The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (66 page)

‘ . . . and you have lunch at your club with Mr Teddy at one.’

‘My God! So I have! I’d clean forgot. Thank you, Miss Seafang.’ His smile contained the ‘What should I do without you!’ expression that never failed to warm her heart.

‘Give me ten minutes and then I’ll see Hoskins.’

‘Very good, Mr Edward.’

God! I must be getting senile! Edward thought. Lunch with Teddy meant that he couldn’t go to the wharf afterwards, as Teddy would expect a matinée or a film, preferably followed by tea at Gunter’s. And he had meant to go to the wharf early and then, since it was the right side of London, slip down to Wadhurst to take Diana out to dinner. He’d managed to fob Villy off, although it had clearly not been popular, but now he’d got himself into a real mess. He pushed his chair back from the desk and rested his feet upon it, a position in which he always thought better. ‘At least I don’t play the fiddle,’ he said to himself, referring to an eccentric younger brother of the Brig’s who had asked to join the firm and then spent his time in his office doing just that. When the Brig had pointed out that this was not conducive to business, he replied that his wife had not liked him doing it at home. He had become a sort of remittance man, living up north somewhere. This had been his office, and alongside the large, dull photographs of men in white overalls standing proud but puny beside enormous logs, there was still a foggy photograph that Edward was secretly fond of, of Szigeti standing with his violin.

Now, then. Supposing he took Teddy to the wharf? No good, he couldn’t catch a train from there. Supposing he went to the wharf the moment he’d seen Hoskins? Better. Must ring Diana first.

That didn’t go well. She said she had managed to get someone to look after the baby all day and was coming to town and could they have lunch? Well, could he meet her at her flat later, but not too late as she had to get back? Eventually, it was agreed that he’d get there around six, they would have an early dinner, and he would drive her down. He could go on to Mill Farm for the night and that would please Villy. He rang for Miss Seafang, who ushered in Hoskins.

When Mr York brought the milk up to the house that morning, he also brought a letter. He hadn’t written one since his mother had died – there’d been no call to – so, of course, when he got out his writing things, his pen nib was rusty and the ink in the bottle had dried to nothing. He’d had to lend some ink from Enid who was always writing – wrote one letter a week, a terrible expense in stamps since she had to send them through the post to Broadstairs, fifty-two pence a year that was, as he’d more than once told her. Then he had to think what he wanted to say, and it beat him how the paper got dirty while he was thinking, but it did. Several sheets, it took. In the end, he’d got the milk pencil, the one he used to count up the pints they used up at the house, and wrote it out in that first.

Enid’s ink turned out to be women’s ink – violet-coloured – so he made the letter as businesslike as he could to make up for it.

‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, avoiding the difficult and fancy name, ‘With respect to the land at back of cottages. I could sell one acre for sixty pounds. Sale of cottages as agreed. Total £560. Yours truly, Albert York.’

He hadn’t put a date. It was near as nothing 27th, which he knew as Arthur was coming over to fetch the red calf that day, so he put that at the end of the letter on the bottom line of the paper. The envelopes had gummed themselves up. He had to use the kettle on one of them, and they didn’t fit the paper so he folded it up quite small and dainty and put it in. Then he had to think about addressing it, which there was no call for if he was taking it up himself, so he put Mr William on it. It was nearly ten when he’d finished. Still ten pound was ten pound whichever way you looked.

He paid a visit to the privy, out at the back door and down a rank little bricked path. It smelled of hogweed and urine and Jeyes’ fluid, but at night there were no flies. When he came out he sniffed the air: the wind had shifted to the west and there would be rain. He’d best get Dick Cramp – one of Edie Cramp’s brothers – up to help get the last of the hay off the south field in case a storm broke. Then he turned out the big oil lamp in the kitchen and found his way to his bedroom in the dark. Working Dick cost less than losing the hay. Five hundred and sixty pound! He’d fooled the old man. He’d have let the cottages go for much less, but if he didn’t ask more for the land the old man might know he’d been fooled. He was a foreigner, after all, wasn’t born in these parts, fair game, but he wasn’t close with his money – he would say that for him.

So next morning, he took the letter, tucked in his waistcoat pocket, up to the house, and handed it over to Mrs Cripps, who gave it to Eileen to put on Mr Cazalet’s plate at breakfast.

