The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (15 page)

‘You shouldn’t put so much on a tray, Dottie. You might have a nasty accident.’

But it didn’t matter how kindly you spoke to her, she still looked scared. Eileen guessed that she was homesick because she remembered how she’d felt when she first went into service: cried her eyes out every night, and spent all the afternoons writing letters home, but Mum had never answered them. She didn’t like to think of those days. Still – we all have to go through them, she thought. It’s all for the best in the end. She went to the kitchen to look at the time. Half past twelve – and she must get a move on.

Mrs Cripps was in a frenzy – stirring things, popping things in and out of ovens. The kitchen table was half covered with basins, saucepans, pastry-making apparatus and the mincer and empty jugs, all waiting to be washed up.

‘Where is that girl? Dottie! Dottie!’ There were huge dark patches under her arms, and her ankles bulged over the straps of her black shoes. She lifted a wooden spoon from a double saucepan, placed her forefinger flat upon it, tasted and seized the salt. ‘See if you can find her, would you, Eileen, for me? There’s all this to be cleared up, and the stove wants a good riddle – I don’t know what they put in the coke nowadays, I really don’t. Tell her to hurry, if she knows what the word means.’

Dottie was moonily laying a fork and then a knife, and then a spoon round the table. She paused between each of these gestures, snuffling and staring into space.

‘Mrs Cripps wants you. I’ll finish the table.’ Dottie gave her a hunted look, wiped her nose on her sleeve and scuttled away.

Eileen could hear the girls laughing and talking with Mr Tonbridge, who was bringing in the shopping from Battle.
They
could lay the table and she would help Mr Tonbridge. She knew where things had to go, which was more than you could say for either Peggy or Bertha. But she had hardly got the butter and cream and the meat stowed in the larder and the Malvern water into her pantry before the word was passed that Mrs Cripps was dishing up. So she sped back through the kitchen, across the hall to the dining room to light the spirit lamps under the warmer on the sideboard, back to the hall where she rang the gong for luncheon, and back to the kitchen where dishes and plates were already piled upon the large wooden tray. She just had time to get across the hall with this and set plates and dishes in position when the family came in for lunch.

Four hours later nearly all of them had arrived: the grown-ups were having tea in the garden, and the children in the hall with Nanny and Ellen. They had arrived in three cars: Edward unloaded the suitcases and Louise carried hers – it was extremely heavy – into the hall. Aunt Rach had come with them to tell them which rooms. She tried to help Louise with her case, but Louise wouldn’t let her: everybody knew Aunt Rach had a bad back – whatever that might mean. She was delighted to be in the Pink Room and bagged the bed by the window as she was first. She saw the camp bed and realised that Clary would be sleeping with her and Polly. This was a bore, because Clary, although she was twelve (like Polly), seemed much younger, and anyway, she was not much fun, and they had to be nice to her because her mother was dead. Never mind, it was heavenly to be here. She unpacked her case enough to get out her jodhpurs so that she could ride immediately after tea. She’d better unpack altogether or they would find her when she was in the middle of something and make her stop and go and do it. She hung up her three cotton frocks that Mummy had made her bring, and bundled everything else into a drawer, except her books, which she arranged carefully on the table by her bed.
Great Expectations,
because Miss Milliment had set it for their holiday book,
Sense and Sensibility,
because she hadn’t read it for at least a year, a funny old book called
The Wide Wide World,
because Miss Milliment had said that she used to have bets with a friend when
she
was a girl that whatever page they opened it at the heroine would be crying, and, of course, her Shakespeare. She heard a car arriving and prayed it would be Polly. She needed someone to talk to: Teddy was aloof – he didn’t answer any questions about his school properly and he wouldn’t even play car numbers with her on the way down. Let it be Polly. Please,
God
, let it be Polly!

