Chapter 18: Zoë and Clary - The Golden Hours

PART THREE: SUMMER 1964

‘Zoë, may I ask your advice?’ Clary said.

Zoë was in the garden at Bank House, surrounded by apple trees and mashed-up lawn, attempting to direct Georgie to clean up various aspects of the zoo which overran it. Georgie had lured Laura up to Trafalgar Square to catch pigeons to feed his hawk. Zoë had found three of them dead, unplucked and unwrapped, in the fridge. Their gnarled little red feet for some reason reminded her of her mother’s death. Plus, he’d used the kitchen scissors to cut the dog’s fringe, and two small Nubian goats had turned up, with noble profiles and no notice. Words had been exchanged.

So she was absolutely not in the mood for the garden, and now the lowering summer afternoon was heavy with potential rain. She was only doing it at all because she wanted Rupert to notice and, with luck, take on the job, at which he was much better than her. Clary asking for advice was a far more tempting prospect. After all these years, Zoë still got a little thrill of warmth and gratitude when her stepdaughter, who had for so long kept herself determinedly away, turned to her for anything. And advice! The best.

‘Of course, darling,’ she said. ‘Georgie!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘At least two pens cleaned out, all right? Your father will be out to check. You can put the gubbins on the compost heap and don’t pretend you don’t know where it is.’

‘Cup of tea?’ Clary suggested, and they went up the steps to the kitchen. They had given up on the original kitchen, in the basement, with its barred and shutterable windows, its black stove and York stone tiles worn by many tired feet and a hundred and fifty years of tidal flooding. Zoë had found one too many flurries of tiny crabs in the pantry, and demanded use of a ground-floor room, with some light, where the food wouldn’t be at risk, ‘before the children turn into troglodytes’. George, of course, had wanted to keep the crabs for his zoo. ‘Are they the ones with furry claws?’ he’d asked, and suggested converting the cellar into a crabbery, and could he choose a lobster at the fishmonger’s as a companion for them? Harriet had pointed out that the crabs were probably Chinese, and that lobsters can go at ten miles an hour and grow to four feet long – ‘Only if they’re a hundred years old!’ exclaimed Georgie – and that Zoë wouldn’t want them coming up the stairs. ‘And what if they breed?’ she’d asked. ‘We could eat them,’ said Georgie. ‘And make real mittens out of their claws. Then we wouldn’t have to have art students all over the place. Though I know you love the art students, Harriet.’ And she had blushed, and Zoë had thought, oh God.

This change of kitchen was a direct result, really, of the war. Such kitchens had been good enough for servants, but now ladies had to toast cheese and produce Sunday lunch. Then one day Rupert had come home with an Elizabeth David cookbook and a desire to air his memories of salade Niçoise and beef daubes with olives in, from his time in France – he had quickly stipulated before the war, giving Zoë a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Since then, the cellar was for coal in plastic sacks, the accoutrements of Georgie’s zoo, and things that nobody cared about.

The new kitchen was a thing of beauty, full of novel equipment and children who had never known the upstairs/below-stairs world of family and staff. Not huge, but with windows you could fling open in summer, an iron staircase to the back garden, and the light of river water dancing on the ceiling on sunny days. None of that today. Zoë reminded herself to check that the floodgates to the front garden were secure before the tide turned.

Harriet, fifteen now and tall like her father, was in there making scones, wrapped in an ancient apron which Zoë remembered from Home Place. Clary moved Harriet aside to put the kettle on, and then waited till she had slid the metal tray into the oven before saying, ‘We’ll take them out. You go and do your homework. Off you go now, shoo.’

The two women sat. ‘It’s a how-best-should-I-go-about-this advice,’ Clary said.

‘Spill the beans,’ said Zoë.

Clary huffed.

‘You know my play,’ she said eventually, staring at an important mark on the kitchen table.

‘Which one?’ said Zoë, who went to them all, and took friends, and brought Clary flowers.

‘Three is Not Company,’ Clary said. ‘The one about the, er, couple having difficulties.’

‘The affair one?’ said Zoë.

Clary grunted yes.

