All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (22 page)

She only got a half-day a week, she said, ‘But I’d really like to come.’ She was blushing deeply. She was a most charming blend of seductiveness and innocence.

Her half-day proved to be Wednesday.

They arranged to meet where the ferry left for Ryde, on the Isle of Wight. He asked McIver if he could possibly borrow one of the firm’s cars for the day – he had a relative on the island who was ill and anxious to see him. McIver was easy to take in, and agreed ‘just this once’. He cashed fifty pounds and the following Wednesday watched her walking down the quay towards him with true excitement. It was a balmy day, and the ferry was not crowded at all.

‘You have a motor!’ she exclaimed, when she reached him. She wore a tight black skirt, her high heels and carried a mac over her arm. Her shirt was of grass-green satin, cut so low that the cleft between her milky breasts was immediately apparent. She looked at him with her cloudy grey-green eyes and started to blush. ‘I’ve never been out with a gentleman,’ she said.

She had not, he discovered later, really been out with anyone.

‘Where are we going?’

To the island, he said. He’d never been there and thought it would be fun.

They both enjoyed the ferry, had a soft drink at the bar, and then went on deck. The sea was behaving like it did in a watercolour hung in the drawing room at Home Place: gentle blue water, with little creamy waves, dotted with the sharp bright white triangles of the many sailing craft that scurried to and fro upon it. He put his arm round her. ‘Don’t want you falling in.’

‘Nor I. I can’t swim no more than a wheelbarrow.’

‘I would rescue you,’ he said. He felt full of tenderness towards her. She was the opposite of his ex-wife Bernadine and the most recent girlfriend he had left so easily in London. ‘I would protect you from anything,’ he said. He bent down to draw her towards him, lifted her chin to kiss her inviting mouth. She gave a little gasp, then pressed herself to him. When they drew apart, she said, ‘I feel kind of funny – must sit down.’

He led her to a bench and they sat in silence for a minute or two. Then she said, ‘I thought I was going to pass out. Sorry. Never felt like that before.’

‘Like what, darling?’

‘Kind of watery – weak.’ Then, almost inaudibly, she added, ‘Weak and eager.’ Then, she said, ‘What’s your name when you’re at home?’

‘Oh. Sorry, I thought I’d told you. Teddy. My name is Teddy – short for Edward, after my father.’

‘Mr Ted. Or Mr Edward, I suppose.’

‘That’s my first name. I’m Teddy Cazalet.’

After a moment she said: ‘And I’m Ellen. Ellen McGuire.’

They were approaching land; the port seemed jammed with traffic and people, the sun winking on the windows of houses and cars. It was midday, and Teddy felt hungry.

‘Where are we going here?’

‘We’re going to find some lunch, and then we’ll go exploring. Would you like that?’

‘Oh, yes! I’d like anything we do really, Mr Ted.’

‘I’m not Mr, darling, just Ted or Teddy.’

They found a quiet pub outside the town where a few people were eating in the garden. ‘Do you like lobster?’

‘I’ve never had it. When they caught any, the fishermen sold it to Dublin for tourists.’

‘Well, today we’re tourists. We’re on holiday. If you find you don’t like lobster, you can have something else.’

But she did like it, and once he’d shown her how to crack the claws and pick out the meat she was better at it than he. ‘It’s the best food I’ve had in me life.’

He leaned across their table to wipe her face with his paper napkin, and she kept trustfully still while he did so. They drank bottled beer with the fish – ‘You can’t trust the draught if you don’t know the pub,’ she said, and he didn’t feel up to choosing wine. He offered her an ice for afters, but she said she couldn’t fancy another thing.

She announced – in a stage whisper that caught the attention of a couple sitting near them – that she was going to find a toilet, and he called the waitress for the bill, which was surprisingly reasonable.

They drove inland to pretty and sparsely populated countryside. They both felt sleepy after the meal, and he said he was going to find somewhere they could have a nice snooze.

