Chapter 2: Clary - The Golden Hours

Clary always tried hard to clear her decks for Christmas in Norfolk, at Polly and Gerald’s. Deadlines were met, drafts finished, manuscripts sent off, all possible balls were sent into other courts. She had an image of pieces of paper rolled up into actual balls and thrown into actual wastepaper bins – well, there had been a lot of that too. But she was ready now to just have Christmas, be with her dear husband Archie, with their children Harriet and Bertie and Buttercup, and the cousins. To have a rest, at least of a kind. There was of course much to do. The difference was that at Fakenham she had no actual responsibilities. Polly and Aunt Rachel, as ever, had everything in hand, months ahead. Gerald was king of the drinks cabinet; Simon was lord of firewood. Her father and stepmother, Rupert and Zoë, would be there too of course with her little half-brother Georgie, but that wasn’t so special, given that they all lived together in London anyway. The husbands and children would amuse themselves and each other. Nanny was coming with them, thank God. Ancient as he was, Tonbridge still creaked around with the car, fetching people from the station in Norwich, and Mrs Tonbridge, though her feet forbade extensive culinary labour, continued to sniff authoritatively in the kitchen.

Best of all was that Polly and Louise, her dear cousins, were there, and nobody had to rush off and go anywhere. The unchangeability of it comforted Clary every year. When had all the Christmases started merging into one? She could divide her life easily by which children she had and where Christmas had been. Until 1958 it was always at their grandparents’ old and lovely house in Sussex, Home Place, with its uneven floors and tennis court and cinder-pathed vegetable garden . . . before the family timber business went bust and the family itself fell apart. Her grandparents had died, first the Brig and a decade later the Duchy. Then suddenly there was no money, no security, no future any more that looked anything like the past.

Looking back, which was something she both liked and felt it her duty to do, it had really been quite dramatic. Everybody – including people who one might have expected to be grown-up already – had had to grow up almost overnight. Since then, Christmas had been at Polly and Gerald’s – an astonishingly convenient alternative, Clary always thought. She wasn’t sure she could have borne not having a place for the Christmases, the school holidays, the retreats from everyday reality, where they could all be together. Of course, Fakenham was reality. Just as Home Place had been reality. But it was a different reality to the everyday they were becoming used to, and one very much to be appreciated.

At Fakenham Hall, Polly, her brother Simon, cousin Louise, Aunt Rachel, and Jemima, Zoë and Clary herself almost automatically pulled together as near a replica of the pre-war Home Place Christmas as they could manage. Did we even think about it? Clary wondered. Or was it an automatic response from all of us? It was as if we packed the whole thing up in a hamper with wood shavings and tissue, and transported it, across time and space, from the fifties to the sixties, from Sussex to Norfolk. Even the ghosts of the Cazalet dead seemed to come out for the season: the Brig with his pipe; the Duchy with her handkerchief tucked up into her watch strap. Beloved Miss Milliment, who had taught them all. God, she seems almost Victorian now, with her enormous bosom, her classical knowledge and her jet beads. Well, she pretty much was Victorian. And Aunt Rachel’s dear friend Sid, so clever and patient, so much part of the family. Can you be homesick for people?

The drive from London was long, and the weather didn’t help. Clary’s husband Archie, artist, teacher, older, and – some people thought – the nicest man in the world, drove, taking it slowly. The windscreen wipers dragged under their burden of slush. The forecast was bad; they wanted to get there before dark, before more snowfall, but also in one piece. Young Bertie was wriggling in the back seat, and his elder sister Harriet was achieving what Clary had always found impossible – reading in a moving car. Buttercup was snoozing between them, and Nanny had gone with Rupert and Zoë. They needed a bigger car, but there was no money for that.

‘Do you think,’ Clary said to Archie, halfway up the A14, ‘that we’ll ever be allowed to admit that Aunt Rachel and Sid were lesbians? Will anybody ever talk about it, do you think?’

Archie glanced sideways at her. It had been an absolute tragedy for Sid and Rachel both, and still was for Rachel. He was trying to find a way to say that perhaps when everybody concerned was dead, or at least Hugh and Edward, when Bertie’s face popped into the gap between the two front seats.

‘What’s lesbians?’ he said.

‘Girls who fall in love with girls, not with boys,’ said Archie, changing gear.

Clary closed her eyes.

Bertie slid back into place. Buttercup, woken by his movement, started trying to climb over into the front, or possibly to impale herself on the gearstick.

