The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (52 page)

He had fallen so much in love with her that he had had to make love to her, and she had felt that she owed him that, at least. But last night, she began to know, had had nothing to do with love. She had not graciously given herself to him: ‘Oh, Philip – please –
please
!’ He had seduced her, he was obviously very experienced – must have gone to bed with dozens of women. He had planned the whole thing from the start. If she
had
resisted him last night, he
would
probably have raped her. But if you went dancing every night with a man you knew was violently attracted to you, and then you invited him into what you knew was an empty flat, what could you expect? What was it he had said? Something about, ‘You don’t know your own weakness.’ Now, it seemed, she knew nothing else, seemed entirely to be made up of it. It was weak to be reduced into some kind of – words failed her here – an animal? A tart? But they did it for money, didn’t they? If it had been a question of money last night, it would have been she who would have paid . . . No reconstruction that she attempted felt true enough to be comfortable. She turned off the lamp and, wearily diminished, set about tidying her clothes from the floor, dressing and packing her case for the journey back to Sussex.

On the same morning, Raymond rang Mill Farm at breakfast time to say that Aunt Lena had died. Nora realised that that was what must have happened because her mother was using her artificial voice. Nobody, Nora felt, could honestly be terribly sorry that Aunt Lena had died as she was frightfully old and never seemed to have enjoyed anything much, but she noticed that Aunt Villy caught her mother’s voice and they both sounded exactly the same as they said how sad it was. The funeral was to be on Monday, Jessica said, and Raymond thought that Angela and Christopher should accompany her to Frensham. ‘Oh, can’t I go too?’ Nora cried. ‘I’ve never been to a funeral!’

‘Yes, you have,’ said Neville. ‘Bexhill had his funeral last week. You were at it.’

‘A little week,’ said Louise dreamily, ‘or ’ere those shoes were old, with which she followed that poor fish’s body—’

‘Be quiet, children! Or, if you’ve finished breakfast, go.’

Lydia got down at once. ‘Where would you like us to go to, Mummy darling? I mean, really
best
like us to go?’

‘To hell,’ Neville said, ‘or the lav, I should think.’

Judy, who was always a slow eater, stuffed her toast into her mouth and said, ‘Is it difficult to bury fat people? Aunt Lena was simply gigantic,’ she explained.

‘Judy, would you kindly shut up and leave the room!’

‘We’ve got to go as well,’ Louise said to Nora, to pre-empt being sent.

Villy heaved a sigh of relief, and then realised that Angela was still with them.

‘It’s all right, Mummy, I must go or I’ll be late for my sitting.’ Rupert was actually painting her portrait from ten until one o’clock every day, an enterprise that enabled her to spend hours alone with him without having to say anything. The portrait was nearly finished, but she lived in hopes that he might start another one.

‘I sometimes wonder whether she has got a bit of a pash for Rupert,’ Jessica said when her daughter had left the room.

‘Oh, well, that doesn’t matter. He’s a perfectly safe person for her to have a pash about. I expect she’s simply thrilled to have her portrait painted. Don’t you remember how excited
you
were when Henry Ford painted you for a fairy story?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t care about
him
in the least. It was just my vanity.’ She gave herself a little shake. ‘Oh dear! Poor Raymond! He’s having to make all the funeral arrangements, and he’s awfully bad at that sort of thing.’

‘I suppose you must go to it?’

‘Of course I must. But I really don’t want to take the children. Christopher will get dreadfully upset and then Raymond will be cross with him, and Angela will probably sulk and say she hasn’t got the right clothes. Nor have I, come to that.’

‘I’ve got a black and white dress you could borrow if it isn’t too short on you. And if you leave the children here, it means you can come back sooner.’

Although she had not told Jessica about the possibility of her being pregnant, she knew that she would miss her sister when she went away: there was nobody else with whom she had the same intimacy. In fact, being with Jessica these weeks had made her realise how lonely she usually was.

At eleven o’clock that morning, one of the Cazalet lorries lumbered up the drive and the driver got down from his cab and tapped on the kitchen window with a stubby pencil from behind his ear. Mrs Cripps, in the throes of making an Irish stew with seven pounds of scrag end of lamb, sent Dottie to find Mrs Cazalet Senior. But Dottie was no good at finding people. She disappeared at once, but did not return as she knew better than to face Mrs Cripps with failure. Time went by; the driver got back into his cab where he ate a bun, dripping with shredded coconut, drank a Thermos of tea and read the
Star.
Mrs Cripps forgot about the whole thing, until she wanted the trug of Victoria plums, and realised that Dottie hadn’t brought them in from the back door where McAlpine would have deposited them. She screeched for Dottie and Eileen said she hadn’t seen her for some time, and there were the plums – the sun had come round onto them and the wasps were everywhere.

‘Eileen, you’d better go for Mrs Senior, although it will be one more for dinner by now, as I can see with half an eye.’ So Eileen went and knocked on the door of the drawing room where the Duchy and Sid were playing.

