Marking Time (7 page)

Tommy’s face contracted. He took a deep, shuddering breath and turned bright red.

‘Jeepers!’ the girl said. ‘Now you’ve ruddy well gone and done it.’ She banged Tommy on the back and a wail burst from him. ‘Want to go ’ome
now
,’ he wept. ‘Want my mum.’ He drummed his heels on the ground. ‘I want her
now
!’

‘Poor boy!’ Lydia cried, as she flew to him.

‘Mind,’ Norma said, ‘he bites people. When he’s upset.’

Lydia withdrew a little. ‘I’m sure it won’t be years,’ she said. ‘Neville, where’s the cake?’

Neville held out his hand, but before he could get it anywhere near Lydia, Robert had snatched it, and seemed literally almost to swallow it whole. Norma looked at him with disgust. ‘You
got worms,’ she said. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

‘ ’Aven’t.’

‘You
’ave
. I shall tell Miss in the ’ouse.’

‘
Worms?
’ Neville said. ‘Where? I can’t see a single worm.’

‘They’re in his stomach,’ Norma said. ‘’E never stops eating. ’E needs a good dose.’

Tommy, who had watched the appearance and disappearance of the cake, had now put his head into his sister’s lap which muffled his sobbing.

‘What a pity they’re inside you,’ Neville said to Robert. ‘It means you can never get to know them.’

‘’E got stung by a chicken,’ Norma said, ‘trying to take an egg off of a nest.’

‘Chickens don’t sting,’ Lydia said. ‘It must have been a bee. What does your father do?’ she added, feeling she should change the subject.

‘ ’E drives a bus.’

‘Gosh! Does he really?’

‘I said ’e did.’ She pulled up her dress which was made of blue shiny stuff, like satin, and wiped Tommy’s nose on her knickers. ‘What do you do down ’ere,
then?’ she said.

‘We go to the beach and have picnics and swim—’ Lydia began.

But Robert interrupted her. ‘
I
bin to the seaside,’ he offered. ‘I bin, and I touched the sea with both ’ands.’

‘Yes, and you was sick in the bus on the way ’ome,’ Norma said crushingly. She had been absently picking at bits of Tommy’s very short tufted hair; it was extremely
short, almost like mown grass, Lydia thought. Robert’s was just the same. She caught Lydia looking at Tommy’s head. ‘Nits,’ she said. ‘Miss in the ’ouse said
they ’ad nits, so she cut it and then she washed them in some ’orrible stuff – didn’t ’alf stink.’

‘You ’ad them as well,’ Robert said, and she flushed.

‘I never,’ she said.

‘What are nits?’ Neville asked. He squatted down beside Norma. ‘Have you got any left? Can I see one?’

‘No, you can’t. They’ve all gone. You’re rude,’ she added.

‘You’re rude,’ Robert echoed; they both glared at Neville.

Lydia said, ‘He didn’t mean to be, did you, Neville?’

‘I’m not absolutely sure,’ Neville answered. ‘I might have, and I might not.’

‘Shall we play a game?’ Lydia said; things didn’t seem to be turning out too well.

‘There ain’t nowhere to play,’ Robert said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Ain’t no pavements. No canal – no nothing. Just
grass
,’ he finished with intense scorn.

‘What do you do at a canal?’

‘We go up on the bridge and when the bargees go through underneath we spit. We call them and they look up and we spit right in their eyes.’

‘
That’s
rude,’ Neville said triumphantly. ‘That’s
in
be
liev
ably rude.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ Norma said. ‘Mum says they’re only diddies. Serve ’em right. It’s a boy’s game, anyway.
I
don’t do it.’

‘What’s diddies?’

‘Gypsies. I thought everyone knew that. Don’t you know that?’

‘We know different things,’ said Neville. ‘We know an enormous amount of different things.’

‘Let’s go to the pond,’ Lydia said desperately; she couldn’t think why they couldn’t all be friends.

They agreed, rather reluctantly, to go to the pond which lay at the bottom of a steep slope in the field next to Mr York’s house. It had rushes growing round it, and at one shallower
corner the earth was encrusted with the hoofmarks of the cows coming to drink.

‘Look, there are dragonflies,’ Lydia said rather hopelessly: she had a feeling that they wouldn’t much like them.

‘If they come near me I’ll kill ’em,’ Robert said. He scratched a scab off his knee and ate it. The rest of his legs were as white as fish, Lydia thought, and they were
so thin that his black boots looked too big.

