The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (71 page)

He found her reading in the hammock in the orchard. She wore a white skirt and the pale greenish shirt that he’d lent her to be painted in. She did not hear him coming: he was afraid he gave her quite a fright, since when he called her, she gave such a start that the book fell from her hands onto the grass.

‘Sorry,’ he said, picking it up. ‘I really didn’t mean to startle you.’ He looked at the book.
‘Sonnets from the Portuguese.
Oh! Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Are they good? Did she translate them?’

‘No, she wrote them to Robert. That’s what he called her, “my little Portuguese”. I think it was because she had such black hair and dark brown eyes.’

There was a short silence – he was thinking that he should have painted her in the hammock – then she said, ‘Is there any news?’

‘Oh. None so far as I know. No, I came to find you because there’s something I want to talk to you about. Shall we go for a walk?’

‘Oh, yes! Let’s.’ She was out of the hammock in a trice, left the book behind her.

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Oh – anywhere! Wherever you like.’

‘Well, just somewhere where we won’t be interrupted.’

‘Oh, yes!’ she said again.

‘Right. Well, there’s a nice huge old fallen tree just the other side of the wood behind the house,’ he said. ‘I used to take Clary there when she wanted to play what she called shipwrecks. Off we go.’

Teddy was feeling very out of sorts. After that smashing day in London, there didn’t seem enough to do in the country. What was really the matter was that he had nobody to do anything with: Simon was still scratching and rather peevish – anyway, he’d quarrelled with him, although if Simon had been about he could probably have made it up. He went to the camp in the morning. It looked just the same, but it felt somehow different: deserted, an unfriendly place to be by himself. There was no sign of Christopher. Then he thought of being a Roman emperor, and having Neville and Lydia and Judy as slaves. They seemed quite keen at first, but by the time he got them there he recognised that their attitude was distinctly unslavish.

‘Why do we have to do what you want all the time?’ Neville said.

‘Yes – why?’ echoed Judy.

He explained about being an emperor, whereupon Lydia instantly said she was a queen. They raided the stores without asking, and when he sent them to get firewood to build a fire they wandered away and did not come back for ages. He thought of building a dam in the stream and tried to get them to help him with that, but they soon got bored and started to drift away. ‘Hey!’ he shouted as he saw Judy trotting off after the other two. ‘Before you go!’ Lydia and Neville stopped and turned round, just as they’d reached the hedge with hazelnuts in it. ‘I forgot to explain. This is a secret place.’

‘No, it isn’t. We know about it,’ Neville said at once.

‘I mean, secret from anybody else.’

‘So what?’ Judy said in an assumed and most irritating voice.

‘You have to promise – all of you – not to tell anyone else about it.’

‘It’s so boring’, Lydia said, ‘that I shouldn’t think anyone would want to know.’

‘Yes. It’s already made,’ Neville said. ‘We like to make our own camps. We’ve made thousands of them. If you wanted us, you should have asked us at the beginning.’

There was nothing he could do with them. He tried threats but they didn’t seem at all frightened. ‘You can’t stop our pocket money, or send us to bed early.’

‘He’s got a gun,’ Lydia interrupted. ‘He could shoot us.’

‘Yes, and then people would find out and you would be hanged,’ Judy said. ‘And I shouldn’t think anyone would mind, not even your mother, if you shot your own sister.’

‘Don’t be so stupid. Of course I wouldn’t shoot you, Lyd – or anyone, come to that. Listen. I’ll give you a cigarette card from my collection, one each, if you’ll shut up.’

‘One card!’ Neville scoffed. ‘You must think we’re nitwits.’

In the end, he had to promise them a Snofrute each as well as two cards. They went off then.

‘Only I think, Teddy, you should play with someone your own age,’ was Lydia’s parting shot. Dignity forbade his going with them. He stood with folded arms watching them trail across the meadow, chatting to one another, and when he turned and went back to the camp he felt lonelier than ever. It would have been much better if he and Christopher hadn’t had a fight. There wasn’t anyone of his age. Well, there would be at school. His second year there must be better than the first. He wouldn’t be so baffled by all the rules which people didn’t tell you till you’d broken them from not knowing; he wouldn’t be so bullied. Awful memories engulfed him: being tied in the bath with the cold tap left on and the bath slowly filling up; being icy cold, and if they didn’t come back to untie him knowing he would drown; being flicked with knotted wet bath towels – that had been the summer term when there was swimming; finding a turd inside the bottom of his bed; getting beaten – twice – the only thing, though, that had made the bullying less. One friend, another new boy, who was a marvellous bowler. None of this could be told. During the year he had come to see that stronger people bullied weaker people, had determined to become strong so that he could take it out on someone for a change. Squash, the game he was best at, had been no good: first-year boys were not allowed to play squash, but he would this year. All the summer he had been pretending to himself that he was looking forward to going back – but he wasn’t, really. He was looking forward to being too old for school, and then, if there was still a war, he’d join up and be the best fighter pilot in the world. He was fourteen now so it wouldn’t be for four years.

