Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (31 page)

Archie arrived, as he had been asked, at half past seven, which was pretty good considering how chancy Sunday buses could be. The walk from the 53 bus stop in Abbey Road had tired him – his leg had long since ceased to get any better. He negotiated the rickety wooden gate and limped up the path that was edged with ancient iris plants. The front door was the kind that had glass to the waist and, although it was frosted and therefore nothing inside was visible, the house was full of sound. A piano being played – extremely well, probably a gramophone record, he thought – a baby crying, the sound of bath water running out down the large iron stack pipe beside the front door, voices, somebody laughing – there was so much sound that he wasn’t sure whether the bell he had pressed had rung. There was a knocker, so he used it.

‘Archie! Oh, good!’ It was Clary. ‘You
are
punctual,’ she added, as though he shouldn’t have been. She gave him her usual perfunctory hug.

‘Who is playing the piano?’

‘Peter Rose. Louise’s friend Stella’s brother.’

At the far end of the hall, Louise was sitting on the stairs. She wore a rather fetching housecoat of some striped material. Her hair streamed down her back and her feet were bare. She greeted him by blowing a kiss.

‘You look like the heroine in an opera,’ he said.

‘I’m sitting here to listen to Peter,’ she explained. ‘If we go in, he’ll stop.’

A girl appeared at the head of the basement stairs. ‘Where’s the tin opener?’

‘Haven’t the faintest idea.’

‘Oh!’ Clary said. ‘
I
used it to prop open the lavatory window.’

‘What, this one?’ The girl indicated the door opposite her.

‘No, upstairs. And Poll’s having a bath.’

‘Well, you can interrupt her, Clary. You’ll have to if you want any dinner.’

Louise said, ‘Is Piers helping you?’

‘Well, he’s
with
me. Not exactly helping. I think he’s the last person I’d have on a desert island.’

‘You’re wrong. I’m wonderful at conversation, and you’d be surprised how quickly you’d feel short of
that
.’ He had loomed up behind Stella on the stairs.

‘This is Archie,’ Clary said. ‘Piers. And Stella.’

Piers gave him a tired smile. ‘I warn you there’s nothing to eat in this house except cork mats,’ he said.

Clary had stumped upstairs in search of the tin opener. Archie looked round for a chair. His leg ached. Louise patted the stairs beside her. ‘Come and sit here, Archie.’

‘No. I’d never get up from there. I’d become a fixture. When you sold the house I’d go with it.’

‘Your baby is crying,’ Piers remarked, leaning over the banisters and stroking Louise’s hair.

‘He’s teething, Mary says. But I’d better go and see what she is doing with him.’

‘Maternal love. Isn’t it amazing? If I had to choose what was my bottom thing in this house I’d find it quite difficult to decide between Sebastian and that frightful soapstone of monkeys.’

‘It belonged to Louise’s grandmother,’ Stella said.

Archie had found a chair with about six coats on it. He put them on the floor and sat down. The piano had stopped.

Clary reappeared with the tin opener and gave it to Stella, who said, ‘Is there really only one tin of corned beef?’

‘I think so, because we used the other one for sandwiches for Hampstead Heath. We had a picnic yesterday,’ she said to Archie, ‘and we went to the Vale of Health. It’s like a dear little village you suddenly come upon. Piers knows a painter who lives there, but he was out.’

‘It was lovely all the same,’ Piers said. ‘We sang the whole way. Sort of Handel recitative making extremely personal remarks about other walkers.’

‘We sang some jolly choruses as well. Nobody realised it was about them, though,’ Clary said.

‘Did you want them to?’ Archie asked.

‘Well, it would have been fun if they’d looked a bit amazed, shocked, you know.’

Louise reappeared with her baby on her shoulder. ‘Mary wants to eat her supper, so I said I’d have him for a while.’

‘Let’s go and sit in the
sitting
room,’ Piers said. ‘Stairs are not conversational for more than two.’

‘Who’s going to finish cooking supper?’ Clary demanded. ‘It really ought to be you, Louise, you’re far the best at it.’

‘I’m no better than Stella – we learned just the same things. And, anyway, I’ve got Sebastian. I peeled all the potatoes.’

