Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 (68 page)

He rushed to Father Lancing with this news. It was received calmly; he was almost piqued by how calm the priest was about it.

‘But what do you want to do about that?’ he asked.

‘I thought I should go into some community. I thought I should become a monk.’

‘Did you, now?’

‘Yes. I don’t seem to be much good in the world. I think I’d be better out of it.’

Father Lancing did not reply at once. He was engaged upon knocking out his evil-smelling pipe. Then he said, ‘Well. I don’t think anyone will want to receive you if you’re running away from the world. It’s more a question of running towards something than running away.’

‘Towards God? Yes – that’s what I mean!’

Father Lancing put his hands on Christopher’s shoulders.

‘I could send you to someone who would talk to you,’ he said. ‘It might clarify things for you and it will do no harm.’

So he had gone to Nashtun Abbey. He spent two days there, and had several long sessions about his possible vocation. The place both enchanted and charged him. There he discovered, as well as much else, that if he was accepted, he would spend two to three years as a postulant and eventually become a novice during which he would be free to leave at any time.

He returned to Frensham in an exalted state of mind; he had no doubts, no fears, he
knew
. It only remained for him to be accepted.

Weeks passed, and he heard nothing. He went to Father Lancing.

‘Father Gregory has written to me about you,’ he said. ‘He feels that you need time and instruction to understand more about what you want to do – to know whether you have a vocation. I see your face fall. Do you think you know everything? Well, people do think that. Spiritual fantasy is much like any other kind. Repetition and you always come out on top. Is that it?’

It was a bull’s eye. He felt himself going red.

‘If you want further instruction, I have been asked to give it to you, so don’t despair, St Christopher.’ But he smiled so sweetly when he said this that Christopher was able to laugh with him.

‘You and Father Lancing. What are you up to?’ Nora asked, when Christopher asked for time to go and see him.

‘He’s teaching me things.’

‘Oh, good. He’s a wonderful man, I think. And it makes me very happy that you’ve started going to church.’

Richard was not so happy. ‘I can see you’re getting sucked in. You’ll soon have first-class reasons for denying yourself – and me, come to that.’

‘No, I won’t.’ He’d decided to collude about the cigarettes and he bought half a bottle of whisky every month which he pretended to share with Richard – actually, he cunningly drank cold tea.

He told Father Lancing that he did not want to tell anyone yet of his intention. By now he was having arguments with him, and once, when he had an appointment to see him and he was not there, he felt furiously angry – which, when they next met, Father Lancing knew at once.

‘You’re angry with me because I had to do something else. Why? Are you more important than the next person?’

‘I thought you could have let me know.’

‘Perhaps I could have done that. I was at the hospital, and I didn’t want to leave the person I was with. That’s about the colour of it.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t see, but you will.’

There was the turning to Polly’s street. He looked down it as the bus passed, but he was not sure if he could see her house.

He had not wanted to go to the wedding, and when Father Lancing asked him why not, he said because he was afraid of how it might make him feel.

‘If that is the reason, you’d certainly better go. Anyway, what about your cousin? Didn’t you say she was very fond of you and won’t that mean that she would want you to be there?’

‘Well, yes, but I didn’t think that was the most important thing.’

‘The most important thing is you, is it? Your spiritual state?’

He looked at his friend dumbly, trapped, because he
did
think so and realised that Father Lancing didn’t.

‘I’m trying to give things
up
,’ he said at last.

‘Ah, that’s it. The problem with that is that it’s when your spiritual pride gets a real look in – has a field day, you might say. God can do without you congratulating yourself for loving Him.’ But he said it with such kindness that Christopher found he could bear it.

‘I do see,’ he said. ‘I’ll go.’

It had been a very strange occasion for him. He had knelt in the church, praying that she would be happy – had chosen the right person. It seemed odd that she would have children whom he would never see, that he would know nothing of her from this day on. She had arrived, and was being led up the aisle by her father, followed, he could see, by Lydia and, he thought, Uncle Rupert’s youngest daughter. Her face, covered by a veil, was not visible. But her voice, as she made her vows, was absolutely clear. After they had been into the vestry and she was walking back down the aisle with her husband, her veil was thrown from her face and he saw her and how happy she was.

When, at the reception, he eventually reached the end of the line waiting to congratulate her, her face lit up, and she stepped forward to kiss him, saying, ‘Gerald, this is Christopher – my most dear cousin.’

