Consider the Lily (2 page)

Found wild over the northern hemisphere, it is a flower more than usually susceptible to domestication and ripe for use in literature and painting. Obedient, voluptuously varied, beautiful.

It was said that the red rose was the emblem of the Goddess of Love, a symbol of the blood of the martyr and also the ‘flower of God’ – the five petals representing Christ’s bleeding wounds and its thorns, his crown. To the medieval mind, the rose embodied many things. A wreath woven from the mystical rose represented the closed circle: the inviolate womb of Mary into which only God could penetrate. Roses were used as tokens of love and grief, and monastic burial grounds were planted as rose gardens. Rose legends reached their peak in the twelfth century, and were woven into the medieval preoccupation with the Virgin and her rose-dowered sanctity.

The Romans brought roses to Britain to soften this outer reach of the Empire. The Crusaders captured the damask rose as a trophy of war from which sprang the perfume industry (a rose in your garden with damascene ancestry will always be sweet-smelling), and later the formidable women of Elizabethan and Jacobean manor houses pounded rose petals with precious gums, barks and balsams to make pomanders, toilet waters and potpourri powders.

During the thirteenth century
Rosa gallica,
the apothecary’s rose, flourished in Europe. From it were devised the things that soothe and comfort: sweet puddings, melrosette, rose-petal water ices, rose cake, rose-scented liquors and, for the ladies, Oyntment of Roses.
Rosa x centifolia
(the original cabbage rose) first appeared in Dutch flower paintings in the early seventeenth century. The Empress Josephine helped to whip up the fashion for roses and when the repeating chinas and teas were introduced into Europe, rose breeding reached fever pitch. In 1867, the first hybrid tea, ‘La France’, made its debut.

See how much there is to know. How it takes a lifetime to find out. It never finishes, my mother said.

Rose names read like images from a poem, don’t you think? Gallicas, albas, mosses, Portlands, robust Bourbons, noisettes, climbers, ramblers, rugosas, polyanthas, floribundas, and, my latest passion, the English rose... So, too, do I love the shape and texture of the rose. From the scrambling wild varieties, to the blowsy dames of the deep cupped hybrid musks.

And the rose twines its way into old tapestries, paintings, poems and myth. Simple and yet complicated, a gardener’s necessity and yet resonant with symbolism, beautiful but touched with danger, drawn from many sources, but English, English, to the last thorn.

All my life, and I am now over sixty, I have studied the lily and the rose. Their contrasts never fail to fascinate a tidy mind such as mine – but with a temperament which also craves the colour and mysticism.

As the visitors to the nursery come and go, I think about these things: echoes and illusions that have a bearing on the story. They don’t suspect that I know this place better than anyone for I was brought up here. It is – it was – my childhood domain. No, the visitors see a shortish, middle-aged man with a moustache, a little faded, a little stooped, but healthy-looking and anxious to help. Sometimes I serve at the counter, and they queue up, clutching their roses, and ask questions which I answer as best I can. Then they leave, their cars and coaches rolling out of the lower field, and silence descends over a place whose past is slipping further and further away.

In my dreams, I return to the house and the garden as they were in the good years. Night after night, I walk across the circular lawn surrounded by its guardian wall of yew, and up the grey stone steps to the house whose windows shine pink in the dawn and purple and sheet gold in the evening, hoping to find the life that was once there.

You can’t ever go back, I know that. But I have learnt it is hard to be the last.

Because I am dreaming I hover as a winged presence above it: I can see everything... the pleached lime walk, the parkland beyond, the stone statue in my mother’s garden. On my right is the river, fringed by ash and willow and its border of anemones and fritillaries in the spring. I can see, too, the wild area, fretworked by poppies, and the kitchen garden, colonized by vegetables and blue starbursts of borage. I stop by the house and look over to the walled rose garden where the alba and Bourbon roses mass over a bed of old-fashioned pinks and penstemons. In my dream it must be June, for I am rolling a petal from the ‘Fantin-Latour’ between my fingers. It leaves a faint, clammy smear on my skin.

Time becomes jumbled. Sometimes I am young, sometimes the stooping figure I have become. But I know each plant here, as I know the smell of wet earth after the rain has swept in from the west, the dry, dust-laden smell of summer and the smell of frost-nipped rotting fruit in autumn – and my heart somersaults in pain because it no longer belongs to me.

Then I wake in the cottage in Dippenhall Street. In the next room Thomas is sleeping quietly, quite different from the mercurial person of the day, and I am alone.

Soon there will be a small army descending on the house to polish, mend and scour. Custodians in blazers will stand in doorways and direct the visitors. ‘How nice it smells,’ the visitors say, invariably, for Mother’s pot-pourri is famous, and walk around the Aubusson carpets in rubber-soled shoes and peardrop-coloured tracksuits.

Then I dream again.

Sun-filled and polish-scented, the house enfolds me, its silence broken only by the chime of the Tompian by the front door. Ageless, I run down the wide staircase into the hall, peer into the drawing room and turn left into the dining room. The table is laid for a ghostly gathering of twenty, monogrammed linen napkins standing to attention on the plates. At one end of the room, my mother’s portrait reminds me that I have lost her – and I don’t wish to be reminded. I turn away. At the opposite end of the room hangs the portrait of my father. Painted when he was in his fifties, his hair is still fair; the artist was kind and only suggested the age lines. He is dressed in riding clothes, one leg bent in front of the other, the impeccable cut of his jacket obvious even to those untutored in Savile Row. Only his hooded eyes, with their slightly troubled, distant expression, suggest that he was anything but an English country gentleman and respected member of Parliament perfectly content with his life.

