Marking Time (74 page)

Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard

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BOOK: Marking Time

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There, she thought. It wasn’t a very interesting letter, but better than nothing. It occurred to her that she didn’t really know much
about
Simon as he had always been away
at school and in the holidays had gone about with Christopher or Teddy. Now, with Christopher working on a farm in Kent, and Teddy having this week joined up with the RAF, there would be nobody for
him in the coming holidays. His loneliness that had struck her so hard the evening after the funeral struck her again; it seemed awful that the only things she knew about him were those that made
him miserable. Ordinarily, she would have talked to Dad about him, but now this felt difficult, if not impossible: one of the things that had happened in the last few weeks had been that her father
seemed to have got further and further away from anyone until by the time her mother actually died, he seemed shipwrecked – marooned by grief. Still, there was always Clary, she thought, she
was full of ideas – even if a good many of them were no good, their sheer quantity was exhilarating.

Clary was in the nursery giving Juliet her tea – a long and rather thankless task; crumbs of toast and treacle lay thickly on the tray of her high chair, on her feeder and little fat,
active hands, and when Clary tried to post a morsel into her mouth, she turned her head dismissively. ‘Down now,’ she said again and again. She wanted to join Wills and Roly who were
playing their favourite game called accidents with their toy cars. ‘Just have some milk, then,’ Clary said, and proffered the mug, but she simply seized it, turned it upside down onto
her tray and then smacked the mess with the palms of her hands.

‘That’s very naughty, Jules. Give me a nappy or something, could you? I do think babies are the
end
. It’s no good; I’ll have to get a wet flannel or something.
Watch her for me, would you?’

Polly sat by Juliet, but she watched Wills. She had seen how he had looked up from his cars when she opened the door and his face had changed from sudden hope to a lack of expression that was
worse than obvious despair. I suppose he does that every time someone opens the door, she thought; how long will it go on? When Clary returned she went and sat on the floor beside him. He had lost
interest in the game and sat now with two fingers in his mouth and his right hand pulling the lobe of his left ear; he did not look at her.

She had been thinking earlier that, really, her mother dying was perhaps worst for Simon because his particular loss had not seemed to be recognised by the family; now she wondered whether it
was not worst of all for Wills who was not able to communicate his despair – who did not even understand what had happened to his mother. But then I don’t either – any more than
Simon – and
they
just pretend that they do.

‘I think that all religions were invented to make people feel better about death,’ Clary remarked as they were going to bed that night. This – to Polly rather startling –
statement came after they had had a long discussion about Simon’s unhappiness and how they could make his holidays better.

‘Do you really?’ She was amazed to find that she felt slightly shocked.

‘Yes. Yes, I do. The Red Indians with their happy hunting grounds – paradise or heaven, or having another go as someone else – I don’t know all the things they have
invented, but I bet you that was why religions started in the first place. The fact that everyone dies in the end wouldn’t make any single person feel better about it. They’ve
had
to invent some kind of future.’

‘So you think that people just snuff out – like candles?’

‘Honestly, Poll, I don’t know. But the mere fact that people don’t
talk
about it shows how frightened they are. And they have awful phrases like “passed
away”. Where the devil to? They don’t know. If they did they’d say.’

‘You don’t think then . . .’ she felt rather hesitant about the enormity of the suggestion, ‘you don’t think they actually
do
know, but it’s too
awful to talk about?’

‘No, I don’t. Mind you, I wouldn’t trust
our
family a yard about that sort of thing. But people would have written about it. Think of Shakespeare and the undiscovered
bourne and that being the respect that makes calamity of so long life.
He
knew far more than anyone else, and if he’d known he would have said.’

‘Yes, he would, wouldn’t he?’

‘Of course, he might have made that just what Hamlet thought, but people like Prospero – he’d have made
him
know if
he
’d known.’

‘He believed in hell, though,’ Polly pointed out. ‘And it’s a bit much to go in for one without the other.’

But Clary said loftily, ‘He was simply pandering to the fashionable view. I think hell was just a political way of getting people to do what you wanted.’

‘Clary, lots of quite serious people believed in it.’

‘People can be serious and wrong.’

‘I suppose so.’ She felt that this conversation had gone wrong several minutes ago.

‘Anyway,’ Clary said, tearing her rather toothless comb through her hair, ‘Shakespeare probably did believe in heaven. What about “Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of
angels sing thee to thy rest”? – that wretched Jules has got treacle into my hair – unless you think that was merely a courtly way of saying goodbye to your best
friend.’

‘I don’t know. But I agree with you. I don’t think anyone else really does. And it has worried me rather. Lately.’ Her voice shook and she swallowed.

‘Poll, I’ve noticed something quite important about you so I want to say it.’

‘What?’ She felt defensive and suddenly extremely tired.

‘It’s about Aunt Syb. Your mother. All this week, you’ve been sad about her for
her
– and for your father, and Wills, and now for Simon. I know you mean all that
because you are kind and much less selfish than me, but you haven’t
at all
just been sad for yourself. I know you are, but you aren’t letting yourself be because you think
other people’s feelings are more important than your own. They aren’t. That’s all.’

For a moment Polly caught the grey eyes regarding her steadily in the dressing-table mirror, then Clary resumed tearing at her hair. She had opened her mouth to say that Clary didn’t
understand
what it was like for Wills or Simon – that Clary was wrong – before a warm tide of grief submerged any of that; she put her face in her hands and cried, for her own
loss.