Polly was thankful to arrive. She always felt car-sick, although she never actually was. They stopped for her twice, once on the hill outside Sevenoaks and once the other side of Lamberhurst. Each time she had stumbled out and stood retching, but nothing happened. She had quarrelled with Simon on the way down as well. It was about Pompey. Simon said that cats didn’t notice if people went away – which was an arrant lie. Pompey had watched her packing and tried to get into the case. He simply concealed his feelings in front of other people. He’d even tried to make
her
feel better about it, by going away and sitting in the kitchen – the furthest possible amount away from her that he could manage. Mummy had kept saying wasn’t she excited about going to Home Place, and she was, but everybody knew you could feel two things at once – probably more than that. She didn’t trust Inge to be kind to him although she’d given her a pot of Wonder Cream as a sort of bribe, but Daddy said that he would be back on Monday and she knew he was trustworthy. But then she’d miss Daddy. Life was nothing but swings and roundabouts. What with crying in London and feeling sick in the car, she had a headache. Never mind. As soon as they’d had tea, she and Louise would go off together to their best tree – an old apple that could be made into a kind of house with the branches being different rooms. It was her and Louise’s tree; horrible Simon wouldn’t be allowed up it. He had been told to carry her case up to her room, but as soon as they were out of sight of the grown-ups, he dropped it and said, ‘Carry your own case.’ ‘Cad!’ She picked it up and began on the stairs. ‘Swine!’ she added. They were the newest worst words she could think of: what Dad had said about a bus driver, and a man in a sports car on the way down. Oh dear! What with Pompey and Simon, things weren’t too good. But there was darling Louise at the top of the stairs, down in a flash to help her with the case.
But
she was wearing her riding clothes which meant no tree after tea, so it was swings and roundabouts
again
.

Zoë and Rupert had an awful journey; Zoë had suggested that Clary should go by train with Ellen and Neville, but Clary had made such a fuss that Rupert had given in, and said she’d better come with them. Their car, a small Morris, was not large enough for the whole family, and as it was, Clary had luggage crammed round her in the back. Quite soon she said she felt sick and wanted to be in front. Zoë said that Clary shouldn’t have come in the car, if she was going to feel sick and she couldn’t be in front. So Clary
was
sick – just to show her. They had to stop, and Dad tried to clean it up, but it smelled awful and everybody was cross with her. Then they had a puncture, and Dad had to change the wheel while Zoë sat smoking and not saying a word. Clary got out of the car and apologised to Dad, who was nice and said he supposed she couldn’t help it. They were still in horrible awful old London when this happened. Dad had to unpack the boot to get at his tools and Clary tried to help him, but he said she couldn’t really. He spoke in his patient voice that meant, she felt, he was awfully unhappy only he couldn’t say. He must be – the most terrible thing had happened to him in the world and he had to go on living and pretending it hadn’t and so, of course, she tried to copy his braveness about it because she knew it was so much worse for him. It didn’t matter how much she loved him, it wouldn’t make it up. The rest of the journey, they didn’t talk, so she sang to cheer him up. She sang ‘Early One Morning’, and ‘The Nine Days of Christmas’, and an
area
it was called, by Mozart, she only knew the first three words and then it had to be la la la, but it was a lovely tune, one of his favourites, and the ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsies O’, but when she got to ‘Ten Green Bottles’, Zoë asked her to shut up for a bit – so, of course, she had to. But Dad thanked her for the lovely singing, so it was sucks to Zoë, and that was something. She spent the rest of the journey wanting to go to the lav, but not wanting to ask Dad to stop again.

Lydia and Neville had a lovely time in the train. Neville liked trains more than anything, which was quite reasonable as he was going to be an engine driver. Lydia thought he was a very nice boy. They played noughts and crosses, but that wasn’t much fun because they were too equal for anyone to win. Neville wanted to climb into the luggage rack above the seats: he said a boy he knew always travelled like that, but Nan and Ellen wouldn’t let them. They did let them stand in the corridor, which was very exciting when they went through tunnels and they could see red sparks in the smoky dark and there was a lovely exciting smell. ‘The only thing is,’ Lydia said after thinking about it when they were told to come back into the carriage, ‘that when you are an engine driver, where will you have your house? Because wherever it is, you’ll keep on going to somewhere else, won’t you?’

‘I’ll take a tent with me. I’ll put it up in places like Scotland or Cornwall – or Wales or Iceland. Anywhere,’ he finished grandly.

‘You can’t drive a train to Iceland. Trains don’t go over the sea.’

‘They do. Dad and Zoë go to Paris in a train. They get into it at Victoria Station, and have dinner and go to sleep and when they wake up they’re in France. So they do go across sea. So there.’

Lydia was silent. She didn’t like arguments, so she decided not to have one. ‘I’m sure you’ll be a very good driver.’

‘I’ll take you free whenever you want to go. I’ll go at two hundred miles an hour.’

There he went again.
Nothing
went at two hundred miles an hour.