Casting Off (33 page)

Then it was time to take her to the osteopath.

In the car she said, ‘Thank you for letting me tell you. I think it will be a relief to have told. But only you. Nobody else.’

‘Of course.’

While she was with Mr Goring, he rang Nancy to tell her that he would not, after all, be able to keep their date. She was very nice about it.

While he sat in the drab waiting room – four upright chairs and a pile of old copies of
Punch
– he tried to imagine being either Sid or Rachel, and failed. He could not think what had induced Sid to betray Rachel over such a long period of time, and he could not think how, or why, Rachel had felt so utterly unable to confront her about it. He knew that Rachel had had a terrible shock; that she felt desperately humiliated by the inference of so much lying and deception on Sid’s part. And, given Rachel’s description of the girl, what on earth could Sid, loving Rachel, see in that creature? But he knew that this question was one that could never be answered. Rachel, he thought, was such a frank, whole-hearted and somehow innocent person, that concealing her only love affair from everybody must have been a very great and continuous strain. And then, as soon as circumstances permitted the prospect of more time together (he was sure that Rachel must have had a hand in getting her parents to choose a house so near to Sid), to be betrayed, and to hear of it from a total stranger, was indeed shocking. No wonder she was so upset. It would have been bad at any time, but to have it practically coinciding with her father’s death was really a bit much. Yet if Sid had sent the girl away, it must be because she loved Rachel, and if that was so, the only chance of a reconciliation lay with Rachel being prepared to talk to Sid, who, from her expression and behaviour at the funeral, clearly did not know what Thelma had done. He resolved that he would try, if he could, to help Rachel to see that talking to her lover was necessarily the best thing to do. ‘I don’t ’arf live vicariously,’ he said to himself, acknowledging that kind of intimate contempt that had gone with much of his soliloquy.

He could see that the treatment had been a success. She walked differently and looked more relaxed.

‘I have to go back in a week,’ she said, ‘but he’s done marvels. I had put something out and he’s popped it back.’

‘Has the pain gone?’

‘Quite a bit, but he says I’ve pinched a nerve and that will take time to settle down. I just feel a bit sore, but
so
much better. Bless you, Archie, for making me go and taking me. I’d never have made it on my own.’

‘Have you got anything to eat at home?’

‘Oh, yes. Heaps. I’ve got quite good at baked eggs. And the Duchy likes them so that is what we shall have. Perhaps you’d like some supper?’ She looked anxious, and he was fairly sure that there were only two eggs.

‘I was thinking of taking you out,’ he said, ‘for a slightly squarer meal.’

She refused this on the grounds that she could not leave the Duchy alone, but when they got back to Carlton Hill, there was a red MG parked outside.

‘Sid!’ she exclaimed. ‘She must have brought the Duchy back from Hugh’s.’ Her immediate level of distress was alarming. ‘I can’t! Archie, I really can’t face her. Oh, what shall I do?’

He took her to the nearest restaurant he could find – a rather dubious little place it turned out to be – and rang the Duchy from there to say what he was doing. Then he added that Rachel was awfully tired after her treatment and didn’t want to see anyone, wanted simply to have something to eat and then to go to bed. He had no idea what all this would mean to the Duchy – he never knew how much she knew of what was going on in the family – but he hoped that the message would somehow get through to Sid and that she would take the hint.

He managed to get two stiffish gins down her before they ate and he kept the conversation deliberately light and untaxing. She responded – ate nearly half of her boiled chicken and rice and all of a crème caramel – and some colour returned to her face.

It was not until he was waiting for the bill that he touched on what he knew had been in both their minds throughout the meal. ‘I know it seems awfully difficult,’ he said, ‘but you might find it cleared things up a lot if you
could
talk to her. It won’t get any better if you don’t.’

‘But what could I
say
?’

‘You could ask her about it. Tell her you know, and that it has made you very unhappy. You might’, he added, discovering this, ‘even find that it is not true, or not all the truth. The girl may have been exaggerating – from jealousy. Many people, even if they have only been to bed with somebody else once, feel that they have, or ought to have, a kind of ownership. I’m sure you can understand that.’