Clary stayed still without saying anything and then she got a face towel and sat opposite her on her own bed and simply waited until she had more or less stopped.

‘Better than about three handkerchiefs,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it funny how men have large ones and they hardly ever cry, and ours are only good for one dainty nose blow, and
we cry far more than they do? Shall I make us some Bovril?’

‘In a minute. I spent the afternoon clearing up her things.’

‘I know. Aunt Rach told me. I didn’t offer to help, because I didn’t think you’d want anyone.’

‘I didn’t, but you aren’t anyone, Clary, at all.’ She saw Clary’s faint and sudden blush. Then, knowing that Clary always needed things of that kind to be said
twice, she said, ‘If I’d wanted anyone, it would have been you.’

When Clary returned with the steaming mugs, they talked about quite practical things like how could they – and Simon – all stay with Archie in the holidays, when he only had two
rooms and one bed.

‘Not that he’s asked us,’ Clary said, ‘but we want to be able to forestall any silly objections on account of
room
.’

‘We could sleep on his sofa – if he has one – and Simon could sleep in the bath.’

‘Or we could ask Archie to have Simon on his own, and then us at another time. Or you could go with just Simon,’ she added.

‘Surely you want to come?’

‘I could probably go some other time,’ Clary answered – a shade too carelessly, Polly thought. ‘Better not talk about it to anyone or Lydia and Neville will want to come
as well.’

‘That’s out of the question. I’d rather go with you, though.’

‘I’ll ask Archie what he thinks would be best,’ Clary replied.

The atmosphere had changed again.

After that, she found herself crying quite often – nearly always at unexpected moments, which was difficult because she did not want the rest of the family to see her, but on the whole,
she didn’t think they noticed. She and Clary both got awful colds, which helped, and lay in bed reading
A Tale of Two Cities
aloud to each other as they were doing the French
Revolution with Miss Milliment. Aunt Rach arranged for her mother’s clothes to be sent to the Red Cross, and Tonbridge took them in the car. When her father had been away with Uncle Edward
for a week, she began to worry about him, about whether he would come back feeling any less sad (but he
couldn’t
be, could he, in just a few days?) and, above all, about how to
be
with him.

‘You mustn’t,’ Clary said. ‘He will still be very sad, of course, but in the end, he’ll get over it. Men do. Look at my father.’

‘Do you mean you think he’ll marry someone else?’ The idea shocked her.

‘Don’t know, but he easily might. I should think remarrying probably runs in families – you know, like gout or being shortsighted.’

‘I don’t think our fathers are at all alike.’

‘Of course they aren’t
completely
. But in other ways they jolly well are. Think of their voices. And the way they keep changing their shoes all day because of their poor
thin feet. But he probably won’t for ages. Poll, I wasn’t casting aspersions on him. I was just taking human nature into account. We can’t all be like Sydney Carton.’

‘I should hope not! There would be none of us left if we were.’

‘Oh, you mean if we
all
sacrificed our life for someone else. There’d be the someone else, silly.’

‘Not if we
all
did it . . .’ and they were into their game, founded on the rhetorical question that Ellen used constantly to ask Neville when he behaved badly at meals.
‘If everyone in the world was sick at the same time it would be very interesting. I should think we’d all drown,’ he had said after consideration, thereby, as Clary had pointed
out, neatly making a nonsense of the whole notion. But almost as soon as they embarked upon playing it, they both – separately – recognised that it had lost its allure, their sallies
were feeble and they no longer collapsed in giggles over them. ‘We’ve outgrown it as a game,’ Clary said sadly. ‘Now all we have to look forward to is being careful not to
say it to anyone else, like Wills or Jules or Roly.’

‘There must be other things,’ she said, wondering what on earth they could be.

‘Of course there are. The end of the war and Dad coming back and being able to suit ourselves because we’ll be too old for them to boss us about and white bread and bananas and books
not looking old when you buy them. And you’ll have your house, Poll – think of that!’

‘I do, sometimes,’ she answered. She sometimes wondered whether she had outgrown the house as well, without, so far as she could see, growing
into
anything else.

MARKING TIME

Elizabeth Jane Howard is the author of fourteen highly acclaimed novels. The Cazalet Chronicles –
The Light Years
,
Marking Time
,
Confusion
and
Casting Off
– have become established as modern classics and have been adapted for a major BBC television series and most recently for BBC Radio 4. In 2002 Macmillan published
Elizabeth’s autobiography,
Slipstream
. In that same year she was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. The fifth novel in the Cazalet Chronicles,
All
Change
, will be published in November 2013.

Praise for Elizabeth Jane Howard

‘She is one of those novelists who shows, through her work, what the novel is for . . . She helps us to do the necessary thing – open our eyes and our
hearts’

Hilary Mantel

‘The Cazalets have earned an honoured place among the great saga families . . . rendered thrillingly three-dimensional by a master craftsman’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Charming, poignant and quite irresistible . . . to be cherished and shared’

The Times

‘Superb . . . hypnotic . . . very funny’

Spectator

‘A dazzling historical reconstruction’

Penelope Fitzgerald

‘As polished, stylish and civilised as her many devotees would expect’

Julian Barnes

‘A family saga of the best kind . . . a must’