Marking Time (17 page)

Stella said virtuously, ‘Cheese is rationed, Pappy. At school, we get only two ounces a week. Imagine you, Pappy, living on that!’

Peter said, ‘At the National Gallery concerts, you get cheese and sultana sandwiches.’

‘Is that what you go for, you greedy boy?’

‘Of course! I have no interest in music at all; I just
adore
sultanas.’ As he said this, he imitated his sister.

All the same, Louise noticed that none of the family ate much of the cheese excepting Mr Rose, who, helping himself to three kinds, cut them into smaller pieces, screwed black pepper liberally
over them, and then popped them into his mouth.

The cheeses were replaced by a delicious-looking concoction of paper-thin pastry which proved to have apples and spices in it, that Louise, although she felt she had eaten far too much already,
was unwilling to resist and, as it turned out, quite unable to – since, with the remark that nobody could refuse Anna’s strudel, Mr Rose ordered his wife to pass her an enormous slice.
During this course, a furious argument broke out between Peter and his father on the merits of various Russian composers, whom Mr Rose provocatively dismissed as producers of schmaltz or fairytale
music, which made Peter so angry that he stammered and shouted and knocked over a glass of water.

It was only after very black coffee served in tiny, brittle red and gold cups that Louise and Stella were allowed to go off by themselves, and then only after much questioning and criticism
about how they were to spend the afternoon.

‘
Are
we going for a walk?’ Louise asked. She felt sleepy after the huge meal, and dreaded the raw freezing air.

‘Good Lord, no! I just said that because it’s the one thing they never seem to mind. We’ll just get the hell out, and then think of some lovely indoor thing to do.’

In the end they took a 53 bus to Oxford Street and spent hours in Bumpus, where after much cheerful browsing, they decided to buy each other a book. ‘Something that we think the other one
ought to have read,’ Stella said.

‘I don’t know all that you’ve read.’

‘Well, if I turn out to have read it, you’ll have to choose again.’ But she didn’t have to. Stella chose
Madame Bovary
for Louise: ‘I would have got it in
French, but your French isn’t much good,’ she said, and Louise, whose French was almost non-existent although she had tried to conceal this from Stella, did not argue. After much
agonising, she had chosen
Ariel
by André Maurois – a blue Penguin. She felt rather mean about this, because
Madame Bovary
cost two shillings, and
Ariel
only
sixpence, but she knew that Stella would pour scorn on that kind of discrepancy. ‘It’s about Shelley,’ she said and Stella replied, ‘Oh, good! I don’t know much about
him.’ They went home on the bus, deciding to inscribe the books when they got home, and inventing the awful things they thought other pairs of girls at the school would have given each other.
‘Lipsticks, and
talc
powder and charms to put on their bracelets, and little notebooks to put people’s birthdays in!’ were some of the suggestions, until Louise,
remembering Nora, said that they shouldn’t be so superior.

‘Why shouldn’t we be? We are. It isn’t saying much, after all. I mean –
look
at them!’

‘You know, Stella, considering how democratic you are, you are extraordinarily arrogant!’

‘I’m not. I’m simply being accurate. You’re so undemocratic that you’re used to people being inferior and think it’s kinder to tell lies about them. I
don’t.’

‘But there’s a difference between people who’ve had opportunities and made nothing of them, and people who haven’t.’

‘Yes, there is. That’s why I despise our schoolmates so much. They’re nearly all far richer than we are, and expense can have been no object in their education, whereas most
people – and certainly girls – don’t get any opportunities to be properly educated at all. Look at your family! The boys all went to school where at least they are taught Greek
and Latin, and you just having a governess!’ Stella had been to St Paul’s, one of the few places where education of girls was taken seriously, and Louise knew that if she wanted to go
to a university she was clever enough and had certainly been prepared.

‘Miss Milliment did her best. She was just too kind to us, and let us be lazy. Which I was.’ She was beginning to find out all the things she didn’t know, like the classics,
languages, political economy, current events – the quantity appalled her.

Stella looked quickly at her, and said, ‘
You’ll
be all right. You
want
to know things and, anyway, you know what you want to do. Lucky you!’