‘Is your father going off to fight in the war?’ Neville asked.

Robert shrugged, but Norma said, ‘’E might and ’e mightn’t. Mum says if ’e does it’ll be good riddance. Never trust a man. They’re only after one
thing.’

‘One thing?’ Neville said as they trudged home later for their tea. Miss Boot had called the evacuees in for theirs and it had been quite a relief. ‘What one thing? I want to
know, because when I’m grown up I suppose I’ll be after it too. And if I don’t like the sound of it, I’ll think of some other thing to go after.’

‘I can go after things just as much as you.’

‘She didn’t say ladies went after it.’

‘I don’t care. I shall.’

They quarrelled gently all the way home.

‘What do you want with your grouse, darling?’

Diana looked down at the large hand-written menu. ‘What are you going to have?’

‘Cauliflower, French beans, broccoli, peas—’ the waiter towering above them intoned.

‘French beans, I think.’ It was awful: here was Edward giving her a slap-up lunch at the Berkeley, probably the last she would have for ages, and she wasn’t in the least
hungry. It would not do to say that, though: Edward, like Louis XIV about whom she had been reading recently, liked his ladies to eat and drink heartily. Ladies! During the last year she had felt a
chilling certainty that someone called Joanna Bancroft, whom she had met at a dinner party, had been one of Edward’s flirtations, if not an actual affair. When Edward’s name had come up
during dinner, the young woman – younger than Diana, hardly more than a
girl
– had said, ‘Oh!
Edward!
He
would
say that!’, as though he was a very
old friend, but when they were powdering their noses in their hostess’s bedroom and she had asked her if she knew Edward well, the girl had answered rather distantly that she had simply met
him during a weekend at Hermione Knebworth’s, and the reply, elaborately casual, had roused her suspicion. When, later, she had asked Edward about Mrs Bancroft, she had recognised at once
that he was lying. He had been suave and hearty, and had not met her eye. She had had the sense to shut up about that, but it had exacerbated her feelings of insecurity which had been thoroughly
kindled by his revelation, a few weeks before the Bancroft episode, that Villy was having another child. Up until then, he had given her to understand, or rather had not stood in the way of her
understanding, that all intimate relations between him and Villy had finished long ago. Her jealousy had been such that she had not been able to stop questioning him about it: had, she realised
afterwards, more or less driven him into saying that it had been Villy who had
wanted
another child, and that he had felt unable to deny her. It was then that she had understood that he
could not bear confrontations of this kind – of any moral kind, she suspected – and as her respect for him diminished (his attitude about the new baby and his wife continuing to be
presented to her in a light she knew not to be true) so, curiously, her conscience shrank, and her intentions, her determination, emerged. If he was a poor thing, she had more right to call him her
own.

She raised her glass of champagne cocktail to touch Edward’s.

‘Happy?’ he was saying.

‘What do
you
think?’

Their caviar arrived – a prim, thick-lipped pot nestling in a bed of chipped ice, accompanied by thin triangles of toast that came warm and shrouded in a napkin, and a young waiter served
them with chopped egg, onion and parsley, while the wine waiter poured vodka into tiny glasses from a frosted bottle.

‘Darling, I shall be utterly tipsy!’

‘Never mind, I shall be driving.’ This, she knew, did not refer to their journey to Sussex later in the day, but to the interlude before it at Lansdowne Road. As though he sensed her
– faint – anxiety about this, Edward said, ‘I really swear we shall be perfectly safe there. The family are all in Sussex, immersed in getting ready for the Babies’ Hotel
arrival. Villy is in charge of the blackout. Anyway, she has . . . other things to look after.’ This, she knew, was a tactful reference to Roland, the new baby, born in April, precisely two
months after she had first heard of his existence.

‘Of course I trust you,’ she said, and he smiled and took her hand.

‘I know you do,’ he said, giving it a little squeeze. ‘You’re a marvellous girl, and I’m the luckiest man in the world.’

While they finished their caviar, they watched a neighbouring couple being served with
canard en presse
– an oldish couple who hardly spoke to each other. The man screwed his
monocle into his eye to watch the carving of the duck breast, while the woman looked distastefully at her mouth in a tiny mirror. The pieces of breast were laid on a silver dish over a spirit lamp.
Edward said, ‘Do you know the story of the woman here who was wearing a very
decollete
dress?’ Diana shook her head. ‘Well, one of her, you know, breasts fell out, and a
young waiter saw it and popped it back.’

