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Overview
As war clouds gather on the distant horizon, Hugh, Edward, and Rupert Cazalet, along with their wives, children, and loyal servants, prepare to leave London for their annual pilgrimage to the family’s Sussex estate. There, they will join their parents, William and Kitty, and sister, Rachel, at Home Place, the sprawling retreat where the three brothers hope to spend an idyllic summer of years gone by. But the First World War has left indelible scars.
Hugh, the eldest of his siblings, was wounded in France and is haunted both by recurring nightmares of battle and the prospect of another war. Edward adores his wife, Villy, a former dancer searching for meaning in life, yet he’s incapable of remaining faithful to her. Rupert desires only to fulfill his potential as a painter, but finds that love and art cannot coexist. And devoted daughter Rachel discovers the joys—and limitations—of intimacy with another woman.
A candid portrait of British life in the late 1930s and a sweeping depiction of a world on the brink of war, The Light Years is a must-read for fans of Downton Abbey. Three generations of the Cazalet family come to unforgettable dramatic life in this saga about England during the last century—and the long-held values and cherished traditions that would soon disappear forever.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504034913 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 04/26/2016 |
| Series: | Cazalet Chronicles Series , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 578 |
| Sales rank: | 156,983 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Light Years
By Elizabeth Jane Howard
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1990 Elizabeth Jane HowardAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3491-3
CHAPTER 1
LANSDOWNE ROAD
1937
The day began at five to seven when the alarm clock (given to Phyllis by her mother when she started service) went off and on and on and on until she quenched it. Edna, in the other creaking iron bed, groaned and heaved over, hunching herself against the wall; even in summer she hated getting up, and in the winter Phyllis sometimes had to haul the bedclothes off her. Phyllis sat up, unclipped her hairnet and began undoing her curlers: it was her half day, and she'd washed her hair. She got out of bed, picked the eiderdown off the floor where it had fallen in the night and drew the curtains. Sunlight refurbished the room – making toffee of the linoleum, turning the chips on the white enamel washstand jug slate blue. She unbuttoned her winceyette nightdress and washed as her mother had taught her to do: face, hands and – circumspectly – under her arms with a flannel dipped in the cold water. 'Get a move on,' she said to Edna. She poured her slops into the pail and began to dress. She removed her nightdress and, in her underclothes, slipped on her dark green cotton morning dress. She put her cap over her unbrushed-out sausage curls, and tied the apron round her waist. Edna, who washed much less in the mornings, managed to dress while still half in bed – a relic of the winter (there was no heat in the room and they never in their lives opened the window). By ten past seven they were both ready to descend quietly through the sleeping household. Phyllis stopped on the first floor and opened a bedroom door. She drew the curtains and heard the budgerigar shifting impatiently in his cage.
'Miss Louise! It's a quarter past seven.'
'Oh, Phyllis!'
'You asked me to call you.'
'Is it a nice day?'
'It's ever so sunny.'
'Take Ferdie's cloth off.'
'If I don't, you'll get up all the quicker.'
In the kitchen (the basement), Edna had already put on the kettle and was setting their cups on the scrubbed table. Two pots of tea were to be made: the dark brown one with stripes for the maids, and a cup taken up by Edna for Emily, the cook, and the white Minton now set out on a tray with its matching cups and saucers, milk jug and sugar bowl for upstairs. The early-morning tea for Mr and Mrs Cazalet was Phyllis's job. She would then collect all the coffee cups and glasses from the drawing room, which Edna would have started to air and clean. First, however, there was their own scalding cup of strong Indian. It was China for upstairs which Emily said she couldn't even abide the smell of, let alone drink. They drank it standing, before the sugar was even stirred to melting point.
'How's your spot?'
Phyllis felt the side of her nose cautiously.
'Seems to be going down a bit. Good thing I didn't squeeze it.'
'I told you.' Edna, who did not have them, was the authority on spots; her advice, copious, free and contrary, was, all the same, comforting: it showed an interest, Phyllis felt.
'Well, this won't make us millionaires.'
Nothing would, Edna thought gloomily, and even though she had troubles with her complexion, Phyllis had all the luck. Edna thought Mr Cazalet was lovely really, and she never saw him in his pyjamas like Phyllis did every morning.
