Casting Off by Elizabeth Jane Howard

affection; Clary had been entirely dependent upon him. So, when he was lying in that ditch with his ankle hurting like hell and all hope of escape with Pipette gone, he had scribbled the note to Zoë and had written another little message for her as the only comfort he could give. But she had been still a child then: children got over things – she had, after all, never once mentioned her mother to him after Isobel had died. Perhaps he, too, would seem like a distant stranger . . . He felt daunted. When it came to getting over things – something he recognized one always hoped other people would do – he wondered how it applied to himself. How long would it take him to get over Miche? He had thought that making the decision to leave her would be the hardest part of it; he had expected, he now realized, to be rewarded for the decision by finding it less painful in practice than in anticipation. Even on the boat he had thought that. He had thought that, once home, he would find it possible to slot into his old life, upheld by the virtue of having made the right decision. But this was not so: not only did it seem to be difficult in ways he had not imagined – sharing a double bed with someone who seemed like an intimate stranger – but the hours without her had simply made his longing for Miche more agonizing. Morality, too, had developed horns: he could neither act nor even feel towards one of them without damage of some kind to the other – at least that was how it was beginning to seem. And once out of the Navy, he would be expected to return to the family business, and absence from that had made it clear to him that he had no heart for it. But how could he expect Zoë to go back to complete penury if he reverted to teaching somewhere and trying to sell pictures? He supposed he would have to get over wanting to be a painter as well, but getting over things now seemed to be a shabby, inconclusive way of dealing with them.
    In the bus going back to his flat with Archie, he managed to say that he was nervous about the meeting with Clary. ‘Don’t you think it might be better if we had the evening à trois ? I mean, it sounds as though she knows you far better.’
    ‘I think she should be allowed to choose about that.’ Then, after a pause, Archie asked, ‘What was it like going home?’
    ‘Oh – you know – very odd . Not exactly how I expected.’ After a pause, he added, ‘Amazing to come back to a five-year-old ready-made daughter.’
    ‘I bet.’ There was another silence in which he noticed how Archie had carefully not mentioned Zoë.
    ‘I didn’t know what to get her. In the end I bought her a pen. Will that go down well, do you think?’
    ‘Sure to. She loves anything like that.’
    ‘Is she still writing?’
    ‘She’s a bit cagey about it – but probably. She wrote a journal for you during the war. For you to read when you came back. She always believed that you would, you know.’
    As he was putting his key in the door of a large, rather gloomy-looking red-brick building, he said, ‘Perhaps you’d better wait and let her tell you about the journal.’ Archie’s flat was small, but it had a balcony looking on to a square garden, now full of may and lilac and laburnum.
    ‘What time is she coming?’
    ‘Straight after work. Between half past six and seven. Like a whisky?’
    ‘No, thanks.’
    ‘Gin, then. I think I’ve got some of that left. Oh, no – it’s vodka. Vodka has become rather a fashionable drink because of our Russian allies. You can have vodka and ice, vodka and tonic, or just vodka. I don’t advise that – it has a sort of oily taste when remotely warm.’
    ‘I think vodka and ice would be just the thing.’ He didn’t really, but he felt tired and a drink might pep him up.
    Archie seemed to sense that he was nervous, because he began talking about the coming election, the end of the coalition and party politics back with a vengeance. ‘They can hardly hear themselves