Marking Time (20 page)

‘Lovely. We went to a concert – and to a play.’ There was a pause, and then she said as casually as possible, ‘Have you heard from Dad?’

‘Not a word. They seem to work him dreadfully hard. He said that as he’s head of the defence, he can hardly ever leave the aerodrome. Still, it’s what he wants to do –
the next best thing to joining the Navy like Uncle Rupe.’

‘I see.’

‘You must stop talking to me now, darling, or we’ll all go broke. But thank you for ringing me up. It was most thoughtful.’

No, she didn’t know. But whether this made things better or worse Louise could not imagine. All the usual emotions that she had about her mother had somehow got overrun by feeling terribly
sorry for her. If her father was in the grip of some uncontrollable passion – which he jolly well ought
not
to be at his age – he might do anything! He might even divorce her
mother and go off with that woman. She tried to think of anyone she knew of who had ever been divorced and eventually remembered Mummy’s friend, Hermione Knebworth. Her divorce had been so
unusual, and apparently so frightful, that people never talked about it; she had only been able to gather that Mummy didn’t think it had been at all Hermione’s fault. But Mummy
wasn’t like Hermione. She didn’t have a dress shop, manage to be awfully good at business and also go about looking so glamorous all the time. If Dad divorced her – left her
– she’d have absolutely nothing to worry about or do. And she was obviously far too old to start having a career. She suddenly saw her mother becoming like Grania after her husband died
– just sitting in a huge armchair refusing to enjoy anything and saying she wished she was dead. It would be all his fault. It
was
his fault already. She remembered Aunt Rach saying
that people of her age started noticing that their parents were not just parents but people, and people were clearly far more nerve-racking than parents. Parents were simply people whom one reacted
to; one didn’t have to
do
anything about them – they were just there. That didn’t mean that they couldn’t make one miserable sometimes, but whatever they did, one
wasn’t
responsible
for them. I don’t want to be responsible for my father: I hate him, she thought. Whenever she went back in her mind to that first sight of them in the
theatre, she saw her father’s hand closing for a moment round the woman’s breast and was overwhelmed by the sick feeling of recognition of other things, other times, that she did not
want ever to think about. And she knew that however much she tried to push it all down and out of sight or knowledge, that in fact she had hated him for ages, ever since that evening when poor
Mummy had had her teeth out and she had been alone with him and he had felt
her
breasts. Mostly, she had avoided him; when he was there, she never met his eye; she snubbed any compliment;
snapped at him, ignored him – or rather, tried to give the appearance of ignoring him; actually she was always horribly aware of his presence. Many of the rows with her mother had been about
how rude she was to him – like that awful evening when they’d taken her out to see Ridgway’s
Late Joys
, the wonderful Victorian music-hall show with Leonard Sachs being a
witty and urbane chairman, and a strange young man called Peter Ustinov who was an opera singer explaining about a hitherto undiscovered fragment of a Schubert song ‘Ziss Poor Creature is
Very Fond of Nymphs’ and then suddenly breaking into the three bars of the fragment. That had all been lovely and they had laughed a great deal. But then they had gone to the Gargoyle Club,
and her father had asked her to dance and she had refused, had said that she didn’t like dancing and was never going to. Her father had been hurt, and her mother furious with her. In the end,
they
had danced, and she had sat and watched them miserably – she would have danced with
anyone
else in the world but him. The evening had been spoiled after that.

During the rest of that term, while she learned to make choux pastry, to bone a chicken, to clarify a clear soup, to interview a parlourmaid, while she and Stella read books, and she rehearsed
her piece for her audition, and they washed each other’s hair and invented a lot of silly jokes that made them almost speechless with laughter, and Stella told her many things about inflation
in Germany and how unfair the treaty of Versailles had been, and why it was no good being a pacifist once you’d actually got a war (‘It’s preventive, you see,’ she said,
‘like alternative medicine; once someone’s actually been shot in the leg, you have to get the bullet out’) until Louise was dizzy with trying to follow the agility of her
analogies – while, or in between these activities and this friendship, she reverted to what she called to herself the horrible secret, and had fantasies, daydreams of putting everything to
rights. She would go to the woman and tell her that he was married and therefore could never marry
her
, that he was a liar and liars told lies to everyone so she would be the next victim.
She would go to her father and tell him that she would tell her mother all about it unless he promised to give the woman up (these, with variations, were the main themes) – and
then
the best daydream of all, her parents coming to her with their arms round each other, smiling, happy, saying that they owed their happiness entirely to her – how could they ever thank her?
– she was the most wonderful and
mature
child that anyone could ever have; her mother saying that she was also beautiful; her father saying what courage and understanding she had . .
. These daydreams were like stale and stolen chocolates: afterwards she always felt faintly ashamed and sick.

