Consider the Lily (16 page)

As an education, it had not left Flora with many reserves. But that narrow, claustrophobic routine had been vital – for it had given her a childhood. It had been safe, and Flora and Polly had needed Miss Glossop, Miss Hunter and the others to get them through.

HOTEL ROMANA,
ROME
5 July 1930

Dear Flora,

    
Did anyone ever tell you that patience is a virtue? Remind me to do so when I get back.
      Seriously, I am very sorry it has been so difficult for you at home, and I hope the Ardtornish solution worked. Keep Father there as long as possible. As soon as I am back on the 15th I will come and take over.
      Would you be very kind and ask Friendly Builder if he has received my letter about (a) replacing the drawing room windows, (b) if it is possible to put in the new kind of radiator? He has not replied on these points.
      Matty seems well and is busy sightseeing. She spends most of her time in art galleries while I tramp round ruins. Funnily enough, she seems quite a different person when travelling, almost animated – you remember how down she was in France? She tells me she is looking forward to coming home.

Your loving brother,
Kit

PS What’s this nonsense about being unmarried? What do you think the performance next year is in aid of?

What Kit did not add to his letter was how much easier it was to get through the days when he and Matty made separate plans.

115 BRYANSTON COURT,
LONDON W1
23 October 1930

Dear Matty,

       
Are you feeling any better? I hope so. Dr Lofts promised me he would keep a strict eye on you.
      As you see from the above I’ve left the club and I am now installed in our new London flat. It is reasonably spacious, with a good drawing room for entertaining. Certainly it is big enough for your luncheon parties when we launch Flora next year. I think you will find it comfortable.
      I have engaged a cook-housekeeper, but I leave you to choose the maid. Mrs Waters assures me that there is a good registry in the Edgware Road. (I hope you are impressed by this grasp of domestic matters.) However, for the flat to be properly shipshape we must wait until you are well enough to come up here yourself. It needs your touch.
      We were lucky to leave Egypt when we did as a nasty situation appears to be blowing up. There were anti-British riots in Cairo which left six dead. Let’s hope that things don’t get too inflamed.
      Which reminds me, I saw a man walking up and down the street by Marble Arch yesterday and I was very struck by the message on the placard.

I KNOW THREE TRADES
I SPEAK THREE LANGUAGES
FOUGHT FOR THREE YEARS
HAVE THREE CHILDREN
AND NO WORK FOR THREE MONTHS
I ONLY WANT ONE JOB

I watched him for a long time and his predicament made me boil with anger and pity. It can’t be right that this is happening.

Yours affectionately,
Kit

PS A piece of gossip that might amuse you. The Prince of Wales has been spotted leaving the building after cocktails. Perhaps he has a friend here?

Mrs Christopher Dysart
, Kit wrote, aware that it took a conscious application of will to do so. He had a wife, but although that was undisputable it did not register with him: he was wearing his marriage like a new suit that had not worn in. He placed the envelope on the stack awaiting the post and readdressed himself to an unfinished letter to a Mr Raby, a man of affairs who had been recommended to him and possessed the advantage of being independent of any previous dealings with the Dysarts.

     To put you in the picture, the family has recently suffered from the effects of bad investments and this has resulted in serious embarrassment. My wife, however, is anxious to put to use the portion of her capital to which she is entitled by her trust. I would like your ideas as to where it would be both safe and productive.
      As to myself, would you consult the Dysart portfolio and assess if anything is salvageable. If it is, I would like it to remain separate from my wife’s account. I am interested in the development of the wireless which I am convinced will become a household item, and the recent formation of the British Broadcasting Company bears out this opinion. I would like to invest in a company developing a machine that will plug into the electricity mains and incorporate the loud-speaker into the design...

There was comfort to be had in the business of re-orchestrating the family fortunes and Kit was making every effort to keep himself occupied. One year and twenty-three days since he had said goodbye to Daisy, there were now days, welcome days, when he did not think about her at all.

