Casting Off (49 page)

‘I don’t want to look pretty, Gran.’

Mrs Headford thought this was a joke. At tea, Juliet reappeared minus the cardigan, wearing her father’s tweed cap the wrong way round, and a large charcoal moustache. ‘This is how I want to look,’ she said. She flatly refused to wear the cardigan at all, although every day, without fail, her grandmother asked why she wasn’t wearing it, until, in desperation, Zoë embroidered red poppies all round the cuffs and edge.

But now she could not knit, and the problem was how she should pass her time. Zoë offered books – novels that she thought light enough – but Mrs Headford simply opened and shut them and said she really only liked library books. This mysterious distinction involved regular trips to the library to select books which, in some cases, they already possessed. Rupert bought her a wireless for Christmas, and this certainly helped, although she remarked plaintively of this – as of reading – that one could not do it all the time. What she liked were little chats about her life in the Isle of Wight and little outings – rendered difficult because of the weather, and when influenza struck, impossible through lack of time. It seemed to Zoë that she spent all her time on freezing excursions to buy food, and then long hours preparing it, followed by exhaustive efforts to get the invalids – and her mother – to eat whatever it was. ‘I know I’m a rotten cook,’ she wailed to Rupert in the evenings, ‘but they all don’t like different things. Jules hates fish and milk puddings, and Mummy says stews give her indigestion, and Ellen won’t eat anything except Bovril made with powdered milk.’

Ellen recovered, and Rupert said that she had confided that she would like to spend a week with her married sister in Bournemouth.

‘I didn’t know she
had
a married sister!’

‘That’s where she always goes for her holidays. And she’s looking very frail – I think some sea air would do her good.’

‘Of course she must go.’ But she thought that she would still be doing everything, just when she had hoped that Ellen might take over the cooking again, at least.

Then, in the middle of that week, when Juliet was better but still not back at school and therefore bored and fractious, Hugh suddenly asked them to a party he was giving for Polly and Gerald.

‘Of course I can’t go,’ she said. ‘But you must.’

‘Darling, of course you can. Juliet will be tucked up in bed, and your mother will be here.’

‘She’s not very good with Jules.’

‘She won’t have to be anything with her, if Jules is asleep. Anyway, we can give her Hugh’s telephone number.’

So she agreed. She hadn’t been to a party for ages, and looked forward to it. ‘Don’t worry about
me
,’ her mother said, ‘I can always boil myself an egg.’

‘You won’t need to, Mummy. I’ll leave supper for you in the kitchen and Juliet will be asleep before we go.’

When Rupert came home from work, she was riffling through her wardrobe hopelessly. ‘I’ve nothing to wear!’

‘I’ll choose for you, then.’

‘You’ve got to wear black tie.’

‘I know.’ He was going through her dresses. She had far fewer clothes than she used to have. ‘You never wear this.’ He pulled out a short black silk dress. It was the one she had bought for her first evening with Jack.

‘I can’t wear a short dress!’

‘Well, nobody will have seen you in it because I certainly haven’t. And it looks pretty dressy to me. You should wear your hair up with it.’

In the end she did wear it. After all, she thought, either I should have thrown it away or I should wear it. It was simply taking another step away from Jack, and that was what she wanted to do.

They explained to Juliet that they were going to Uncle Hugh’s and that Gran would be there. This did not go down very well. ‘I really don’t want to stay here just with her. I want to come with you and see Wills.’

‘Wills is at school. You wouldn’t see him. And you haven’t got to talk to Gran. You’ll be asleep.’

‘I won’t! She might come into my room. She really
smells
so
awful
, Mummy.’

‘Jules, that’s nonsense – and rather unkind.’

‘It’s not unkind to say what people
are
. She smells . . .’ she wrinkled her nose as she thought ‘. . . she smells sort of like Irish stew with violets in it.’

‘Don’t you dare say that to her. It would hurt her feelings.’

‘I don’t want to say anything to her. She’s not good with children, my dear. That’s what.’

Rupert laughed when she retailed this exchange, but it worried Zoë. ‘Supposing she has a bad dream, or something?’

‘She won’t. She sleeps like a top, and your mother can always ring us at Hugh’s. After all, we’re only a few minutes away.’