Whether it was the glistening white satin, the veil, the pearls round her throat, her radiant dark blue eyes or all of these things, he did not know, but light seemed to stream from her – he felt struck, and speechless from it, and for a second he was afraid that he still loved her. And then he was simply glad that he loved her and this was accompanied by a feeling of living peace.

‘. . . and you must come and stay,’ she was saying. And her husband was smiling and saying of course he must.

He wanted to tell her then, but it was neither the time nor the place. For the rest of the party, during the speeches, the toasts, the general rejoicing, he tried to see as many of the family as possible – say his silent farewells. Clary, thin and with long hair and wearing a green dress, was the only one who regarded him steadily (he had never noticed before how lovely her eyes were), was the only one who noticed that he had changed. ‘I don’t know exactly
how
, but you have. You look as though you’ve found something good,’ she said.

‘I have.’

Then she had grinned at him and looked more like the girl he remembered – whose face was smudged and whose clothes seemed always to be torn or spattered with fruit juice. The Duchy, who seemed a little smaller but otherwise just the same. And Uncle Hugh, who looked so different he seemed almost jolly – ‘The last wedding we met at you were wearing my trousers, do you remember?’ he said – and more cousins. Simon and Teddy, resplendent in morning dress, pleased to see him, and both mentioned that camp in the wood. He’d been trying to get away from things then – he’d always been trying to get away because he had not found what to go
towards
. . .

The bus conductor shouted up the stairs that this was the stop for Marylebone station, and he got off. My last bus, he thought, not caring, just noting the fact.

‘It does seem to me a way of not facing up to things,’ had been one of his father’s sallies at lunch.

As he walked to the station he thought that, curiously, it had been harder to leave Richard than anyone else. He had told Nora that he was going to a retreat, but she knew too much about these things, and after she had asked for how long, and he had answered he didn’t know, but months anyway, her eyes had widened, and she’d said, ‘Oh, Christopher! I understand now. Oh, I do hope you have a vocation!’ Then she said – almost shyly, ‘One thing. Would you mind
not
telling Richard that you are going for good? He has got rather attached to you, and it would make him so sad. It will be easier for him to know when he has got used to doing without you.’

She did love him – in her way. So he’d agreed to that. He didn’t feel good about it, would rather have been honest, but Richard’s distress about his going at all was so evident that he recognised that perhaps, for once, Nora had been right.

‘I can’t say it won’t be the same without you, because it
will
– it will all be exactly the same. Bloody awful.’

Nora had left them alone together on his last evening – a piece of tact, of which, Christopher recognised with shame, he had not thought her capable – and they’d had a last drink together and Richard had smoked three cigarettes.

‘It’s not just the booze and the fags,’ he said. ‘I like
talking
to you. Still, if you’re coming back, I’ve got something to look forward to, which I suppose is the next best thing to having it in the first place.’

On impulse, he’d bent down and kissed Richard on leaving, and Richard had started – almost as though he’d
hurt
him. ‘Get on with it, then,’ he’d said.

Perhaps he could write to Richard. But, then, Nora would have to read the letter to him and that, he knew, would change the sort of letter it could be. If I’m allowed to write letters at all, he thought, and was possessed with a nervous dread of what might lie ahead.

But once in the train, with his small suitcase on the rack, he returned to the sense of adventure and challenge that this journey to the interior – the centre of his universe – exacted, and he thought then that the things he had to give up were not either things or even people who had been in his life, but mysterious, as yet not known things, that lay inside himself, for only that could make room for a new inhabitant.

ARCHIE

1946–47

Until now, he had always thought that if one could not make up one’s mind about what to do, it was because one was not sure what one wanted. How untrue that is, he thought, as he drove down the familiar lane, away from the cottage, through the wooded bit and then past the drive leading up to the station. Three miles away . . . He could still turn back, but he knew that he would not. He would continue the boring, well-known, dull road all the way to the suburbs of London and thence to his empty ill-kempt flat. Six weeks was not so very long, he said, as though to someone else. It seemed interminable. But this morning had been the last straw. Seeing her naked in the kitchen with her burned hand – the imagination of a body in no way impaired the impact of a first sight of the real thing – had brought home to him as nothing else had seemed to do that he could not continue this life with her which had become so beset by dishonesty.