‘Couldn’t we just quietly look and then fold the papers back again?’

‘Louise! Of course not. It’s a sacred trust.’

‘All right. It was just an idea. How many have we got now?’

‘You and me. The three children. Christopher and Angela.’

‘How on earth did you get her to agree?’

‘Never mind. Don’t interrupt. Miss Milliment, Simon, Ellen – I tried the maids but they just said it was very nice but they couldn’t think of anything, Aunt Sybil, Aunt Rach, Mummy, of course, and yours. Uncle Rupe. I tried Grania and she said she’d gladly give her life not to have a war but obviously that was no good.’

‘Why not?’

‘To begin with because she was so glad about it, and to go on with she’s really too old to commit suicide. I had to tell her that – nicely, of course.’

She managed to walk back to the house with him in an ordinary dignified manner, as though nothing had happened – or nothing very much – or as though, perhaps, even if it had, it was now resolved. In the drive she said she must go back to Mill Farm for lunch, and he said, of course. Then he stopped her walking, by putting an arm on her shoulder and said, ‘Look. I
am
so sorry. I mean, to have been so thick – and not realised. You’re such a good person. You’ll find a marvellous chap.’ There was a pause: her face felt as stiff and rigid as if she’d put a face mask on it. Then he said, ‘And you won’t forget about Christopher, will you?’

She had shaken her head, and then she had smiled, which felt the right dignified thing to do, and said, ‘No, of course not,’ and then turned away and started walking purposefully down the drive. She heard the click of the gate as he went into the garden before she had gone a few yards away from him but she didn’t look back. She had walked down the drive and started to go down the hill, but she knew she couldn’t go home to the farm yet. So she turned in to the left along the cart track that led to York’s farm and when she came to a gate in the hedge at one side of it, she climbed over and ran a few yards along the stubble and flung herself on the ground. Sobs engulfed her in great racking wordless waves. Grief poured out of her as though she had never contained anything else. When these first paroxysms were exhausted and she was still, the words and thoughts began. What he had said, what she had said – and, more scaldingly shameful,
thought
as she got out of the hammock so many ages ago. ‘There’s something I want to talk to you about.’ Why should she have assumed that the yearned-for moment had come? That he wanted to tell her how much he loved her? Now she could think of no reason why she should have thought that, and yet she
had
thought it. And then, later, but when she still had the chance to be secret, why had she not? Why had she seized his hand and pulled him to face her? ‘I love you. I am completely in love with you,’ she had said, and endured the memory of dawning comprehension, and – yes – horror on his face to be succeeded quickly by compassionate kindness that hurt almost as much. It was too late to stop then – it had all poured out. She had only told him because there might be a war, and he might get killed, and in any case would go away, and she would not see him. ‘I couldn’t bear not to tell you,’ she had said, now unable to bear having told him. She was weeping now, as she had then, but now without his arms round her. For he had held her, tried to comfort her by telling her all the hopeless, despairing things that meant nothing. She would get over it, she was so young, she had her whole life before her (as if a whole life that contained so much pain could be comforting!). Everything he said merely belittled her, diminished everything that she felt. In trying to present her love to her as transient, he took away all that she had. ‘I would never say that to
you
!’ she had cried: it had silenced him. He had held her until her tears had ceased, had given her his handkerchief. Then he had said something about how much he liked and admired her – but she couldn’t remember any of those words – had said that he was so much older, and, anyway, married, and she knew all that, and in the end he had said how sorry he was, and there was nothing that he could say and she realised that this was true. She had mopped up and blown her nose. ‘Keep the handkerchief,’ he had said. They had walked back without saying anything more at all. And then, in the drive, he had said, ‘You won’t forget about Christopher, will you?’ How could he say that? But she had forgotten. She’d listened to all the stuff about Christopher in a daze of radiant anticipation of what was to come. Nothing is to come, she thought. Nothing ever is to come. She turned over onto her face again and her tears ran straight into the ground.