Camomile Lawn (2 page)

‘Your uncle does not think there will be a war. I would rather you did not discuss it in front of him.’

‘Oh, Aunt, really!’ Calypso threw back her head and laughed, then, seeing Helena’s face, stopped abruptly.

‘He wants the last one all to himself,’ Polly muttered to Walter, ‘and Aunt lost her first husband completely not just a leg and an eyeful of gas.’

‘Here we are.’ Helena swung the car into the drive, which led to the back of the house and the entrance protected from the prevailing wind. ‘When you’ve seen Richard will you choose your rooms?’

‘Shall you get full up with evacuees, Aunt?’ Walter hefted the suitcases.

‘Uncle’s leg will prevent that.’ Polly slid out of the car. ‘Oh damn, I’ve laddered my stocking.’

‘Polly, please—’ Helena felt inclined to slap.

‘Sorry, sorry, Aunt. Hullo, Uncle Richard, how are you? Father and Mother sent their love.’

Polly and Calypso kissed their uncle. Walter held out his hand, too old now to kiss and comment on whether or not his uncle had halitosis.

Waiting for the midnight train, which was late, Calypso shivered as she walked along the platform. She remembered Polly’s suggestion that this might be their last holiday. She and her cousins had been coming every summer for ten years, ever since Helena married Richard and bought the house, square and ugly but in a marvellous position.

Every August since she was Sophy’s age she had come with Polly, Walter and Oliver to bathe, climb cliffs and over-eat at Helena’s expense, treating the house as their own, then vanish like a flock of starlings, leaving the house for Uncle Richard and Helena and, for the whole year, Sophy, who could speak of winter storms and violent seas, of driving rain, wind she could not stand up against and fog. Calypso hugged her cardigan close and hopped from one foot to another. ‘Come on, train, come on, Oliver.’ Would he be changed? Would beautiful funny Oliver, who planned all the games, be the same? What had he seen and done in Spain in this war people felt so passionately about?

Oliver stepped stiffly from the train and looked about him. Calypso ran.

‘Oliver, darling, how brown you are! You look like Suzanne Lenglen. Does it hurt?’ His head looked strange bandaged. Oliver put his arm round her shoulder. It was all exactly the same, nothing changed, same porters, same ticket collector, same cab rank, harbour, water lapping at high tide, tired train.

‘Does it hurt?’ she repeated.

‘No, I can take the dressing off tomorrow. Are you driving? Where’s the car?’

‘Usual place.’

‘D’you think there’d be a pub open?’

‘It’s far too late. Have you taken to drink?’

‘Just wanted to delay arriving.’

‘Why?’

‘All the questions.’

‘There won’t be many. Helena says we are not to talk about Spain or the war. How soon will it be, Oliver? How long have we got? They are all in bed by now.’

‘Could we stop on the cliff before we get to the house?’

‘Of course.’ Calypso, vaguely embarrassed, drove fast through the sleeping town on to the cliff road. ‘Will this do?’ She stopped the car. Oliver got out, walked across the rough ground and stood looking down at the sea. He seemed to have forgotten Calypso, who sat in the car watching him. He did not move so she joined him.

‘The Terror Run.’ She pointed to the cliff path. ‘Shall we run it this year? Polly says this may be our last holiday.’

‘May I fuck you? Now, at once? Calypso, I want to marry you.’ She said nothing. ‘Well?’ Oliver looked down at the sea. ‘Well, can I?’

‘No, darling. I’m a virgin. I’d have a baby. I can’t marry you. I want to marry somebody rich, you know that.’

‘To keep you in the state to which you wish to become accustomed?’

‘Yes. I do love you, Oliver, you know that. Besides, we are only nineteen.’

‘Nineteen!’

‘Nineteen is too young for a man to marry. You have to go to Oxford.’

‘Oxford, Christ—’

‘Don’t spoil our holiday.’

‘All right, we will have the Terror Run.’ He walked back to the car. ‘God, I’m tired.’ Calypso got in beside him. ‘The smell. I can’t tell you what it’s like.’

‘What smell?’ She started the engine.

‘Death.’

‘Bits of people, like Uncle’s leg?’

‘Exactly. The poor sod, and we mock him.’

‘You have changed.’ She tried to speak lightly.

‘I’ve only come out of my shell, woken up, grown up.’

‘Here we are.’ Calypso stopped the car by the house. ‘I’m so sorry, Oliver.’

‘Goodnight. Which room am I in?’

‘The red room.’

‘Thanks.’ Oliver went up the stairs without looking back and into his room. He undressed without putting on the light, pulled on pyjamas, crossed to the window to pull back the curtains, found Sophy.

