Casting Off (61 page)

Archie met her at the station. He bent to kiss her, but she turned her face so that he only got her ear.

‘What’s up?’

‘Nothing’s up. Dad is giving me an allowance. And he sent you this cheque to pay you back for all the money you’ve spent on me.’

‘I’ve hardly spent any money on you.’

She didn’t want to have it out with him while they were in the car, so she didn’t reply.

‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said, as he dumped the shopping he had done on the kitchen table, ‘we’ll buy you some new clothes. You badly need some. I’m getting rather sick of those two torn old jerseys and those baggy corduroys.’

‘Well, when you go to France, you won’t have to see them any more, will you?’

‘Oh! That’s what it is! Clary! You are one for making mountains out of molehills.’

‘I’m not! It isn’t you
going
that I mind particularly, it’s you not
telling
me. Telling other people, and not me.’

‘I didn’t. I haven’t.’

‘Dad said you did, so don’t try to get out of it.’

‘He asked me if I was going back – no, he said, “I suppose you’ll be going back”, and I said that I hadn’t decided, but I might.’

‘To live there?’

‘Well, yes. If I go back I’ll expect to do a spot of living.’

‘Don’t be facetious! You see, you are serious about it. And I notice,’ she added, and could not stop her voice from trembling, ‘that you don’t ask me.’

‘Whether I may go? No, I don’t.’

‘No! Whether I would like to go with you.’

There was a dead silence. He was leaning against the sink, his back to the light. She could not see his face. She was sitting on the kitchen table fiddling with a paperback from the shopping basket.

‘I couldn’t stay in this cottage alone,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t be here all by myself for months and months. I’d go mad with – with nobody to talk to! Surely you can see that!’

He walked over to the table suddenly, put his hands on her shoulders, and then, surprisingly, folded his arms.

‘You could go back to London,’ he said. ‘You’ll need to get some other work to support you while you write. For a bit, anyway.’

‘I know about that,’ she said. She felt her eyes filling with tears. ‘I know I’ve got to find a job, and I will. It’s just – I don’t think I can do anything if you simply aren’t there. You tell me what to do, you see. And then I can do it.’

‘You’ve got accustomed to having two fathers.’

‘I suppose I have.’

‘Well,’ he said briskly, ‘you’ve got to grow up. You’ve got to stand on your own feet. One father is quite enough for most people.’

‘Why did you look after me if that’s what you think?’

‘Because you were in a bad way. But you’re not now, you’re over that and ready for the next thing.’

‘What next thing?’

‘Oh! You’ll find a nicer man than that ghastly Number One, and fall in love like a normal grown-up girl. Now stop snivelling and help me get lunch.’

‘I don’t want any lunch,’ she said, and could hear herself sounding like a sulking child, and felt angrier and more despairing than ever.

‘Well, I do.’

So she peeled potatoes and washed lettuce, and nobody said anything. When she had put the potatoes on to boil, she went upstairs to change out of her London clothes – her only skirt and a flannel shirt that had belonged to Archie. Then she put on her cotton trousers and one of Dad’s old shirts and didn’t comb her hair. Trying to tell her not to be dependent and then saying, ‘We’ll buy some new clothes!’ Trying to have it both ways. If he thought she would muck about with her appearance just to please him, he could think again. She could perfectly well get a job, not live here or at Blandford Street; she could start all over again. However awful life was it kept on going on. It was not a comforting thought. She took off the shirt and put on her holiest jersey. There is never really another person, she thought, only yourself.

When she went down again (which she found quite difficult – her dignity felt dangerously precarious, but she was bloody well not going to break down and ‘snivel’, as he called it), he looked up from mashing the potatoes and said quietly, ‘Clary. I would never do something like make plans to go away behind your back. If you thought that, then I apologize.’ And he looked at her and seemed quite friendly again.

For weeks after that she worked and worked – or rather re-worked. She had become perfectionist: nothing she wrote seemed quite right or good enough, and she became obsessed with getting at least the first chapter right.

