Marking Time (48 page)

‘Absolutely charming,’ he answered promptly with such a straight face that Louise felt he was on her side.

The evening before Louise was to go, Ernestine suddenly invited her to her room. She had learned that Louise was going away for a week. ‘I might have something for you.’

Unable to think of any decent way of getting out of this, Louise joined her after the customary roast meat and cabbage.

Ernestine offered her one of her black Balkan Sobranies and a glass of wine. Louise was seated on the end of her orange divan, while Ernestine found glasses and a corkscrew.

‘Are you going home to your family?’ she asked, when she had poured a glass and handed it over.

‘No.’ Louise found it difficult to lie, and also a part of her wanted to assert herself before Ernestine who thought the rest of them such a pack of children. ‘As a matter of
fact, I’m going to see my sailor, as you call him. He’s got a week’s leave and it happens to fit in.’

‘Good for
you
!’ She seemed genuinely admiring. ‘I rather thought that that might be what you were up to.’ She raised her glass. ‘Here’s to you
both!’ When she wasn’t jeering, her husky low voice was rather pleasant. ‘He’s not a sailor all the time, is he?’

‘Oh no. He’s a painter.’

‘An art student. Oh my!’

‘Not a student. A proper painter. He does portraits.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Michael Hadleigh.’

‘Michael
Hadleigh
? So you have a
famous
lover!’

‘He’s not exactly my
lover
.’ She felt herself beginning to blush and took a large swig of the wine. ‘I mean, I just
know
him – that’s
all.’

Ernestine leaned towards her and filled up her glass. ‘Well, it sounds as though he wants to know
you
better. You don’t expect to spend a week with him holding hands, do
you?’

‘N-no.’ That sounded idiotic to her. ‘Of course not.’

‘Well, then, my dear, perhaps you need a little advice.’ She got up and went to a chest of drawers, returning with what looked like a tube of toothpaste. ‘A precaution,’
she said, handing it to her.

Louise looked at it. ‘Volpar Gel,’ she read. ‘What’s it for?’

Ernestine rolled her eyes. ’My God! I can’t
believe
it! To stop you getting pregnant, you poor little innocent. Of course, later on, you’ll be needing a Dutch
cap.’

Louise had a sudden vision of herself wearing one of those little white caps with stiff wings on them that occurred in Dutch pictures, and spooning jelly straight from the tube into her mouth.
It seemed fantastic and silly and how on earth it would stop one having a baby she couldn’t imagine. She finished her second glass of wine while she considered this.

‘I am certainly not thinking of having a baby,’ she said. She said it as though she had considered the matter and decided – calmly, of course – against. I should like to
go now, she thought, but Ernestine, as though she had divined this, lit two cigarettes and handed her one. The gold tip was smudged with cyclamen lipstick, and Louise did not want it, but she felt
it would be rude to refuse.

‘Of course you aren’t. I’m only trying to help. I don’t suppose “Mummy” has told you much, has she? Anyway, you just go to any chemist and ask for a tube, and
you’ll get it. The other thing I wondered was whether you would like to borrow some less schoolgirly underwear. Torsten gave me a couple of nightdresses that he said gave him a kick.
I’ll show you.’

One was black chiffon, and the other of fuchsia-coloured satin trimmed with black lace.

She really meant to be kind, Louise thought, and decided that the easiest thing to do would be to accept one of them. She need never wear it, and Ernestine wouldn’t know.

‘It’s awfully kind of you—’ she began.

‘Balls! Always come to Auntie Ernestine when you want any advice about sex. You’d better take the tube as well. I don’t see you getting up the nerve to go into a chemist to ask
for it.’

Soon after this Louise made her escape. She felt uncomfortably that although she didn’t really like Ernestine much, she seemed to have meant well. She had also opened up vistas of what the
week before her might hold that made her almost – but not quite – wish that she had never agreed to it.

