Casting Off (44 page)

After lunch he said what would she like to do? What would he like? ‘I don’t mind as long as we do it together,’ and he began to blush. ‘But perhaps you’ve had enough for the day.’

They went to the Tate Gallery. ‘I don’t know anything about pictures,’ he said. ‘I don’t even know what I like, I bet you do, though.’

‘We had a governess who used to take us. She especially loved Turner. I’ll show you.’ This was a success.

‘He really is most awfully good. I mean, I like looking at them.’

They went back to Polly’s and she made tea and toast with Marmite on it, and then he went out and bought an evening paper to see if they wanted to go to a film. She felt worried about his spending money on her because she knew he wasn’t earning any and it didn’t sound as though his family gave him much, if anything. But when she said couldn’t they share the cinema, he said, ‘It’s all right: I’ve got quite a bit of my gratuity, because my aunt gave me three thousand pounds to buy somewhere to live and do it up. So really I’m temporarily flush.’

They found a cinema showing
I Married a Witch
and then they had supper and then he took her home. Their parting was awkward.

He saw her out of the car and up to her front door.

‘Thank you for a lovely day,’ she said.

‘Oh, no! I should thank you.’

They stood for a moment, looking at each other, and then he said, ‘Well! Just see that your key works, and then I must be off.’

So she made her key work and he said, ‘Well – good. I’ll be off.’ And went.

She walked slowly up the stairs wondering how, although they seemed to be very intimate in some ways, they were still utterly impersonal. He’d never once made what people in her childhood described as ‘personal remarks’. She remembered how, when reproved for making them herself, she had thought how much more interesting they were than many of the other kind. But Gerald – she had not called him that – had never once said anything to her that could remotely be described as personal. He had not even called her Polly. She felt slightly piqued by this. She had taken her usual trouble about her clothes and appearance generally, and she was used to people saying, ‘That blue looks lovely with your hair, or matches your eyes perfectly,’ things of that nature, that she had not particularly noticed at the time but noticed now because of their absence. She had quite wanted to hug him when they parted because she felt sad that the day had come to an end: it had even crossed her mind to ask him in, but then she’d felt nervous at the idea. He might have thought that she expected him to stay the night, with all that that might have implied, and with the experience of poor Clary fresh in her mind, she was not going to take any plunge. But I suppose I would have liked to be led to the water, she thought. I wouldn’t have minded if he’d wanted to kiss me: in fact, it might have been a good idea to find out what it would be like. But, of course, it’s no earthly good if he doesn’t want to. And he’d shown no signs of wanting to. Oh dear, she thought, the people who I wish would just be friends don’t want to be that at all, and when I would quite like someone not to be just that, it seems to be all they want to be.

The next morning the telephone rang at nine. It was him, and she felt a rush of pleasure when she heard his voice. ‘I hope I’m not ringing you too early.’

‘No. I’m just having coffee and toast. What about you?’

She was just about to say why didn’t he come over and join her, when he said, ‘When I got back last night there was a telegram. My father died yesterday morning.’

‘Oh!’

‘So I’m afraid I’ve got to go down there and see to things. The funeral and all that. I think I’ll be away about a week. I just wanted to tell you.’

‘Yes.’

She started to say she was sorry, but he interrupted. ‘It’s all right. There’s nothing you can say. I just wanted you to know. So you wouldn’t think I’d just vanished. Not that it would necessarily matter if I had.’

‘It would!’

‘Would it?’ His voice was suddenly tender. Then he said goodbye in his usual tone.

She did not hear from him for ten days. She spent half of that time not thinking about him – that is to say, if she started to she quickly thought of something else – and the other half trying to get his flat more habitable for his return. The wiring and plumbing were finished, the floors were sanded, and she’d had the bars and the black brick area wall painted white.

