The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (61 page)

‘I think you’ve got a temperature, my darling.’ She kissed him and he clung to her like a little crab. ‘There. I expect you’re rather dreading your new school. That’s what it is, isn’t it? I know it’s rather a frightening prospect. But you’ll have Teddy there, you know. You won’t be alone.’

‘I
will
! Teddy has become my enemy! It will be worse with him!’ He was sobbing now. ‘Honestly – I’ve thought about it, and I really don’t think I can stand it! I don’t want to be away by myself. Couldn’t I just go to day school like Christopher? I’d do anything you like if I don’t have to go!’

‘Oh, darling!
I
don’t want you to go. I miss you all the time. Listen, my pet. I want you to lie on my bed while I take your temp. Then we’ll talk more.’

But they didn’t much because his temperature was 101. and when he said he couldn’t sleep in the room with Teddy she put him to bed in their dressing room, and brought him a mug of hot milky tea and an aspirin, and went to ring up Dr Carr. When she came back, he was feverish and sleepy. ‘Bet you won’t send Wills to a boarding school,’ he muttered. ‘Anyway, I didn’t sneak. He’s got to admit I didn’t,’ and he drifted off.

She sat and watched him, full of sad, helpless thoughts. Why
should
he be sent away for so many years from his father and brother and sister and, above all, from her? Why had boys always been sent away? He had been at boarding school since he was nine, and he was only twelve now. Even the little medieval pages had been sent to another house with the lady of it to care for them. It wasn’t as though Hugh had been happy at school: he had loathed every minute of it, he said, but he still had the apparently immutable view that his son must go through the same mill. That remark he had made about Wills struck at her heart. It was true that she had been indulging herself with this last baby, paying far more attention to him than she had ever done with the other two. True, also, that since Simon had gone to his prep school she had braced herself to the loss by trying to be calm and worldly about it, although the very first time when she had seen him off from Waterloo she had wept bitterly all the way home in the taxi. In some way she had known then that it was the very beginning of saying goodbye to him. Even her letters to him at school had been cool and cheery, and she had found them harder and harder to write – harder to know what he would want to hear and, because none of them ever really could say how much she missed him, putting in nothing that really mattered. His letters – the homesickness was palpable early on: ‘Darling Mum, please take me home I am board, board, board. There is nothing whatever to do here’ – had contracted to demands for various things, chiefly food: ‘Please send me six more tubes of toothpaste. I had to eat mine!’ Mysterious descriptions of masters: ‘When Mr Attenborough eats toast and marmalade at breakfast, his head steams. We did not have Latin prep today because Mr Coleridge has gone off his head again he rode his bicycle into the swimming-pool: he was smoking and reading and got stung by a wasp but nobody believed him.’ She had read the letters to Hugh, who had laughed and said he seemed to be settling down. Well, in a way, he had. But prep schools were not at all the same as public school, and now he had six years of that lying ahead. Poor lamb. At least he’s too young for war, she thought for the hundredth time, and Polly is a girl, and Wills is a baby and Hugh can’t really be in it. She put a glass of water by Simon’s bed; then she bent and kissed him with almost guilty tenderness. He was asleep, and there was no one else to see.

Sid had hated leaving Rachel, whose back was clearly very bad. When it had transpired that William had decided that if the worst came to the worst the Babies’ Hotel must be evacuated and that the beds were for the nurses to occupy in the squash court, Rachel had insisted on helping cart them over there. The Duchy had mildly enquired where the babies were to sleep, and he had simply said that they were small and could be fitted in somewhere. The billiard table could be moved from the billiard room, he had added vaguely. Anyway, the camp beds had done for Rachel’s back, and Sid hated to leave her alone. Well, hated not sharing a room with her. In the daytime, she realised despairingly, Evie would never leave them alone together if she could help it. How quickly one got used to things! A week ago, she would have been utterly overwhelmed at the prospect of spending one day and a night with Rachel; now she was grousing because she couldn’t spend
all
the time with her. ‘Be grateful for what you have,’ she told herself, but, then, one of the things she had was Evie, whose presence had never promoted gratitude in anybody. ‘Swings and roundabouts,’ she told herself bracingly; she was never sure which was supposed to be which, but there were usually more of one than the other.

Louise got up half an hour earlier than she needed to because going to church made her review her character, and one thing that wasn’t very good about it was the way she had stopped really talking to Polly. She knew – and probably no one else did – how much the idea of war preyed on Polly’s mind, but she had not once given Poll the chance to talk about it. So she decided that when she fetched the second bicycle, which was at Home Place, she would go and see Polly and invite her to go to church with her and Nora.