‘My father,’ she remarked later on when they were having a bath together before dressing for Peter’s concert, ‘says that girls should be educated absolutely as much as
boys because then they are less likely to bore their husbands and children. Or, I suppose, if they don’t have any of those, themselves.’

‘It’s funny. I thought your family would talk about politics all the time at meals. I was terrified.’

‘They often do. It just wasn’t a day for that. I think Pappy was anxious not to work Peter up before his concert.’

So they had a scene about Russian music instead, Louise thought, but she did not say so. It was new for her to observe things and have private views about them: at home she seemed to herself to
have taken everything for granted. It was a sure sign that she was growing up – getting older and, surely, more interesting?

The family seemed to thrive on scenes. There was a scene between Stella and her mother about the dress Stella had decided to wear for the concert. In fact, it wasn’t a dress: it was a
scarlet jersey and a black and white check pleated skirt. Her mother said it was not formal enough for the occasion. Voices were so raised that Mr Rose emerged from another of the innumerable doors
that lined the long passage and said that it was impossible to hear himself think with such a racket. He then joined the fray with gusto, disagreeing with his wife about the bottle-green velveteen
being more suitable and insisting upon a cream tussore silk that Stella said was a hundred years old and too short for her. Peter’s taste was quoted by both parents, although they did not
agree on what it might be. Mrs Rose said that he would be ashamed of his sister turning up at his concert dressed as though she was going to play some
game
. Mr Rose said that Peter would
detest her appearing in something so clearly meant to draw attention to herself as the bottle-green velvet. Stella said that if she wore the tussore silk Peter’s friends would scream with
laughter. Aunt Anna arrived and contributed a pink silk shirt to Stella’s black and white skirt. This temporarily united the others – against
her
– and she leaned against
the wall with little clucking cries of dismay. Mr Rose, although not exactly shouting, was speaking with that irritable clarity of enunciation that Louise associated with people trying to make an
idiot – or a foreigner – understand. ‘It is perfectly simple. You will wear the silk and do as you are told.’ At this both Stella and her mother uttered cries of dismay;
Stella burst into tears, her mother broke first into a cascade of sighs, disappeared into her bedroom and returned a moment later with a pale green woollen frock that she held against her daughter
while tears slipped slowly down great tracts of her beautiful face. ‘Otto! Otto? Would not this be the answer to the trick?’

He surveyed them both, his wife’s suitably imploring expression, Stella’s mutinous silence. That would have to do, he said at last. He was sick of the whole business. It was not,
after all, of the slightest interest to him
what
his daughter wore; she was quite old enough to make a fool of herself if she pleased. He had no interest in the matter. He could not
imagine why there had been such a fuss in the first place. He smiled with a weary, long-suffering kindness and shut his door, leaving Louise, and Stella holding the green woollen dress. Mrs Rose
sighed again, and then went briskly down the passage, seemingly rejuvenated.

‘Listen! What shall
I
wear?’ Louise said anxiously to her friend.

‘Oh, anything you like. They won’t mind what
you
wear.’

Louise could hardly believe this to be true, but she had very little with her and, as she wished to save her best dress for the theatre, the alternative was a tweed pinafore dress with a cream
silk shirt that Aunt Rach had given her for Christmas.

