Casting Off (18 page)

‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Funny – I don’t remember the ants. I remember that awful bumpy tennis court we played on, and how bad Rory was at bridge.’

He had joined her in bed by now.

‘You took to sailing like a duck to water,’ he said, put one arm round her and with his other hand, pulled up her nightdress.

She went to sleep, pleased that he had done what he wanted and relieved that it had taken less time than usual.

Four

THE OUTSIDERS

January–April 1946

If anyone during the seemingly endless six years of war had suggested that he would actually
miss
it when it stopped, he would have been affronted and thought they were simply trying to provoke him. Now, however, living aimlessly in the toy house that Jessica thought was so convenient, he had to admit that he
did
miss it – in more ways than one. The first crunch had been in the autumn, when he had gone back to see what was going on in his house at Frensham. Of course, he had been delighted when Nora and Richard had gone to live there after their marriage: it had stopped the house being requisitioned, because of Nora’s intention to run it as a home for disabled ex-servicemen. But this he had seen as simply a wartime project: he had always imagined himself reinstalled there – the squire of the village, living, for the first time in his life, in the way to which he felt himself suited. Jessica had warned him that he might find the place changed, but he had not taken her seriously. In the train, he had begun to form plans to make some sort of flat in the house for Nora and Richard (Jessica had also said that it would be very hard on Nora to turn them out).

He had sat in the train on the familiar journey thinking fondly of Aunt Lena whose house it had been, and of how often he’d taken this particular train – the three thirty-five – when he had been sent there for a week of his holidays. He had loved those visits: Aunt Lena had spoiled him – she was childless. He would be met at the station by Parkin, who had called him Master Raymond and agreed with everything he said. When he arrived, he would go and kiss his aunt’s pillowy cheek. There would be a large coal fire at all times of the year and, within ten minutes, the maid would start bringing in an enormous, wonderful tea. Egg sandwiches, scones with strawberry jam and delicious butter that had beads of water in it when you cut it, mustard and cress sandwiches, gingerbread, fairy cakes, and to crown all, apart from a seed or a cherry cake, a wonderful iced affair that said, ‘Welcome to Raymond’ in contrasting piped icing. The cups were very shallow with dragons on them. Aunt Lena always said she was not hungry, but she usually ate some of everything, and he was encouraged to do the same. After tea, when the maid had cleared everything away, Aunt Lena would read to him from
The Water Babies
or a thin battered book about the exploits of a brownie, a kind of mischievous but well-meaning fairy. When he was older they played draughts, and Halma and Letterbags. There was an enamelled clock on the chimney-piece that struck the quarter hours with delicate silvery chimes, and at six o’clock Aunt Lena would ring for Barker, the lady’s maid, who would come to fetch him for his bath, after which he was conducted to what was unaccountably called the schoolroom where a bowl of bread and milk and brown sugar and a boiled egg awaited him. When he was in bed, Aunt Lena would come and say good night to him. She would have changed into black silk with a white cashmere shawl and long, elaborate, seed-pearl earrings that were shaped like baskets of flowers. She would make him say his prayers and kiss his forehead, and sometimes send for Barker again: ‘The boy’s hair is damp from his bath – it should be dried – see to it, will you, Barker?’ And then he would hear her painful, uneven retreat and the tap of her stick as she descended the stairs. Thus would begin a halcyon seven days of being petted, the centre of attention both with Aunt Lena and her servants for whom his visit provided a minute but welcome change from the stultifying regularity of their lives. He was given his favourite food, taken out for little treats, the best being a journey to Guildford with Aunt Lena to choose his Christmas and birthday presents, but most of all he enjoyed being the centre of utterly uncritical attention. Everything he did was clever and good; he was ‘such a good child’, he would hear Aunt Lena telling everyone, and he revelled in living up to this entrancing reputation. It had been utterly unlike home, where his father ruminated publicly and at length on his dimness – his mediocre reports from school, his paralysing inability to come up with the right answers to terrifying questions headed as ‘elementary’ general knowledge that were his father’s favourite lunch-time conversational ploys. ‘Can’t think what they teach you,’ he’d end up by saying. ‘Never known such an ignoramus in me life.’ His mother did not criticize him, she simply took as little notice of him as possible. Her interest was entirely centred upon his older brother, Robert – the one who was killed in the war. Robert had once accompanied him on a visit to Aunt Lena, but had professed himself bored; he had also been exceedingly naughty in some unspeakable way (at least he could never get anybody to speak of it). ‘Not, I am afraid, a
good
child,’ Aunt Lena had said the evening after he had been sent home in disgrace (he, Raymond, had been allowed to stay).

