Chapter 15: Hugh and Jemima - The Golden Hours

‘The thing is,’ Jemima said, her little hat neat on her pale shining head, ‘that things are just as likely to go wrong if you don’t talk about them, as if you do. People knowing things doesn’t make any difference.’

‘It makes a difference to how people feel about it,’ said Hugh.

‘It gives them a chance to help,’ she said, cautiously. He looked at her over his glasses. The look was fond and understanding, and spoke quite clearly.

When they walked together, she would walk on his left, on the side of his half arm. She would tuck her hand into the crook of the remaining elbow, above the stump gloved in black silk, his jacket sleeve carefully pinned. This kept his good arm free to be used. Sometimes she would fold her own hand over the blind end of his sleeve. He still did daily stretches and lifted a set of weighted straps, in order to keep his body level and his shoulders strong. In bed, he would pull her gently on top of him, roll her carefully over with a look, balance on his elbow while negotiating taking his own weight so as not to squash her. He would ask her quietly, ‘Am I reaching you?’ Jemima did not talk to anybody about sex and had no way of knowing that this care of Hugh’s was why her experience was so much more fulfilling than that of many women. She didn’t know if he had ever made love to a woman as a man with both arms. His damage gave his love a sensitivity and sweetness that Ken’s glamour and confidence, in their youth, had never had. The bed part of things had hardly declined over the years. Her love and admiration for Hugh was constant as sunrise.

Today they were walking down Marylebone High Street towards Maison Sagne, which mostly served elegant lunches to ladies who’d been in boutiques all morning but also did nicely for couples who’d been to the doctor, as long as the man wasn’t the kind who required meat and brandy at every meal. Hugh liked soup, and even small salads with boiled eggs and watercress and foreign mayonnaise, so he was happy to sit among the beautiful women with their packages and stripey hat boxes.

The subject around which they circled was his health. They had been married fifteen years now, longer than either of them had been with their spouses who had died: her Ken, father of her twins, and his Sybil, mother of Polly, Simon and Wills. Both had loved their original spouse deeply and never thought to lose them: Sybil to cancer; Ken to the war. Jemima had quietly noted the day when this marriage had outpaced her first. She had, without fuss and without anybody noticing, visited a smart little florist in Knightsbridge which she knew, because she had rung them up, had tuberoses. She’d spent an absurd amount of money on buying seven of them, taken them, fanned out in their tissue paper and cellophane, on the train to Cambridge where his people were from, walked to Little St Mary’s and laid them on his flat grave. She remembered how on the day of his funeral the tiny graveyard, walled in lichen and moss, had been awash with bluebells and wild garlic, forget-me-nots, bracken and cow parsley, the old stone crosses and slabs rising like rocks and lighthouses from a sea of tiny bells and froth.

Nobody had told her that someone dying doesn’t stop you being in love with them. You love them just as much. They’re just not there to be loved. In fact, you probably love them more, because they’re not there to disappoint you . . .

But if you’re sensible, you take a more realistic attitude; put them aside, and get on with things. They had been lucky to get his body back, she’d been told, to be buried there with his father, his name added to the stone. And she’d gone to London and stayed with her sister and got a job because children have to be fed. And Hugh had been her boss.

So she had known about looking after Hugh long before she came to love him. She could see his headaches coming almost before he felt them: there was a pallor; his skin seemed to contract slightly to his well-made bones, giving him a smoothness, a sense of chill. It made him look rather saintly, and was undoubtedly attractive. ‘I think I’m soon to become that pale green you like so much,’ he would say, with an almost flirtatious cast to it – it was the closest he got to talking about that sort of thing. So many things he didn’t talk about. Well, it’s that generation, isn’t it, she thought. Jemima was only ten years younger than Hugh, but in 1914 that ten years had been the difference between being in the war, and not; being a soldier and being a child. And fifty years on it still echoed. Being Hugh or Edward, both of them complex men, who had headed out as teenagers, and being their little brother Rupert – but then Rupert had had his own experience in the second war. What that experience was, still nobody fully knew. Except his wife, Zoë. Jemima was fairly sure that Zoë knew. They wouldn’t have been able to save their marriage if she didn’t. In the late forties, when Jemima was finding her feet with this close and intense family and had looked to Zoë as someone who had managed to find a way in, she had seen the delicate courtesy with which Rupert and Zoë treated each other, and it had filled her with fear for them. Then one day, one visit, it simply wasn’t there any more. Suddenly, they were no longer face-to-unhappy-face, uncomfortable, sneaking looks and dodging each other’s attention; they were arm-in-arm looking out, cheerful, safe. Their smiles were complicit; their laughter untrammelled, their physical propinquity relaxed. Jemima had felt it like a long-held breath let out.

