Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (32 page)

Once, when he had finished playing a rather acrimonious game of Pelman Patience with all of the girls, Lydia had suddenly asked: ‘After the war, Archie, will you be going back to your house in France to live?’

‘I don’t know. I expect I might.’

‘Because if you are, I thought of coming with you. Only I’d quite like to know if you are, because I won’t bother with French if you aren’t. So far, it is being a fearfully dull language where I can only say the sort of thing people put on postcards.’

The other two came down on her like a load of bricks.

‘Really, Lydia, you are the limit! You can’t just propose yourself like that!’ Clary said.

‘He might not want anybody, but he certainly wouldn’t want a
child
!’ Polly said.

‘And if he did, it would be up to him to say, not you,’ Clary said.

‘And, anyway, he might not be going back to France at all,’ Polly said.

‘He certainly wouldn’t want someone as much younger than he is as you, anyway,’ Clary said.

‘Shut up snubbing me! How old
are
you, Archie? We know you so well, I think I ought to know that.’

‘I shall be thirty-nine this year.’

‘That makes you twenty-six years younger, so you can see it is out of the question.’

‘What is? I wasn’t considering
marrying
him! I just want to be an adventuress – like in
Bulldog Drummond
. I’d just live with him and he’d buy me frocks and strange exotic perfumes and I’d arrange parties.’

‘Oh, do stop talking about me as though I wasn’t here!’ Archie said with an exaggerated dismay that he hoped would lighten the situation. It didn’t.

‘He wouldn’t want anyone so naturally rude and tactless,’ Clary retorted. ‘But if you do want someone, you know, to talk to in the evenings, I could always come and stay with you.’

There was a pause. ‘And what about you, Poll?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘I really haven’t the faintest idea. The war’s not even over. I think it’s silly to talk about – anything – till it is.’

‘Mr Churchill said the hour of greatest effort is approaching,’ Clary said. ‘It might be nearly over.’

‘Only in Europe,’ Polly said. ‘There’s still the Japanese.’

Her face had become so pale, that Archie knew she had been blushing. She saw him, and began picking up the cards from the floor.

Then Clary put an arm round her and said, ‘It’s all right, Poll. The Japanese will never invade
here
.’

But Polly merely answered in a thin, unfriendly voice, ‘I know
that
. Of course I know
that
.’ And Archie saw how Clary felt rebuffed, and suddenly wanted to put his arms round her.

That night when he lay in bed waiting for sleep, the house in France came vividly back to him. He had left one morning in such a hurry (he’d been offered a lift north in a lorry by a friend of the café owner who was taking a load of peaches to Paris, and some instinct had warned him to take the chance when it was offered), that it had left him no time to do anything but pack one bag of clothes; he’d even left his bed unmade, pots and pans in the sink and paintbrushes uncleaned – they might still be stuck, stiff and useless in the jam jar with the turps long gone . . . He’d taken one final look at the kitchen, with its deeply recessed windows that looked out onto olives and apricot orchards and down onto the vine-covered veranda of the café below. The geraniums and basil that he had left on the window-sill would have died quickly from lack of water. He had even left the book he had been reading – a huge American novel, what had it been called?
Anthony Adverse
– or, rather, that he had been struggling through, open on the pearwood table into which some long past wicked child, probably, had cut initials. He’d walked through the wider door he’d made, which connected the kitchen with the larger room where he worked. It faced north over the valley bathed at that moment in hot, golden light. It wasn’t really a house: he had two small bedrooms and a shower he had installed on the floor above, and then a steep staircase that led to the door that opened out onto the village street. But this separate entrance had made it seem like a house, and he liked the sounds and smells from the café where he often ate. It made him feel less solitary and, after ten years or so, he had become accepted as a reasonable foreigner. He’d left his key in the café, and perhaps the old woman who cleaned his place would have taken the plants although she would not have touched his brushes. It was odd. He missed the place – realised that he had a great longing for it, but at the same time so far as being solitary was concerned, he felt softened up. It would be an ordeal, of a different kind from what it had originally been when he first went there. Then, he had gone to try to forget Rachel; it had only been she whom he had wanted; if he could not have her, then he was able to endure without anyone. Now he would be going back with nothing to renounce, but he would be leaving this family who had taken him in and who had become a part of his life. This summer – the invasion was certain – it would be the beginning of the end of the war. And with France liberated, Rupert’s fate would be certain. It was still possible, though very unlikely, that he was alive, but if he was not, then he would have to see to Clary. He might take her to France with him to help her through her loss, as years ago he had helped Rupert when Clary’s mother had died. There was a kind of symmetry to that. It was the least he could do for Rupert, he thought defensively; he found himself smiling in the dark.