Thereafter he had the monopoly of Frensham and Aunt Lena and, bless her heart, she had left him everything when she died: the house that he had become so fond of, that had, in fact, felt like his real home, all its contents and what had seemed at the time to be a staggering number of most conservatively invested shares. He, who had never succeeded in making any money to speak of, was suddenly comparatively rich. But before he could really settle down in the house to enjoy everything, the war had come, he had felt bound to offer his services and the job he had got precluded his living at home. He had been banished, as it were, to Woodstock, and subsequently Oxford for the duration. As Jessica did not want to live at Frensham on her own, the house had been shut until Nora’s marriage to that poor chap Richard, and when she had suggested running a sort of nursing home for paraplegics it had seemed the answer. All very well, but now that the war was over he wanted to get back to normal. He was perfectly prepared to convert the stables and coach house into a home for Nora and Richard, but he wanted his house back, whatever Jessica thought or said about it.
She
wanted to keep that doll’s house in Paradise Walk, which, as he had pointed out to her, was barely big enough for the two of them, and impossible when Judy came home for the holidays. And giving Angela any decent sort of send-off there was out of the question.

At the thought of Angela he sighed – audibly, he realized, since the passenger opposite him looked up suddenly from his book, and, embarrassed, he averted his gaze to the window. Angela’s impending marriage had been a shock to him as well as to Jessica, but in quite different ways. She had objected to her fiancé’s being nearly twenty years older than Angela; this did not seem to Raymond a bad thing, Angela needed looking after. She objected to the fact that he had been married before – he partly agreed with that, but pointed out that if Major, or Dr Black as he presumably now was, had reached the age of forty-five without being married there might be other things to be said against him. She had also said that he was far from glamorous (Black had gone back to the States before Raymond had the chance of meeting him), and remembering bitterly her liaison with that slimy little worm Clutterworth, he thought she was a fine one to talk about
that
. Black being a psychiatrist was certainly a bad mark: he had a profound distrust for head doctors and all that mental stuff, but still he
was
a doctor – and had been a major in the American army, which was respectable. He had certainly felt upset when he discovered that the wedding would not take place here, either in London or at Frensham which, of course, was how it should be. It was not even that Dr Black was unwilling to come over for the wedding, it was Angela who insisted that she did not want a big wedding – a family do – she wanted to go over to New York and be married quietly there without any fuss, as she put it. So, in a couple of weeks’ time, she would be sailing in the
Aquitania
– entirely on her own – sailing away to a life which probably meant, he felt, that he would never see her again. That was what shocked him. It meant that there would now never be any chance of his repairing their awkward, uncomfortable relationship, something that he had craved ever since that disastrous lunch at Lyons Corner House – five, no, six years ago, that last time he had been alone with her. After it, he had been so discouraged by her indifference and boredom; he had made two or three attempts to see her and been put off – immediately, or worse, at the last minute – until he had lost his nerve. He had never had the opportunity to explain that he understood that she was grown-up, that he was no longer simply a parent, but that he wanted to be her friend, an equal in some sort, that all he asked was affection and trust, that he could not bear being treated as a stranger who, he felt,
she
felt, she would dislike if she knew him any better. But this was how it was with them – or had become. He remembered now when the full realization of his failure with Angela had flooded upon him: it had been the summer of ’43, the evening after he had had that awful lunch with Villy to try – hopelessly, as it turned out – to get some help from her about Jessica’s perfidy. The shame and misery he had endured when he had first discovered that his wife was having an affair! It would have been awful whoever it had been, but her choice of that dreadful little man had been the utmost humiliation. His Jessica
lying
to him – not once, but repeatedly – for months, for the best part of a
year
. The fool she must have thought him, the terrible fear that she could never have cared two straws for him, that he had imagined her love, that she had simply countenanced his adoration, had merely endured his love without returning it. He had descended then to a black pit of despair and isolation: his bluster, his rage at her when he was alone did not for one moment sustain him. He felt his failure as a husband and then, immediately, as a parent as well, and what on earth else was he if he was neither of these?

