Casting Off (70 page)

To begin with he had thought, Here we go again. She’s still expecting me to be there to support her.

The trouble was that, although he hadn’t decided, he had to keep France as an option; he had to have some sort of long shot – or maybe not long at all, some necesssary resort – if things went wrong. Which they showed every sign of doing. She’d called him her second father just before she’d gone to see her real one. But it was clear that the idea of his going away filled her with fear – something like panic. When she said that she couldn’t stay in the cottage alone without him, he very nearly blew it, was touching her before he pulled himself together. He’d been brisk and tough with her, even telling her she’d fall in love with a nice man like a normal grown-up person. She sulked then, which he could deal with more easily than her fear.

But during that afternoon he’d thought it was wrong for her to feel he would make major plans behind her back – and apologized.

He’d reached his flat by now, got out his case and went in. The place seemed infinitely dreary. What was she doing now, he wondered. It was a good thing he hadn’t even tried to get a telephone installed, because he knew that the temptation to ring her would have been too much for him.

Anyway, talk of people standing on their own feet, what about him? He had to decide what to do, how to earn a living beyond his small inheritance and what he had saved and any pictures he might sell. Rupert knew a good deal about how to survive and try to paint, he thought. He would start there.

His relationship with Rupert had undergone a considerable change. This had been largely because he had taken the plunge with him when they’d been at the weekend at Home Place designed to welcome Diana into the family. ‘I should be so grateful if you would be there,’ the Duchy had said. ‘You know us all so well, and you are such a
diplomat
.’ So he had gone, and then there had been a chance of going for a walk alone with Rupe, as Zoë had a headache and the others didn’t want to come.

‘Not that I’m a marvellous walker,’ he had said, ‘but I really wanted to talk to you on our own about something.’

‘Fine.’

‘Actually,’ he said, minutes later, ‘I think I’d find it easier if we were sitting down.’

So they sat on the old tree that the children had always played on in the copse behind the house.

‘You look worried about something. What’s happened? You know that you can trust me.’

‘What do you think?’

Rupert had looked at him, and then he smiled slightly, and said, ‘I think you’ve fallen in love with somebody and you’re not sure if it’s a good thing. I bet it is, though.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’

‘I’m right, then?’

‘Yes. I have. It’s Clary,’ he said quickly. ‘Hang on a minute. I haven’t said a word to her. She has no idea.’

‘
Clary!
Good God! You don’t mean that!’

‘Of course I mean it. I’d be bloody daft to say that to you if I didn’t.’

There was a silence. Then Rupert, clearly trying to tread carefully, said, ‘Don’t you think you’re a bit old for her?’

‘I knew you’d say that. Zoë is a good deal younger than you, though, isn’t she?’

‘Twelve years. But you’re – you’re the best part of twenty years older than she is. That’s different, surely?’

‘It’s certainly different, but I don’t think it’s necessarily worse.’

There was another silence. Then Rupert said, ‘How long has this been going on?’

‘Nothing’s
been
going on. How long have I been in love with her? God knows. Since she was about eighteen, I should think – only I didn’t realize it.’

‘And how does she feel about you?’

‘That’s the trouble. I sort of stood in for you all that time you were away, and she still thinks of me like that.’ He looked at him – he could feel his eyes pricking. ‘One doesn’t choose exactly about this sort of thing,’ he said. ‘You know that. It – strikes you.’

‘Yes. Archie, I don’t know what to say. It must be awful for you. All this time – after Rachel, and all that – to have it happen again—’

‘Look. Nothing’s happened.’ He added wearily, ‘I don’t think she has the faintest idea.’

‘Well – wouldn’t it – I mean, well, I suppose it might be better for you if you
did
talk to her. Then at least you’d know.’

‘I can’t – now. I just know it’s not the right time. And anyway, I don’t think I can face it. If I talk to her and it’s absolutely no good, it’ll be the end of everything for me with her – I know that, and I can’t face it.’

‘Why are you telling me?’

