All Change: Cazalet Chronicles Read Online Free PDF

living there alone . . . It seemed both frivolous and greedy to be thinking of money at a time like this. She never used to think about money at all, and now she seemed to think about it all the time. Her eyes filled again, and she had another weep, this time about her rotten character.
    Going to task with the children’s clothes, she discovered that Bertie had a hole where his big toe came through his sand shoes and this meant he probably needed a larger size in his other – more expensive – ones. There it was again. Shoes cost money. Everything cost money. She blew her nose and decided to make some fishcakes for the children’s tea. The recipe said tinned salmon, but she only had a tin of sardines. If she put quite a lot of mashed potato with them, and a splash of tomato ketchup and an egg to bind the mixture, it ought to make four quite large and unusual fishcakes; and then she would ring Archie just after one, when his fat sitter had gone off for lunch. The thought of talking to him suddenly cheered her.

VILLY
    And of course I shan’t be able to go to the funeral because That Woman will be there.
    Such thoughts – bitter and repetitive – buzzed in her head like a disturbed wasps’ nest.
    It was nine years now since Edward had left her, and she had carved out some sort of life for herself. The dancing school she had started with Zoë had faltered and finally shut down. Zoë’s pregnancy, the fact that she and Rupert had moved so far away and that Villy was then unable to find a new business partner who came up to her standards, had finished it off.
    For a while after that, she had had to content herself with the house Edward had bought for her. Roland now went to a public school where he had been disconcertingly happy. At the beginning, she had expected (had she even wanted?) a desperate little boy already deprived of his father (she would not dream of letting him meet That Woman, so he saw his father once a term when Edward took him out to lunch) and then deprived of her, his loving mother. She had envisaged sobbing telephone calls, mournful letters, but the nearest she had got to these was when he had written, ’Darling Mother, I am board, board, board. There is nothing whatever to do here.’ After that the letters were full of a boy called Simpson Major and the amazing crimes he committed without ever being found out. However, Miss Milliment, the girls’ governess, was still with her; on discovering that she had no living relatives, Villy had offered her a home for life. In return she received a steady affection that touched her blighted heart. Miss Milliment’s attempts in the kitchen were disastrous, as her sight was very poor and she had not cooked anything since her father had died a few years after the First World War, so her help was confined to feeding the birds and sometimes the three tortoises, and going to the local shops if Villy had forgotten anything. She was largely employed in editing a work of philosophy written by one of her former pupils. In the evenings they were taking turns to read War and Peace aloud. So when Villy took an ill-paid and dull clerical job with a charity that a rich cousin of her mother persuaded her into, it was comforting to come back to a home that was not empty.
    The family had been good to her, too. Hugh and his nice young wife Jemima had her to dinner sometimes, Rachel always visited when she was in London, and the Duchy usually invited her to Home Place during term time. Teddy turned up about once a month. He was working in the firm, but found conversation about it tricky as he kept nearly mentioning his father, which he had discovered early was a no-go area. The trouble about nearly all of this was that she felt they only made the effort because they were sorry for her. Like most people who are sorry for themselves, she felt she had to have the monopoly of it. She called it pride.
    No. The people she loved were Roland (how could she ever have contemplated not