Casting Off (28 page)

‘Think of the germs!’ the woman said. She rolled her eyes, including Christopher and Polly in her perfunctory dismay.

‘If you want to be right in front of the train, I think we’d better start moving,’ he said. He couldn’t bear his last few minutes with her to be shared with anyone else.

But in fact they had hardly walked the short way to the end of the platform before the train appeared and he had to put her into it.

She said she had had a lovely time, thanked him, kissed him rather uncertainly, and then he was out of the train and seeing her through the thick glass window that she tried to pull down, but could not. She made a little face, and with her dark blue eyes still anxious, blew him a small kiss. The whistle sounded, the guard got on to the train and it puffed slowly away, then gathered speed so quickly that he lost count of which was her window.

He waited until the train was out of sight, then walked slowly back to the station yard. The rain had stopped; a cold grey dusk had descended.

He drove back, parked the car, and trudged up the track to the van. Oliver was waiting for him with his customary, courteous enthusiasm. He lit the lamp and opened the doors of the stove, then sat in the chair that had been hers. Everything – his books, his china – everything in the van had been touched by her, had been transformed, as she had transformed him from extreme joy to his despair. If only he had not
told
her, had not blurted it all out in that senseless manner simply because they were early for her train – if only he had not done that, he could have held on to his astonishing happiness, could have continued to feel the new and extraordinary sensation of love that might be returned. In the end, of course, he would have had to know that she loved some idiot who didn’t love her back, but to know it so soon meant that his pure joy had lasted hardly at all whereas he could see no end to his present hopelessness. For what had he got to offer her? All he had been able to say was that he would change things – live somewhere else,
do
something else, vague, weak promises with no substance to them. He remembered her saying, ‘But don’t you have any
friends
here?’ and realizing when she mentioned Oliver that she knew he didn’t. He hadn’t been living a proper life: he’d simply run away from things he couldn’t bear, and put very little in their place. How could anyone love that? He was twenty-three and he had done absolutely nothing with his life. He remembered her saying, ‘You have to want whatever it is, or it simply won’t work.’ Well, all he wanted was Polly, to love her, all the time and for ever, to live his life for her. ‘You can’t decide to do something just because you think you ought to – your heart wouldn’t be in it,’ she had said. In a sense, he thought, she had given him his heart – the fact that it hurt so much was probably not the point.

He became aware of Oliver, standing on his hind legs with his front paws on the arm of the chair, licking the tears off his face. When his vision cleared, he saw the cardboard box, with the pink lustre tea-set that he had meant to give her, by the door of the van, perfectly obvious, but he had completely forgotten it. If he gave it now, would she think it a bribe or an attempt at one? Then he thought it didn’t matter what she thought, he had bought it simply because she had loved it and he had wanted to give her something she loved. He would still give it. Oliver was sitting now, with his head resting heavily against him, brown eyes glowing with sentiment. People laughed at sentiment, always dubbed dogs as sentimental, but sentiment was simply a part of their love, he thought as, later, he eased himself into the sleeping bag that he had provided for her, and put his head on her pillow. Sentiment would be not good if that was all, but he knew now for himself, as well as from Oliver, that it was not.

Oliver waited until he had blown out the candle, and then settled himself in his usual position against his friend, back against his belly, head on shoulder, a bulwark against what would otherwise have been entire despair.

All morning the removal men, wearing aprons, had tramped back and forth from their van with the furniture for the new maisonette and Sid had been helping Rachel with its disposal. By eleven o’clock all the larger pieces were in – one of the pianos, the grandfather clocks (two), the vast mahogany wardrobes (three), the Duchy’s bureau, the Brig’s huge kneehole desk, the beds, the dining-room table, the dressing-tables, what seemed to her an incredible number of chairs, a sofa, the Duchy’s sewing machine and gramophone, the Brig’s glass-fronted bookcases of laurelwood. She wanted Rachel to sit and rest while the men drank tea and ate buns in their van, but Rachel wanted her to see the garden with a view to tidying it up a bit before the Duchy’s arrival, so out they went into the bitingly cold wind. The garden was so small that she felt they could just as well have surveyed it from the house. It was a small rectangle; a square of lawn – now sodden, high grass – edged by a weed-ridden gravel path, and with narrow black beds that contained the remains of Michaelmas daisies, blackened by winter frosts, a few ferns and an old pear tree. It was bounded by low black brick walls, and there was a rotting shed crazily perched in the far corner.

‘If we could just cut the grass before they come,’ Rachel said. ‘Do you think I could borrow your mower?’

‘You could, but it wouldn’t cut this. It needs scything first. Let’s go in, darling, I can see that you’re freezing. There are some daffodils – look!’

‘The Duchy said they were King Alfred, and she hates them. Oh, darling, I do hope I’ve done the right thing! It does seem rather small now that the furniture is in. Still, it’s lovely and near to you.’ She tucked Sid’s arm in hers with that smile that melted her heart.

The afternoon was spent unpacking the tea-chests that arrived in such a fast, steady stream that Rachel was reduced to telling them to put them all in the sitting room. This meant that those containing linen and bedding had all to be carted upstairs in armfuls. The flat consisted of a large sitting room, a dining room, a study and a small kitchen and cloakroom on the ground floor, and two large and two small bedrooms and a bathroom on the floor above. Needless to say, Rachel had designated the two larger bedrooms for her mother and Aunt Dolly, the south-facing smaller room for the Brig, and had taken the smallest room (not more than a boxroom, Sid thought angrily) for herself. ‘It’s quite large enough for me,’ she had said. ‘I have too many clothes anyway, and they’re all as old as the hills. It’s high time I gave them to the Red Cross.’