‘What
savoir faire.’

‘Oh, no, it wasn’t. The head waiter came up to him and hissed, “In this restaurant, we use a slightly warm tablespoon.”’

‘Darling! You made that up!’

‘I didn’t. A chap I know saw it all.’

The juices of the carcass had now been pressed and were being heated in a silver sauceboat over another spirit lamp.

‘Supposing everybody ordered that,’ Diana said, ‘what would they do?’

‘They’d be up a gum tree. I don’t much care for it myself – it’s too rich. I like plain food.’

‘Plain food! You really can’t call caviar and grouse plain food! It’s party food!’

‘Well, this is a very small private party. It’s my birthday.’

After a second of horror that she might have forgotten, she said, ‘Your birthday’s in May!’

‘I have one every month.’

‘It must make you frightfully old.’

‘Yes, I’m marvellous for my age.’ The wine waiter brought the claret and poured a little into Edward’s glass; he thrust his nose into it, and nodded. ‘That’s
fine. Pour some now, would you?’

‘What is it?’ She knew he liked her to be interested in wine.

‘Pontet Canet ’twenty-six. I thought it would suit our grouse.’

‘Lovely.’ One of the differences between her husband and Edward, she thought, was that Angus kept behaving as though he was rich when he wasn’t, and Edward behaved as though he
was only a little richer than he was. It was wonderful to be with somebody where a treat of any kind didn’t involve pinching for weeks on everything else. It was also lovely to be with
somebody who didn’t pretend to be bored by the good things in life. Angus thought it was the thing to seem weary about any pleasure or extravagance, as though he had really had too much of it
all, whereas Edward, who seemed to have a pretty good life all the time, never stopped enjoying it and saying so.

‘This is
fun
, isn’t it?’ he was now saying, as he attacked his bird. ‘It was rather bright of me to have to spend the morning at the wharf. A really cast-iron
alibi. And then, of course, I
have
to collect all kinds of stuff from Lansdowne Road for Villy, and then the traffic will be dreadful getting out of London.’

‘It probably actually will be.’

‘Well, we’ll worry about that when we get to it. The great thing is to enjoy the present and let the future take care of itself.’

But it doesn’t, she thought, several hours later, lying on her back in the bed in Edward’s large dressing room; or, rather, perhaps it does, but it doesn’t take care of
me
. Her own future stretched drearily before her and she felt she was simply being keel-hauled in its wake. If there was a war, and even Edward seemed to think that there would be, she
would spend the winter and beyond stuck in that damp, oaky little cottage in Wadhurst with Isla and Jamie. She loved Jamie, of course, but her sister-in-law bored her beyond belief. The alternative
was spending the winter – or, indeed, the whole
war
– in Scotland with Angus’s parents, who had never liked her and where she would be miles away from the slightest
chance of seeing Edward. Angus, who was as usual staying with them till he brought the other boys back down south for their prep school, had said that he was joining the army, which would keep
him
out of the way most of the time, but then Edward might be away too. He had already tried for the Navy and been turned down, but he’d get into something. She remembered feeling
like this last year, but last year there had been a wonderful reprieve; it was too much to hope that that would happen again. Edward was asleep. She turned to look at him. He lay, turned towards
her, his left arm thrown across her, his hand loosely clasping her right breast – his favourite, he called it. She had unfashionably large breasts, but he liked them: his lovemaking always
began there. His face, in repose, had a kind of simple nobility: his wide forehead with the widow’s peak that was just off centre; the rather large and beaky nose, whose nostrils were each
adorned by one silky, even more voluptuously curling hair, only visible if his head was thrown back; the faintly purple bloom below his cheekbones (he shaved twice a day if he was going out in the
evenings); and the chin with a faint cleft above which the neat and bristling moustache, kept as carefully clipped as a little hedge, barely concealed the long, narrow upper lip that contrasted so
oddly with the full lower one. One saw people who were asleep quite differently, she thought. It was the open eye that distracted one from being able to be sure what the person
was
. Now,
because they were soon to part, and the sex had been good – the best ever for him, he had said – and he lay, handsome and defenceless beside her, she felt a surge of love that was both
romantic and maternal. ‘Wake me up if I drop off,’ he had said earlier. ‘If we are
too
late getting off, I’ll be in hot water the other end.’ A boy’s
remark.