Casting Off (51 page)

Mrs Headford spent the afternoon writing letters – or, rather, although she had described this activity in the plural, one rather long letter, which she asked Zoë to post when she went to fetch Juliet from her dancing class. The subject of her mother leaving was still not mentioned between them.

She took her shopping – to her favourite old-fashioned drapers, Gaylor and Pope, where when you paid the lady at the counter wherever you bought what you wanted, your money and bill were put into a small canister and whizzed away along wire to the cashier, returning with your receipted bill and any change required. Mrs Headford had made a list and they ploughed through it: knickers, warm stockings, bedroom slippers, some petersham ribbon to trim her summer hat, buttons for the cardigan she was now able to finish, bias binding, elastic, some hairnets, a bath-cap, and a bag to keep her knitting in. She was indefatigable, and kept remembering things that she wanted that she had not put on the list.

Zoë had resolved to be infinitely patient about the expedition, and to take her mother out to lunch after the shopping was done.

‘Oh, I should like that,’ she said, when this was proposed. Marylebone High Street also contained one of those places where chiefly women went, generally for elaborate cake and tea or coffee, but which also served simple, genteel luncheon dishes, such as omelettes or cauliflower cheese, and they went there, and sat at a very small round table so surrounded by carrier bags that the waitress could hardly reach them.

‘I seem to have bought the shop up,’ her mother said happily.

‘Shopping clearly does you good.’

‘And things are much better now, aren’t they, Zoë, now that you know I’m going.’

‘You know I’m worried about that.’

‘Yes, dear. But I shall be all right. Doris is very good to me, and she will help me with the cooking, and, as Maud always said, Avril is a brick. And I think I shall get a cat for the company.’ Later, she said, ‘And of course you must bring Juliet for a visit. As you know, we’re not far from the seaside.’

‘She’s absolutely
determined
,’ she told Rupert that night.

‘Perhaps you’d better take her down and make a point of seeing this friend of hers and asking her to get in touch with us if she’s worried.’

‘Oh, God! I suppose I’d better.’

‘I’m only pointing out that if you’re worried about her this would be something you could do about it.’

She sensed that they were nearly quarrelling and that it was because she was so full of conflicting feelings about it. She did not tell him that, in the taxi coming home after the shopping spree, her mother had said, ‘You know, Zoë, I don’t think you appreciate how lucky you are to have your husband back from the war. You’re not faced with being a widow at twenty-four as I was, with a little girl to bring up on my own. He’s a very nice man and you should do everything you can to make him happy.’

‘I think he
is
happy.’

‘Do you, dear? Well, I’m sure you know best.’

Nothing more was said, but again, this parting shot of her mother’s unnerved her. Was he happy? He was devoted to Juliet and when he was doing things with her he was the old Rupert she had married – kind and funny, full of small jokes and sweetness of temper. With her he was patient, gentle and, she now felt, somewhat bored: there was nothing light about their relationship – it seemed to be composed of myriad small duties, and whenever these seemed, temporarily, to come to an end, there was a kind of void, a feeling of tension and uncertainty. With Ellen back, there were fewer tasks for Zoë, and consequently more of the tension.

The letter from Avril Fenwick arrived promptly – she must have replied by return of post, Zoë thought, as she took it in on her mother’s breakfast tray.

When she went to fetch the tray, she found her mother still in bed, the letter spread before her and her breakfast untouched.

‘Oh Zoë!’ she cried. ‘Such news! Such a wonderful letter! I’ve never had such a letter in my life. Poor Avril! She didn’t want to tell me because she thought I would be so upset, but when
I
wrote to her she says she saw her way clear at once! And she
was
ninety-six, after all. As Avril says, it was a good age and she had a wonderful life. But it’s so
kind
of her! I can’t get over it!’

‘Mummy, perhaps I’d better read the letter.’

‘Do, dear. It’s such a wonderful letter, do.’