All the same, by the time that last term was over, she had somehow become
used
to the situation, and the prospect of having Stella to stay at Home Place, and her audition at the acting
school – now only three weeks away – went some way to making her feel that life was not too bad on the whole.

May–June 1940

‘She is rather
remote
, if not actually sulky, but I expect it is largely sexual frustration,’ she wrote, and then looked at the fresh page adorned by this
smooth and worldly sentence with satisfaction. She had come upon this phrase in a book and had been longing to use it. During the winter and ever in search of new subject matter, she had decided to
write about all the things that she noticed people never
talked
about. She had made a list. Sex. Going to the lavatory. Menstruation. Blood generally. Death. Having babies. Being sick.
Personal shortcomings that didn’t sound romantic such as sulking, rather than being hot-tempered. Admitting to being frightened of things. Adultery, divorce – although it was going to
be a bit difficult to write about them without any first-hand information. Still, quite a lot of good novels told you a bit about adultery. The after-life, or whether there was any. Jews and why
people were against them. What was horrible about being a child (they only produced quaint or funny stories about their extreme youth). The possibility of losing the war and being slaves for the
Germans. And so on. She kept the list and added to it from time to time but, disappointingly, it had not suggested a plot to her, and as Miss Milliment had rather unfairly stepped up the amount of
homework that she and Polly were supposed to do –
and
given them quite arduous holiday tasks as well – she decided to write small portraits of anyone she knew who came to mind,
just to keep her hand in. This one was about Zoë, who these days was pretty boring and therefore, from the literary point of view, something of a challenge. In the autumn, she had just come
out of her gloom about the baby dying, and got pregnant again, and looked very pretty indeed, and then, when Dad said the Navy had accepted him and he was going off to a place called King
Alfred’s to be trained, all hell broke loose. She cried for days. Apparently, and according to Dad who got awfully upset by it, she had thought that men were not called up if their wives were
pregnant. Or they
needn’t
be, but where she had got this idea from, no one knew. It was daft. Even she – Clary – could see that the things had no bearing upon one
another, but then Zoë had childish views – she was rather like an old sort of
worn out
child, Clary realised, and quickly put that down.

‘Look after Zoë for me,’ he had said the night before he went, which really was a funny way round. After all, who was the stepmother? But she couldn’t imagine him saying,
‘Look after Clary for me.’ She rather doubted whether Zoë had ever been asked to look after anybody. It might be a good idea to give her an only medium-demanding animal like a
rabbit for her next birthday to get her started on looking after something – or else her baby was in for a rather rotten time. (Of course, it was Ellen who really looked after all of them.)
At Sports Day at his school, Neville had even pretended he hardly knew her. ‘You’ve hurt her feelings, you fool,’ Clary had hissed at Neville when they were meant to be getting
plates of strawberries for the grown-ups in the tea tent. ‘Well, she hurt mine wearing that silly fur fox round her neck. If you ask me, that’s what feelings are for,’ he added
while he skilfully transferred some better strawberries to the plate he had chosen. He had grown a lot, but his front teeth looked far too large for him and he had spent a lot of the Christmas
holidays up trees that Lydia was afraid to climb. He didn’t seem to make any great friends at his school and he loathed games. His asthma was much better, but the night before Dad went, he
quarrelled with everyone, drank what Emily said was the best part of her bottle of cooking sherry, unpacked his father’s suitcase, threw everything into the bath and turned on both taps. Dad
found him and they had a sort of fight but in the end he was crying so much that Dad just carried him off to his room and they spent a long time alone together. He had asthma all that night, and
Ellen stayed up with him because Dad had to be with Zoë because she was so upset. ‘Look after Nev, won’t you,’ he’d said to Clary next morning. ‘He kept saying
last night that now he’d have nobody, and I kept telling him he had you.’ He’d looked so grey and tired, that she
couldn’t
say how much
she
minded his
going, couldn’t say, ‘And who do you think I’ll have?’ or anything selfish like that because she could see that some kinds of love simply wore him out, so she just made her
face smile and said ‘Yes, I will.’ He smiled back at her and said, ‘That’s my Clary,’ and asked her to come to the station with him. ‘Zoë doesn’t feel
up to it,’ he said. Neville had gone to school as usual, and Tonbridge had driven them to Battle; she’d waited on the platform with Dad with nothing left to say and the train coming in
was a relief. ‘Don’t wear any of those wet vests,’ she’d said as the most grown-up thing she could think of, at the end. ‘No, no. I’ll make His Majesty dry them
for me personally,’ he’d said, bent to kiss her and got onto the train. He waved until he was out of sight and she’d walked slowly back to the car where Tonbridge was waiting, and
got into the back and sat stiffly upright. Once, she saw Tonbridge looking at her in the driving mirror, and in Battle he stopped and went into a shop and came out with a bar of milk chocolate
which he gave her, and although she loathed milk chocolate, this was a considerable kindness. She started to thank him and then had to pretend that she had a bad cough. He drove her back to Home
Place without talking, but when she got out of the car, he said, ‘You’re a little soldier, you are,’ and smiled, so that she could see his black tooth next to his gold one.

