Marking Time (13 page)

Polly was abstracted: she left a lot of her mince, and when it came to apple amber, she said she didn’t want any. She, too, was thinking of last year, when Oscar had been
alive and got lost, and then found, just in time for peace. But Oscar had been found stretched out, stiff as a board at the end of the back garden. He had been run over, the vet had said: his back
was broken. Another serious funeral, and after that, she had decided that she had better not have another cat until she had her house and everything. Now, she was glad of that decision. At least
she did not have to contemplate whoever she might have had being gassed to death. Dad had wanted to give her another for her birthday, but she said she was too old for a cat. ‘At least,
I’ve reached a middle age when it wouldn’t be advisable,’ she had said, and he had said, ‘Well, Poll, you know best,’ and she had wondered afterwards why people always
said that when they disagreed with one. Actually, she felt sad about not
wanting
a cat, but now, she thought, perhaps she had always known that the war wouldn’t go away, had been
simply waiting, and looming all the time. And here it was, and everything, on the face of it, seemed to be much the same. If only Dad wasn’t going to be in London, she thought. If only they
could all stay together, then whatever happened couldn’t be so awful. At least she didn’t have to go on trying to believe in God.

Bessie was between her and Christopher. She had quickly realised that Polly had food on her plate and had leaned her bulk against Polly’s knee and chair. Christopher had turned to her and
smiled and said, ‘Don’t give in to her, she’s far too fat for her age. It wouldn’t be a kindness.’

‘I know,’ she said. Bessie wouldn’t have a gas mask. Human beings were only kind to them up to a point, she thought, they weren’t
really
kind. Teddy and Simon
were talking about cricket. They talked more and more about things that didn’t interest her. If she had children, she’d have them all educated in the same place, then they’d go on
knowing each other and doing the same things. This idea cheered her up and she asked Christopher if he agreed, and he did, and then Nora, who had heard them, chipped in saying there was a
frightfully modern school like that in Devon called Dartington Hall where the children were all terribly spoiled.

‘What do you mean, spoiled?’ Clary asked.

‘Well, you know, allowed to do what they like all the time. And they do crafts, things like woodwork which doesn’t strike me as an educational subject at all.’

Clary said, ‘I can’t see that doing what you like would spoil you. It makes me far nicer when I do.’

‘Everybody needs discipline,’ Nora said. ‘I know
I
do.’

‘Well, we can’t all be the same,’ Clary said. Christopher suddenly choked with laughter, but Nora just went rather red.

An evening, just like any other evening, Polly thought, as Aunt Rach came downstairs dressed in her blue moiré dress with a little cape round her shoulders. ‘Hallo, darlings! Having
a nice supper?’

Simon said, ‘What would you say if we told you it was horrible?’

‘I should say, “Serve you right, silly old aunt, for asking such a daft question.”’

She was on her way to the drawing room, but the Brig had heard her voice and now called to her: ‘Rachel! The very person I wanted to see,’ and she turned and went to his study.

‘Poor Brig,’ Clary said. ‘Think of not being able to read.’

‘Or ride. Or drive,’ Teddy said, which seemed far worse to him.

‘He hasn’t driven for ages. Tonbridge won’t let him. But he goes on the train all by himself.’

‘Bracken meets him at Charing Cross.’

‘Bracken is getting so huge that Dad says he’ll have to buy a larger car to fit him into. And in the end he’ll only fit into a lorry. I expect he’ll be called up and
they’ll have to put him in a tank to drive. Come on, Simon, let’s finish our game.’ They went off to the billiard room.

‘Let’s play cards,’ Clary said, not because she specially wanted to, but she wanted to get Polly’s mind off the war. She looked at her now. ‘Pelmanism?’ she
coaxed; she was particularly good at that game. Polly wrinkled her white forehead. ‘Racing demon?’

Louise, who also realised about Polly, said what a good idea, so they went up to the old nursery, where Polly and Clary now slept, and got out the packs of cards and made Christopher join them,
but he never won, and so he left, saying that he was going to read.

At dinner, in the dining room, nobody talked about the future; all general ruminations had been exhausted and everyone had withdrawn into their own personal uncertainties which
most of them felt, for various reasons, it would sound both selfish and pusillanimous to discuss. They ate their asparagus soup, made from the last pickings from the beds for that year, the Duchy
remarked, and oxtail with beetroot in a white sauce and carrots chopped up with peas and mashed potato, followed by charlotte russe, a pudding dear to Mrs Cripps’s heart – she loved
arranging all the little upright sponge fingers in the pudding mould – but Edward called it wet cake and thought he would wait for cheese. Even he was at a loss for conversation; the precious
hardwood logs had been dumped in the river again, but the men never talked about the business except when they were alone together. He wondered how Diana was doing, and whether she had been joined
by Angus, and if she had, whether she would let him sleep with her or not. He hadn’t got a leg to stand on there because, after all, he and Villy . . . but he didn’t exactly relish the
idea. He looked at Villy, who was wearing a plum-coloured dress with a sort of draped neck that didn’t suit her at all. They had had the beginnings of a row at Pear Tree Cottage when they
were getting ready for dinner because she had said that she wasn’t prepared to spend the entire war tucked away in the country looking after one small baby; she would go mad, she said. If
there was to be one London house kept open, she thought it should be Lansdowne Road. ‘Hugh could live in it during the week, and the rest of the family could come up whenever they needed
to.’