‘What about it?’ said Zoë cautiously. She had watched that play on tenterhooks, uncertain whether or not Clary knew anything about Zoë and Rupert’s history during the war: about the French woman, Michèle, about Jack Greenfeldt. Or about the other thing, the thing that was never mentioned at all: Zoë’s poor little Nobody’s Child, the baby who, Zoë told herself now, on the rare occasions the memory surfaced, had not so much died as never quite lived. Which is almost the same as never having existed. Or so she told herself. Quite convincingly too. Though a sorrow like that never leaves a woman’s heart. Always a quiet shadow in a corner, undisturbed, eternal.

But it had soon become apparent the play was not about her and Rupert, it was even closer to home.

‘Well,’ said Clary.

‘Does someone want to do a new production?’ Zoë asked. ‘Because frankly, Clary, surely you learnt your lesson last time, didn’t you? I mean, you’re not considering it. Surely?’

‘It’s not –’ said Clary, but before Zoë could relax she blurted out, ‘It’s film. Someone’s been wanting to make a film. Based on it. It came up as an idea eighteen months ago; they couldn’t raise the money and it went away like these things do, but now they’ve got an investor and they want me to write the script, and be some kind of producer, and be involved. They might need me to go to America! To Hollywood! Zoë, it’s the biggest opportunity of my life. You know the last time film was mentioned at all I had to turn it down because of being pregnant with Buttercup, but she’s quite big now and there’s Nanny, and the household here . . .’

‘She’s four,’ said Zoë. ‘And if by household you mean me, you might as well say so.’

‘I mean the whole thing,’ said Clary. ‘I mean that all that side of things is organisable. Harriet and Bertie could go to boarding school if it came to it.’

‘You’re against boarding school,’ said Zoë. ‘You think it causes lasting psychological damage to tender minds. You’re always saying so.’

‘For small children – they’re teenagers now! They might love it! And only if it came to it. I mean, I’m sure it wouldn’t. And we don’t know how long it would be for even if it did come about. It might be just a few weeks. Obviously I want to be here for them and Archie, of course I do. But Zoë – wouldn’t it be marvellous?’

‘And how would you afford it?’

‘They pay, Zoë. Especially the Americans.’

Zoë had never earned a penny in her life. Women like her just . . . didn’t. The topic itself made her nervous.

‘Are you planning on earning more than Archie?’ she said. ‘Because husbands don’t like that.’

‘Well, it wouldn’t be hard,’ Clary said, and then bit her mouth shut. Archie is doing what he loves and that is how it should be. So the art school eats any money it makes. We are fine. Toodling along. ‘But listen,’ she said. ‘How can I bring it up? That I want to do it? You understand, don’t you?’

‘I don’t,’ said Zoë. ‘I don’t understand why you’re even thinking about it.’ It would hurt your husband deeply, she didn’t say. It would upset your children, mark you for life as a woman who knows rather too much about affairs. It would disrupt this household, and confuse your father. And take me for granted. She eyed Clary over her glasses. ‘I’m afraid I think it’s pretty selfish.’

Clary was blinking.

‘Well, you did ask, darling,’ Zoë said. ‘You can’t have thought I’d say anything else?’

Clary was stunned. She had hated asking. So embarrassing, and somehow dispiriting. A person really ought to know what to do without having to talk to other people. She knew what she wanted to do. Why wasn’t she just doing it? Because I want permission, I suppose, she thought sadly. If Zoë had agreed with me, then I could have said so, and that would’ve been an extra leg when – if – all right, when – Archie doesn’t like it.

And if it had been this hard telling Zoë, who had nothing to do with it, she might never be able to tell Archie.

She had laid it out so elegantly in her own mind: a person’s right to tell her own stories, a writer’s obligation to the truth, sharing the load in a marriage so that each creative person got a go of being supported by the other. Surely Archie would see it her way? They’d already been through the pain of it, and the wounds had healed. Why would it matter, now, to revisit that tricky time? After all, both of them had succumbed to weakness and vulnerability, and it had been absolutely awful, for both of them. Good Lord, it wasn’t that she wanted to revisit all that! But human experience is what we have, isn’t it? All those things other people put down to experience, writers put down on paper. It’s how we get to understand things! And she’d be exposing herself as much as him . . . She remembered his cry, from last time: ‘But don’t you see? That’s you choosing to expose you. You choosing to expose me is really not the same and I would have thought you could see that.’

But she wanted it. So much.