CLARY

May–June 1944

This is a weekend, and I’m not going home because I’ve just become an air-raid warden and I have to go to lectures which they tend to have at weekends so that people who are working can go to them. We haven’t had any bombs lately, but everybody seems to think that we will – especially when the invasion starts which might be any day now. Louise has gone away to Hatton as Michael has leave and he doesn’t much like spending it in London. She has taken the baby and Mary with her, but Mary is leaving soon to get married. We all earnestly hope that Louise will get another nanny because when Mary had a holiday the house got into a frightful mess and she never stopped washing nappies and sterilizing bottles and Sebastian cried an awful lot. He was cutting teeth and his face had sort of tomato-coloured blotches. Otherwise he looks rather like Mr Churchill who is reputed to have said that all babies look like him, so you can see that my simile was not original. Anyway, this is Saturday morning, and the house is very quiet because Polly is still asleep. She has taken to sleeping later and later at weekends. So I’m sitting on the steps that go down to the back garden drinking rather cold brown tea and writing my journal to you. The trouble is, Dad, that by the time you get back there will be so much of it, it will take you years to read and you’ll probably get bored which I wouldn’t blame you for although it would hurt my feelings. I haven’t told you about my job – my first job. It is a bit of an anti-climax actually: I work for a bishop called Peter. He’s supposed to be young for a bishop, but that isn’t awfully young. He has a rather bunnish wife – I suppose I mean dumpy (but she also has a bun) and she is always smiling but without much enjoyment. They live in a large, dark house filled with bits of furniture that they don’t seem to use, and the whole place smells of very old meals and clothes. People are always coming and Mrs Bish makes tea for them, sometimes with biscuits, often not. Then the trays get left on tables until I clear them up, because she’s run out of teapots. The garden is full of thistles and loosestrife and very ragged evergreens. They don’t have time for the garden, they say. I work at one end of the dining-room table – well, it’s where I do the letter typing, but I take down the letters in the Bish’s study. I sit on a hard armchair that looks as though it is upholstered in
moss
and he wanders about the room making rather awful jokes that I keep putting into the letters by mistake. His favourite jokes are Spoonerisms, you know, like ‘Excuse me, Captain, your slip is showing’ or ‘Hush my brat.’

They have two children called Leonard and Veronica, but I haven’t met them as they are always away. Anyway, I go in the morning to be there at half past nine and usually I go out to lunch at a local café and have chips and a fried egg or rather awful sausages that taste as though they are made from some animal that died in the zoo and then I go back and work until five, and then I bicycle home. I have to answer the telephone as well, but that is in the hall, nowhere near my typewriter. Still, it is a job and I get two pounds a week. Everybody the Bish knows is described by him as a saint or splendid or a bit mad but enormously interesting, but when they come to the house they don’t seem to be any of these things. So I am not learning much about human nature which is a pity.

This house is odd, largely I think because it doesn’t feel as though it belongs to anybody. It still had quite a lot of Lady Rydal’s furniture and things in it, and then Louise has added her wedding presents, and then we – Polly and I – have brought a few of our things. At weekends, when people come to stay, they have to sleep in beds in the dining room, because there are only five bedrooms and Louise and the baby and Nanny take up two of them. Poll and I have a little attic room each on the top floor.

Marriage doesn’t seem to have changed Louise much. But in a way, of course, she doesn’t lead a very married life, with Michael nearly always away. Quite a lot of people who come are a bit in love with her and I think she enjoys that.