And then, in April, he announced that he was going to Home Place for the weekend. He had come back from one of his visits to London, which he made most weeks, and he told her during supper.

‘Why?’

‘Because the Duchy asked me. Edward and his new lady are being invited together for the first time, and she asked me to be there.’

‘Oh.’

‘You could invite Poll for the weekend. I’m sure she’d like to come.’

‘I could if I wanted to, of course.’ She thought about it: having anyone, any outsider, would mean that she couldn’t work.

‘It would do you good to have a couple of days off,’ he said, as though he knew what she was thinking.

‘It wouldn’t. I’ll ask her when I’ve finished the book.’

So he had gone, and it felt very strange. She spent one morning reading all that she had written, and then decided to copy out the first chapter on the second-hand typewriter that he had given her for Christmas. If it was typed, she felt, she might be able to see it better. But when she had done that, it still didn’t seem right. She felt despair, and on Sunday evening she decided that she would show it to Archie – get him to read it and see how it struck him. If he says it’s absolutely no good, I’ll have to stop, she thought. But at least I’ll know.

He came back in good spirits. Yes, he had had a very nice time. Her father had been there, and Teddy with his incredible wife. She asked about Uncle Edward’s new lady, and he said that she seemed anxious to please, and he supposed she was all right as far as she went. ‘Which wouldn’t be far enough for me,’ he had added.

After supper she gave him the typed chapter. ‘I really want to know what you honestly think,’ she said. ‘Because if you don’t think it’s any good, I’d rather know and I’ll stop.’

He had looked up suddenly from the papers she had put into his hand and said, ‘Of course I will be honest with you, Clary, but
you
must remember that it will only be my opinion – not some cosmic edict. You mustn’t take
too
much notice.’

She could not bear to be in the room with him while he was reading it, so she went and washed her hair. When she came back to dry it in front of the fire, he had finished.

‘Well?’

‘Well, there’s some very good writing in it. Some of it almost felt
too
good.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘As though you are more concerned with how you are doing something than what it is you are doing. I like the simpler bits best. Tell me what you wanted to have in this bit. I mean, what you wanted me – the reader – to end up knowing.’

She told him. It didn’t take long, seemed quite small and clear.

‘Yes, well, that all seems quite right. But sometimes you have obscured that by getting too elaborate about it. Take the bit where Mary Anne realizes that her father isn’t interested in her. That’s a shock. I don’t think she would think about what the room looked like and her earliest memories of everything else just then. I think she would be too upset by what her father had said. But, that’s only a minor criticism. It reads as though you have had a number of second thoughts and so the feeling has got a bit lost. I think.’

‘In the first draft I just said: “So she was not loved.” That was it.’

‘You see? That’s far better. The feeling is there. Goodness, I’m no literary critic. Could I see your first draft?’

‘You won’t be able to read my writing.’

‘I think I can just about manage it.’

But she said she would type it out for him.

When he had read it and said he thought it was better, and why, she felt enormous relief.

‘Oh, Archie! That does cheer me! I was afraid you were just going to say it was bad in a different way.’

‘And what would you have done then?’

‘Don’t know. Given up, I expect.’

‘Don’t let me ever hear you say that. If you’re going to make writing your life, you’ve got to start depending on your own judgement. You may take notice of other people, but ultimately, it’s what you think is right that’s right.’

‘You often ask me what I think of your painting.’

‘Yes, but I’d still go on doing it whatever you said.’

She thought of all the times when he had shown her paintings and drawings accompanied by his own disparaging remarks about them, about the innumerable, often absurd, alternative careers that he then devised for himself when he said that he would throw in the sponge.

‘What are you smiling at?’

‘Nothing. I think in some ways we’re rather the same.’

Archie was painting a lot now. He took some pictures to London to show to galleries and came back rather gloomy. Only one had been at all interested, he said; it was the one where he had had a show before the war, and they wouldn’t give him one although they said they would take a couple of landscapes to put in a mixed show.

‘Well, that’s a start,’ she said.

‘I can hardly live on it, though, can I?’

