Casting Off (22 page)

‘And Mummy’s bought a house in London anyway. And she says you have lots of money to buy another one if you want. I’ve put all the furniture and stuff in the coach house. If you don’t mind, I must go to bed now. I have to get up for Richard in the night.’

He asked what time breakfast was.

‘Well, I have it at six, because of getting it for everyone else. They have it in their rooms.’

‘We’ve really got to talk a bit more about all this.’

‘I can’t tomorrow because I’m taking Albert to the dentist quite early. Anyway, Dad, I don’t think I’ve much more to say. I think you ought to talk to Mummy, she knows all about it. Would you put out the lights when you go up?’

That was it. She took his breath away. She seemed completely unaware of the outrageousness of the situation. He gulped down the whisky and gave himself another. He’d buy her another bottle, but he needed a proper drink to calm his nerves. He limped up the two flights of stairs to bed (how on earth did she get the poor chaps up even one flight?) to his freezing room. It was so cold that he wore his pyjamas on top of his vest and pants. He lay awake for most of the night with angry, circular thoughts. It seemed to him that he was facing a well-planned conspiracy to deprive him of his house and home. Jessica’s part in it enraged him, but it also made him feel frightened. If she really refused to leave London, how could he live here? He couldn’t contemplate it on his own.

He left as soon as he could the next morning, and on the train rehearsed various ways of tackling Jessica and her perfidy. Although Nora’s calm assurance that she almost had a
right
to the house had rendered him at the time almost speechless, he could not altogether blame her. It was clear to him that Jessica was largely responsible. He alternated between wanting to vent his rage upon her, ‘to put her in her place’, and wondering rather tremulously how he could coax and prevail upon her to
want
to live in the country. For, he now realized, she had in various ways intimated to him that she wanted to stay in London. He hadn’t taken a great deal of notice of the hints, casual remarks, that had been thrown out. Frensham was their home and of course they were going back there. But now he saw that she had always, in fact, been decided, and was afraid of her determination.

‘You might have told me what was going on,’ was what he did manage to say.

‘Oh, darling, I knew you had a lot on your mind. I was really trying to make things easier for you.’

‘The things she’s done to the house!’

‘Only things that were necessary for the poor patients.’

‘She’s taken the Virginia creeper right off the front. That can’t have made much difference to them.’

‘There was appalling damp, darling. The walls had to be rendered with some damp-proof stuff.’

‘But I did have a good idea,’ she said some minutes later.

‘When was that?’

‘
I
thought why not convert the coach house into a little weekend retreat? Don’t you think that would be rather fun? It could be quite small and cosy and easy to run.’

‘I don’t want to live somewhere small and cosy and easy to run.’

‘Raymond, I
do
. I’ve spent most of my life struggling with places and having to do everything, and now, just when I might have expected to stop doing that and have some servants to do things, there aren’t going to be any. So I do think you might look at things from my point of view.’

That was the only way he was going to be allowed to consider them, he thought resentfully. He was silenced, while she told him that
he
wasn’t going to do the housework
or
the cooking, and that she was absolutely sick of doing that. ‘I want to have things as simple as possible, so that at least there’s some time for other things.’

When, some weeks later, he said what a pity it was that they couldn’t have Angela’s going-away party at Frensham, she retorted, ‘That would have been out of the question even if we had been living there. We couldn’t begin to put enough people up for the night. It would always have had to be London.’

She usen’t to be like this, he thought. Before that little worm Clutterworth had come along she had always tried to fit in. Now she had joined the Bach Choir and was also having singing lessons.

‘Where
does
Angela want her party to be?’

‘She doesn’t mind. I thought Claridges would be nice.’

‘How many people does she want?’

‘She’s going to make a list. About twelve, she thinks – not counting the family, of course. I should think we shall be about fifty, counting the children. And then just a few of us for supper afterwards.’

‘Shouldn’t we give them all supper?’

‘It would be awfully expensive.’

‘Never mind that. I’d like to give her a really good send-off.’

‘All right, darling. Whatever you say.’

She leaned forward to allow the servant to put her pillows into a sitting position – Mamma had always said one must try to make servants’ lives easier for them in every way possible – and waited until her breakfast tray was placed on the bed table in front of her. She was so excited.

‘Did you know I’m going to India, Harrison?’

‘No, darling, I didn’t. Who with?’

It wasn’t Harrison: it was Kitty’s little daughter, what was her name, Beryl? Barbara? It began with a B she was sure . . . Rachel, that was it. How she had grown! Shot up, as Papa used to say, to quite an unbecoming height for a girl. She looked at the tray again. ‘They have coddled my egg, haven’t they? Coddled eggs are far more digestible than boiled. I must make a good breakfast because . . .’ But she could not remember why she should, although she knew there was a very good reason.

‘Lady Tregowan!’ she cried triumphantly. It was all coming back to her. ‘Mamma’s friend, Lady Tregowan, is chaperoning me. I really think, you know, that I should have more than one egg before such a journey.’

‘Darling, we haven’t got many eggs. I know the war is over, but it’s still difficult.’

War? What could war have to do with eggs? Sometimes, she felt, people fobbed her off with the flimsiest of excuses. However, it did not do to make a fuss. In this spirit, she allowed her niece to help her into her bedjacket and to tie a napkin round her neck.

‘Actually, we’re going to London, Aunt Dolly. Don’t you remember?’

