Casting Off (60 page)

She had reached the wooded part of the road and, although this meant some protection from the rain, great flurries of larger drops fell from the branches, making straight for the back of her neck until she felt sodden – wet to the skin. The only traffic she encountered was a farm tractor coming the other way, whose driver asked whether it was wet enough for her.

The key to the cottage was under a stone near the back door. She felt light-headed with exhaustion, but she was back.

She made a pot of tea. She knew that the next thing was to light the fire, but she felt too tired to do it. She took the tea upstairs and got out of her wet clothes. It seemed easiest to get into her pyjamas and then to bed, but once there, she could not get warm. Her feet were icy and her teeth actually chattering – like people in books, she thought. So she got up again, made a hot-water bottle, dried her hair a bit on her bath towel and found some woollen socks. Back in bed she gradually began to thaw, until she was warm enough to fall asleep.

She woke when it was already dark, very thirsty and, she thought, hungry. But when she sat up, her head ached so violently that she couldn’t face going downstairs. She drank what remained of the cold tea with two aspirin she got from the bathroom and went back to bed. The hot-water bottle was cold, so she got up again and refilled it from the hot tap in the bathroom. These two trips had made her cold again, and it took ages to get warm.

She spent a night full of feverish thoughts and dreams. It was hard to tell which was which – what she was thinking and what she was dreaming. There was Archie saying she’d let him down and he was going to France that day, and there was Noël saying she’d let him down and he didn’t want to see her any more, and Polly saying she was so happy she didn’t need her friends, and somebody whose face was turned away and whose voice she did not recognize who kept saying she didn’t belong anywhere. And then she was running along a street towards a crowd of people but when she reached them the ones nearest threw up their arms in horror as though to ward her off and all the others melted away and there was the empty street again, only it had turned into a lane and at the end of it she thought she saw the cottage but when she got nearer there was just a black place and she fell into it and as she fell it got hotter and hotter until she was burning and there was a drumming, beating sound coming from her head and someone was telling her to open her eyes, but she was afraid that if she did that, it would be just the same – no dream, no difference.

‘. . . it’s all right, darling, wake up. I’m here with you.’

It was Dad. He was sitting on the side of the bed, and he was stroking her forehead with his long thin fingers. She looked at him with terror that it might not really be him, and then with fear that he might be angry at her being in the cottage away from home although she couldn’t remember where that was . . . ‘Oh, Dad!’ she said. ‘Oh, Dad! I’m so glad you’ve come!’ But then as she looked into his face, that had been smiling, she thought, and saw his serious eyes, it wasn’t Dad at all – it was Archie.

‘It’s Archie,’ he said.

‘I know. I can see you now. I was having a dream, I think. Such an awful dream.’

He put his arms round her as she began to cry, and held her with small rocking movements as she tried to tell him – but the whole thing went into jagged pieces and made no sense.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he kept saying, as she repeated hopelessly that there wasn’t anybody – anybody at all – she couldn’t find a single one. ‘I saw some people, but they melted.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said. ‘You’re burning hot. Now, lean forward and I’ll make your pillows comfortable.’

‘Is it Friday?’

‘Tuesday, as a matter of fact.’

‘Nowhere near Friday.’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Why are you here, then?’

He straightened up from collecting her tea-tray off the floor and looked at her for a moment – consideringly, she thought.

‘I came to see you.’

‘Oh. To see me.’ She felt a different kind of warmth.

‘Especially to see you,’ he said, and went with the tray.

She leaned back on the pillows: relief, contentment, pleasure filled her and she hardly felt ill.

He stayed all that week. The first two days she was in bed because she had a fever. He made her pots of tea and brought her a bottle of Robinson’s lemon barley water and a large jug of water to mix it with. He made a fire in her room, and in the mornings, after a bath, she lay in bed reading a book called
Animal Farm
that he had brought her, while he sat and drew her. ‘Got to get my hand in,’ he said, ‘and there you are. You might as well be useful.’

After lunch, he tucked her up and went out to shop and do other chores while she slept. She slept deeply and without dreams each afternoon, and would wake when it was dusk and the firelight was coming into its own.