In due course he found the perfect place: an opening with a gate into a small field. On the far side of the hedge was a delightfully dry ditch. There was an old tartan car rug on the back seat, and he took that with him and laid it in the ditch. She had kicked off her uncomfortable shoes and joined him in their makeshift bed without a qualm. Soon they were lying side by side, out of the breeze with the sun on their faces. He had taken off his jacket and made a pillow for her head.

‘Comfy?’

She nodded, and gave a pretty yawn, which showed her small white teeth.

But as soon as they were set for the sleep, the desire for it vanished. Instead he was undoing her blouse, exposing a tantalisingly inadequate brassière that hardly restricted her firm white breasts and rosy nipples. The moment he took one in his mouth she moaned, and the nipple hardened. He took his hand away to tear at the zip of his trousers, but she did it for him. ‘Oh, Ted. Oh, Ted!’

For a moment it occurred to him that she had done all this before, and a mixture of disappointment and relief overcame him. ‘So you want me, darling?’

‘Oh, I do, Ted, I’m yelling for you, whatever it is. Wait just one moment.’

She pulled down her skirt and then the white pants until her whole body was to be seen. Her nipples were like the furled centre of a dark pink rose.

For an unknown amount of time he had her, as many times as he could get a fresh erection.

She had not done it before – she cried out the first time – but her arms tightened round him, and when he asked her if she was all right, she kissed him with surprising strength. In between these bouts of passion, he stroked her hair, murmured to her, kissed her throat and told her how lovely she was. ‘I love you,’ she said.

When eventually he parted from her he realised that she was bleeding heavily; the rug was soaked under her legs, which had more blood running down them.

‘I must have hurt you – I didn’t mean to.’

‘No hurt,’ she said. ‘Only a smidgen. Nothing to fret about.’

But there was. There was nothing to clean her up with, so he got up and looked wildly round for water – a stream or a pond – but there was nothing in sight. He knew from his map that even if they managed to reach the sea it lay at the bottom of steep cliffs. They had to get back from the island somehow, but for a few panic-stricken moments, he could not imagine how this was to be accomplished.

‘I think it’s stopped,’ she said. ‘Give me my stockings.’

She rolled them up and stuffed them between her legs. She was sitting up now, and held out her hand for her diminutive white knickers, and he helped her pull them up. Then she sat on the edge of the bank while they tried to scrub her legs with the rug. This was not really successful as the blood had dried, and the result merely looked rusty. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about anything but you.’

Somehow, he finished dressing her, hooking up the bra, pulling on her small black skirt and the green shirt, whose buttons he fumbled with. ‘I didn’t know bleeding was involved,’ she said. ‘People don’t tell you anything where I come from except it’s wicked, unless . . .’ Her voice tailed off, until, in a quite different tone, she said, ‘Oh, Ted, will I be having a baby?’ Terror. She was terrified, he could feel.

‘Of course not, darling. Of course you won’t.’ But this lie frightened him.

‘Anyway, it would have happened when you kissed me on the boat, yes? It would have happened then?’

He was able to reassure her: no, that was not possible. Desperately not wanting her to pursue the matter, he looked at his watch and said they must be getting back so as not to miss the ferry.

He picked up her shoes, but she said she didn’t want them until they got back. ‘They kill me,’ she said, ‘but I don’t have another pair.’

The journey back was more or less silent. He attended to her – got her a cup of tea on the boat and brought it to the same bench on deck that they had used before. He found that if he sat with his arm round her, she seemed content and, burdened with the lie he had told her, he didn’t really want to talk at all.

They parted on the quay where he wrapped her in her mac. Silently, she held up her face and he kissed her trembling lips. She was trying not to cry. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said. ‘It’s been a wonderful day.’

‘All the best,’ she said, then went bravely stumbling in her shoes down the quay and out of sight.

