Casting Off (16 page)

He lit her cigarette for her, and one for himself. ‘I mean the house, for instance. Do you think we want to keep it, or would you rather we looked for one that was nearer a park? Or we could get a flat. I don’t think poor old Ellen is up to all the stairs in Brook Green. Edward wants me to go and run Southampton. I’ve told him I don’t feel remotely up to it, but if you wanted to live in the country, I’m willing to have a go. And Hugh – I want you to have all the options – did say that if we wanted to share his house, we would be more than welcome. I think he was partly thinking of Wills, and how it would be nice for him to go on being under the same roof as Ellen. I don’t expect you would like that, but I thought you ought to know it was on offer.’

Another relief, this time coupled with the kind of irritation that accompanies being given a fright and the consequent expenditure of needless courage. There was nothing to be brave about; she fell back upon being accommodating. ‘What would you prefer?’

But, of course, he didn’t know: decisions had never been his strong suit. She knew that if she had advocated any one plan, he would have fallen in with it, but she could only think of what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to lose Ellen, she didn’t want to go back to the house in Brook Green that had always struck her as dreary, and in any case had once belonged to Isobel, but after that . . .

They spent the rest of the evening in polite and fruitless discussion.

In the night she woke and it came to her that perhaps Rupert was so indecisive because
he
didn’t want any of it. Perhaps, now, he should go back to painting and/or teaching, and their having less money would mean that she might find some sort of job that would fill her life. Perhaps they could go and live in France with Archie. A completely new life: in the night it seemed to be the answer.

But when she had suggested this to him, he seemed appalled. ‘Oh, no! I don’t think so. I think it’s a bit late to be thinking of that sort of thing.’

‘But you often said how much you love France—’ ‘France? What’s France got to do with it?’ ‘I thought you specially liked painting there—’ But he interrupted her, coldly. ‘I haven’t the slightest desire to live in France.’

There was an almost sullen silence.

‘Is it – is it because you had such an awful time there?’

‘No. Well – partly. I just wouldn’t want to.’

They had been walking along the beach – the shingle hurt her feet and they had sat down with their backs to the breakwater. When he fell silent again, she turned to look at him. He was staring at the sea, preoccupied, withdrawn. He swallowed as though to rid himself of something painful, but he didn’t look at her.

‘Wouldn’t it help to tell me about it?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘What happened to you. What it was
like
. I mean – why couldn’t you come home some time after D-Day? Why did it take so long? Were you kept as some kind of
prisoner
?’

‘No – not exactly. Well, yes, in a way. It was a very remote place – the farm . . .’ There was a pause, then he said rapidly: ‘They’d sheltered me for so long, looked after me when it was dangerous for them and there was a fearful shortage of able-bodied men. I felt I had to stay on a bit to help – you know, the harvest and so on.’

After a moment, she said, ‘But harvests are in the autumn!’

‘For God’s sake, Zoë, stop trying to
trap
me! I made a promise to stay as long as I did. Will that do?’

Resentment, anger that she had not known was there, possessed her. ‘No, it won’t. You could at least have sent a message, written. What do you think it was like for your mother? For Clary. For me. Not hearing
any
thing after the Allied landing meant that we thought you
must
be dead. You made everybody suffer when there was no need. Don’t you see how incredibly selfish that was?’

He didn’t answer – simply put his head in his hands with one racking sob. Before she could do anything, he took his hands from his face and looked at her. ‘I
do
see. I
do
realize. There’s nothing I can do about it now. I can’t excuse it – it was just another life, different problems, difficulties. I can only say, that, mad though it may seem to you, it seemed the right thing to do at the time. I don’t expect you to understand that. But I am sorry – ashamed to have caused you so much distress.’

He was trying to smile; there were tears in his eyes. To put her arms round him, to kiss his face was not difficult. The rest of the weekend was spent in a kind of emotional calm: they were kind to each other; they finished their walk, had lunch in a bad restaurant, went to a cinema, browsed in second-hand bookshops, dined in the hotel, decided to give up the house in Brook Green, but got no further. ‘You know what I’m like about decisions,’ he had said. ‘One is quite enough.’ Through it all they were careful of each other. She was relieved both that he seemed to want no more from her than that, and also for those random hours in the day – in the bookshop where he found her a first edition of Katherine Mansfield that she was delighted to have, and during a long talk about whether Juliet should be allowed to have a puppy, currently her dearest wish – when she discovered that time had passed when she had not been thinking of Jack.

