Casting Off (25 page)

‘Oh, Ange! Did you lose the baby?’

She hadn’t answered at once, then she had said, gently, almost as though she was comforting him, ‘I’m glad I didn’t have it.’

She offered him a cigarette, but he didn’t smoke.

‘But now,’ he said, ‘you’ve got Lord Black, haven’t you? I didn’t know Americans had lords.’

‘He’s not a lord! That’s his name. Earl. I shall be Mrs Earl C. Black. And live in New York. I can’t wait.’

He could see she was happy, which was the point. But it did feel a long way away. She said she must get ready for the party – ‘the probably awful party’ – and told him where the bathroom was.

‘Do you think I ought to shave again?’

She felt his face. ‘Well. Did you shave this morning?’

‘Yesterday. I only do it every other day usually.’

‘You are a bit bristly. And you’re bound to have to kiss people. Better.’

So he did, and managed not to cut himself.

The party was in a large room in a very grand hotel. All the family were there – well, it felt like all.
His
family, at any rate. Dad was wearing a dinner jacket and Mum had a long floaty blue dress. They put Angela between them to talk to everyone as they arrived. Judy had got rather fat and was wearing the bridesmaid’s dress she’d worn for Nora’s wedding. She rushed about the room eating things off the plates on the tables as well as things that were handed to her. He felt very proud of Angela who wore a red velvet dress that just reached her knees and marvellous stockings that she said Earl had sent her. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she had long red and gold earrings. ‘You look absolutely terrific,’ he had said before they left her home, and she kissed him. She smelt like a greenhouse full of flowers.

Nora arrived a bit late wheeling Richard, whom she placed beside her parents. ‘So that he has a chance to see everyone as they come in,’ she explained. Everybody who arrived was given a glass of champagne and Nora held Richard’s up to his mouth to give him little sips, but Christopher noticed that she did not do it very often.

He stood a little way off from his family and watched the Cazalets arrive. He had not seen any of them for three years – since Nora’s marriage, in fact. First were Uncle Edward and Aunt Villy who looked as though she had shrunk inside her dress. They brought Lydia, who looked very elegant in a dark dress that made her waist look tiny (the opposite of Judy, he thought sadly), and Roland in grey flannel shorts with matching jacket and hair spiky from brilliantine, and Wills, dressed exactly the same. He saw Wills and Roland confer, and then descend upon Richard in his chair, whom thereafter they fed steadily with the little bits of food that were being handed round. Then Uncle Rupert and Aunt Zoë arrived and Aunt Zoë looked nearly as terrific as Ange in a dark green and white striped dress with dangling diamond earrings. He watched as Uncle Rupert kissed Ange, but she didn’t seem to mind. Then the Duchy came with Aunt Rachel, both dressed as he always remembered them, in misty, bluebellish blues, but with long skirts. Uncle Rupert got the Duchy a chair and Aunt Rachel went at once to talk to Richard. Some other people arrived whom he didn’t know – friends of Ange’s, he supposed. Some of them knew each other, but they didn’t seem to know the family. Then – and this was what changed the whole party for him – Clary arrived with Polly. Clary looked like he always remembered her, but Polly, although of
course
she was not unrecognizable, looked so extraordinarily beautiful that he felt he was seeing her for the first time in his life.

They came up to him at once. ‘
Chris
topher! Hello, Christopher,’ was what they severally said. In a daze he allowed himself to be hugged by them. Polly’s dress was the colour of autumn beech leaves: she smelt of some indefinably rich scent.

‘You do smell extraordinary,’ he found himself saying.

‘It’s a scent called Russian Leather,’ Clary said, ‘and I keep telling her she puts far too much of it on. She only wants to smell like
one
very expensive leather chair, not a whole row.’ She added, ‘It’s French, actually. It’s called Cuir de Russie in France.’

‘If I had a scent, I’d choose one called Fried Bacon.’ Someone very tall loomed behind the girls.

‘Neville, you can’t choose scents like that. You can only choose from what there is.’

