The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (28 page)

They no sooner drew up beside the gate that led to the front door when Eileen, who had been watching for them, ran out and said that Madam said that Miss Rachel was to go up to Mrs Hugh’s room immediately as the baby had started and the doctor hadn’t yet arrived. Rachel sprang out of the car without a backward glance and ran into the house. Oh, Lord! thought Sid. Poor darling! She meant Rachel.

Sybil sat in bed, propped up by pillows; she refused to lie properly, which the Duchy felt was wrong but she was far too anxious and alarmed to try to insist. Rachel would do it, and here at last was Rachel. ‘The doctor
is
coming,’ said the Duchy quickly and gave Rachel a little frown meaning don’t ask when. ‘If you will stay with her, I’ll see to towels. The maids are boiling water,’ and she went, glad to do something she could accomplish. She had been beginning to find Sybil’s pains more than she could bear. Rachel drew up a chair and sat beside Sybil.

‘Darling. What can I do to help?’ Sybil gasped and threw herself forward with clenched hands, pressing on the bed each side of her thighs. ‘Nothing. I don’t know.’ A bit later, she said, ‘Help me – undress. Quick – before the next one.’ So in between the pains Rachel helped her out of her smock, her slip and her knickers, and finally into a nightdress. This took a long time as with each pain they had to stop, and Sybil gripped Rachel’s hand until she thought her bones would break.

‘Supposing it’s born before he comes?’ Sybil said, and Rachel knew that she was terrified by the thought.

‘We’ll manage. It’s going to be all right,’ she soothed, but she hadn’t the faintest idea what to do. ‘You mustn’t worry,’ she said, stroking Sybil’s hair back from her forehead. ‘I used to be a VAD. Remember?’

And Sybil seemed comforted by that, gave Rachel a small trusting smile and said, ‘I’d forgotten. Of course you were.’ She lay back for a moment and shut her eyes. ‘Could you tie my hair back? Out of the way?’ But by the time Rachel had found the strip of chiffon indicated upon the dressing-table Sybil was again racked, her hand searching blindly for Rachel’s hand.

‘Oh,
God
– let the doctor come,’ Rachel prayed as Sybil uttered a moan.

‘Sorry about that. It’s all a bit Mary Webbish, isn’t it? Straining at bedposts and all that?’ And as Rachel smiled at the gallant small joke, she added, ‘It does
hurt
rather.’

‘I know it does, darling. You’re tremendously brave.’

Then they both heard a car, which surely must be the doctor, and Rachel went to the window. ‘He’s come!’ she said. ‘Isn’t that good?’ But Sybil had crammed her fist into her mouth and was biting her knuckles not to scream and seemed not to hear her.

He was an old man, an elderly Scot with gingery brindled hair and moustache. He came into the room taking off his jacket and putting down his case and was rolling up his shirt-sleeves as he talked.

‘Well, well, Mrs Cazalet, so I hear you had a wee fall in the bath this morning and your baby’s decided to make its way out.’ He looked around the room, saw the jug and basin and proceeded to wash his hands. ‘No, I can manage quite well with cold, but we’ll be needing some hot water. Perhaps you would arrange that, Miss Cazalet, while I examine the patient?’

‘But I’ll need you back in five minutes,’ he called, as Rachel left the room.

On the landing, she found the housemaids with covered pails of hot water, and a pile of towels laid on the linen chest. Downstairs she found the Duchy with Sid. Her mother was deeply agitated. ‘Rachel! I feel I must ring Hugh.’

‘Of course you must.’

‘But Sybil begged me not to. She doesn’t want him worried. It seems wrong to do exactly what she doesn’t want.’

Rachel looked at Sid, who was looking at the Duchy with a kind of protective kindness that made Rachel love her. Now, Sid said, ‘I don’t think that’s the point. I think Hugh would mind very much if he hadn’t been told what was going on.’

