Marking Time (23 page)

It was at this point that she began not to want to show her journal to the others. This was another thing about journals: if they were private, you somehow had more chance to make them
interesting. But she didn’t really want Miss Milliment to have the slightest idea of her feelings – or the lack of them – for Zoë. In the end, she kept two: the public one to
be read at lessons, and the serious private one that she read to herself – and quite often to Polly, who didn’t seem to have that problem at all. ‘I can’t think of enough to
say about people,’ she said, ‘and everyone has their good side.’ Polly put drawings in her journal – they weren’t particularly apposite, as she pointed out to her,
just anything that came into her head – at the moment the journal was full of moles because she’d found a dead one on the tennis-court lawn and learned how to draw it until it began to
smell awful and she buried it. Polly’s moles were rather good: they had the sort of expression that made you think
they
thought it was quite all right to be blind. Miss Milliment
admired them very much and found her a book illustrated by Archibald Thorburn which the Brig had in his study. But he mostly painted birds and Polly wasn’t so interested in them.

But as all the old men she knew
were
married, this seemed probable. So she would still just be getting postscripts and the two letters of her own that he had sent.

‘Lord Beaverbrook,’ she wrote, ‘has become Minister of Aircraft Production.’ It was a wonderful name. She wondered if there was a Lady Beaverbrook. ‘Clarissa
Beaverbrook’ she wrote on a separate piece of paper. It looked very grand. Although to people she knew well, she’d have to put ‘Clary Beaverbrook’.

The news that week did not seem at all good. The Maginot Line, which Miss Milliment had made them trace onto their map, and which she had imagined as a huge kind of long mountain covered with
guns and tanks with the soldiers living in tunnels underneath, didn’t seem to count at all. The Germans simply went north round it, which as it hadn’t got as far as the sea by a long
chalk, anyway, was not really surprising, but it seemed to surprise the grown-ups.

She began to imagine herself in their house at Brook Green on her own. She could have Grape Nuts for breakfast (no cooking) and then she would put on her coat and go off and sit on the seats in
buses near the door so that she could watch everyone. In the afternoon she would go to the cinema, and in the evening she would go home and fry a chop – she had never actually done this but
she thought she could buy a few extra chops to start with until she got it right. Money: she’d probably have to sell things. The house was full of stuff in cupboards and in the attic that
nobody would notice. If she particularly liked anyone – like a bus conductor or someone she sat next to at the cinema – she would invite them back to chops and a gin and it, which she
knew how to mix from Dad’s drink cupboard. And if they were suitable, she would fall in love with them. That would all be what Aunt Villy called grist to the mill.

She stopped here, and began gloomily to review the grown-ups round her. She couldn’t think of
one
of them that she would want to be. Not Aunt Rach – taking the Brig to
London on the train every day, and having to type letters for him, although she’d never learned to type so she kept making mistakes and did it very slowly. And then getting back and being
told about the six o’clock news by the Duchy and Aunt Syb, and having a rest before dinner because her back was hurting, and then spending the evening knitting socks for seamen with
foul-smelling wool and listening to the nine o’clock news and going to bed. Occasionally someone rang her up in the evenings which always seemed to make her more animated, but it must always
be a toll call, because she never talked to them for long. ‘God bless,’ Clary sometimes heard her say if she happened to be in the hall outside the Brig’s study where the
telephone was. One couldn’t possibly want to be the Duchy because she was so very old, at the end of her life almost, although that was a tremendously sad thought, and she lived such a quiet
one that it might easily go on longer than most. Aunt Syb – no definitely not. At the weekends she seemed more or less how she’d always been – except for this last one when Uncle
Hugh had said after the six o’clock news that he really wanted to shut their house in London because anyway he needed to be on fire duty quite a lot of nights at the wharf. Aunt Syb had
completely broken down, had burst into racking sobs and then rushed out of the drawing room, and Uncle Hugh had gone after her and not come down again for a long time, and then he
had
come
down to get Aunt Rach, and when
she
got back she said that Aunt Syb had been rather sick because she’d eaten something that had disagreed with her, and that she would spend the week
in the country, and they would discuss the house when she was better. She’d spent a lot of Monday in bed, and when she did reappear she looked rotten. She had asked Polly to buy her a bottle
of aspirin at the shop, and she’d said please don’t tell the Duchy who was known to disapprove of aspirin. Aunt Rach wanted Dr Carr to come and see her, but Aunt Syb got awfully worked
up and said she wouldn’t hear of it. The Duchy made her have arrowroot and Benger’s Food and also tried to make her have Parrish’s Food, but Aunt Syb put that down the wash basin
in the bathroom. Polly said, and one couldn’t blame her, it tasted like old iron railings. Neville had once drunk a whole bottle of it (you were meant to have about a dessertspoon in water)
and gone about all red in the face and charged up for days –
he
hadn’t been sick although everyone said he would be. Poor Aunt Syb! Her hair looked awfully dull – like
unpolished old brown shoes – and her getting thinner had somehow made her more shapeless, sort of baggy, and she had quite deep marks on her forehead. There was something called change of
life that neither she nor Polly had properly fathomed, but it got mentioned that week about the house – not to
them
, of course, but she heard Ellen and Eileen when they were changing
the sheets. Change of life. Just what she wanted, she thought, but not, of course, if it meant you felt rotten. It sounded as though it could be the most marvellous thing, put just like that. No,
she certainly wouldn’t want to be Aunt Syb. And of
course
not Zoë, who now played clock patience all day, when she wasn’t eating or sewing.