‘But I don’t—’ she started. She clasped one hand over the other on the table in a vain effort to stop them trembling, as she began to blush again, and then, in a small, unsteady voice, she asked: ‘Do many – most – people – does everybody – want to – to go to bed with people they love?’

‘Darling Rachel, you must know that they do.’

She looked up into his face. The pain, the anguish in her eyes made him shut his own for a second. Not seeing her, he heard her say: ‘I have never been to bed with Sid. Like that. Never.’

There was a silence, then she said: ‘I must be the most selfish person in the world.’

He took her home. She wept silently all the way. Turning to her in the dark, he saw, by the intermittent street lights, that her face, pale again and white as bone, was streaked with tears.

The car had gone and the house was dark excepting for one light in the hall. He helped her out of the car, took her up the steps. ‘Will you be all right? Dear Rachel, shall I come in with you?’

She shook her head. ‘Thank you, though.’ She tried to smile. ‘I really do thank you.’ She let herself into the house and shut the door quietly.

During the journey home, the long whisky that he gave himself, the bath that he thought might calm him, the hours that he lay awake, he thought about both of them – Sid, now, as well as Rachel. The months, even years, in France when he had longed for Rachel and known that he could never have her came back to him. He had endured and survived, and eventually overcome that loss, but he had removed himself from her; he had arranged his life so that he would never see her. But Sid’s situation was infinitely more painful. Rachel had never loved him, but it was clear that she did love Sid, and so there had been no reason for them to part: Sid had spent all these years loving Rachel and not being essentially requited. He could understand how an affair with someone else could come about; he felt nothing but pity for Sid about that. That astonishing, astonishingly naive, question of Rachel’s – did most people, everybody, want to go to bed with people they love? – now cast a light upon that relationship that he could hardly bear, on Sid’s behalf, to contemplate. And then – and these three things that Rachel had said to him repeated themselves again and again – she had said that she had never been to bed with Sid, followed by her indictment of herself: ‘I must be the most selfish person in the world.’ Rachel, whose life had always seemed to him the epitome of self-abnegation, whose creed had, ever since he could remember her, been to put other people’s comfort and happiness before her own, had now to live with the knowledge that she had withheld what the person she loved most had most wanted, needed. Had they never talked about this? Clearly not.
Why
not? He could only suppose that Sid, understanding Rachel’s attitude, nature, had been afraid to risk what she had. But
why
did Rachel feel, or not feel, as she did? When he had gone first to Home Place to see all of the family again, and he had seen Rachel, with whom he had once been so much in love, with Sid, he had thought that all was clear to him: she loved women rather than men. Now, he could only imagine that Rachel in her incurable innocence had assumed that love with a member of your own sex meant love without it.

He couldn’t sleep. What would she do now – now that she knew how Sid must have suffered (although she couldn’t really know that, since she neither valued nor understood that particular deprivation)? She did love Sid: she had not been wittingly selfish – although he doubted whether she would give herself the benefit of that. But how could Sid accept, supposing it was offered, any gesture that arose from mere apology or sheer unselfishness? There might be, indeed there were, men who could manage that, he thought, as he remembered wardroom tales of single-minded and relatively heartless debauchery, but Sid, apart from her sex, did not come into that category at all.

He got up and made a pot of tea, sat in his kitchen to drink it. I must go away for a bit, he thought. Getting stale. I need some life of my own – something more than this keeping-my-head-above-water existence. He decided that he must straighten things out with Nancy, go back – for a holiday, at least – to his flat in France, have a change.

As he settled in bed for the second time, he thought that he might perhaps take Polly and Clary with him. Neither of them had been abroad in their lives – it would be fun to introduce them to the delights of Provence.

The next day he met Nancy in the canteen and they ate lunch together. He explained why he had let her down the previous night, and she said that she quite understood. She asked how old the widow was and he said seventy-nine. ‘The poor lady!’ she said. ‘It must be awful to be widowed when you are very old.’