‘Not if I was a scent inventor, which might be a very good way of getting rich: they must have used up all the soppy flower smells by now. Also, sometimes people might like a scent that put people off. Essence of Grass Snake would be good for that. Or Burglar’s Sweat could be another – oh, hello, Christopher.’

Neville was now as tall as he.

‘Don’t be silly and disgusting,’ Clary advised. ‘This is a party. It’s meant to be
fun
for people.’

She went with Polly to be greeted by Ange. Neville stayed.

‘I must say I think parties are vastly overrated. You’re not meant to have a proper conversation at them, but you
are
meant to kiss the most awful people and exchange platitudes with whoever is the most dull. Do you agree with that?’

‘Well, I don’t
go
to parties much. At all.’

‘Really? How do you manage that?’

‘There aren’t parties where I live.’ As he said that, he felt panic. He
did
live cut off from people: apart from the Hursts and Tom, the other chap who worked for them, he didn’t live with
people
. Of course, he saw people in shops, when he went to them, but otherwise he lived with Oliver, a half-wild cat who made use of him when she felt like it, and intermittently with other creatures whom he looked after when they were in the wars, like the vixen last autumn found in a horrible trap, various hedgehogs weak from fleas, birds that fell out of nests, and the young hare that Oliver brought him, one of whose eyes had been pecked out when it lay in a stupor – from some kind of poison he had suspected. But all these cousins, whom years ago he had spent holidays with, who had all once been part of his landscape,
they
all seemed to know one another, had continued to grow up together, while he had been cut off. Cut myself off, he admitted: in his intense determination to have as little to do with his father as possible he had isolated himself from everyone else. He looked at Neville, who had been choosing a sausage roll off a plate with great deliberation. He remembered him as a
boy
.

‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen. And a half. But I’m working on being old for my age. It’s largely a matter of vocabulary and never being surprised by anything.’

He bent his head to take a bite out of the roll, and a lock of reddish-brown hair fell across his bumpy white forehead, but at the crown, Christopher noticed, his hair grew upright in two tufts.

‘Are Teddy and Simon coming?’

‘Teddy’s still in America, although he’ll soon be back, with a girl called Bernadine who he’s married. Simon’s swotting for his finals.’

He didn’t know whether he was sorry or glad about this.

At this point Christopher’s father called for silence and made a fairly long, not always audible speech about Ange. He stopped listening to it almost at once because Polly came over to him and again her incredible beauty struck him so forcefully that the room seemed to contain only her. She
was
listening to his father’s speech, so he was able to look at her – at her shining coppery hair that had been cut so that it stood out inches from the back of her slender white neck, and when his father made some sort of joke and there was laughter – not the real sort but polite – she turned to him and there was an eddy of the rich scent: she wrinkled her white nose, just like Aunt Rach used to do, he remembered, when she wanted to share something funny with anyone, and her dark blue eyes shone with conspiracy. What? That she knew that they both knew that his father was not funny? That she was simply pleased to see him?

Anyway, when his father had stopped speaking and there was applause, and before Ange began to say anything back, he took a deep breath and asked if she would come and stay a weekend in his caravan.

And now she was coming. He had
warned
her that he didn’t have things like baths and electric light. He’d
said
it was only a caravan. But he hadn’t said that there was only a sort of outdoor privy that he’d constructed just inside the wood, or that there was only a wooden bunk in the tiny bedroom at one end of the caravan. He’d put her in that, and he could sleep on the floor in the main part.

He spent the whole of the next day cleaning things and tidying up, and making a vegetable soup. Mrs Hurst, who had been extremely helpful, had made him a fruit cake and a baked custard with her own eggs and milk, so they would do for puddings. He decided upon a macaroni cheese for the main course, which he could cook in his little Dutch oven. He collected plenty of wood for the stove, cleaned the windows, which were always dim with woodsmoke and condensation, and his outdoor larder – a box with a zinc mesh door that was hung from the roof of the caravan. This was to house most of the food for the weekend. On one of his many borrowing trips, in this case for extra bedding, Mrs Hurst had suggested that his cousin might like to sleep at the farm, but he felt that it would spoil things. As the day drew on, however, and it was nearly time to go to the station to fetch Polly, he began to wonder whether he was wrong; perhaps she would prefer to sleep in a proper room in a proper bed.

