Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 by Elizabeth Jane Howard Read Free Book Online

overgrowth of black bushy eyebrows. Personal reasons, sir, he had eventually admitted. Commander Brooke-Caldwell had snorted.
    ‘Personal reasons come second in this service, a fact which I am quite sure you are well aware of.’
    Yes, he was.
    ‘Report back here in two days. Ask my secretary on your way out what is a convenient time for me.’
    He had left feeling distinctly small. It was Archie who had fixed him up with a temporary ration card, who’d got him some money, who’d arranged for Clary to come to his flat for their reunion. ‘She often comes to supper with me, so she won’t think it odd. I’ll see that there’s some food, or you can take her out, whichever you like.’
    ‘What will you do?’
    ‘Oh, I can easily make myself scarce. Much better for her to have you to herself. She bloody well deserves it.’
    They had been eating a fairly horrible lunch in a café off Leicester Square. Archie had to go back to his desk but said he’d be through by five; Rupert had the afternoon to himself. He walked, aimlessly, for about two hours. The state of London appalled him. Sandbags, boarded-up windows, dirty buildings, blistering paint – there was a general feeling of dinginess and exhaustion. People in the streets looked grey and shabby, tired as they stood patiently at bus stops in straggling queues. The conductors were women, dressed in stiff dark blue serge trouser suits. The queues daunted him – he decided not to take a bus. Every now and then there was another of the posters he had seen at the railway station, ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’, and another that said, ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’, and a third one that simply said, ‘Dig For Victory’ – all a bit out of date now, he should have thought.
    He walked – across Trafalgar Square and up Haymarket and then along Piccadilly. The church there had been bombed; loosestrife and ragwort grew out of its broken walls. He had some vague idea of buying a present for Clary, but he could not think of what to get. Five years ago he would have been in no doubt, but now . . . the gap between fifteen and twenty was enormous; he had not the slightest notion of what she would like or want – should have asked Archie when they were having lunch. He tried to buy her a man’s shirt in one of the shops in Jermyn Street, but when he had finally chosen one, in wide pink and white stripes, it turned out that he couldn’t have it because he hadn’t any clothes coupons. ‘I’ve been away a long time,’ he explained to the very old salesman, who looked at him over his gold-rimmed half-glasses and said, ‘Ah, well, sir, that is the unfortunate situation, I’m afraid. Would you like me to keep the shirt for you until you acquire the requisite coupons?’
    ‘Better not. I don’t know whether I’m entitled to any.’
    He wandered along the street until he came to a stationer’s. He would buy her a fountain pen. She had always loved them. When he had chosen one, he thought he had better buy a bottle of ink to go with it. She had always liked brown ink: he remembered her saying, ‘It makes my writing look nice and old and settled on the paper.’ As he wondered whether she was still writing stories he began to feel vaguely frightened, afraid that he might, in some way, fail her. His record so far, from the reunion point of view, was hardly a blazing success. It had been a relief to have to come to London this morning after the enforced, nervous intimacy of the previous evening. He had been so terrified of not being able to perform with Zoë that he had dreaded touching her. With the old Zoë this would at once have led to passionate declarations, demands, small seductive dishevelments – he remembered how the wide white satin ribbons of her shoulder straps would slip off her shoulders, how the combs would slide from her hair . . . He had not dared to embark upon such a course.
    After dinner, they had been left alone in the drawing room. He had been