Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (12 page)

She indicated that she wanted to get up from the sofa on which she was lying.

‘Although you do like her, don’t you, darling?’

‘Little Louise! Of course I like her. I am delighted with her. So funny and charming and so
very young
!’

She was on her feet now, and he put his arm in hers as they began the slow progress to their respective bedrooms.

‘And I shan’t lose my son,’ she said. ‘Nothing but death would achieve it. And I have no intention of dying. I want to see my grandson far too much for that.’

LOUISE

Winter 1942

When she was alone, which was very nearly all the time these days, and when she was not completely inert – she would try to put the pieces of herself together into some recognizable shape so that she could sort of
see
what she was. At the acting school they had spent hours discussing characteristics of people – facets of their personality, aspects of their nature, quirks of behaviour or temperament. They had discussed characters in plays, of course, and over the weeks had condemned ‘bad’ plays that had characters who were merely two-dimensional – cardboard cut-outs with no depth. Then, when she had talked about this with Stella and had trotted out all their theories, Stella had said: ‘Of course, that’s why Shakespeare and Chekhov are the only playwrights with genius. Their characters are more like eggs. However you approach their surface they are never flat, always tailing mysteriously off round a corner that isn’t even a corner, but at the same time you can always imagine the whole shape . . .’

But she, although she was not merely a character in a play, did not feel at all like an egg; more like a bit of crazy paving, or part of a jigsaw puzzle. She did not feel like anyone she could recognise; even the disparate pieces of paving or jigsaw seemed hardly to belong to her, were more like a series of bit parts that she had become accustomed to, and was therefore good at playing. Mrs Michael Hadleigh was one of them. The fortunate young wife of a glamorous man who, according to Zee, had broken innumerable hearts. People wrote ‘Mrs Michael Hadleigh’ on envelopes; it had been the caption to the photograph taken by Harlip that had appeared shortly after her marriage in
Country Life
. Receptionists in hotels called her that. This person had gone through a fashionable wedding with photographs of it in most of the newspapers. ‘I look like a new potato in white lace!’ she had wailed, knowing it would make Michael’s family laugh. This person wore the gold watch that the Judge had given her as a wedding present and a turquoise and diamond ring that Zee had given her for her engagement. She had new luggage stamped L.H. in gold on the white hide. At Claridge’s, she had been given a room in which to change from the white lace to the suit Hermione had made her for going away – a pretty creamy tweed with a wide-spaced thin scarlet check on it, a straight short skirt and short-sleeved jacket with light scarlet buttons. She had emerged from the lift to walk through the wide entrance to the hotel that was thronged with family and people she had never seen before in her life, to the Daimler where Crawley – the Judge’s chauffeur – was waiting to drive them away. Her topcoat had been forgotten, and Zee sent Malcolm Sargent for it, ‘Kind Malcolm will get it,’ she had said, and he did. Mrs Michael Hadleigh was the person who was eyed appreciatively by admirals, some of whom had sent huge packing cases full of what had clearly been valuable but was now shattered glass. These had been difficult to thank for, as in the worst instances, the fragments made it impossible to know what the object had originally been. ‘Thank you so much for sending us all that lovely glass,’ she had written to one of them. A large number of people – many of them distinguished – were delighted to meet Mrs Michael Hadleigh, and congratulated Michael with varying degrees of elegance and gallantry on his charming young wife. Sometimes she felt a little like a conjuring trick, the white rabbit he had so cleverly produced from nowhere. Mrs Michael Hadleigh only seemed to come to life when there were other people present.

