All Change: Cazalet Chronicles by Elizabeth Jane Howard Page A

them.’
    ‘What did you do?’ Georgie had a soft heart and was beginning to feel guilty.
    ‘I went and slept in Aunt Rachel’s room.’
    This impressed them. ‘Of course, I was older than Laura, but the feeling is the same. Don’t gargle with your milk, Bertie, drink it.’
    Bertie made the double effort of swallowing his milk and twisting in his chair to hug his mother. Milk went everywhere.
    ‘You can’t help your age,’ Georgie said to Laura, when things were cleared up. ‘You can stroke Rivers, if you like. He won’t mind at all.’
    But Rivers felt differently. He endured Laura’s nervous stroke, but when Harriet and Bertie joined in, he fled to the safety of Georgie’s dressing-gown pocket.

    Archie, having persuaded Clary to have a bath with a promise to ‘settle the monsters’, found them all in one bed arguing about which book they wanted to have read to them, but the moment he appeared Harriet rushed to him. ‘Be a dinosaur, Dad. Just for a bit, please, be one.’
    ‘If I do, it means no reading. Anyway, you can all read.’
    ‘We can, if we want to. But we prefer you to read to us.’
    ‘Shut up, Bertie. Let him be a dinosaur – he’s awfully good at it.’
    ‘My father is often a monkey or a sea lion,’ Georgie said. Archie admired his loyalty.
    ‘Go on, Dad!’
    Archie straightened himself up, then made his arms long, arched his back and took enormous strides towards his daughter, uttering huge cries that began as an unearthly croak and ended with a trumpet-like squeal. He scooped her up with his claws and dropped her – shrieking with pleasurable fear – onto her bed. Then he turned his – surely by now – bloodshot eyes on Bertie and repeated the manoeuvre. Fear made Bertie giggle with relief after he was dropped onto the bed.
    That left Georgie, whom he could see was really frightened. He became Archie again and sat on Georgie’s bed. ‘Don’t want to frighten Rivers,’ he said.
    Georgie stopped trembling and gave Archie a look of gratitude: his face had been saved.
    He kissed all three of them, ignoring the routine protests: ‘It’s perfectly good daylight outside, so why can’t we be in it?’ ‘Why should I go to bed at the same time as much younger people of six?’ Injustice stalked the room, and he escaped, leaving them to Zoë, who had come to see that Rivers was safely in his cage.
    When Archie got back to their bedroom, he found Clary, wrapped in a bath towel, asleep on their bed. She lay on her side, her knees drawn up, one hand cupping her cheek; she looked, he thought, like an exhausted thirteen-year-old. He sat beside her and gently stroked her hair until she stirred, opened her eyes and smiled at him. ‘It was the gorgeous hot bath. I just passed out.’
    ‘We must dry your hair, my darling.’
    ‘Are the children all right?’
    ‘They’re fine. I left them with Zoë. I did my dinosaur – they’re bottled.’
    ‘I heard your dinosaur. You never do him for me.’ Her voice was muffled because he was towelling her hair.
    ‘You’re over age. I don’t ever do him for people of thirty. Have you brought a dress?’
    ‘Of course I’ve brought a dress. The Duchy didn’t like us to wear trousers in the evening. It’s my blue linen one. It probably got a bit crumpled in my case and, oh, gosh, I forgot to sew up that bit of hem. Never mind. I’ve got lots of safety pins – it won’t show. I think I left my bra and knickers on the floor somewhere.’
    ‘Here. You look so nice, so lovely without clothes.’ Her skin was pearly, translucent, almost white, very difficult to paint, he had discovered over the years, but lovely in every other way, as he told her now. She still found it difficult to accept compliments, unless he made a joke of it. ‘I’m so vulgar and depraved that I like people with skin that looks as though they have been kept under a paving stone.’
    Clary now seized her comb and wrenched it through her hair, which she fastened with an