‘I suppose I sort of hope that at least you would not feel bad about it. My intentions, I mean. Entirely honourable.’ He had tried to smile – and broken down. Until that point, he hadn’t known what a strain the whole thing had been for so long and how isolated he’d felt trying to deal with it. He tried to tell Rupert this, and he’d been really good about it. He’d sat by him and let him say all these things – and more – without interruption or argument. ‘The stakes seem so high,’ he had said. ‘I really do love her – everything about her – but she’s got to grow up, be in charge of her life and make a choice, you see, which isn’t based on being dependent on me and all that.’

At the end of it Rupe had said, ‘You’ve made me see that you do love her. That’s what matters. We’re the same age. I think if I were in your position, I’d feel the same.’

He could have kissed him: they did embrace. Rupe swore he would not tell anyone. ‘Even Zoë?’ Not even Zoë, he had said . . .

He would ring Rupe now and see if they could meet
à deux
.

He did this, but Rupert was not able to help much about what he could do about painting and earning some money. ‘I always found it was one or the other,’ he said, ‘and with a family, I thought I’d better opt for the other. You could see if there’s any supply teaching at any of the art schools, I suppose.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

He had explained how he was leaving her on her own for six weeks – on purpose – and that they would not meet until Polly’s wedding. ‘Then, I expect, I’ll have to risk it, but I’ll wait and see.’

And Rupe, who he knew found it difficult to make up his mind about anything, said he could see it was a good thing to give her time on her own and to wait. By now Rupe – possibly because he thought the situation was hopeless – seemed to be fairly on his side.

He’d gone back to the cottage after that weekend at Home Place somewhat lightened by having told Rupert and not been lectured or rejected – not, he knew, that that would have changed things about how he felt about her, but it was good that Rupert knew.

And there she was, really into her book, and wanting him to read some of it. Of course he had – and been surprisingly disappointed with the first chapter: it had not seemed like her at all, was more self-conscious and convoluted than he’d expected. But then she’d said how many times she had written it, and he’d seen her first attempts and that was her, and clear and simple – and gifted. How marvellous it was to be able to say sincerely that he thought it was good. But again (even in this context!) he had had to warn her not to take too much notice of what he – or anyone else – said about her work.

It was soon after that he’d taken some of his own work to London in the hope of interesting a gallery. No dice. Or, rather, two miserable little dice. His old gallery said they would take a couple of landscapes for a mixed show.

He got through the first week without her by various abortive attempts to find work – teaching no good, a few more galleries, no good. One of the bad things about his flat was that he could not paint in it. The weekend was awful. He missed her, he worried about her, he wanted to be at the cottage. He was lonely and he didn’t want to see anyone. He went to
Annie Get Your Gun!
by himself and kept wondering what she would think of it; he went to the pubs where, when he talked to people, he seemed always to get into some futile argument about whether the Government was dealing with the severe dollar shortage – rumours were that rations were to be cut yet again, they were putting a tax of ten pounds a year on cars, and who was behind the letter bombs that the Foreign Secretary and his opposite number had received? ‘It’s the Reds or the Jews,’ one morose and slightly drunken man had kept on repeating, until he knew that he’d have to hit him or leave. And then there was India. People in pubs seemed to consider that the whole idea of India becoming independent was (a) a crime and (b) didn’t matter a tinker’s cuss because they were only bloody foreigners anyway.

He stopped going to pubs on his own. He read, and ate out, and went to bed tired from walking: why did his leg seem worse in London? And on Sunday evening, he thought, it might not only be six weeks of this, it might be for ever. In bed he thought, Here I go, keeping on about
her
being independent of
me
, when perhaps it ought to be the other way round.

So, when Rupert rang him on Monday to say that old Aunt Dolly had died and would he feel like going down to Sussex and giving the Duchy some support, he said of course he would.

