The Light Years (The Cazalet Chronicle) (33 page)

He was back again, standing in the bedroom doorway, waiting with exaggerated patience for her to shut her suitcase. He always insisted upon loading the car for her, which was a sort of coals-of-fire kindness. As a matter of fact, even with the roof rack it took a bit of doing for five of them, but he made a regimented meal of it – insisting upon everybody’s luggage being stacked on the pavement beside the car before he would begin.

‘Sorry, darling,’ she said as brightly as she could.

He picked up the case and raised his eyebrows. ‘Anybody would think you were going away for six months,’ but he said it every time she ever went away, and she’d long ago stopped explaining that one needed as much for two weeks as for six months. Watching him limp heavily down the stairs with the case she felt familiar urges of guilt and pity. Poor Raymond! He hated his job – bursar at a large local school – he was a man who needed physical action to feel good-humoured and his leg precluded that entirely. He had been brought up with money and now had none, excepting for uncertain expectations from a fractious aunt, who at regular intervals implied that she might have changed her mind and would leave him her art collection – one Watts, a Landseer and over five hundred queasy watercolours painted by her late husband – instead of her money. But if he
had
the money it wouldn’t last: he’d use it up on some hopeless, mad idea. He was not much good at working with people – things got on his nerves and he flew off the handle at unexpected moments – but on the other hand he had no business sense whatsoever and therefore needed a partner. Any minute now he would give up his present job, she knew, in favour of some new scheme, but any money for that would have to come out of selling this house to go somewhere even less congenial and cheaper. Not that she liked the house (a semi-detached Tudor bijou gem, as she described it when she had wanted to make Edward laugh), erected soon after the war by speculative builders as part of the growing ribbon development along a main road to East Finchley. It had mean little rooms, passages so narrow that it was difficult to walk along them carrying a tray without barking your knuckles, and already there were long slanting cracks in the walls, the casement windows had warped and let in the rain, and the kitchen always smelled of damp. It had a long narrow back garden at the end of which was a shed that Raymond had built when he had his mushroom-growing venture. It was now used by Judy as a house in which she could have her friends – a mercy, really, because being the youngest she had the smallest room, which was so small that there was no room for anything else besides her bed and her chest of drawers.

‘Jessica! Jessica!’

‘Daddy wants you, Mummy!’

‘It’s the milkman, Mummy. He wants to be paid.’

She paid the milkman, sent Christopher to hurry the older girls, went into the drawing room to make sure she had shut the piano and covered it with the paisley shawl against the sun, told Judy to go to the lavatory and finally, when she could think of nothing else to do, went out of the front door, down the crazy-paving path to join the jigsaw front gate – now open, with Nora sitting upon it – to watch the final packing arrangements.

‘The object of the enterprise, Christopher, in case you hadn’t realised, is to stop the cases slipping.’

‘I know, Dad.’

‘You know, you
know
? How absolutely extraordinary that it didn’t occur to you to put some rope through the handles, then! I suppose I have to conclude that you simply aren’t very bright.’

Christopher went scarlet, climbed onto the running board and began to thread the rope through the handles. Watching his thin paper-white arms below his rolled-up sleeves and his shirt tail hanging out from his trousers as he stretched up, Jessica felt love and hatred converge in her at the spectacle of her son and her husband doing respectively their best and worst. She looked up at the sky: the earlier blue had faded to a milky pale grey, there was not a breath of wind, and she wondered whether they’d reach Sussex before a thunderstorm.

‘That looks marvellous,’ she said. ‘Where’s Angie?’

‘Waiting upstairs. She didn’t want to hang about in the heat,’ said Nora.

‘Well, get her. I thought you were supposed to tell both girls to come down.’

‘I’m sure he did, darling, but you know Angie. Call her, Nora.’

Judy, the youngest, emerged from the house. She went up to Jessica and indicated that she wanted to whisper. Jessica bent down.

‘I tried, Mummy, but not a drop came out.’

‘Never mind.’

