Casting Off (31 page)

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said at last, as he leaned forward to light her fifth or sixth cigarette.

‘The children,’ she said. ‘What on earth shall I tell them? Teddy and this frightful woman he has married. Lydia, thank God, is away at school. And Roly’s far too young to understand. I don’t suppose Louise will care, but poor little Roly without a father! Because he needn’t think I shall let Roly near that woman!’

There was a short silence and a piece of coal fell out of the grate.

‘I gave up my dancing for Edward,’ she said, and for the first time she sounded simply sad. ‘And it’s no good wishing now that I hadn’t, because I’d be too old anyway. Too late to do anything about
that
.’

She was fifty, he knew – there had been a birthday party in January at Hugh’s house.

‘What do you think I should do?’

‘I think you should have a rest before you even think about that.’

‘I couldn’t bear to go up – to our room!’

What a relief it was to feel sorry for her – even for a second. He said, no, she needn’t; she could lie on the sofa and he’d make up the fire and cover her with the shawl that lay on the piano. He’d make her a hot drink, he said – no, he was good at finding things . . . He got her on to the sofa; the puffiness had gone from her face leaving it gaunt and haggard with fatigue. But as he settled her, she looked up at him and said, with a kind of jocular heroism that shrivelled him, ‘Oh, well. It will all be the same a hundred years hence.’ He said nothing. He tucked the shawl round her and got down on his knees to make up the fire – the room was becoming cold. She was quiet, and as he hauled himself to his feet and glanced at her, he thought that she had fallen asleep. Better do the tea anyway, he thought, and made quietly for the door. But as he was opening it, she said, ‘Archie! You will talk to Edward, won’t you? Try to get him to see . . .’

‘I’ll do what I can,’ he had replied. What else could he say?

By the time he had made the tea and brought it into the room, she was asleep. He poured himself a cup and drank it gratefully. His head and his throat ached; he felt rotten. It was nearly six o’clock: just time, he thought, to get home, have a bath and shave and go to work. He wrote a note telling her this, and let himself out.

In the taxi it occurred to him that in all those hours, when she had been pouring out her shock, her rage, her humiliation, she had never once said anything about loving Edward. He wondered not so much about Edward leaving her as why he had married her in the first place. She had always seemed to him admirable, without being in the least endearing.

‘You should have rung me before, you really should.’

He opened his mouth to say that he had not rung her at all and the thermometer fell out.

‘Steady the Buffs!’ she said as she retrieved it. She put it back into his mouth and continued, ‘If Marigold hadn’t rung me I’d never have known. How long have you been like this?’

He removed the thermometer to say, ‘Four days’, and put it back again. She said that if she went out of the room he’d have to keep quiet, and went.

He took out the thermometer and looked at it. It registered just under a hundred and one. His temperature was coming down. The day after the vigil with Villy he’d gone to work feeling pretty frightful, but he’d got through the day on aspirins and cups of tea brought by a filing clerk who, over the years, had done him innumerable small favours. At about four, just when he thought he would pack it in, he was sent for. The fussy little man for whom he worked said that he’d been to a very important meeting that afternoon, and the upshot was that the forms currently in use for the processing of demobbed men were being changed which would, he said, have far-reaching consequences. He had waited in silence to hear what these might be, but he might have guessed. They reached no further than himself: he was to redo the last batch – a fortnight’s boring repetitive work down the drain. A minute was to be sent out to all relevant departments that evening and tomorrow: forms that had left the building would have to be cancelled and the new ones put to use as soon as the format had been passed by the deputy assistant head of the department. It was not clear precisely when this would be, but Archie was to hold himself in readiness for all systems go.

He had saluted himself out of the stuffy room and walked out of the building. It was raining. He couldn’t face the bus and walk to his flat, and had taken a cab. The weather had been foul for May, dark grey skies, rain and thunderstorms – one started on his way home. By the time he had let himself into his flat he was shivering, and all he wanted to do was go to bed and get warm. The next day, after a miserable and feverish night, he rang to say he wouldn’t be in to work and then unplugged the telephone. On the fourth day, his doorbell had rung and there was Nancy. He’d clean forgotten that he was supposed to meet her yesterday evening outside the Curzon cinema. She was a kind girl – or woman; she did not reproach him and seemed only anxious to help. She quickly discovered that there was nothing to eat in the house, and went shopping for him. She ran him a bath and changed his sheets while he had it. She returned now with a bowl of soup and some toast. He was ravenous and grateful.

‘It’s turtle,’ she said. ‘Supposed to be very nourishing. I bought another tin. I suppose you haven’t had a doctor?’

‘There’s no point. It’s only flu. I’m on the mend, anyway.’

‘Your telephone doesn’t seem to be working – I’ve reported it.’

‘It wouldn’t. I unplugged it.’

‘Would you like me to – stay the night? I could sleep in the sitting room.’

‘It’s very kind of you, but I’d rather be alone.’

She looked disappointed, but unsurprised. ‘All right. But do plug your phone in, so I can ring to find out how you are tomorrow.’

He spooned up the small jellyish square of turtle meat provided in every tin and ate it. ‘Thanks awfully for being so kind.’

‘Don’t mention it. I’m really very fond of you.’

It was said carelessly, but it worried him. ‘You honestly don’t need to come tomorrow. You’ve got me enough provisions and you can tell them I’ll be back in the jolly old Admiralty by Monday.’

‘
If
your temperature’s been down long enough.’

She removed the small tray from his lap. ‘I’ll just wash this up and then I’ll be off.’ She’d put on her mac, which concealed her knees hitherto exposed by her short dirndl skirt.

‘I won’t kiss you,’ she said. It sounded like a concession. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ she said for the third time, at the door, as she tied a silk scarf – royal blue with mustard-coloured treble clefs printed at random over it.