She did. She had gathered that old Mrs Fenwick had died, and read through the paragraph that enumerated her many – Zoë felt hitherto well-concealed – virtues. Her courage, the way she always spoke her mind, never mind to whom or the circumstances, her zest for life – and here there was a menu of the foods she had most enjoyed – her high standards about other people’s behaviour, her wonderful endurance of a difficult marriage, to a man who was always either working or obsessed by his collection of butterflies and whose early death had proved a blessing in disguise, Mother had never really seen the point of men . . . Zoë gave up at this point and went on to the next page. Here, Miss Fenwick suggested at some length that Mrs Headford might like to ‘team up’ with her, share her cottage and ‘stick it out’ together. She said how much she would enjoy looking after her, what a lot they had in common, how, if they pooled their resources, they would have more money, and all kinds of little trips might be arranged, and finally what a kindness it would be if Cicely were to accept, since she contemplated living alone, after all these happy years with Mother, with such dread. Finally, she begged Cicely to think it over carefully without hurrying about her decision, and meanwhile she would be delighted to get Cotter’s End ready for her return. The letter ended ‘with ever so much love, Avril’.

‘Isn’t it wonderful of her? When she had her own grief to bear, to think of me.’ She was trembling with excitement. ‘If you don’t mind, Zoë, I shall send her a telegram. I should go at once. To think that she’s gone through the funeral weeks ago and I never knew! So the sooner I go the better.’

‘Would you like to speak to her? You could ring her up.’

‘I couldn’t, dear. She’s not on the telephone. Her mother didn’t like the idea. They had one for a bit, but her mother said that Avril talked on it too much.’

The telegram was sent, and in it she arranged to leave in two days’ time.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Oh, no, dear. Avril will meet me. Either at Ryde, or she will come over on the ferry and meet me at the station in Southampton.’

All day, she talked about Avril and her letter. She had no hesitation about her decision, she said. It was the most wonderful opportunity. And then came out – streamed out – how frightened she had been at the prospect of living alone: the long evenings, the noises at night, the absence of anyone to talk to, the fear that she might not manage if anything went wrong – the gas cylinders, for instance, they were so heavy and could be dangerous, they could leak without you knowing it – and the shopping when she didn’t have a car and could not drive and so on. All of it made Zoë feel she had felt so unwelcome in London with them – with
her
.

When Rupert got back from work and was informed, he made Martinis and entered into her mother’s spirit of festivity. He listened to an account of the letter, was given it to read and then told its contents all over again; throughout, he was patient and charming to her, while she, Zoë, was virtually silent. When Ellen sent Juliet up to say goodnight, her grandmother said: ‘I’m going back home, Juliet. I’m going back to the Island. Will you come and visit me in the summer?’

‘Will there be other people on it?’

‘Oh, yes, dear. All my friends. It’s a big island. You’ve been there, you remember.’

‘I don’t because I was a baby.’ She shut her eyes tightly to kiss her grandmother and escaped.

‘Well!’ Rupert said, when Zoë’s mother had gone to bed and they were on their own in the drawing room. ‘All’s well that ends well. Are you taking her down?’

‘No. She wired her friend, and she’s coming
here
to escort her home. She seems to want to, and that’s it.’

‘Well, that seems to me a good thing,’ he said tiredly. ‘Obviously this Avril person is fond of your mother.’

‘She said – Mummy, I mean – how nice it would be for us to be on our own again.’

‘And will it?’

‘I don’t know, Rupert. Will it?’ She looked at him; there was a moment when they both seemed frozen. It came to her that that was how it had been for a very long time, and also that they could stay like that, or move on to something better or worse.

She said, ‘We’ve never talked about what it was like for either of us all those years that you were away. I want to now. I have to tell you something.’

He had been standing by the fireplace fiddling with the fire. Now he straightened up, looked quickly at her and then sat on the arm of the chair opposite: almost, she thought, as though he was poised for escape.

‘You sound very serious, darling,’ he said, and she recognized the voice that he used when he thought she was about to make a scene.

