Casting Off (17 page)

When the telegram from her mother arrived, he had said, ‘If you think it would be a good thing for your mother to come and live with us, you know I should be glad to have her. I know you find her difficult, darling, but if she can’t manage on her own, I’m sure we could work something out.’

Well, she thought, as she queued on the icy station for a taxi, at least it didn’t look as though they would have to have her mother at the moment, which was a good thing because, apart from anything else, there simply wasn’t room for her in Hugh’s house.

In the taxi just as she was thinking that, after all, her mother was only fifty-five or so, it struck her that in twenty-five years’ time that would be
her
age. Would she simply become someone who irritated and bored her daughter? Was that all that life was
for
? She was thirty, and she had done nothing except marry Rupert, have his child and fall in love with someone else. It was not enough. She was going to have to search for and find something that she could do or become that had more to it, that had a life of its own, that would engage her. She could not imagine what that could be, and wondered, there was a certain excitement in the speculation, whether she could search for something quite unknown to her.

‘You always said you liked houses that faced east and west.’

‘I know, but the garden side will be sunny.’ ‘Yes, but at least half the house won’t be. It’s due north this side.’

Just as Villy was beginning to wish that she hadn’t asked Jessica to look at houses with her (she seemed in a bad mood, but it
was
fiendishly cold) the agent appeared. ‘So sorry, Mrs – Cazalet, isn’t it? My car wouldn’t start.’ He fumbled in the pockets of his Army surplus overcoat and brought out an enormous bunch of keys with dirty labels attached to them. He had a heavy cold. ‘Here we are.’ He fitted a key into the mock Gothic door, which opened to reveal an unexpectedly large, dark hall. The agent turned on a light – a naked bulb that hung from a cord in the middle of a pargeted ceiling revealed a number of doors much like the one they had come through.

‘It’s a house full of features,’ the agent said. ‘Did you bring the particulars with you, Mrs Cazalet? If not, I have a spare copy.’ He sneezed and wiped his nose on an overworked handkerchief.

‘I have got them, but I’d rather just look round first.’ ‘Of course. Well, I’ll just take you round and then I’ll leave you to poke about on your own.’ He walked across the hall to the furthest door. ‘This is the main lounge. As you will appreciate,’ he said, before they had a chance of doing so, ‘this room faces due south with attractive Gothic windows on to the garden, and a French window that opens directly into it. There is also an open fireplace with tile surround and parquet flooring.’

The room was quite large, she thought; she remarked on this to Jessica who thought it seemed larger than it was because the ceiling was so low.

The agent said would they mind if he just quickly showed them the rest of the house and then left them to spend as much time as they liked in it. He had another appointment, a house in Belsize Park, an awkward distance without his car. ‘I’m sure I could leave you ladies to lock up and pop the key in to us afterwards.’

The rest of the house consisted of one equally large but dark room, a small kitchen on the ground floor, and four bedrooms, two large and two small, plus a bathroom on the floor above.

She said that she wanted to see the garden, and before he went, the agent produced another key.

‘You can see the garden from the house,’ Jessica said.

‘I want to see the house from the garden.’

They shuffled across the small square lawn, thick with rotting leaves, and turned to stare at the house. Like the front, it was faced with roughcast, now a dirty grey from neglect. The slated roof had a pointed gable, which looked as though the upper rooms would be attics, but they weren’t. The whole thing had a kind of rustic romantic air; she thought that was most unusual in London houses, and she knew that she wanted to live in it. She felt resentful at Jessica’s lack of enthusiasm.

‘Why don’t you like it?’

‘It’s just that I simply can’t imagine Edward wanting to live in it. It’s a kind of glorified
quaint
’ – she made the word sound really horrid – ‘
cottage
!’

‘That’s what I like about it. Think how easy to manage! No ghastly basement, hardly any stairs. And this garden could be
made
nice.’

‘But where will you keep the servants?’

‘Oh, darling, don’t be so out of date. I shan’t have any living in. I shall get a really good daily, and do the cooking myself. After all,
you
used to do that.’

‘I had to, but you don’t. Seriously, Villy, you don’t want to saddle yourself with all the cooking.’

‘Why not? I shall have Roly to look after because Ellen will go with Rupert and Zoë, so I’d be fairly tied to the house anyway. I shall enjoy having something useful to do.’

‘Well,’ Jessica said, as they were going back in a taxi to her house in Paradise Walk, ‘I still cannot see Edward wanting to live here. He likes lots of room for dinner parties.’

‘He told me to choose exactly what I wanted. And he’s going to get a yacht for sailing at weekends. And we’ll still go to Home Place for the children’s holidays.’

Two days later she took him to see the little house. He didn’t say much except that weren’t the front rooms rather dark, but he said that if she liked it, he would get it if the survey was all right. He was also very sweet, she thought, about her plan to have Miss Milliment to live with them. ‘She won’t be dining with us, darling. I’ll make her a bed-sitting room in that large downstairs front room and she can have her other meals with me and Roly.’ He had smiled and said that would be fine. The survey was set in motion and, in the meantime, there was Christmas.

Although the war was over, it felt like the last Christmas of the war and in some ways it wasn’t very different. Food was no easier, although Archie managed to bring two sides of smoked salmon, but with twenty people (Simon brought a friend from university, who seemed completely speechless except on the subject of Mozart) even that didn’t go very far. Everybody was there, except Louise who had gone to Hatton, and Teddy and his bride, who were not yet back from America. The older children overflowed into Mill Farm, presided over by Rachel and Sid, but everybody converged upon Home Place for meals except for breakfast.

Everybody, she thought, was how they had always been, only more so. The Brig had become unexpectedly tyrannical about things that he had never minded before. ‘I will
not
have a tree dying in my house,’ he had said, when she had staggered into the hall with the Christmas tree she had bought in Battle.

