Marking Time (64 page)

‘You look lovely. And serene. Lovely,’ he repeated and put his hand under her hair at the back of her neck. ‘I rather miss your neck.’

‘I’ll grow my hair again. But I don’t think long grey hair is awfully attractive, do you?’

‘Your hair isn’t grey?’

‘One day it will be.’

He turned her head towards him and kissed her mouth. ‘I’m going to tuck you up now,’ he said at the end of this silent gentleness.

‘Oh, Hugh! Hugh! Do you realise how much better I am? I can tell you now. I’ve been feeling awful for so long that I’d begun to think – to be afraid – do you know I
even thought that perhaps I might be going to die! Oh!’ She made a little sound between a laugh and a sob. ‘It’s such a relief to tell you. I couldn’t have before, but now
– I am so
much
better! For a week now. Every day!’

He knelt to put his arms round her and held her as tears of exquisite relief came and slipped away. When she could look at him she saw unfathomable sadness. He shook his head almost irritably.
‘Do you mean you have been feeling all that and not telling me?’

‘I couldn’t. Darling, I didn’t want to distress you. And look how right I was. It would have been needless distress.’

‘I want you,’ he said, in a voice that steadied as he spoke, ‘I want you to promise me that if you should ever, by any chance, feel anything
like
that again,
you’ll tell me. Don’t keep anything from me.’

‘Darling, I don’t. You know I don’t. Excepting that. I couldn’t tell you that I thought I was going to die!’

‘Do you really think it would be better for me to know – afterwards – that you’d been through all that by yourself? How would you feel if it was the other way
round?’

‘Oh, my dear love. If it was
you,
I’d know – whether you told me or not.’

She said it with such a certain and tender conviction that he had to dismiss the pain it caused him.

‘Well,’ he said doggedly. ‘Promise me now.’

So she did.

‘It occurs to me,’ Clary said, ‘that perhaps people on mountains in the Old Testament really got struck by lightning which turned them from being gloomy and
hopeless about destiny into quite bossy, optimistic people. A sort of electric-shock treatment from God.’

They were stacking logs in the porch outside the front door and Christopher, who was bringing the logs in a wheelbarrow, had just told them they were doing it all wrong.

‘He’s certainly much better,’ Polly said. ‘But it must be a most frightening treatment. Strapped down on a bed thing and being given shocks.’

‘Has he told you about it? I ought to know.’

‘He said he felt so awful that at first he didn’t really care. And afterwards he had the most terrific headache
but
also a tremendous feeling of relief. But after a few
treatments, he started to dread them.’

‘He is better, though. He hasn’t cried for ages.’

‘That’s Oliver. Clever Dad for getting him. The trouble is, he’s beginning to dread what will happen to him when he is quite better.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘He’s afraid his father will get him sent back to the aerodrome to go on levelling ground for runways or, worse, make him join the Army.’

‘I don’t think the Army will take him. Not after all that treatment.’

‘You don’t
know
, Clary. And now Uncle Raymond’s working in some grand hush-hush establishment, he’s probably got a fiendish amount of influence.’

‘That won’t make any difference. Louise says that one of the actors in Devon couldn’t be called up because he had
flat feet
! I ask you! If they’re as fussy as
that, it’s a wonder they’ve got an army at all.’

Louise had come back, very run-down, as the Duchy put it, and Dr Carr had said her tonsils ought to come out.

‘She ought to be helping us.’

‘She’s gone with Zoë to the nursing home. I could see her practising to be Florence Nightingale this morning.’

‘Do you think she’s in love?’

‘With that portrait painter bloke? Haven’t the faintest.’

‘She writes to him a lot. She doesn’t want her tonsils out in case he gets leave.’

‘That might not be love. You might want to see
anyone
rather than have your tonsils out. Oh, God! Here come the children.’

Neville’s school had broken up early because of scarlet fever. ‘I won’t be getting it,’ he informed everybody. ‘I simply loathe the boy who started it all. I
loathed him so much I never went within about two miles of him.’

‘There aren’t two miles in your school,’ Lydia said. ‘It’s quite a small place really.’ But she and Neville had become friends enough to run a shop together,
which sold what Clary and Polly considered to be such awful and boring things that nobody bought them except out of kindness. ‘And I’m running out of
that
,’ Clary said,
‘quite apart from the cash. How could I possibly want to buy my own last year’s vest – outgrown and holey to boot?’

Apart from any clothes they could cadge, they sold insects described by Neville as racing beetles, each in its own matchbox where they quickly died, Christmas cards made by themselves, cigarette
cards, old toys, empty bottles, relics from the museum long since abandoned, bead necklaces made by Lydia, shampoo, made by immersing slivers of soap in boiling water and poured into old medicine
bottles with labels made by Lydia: ‘SHAM POO’ they read ‘for all hairs’. They sold information cards, each one having six pieces of information on them. ‘How to put
out fires’ – Lydia got that out of Mrs Beeton’s
Household Management.
‘Put silver sand into large bottles and store for use,’ it read. What to do if chased by
a bull: ‘Stand very still and take off anything red you are wearing.’ The grown-ups bought these, and they began to run out of information. The shop was on the first-floor landing, and
Polly and Clary thought it a perfect pest. Lydia and Neville crouched there for hours, cajoling, whining, bullying people to buy things. ‘It ought to be against the law,’ Clary
said.

Now they arrived, very sulky, because they’d been told to help with the logs. Luckily Christopher appeared with another load, and said he would take them to load up the next barrow.