‘Sophy, what are you doing here?’

‘Aunt Helena wouldn’t let me meet you. Calypso wanted to take me to the station.’

‘She did?’

‘Yes, she suggested it, but Aunt Helena said I must go to bed and could see you in the morning. Are you cross?’

‘No. You are cold. Come here.’ He picked her up. ‘Let me warm you.’ He carried the shivering child to his bed. ‘Let’s warm each other. Get in with me.’

‘Does your head hurt? How did you get shot?’

‘No, it doesn’t. Lie quiet. Perhaps we can hear the sea.’

‘Oliver, you are crying.’ She touched his wet face. He held her close in her Viyella pyjamas. She smelt of soap.

‘Just let me cry—’ He wept for the horrors in Spain and Calypso’s rebuff.

‘M
AY WE ASK THE
twins over?’ Walter addressed his aunt. ‘Of course.’ Helena glanced fleetingly at her husband’s fingers and balding top, which was all she could see behind the outspread
Times.
She watched the fingers tighten their grip. ‘Ask them to lunch tomorrow or Friday.’

‘I am out on those days.’ Richard Cuthbertson doubled up the paper with a sweep of his arms, tearing the top sheet. Helena winced and Walter and Polly exchanged a smile.

‘Telephone and ask them.’ Helena spoke towards Polly without moving her head. ‘Such nice boys.’

‘Extraordinary, considering their father. The fellow’s a conchie. I hear he’s filled the Rectory with Germans. What’s he going to get away with next?’

‘Actually, the Erstweilers are Austrian. He played the organ quite beautifully on Sunday, even though it needs repairing. It was so nice of him.’

‘Playing for his supper, that’s all. The fellow’s a Jew, I hear.’

‘Presumably that’s why they are here.’ Walter helped himself to more butter than he needed.

Polly reached for the toast. ‘Are there any young Erstweilers, Aunt?’

‘One, in a camp. The Floyers say the Erstweilers are worried stiff.’

‘Brace him up, do him good. The General says they are splendid places. His friend at the Embassy offered to show him round one when he was over there. Of course he knows it’s all propaganda.’

‘What’s propaganda?’ Calypso came sleepily into the room. ‘Forgive me coming down in a dressing gown, Aunt. Good morning, Uncle.’

‘Concentration camps.’ Walter swallowed his toast.

‘Father says General Peachum is the most gullible man he’s ever come across. Any kedgeree?’

‘I ate it.’ Polly got up from the table.

‘All of it?’ Calypso whispered.

‘There wasn’t much. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right. I’ll eat an egg.’ Calypso sat beside her uncle. ‘I didn’t think it worth dressing as I intend spending all day in the sun. Oliver’s marvellously brown.’

‘We are going to ask the Rectory twins to lunch tomorrow,’ said Walter.

‘If they are conchies like their father I won’t have them in my house,’ said Richard aggressively.

‘It’s Aunt Helena’s house, Uncle, and Father says we should all admire people like Mr Floyer. If there had been more like him in 1914 we should all be living in a better world.’

‘Walter,’ said Helena quietly. ‘Stop it. He will wreck
The Times
if you tease like that!’ The three young people gave a whoop of laughter. Helena suppressed a smile. Richard Cuthbertson left the room.

‘Aunt Helena, he’s worse than ever.’ Calypso laid a hand on her aunt’s.

‘He doesn’t want another war.’ Helena patted Calypso’s hand. ‘He won’t admit it’s coming. Here’s Oliver. You are up early, that’s not like you.’ Oliver came in through the French windows carrying a towel.

‘I’ve developed new habits, Aunt. Not all of them good. I’ve been swimming in the cove with the twins. Is there any coffee left for us?’

‘Come in, twins, we were talking about you. We were going to ask you to lunch.’ Polly went to pour coffee. ‘Don’t just stand there.’

David and Paul came in shyly, muttering ‘good morning’, ‘thank you’ and ‘hullo’. Tall, with startling yellow hair and brown eyes, indistinguishable, they sat down, their eyes fixed on Calypso, by whom they were fascinated.

‘Uncle was suggesting you will be conchies if there’s a war.’ Polly handed them coffee.

‘No, no,’ they said. ‘Not this war. One should fight for the Jews.’

‘Two should.’ Calypso, aware of their eyes, mocked them.

‘Two will,’ said David.

‘Two are joining up at the end of the holidays,’ added Paul.

‘Oh,’ said Walter eagerly, ‘what in?’

‘Air Force,’ they said.

‘Long distance killing.’ Oliver looked at them. ‘Heard of Guernica?’

