Chapter 8: Zoë - The Golden Hours

Polly’s done awfully well, Zoë thought, looking down the table at the clean white linen, the thick candles in the bright family silver, the neat little bundles of holly down the middle, salt and pepper in the tiny silver baskets with blue glass liners. It’s hard to have a table look smart with so many children bent on wrecking it. But then Polly always did things awfully well. She had a sort of fastidious slow-burn energy, where she never seemed to get impatient, never took her eye off the ball, never failed to get what she wanted. It was rather a shame, Zoë felt, that Polly hadn’t continued with the interior design job she had before she married Gerald. She, Zoë, might have hired her to help sort out Bank House, which frankly – oh God. Where to begin? And anyway, there was no money. She was bloody glad to be here, put it that way.

Her husband Rupert, sitting across from her, looked so happy and relaxed – which, let’s face it, he didn’t often at home, which was, to make no bones about it, chaotic. Here at Fakenham Hall, despite how huge the house was and the number of guests, things never felt chaotic. Did they have a special place below stairs, where they kept the chaos? Most people did, one way or another. Domestically or emotionally. But then, she thought, Gerald is good-humoured and stable, which makes a big difference. Oh God, am I saying Rupe isn’t good-humoured and stable? He is! But he’s an artist, and that comes with a certain . . . a certain . . .

And there’s plenty of space here for the children to be elsewhere – very useful. And they have Rachel, who’s an absolute sponge for problems. Rachel soaks up strife before you even notice it’s there. Plus staff . . . Yes, it’s not like the old days, but Mr and Mrs Tonbridge are still lurking about, and there’s Mrs Dodds and Eileen who make a huge difference, and always extra hands when they need them. And Clary had said there’s a woman who comes in every week from the village to clean the silver! And Simon’s so wonderfully practical and hands-on in the garden. Where is Simon? Oh yes, down there on the left – still looking like he’s been dragged through a hedge and needs to brush his hair, though he must be nearly forty. Sweet boy. Lydia’s looking positively middle-aged, though she can’t be much over thirty. Christ, then how old does that make me! Nearly fifty, Zoë. You’re nearly fifty.

She was feeling rather chaotic herself. Even now, despite having promised herself to leave it all behind for the holiday, her mind was spinning on domestic issues. The simple fact was that though it was busy, the Art School made not a bean. Bank House wasn’t small, but it was a house. A good-size house. But not big enough for a school. Its attic was an attic, not a set of studios. Putting in skylights and dormers didn’t change that. Yes, the north light over the Thames was lovely, as were the draughty eighteenth-century windows and the almost-as-old boiler and the wide elm floorboards and enchantingly pretty staircase. But also there were rooms into which, at spring tides, the river that made such a pretty view flooded. Sandbags and floodgates notwithstanding. They had learnt to their cost that the cellar was more of a reservoir than a safe storage space.

Then when Cazalet’s collapsed, and everybody had to start facing up to reality, Rupert’s daughter Clary and her husband dear Archie, nicest man in the world, moved in too. With their now three children. And there was Georgie’s zoo, in the back garden. She’d hoped he’d grow out of it. Instead, it just grew. Thank God Juliet – oh God, don’t start fretting about Juliet! – had moved out. Not that that’s ideal . . .

Was it right that it should take a woman ten minutes to explain her domestic set-up? It was certainly exhausting. So: Rupert and Zoë, Georgie, two tortoises, three rats, Rivers Two the dog, two cats, a rather fighty iguana and – until he flew away – a cockatiel called Hardy who sat on Georgie’s shoulder singing love songs and nibbling his earlobe. Then Clary and Archie, Harriet, Bertie and little Buttercup, and Nanny, plus the two resident students, and whatever day-students were hanging around after hours. The hours were extremely flexible – as were family/school boundaries. Almost once a week Zoë, sleek and damp in her towelling robe, would try to get across the landing from what she still naively thought of as her bathroom to her and Rupert’s bedroom, and would find herself tripping over some long-haired youth or maiden wanting to get turpentine all over everything. Surely they could use the downstairs loo, or the children’s bathroom? Her cold cream went down at an alarming rate. Rupert had told her off for roaring at them: being possessive about the bathroom was unconstructive, he said. He wanted freedom and a sense of security for the students. He wanted them to feel at home. Meanwhile Archie’s leg, his war damage, made it hard for him even to get up to the attic studios, and Clary was working so hard you hardly ever saw her. And while it’s nice to have your kitchen to yourself, Zoë found she was making tea for Clary and Archie’s children rather more often than she felt reasonable. Thank God for Nanny, basically.

That sounded a bit dismissive, didn’t it? She didn’t want it to. She loved her stepdaughter; God knows they’d been through some nonsense together, and fifteen years ago neither would have imagined for one moment they’d end up sharing a house – and sharing it happily. But was Clary happy? Obviously, being happy is quite a demand to make of anybody . . . But she did want Clary to be happy, after the childhood she’d had, and the fact that she, Zoë, had been so utterly useless as a stepmother, and the only parent present while Rupert was away during the war . . . Yes, she did still feel all that. And Clary was restless, Zoë felt it. A woman approaching forty, with a husband and three children, should be able to relax, Zoë thought. But Clary always wanted something more.

And don’t I want something more? Zoë asked herself. There was such change in the air. Not here at Fakenham, obviously, but in general. Little things like the students not wearing ties, like Clary’s refusing to do household things, saying she had to work when of course she didn’t have a job – Zoë couldn’t put her finger on it at all. Restlessness. In both of them. In fact, all the women she knew seemed to be either clinging to things or trying to escape them.

‘And what about me?’ she had said to Rupert, quite firmly, only last week. ‘Am I allowed to feel at home?’ She didn’t say anything about wanting security and freedom for herself, never mind the students. She didn’t want to torment him with bitchy throwing back of words; that kind of vicious ping-pong where everybody just wants to be right and go ‘haha, gotcha!’ while hurting each other’s feelings. She didn’t have to be right. But she did want to be comfortable. The only place she felt that now was in bed with a hot water bottle, a gin and It, and the latest Margaret Millar or Raymond Chandler. Reading about gangsters in Los Angeles was, it turned out, tremendously soothing.