The Duchy said gratefully, ‘Of course you are right. Sensible Sid! I’m so glad you are here. I’ll do it at once.’

When she had gone, Sid held out her battered silver case and said, ‘Have a gasper. You look as though you need one.’

And Rachel, who usually smoked Egyptian cigarettes, finding Gold Flake too strong, took one, and found her hand was shaking as Sid lit it for her. ‘It is ghastly,’ she said. ‘The most ghastly pain. I didn’t realise. Has the doctor got a nurse coming?’

‘Apparently not at once, anyway. He tried his usual midwife and she was out on a case, and the district nurse said she couldn’t come until some time in the afternoon. He’s told me what to do. I’m sorry about our day.’

‘It can’t be helped.’

‘Have you been asked to stay?’

‘I have. The plan is that Mrs Cripps should make a picnic tea and I should deflect the beach party – keep the children out of the way until it’s over. It’s curious, isn’t it?’ She added after a pause, ‘How for the most important events in people’s lives everybody has to keep out of the way, know nothing about it.’

‘Oh, but, they might hear her. Not that Sybil would make a sound if she could possibly help it.’

‘Exactly.’

Sensing Sid’s faintly ironical expression, Rachel was conscious of the fleeting but familiar sensation of Sid’s foreignness – at least, that was how she put it to herself. Sid’s mother had been a Portuguese Jewess whom her father had met on tour with the orchestra in which he played. He had married and fathered two daughters, Margot and Evie, and then abandoned them, gone to Australia; he was always referred to – rather bitterly – as Mr Sidney of that ilk. They had had a hard impoverished life, their mother eventually dying of TB and homesickness (her family cut her off at her marriage). It was difficult, Sid said, to know which had been worse. But all this, and the fact of her coming from a family of musicians, made her seem foreign and this in turn seemed to make her keener on confronting things than Rachel’s family had ever been. ‘I’ve seen nothing but spades since I was a baby,’ Sid once said. ‘How am I call them anything else?’ As soon as her mother was dead, Margot had abandoned the name she had always loathed and called herself Sid. Like many couples whose cultural backgrounds are very different, they both had ambivalent attitudes in their behaviour to one another: Sid, who recognised that Rachel had all her life been overprotected from either financial or emotional reality, wished to be the person who protected her most, and at the same time could not resist the occasional dig at the middle-class Englishness of it all; Rachel, who knew Sid had not only had to fend for herself, but really for her mother and sister as well, respected her independence and authority but wanted Sid to understand that the understatements, discretion, and withholding were an integral part of the Cazalet family life, existing only to uphold affection and good manners. ‘I can
understand
,’ Sid had once said during an early confrontation, but I can do that perfectly well without
agreeing.
Don’t you see?’ But Rachel did not see at all; for her, understanding meant tacit agreement.

To each of them some of these thoughts had recurred, but there was no time for any of that now. Rachel stubbed out her cigarette and said, ‘I must go back. Would you ask the Duchy to get one of the maids to bring me an apron?’

‘Of course I will. God bless. Tell me if there’s anything I can do.’

‘I will.’

I have only to do exactly what he tells me, she thought, as she went upstairs, and it’s utterly ridiculous to mind about blood so much. I must simply think of something else.