For some years now Clary had been doing an exercise with herself, based on one she did with her characters. When inventing a fictional person, you don’t, as so many readers imagine, think about a real person and try to recreate them in every detail. If you’re lucky, a half-formed idea of a person comes to you, and then your job is to follow them around in your mind, keeping the voices of reality quiet so that you can catch this imaginary voice, hear it, build on it. Things start to accrue: tastes, habits, history, fears and desires. The person becomes a person, filling out, doing things, fitting in (or not) with the other voices. And then, when the moment is right, you start interrogating it. Why? You ask it. Why did you do that? Why did you say that? Why do you want that? And then you find you are interrogating yourself.

Why, Clary, do you want this so much? She had a theory: she wanted glory. And interrogating herself further, she’d uncovered four other things she wanted: to stop wanting glory, to stop feeling bad about being so cheap as to want glory, to understand why she wanted glory, and to understand why she thought it was cheap to want glory.

‘And,’ Zoë had said, ‘you’d be miserable if your children were at boarding school. You want people to be in the right place. You always have.’

Well, that was true, Clary thought. That’s the kind of thing that happens when a person’s mother is in Heaven and her father has disappeared into France. Perhaps I want glory to make them pay attention to me. Could be.

She’d been getting terrible pangs about her mother recently. It must be to do with age. Knowing she was older than her mother ever was.

Or is that all nonsense? The idea that something from so long ago could still matter?

No. No, it isn’t nonsense.

Buttercup had not been expected. Sometimes she was referred to as a mistake, but Archie pulled people up. ‘No,’ he’d say. ‘A surprise. Not a mistake.’ The fact was that when Clary stopped getting the curse she thought it must be the change coming early, and didn’t worry about it. It was only towards the end of 1958 that she felt some recognition of the physicality she was going through: this wasn’t bloating, or weight gain, or hot flushes; this was no middle-aged drying up. By the time she went to see a doctor, it turned out she was six months along.

And it wasn’t that she was unhappy about it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want another baby. It wasn’t that she didn’t love her when she arrived: Buttercup was almost absurdly lovable, hence her nickname. (Her actual name was Allegra, which didn’t suit her at all. Whereas Buttercup, as Archie had said, was her disposition.) But even third time round, the physicality of motherhood had floored her. ‘Milk for brains,’ she would say to herself, cradling her sweet child, and it was true. She had been surprised in the middle of other plans; hijacked, and she always quietly regretted the interruption Buttercup was to what had started, once Harriet and Bertie were old enough, to be her uninterrupted writing time. She never mentioned this, not even to herself, and she thought nobody knew.

She had wondered, at the time, if she should return to novels, which need less collaboration from the outside world. She could just write, in the time she could find, and not have to do all the negotiation and sociability involved with theatre, all the evenings watching other people’s dreadful (or perhaps worse, brilliant) plays, all the meetings and rehearsals and nights in pubs. All those relationships! She did try to write another novel, but it never made up its mind what it was meant to be, always just slipping out of her reach. It was sitting even now in a pile at the back of her desk, under a dusty Anglepoise.

So the film offer, now . . . Oh God, it’s so perfect! Money plus kudos buys time plus freedom. They always needed money; who didn’t? Bertie was at the local grammar – Dad had been a bit funny about that, but had understood the reality of it. He’d wanted to help but he was already paying Georgie’s fees, and Archie outright refused. For God’s sake, times change! And Uncle Edward had been quite ridiculous, horrified, poor darling. He seemed to carry an air of guilt, she thought. A kind of scurrying, as if dodging complaints and insults hurled at him. Perhaps he felt himself responsible for the failure of the company. Or felt that other people blamed him for the loss of former glories. He certainly held on to them: the well-worn, out-of-date, excellent-quality suits; the calls for champagne; the genuine alarm at the idea that a boy wasn’t going to Eton, or Stowe, or at least Radley. The idea that girls should go to school at all! Well, she had no common ground with him there.

A memory came to her, of him tooting on his cigar, looking round at Clary and Polly and Louise, saying, ‘But you lot did all right!’

‘We might have done much better, Daddy,’ Louise had said, and in all three of the women’s heads the word ‘goffering’ appeared, and they caught eyes and started to laugh.

‘What?’ he said. ‘No, what?’

Who had put him out of his misery? Louise, of course.

