Casting Off (53 page)

Diana followed Edward along the gallery landing to the end where there were two doors and the passage turned to the left.

‘Here we are!’ The room looked out on to the front lawn where there was a monkey puzzle tree with daffodils under it. ‘The bathroom’s along the passage, down two steps and turn left,’ Edward said. ‘And the lavatory’s next door to it.’

She went along the passage to the lavatory. Clouds of steam were creeping out from under the bathroom door and there was a smell of expensive bath essence. As she returned, she heard peals of laughter coming from the room next to theirs. Then the door opened and there was Rupert in white shorts and a shirt. ‘Oh, hello, Diana! You didn’t by any chance notice whether the bathroom is free, did you? I’ve just had a rather humiliating game of squash with Teddy, and Zoë says I smell like a very expensive horse.’

‘How I imagine an expensive horse would smell,’ Zoë said as she appeared behind him.

‘Hello.’ She smiled at Diana: she was wearing a pale green bath towel like a sarong; her hair hung down her back and she looked extremely beautiful. When she said that someone was having a bath, Rupert said, ‘It’s Bernadine. She’s been there for hours.’

‘I expect Teddy’s in there with her.’

‘Oh, is he, indeed?’ He stalked along the passage and banged on the door. ‘Are you in there, Teddy? Well, hurry up. I need a bath.’

‘Although I expect the hot water will have run out,’ Zoë said. ‘I hope you don’t want one.’

No, she didn’t.

Back in the room, she asked, ‘Do we change for dinner?’

‘Only a bit, not much. We change more on Saturdays.’ He was mixing up some white stuff in a glass of water. ‘I thought I’d be on the safe side,’ he said. ‘I’d rather knock this back and not worry about what I eat.’

The room was quite cold. She unpacked and put on her petrol-blue woollen dress with long sleeves and settled at the dressing table to do her face.

‘Darling, I’ll leave you. They’ll want me to make drinks.’

‘Where will you be?’

‘The drawing room. Bottom of the stairs and then opposite you on the left. Don’t be long.’

While she combed her hair, powdered her face, and added a discreet touch of blue mascara to her eyelashes, she thought how extraordinary, in fact, it was to be there, the place where she had miserably imagined Edward weekend after weekend during the war. When Rupert and Zoë had come to dinner with them she had thought how unlike Edward Rupert had been, and that although Edward had said how pretty Zoë was, she had seemed rather lifeless. This evening, draped in that peppermint towel, she had looked like a film star, effortlessly fresh and glamorous with that wonderful creamy magnolia skin and those clear green eyes. Of course, she was years older than Zoë, and one’s hair when it was permed and tinted, never looked quite the same. She tied a mauve chiffon scarf loosely round her neck to conceal it and went down to find Edward.

In the drawing room she found him talking to a very tall dark man, who rose from his chair when she came in.

‘Archie, this is Diana,’ Edward said. ‘I’ve just made a splendid Martini.’

‘How do you do?’ He had a limp, she noticed, and a domed forehead from which his dark hair was receding, and very heavy curved eyelids. He looked at her in a manner that was both penetrating and impassive, and she felt wary of him. It was clear, though, that he was much appreciated by the family. The Duchy made him sit next to her at dinner, during which there was a good deal of general conversation. They ate roast lamb, which reminded someone of the frightful floods – ‘two
million
sheep were drowned,’ Rachel was saying, ‘poor dears.’

‘I don’t suppose it was any worse for them than being killed any other way,’ Teddy said. He was sitting next to Bernadine, who wore what could only be described as a cocktail dress, of turquoise creˆpe with bands of gold sequins round the sleeves and neck. She kept putting pieces of skin and fat on his plate and he obediently ate them. On her other side was Edward, with whom she was flirting in a worn, girlish manner that made him dull and breezy. They talked – briefly – about the violence and uncertainty in India: Archie said it looked as though we were going to divide and
not
rule for a change, and Edward made his usual remark about what a damn shame it was that we were casting off the Empire as fast as we could. But what could you expect, considering the government we had?

‘I love our government,’ Rupert said. ‘Don’t you think it’s fascinating that the moment the war is over, we stop having dramatic chaps like Churchill and Roosevelt, and opt for quiet little men who look like bank clerks – like Truman and Attlee? It makes peace comfortingly middle class. More roast drowned lamb, please.’