This had silenced him: he knew that the chances of seeing Diana would be halved if Villy was in London, but he could hardly raise that as an objection. ‘We’ll have to see how things
turn out,’ he had said.

He noticed that his father wanted some port, which stood at his right hand, but that he was unsure where his glass was. He got up and went round to pour it for him, and then pushed the decanter
round the table to the next person.

‘Zoë, the port is with you,’ he said, and she gave a little start, and moved it on to Hugh. How attractive she looked. She was wearing some sort of housecoat affair, long, pale
greeny-blue brocade woven with little apricot flowers, with her hair swept smoothly back from her face into some kind of net so that it looked like a huge bun – a sort of Victorian effect.
And she had a complexion that made all the other women look weather-beaten or faded, although these days she was very pale. He wondered whether Rupe had taken his advice about starting another baby
as soon as possible.

The Duchy knew perfectly well that the men wanted to talk on their own so as soon as the pudding was eaten (the Duchy disapproved of cheese at night), she suggested that the women withdraw. When
they were settled, and Eileen had brought the coffee, Rachel said, ‘Before you start any music, Duchy dear, I think I’d better distribute these. The Brig wants them put on every bedroom
door.’ She handed them round.

‘“Instructions in case of an Air Raid,”’ Sybil read aloud. ‘Goodness! Who did all this?’

‘I did. Matron said she must have them for the nurses, and the Brig said they should be for everyone. I’m sorry that my typing is so bad – I type like a two-toed
sloth.’

It must have taken her hours, Sid thought, and Villy obviously thought the same, because she said, ‘Wasn’t there even any carbon paper?’

‘There was, but it was frightfully old and, anyway, if you make as many mistakes as I do, it isn’t actually much quicker.’ The instructions were very sensible, and told people
what to do either during the day or night. ‘Although, of course, they won’t have air raids in the dark. They won’t be able to see where they are,’ Villy said.

‘As long as we all do the blackout properly.’

They spent a little time deciding which children they would be responsible for, and then there was a silence.

The evening, filled, as in a way it was, by small domestic activity – by Sid and the Duchy playing Mozart sonatas, by the men coming out from the dining room – was, none the less,
punctuated by these small, dead moments, when the minute sound of Sybil’s knitting, or a log subsiding in the fireplace, or sugar being stirred into a coffee cup only accentuated those times
when each person was engulfed by their private anxieties.

As she was shutting the piano, the Duchy remarked, ‘Do you remember how, in the last war, it became unpatriotic to play German music? Such a ridiculous notion.’

‘Not everybody thought that, surely?’ Sid was putting her fiddle away, but Rachel could hear that she was shocked.

‘Only the sort of people who gave white feathers to men with flat feet or bad eyesight, Duchy dear,’ she said.

‘I’m sure the Germans will be worse about that sort of thing,’ Hugh said.

‘But, then, they will have far less to lose. Composers aren’t our strong point, compared to them,’ Rachel said, then put her hand over her mouth and looked at Villy whose
father had been a composer, after all. How lucky, she thought, that Lady Rydal had opted for dinner in bed that night.

But Villy, who had loved her father dearly, perhaps more than anyone else in her life, was suddenly remembering him writing in one of his diaries that going to Germany as a young student, and
dazzled by the quantity of music available, had been like being a dog let out into a field of rabbits.

‘Hitler is reputed to like Wagner,’ Sybil said; she had finished the second sock, and pulled its pair out of the bag before handing them to her husband. Thank goodness
that
pair was finished: she was really bored of knitting socks, but Hugh seemed so pleased with them that she felt she had to keep him supplied.

‘I can well believe it.’ The Duchy disliked Wagner immensely: he went, she felt, too far in directions that she did not like to consider at all.

‘Bed!’ Edward cried. ‘We’ve got an early start.’ He looked at his brothers. ‘Better if you give Rupe a lift, I’ve got a call to make on my
way.’

Rupert had been faintly dreading the moment when he would be alone with Zoë in their bedroom. When he had gone up for his bath before dinner, she was sitting at the
dressing table doing nothing. He put his hand under her chin and tilted her face up to him; he could see that she had been crying because her eyelids were swollen, their whiteness a faintly
translucent blue. To his surprise she smiled at him, took the hand that now lay on the shoulder of her kimono and thrust it under the silk. As he gazed into her astonishing cloudy eyes, that were
not, he had long discovered, the green of anything else, she moved his hand from her shoulder to her breast. Startled, charmed, he bent to kiss her, but she put her hand on his mouth and made a
little backward, provocative movement with her head, indicating the bed. He felt a sudden surge of light-hearted excitement and pleasure – his old, young Zoë was back.