Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 Read Free Page B

short silence. Then Sid said she would join them in a minute.
    ‘Miss Pearson is leaving me,’ he said, to deflect their thoughts.
    ‘Oh dear. I was afraid she might. Her mother’s become such an invalid. She told me she got back last week and found the old lady on the floor. She’d fallen trying to get out of her chair, and she couldn’t get up.’
    ‘I shall miss her.’
    ‘I’m sure you will. It’s pretty awful for her because she won’t get her full pension. I was going to talk to you about that. I’m afraid she’s going to be rather hard up.’
    ‘She must have saved a bit – she’s been working for us for at least twenty years.’
    ‘Twenty-three, actually. But her mother’s only got a very small widow’s pension that dies with her. Except for the house, Muriel won’t get left anything, and I should think that by the time her mother dies she’ll be too old to get another job. Don’t you think, in the circumstances, that perhaps we ought to see that she gets her full pension?’
    ‘The Old Man would say that it was setting a dangerous precedent. If she gets it, everyone else will think they’re entitled to the same treatment.’
    ‘That’s absurd,’ she said – quite sharply for her. ‘ He needn’t know, and nor need any of the staff.’
    He looked at her; her expression was uncharacteristically ferocious – an expression so ill-suited to her that it made him want to laugh. ‘You’re absolutely right, of course. You’ve completely melted my stony Tory heart.’
    She smiled then, wrinkling her nose in the way she always did when she wanted to add affection to a smile. ‘Your heart isn’t in the least stony, dear old boy.’
    Then Sid returned; he called for the bill, and Rachel said that she would go and find the ladies’.
    As soon as she was gone, Sid said, ‘Thanks for the lunch, it was very good of you to have me.’
    He looked up from writing the cheque; she was fiddling with the coffee sugar and he could not help noticing her strong, elegant, but somehow mannish hands.
    ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘that I know I should have shut up about what are, from your point of view, purely family matters, but she never gives herself a chance! She’s always worrying about other people – never gives herself a thought. And I supposed that now the war is over – here anyway – at last she might consider some life of her own.’
    ‘Perhaps she doesn’t want one.’
    For some reason, although he couldn’t for the life of him think why, this quite harmless remark seemed to go home. For a split second she looked positively stricken; then she said so quietly that he could barely hear her, ‘I do hope you’re not right.’
    Rachel returned. They parted in the street outside, he to go back to the office, and they for a shopping spree in Oxford Street, at HMV for records, and Bumpus for books – ‘It’s so handy that they’re practically next door to each other.’ There was a faint, mutual atmosphere of apology.
    Much later, in the early evening when he’d finished at the office, had caught a 27 bus back to Notting Hill Gate and walked down Lansdowne Road to Ladbroke Grove and let himself into his silent house, he remembered Rachel’s remark about his heart not being stony. To him it seemed not so much a matter of the texture of his heart, more a question of whether it still existed at all. The effort of trying to turn grief into regret, to live entirely on past nourishment, even to keep the sharper parts of nostalgia credible (he found himself beginning to doubt and struggle with the intricacies of the smaller memories), and, most of all, the fearful absence of anything that could begin to take their place, had worn him down. Feeling had become an exercise that no longer enhanced the present; he slogged from one day to the next without expectation that one would be different from another. He was capable of irritation, of course, with small things like his car not starting, or Mrs