Cooden really wasn’t the best beach for the children, Villy thought, as she shifted her bottom on the boulderish pebbles and tried to find a more comfortable bit of breakwater for her back. Even on such a calm and blazing day, the sea was surprisingly cold – a steely blue far out, but near them an aquamarine swell that heaved endlessly in and broke upon the steeply shelving shore in a creamy fringe that swooned and melted to green again and was sucked out beneath the next wave. The boys were all right, they were good at swimming from school, but the girls were afraid of going out of their depth, hobbled over the pebbles, waded a few steps, swam two or three strokes again and again, until she made them come in, teeth chattering, cold and slippery as fishes, to have their backs rubbed, to be given pieces of Terry’s bitter chocolate or hot Bovril. There were no rock pools for Lydia and Neville, and almost no sand; Lydia got swept off her feet by the undertow and wept bitterly for ages in spite of Villy’s soothing. Neville, who had watched it all with horror, announced that he was not going to use the sea today at all, ‘Except for water for my bucket.’ ‘Then you won’t get any chocolate,’ Clary had said and was at once told to mind her own business by Ellen, who was pinning a handkerchief with safety pins to Neville’s Panama hat so that a square of white covered his already pink bony shoulders. Ellen and Nanny sat in their hats, grey cardigans and sensible belted cotton dresses, their legs stretched out in front of them in thick pale cotton stockings with black double-strap shoes, their knitting on their laps. A day at the beach must be purgatory for them, Villy thought. Neither would have dreamed of bathing, their authority with the children was shaky, undermined by the presence of parents, but at the same time they were responsible – for Lydia and Neville not catching cold or getting a touch of the sun, or going off with strange children from whom they might catch something.

Now Nanny, who had begun to dress Lydia, was forestalled by Edward, who said he would take her out on his shoulders as Rupert was going to do with Neville (neither liked the idea of their offspring being afraid of the water). ‘Tell the boys to come in when you do,’ Villy called; it would be a point of honour with them not to come in until they were made to. She looked across at Zoë, who had curled herself up against the breakwater on a car rug and was rubbing some cream on her legs – which was the only part of her in the sun – rather a common thing to do in public, Villy thought, then felt ashamed. Whatever the poor girl does, I’m horrid about it. Rupert had tried to make her bathe, but she wouldn’t, said she knew it would be too cold. She had never let any of the Cazalets know that she couldn’t swim.

Villy watched as Edward and Rupert picked their way out into the sea with Lydia and Neville clinging to their backs like nervous little crabs. When they began to swim, Lydia screamed with excitement and Neville with fear, their screams mingling with the sea cries of other children, afraid of waves, not wanting to come in, shocked by the cold, afraid of being splashed by the swimmers. The fathers went on swimming until Rupert was in danger of being strangled by Neville and had to come in. Neville’s hat had blown off and Villy watched as Simon and Teddy raced to retrieve it, like little otters.

The girls, clad now in their shorts and Aertex shirts, were starting to ask about lunch. Polly and Clary were collecting smooth flat pebbles and putting them into Clary’s biscuit tin, and Louise lay flat on her stomach, apparently untroubled by the stony beach, reading and wiping her eyes with a bath towel.

‘How soon?’ one of them said.

‘As soon as the others come in and get changed.’ He waved to Edward who was carrying Lydia now and shouting to the boys.

Lydia returned triumphant and very cold; Edward dumped her beside Villy, against whom she leant, pigtails dripping, teeth rattling.

‘I swam much further than you did,’ she called to Neville.

‘You’re freezing, darling.’ Villy wrapped her in a towel.

‘I’m not. I’m boiling really. I’m
making
my teeth chatter. This is how Nan dresses in the morning. Look!’ She held the towel around her, turned her back and made humping movements of someone wriggling into stays, a fine imitation of clumsy decorum. Edward caught Villy’s eye and they both managed not to laugh.

Teddy and Simon came in quickly enough the moment that Edward shouted, ‘Lunch!’ They came rushing in from the sea, running easily over the pebbles, their hair plastered to their heads, the straps of their bathing dresses dropping over their shoulders. A super bathe, they said; they hadn’t wanted to come in; there was no point in changing as they were going back immediately after lunch. Oh, no, they weren’t, said Edward. They had to digest their lunch first. People got cramp and drowned if they bathed immediately after a meal.

‘Have you known anyone who actually drowned, Dad?’ Teddy asked.

‘Dozens. You get changed. Chop chop.’

‘What does chop mean?’ asked Lydia nervously.

‘It’s Chinese for quick,’ said Louise. ‘Mummy, can we start unpacking lunch? Just to see what there is?’