‘Boys and girls were taught different things, Dad,’ she’d said. ‘While Teddy and Simon and the rest of them were learning Latin and science and how to run the world, we were learning very specific and utterly outdated ways of ironing items of religious clothing.’

‘And the thing is, Uncle Edward,’ Clary said, ‘none of us was ever going to marry a nineteenth-century clergyman.’

God! she thought now. When would those people learn that their old-school ideas didn’t work any more, and probably never had? Children like Harriet and Bertie needed to be prepared for the modern world, and it was a different world. That was all. It was all about class, obviously. Edward was simply afraid that members of his family wouldn’t be posh. She would have felt sorry for Edward’s grandchildren, only he didn’t have any – which was interesting in itself. Apart from the spirited-away Sebastian, who scarcely existed any more in the family’s world, and that was pretty weird, and she did wish, sincerely but very carefully, that Louise could be a bit more . . . open? . . . about it . . . But apart from him, Edward and Villy’s children had not had children of their own. Clary wondered if it was because Edward and Villy were so . . . Hmm. Like many writers, she still couldn’t quite conceive how people older than herself operated. You sort of drift older, and at each stage you realise a little more about time passing – both in the sense of your own chronological age, and the era you’ve been living through – and with luck things clarify. But looking at people in their sixties or seventies from your thirties or forties required a clarity which Clary feared she didn’t yet have. Still, she thought briskly, acknowledging ignorance is a good springboard for learning. Were Edward and Villy dreadful parents? Of all the cousins on that side, Louise was the only one Clary saw regularly now, usually with Polly, in their trio, but also by chance, doing theatre things. Louise was often in The King’s Arms, next to the Royal Court on Sloane Square, talking to everybody, gossiping, fixing, connecting, being a kind of godmother to the younger actors and directors, especially protective of the new young girls, not too proud to know the hair and make-up people, wardrobe, techs. Since she broke up with Joseph, she had become almost manic about filling her time. But it was always hard to address the past with Louise; she was so determinedly forward-looking now that Clary and Polly had talked about how, in her company, they sometimes felt rather past it. Harking on the old days!

But if a writer can’t hark on the old days, and see how they formed the present, and what that might do to the future, what can they do? Louise was in the now. She always had been. Like a kind of worldly Buddhist, Polly had said. Simon was getting into Buddhism, so Polly knew quite a lot about it.

It was a short leap from that back to her own parents, Rupert and the long-lost Isobel. Clary was older now than her mother had ever been, had more children than her mother had ever had. Imagine losing your children! Never knowing them. Hardly even meeting Neville. And her own husband had known her mother better than she ever had.

Poor Isobel.

And Harriet, dear tender, calm Harriet, had come to her recently, quiet and hesitant, and said, ‘Mummy, this may sound daft and I don’t want to upset you. But I would like to know. If Zoë isn’t your mum, and I know she’s not, then who was your mum?’

Clary had been so surprised she’d just blurted, ‘Why, Isobel. You know that.’

‘I don’t really,’ Harriet said, almost apologetically. Which had stopped Clary short. If Harriet felt she didn’t know – well, it started her wondering if she herself knew. It made her look again at her father, and at Archie, at Rachel, holders of knowledge of the past. And that gave her a feeling of mild nausea, of a kind of emotional subsidence. Unsafety underfoot. Yes, it’s the writer’s job to look at the past and explore its effects, but some things, she simply didn’t want to look at. There are corridors in my mind, she thought, that I don’t want to go down, and they have doors I don’t want to open. What kind of attitude is that for a writer?

Where was I, she thought, with a physical flutter, where was I, when my mother was dying?

‘Of course you know,’ she’d said to Harriet, as a placeholder really. Harriet and Bertie; herself and Neville. Big sister, young brother. Dead mother. Well, at least I’m not dead! she thought, and that made her almost cheerful again.

* * *

The selfishness of this family! Zoë thought, as she washed up Harriet’s baking things. Yes, of course Harriet would have done them in the end, but if a person has to cook their family’s dinner, then at least she deserves a clean kitchen to do it in, and Mrs Thing (her name wasn’t Mrs Thing. Her name was Mrs Tring – but Rupert couldn’t resist, and it had stuck) only comes in the morning, and Harriet knows that. But then why should Harriet be burdened with domestic duties that Zoë and Clary hadn’t had to face till they were in their twenties and had left home? And which their mothers – well, certainly Clary’s mother – had never faced at all. Zoë didn’t like to think of Clary’s mother, without whose death she would not have had this life.

