The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (37 page)

‘Oh, Dad! I’m not in the least bit tired!’

‘Of course not. But all the same.’

She went to kiss him, and he put his arms round her and gave her one kiss on her cheek and then one, surprisingly, on her mouth, which he’d never done before. His moustache was bristly and for a second she felt something soft and wet and realised it was his tongue. It was horrible: she supposed it had somehow slipped out by mistake and felt embarrassed for him and wriggled out of his arms. ‘Good night, then,’ she said, not looking at his face, and ran out of the room. Upstairs she thought, poor old Dad; he had false teeth like Mummy did now, and it probably made kissing people quite difficult.

Mummy was lying propped up with all the pillows. She’d had some soup, she said, it had been just what she wanted.

‘Did you have a nice evening with Daddy?’

‘Oh, yes. We played the gramophone.’

‘Good, darling. And thank you so much for being so sweet to me.’

‘Is it better? Is it hurting much less?’

‘I think it is.’ It clearly wasn’t. ‘I’m going to take some more aspirin and Daddy’s going to sleep in the dressing room tonight. Off you go, darling.’

‘Yes, I will.’ She realised that she wanted to get to her room and shut the door before he came up. This was funny – she’d never felt like that before. She’d not written about the evening with her dad in her diary.

She heard her cousins’ car in the drive, and decided that she was pleased about them coming. Angela was probably already too old to be much fun, but she had always liked Nora who, though plain – a bit ugly, in fact – was nowhere as bad as Miss Milliment and Christopher was a far more interesting boy than Teddy or Simon: last year he had been mad about butterflies and they had gone off hunting with nets and a killing bottle, and then they had lain in a cornfield and eaten corn kernels, and he had told her how much he hated his school, and how being at home was pretty awful too because his father was always getting at him. Louise, who had been brought up on the family notion that Aunt Jessica’s husband was somehow not the sort of person she should have married, sympathised hotly – even invented things about her own father to make Christopher feel better. Only now I wouldn’t have to invent, she thought. But of course I couldn’t possibly tell him anything about that. For the first time since it had happened she thought about it. Because after the night when he had taken her out for her birthday treat, which had been completely lovely until they had got home, after supper at the Ivy restaurant, and he had driven them home, had let them quietly into the house (‘Mustn’t wake Mummy’) and she had thrown her arms round his neck to hug and thank him for her lovely treat – it had happened again, only worse. He’d kissed her in just the same horrible way, only this time he’d put his hand under her frock and hurt her breast, and his other arm was so tightly round her that she couldn’t stop it, although she did in the end because he took his mouth away and started to say something about her growing up, and she wrenched herself free. ‘I’m
not
!’ she began to say, thought she was going to be sick, and ran a few steps up the stairs, but she’d forgotten her long dress and caught her heel in her skirt and had to stop to free it, and as she straightened up she saw him standing there looking up at her – he had become an enemy – smiling.

She had stood in the dark behind the closed door of her room, possessed by some nameless terror, like a terrible dream, only it wasn’t a dream. He would come up the stairs – any minute – he might come into her room – no key – how could she stop him? This thought occurred, recurred, recurred, recurred, but she could not respond – she could not move at all. She heard his steps coming up and could only stand with her hands pressed over her mouth to keep everything from coming out. Only now she knew that the terror had consumed her voice, that her scream would be simply a louder silence.

His steps – the only thing in the world – came nearer – reached the landing outside her door – a pause – then they went on to his dressing room, and there was an unknown amount of time before she heard him walk across the landing to the bedroom where her mother slept and shut the door. And then she heard a horrible sound, like a retching sob, and when she turned on the light it must have been her, because there was no one else in the room.

She couldn’t remember much after that: could just recall hanging over her basin trying to be sick. Then she thought, why hadn’t she run upstairs and gone straight to Mother’s room and woken her and told her? But at once she knew that her mother would be very angry, would blame her for being dirty and disgusting, and
he
– the enemy – would agree and it would be far worse, and perhaps it
was
her fault because she now felt so ashamed. So she swallowed everything down and was not sick. And the next day, at breakfast, he had been exactly as he used to be, as though nothing had happened, as though the whole thing belonged to
her
and had had nothing to do with
him
at all. And her mother waited until he had gone to the office to say that if she was going to be so ungrateful and sulky after a treat, people would not want to give her any more of them. She found a key to one of the other bedrooms that fitted her door, and after that, she tried never to be alone with him. But there was no one she could tell. That was the worst thing.

The feeling of extreme discomfort that came over her whenever she encountered her father now descended, a huge grey blanket that engulfed her and made her feel both betrayed and somehow guilty, and also, if she
tried
to think about it, frightened, and just remembering her birthday evening was worse than that: she felt shaky and sick; her mouth was dry and she kept swallowing – nothing. She might have to leave home, but being more frightened of something else hadn’t made her less frightened of that.

‘Oh, God! Why can’t it be last summer when nothing was wrong?’ But it couldn’t be. ‘It will all be the same a hundred years hence,’ her mother was fond of saying about practically anything, a completely annoying remark since it involved not caring what was happening during the hundred years and that rendered life utterly pointless. Perhaps it was. Perhaps it was a gigantic terrible secret that grown-ups kept from children – like there being no Father Christmas, or getting the Curse; perhaps being grown-up, something she had always looked forward to, meant just that. That must be nonsense. They couldn’t all be as cheerful as they were if they knew that. And there was God, who was supposed to be pretty kind to people and who had presumably made the rules about whether life was pointless or not. She decided to have a jolly serious conversation with Nora, who was a year older, about life to see whether she knew anything useful. Cheered by this, she went into the house.