Alone, he sat in the car for a while, trying to sort out his feelings, but he couldn’t and felt suddenly too tired to try. Better get the car back but, no, he would have to take the car rug to the cleaners and they would be shut now. He went to his lodgings, needing to wash and find a fresh shirt.

But when he got back, he was confronted by his landlady in a state of high excitement.

‘There’s two gentlemen been calling for you. I told them where you work, but they told me to pass on the message that they’ll be expecting you at the Polygon Hotel before eight o’clock. It’s ever so nice at the Polygon. My late husband’s niece had her wedding reception there. She married an accountant, you know – they went to live in Canada so, of course, I don’t see much of them. Two little girls they had, Sally Ann and Marylyn. I’ve ironed your best shirt and pressed those suit trousers for you.’

He thanked her, with a sinking heart. Somehow he knew that the appearance of uncles and/or his father boded no good.

It did. They were waiting for him at the bar and beckoned him to a table in a far corner.

Uneasy greetings.

‘I wish you’d told me you were coming.’ It felt the wrong thing to have said the moment he’d said it.

‘McIver told us that you’d gone out for the day.’

‘Yes – yes, I did. I felt I needed a day off.’

Hugh said, ‘He told us you’d gone to see a sick relative on the Isle of Wight. He apparently lent you his car.’

‘It was very kind of him.’

His father said, ‘You know perfectly well that is not on. This is a weekday, and you’re supposed to be running the wharf and sawmill. So your grandmother’s funeral ploy won’t wash.’ He beckoned a waiter and ordered a second round.

That was just the beginning of it. They had been looking at the books – the correspondence, the lack of sales, the muddles and complaints. Did he know that a large order for teak had been transferred by the vendors to Maxwell Perkins, well known to be a highly competitive rival? And what had possessed him to order a large quantity of softwood to be dumped in the river?

When he said there hadn’t been enough room on the land his father had exploded. ‘Balls! You know perfectly well that soaking softwoods renders them unsaleable for weeks – even months – after you’ve taken them out.’

At this point a waiter said their table was ready in the dining room.

They chose their meal – at least, his father and uncle did – and he said he would have whatever they had chosen, which turned out to be lobster. He drank some of the wine, which was waiting for them in a misty bucket, and wondered how on earth he was going to get through the evening without blubbing or throwing up. At one moment, when his uncle went to answer a telephone call, his father leaned towards him and said, ‘Listen, Teddy. You took some girl off with you for the day, didn’t you? Hugh won’t understand that, but I do. It’s all very well for you to have some fun sometimes, but you really should be more sensible about how you go about it. And the one thing I won’t stand for is you lying – to me or anyone else. You let the whole family down when you do that.’

His eyes filled with scalding tears and Edward whipped out one of his immense silk paisley handkerchiefs and proffered it. ‘Blow your nose, and pull yourself together.’

‘Sorry, Dad. I truly am. You see, I don’t know if I can do this job – if I’m up to it.’

‘Nonsense. You just need to learn more, work a bit harder at it. It’s time you got married again, Teddy. I know you made a bit of mess with whatsername—’

‘Bernadine.’

‘Her. You need to find a nice girl, settle down and start a family. Lots of people don’t have a good job they can walk into as you do.’

There was a pause while Teddy watched him put mayonnaise onto a mouthful of lobster. He looked then at his own plate, and pictures of the sunlit lunch with Ellen flickered and went out. He had lied to her, too. Well, a kind of lie. He supposed time – nerve-rackingly inexorable – would tell about that.

‘Could I have some more wine?’

‘Help yourself, and give me some. Hugh doesn’t seem to drink much these days.’

A sudden passionate wish to confide in his father about Ellen invaded him. He would feel better if he could tell someone – especially if he could get some advice. But at that moment Hugh came back. ‘Sorry, chaps. It was Jem. Her boys have got measles, and she feels she ought to send Laura away until they’re out of quarantine.’

He looked only mildly worried; the ghost of a tender smile was there, as it always seemed to be whenever he spoke about his wife. He adored her – and it was mutual.