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

though, she once thought in a rare, clearer moment, she was a sheet of glass that had been hit with a hammer or bombed, leaving jagged fragments that did not fit together because so many bits had been shivered to smithereens. Every time she looked at a piece and saw some reflection of herself she felt uncomfortable and sometimes actually ashamed. She wanted approval, for instance, even from people she did not like. She wanted people to find her quite different from how she knew that she was. The acting of parts came in here and even this capacity divided her. She was astounded at how easy she found it, and appalled at her dishonesty. She supposed it was so easy because she did not feel anything very much – beyond mild discomforts, irritation at domestic strife or boredom if she had to do something that she knew was going to be dull. She managed hardly ever to go to bed with Michael, who had sulked for a bit, and now, she was fairly sure, had found consolation elsewhere since he had more or less stopped saying anything about another baby or the means to one.
    She did not mind this very much, and when Michael lost his election by three hundred and forty-two votes to the Labour candidate, he immediately took steps to go back to the Navy, who seemed prepared to have him. This would mean the destroyer and the Pacific. ‘For how long?’ she had asked. ‘Not more than two years,’ he had said. The thought of this absence was a kind of relief. She felt that she could not make any decision about her marriage until he was really home and out of the war, and the thought of having to consider such a step as leaving him frightened her so much that she was glad to have what seemed to be a right reason for not having to think about it. She told him that she was going to try to get back to acting, and he had not objected. ‘I should love a famous wife,’ he had said, only half jokingly. But after strenuous efforts all she had managed to get was this part as an extra in what promised to be a pretty awful film. Then on the first evening that she had returned from the studios she found that everything had changed again.
    ‘The Americans have dropped an atomic bomb on Japan.’
    ‘I know,’ she answered. It had been mentioned in passing that morning after Make-up and while she was being strapped into her padded top.
    ‘Whatever will they do next?’ Marlene had said after the lunch-break, but nobody had come up with an answer.
    ‘If anyone mentions the word bomb to me again I shall throw a fit,’ someone called Goldie said.
    Nobody did.
    ‘. . . darling, don’t you realise? It could mean the end of the war.’
    ‘Goodness!’ she had answered. She didn’t believe him for a moment. He simply liked talking about the war.
    At the end of the second day at the studios they had the Cargills to dinner and she told them about how she had come upon Tommy Trinder in a corner of the set. He had been wearing a very short, pleated white kilt and he was all by himself doing a little dance, flicking up the kilt with both hands and intoning, ‘Now you see it! Now you don’t!’
    It wasn’t a success. Patricia Cargill said, ‘Good gracious!’, and her husband, to be Number One in Michael’s destroyer, gave an uneasy smile and said, ‘How awfully funny,’ before he turned back to Michael who said, ‘Take Patricia upstairs, darling, and leave the gentlemen to their port.’ There wasn’t any port actually; it was just a way of getting rid of her – of them.
    She took Patricia Cargill upstairs to the pretty L-shaped drawing room. She had painted the walls white and hung curtains made of mattress ticking – grey and white stripes with yellow corded ties. She was pleased with this room, although there wasn’t much furniture – a sofa and two chairs and a beautiful mirror that she and Hugo had found together. ‘Thirty bob if you can take it home,’ the man had said, and Hugo had said, ‘Done!’ He’d even persuaded a taxi driver to