Her mother was sitting in her armchair next to the gas fire. Zoë had undressed her earlier, and she was wearing her thick quilted dressing gown. ‘I can’t seem to get into this book,’ she said. ‘It’s all about a clergyman with a difficult wife – a depressing story.’

‘Well, perhaps you should give it up and listen to your wireless,’ she said, as she put the supper tray on the card table in front of her mother’s chair.

‘Oh, no, I don’t think I’d better. The batteries have run right down so that I can hardly hear it.’

‘You should have told me.’

‘I didn’t like to be a trouble.’

‘Here’s our telephone number at Hugh’s in case you need it. We’re just down the road, we can be back in a minute. Juliet is in bed. We’ll wait till she drops off.’

‘Don’t worry. I’m perfectly capable of looking after her. Mind you don’t catch cold in that dress, Zoë. It looks very skimpy to me.’

Rupert had said that he would tell Jules a story to settle her, and Zoë went upstairs to the sitting room to wait for him. Once, she thought, she would have wanted passionately to go to this party; she would have thought about it for weeks, would probably have made or bought a new dress to wear, and would have been utterly cast down if anything had happened to prevent her going. It seemed to her now to be a very long time since she had felt anything of the sort about anything at all. Ever since that evening before she had gone to the Island to fetch her mother, her relationship with Rupert had been in limbo: had altered neither for better nor worse; they were courteous, kind to each other and he had been, she recognized, immensely generous about having her mother, in spite of the many disadvantages this entailed. It cut down the time they could have alone together, but she thought, sadly, that perhaps that was a relief to him as well as to her. Certainly he never protested about it, any more than he teased her as he used to do. They were most at ease with or about Jules, whom he adored; but the rest of the time she sensed – not so much any more that he was withdrawn as that he was resigned. Looking at herself in the mirror over the fireplace, she saw her image, the piled-up dark hair, the thin black shoulder straps emphasizing the whiteness of her skin, and remembered looking at herself in Archie’s flat, when she had dressed there before she had gone to meet Jack, the stranger she had met on a train that morning. Then, she had worn her pearls twined in her hair as she had no other jewellery with her; now, she wore the paste ear-rings that Rupert had given her years ago the Christmas before they had gone skiing with Edward and Villy. She was looking at her reflection but she hardly saw it, because it came to her then that the feelings she sensed in Rupert were a reflection of her own for him. She was no longer withdrawn, but a kind of resignation had taken the place of withdrawal. She was becalmed, trapped by responsibility and goodwill – but without anything more heartfelt. The nearest she had come to natural, spontaneous feeling had been that evening before she had gone to her mother, when she had thought that Rupert did know – somehow – about Jack. She remembered her instant terror when she had asked him how did he know, and then the extraordinary tide of hysterical relief when she had realized that he was talking about her mother – he had known nothing about Jack. Now, she recognized that she also had been stabbed by a disappointment: it had been as though she had been dragged to the edge of a cliff and there had been nothing for it but to take the plunge, only to discover that it was not a cliff, merely a dreary slope. If she had been forced to tell him more about something he already knew, it would be over, one way or another – there would have been some movement, some release from careful immobility. But to do it in cold blood. I simply have not got the courage, she thought, and her image looked back at her with contempt.

‘She’s off. I say, that is a good dress!’ He picked up her overcoat and helped her into it.

‘Is there really going to be dinner for everyone?’

‘A buffet. His secretary has done all the arrangements. She’s pretty efficient so I expect it will be all right.’

Hugh’s house seemed transformed. The large L-shaped drawing room had a fire burning logs that had a wonderful fragrance, and the room was full of blue and white hyacinths. Hugh stood by the fireplace with Polly. She was wearing a pearl grey satin damask dress with a tight bodice and a long full skirt below her tiny waist.

‘This is Gerald,’ she said, after she had kissed them, and a young man with rather bulging eyes blushed.

‘I say, Poll! You do elevate prettiness to an operatic level!’

‘It’s my dress, Uncle Rupe. Dad gave it to me.’

She saw Hugh smiling with pride, and thought how much younger he looked when he smiled. When she said how lovely the room was, he smiled again and said that Mrs Leaf had done it all. ‘She’s here, as a matter of fact,’ he added. ‘I couldn’t let her arrange everything and then not come to the party.’

