Read Casting Off: Cazalet Chronicles Book 4 for Free Online Page B

Ellen, and with growing envy and insurrection by the children: Lydia, Wills – no longer a baby, a boy of eight – Roland and his own daughter. It was the children who underlined the length of his absence. ‘We only get boiled eggs for tea on our birthdays,’ one of them said. ‘We don’t get eggs. We get one miserable little egg. Once a year,’ and so on.
    It was the children who fired a series of direct questions at him. What was being a prisoner like ? How had he escaped? Why hadn’t he escaped sooner when the war stopped? Lydia wanted to know, but Villy told her that her uncle was tired and didn’t want to be cross-examined the moment he got home. Villy’s hair had gone completely white, he noticed, but her strong eyebrows had remained dark.
    To deflect curiosity about himself he had asked about Clary and Neville, but before any adult could answer him Lydia said: ‘Neville’s voice has changed, but I can’t honestly say his character has improved at all. He’s simply awful in slightly different ways. He gambles with money and he hardly ever plays any decent games with us. Clary’s much nicer. You ought to ring her up, Uncle Rupert, she’ll be so frightfully pleased. She always thought you’d come back – even when everybody else thought you were dead.’
    ‘Lydia! Don’t talk such nonsense!’
    ‘I wasn’t. I’m not.’ She looked at her mother defiantly, but she didn’t say any more.
    He had glanced involuntarily at Zoë, seated beside him, but she was staring at her empty plate. It had been then that he had been assailed by senses of guilt and unreality – both so violent and so evenly balanced that he was paralysed. His decision to stay on in France all those months after he could legitimately have left, a decision that had seemed romantically moral at the time, now seemed mere self-indulgent folly, selfish in the extreme. And he was not even returning with a pure, undivided heart . . .
    The train was slowing down for a station – Basingstoke. He hoped that nobody would get into this compartment; he spent much of his life hoping to be left alone these days, not because he enjoyed the solitude but simply because he found it less demanding. He felt tired all the time, kept thinking he wanted to sleep, but usually the attempt simply provided a replay of small, disparate, disturbing pieces of his life. The only person he felt comfortable with was Archie, to whose flat he was now bound. He had rung Archie that first evening at Home Place, and somehow Archie’s pleasure (‘I say! What a thing!’) had felt completely all right – he hadn’t felt guilty or inadequate or dishonest at all. It was Archie who had said that he should not ring Clary, he should see her; he had also, after he’d heard about the fishing boat, asked immediately whether the Navy knew he was back, and when he’d said no, they didn’t, had said, ‘Well, you’d better come up at once and I’ll fix an appointment for you at the Admiralty. I warn you, they won’t be pleased.’
    They hadn’t been. He’d gone up the next morning, met Archie at the Whitehall entrance and been taken by him to see a Commander Brooke-Caldwell by name, who was distinctly hostile. He’d had to go over the whole thing. Why hadn’t he got in touch with any of the British services still in France? Why had he waited so long? What the hell had he been up to and who did he think he was? Who had been concealing him all these years? Was she a member of the Maquis ? Did MI6 know anything about her? Why hadn’t she tried to move him on? She hadn’t been a member of anything, he’d said. Well, that could be checked out – and would be. It was a good thing, he’d finished grimly, that Lieutenant Commander Lestrange was able to vouch for his identity. He’d read the relevant action report from Rupert’s captain, so the first part of the story was accredited. But he still hadn’t accounted for his delay in returning, had he? A stony glare from the