‘It’s no good, darling,’ the Duchy had said. ‘That will have to disappear and McAlpine will have to dig one out of the nursery.’ She thought of saying that he wouldn’t be able to see it, but one look at the Duchy’s face and she knew that any such subterfuge was out of the question, so she gave the tree away to someone in the village. Then there was some altercation about who merited Christmas stockings. She had thought that the children, from Lydia downwards, should be the recipients; when she announced this at tea-time, the children thought otherwise.

‘I’ve been
banking
on my stocking for months,’ Neville said. ‘If I don’t have one, people will give me stocking presents instead of real ones. I’m simply not prepared to put up with that sort of lowering of my standards.’

Clary looked at him with scorn. ‘People who want stockings years after they’ve known that Father Christmas is a myth are simply wedded to the material things in life. It’s avaricious to want things so much.’

‘
Is
it? Don’t you want things? I seem to have noticed that you’re pretty keen on some things.’

‘Of course I want
some things
. I’m just not so dead set on getting them.’

Neville pretended to consider this. ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘That just doesn’t work. What on earth’s the point of wanting things if you don’t mind whether you get them or not?’

‘I see his point,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s one of the things we do at school. Have debates on things and try to see the other person’s point of view. Miss Smedley says that’s tremendously important.’

‘When your father was a little boy,’ the Duchy said, ‘he was so greedy about his stocking that one Christmas he hung up a pillow-case thinking that Father Christmas would put more into it.’

Wills looked up with sudden interest. ‘What happened?’

‘In the morning he found it full of coal. Not a single present.’

This shocked everyone.

‘Oh! Poor Dad!’

‘What did he do with the coal?’ Wills asked.

‘That’s not the point. There was nothing he could do about the coal.’

‘Yes, there was,’ Neville said at once. ‘If it had been me, I would have sold it to poor freezing people who would pay pounds for it. Or I would have wrapped up each separate piece and given them as Christmas presents. That would teach people. And please don’t see what I mean,’ he said to Lydia just as she was going to. ‘It’s
my
point of view; I don’t want
you
to see it.’

‘Did it do Uncle Edward’s character any good?’ Wills asked.

‘Well, he never hung up a pillow-case again.’

Then Archie, who had been listening to all this, suggested that perhaps people who were being struck off the stocking list should be given a year’s notice, and this was considered a generally popular idea and adopted.

Throughout that Christmas – it still felt like the last one to her – while she coped with the various needs of the family whose ages ranged from Great Aunt Dolly, now approaching eighty-one and whose memory was shakily ensconced in the 1880s when she had been a young girl, and Juliet, now five, who lived firmly in the future when
she
would be grown up – ‘I shall have twelve children and keep them in bed and just take them out one at a time to keep them
clean
!’,
etc.
– she realized that she was actually excited at the prospect of having her own house again, where she could choose what happened, and where there would be opportunities for the indulgence of some solitude. It was years since she had had any sort of holiday: when Edward got the yacht they would be able to have a couple of weeks in her. Zoë had said that she would have Roly and she was sure that Miss Milliment could manage on her own, provided she got a decent daily. She broached this idea to Edward on Christmas Eve when they were undressing for bed.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I haven’t got the boat yet – probably I’ll wait till spring. This isn’t the time of year for yachting anyway.’

He did not sound at all like his usual good-tempered self.

‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘there’ll be masses to do to the house. I’ve decided to do all the painting inside myself. Do you think it would be nice to have the drawing room a sort of duck egg blue?’

‘Oh, Lord,
I
don’t know – it’s no good asking me things like that.’

She realized suddenly that whenever he talked about the house he seemed to become irritable and the awful thought occurred to her that perhaps, in spite of his saying that he liked the house and that she must choose, he was dreading it. Jessica’s remarks came back to her.

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I have a feeling that perhaps you’re not happy about the new house, that you’re just being sort of kind about it. You really mustn’t be. It’s far too important a decision for there to be any disagreement at all about it. I would be quite happy to look at more houses, I really would.’

There was a pause, long enough for her to fear that she was right. Then he said: ‘Nonsense. I think it’s a very good choice. Not too large and all that. Hadn’t we better go on Father Christmas’s rounds?’

So, in their dressing gowns, they crept round the bedrooms that contained the small children, with the bulging, creaking golf stockings that Hugh and Edward donated for the occasion, ending with Lydia who lay with her eyes theatrically shut.

‘She wasn’t asleep.’

‘I know. Better to pretend that she was, though.’

As she got into bed, she said, ‘Does it feel like a last Christmas to you? It does to me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, we’ve all been living here for six years now – well, more actually – and now, quite suddenly, we’ll all be going our own ways. I know we’ll all come back for holidays, but it won’t be the same.’

‘It isn’t all that sudden,’ he said – rather defensively she thought. ‘I mean, Teddy and Louise are both married, Lydia’s at boarding school. There’s really only Roly, isn’t there? Things
do
change, whether we like it or not.’

‘Oh, but I’m looking forward to that. When Roly starts school I think I’ll try and find some sort of job. I don’t want to go back to my pre-war life at all. I’d like to have some real work to do, and proper holidays. Oh, darling, I’m so looking forward to us having a boat! Do you remember our first sailing holiday in Cornwall? That very hot summer – catching mackerel and eating them that same evening? And the ants! Do you remember that extraordinary time when we saw them on the steps going up to that little hotel? When they were carrying things down and when they got to the edge of the step they just tipped the crumb or whatever it was over and then went down the step to collect it at the bottom? The Mannerings were with us. I remember you thought that Enid was frightfully attractive and I felt quite jealous.’