She wiped flour across the table, chasing it with a damp grey cloth (oh, why must cloths be grey? A businessman could make a fortune selling kitchen cloths that were not grey) and noting disconsolately the disgusting little worms of mucky dough this created. At least both the students currently lodging with them were out – there was a private view of some kind on Cork Street. Time was Zoë would have been delighted to go, to put on something backless and chat and look gorgeous, perhaps out to dinner and on to the Gargoyle . . . She’d had to let all that outside-world presentation go. She was still slight, still looked beautiful in spaghetti straps, but she was no longer electrically hard under her amazing skin; she kept her curls dark but they were no longer silky; she carried on with the cold cream but didn’t weep over the loosened flesh of her face. She was a woman whose husband loved her, whom domesticity had embraced; a better mother, she thought – and she held the thought as a medal – than her own mother had been. She’d ring Juliet later.

Well, she hoped the students would all find some rich collector to marry, or a job building galleries, because as far as she could see not one of them had an ounce of talent, despite Rupert and Archie’s best endeavours. You can’t teach talent, she thought, and found herself furious again that she had ended up nurturing a house full of talent – Rupert, Archie, Clary – and talent’s children, because God knows artists make funny parents – and wondering, again, if she had ever had even a scrap of talent lurking somewhere, which with care and attention might have been located, coaxed out and tended, recognised . . . and whether she might, had she identified it, have made something of it . . . Well, she’d never know now. Which probably meant she’d never had any talent in the first place. Because God knows talented people always seem to find a way to inflict it on everybody else.

Rupert came galloping down the stairs, paint-stained in his fisherman jumper. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘How sweet you look in your apron. But you don’t have to do that, surely? Isn’t Mrs Thing coming in the morning?’

‘I can’t make mess on top of mess,’ she said. ‘It’s like putting today’s make-up on top of yesterday’s.’

He smiled.

‘Like painting on a canvas that’s already got the remains of a bad painting on it,’ she said, seeking to clarify.

‘In fact, that can work quite well,’ he said, and started talking about impoverished seventeenth-century painters who couldn’t afford fresh canvasses, and the techniques to clean them, and how he’d been reading something about how X-rays could show . . .

She sat at the table and started slicing onions. He pulled out a chair and sat across from her.

‘Darling,’ he said.

She’d read somewhere that if you keep your mouth shut while slicing onions, you don’t cry, so she just looked up and smiled.

He had his elbows on the table, his hand across his mouth. This was a habit of his: she knew perfectly well it meant he was about to say something he didn’t want to have to say.

‘I want to go to France,’ he said. His eyes fixed far too importantly on hers.

She put down the knife.

‘Oh, that’s nice!’ she said, almost immediately, though she knew somewhere inside that it wasn’t. ‘For the summer? Just us, or with the Archie-and-Claries as well? It would probably be fun to see them while we’re out there but perhaps not actually go with them, don’t you think?’

‘Just me,’ he said, blurting it out so she knew he knew he was being unfair.

She paused, knife in hand.

Rupert. And France. Well, Rupert and France had history, and that history wasn’t talked about, and not everybody knew all the history, and not everybody was happy about what they did know, even though they might act as if they were. And ranking high among those people were Clary – Zoë didn’t know how much Rupert had told her – and Juliet – Zoe didn’t know if he’d told her anything at all – and, well, Zoë herself. And a veil came down.

She closed her mouth and put her head to one side. No onion tears here.

‘I need some time,’ he said. ‘You know how the school takes it out of me. Perhaps six weeks in all. Archie says I can go to his place. And he can cover the classes. I just need some clarity. To see. Really see. Clear my head. Be a painter.’

She said nothing.

‘Darling?’

She stood up, fetched a clean dishcloth and laid it carefully over the onions. She moved towards the door to the garden, and opened it onto the still incipient rain. She blinked into the damp air. A running cold tap is another way to prevent crying over onions.

‘France,’ she tried to say. ‘On your own.’ But a huge frog she hardly knew existed had turned up in her throat, and her body rebelled. There was to be no speaking. Not for the moment.

‘Darling?’ he said again.