The Week . . . It seemed wonderfully long – the opposite of what she had imagined a marvellous time to be. She had thought that when she was really enjoying herself the
time would go in a flash, but these seven days spun themselves out, so that after about two of them, she felt as though she had been living like that for years. The first day she felt very nervous.
He was wearing his uniform as he had been the first night that she had met him. He put his arms round her and gave her a hug, kissing her face in a brotherly manner. He had made plans. They were to
go to a revue,
New Faces,
at the Comedy Theatre. ‘I got seats for the early performance,’ he said, ‘so that we can have some supper before we drive down to Hatton. I know
it’s not highbrow enough for you, but it’s supposed to be awfully good. Is that all right?’

She said it sounded lovely.

‘There’s plenty of time for you to change and have a bath.’ He led her upstairs; the house seemed very quiet.

‘The servants are all in Wiltshire,’ he said. ’My stepfather is going to shut the house and live in his club, or take a small service flat. He doesn’t want Mummy to be in
London.’

‘Your stepfather?’

‘Yes. Did you think he was my father?’

‘I did. But nobody said his name. I mean, the servants called him Sir Peter, and you and your mother called him Peter, so how could I know?’

‘You couldn’t. Don’t look so anxious. My father died in the last war. I can hardly remember him.’ He showed her to the spare room and the bathroom a few steps down on a
half landing. ‘I’m going to have a bath too. My quarters are up top. Don’t be long, I don’t want to waste you.’

The revue was wonderful; the most memorable bit, she thought, was the lovely Judy Campbell singing ‘A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square’.

Afterwards, he took her to Prunier’s and she had her first oysters. Then he told her more about his father. ‘He was a bit of a hero, so I feel I have a lot to live up to.’

She fell asleep in the car driving to the country, and he woke her by gently ruffling her hair. At the door of her bedroom, he kissed her again in the same way that he had greeted her in London,
and said, ‘Sleep well. See you at breakfast.’

It wasn’t at all how Ernestine had envisaged.

One or two curious things happened during the week. His mother, Zee, had announced that Rowena was coming to luncheon the following day. Michael had seemed upset by this.

‘Oh, Mummy! Why?’

‘Darling, she wanted so much to see you on your leave. I hadn’t the heart to refuse her.’

Rowena turned out to be the beautiful girl in the painting. She arrived impeccably dressed as a country lady: tweed skirt, cashmere to match, well-polished shoes, and a velveteen jacket that
suited the ensemble. Louise, in trousers and a Viyella shirt, felt uncouth beside her. Her natural pale blonde hair hung in a simple bob, she wore no make-up, and her face was colourless, so that
her large, wide-apart pale eyes dominated it. She looked unhappy. Lunch was rather a tense affair; Zee made Michael talk about his ship – which, Louise noticed, he seemed very much to enjoy.
His mother seemed to know a great deal about his naval life: when he mentioned Oerlikon guns, she immediately knew what they were. She and Rowena sat more or less in silence throughout the meal.
After it, Zee suggested that Michael should show Rowena the stables, and settled herself with Louise in the library.

‘Poor little Rowena,’ she said as she matched some wool. ‘She is
so
in love with Michael. But really, it simply isn’t
on
.’ She looked up from her
sewing at Louise, silent and pinned to the spot. ‘But I think she understands that now. Michael is a great breaker of hearts. I do hope you won’t let him break yours.’

After about an hour, they returned. Louise noticed that Rowena had been crying. She thanked Zee for the lunch, and said that she must be going.

‘I’m sure that Michael will see you to your car.’

As they left the room, after polite goodbyes, Louise caught Zee observing her. She smiled, and Louise found herself unable to return it.

Later, when they were up in the studio, and Michael was pinning paper to his board to make another drawing, she said, ‘The portrait you did of Rowena is awfully good.’