The following weekend Uncle Hugh had come down, of course, bringing Aunt Villy and Louise. Louise looked extremely glamorous: she wore terracotta linen trousers and an emerald-green Aertex shirt
and a creamy cardigan slung over her shoulders and sandals. She had
green
eyeshadow and scarlet lipstick and very long hair, and she did exercises every morning that she said was writing
the alphabet with her body – one wouldn’t have known, Clary thought. Louise seemed quite prepared to spend time with her and Polly, largely, Clary immediately discovered, because she
only wanted to talk about acting and her school, and the grown-ups talked about nothing much but how the war was going, which seemed to be worse and worse.

‘I’m absolutely bloody fed
up
with war talk,’ Louise declared. She took a very small packet of cigarettes out of her pocket and they watched, fascinated, as she
proceeded to light one.

‘When did you start doing that?’ Polly asked.

‘Weeks ago. Everybody smokes at school.’ She blew the smoke out very quickly after each puff. ‘They’re only de Reszke Minors: I can’t afford ordinary-sized
cigarettes – none of us can. A lot of people smoke because they can’t afford food,’ she added. This was pounced upon.

‘How much are de Minors or whatever they are?’

‘Only sixpence for ten.’

‘You can buy a chop for fourpence. And that would leave you twopence for vegetables and bread, et cetera.’

Louise looked cross. ‘We haven’t time for stupid things like
cooking
,’ she said. ‘If you are seriously trying to be an artist, you simply don’t
do
that sort of thing. One person I know – a boy called Roy Prowse – just has mustard sandwiches for lunch. He’s a brilliant actor – he did the most arresting Lear last
week.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Much older than I am, nearly nineteen, but he’s more like someone of twenty – he’s frightfully sophisticated – he’s working as a waiter and has been abroad
on his own.’

‘I should have thought he was a bit young for Lear.’

She turned on Clary. ‘Honestly, how dim can you get? Do you seriously think there are old men of seventy at an acting school? Anyway, we have to do character parts – in make-up we
learn all about how to put ageing lines all over the place on top of our five and nine.’

Clary deliberately didn’t ask what five and nine was to pay her back for being called dim.

‘Louise is insufferable!’ she exclaimed to Polly when they were having their baths.

‘She’s certainly changed a lot. I think seventeen is probably a difficult age – you know, you’re not quite one thing or the other.’

‘I thought that that’s what
we
were.’

‘We are, but I think it gets steadily worse until – we’re sort of . . .
finished
.’

‘Mm. Personally, I think it’s got something to do with her being so mad on acting. It is a pretty
affected
profession, don’t you think? I mean, that friend of hers,
Stella, wasn’t at all like that. She wanted to know all about us, whereas Louise didn’t ask a single thing. How
can
she say she’s fed up with war talk? We’re in a
war, that’s what we’ve got, her as well as us.’

‘Well, if she comes down to dinner in trousers, the Duchy will be furious.’

But she didn’t. Apparently she tried, but was sent back by Aunt Villy and returned rather sulky and subdued in her green woollen dress – too late for the glass of sherry that Uncle
Hugh had poured for her.

Clary knew that the news must be particularly bad, because nobody talked about it at dinner. They kept to small things like the price of petrol having gone up: at one and elevenpence a gallon,
the Duchy said they ought to lay up the big car and only use the small one. Uncle Hugh said how marvellous everyone was being at the wharf and Aunt Villy was actually quite funny about training to
be an air-raid warden, after trying to get all sorts of war jobs and nobody wanting her. ‘The language is all like filling in forms,’ she said, ‘so pedantic as to be almost
incomprehensible. You never
start
anything, you commence. You don’t
go
, you proceed, and so on.’ And they talked about music because the Duchy always enjoyed that and
Aunt Villy said she’d been to a marvellous concert that week, of baroque music that one hardly ever heard. Somebody asked who had been conducting, and she said, ‘Oh – that friend
of Jessica, Laurence Clutterworth. He really is most awfully good,’ and she saw Louise suddenly look at her mother with an expression that was either wary, or hostile or frightened, or
perhaps all three – she could not determine.

‘You would have loved it, Duchy darling,’ Villy was saying, ‘and you, too, Syb. Next time he does a concert in London we must go. And I thought possibly, if he gets a bit of
time off, he might come down here and we could have an impromptu concert?’ She was back to the Duchy again, who said how nice that would be and, perhaps, if she got leave at any point, Sid
could come too.

‘She
gets
leave, but never with any warning!’ Aunt Rach said. ‘And last time she couldn’t come because Evie had come up to London to collect her summer clothes
and go to the doctor, and she insisted on Sid going with her.’

After dinner, however, they did listen to the news, and as Polly wanted to, she stayed. There had been a German attack, and the Belgian army had got cut off from the Allies. ‘Bang goes
gallant little Belgium,’ Uncle Hugh said. He looked bitter. The news ended with something about someone called Trotsky being injured in his home in Mexico, but nobody seemed much concerned
about that, and when she asked who he was, Uncle Hugh just said, ‘A bloody little Red.’ Then the telephone rang, and it was Uncle Edward. Villy had a long talk with him, and then came
and fetched Uncle Hugh, who was also ages. When he came back, he said, ‘It’s time all the young were in bed.’ Everybody concurred in this with such firmness that they simply had
to go, and Louise, combining with them in resenting this treatment, became quite human, and they all played racing demon, turning up their cards in ones to make the game faster.