Casting Off (66 page)

Then she had covered her typewriter in the small black office that was behind this room, collected her hat and her bag and slipped out. ‘Going early, are you?’ the office boy had said.

‘Yes. Mr Hugh’s not in today,’ she had replied. But why had she even bothered to say that? It wasn’t Alfie’s business.

She went home to pack up for the boys. Home was – had been for nearly seven years now – the bottom half of a house in Blomfield Road by the Regent’s Canal. She had chosen it because the rent was cheap, and because there was a large back garden for the boys. It had two bedrooms and a sitting room on the ground floor, and a dining room and a tiny kitchenette in the basement. It was damp, and difficult to keep warm, and some very strange people lived in the flat above, of whom she was slightly afraid, but it had been their home since soon after Ken had been killed.

She got home well before the boys were back from school, which was good because she could get their packing done far more peacefully without them. They were excited at the prospect of going away to camp for two weeks: the only thing that was worrying them was whether there would be an adequate supply of poplar leaves for their elephant hawk moth caterpillars. She got out the battered old leather case that had belonged to Ken. It no longer shut properly and had to have a leather strap round it. She’d done all their washing last weekend, so it was simply a matter of counting out enough of everything. Two vests each, two pairs of shorts, four shirts each and a pullover. They could travel in their sand shoes and just take sandals. Perhaps one pair of socks each? But she knew they wouldn’t wear them. They could travel in their macs – only they wouldn’t wear
them
either, and she’d have to beg them not to leave them behind in the train. Ration books would be required, and into them she pinned an address and telephone number in case she was needed. She finished the packing with their hats, bathing suits and a towel each. They could have the little case for their books, pen-knives, and any other clobber. Tom had a magnifying glass, with which he was mad keen to start a fire, and Henry would want to take his box Brownie camera. Then, of course, they would take Hoighty the grey monkey (Tom’s) and Sparker (Henry’s teddy). How the caterpillars were to travel, she didn’t know. What seemed so odd, she thought, was that they were not just going away from here for two weeks; they weren’t coming back here. They knew this and seemed simply excited by the prospect, but looking round their overfilled, untidy room that was so crowded by their possessions and interests, she felt a pang. It was the end of an era.

They were back. The boys’ room looked on to the street, and she saw Elspeth, the girl she paid to take and fetch them to and from school, at the garden gate. She opened it and they surged through like a high tide. Elspeth waved and turned to walk back to the main road. A good thing she’d paid her and explained that she’d get in touch in the autumn, she thought, as she sped down to let them in.

‘We’ve got to pack!’ they shouted. ‘We’ve got to collect everything to pack!’

‘Not everything. Just enough for your fortnight in camp. You won’t need everything for that.’

They looked at each other. ‘Yes, we will.’

‘We will because we don’t know what we
will
want.’

‘You’ve got one small case. You can fill that, and that will be it. I’ve packed your clothes.’

‘We’ll hardly need any. Mr Partington says there’s a huge lake and we shall go on it most of the time.’

‘And in it,’ Henry added.

‘You go up and wash for tea.’

‘What’s for tea?’

‘Baked beans on toast.’

‘Oh,
Mum
!
Again!?
’

‘You love baked beans.’

‘We
like
them,’ Tom conceded. ‘But we have them so often we’ve stopped loving them.’

‘I can’t help that. That’s all there is. I’m saving the eggs for your breakfast.’

‘Tell you what,’ Henry said, following her to the kitchen. ‘We could have the eggs now, and the baked beans for breakfast. It would be just the same.’

The whole evening was like that. Sometimes she stood firm and sometimes she gave in; they accepted defeat with good humour and success with whoops of joy. They were so excited that she sent them out into the garden after their tea to work off steam. By the time she’d got them in to do their packing, run them a bath and got them into it, the negotiations had quite worn her out. There was a very early start tomorrow – she had to get them to Paddington by eight o’clock – and she still had her own packing to do. She left them in the bath while she cleared up their tea, and when she came back they had got into their pyjamas and were sitting side by side in Tom’s bed, picking a torch to pieces and trying to make it work. Their sandy hair was damp, and they did not seem to have dried themselves much, but they had that look of rosy polished virtue that seemed only to occur just after a bath.

