Casting Off (59 page)

They walked for a while in comfortable silence, and then he said, ‘I’ve decided to give up my dreary old job.’

‘And go back to painting?’

‘I’m not sure. Probably. If I can make a living at it.’

‘You were before the war, weren’t you? Of course, you were in France then. I suppose that’s different.’

‘I still have to eat food and live somewhere. I’ve still got my place there.’

‘Are you going back there to live?’

‘Don’t know. Haven’t decided anything.’

The faint stirrings of alarm in her subsided. ‘I should think you’d be jolly lonely if you went back there now,’ she said, and felt him glance at her before he answered.

‘Perhaps I would.’

Later, when they were toasting crumpets, she asked him when he would be leaving his job.

‘Christmas,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to stick it out until then.’

Christmas seemed a long way off. She was content to leave it at that.

It was hard when he left very early on Monday morning. He brought her a cup of tea in bed at half past six, kissed her forehead and said he was off.

‘Work hard, eat a lot and get the lawn mowed,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back on Friday. I shall
notice
all those things.’

She listened to his car start and then to the engine noise becoming fainter until she couldn’t hear it. It would be five days and four nights entirely alone. She got up and looked out of the little window. There was a white mist rising from the canal and a lumpy thrush was hauling a worm out of the grass with short, irritable tugs. She decided then that the best way of not thinking about him driving back to London was to get her work and read over what she had written before the weekend. This became a routine. She would get up, make a mug of tea and go back to bed with it and her novel, which she read aloud to herself because she found that this was a good way of hearing uneasy passages, repetitive words or sounds, or simply finding out what she had left out. Miss Milliment – she decided to call her Marianne rather than Eleanor – was now seven, rather fat with skimpy pigtails. Then she thought that perhaps girls in those days didn’t have pigtails but flowing hair streaming down their backs, and poor Marianne’s hair was not the kind that flowed – any more than her own had been.

After her breakfast – porridge and more tea – she got a mirror and had a long, careful look at her face. Her forehead was broad but rather low, with a widow’s peak off centre. ‘Low forehead, greasy hair growing to a point,’ she wrote. Eyebrows. Hers were quite thick and Polly had made her pull bits out towards the middle so that there was more of a gap between them. ‘Sparse eyebrows growing too close together,’ she wrote. Eyes. Her own eyes, large, grey and calculating, she critically surveyed them, were really just ordinary eyes. ‘Small, grey, rather beady eyes,’ she wrote. Nose. Pudgy. ‘Pudgy.’ Noses were very boring to describe. Shape of face. She seemed to have wide cheekbones above a round face and a firm-looking chin. ‘Pudgy face with chin and sub-chin,’ she wrote. When she had finished she read the notes again. The funny thing was that they didn’t really give a picture of a face; they stayed stubbornly being bits of a face. She shut her eyes and started remembering Miss Milliment’s
now
– in her extreme old age. (It was very difficult not to call her Miss Milliment: she decided to change Marianne to Mary Anne – much better for a plain child.)

Remembering her old was much better: her vast face, the colour of grey custard, her surprisingly soft skin, her eyes like tiny pebbles behind the small thick water of her glasses, her descending arrangement of chins, her strained-back, oyster-shell-coloured hair, the intricate network of wrinkles like crazed china all over her face, her expression of gentle anxiety born of a lifetime of not being absolutely sure at first what she was seeing, punctuated by a glance minutely penetrating and kind that somehow made one forget any or all of her separately unattractive features. I think my eyes are my best feature, she thought, but I suppose most people’s are. She could not remember looking either penetrating or kind, but there it was. One knew less about oneself than other people realized, although one couldn’t consider other people in a novel without considering oneself. This seemed to be because one could never be
quite
sure about getting other people’s feelings right unless somehow one
became
them. And this in turn meant that one was pulling things out of oneself: it was a maze and she felt lost in it, but extremely interested.

So, that first week passed surprisingly quickly and then there was Archie again and the weekends were lovely. He always brought some kind of treat: chocolate biscuits, a poster of Madame Bonnard in her bath (the cottage had no pictures), a new record, the desk that Polly had given her years ago that he had collected from Blandford Street. ‘She’d love to see you,’ he said. ‘I thought you might come up with me one Monday and spend a night or two with her?’ She might.