They’d been to France, since the war. Once or twice. She much preferred Italy: their season in Rome had been an eye-opener, and so glamorous, and such fun. They’d even almost lost Nanny to that terribly handsome man. And Venice! They’d stayed at the Cipriani; there’d been a famous pianist in residence who had enchanted everyone by playing Rachmaninoff late into the night, who’d called her a bella beata figlia di perfida albione. Beautiful blessed daughter of perfidious Albion. There was no personal history to Italy.

But France.

She said, ‘Have you mentioned this to Clary?’

And he said, ruefully, presumptuously, ‘I was hoping you might.’

Well, she didn’t want to! And it was rather hard, given that she’d only just told Clary off about her plan to desert her every domestic duty and head off to Hollywood, no doubt to sit with her typewriter under a palm tree in sunglasses smoking cigarettes and probably running away with Humphrey Bogart or someone. She’d read in the paper that America was mad for English people. Then she had to close her eyes for a moment, and ask herself if she were simply jealous.

She had to call them all when supper was ready, so she called Clary a little early. The children were mostly doing homework, or at least they were somewhere she couldn’t see them, and God knows where the men were. Doing something important with turpentine no doubt, oh stop it Zoë!

Clary didn’t offer to lay the table, and Zoë didn’t ask her. She had for years made a point of not treating Clary in any way like a child – even though Clary still had a childlike quality, a way of seeing things as if for the first time, a kind of middle-aged naivety which, though sometimes irritating, undoubtedly contributed to her being such a good writer. She sat down now with a glass of red wine and started talking about an Italian film director she was crazy about.

Zoë put the kettle on for the cabbage.

‘Has your father spoken to you?’ she said.

‘About something in particular?’ Clary asked, immediately alert.

‘I think he’s nervous to mention it,’ Zoë said.

‘Is it about you two?’ Clary asked. ‘Or why would he talk to you about it and not me?’

Zoë wasn’t going to get into that. Instead, she turned, and put on her ‘this hurts me as much as it hurts you’ face, which always annoyed Clary but she had learnt to live with it, and said, ‘He wants to go, on his own, to France –’

Clary went white.

‘– for six weeks, to paint. He thinks Archie will let him stay at his place, and just wants some, you know, artistic solitude. Away from all this.’ Zoë gestured. Washing-up, animals, pans, newspapers. Family. Their life.

Clary’s chin was high and her breathing suddenly quick. She looks like an animal who has sensed something, Zoë thought. Her nose almost twitched. Am I going to have to look after her feelings, at the expense of my own? And a tiny part of her whispered, Well, that would make up for last time, when you didn’t look after her at all . . .

‘Well, there’s absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t,’ Clary said, rather quickly. ‘I mean, it’s just the sort of thing. And if Archie thinks it’s all right for Dad to – I mean, it’s not twenty years ago. Is it? Of course he should go. Don’t you think? I mean, I don’t mind in the tiniest bit, why should I?’

‘Sometimes we just mind things,’ said Zoë. ‘Isn’t that half the thing about minding?’

‘Thank you, Zoë, I am aware of that,’ Clary said. ‘For God’s sake there’s no need to patronise me. I’m not actually hungry,’ she said, pushing her chair out, picking up her wine. Zoë heard her footsteps on the stairs.

When the steps had faded, Zoë went out and pulled the little rope to the dinner bell – an old ship’s bell, from Archie’s father’s ship, which hung in the stairwell, between the curves of the elegant banister. In slow dribs and galloping drabs the population appeared: first Bertie and Georgie, starving as usual; Harriet, reading; then Nanny; then Archie and Rupert, deep in conversation. Archie had put Buttercup to bed. And, rather surprisingly as Zoë hadn’t known she was there, Juliet.

‘Oh, hello,’ she said.

‘Hi, Mum,’ Juliet said, flinging her coat – some kind of full-length trench coat, possibly made of plastic, Zoë thought – on the sofa and herself down in her father’s seat. She looked absolutely stunning: her red hair smooth as a lick of paint down her back, her face white, her lipstick almost whiter; her legs longer than might be considered decent. Which could not be said for her skirt.

‘If that’s a belt,’ said Rupert, ‘you’ve forgotten to put your trousers on.’

She fluttered her black eyelashes at him. ‘Oh, very funny,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry Mum, I’m not eating. Just missed the old homestead.’