‘Thanks very, very much,’ Neville said. He was practising sarcasm, but people rather tiresomely continued not to be withered by his efforts.

The Duchy was in a bad humour. ‘I do not see how everybody is to be fitted
in,’
she said. She was making toast for tea in the morning room with Rachel, the
great-aunts, Zoë and Louise. The room was very full of people, and the quantity of toast that needed to be made was flustering her.

‘Duchy dear, let me show you my chart,’ Rachel said. She was anxious that Sid would not be included and as she had leave at Christmas, this would be awful. ‘If we put the
younger children on the top floor in one of the maids’ old rooms—’

‘The windows don’t open, and it is most unhealthy for children to sleep without fresh air,’ the Duchy replied, handing out two pieces of toast which her sisters seized.

‘Although you never used to eat two pieces at tea-time,’ Dolly reproved Flo. ‘You always said it spoiled your dinner.’

Zoë looked up from her sewing. ‘Duchy, I have been thinking that I really should go and visit my mother. She hasn’t seen Juliet since she was born.’

‘For Christmas, darling? Are you sure you want to be away at
Christmas?’

‘I think Mummy would especially like that. And it would give you an extra room.’

She did not want to go very much, but she had had a letter from her mother’s friend hinting that all was not well, and saying how much her mother longed to see her grandchild. And
anyone
would want to see Juliet, Zoë thought. ‘I really do want to go,’ she said. ‘Apart from anything else, I’ve never been to the Isle of Wight.’

‘The Isle of Wight?’ Dolly repeated. ‘How, I wonder, do you
get
there?’

‘As it is an island, I should have thought it was fairly obvious that a boat would be involved,’ Flo said.

‘Really, Flo dear, I am not a
lunatic
. It is
because
it is an island that I wondered. I thought that civilians were not allowed overseas. There
is
a war
on,’ she reminded her sister.

‘The Isle of Wight, Dolly, is
not
overseas. It is part of the British Empire.’

‘And what, pray, is Canada? Or Australia? Or New Zealand? And incidentally, Flo, you have the teeniest bit of blackberry jam on your chin, to the right of your larger mole.’

Flo flushed with anger, and just as Rachel and the Duchy were exchanging glances of resigned amusement, put her hand up to her face. Then she made a sudden, shocking convulsive movement, became
rigid and started to fall sideways off her chair.

She was caught by Rachel and Zoë who between them levered her back onto the chair. The Duchy said, ‘Ring for Dr Carr,’ and put her arms round the stiff body. ‘It’s
all right, my darling sister. Kitty’s with you, dearest, it’s all right,’ and gently she removed the red bandana from Flo’s head, which seemed locked curiously to one side;
her eyes glared unseeingly with a look of outrage and crumbs of toast appeared at one side of her lopsided mouth. When Rachel returned, saying that Dr Carr was on his way, they all three lifted her
and with difficulty laid her on the ottoman by the window, and Zoë went to get a blanket.

Dolly sat through this, frozen with shock, but when Flo was on the ottoman she got heavily to her feet and then painfully down onto her knees by it.

‘Flo! I didn’t mean it! You know I didn’t mean it!’ She took her sister’s unresisting hand, pressed each finger round her own and held it to her breast. Tears were
streaming down her face. ‘It was just a little joke. Don’t you remember our spinach joke? When Mamma said that to you just after you came out and the curate came to dinner? A teeny bit
of spinach? And you were
so
upset. But afterwards we laughed together because it was so like Mamma.’ With her other hand she pulled her handkerchief out from her wrist band and
tenderly wiped the crumbs away from Flo’s mouth. Then she looked up at Rachel, who was arranging the blanket, and said in a bewildered, anxious voice, ‘She doesn’t seem to hear
me. Is she very ill?’

‘She’s had a stroke, Dolly darling. Why don’t you—’

‘No! I’m not going to leave her. Not for a second. We’ve always been together – through thick and thin, Flo, you always said, and, my word, we had our share of thin,
didn’t we, my lamb? Oh, Flo –
do look
at me!’ Rachel tried to persuade her to have a chair, but she remained painfully on her knees until the doctor came.

Flo died that evening, of another stroke which, Dr Carr told the Duchy, was a mercy since she had little chance of recovering from the first one. Dolly stayed with her until she died, and the
Duchy said she was sure that this was a comfort for Flo, but nobody knew whether she even realised who was with her. After she died, they were going to take the body away, but Dolly, who was
otherwise passive from grief and fatigue, became vehement in her refusal about this. Flo would stay in their room until her funeral, in her own bed, at home, with her family. For two days she
dusted the room and made her own bed, as the maids were made nervous by the still body with its younger, shrunken face, and the sickly violetish odour of the room. But the Duchy said that things
must be as Dolly wished and kept her going by consulting her about every detail of the funeral. Everybody tried to comfort her, but she blamed herself unceasingly and nothing that even the Duchy
could say would alter this. She got through the funeral with a thick veil to hide her poor bloodshot eyes, but after it the children noticed that she called them by the wrong names, and she was
also liable to break out into often incomprehensible reminiscence, in which, the Duchy said, Flo always emerged as a paragon.

‘I should think she should be given an animal to cheer her up,’ Polly said, the example of Christopher foremost in her mind.

‘A parrot,’ Clary suggested, ‘a nice Victorian bird.’

‘Or a rabbit,’ Lydia said: she badly wanted one herself and it wasn’t allowed. ‘They might let a grieving person have one.’