Then he would bring their supper up on trays, and afterwards they would play bezique: they had kept the score for months and he said she owed him two hundred and fifty-three pounds.

When she was better, their ordinary life resumed, and when he left for London the following Monday, she went back to her book.

He asked her why she had left Blandford Street, and she told him about Polly and Gerald – a bit, though not much, about hating her room because of Noël.

‘Did you know about Poll and Gerald?’ she had asked him.

‘I did, actually. But Polly wanted to tell you herself.’

‘Do you think it’s a good thing?’

‘I think it’s a very good thing. He’s a very nice chap and she’ll make a splendid countess.’

‘
What?
’

‘Didn’t she tell you? He’s a lord. So, of course, she will be a lady.’

‘Lady what?’

‘Fakenham. Didn’t she tell you about his house? It’s enormous and in an awful state – just the thing for Poll.’

‘Yes, it would be. I can see the house part of it. I was just worrying – I mean, supposing she married him and it all goes wrong? They stop loving each other, or even
one
of them stops . . .’

‘Well, then it would all be sad and an awful mess, wouldn’t it? It’s a risk, of course, but people have to take them, and in their case I think it’s a pretty small one. But it’s their business, Clary. You can’t tell anyone who to love or not love.’

‘No.’

‘Would you have taken the slightest notice if I had advised you
not
to take up with Number One Noël?’

‘I wouldn’t. I see. OK, you win.’

They spent Christmas at the cottage. He asked her if she wanted to go to Home Place or be in London for it, and she said no, she wanted to stay where she was. The book had reached the stage where things were working in it that she had not envisaged when she began, but she had started to worry about the end, and didn’t want a holiday away from it. But she also – although she did not tell Archie – felt superstitious about leaving the cottage where she felt safe and cut off from her old life. She wanted simply to write, to make the garden and to have Archie every weekend. He taught her to make a proper vegetable soup, and interesting salads with things like potato and egg and anchovy in them. She began to grow things from seed and she planted bulbs to come out at Christmas.

She did one day talk to him about the fact that she had no money and that he was having to pay for everything. To begin with, he said that she could pay him back when her book got published, but, having worked in a literary agency, she knew that writers did not get paid much for their first book – or indeed, sometimes for many books after that. When she pointed this out, he said he thought that her father would probably give her a small allowance if she asked for it. So she suggested asking him down to the cottage, but Archie did not seem to want this, and said no, she should go to London to talk to him.

After Christmas, Archie had stopped his job, and although he had not given up his flat in London, he began to spend more time at the cottage, and was out painting whenever the weather was fine enough. ‘I could go up for the day,’ she said.

‘No, for a night,’ Archie said. ‘Unless you go at a weekend, otherwise he’ll be working. Go on,’ he said, ‘don’t be feeble.’

‘Why don’t you want him here?’

‘He might get the wrong idea.’

‘Oh, that! I could tell him.’

‘What would you tell him?’

‘I’d tell him – I’d tell him that we’re
friends
! Well, we are, aren’t we?’

‘I think you could say that.’

‘You don’t sound very pleased about it.’

‘What am I supposed to be? Hopping up and down with excitement? Like you?’

‘I’m not hopping,’ she said. He was making her feel grudging and sulky, which she hated. They had parted company for the afternoon. He went off to paint by the canal, and she collected branches that had fallen from the trees on to the piece of woodland garden where all the snowdrops had been and primroses were to come. All the time she was doing this she felt worse and worse about him. She thought of how kind he had been, how he had looked after her, how he had found this cottage and supported her living in it, encouraged her to write her book – really done every single thing for her for months and months. She thought of how good he had been with Neville when their father was still away; how tactful he had been with Polly when she was in love with him. He was the kindest and best person she had ever met. And there she was, making difficulties about doing one thing the way he wanted her to.

When she went back into the cottage, he was standing at the kitchen sink washing his brushes.

‘I want to apologize,’ she said. ‘I was foul to you. Of course I won’t tell Dad about our life. If he asks me I shall simply say that you have been terrifically kind – like a sort of second father to me.’