Angela, wearing a blue Moygashel suit that she had made herself, came slowly down the path. She wore her white shoes and carried a pair of white cotton gloves; she looked as though she was going to a wedding. Jessica, who knew that this was to impress her Aunt Villy, said nothing. Angela was just nineteen, and had recently become both dreamy and demanding. ‘
Why
don’t we have more money?’ she would wail, when she wanted more pocket money – she called it dress allowance – and Jessica had to refuse her. ‘Money isn’t everything,’ she had once said in Nora’s hearing, who had immediately shot back at her, ‘No, but it’s something, isn’t it? I mean, its not
nothing
.’

Raymond was now saying goodbye to them. He kissed Angela’s pale and passive cheek – Dad was sweating, and she simply loathed sweat – and Nora, who hugged him so fiercely that he was pleased. ‘Steady
on
,’ he said. He clapped Christopher painfully on the shoulder, and Christopher muttered something and got quickly into the back of the car.

‘Goodbye, Dad,’ Judy said. ‘I expect you’ll have a spiffing time with Aunt Lena. Give Trottie my love.’ Trottie was Aunt Lena’s pug; a rotten name, as Nora had remarked, as he was so fat he could never have trotted in his life.

Angela got carefully into the passenger seat in front.

‘You might have asked,’ said Nora.

‘I’m the oldest. I don’t have to ask.’

‘Oh, so you
are
, I can’t think how I can have forgotten that.’ This was a painfully accurate imitation of her father when he was doing his schoolmaster sarcastic act, Jessica thought. She kissed his hot damp face and gave him the little mechanically intimate smile that secretly so enraged him.

‘Well, I hope you all enjoy yourselves more than I shall,’ he said.

‘There are more of us so we ought to,’ Nora replied cheerfully. She had a gift for the amiable last word.

Then they were off.

These days, it seemed to Louise that whatever she was doing her mother stopped her and made her do something else that she would never want to do, anyway, and particularly not if she was already doing something. This morning she was stopped from going to the beach with Uncle Rupert, Clary and Polly because Mother told her that her cousins were coming and it would be rude not to be there to greet them.

‘
They
wouldn’t think it in the least rude.’

‘I’m not interested in what you think they’d think,’ said Villy sharply. ‘In any case, I’m sure you haven’t tidied your bedroom.’

‘It doesn’t
need
tidying.’

Villy’s answer to this was to take her daughter by the arm and march her upstairs to the large back attic that Louise was being made to share with Nora and Angela.

‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘The proverbial pigsty.’ She twitched open a drawer that was bulging with Louise’s half-worn clothes and other things.

‘How many times have I told you that it is disgusting to keep your knickers in with your other clothes?’ She managed to make it sound disgusting, Louise thought. She’s always managing to make me sound like that, as though she sort of hates me. For answer, she pulled the drawer right out and tipped its contents onto her bed.

‘And books as well! Really, Louise! What
is
this book?’

‘It’s called
Chin Ping Mei
. It’s about sixteenth-century China,’ she said sulkily, but she was alarmed.

‘Oh.’ Villy knew that the girls were doing China with Miss Milliment and that they had all become passionate about anything Chinese – Sybil had told her about Polly’s growing collection of soapstones and Louise’s room at home was full of little shattered pieces of embroidery. ‘Well, put all your books on the mantelpiece. Get everything looking nice, there’s a good girl, and you might pick some roses to put on the dressing-table which, incidentally you will also have to clear to make room for Angela’s things. Do it quickly, because Phyllis will be wanting to make up their beds.’ And she went, leaving Louise considerably relieved. She decided to tidy everything perfectly, and then go and read in the hammock by the duck pond. Although she did not understand the Chinese book much, she knew that it contained a good deal of stuff of which her mother would deeply disapprove. It was nearly all about sex, but of such mysterious kinds that Louise, who began reading it for information, felt more at sea than ever. But the food and clothes and other things that happened fascinated her, and it was jolly long, which was the chief criterion by which she bought second-hand books, because she still only got sixpence a week pocket money and was constantly short of reading matter.

