Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (29 page)

‘I don’t know. Salter, my friend, is going to be a doctor and I think I might quite like to be one too. If he doesn’t run a restaurant which is another thing he has in mind. He is very keen on food and cooking and all that. And he knows absolutely everything about Mozart. So he might write one or two books about him. He can do everything, really.’

‘He sounds interesting.’

‘He is, but I don’t think you’d like him much. He believes in socialism and he has a ghastly stammer and once he had a fit and Matron thought he was just acting, which she
would
, and he might have died.’ There was a pause, then he added, ‘He won’t get called up because of them – the fits, I mean – but of course I will so it’s no earthly use our making any plans together. But I did wonder, Dad, whether I could have him to stay in London for a week because he lives in Dorset and there are a lot of things he wants to do in London, like go to concerts, et cetera. He wouldn’t talk about politics – he knows you’re politically immature but he quite understands because his family are too. He says it has just as much to do with generation as with class.’

He had said, of course Simon could have his friend for as long as he liked. He was so delighted that Simon had a friend – none had ever been mentioned before – and that there was something he wanted that he, Hugh, could give him, and, above all, that perhaps the ice had been broken, that for several days he felt more light-hearted about his son. But after that burst of loquacity, Simon relapsed into politely fielding any shot that Hugh made at conversation between them.

With Wills he felt at sea in a different way. He simply never saw enough of him: a couple of evenings a week was not much, and although he did make attempts to play with him at weekends, Wills always gravitated towards the women – Ellen, of course, and Villy and Rachel, and Polly when she was there. He was terrified of the Brig who had once pretended to be a lion with disastrous consequences. He was nearly six now and rather spoilt and tyrannical. At Wills’s age, and younger, it had always been Sybil who had coped with the children; he had come into his own when they were seven or eight, although he had always had a special relationship with Poll. Villy had been a brick about Wills. It was she who was teaching him to read, who took him over on Ellen’s days off, who cut his hair and bought or made his clothes. But when he thought of Villy, he came inevitably to Edward. He had always vaguely known that Edward strayed, as he put it to himself, but the extent and degree of his alliance with Diana Mackintosh had appalled him when he discovered it, which, of course, he did by degrees. He had nearly, he thought, persuaded Edward to give her up for Villy’s sake, but Edward had reneged on that, and then the frightful blow of his having a child by her had come out. After that, he did not know what to say to his brother. He hated knowing about Diana because of his gratitude to and affection for Villy. He would never tell her what he knew, but knowing and not telling made him feel dishonest with her, which seemed a poor return for her kindness to his child. He felt she would be devastated if she knew and he did not trust Edward not to be so careless that his betrayal would be discovered. When he had tried to talk to Edward about it, they had reached a degree of tension that he knew would end in a pointless row: Edward’s eyes became like blue marbles and in a voice that was chilly and trembling with anger he told Hugh to mind his own business. After he had tried once or twice to confront Edward, with more or less the same results, he gave up, but the unresolved situation silted up between them, damming any of the old easy intimacy that, nowadays, he missed more than ever. He even wondered sometimes whether he and Edward might not have come to some better agreement about the new wharf if they had been on generally better terms.

He was driving to the office; the day had hardly begun, and already he felt tired. ‘We’re all tired, old boy,’ his friend Bobby Beecham had remarked at the club the previous night. ‘If Adolf sees fit to start another blitz on London, I think the situation could become really tricky. The average person has had about as much as they can take. Everything is either drab or terrible. It’s all been going on too long.
We
need that Second Front every bit as much as the Russians do. Finish the blighters off while we’ve still got the strength, that’s what I say.’ He had gone on to invite Hugh to visit the Bag of Nails with him, ‘A bit of female company wouldn’t do you any harm. Take your mind off things for a bit.’ But he hadn’t gone. It wasn’t that he had any moral obligation, he told himself, simply he didn’t have the slightest desire to get into bed with a stranger, however attractive. He could all too easily imagine himself, unable to get it up, being drawn out by the girl to talk about himself. Even ‘my wife died’ might open floodgates that it made him cringe to consider. Nothing would induce him to talk about Sybil to a total stranger.

‘Darling, if what you are trying to say is that you want Thelma to come too, I
quite
understand.’

‘No, no, I didn’t mean that.’ The thought horrified her. ‘I only meant that the timing is slightly awkward, because I’d promised to take her to Stratford for a few days and she’d arranged her leave to coincide with mine.’

‘The trouble is that I
can’t
do the following week, because Ellen is having her holiday and I really shall be needed at home.’

‘I
do
understand. It’s just a pity that you didn’t tell me sooner.’ Then, before Rachel could explain why she hadn’t been able to do that, Sid added, ‘I’m sure that Thelma can make another plan about leave. I’ll talk to her.’

‘Yes, do, but
do
bear in mind that I would perfectly understand if she can’t, and then we could all three go, which might be the simplest thing in the end.’