Well – back to Zoë. She’d gone upstairs and Zoë was lying on the bed that still had Dad’s pyjamas on it and Ellen was standing with a tray saying she’d feel
better if she ate something, think of the baby. But that seemed to make Zoë cry more than ever.

Description of Zoë lying in bed. Dark silky hair, all tangled but somehow looking better than when she’s done it; very white skin that has a kind of thick pearliness about it (creamy?
satiny?); no colour in her cheeks, just a slightly darker cream; sooty eyelashes that look as though they have mascara on them even when they haven’t; wide-apart eyes, not emerald –
more like grass . . . well, exactly like Polly’s last but one cat. Rather a short upper lip and then a longish mouth that turns up at the corners when she smiles, which makes a dimple in her
left-hand cheek. What a horrible word dimple was. Shirley Temple has a dimple. If she was actually describing a heroine in a story, she’d never give them a dimple, but there it was, Zoë
had one and this was meant to be a portrait. She couldn’t write much about the rest of her because it had been under the bedclothes except for one arm that was just really a boring white arm
with tremendously carefully manicured nails painted a shiny pale pink. This was being a failure. She suspected that one would need to be in love with Zoë to be interested in her appearance,
and if one was in love with someone, how much did it matter what they looked like? She supposed that liking the looks of someone would be what made one get to know them better. The only person
who’d ever seemed to like the look of
her
was Dad, that day when they’d been filling the bottles with spring water and he’d said she was beautiful – well,
he’d said he was surrounded by beautiful women and she’d been one of them. The trouble about writing
anything
was that it made one think of something else. She felt she was a
bottomless pit of memories, and she was only fifteen. What on earth must it be like when you reached the Duchy’s age? You’d hardly be able to think at all for them; it would be like
having so much furniture in a room that there was nowhere left to move.

Anyway, that day she’d sat on the side of the bed and tried to cheer Zoë up, saying all the things that
he’
d said about only being at King Alfred’s for a matter of weeks, and then probably getting leave, and not being in the slightest danger, which nobody was as far as she could
see, anyway, in the whole war, except in places like Finland and now Norway, although she knew that Polly did not agree with her at all about this. Then she had had to go and do lessons with Poll
and Miss Milliment, and, extremely boringly, Lydia, because now that Neville had been sent to the prep school near Sedlescombe, they said Lydia couldn’t do lessons by herself. She still had
to do them partly by herself, because being merely nine, naturally Lydia couldn’t understand most of what she and Polly did, but Miss Milliment was very patient and clever about dividing her
time between them. The Babies’ Hotel had gone back to London and they’d still been living in Pear Tree Cottage then, as the boys were home from school, but when term started,
they’d all gone back to Home Place. Miss Milliment slept in the cottage over the garage and they had lessons in the little ground-floor sitting room. Mill Farm was let as a convalescent home
for people – it had been meant for wounded soldiers only there weren’t any, so it took people recovering from operations and things like that. In the weekdays Aunt Sybil and Aunt Villy
went to London and Wills and Roland were left with Ellen. At the weekends Uncle Hugh came down with Aunt Sybil, but Aunt Villy came on her own – she didn’t always come and Lydia minded.
Sometimes they were taken to London to go to the dentist, or get clothes. Dad’s house in London was shut up, so when she went it was with the others; she no longer had a London home, but
she’d got all her valuable things, her books and the scrapbook with pictures of her mother when she was a child and a postcard from Cassis in France that her mother had written to her before
she was even old enough to read – ’Darling Clary, Here is a picture of the place where Daddy and I are staying. We live in the little pink house on the right. Love from Mummy.’
The house was marked with a cross in faded ink – for years afterwards she had lived on that love sent. Well, she was used to it now – to not having a mother – and Neville had
always been used to it. But it made Dad pretty important to her. She’d had a good cry with Polly after lessons in the potting shed. Polly was awfully good to cry with because she cried as
well, though not so much.