‘Well, we’re happy to see you,’ Zoë said. ‘To what do we owe the honour?’

‘I just said I missed home!’ Juliet said. ‘Does there have to be something?’

‘No, not at all,’ murmured Zoë. Juliet levered herself up again, and across to give her mother a kiss on the cheek.

‘Better?’ she said, and Zoë smiled.

‘No Clary?’ Rupert said, noticing the absence.

‘She’s gone upstairs,’ Zoë said, dishing out fish pie. ‘To think about France, I imagine.’

‘Oh,’ said Rupert.

‘The inner child,’ Zoë murmured.

‘I’ll go up,’ said Archie, and Rupert, noticing how Archie had to lift his thigh a little to move it to stand up again, said, ‘No need, old boy, I’ll go. This is my pickle.’

‘What about France?’ said Juliet.

‘Your father wants to go there,’ said Zoë, trying not to give Archie a look. It was rather irresponsible of him to have encouraged Rupert by offering his house. But it would be no fun for him either, picking up the slack of the school. A small kerfuffle by the front door announced the return of the student lodgers: Massimo and Jem. They weren’t very drunk. No, they hadn’t eaten. Zoë divided the remains of the pie into smaller portions.

‘Onions in fish potato pie,’ said Massimo, who was thin and Italian. ‘Hmm.’

‘God, how marvellous just to go to France, just like that, no responsibilities,’ said Juliet. ‘Is Clary upset, because of the war? Honestly, I mean, what about me? I could be scarred for life. And frankly nobody ever sat me down and explained it to me. I was just magically supposed to know somehow . . .’

‘How’s work, darling?’ asked Zoë. She knew she shouldn’t.

‘Louise has an interview lined up for me, for a TV show,’ Juliet said, leaning back in the chair. ‘Something very glamorous apparently. Patrick Macnee’s in it. And she’s got me an ad. She says soon I’ll have to choose between advertising and real work, because though the money’s better it’ll spoil my image. I can’t have both apparently.’ She was looking in her bag, and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. The two young men students gazed at her. She took not an iota of visible notice.

‘Lovely,’ said Zoë, wondering how often she could repeat the same bland agreeablenesses. ‘And how’s Louise?’

‘Oh, same old Louise, you know,’ said Juliet.

Zoë did not know. She could not apply the words ‘same old’ to Louise, by any stretch. Louise, working in the West End, was as glamorous and ever-changing as she always had been. She’d seemed a little low since Christmas, but age would not wither her, nor – she forgot the next bit. Custom defile? Something about infinite variety, and fading? Louise, of course, would know. Zoë, on the other hand, mother of two, stepmother of two, and quasi-part-time mother of the other three who lived in her house, was becoming same-old. It didn’t apply to men, did it? Not in the same way. Dear Rupert. Is he old? When she looked at him – really looked, as he might say, when she saw him – yes, she saw an old-ish man: elegant, a bit stooped, humorous, clear-eyed, silver-haired. Everyone had said there was a price to be paid for marrying an older man. She had pooh-poohed this wisdom for years – but perhaps, after all, it was true. Well, of course it was true! Perhaps living through the war made you so accustomed to the fear of unnatural death that there was no room for fear of old age. But yes, there was a vulnerability now, where there used to be boyish swagger. Her heart contracted.

Of course he should go to France. She could handle things here.

‘Don’t smoke while we’re eating, will you, Juliet,’ she said. ‘You know your father hates it.’

‘I know,’ said Juliet. ‘I’ll probably put it out when he comes down.’

‘How old should you be to start smoking?’ Bertie asked. ‘Because quite a few of the boys at school do and I’m considering taking it up.’

‘Waste of money,’ said Archie. ‘Also, since when do you do things just because other people do?’

‘Oh no, only the best kind of boys smoke,’ said Bertie. ‘Naughty ones, unnaturally clever ones.’

‘It’s not clever to smoke,’ said Zoë, wondering if she could scrounge one off Juliet, perhaps after dinner, after Bertie had gone upstairs. She wasn’t convinced by this talk that it gave you cancer. But perhaps she could get one of those cigarette holders. She laughed inside. Very twenties! Very bright young thing!

Clary didn’t come down for dinner.