On Monday they had gone back to London: he had stayed there and she had returned to Home Place.

The Duchy had welcomed her affectionately. ‘You look as though you have had
some
rest,’ she said, and then Juliet and Wills, clattering down the stairs, had intervened.

‘Mummy! While you were away Wills sleepwalked! He sleepwalked down the stairs into the dining room! They put him back to bed and in the morning he said he didn’t know he had sleepwalked at all! The next night I sleepwalked only I nearly fell down ’cos you can’t sleepwalk downstairs at all well with your eyes shut and they put me back into bed and I can perfectly remember it. And Wills said I can’t really have sleepwalked ’cos when you sleepwalk your eyes are open! They can’t be, can they? Anyway, when
I
sleepwalk I sleepwalk with my eyes shut. I do it like this.’

‘She only pretends,’ Wills said. ‘She doesn’t do it properly – she’s too young for that sort of thing.’

‘I’m not too young for anything! I may not look it, but inside I’m older than I look. Like you, Mummy. Ellen says you’re older than you look.’

‘Ha, ha,
ha
,’ Wills said, very slowly indeed. ‘Would you like to see my tooth?’

‘She wouldn’t. I saw it and it was quite boring. Do you know what the Duchy told us? When her teeth were loose when she was a child they used to tie a piece of string to it and the other end to the door handle and slam the door and the tooth just jumped out at them and then she got a penny for being brave.’

‘I’d charge a lot more to let people do that to me,’ Wills said, and she said she agreed with him.

‘Oh, Mummy! Don’t agree with
Wills
, agree with
me
! She’s
my
mother!’ And she flung her arms round Zoë’s legs and glared challengingly at Wills, whose face, Zoë saw, became suddenly blank.

‘I’ll carry your case, Aunt Zoë,’ he said.

A few days later, she found herself alone with the Duchy. They had finished picking the sweet peas – a job that needed doing every two or three days – and were sitting on the seat by the tennis court. The Duchy took a cigarette out of her shagreen case and was returning it to the pocket of her cardigan.

‘Could I have one?’

‘My dear, of course. I didn’t realize that you were a smoker.’

‘I’m not really. At least, every now and then I have one.’

Silence, because she could not think how to start. She looked at the calm, frank face of her mother-in-law. One was supposed to find that relationship difficult, but she felt nothing but a profound gratitude for the Duchy’s steady, perceptive kindness, right from the beginning when Rupert had brought her into this family, a spoiled, self-regarding girl, through the guilt and depression after that first baby’s death, and then all the war years when Rupert was missing. It had been the Duchy who had encouraged her to go and work in the convalescent home at Mill Farm, the Duchy who had never criticized her inability to deal with Clary and Neville. But, above all, although she was sure that the Duchy had been aware that she went to London so much because she had a lover, and then, when he turned up, that it was Jack, she had neither confronted her with it nor betrayed her afterwards. She found herself trying to say some of this now. ‘You have always been so good to me, even at the beginning, when I must have seemed incredibly selfish and irresponsible.’

‘My dear, you were simply very young. You were only a year older when you married than I had been when I did.’ After a pause, she said, ‘I found it difficult enough adapting my romantic attitude to reality. Husbands do not spend their lives constantly on their knees before one, offering bunches of flowers, but girls in my day had silly notions of the kind put into their heads – one read novels that contained a good deal of that kind of thing, and, of course, one’s parents never
told
one what marriage and parenthood were really like. People did not consider it necessary or desirable to inform the young of anything that lay ahead.’

When the Duchy shifted so that she was facing her, Zoë had a sudden fear that, at last, here was coming an indictment, the forfeit of her mother-in-law’s good opinion, but it wasn’t that.