The moment Phyllis had shut the door, Louise jumped out of bed and took the bird's cloth off his cage. He hopped about in mock alarm, but she knew that he was pleased. Her room, which faced the back garden, got a little of the morning sun, which she felt was good for him, and his cage was on the table in front of the window beside the goldfish tank. The room was small and crammed with her possessions: her theatre programmes, the rosettes and two very small cups she had won at gymkhanas, her photograph albums, her little boxwood chest with shallow drawers in which she kept her shell collection, her china animals on the mantelpiece, her knitting on the chest of drawers together with her precious tangee lipstick that looked bright orange but came out pink on the mouth, Pond's cold cream and a tin of Californian Poppy talc powder, her best tennis racquet and, above all, her books that ranged from Winnie-the-Pooh to her newest and most prized acquisitions, two Phaidon Press volumes of reproductions of Holbein and Van Gogh, currently her two favourite painters. There was a chest of drawers filled with clothes that she mostly never wore, and a desk – given her by her father for her last birthday – made of English oak from a log that had proved to have a uniquely unusual grain, and contained her most secret treasures: a photograph of John Gielgud that had been signed, her jewellery, a very thin packet of letters from her brother Teddy written from school (of a sporting and facetious nature, but the only letters she possessed from a boy), and her collection of sealing wax – probably, she thought, the largest in the country. The room also contained a large old chest filled with dressing-up clothes – her mother's cast-off evening dresses, beaded tubes, chiffon and satin, stamped velvet jackets, gauzy, faintly Oriental scarves and shawls from some earlier time, dirty, teasing feather boas, a hand-embroidered Chinese robe, brought back by some relative from his travels, and sateen trousers and tunics – stuff made for family plays. When you opened it the chest smelled of very old scent and mothballs and excitement – this last a faintly metallic smell which came, Louise thought, from the quantity of tarnished gold and silver threadwork on some of the garments. Dressing up and acting was a winter thing; now it was July and very nearly the endless, wonderful summer holidays. She dressed in a linen tunic and an Aertex shirt – scarlet, her favourite – and went out to take Derry for his walk.
Derry was not her dog. She was not allowed to have one, and, partly as a way of keeping up her resentment about this, she took a neighbouring and very ancient bull terrier for a walk round the block each morning. The other part of taking him was that the house he lived in fascinated her. It was very large – you could see it from her back garden – but it was utterly unlike her house or, indeed, the house of any of her friends. There were no children in it. The manservant who let her in to collect Derry always went away to fetch him which gave her time to wander through the black and white marble hall to the open double doors of a gallery that looked down onto the drawing room. Every morning this room was in a state of luxurious after-a-party disorder: it smelled of Egyptian cigarettes – like the ones Aunt Rachel smoked – and it was always filled with flowers, smelly ones – hyacinths in spring, lilies now, carnations and roses in winter; it was littered with coloured silk cushions and there were dozens of glasses, open boxes of chocolates and sometimes card tables with packs of cards and scoring pads with tasselled pencils. It was always twilit, with creamy silk curtains half drawn. She felt that the owners – whom she never saw – were fantastically rich, probably foreign and possibly pretty decadent.
Derry, reputed to be thirteen which made him ninety-one according to the Dog Table of Ages that she had made, was quite boring to take for a walk as he was only up to a ramble with frequent and interminable stops at a succession of lamp posts, but she liked having a dog on a lead, could smile at people in a proprietary way that would make them think he was hers, and she lived in hope of finding that one of the occupants of the house or their decadent friends might actually have passed out in the drawing room so that she could examine them. It had to be a short walk because she was supposed to practise for an hour until breakfast at a quarter to nine, and before that she had to have a cold bath because Dad said it was so good for you. She was fourteen, and sometimes she felt quite young and ready for anything, but sometimes she felt languid with age – exhausted when it came to doing anything that was expected of her.
After she had returned Derry, she met the milkman, whose pony Peggy she knew well because she'd grown grass for her on a bit of flannel as Peggy never got to the country and anybody who'd read Black Beauty knew how awful it was for horses never being in fields.
