Casting Off (47 page)

‘I’m sure Miss MacDonald could rustle up a cup of coffee – in fact, we’d both like some, if you’d be an angel.’ Miss MacDonald smiled again and disappeared.

‘What’s happened to your neck?’

‘I broke it last week. Rory and I rather misjudged the most enormous hedge that turned out to have a horrid ditch on the other side of it. We both came down, but our respective vets have said the damage is superficial. Rory has to rest and I have to wear this horrid collar. Sit down, darling, and let’s consider what you would like to see.’

Villy sat on the fat little sofa, newly upholstered in grey damask, while Hermione lowered herself stiffly on to a chair. ‘I don’t need party clothes. There aren’t any parties these days.’ She looked up from getting a cigarette out of her bag and met Hermione’s shrewd, cool gaze. ‘I’m not being sorry for myself,’ she said. ‘It’s simply a matter of fact.’

‘I always think the English concept of best clothes that are hardly ever worn is one of the chief reasons why they look so dowdy. One should wear one’s best clothes all the time. I think what you need is a really ravishing tweed suit, and perhaps a cosy woollen dress that will lend itself to some of your beautiful jewellery. But we’ll see.’ They saw for about two hours, at the end of which she had acquired a suit of charcoal and cream tweed with charcoal velvet trimming, a dress in fine facecloth the colour of blackcurrants with long sleeves and a high neck, and a short coat in black doeskin lined with artificial fur. Of course, she had looked at, and tried on, many other things – including, at Hermione’s insistence, a long straight evening skirt of black creˆpe with a multi-coloured figured-velvet jacket. ‘It is lovely, but I’d never wear it,’ she said, and realized that for the past two hours she had not, until now, remembered her altered state.

Hermione took her to the Berkeley, where they had a secluded corner table with the head waiter behaving as though Hermione lunching there had filled his cup. When they had settled for hot consommé and a casserole of grouse, Hermione said, ‘Now we’re out of Miss MacDonald’s earshot, I really want to know how you are and what is going on. Are you knee-deep in lawyers?’

‘No. Edward’s lawyer wrote to me once about money, but that’s all. Why?’

‘Divorces usually have lawyers attached to them. I imagined you were divorcing him.’

‘I don’t know. He wants me to.’

‘That’s not a good reason. I think it should be entirely for your sake.’

‘Why?’

‘Darling, he has behaved abominably. Unless, of course, he has recognized this and wants to change his mind . . .’

‘Oh, no. He’s set up with her now. They have a household.’ She heard, and disliked, the bitterness in her own voice. ‘Oh, Hermione, I find it so hideous! I can’t stop thinking about it. To know that he’s in London, a few miles away, getting up and making plans with her at breakfast – he must drive almost past the end of my road going back to her in the evenings, and his taking her out, going to his club with her so that all the members can see her – they’ve even been to dinner with people who used to be our friends – and then going back to their house and their bedroom—’ She could not go on: her imagination by no means stopped there, but she was ashamed of the disgusting thoughts that so easily took possession of her, night after night, and so frequently rendered her sleepless until they had run their revolting course. Not here! Not in this restaurant, in broad daylight, with Hermione opposite her. She picked up her glass of water and sipped it while she tried to think of something pretty and harmless. ‘It’s all been such a shock,’ she finished lamely, because she had said this so many times before. Daffodils, she thought, that cliché-ridden poem of Wordsworth’s that Daddy used to love so much. But it was too late. Looking at Hermione’s attentive, carefully expressionless face, she felt exposed.

‘It is vile for you . . . I can’t help feeling that you need to be entirely shot of him so that you can do something else with your life.’

‘But what could I do? I’m years past dancing, even if I’d been doing it all my life. I gave all that up for Edward.’

‘You might teach – children, perhaps. More and more little girls seem to want to do ballet.’

‘I don’t think anyone would have me. I’m fearfully rusty.’

‘You don’t know that.’

For the rest of lunch it seemed to her that every time she explained – with a practical reason – why she would not be able to do something, Hermione simply presented her with something else, until she felt hedged in by possibilities.

As they got back to the shop to collect her new clothes, she said, ‘I suppose one of the reasons why I don’t want to divorce Edward is that it would mean I was giving in, just doing what he wants and becoming nobody in the process.’

