Casting Off (21 page)

He took her car and went to work, where he requested an interview with his boss to whom he gave a brief – and, he felt, fair – description of the situation. Anstruther was a man with an incisive mind and a distaste for emotion of any kind. He was briskly sympathetic. ‘Nasty situation. Hysteria, I suppose. Bit unwise to set up with her, wasn’t it? Have you got hold of her parents? I should advise that, because the police or the hospital are likely to and it might be better if you got there first.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, I’d better.’

‘Not pregnant or anything, is she?’

‘No. Nothing like that.’ He explained again, without delicacy, why she couldn’t be.

At this, Anstruther became incredulously impatient, said that he had no wish to go into details, and would take Raymond’s word for it.

‘I’ll arrange for Miss Watson to have extended leave, and perhaps you would arrange for her parents to fetch her. We don’t want any more trouble. When do you start in London? Next week? Well, you’d better take a few days yourself.’

He said something about not wanting to upset his wife.

‘Naturally not.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

He rang the parents, got the mother, and told her the most emollient version he could muster. Veronica had been overworking; he was afraid she had become a little too fond of him, in spite of her knowing that he was married with four children, and when she had learned that he was being sent elsewhere for work, she had done this foolish and unfortunate thing. She was going to be perfectly all right, he repeated (he had begun the conversation by saying that), but her boss thought it best if she had a long leave at home. Would they come and fetch her as soon as possible?

Mrs Watson seemed unable to take things in. ‘I can’t understand it,’ she kept saying. ‘Veronica’s such a
sensible
girl.
Cut
herself. With a knife? I can’t understand it!’

He said how sorry he was, and repeated Anstruther’s verdict of hysteria. Mrs Watson said that they would both come to Oxford the next day. That was that.

He went back to the flat in her car and packed up. He decided to leave no trace of his having lived there so this took some time. He dismantled his bed leaving it with its bare striped mattress, took his socks and shirt off the washing line in the kitchen, leaving her pink fluffy jumper that always got up his nose hanging on the line. He even went through her chest of drawers, discovering a small bundle of notes he had written to her. These he burned, together with her letter. By now he was feeling quite fugitive: the thought of going to see her in hospital unnerved him. He was afraid of what she might say – of what people might hear her say. ‘After all, I never went to
bed
with her,’ he kept saying to himself. By the time he had packed and called a cab, the whole thing was beginning to feel hardly his fault.

He didn’t go and see her.

Thereafter, when he thought of ‘the episode’, as he came to call it, he was subject to unease, a certain amount of guilt which he became adept at rationalizing. A large number of the staff at Woodstock had engaged upon extra-marital activities – there were rumours of pregnancies, abortions, even an eventual remarriage or two. He had not behaved differently from any of them, except that he had behaved better. It had been just his bad luck to land up with someone who had refused to take him at face value, who had insisted upon reading more into the affair than was ever there. He heard on the grapevine that she had gone home and had not returned, had been discharged. He went back to London and to Jessica with whom he resumed an (almost) chaste marriage. Sex with each other did not seem rewarding or to enliven either of them. He decided that it was because of his job, which took a lot out of him, and the awful little house that she had insisted upon them living in: a doll’s house, no room to turn round. It would be different – and better – when the war came to an end and they got back to Frensham.

The war did come to an end, but the visit to Frensham had been discouraging, to put it mildly. Nora had sent John, the old man who had always worked in the garden – a gardener’s boy in Aunt Lena’s day – to meet him at the station. He seemed to have aged about twenty years since Raymond had last seen him, and now shuffled in a rheumaticky way and seemed not to hear much that was said to him. ‘You’ll find the place changed,’ he remarked more than once during the short journey.

He did indeed. From the moment they arrived on the gravel sweep before the house, it was clear that changes had occurred. The lawn below was now a tract of frozen mud, punctuated by the shabby spikes of Brussels sprouts. The Virginia creeper that had so charmingly clothed the front façade was gone, and the mellow brick had been covered with some frightful yellow paint. The stained glass in the waisted front door had gone, and in its place was some white opaque stuff commonly used, he thought, in bathrooms.