'Glorious day,' Mr Pierce remarked, as she stroked Peggy's nose.
'Yes, isn't it.'
'Full many a glorious morning have I seen,' she muttered when she was past him. When she married, her husband would find her quite remarkable because she could think of a Shakespeare quotation for anything – anything at all that happened. On the other hand, she might not marry anybody because Polly said that sex was very boring and you couldn't really go in for marriage without it. Unless Polly was wrong, of course; she often was, and Louise had noticed that she said things were boring when she was against them. 'You don't know the first thing about it, George,' she added. Her father called everyone he didn't know George – all men, that is, and it was one of his favourite phrases. She rang the front-door bell three times so that Phyllis would know it was her. 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.' It sounded a bit grudging, but noble as well. If only she was Egyptian she could marry Teddy like the Pharaohs did and, after all, Cleopatra was the result of six generations of incest, whatever incest might be. The worst drawback about not going to a school was that you knew quite different things and she'd made the stupid mistake in the Christmas holidays of pretending to her cousin Nora, who did go to school, that sex was old hat which meant that she hadn't found anything out at all. Just as she was about to ring again, Phyllis opened the door.
'Louise might come in.'
'Nonsense. She'll be out with the dog.' Before she could say anything else, he put his mouth, edged on its upper rim with his bristling moustache, upon hers. After a moment of this, she pulled up her nightdress and he was upon her. 'Darling Villy,' he said three times before he came. He'd never been able to cope with Viola. When he had finished he gave a deep sigh, took his hand from her left breast and kissed her throat.
'China tea. I don't know how you manage always to smell of violets and Chinatea. All right?' he added. He always asked that.
'Lovely.' She called it a white lie to herself, and over the years it had come to have an almost cosy ring. Of course she loved him, so what else could she say? Sex was for men, after all. Women, nice women anyway, were not expected to care for it, but her own mother had intimated (the only time she had ever even remotely touched upon the subject) that it was the gravest possible mistake ever to refuse one's husband. So she had never refused him and if, eighteen years ago, she had suffered some shock accompanied by acute pain when she discovered what actually happened, practice had dissolved these feelings into those merely of a patient distaste, and at the same time it was a way of proving her love which she felt must be right.
'Run me a bath, darling,' she called as he left the room.
'I'll do that thing.'
She tried a second cup of tea, but it was cold so she got up and opened the large mahogany wardrobe to decide what to wear. She had to take Nanny and Lydia to Daniel Neal for summer clothes in the morning, and then she was lunching with Hermione Knebworth and going back to her shop afterwards to see if she could pick up an evening dress or two – at this time of year Hermione usually had things that she was selling off before everybody went away for the summer. Then she must go and see Mummy because she hadn't managed it yesterday, but she wouldn't have to stay long because she had to get back to change for the theatre and dinner with the Warings. But one could not go to Hermione's shop without at least trying to look smart. She decided on the oatmeal linen edged with marina-blue corded ribbon that she'd bought there last year.
The life I lead, she thought (it was not a new idea, rather a reiteration), is the one that is expected for me: what the children expect, and Mummy always expected, and, of course, what Edward expects. It is what happens to people who marry and most people don't marry someone so handsome and so nice as Edward. But removing the idea of choice – or choice after a very early date – in her conduct added the desirable dimension of duty: she was a serious person condemned to a shallower way of life than her temperament could have dealt with (if things had been very different). She was not unhappy – it was just that she could have been much more.
As she crossed the landing to her husband's large dressing room that contained their bath, she heard Lydia on the top floor shouting at Nanny, which meant that her pigtails were being done. Below her, a C major exercise of von Bulow began on the piano. Louise was practising.
The dining room had French windows that looked onto the garden. It was furnished with the essentials: a set of eight beautiful Chippendale chairs, given to them by Edward's father when they married, a large koko wood table at present covered with a white cloth, a sideboard with electric heaters on which were kidneys, scrambled eggs, tomatoes and bacon, cream-coloured walls, some pictures made of coloured wood veneers, and sconces (mock Adam) with little half-shell lampshades, a gas fire in the fireplace and a battered old leather chair in which Louise loved to curl up and read. The general effect was ugly in a subdued kind of way, but nobody noticed it at all, except Louise who thought it was dull.