He realized then that he had been so taken up by Rachel that he had hardly thought about the Duchy.

‘Did she have a happy marriage?’

‘I really don’t know,’ he said. He knew nothing about that marriage, he discovered, and remembered now that he had hardly ever heard them talk to each other. They had seemed to have little in common beyond their children and descendants. Their interests had hardly coincided: she loved gardening; he was passionate about forestry; she adored music which left him unmoved; he had loved to ride and shoot, to go to his club, to entertain all kinds of people, to eat and to drink – particularly good burgundy and port; she had no other outdoor interests beyond her garden, hardly ever left either of her houses except to go to a concert or to deal with a difficulty about housekeeping; she seemed to have no friends outside the family, condemned nearly all food as too rich and drank nothing. Ever since he had known them, they had slept in separate rooms. On the face of it, it would hardly seem to have been either a very close or happy arrangement. And yet, perhaps preserved by Victorian veils of a discretion that almost amounted to secrecy, it had not been
un
happy. There had never seemed to be that uncomfortable, airless vacuum in which mysterious tensions could suspend themselves that he associated with unhappy or difficult marriages. The household had jogged along with that pair at its head and he felt sure that, like himself, nobody in it had ever questioned how the couple who had instigated it had got on with one another.

‘You are lucky to have such a large family.’

‘They aren’t my family. They sort of took me in, in the war. Before that I was at art school with one of the sons and we became friends.’

‘I never knew you went to an art school!’

He shrugged and then felt ashamed of himself because it showed that he didn’t particularly care what she didn’t know about him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I have to be
somewhere
.’

He knew that he needed to talk to her seriously and that the canteen at lunch-time was hardly the place, but meanwhile he was finding it difficult to talk to her about anything.

‘She must have been extremely beautiful,’ he said.

‘So I expect she minds, anyway, about being so old.’

‘Don’t think so. She’s never cared in the least about her appearance.’

‘Anyway, you said she has a daughter. That must be a comfort to her.’

He agreed.

After they had parted, having made an arrangement for the film they were to see together, and he had gone back to his office, he wondered whether, perhaps, the Brig and the Duchy’s marriage had sustained itself at Rachel’s expense. It had seemed taken for granted that she should do everything for her father – even things that one might have expected his wife to do for him.

He had a meeting with his boss mid-afternoon and found him in a state of indignation, fulminating, as usual, against the Government.

‘Attlee must be
mad
! If we withdraw our forces from Egypt, those wogs will take the canal from under our noses. And then where will we all be?’

‘I suppose it
is
their canal, sir,’ he ventured, but was shot down at once.

‘Nonsense! Nothing of the sort! Do you know how much money the Egyptian government put into the building of it?
Ten thousand pounds
! How much canal do you think that would pay for?’ He glared at Archie with his burning blue eyes.

‘They say that they’re leaving adequate defence of the canal, sir.’

Commander Carstairs snorted. ‘We all know what that means. Just enough personnel to call for help after the balloon’s gone up. You mark my words, this government’s hell-bent on giving everything away. Empire will go to pieces – look at India! These bloody Socialists will see to it that we shall emerge in the next ten years as a second-class power, but they won’t care a damn. Five years of them and we shall be back where we were in 1937, without enough of an army or navy to say boo to a goose.’ (He did not like the RAF, Archie knew, so it usually got left out of his calculations.)

The trouble with men like him was that they had been trained to go to sea, to command in a ship, and when they were reduced to sitting in an office and paperwork, they became crusty and hidebound from frustration.

He let Carstairs rumble on until he reached the every-man-in-the-country-will-have-a-suit-and-own-a-bloody-little-car stage, when it became possible to raise the matter that he had come for in the first place.

This is what happens, he told himself, if you do something you don’t like every day simply in order to earn enough money to go on doing it, and it’s what I’m doing, and it’s got to stop.