Hugh had been generally well since his heart attack six years earlier. He went obediently, if grumpily, to his check-ups. Occasionally – including on this occasion – he allowed Jemima to go with him. His cardiologist, Dr Shellhorn, young and keen, liked him. Jemima’s theory was that Dr Shellhorn’s father would have been in the first war, and something about the ‘array of minor damage’, as Hugh called it, spoke to him. Certainly he was always very – perhaps too – helpful.

The appointments were annual now. Each year, Dr Shellhorn would say, ‘I’ve been speaking to a colleague of mine, and it seems things have moved along rather, and I was wondering if you’d heard about . . .’

Last time, it had been further developments in scanning and in brain surgery, the combination of which meant, according to Dr Shellhorn, there could be a chance of Hugh being eligible for a scan which could locate with considerable precision the shrapnel in his brain, which meant that there was a chance that it – at least some of it – could now be surgically removed, which would – almost certainly – relieve the headaches. This time, it was artificial hands: the Russians had come up with a thought-controlled prosthetic arm, involving myoelectric signals from the flexors and extensors of the wrist; there was a chap in Austria having some success with a version of it, and the Americans had worked out how to fit the batteries in the wrist unit. New socket designs for transradial amputees like Hugh could provide self-suspension, so there would be no need for any wiring or harness above the elbow . . .

Hugh had quietly stood up and left the room.

Jemima, torn between going with him and staying for a moment with the astonished doctor to clarify things, chose the latter.

‘He doesn’t use “amputee”,’ she said. ‘It’s not how he sees himself. He’s never been interested in any kind of replacement hand. He’s skilled – it’s been a long time. And –’

‘It needn’t cost you anything,’ Dr Shellhorn had said. ‘This could be done by the National Health Service.’

Jemima had been shocked. It had never occurred to her to use what she still thought of as the new health service. It was for poor people, surely? But then, Jemima had been poorer than any Cazalet, as a child. Respectable, though. Her mother had said they were middle class, because they had carpets, not lino. Louise said the Cazalets were middle class, because they didn’t (apart from Polly) have stately homes, and the money was from trade. But the Cazalets were now (apart from Polly, thanks to the Turners – I mean! thought Jemima. You couldn’t make it up) poorer than they’d ever been, since the company finally fell off the side of the cliff, taking the old house and everybody’s share values and bits of private income with it. But they remained, by any normal person’s standards, upper class. ‘Are we?’ had been Rachel’s comment, when the subject had once, rather embarrassingly, come up, ‘Upper-middle class, perhaps?’ Jemima had looked round for somebody whose eye she could catch, at just what a tremendously upper-class thing this was to say. There was nobody.

I’m upper-class by marriage, she thought. But she knew it didn’t work that way. How it did work was something which she both knew in her bones, as every English person does, and which at the same time remained a mystery to her, as it does to everyone. And in addition, it was changing, changing all the time now.

Even so. The National Health Service! She was fairly sure that Dr Shellhorn wasn’t part of that.

‘He won’t think of it,’ she said. ‘He’s –’ but that was all she could manage, before smiling apologetically and scooting past the heavy smooth-hinged door back into the waiting room, with its copies of The Lady, and Horse and Hound, its prints of Scottish landscapes, and Hugh standing looking out of the window at the rain on Wimpole Street.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ she said, the usual apology of the English lady when there’s nothing to apologise for.

‘Not at all, not at all,’ said Hugh. ‘Quite amusing, almost. An electric Meccano arm on an old man like me!’

There was no way for her to tell him how she admired his patience and determination, his skill, and his humility, when it came to his arm. Saying so would violate an unwritten contract of modesty between them. In the bathroom at Ladbroke Grove the little nailbrush was still screwed into the wall above the basin, so he could, at least there, give his hand a good wash on his own. She’d tried to find one for Fakenham, but it turned out you couldn’t get them any more. Which was a good thing, of course, though not much help to Hugh. Years ago, he’d told her that they had them in the gents’ at his club as well. She wondered who would decide when it was time to take them down, as the damaged men acquired Meccano arms and robot hands, or as war fell out of style, and they got to keep their limbs intact. She used to see a man sometimes in Kensington Gardens, about Hugh’s age, who had one of those faces that had been put back together, perhaps by the famous Mr Gillies. He had a look of Buster Keaton: tragicomic and crooked, fundamentally beautiful. These men.

No. She couldn’t tell him, without drawing the attention that he so didn’t want.

‘You’re not old, my old darling,’ she said, and he patted her arm.

The main message, though, was that Hugh’s blood pressure was still high and he was not to worry about anything, ever.