Lydia sat with her knife and fork poised like Tower Bridge opening while Nan chopped up tomato and bacon. 'If you give me kidney, I'll spit it out,' she had remarked earlier. A good deal of early-morning conversation with Nan consisted of threats from either side, but since neither called one another's bluff it was difficult to know what the consequences might ever have been if either had gone through with them. As it was, Lydia knew perfectly well that Nan wouldn't dream of cancelling the visit to Daniel Neal, and Nan knew that Lydia would not dream of spitting out kidney or anything else in front of Daddy. He, Daddy, had bent over her to kiss the top of her head as he did every morning and she smelled his lovely woody smell mixed with lavender water. Now he sat at the head of the table with a large plate of everything in front of him and the Telegraph propped against the marmalade dish. Kidneys were nothing to him. He slashed them and the horrible awful blood ran out and he mopped it up with fried bread. She drank some of her milk very noisily to make him look up. In winter he ate poor dead birds he had shot: partridges and pheasants with little black scrunched-up claws. He didn't look up, but Nan seized her mug and put it out of reach. 'Eat your breakfast,' she said in the special quiet voice she used at mealtimes in the dining room.
Mummy came in. She smiled her lovely smile at Lydia, and came round the table to kiss her. She smelled of hay and some kind of flower that made Lydia feel like sneezing but not quite. She had lovely curly hair but with bits of white in it that were worrying because Lydia wanted her never to be dead which people with white hair could easily be.
Mummy said, 'Where's Louise?', which was silly really, because you could still hear her practising.
Nan said, 'I'll tell her.'
'Thank you, Nan. Perhaps the drawing-room clock has stopped.'
Mummy had Grape Nuts and coffee and toast for breakfast with her own little tiny pot of cream. She was opening her post which was letters that came through the front door and skidded over the polished floor in the hall. Lydia had had post once: on her last birthday when she was six. She had also ridden on an elephant, had tea in her milk and worn her first pair of lace-up outdoor shoes. She thought it had been the best day in her life, which was saying a lot, because she'd already lived through so many days. The piano-playing had stopped and Louise came in followed by Nan. She loved Louise who was terrifically old and wore stockings in winter.
Now Lou was saying, 'You're going out to lunch, Mummy, I can tell from your clothes.'
'Yes, darling, but I'll be back to see you before Daddy and I go out.'
'Where are you going?'
'We're going to the theatre.'
'What are you going to?'
'A play called The Apple Cart. By George Bernard Shaw.'
'Lucky you!'
Edward looked up from his paper. 'Who are we going with?'
'The Warings. We're dining with them first; seven sharp. Black tie.'
'Tell Phyllis to put my things out for me.'
'I never go to the theatre.'
'Louise! That's not true. You always go at Christmas. And for your birthday treat.'
'Treats don't count. I mean I don't go as a normal thing. If it's going to be my career, I ought to go.'
Villy took no notice. She was looking at the front page of The Times. 'Oh dear. Mollie Strangways's mother has died.'
Lydia said, 'How old was she?'
Villy looked up. 'I don't know, darling. I expect she was quite old.'
'Was her hair gone quite white?'
Louise said, 'How do they know which people who die to put in The Times? I bet far more people die in the world than would go on one page. How do they choose who to put?'
Her father said, 'They don't choose. People who want to put it in pay.'
'If you were the King, would you have to pay?'
'No – he's different.'
Lydia, who had stopped eating, asked, 'How old do people live?' But she said it very quietly and nobody seemed to have heard her.
Villy, who had got up to pour herself more coffee, noticed Edward's cup and refilled it now saying, 'It's Phyllis's day off, so I'll do your clothes. Try not to be back too late.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Copyright © 1990 Elizabeth Jane Howard. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
The Cazalet Family Tree,The Cazalet Family and their Servants,
PART ONE,
Landsdowne Road: 1937,
Home Place: 1937,
PART TWO,
Home Place: Late Summer 1938,
Home Place: September 1939,
Preview: Marking Time,
About the Author,
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