Casting Off (32 page)

‘I’ve been having some kind of bug, and I unplugged my telephone. I’m so sorry. How are they?’

‘The Duchy seems to be bearing up.’

‘Rachel?’

‘She’s not so good. Of course, she did most of the nursing – especially at night – so I think she’s simply worn out physically. She put her back out lifting him which hasn’t helped.’

There was a short silence.

‘Anything I can do? You know I would,’ he said.

‘I do know, old boy – you’re practically family.’ Then he said, ‘Do come to the funeral. I’m afraid it’s a cremation but he said he wanted that. Two thirty, Golders Green on Friday. I’m rather dreading all that – especially – with all the other stuff going on. Hugh’s so angry with Edward, he won’t speak to him. Between you and me, I’m just praying Villy won’t want to come to the funeral. She’s completely frantic, poor girl. She got Hugh to have a go at Edward and, of course, all that happened was that they had the most fearful row. Families. Sometimes I envy you. If this goes on, Zoë and I will have to get ourselves our own house. I can’t face what goes on in the office all day
and
evenings as well.’ Then he apologized. ‘It’s not your problem.’

‘Let’s have an evening. Just you and me.’

‘I’d love to, old boy, but not this week. I’ll give you a call after the funeral.’

Archie borrowed a car to go to Golders Green, arrived early, parked and sat watching small groups converging on the place. It was raining and windy, and people were having trouble with their umbrellas; even from the car he could detect the muted, uneasy friendliness that seems to pervade occasions of this nature. There seemed to be an awful lot of people, but he realized when he decided to join them that there were several funerals going on in different chapels.

There was a halt; they had to wait outside while the previous service finished. Most of the family seemed to have arrived (with the exception of the Duchy and Rachel – waiting in a car probably, he thought). A number of respectable-looking chaps in raincoats with black armbands had also arrived; from the office, he guessed. There were also some old – some remarkably ancient – men, members of his various clubs, and one or two middle-aged ladies, secretaries, mistresses, it was impossible to say. They wore black and one of them had a bunch of artificial violets pinned to the lapel of her overcoat.

The door opened and everyone filed slowly inside.

‘Sit with us.’ It was Clary, dressed entirely in black in clothes that he was certain she must have borrowed since she looked so awful in them. She’d got much thinner lately, and looked tired. Polly, on the other hand, looked most elegant in her very dark blue coat. She gave him a small, remote smile and looked away.

The chapel was not very large and was soon completely full. At the far end lay the coffin with a wreath of dark red roses upon it. It was sad, he thought, that the place had to look so ugly and depressing: a church, almost any church, would have been better than this oak and brass and dreary little stained-glass windows. It was not in bad taste, it was without taste of any kind. He tried to imagine an architect being commissioned. Something practical, he would be told: they must be able to conduct as many ceremonies as possible. So a series of chapels, non-denominational, so that all could be used for any sect; discreet, don’t want the ovens to be obtrusive; nice peaceful grounds round the building; somewhere under cover for the people to admire the flowers afterwards. That’s about it Mr Cubitt, Nash, Kent, Sir Christopher, whoever . . . And the customers, of course, only came because they had to, and stayed as short a time as possible: there was no indigenous population to inspire or criticize . . .

The Duchy, on Hugh’s arm, followed by Rachel, came in. They were conducted to the front row in the left aisle. Rachel’s appearance shocked him: she looked grey and drawn, almost as though at any moment she might break down. He had taken a seat on the aisle because of his leg, and she passed by him so close that he could have touched her, but she did not see him; her eyes were fixed upon the coffin and she looked at no one.

The service began. A prayer was said by the tired clergyman; a hymn was sung. A psalm, the Lord’s Prayer, another hymn during which the doors at the end of the chapel opened, and the coffin slid slowly away. Unable to take his eyes off Rachel, he saw her give a small, anguished gasp as it vanished. It was over. The fifteen minutes were up, another set of doors opened and, led by the Duchy, Hugh and Rachel, everybody left the chapel.

‘Goodness!’ Clary said. ‘What a horrible little end. Poor Brig!’ Her eyes were full of tears.

‘I don’t suppose he knows,’ he said.

‘How do you
know
?’

‘I don’t.’

