The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (31 page)

The baby, who had stopped crying, lolled in the bath, his slaty eyes, now open, roving about the room, his fingers opening and closing into a fist, his knees turned out, his feet at right angles to his legs, a bubble of mucus coming out of one nostril. Dr Carr, who seemed to miss nothing, looked at him, then cleaned his nostrils with a twist of cotton wool. The baby frowned, arched his back so that all his tiny ribs showed, and cried again. His skin, the colour of the smallest pink shells, was as soft as a rose. He made slow random movements with an arm or a leg, and sometimes he seemed to look at Rachel, but his gaze was inscrutable. She sponged him carefully, even humbly: he looked at once so vulnerable and majestic.

‘You can take him out now and dry him, and then we’ll put him on the scales. Just over seven pounds, or I’m a Dutchman, but we need to be sure. There we go, Mrs Cazalet.’ The room was suddenly full of the smell of warm blood. It was a quarter to five.

Hugh did not reach Home Place until twenty minutes after his son was born. He had had a puncture and had had trouble getting the tyre off the car. He arrived to find the Duchy feeding Rachel with ham sandwiches and tea, Mrs Pearson, the midwife, had arrived and Dr Carr, after a quick cup, was back with his patient for the delivery of the second baby – there were twins, after all – but he did not expect that to take long. Rachel came with him to fetch the baby clothes from the car.

‘I should like to see Sybil. Do you think it would be all right if I went up?’ he said as they walked back into the house.

‘Darling Hugh,
I
don’t know. What do you usually do?’

‘Well, Sybil doesn’t like me to until everything’s all shipshape, but it hasn’t been like this before.’

‘Well, we’ve got to take the clothes up, anyway. Your son is making do with a cashmere shawl.’

‘Is he fine?’

‘He’s
wonderful
!’ she said so fervently, that he looked at her with a little smile, and said, ‘I didn’t know that aunts could be so
épris
.’

‘Well, I was there, as a matter of fact. Mrs Pearson couldn’t come at once so I sort of helped.’

‘Did she have a bad time?’

‘I don’t think it’s ever exactly a picnic. She was marvellous, very brave and good. Dr Carr said that the second one would be quite quick, he thought,’ she added hurriedly, in case she had said too much of the other thing.

‘Oh, good, you’re a brick, Rach. I wonder if they’d let me see her – just for a second.’

But when they got up to the room, Mrs Pearson came to the door, said something to Sybil, and then turned back to say that Mrs Cazalet sent her love but would rather see him later, and Hugh, sure that Mrs Pearson was needed by his wife, did not dare ask her to show him his son.

There was a silence: then he said gently, ‘You have a beautiful son. Would you like your husband to come and see you both?’

Half an hour later, Dr Carr climbed wearily into his old Ford. He had been called out the previous night, had taken morning surgery and done five calls before delivering Mrs Cazalet, and he was not as young as he used to be. In spite of forty years’ experience, the birth of a baby still moved him and he had a rapport with women in labour that he never felt about them at any other time. It was rotten luck that the second baby had been stillborn, but at least she had the other one. My God he had tried with that second baby, though – she would never know how much. He’d pressed and released that wee chest minutes after he’d known it was hopeless. Mrs Pearson had wanted to wrap it up, put it away out of sight, but he’d known the mother would want to see it. When he’d gone downstairs, they’d given him a fine drop of whisky, and he’d warned Mr Cazalet that his wife was very tired and not to stay with her long; all she needed was a nice cup of tea and a sleep, no emotional scenes, he had wanted to add, but looking at the father’s face, he thought there wouldn’t be any of that. He looked a decent, understanding man – not like some of them who became breezy and facetious and often drunk. Now he must get back to Margaret. In the old days, he used to come home full of tales about deliveries, excited, even exalted by having witnessed the same old miracle. But after they lost both their sons in the war, she couldn’t stand to hear about any of that and he kept it to himself. She had become a shadow, acquiescent, passive, full of humdrum little remarks about the house and the weather and how hard he was on his clothes, and then he’d bóught her a puppy, and she talked endlessly about that. It had become a fat spoiled dog, and still she talked about it as though it were a puppy. It was all he could think to do for her, as his grief had never been allowed to be on par with hers. He kept that to himself as well. But when he was alone in the car like this, and with a drop of whisky inside him, he thought about Ian and Donald who were never spoken of at home, who would, he felt, be entirely forgotten except for his own memory and their names on the village monument.

‘I
did
ask her, and she just said, never you mind.’ Louise looked across the glade resentfully at her mother who was smoking and laughing and talking with Uncle Rupert and someone called Margot Sidney. She and Polly and Clary had withdrawn from the main picnic – over in any case for some time now – in order to have a serious discussion about exactly how people had babies but they weren’t getting anywhere. Clary had pulled up her shirt, fingered her navel doubtfully and suggested that it might be the place, but Polly, secretly horrified, had immediately said that it wasn’t big enough. ‘Babies are quite large, you know, about like a medium doll.’

