‘I don’t think Miss Milliment would,’ Lydia said pensively. ‘I should think it would be very difficult for a German to tell whether she was in hers or not.’

‘That will do, Lydia,’ Ellen said, ‘and hand the bread and butter to your cousin.’

‘Mummy said if we wear them for five minutes every day, we’ll soon get used to them.’ Nora realised that Neville had been frightened, and was kindly trying to encourage him.

‘I shall wear mine nearly all the time except for meals. It’s true you can’t eat in them. You couldn’t kiss anyone either.’

‘Drink your milk, Neville.’

He did, and then he said, ‘I know a good thing. If the great aunts were kept in them, we’d never have to kiss them.’

‘Oh, poor them!’ said Judy in her most affected voice.

‘It’s all very well for you. They’re not your great aunts. Guess what their poor old faces feel like!’

‘Very old strawberries,’ Neville said at once. ‘All softy and bluey – with damp fur.’

‘That’s just one,’ Lydia said. ‘The other one is – is – like kissing a huge dog biscuit. All hard and leathery with holes.’

‘That will do, Lydia,’ Ellen said again.

‘Why will it always do for me and not for Neville?’

‘That will do from both of you.’

‘Aunt Lena’s face was like kissing blancmange,’ Judy said, ‘and Grania’s—’

‘Shut up,’ Nora said sharply. ‘Aunt Lena’s dead. You shouldn’t say anything at all about her.’

In the rather surprising silence that followed, she poured a cup of tea to take up to Louise, who was lying down with a headache.

It was indeed oppressive, Miss Milliment thought, as she zigzagged lightly up the hill to Home Place after tea with Angela. After the collection of the gas masks, she made herself useful reading those portions of
The Times
to Lady Rydal that she wished to hear: the obituaries, the Court Circular, and some of the letters. She had expressed her desire to visit Clary to dear Viola and Jessica, and Angela had volunteered to conduct her up the hill. She was a very pretty girl, astonishingly like her mother had been at that age (Miss Milliment had taught Viola and Jessica until they were seventeen and eighteen respectively), but she seemed most withdrawn, whereas Jessica had always been such an outgoing girl full of good humour and spirits. She tried talking to Angela about France, but Angela did not seem to want to talk about that at all, and Miss Milliment, reflecting that, at her age, Angela had probably fallen in love with some young Frenchman from whom she was now parted, tactfully changed the subject.

‘Your uncle was telling me that he has been painting you. Do you think that there is a chance that I might see it?’

And Angela, who had been striding ahead, stopped at once and turning round said eagerly, ‘Oh! I wish you would! I went this morning to sit, but he said he thought it was finished. It doesn’t look like that to me at all! I should be so glad of your opinion!’

So they went in at the front door, through a room where old Mrs Cazalet, in a hat, was machining curtains, into an enormous hall where supper was being laid for the children, down a passage, rather dark and she nearly tripped but that was because one of her shoelaces had come undone – they were not really long enough to tie double bows – through a baize door to a long dark room with a billiard table in it and a bow window at one end. And there was the picture. An interesting portrait, Miss Milliment thought. He seemed to have captured the paradoxical ardour and languor of a young girl – that air that was both expectant and passive, and she noticed that the mouth, often the Achilles heel if one could think of it like that for many painters, had been made far easier in this case because Angela had her mother’s mouth, a pre-Raphaelite affair, full but finely chiselled, a clear case of nature imitating art, but here a cliché that did not require the artist’s creative perception . . . fashionable portrait painters, of course, had always imposed features upon people: the rose-bud mouth of Lely, for example . . .

‘You see what I mean? My skin looks all blotchy. He wanted my hair all straight like that,’ she added.

‘I don’t think anyone but the painter can decide when he has finished,’ Miss Milliment said. ‘And there is a danger, I believe, of painters overpainting a portrait. I think it is most interesting, and you should feel honoured to have been the subject.’

‘Oh, I
am
! I’m sure he’s really a marvellous painter. But it takes years and years to be one, doesn’t it? So he mightn’t have—’

‘Well, perhaps he will want to do another one.’

‘Yes, I expect he will. Oh, Miss Milliment! Your shoelace is undone.’

And my stockings are coming down already, she thought, looking down at the fat wrinkles round her ankle.

‘Would you like me to tie it for you?’

‘Thank you, my dear. That would be most kind.’

Angela knelt and tied the lace, thinking, Poor old thing! I don’t see how she can bend down to do it for herself.

And Miss Milliment, who every morning and evening had this struggle alone seated on the side of her bed with her foot on a chair, suddenly thought of something, ‘I wonder’, she said, ‘if you could tell me? Dear Louise gave me a tin of something called talc powder for Christmas. I have brought it with me, as with the Situation one does not know when one will be returning home, but I am not very clear about its
use
?’ Angela, on her feet again, looked mystified.

‘I tried it on my face,’ Miss Milliment persisted, ‘but that did not seem to be quite right.’

‘Oh.’ She saw that Angela was amazed. ‘It’s not for the face at all, Miss Milliment, it’s for your body. You know, after your bath.’

‘For my body, after a bath,’ Miss Milliment repeated steadily with less idea than ever what it could possibly be for. ‘Thank you, Angela. Perhaps you would show me Clary’s room?’

So Angela took her right to the door, and then wandered away – hoping she would find Rupert somewhere not with Zoë.

Evie’s train was late, which was a good thing as Tonbridge was also late fetching her. He had had a tiring day, taking servants to get their gas masks. Mrs Cripps had enjoyed sitting in front with him, but had deeply resented the girls in the back and snubbed them whenever they opened their mouths, but the instant, uneasy silence that ensued each time left her irritably aware of their attention to whatever she might say to Mr Tonbridge, now called Frank by her whenever they were alone. So she confined herself to incontrovertible remarks about the weather with which Tonbridge instantly agreed: it
was
very close, they were likely to have another storm before the day was out; it wasn’t as though they needed rain although a good downpour might clear the air and send them hop-pickers back to London where they belonged.