He need not have worried. It was dusk when he met her on the platform. She was wearing trousers and a dark jacket and a scarf tied over her hair. They kissed in a family way and he took her small case.

‘I didn’t know you had a car!’

‘It’s not mine, it belongs to the farm I work for. He lent it to me to fetch you.’

‘It’s all pretty rough,’ he warned her as he drove carefully out of Hastings – he didn’t drive much and, anyway, felt he had to be extra careful with Polly: her face had felt like cool china when he kissed it.

‘I know it will be lovely,’ she said, with such a warm assurance that he began to feel that perhaps she
would
like it.

But when he had parked the car in the farmyard and begun to lead Polly up the track in the dark, all his anxiety surged back. He should have lit the oil lamp so that there was a welcoming glow ahead, he should have brought the torch . . . ‘You’d better hold my hand,’ he said, ‘the track has rather deep ruts.’ Her hand felt very soft and cold in his.

‘You’ve still got Oliver, haven’t you?’

‘Oh, yes. I left him to guard things.’

She stood quietly in the dark while he fumbled with matches, and the soft yellow light bloomed.

‘How pretty! What a lovely light!’

Oliver, who had been standing in the middle of the floor, went up to her and stared up at her with his rich brown eyes. While she was greeting him and his interest in her was speedily progressing from courtesy to affection and then towards passionate devotion, Christopher anxiously looked round his home, trying to see it with her eyes. The table looked nice with its red and white checked tablecloth with a jam jar of berries on it, but the piece of carpet in front of the stove, whose doors he went to open, looked worn and rather dirty, and the one comfortable basket chair – once painted white – looked rather grey and bristled with pieces of cane that had worked loose, and the cushion that concealed the hole in its seat was made of a balding plush of the colour that moss was not. The shelves he had made were littered with china – all odd pieces – and his books, and every hook or peg he had put up was covered with his clothes, all in a state of disrepair. The walls of the caravan and the partition that marked off the bedroom were, excepting for the four small windows, entirely choked up with stuff so that it seemed even smaller and more crowded than he felt it really was. Oliver’s basket occupied a lot of space near the stove. He moved it now and pulled out a stool from under a shelf.

‘Oh, Christopher, it’s lovely! It’s so
cosy
!’ She was taking off the scarf and then her jacket; her hair looked like conkers just after they’d had their green spiky skins peeled off. He hung up her jacket and made her sit in the basket chair; he took her case into the tiny bedroom, came back and offered her tea, ‘or there’s some cider’ (he’d forgotten about drink; she probably drank things like
cocktails
), but she said that tea would be perfect. Her presence in this place where, until now, he had always been alone, except for Oliver, elated him; her perfect loveliness filled him with excitement and joy, and beyond this, and perhaps best of all, she was not a stranger – she was somebody, one of the cousins, somebody he had known practically all his life. If he had not known her, he thought, as he pumped up the Primus to boil the kettle, he would never have dared to speak to her at Ange’s party, and even if, by some amazing chance,
she
had spoken to
him
, had
asked
if she could come and stay with him, he would have been so intimidated by her radiance that he would not have been able to say a word.

They had tea, and some time after that the macaroni cheese.

She asked about a lavatory, and he escorted her, with the torch which he left with her.

‘I heard an owl,’ she said, when she returned. ‘It is a lovely wild place, isn’t it? A bit like your camp in the wood at Home Place, but much nicer.’

They had talked quite a bit about the family by then, and she’d told him about her job in what sounded like a very posh shop and about life with Clary in their flat. He asked her if she liked living in London.

‘I think I do. When we were at Home Place in the war I used to long to live there, and have a job and my own place and all that. It’s odd, but things always seem much more exciting when they’re a long way away. I suppose that’s why people like views so much. You know. Something that they can see a lot of but they’re not
in
it,’ she added.

He thought about that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I see what you mean, but I don’t in the least feel like that.’