WHAT IS ALL THIS ABOUT DAMNFOOL WIRELESSES STOP CONSULT ME BEFORE TAKING DECISIONS STOP WHY AREN’T YOU USING OUR MAN STOP REPEAT YOU MUST CONSULT ME STOP RUPERT STOP PS COME HOME

NUMBER 5
UPPER BROOK STREET
26 November 1930

Matty,

      Goodness! You are brave to invite the Chudleigh family down to Hinton Dysart for Christmas, and I salute your courage, or is it your thick-skinnedness? You will see it’s impossible. Of course we will meet from time to time, and I will be polite, but I don’t really want to see you or Kit, still less at Hinton. I have also persuaded Mother not to come either.
        Selfish and self-obsessed this might seem to you, but it is what I feel, and I must be honest.
      Don’t worry, I am joining Tim Coats’s skiing party in Bavaria which promises to be huge fun. I am quite looking forward to sniffing out this new Germany that I have been told about.
     I could never bring myself to say this before as you never struck me as possessing the gift for happiness, but be happy if you can and take care of him.

Daisy

CLIFTON COTTAGE,
NETHER HINDTON
5
December 1930

Dear Betty
[Ellen licked the tip of the pencil which had worn down to an inch and a half.]

      
I hope you are well and your veins are not hurting too bad. I would like to see you very much and your Dad and I wondered if we could come over on New Year’s Day when I will have a day off?
      Big things have taken place here. With Master Kit marrying and all that, and the house being done up. Quite different it is now, you would not recognize it, spanking fresh paint, a new roof, new windows. It does look nice and now she is back from the honeymoon Mrs Dysart is starting to do the inside up. I can’t say her taste appeals to me though.

Displayed in isolation on the mantelpiece above the range, Betty’s photograph seemed to nod at Ellen. At least, that is what she imagined, even if Ned did tell her she had lost her marbles. Ellen always wrote letters to her daughter facing the plump, rather blurred image. She liked to feel they were in direct contact, as if those years with the little girl, her two plaits and print pinafore, were not quite so far behind.

She turned over the paper and described Matty on the verso. After a paragraph she looked up. ‘You know, I don’t think it’s right with those two,’ she told Ned.

‘What’s new? The master never had any time for
his
missus.’

‘You mean the other way round. She couldn’t abide him, Ned.’ Ellen paused while she weighed up the benefits of being virtuous and remaining silent against the satisfaction of airing gossip. ‘Did I tell you what Madge heard?’

Ned enjoyed chewing the cud as much as Ellen, but he did not let it worry him. ‘Tell me, girl.’

Ellen chose her words. ‘Well. Between you and me, Madge says Lady D. had something going for her brother. Nasty, really,’ she added, in an attempt to clear her conscience.

‘And I say don’t poke your nose in what ain’t your business, Ellen.’

Your Dad says
[Ellen knew Ned was quite right. Again she licked the pencil and was rewarded by a watery outline on the page.]
I’m poking my nose in but I don’t think Miss Polly or Miss Flora were very pleased when Mr Kit married Mrs Dysart. Despite the money. And Mr Kit is a restless one and Mrs Dawes says he wanted to marry someone else. There.

‘Isn’t it tea-time?’ Ned got to his feet. He stood behind his wife and massaged gently at the nape of her neck where he knew it ached.

Ellen dropped the pencil and stared at the photograph. ‘I look awful, Ned, nowadays. Don’t I?’ Her daughter’s young face nodded back. ‘I’m growing old.’

‘So you are,’ said Ned, giving his wife’s shoulders a quick squeeze.

In panic, Ellen swung round. ‘Ned, do you really think so?’

‘It’s true, my girl.’ Face hidden, Ned bent over to stoke up the coal in the range and put the kettle on the hob. ‘You’ll be knocking at the pearly gates any minute.’

‘Get off, Ned.’

‘True, girl.’

‘Not yet awhile,’ said Ellen grimly, and rubbed her still swollen knee. ‘You’ll have to put up with me for a time yet.’

‘Tea?’ Ned leant the poker against the stove and peered at the pie inside the top oven. ‘Or have you gone on strike?’

The smell of cooked meat and pastry filled the room and the kettle began to do a steam dance.

That reminds me
[wrote Ellen to Betty]
, the recipe for rook pie. Use only skinned breasts, otherwise the pie will be bitter, and layer with the best beef and a bit of fat bacon. Season. Add some liquid. Cover with pastry...