He had got off the train at Oxford and sat the whole hot, airless evening in a pub that he had never been to before, that he rightly assumed would not be frequented by his colleagues. He had sat there nursing the two small whiskies that was all the landlord was prepared to sell to a stranger, until his newly acquired ulcer caused him such pain that he knew he must go somewhere to eat.

The weeks that followed were the worst in his life. He had arranged the luncheon with Villy because he simply had to talk to someone, to share some of his rage and shock and the only possible person had seemed to be Villy, who he was sure would be as outraged at her sister’s behaviour as he. Then, on his way to meet her, the dreadful thought had occurred to him that she already knew, and from there it was a short step to the nightmare possibility – likelihood – that
everybody
knew, that not only Jessica but the world was laughing at him behind his back. But she clearly
hadn’t
known; seemed suitably, mercifully shocked. Then, as he was telling her what he felt about it all, he had the idea that perhaps he could get Villy to talk to her, something that he shrank from doing. But after lunch with Villy, and that first, awful evening in the pub, he had rung her the next day and asked her after all to say nothing. ‘It may all blow over,’ he had said, trying to sound hearty and optimistic. She had agreed to silence (he was pretty sure that she would have been silent anyway), and that was that. Of course, he played endless scenes to himself when
he
confronted Jessica, told her exactly what he thought of her monstrous behaviour. But here, always, after the first flush of exhilaration that the idea of doing this induced, he came up against her unknown response. Supposing she was in
love
with this frightful cad? Supposing she wanted to have a divorce –
leave
him and go off with Clutterworth? The thought paralysed him: the idea of Jessica leaving him was quite simply more than he could bear. Divorce would be a public humiliation that he felt he could never recover from, but beyond that, his private anguished contemplation of his life without Jessica made him too terrified not only to confront her but to give her the slightest inkling that he knew.

He took to giving Jessica as much notice as possible of his coming to London, and claimed that Wednesdays were the only day he could get off – and that not every week. The visits caused him a different kind of pain from that which he endured the rest of the time. He took her to the theatre and to restaurants – the latter with other people if possible – in order that they should not be alone. Once, when he stayed the night, he had tried to make love to her and failed. He had claimed that he had drunk too much because he’d felt he was catching some sort of bug and she had seemed to believe him – been extraordinarily nice about it. Afterwards he had turned away from her, had lain, tense and miserable in the dark: tears had run down his face until his neck was cold with them. After that, he made excuses about having to catch the last train back to work, and started having spasmodic pains in his stomach that the doctor diagnosed as a threatened ulcer. He was supposed to lay off drink and to smoke less, but he was so miserable that he did neither of these things and the ulcer got worse. He was irritable at work, aware that none of his colleagues liked him but he hardly cared about that. Work became his best solace: he plunged himself into it with, unexpectedly, some success. He discovered that he had a capacity to think about and explore certain problems that promoted, and in one case achieved, their solution. Crumbs of self-respect occurred but they seemed only to emphasize his otherwise vast and despairing sense of failure.