‘Henry pretended to be blind,’ Tom said. ‘He could do up his pyjama buttons by feel, but he kept bumping into things. It must take a long time to be blind.’

‘A long time to do things,’ Henry agreed. ‘But if people practised every day, then when they were blind it wouldn’t matter.’

‘But think of all the other things you’d have to practise,’ she said. ‘Having one leg, like Long John Silver, for instance.’

‘Don’t mention him at night, Mum. You know I don’t like it.’

‘But it would be fun to pretend having one leg,’ Henry said. ‘Could you swim with one leg, Mum?’

‘You could if I held you up,’ Tom said.

They were so alike, she thought, but the moment either of them spoke she knew which one it was. A lot of the time she knew anyway, but nobody else did. Tom had always protected Henry and Henry always listened to Tom.

When she had read them another chapter of
Bevis
, a book they never tired of, and kissed them goodnight, it was well after eight.

For once she would have liked a drink, she thought, as she went to find something to eat for herself, but she had never been able to afford drink. With her pension, and the salary, she had just about got by, but it had always been a struggle. It was worse with twins, because they always needed new clothes at the same time. She had made her own clothes, and taken the boys home to her parents for holidays. Her mother knitted them all jerseys and her father had paid for her to take a secretarial course after Ken was killed when she was pregnant and it had seemed as good a way as any other of getting from one bleak day to the next. They had had barely a year together, far less if one simply counted his leaves, which was really all the time that they had had. The rest of it had been anxious waiting – except that she was a WRAF and therefore working in the ops room on one of the east coast stations for Bombers. They’d had a heavenly ten days after they were married, but that was the longest time they had ever spent together. Afterwards, it was usually forty-eight hours and, once, a week because he had flu.

So, of course, he never saw the boys, who were born five months after his death. He had
known
about them (but not known that it was
them
); the news that she was to have twins was broken to her about a week before their appearance). By then, of course, she was out of the WRAF, and in a panic about how she was going to be able to manage everything. She had thought that she would get a job as soon as they were weaned, but when it came to the point, she could not get any job that paid enough to pay someone else to look after the babies. Her mother offered to have them, but she could not bear them being so far away, and she felt that going back to live at home was admitting defeat. So she got a few bits of copy-typing that she could do in the evenings at home until the boys were old enough to be going to school, and then she had applied for the job at Cazalets’ – and got it.

She didn’t feel hungry, so she made a pot of tea and took it up to her bedroom to drink while she packed. This would not take long: she did not have many clothes and most of them were pretty worn out. Her parents had given her the money to buy her outfit for tomorrow and she had chosen a linen mixture in a blue the colour of cornflowers for a very simple suit with a short jacket and longish skirt. She had decided against a hat, and now worried that she should have got one. Too late now. Her friend Charlie was lending her best handbag – a navy blue affair in the most beautiful soft leather that her husband had brought back from Rome. Their husbands had been in the same squadron, but George had survived and become a wing commander – she thought, then, that if Ken had survived he, too, would have reached that rank. His photograph, in a leather frame, stood on the mantelpiece. It had been taken when they were engaged and he was twenty-two, the same age as herself. He was in uniform with his cap slightly askew, nearly smiling but with that look of restless energy, of wanting to get on with whatever might happen next, that she remembered so well. How many times had she looked at this picture and prayed that his death had been too quick for agony? And how many times had she wept because she knew too much to believe that? He was a navigator in a Wellington. They’d gone on a day raid and his plane had been met by fighters well before they reached their target. They’d lost one engine, had had to jettison their bomb load over the North Sea as they limped home on the remaining engine, their rear gunner had been hit, and Ken had gone aft to minister to him. They had reached their home base, had made a clumsy landing. Two of the crew got out in time, before the plane, still laden with fuel, blew up, but Ken had not been one of them. The flight lieutenant who’d served with him had come to tell her about Ken. She remembered she had said, ‘He would have died at once?’ and John had answered, ‘He wouldn’t have known a thing.’ But she always remembered how he did not look at her when he said that. The last, perhaps the very last, old tears came to her eyes. It was time to stop them, to cast off this old grief: it was done and nothing could alter it. She picked up the picture, gave him a kiss, and put it in the case that she would not be taking with her tomorrow. She would keep the picture for the boys.

