Chapter 47: Clary - The Golden Hours

It had been a long dingy winter, from Hugh’s death onwards. Christmas had been dismal. The little ones had been the only brightness, Buttercup and Pen. But now the days were lengthening and the spring parade was well on its way: the snowdrops and crocuses had come and gone, the daffodils, then the first little narcissus and the tiny irises in their Oxford and Cambridge blues. The first tulips were poking up in their municipal rows, and how could they not cheer your heart and put you in a mood for regeneration? Rupert and Zoë being at Fakenham with everybody for Easter had cheered Clary up. Had Zoë put on a little weight? Or was it just spring? Or wishful thinking? April is the cruellest month, she intoned, sitting alone in the kitchen at Bank House, feeling mildly guilty as she still did for having left, and wondering if Miss Milliment had ever read Eliot, and if so, what she thought of him. There are so many things we never get to know because we die . . . Bertie had recently been asking people if, given the power of time travel, they would want to go backwards or forwards. Clary had said backwards, of course, as we’re already going forwards. Everything comes to an end, she was thinking, lugubriously. Which was ridiculous because there was so much to look forward to!

How was it one could be really quite depressed and madly optimistic at almost exactly the same time? Cognitive dissonance. All you had to do was read in the paper about Vietnam and you’d give up on humanity entirely, then look out the window at the willows and the blossom, and you’d be happy as Larry. Who was Larry anyway? And why was he so happy? There was probably a Brewer’s somewhere, or a dictionary of slang. A dictionary of slang! Now that would be a good idea, and fun to do . . .

Anyway, she’d arranged with Zoë that she would come round to Bank House and cook supper for them, just to remind them that they were loved, and life goes on. See if they might be willing to talk about taking a trip, or going to hear some Mahler, or something, to blow their heads clean. At least Clary thought she’d gone round there for all that. When she got there, decked in everlasting hope, Georgie opened the door and told her that they had gone out to dinner, together.

Well. She was so happy to hear this that she quite forgave them for not having rung her to cancel. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have other things to do. She could have put Buttercup to bed! A rare enough pleasure. She glanced at her watch. Too late now.

‘And I’m off to choir practice,’ Georgie said. ‘Make yourself at home!’

She decided she’d just have a glass of wine and go home. So now she was sighing over a tumbler of Chianti in the kitchen, looking at starlings roosting in the trees across on the far bank, the spring light fading over the river, grey and gold, like a Turner painting. The kitchen was almost exactly as it had been before she left: Zoë didn’t seem to have changed anything, or even expanded much into the spaces created. Some garden tulips lurched and bent like swans’ necks in a jar on the kitchen table, and there was fruit in the bowl.

During the past year she had failed over and again to get Zoë to talk about things. Until recently Zoë hadn’t seemed to think there was anything to talk about. Or so she said, over and over. She’d just dried up, and looked tight. You can’t force another person to face things, can you?

Ha! Except that Clary totally had with Neville. She had just run with her thoughts, loosened her tongue, let it all out – and it had landed on some tender spot in him which set off . . . what, a chain reaction? A reaction, anyway. He’d rung the next day, and said he would talk to Juliet and was leaving the country, and that he didn’t know when he’d be back, and he didn’t want to talk any more. And she, sort of mortified by the thought of how open and drastic she had been with him, was as quiet as a mouse, and let him just say his piece.

Well, that was months ago now. She hadn’t heard from him and perhaps it wasn’t surprising. But it meant she didn’t know if he was using the crisis as a springboard to change, or if he was carrying on being his old self with new people who didn’t know him. She had no choice but to wish him well, from a distance. For now.

But when someone feels the thing doesn’t exist, and you don’t know what it is yourself, where do you begin? With intuition, love, support . . . and courageous honesty. With Neville, she’d turned out to have a cogent and perhaps pretty accurate theory, an understanding of what might be going on. With Dad, she just didn’t know. It wasn’t only Hugh’s death, though God knows that was a blow for him. It had started before that. When she invited Rupert out, he would come, to see plays and films, to a gallery. He responded politely. He smiled a strange empty smile. And then he just wanted to go home. He didn’t want dinner, or talk, or anything.

