Confusion: Cazalet Chronicles Book 3 (15 page)

‘Why should you have? You were a child. And, anyway, it’s far harder for you. I didn’t start until I’d been married for about five years, and Rupert wasn’t
in
the war then. You’re doing it all at once.’

In some ways this conversation was comforting; but in other ways not. Perhaps, like Zoë, she would feel quite differently about a baby once it was
there
; on the other hand, and for the first time, she came up against the dreadful prospect of Michael getting killed.

A few evenings later when he rang her up, which he did from time to time, he told her that he could get away for a night and proposed coming to Sussex. ‘We’ve had a bit of engine trouble and so I’m leaving them to it for a day or two.’

She felt light-hearted with excitement; everybody was very pleased for her and the whole family entered into preparations to welcome him. The Duchy procured a brace of pheasants for dinner; the Brig spent the morning choosing and decanting port; Lydia had a row with Polly about wearing their bridesmaids’ dresses for dinner (Polly thought it was unsuitable but Lydia, who had tried to wear hers for lessons, for tea on Sundays and sometimes secretly after her bath, was determined). ‘It is perfectly the proper thing to wear for dinner,’ she said, ‘and it will remind Michael of old times – his lovely wedding and all that.’

‘You won’t
be
at dinner,’ Polly had said.

‘I shall! Louise! You’ll let me be, won’t you, as your sister?’

But before Louise could reply, their mother had said she was afraid it was out of the question. There was not enough pheasant to go round; Aunt Dolly would be having a tray upstairs, and Aunt Rach had said that she found pheasant a wee bit indigestible and was going to stick to veg.

‘Couldn’t I be at dinner and have a boiled
egg
?’

‘No, you can’t. Miss Milliment is having hers on a tray in the nursery. You may have yours with her.’

‘Thanks very bloody much.’

‘That’ll do, Lydia. I’ve told you not to use that word.’

‘It’ll only be an ordinary old dinner,’ Clary said when Villy had left the room.

‘It wouldn’t be ordinary to me. I don’t
have
dinners as a rule. I seem to be in a class by myself for misfortune. It doesn’t seem to have struck them that we might all get bombed before I reach the age to have any privileges at all. I shall have had a completely wasted life.’

Clary and Polly exchanged weary, consciously adult glances but then made soothing noises of comfort and commiseration. But Louise had recognised the faint irritation in her mother’s voice and found herself in sympathy. Lydia was only trying to get the rules changed: all children did that – why, even
she
had done the same thing ages ago. Being at home certainly made her feel older although not the same age as anyone else in the family.

Michael arrived that evening by train, and she went to meet him with Tonbridge who now called her ‘Madam’. He drove her so slowly to Battle that she thought they would be late, but they weren’t. She had only to stand a minute at the door of the ticket office when the train shuffled in. Although it was dark, small chinks and streaks of dark yellow light were emitted by the train as doors opened and some passengers twitched aside the blackout in a hopeless attempt to see where they had arrived. Stations had been without names for so long that most people were used to it, and simply counted the number of stops, but there were always a few anxious strangers.

‘Fancy seeing you here!’

‘Oh – I just thought – if I meet enough trains, I’m bound to know
someone
getting off one of them.’

He put his free arm round her and gave her a hug before a kiss. ‘I’m not ’arf glad to see you. How’s His Nibs?’

‘Who?’

‘Our babe.’

‘Fine.’

‘Darling girl! Have I missed you!’

The feeling of excitement and happiness came back. He was wearing his greatcoat that smelled faintly of diesel oil and salt and camphor with the collar turned up round his neck; the badge on his cap glinted slightly in the darkness when he turned his head towards her. They sat, holding hands, and made grown-up conversation for the benefit of Tonbridge.

‘News is good, isn’t it? Good old Monty.’

‘Do you think we’re actually winning the war?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it would seem that the tide is turning. The Russians are holding on in Stalingrad. North Africa is definitely our biggest victory so far. But we’ve still got a long way to go.’

‘What’s wrong with your ship?’

‘We’ve been having trouble with the port engine. Each time they think they’ve got it right and then it packs up again. So now they’re having a really serious overhaul. There have been other things, of course. But the crew is shaking down nicely. Little Turner packed some cheese for you; it’s in my case. I’ve scrounged a tin of butter as well. So I hope I’ll be popular.’

‘You would be, anyway,’ she said. ‘They’re all longing to see you. Lydia wanted to wear her bridesmaid’s dress in your honour. Do you think you could draw Juliet? It would be so lovely for Zoë.’

‘I might at that. Not easy because at that age they don’t keep still. You’re my best sitter, darling. Which was Juliet?’

‘My smallest cousin.’

‘She was ravishing. I’ll have a go. Haven’t got very much time, though.’

‘When do you have to go back?’

‘Tomorrow afternoon, I’m afraid.’

What he did not tell her then, what only came out at dinner – it seemed to her almost by accident – was that he wasn’t going back to the ship the next day, he was going to go on a bombing raid over Germany. ‘They’re going to pick me up at Lympne, which seems to be the nearest airfield to you, but it’s devilish small for a Stirling. However, they say they can just about manage it. That would be super,’ he said when Villy offered to drive him there. ‘It would be lovely to have a family send-off.’

‘Why on earth are you going in a bomber? They haven’t told you to, have they?’

‘No. I just thought it might be fun. And I’m rather interested in camouflage at the moment. Said it would be useful to me to make the trip. And they agreed.’

Pride forbade her letting the family know that this was news to her, so she was silent. But once they were on their own, undressing for bed, she said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘I was going to tell you. I have.’