Teddy sat bolt upright between his parents in the Visitors’ Dining Room at the club with a beautiful menu that had the Yacht Club burgee embossed at the top. There was an agonising choice of all three courses: potted shrimps or smoked salmon to start with (and boring old soup – he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting that), and then lamb cutlets, steak or game pie, and a choice of boring old vegetables, and then treacle sponge, blackberry and apple tart with cream, or an ice. In the end, he decided on potted shrimps and game pie because saying to other boys that the game pie at his father’s club was not half bad, sounded more worldly than saying the same thing about cutlets or steak. He needn’t mention treacle sponge which he simply loved – he could
invent
a pudding he had had (on the first night of term after lights out there was a prolonged discussion of the food consumed in the holidays ending invariably with ribald comment on the fare to come). It was a lovely lunch. For once his parents took more notice of him and didn’t have long boring conversations about things he couldn’t possibly be interested in, although he wouldn’t have minded because the food was so good. The potted shrimps came encrusted in yellow butter with thin triangles of toast under a white napkin on a plate just for him. The game pie was a slice like a cake: crisp, shiny brown pastry on the outside, then about half an inch of white not-very-cooked pastry – absolutely delicious –
then
a layer of stiff pale brown jelly, and then wedges of pink gamy meat, very juicy and tasting as though it was nearly too old but not quite. He had two glasses of cider as well. The conversation, as usual with grown-ups, mostly consisted of them asking rather pointless questions. ‘And what did you do with yourself all morning?’ his father was now saying.

‘Helped Mum cart things into the car. If a bomb drops actually on our house, would it be flattened?’

‘I should think it might be, if it was a direct hit.’

‘I got my collection of cigarette cards just in case,’ he said. ‘But, I say, it’s jolly exciting, isn’t it? Mum and I saw them building air-raid shelters, and they were digging trenches in Hyde Park. They don’t expect the war to be fought in the Park, do they? If you could join up, if you weren’t so old, what service would you go into? I’d go into the Air Force. There’s a wizard new aeroplane called a Spitfire that can go at two hundred miles an hour—’ He stopped. ‘It might have been four hundred – anyway, it’s the fastest plane in the world. Would you join the Air Force, Dad, if you weren’t too old?’

‘I’d join the Navy. I’m not too old for that, old boy.’

‘And I suppose Mum could be a nurse,’ he said, anxious to include her (she’d been jolly decent not making a fuss about the socks).

‘I might join the Wrens,’ said Villy.

‘What’s that? Oh, thanks.’ A waitress had brought him some more cream.

‘It’s the women’s navy.’

‘Oh. I think it would be better if you were a nurse,’ he added kindly. ‘I don’t think women should go on ships, Dad, do you? I mean skirts in submarines would be idiotic—’ He spread his hands out and knocked over his cider glass. ‘Sorry!’

‘That’s all right.’ A waitress came to mop up the cider, and seeing that Teddy was rather dashed, Edward went on, ‘As a matter of fact, a bloke who works for us came in this morning to tell me he’d joined the Air Force. A very useful bloke – we shall miss him.’

‘Still, it’s what people ought to do, isn’t it? Dad, if there is a war, do you think it will last long enough for me to fight in it?’

‘Not a chance,’ Edward said at once, and met Villy’s eye.

‘Can we have our coffee next door?’ she asked. ‘I’d rather like to smoke.’

‘It’s after two o’clock, you can here if you like. Or we’ll go next door. Have you finished, Teddy?’

‘It looks as though I have.’ But as this did not procure a second helping of treacle sponge, he got up when they did and followed them back into the room where they had had drinks before lunch. As they walked through, a very old man with a purple face and white hair called to Edward, ‘I see we’re getting a broadcast from Chamberlain tonight. Put us in the picture – and high time, too. That your boy?’

Teddy was introduced and called him sir as he was so awfully old.

‘And your lady wife. How do you do, my dear? Let me offer you some port. I owe that husband of yours some port – he trounced me at billiards last week.’

Mum didn’t want port, but Dad had some and let him taste it. ‘I had port,’ he’d be able to say. ‘It wasn’t bad at all.’

They had rather grey coffee in little cups with yellow roses on them, and he began to want to go to the film, but suddenly Mum and Dad
did
start one of those talks that were all about plans that they didn’t seem to agree about. It transpired that Mum couldn’t go to
Scarface
after all, as she said she had a lot of things to do, and Dad had to work immediately it finished, so then they went on and on and on about how he was going to get back to Sussex. He could easily catch a train by himself but Mum said that if Dad drove him home, she could load the car up with a whole lot more things she wanted to take down to Sussex. Dad didn’t seem to want to do that and in the end it was decided that he should take the Underground from Oxford Circus or somewhere like that to Holland Park and be with Mum by six o’clock, which meant there would hardly be time for tea. He pointed this out and all she said was, ‘But you’ve just had the most enormous lunch!’ as if that had anything to do with it. He left them at it while he went to the lavatory, and when he came back they weren’t talking about anything else. When she went, Mum gave that cheery smile that didn’t feel like a smile at all, and said, ‘Have a good time,’ and kissed him, which he’d been trying to train her for years not to do in front of strangers – there were several other lots of people in the room. When she had gone, he rubbed the place where there might have been lipstick, and Dad said, ‘Right! I’m just going to do what nobody else can do for me, and I’ll be with you,’ and things felt much easier again.