The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (74 page)

‘Do you want to tell me what you promised?’

‘I
do
,’ she said consideringly, ‘but I don’t want anyone else to know.’

‘Right.’

He drew his fingers across his throat, and she said, ‘Oh, Dad, don’t be so old-fashioned!’

‘I am so old,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’ They looked at each other and both burst out laughing, and that was more like Polly.

‘Well, it started with us going to church and I said I didn’t think I ought to go, because, Dad, you see, I’m not at all sure that I believe in God.’ She looked at his black silk stump and said, ‘In fact, I don’t. But Nora said that if we prayed for there not to be a war and there wasn’t one that would show me. So when it got to be promises I thought I’ll have to believe in God if there isn’t a war, so I put that in the box.’

She seemed only to pause, so he said, ‘And?’

‘Well, I feel just the same. I don’t feel the slightest belief. How can you make yourself believe in something? I mean pretending is useless, probably evil.’

‘I agree pretending is useless.’

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Er – you know, Poll, I’m not sure.’

‘You must have thought about it,’ she said severely, ‘by your age.’

‘Yes. Well, no, probably I don’t.’

‘I mean, supposing I start managing to believe and
then
we have a war.’ That’s it, he thought, she doesn’t believe the news.

‘Polly, there isn’t going to be one. Peace has broken out.’

‘I know that. But can you solemnly swear, Dad, that there never will be one?’

‘No.’

‘You see? Oh, I wish I’d given up sugar in my tea or something manageable like that!’

‘Could you swap?’

‘Dad! That would be cheating!’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think if you say every night that you wish you believed in God, and there is one, he’ll hear you.’

‘I don’t wish I believed.’

‘Well, then, you could say you wish you
wanted
to believe. I don’t see how you can do more.’

‘And the rest of the time carry on as usual?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘That’s what ordinary life is, isn’t it? Carrying on as usual.’

‘Does that sound boring to you?’

‘It sounds it, but when you’re in it, it isn’t.’

When he kissed her she said, ‘Dad! Do you know what I love about you best? Your doubtfulness. All the things you don’t know.’ As he reached the door she called, ‘It really makes me admire you.’

‘I bet she knew there wasn’t going to be a war.’ Neville was very grumpy and felt Nora was to blame for the beastly prospect ahead of him.

‘The thing is the aunts will go home, and then you’ll be free. It’s much worse for us.’

‘Yes,’ said Judy. ‘It jolly well is.’

‘Can you imagine having no pocket money at all for a year? Having to live on Christmas and birthday presents for twelve whole months?’

‘Six for me, actually,’ Judy said. ‘I changed my mind just before I put the paper in the box.’ Lydia looked at her with loathing, and she went pink.

‘Really, it would have been much easier for us to have war,’ Neville said. ‘I wouldn’t have minded one at all. Aeroplanes and tanks everywhere – well, I’m extremely fond of them.’

‘That’s stupid, Neville. You might have got killed.’

‘I wouldn’t. From the sky I would be just the tiniest speck to a German – they wouldn’t even see me.’

There was a silence. Then he said, ‘What we could do is just not do any of it. Pretend we thought it was a joke.’

‘Oh, we couldn’t!’ both girls exclaimed, but he could see that they really didn’t mean it.

‘I shall, anyway,’ he said. ‘You can do as you like.’

‘No, indeed, Lady Rydal.’ A little smile twitched her small mouth and disappeared into her chins. She had known Lady Rydal for many years, and happy outcomes were hardly her forte.

Villy came into the room. She was wearing the most attractive black frock. ‘Oh dear! You haven’t had your sherry!’

‘I didn’t want to cause Miss Milliment any trouble.’ This was the most delicate way she could think of to imply to Viola that one did not give governesses drinks, even if she was, due to difficult circumstances, having them to dinner. Democracy, she felt, should never be allowed to get into the
wrong hands
. But Viola did not take the hint.

‘I expect Miss Milliment has been dying for hers,’ she said as she handed them both a glass.

‘Hardly dying, Viola, but certainly looking forward.’ Miss Milliment sipped her drink with a grateful smile.

Lady Rydal, baulked, eyed Miss Milliment’s banana-coloured ensemble with distaste. It looked like the kind of thing one might get in a
shop.

‘Polly has gone down with chicken pox,’ Villy said. ‘I must say, I wish our brood here would get on with it.’

‘Then you would have hardly anyone to teach, Miss Milliment,’ Lady Rydal remarked. ‘However,’ she went on with what she felt was the uttermost kindness, ‘I’m sure you must be longing to get back to your own nice cosy little home with all your own things round you. I know that I am.’