‘I’ve always thought that you had a difficult time – inheriting two children, particularly Clary, who missed her own mother so much. And then the grief about the first baby – and, most of all, Rupert’s long absence with all the miserable uncertainty attached to it. I think you’ve done well – very well indeed.’

At the mention of grief about the first baby, she felt herself beginning to blush. A brief affair with her mother’s doctor, its humiliating dénouement and dreaded consequence was something that she had managed almost to expunge from conscious memory. Now she knew that it lay there, like an iceberg in the centre of her conscience, and at that moment it came to her that although she felt she could never bring herself to confess about Philip, she might, perhaps, manage to tell Rupert about Jack. And here was the Duchy, wise, kind, unexpectedly understanding – the best person for advice on such an explosive and delicate matter.

She did ask her.

‘Oh, no, my dear! No, no! You must understand that I do not blame you for anything to do with that poor young man, but part of your responsibility now is to bear that experience by yourself. Do not burden your husband with it.’

She felt her hands being taken, pressed, but the Duchy had met her eye and held it.

‘But if—’ She struggled, uncertain of how much she should say. ‘
He
– Rupert – isn’t happy. He feels – I think he feels bad about not telling us he was alive when he could have. He didn’t want to talk about it, but if I told him things first, he might find it easier—’

Afterwards, she was never sure but it had seemed to her that the steady gaze had faltered, the sincerity shadowed by something else, but it was gone before she was even sure that it had been there. ‘I think,’ the Duchy said, ‘that you should not try to get him to tell you about France. Leave it to him. If he wants to talk about it, he will.’ She reached down and picked up her basket of sweet peas. ‘You have a great deal of future before you both. My advice to you is that you should pay attention to that.’ She took her arm and gave it a little squeeze. ‘You did
ask
me.’

She had asked, that had been the advice, and she had taken it.

In the autumn, the house at Brook Green had been put on the market, but London was full of houses for sale in various states of disrepair, and as they could not buy anywhere else until it did sell, they moved in with Hugh, who was delighted to have them.

On the whole, the arrangement worked very well, although whether this was because it was acknowledged to be temporary, or whether she was so used to living with the family that it was easier to continue like that, she didn’t know. The children seemed pleased: Wills, because it postponed his going to a preparatory boarding school, and Juliet, because she loved her morning school and quickly developed a full social life with endless tea and birthday parties with friends she made there. Ellen, installed in a back basement room that Hugh furnished for her, took over most of the cooking, and seemed relieved not to have to keep climbing stairs all day. The children had their nursery meals in the kitchen; Ellen still washed, ironed and mended their clothes, but Zoë got them up in the mornings and supervised their baths after their supper. Hugh had insisted upon giving up his bedroom to her and Rupert, and also spent two nights a week in his club so that they should have some evenings to themselves. Mrs Downs, a large sad lady who described herself, to Rupert’s delight, as bulky but fragile, now came four mornings a week to clean the house. She was one of those people who habitually looked on the black side of everything with a cheerfulness that bordered upon the macabre. When the war came to an end, Hugh had reported that she had said: ‘Well! We’ve got the next one to look forward to, I suppose. You can’t have everything in this life.’ And when General Patton was paralysed from his frightful collision with a truck in Frankfurt and subsequently died, she had remarked that it came to all of us in the end – ‘You’ve only got to wait for it.’ Rupert had started reading out pieces of news in the morning paper and adding Mrs Downs’s comments. During family life, at meals and so forth, Rupert was slowly becoming more like his old self; it was when they were alone together that he was constrained. He was unfailingly nice to her, consulting and considering her wishes about everything they did together, what plays and films they saw, which restaurants they went to afterwards, asking her if she liked what she had chosen to eat, wanted later in the evenings to go dancing (she never wanted to do that). In bed they had achieved a kind of conspiratorial calm: when they spoke it was in hushed voices, as though each was afraid of being overheard, as though they were trespassing on unknown territory. Their speech was mostly questioning about each other’s pleasure, or courteous reassurances. She tried to please him and he said that she did; he asked her if things had been good for her, and she said, or implied, small, protective lies.