She missed him.

She wondered, and had mentioned it to absolutely nobody, hardly even to herself, whether Dad might be a bit jealous of Archie’s success. An unspeakable thought.

But perhaps things were improving now.

Neither she, Louise nor Archie had said anything to Rupert or Zoë about the Juliet and Neville thing (and she couldn’t imagine that Neville or Juliet had). Of course this wasn’t satisfactory. It seemed to her that as she and Louise were protecting Rupert and Zoë, it was an existential generational shift. If we are protecting our parents, our uncle and aunt, then we are now the adults. That’s hierarchical, she thought. We have taken the responsibility, but we don’t seem to have the courage to tell them so.

She knew how she’d continue from here, if she were writing the novel of them. Neville needs to talk to Rupert, and vice versa – the two of them need to resurrect Isobel and talk about her, let her exist properly in their minds and hearts, acknowledge her and admit their love and their loss, so that she could then properly leave them. But Rupert has been so deep in whatever he’s deep in that mentioning Isobel would be like a slap . . . he never talked about her . . . and that sort of thing surely is a person’s own responsibility? She certainly wouldn’t thank anyone for telling her she needed to think about her dead mother.

Perhaps it is me who needs to bring our mother back, she thought. To clear things up with her.

God, this is all going a bit Greek tragedy, a bit Antigone. There are dead who need to be honoured!

So, she sat there at the scrubbed wooden kitchen table, and thought about her dead mother, as best she could. She took out the few well-handled memories: the softness of a grey shawl, a soapy smell. Her hands, knobbly knuckles and the bony fingers with the pretty rings, an oval stone like a tiny moon, a row of little pearls. Her face as she played the violin. The inside of the violin case: blue velvet, shiny or matte depending on which way you stroked it, the soft yellow cloth, the little round of rosin smelling like forests, the clips for where the bow went. First, she’d play up and down, then some sensible tunes, and then she’d give a little grin and play the wild Irish music, naughtily as if expecting to be told not to. Mama played violin and fiddle. Mama’s belly tight and huge: ‘I have your baby in there. Baby sister or a baby brother!’ Clary had knocked on it and whispered messages.

Scraps. She hardly ever took them out. It’s as if I fear to use them up, she thought. That they’ll fade like perfume in a bottle left open. Their bloom destroyed by handling.

Poor, poor Isobel.

But the past is pointless, she thought for a moment. Absolutely pointless. For goodness’ sake, we’re here now. Then again, Louise had been telling her about this chap she knew, Tom something, a friend of Stella’s chap, who had a similar family situation: he was the older child, their mother had died having his little sister, and Louise said it had taken the most un-English – his phrase, according to Louise – self-examination! – for them to even realise they needed to come to terms with it. This idea fascinated her. Isn’t that what we do in plays and novels?

Bloody Neville, she thought. Poor, poor Neville.

If and when he came back, she would try to get him to come and see Ellen. She was still alive; Rachel was in touch with her. They could all talk about when they had been little, when Ellen had looked after them. Ask her how it had been. How they had been. Maybe one day.

Her heart shrank a little in her chest. Just the other day Harriet, who was studying the Victorian novel, had said that she didn’t understand why families in the old days seemed to be riddled with secrets, yet nowadays there don’t seem to be any secrets at all. This had made Clary feel something of a toad. And then Harriet had said she supposed there’d be no skeletons in closets anyway if people didn’t put them there, plus actually who had closets any more? Or used the word, except in reference to skeletons?

Rupert and Zoë can’t have known, Clary thought, again. Imagine if Archie had had a son, before we met, who had lived with us and been around all the time, and he started trying to get off with Harriet. It was impossible!