‘Of course we have. Picasso.’

‘Just as awful as close to. I shall go into the Navy as soon as they will take me.’ Walter spoke eagerly.

‘Oh!’ cried Helena, rising from the table. ‘Do stop, children. There may not be a war. It may not happen. All that over again. I can’t bear it.’ She left the room, closing the door.

‘Poor Aunt Helena.’ Oliver buttered his toast. ‘She will not face the fact that in all of us, even in her, there is the person who is capable of killing, you, you and you.’ He pointed round the table with his knife. ‘Every one of us is capable of killing other human beings. Let’s have that game for this year. As well as the Terror Run we will have the Killing. What do you say? Draw straws? Not afraid, are you? Let’s have a killing, to take any form you choose. We’ll include Sophy. That makes seven of us.’

‘You are mad, Oliver.’ Calypso was looking excited.

‘It’s a mad world. Are you on?’

‘I’m on.’ Calypso smiled across the table at Oliver. ‘I’m on.’

Nobody else spoke until Sophy, who had followed Oliver and the twins into the room, said: ‘What does it matter if there’s going to be a war, anyway?’

‘Out of the mouths—’ said the Floyer boys in a tone of relief and Walter said: ‘All right, let’s make it that the killers kill within a time limit of five years. That should include us all. Sophy doesn’t really count.’

‘But I do. I do count, don’t I, Oliver?’ Sophy screamed suddenly at Oliver.

‘Yes, yes, you count,’ Oliver said soothingly, not taking his eyes off Calypso. Calypso stared back, remembering the coarseness of his words the night before, her hasty refusal more from habit than inclination. Oliver back from Spain had a new dimension.

R
ICHARD CUTHBERTSON SMOOTHED HIS
hair with the ivory brushes Helena had given him when they married, brushing the grey hair along the sides of his head. He laid the brushes in exact alignment with the bottle of hair oil in symmetry with the matching clothes brushes, and glanced as he always did at the photograph of his first wife Diana, posed looking away from him, her arm round her dog, a sensible smooth fox terrier, not one of those rough-haired things one saw nowadays with oblong snouts and trembling legs. He had no dog now that his retriever had died. Helena had objected to the smells when it farted and the hair shed on the carpets. She was happier without a dog. She would not prevent him replacing his old companion but difficulties would be made, hints dropped. Two can play at that game, he thought. ‘It would be good for Sophy.’ His eyes travelled past his first wife’s photograph—had she really looked like that?—to the group photographs of his fellow officers, a splendid lot, mostly dead. He ran over their names, a familiar litany. They looked so young. Peter a stockbroker now, Hugh a brewer, Bunty secretary to a golf club, Andrew farming, their commanding officer now retired a general, chairman of the local bench of magistrates, Master of Hounds, rich.

‘And I live on my wife’s money and have one leg.’ Richard looked closer at the regimental group of 1913, young men without fear. He wiped a tear from his right eye with a fastidious handkerchief, a perpetual tear due to gassing just before the loss of his leg, an embarrassment and a nuisance. He would get a dog, to hell with Helena. He settled his tweed jacket squarely on his shoulders, tweaked his trouser crease into correct line down his artificial leg and turned to leave the room. As he did so he glanced out of the window and caught sight of his nephews and nieces running from the house across the lawn, carrying towels and bathing suits and accompanied by the parson’s twins.

‘Wait for me!’ Sophy’s high-pitched scream halted Oliver, who with Calypso made the tail end of the procession. ‘Wait, wait!’ Irritating child. He watched Oliver pause and noticed with a frown that he and Calypso were holding hands. Oliver had taken off the ridiculous bandage he had worn at breakfast, showing off, of course. Oliver dropped Calypso’s hand and, catching hold of the child, swung her on to his shoulders to sit astride. The child’s gingham dress flew up and Richard saw that she was wearing no knickers, bloody little bastard exposing her bum.

‘Helena?’ Richard shouted, limping downstairs. ‘Helena, where are you?’

‘Here.’

‘Helena, I don’t often interfere in your department, but this time I must insist—’

‘What?’ Helena was in the drawing room, putting roses in a bowl he had won at polo before the war. She did not look round.

‘That bowl needs cleaning.’

‘If we polished the silver according to your directions there wouldn’t be a silver mark left. What is it, Richard?’

‘That child Sophy is wearing no knickers.’

‘How on earth do you know?’ Anxiety showed in Helena’s eyes.

‘I saw Oliver pick her up.’

‘Is that all?’

‘All?’ He was nonplussed. ‘It’s indecent. I ask you.’