Simon, very tall and elegant in his dinner jacket, appeared with a tray of champagne: more people were arriving, and the party began.

Throughout it, the drinks, the greetings, the buffet – everyone went down to the dining room to collect a plate and a glass of wine – she was conscious of, fascinated by Polly and Gerald. Even when she could not see them, the power of their happiness radiated the room: their love, which seemed bewitchingly mutual, engendered love from everyone else. She remembered her first dinner at Chester Terrace, to meet Rupert’s parents and brothers. How much she had been in love with Rupert then! And Rupert?
Then
she had been sure that he adored her, but now her sense of what that meant had changed; now she could see that she had been in love with a man far older than herself who had a dead wife and two of her children. She had been clear that he wanted her, and she had equated that with love; her mother had brought her up to believe that appearance won everything that could be desired. When she had married Rupert, she had been in love with his desire for her; now, she was no longer sure what else she had felt. It had taken Philip and his sexual revenge upon her vanity, and then Jack (for a moment, she could not bear to think what Jack had felt about her) to teach her anything about love. Jack . . .
had
he loved her? Not enough to stay with her, at any rate. But perhaps that was not fair; perhaps he had loved her and she had been part of the life that he gave up. I did love him, she thought, for the first time without anguish, I wasn’t enough for him, but I loved him. It was some comfort.

In the car going home, Rupert was very quiet. When she asked him what he was thinking, he said, ‘I was just hoping that Clary would find someone she could love like that. But I’m afraid she’s not like Polly.’

‘She will get over it.’ She knew that Clary had fallen in love with a married man and that he had called an end to the affair.

‘Yes. But getting over something doesn’t mean that you’re the same person that you were before. Clary loves people very seriously.’

They got home to find that Juliet was up, barefooted in her nightdress. The back door to the kitchen that led on to the garden was open and she was chopping up a loaf of bread. ‘I’m feeding the poor birds,’ she said; her teeth were chattering. ‘I took them out one bowl, but it didn’t look enough, so I’m doing some more.’

While Zoë shut the door, boiled a kettle for a hot-water bottle and wrapped her in a blanket, she said that she had woken up because she had dreamed about a horrible seagull who stole all the food ‘and bit the other poor birds with his horrible beak, so I had to make some breakfast for them, Mummy’.

‘Why didn’t you go into Gran’s room?’

‘I did. She was asleep, all muddled in her chair with the lights on. She doesn’t like birds.’

‘Let’s put her in a hot bath,’ Rupert said. ‘The fastest way to warm her up. I’ll do it, you go and see to your mother.’

She found her mother as Jules had described, but with the added horror that her library book had fallen from her lap and been partially charred by the gas fire.

‘Oh dear! I must have dropped off.’

‘And you nearly set fire to the house, Mummy – look at your book!’

‘Oh dear!’

‘And Juliet woke up and you didn’t hear her – she came into your room and you were fast asleep, and now she’s probably caught her death of cold going into the garden.’

‘That’s very naughty of her. She shouldn’t have done that. I was here all the time. She had only to wake me.’

‘Oh, Mummy! You were meant to be looking after her! We go out for one evening and she might have died!’

‘Don’t shout at me, Zoë, I couldn’t help dropping off. How was I to know that she’d wake? You said she never did!’

Before she could stop herself, she completely lost her temper. ‘And
you
said you were perfectly capable of looking after her! And apart from possibly being burned to death, she’s probably caught pneumonia! After all these months, this is the first time I’ve ever asked you to do anything for me, and look what happens! Well, I’ll never ask you to do anything again, you can be sure of that!’

Her mother’s face, her trembling mouth and frightened eyes stopped her. She was standing, ineffectively tugging at the zip on her dressing gown.

‘I’m sorry. I’ll do that for you.’

‘I think I’d better pay a visit to the bathroom first. You needn’t wait for me. I can put myself to bed.’

Zoë picked up the supper tray and took it out to the kitchen. Then she went back to her mother’s room, turned out the gas fire, and took the counterpane off the bed. Then she waited: she felt shaky and sour, but she couldn’t leave things like this, she wanted to apologize and get the hell out.