The thing was, thinking about Neville . . . when there had been great sorrow and loss, imperfectly handled by your adults, and you had managed to put yourself back together somehow, on your own, and created a persona for yourself which worked pretty well – would you want to dismantle yourself again? Would it be a good idea? What if it all fell apart under scrutiny?

Well, Neville’s persona clearly wasn’t working very well.

But she wasn’t thinking only about Neville.

Anyway, headshrinkers were completely normal in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles! She’d been given a tentative release date for the film. There’d been problems with the edits, and the composer who was meant to be doing the score had broken his arm, and somebody had demanded their money back . . . Anyway, this summer, they said. Would she go over there for the premiere? Damn right she would. And would she see Neville?

She sighed. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, she thought. She’d just found out, after all these years, what that actually meant: that one day is enough for a problem; don’t lug it on into the future. Neville could do what he wanted. And she and Louise had done what they could for poor Juliet – who, living in that flat which apparently Neville had bought for her, had got a job with a small costume company, acquired a car, and seemed to be dividing her time between film sets and jazz clubs. Well, good! But – and this thought wouldn’t leave Clary – why had she been she so stupid about Neville? And then she would check herself: she had been absolutely as stupid about horrible Noel when she was not much younger than Juliet is now.

For a moment, Clary considered what was likely to happen to Louise. Would she find someone now – beautiful as she was? The effort she’d had to put into distancing herself from Joseph seemed to have produced a sort of blanket effect of distancing her from all men. It was a pity. For herself, Clary felt it was a relief not to be young any more. It had been tiring not being pretty, and probably it was just as tiring being pretty – certainly by Louise’s example. Polly of course had just got out of the ring entirely, the moment she could, by marrying Gerald. So lucky that she had married the right man! No, Clary could imagine all kinds of things for Louise, but nothing that she could concoct out of the current situation. She wanted her to travel, to have marvellous adventures, to find a Greek millionaire who would give her an island, or a Scottish earl with a freezing cold castle and a herd of wolfhounds; or she could live outside Cap Ferrat and take up abstract expressionism. A vineyard! A psychology degree! Her own agency? A late return to acting?

She had to admit that many of these fantasies were her own, and wouldn’t suit Louise at all. She just couldn’t seem able to concentrate on other people’s lives without bringing her own into it. But she, Clary, was all right. She knew what she was, and why, and that she would be herself for ever, till she was a tiny old lady like Flo or Dolly, propped up in a four-poster with her typewriter parked on a breakfast tray on legs, perhaps on a Greek island or in a Scottish castle, or in Ladbroke Grove, or at Fakenham. It didn’t matter. She would just write and write. Plays; films perhaps, or perhaps novels again. But what would Louise do? Carry on agenting, organising other people’s lives, and not having anything of her own outside work? And Clary’s mind drifted again to Sebastian, lost Sebastian, out there in America in the life that had claimed him, so far from the life that might have been his, and the family that somehow still was his, though he would know nothing about it . . . She had no idea if Louise even thought about him. Another skeleton rattling silently away.

The wine wasn’t very good. She was thinking how Dad ought to have acquired better taste in France, but perhaps Zoë loved it, God, she used to drink that awful rose-flavoured stuff – what was it called? Ghoul, or something – anyway, it was lovely to think that they were out having dinner together – when the doorbell rang.

It was already dusk, getting chilly. She pulled herself up off the kitchen chair with a twinge of middle-aged creakiness, and went to the door. She opened it as if she still lived there, half yawning.

‘Yes?’ she said.

A young woman stood before her, tired, with a small suitcase and big eyes. She looked both nervous and defiant, like a three-year-old with an opinion.

‘Hello?’ said Clary.

‘Ah,’ said the girl. Her accent was French. ‘How do you do. I look for Rupert Cazalet. Hello.’

‘Oh,’ said Clary. ‘Well, he’s out. Do you want to come in? I’m his daughter. Who are you?’