The Duchy said, ‘Stop teasing your brother, Rupert.’

Bernadine fitted a cigarette into a long holder and lit it. This, Diana saw, did not go down well with anybody, and after a moment Teddy muttered, ‘We don’t smoke until after the port.’

Bernadine shrugged, gave him an angry look and then smiled and shrugged again as she stubbed it out on her side-plate. ‘I shall never get used to your British ways.’ So she had to wait, sulking through the rhubarb tart and cheese.

‘That was all right, wasn’t it, darling? They liked you – that was plain to see,’ Edward said when they were going to bed. ‘You fit in a jolly sight better than Teddy’s wife.’

She opened her mouth to say that she hoped she
did
, but desisted. Instead, she said, ‘It must be very difficult for her. I think she was bored, poor thing.’

‘Oh, well, I expect she’s wonderful in bed,’ he answered. ‘And you know what it’s like when you’re young.’

‘She’s not young! She looks older than Zoë. Is she the kind of girl you’d have gone for when you were Teddy’s age?’

‘Lord, no! When I was his age I was madly in love with a sweet, innocent girl called Daphne Brook-Jones – we got engaged, in fact, but we didn’t dare tell our families.’

‘Why not?’

‘We knew they wouldn’t approve,’ he said. She sensed that he didn’t want to tell her why.

‘We used to go riding in the Row before breakfast,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we just met at parties.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Oh, she married someone else,’ he said.

‘And you?’

‘I met Villy,’ he said shortly.

So his marriage had been a kind of rebound, she thought after he had made rather perfunctory love to her and gone to sleep. She had the feeling that there was more to his first love affair (if that was what it had been) than she would ever find out. But the knowledge that his marriage had been a rebound made her feel more sure of herself.

The weekend was pleasant but uneventful. ‘It seems so strange to be here without any of the children,’ Rachel said at one point.

‘Except me,’ Teddy said: he was consuming an enormous Sunday breakfast.

‘Well, yes, darling, but you are grown-up now.’

‘So is Louise. So is Simon. So are Polly and Clary.’

‘Yes. There are only the babies left.’

‘They’re not babies, they’re what we used to be.’

‘Well, I miss the long table in the hall and the nursery meals,’ Rachel said. ‘Thread this needle for me, would you, Zoë? I need new specs – can’t see a thing.’

‘Even Lydia thinks she’s grown-up,’ Teddy said. ‘Oh, Lord, I nearly forgot Bernie’s tray.’ She preferred to have breakfast in bed, he had earlier explained, and he put far more than her share of butter on the tray when he took it up. The Duchy, Rachel said, who deeply disapproved of people having any meals in bed unless they were too ill to eat anything, had said that he must be responsible for bringing the tray down to the dining room so that it could be cleared away with the rest of breakfast.

Diana went round the garden with the Duchy, who showed her her gentians. ‘They aren’t doing as well as I had hoped, but it’s lovely to have them. Do you like gardening?’

‘I think I should like it, but either I haven’t had the garden or when I had a cottage during the war there never seemed to be time.’

‘Ah. But you have three children?’

‘Four. Three sons and a daughter.’

The Duchy asked their ages, and Diana explained about the older ones being brought up by grandparents. ‘I have Jamie, but he’s just started prep school. So only Susan is at home.’

‘And how old is she?’

‘Almost four.’

‘And she is Edward’s child,’ the Duchy said tranquilly. It was hardly a question.

‘Yes – yes, she is.’

There was a pause, and then the Duchy said, ‘I don’t think that Edward’s wife knows this, and as there is to be a divorce, there seems to be no need to broadcast the fact. I hope you agree?’

‘Yes.’

She did not tell Edward about this exchange.

A great deal of the conversation consisted of family affairs. Polly’s wedding, for instance. Everybody seemed pleased about it, and the wedding was to be in July. Diana felt rather out of this, because she thought she was the only person who had not met Polly’s fiancé. ‘A nice young man,’ the Duchy said.

‘He’s no pin-up,’ Bernadine confided to her, ‘but she’ll have a title, and they say he’s got no money, but it sure doesn’t sound like it. He has a house as big as a
hotel
, so she can’t be short of dough the way Teddy and me are.’ (The remark about Polly had come out of a fairly long ingenuous ‘chat’ that she’d had with Diana about making ends meet and the meanness of Cazelets in this respect, which she knew she was supposed to hand on to Edward.)