‘Yes. While you were away, I fell in love with someone. An American officer I met on a train coming back from seeing Mummy on the Island. He asked me to have dinner with him – and I did. It was the summer of 1943: I’d heard nothing from you for two years – not since the note that the Frenchman brought. I thought you were dead.’ She swallowed: that sounded like an excuse, and she didn’t want to make any excuses. ‘Anyway, that’s not the point: I think I would have fallen in love with him anyway. We had an affair. I used to go to London to be with him, telling all sorts of lies to the family. Only for short times – he was taking war pictures for the American Army, so he was often away. When it got to the Normandy landing, he was away a lot.’ She thought for a moment, she was anxious now not to gloss anything over, leave anything out. ‘He wanted to marry me. He wanted to meet the family – and particularly Juliet. We had our first – row – well, really the only one we ever had – about that. Because I wouldn’t agree—’

‘To marry him?’

‘No. I wanted to do that. But to tell the family about it when we didn’t know whether you would come back or not. And then, the following spring, nearly a year after the invasion and still we heard nothing from you, he had to go to photograph one of the concentration camps, I think it was Belsen. About a week later, he suddenly rang me at Home Place to ask me to go to London that night, and I couldn’t because I’d said I’d look after the children while Ellen had a weekend off. By then the war was so nearly over and I was – I was imagining going to America with him. I got back from taking the children for their afternoon walk and there he was, sitting next to the Duchy at tea. The Duchy was wonderful. I think she knew but she never said anything. She told me to take him into the morning room after tea so that we could be on our own. He was different – unreachable, somehow. He said he had to go back to London at once as he was flying the next morning. He was going to another camp. He said,’ for the first time she felt her voice trembling, ‘he said he was glad he’d seen Juliet. He said he was going to be away for a long time. Then he went.’ She stopped. ‘I never saw him again.’

‘He went back to America without a word?’

‘No. He died.’ It was a great effort to tell him how Jack had died, but she managed it. ‘About six weeks later, you came back. Oh. There was one important thing I’ve left out. He was Jewish. That’s why. Why he killed himself.’

There was a long silence. Then he got up and came over to her, took her hands and kissed them. ‘You’re still in love with him?’

‘No. I don’t think I could have told you if I was.’ Then she became anxious that some element of truth would elude her. ‘I shall always have love for him.’

‘I understand that,’ he said; she saw tears in his eyes.

‘It’s a great relief to have told you.’

‘I admire you so much for telling me.
Love
and admire you. You have been far braver than I.’

And while she was still trying to understand what he meant, he began to tell her his tale. As he told it, she could not imagine why none of this had occurred to her before. He had been away so long: he had been left by Pipette with this woman who had taken them in, and on whom he had in the immediate future to depend. When, in the telling, he lapsed from Michèle to the diminutive – his pet name for her – she felt a dart of jealousy and was almost glad of it. Then, as he told her about how the woman had gone to so much trouble to get him painting materials, she thought how little she had ever supported him in that, but when he described the visits of Germans to the farm, she realized how potent this isolation plus danger must have been. And then he came to the difficult part. The invasion, and his continued stay at the farm, and the reason for it. For he did not gloss things over, or excuse himself, or pretend that he had not loved her. She had wanted him to stay and see the child, and then she had sent him away. He did not even say that it had been he who had made that decision. ‘I am really trying to match your honesty,’ he said. ‘I can’t match you in anything else. It was not excusable to you,’ he said, ‘leaving you all that time without knowing. I owed Miche a great deal, but not, perhaps, that. But that is what I did. Archie said I should tell you,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t.’

‘Archie? You told
him
?’

‘Only Archie. I told no one else.’

‘Archie knew about Jack. I took Jack to have a drink with him one evening, and it was Archie who Jack wrote to before – he died. He came down to Home Place to tell me.’

‘He certainly has been a repository of family secrets.’

‘But that’s hardly his fault, is it? He’s simply the kind of kind, loyal person who gets told things.’

‘You’re right. Oh, Zoë, how much you have changed!’

‘Do you,’ she said – she was dreading the possible answer – ‘do you keep in touch with her?’

‘No. Oh, no. It was agreed that we should part completely. No letters, no visits, nothing at all.’

‘You must have found that very hard.’

‘It’s been hard for both of us.’