Then there was the child bride. Her youth was endlessly harped upon, by senior naval officers, by friends of Michael, many of whom were even older than he. This also applied at Hatton, where she discovered they were to spend half of their honeymoon. ‘A week on our own, and then we’ll stay with Mummy,’ Michael had said. She
was
the child: arrangements were announced to her with the ostensibly indulgent, slightly teasing admonition that she would like whatever it was, wouldn’t she? It would have been churlish to disagree, and she never did. Part of being the child bride was everybody approving of her – a
good
child bride . . . So – they had spent a week in a cottage lent to them by a godmother of Michael’s who lived in a large house in Norfolk. The cottage was pretty, with a reeded roof and a large open fireplace in the sitting room where they also ate. Lady Moy, the godmother, had arranged for somebody to cook and clean for them, and when they arrived, that first evening, it was to the enticing scents of a log fire and roasting chicken. Crawley brought in their suitcases, touched his cap and left, and when she had served them their chicken and shown them the damson tart lying on the trolley, the cook, who said her name was Mary, also left and they were alone. She remembered that she had thought, This is the very beginning of my married life – the happily ever after bit, and wondered what that would be like. And Michael had been full of the most charming admiration, telling her again and again how lovely she had looked as a bride and how lovely people had
told
him she was. ‘And just as lovely now,’ he had said, picking up her hand and kissing it. Later, when he had poured two glasses from the bottle of hock Lady Moy had left for them, he had said: ‘Let’s drink to us, Louise and Michael.’ And she had repeated the toast, and sipped the wine and then they had had dinner and talked about the wedding until he had asked her whether she would like to go to bed.

Afterwards, when she slipped out of bed to put on one of the nightdresses her father had given her when she was fourteen that were still her best, she thought how lucky that this hadn’t been the first time, because at least now she knew what happened and was more or less used to it. She had, in fact, been to bed with Michael four times before: the first had been awful because it had hurt so much and she’d felt she couldn’t tell him as he seemed so enthusiastic. The other times had been better in that it hadn’t hurt, and the beginning of one time had even begun to be exciting but then he had started to put his tongue in her mouth and after that she had a sort of blackout and felt nothing. He didn’t seem to notice, though, which at the time had seemed a good thing, but, and it happened gradually, during that first week of the honeymoon, she began to feel that it was odd that although he kept saying how much he loved her, and kept telling her how he was feeling and what was happening to him throughout his love-making, he didn’t seem to notice much about her. In the end she wondered whether the sharp, sweet thrill – as though something was starting to open inside her – had actually occurred.

That first night, however, she simply felt relieved that it didn’t hurt and he had seemed to enjoy it; she also felt suddenly dog tired, and fell asleep moments after she got back into bed.

In the morning she woke to find him making love to her again and then there was all the novelty of having a bath together and getting dressed and a delicious breakfast with eggs and honey, and after it they went for a long walk in the park where there was a lake with swans and other waterfowl and then woods. It was a perfect September morning, mellow, balmy and still. They walked hand in hand, saw a heron, a fox and a large owl, and Michael did not talk about the war at all. During the week, they went and had dinner at the big house where Lady Moy and a companion existed in a state of elaborate decay. Most of the house was shut up and the rest of it seemed implacably cold; it was the sort of house, she thought, that made you want to go out of doors to get warm. Lady Moy gave Michael a beautiful pair of Purdey guns that had belonged to her husband and two watercolours by Brabazon. ‘I’ll have them sent over to you,’ she said; ‘And
you
,’ she later said to Louise, ‘I could hardly choose a present for someone I had not seen. But now I’ve met you – and by the way, Mikey, I think you’ve done very well for yourself – I know what to do.’ She rummaged about in a large embroidered bag and produced a small watch of blue enamel edged with pearls that hung from an enamelled bow with a brooch pin behind it. ‘It was given me by my godmother when I married,’ she said. ‘It does not keep very good time, but it is a pretty thing.’

During dinner Lady Moy asked Michael about his ship and he told her a great deal about it. She tried to be, and then to look, interested but the number of guns with which a new MTB was going to be equipped was not a subject to which she could contribute.

It was not until they were about to leave, and Lady Moy asked them about their plans, that she learned that they were to spend the second week of Michael’s leave at Hatton.

‘Mummy is so longing to see us. And we thought it would be nice for her if we went.’

‘I’m sure it will be.’

She found Lady Moy’s eyes upon her but she could not interpret their expression. ‘I must kiss you too,’ she said after she had embraced Michael.