‘Are you excited? You must be,’ Charlie answered herself. She had come to help her dress. She had got the boys off: breakfast, a taxi called from the rank – they
loved
going in a taxi which happened very rarely. They journeyed to Paddington with the elephant hawk moth caterpillars in a shoe box – its lid spattered with holes – resting on both their knees. A paper bag with spare leaves picked from the back garden that morning was in one twin’s sponge bag. ‘They eat an awful lot, you know, before they pupate,’ Tom had said. They had seemed unconcerned at parting with her, but they had each other, and she was glad they were so simply happy.

‘Have a lovely holiday,’ she had said, as she hugged them both.

‘We will,’ Henry had replied.

‘You, too, Mum,’ Tom had added, and Henry had nodded.

‘If we actually found a rabbit that was tame, could we bring it back?’

‘If it really wants to come,’ she said. Then the man who was taking them said they must all get on to the train, so she left.

Back home, she had a bath, and washed her hair, and then Charlie arrived looking very smart, and bringing a small bunch of yellow and white roses. ‘I’ve made you an egg sandwich,’ she said. ‘I bet you didn’t have breakfast.’

She thought she would not be able to eat it, but found she could. ‘You are a good friend.’

‘I’m just so happy for you. You deserve a really good time for a change. Let me just trim your fringe – it is a tiny bit long.’ She tied a bath towel round Jemima’s neck and snipped across her forehead. ‘That’s better. What about your make-up?’

‘I haven’t got anything much. Some lipstick.’

‘You need a spot of rouge too. You’re very pale, darling.’

So Charlie applied the make-up. ‘Nothing will stop you looking about fourteen,’ she said.

She was dressed, and it was time to go, and Charlie drove her to Kensington.

‘He’s twenty-one years older than me,’ she said, as they drove over Campden Hill.

‘That doesn’t worry you, does it? Not if you love him.’

‘I do love him,’ she said and, as she said it, was flooded with love for him: for his sweetness, his wholehearted kindness to the boys, the way in which his gentle, haunted expression dissolved to tenderness and fun when he looked at her, his startling sincerity (‘I want always to know what you feel,’ he had said, ‘even if it turns out that we don’t agree, or feel the same about any particular thing, I always want to know it’), his surprising capacity for both love and affection, the sense that his loyalty was boundless, and then the discovery, made once – a few weeks ago – that he was for her the perfect lover, patient, sensitive, delightful and full of ardour. He had asked her whether she wanted to go to bed with him before marrying, had said that it should be her choice. ‘
I
am quite sure,’ he said, ‘but I would like you to feel the same.’ And so, because she had had lingering fears – she had been celibate since Ken died, had had neither time nor opportunity to be in love, and was afraid that she would disappoint either herself or him – she had agreed. Charlie had had the boys for a night, and he had taken her to an hotel on the river on a hot June evening, and when they were in their room he had said, ‘Let’s go to bed now, and then we’ll have dinner.’ And he had been right about that, because she had felt very strung up. Afterwards, full of a happiness extraordinary to her, she had said how glad she was that he had proposed it that way round. ‘Ah! I didn’t want you to have the chance to feel
dogged
about it,’ he had said, opening a bottle of champagne – she was amazed at what he could do in that way – and when he handed her a glass he said, ‘Darling Jemima,
will
you marry me?’ And she had said that, in view of what had happened, she had no alternative, and he had said that he had hoped she would say that. They had drunk the champagne and gone down to dinner, which had been full of joyful plans about this life they were to embark upon.