There was a silence. He did not turn round, but eventually she heard his croaky laughter, so she felt things were all right.

She went to London for the night, which she spent with Dad and Zoë in their rather grand new flat that looked on to Ladbroke Square. They both seemed very pleased to see her, and Juliet rushed in from playing in the square to give her a hug.

‘You’ve grown your hair long!’ she cried. ‘You’re grown-up. Why aren’t you wearing lipstick? Mummy, a boy called Hastings is coming to stay because he’s running away.’

‘Why is he running away?’

‘His parents are very cruel to him. He stood on a wall ’cos he wanted to jump off it and they didn’t want him to so when he jumped, they spoiled it and
caught
him! I’m going to be a bridesmaid at Polly’s wedding! If you come to it you’ll see me in a long dress, and probably – ’ her voice dropped and slowed dramatically ‘ – I almost surely . . . perhaps . . . may be . . . wearing lipstick. A bit.’

Zoë bore Jules off and Dad took her upstairs to the drawing room for a drink.

‘Let’s have a good look at you,’ he said. ‘You look quite different since I last saw you – although, heaven knows, that’s far too long ago. You’ve got very thin.’

‘Have I? I didn’t notice.’

‘It suits you. What have you been doing? Archie told me that you were writing.’

She told him about the book. Well, not
about
it, but about doing it. Then – he brought it up – he asked her how she was managing about money, and she told him that she hadn’t got any. ‘I haven’t even paid Polly for the rent for the flat,’ she said (a thought that had only recently occurred to her).

‘Don’t worry about that,’ he said. ‘I’m paying it for Neville. He seems to like staying there – doesn’t want to be here, and it seemed sensible.’

‘Oh.’ How could she ask him for more money after that?

‘But that’s another matter. You must be needing some for yourself, though. I suppose Archie has been subsidizing you. We can’t let him go on doing that. He’s probably saved a bit from his job, but he told me that he was thinking of giving that up, then he’ll be off to France and he’ll need what he’s saved to get started again. It’s the devil going back to something like painting when you haven’t been doing it for years.’

‘Did he tell you he was going to France?’

‘He said he was thinking about it.’

‘When?’

‘Oh, darling, I don’t know when! Sometime in the autumn, I think, after he’d found that cottage for you. I seem to remember that he said the cottage was dirt cheap – twenty-five pounds a year. Are you going to stay in it after you’ve finished your book?’

‘I don’t know.’ She was suddenly feeling so frightened that she couldn’t concentrate on what Dad was saying. If Archie was going, why hadn’t he told her? All he had said, months ago, was that he hadn’t decided. So had he changed his mind?

‘It was just before Christmas, I remember now.’

‘What was?’

‘When Archie talked about France. Clary! Do listen to me! What I propose is . . .’

The rest of the evening, although she tried to conceal it, she felt completely desperate. Zoë arrived to say that Juliet wanted her to say goodnight, and she went downstairs to Juliet’s bedroom. It’s probably a mistake, she thought, as she went, a misunderstanding. He wouldn’t lie to me.

‘Mummy said you live in a cottage? Do you like it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I wouldn’t. I shall live in a boat. Or an aeroplane. Yes, an aeroplane because I don’t want to have a garden and weeding to do. You’re my sister, aren’t you? Sort of?’

‘Yes, I am. We have the same dad.’

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘She died.’ She found that she could say that as though she was talking about somebody else.

Juliet flung her arms round her and she was tightly squeezed. ‘I’m very, very,
very
sorry for you.’

‘It’s all right, Jules. It was a long time ago.’

‘Oh. I suppose it’s gone into history. We do history at my school and people die all the time. They keep doing it, and then we have to learn about a new person.’

She went back on the train next morning. She should have felt relieved. Dad was giving her an allowance of a hundred and twenty pounds a year, and he produced two hundred at once to pay Archie back. ‘You’ll probably have to get some sort of job, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy to live on writing books to begin with. Come back soon. Don’t disappear again.’