Just before Christmas, she did. They went on Sunday evening, so that Polly would be there when she arrived: she couldn’t face going there alone. Polly, looking wonderful, received her with open arms. ‘Oh, it’s so lovely to see you,’ she kept saying. She was wearing a scarlet corduroy skirt and a raspberry-pink shirt, and a very flashy ring of smoky blue with what looked like diamonds round it.

‘They are,’ she said. ‘Gerald gave it to me. That’s what I’ve been dying to tell you. I’m in love with him and we’re going to be married.’

It was a shock.

‘Are you sure, Poll? Really
sure
?’

‘People keep saying that. Of course I am. I don’t think it’s something one is unsure about. Either you are or you aren’t.’

‘Are what?’

‘In love.’

She was silent. She knew then that it was the kind of untruth that everyone had to discover for themselves. But perhaps Polly would never have to do that. She was the kind of person who got things right, she thought, seeing Polly’s shining eyes and air of joy.

‘I’ve asked him to come after supper to meet you,’ she was now saying. ‘He knows you’re my best friend as well as my cousin.’

All through supper Polly told her about him. About his enormously ugly house, and how she’d nearly not met him, and how they were to be married in July and he was going to take her to Paris for her honeymoon, and how good he was at imitating people, and how he wasn’t conventionally good-looking (that probably means ugly, she thought: people’s appearance and the consequences of it were her profession these days), and the more Polly talked about him, the more she thought about Noël and the worse she felt.

Goodness, she thought, love can make people rather boring.

‘I’d rather not,’ she said, when Polly said she wanted her to be a bridesmaid.

When Polly began asking her about herself, she could find little or nothing to say. ‘Yes, it’s a good place to work,’ she said of the cottage.

The book was getting on. (What could one say about a less than half-written book? She didn’t want to say anything about it at all.) Talking to Archie about it was different.

Yes, she said in answer to the most serious question. Yes, she was over Noël. ‘But that’s what I mean,’ she added, suddenly finding something to say. ‘I am over him – more or less – and once I thought I never would be. I thought I was completely in love. Don’t you see?’

‘See what?’

‘That it isn’t as simple as you think. You are in love with Gerald now, but how do you know you’ll go on feeling like that?’

‘I see what you mean. But I
do
know, Clary. I really do. It is awfully difficult to explain—’

‘What about Archie? You
thought
you were in love with him, didn’t you? It went on for ages.’

‘That was different.’

‘You didn’t think so at the time.’

‘I see what you mean,’ Polly said again. ‘I suppose everyone has to go through falling in love with the wrong person, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t find the right one. If they didn’t nobody would be married.’

‘That might be a very good thing.’

‘Don’t be silly! Of course it wouldn’t be.’

‘Well, I’m not going to marry anyone.’

‘I think you’re just saying that because you’ve had such a rotten time. I do admit it was far luckier to fall in love with Archie than with Noël.’

At this point the doorbell rang and Polly rushed down to let Gerald in.

Clary had felt divided about whether she wanted to like him or not. Of course, in a way she did, but there was a stubborn, contrary part of her that resented having to fall in with Polly’s complacency and happiness. ‘I know you’ll like him,’ she had said, more than once. How could she know that? Why should she, Clary, like people just because Polly thought she would? But she had to admit to herself that he did seem all right; moony about Polly, of course, but very nice to her as well. When Polly told him that she didn’t want to be bridesmaid, he looked quite disappointed, and then he said, ‘I can’t blame you. I should hate to be one myself.’ And he asked her about her cottage much more than Polly had, so that Polly said, ‘Why don’t we come and see you there? One weekend?’ and she heard herself saying – quite rudely, ‘Oh, no! I can’t have people there. It’s far too primitive, especially for you, Poll. She’s always wanting to do things to houses, decorate them and all that.’

And he had said, ‘I know. Well, she’s taken on either a life’s work or her Waterloo with mine.’ He had looked at Polly, and they had both smiled. They were continually meeting each other’s eyes and smiling. Once he picked up Polly’s hand and kissed it, and Polly sat looking at that hand with a look of contented bliss that went straight – and painfully – to her heart. Noël had never, at any point, treated her like that.

The atmosphere was so full of this sort of thing, evoking all kinds of painful contrast, that in the end she couldn’t deal with it. She said she was tired and would go to bed.