‘Hugh is so pleased. He’s become a different person since Polly’s engagement,’ Rachel said. ‘He looks ten years younger.’

‘Clary will miss her,’ Rupert said. ‘They’ve been such friends for so long. When
is
she coming back to London, Archie, do you know? Archie?’

He had been knocking out his pipe against the grate, and seemed not to have heard. ‘I think she’ll come back when she’s finished her book,’ he said.

‘The best thing is that they’re so tremendously in love,’ Zoë had exclaimed, and Diana saw Rupert give her a very loving look. They’re in love, she thought. They really are. And envy briefly possessed her.

But on Sunday evening, when they were alone, Edward said, ‘Don’t get too excited about this wedding.’

‘I’m not, but why not? It sounds very happy.’

‘We shan’t be attending it, I’m afraid.’

‘Why not? I’ve met everyone now, and they seem to have accepted me.’

‘Because Hugh wants Villy to go. That’s why. Villy was awfully good to Sybil when she was dying, and Hugh has never forgotten that.’

‘Oh. Does that mean he’ll go on refusing to meet me?’

‘I don’t know. He may do. He’s stubborn as hell about some things. And there are other differences between us. It’s not just you.’

‘I’m glad of that,’ she said.

‘Are you?’ He looked hurt. ‘You know there are.’

Of course she did. It was all about capital investment and Southampton and things which, although he had told her about them, had seemed so tortuous, unresolvable and actually rather boring that she kept forgetting how much they preyed upon his mind. ‘Darling! I’m sorry! I know it worries you. I only wish there was something I could do to help.’

‘Sweetie! You do help. I love you very much, you know.’

‘I know. And I love you.’

Then, when they had returned to London, there had been the fearful business about John. The hospital had rung about an hour ago, Mrs Greenacre said, but when she had rung Home Place she had been told they had left. It was about Major Cresswell. He was in the Middlesex Hospital.

‘I’ll take you,’ Edward had said, and they had gone straight away without even ringing the hospital.

‘Do you think he’s been in a car accident or something?’

‘I don’t know, darling. He could just have had a particularly bad attack of malaria.’

‘They wouldn’t have rung us about that, surely?’

‘Or a heart attack or something like that. It’s no good worrying about what it is, we can’t know. Just have to get there as fast as we can.’ It was pouring with rain again, but there was not much traffic.

‘He took an overdose,’ the ward sister told them, ‘but fortunately, he was found in time. We’ve pumped him out, and he’s quite comfortable. Your name was in his address book so, naturally, we telephoned your number.’

She was leading the way down a ward. He was in a bed at the very end of it. Edward said he would wait for her outside. There was a chair by the bed and she sat on it. He lay, looking very grey and pinched with his eyes shut, but he opened them when she said his name. ‘Johnnie! It’s me, Diana.’

He looked dazed. ‘Awfully sorry,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t think what to do.’ She took his hand. He gazed at her earnestly. ‘It’s no use,’ he said, ‘I simply can’t – find . . . Haven’t even managed that, though, have I? Here I am again.’ He tried to smile and a single tear slid slowly out of one eye.

She stroked his hand. ‘Darling Johnnie, it’s all right. I’m here.’

‘There isn’t anyone to talk to, you see.’ He shut his eyes again, then, with them still shut, he said, ‘That was one good thing about the camp. No shortage of that kind of thing.’

‘I think you should get some sleep now. I’ll come back tomorrow and we’ll talk properly.’

‘Poor old chap. What an awful thing!’

By dint of much questioning she discovered that no, he wasn’t much good at the job he had at Cazalets’; that they’d kind of
made
a job for him, but it wasn’t really working out. He kept worrying about how to do it, and asking other people. Hugh had thought he should go, and Edward had persuaded him to let things run for a bit longer.

‘Tell you what. Why don’t you talk to Rachel about him? She’s really good at that kind of thing.’

And she had been. Diana had rung her and she had come round the same day and they had had a long talk, and Rachel had said she would go and see him. ‘He sounds as though he is too lonely, poor fellow,’ she had said.

Diana felt grateful and relieved. Then she began to worry about where he should go when he came out of hospital, which, she had gathered from her second visit, was to be as soon as possible. Obviously, she could suggest his coming to her, but her heart sank at the prospect, and although she guessed that Edward would agree to such a scheme, she knew that he wouldn’t want it.