She gave a loud sniff, and said, ‘It’s the usual thing, isn’t it? Not believing in anything is not much fun.’

‘Things at funerals aren’t meant to be
fun
, Clary,’ Polly said, but she hooked her arm into Clary’s.

Outside people wandered about, looking at the wreaths and bunches laid upon the ground. He saw Edward, but no Villy. He wanted to speak to Rachel. As he approached her, he saw Sid go up to her and put a hand on her arm. Rachel moved; he saw her looking frantically for someone, then she noticed him and he heard her say, ‘I’m going with Archie, but thanks.’ And Sid turned away.

He took Rachel’s arm. ‘Do you want to go?’

She nodded. She seemed unable to speak.

She stumbled as they walked to the car.

‘Your back hurting?’

‘Mm.’

He put her in the car, and she said, ‘Just drive – out of this place.’

He did. He drove up a road leading on to Hampstead Heath until he found a quiet place to stop. When he turned to her she was sitting rigidly, staring ahead. ‘Darling Rachel, does your back hurt dreadfully?’

‘Everything hurts.’ Then she began to cry. She cried as though the act of crying was inexpressibly painful. Of course, it’s her father as well, he thought. It’s been quite sudden – a shock – and on top of that she’s worn herself out nursing him.

‘You looked after him so well. You couldn’t have done more.’ Then he realized that it was better to say nothing, to let her cry. He kept his arm round her – how easy it was to do that now! Once it would have caused him both ecstasy and anguish. After a time he sought for and gave her his handkerchief.

‘Oh, Archie, you are a blessing. There’s nothing like an old friend.’ But for some reason this made her cry afresh.

‘He did have a very happy and successful life, didn’t he?’ He felt now that some talk might steady her.

‘Oh,
yes
! You should see the letters the Duchy has had! Some of the nicest are from the people who worked for him. And the day of the night before he died he told me that he’d been afraid he might die without knowing about Rupe. And he wasn’t really ill for long . . .’

She continued in this vein for a while, assembling small, comforting facts, but somehow they were not comforting her. She had stopped crying; although he sensed that she had not reached the end, that there was something else, or more to come.

‘Do you think that we should perhaps be getting on to Hugh’s?’ There was to be a gathering at his house with tea and drinks.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I really can’t face it.’ It was said with an intensity that surprised him, and it occurred to him that she might be starting some kind of breakdown.

‘I’ll take you home, then,’ he said, with all the calm and good cheer he could muster.

‘Thank you, dear Archie. Do you mind if I smoke?’

‘Course not.’

‘You know,’ he said, as they reached Hampstead, ‘what I think you need is to send the Duchy and Dolly back to Home Place and have a good long holiday. Wouldn’t Sid be able to take you somewhere restful and nice?’

‘Oh no!’ she began to say, but was prevented by a fresh flood of tears, of sobs that racked her and made her gasp with pain as she cried.

‘Darling Rach. I’m just going to get you home and put you to bed.’ A doctor, he thought: at least he might give her something for her back and she might sleep.

He reached the house, found the key in her bag and came round to her side to help her out of the car. This hurt very much. Somehow he got her up the steps to the front door and into the sitting room and thence to what looked like the most comfortable armchair – ‘Upright is best.’ She asked him to fetch her some aspirin from her dressing table upstairs. Her room was very cold and bare, a nun’s cell, he thought. She asked him to ring Hugh and he did. He suggested ringing her doctor and she said no, what she needed was her osteopath: ‘There hasn’t been time to get to him – or even make an appointment.’ He rang and, using all his powers of persuasion, managed to get Mr Goring to agree to see her at six that evening. ‘I’ll take you,’ he said. He went to the kitchen and made some tea. She had started to worry about smaller things: was not six o’clock after people like Mr Goring stopped work and, if it was, wasn’t this rather unfair on him? And what about the Duchy’s supper? She liked to eat early, ‘and I’m afraid it takes me ages to make anything’.

He rang Hugh again to explain about the osteopath and Hugh said he would look after the Duchy. ‘Jolly good you’re looking after Rach,’ he had added.