‘Most extraordinary,’ the Duchy said to Rachel and Sid when she returned to the drawing room. ‘The man has twenty-four camp beds which he says William told him to deliver. What can they be for?’

‘Evacuation of some kind,’ said Sid.

The Duchy looked relieved. ‘Oh, I do hope it’s only that! You remember that awful time when he met that cricket team on the train and invited them for the weekend, and there was nothing to give diem but macaroni cheese? Who do you think he wants to evacuate? Oh dear! It might be the members from his club. They all expect such
rich
food.’

‘Darling, I’m sure it won’t be. You know he likes to be on the safe side. And if he buys things, he always gets them in dozens.’ Rachel spoke soothingly, but felt a twinge of uneasiness.

‘Where is he, anyway?’

‘He’s gone to Brede. There’s supposed to be an old man there who’s a frightfully good water diviner. He wants him to sink another well for the new cottages. He said he’d be back for lunch. We’ll deal with the lorry man, darling, won’t we Sid?’

‘You bet.’

‘Don’t let her lift anything, will you, Sid? She’s just got her back right again.’

‘Righty-ho.’

‘Have you finished it?’

‘No – no. But I’ve got to go.’ He was wiping his brush on a rag. ‘Got to meet Zoë’s train. Hey! I’ll be late if I don’t scoot. You couldn’t clean my brushes, like a darling, could you?’

Of course she could.

‘Bless your heart.’

And he was gone. A bombshell – out of the blue. He hadn’t said a word about Zoë returning. ‘Got to meet Zoë’s train. Perhaps he didn’t
want
to meet her – simply had to because they were married. She got slowly to her feet. She got awfully stiff sitting with her head turned towards him, trembled sometimes with the effort of keeping still. But it was all worth it for the being alone, and for the breaks of ten minutes every hour when he gave her a cigarette and told her what a jolly good sitter she was. Would he stop – now that Zoë was back? At least, he would probably finish the picture after spending so much time on it. She went over to the easel to look at the portrait. He had painted her sitting in the large high-backed leather chair that lived at one end of the billiard room. The leather was a kind of greenish black, and he had made her sit at an angle in it but looking up at him, with her hands on her lap. In spite of her bringing a selection of her best clothes for him to choose from, he had discarded the lot and, in the end, put her into a very old silk shirt of his that was a kind of greenish white. It was far too big for her, but he had rolled up the sleeves and left two of the front buttons undone. She was divided between the intense pleasure of wearing something of his, and feeling that she looked awful in it. He had also stopped her curling her hair, tied it back with a dull green ribbon that unfortunately belonged to Zoë, and he had said that he preferred her without lipstick. She thought she looked drab and watery, he had even made her eyes look a kind of aquamarine colour. She didn’t feel it was actually
like
her at all. He said she looked beautiful, and what more could she want? For it to go on for ever, she thought, and felt her eyes filling with tears. Sometimes she deliberately got her pose wrong so that he would come and move her head with his hands, but he had never touched her face again. She took the brushes out of the jam jar where he had stuck them and started to wipe them on the turps-soaked rag. And it will only get worse, she thought. Not only will Zoë be here from lunch-time onwards, but we shall finish our visit and they will make me go back to London and leave him. I won’t be able to bear that.

When Polly woke on Friday morning she felt just the same as when she had gone to sleep the night before – just as awful and frightened and full of doom. It was like a nightmare, except that it wasn’t confined to the night: that was the only time when she hadn’t felt anything – hadn’t even dreamed about it. It seemed extraordinary that out of the blue, when everything seemed quite normal and nice with only small things to worry about, like would she manage to get chicken pox at the right time and how could she explain to the Duchy that hot milk was like a sick-making poison and therefore couldn’t do her good, that with no warning at all, the thing she had dreaded most in the world for years now should not only be probable but imminent. It had started after tea yesterday: she had gone to her favourite tree in the orchard beyond the kitchen garden – the tree that she and Louise used to share, only now Louise wasn’t interested any more and she made Clary jolly well have her own tree – and settled on the best flat branch quite high up where she could sit with her back to the trunk and read and nobody could see her. She had taken her holiday task: Miss Milliment had let them choose from a list she had made and Polly had chosen
Cranford,
which she was finding rather boring. So when she heard voices approaching, her attention was easily diverted. As they came nearer, she could see that it was Aunt Rach and Sid. She was just about to call out to them when she realised that Aunt Rach was crying, which was very unusual for a grown-up. Then she realised that they were stopping under the tree, and it felt too late to say that she was there. They were talking about someone called Evie and how she was making a fuss about Sid being away, and Aunt Rach suddenly cried out, ‘But if you go back to London, and there
is
a war, there’ll be bombs – terrible air raids – someone said that they could flatten London in two or three raids – or they may use gas – I couldn’t bear you to face all that without me!’