Inside was worse. He stood in the hall staring at the dark green linoleum that now covered the floor and the bright yellow painted walls where Aunt Lena’s Morris willow-pattern paper had always been. Odours of Jeyes fluid, Irish stew, carbolic soap and paraffin reached him.

Nora appeared. She wore a dark blue overall and tennis shoes with ankle socks, her sturdy legs were otherwise bare. ‘Hello, Dad. I do hope you aren’t expecting tea because it’s over. But supper is at half past six so you haven’t got long to wait. We have it all together, because it takes a long time to get some of the chaps to bed. I’ll take you up to your room, and then you can come and talk to Richard.’

‘I can find my way to my room.’

‘Can you? Oh, fine. It’s at the very top, the little attic on the right.’

Wordlessly, he picked up his case and limped upstairs.
Attic
? Why on earth did he have to sleep in an attic? It was where the servants had slept, two in a room. A large chromium-plated stair rail had been installed on the wall side of the staircase. Nora had certainly been taking liberties with the place: he would wait till they were having drinks and then find out what on earth she thought she’d been up to.

His attic contained the maid’s furniture. A small battered chest of drawers, an iron bedstead and the old black-out blinds that had not been removed. It was icy cold up there – next to the roof, it would be. He had imagined tea in front of the drawing-room fire with Nora and Richard. This did not seem unreasonable at half past four. He left his suitcase on the bed and limped downstairs in search of the bathroom. This, too, had been substantially altered, with a heightened seat for the lavatory and steps into the bath that also contained a seat. A row of bedpans filled with some milky substance were ranged on the window shelf.

Nora was standing in the hall. ‘I was afraid you’d got lost.’

How could he get lost in his own house, he thought testily, but he decided to wait until they were settled with a drink before tackling her.

This proved far more difficult than he thought. She didn’t settle anywhere, she rushed about the place either because someone came and asked for her or simply, he thought, because she imagined herself wanted. For half an hour before dinner he sat with Richard in what had been the morning room, now described by Nora as ‘our own little haven’. The room was stuffy, and smelled strongly of the paraffin stove that flickered sulkily, emitting the minimum of warmth.

‘Why don’t you have a fire? There’s a perfectly good fireplace.’

‘Nora says it’s too much for the staff. It’s awfully difficult to get people at all. She says.’

Richard sat in his wheelchair. He wore an open-necked flannel shirt with a heavy cardigan, the empty sleeves pinned neatly to the sides. A tray placed over the arms of his chair contained a Bakelite mug with a straw in it. Every now and then he bent his head to suck his gin and tonic. ‘Sorry there’s no ice,’ he said. ‘Still, a gin and tonic is something of a treat, I can tell you.’

‘Is it still difficult to get gin in the country?’

‘I don’t think it’s
difficult
. I think it is considered not to be affordable.’

‘Oh.’

‘While you’re up’ – he wasn’t – ‘I wonder if you’d give me a refill? Before the boss gets back?’

He did as he was asked, and refreshed his own glass.

‘If I was in control,’ Richard said, when he’d had another suck, ‘there’d be unlimited gin. But there you are. I’m not known for my control. Over anything.’

A silence, while Raymond felt ripples of uncomfortable pity that somehow pre-empted his being able to think of anything to say.

‘Still,’ Richard said, ‘I suppose we’re a good deal luckier than the other poor blighters. Don’t mention the gin to them. Because, unless their relatives visit them, they don’t get a drop.’

There was another short silence.

‘I wonder whether you’d be so good as to get the packet of fags which you should find behind that dictionary behind you on the bookshelf and light me one? Have one yourself if you feel inclined. Only be quick about it, before she gets back.’

He found the nearly empty packet and a box of matches beside it and lit the cigarette, which he placed between Richard’s lips. He inhaled deeply twice and then indicated that he wanted it taken out.

‘Sorry, if you pulled your chair over to me, you wouldn’t have to stand up to do this. Shove it in again. Do have one yourself, and put the packet back, if you wouldn’t mind.’