To which Hermione in her light, rather amused drawl, answered, ‘I don’t think you would. I’m divorced, after all – have been for ages when it was far less acceptable, and I am not a nobody. Never have been.’

‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry! Of course you aren’t but I’m not glamorous and entertaining and all the things you are.’

‘Oh, my dear! What an abject refugee! And here is Miss MacDonald with your sackcloth and ashes.’

She drove home full of the conversation at lunch. Of course, it had not changed her mind but it had provided food for thought. She felt uncertain, excited and fearful: the future branched out before her with more prongs to it than she had been envisaging. Perhaps she could start a small ballet class? This had nothing to do with a divorce: she could not see why Hermione had connected the two things. Perhaps she would talk to Sid, who taught at a girls’ school and might have ideas about how one set about getting teaching work.

But when she got home it was to a strong smell of burning cake – and freezing cold, since Lydia had opened all the windows to get the smoke out, she explained. She found Miss Milliment on her knees before the sitting-room fireplace, trying to clear out the grate – the fire had gone out – in order to re-lay and light it. Oh, Lord! she thought. How could I ever think of doing anything? ‘I leave you for a few hours and look what happens!’ she scolded. ‘All those cake materials wasted, and the kitchen looks as though you’ve been cooking for about two days, Lydia! And why did you let the fire go out? You were in here, weren’t you?’ She was helping Miss Milliment to her feet as she spoke.

‘I fear it was my fault,’ Miss Milliment was saying. ‘I fell asleep over the crossword after lunch and did not keep an eye on everybody as I should have.’

‘You shouldn’t have had to. Lydia is quite old enough to have dealt with things.’

‘It was Roland who burnt the cake,’ Lydia said. ‘He turned the gas up to make it cook quicker. I could have told him how stupid that was.’

‘And don’t tell tales. Will you never learn not to do that?’

‘I think at my age it’s too late now for me to learn that kind of thing.’

‘It was my fault, Mummy. I’m really sorry. We were playing Racing Demon and we forgot the cake. And I’m afraid I fused the lights upstairs because I was doing my experiment and there was a bang. Sorry, Mum. I’ll do the fire for you.’ He stumped on to the tiled fireplace and there was a scrunching sound that turned out to be Miss Milliment’s spectacles, which had fallen off when she was being hauled to her feet.

‘Have you got another pair, Miss Milliment?’

‘I believe I have still the ones that I had before I left London. They are in my father’s old case, as they were his frames. Somewhere. I cannot quite recollect where.’

Hours later, Villy had mended the fuse, got the fire going, shut the windows – it had begun to snow – set Lydia to clearing up the kitchen and Roland to help her with the washing-up, spent ages searching through Miss Milliment’s battered and capacious luggage for the spare spectacles, which proved almost useless when they were found, made tea for everyone with toast and potted meat instead of the cake, cleaned the oven and got more wood from the shed in the garden, sent Roland up to have his bath before supper and had another confrontation with Lydia about the state of her bedroom, which resulted in Lydia bursting into tears and then coming to her and saying that she had rung up Polly, who had invited her to supper and she was jolly well going. As this meant one bus down Abbey Road and Baker Street, she allowed it on the understanding that Lydia came back in a taxi for which she gave her money. Lydia went off, white-faced and sulking, and Villy felt miserable about it. As she had been coming downstairs from Roland she had overheard Lydia on the telephone saying, ‘. . . it’s horrible here’, and the phrase, and her daughter’s voice saying it, kept repeating in her head. After all her efforts it was horrible!

Roland said he didn’t want any supper, and proved to have a temperature. He couldn’t have caught cold already – must have been cooking up some ailment before that. She settled him down with an aspirin and a hot drink, and then began to make supper for herself and Miss Milliment who, it was clear to her, could hardly see at all. ‘I’ll take you tomorrow morning to the optician,’ she said, ‘and we’ll have two pairs of glasses made.’ She made herself an extremely strong gin before dinner. It meant that she was going to run out of it before the grocer would let her have another bottle, but she was so tired and dispirited, she didn’t care. She gave Miss Milliment her sherry, but the glass got knocked over before she had had more than one sip of it. ‘Oh, my dear Viola, what must you think of me?’

‘It’s quite all right, only I’m afraid there’s only a drop left.’