They walked back down the drive to their cottage in the dark.

‘You never told me we were going to Hatton!’

‘Didn’t I? I must have. I’m almost
sure
I
did
. You don’t mind, anyway, do you?’

‘No.’ She was not at all sure.

‘You see, darling Mummy is not very well, and she worried so frightfully about me that it seemed – she loves
you
very much, you know. She told me that she couldn’t imagine a better mother for her grandson.’

She was aghast.

‘We’re not actually
having
one, are we?’

He laughed, and squeezed her arm. ‘Darling, you’ll be the first to know that. There’s always a
hope
.’

‘But—’

‘You told me you wanted six. We have to start somewhere.’

She opened her mouth to say that she didn’t want them immediately – now – and shut it again. His voice had sounded teasing – he wasn’t serious.

But the subject was resumed at Hatton. She got the curse when they had been there four days, and although Zee didn’t talk to her directly, this resulted in various messages. She had fairly bad stomach cramps, and Michael was very kind to her, tucking her up in bed with a hot-water bottle after lunch.

‘You are sweet to me,’ she said, after he had bent down to kiss her.

‘You are my little darling wife. By the way, Zee told me one useful tip. When you’re OK again, after we’ve made love, it helps if you prop your legs up with a pillow. It gives the sperm a better chance to meet an egg.’

She swallowed: the thought that he had been discussing all this with his mother suddenly nauseated her.

‘Michael – I’m not at all sure that I
want
to have a baby so quickly. I mean, I do want them in the end, but I want to get a bit more used to being married first.’

‘Of course you do,’ he said heartily. ‘But that’ll happen in no time, believe me. And if, by any chance, the other thing does happen, nature will take over, and you’ll feel fine about it. Now, you have a lovely snooze, and I’ll wake you up in time for tea.’

But she didn’t sleep at all. She lay and worried about why they wanted her to have a baby so badly, and felt guilty that she didn’t feel as they did.

The rest of the week was passed with music and Michael drawing her and beginning an oil painting, and jokes and games with neighbours and a dance and the Judge reading aloud to them, and they all treated her with teasing, affectionate indulgence and she was the favoured, petted child bride. Conversation at meals was exhilarating: the family jokes involved being better read and having a far larger vocabulary than she possessed. She had asked the Judge, whom she had learned to call Pete, if he would make her a reading list.

‘He was
delighted
,’ Michael said when they were dressing for dinner that evening. ‘You do fit in so well with my family, my darling.’

‘How did you know I had asked him?’

‘Mummy told me. She was very touched that you asked
him
.’

Whenever people came to lunch or dinner, they would ask Michael about his ship, and he always told them, usually at great length. She noticed that however often he talked about the superior merits of Oelikon guns to the Bofors or Rolls, Zee listened with rapt interest as though it was the first time she had heard him on the subject. Privately, she found these conversations very boring, more boring even than when they talked about the war more generally: the battle for Stalingrad, which was on the news every night, and the bombing raids on Germany.

During all this time, which was actually very short – only two weeks – excitement, like a heat haze, had obscured most of any other feeling: she had married her wonderful, glamorous Michael, who, although he was so much older and famous and brave, had chosen her. It was exciting, if you had never thought much of your appearance or brains, if you felt, as she felt then, that you had not been properly educated, to be told from morning till night how beautiful, clever and talented you were. It was a fairytale, and she was the fortunate princess who at nineteen had already embarked upon her ‘ever after’.

They left Hatton at the end of the week, and went by train to London. Michael had to go to the Admiralty and they arranged to meet at Waterloo station.

‘What will you do with yourself, darling?’

She hadn’t thought. ‘I’ll be all right. I might try to get hold of Stella, but they don’t like you ringing students at Pitman’s. If I can’t get her, I’ll go to the National Gallery.’

‘Have you got any money?’

‘Oh! No – no, I’m afraid I haven’t.’

He thrust his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out a wad of notes. ‘There.’