Casting Off Read Online Free PDF Page B

was a clear, sunny evening and Edward drove east with the sun behind him, on his way to have dinner and stay the night with his mistress. The prospect, which usually made him feel excited and carefree – as he always felt on the nights before his holiday – seemed now to have other dimensions: the watertight compartments in which he had kept his two lives throughout the war were no longer sound; guilt was leaking steadily from one to the other. He supposed that talking to Rupert had somehow made everything seem more urgent. When he had said that Diana and he had not actually talked about marriage, he had rather simplified the point. Although she never said the word, she managed to bring all kinds of conversation to the outskirts of marriage. She couldn’t go on in the cottage, for instance. Well, that was fair enough: it was cut off and a mean little place where she was hopelessly isolated. But what should she do? she had asked – more than once – her lovely eyes fixed on his face. She also asked many small, trapping questions about whether Villy was to continue in the country or go back to London. He hadn’t told her about selling Lansdowne Road as he’d been afraid she would jump to conclusions. It was dreadfully hard on her, poor darling, having all this uncertainty. But, after all, he had it too. There was nothing he would like better than to have settled Villy comfortably, so that he needn’t worry about her, and then be free to start a wonderful new life with Diana. Perhaps, he thought, reaching for his snuff box (marvellous stuff if you got sleepy driving), perhaps I should tell her this, and resolved that he would.
    So, after dinner when they were drinking brandy, he did tell her, and she was overcome, said, ‘Oh, darling, how wonderful!’ and was awfully understanding about the terribly difficult problem of Villy. ‘Of course I understand! Of course you must think of her first. We must both put her first, darling.’

     
    When he had bought his ticket and discovered that the next train to London would be in twenty minutes, he wandered up and down the platform, past the news-stall – closed – to the station buffet. He went in: they might have some cigarettes and he was running out. They hadn’t. The place was disconsolately dirty and smelt of beer and coal dust; the walls, once decorated in pale green high gloss paint, were cracked and blistering, and the long counter had heavy glass domes that contained sandwiches writhing with antiquity. Just as he was wondering how on earth anybody could face them, a sailor came in and bought one with a bottle of Bass. Rupert left the buffet and walked to the very end of the platform. It was a beautiful evening full of tender yellow light and moth-coloured shadows; moth was a cop-out – they were all kinds of colours, really. He stopped looking: he was not a painter, he was a timber merchant. Like the rest of his life now, that seemed a completely unreal statement: he’d better think of something else. He thought about his brother, his older, once glamorous brother, whom he had felt was a kind of hero, or at least an heroic figure, although that, originating from when he was still a schoolboy during the First World War, had simply congealed into a habit. Poor old Edward! he now thought. He has got himself into a mess. Whatever he does now will make someone miserable . . . He suddenly found that he couldn’t think about that, either. ‘I suppose in the end she will get used to it,’ came into his head: he might even have spoken it aloud, the cat’s mother must be Villy. He knew, somehow, that Edward would do what he thought was the easier thing. He might well be wrong about what that might be, but when he did it that was what he would think. If whatever one did made one unhappy, might it not be best for Edward to do the harder thing? The harder thing was implicitly right, he knew, but that did not, he also knew, often provide much comfort. After all, Edward had