All Change: Cazalet Chronicles (32 page)

She had led her slowly home, sobbing, apologising, but beneath the confusion, Villy had sensed real fear – even terror – and she did her best to be gentle and reassuring.

When they got home, she changed Miss Milliment’s nightdress, adding a bed-jacket, the scrambled egg upon which had become distressingly crusty, got her into bed with two hot-water bottles and finally brought her a mug of cocoa, then sat with her while she drank it . . .

‘My dear Viola, I have a confession to make.’ She was regarding Villy intently. ‘I fear that I have recently become rather forgetful.’

‘Well, dear Miss Milliment, I think we all forget things when we get older. The great thing is not to worry about it.’

Miss Milliment was silent, and then she said, as though to herself, ‘That would be the great thing.’

But later, long after Miss Milliment had dropped off, Villy lay in bed worrying. When she had offered her a home, she had not envisaged looking after a demented person, and that was what she now realised Miss Milliment was likely to become. She would have to keep the front door locked at all times, conceal matches and cigarette lighters to prevent combustion in the kitchen – and what else? Soon it would be unwise to let her be alone at all. But the worst would be feeling guilty and anxious whenever she did leave the house. She had planned to take Roland to
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, the new film with Alec Guinness, and then to have supper in a Chinese restaurant in Soho as a Christmas treat. Zoë’s offer of a Christmas lunch was another event for him. But there were at least three weeks to be filled, and she passionately did not want him to be bored. He had always been remote, courteous, but earlier Christmases had clearly been dull for him: sitting at the table after roast chicken (a turkey impossible for three), a very small Christmas pudding and a mince pie, and then a box of crackers that never had anything interesting in them; listening to the Queen’s speech on the wireless and the prospect of playing cards with her until tea . . . It wasn’t as though his siblings helped at all. Teddy and Louise would pay duty visits; she knew they were that, although Teddy took more trouble than Louise to conceal it. They were awkward with Roland – didn’t really try to make friends with him – and Lydia was away acting in a pantomime. Perhaps we should go and see her, Villy thought, but then she realised that of course they couldn’t leave Miss Milliment for so long. Northampton and a show would take the whole day.

One of her periodic fits of rage came over her now. Why the hell couldn’t Jessica take her share of caring for Miss Milliment, who, after all, had been her governess as well? And while she had gone through the humiliation and impoverishment of a divorce, Jessica and Raymond had inherited property and a great deal of money from Raymond’s aunt. They had recently bought a villa on the Costa del Sol where they went for most of the winter and that let Jessica off doing anything for Villy at Christmas. But she was pretty good at evading any ‘governess duty’ at all, as she called it.

‘I have come to the conclusion that I’m really not very good with old people,’ she had said, on one of her rare visits, as though that settled the matter. ‘And you’re so marvellous with her – it’s much better if she stays with you.’

‘Shall we get a small tree this year?’ she’d asked Roland, on the way back from the station.

‘I don’t mind,’ he’d said politely.

All these years she had been choosing a small tree and decking it with the same old baubles and tiny candles (so much prettier than electric lights), arranging the presents under it, always making a small ceremony of it before lunch. And he hadn’t minded! No more trees, she thought now, before eventually she slept.

THE FAKENHAMS AND THE LESTRANGES

‘I thought the best thing was simply to tell them where they’re all sleeping to prevent arguments about it.’

Polly had arranged everything beautifully, Clary thought. Harriet was to sleep in the big night nursery with the twins, Eliza and Jane; Bertie was to sleep with Andrew. Spencer slept in Gerald’s dressing room next to his parents. Surprisingly, no one objected to the arrangements. The Lestranges had arrived in time for a late tea in the kitchen, presided over by Nan – a piece of bread and butter before they could go on to jam sandwiches and cake. In spite of claiming car sickness, Bertie and Harriet were, they said, nearly starving. Sickness, however, proved a fascinating subject.

‘I’ve never been sick. What’s it like?’ Andrew asked.

Harriet considered. ‘Well, your mouth gets full of water and you have a sort of awful rumbling in your throat and then, whoosh! Up it all comes over everything.’