If he tried to think about it, he could not pin down the moment when he had begun to love her. Certainly, when he had come back from France and found her so wrecked and desperate, he had dropped everything to care for her, had managed to put aside or at least conceal his fury and loathing for the wretched man who had caused her such anguish. Was this love? Or was it simply that he
knew
her – her intense, whole-hearted capacity for love, and the deprivation she had already endured? He could think of no one less equipped to withstand total rejection and pregnancy. The first thing that he had known about her, before he had even seen her, was that she had lost her mother. He remembered how, on one of those long walks in France with Rupert, shattered by Isobel’s death, there had come a moment when he had been able to suggest to him that the daughter, the little girl, Clarissa, wasn’t it?, must also be very bereft and needing his love. And Rupert had said: ‘There’s the boy as well, two of them.’ And he had said, ‘The boy is a baby. The girl is old enough to grieve. You must go back and see to her.’

Which Rupert had done, clearly to much effect, because when Archie did actually meet her, she was sixteen and suffering very much from the loss of him, whom everyone, including Archie himself, thought probably dead. Not she. Her faithful love had touched him then, had transcended her childish, unkempt appearance. She had always been careless of that, had no vanity. He remembered his first sight of her, tidied up for dinner his first evening at Home Place, in a shirt with odd buttons sewn on it, and her hands, bitten nails and ink stains almost, but not quite, obliterating their shapeliness, and the ill-cut fringe just above those amazingly expressive eyes. He had observed these things with no more than a professional eye and friendly interest. This was his best friend Rupert’s daughter. And as he became embraced by the whole family – he had the Duchy to thank for that – and he had had time to know all of those children, as he thought of them, she seemed always to be the odd one out. She had none of the Cazalet good looks – the blue direct gaze, the fair to fairish hair, the clear complexion, the height, the long arms and legs; she was small and sturdy, round-faced, with her mother’s eyes and heavy brows and fine dark hair, which was always untidy and needing a wash. He had not loved her then. But when that little Frenchman had arrived with his tale and the message for her and he had seen its effect – her eyes like stars, her utter joy that had been dashed (momentarily) by Pipette saying that the message was eight months old, how after a moment she had looked up at him and said that it was ‘just a question of time – waiting till he comes back’. He had been touched by her, because by then he knew something of the intensity of her love and longing. After he had broken his leg, she would come to his room, because, he thought, he was the only person who let her talk about her father and he had been amazed – and sometimes amused – by her detailed imagination of his exploits. And then there had been the diary she wrote for Rupert. One day, she had showed him a few pages and he learned much more of her. She had a graceful mind, even though she was clumsy in everyday life – knocked things over, tore her clothes; she was passionate about quite small things. The night after Pipette had come, he had found that he actually respected her, recognised her knowledge of what it was to love, and he thought now, but could not remember, that it had been then that he had felt anxiety that it might get wrongly bestowed.

After that, he supposed wryly, he had tried to be a father of sorts to her. Little did he know how that would rebound. When the girls had come to London, he had taken them out, sometimes together, but later separately . . . Why? At the time he had told himself that it was hard on her always being with the beautiful, immaculate, charming Polly. He remembered that pathetic time when Polly had had a perm, and so she thought she should too, and how deeply unbecoming her frizzy hair had been – like the make-up that she attempted, when in no time her eyes would get ringed like a panda with mascara that always ran because she either cried or rubbed her eyes, or laughed too much, and her lipstick would be eaten off in a trice. She would still spill food on her clothes; she had still been, at seventeen, unconscious of her appearance. But this was
not
true. He remembered one evening when he had taken her to Lyons’ Corner House and she had asked him if beauty mattered – by now she had cut off the awful perm and her hair was short and straight again, and whatever it was that he had said had upset her and he had made it worse by saying that he liked her as she was, and she had tried to be rude to him which she always did when she was afraid of crying, and then she had told him that Rupert had once said that she was beautiful and how it had made her seem less ordinary. She would have to fall back on character, she had said. And she had told a story about herself and Neville and the discovery that she just wanted to be pretty. And he had then – suddenly – because she seemed so vulnerable, been overwhelmed with affection for her, trapped by what she thought of as her unpleasing appearance, and also by her unerring honesty. He had wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her with any old nonsense that had enough truth in it to conceal the lies, and she had mercifully prevented this by saying he looked soppy. Did he love her then?