After a week, when Gerald had still not returned, she organized the painter for his flat and told him to do the bedroom first in case the owner came back. Caspar gave her another job – a studio flat overlooking the river where the conversion had already been done and she had simply to design and organize its décor. Ordinarily she would have been excited at the promotion; now she was just grateful to have something to do to take her mind off things. What things? she wondered as she boarded a bus to meet the new client on site. Was she beginning to fall in love with Gerald? If so, why? If she thought about him dispassionately, there really didn’t seem to be any good reason for this. He seemed aimless, and he certainly couldn’t be described as good-looking; he was kind and she enjoyed being with him but that was probably because she didn’t know him well enough to be bored by him. Perhaps she had just reached the age where she wanted to be in love with somebody so whoever came along became the object. This was a depressing thought and, because it depressed her, she thought it was probably true.

Her client turned out to be a young man – he said he worked in the City – who wanted the studio as a
pied à – terre
. ‘My wife and children are in the country,’ he said, ‘but I’ve found commuting a bore.’

He seemed very young to have a wife and children, although he was beginning to go bald. ‘It’s on the small side, but I was rather taken with the view, and it’s handy for getting to the Bank. I want it kept quite simple, but I may want to bring people back to it from time to time, so I’d like it to look good.’ The studio was quite large, but the bedroom was small and the kitchenette and bathroom barely adequate.

‘The bedroom is rather a problem, isn’t it? By the time you’ve got a bed in it, there’s hardly room for cupboards.’

‘Oh, I thought I’d use it just as a dressing room and sleep in the studio. I like a really large bed.’ As he said this, she caught him eyeing her speculatively.

She had brought samples of paint colours and swatches of curtain material which she laid out on the draining board in the kitchen, but he did not seem very interested. She asked whether he had furniture, or whether he wanted it bought for him. ‘Oh, you buy it,’ he said. ‘Get some modern stuff – we’re loaded with antiques in the country. Annabel’s mad for them.’

When she was putting away the samples in her case, he came up behind her and said, ‘Has anyone ever told you how surprisingly attractive you are?’

She felt hands on her shoulders, which turned her round to him. ‘Quite enough people,’ she said.

‘I was thinking we might have lunch.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Don’t get on your high horse. I really do find you extraordinarily fetching.’

‘Has anyone ever told you how patronizing you are?’

His smile faded. ‘There’s no need to be unpleasant. I only asked you to lunch.’

‘No, you didn’t.’ She shut her case and walked to the door as deliberately as she could manage, but her knees were shaking.

‘You have a high opinion of yourself, haven’t you?’ He said it with a kind of feeble malice; she felt she’d won.

But when she got back to the shop, she found that he’d telephoned to cancel the job. ‘I’ve told you before, you must not be rude to clients,’ Caspar said. ‘I don’t know what you said to him, but you certainly did upset him. Rolling in money, too. Gervase won’t be at all pleased.’

‘He made a pass at me,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘I dare say he did. You’re a big girl now, darling. Be your age.’ She didn’t get the rise that had been hinted at that morning.

On Friday morning Gerald rang her early before she left for work. ‘I do hope you don’t mind,’ he said, ‘but I have a favour to ask you. Are you by any chance free this weekend?. . . Oh, good. Well, would it be possible for you to take a train to Norwich tomorrow morning? I’ll meet you. I’m still in the country, you see. I’ve got a bit of a problem about my parents’ house. And you’re so good at that sort of thing. I thought you would know what to do.’

She agreed to catch the nine thirty from Liverpool Street.

‘It’s really wonderful of you to come. Bring warm clothes – it’s rather a cold house.’

In the train she wondered about the house and why it was a problem. Perhaps his mother was going to live abroad, and he was being left with having to sell it. She had never been to Norfolk. Perhaps it was a farmhouse with beams everywhere and smoky steaming log fires. She was just being romantic: it could as easily be a modern house – a bungalow, even. Anyway, there was such a housing shortage that, whatever it was, it shouldn’t be too difficult to get rid of, if that was what they wanted.

He was standing on the platform; she saw him before he saw her and she felt the same rush of pleasure at the sight of him as she had at the sound of his voice on the telephone. He wore a polo-necked jersey under the tweed jacket with leather elbows. ‘There’s lunch of a sort at home,’ he said, ‘if you can hold out till then. It’s about twenty miles.’

‘I don’t mind.’