‘Well, darling? How goes it?’

Villy had ensconced Jessica on the wicker
chaise-longue
in the drawing room. Lunch was over, and the children had all dispersed. Villy had tucked herself up in the huge, shapeless armchair opposite, had lit a Gold Flake and settled down for a good chat. A table with a coffee tray on it lay between them; Villy had drawn the blinds on the south window, and the room was suffused with aqueous light that was restfully cool and conducive to intimacy.

Jessica sighed, and smiled, and crossed her elegant ankles and stretched her long white arms clasping her head before she said, ‘It’s sheer
heaven
to be here. I can tell you that. It was a nightmare drive. Poor Christopher was sick, and Judy kept wanting to go to the lav, and Nora quarrelled with Angela about sitting in front and the car overheated on that hill – you know, coming out of Lamberhurst, I think—’

‘Well, you’re here now. And Mama doesn’t come until next week. And Edward goes to London tomorrow. We’ll be on our own, except for the riff-raff. We’re dining at Home Place tonight, but there’s plenty of time for a rest.’

‘Heavenly!’ She shut her heavy-lidded eyes and for a moment there was silence in the room except for the distant ticking of the grandfather dock in the hall.

Then Villy, in a voice charged with neutrality, asked, ‘How is Raymond?’

‘Very cross, poor darling, about my leaving him. He’s off to Aunt Lena tomorrow. I don’t think he was much looking forward to it.’

There was another little silence, then Jessica added, ‘She’s ninety-one, but except for not hearing a word one says, she’s really in splendid health, but I suppose if you do absolutely nothing from morning till night except eat four regular meals a day and bully your servants there’s no reason why you should feel worn out.’

‘She is devoted to Raymond, though, isn’t she?’

‘She adores him. But there is this other rather awful nephew – the one who emigrated to Canada whom she rather
holds
over Raymond’s head.’

‘I suppose,’ Villy said delicately, ‘that when she . . . I mean, it would make all the difference?’

‘Oh, darling! I’m not sure that it would any more. The moment Raymond gets his hands on any money at all, he thinks of some frightful scheme that needs far more than whatever it is he’s got and then, of course, it all goes wrong because there wasn’t enough money in the first place. I mean, the idea he had about boarding people’s dogs when they go away. He completely left out that most of the year people don’t, and then in August they all do, and, of course, it cost a fortune to build separate kennels and even then we had a dog in every room, and in winter the kennels all got wet rot and weren’t fit for canine habitation. So really I actually dread Aunt Lena dying. Raymond simply hates his present job; he’d do anything to get out of it.’ She gave her charming, defeated smile and said, ‘But I dread to think what might be the alternative.’

‘He’s impossible!’

‘Yes, he’s impossible, but he’s the children’s father. He can be a perfect lamb, sometimes.’

Villy equated this with charm, which she had been brought up to distrust; charm in their mother’s eyes had been synonymous with worthlessness. Lady Rydal had distrusted Edward for his charm, and the fact that he was richer than Raymond was marred by his money having come from Trade – a situation that had required her to be as broad-minded as she had always said she was. Edward, however, without even trying, had succeeded in charming her in a way that Raymond had totally failed to do. As Lady Rydal, in any case, had had lower expectations of Villy than she had had of Jessica, Edward turned into a satisfactory son-in-law. It was poor Jessica who bore the full brunt of her disappointment. Looking at her sister, of whom, when they were younger, she had been so jealous, Villy felt a rush of affection, pity and sentiment. Jessica was so
thin
; her white, pre-Raphaelite face, coloured faintly by the sunlight filtered through the green drawing-room blinds, was gaunt with fatigue: there were mothy shadows under her eyes and in the hollows below her high cheekbones, fine declining lines each side of her pale, chiselled mouth, and her poor, once beautiful hands were now roughened, thickened by washing clothes and cooking—

‘ . . . although he can be awfully difficult with Christopher.’

‘What?’

‘Raymond. He keeps wanting Christopher to be tough and athletic – all the things
he
used to be – and Christopher’s the dreamy type, and much clumsier than usual because he’s growing so fast. It’s all being a bit tricky. I keep apologising to each of them for the other.’

‘I think Christopher’s a dear.’

‘He’s not an all-rounder, like your Teddy.’

‘I’m sure he’s far brainier.’

Jessica took this, not as a compliment to her son’s brains, but as a criticism of his outdoor capacities and replied a little coldly, ‘I don’t think he’s particularly brainy.’

Meaning, Villy thought, that darling Teddy was an absolute nit-wit, which of course he wasn’t. She lit another cigarette. Jessica wondered when there would be tea.

‘Angela is looking quite beautiful. Just like you, of course, an absolute knock-out.’ Daughters were safer ground, and it was a handsome peace-offering. Jessica responded at once. ‘Villy, I just don’t know what to do with her. She only just scraped through her matric. She isn’t interested in anything except clothes and her appearance about which she is completely
obsessive
. I’m sure we weren’t so aware of ourselves at her age. Or were we?’

‘I don’t think we were allowed to be. I mean, everybody knew you were beautiful, but it wasn’t
mentioned
. Mama would have had a fit if it had been.’

‘Well, of course, I don’t keep telling her how pretty she is. But other people do. And she seems to think it entities her to a far more exciting life than we can provide, and what’s more, that she ought not to have to do anything to get it. I think sending her to France was a mistake. It’s since she’s come back from there that she’s been so sulky and passive.’