Casting Off (62 page)

She had nodded. Flo had gone, she knew that now – and all she had was this picture taken of her in the summer frock that she, Dolly, had never really liked, with her amber beads that, she remembered having pointed out at the time, were really better as
winter
jewellery.

She had had to let Rachel pack things – and even she had recognized the need for more than one case – but after she had had her supper and they had said goodnight to her, she had got out of bed and started to deal with everything. She was
not
going for a mere fortnight, she was going for much longer – longer, it seemed, than they knew. So she had to take everything she possibly could.

It was very late by the time she had repacked the cases and she was quite unable to shut them. The servants would have to do it, although they hardly ever came near her nowadays, she had noticed. When she finally got back to bed, her hot-water bottle was cold and she had to dispense with it. She had once tried refilling it from the bathroom tap, but there had been something wrong with the stopper because it had leaked very badly in the night.

Rachel had said that sometimes one did not remember things when one got older, and the remark had both incensed her and hurt her feelings. It simply wasn’t true. She might not always remember every single little thing, but what she did remember was always sharp and in great detail. Tonight, she was too fagged to think about anything, and for a long time she seemed too tired even to go to sleep, although in the end she must have dropped off because there was Rachel with her breakfast tray saying what a beautiful day it was.

When she came back to her room after washing, her cases were shut, so that was all right. She felt nervous because she was not absolutely sure whether they were going to Stanmore or to Home Place – or, possibly, to somewhere else. This became so worrying that she had to find out.

‘I suppose the garden at Stanmore has suffered from our absence?’ she said to Kitty, as they sat in the drawing room downstairs while the chauffeur put the luggage in the motor.

‘Oh, darling, I don’t know. I expect the new people will have looked after it. I don’t think we’d want to go back there to see, do you?’

‘Oh, no. Of course we wouldn’t. It wouldn’t be at all like Home Place. The garden, I mean.’

‘Oh, I’m really looking forward to my roses there. They will be out, or better still, just starting. Won’t that be nice?’

So it was Home Place. She had been to visit there, with Flo, and they had shared a room and Flo had had the bed by the window because she was such a demon about fresh air.

When they got into the car, she discovered that Rachel was not coming with them. ‘She is going to have a holiday with Sid,’ Kitty said, when they were both safely ensconced in the back. It seemed odd of Rachel to want to have a holiday at all.
She
had never had a holiday in her life – unless one counted the seaside visit to Rottingdean after she and Flo had had the measles. ‘It was really a convalescence,’ she said aloud, and Kitty answered, ‘Well, poor Sid
has
been very ill.’

She didn’t reply to this. It was not her fault if Kitty muddled things up, although she ought not to – she was a good two years younger than herself.

But she enjoyed the drive. Tonbridge did not drive too fast, and once they were out in the country there were meadows with buttercups and Queen Anne’s lace and country-cottage gardens full of flowers. Kitty looked out of her window and kept pointing things out to her but, of course, she could not see them because by then they had passed – they were on to something else. But she
pretended
to see them, as she did not want to spoil Kitty’s happiness. Her husband had died, some time ago, but it did not seem to have upset her unduly; another reason, she felt, for being thankful that she had adhered to the single state. It was odd, she thought, how much she had to pretend these days: to hear what people said, to understand (sometimes) what on earth they were talking about, to feel a great deal more well than she did, a great deal of the time, that she hardly needed her spectacles (she could never find them and got quite sick of asking people where they were), that she had slept quite beautifully, when this was hardly ever the case, to know who a large quantity of people who came to see Kitty, or stayed with her, were.

Of course, she knew that they were part of the enormous family that Kitty had married into, but that did not help about their precise relationship. And most of all, and this was nearly all the time, to pretend not to be tired. This was a fib if ever there was one: she felt tired nearly all the time; she often woke up tired. Oh, yes, and to being able to digest anything. When she was young, Flo had always said she had the digestion of a horse. This had not been very kindly meant at the time, but it was infinitely better than not having a digestion at all, which she felt had become the case. But, ‘Away with care,’ she said aloud, and Kitty looked at her and said, ‘Yes, away with it. We shall both feel the better for a little country air.’

She was glad when they arrived, and they had tea on the lawn, although it seemed a bit chilly to her, but Kitty got Eileen to fetch her thicker cardigan, on which she unfortunately dropped some strawberry jam but she knew she had another cardigan in one of the cases.

After tea, she insisted on doing her own unpacking, although Eileen offered to help her. It tired her but she felt that she would learn where things were. There were no other people there, excepting the servants, of course, and so she insisted upon dining with Kitty who would otherwise have been alone. But soon after it she said she thought she would go up to her room to settle in. Kitty accompanied her, which meant that she had to take the stairs faster than she would have wished, and when she had been kissed she subsided on her bed, quite breathless. She had made a very good meal: Mrs Cripps had produced a roast chicken – which had always been a treat when she was a girl – and new potatoes and spinach from the garden. This had been followed by a rhubarb tart, and she had always been partial to rhubarb and forgot that it did not any longer seem to agree with her. She had a touch of indigestion. She sat on her bed for a few moments’ rest. The window was open, and the sky was the lovely soothing colour of lavender: it was still quite light. She was really quite fagged, as dear Papa used to say, but a trip to the bathroom was essential and she got up to make it. When she had been unpacking, she had thought there was something missing about her room, although she could not think what it might be, but when she returned from the lavatory she knew at once. Flo’s bed was gone. It had been by the window, and now there was simply a space where it had been. This distressed her: it was as though whoever had moved the bed was denying Flo’s existence. Not her existence now: she knew that Flo had gone – to her Maker, to Papa and Mama and their dear brother killed in the war – but her existence at
all
. She had always shared this room with Flo, and her bed being gone made her feel much more alone. Then she had a very good idea. She would move
her
bed to the window and sleep where Flo had slept. It would not matter if there was a gap where her bed had been because, after all, she knew
she
existed. She looked at the bed and wondered whether she would have the strength. ‘Nothing ventured nothing won,’ she said aloud, and set about it. The bed was on casters, so sometimes it moved quite easily although sometimes it got stuck by a ruck in the carpet, but she persisted, moving it a bit one end at a time until with one last heave, it was exactly where Flo’s bed had been.