‘Oh no you don’t,’ said Bertie, and Harriet, without raising her eyes from her book, reached out a hand and caught her little sister by the straps of her Viyella pinafore, pulling her back and tucking her under her arm. ‘You stay here with me, babydoll,’ she said. Harriet hoped for babydoll pyjamas for Christmas, and had been calling Buttercup babydoll for months, hoping to have a subliminal effect on her parents’ subconsciouses.

Bertie was gazing out of the window.

‘You’re probably right,’ said Clary.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ protested Archie.

‘You’re probably right anyway,’ said Clary. ‘I mean, who would be more embarrassed? Her, or us?’

Archie was shaking his head.

‘All those years,’ said Clary, musing. All those years.

When they arrived it felt like just in time. It had been the sort of day that never quite gets light anyway, grey and eternal like old floor cloths. The children could stretch their legs on a quick walk out over the lawns. The snow on the drive was already settling, and as they passed the lake the frozen reeds clattered lightly. The house itself loomed in the gloaming. Oh my God, why is it so big? she thought, not for the first time. So grand, yet somehow absurd too, with all the archways and crenellations which made Polly, the châtelaine, compare it to a Victorian mental hospital.

Polly had told Clary once about how her twins, as pupils at the more genteel of the local primary schools, had been given the task of ‘Draw your house’ – so they had, the two of them doing one picture as usual, the whole thing, towers and turrets, stable block, archways and courtyards, avenues, tunnel, winter garden, the lot. This had led to a classmate saying it was because their father was a lord, and another declaring that he couldn’t be because there was only one Lord and that was the Lord God. ‘And then,’ Polly had said through giggles, ‘Pen got the idea I was the Virgin Mary; he said I looked like her in the pictures, and the dogs could be Baby Jesus, I suppose because they’re always on my lap. And Laetitia said that it was our fault for sending them to a country school, could we not find a decent governess, she was sure she could, so Gerald had to give her a short lecture about money, and the modern world. He just bellowed, “Money, Mother! And the modern world!” at her, and she went back to Cape Town to sulk, thank God . . .’ Clary knew, though, that Gerald and Polly had put a Turner aside to educate each child.

A string of welcoming glows seeped out now from the rows of windows; the light puny against the chill Norfolk flats, though the sheer size of The Pile, as Gerald called it, stunned every time. Today the towers, the massive porticos and sky-bound chimneys, the belvedere that seemed to have wandered in from the shores of Lake Como, all looked better for the dusting of white snow, which unified things as icing unifies a misshapen cake. The effect was magical. Gerald claimed that it wasn’t clear if any architect had been involved in the house’s creation. Clary thought now that if they had, they had made sure that the style of every country in the Empire was represented. At the front entrance, by the great semicircles of the marble staircase, a few late roses dangled, frostbitten, pink and brave.

The usual kerfuffle with baggage and coats and unloading ensued. Clary glanced up at the Hall’s front elevation, shook her head as usual, and stomped up the staircase, through the front doors, and into the echoing entrance hall where she dropped her suitcase onto the black-and-white floor. Rachel, Clary’s beloved aunt, backbone of the family, was already crossing towards her, presumably coming from the kitchen, which was about half a mile away. The greying hair was tucked up in a bun, her smile bright and her hands covered in flour. Belka and Strelka, Polly’s two exceptionally clever Jack Russells, scampered around her feet.

‘Hello, darling!’ she called. ‘I thought I heard a car . . . well, the dogs told me. Mince pies! I know, everybody will get terrible indigestion . . . my pastry is entirely grey, and the look on poor Mrs Tonbridge’s face . . . How was the drive? Everybody all right?’

Clary gave her a quick bundled-up hug, avoiding the hands which Rachel was holding up either side, like a saint giving a floury benediction. Hugging with coats and scarves and bags on was always so difficult anyway. She’d like to give Rachel a proper unencumbered hug. Later. Unencumbered! What a lovely word. What was cumber? she wondered. She would dig out the Brig’s old copy of Skeat and look it up.

‘Is Juliet not with you?’ Rachel asked.

‘I don’t know where she is,’ Clary said. ‘Didn’t she come with Rupert and Zoë?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Rachel, glancing around as if Juliet might emerge from somewhere.

No, Clary thought. Nobody, but nobody, would ever use the word lesbian to Rachel.

It wasn’t possible, of course, to recreate a perfect replica of everything that Home Place had meant. But it was all very traditional, and just the right side of stultifying. The warm embrace of familiarity; the strands of nostalgia and affection, ghosts and childhoods, spread across each other like the layers of a great strudel – dreadful image, Clary thought, don’t save that one, it doesn’t work at all. And anyway, she really was going to try to leave work behind, to make herself entirely available to Polly and Louise, to Archie, to Harriet and Bertie and Buttercup and everybody. But a person does still need to be able to note things down. She had brought her typewriter (a snazzy little Olivetti, her early Christmas present from Archie) and a couple of notebooks.