They had unpacked the tea-chests, kitchen stuff, china – ‘Where
are
we going to put everything?’ Rachel had said. ‘I’m afraid the poor Duchy is going to feel dreadfully cramped’ – until she could see that Rachel was absolutely ‘done up’, as she would put it.

‘Darling. We must stop. I’m going to take you home and give you an enormous gin and then you can have a hot bath and supper in bed.’

And in spite of some protest, that is what they had done. Sid had cut up the pork pie she had bought and made a salad, but when she carried the tray up to Rachel’s room, she found her lying in her dressing-gown, flat on her back asleep. She put the tray on the dressing table, moved the armchair to where she could see Rachel, and sat down to wait.

When the idea of the older Cazalets moving back to London had first been mooted, she had had a sense of relief that at last and at least there would no longer be such a distance between them. She had even had the fantasy, as now she bitterly called it, of Rachel settling her parents somewhere and then coming to live with
her
. That was soon exploded: Rachel had explained at some length how she could not possibly leave the Duchy – no longer with the staff she was accustomed to – on her own with the blind Brig. So then it had been a question of where they would find a flat, and the house – or rather half of it – in Carlton Hill had seemed the perfect answer. Now, she wondered how much time, freedom and privacy this would really afford them. Its size precluded ever being alone with Rachel if she went there, which left Rachel coming to
her
at odd times and when she felt able to get away – the only alternative. And here was the dilemma. Ages ago – it must be nearly two
years
– she had resolved that if Thelma ever got in the way of her seeing Rachel, Thelma would have to go – for good. Somehow, however, this situation had never actually occurred; her meetings with Rachel had been so occasional, and always so much planned in advance, that there had never been the pressing need that would have precipitated such a decision. And Thelma? She was fairly sure that Thelma guessed or knew that there was someone else in her life, but it was never mentioned. Thelma had all the ingenious flexibility of a piece of ivy determined to conquer a tree or a wall; she clung unobtrusively, she encroached by minute degrees, and if Sid defeated any particular advance, she fell back upon a series of apparently innocuous excuses: she had only thought she would stay an extra night because she planned to wash all the paint on the stairs and to do this in one day meant a very early start; she was only staying that particular evening because she knew Sid got back late from Hampshire where she taught in a girls’ school and would be too tired to cook for herself. Sid had ceased wanting very much to go to bed with her, but in a curious way, which she had not expected, this made it almost easier to do. The fact that she did not enjoy it in the way that she had at first made her feel less guilty. A piece of twisted morality, she now thought, as she gazed at Rachel’s peaceful face. Asleep, she shed years: it was easy to see the beauty she had had as a young girl. Thelma would
have
to go.

The next day, she set about it.

‘But I don’t understand!’

‘It’s simply that our situation isn’t right for me – any more. I’m very sorry about it, but I must tell you. I can’t go on like this.’

The hot brown eyes peered at her with a look of hurt bewilderment. ‘I still don’t understand. What has happened to change things?’

How could she answer that? She simply no longer felt the same. In any case, it would be much better for Thelma to go. ‘I can’t give you all you want, you are quite young enough to go and find that with someone else.’

This, before it was out of her mouth, she knew to be a tactical error.

‘But I would far, far rather have what little I do have with you than any life with anyone else! Surely you know that.’ The eyes were brimming now and, from much past experience, she knew that they were in for a major scene.

‘Thelma, I know it’s very hard for you, but you’ve simply got to accept this.’

‘That you don’t love me any more?’

‘That I don’t love you.’

‘But you
did
love me. Something
must
have happened.’

‘Time has happened.’

Tears, sobs, violent crying: she managed not to touch her throughout all of it, to continue to stand by the piano repeating at intervals that she was sorry.

‘You can’t be very sorry, or you wouldn’t do this to me! You couldn’t be so unbelievably cruel to someone you cared for!’

She had no choice, she said. This was to be the end.

‘You don’t mean that I’m not to come here any more? I mean, even if you don’t want – to spend nights with me – you surely can’t banish me completely?’

A clean break, she said, was the only way.

But Thelma had the indomitable strength of the abject. She would only come once a week. She would clean the house and do the shopping. She would not expect payment for any of this. She would get herself another job that would keep her. She would not expect any more music lessons. She would not ever,
ever
turn up unexpectedly. She would be content if they simply had coffee together in the kitchen when she had finished cleaning.

Eventually, it got through to her that none of this was to happen, and it was almost with relief that Sid recognized resentment beginning to smoulder in the girl’s eyes. She said she supposed she would be given time to pack up her things, or would Sid prefer her to return tomorrow for all that? Sid saw this attempt to clutch at a thin edge just in time to thwart it. No, she should pack everything now. She would pay for a cab. While Thelma disappeared upstairs to the spare room, Sid collected her music that lay on the piano and in the music stool and put it all into her music case. She was shaking with shame, the horrid discovery that apart from not loving Thelma she no longer even liked her, and the realization that their natures – hers as well as Thelma’s – combined to make it impossible for her to conduct this ending with any sort of kindness or delicacy. The inch would become an ell, the straw seized would become a rope with which she would certainly get hanged: a brutal, sudden and complete termination was all that she could manage.

She did contrive to give Thelma some money, and found her a second case (she turned out to have far more possessions than Sid had been aware of) and rang for a taxi-cab while Thelma was filling it. She was anxious now that there should be no hiatus between Thelma being ready and her going.