He had tried to get Rachel to have a tot of whisky with her aspirin but she had absolutely refused: ‘Whisky on an empty stomach and I’ll arrive at poor Mr Goring roaring drunk.’ Now he realized that with Rachel this meant that she had not only had no lunch, she had probably had no breakfast either. He questioned her, she was evasive, but in the end admitted to a cup of tea at breakfast, and not having felt like any lunch. She agreed to his lighting the gas fire and toasting some bread which she said she and the Duchy always did at tea-time.

Everything seemed to be getting calmer. She talked with affection and an only reasonable degree of emotion about the Brig and how funny he had been about her awful cooking, about the problems that Dolly, with her distinctly patchy grasp of reality, posed for all of them (she had had to be sent to stay with old Sister Crouchback – now retired – when the Brig became ill, but would, no doubt, be returning soon).

‘But, darling Rach, can you really cope with the two old ladies and no living-in help? Ought you not to consider getting a cook?’

‘Oh, no. It will do me good to do something for a change.’

‘A woman to clean, perhaps?’

They had had a Mrs Jessup, but she had only stayed for a fortnight and then disappeared without trace.

‘Sid must have someone, and even if they couldn’t come to you they might know someone who could. Or you could put a card in the local newsagent’s? That often works.’

‘Oh, no!’ He had been stooping to put the toasting fork back into its niche on the hearth but the sheer misery of this cry made him turn to her. She was frowning, biting her lips, rigid with the effort not to break down. When she met his eye, she said: ‘I did. Put a card. Someone came . . .’ Her voice died away and she started to shake. Then before he could reach her she put her face in her hands and began to weep – a soft, heartbroken sound that pierced him more than anything that had gone before.

He drew up his chair so that he could sit close to her. ‘Rachel, tell me. You must tell someone what is making you so unhappy.’

‘I think I must, I don’t know how. Such horror – such dreadful things!’

In the end she did tell him. Or rather, from what she said, and what she left unsaid in a confused, circuitous account, he thought he came to understand what had happened.

A girl had come in response to the advertisement in the newsagent. She had come in the afternoon; mercifully the Duchy and Dolly had both been having a rest and the Brig was out. Rachel was alone. At least she had been alone. She had seemed a nice, quiet, suitable girl, and also vaguely familiar. Then, after she had asked the appropriate questions and received the right answers,
just
as she had been about to accept her for the job, the girl suddenly said that really she had come about something else. ‘I had no idea what that could be, but for some reason I felt frightened.’

Then it had all come out. The girl knew Sid: hadn’t Rachel
heard
about her? Of course: she’d met her once in Sid’s house. She had been in Sid’s life, oh – for
years
! ‘She said something about knowing that I was a friend of Sid’s but she had thought just a friend. I said that that was true; we had been friends for a very long time – since before the war.’

The girl had said that friends were one thing, but Sid had
lied
to her, had pretended that she – her name was Thelma – was the only love in her life. ‘And then she said – she said – so
dreadful
– that the moment I came to London, she had been turned out of Sid’s house, out of her life without any warning at all. I couldn’t understand any of it, why she was so upset, and worse, what had made Sid be so unkind to her. But when I said that there must have been some reason – I didn’t like her very much but I did feel sorry for her – she suddenly shouted at me, “
You!
You’re the reason!”’

Then she had looked at him and he could see what it cost her to continue. ‘She started to talk about herself and Sid, things they had done together . . .’ A slow and painful blush suffused her. ‘I can’t speak of that. It was too horrible. I asked her to go, but she didn’t go. I was sitting down and I was afraid to stand – I mean I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stand if I got up . . .’ Her voice died away and she was silent, swallowing as though nauseated. She kept swallowing as she stared down at her lap.

He wanted to say that he knew jealousy was a terrible feeling, that he was sure Sid loved her, that the girl sounded a bitch and was also possibly a liar, or at least was exaggerating, but something warned him to say none of these things. Instead he asked: ‘How
did
you get rid of her?’

‘My mother called from upstairs. When the girl realized we were not alone in the house, she got up and said she had felt she had to tell me, to
warn
me – presumably I didn’t want my life to be ruined by Sid as hers had been. She actually said’ – and here her disgust was tinged with contempt – ‘that she was
sorry
to have upset me. I don’t think she was, at all. She said she would see herself out, but I went with her to the front door and I said, “Never come back,” and shut it after her.’ Her eyes filled again with tears. ‘But you can see why I cannot see Sid – can’t talk to her at all.’