It was a beautiful morning with yellow sun and a milky blue sky; the steep banks each side of the road refreshed by the heavy rain, glittered with beaded cobwebs that were precariously slung between little drenched ferns, and the air smelled of mushrooms and moss. She met Mr York in the drive, carrying his pails of steaming milk, and she said, ‘Good morning, Mr York.’ He grinned, which showed his most frightening tooth, and nodded at her. The front door of Home Place stood open, and the maids were shaking dusters and there was a smell of bacon frying and the distant, squeaky, irregular sound of the carpet sweeper. She ran lightly up the stairs and along the passage to Polly’s and Clary’s room. Clary was not awake but Polly was sitting up in bed with Oscar coiled in a paroxysm of sleep at her feet. She had been crying. She brushed her face with the back of her hand, glanced warningly at Clary’s bed, and said, ‘Simon has got chicken pox now.’

‘You’re not crying about that?’

‘No.’

Louise went and sat on the bed, and Oscar raised his head, instantly awake. She stroked his rich fur, and he stared at her as though he’d never seen her before in his life.

‘I’ve come to ask if you’d like to go to church with Nora and me. To pray for peace. Nora says it’s very important.’

‘Louise, how can I? I’ve told you, I’m not at all sure that I believe in God.’

‘I’m not sure either, but I don’t think that’s the point. I mean, if there is one, He ought to take notice, and if there isn’t, it wouldn’t make any difference.’

‘I see what you mean. Oh, it’s so
awful
! Why don’t they have gas masks for animals? I tried to put Oscar in mine last night – you know, put a lot more of him in than just his head, and it still doesn’t fit anywhere. And he simply hated it. I couldn’t keep him in it.’

‘You couldn’t give him yours because if he needed it, you would, too.’

‘Not more than him. Anyway, I’d decided to say I’d lost mine and get another. To tell a lie about it.’ She looked at Oscar with tears of anguish. ‘I’m responsible for him. He’s my cat!’

She stretched out her hand to stroke his neck and he got up, stretched and then jumped heavily off the bed, making a weak, clockwork sound as he reached the floor.

‘Look, Poll, you’d really better come. It’s all you can do.’

‘OK.’

She leapt out of bed and began putting on her clothes that lay on the chair beside it.

‘You can’t go in shorts!’

‘Oh, no. I wasn’t thinking.’

As soon as she was out of bed, Oscar got back into it, settling himself where she had been for some peace and quiet.

‘You’ll have to wear a hat.’

‘Oh, blast! It’s got all my shells in it.’ Emptying them onto the dressing-table woke Clary, who, the moment she knew what they were doing, wanted to join them.

‘You can’t. You’ll give everybody chicken pox.’

‘I won’t. They said I could get up today, anyway.’

‘There isn’t another bicycle.’

‘I’ll borrow Simon’s.’

‘You’ll faint,’ said Louise. ‘You may have been up, but you haven’t been out.’

But Clary was hunting for clothes. ‘Although I have to point out’, she remarked as she pulled a blue cotton dress stained with blackberry juice over her head, ‘that I don’t think prayer works unless you
believe.
However, anything’s worth trying,’ she added as she saw Louise and Polly’s faces: Louise darting her a black look and Polly starting to agonise about her uncertainties.

‘You haven’t got a hat,’ Louise said in a crushing voice.

Clary looked from Louise’s white boater with a navy blue ribbon to Polly’s straw with cornflowers and poppies round the crown: Zoë did not buy her hats and Ellen chose such awful ones that she lost them on purpose.

‘I’ll borrow Dad’s outdoor painting beret from the hall,’ she said.

‘Sixteen student nurses, plus Matron and Sister Hawkins, and thirty-five babies under five! How can they imagine that they can all be fitted in?’

Rachel sitting bolt upright on her air cushion, put down her tea-cup. ‘Duchy, darling, couldn’t you talk to him yourself?’

The argument about the proposed immigration of the Babies’ Hotel had been raging all day, with Rachel, for whom mobility was agonising, being sent from one parent to another – they refused to treat with one another, William because he had said he hadn’t time for women fussing over details, and the Duchy on the grounds that he didn’t listen to a word she said.

‘I’ve told you that he said that Sampson is building three Elsans at the side of the squash court.’

‘I daresay he is, but there won’t be enough water!’

‘He says he’s going to sink another well. He’s out water divining now.’

The Duchy snorted. ‘You remember how long the last one took?
Three months!’
She scraped some butter onto her toast. ‘And how does he think this multitude is to be fed? Answer me that!’

Rachel was silent. When she had put the same question to her father earlier in the day, he had retorted that they had a perfectly good cook, and, anyway, it was well known that babies lived on milk, which York could produce – and if he couldn’t, he, William, could provide him with another cow.

‘Well,’ said the Duchy – she was wearing her hat for tea, a sure sign of rage. ‘If he thinks that Mrs Cripps can cook for an extra eighteen people – not counting the babies – he must be mad.’