Free Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page B

difference to the solitary and separate lives of her husband and son. Somebody who cleaned the house twice a week did some shopping. Noël lived on school lunches and bread and butter and lamb chops in the evenings. A dreadful childhood, Fenella said. One could not treat Noël as one might treat anyone else.
    She had to agree. His parents sounded like monsters: she could not imagine the awfulness of being abandoned by a live mother – hers, after all, had died when Neville was born, which was completely different, and she could not begin to imagine having a father who did not talk to her. It made her understand Noël’s contempt for family life, his dislike of parents, of children, of the institution of marriage even. When she asked Fenella why, since he so much disapproved of the last, he had married her, she said simply that he was a conscientious objector, and it had been to prevent her being called up. ‘I’ve been reading the papers,’ he had said one morning, ‘and I think I’d better marry you.’ This seemed to Clary to be the most incredibly sophisticated proposal she had ever heard of, and she received the account of it in respectful silence. How had they met? she had asked at last. He had advertised for a secretary for the literary agency, and she had replied to it, gone to see him, and been engaged. He had rented a top-floor flat in Bedford Square, where he lived and worked, and shortly afterwards Fenella had moved in with him. It was hard to see, Clary thought, how he had ever managed without her. She not only did all his typing, she cooked, washed his shirts, cleaned the house (he did not like the idea of anyone coming in to clean it), but she accompanied him on his vast walks about London or the countryside, read aloud with him until well after midnight every night and then made his last meal of the day – yoghurt, bread and butter and a glass of hot milk – which he usually took in bed, where he stayed for breakfast the next morning. He liked to breakfast early. Fenella said, and to read the papers in bed before he got up. This meant, Clary knew, that Fenella did not get much sleep, and indeed she had admitted once that on the occasions when Noël took women friends to the theatre or opera, she usually went to bed early and slept until his return. Unlike Noël, who was small and wirily thin with very thick gold-rimmed spectacles, Fenella was large, with big bones, a matronly figure and huge hazel eyes – her best feature – that sparkled with intelligence. Noël, she had told Clary, was the most remarkable and interesting man she had ever met. If this was true for Fenella, who was middle-aged, at least thirty-five and probably more, obviously it must be true for her. Her life was now split into two distinct halves: life with Noël and Fenella, and life with Polly and the family; and sometimes she felt as though she was becoming two different people – the old Clary, who was playing house with her best friend and cousin, who had had the magic joy of Dad’s return from France and who had now got used to it enough to start worrying that he seemed changed and, she felt, was not happy, and the new Clary who was being educated in a thorough, serious manner about practically everything. Each day with the Formans opened up new vistas of her ignorance. Information, about the arts, the paranormal, transport, history, disease – Noël seemed to know what any famous people mentioned had died of – the state of footpaths, canals, railways in England, the cost of Elizabethan sweetmeats, how coracles were constructed, the dying words of an astonishing variety of famous men, the eccentricities of others – Nietzsche and his cream buns, Savarin and his oysters, a millionaire in the Isle of Man who played cargo ships with a map of the world and real ships that he owned . . . Facts, extraordinary, improbable (though she did not question them) streamed from him in an apparently ceaseless flow. He seemed to know