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

put it on his roof. Now it reflected the two main windows that looked on to the square. She knew, whenever she looked at it, that it still had an aura of happiness, and she could not look at it if she was alone. After the first misery of knowing that Hugo was dead, that she would never see him again and that his only letter to her had been destroyed, she had to shut out all thoughts of him. In her frozen state the memory scorched her; it seemed easier to feel nothing at all.
    She set about being a hostess. ‘Do you want to powder your nose or anything?’
    ‘No, thanks.’
    ‘I’m afraid the coffee will have gone into the dining room but I could get you some, if you like?’
    ‘No, thanks. I don’t sleep a wink if I have coffee in the evenings.’ Patricia gave an apologetic little laugh and fingered the graded pearl necklace that lay unevenly over the salt cellars at the bottom of her neck. ‘Your little boy is two, isn’t he? You must have been married awfully young.’
    ‘I was nineteen.’
    ‘We had to wait until Johnny got his second stripe. He wouldn’t marry me on a sub-lieutenant’s pay. We were lucky. He got promotion sooner because of the war. We married in ’thirty-eight – Johnny was in the Med and I spent a glorious month in Gib. We had such fun! Dances, and parties on board ship, and treasure hunts and picnics. Then Johnny got moved and I had to come home. I was pregnant by then, with the twins.’ She gave her apologetic laugh again. ‘I mustn’t bore you with all that. You must have been awfully disappointed when your husband didn’t get into Parliament.’
    ‘Oh, well, I wouldn’t have been much good at political life. And I don’t think he minded. He’d much rather have his destroyer.’
    ‘But that’s rather what I meant. I mean, he’ll be away for such a long time. Just when you must have thought you’d got him home for good.’
    ‘It’s the same for you, isn’t it?’
    ‘Not really. Johnny’s regular so, of course, I’m used to it. It’s you Wavy Navy wives I feel sorry for.’ Her rather protuberant faded blue eyes rested on Louise’s face with a look of kindly speculation. She leaned forward. ‘If you don’t think me impertinent, I could give you a little tip.’
    Louise waited, wondering what on earth it could be.
    ‘If I were you, I’d do my damnedest to start another baby. You’ll be amazed how the time will fly if you do. And you can get through all the unattractive part while your husband is away.’
    ‘Is that what you’re going to do?’
    ‘Oh, my dear, would that we were! But we’ve got four, and I don’t honestly think we could afford another. I should simply love to because, after all, I think that that is what marriage is for. Some of it,’ her pale face became mildly suffused, ‘is rather over-rated, if you know what I mean.’
    There was a short silence during which Louise wondered why she seemed to be the only person in the world who didn’t want her to have another child. Nannie kept mentioning it: ‘Sebastian keeps wondering when he is going to have a little sister, Mummy,’ was one of the ghastly ways she would put it. To change the subject, she said, ‘You don’t think this bomb will stop the war?’
    ‘Oh, my dear, I wish I did. But you know the Japanese!’
    ‘I suppose not, then.’ She had never met a single Japanese person and knew nothing about them. One of the things she had discovered about her marriage was that she didn’t know anything about a whole lot of things that she didn’t want to know anything about.
    But two days later another bomb was dropped, and within a week of that the Japanese surrendered. Michael, after all, did not get his destroyer, and was to come out of the Navy and go back to portrait painting.
    When she knew this, the decision about what on earth she was to do about her life loomed again and she was overcome with the apathy of terror. The film work was over – there had only been a week of it – and