Free Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

work things, and I’m going to see if I can have a basin put in there. Then I’ll just have this room with the divan and chairs and things. What about you?’
    ‘I don’t know. I thought, as I’m not nearly as tidy as you, that I’d better make the small room a bedroom and have my desk and things in the big room.’ And never, she thought, let anyone into my bedroom because it will always be such a mess.
    ‘It’s important to decide before we choose the papers.’
    ‘I don’t think it matters what I choose.’
    ‘Oh, Clary! Don’t be so humble. It’s what you want that matters.’
    They sat on Polly’s bed, side by side with their backs to the wall and the enormous wallpaper book on both their laps.
    ‘I like red,’ Clary said after a bit. ‘But I don’t want people on horses and harps and things all over it as well.’
    ‘Our rooms aren’t big enough for that sort of thing.’
    After a bit, the harps gave way to stripes of various dimensions, and Clary seized upon a narrow one in two reds. ‘That’s what I want! Just like the Opera House at Covent Garden. All the passages are covered with it.’
    ‘I didn’t know you liked opera.’
    ‘I don’t especially – well, I don’t know whether I do, but Noël is taking me to it as part of my education. He says opera is nothing like it used to be, but, still, I ought to know the obvious ones. They nearly always make me cry – they’re so full of doom.’
    ‘Red is a bit hot for a room that faces south.’
    ‘You told me to choose. Red is what I like.’
    ‘And stripes will be difficult on these walls – they’re so bulgy.’
    ‘What’s the point of telling me to choose if you’re going against whatever it is?’
    ‘I was only trying to guide you.’
    ‘Either tell me, or let me choose for myself. I hate being guided.’
    In the end she chose the red stripes for her smaller room and let Polly advise a pale yellow paper covered with small gold stars for the larger one.
    But, she thought, as she lay in bed later, I’m always being guided by someone. Then she thought again, and knew that she meant the Formans – mostly Noël, but Fenella a bit as well, though not nearly as much. This was partly because everything about them was so completely different from anything she knew about other people that when she was with them she kept having to have things explained to her. Fenella had explained quite a lot about Noël to her. He was, or had been, an only child (his parents were dead and when alive they had not been in the least interested in him). He had been brought up in a small house in Barnet, but from the age of three he had been expected to fend for himself. He had learned to read The Times when he was four and subsequently all the books in the house, had got his own meals (how on earth had he managed that?), had been sent to a day school in Highgate but had never made any friends since his parents would not let him have them home. In any case, he did not really like men much, Fenella said, only women; he adored the company of women. He had gone to the theatre, the cinema and to concerts by himself from the age of eight (how did he get the money, she had wondered, but she had not liked to ask). He had grown up without any love or care, had been treated as a not particularly desirable third adult in the household. His father had been an unsuccessful architect who had lived largely on a small inheritance, the remains of which had gone to Noël when he died. His mother had made periodic forays into various societies and sects, the Oxford Movement, Gurdjieff, and an Indian with a Japanese wife who gave talks in a house in Bayswater, but none of them lasted, and in between she lay on the sofa reading novels and eating cakes. Then one day she left – simply disappeared, so far as Noël was concerned. His father informed him of this at breakfast one morning, adding that he did not wish to pursue the subject. Her departure did not seem to make much