The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (23 page)

‘Supposing I don’t get to twelve?’ It seemed to her very unlikely.

‘I’ll get to it first,’ Neville said. ‘There’ll be one holiday when you’ll be the
only one
having a rest.’

‘Don’t quarrel. If you go in all smeary with tears, they’ll ask what we’ve been doing.’

They composed their faces to uniform conspiratorial blandness and went up to the house.

At one o’clock Eileen sounded the gong for lunch.

‘Gracious! I haven’t done the bag!’ Rachel sprang to her feet, felt the familiar twinge in her back that seemed always to be there when she made an unconsidered movement, and went quickly into the house. ‘Don’t worry about the curtains,’ she called, in case Sybil should tire herself trying to fold and carry them. The bag, kept in a drawer of the card table in the drawing room, was a small linen affair with R.C. embroidered in blue cotton chain stitch. It had been Rachel’s school brush and comb bag, but now it contained eight cardboard squares, six of them blank and two marked D.R. As the children came downstairs from washing for lunch, they each pulled a square out of the bag. This ritual was because the Duchy had decreed that two children should be allowed into the dining room for lunch in order that they should learn how to behave at meals with the grown-ups; the method of choosing had been evolved to stop squabbling and the perennial allegations of injustice. Today, Simon got one of the tickets, and then Clary.

‘I don’t want it,’ she said, put it back like lightning, and drew a blank. ‘My father’s out, you see,’ she said quickly to Rachel. Really, she was afraid that Lydia and Neville might spill some beans about the garden if she was not there to stop them.

Rachel let this pass. ‘But next time you must stick to the rules,’ she said mildly.

Neville was late for lunch. He came down with Ellen holding his hand (a sure sign of humiliation and wrong-doing).

‘I’m sorry we’re late. Neville had lost his sandshoes.’

‘I only lost
one
of them.’ The fuss that people could make about one miserable shoe was beyond him. In the end, Teddy got the other ticket for which he was profoundly grateful. He was not ready yet to make the difficult change from an all-male society at school – except for Matron and the French mistress, both objects of continual, covert derision – to eating and talking with all these women and babies.

He decided to sit next to Dad and Uncle Hugh and then they could talk either about cricket, or possibly, about submarines, in which he had lately become interested. Lunch was hot boiled gammon and parsley sauce (the Duchy had a Victorian disregard for weather when planning menus), with new potatoes and broad beans followed by treacle tart. Simon loathed broad beans, but Sybil ate them for him. She’s a pretty broad bean herself, he thought and then choked trying not to laugh at such a marvellous joke; he didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings, and nobody would like being called broad except a bean. This set him off again; Dad hit him on the back, and his plate fell out onto the table cloth – a jolly embarrassing meal.

Teddy ate an enormous lunch – two helpings of everything and then biscuits and cheese. He had decided to make Simon play tennis immediately after lunch because later on the grown-ups would probably hog the court. Dad had said that he could practise his serve on his own, but that wasn’t much fun if there was nobody to return the balls and, worse, nobody to tell him whether they were in or not. If he worked at it, he could end up playing for England. The thought of the board at Wimbledon Cazalet
v.
Budge made the back of his neck prickle. ‘Brilliant New Player Annihilates Budge!’ would be the headline. Of course, it might not be Budge by then, but whoever it was – Hell’s bells and buckets of blood, it would be a pretty exciting week. The thing would be to get Fred Perry to coach him; there couldn’t be anyone better in the world than Fred. It was rotten that one couldn’t play tennis in winter at school, but he’d be able to play squash or racquets to keep his eye in. He decided to write to Fred Perry to see what he would advise. Dad and Uncle Hugh had been no good to talk to: they’d been arguing about whether to get something called a Dictaphone in their office or not. Dad wanted one because he said it would be more efficient, but Uncle Hugh said it took the same amount of time to dictate to a secretary as it did to a machine, and he believed in the personal touch. The women were talking about babies and rotten things like that. God! He was glad he wasn’t a woman. Having to wear skirts and being much weaker – hardly ever doing anything really interesting like going to the South Pole or being a racing driver, and Carstairs said that blood poured out of them in streams from between their legs whenever there was a full moon, an unlikely tale because there was a full moon every month and obviously they’d die from loss of blood, and, anyway, he’d never
seen
any of them doing it, but Carstairs had a gory nature, he was always on about vampire bats and the Charge of the Light Brigade and the Black Death. He was going to be a detective when he grew up – on murder cases; Teddy was glad he wouldn’t be seeing any more of Carstairs. His new school loomed up in his mind like an iceberg: what he could see of it was frightening enough and that was only a fifth (or was it a sixth?), as frightening as he knew it would be when he actually had to
go
to it. Ages away – the holidays had hardly started. He caught Simon’s eye across the table and made a batting movement with his right arm which knocked over his glass of water.