‘But what does it look like?’

‘A sort of mixture between scrambled egg and porridge. It smells horrible too.’

Eliza, who was the best at reading, said, ‘They often say in newspapers that people choke and die in their own vomit.’

‘Well, think how nasty it would be if it was someone else’s.’ Jane was very good at capping Eliza’s remarks.

Nan, who seemed not to have noticed what they were talking about as she was busy feeding Spencer, came to life. ‘I’ve told you, Miss, little girls don’t use words like “nasty” or “beastly”. You say “horrid”.’

‘People do at school, Nan.’

‘You’re not at school now.’

After tea they played Torchlight Ogres, which meant that they turned off every light they could reach. Nan kept to the kitchen and the parents to Polly’s sitting room, which was strictly forbidden to the children anyway because a lot of secret things were going on in it. For what seemed like hours, they rushed about the house armed with torches supplied by Eliza.

The rules of the game were utterly mysterious to the onlooker, and sometimes to the younger players – Andrew, in particular, who resorted to weeping in a cupboard about the unfairness of it all.

‘It may make them a bit sleepier than they would otherwise be,’ Archie remarked. He was tired from the long drive and his bad leg ached. He stretched it out gratefully in front of the large wood fire. She’ll be in Surrey with her family, he thought. He need not think about her. ‘You have made this room nice, Poll.’ It was warm, with lamps that cast a friendly light, the huge windows curtained in green velvet, one wall covered with books, and the rest in a sea-green jasper paper.

Gerald said he was going to brave the dark to get ice. ‘We could all do with a stiff drink before their bedtime.’

Clary said, ‘I’m doing bedtime, darling Gerald. You can confine yourself to a goodnight kiss.’ She had been kneeling on the floor by the window and she and Polly were unpacking the cardboard boxes that contained the decorations.

But when Gerald returned from ‘a positively polar expedition’ with the ice and had mixed them a strong reviving concoction, they all sat by the fire to enjoy it. There ensued a long, comfortable silence, and Gerald thought how good it was to have even more children in the house, how charming Polly looked with the firelight flickering on her copper hair, and wondered whether the tree nursery he had planted with Simon would yield some sort of income, since hiring out the house had so far barely broken even . . .

Polly thought how lovely it was to have Clary and Archie, and how sad it was that their lives were so distant that she almost didn’t know Clary, which was largely because she, Polly, could never get away: she could not leave the children with Nan any more and Gerald – whatever he said – could not cope alone with the house, the children and his plans for improving the grounds. She thought, as she often did at this time of year, of Christopher in his monastery, and hoped that he was happy with his life. She remembered the time with him in his caravan when he had had his beloved dog, and had also wanted to be in love with her. Luckily that had come to an end quite quickly, as he had never mentioned it again. She thought of her father and how careworn he had seemed when he came. Jemima had told her about the subsequent dinner with Edward and Diana: at least some progress had been made for a reconciliation . . .

Clary was thinking how lovely it was not to be the main person responsible for Christmas. She would help, of course she would, but she would only have to do as she was told. Polly was amazing. She organised everything while looking as though she did nothing. She has real glamour and it’s such bad luck for darling Archie that I don’t have a scrap of that, she thought. She had put her hair up at home that morning, but pins kept dropping out, and the more she tried to push her hair back, the more strands kept falling. Just as another pin fell out, Archie leaned over and gently pulled the whole lot down. ‘That’s how I like it,’ he said, and she felt such a surge of love for him that she blushed.

It was a little like the old Christmases at Home Place – only no Mrs Tonbridge or Eileen to bear the domestic brunt. We have to do that now for ourselves. Which is probably very good for us but must be very hard on the older generation, people like poor Aunt Villy and even Zoë. It was one of those apparently small changes that had come about together with the welfare state and a Labour government. Having Mr Macmillan didn’t bring any of that back, although if you were rich, of course, you still had the old advantages. She wondered whether all the people who had been in domestic service were having nicer lives out of all that. Both Archie and her father had always been left-wing, although Dad had never said very much about it; he was so awfully good at seeing the other person’s point of view that he often agreed with the people who weren’t on his side, and Archie hardly ever talked to her about politics, although he read the
Observer
and the
Manchester Guardian
every week. Life was supposed to be getting better for women. He had pointed out to her that there were going to be life peers in the House of Lords. ‘Baroness Clarissa Lestrange took her seat last week, and her maiden speech about children’s education was warmly received . . .’ But no: she was going to be a playwright; she was going to join what Archie called the Club, which only practising artists could join . . .