HINDTON DYSART,
NETHER HINTON,
HAMPSHIRE
10
December 1930

Dear Dr Hurley,

     
Your name has been recommended to me by Lady Foxton and Mrs d’Arborfield. I have had one or two disappointments recently and I wish to consult someone such as yourself as soon as possible in the New Year.
      Could your secretary contact me at the above address in order to arrange this? I would like to emphasize again the urgency.

Yours sincerely,
Matilda Dysart

Gardens are like families, don’t you think? Each time the season repeats itself it draws on the past: each plant tied in to its parent. Every child that is born is determined by what took place before it was conceived, and the cycle goes on renewing itself until it is broken or played out – and the secrets are lost.

Each of us, then, comes with a hallmark, as permanent as the silversmith’s stamp. With plants, it is luck that determines whether or not the sun shines and the rain falls at the right time in the right quantities. Luck, and the love of the gardener who watches over them. Certainly, the manner in which we carry the burden of our past is up to us, but we, too, need luck.

Each summer when the garden groans under its own generosity and the visitors clog the pathways of the walled garden, I am reminded of this.

I was lucky.

The smell of an English country house is unique: its inmates can sniff an approximation anywhere in the world and say, ‘Ah, yes.’ In the Malaysian jungles, riding over African landscapes, or dying among Flanders poppies, they dreamed of tea-time in the library and of damp tweed and wet dogs steaming by the fire. Starch, Brasso, human sweat trapped in wardrobes, game hanging in the larders, boiled ham, mould in the cellar and the flat scent of cold earth streaming in through the window on a December morning.

In the weeks before Christmas the smells in the house at Hinton Dysart turned sharp and spicy. Lifted from Lee Wood, a Christmas tree shed its needles onto the hall floor, apple logs released their scent from the fireplaces, orange and tangerine peel perfumed the dining room and Mrs Dawes enveloped the kitchen in cinnamon, cloves, allspice – and brandy. Under these fresh assaults the lingering residue of paint, linseed oil, putty, new wood and freshly made up chintz was routed.

‘It’s more like home now,’ Flora told Matty over afternoon tea by the fire when the builders had finally departed. ‘The house doesn’t seem so foreign. More like it was. Only nicer, of course,’ she added kindly, interpreting Matty’s stricken look correctly. She went on to say that Matty should not take her comments as criticism. Matty, who was not at all sure she understood her bewildering in-laws and equally uncertain how to behave with them, spent a sleepness night worrying that she had overdone the improvements.

On the day before the Christmas guests — her first guests – were due, Matty roamed the house with Ivy at her side, checking the toothpowder and bath salts in the bathrooms, the McVitie’s biscuits in the tins on bedside tables, that there were enough towels, enough pillows, enough hairpins, enough blotting paper, enough ink... and prayed that she would pass the test.

‘Kit, can’t you do something about Matty?’ Flora begged. ‘She’s fussing about like a headless chicken and it’s making Father tetchy.’

Bearing a glass of strengthening gin and tonic, Kit eventually discovered his wife with her head in the linen cupboard. ‘I’ve been sent to tame you. There is a general protest at the high level of activity.’ Matty’s reply was muffled. ‘Please, Matty. Why don’t you come and sit down in the drawing room and read the newspaper?’ He held out the glass. ‘Have a drink at least.’

Matty barely glanced at him. ‘Later,’ she said. ‘I just want to be sure...’

She prodded a pile of towels. Kit stared at Matty’s excellently tailored but decorous rust and beige tweed suit, over which she had tied one of Mrs Dawes’s aprons, and protested, ‘Really, Matty, we have the servants to do that sort of thing. There is no need—’

‘Will you pass me the list on the table, please, Kit?’

Kit obeyed. He had already learnt that Matty could display a stubborn streak. ‘This isn’t going to become a habit, is it?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Matty’s face peered round the cupboard door, looking flustered. ‘You can’t expect people to do things for you unless you are willing to show them how.’ She grinned unexpectedly. ‘Aunt Susan told me.’

He found himself grinning back. ‘No. I don’t suppose you can.’ He was still holding the gin and took a sip. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t supposed to have this. It was for you.’

Matty stretched up to the napkins on the top shelf of the cupboard. She was far too small to reach them easily and a pile fell onto the floor by her feet. She swooped down to pick them up. Kit’s amusement vanished and a wave of irritation buffeted his good intentions. Disappointed with himself, ashamed, and guilty because he felt both, Kit put down the glass on the table and walked away.