‘We
are
living,’ she pointed out.

‘Just. But, of course, I’m expecting you to be a combination of Agatha Christie and Jane Austen and make thousands, while I shall simply be frightfully good – like van Gogh – and hardly make a penny.’

‘Funny. I was planning for you to be Mabel Lucie Atwell or Burne-Jones while I was Virginia Woolf.’

This became a game she enjoyed where insults – elaborate and oblique – could be exchanged.

Then, at the beginning of June, everything went wrong. Afterwards, when she tried to think what had started it, she could only come up with rather petty things, like it being a heat wave and Archie saying he hadn’t been sleeping well. What happened was that she’d put the kettle on for breakfast before having a bath and then she’d forgotten about it. Archie was out painting a picture he worked at before breakfast on fine days, so he didn’t smell the burning. Anyway, she finally smelt it, and tying her bath towel round her, ran down to the kitchen to find black smoke. She turned off the stove, and then, without thinking, she tried to pick up the kettle and, of course, burned herself. She cried out with the pain and went to the kitchen sink to put her hand under water and in doing this, her bath towel slipped and fell on the ground. So when Archie, who had heard her cry of pain, came into the kitchen, she was naked. He found the tube of tannic acid and made her pat her hand dry while he tucked the bath towel round her and then dressed her hand. It was quite a bad burn: the skin was going to come off. In spite of this, he seemed almost cross with her, saying she was bloody careless and – not quite saying it – implying that it served her right. He put on a saucepan for boiling water – the kettle was ruined – and said for goodness’ sake go up and put some clothes on. Not at all the way that
she
would have behaved if he had burned himself getting their breakfast. But when she pointed this out to him, he snapped at her again, saying that they didn’t feel the same about a lot of things, although he absolutely refused to say what.

That evening he announced that he was going to go away for a bit. ‘I want to sort things out,’ he said, ‘and I think you should too.’

And while she was wondering what he meant, he said, ‘Well, we can’t go on like this for ever.’

‘Why can’t we?’

‘Clary, for God’s sake, grow up! I’ve got to make a decision about my flat in London – and France. I can’t possibly afford both, which is more or less what I’m doing now. And you’ve got to learn to cope with your own life and not depend on another person for everything.’

‘I
can
cope.’

‘Good. Well, you won’t have any trouble while I’m away, then.’

‘Are you going to stay in France?’

‘I might. Haven’t decided. But part of the deal is that I don’t have to tell you where I am. Nor you me.’

‘I don’t mind telling you. In the least.’

‘I know that.’

‘How long is this going on for?’

‘I’ll be back for Polly’s wedding.’

‘That’s not until half-way through July. That’s six weeks!’

‘Just about.’

‘I can’t see the point of it at all.’ Then she said, ‘You said you’d help me to choose the clothes to wear for the wedding!’

‘Supposing the cottage catches fire? Or I get awfully ill?’ were some of the other things she said at intervals. But he only looked at her, shrugged, smiled, and said, ‘Well, if the worst comes to the worst, you’ve always got your dad in London. I agree that you’re no good at clothes, but Zoë will help you and she’s much better at that sort of thing than I am. And forgetting about kettles is the sort of thing that people of seventy-two do rather than twenty-two. You must take any advantage that can be found in being so pathetically
young
.’

He was so calm and maddening and unsympathetic that she felt more angry with him than sad, and when he left the following morning, she kissed him quite coldly on the cheek.

Three

THE OUTSIDERS

Summer 1947

She felt quite fagged and no wonder. She had been up half the night as, apart from little journeys to the bathroom, she had had to repack her cases. She had started packing the moment Kitty said they were to go, but by the time she had taken everything off the mantelpiece and out of her two top drawers, the case was full. ‘But how do I know what I shall need?’ she had exclaimed, as she watched hopelessly while Rachel unpacked the case and started again.

‘You’re only going for a fortnight or possibly three weeks, darling, you won’t need
all
the photographs, and I think the china dogs might get broken so we’d better leave them. Shall we just put in the nice one of Flo?’