‘Thank you so much. It was really sweet of you to come.’

‘
De narther
,’ she said.

‘We’ll have that film when I’m well,’ he called after her.

‘Fine.’

When she had gone, he imagined her walking to South Ken, taking the Circle to Notting Hill Gate, catching a 31 bus to Swiss Cottage, and then walking again down one of those streets lined with dark red-brick houses until she reached the one that contained her small flat. It would take her well over an hour.

He was still hungry. He got out of bed, and went to the kitchen where, feeling rather dizzy and weak, he boiled himself an egg and made more toast.

He’d cut off his telephone partly because he hadn’t felt up to dealing with the family about Edward’s defection. But he had also known that Nancy, if he’d told her he was ill, would be round in a flash. He hadn’t thought, which was stupid of him, that she’d hear about it anyway, as she worked in the same building. They’d met nearly a year ago in the canteen after she’d been taking the minutes of a particularly pointless meeting he’d had to attend. They became united through a mutual hatred of his boss and an interest in old films. She belonged to the film society and invited him to go to the Scala Theatre on Sunday afternoons where a succession of classics were shown. Afterwards, he would take her out to a meal that was a cross between a serious tea or a light supper at Lyons Corner House in Tottenham Court Road. Gradually he had come to know a bit about her: fiancé killed at El Alamein, brother taken prisoner in Burma and eventually returned a wreck. He quickly became an alcoholic, unable to hold any job down and always asking for money. She also had a Siamese cat called Moon to whom she was uncritically devoted. She asked for, and got, very little, it seemed to him, from life; she was unaffected, simple – and kind. She never said anything very silly, or very interesting, although he had initially been deceived by her enormous knowledge of the cinema into thinking her more sophisticated than she was. (In the same way, when she talked about Moon she was often rather funny, and he had at first thought she possessed a more general sense of humour.)

Moon died. He got out of the flat, disappeared for more than a week, and when he finally returned it was with a terrible wound that had become poisoned. When she told him about it tears streamed out of her eyes, as she spoke in a rapid monotone without heeding them. ‘The wretched man who came to read the meters,’ she said. ‘He left the front door open although I asked him not to, and Moon was always looking for excitement. The vet said it was too late: he tried to clean up the wound – it was awful – Moon had an abscess but it kept on coming back and in the end he was so ill and in so much pain that the vet said the kindest thing was to put him down. So he did. I held him in my arms but he was past speaking at all. I haven’t got a garden to bury him, so he hasn’t even got a grave. It’s so awful going back to the flat and knowing he won’t be there discussing his food, shouting about where the hell I’ve been.’

That evening, he took her back to his place and she spent the night with him. ‘I’m a bit out of practice,’ she said as she climbed into bed. ‘Haven’t made love to anyone since Kevin died. But I expect I’ll soon get the hang of it again.’ She was awkward and affectionate and really rather sweet.

All the same, he thought, during his lonely, convalescent weekend, it can’t go on like this because she will get to think that it can’t go on like this. She’ll imagine that I wouldn’t have gone on seeing so much of her if I didn’t want to see more of her in the end. And he didn’t. Which meant that he ought to make his lack of intention clear. He always seemed to know what he
didn’t
want, he thought irritably – he had reached that stage of convalescence when weakness allied to self-pity led to boredom and made for general discontent – but he seemed far less sure of what he did want. France, for instance: when he finally got out of his present job, did he really want to go back there? He would have to try to find out. For years there, he had been so used to wanting Rachel, and getting
over
wanting her that his entire life had been coloured by it. Well, now he was free of that and it had been supplanted by a most tender affection for her and for all of her family, who had almost become his own. If he went to France, he would see much less, or in some cases, nothing of them.

Early on Sunday evening, he went for a short walk to get some air. It was good to be out. The air was warmer, the pavements every now and then powdered with petals from flowering crabs and there were occasional wafts of lilac from people’s back or front gardens. Cats sat on walls enjoying the end of the pale sunlight that also winked on high bedroom windows of the terraced houses, most of which were badly in need of a fresh coat of paint. But if you were faced with the building of twenty new towns to house a million people who presumably had nowhere to live, painting houses that were otherwise serviceable was hardly a priority. He wondered how long it would take for the outer consequences of war to disappear, for people to look well dressed, well fed and less tired. When he got back to the flat, he thought he really must pull himself together and ring. Villy. Or perhaps Rupe, to test the water. For all he knew, Edward might have changed his mind: no, he surely wouldn’t have screwed himself up to telling Villy unless he had been sure of what he intended. And he would ring Nancy to make a date for the cinema with her, and after the film, he would explain that there was no future for her with him. I may be drifting, he thought, but it isn’t fair to make her drift with me. Strengthened but depressed by these decisions, he walked slowly back.

He made a date with Nancy for the following Friday evening. Then, not feeling quite up to tackling Villy, he rang Rupert.

‘Archie! Been trying to get you all weekend. Your telephone’s been out of order. It’s rather bad news, I’m afraid.’

‘I know. I went to see her the night after the party.’

‘See – who?’

‘Villy.’

‘Oh,
that
! No, it’s not that. It’s the Brig.’ There was a pause and then he said, ‘He died on Thursday.’

‘Oh, Lord!’

‘He’d had another of his bronchial attacks and it turned into pneumonia. They gave him M and B but it didn’t work. They said his heart was a bit dicky as well. Anyway, the dear old boy passed away quite peacefully at three in the morning. We were all there. Rachel and the Duchy were with him, and he couldn’t talk, but he knew them. He had a good innings, but it still feels pretty awful. Hard to believe. Rachel wanted me to tell you.’