She smiled to conceal her irritation. ‘
First
. My dear, I am not so foolish as to suppose one could board a ship – any ship –
here
. Naturally we are going to London first. Then we may well go to Liverpool or’ – she searched for other places by the sea – ‘or
Brighton
, possibly. That is something I do not know. Because nobody has told me!’

‘Shall I butter your toast for you?’

‘That would be most kind.’ She accepted a thin triangle with the crusts cut off – very little butter, she noticed, but when she mentioned this, ever so tactfully, Rachel made some incomprehensible excuse about rations. Perhaps Mamma was worrying about her figure. Ah! Give her time and she should solve any mystery.

‘Maud Ingleby is a very good sort of girl, but Papa described her as plain as a pikestaff. Between you and me, I think it most unlikely that she will marry well – even in India.’ Seeing that her niece looked mystified, she explained, ‘Maud is Lady Tregowan’s daughter.’ She had picked the shell off the top of her egg and was cutting the faintly translucent white dome. It was one of those eggs with a very small yolk, you could see.

‘Flo is very cross, you know, not to be coming too. But Lady Tregowan would only take one of us and Papa said it should be me. “With Kitty getting married, you will be holding the fort,” I said to her, but I fear hers is not a happy nature as she shows no sign of making the best of it.’ She put down her spoon. ‘You know, I am afraid something has
happened
to Flo.’ She looked searchingly at Rachel to see whether she was concealing anything.

‘She seems to be avoiding me.’

There was a silence. Rachel had gone to the window, and was drawing the curtains. ‘Rather a dreary day, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to drink your tea, darling, before it gets cold,’ she said, as she left the room.

When she was alone, her mind filled suddenly with disturbing thoughts. Something was not right; she knew it. She was not at home: this was not Stanmore – she was somewhere quite else. Staying with Kitty! That was it. But where
was
Flo? She remembered someone – a man she most certainly did not know – saying something about Flo having gone to her father, but what on earth could that mean, and who
was
he? Everybody had listened to him – you could have heard a pin drop. Flo’s father was
her
father, of course. Anyway, Flo could not have gone to him because he was dead; he died in the winter and she was not able to go to India after all – she had to stay at home with Flo and help look after poor Mamma. It was still a fearful muddle. If she had not been able to go to India then she couldn’t be going to India now . . . The bubbling excitement had all died away and she felt nothing but disappointment and dread. ‘It was the worst disappointment of your life,’ she told herself. But at least that meant that Flo had no reason to sulk, to keep away in this cruel manner; she would get Mamma to speak to her about it. But that was no good because she could now remember as clearly as anything that Mamma was dead too.

The trouble was not that she could not remember things – she had too much to remember, more than most, she supposed, and this made it difficult to sort out their order. For instance, she was perfectly certain that when she had stayed here before, with Kitty, Flo had slept in a bed over there – by the window, because she had always had a passion for fresh air. Mamma had died from getting a chill, so perhaps it ran in the family. It had been quite a small funeral, she remembered, only Flo and Kitty and herself, the family doctor and his wife and, of course, the servants. She had been to much larger funerals in her day – she could
not
remember when it was; in one way it seemed to have happened a long time ago, and in another it felt as though it had happened yesterday. Yesterday must be nonsense, because yesterday she had been packing, sorting things out and packing. So – and this was what was so confusing – one did not pack things unless one was going away.

Her egg had got cold but she persisted in eating it because to go on a journey without a proper breakfast was, as Papa used to say, sheer folly. I have my common sense, she thought, as she scraped the inside of the shell for remaining scraps of white. Perhaps she was simply
ending
her visit with Kitty, and going home. And perhaps Flo had gone ahead of her to get the house ready. She was the one with common sense, but Flo had always been the practical one, and who knew what those wretched Zeppelins might have done to the house? Of
course
! That was what little Rachel (only she wasn’t so little nowadays, more of a beanstalk one might say) meant when she was chattering about shortage of eggs, although what eggs had to do with Zeppelins, she really couldn’t think. ‘I really cannot
think
! she repeated to herself, glad to have found something so absurd to account for this loss. But things were falling into place. There had been a terrible war (this
was
a terrible war? she wasn’t quite clear about that) and so many gallant young men had been killed that no odium could any longer attach to being unmarried: there were simply not enough men to go round. In any case, she had always thought that whereas she would rather enjoy being
engaged
to someone, marriage might be rather—

‘I suppose Flo has simply gone before me?’ she said to Rachel when she came to collect the tray.

Rachel stooped and kissed her. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think that’ s it.’

‘Just look at me for a moment, would you? No, don’t move your head – just your eyes. That’s perfect.’ He smiled admiringly. Lady Alathea stifled a yawn and smiled back.

Her eyes were small, pale blue, but mercifully fairly far apart. He could make something of them. He had made them darker, of course, and larger, and he had substituted their vacancy with an alert, enquiring expression – as though Lady Alathea was about to ask an intelligent question. The trick was a likeness, but a flattering likeness. She had a rather pudgy nose, and he had sharpened it – he had even managed to give her face some shape by heightening the colour high up under the eyes. But her mouth defeated him. It was small and thin, more like a slit in her face with narrow edging than a mouth, and this tricky state was compounded by her painting quite another mouth in dark red lipstick round it. During the sittings, she usually licked most of the lipstick off, which was the case now. It was midday, and he was due to lunch with his mother.