Nora returned before the cigarette was over.

‘Poor Leonard! He’d fallen out of his chair and Myra couldn’t get him up off the floor on her own. I thought I heard a thump so it was a good thing – Darling!
Where
did you get that cigarette?’

‘Raymond gave it to me.’

‘Oh. He’s not supposed to have them, Daddy. I thought you knew that.’

‘Might as well finish it,’ Richard said, his eyes fixed upon Raymond with such determination that Raymond put the fag back between his lips. Richard inhaled again and started to cough.

‘I told you, darling!’ She twitched it away and stubbed it out. ‘It only makes you cough. He has to be careful of his lungs because they don’t get enough exercise.’

‘And as you can see, it’s vital to keep me in good nick.’

There was no mistaking the irony. Raymond watched Nora mistake it. ‘Of course we must,’ she said cheerfully. She picked up his mug and shook it. ‘Goodness! You haven’t even finished your drink.’

‘For God’s sake, don’t take
that
away.’

‘You know I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Nora said gently, ‘but drink it up, darling, because supper is ready.’

Supper took place in the old dining room, now furnished with a long trestle table round which the five wheelchairs could be placed, interspersed with ordinary chairs for the helpers – there were two besides Nora. Nobody was so incapacitated as Richard, Raymond noticed: mostly they were able to feed themselves, though two of them used a spoon. Nora helped everybody to Irish stew, from which, she said, the bones had been removed, and fed Richard. The carpet had been removed from the floor, which was just as well because a good deal of food got dropped on it. Conversation was constrained and spasmodic. The patients did not talk much to one another, and did not seem to find anything that anybody else said of much interest. They concentrated upon the food: the stew was followed by a weighty treacle sponge.

It was not until some time after the meal that he was able to get Nora to himself. The patients had been installed in the old drawing room: another room that had been stripped of its Victorian contents and now had very lurid, he thought, posters drawing-pinned to the walls (‘the paper was so dingy, we had to do something’), linoleum-covered floor spattered with small, baize-topped tables so that cards and board games could be played alongside the wireless, which seemed to be permanently switched on. After he had been shown all this and Richard had said that he would stay to listen to the nine o’clock news, Nora consented to return to the ‘haven’ so that he could, as he had told her he wanted to, talk to her.

The outcome of the talk was deeply depressing to him. He discovered that Nora had been led to believe by Jessica that she could continue in the house, running it as a home for the present inmates. ‘Mummy said you wouldn’t
want
to live here now we’re all grown-up – except for Judy, of course, and she’ll soon be on her way. She thought it was a marvellous idea for me to run this. And it does do a lot of good. If it wasn’t for this, my patients would be in a large institution and here we do try to make it more like family life.’ It transpired that she had raised a considerable sum of money for what she described as the ‘improvements’ to the house. ‘It really wasn’t at all suitable for them as it was. But of course I got the money on the understanding that we were staying here.’

He said he couldn’t
understand
why she hadn’t consulted him first.

‘I was so afraid you’d say no,’ she said. She had gone rather pink. ‘The thing is, Daddy, that when one feels really
called
to do something, one must not let anything stand in the way. Of course you could always come and
stay
here. Absolutely whenever you liked. It depresses Mummy, but that’s because she has got a bit of a selfish side. I don’t think she stops to think what it’s like to be in Richard’s position – or any of them. Richard is my life now. It’s my job to look after him. And I do feel that it’s good for him to have other people around who are more or less in the same position as he is. It gives him a sense of proportion about things.’ These were some of the things she said. Then she had to go and put Richard to bed.

When she returned from that, he asked if there was any whisky.

‘There might be a bit left. I keep it for very special occasions.’ She found a nearly empty half-bottle, poured an extremely small drink into his before-dinner gin glass, and handed it to him with a jug of water.

‘After all, we are paying a rent for here,’ she said.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Well, I’ve been paying it to Mummy. It isn’t much, I know, but it’s what we can afford.’

The water had dust on it.