Home Place had not been perfect anyway, she mused. Memory is a trickster after all.

Two terrible things had happened in Clary’s life. She had lived with them for so long she didn’t need to think of them; and she understood that there was more to it all than just what you consciously thought about. The first was that her mother Isobel had died in childbirth when Clary was five, having her brother Neville. In fact, this year Clary had reached the age at which her mother had died. As the end of the year approached, she felt almost a sense of relief that she herself, having three times not died in childbirth, didn’t seem destined to die at thirty-seven either.

The second came ten years later, in 1940: their darling, beautiful father Rupert went to the war and didn’t come back. They didn’t know if he was alive or dead. For years.

We’ve all had enough hardships to be grateful and appreciative when nothing particularly awful is happening, was Clary’s view: not a bad place to be in life. So here at Fakenham, she and her cousins had an unspoken agreement to make things as light and affectionate as they could be. We want to be happy, Clary thought, and that’s almost the most important thing. Glancing up, half a tree’s worth of mistletoe was already hanging from the massive chandelier over the staircase, berries glowing like pearls. She smiled, and wondered who had been up the ladder. Simon, she thought.

Yes, for family Christmas the children would have the same joys their parents had had. The grown-ups would behave better than their own parents had; they would be true and loyal to each other. The grown-ups’ parents would behave better than they used to, whether they wanted to or not. Husbands would be true and loyal to wives – apart from Louise, of course. Louise had an ex-husband now living in America, and a lover who was still husband to the woman he’d been married to all along, but she didn’t have a husband of her own. ‘She just has someone else’s,’ Polly had said, with uncharacteristic asperity.

Everyone was invited. At last count it was about forty. They wouldn’t all come, but they were invited.

Christmas, by rule, had above all to be the same. All the same natural and normal pleasures were required. The children, most of them now thirteen or fourteen, would not be the only ones to shriek in dismay if details were adjusted. A big tree from the estate had to be felled and dragged by Simon and Gerald into the great hall (not to be confused with the entrance hall), to be propped up in the washing copper, which would have been polished up and brought out by Tonbridge and placed on a low plinth. (Bertie had a little song for the occasion, which went ‘Lop it and prop it, lop it and prop it, lop it and prop it, properly . . .’) The copper was not really deep enough, so the tree, to be kept upright, had to be buttressed with firewood and an unidentifiable piece of heavy and rusty machinery from behind the stable block. Simon’s bungee ropes were also sometimes brought into play, hooking on to the brass curtain tiebacks by the floor-to-ceiling windows (and in extremis, to a pineapple-shaped finial on the curtain rod). Polly would then throw a huge and only slightly moth-eaten crimson brocade cloth around the set-up like a baby’s bib. It usually took several throws, and the children would gather to cheer and pick up corners as required to help straighten it out. Polly would tie the ends round the back, so it formed a festive backdrop for the piles of presents. On first sight of it, Archie always had to say it looked papal. Years ago, Harriet had pre-empted him: ‘Daddy, does it look papal?’ so now everybody had to say it.

Six fine geese had been ordered, fattened, slaughtered, hung and plucked. Clary would make the orange and chestnut stuffing, but only when Mrs Tonbridge wasn’t about, because her glare had a way of curdling the simplest of recipes. Mrs Tonbridge had long before made the huge pudding, which sat plump and ready in its crazed cream-coloured kitchen bowl, waiting to be taken from the slate-shelved larder, and stabbed repeatedly with a palette knife for the insertion of the silver charms.

The class system, thought Clary, is alive and well and living anywhere where people are over forty. Gosh, that’s almost us! Polly, Louise and I are all nearly forty. Our lives have changed so much, yet Tonbridge and Mrs T seem to be living exactly as they always did. And of course Mrs T doesn’t like to see us in the kitchen too much. If we do her job, then who is she?

Clary needed all this comfort now, this old-fashioned, unchanging support. She had a feeling she was about to throw a rather unwieldy spanner into the works. Her own works. But she had no choice. At least, she felt she didn’t. Oh damn. She thought she’d made up her mind. Why does it have to be so hard?

Christmas would be lovely. That was all that mattered for now. Then, in the new year, she would talk to Archie about the fact that she’d had an offer to make a film based on the play she’d written that had broken his heart, that she wanted to accept it, and go off to Hollywood.

Only she’d express it better.

She did look up cumber. It was from Con (with, together) and Bear (to carry). So basically, unencumbered meant doing things on your own. Nice, she thought. Nice in the original meaning of the word.