‘Yes,’ he answered absently, ‘one of my better ones. Now, you sit in that chair – there.’ He drew up a small, low stool and sat, so that he was slightly below her.
‘Now, turn your head a little to the right, and look at me. A little more – more, now stop. That’s perfect. Sorry. Relax, I’ve got to sharpen my pencil.’

But she felt she couldn’t leave it there. ‘Your mother said that she was very much in love with you.’

‘I’m afraid she is. Poor little Rowena. We did have a bit of a fling. She’s perfectly lovely, of course, and she has a remarkably sweet nature, but, as Mummy said, she
isn’t the brightest. I’m afraid I should have got fearfully
bored
.’

‘You mean, if you’d married her?’

‘If I’d married her, yes.’ He was sharpening the pencil with a penknife very carefully, scraping the lead to a point. Then he said, ‘She realised when she saw you. So you
don’t have to be jealous.’

‘I’m not jealous!’ She really meant it, she wasn’t; she was shocked. She imagined Rowena preserving her dignity in the face of what seemed to her almost vulgar
humiliation, getting into her car and driving far enough down the drive before she broke down . . .

‘Darling Louise! You are looking quite fierce. But Mummy was quite right. It was high time I told her, and she said she knew the moment she walked into the room and saw you. Now,
let’s get you back into position. Head to the right, no, that’s too far, that’s better. That’s perfect.’

Somehow or other, he soothed and charmed her into not thinking any more about it at the time, and indeed as the week continued, found herself so basking in the general approval that emanated
from his mother and stepfather that she did not think about it at all. She was treated as though she was a precocious little genius, one of
them
– privileged, gifted, lucky in every
imaginable way – and because of her youth, petted, admired, encouraged to entertain. Sir Peter shared her passion for Shakespeare and this time easily persuaded her to play some of the great
set pieces to him: Viola, Juliet, Queen Katherine from Henry VIII and Ophelia, and talked to her about the plays, taking her opinions seriously and with a courteous approval. ‘Don’t you
think that Katherine and Wolsey were the only two parts he wrote of that play?’ Why did she think that? Because their parts were written in iambic pentameter, whereas Henry and the others
were not, and so on. When they played acting games in the evening, she was sufficiently encouraged by their admiration to shine, discovered, in fact, her talent for comedy. At home, nobody had been
anything like so interested in what she did and who she was and these benign expectations went to her head. They were compounded also by the fact that the family seemed to consort so much with the
great and famous. There seemed to be nobody whom they did not know, and usually intimately. She noticed this most with Zee, as she now confidently called her. It was impossible to mention a
politician, a playwright, a conductor whom she had not known or knew now. The visitor’s book was full of their names, together with actors, musicians, writers, painters and dancers of renown.
They were predominantly men. Books in the library were inscribed by their authors in varying tones of homage and affection to her, and Louise concluded that someone who had clearly been – and
still was – so much loved must be a very wonderful and unusual person. One day at tea-time a telegram arrived for her, and Louise noticed that at once Peter, as she now called him, moved
across the room to be near her while she opened it. She read it and handed it to him with a smile: ‘Winston,’ she said. ‘I sent
him
one telling him how well I thought he
was doing.’

It was all a far cry from Stow House – or even from her own family. They asked her about her family and she described them as interestingly as she could: her mother dancing with the
Ballets Russes, her father’s distinguished war record, the way they all lived together under her grandfather’s patriarchal roof. On Friday, her mother rang up, and she went to the small
study called the telephone room.

‘I had no idea that you were not at Stow House,’ her mother began; she sounded very displeased.

‘Well, they didn’t want me for a week, and Michael asked me to stay here as he had a week’s leave.’

‘You should have rung to tell me your plans. You know that perfectly well.’

‘Sorry, Mummy. I would have if I’d been going anywhere new. It’s only a week, anyway.’

‘That isn’t the point. Daddy had a couple of days off, and he wanted us to go down to Devon to see you. We might have gone all that way, and then found that you were not there. We
very nearly did, as a matter of fact. Daddy wanted it to be a surprise.’