Lunch in the hall was difficult for Clary in ways she hadn’t thought of. Neville and Lydia behaved beautifully, didn’t say a word about their garden, and Clary offered to look for and find Neville’s missing shoe, which went down well with Ellen. But Polly, who felt guilty that she and Louise had again left Clary out by going off and riding together and not even asking her whether she wanted to come, was now suggesting all kinds of things that she and Louise would do in the afternoon with Clary, like go to the stream in the far wood and make a dam, and when Clary didn’t seem very keen on that, a tennis tournament, or making a log house in the wood. ‘Well, what
would
you like to do?’ she said at last.

Clary felt Lydia’s and Neville’s eyes fixed on her. ‘Go to the beach,’ she said. The beach meant cars and grown-ups, so she knew that Polly and Louise couldn’t do anything about
that.
They gave up; it was common knowledge, Louise said, that they were going to the beach on Monday and not before.

After lunch, Villy drove Sybil to Battle to buy flannel and white wool. They had made this plan at breakfast, but had a tacit agreement to keep quiet about their trip in order that no children should clamour to join them. Now they drove in a peaceful silence, easing comfortably into their customary summer relationship. They saw each other in London, naturally, but this was more because of their husbands’ affection for one another than from their own choice. But, since they both became life members of the Cazalet family at about the same time, they had had years of natural proximity to develop an undemanding intimacy of a kind they did not either of them have with anyone else. They had married the brothers two years after the war: Sybil in January, Edward and Villy the following May. The brothers had suggested a double wedding, had even mooted a double honeymoon, but this had been averted by Villy having to finish her contract with the Russian ballet, and Sybil wanting to marry before her father’s leave was up and he went back to India. Sybil’s godmother had provided the necessary background (her mother had died in India the previous year), Edward had been best man and they had gone to Rome for their honeymoon – Hugh said France was too full of things that he wanted to forget. Edward had taken them to see Villy dance with the ballet at the Alhambra and Sybil had been deeply impressed by Villy actually being a professional dancer. They had seen Petroushka (Villy had been one of the Russian peasant women) and Sybil, whose first visit to the ballet it was, had been overwhelmed by Massine in the title role. Afterwards they had waited for Villy to come out of the stage door wearing a coat with a white fur collar, and her hair – long in those days – done in a bun and a little silver arrow sticking in the side of it. They had all gone to the Savoy for supper, and Villy seemed the most sophisticated and glamorous person Sybil had ever met. Under the coat, she wore a black chiffon dress embroidered with brilliant green and blue crystal beads that showed her elegant narrow knees, with green satin shoes to match that made Sybil’s beige stamped velvet trimmed with Irish lace seem dull. She had been bubbling with energy and, egged on by Edward, chattered all evening about the Russian company and touring; about Paris, and rehearsing with Matisse dropping paint pots onto their heads, and not being paid for weeks, living on a pint of milk a day and lying in the beds between rehearsals and performances; of Monte Carlo and the glittering audiences; of how Massine and Diaghilev quarrelled, and how some of the company gambled away their salaries in a single night.

It had seemed to her then incredible and heroic of Villy to give up such a life for marriage, but Villy, who seemed as much in love with Edward as he was with her, made light of it. They were married from Villy’s home in Albert Place, and her father composed an organ suite for the service which was noticed in
The Times.
Villy had cut off her hair and was fashionably shingled for the wedding, which Sybil had attended feeling terribly queasy with her first pregnancy – the one that had ended with a stillborn son. Apart from being married to brothers, they had little in common to begin with but with the Cazalets, being married to brothers meant steady, continuous meetings: evenings when the brothers played chess, winter holidays when they went skiing – Sybil was hopeless at that, invariably twisted an ankle, once broke her leg, while Villy whirled down most daring runs with a verve and skill that earned her much local admiration. They played bridge and tennis. They went to theatres and to restaurants where they dined and danced. One evening, at the Hungaria, Villy said something in Russian to the leader of the orchestra, and he played some Delibes and Villy danced by herself on the cleared floor and everyone applauded. When she returned to their table and Edward said perfunctorily, ‘Well done, darling.’ Sybil had noticed tears in her eyes, and wondered whether giving up her career had turned out to be so easy for Villy after all. Villy never mentioned her dancing days again, continued in her role of wife and, subsequently, mother of Louise and then Teddy and Lydia as though it had never happened. But Sybil had observed her restless energy, which, like water, streamed out in any direction it could find. She got a loom and wove linen and silk. She learned to play the zither and the flute. She learned to ride, and was soon exercising horses for the life Guards – one of the two women in London allowed to do so. She worked for the Red Cross, took blind children to the seaside. She sailed a dinghy in small boat races. She taught herself Russian: for a short time she joined a Gjieff sect (Sybil only found out about this because Villy tried to make her join it too). Some of the crazes – like the sect – did not last long. Resisting a sudden urge to say, ‘Are you happy?’ she said, ‘I suppose the shops in Battle may be shut.’