‘I’ve made up your bed,’ Polly said, after she had insisted upon taking her downstairs. ‘I’m afraid Neville has made rather a mess of your room, but at least the sheets are clean.’

And then the inevitable question.

‘You
do
like him?’

‘Oh, yes, of course I do. I think he’s – jolly nice,’ she finished.

‘Oh, good! I thought you would. Sleep well. See you in the morning.’

But she couldn’t sleep. To be back in this room, where she had occasionally spent nights with Noël – where, in fact, their last meeting had taken place – brought back a weight of misery and anguish that she thought had gone. That she had cared so much for him, that he had never, in fact, loved her, that she had not recognized this until it was too late, engulfed her more painfully than ever before. This was because she now knew all three of these factors, whereas before they had occurred one after the other. Again and again she heard Noël’s cold and irritable response to her saying she was pregnant; again and again, she played her memory record of Fenella’s voice on the telephone with its precise blend of indifference and hostility that had so confounded her – they were not, had never been, her amazing, dear, close friends. She supposed dimly that she had been used, although she did not understand why, but in any case she had been stupid enough to be a willing, an enthusiastic victim. All the events connected with her pregnancy came back, and remembering how she had bled and wept after the abortion, she wept again as pride leaked out of her until she was nothing but her humiliation. The whole night her losses ganged up on her. Her mother who had left her for ever by dying – left her with a single postcard and memories that were not to be talked about because of upsetting her father. And then Dad – going off and leaving her for
years
. He would never know what his absence had cost her. And then, when he did come back, of course he had a new, far more beautiful daughter to look after, and she, now ostensibly grown-up, was meant to look after herself. And now Polly was going off to be married which really meant that she wouldn’t want the same kind of friendship any more that they had had all these years. She had reached the stage of misery where she searched for yet more reasons to justify it. And I just don’t look like Polly, so nothing like that would ever happen to me anyway, she thought, as she put on the light to search in her chest of drawers for a handkerchief. But her chest of drawers turned out to be full of Neville’s things – dirty shirts, sheet music, half-eaten packets of biscuits, broken pencils, rolls of film . . . Her chest of drawers! Full of the wretched Neville’s things! And he had not even asked her if he could use her room! She found one of his handkerchiefs – a Cash’s nametape with N. Cazalet sewn on it. I’ll use it and I’ll keep it, she thought. Then she saw that she was behaving like a cross little girl of ten and not at all like a grown-up with tragic events behind her.

At this moment, she heard the front door slam downstairs. So Gerald did not spend the night with Polly. She turned off her light again; she did not want Polly coming in to talk to her.

She must have slept a bit, because when she came to it was beginning to be light. She got up, packed the rucksack she had brought and wrote a note to Polly. ‘Am going back to the cottage to work. Sorry, but I don’t want to be in this place at the moment. Nothing to do with you – it’s other things. Love, Clary.’

She took the note upstairs and put it outside Polly’s room. It was half past six. She let herself out of the house and walked to Baker Street station to catch a train for Paddington and her journey back to the cottage.

It was raining heavily and she was soaked on the walk to Baker Street; she had just enough money to buy the two train tickets, but not enough for a taxi at the other end. This would mean a three-mile walk unless she got a lift. The train was unheated, and she sat in a compartment to herself, wishing that she had a hot drink to warm her up and hoping that the rain would have stopped by the time she reached Pewsey.

It hadn’t, of course. It seemed set for the day, if not for ever. Only one other person got off the train at Pewsey, and was met by an old man in tweeds with a pipe; he carried her off in an old Morris Minor before Clary had a chance to ask them which way they were going. She would have to walk it. Up to now, the journey had felt like an escape: even shivering and damp in the train she had felt that everything would be different and better when she got off it. But now as she tramped wearily towards the cottage, its emptiness and silence began to weigh upon her. She would be alone for at least four days, and Archie, who had expected to drive her down the following Friday, had not left the usual five pounds for housekeeping. She would not have money to buy food and there was very little in the way of stores. She realized then that for weeks Archie had been providing for her, since she’d had no money of her own once her job had stopped. She simply had not thought about this before, but now it frightened her. She was completely dependent upon Archie turning up when he said he would, and supposing he was cross with her for running away from London (and without telling him – she could have rung him up, she now thought), he just might not come on Friday.