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

turning over music for the Duchy, who had played at his request. Now he stood, irresolute, by the piano looking across the room at her – his wife. She sat in the large armchair, whose linen cover had been elaborately patched and mended, sewing some frothy white muslin concoction that was to be a summer frock for Juliet. She wore a pale green shirt that made her eyes a darker green and a little turquoise heart slung on a silver chain round her neck. She must have felt his eyes on her, for she looked up as they both spoke at once. Both stopped in mid-sentence waiting for the other.
    ‘I was only asking whether you wanted a whisky.’
    ‘No thanks.’ He’d had one before dinner with his father, and discovered that he’d lost the taste for it.
    ‘What were you going to say?’
    ‘Oh! I was wondering what you thought of Pipette.’ That story had come up at dinner, but Zoë then, as during the whole evening, had hardly said anything.
    ‘I never met him. I was visiting my mother when he came. On the Isle of Wight. She still lives with her friend Maud Witting.’
    ‘How is your mother?’
    ‘Quite well, really.’
    There was a short silence. Then he said, ‘Do the family always go to bed as early as this?’
    ‘Not usually. I think they’re trying to be tactful.’
    Her timid smile made him recognise that she was used to deprivation, sadness, the absence of any lightness. He said involuntarily, ‘It has been far harder for you.’ He pulled a stool nearer to sit before her. ‘Even after you got the message. You must have thought that I had died. But you couldn’t be sure. That must have been so – difficult . I’m so sorry.’
    ‘It couldn’t be helped. It wasn’t your fault. Any of it.’
    He saw that her hands, folding the white muslin, were trembling.
    She said, ‘Your family have been wonderful to me. Especially your mother. And I had Juliet.’ She looked quickly at him and away. ‘Seeing you walking towards me in the lane was such a shock. I can still hardly believe you. Believe you’re back, I mean.’
    ‘It seems extraordinary to me too.’
    ‘It must.’
    They had come to another full stop. Exhaustion hit him like a freak wave. ‘Shall we turn in?’
    ‘Perhaps we’d better.’ She put her sewing on the table.
    He held out his hand to pull her to her feet and saw a faint blush – she was paler than he remembered; her hand was very cold.
    ‘Time,’ he said. ‘We both need some time to get used to one another again, don’t you think?’
    But in the bedroom – astonishingly unchanged, with its faded wallpaper of monstrous, mythical birds – there was the business of undressing in the uncompromising presence of the small double bed. Had she kept any of his pyjamas? Yes: most of them had been passed on to Neville, but she had kept one pair. The clothes he had been wearing, a pair of cotton trousers, a fisherman’s sweater that had belonged to Miche’s father, a threadbare shirt that she had washed and patched and ironed for his journey back – had now been discarded. He undressed while Zoë went to the bathroom – gathered the shirt to his face to conjure the hot, peppery, baked smell that had permeated the large kitchen when Miche was ironing . . . He rubbed his eyes with the shirt and then put it on the chair that he had always used for his clothes.
    When Zoë returned, she had undressed. She was wearing the very old peach-coloured kimono that the Brig had given her years ago, soon after they were married. She put her clothes almost furtively on the other chair and went to the dressing table to unpin her hair. Usually, he remembered, this had been the beginning of a long evening ritual, when she would clean her face with lotion, put some cream on it, brush her hair for three minutes, massage some special lotion she used to have made up at the chemist into her hands, take off her jewellery – it could all take what had seemed to him ages. He went to find the bathroom.
    That, too, was