It was their first holiday at Mill Farm, bought and given by the Brig to his sons for their families. This time, because of Aunt Jessica and her cousins, it was their own family, plus Neville and Ellen as company for Lydia. The others were all up the road at Home Place, but they met every day. Mill Farm was white clinker-built weatherboarding with a tiled roof. It was approached by a drive edged with chestnuts and ending in a formal sweep before the front door. To the side of the drive and in front of the house was a paddock that had probably once been an orchard since it still contained a few very old cherry and pear trees, and in a little hollow near the road end of the paddock was the duck pond – out of bounds to the younger children as Neville had fallen into it on their first evening. He had come out all green with duckweed, like the Dragon King, Lydia remarked, from
Where The Rainbow Ends
, a play she had seen for her Christmas treat that had frightened her very much. The house had been a farm until shortly before the Brig bought it. It had only contained four bedrooms and a pair of attics above, a large kitchen and sitting room below and so he had had a heady six months planning and building a wing on the back – four more bedrooms, and two bathrooms above, a large sitting room and dining room and a small, extremely dark study that looked onto the walls of the old cow shed. He had wired the house for electricity, but water was obtained from two wells, one of which had already run dry and rabbit’s fur was reputed to have come out of the kitchen cold tap. The Duchy had had a hand in the interior, so it was all white walls and coconut matting, indeterminate floral chintzes and large plain parchment lampshades. There were fireplaces in the sitting room and dining room, and a new range in the kitchen, and a small grate in the best (old) bedroom, but otherwise it was without heating. Not a house for winter, Villy had thought when she first saw it. It was furnished with whatever any of the families had to spare – iron bedsteads, one or two nice pieces that Edward had picked up from Mr Cracknell in Hastings, some of Rupert’s pictures and an extremely ancient gramophone in a laurelwood cabinet, with a horn and at the bottom a place for records, which the children played incessantly on rainy days, ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’, ‘The Grasshoppers’ Dance’, ‘The Gold and Silver Waltz’, and, Louise’s favourite, Noel Coward singing ‘Don’t Put Your Daughter On The Stage, Mrs Worthington’. This last they sang whenever the grown-ups made them do things they disliked: it had become, Villy remarked, a kind of ‘Marseillaise’. There were still a number of old farm buildings at the back, beyond which the hop fields stretched with luxuriant geometry.

Villy had brought down their cook, Emily, and Phyllis, who was helped out by a local woman called Edie who arrived on her bicycle each day and did most of the housework. Nanny had left in the spring when Lydia had begun going to Miss Puttick’s school in the mornings, and since it had been decided that Neville should stay at the farm to play with Lydia, Ellen had come with him, and was in charge of both of them. Which left Villy comparatively free, she supposed, to ride, to play tennis, to practise the violin which she had worked hard at all year, to read Ouspensky and ponder on things like negative emotion – something to which she felt herself peculiarly prone – to do a little gardening, and the shopping in Battle for the endless meals. Today, Edward, who was taking a long weekend, had gone to Rye with Hugh to play golf. When he returned to London, she and Jessica were going to have their mother to stay for a week. That was an event, of a kind; at least, it was something which she felt she should do and it would enable Lady Rydal to see all of her grandchildren at once, but Villy, knowing how tired Jessica would be, had arranged that she should have a clear week before their mother arrived. She had worried about leaving Edward in London with only Edna to do for him, but he had said that he would use his club, and certainly he seemed to go out a good deal. She was looking forward to having Jessica to herself; although Raymond was supposed to be joining them at some point, there still would be plenty of time to talk about things. By things, she meant Jessica’s husband – and Louise, who had become quite trying lately. Villy was seriously beginning to wonder whether she should not have sent her to a boarding school – look at Teddy! After three terms he seemed to her much improved, was quiet, polite, rather silent, but that was better than being noisy, and nothing like as selfish and moody and wrapped up in himself as Louise. A year ago, Louise would have been so excited at the prospect of her cousins coming to stay that she would not have
dreamed
of wanting to go to the beach, and she was too old now to keep her things in such a squalid mess. If she was asked to do the least little thing, she sulked. Edward always took her part, treated her as though she was already grown up: he had bought her the most unsuitable nightgown for her last birthday and took her to the theatre and out to supper – just the two of them – and kept her out far too late so that she was like a bear with a sore head the next day. He introduced her to people as his eldest unmarried daughter, which irritated Villy profoundly although she did not quite know why. Well, perhaps fifteen was just a difficult age; she was still a child, really. If only Edward would treat her as one.