He had a different – somewhat larger but equally battered – car: ‘It was my father’s,’ he said. ‘It’s marginally more comfortable.’

‘Is your mother . . .?’

‘She left immediately after the funeral. A friend has taken her to France for a holiday. It’s quite a relief, really. It means at least I can try to sort things out in peace.’

He sounded as though he had been having a difficult time, she thought. ‘Is there a lot to sort out?’

‘Well, in one way there is. But every decision seems to depend upon another one, and it’s not easy to know where to start, so I thought I’d start with you.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to talk about it now. Tell me about your week.’

So she told him about the studio flat and its owner. She thought she made it sound quite funny, but she saw him scowl and then glare ahead at the road.

‘Insufferable lout,’ he said, ‘but I suppose, looking as you do, you come in for rather a lot of that sort of thing.’

‘The thing was, I lost the job, and Caspar and Co. weren’t best pleased.’

‘What’s so depressing about that’, he went on, as though she hadn’t said anything, ‘is that he can’t have known what you’re like. But I suppose that sort of person doesn’t care.’

A few miles later, he said, ‘Do women ever feel like that man? I mean, do they mostly notice what men look like?’

‘Not so much, I don’t think. I mean, of course they do talk about men being handsome and all that.’

‘Do they? I thought they might.’

‘Well, they do in books. But I don’t know how much you can trust
them
.’

After another silence he said, ‘At least my mother turns out to have some money of her own. She’s all right – she can easily live in the South of France if she wants to. And she absolutely doesn’t want to go on living here.’

‘So she’ll want to sell the house?’

‘The house? Well, actually, my father left it to me. That’s rather the point. He hasn’t left me any money – there wasn’t any to leave.’

He turned off the road into what she thought at first was a cart-track, but when an avenue of large trees began each side of it she realized that it was some sort of disused drive. Beyond the trees on either side there was parkland, studded with more enormous trees, most of which appeared to be dying or already dead. After about a quarter of a mile the parkland stopped and the avenue became woods that arched over the drive cavernously. Then they emerged from the wood and, turning a sharp corner, she saw across further park an enormous building splayed across the skyline. It was a yellowish colour with three square towers. The avenue had stopped, had been felled, and sawn logs lay on either side. The building was further away than she had thought, since they continued to bump along the drive for some minutes without it seeming appreciably nearer, but gradually, windows winked in the cold sunshine, and she saw that it was built of bricks that looked like clean London stock, with stone facings, and that the towers were pink brick, crenellated with stone battlements. It looked as though it might be a hospital or an Edwardian hotel, and was, she thought, the ugliest large building she had ever seen in her life. He had been completely silent, but now, as they got within a hundred yards of the place, he drew up and stopped the engine. In the silence that followed, she could hear the distant cawing of rooks. ‘You can see my mother’s point,’ he said. ‘It’s stately without being much of a home.’ Then he turned to her. ‘It appals you. I was afraid it might. That’s why I had to show it to you. Anyway, let’s go and have some lunch in it.’

He started the engine and they drove up to the front of the house. The front façade – about the length of a tennis court – was flanked by two wings running at an angle. The forecourt, which must once have been lawn, was a desolate and tangled jungle of thistles, nettles and ragwort. The wings, each ending with its pink brick tower, had an archway where they joined the main part of the house. He drove through the right-hand one of these, to reveal a further courtyard surrounded by buildings that looked as though they had been stables and garaging. ‘We go in here,’ he said, and opened a glass-fronted door. ‘Perhaps I’d better lead the way.’

She followed him down a wide dark passage, and through a second pair of doors. The chill struck her at once. Here, the passage, which continued, was lighter as there were skylights at regular intervals. Towards the end of it, he turned left through a mahogany door into what seemed like a small hall, since it had other doors, all in one wall. He opened one of these and shouted, ‘Nan! We’re back,’ shut it and went to another one, which revealed a small sitting room, with a gate-legged table set for lunch. A very small coal fire burned in the grate. ‘It’s marginally warmer in here,’ he said. ‘There’s some sherry, if you’d like it. Come and sit by the fire while I get it.’