Casting Off (3 page)

‘The Old Man would say that it was setting a dangerous precedent. If
she
gets it, everyone else will think they’re entitled to the same treatment.’

‘That’s absurd,’ she said – quite sharply for her. ‘
He
needn’t know, and nor need any of the staff.’

He looked at her: her expression was uncharacteristically ferocious – an expression so ill-suited to her that it made him want to laugh. ‘You’re absolutely right, of course. You’ve completely melted my stony Tory heart.’

She smiled then, wrinkling her nose in the way she always did when she wanted to add affection to a smile. ‘Your heart isn’t in the
least
stony, dear old boy.’

Then Sid returned; he called for the bill, and Rachel said that she would go and find the ladies.

As soon as she was gone, Sid said, ‘Thanks for the lunch, it was very good of you to have me.’

He looked up from writing the cheque: she was fiddling with the coffee sugar and he could not help noticing her strong, elegant, but somehow mannish hands.

‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘that I know I should have shut up about what are, from your point of view, purely family matters, but she
never
gives herself a chance! She’s
always
worrying about other people – never gives herself a thought. And I supposed that now the war is over – here anyway – at last she might consider some life of her own.’

‘Perhaps she doesn’t want one.’

For some reason, although he couldn’t for the life of him think why, this quite harmless remark seemed to go home. For a split second she looked positively stricken; then she said so quietly that he could barely hear her, ‘I do hope you’re not right.’

Rachel returned. They parted in the street outside, he to go back to the office, and they for a shopping spree in Oxford Street, at HMV for records, and Bumpus for books – ‘It’s so handy that they’re practically next door to each other.’ There was a faint, mutual atmosphere of apology.

Much later, in the early evening when he’d finished at the office, had caught a twenty-seven bus back to Notting Hill Gate and walked down Lansdowne Road to Ladbroke Grove and let himself into his silent house, he remembered Rachel’s remark about his heart not being stony. It seemed to him that his heart was not so much a matter of texture, it was more a question of whether it still existed at all. The effort of trying to turn grief into regret, to live entirely on past nourishment, even to keep the sharper parts of nostalgia credible (he found himself beginning to doubt and struggle with the intricacies of the smaller memories), and, most of all, the fearful absence of anything that could begin to take their place, had worn him down. Feeling had become an exercise that no longer enhanced the present; he slogged from one day to the next without expectation that one would be different from another. He was capable of irritation, of course, with small things like his car not starting, or Mrs Downs failing to collect his laundry, and anxiety – or was it simply anger? – at Edward’s behaviour over Diana Mackintosh (he had refused point blank to meet her); since the time when he had failed to get Edward to see that he must give her up, Hugh had refused even to discuss the matter. This resulted in it being very difficult to discuss anything with Edward in the old, easy way that they had used to do, and left them in a state of mutual disagreement and irritation about things like the Southampton project, which he thought thoroughly ill-advised, a dotty way to use their capital and something which, if there had not been this other profound, private rift, he might have been able to reason Edward out of. At any rate, he missed their old intimacy and affection, compounded by the fact that in the old days it was exactly the kind of thing that he would have been able to resolve by talking it over with Sybil, whose attention and good sense he had come to value even more now that they were no longer available. He tried to have conversations with her about it, but it was no good, he missed her precisely because he could not become her in the duologue. He would say his say – and there would be silence while he battled with his failure to imagine how she would have responded. He had never had the same intimacy with Rupert; his being six years younger had been crucial. When he and Edward had gone to France in 1914, Rupert had been at school. When he and Edward had gone into the firm together, Rupert had gone to the Slade and had been determined to be a painter and have nothing to do with the family business. When he
had
come in, it had been after a lot of dithering, and had been largely, Hugh now felt, because he wanted more money to please Zoë. Then, since his amazing reappearance – long after (although it was not voiced) everyone had given up hope of it – he had seemed, after the initial family celebration, to be curiously withdrawn. Hugh had had one good evening with him – had taken him out to dinner the evening after the Navy had relinquished him, and before it they had drunk a bottle of champagne together at home. Rupert had asked about Sybil and he had told him about those last days when he and Sybil had talked and talked and discovered that they had both known that she was going to die and had each tried to shield the other and the sweet relief when this was no longer something that either of them felt the need to do. He remembered how Rupert had stared at him without speaking, his eyes filled with tears, and how, for the first time since her death, he had felt comforted, felt some of the rigid blocked grief begin to dissolve from this silent, complete sympathy. They had gone out together afterwards to dine, and he had felt almost light-hearted. But it had never been like that again: he sensed that there was some mystery about Rupert’s long time away and his reticence about it, and after one tentative attempt, he did not pry. He imagined that if one had been so isolated for so long, a return to ordinary family life must be difficult and left it at that.