Everybody else came into the room – Edward had brought two bottles of champagne – and the celebration began, but at intervals during the rest of the evening, and during the long and – in spite of Lady Rydal – merry dinner, which seemed to her full of laughter and affection and fun, and, perhaps most of all, when she slipped away for the dark walk back to the cottage, Miss Milliment thought of her home. She thought of the dingy room that was without heating unless she spent a fortune on the gas meter; of the lumpy bed and hard thin blankets; the single ceiling light with a white china shade, not near enough to the bed for comfortable reading (in the winter one spent the evenings in bed as it was the easiest way to keep warm); the linoleum whose worn places she was in constant danger of tripping over; the coffee-coloured wallpaper with its frieze of oranges and pears. She thought of the window, hung with grey net curtains, through which there was nothing to be seen but the row of houses identical to the one she lived in: not a tree in sight, nothing to nourish the eye during those long evenings, when, after her solitary supper, she would have to spin out the hours, without company or distraction of any kind, until it was time to make her glass of hot water and retire for the night. All these things pressed sharply and uninvited into her mind, splintering the warmth, and celebration, company and comfort that surrounded her. Now, Eleanor, I won’t have you down in the dumps. Think how fortunate you have been to enjoy this wonderful change; this beautiful place, the country, this kind family. It has been a real oasis— but she could not go on with that.

In the cottage, she found Evie, whose bedroom door was open and room littered with luggage and belongings.

‘I am going home tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I made a telephone call to my gentleman friend and I am needed in London. I knew I would be. I knew there wouldn’t be a war, but she never listens to me, my sister. She always has to be right.’ She seemed exhilarated and full of animation.

Miss Milliment wished her a pleasant journey and went to her room. She stood by the open window for some time enjoying the soft, warm and damp air on her face. There was a smell of woodsmoke and the scent of pine from some of the trees in the wood at the back. The black dog still sat on her shoulder and she thought that perhaps this was because she had so much wanted to see the sea – nine miles away in the dark, and that would not happen now. That might be it. You cannot expect to have your own way in everything, Eleanor. Wonderful scent of pine! She had become aware of it only today, when, before dinner, she had fulfilled her promise made for Nora’s box and had taken the packet of yellowing letters and put them in her father’s old oiled silk tobacco pouch – together with the lock of red hair – and gone up to the wood with them, and scraped a little grave in the soft leafy mould and buried them. Thus, when she died, there would be no prying, indifferent eyes to patronise his memory.

She had been meaning to do something of the kind for a very long time now, but it was not easy. She had so little to remember of him, and after all these years what memories that remained had become distant, faded fragments, small matters of mysteriously unrelated fact, only saved from crumbling to spectral fantasy by the few relics, now safely buried in the wood. Now that she could no longer read his letters she knew that the rest of him would slip away: already, she had noticed, invention had been taking the place of memory. She would say (to herself) things like, ‘He must have,’ instead of ‘He did’: She did not want to turn him into a bad biography.

She shut her eyes to recall him for the last time on the evening before he had left for South Africa, when he had taken her out in the garden seized her hand and recited to her the end of ‘Dover Beach’.

His quiet, high-pitched, rather pedantic voice (although he could not say his r’s) came magically back . . . and then she could not remember how the poem went on, and as she groped towards the darkling plain, it diminished, and was silent.

That was all.

Elizabeth Jane Howard is the author of thirteen highly acclaimed novels, most recently
Love All
in 2008 and
Falling
in 1999.
Falling
was dramatized by ITV in 2005, starring Penelope Wilton. The Cazalet Chronicle
The Light Years, Marking Time, Confusion
and
Casting Off –
has become established as a modern classic and was adapted for a BBC television series in 2001. In 2002 Macmillan published her autobiography,
Slipstream.
In that same year she was awarded a CBE in the Queens Birthday Honours List.

‘The Cazalets have earned an honoured place among the great saga families . . . rendered thrillingly three-dimensional by a master craftsman’
Sunday Telegraph

‘In due course, this chronicle will be read, like Trollope, as a classic about life in England in our century’

‘As polished, stylish and civilized as her many devotees would expect’
Julian Barnes

‘She writes brilliantly and her characters are always totally believable. She makes you laugh, she sometimes shocks, and often makes you cry’
Rosamunde Pilcher

Love All

The Beautiful Visit

The Long View

The Sea Change

After Julius

Odd Girl Out