Archie gratefully acknowledged his glass being refilled by Gerald. He was the perfect host, seemed to anticipate everything. And he so clearly adored Polly. He was also, Archie thought, secretly in love with the hideous old pile he had inherited. He remembered Polly talking about how she wanted to make a house entirely beautiful – she could never have bargained for this but she had made pockets of luxury and comfort. His and Clary’s room, for instance. It had been painted and papered, had a moss-green carpet and rose-coloured curtains that matched the roses climbing up the wide trellis on the walls – a French paper, by the look of it. Polly had explained that it was the bedroom they had chosen to be the brides’ dressing room, but meanwhile it was the best guest room. ‘I had to try and do it to suit them,’ she said. She had hung what she described as furnishing pictures, blameless meticulous sea- and landscapes, and one of the less sinister family portraits,
Lady Agatha Barstow
, wearing a blue taffeta evening dress, with an agonisingly tiny waist. Her face – the china complexion, the slightly protuberant blue eyes, the tiny dark red mouth and the faintest indication of a double chin – gazed upon the room utterly without expression. ‘The agent people love it because she’s got a title,’ Polly had said. ‘And the room has a loo and a basin en suite, which is more than we have.’

Polly had certainly done her best, he thought, but the major part of the vast, sprawling house was unoccupied: the upstairs passages led off to rows of bedrooms in various states of disrepair. The place had been built to entertain huge idle house parties attended by a battery of staff. Polly had told them that Nan was the only person who really knew her way around it.

A little while after Polly and Clary had gone to get the children to bed, Gerald said that he was going to see if more help was needed. Archie was left by the fire with his replenished drink, and she came into his mind yet again. A shit and a bastard was what he had been, and Clary’s play had brought it all home to him. The play had impressed him: she had certainly dealt fairly with the three people involved – she had a real talent for dialogue – and she had kept the tension right to the end, which, Archie supposed, they were all living through now. It was all very well for him, he thought. He had never stopped loving Clary, but the girl had been left with nothing. The play certainly revived all these guilty feelings, and he repeated for the hundredth time that she was very young, she would get over it, most people began their love lives with an unhappy affair – look at him and Rachel, whom he had cared for for so long and so much. All in a peaceful past.

It was the future that was less certain – particularly for old Rupe. He had confided that the firm was losing money. He had never wanted to join the family business anyway, had done it because he wasn’t earning enough teaching art and selling hardly any pictures, and he felt that Zoë deserved a better life. He had told Archie about the affair he had had when he was in France and how difficult it had been to adjust to the old – new – life. Much as Archie longed for someone in whom he could confide now, it was not possible to tell Rupe. He had married Rupert’s daughter, was several years older than she, and to admit to any kind of infidelity was out of the question. It was awful, he thought, how everything seemed to depend upon money. And fear.

Fear made people greedy and therefore selfish; that small minority who honestly did not care for themselves in that way, who could sincerely say that money was unimportant to them, almost always had no dependants. When he and Rupert had been students they had thought like that; they had been admirably high-minded and scorned those who did not agree with them. Hardship and poverty were romantic, and when either occasionally touched them, they put it down to the cause of Art . . .

‘They want you to say goodnight.’ It was Clary. She looked hot and she had tied her hair back with a piece of string.

‘Where are they?’

‘Harriet is with Eliza and Jane. Bertie is with Andrew. You’ll hear them if you just go upstairs. Polly’s getting supper. Hot soup and smoked-salmon sandwiches. We’re going to have it in here, then do the tree and the stockings. It’s all lovely, don’t you think?’