Afterwards, everybody helpfully piled the dishes into the sink and onto the draining board, and wandered off. Zoë glanced at the pile, food leftovers unscraped, smeared glass and streaked china unsorted, knives and forks sticking out at angles from tottering towers of plates. She seriously considered tidying up the washing-up for Mrs Thing; caught herself, laughed. She laid the table for breakfast: toast and cereal for whoever wanted it; honey and marmalade, butter out of the fridge so it wouldn’t be hard. She put aside two eggs to give Clary. Though she was pretty sure she would come down very late and have a bowl of Grape Nuts and cream. If anybody else wanted eggs, they could take their chances.

In bed, Zoë luxuriated, pointing and flexing her white feet under the sheets, until Rupert came, sighing, and creaked in beside her.

‘So,’ she said, rolling in to lie on his shoulder. ‘How did she take it?’

‘She seemed all right,’ he said. ‘But I’m pretty sure she’s not. I was as reassuring as I could be.’

‘Of course she’s not all right,’ said Zoë. ‘But she will be.’

‘You don’t think I should go, do you?’

‘I think you’re . . . asking rather a lot of us,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Is it too much? I mean – I hope I’ve given quite a lot as well. For an artist. Lots of artists can’t even have families, or have five of them . . . lots have to be drunks or runaways, or never make any money at all. I’m not bad, overall, am I? I’ve really tried.’

He had tried. She knew that. He did go and work at the company, he got us this house, and set up the school . . .

Time was, Zoë would have taken offence at the possible suggestion that loving her was an effort. She would have grabbed the opportunity to throw a pretty little tantrum, cried and taunted, her red mouth and her green underwear, her eyeliner running and her narrow bosom heaving. All those cocktail-fuelled bedroom fights, ending in passionate declarations and stormy sex. She had brought the hurly-burly of the chaise longue right into the marital bed, and nearly wrecked the whole thing. What a relief it was, being older.

‘You have, darling,’ she said. ‘You should go.’

‘And you know it’s not anywhere near where I was during the war,’ he said carefully.

She didn’t answer for a moment. This was another thing they didn’t talk about. Didn’t need to, they both thought.

Gently, she rolled on top of him. ‘I know you love me,’ she whispered.

‘It needn’t be six weeks,’ he said.

* * *

In the kitchen, Clary, too lazy to chop, was biting almonds in half over a bowl of Grape Nuts. Dad’s in France, she thought, practising. Oh, yes, Dad’s in France. Just for a few weeks. He’ll be back soon. He’ll be back.

Ridiculous, she thought, that her stomach churned even thinking the words. She poured milk and cream over the bowl and tried to say it out loud: ‘He’ll be back from France. Dad’s in France, he’ll be back any day. Any day now.’

She’d told him of course he could go. She’d said, Things are entirely different now, Dad; why shouldn’t you go? She’d said she understood completely. She hadn’t said, This hurts my soul; it dances on old wounds I barely understand. I feel sick just thinking about it; yes, of course it’s irrational, but I do. She didn’t say, either, that she herself wanted and needed to go away, for her work. For her career. And her art. Her art wasn’t art like the men’s art was. She was just a writer, and though not everybody could write well, everybody could write. You didn’t need to learn special techniques with particular tools and materials. Anyone could pick up a pen and write sentences that made sense. Except for very poor and unlucky people obviously, and ones whose minds don’t develop properly – but you know what I mean. No, painting was higher. Everyone knew that. But writing was not nothing.

Of course Archie and Zoë could run things here without either her or Rupert. The children would have to shape up a bit. And of course Archie wouldn’t mind her revisiting the play. He was a supportive husband. He always had been. Everybody said so.

For a moment her thoughts flicked to her brother and sister, Neville and Juliet, and how they might feel about Rupert going. She’d only seen Neville a couple of times since he’d come back from New York; he didn’t seem to be bothered about family very much, and as long as he was all right she didn’t feel any obligation to seek him out, or to pick up with him. And it had all been quite different for Juliet – she’d never even met their father until he came back so how could she have missed him? It was like Neville and their mother – they never knew each other at all! She, Clary, was the one with the strange blessing of suffering most because of having had extra time.

‘Dad’ll be back any day now,’ she said, and her gorge rose. Hollowness in her stomach. A tightness over her scalp, and she ran to the lavatory, shaking.