There were the children, but his affection for them was beginning to be tainted by anxiety and feelings of inadequacy about them. Without Sybil, he felt that he was losing his nerve. For instance, with Polly – he was fairly sure that she had fallen in love, some time about last Christmas was when he had noticed this, but she hadn’t told him, had brushed off his (probably clumsy) attempts to give her openings for confidence. Nothing seemed to have come of it: for months she had been listless, polite, without her usual spirit. He worried about her, felt shut out, was afraid of boring her (this was the worst thing because if that was true, or became true, she would only spend time with him from pity). When he had discovered that Louise and Michael were giving up the house in St John’s Wood, he had thrown out a very casual suggestion that she and Clary would always be welcome to take up their old rooms at the top of the house, but Poll had only said, ‘That’s jolly kind of you, Dad,’ and changed the subject, so he was pretty sure that she wouldn’t. And that made staying on in this house absurd. He only used his bedroom, the kitchen and the small back drawing room; everything else was shut up and probably getting filthy dirty, as Mrs Downs could not possibly clear the whole place in the two mornings a week that she came. The place needed some staff, a family – above all, a mistress . . . The thought of moving appalled him: it was something he had only ever done with Sybil. With her it had been an exciting adventure each time. They had begun married life in a flat in Clanricarde Gardens – all they could afford. It wasn’t a nice place at all, being the ill-converted floor of a huge tall stucco house whose owner needed the income. It had enormously high ceilings with paint-encrusted friezes, huge draughty sash windows and a gas meter for the fires that swallowed shillings as voraciously as the wide cracks in the floorboards devoured Sybil’s hairpins or the buttons off his clothes. Poll had been born there, but soon after they had moved to the house in Bedford Gardens. That had been a wonderful move. Their own little house with its tiny front and back gardens and a wisteria that reached the iron balcony outside their bedroom. He remembered their first night there, eating their first Bellamy pork pie and drinking the bottle of champagne that Edward brought when he came to fetch Poll to stay until they had got her room decorated. Hugh had taken a week of his holiday, and he and Sybil had painted the house together, had picnic meals and slept on a mattress in the sitting room while he laid the hardwood floor in their new bedroom. It had been one of the happiest weeks of his life. Simon had been born in that house, and they had only moved where he was now when Sybil became pregnant for the third time.

By now he had changed his shoes, washed, made himself a whisky and soda and settled down to listen to the six o’clock news. It was even more depressing than he had expected. Churchill, who had not been opposed by either Labour or Liberal candidates, had lost over a quarter of the poll to an independent – a man he had never heard of. He leaned over and switched off the wireless. Silence invaded the room. He sat for some minutes, trying to think of something that he could do, could have, to distract himself. He could go to his club where he would probably find someone to dine with and perhaps have a game of billiards, but everyone would be full of election talk, and collective depression was not an inviting prospect. He could ring up Poll – he
could
, but he knew that he wouldn’t. He rationed himself to ringing her once a week, did not want her to feel that he was interfering with her life or being a burden. Simon was off somewhere with his friend Salter – a bicycling holiday in Cornwall. He realized now that Simon had worked so hard this last year at school in order to get into Oxford because that was where Salter was going. Well, why not? He knew that Sybil would have been keen on it, partly, of course, because it deferred his being called up, and now might even mean that when he was, he would not actually have to fight. And she would, anyway, have approved of Simon going to a university, attaching far more importance to education than the family did. The Brig thought it was a waste of time and Edward was pretty dismissive, but then he had hated his school life and had been delighted that their war had curtailed it. Whenever universities were mentioned, Edward would bring up the pre-war debate in the Oxford Union where there had been some ghastly pacifist vote, which had showed, Edward had repeatedly said, how degenerate the young had become, the implication being that places like Oxford simply filled the young with decadent ideas. Of course, the war, when it came, had utterly disproved this, but it had not really allayed the male Cazalet view that education should stop as soon as possible in order that real life could begin. That Simon was to read medicine had made the whole project more respectable: the Duchy, Villy and Rachel were deeply in favour; it was really only the Brig and Edward who passively disapproved, and that, he knew, was because they thought that all male Cazalets should go into the family firm. Anyway, Simon was not available for company. Tomorrow he would be going down to Sussex, and he’d think of things to do with Wills who, he felt, suffered from too much female company. Tonight he could not be bothered to go out. He made himself another drink and descended to the basement, where, after some searching, he found a tin of Spam, the rather stale remains of a loaf from which he had been making his morning toast all week, and a couple of tomatoes brought up from Home Place last weekend. He put these things on a tray with the tin opener and went back to the drawing room. A quiet evening at home, he told himself, would do no harm.

They were running late, Edward reflected, although he ought to have known they would be. Whenever he went to Southampton unexpected problems came up, and today had been no exception. He’d gone down to interview a couple of blokes to be assistant wharf manager, and he’d taken Rupert with him because Rupert hadn’t even seen the place and – as it was beginning to look as though he would be the only candidate for running it – it was high time that he was put in the picture. He’d meant just to interview the chaps and then they’d have a jolly good lunch and he would show Rupe round and generally enthuse him with the project. But it hadn’t turned out like that. The first bloke had been hopeless – far too full of himself and of pointless breezy little anecdotes that were meant to show him in a good light but actually put them off him – and pretty cagey about his previous experience. The second man was late, on the old side and very nervous, clearing his throat every time before he spoke and sweating, but his track record was good: he’d run a softwoods sawmill throughout the war and was only leaving because the firm was taking somebody back out of the Army who had had the job before. Edward had the impression that he was older than he said he was, but he didn’t push that one, and when the interview was over he asked Rupert what he thought.

‘He seemed all right, but I wouldn’t know whether he could do the job.’

‘Well, it’s all we’ve got to choose from.’

‘Now it is. But any moment there’ll be hundreds – or dozens, anyway – of men wanting a job.’

‘But we need someone
now
. Unless you think you could do it as a stop-gap.’