She went to the kitchen to get it. It would probably take a week for the new glasses to be made and she realized that everything about Miss Milliment’s life would be a hazard until they were. I shall be more pinned to the house than usual, she thought, as she put the potatoes on to boil, scorching her finger with the match. ‘Oh! Damn!’ The sudden pain brought tears to her eyes.

When she had given Miss Milliment what remained of the sherry, she topped up her gin without thinking. ‘The other half’, Edward had always called the statutory second drink. But no sooner had she settled herself upon the sofa than unmistakably she heard Roland crying. ‘I don’t think he’s very well,’ she said, and then, as she was pounding upstairs, realized that Miss Milliment had not heard him and therefore hadn’t understood what she had said.

He was sitting up in bed, crying. When he saw her, he cried, ‘Oh, Mummy! I want you to be with me!’

She sat on his bed and put her arms round him. He was hot and his hair was damp with sweat. ‘Darling! How do you feel?’

‘Crumbly.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I feel like a weak old biscuit. Hot and crumbly.’

‘Biscuits aren’t hot,’ she said, stroking his head. His ears stuck out in spite of Ellen taping them back when he’d been a baby, and with his feverishly bright eyes and the widow’s peak of his hair that grew, like hers, just off centre, he looked like a small monkey. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘A cold drink. There’s toast in my bed scratching me.’

She picked him up and put him in a chair wrapped in an eiderdown with a thermometer in his mouth while she tidied his bed which, apart from undeniable crumbs of something, contained his two bears, a dismantled torch, his favourite tin tip-up lorry and some sticking plaster that had come off his knee. ‘You’ve got so many things in your bed, no wonder it’s not comfy. Now. Let’s see.’ His temperature was a hundred and one, in spite of the aspirin.

He began crying again. ‘I don’t want you to go!’

‘I won’t be a minute, my darling. Let’s put you back in your nice tidy bed, with Tedward and Grizzly.’

When she came back with the drink, he said, ‘Why can’t we go back to living with Ellen and Wills and Jules and everyone? Why do we have to live in a house by ourselves?’

She explained – not for the first time – about all the family returning to London because the war was over, and coaxed him to drink a little. He was snuffling now, and she helped him to blow his nose. But when she started to tuck him up, he became frantic again. ‘I don’t want you to go!’

‘How would it be if you slept with me tonight? With Tedward and Grizzly in my bed? I’ll get you a night-light, and then when you wake up I’ll be with you.’ That seemed to go down well. She carried him to her room, went downstairs again and found a night-light, which she put in a saucer. When she got back to him, he was lying quite peacefully in her bed. She kissed him and he received her kiss with a dignified satisfaction. As she was leaving the room, he said, ‘Mum! I know why Dad doesn’t come here.’

‘Oh?’

‘The ceilings are too low for his head. It might be better if we got a taller house.’

‘I’ll think about it. Sleep tight.’

She went to tell Miss Milliment that she was now going to get supper, but in the kitchen discovered that the potatoes had boiled dry, had begun to catch on the bottom of the pan. She tipped them out, and cut the burned pieces off them. There was neither milk nor margarine to mash them. She put them on a tray with the remains of a meat loaf she had made. It would have to do. She was too exhausted to think about any other vegetable. She finished her gin: she wasn’t hungry, but luckily Miss Milliment wouldn’t see if she hardly ate any supper.

But Miss Milliment seemed to know some things whether she could see or not. After they had discussed Roland – she would ring the doctor in the morning – the current strike of the road hauliers, and the food shortages, the desirability or not of using the Army to distribute food supplies and the imminent shortage of potatoes, she said, ‘Viola, my dear, there is something I wanted to discuss with you—’ but then the telephone rang.

It was Lydia. Polly had asked her to stay the night, was that OK? She’d be back after breakfast. ‘Well, for lunch anyway,’ she said.

‘You haven’t got anything with you,’ she heard herself weakly (and pointlessly) saying.

‘It’s OK. Polly will lend me a nightdress and I took my toothbrush just in case she asked me.’

‘All right. Have a good time.’

‘I am! It’s lovely here.’

And horrible here, she thought, as she went back to the sitting room. ‘That was Lydia,’ she said, as she sat down at the small gate-legged table. ‘She’s staying the night with Polly,’ and then, without any warning, she burst into tears.