‘All right,’ Stella said. ‘Clary and I will do the rest. Just remind me of what we’re aiming at.’

‘You fry the onions, mash the potatoes, and then you mash in the corned beef.’

‘Will one tin do for seven of us? It seems a bit mean.’

‘I brought a tin of peaches,’ Piers said. ‘All the way from sunny Bletchley.’

‘I daresay you did. But they won’t be any good in a corned beef hash. They’ll have to be pudding.’

‘Polly’s made her Carnation Milk pudding.’

‘God! That sounds revolting.’

‘It isn’t at all. It’s a kind of whip. You’d never know it was tinned milk.’

The sitting room was empty except for a young man sitting at the piano. He got to his feet as they came in, and Archie saw that he was wearing RAF uniform.

‘Leading Aircraftsman Rose,’ Louise said. ‘This is Archie Lestrange, and you know Piers, of course.’

The baby, who had been staring at Archie in an intense impassive manner that he was beginning to find disconcerting, suddenly convulsed himself and began to cry.

‘Give him to me,’ Peter said, and held out his arms; his rather heavy and haggard face was transformed by a tender smile. He carried the baby back to the piano, wedged him between his arms and began to play ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. Sebastian stopped crying.

‘Do play the variations, Peter,’ Louise called from the other end of the room.

Archie sat down on the hard little sofa and wondered whether he was going to be offered a drink. Clary had retreated to the kitchen with Stella, and Piers was leading Louise out of the French windows and down the steps into the garden.

Then Polly appeared, her coppery hair newly washed and shining. She wore her dark pleated skirt and over it a loose jersey of gentian blue that made her eyes look the same colour. ‘Sorry to be so long. I had to wait until Sebastian had had his bath and then the water wasn’t hot for a bit. Nobody has given you a drink, I’ll go and see what there is and tell you.’

She went through double doors that led to the dining room. ‘There’s a bit of gin, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to put in it.’

‘Water would be fine.’

She came back with a tooth glass and the gin bottle. ‘You help yourself and I’ll get some water.’ When she had done that, she sat neatly on the floor a few yards away from him.

‘Am I the only person having a drink?’

‘Tonight you are. We don’t awfully mind about it and the bottle got used up two nights ago when Louise had a party. We only get one bottle a month from the shop, you see.’ She gave him one of her quick little social smiles and then stared at her hands that were clasped round her knees.

‘How’s the art school?’ he asked.

‘Oh! The art school. Fine. Very interesting. The most surprising people seem prepared to be models for life classes. I’m no good at drawing, of course.’

‘It’s a bit early to know that, isn’t it?’

‘It may be,’ she answered politely.

The music had stopped as the baby had begun to cry again. Peter got up from the piano and walked about with him in his arms. ‘He doesn’t really care for Mozart,’ he said, ‘he prefers the theme.’

‘He’s teething,’ Louise said as she came up the steps from the garden. Piers was holding her hand. ‘I’ll take him up to Mary.’

It was a long time before they had their supper, which was eaten in the basement in the kitchen, and by the time they had had it Peter said he had got to start getting back to Uxbridge, and Archie, who had decided upon a cab for going back to his flat, offered to give him a lift to his station. He’d been on forty-eight hours’ leave, he said, and Louise always let him stay whenever he wanted, but he only went when Stella got time off as his parents liked him to go home. ‘We don’t tell them about these times,’ he said, ‘but you don’t know them, do you, so it’s all right. They’d kick up no end if they knew.’

‘I wouldn’t tell them, anyway.’

His white, rather haggard face softened, as it had when he had been dealing with Sebastian. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean you would,’ he said. ‘It’s just that it would be awful if they knew.’ He had dark marks under his eyes, like bruises, and his uniform looked like fancy dress.

‘Louise is wonderful,’ he said after a silence. ‘She’s made the place so friendly and easy. And she lets me practise as much as I like when I go there.’

‘You’re in the RAF orchestra, aren’t you?’

‘I know it sounds marvellously lucky, but it has its drawbacks. They don’t think you need to practise at all, you see. I’m always travelling about, arriving somewhere and playing something I haven’t worked up with practically no rehearsal on a usually quite awful piano that I won’t have had a chance to touch before the concert.’

‘I suppose in a war one really has to choose between being frightened or being bored,’ Archie said.