‘I can’t think
why
you want to do that. You might – you might get—’

‘No, darling, that’s very unlikely. Where’s the bathroom, darling? I’ve rather lost my bearings.’

She told him and he went. Alone, remnants of news bulletins kept bombarding her: ‘Three of our aircraft missing’, ‘Two of our bombers failed to return.’ He was mad to go if he didn’t have to; of course it was dangerous. It wasn’t fair that he should risk his life – on purpose, as it were – when he had married her and was so keen on having a family.

‘Does Zee know?’ she asked when he returned. (That might stop him: she was sure Zee would be against it.)

‘Yes. Of course she doesn’t like the idea any more than you do, darling – she loves me too, you know. But she just put her arms round me and gave me a hug and said, “You must do what you want.”’

‘Actually,’ he said, smiling at the recollection of it, ‘she said, “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.” She is amazing – she really is.’

‘You
saw
her last night? Did she come to Cowes, then?’

‘No. She came up to London for the night. There was a play of Jack’s she wanted to see.’

‘Jack?’

‘Jack Priestley. So we went to that. Jolly good it was. We both thought of you and how much you would have enjoyed it.’

It was all too much. He had two – no,
three
– nights’ leave and he had chosen to spend the first with his mother and the third on a bombing raid over Germany. She burst into tears.

‘Now, darling,’ he said, ‘you mustn’t upset yourself. You really mustn’t. This is war, you know. I shall have to do all kinds of things that involve a certain amount of danger, that’s what war is. You must learn to be brave.’

The next morning he spent half of it drawing Juliet, and the other half teaching her a code so that if he was taken prisoner he could send messages about his escape plans in apparently innocuous letters to her. He wrote out a specimen of the code in his beautiful clear writing and told her to lock it up somewhere safe. ‘Unless you can memorise it,’ he said. ‘That would be best, of course.’

Then there was lunch – fricassé of rabbit and gooseberry fool – but she found it difficult to eat anything, listening dumbly to the usual family discussion about who was to come on the excursion to the airfield. Lydia was determined to go and Wills wanted to see the aeroplane, but as she would not have been alone with him in any case, she did not very much care. Michael had brought some petrol coupons with him (he must have planned to get the lift, she thought); it seemed as though all of his arrangements about life were unknown to her until they happened. She sat in the back of the car with him with the children wriggling and chattering in front. She had become very passive, and simply concurred in everything, but inside she felt cold and heavy with fear. In an hour, she thought, he would be gone, and she might never see him again, and he seemed unaware, unconscious of what this meant. To spend your last hour with someone who was map-reading, while ‘I spy with my little eye’ went on in the front of the car seemed bizarre.

Eventually they reached the windswept but bright green grass runway, and everybody got out. It was raining, not hard but steadily. Michael was saluted by a very young man in RAF uniform and they were conducted to the hut, which smelled strongly of the paraffin stove that stopped it being entirely cold.

Here was an officer who said he was the station commander, adding that he was amazed that a Stirling was going to land there: ‘I must say I rather doubt whether it
can
.’

For a moment she imagined it failing – swooping away, and not managing to pick up Michael, after all. But a second later the throbbing sound of the engines could be heard and, surprisingly soon, there it was. It looked enormous. It did one circuit over them and then came in at the far end of the runway, finally stopping right at the other end, with its blunt nose almost in a hedge.

‘Right,’ he said, ‘here we go. I mustn’t keep them waiting.’ He kissed his mother-in-law affectionately, bent down and kissed Lydia on the cheek and she blinked and went pink, nodded to Wills who was transfixed by the Stirling and finally turned to her, put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a kiss on her mouth of the kind that is almost over before it has begun. ‘Keep your pecker up, my darling,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring some time tomorrow. Promise.’

Her mother took the two children to the car: Wills had broken out into a roar of despair when he realised that he was not going to get
into
the aeroplane. She stood and watched him climb up into the bomber, watched them pull the narrow stairway up into it after him, watched the door, or hatch, or whatever it was, slam shut, removing him from sight, watched the huge unwieldy plane turn and then taxi away down the runway.

‘The wind’s east,’ the station commander said. ‘They’ll go out to sea and then turn and come back over us. You can wave to them then.’

So she waited the few minutes to do that, wondering whether he could see her, whether even if he could see her, he would be looking.

Her mother was very kind to her in just the right way: she made it clear that she thought it was hard, but she did not go on about it.

Lydia wanted to go and have tea in a tea-shop in Hastings, ‘As we’ve come all this way. To make it a proper treat.’

Villy turned to Louise who was sitting in front beside her. ‘Do you want to do that, darling?’

She shook her head. As so often nowadays, she was perilously near tears.

‘We’ll go home, then.’

They drove home in the dusk, and that evening she stayed with the family to listen to the nine o’clock news. ‘French fleet has been scuttled by their crews in Toulon harbour,’ it began, but eventually it got to heavy raids having been carried out on Kiel and Cologne the previous night. Then she realised that she wouldn’t know anything about the raid Michael was on until he rang up. So the aircraft that were being reported missing could have nothing to do with him. Soon, as she was unable to bear the atmosphere of covert sympathy, she escaped to bed where she had what her family would have called a good cry. She had begun to be afraid that Michael did not love her, and that he would be killed.

PART TWO

THE FAMILY

New Year 1943

‘But Happy New Year all the same.’

There was such a silence, that she said, ‘Darling, you
know
how disappointed I am. Or perhaps you don’t.’

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

‘Well, I am. But I simply can’t abandon poor old Dolly with nobody to look after her.’

Nobody! Sid thought. The house is chock-a-block with people and servants. What does she mean ‘nobody’? Aloud, p

POLLY AND CLARY