Poll worries me rather. She has become quite difficult to talk to. I know she finds her job awfully dull, but I don’t think that is the whole problem. She feels guilty about having left Uncle Hugh alone in his house, but
that
isn’t the whole thing either. I suspect her of being in love, but she gets furious if one approaches the subject, which I have done six or seven times with enormous tact. She goes to an art school two evenings a week, and I think it may be someone she has met there. Her not telling me probably means he is married and the whole thing is doomed. But she always
used
to discuss everything, and not doing so is making her much crosser than it makes me – the front doorbell’s rung, one of Louise’s devoted admirers I expect, but I’ll have to go and answer it.

This is
days
later because it
wasn’t
one of Louise’s men, it was Neville! He was wearing his school uniform (I told you, Dad, he’d left his prep school because he got too old and they sent him to Tonbridge). I knew he absolutely loathed it there, so although he said he’d come to breakfast, I knew he’d run away. He had a small suitcase with him which I knew wasn’t his but I thought the best thing was to give him breakfast (he’s got rather scraggy and always looks as though he’s starving, even after a meal these days) so I didn’t make any remark about the suitcase. He followed me down to the kitchen and I made him toast and he had marge and Bovril on that and then he ate the remains of the macaroni cheese Poll and I had had for supper the night before and some stewed apple and then he noticed a tin of pilchards that I didn’t even know we had and wanted that. All the time he ate, he talked about Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers’ films. But eventually, even he had run out of things to say about them and he just sat drinking tea. Then he said, ‘Did you know, one can’t get to Ireland any more? There’s a ban. Idiotic. I didn’t know till I got to London.’ I remembered that once before, when he’d run away, he’d said he was going to live in Ireland, so now I was sure he’d done it again. I told him he’d run away, and he said, yes.

‘I really do definitely, absolutely, inevitably loathe it,’ he said. ‘It’s quite idiotic to go on being somewhere you hate so much.’ Then he looked at me in a surprisingly charming way and said, ‘You’ve been miserable in your life, so I thought you’d understand. That’s why I came here.’

But if you’d been able to get to Ireland, I thought, you would just have gone. He was turning on the charm, and actually, Dad, in an awful way, he
can
be frightfully charming. I said: ‘Supposing I just hadn’t been here. What would you have done then?’

‘Waited,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some gobstoppers in my case, and some oats that a boy feeds his secret rat with at school. I took some of them.’

‘Of course you haven’t told them at home.’

‘Of course not. They’d only try to send me back. I came here because I assumed you’d be different. Or have you,’ his eyes narrowed, but his voice was bland, ‘have you become one of Them?’

It was a jolly difficult question to answer, I found. Because I couldn’t see what he could do if he
didn’t
go back. On the other hand it did seem quite wrong to betray him. In the end I said I didn’t know but I did promise not to do anything behind his back. ‘I shall keep my back permanently turned, then,’ he said, but he looked relieved, and it was then I realised that his usual expression these days is wary – a bit as though he is being hunted.

Then I thought of Archie.
He
would know what to do. To begin with, Neville didn’t want me to ring him but when I guaranteed that Archie’s behaviour would not be dastardly, he said all right.

Archie came in a cab. While he was on his way, Neville kept thinking of stupid things he could do: drive a taxi-cab – he said Tonbridge had taught him to drive but, of course, he’s nothing
like
old enough – or be a keeper at the zoo – he knows quite a lot about snakes, but I really don’t think that would help him – or be a waiter in a restaurant, or a bus conductor, which he thought he’d quite like for a bit, all hopeless careers for a boy of – he says fourteen but he isn’t even that yet. When Archie arrived, he hugged me as usual and gave me a kiss, and then he did the same with Neville, and Neville sort of shied like a horse and then frowned and frowned and I could see he was quite upset – he was trying not to cry. Archie didn’t seem to notice and brought out a small parcel and said it was coffee and would I make some. While I was doing that Polly turned up in her dressing gown with her hair in curlers. She stopped in the doorway when she saw Archie and Neville, and said she’d just go and get dressed. I don’t think she wanted Archie to notice her too much in her curlers. But he said why didn’t she have her breakfast as he wanted to talk to Neville and they could do it upstairs. Neville said he didn’t want to be told things to do, and Archie said, ‘I don’t want to tell you, I want to hear you.’ And that seemed to make it all right with Neville because they went upstairs.