But he had been right to go away from her, he thought the next morning, as he drove down to Home Place. He could not go on being avuncular, giving the impression of calm disinterest when he felt none of these things. That moment in the kitchen recurred – again and again. It had been when her beauty, her shock from the burn and her utter unawareness of him had hit him so hard that he simply couldn’t take any more. If he stayed, he’d blurt everything out, and his chance of
that
being a success would, he felt, be nil. He
had
to go.

It was soothing to be in the old house. The Duchy was really pleased to see him. ‘I think she died quite suddenly,’ she said, ‘a heart attack, or a stroke, but I don’t think she had any pain.’

‘But you will miss her,’ he suggested.

‘Well, you know, I don’t think I shall, really. She had become so dependent. It is difficult to maintain a connection with somebody when that is the chief ingredient, don’t you think?’

‘Very difficult.’

When those of the family who had come down for the funeral had gone their various ways, and he was preparing to do the same, the Duchy had said, ‘Rupert told me that you had given up your job, and were going back to painting. Where are you going to do that?’

He said he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t paint in London, he added.

‘You’re returning to France? You have a house there, I think you said?’

‘A sort of house. The top two floors over a café. I don’t know. I thought I’d stay here until after Polly’s wedding anyway.’

There was a pause. The Duchy was scraping a very small amount of butter on her toast. ‘If you would like to spend that time here and paint, we can make you a room for it, and I should very much enjoy your company in the evenings.’

So he did. He made one journey to London to collect his painting gear and went back. All the weekdays there was just the two of them; the Duchy gardened and he painted outside when the weather permitted; there were frequent thunderstorms, but after them the peculiar beauty of country deluged from violent rain, reviving, glistening in the returning sunlight. There was heavy dew in the mornings, as though the lawns were inlaid with tiny diamonds that dissolved to show daisies opening flat and unwinking in the sun. In the evening, if there had been enough heat, a pearly mist shrouded the ground. All day it seemed to him that everything he saw was changing, on the move. He took to working on two or three pictures at once, for different times of the day and the changing weather. For the first time in his work he became sharply aware of what he was not seeing. It reminded him of the countless times he had tried to draw her without once achieving anything that satisfied him. It was something, he now thought, to do with the first look at anything that had to embrace the whole view and not simply record part of it. He said something of this – about landscape – in response to the Duchy’s enquiry about how he was getting on, and found her unexpectedly understanding of his dilemma.

‘It is something to do with trusting that first sight, isn’t it?’ she had said. ‘One gets embroiled in a part of what one has seen and then forgets the rest.’

He was so surprised that he could not help saying, ‘How do you know that? You used to paint?’

‘Oh – everyone painted a little when I was a girl. It was very much the done thing. But I wanted to do it more seriously. I wished to go to an art school, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it. And after I was married it was somehow easier for me to play the piano, you see. It was regarded as a more useful accomplishment.’

She played in the evenings, and he drew her, and then, one day when it rained a great deal, asked her if he might paint her while she was practising. So the drugget that protected the drawing-room carpet from sun was brought, and he put his easel on it.

But what she had said about the first sight remained with him, and one day he drew Clary from memory – quite quickly. The next day when the Duchy brought him his jug of flowers – she felt all rooms in use should have flowers – she saw the drawing (he’d used charcoal on a darkish paper) and said, ‘Clary! That is Clary to the life! When did you do that?’

‘Not long ago,’ he had answered, as casually as he was able.

No more was said. But a few days later, when they were having tea, she said, ‘You seem to be profiting from this rest, although I know you are working. I feel that you were much in need of respite of some kind. Is that right?’

‘I think so.’

‘My dear, I don’t wish to probe, but for so many years it seems to me that this family has leaned on you – for love and support of many kinds. I should be sad if when you needed those things you did not get them from one of us.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Oh. I feel that you are not very happy, and I cannot help wondering whether you need to be.’

After a pause, during which he wondered wildly whether to confide in her, she said, ‘You have been so good – to Rupert and his family particularly, to him and to Zoë, to Neville about his school and to Clary. I shall never forget any of that.’