‘Which are you?’

‘Well, after a spell of being frightened, I’ve been relegated to being bored.’

After he had dropped Peter at Uxbridge, he thought about these alternatives: his job, certainly, was largely boredom. The hours and days and weeks he must by now have spent at staff meetings, in reading hundreds of Action Reports, and the endless flow of memos that were dumped in his in-tray every few minutes of every day in his office. He was really a kind of glorified clerk – condensing information for his superiors, making innumerable very small decisions about the selection of material that needed referral to the right department, sometimes trying to persuade people with bees in their bonnets to take them out. Since the window in his office had been blown out, they had made it very much smaller but it had also ceased to open – he felt he had been breathing the same air now for years. Still, he was lucky really – to be alive, to have something to do that was presumably useful in some sort. He did not have the kind of anxiety that Louise must live with: that her husband might be killed. He had not had to spend his extreme youth as the other girls were doing: Polly had a typing job in the Ministry of Information, and Clary, most surprisingly, was being a secretary for a very young bishop, ‘He hasn’t asked me whether I believe in God, so I just don’t say anything on the subject,’ she told him. But clearly, in that house, they were having some fun. They had a much played gramophone and the piano and they went to the cinema and on expeditions like the one to Hampstead Heath. In spite of funny food – and there hadn’t been much of it – and no drink, they had a lot of silly jokes, and Louise gave parties. ‘Who comes to them?’ he had asked. ‘Oh, we pick people up in the Underground sometimes and Michael’s friends from the Navy come when they are on leave and
they
bring friends – lots of people,’ Clary had replied airily. They had had a cook to begin with, a Mrs Weatherby found by Villy in Sussex, but she had not been able to cope with the hours they kept, or the untidiness and noise, and had soon left. ‘It’s much more fun without her and, anyway, we needed her bed for people who come to stay.’ On the whole, he thought, it was a good thing that the girls had gone to live with Louise, partly because it was time they had more independence, and partly because he had begun to sense that they were not any longer so close to one another as they had been. This had come up before: it no longer seemed to be the thing to invite both of them together for supper or a film. Clary had been quite open about it. ‘I’d much rather go out with just
you
,’ she had said. ‘Anyway, Poll has dozens of people in love with her – she could go out every night if she wanted to. Another drawback of working for the Bish. He’s married and I can’t see him taking me to anything except a church fête.’

‘Are you jealous of Polly?’ he had asked her one evening.

‘Me? Jealous? Good Lord, no. I couldn’t stand the sort of dreary people she has mooning after her. Frightfully old men in suits – far older than you,’ she added hastily, ‘who work in the same building as she does, and quite a lot of Louise’s husband’s friends – they all fall for her. It’s her appearance – people stare at her in the Underground, and once, at the Arts Theatre when we went out with Louise and Michael when he was on leave, a man actually sent a note to our table to her. He can’t have known at
all
what she is like, can he? Just across a room. Any more,’ she said after thinking about it, ‘than people could tell what
I
was like across a room. Or you, Archie.’ She had looked at him challengingly when she said this, but he decided not to disagree. But after that he took to inviting them separately, although he noticed that whenever he went down to Home Place for the weekend they both came too. On these occasions, Clary became rather noisily proprietary, and Polly withdrew. However, there was so much else going on there that neither of the girls could monopolise him. He had become one of the family, and was treated to all the small complaining confidences that might be expected from that. Villy did not approve of the frequency with which Zoë went to London – to see an old school friend who had just moved back there; it was hard on Ellen, she said, who was getting on and finding Wills a handful. Poor Rachel was pulled this way and that between the demands of her old aunt Dolly and the Brig, the one with no memory and the other with no sight, neither of them able to understand why she could not spend all of every day with them to the exclusion of the other. Lydia complained at not being sent to a proper school like Neville, of being treated like a child, ‘I am thirteen, after all, and they don’t seem to realise that when they send me off to bed I’ve got nobody to go with. My foul cousin Judy who goes to a proper school is learning dancing and art and things and she goes on and on about team spirit and I don’t even know what it
is
! You might point some of this out to them, Archie, because they listen to you. I don’t want to go to the same school as
Judy
but any other old school would do.’