When she thought about Christmas she felt uneasy – sad. It had been spent, as it always had been, at Home Place, and although everybody had made efforts to make it seem the same, it
hadn’t been, although it was difficult to say that anything (which really mattered) was different. They had all had stockings – although there was no tangerine in the toe and Lydia had
wept because she thought they had simply left hers out. No tangerines and no oranges – no lemons, so no lemon curd tartlets on Boxing Day, one of the Duchy’s traditions – all
details but they added up. But the house seemed colder, and there was hardly ever any hot water because the range took so much coke and the Duchy had changed all the light bulbs to a lower voltage
to help the blackout, she said, and use less electricity. Peggy and Bertha, the housemaids, had gone off to join the WAAF, and Billy had gone to work in a factory. The garden looked different, the
flower borders gone and McAlpine growing vegetables in them. He creaked about, very bad-tempered because his rheumatism was so much worse, and the Duchy had been trying to get a girl to help in the
garden, but the first one left in a week – couldn’t stand McAlpine, who refused to speak to her and complained of her incessantly behind her back. All the horses were gone except the
two old ones so Wren, the groom, did odd jobs like chopping wood and stoking the boiler and painting bits of the greenhouse roof. He still wore his shiny leather gaiters and a nutmeg-coloured tweed
cap that went, as Polly said, so very badly with his beetroot face, but he seemed shrunken and was often heard talking to himself in tones of great grievance. Dottie had been promoted to housemaid
and Mrs Cripps had to make do with a much younger girl in the kitchen, who was worse than useless, she continually said. The Brig seemed much blinder than in the summer, and now made Aunt Rach take
him to London three times a week when he went to his office and she was, as she said, making a joke of it, his very private secretary. Aunt Zoë was pregnant and being sick all the time, or
lying with a green-white face on the sofa. Aunt Sybil – who at least had got thinner – seemed quite ratty, especially with Polly who said she spoiled Wills to death and worried Uncle
Hugh by worrying so much about him. And
her mother
! Sometimes she thought that Villy actually
hated
her; she didn’t seem to want to know anything about school, or her
friend; she criticised Louise’s appearance and the clothes that she chose to buy with her new dress allowance (forty pounds a year – for
everything
, her mother reiterated in
the kind of voice that, to Louise, meant including STs). She disapproved of Louise growing her hair, which obviously if one was going to be an actress one needed to do in case one played a very old
lady with a bun; she complained if she ever caught Louise doing anything that wasn’t
useful
, like laying the table; she tried to send her to bed at a ridiculous hour, and spoke about
her to other people – in front of her – as though she was some kind of petty criminal or idiot, saying that Louise couldn’t be trusted to do
anything
she promised, that
she was utterly wrapped up in herself, that she was so clumsy that she really wondered what would happen if Louise ever got on a stage. This last was the thing that hurt most, and things had come
to a head when, on Boxing Day, Louise had broken the Duchy’s favourite china teapot: some scalding tea had spilled from the spout onto her left hand, the shock made her drop the pot, and
tea-leaves and tea and bits of china were all over the floor. She had stood appalled, holding her scalded hand with the other one and staring at the floor, and before anyone else could say or do
anything, her mother had said in her sarcastic voice, which was like a bad imitation of her friend Hermione Knebworth, ‘Really, Louise, we shall have to start calling you Tony Lumpkin –
or Bumpkin would be more appropriate!’ There were strangers to tea; her face burned and, knowing she was going to cry, she rushed blindly from the room, knocking a book off a small table in
her flight.

She was half-way up the stairs before her mother’s icy voice stopped her. ‘Where on earth do you think you are going? Go to the kitchen and get a cloth and a dustpan and brush and
clear up the appalling mess you have made.’

She turned and got the things, and went back into the room, and picked the pieces of china off the floor, and swept up the tea-leaves, and mopped at the tea, until Eileen, who had been sent for
to make more tea, came and helped her, while her mother expatiated on the variety of her clumsiness: ‘The only girl who is staying at her domestic science school for three terms because she
broke so many pudding basins during her first two.’ There had been a feeling of unease in the room as nobody else seemed able to think of anything to say, and by the time she had finished the
clearing up, her hand was hurting very much. When she had taken the dustpan et cetera back to Eileen she went to find the Duchy to apologise, but she didn’t seem to be anywhere, although she
did find Aunt Rach who was sewing name tapes on Neville’s clothes for his new school. ‘I don’t know
where
she is, my duck. What’s up? You look a bit under the
weather.’

Louise burst into tears. Aunt Rach got up, shut the door, and led her to the sofa. ‘You can tell your old aunt,’ she said, and Louise did.

‘She hates me! Really and truly, she
must
hate me – in front of all those people! She treated me as though I was a stupid little ten-year-old, and the way she goes on just
makes me
more
clumsy than I would be if only she’d shut up.’ There was a pause, and then she added, ‘She never says anything
friendly
to me.’ At this, Aunt
Rach gave her hand an affectionate squeeze, but it was the bad hand. Aunt Rach looked at it, and then got the first-aid stuff; she lit the spirit lamp that the Duchy used for making tea, heated up
the paraffin wax, waited and then coated the scald with it, which hurt very much at first, but by the time her hand was being bandaged, it had begun to feel better.