Oh, no, it wouldn’t, Sid thought, when she had put the earpiece back. It certainly wouldn’t. Thelma and Rachel had met but that had been nearly a year ago when the situation had been very different, when Thelma had been simply a protegee with every qualification for the post – young, penniless, friendless and reasonably talented. She had come from Coventry hoping to get into the Academy (violin, with the piano as her second instrument) but had had to give up the idea when her widowed mother had been killed in the big air raid on that city. The terraced house in which she lived had been reduced to rubble. It had been rented, and the small pension on which her mother had both lived and helped her daughter had died with her. Her eyesight had precluded her being called up, and dull domestic jobs had been the only available alternative. Shortly after Sid met her there had been a concert got up by the station for a local charity, and Sid had asked Thelma if she would like to accompany her on the piano. It then transpired that Thelma did not have access to an instrument and Sid offered her a key to the house so that she could practise. To begin with Thelma had been scrupulous about going there when Sid was on duty, and she had been scrupulous in other ways. The first time that Sid came home it was to find the sitting room tidy, last night’s supper tray removed, everything dusted, even the grimy glass of the French window looking on to the back garden had been cleaned, and (and this had touched her most of all) a bunch of rather mildewed Michaelmas daisies picked from the back garden had been put in a vase on the mantelpiece. When she had seen Thelma next day in the canteen and thanked her, Thelma had said, ‘Oh! Afterwards I was afraid you’d mind – think it was a bit cheeky of me,’ and started to blush. ‘I didn’t know how to thank you,’ is what she managed to say at last. By the time they were rehearsing for the concert it had become a ritual for Thelma to provide all kinds of little domestic attentions: she had cleaned the old gas cooker so that the burners ignited properly; she had wrested a quantity of hair out of the carpet sweeper so that it now consented to clean the carpets, she had procured a washer for the hot tap in the bathroom so that it ceased to drip and she said she loved ironing. It was pleasant, Sid found, to have things done for you by someone who protested not only that they
liked
the work, but also intense gratitude for being allowed to do it. ‘It’s so lovely to be in a proper
home
,’ she kept saying. And ‘I’ve never
touched
a piano half as good as this one.’

When Rachel came to stay, which was not very often, the girl cleaned the spare room and seemed perfectly to understand that Sid would want the house to herself while her friend was with her. Rachel always asked after her and had thoroughly approved of Sid giving her lessons and befriending her. Then one day, after she had exclaimed about how wonderfully clean the kitchen had become (they were sitting down there finishing a bowl of delicious vegetable soup made by Thelma), she said: ‘And what do you pay her for all this work?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Not anything?’

‘Well, she gets a free lesson a week and she has a key to the house so that she can come and practise whenever she likes.’

There was a brief silence. Rachel was taking one of her Passing Clouds out of the pretty enamelled cigarette case that Edward had given her. She handed the case to Sid and then leaned across the table towards her for Sid’s lighter, and Sid could smell the faint scent of violets that Rachel only used on special occasions.

‘Do you think I should?’

‘Well – I suppose it would be rather nice for her to earn a little extra. You told me she was pretty hard up.’

‘You’re perfectly right, of course. I should have thought of it. The whole thing has just sort of slowly come about and I didn’t think. Darling! What should I do without you?’

And Rachel had smiled and said, ‘You don’t have to.’

‘I do. Most of the time, indeed I do.’ It had slipped out more bitterly than she intended, indeed she had not meant to say it at all.

‘I think of you every day,’ Rachel said in her apparently casual but slightly unsteady voice that denoted deep feeling, and Sid experienced the joy – like sunlight flooding her heart – that these declarations, which did not even occur every time they met, invariably produced.

But then, the following week when she pressed a pound and a ten shilling note into Thelma’s hand the result was not at all what she had expected.

‘What’s this for?’

Sid explained that it was for all the work she did.

‘I don’t want it!’

Sid explained that she couldn’t let her go on doing all the housework for nothing.

‘I thought I was your friend! How
could
you!’ She looked at Sid with a kind of wounded consternation. ‘I thought you –
liked
me!’

Sid started to say that of course she liked her, but that that had nothing to do with it.

‘It has for me.’ She put the notes on the kitchen table. ‘I don’t want to be treated as a servant!’

Sid put her arm round her, and she burst into tears. ‘You’ve made all the difference to my life, and I can’t give you things and I’d do
anything
for you, I’d have thought you’d have known that, and being such a marvellous musician naturally you don’t think about house things so I thought at least—’

Sid said how sorry she was, and she
was
. She invited Thelma to supper and said they would go out, but in the end they didn’t, because she took Thelma upstairs and gave her some gin and for the first time asked her about her life, and by the time Thelma had finished telling her it was late and they had finished the gin. In the end they had dried egg omelettes in the kitchen, some cider and finally cups of tea by which time it was so late that Sid suggested Thelma stay the night. She lent her a pair of pyjamas and put her, now happy again and slightly tipsy, into the spare room. That night she reflected upon the poor girl’s unhappy situation: she had clearly not at all recovered from her mother’s death which had so suddenly swept away everything that she knew and had; her loneliness – she did not seem to have made a single friend in London – and finally Thelma’s striking devotion to herself. This last, although she attempted to dismiss it as a schoolgirl crush with more than a little sentiment involved, still touched her. To be looked up to and admired – particularly as a musician – was a kind of balm that assuaged some of the pain and loneliness she suffered as a result of her love for Rachel that was never to be consummated. Her protective instincts were also aroused, and Rachel was seldom there to be protected: this girl responded gratefully to any care or affection. Her youth, too, was appealing: although she was not – as Sid put it to herself – conventionally pretty, there was something rather fetching about her hot brown eyes with the large, dark pupils that peered at one with such intensity. She wore spectacles for sight-reading music, and Sid suspected that she could not see very much at any other time without them. She wore her straight dark brown hair parted in the middle and was always pushing strands of it back from her face. She was pale except when she blushed, which she did frequently and every time as though it was a new and embarrassing experience. She was small and thin with a high, clear voice that if one did not see her – the telephone came to mind – could have been mistaken for a child’s.