She sat suddenly on it. She had a frightful twinge of indigestion high up in her chest and shut her eyes tightly to endure it. When she opened them, the room seemed to be full of tiny flies – coming in, no doubt, from the open window. She turned her head to look. The light, which had become a greyer, darker lavender, seemed without flies, but her chest still hurt, and she turned to prop up her pillows so that she could sit upright, but when she leaned back against them, it was as though someone was pushing her chest, a painful shove with a heavy weight that was going to crush her if she didn’t look out . . . She heard a distant, rather gasping voice telling her to keep calm (could it be Flo?) and turned again to the window, but the dusky lavender had become quite dark – no colour at all – and was then succeeded by a light so white and blinding that with a cry – of fear and recognition – she fell towards it . . .

‘Are you awake?’

There was no answer from below. No wonder, it had been a momentous day for her as well as for Rachel. But it had been Rachel who had borne the brunt of the most tiring part of it. When she had seen the Duchy and Dolly off to Home Place that morning, she had had her own packing to do. She had had to shut up the flat, and then she had come round to Abbey Road to help
her
do the same things. She still had to rest in the afternoons and she had begged Rachel to do the same but, of course, she hadn’t – had spent that time tidying everything up, throwing away food that would go bad in their absence, washing out the tea-cloths, going to the local newsagent and paying the bill for papers. She brought tea at five just when she awoke from a long, refreshing sleep. That was when she had told her about the Duchy’s possible future plans. To begin with, she had thought that this would mean that Rachel would be incarcerated at Home Place, and had waited, with a sinking heart, to be told what little snatches of privacy would be afforded. But Rachel had said that the Duchy was perfectly happy to be in Sussex on her own, with the family coming at weekends, and that Rachel could either keep the Carlton Hill flat if she liked, or sell it and buy somewhere else. She still felt so weak that any strong feeling made her want to weep, and Rachel had most tenderly forestalled this by sitting on the bed and putting her arms round her. ‘We’ve got lots of time to talk about it,’ she had said. ‘Now let’s concentrate on catching our train.’ They were going to Scotland, by night sleeper, putting the car on the train to Inverness, and once there – they had made no plans – were simply going to explore and stay where they pleased for two whole weeks. Rachel had taken them out to dinner in a very charming restaurant in Charlotte Street that she said Rupert had recommended, and they had sat at a table with a little red-shaded lamp and had a most delicious French meal. She still had to be very careful to eat things with as little fat as possible and she was not allowed to drink, but she did not care in the least. She felt intoxicated with the senses of adventure and freedom, and her darling looking as happy as she. ‘My friend has been ill,’ Rachel had said to the waiter, ‘so we want a very
simple
meal.’ And he had understood and helped them choose: consommé Julienne, grilled sole and raspberries. Then they had driven to King’s Cross, seen the car on to the train and repaired to their sleeper. There had been just time to prepare for bed before the train started.

And now she lay in the dark, listening to the regular rhythmic rocking, thinking how extraordinary life was.

Just over a year ago, soon after Rachel had come to London with her parents and the Brig had died, she had thought that there was no future of any kind in their relationship. Rachel seemed to avoid her, to be almost frightened of her, and at the same time had seemed so desperately unhappy. She had suffered tortures watching this and being unable to do anything about it but make it worse. She had finally written to Rachel saying that she thought perhaps that they should not meet at all for a while. It had cost her much to do this, and it had been a last resort, but Rachel’s ravaged face, and her frequent oblique allusions to her own worthlessness, which she, Sid, seemed unable to alleviate, so distressed her that she felt it was all she could offer. It was accepted in a short, but still incoherent letter. Rachel said that she agreed it might be better ‘for a while’; she hoped that with time she might be able to ‘deal with things’; she doubted whether she had ever been worth a moment of Sid’s time, and she was deeply sorry for the distress she could now see she must have caused her – ‘I am simply not worth it!’ she had exclaimed at the end. ‘I am not. I am so
ashamed
of myself.’

So then, all through that spring and summer, she had seen nothing of Rachel – excepting for one glimpse of her in the street. She worked, she taught, she eventually found an oldish woman to come and clean the house, which had become very shabby without the ministrations of Thelma from whom she mercifully heard nothing. Then, in the autumn, her sister Evie had suddenly descended upon her. Her latest relationship had crumbled and she was at her exasperating and exacting worst. Sid had to help her to find a job. For a short time she worked at HMV, selling records in Oxford Street, but she never ceased to reproach Sid for making her do such a menial job, and soon took refuge in various ailments that precluded her going to work, which, of course, in the end resulted in her being sacked. Then she got indisputably ill, with jaundice, and Sid had to nurse her through it. Then just as Sid was despairing of ever getting rid of her (she owned half of the little house in Abbey Road and there was no way that Sid could buy her out), she got left a small sum by the conductor who had briefly engaged her affections at the beginning of the war. She was transformed. Five thousand pounds! She would go to America where there were so many more orchestras and musicians she might work for. She bought herself a new wardrobe – using all Sid’s clothes coupons as well as her own – and went. The relief!