‘It’s got all sorts of wrinkles in it. It might stretch.’

‘It would be much better if they just laid eggs.’

‘People are too heavy for eggs. They’d break them sitting, and it would be scrambled baby all over the place.’

‘You’re revolting, Clary. No. I’m afraid it must be – ’ she leant over Polly and mouthed, ‘between the legs.’

‘No!’

‘It’s the only place left.’

‘Who’s revolting now?’

‘It’s not me.
I
didn’t plan it. It’s common sense,’ she added loftily, trying to get used to the ghastly idea.

‘It’s certainly common,’ said Clary.

‘
I
think,’ Polly said dreamily, ‘that really all they have is a sort of pip, quite large compared to a grapefruit, and the doctor puts it in a basin of warm water and it sort of explodes – like a Japanese flower in those shells – into a baby.’

‘You’re an absolute
idiot.
Why do you think they get so fat if all they have is a pip? Look at Aunt Syb. Can you honestly believe that all she has inside her is a
pip
?’

‘Also, it’s known to be dangerous,’ Clary said. She looked frightened.

‘It can’t be all that dangerous – look at all the people there are,’ Louise began, and then remembered Clary’s mother and said, ‘You might be right about the pip, Polly, I expect you are,’ and winked very largely at Polly to make her realise.

Soon after that, Aunt Rachel came and found them and told them that Aunt Sybil had had a baby boy, and a little girl who had died, and was terribly tired so would they all go home quietly and not make a noise? Simon, who was up a tree at the time, said, ‘Good show,’ and went on hanging from a branch by his knees and asking people to look, but Polly rushed to Aunt Rachel and said she wanted to go and see her mother and the baby at once. Everybody was glad to be going home.

Rachel and Sid slipped out at about six for a walk. They walked fast – almost furtively – round the drive to the gate into the wood in case any of the family saw them and suggested coming too. Once in the wood, they began to stroll along the narrow path through it that led to the fields beyond. Rachel was very tired; her back ached from leaning over Sybil’s bed, and the news of the stillborn baby had upset her very much. When they reached the stile into the meadow that slipped gently uphill before them, Sid proposed that they go only as far as the large single oak that stood by itself a few yards from the wood and sit for a bit, and Rachel gratefully agreed. Although, if I had suggested a five-mile walk, Sid thought, she would have agreed to that even though she is dead beat. The thought filled her with tender exasperation; Rachel’s unselfishness was formidable to her, and often made decisions a matter of strenuous perception.

Rachel arranged her back against the oak, accepted a gasper from Sid, who lit it for her with the little silver lighter that had been an early present on her first birthday after they had met, nearly two years ago. They smoked for a while in silence. Rachel’s eyes seemed fixed upon the green and golden meadow starred with poppies and ox-eye daisies and buttercups, but not as though she saw these things, and Sid watched Rachel’s face. Her fine complexion was pale and drawn, her blue eyes clouded, smudged above her high cheekbones with fatigue, her mouth trembling, making small movements of compression and resolution as though she was afraid of crying. Sid reached out and took one of her hands. ‘Easier if you tell,’ she said.

‘It seems so
cruel
! All that agony and effort and then that poor little thing born dead! Such ghastly, frightful bad luck!’

‘There is one baby, though. That’s a great deal better than if there had only been one in the first place.’

‘Of course it is. But do you think it will always miss its twin? Aren’t they specially devoted?’

‘Only if they’re identical, I believe.’

‘Yes, that’s right, I’d forgotten. The awful thing is that I can’t help being glad I wasn’t there for the second part. I should have blubbed.’

‘Darling, you weren’t, and if you had been you probably wouldn’t have blubbed out of consideration for Sybil, but if you had it wouldn’t have been the end of the world, you know. Crying isn’t a crime.’

‘No, but it’s unsuitable when you get to be my age.’

‘Is it?’

Looking at Sid’s tender, ironical expression, Rachel said slowly, ‘Well,
we
were brought up to think that part of growing up was learning not to cry at things. Except music and being patriotic and things like that.’

‘Elgar would be a hole-in-one, you mean?’

This made Rachel laugh. ‘Dead right. I wonder what the Cazalets did for tears before Elgar!’

‘We don’t have to consider the Dark Ages of the Cazalets.’

‘We do not.’ She took the little white handkerchief from her wrist and wiped her eyes. ‘How absurd one is!’

Then they began to talk about themselves. Rachel asked about the seaside holiday that Evie wanted to go on, and Sid said how much she did not want to go, leaving out only the fact that it was going to be very difficult to afford – Rachel’s affluence and Sid’s lack of it embarrassed them both – and Rachel said did she feel she had to go because Evie really
needed
it, in which case, why not go to Hastings, and then they could both come to Home Place for lunch, etc. But Sid said that she was afraid of Evie finding out about them – her and Rachel.