Gripped by the memories, mine and others, I stare at him and my dream changes into the old nightmare.

Again I ask myself: who am I? Where do I belong in all this?

Polly Dysart entered the church of All Saints, Nether Hinton, on the arm of Sir Rupert, her father, to the expectant hush that normally greets the arrival of a bride. Unlike her more fortunate younger sister Flora, she was not a good-looking girl, merely passable in a healthy, rather jolly manner. Yet today her looks had risen to the occasion. Granted Polly was a shade too broad for her grandmother’s remodelled satin dress and, being tall and large-hipped, of a different shape from the corseted waist and bosom for which it had been made, but it sat well enough and the Honiton lace veil (washed carefully in tea by Robbie) billowed around a face rendered soft and pink from emotion.

The Reverend Mr Pengeally made his opening remarks and Flora allowed relief that Polly had made it to the altar to wash over her. Her father had been against the marriage, for no better reason than that James Sinclair, stockbroker, was, in Sir Rupert’s opinion, nowhere near good enough for a Dysart, even if he was ambitious. James’s family did not matter a twopenny toss to her, Polly had sobbed into Flora’s shoulder after a tense encounter between her fiance and father – she was desperate not to lose the one man who was likely to marry her. Flora, who knew Polly and her permanent grudge against life better than any, had remained silent.

She stole a look at her bridegroom’s unremarkable profile. The situation had been delicate. James was ambitious, but also sensitive, and not unnaturally he had taken offence at the implication that he was lacking in both social and financial credibility – particularly as the Dysarts were known to be as poor as church mice. But they possessed something very desirable: breeding, stretching way back through a history of leet courts, manor houses, knighthoods, internecine wars, and the armorial bearings reposing in the College of Heralds.

‘Do you take this man...?’ asked Mr Pengeally, levelling his short-sighted gaze onto Polly’s face beneath the veil.

She does, yes, she does,
thought her sister. Half choked by the smell of lilies, Flora grasped her bouquet tightly in her gloved hands, and the nightmare receded of processing with Polly into the church from which the bridegroom had bolted.

‘I do,’ said Polly loudly, and Flora made a mental note to search out the charity for distressed stockbrokers and make a large donation.

Too provincial, considered Susan Chudleigh from her vantage point at the end of the pew. (Susan possessed only one yardstick with which to measure things: an inflated notion that anything outside London was not worth considering.) This wedding is too provincial for words. She turned her head forty-five degrees in order to target the guests on the right-hand side of the church, and saw no one that she recognized or who looked worth pursuing. At least, Susan thought complacently, assessing Polly’s clumsy hips and half-grown shingle under the veil, my children are good-looking. Her face hardened, however, when her gaze encountered a diminutive figure standing beside Marcus. Try as she might, and God knew she had tried for twenty years, Susan could not bring herself to love her niece, Matty.

Because the pew was full, Daisy was pressed up against her mother. Susan’s surreptitious sweeps over the guests and a certain rigidity of her lips gave her away and Daisy had a shrewd notion of what Susan was thinking. Even at a wedding – no, especially at a wedding – Susan concentrated on the business of social analysis and it never failed to amuse her daughter.

Religion held little appeal for Daisy, or, more precisely, the Church of England variety rendered her angry and frustrated. It preached nothing to her except Do and
Don’t
and, in the end, when she tried to dissect the meat from the bone, its certainties slithered away. Thus Daisy occupied herself during the theological bits of the Reverend Mr Pengeally’s address by counting the number of polka-dot frocks in the congregation. There were five: black on beige, black on white, two whites on black and daring red on black. Daisy tugged at the skirt of her own geometrically patterned frock with its fashionably longer hemline so that it appeared even more so.

Five pews ahead, on the opposite side of the aisle, sat the bridegroom’s family. From the back, they presented an unbroken line of stiff collars and regimented haircuts, interspersed with rather dull dresses and trimmed straw hats. Directly across from them sat the Dysarts and Daisy applied herself to working out who was who. She fixed on a figure in a grey morning suit with fair hair slicked well back and concluded that that was Polly’s brother, Kit. At the other end of the pew sat Sir Rupert, a bull-necked, broad-shouldered man who, judging from the angle of his head, was gazing not at his daughter but at a point above the altar. Behind him was a woman in a navy blue coat and a hat that could only be described as lacking, who appeared to be staring at something on Sir Rupert’s shoulder.

The previous evening the Lockhart-Fifes had let drop at dinner that Sir Rupert had fought in the Great War and had suffered from it, although they had been vague about how. The information had been delivered in a hushed tone and Daisy had understood: the Chudleighs also had friends who had survived, some burnt, some missing limbs or coughing phlegm, and it had often struck her that a component of their spirit had also been blown to bits in the stink and carnage over a decade before. They frightened Daisy, these survivors; today’s men who, by some trick of history, had become yesterday’s.

‘Love is a bottomless well...’ said Mr Pengeally, nearing his conclusion.

Is it? If this was true, Daisy had not observed her parents drawing upon it, more like a teacup, and she considered nudging Marcus to share the joke but thought better of it.

Beside Daisy, Matty’s small gloved hands tapped her prayer book – ‘claws’, Marcus called them in his kindly but patronizing way. She looked down at her lap: it was true. The leather concealed their dry, papery skin. She smoothed out the wrinkles in the glove and tried to ignore her hands.

At the altar, Polly climbed to her feet and allowed James to lead her into the vestry. Seven minutes later, exactly as Rupert had allotted on the timetable, they walked back down the aisle.

Outside, a mild June sun poked at intervals through billowy clouds and sent shafts of light through the avenue of limes that led up to the church door. It had rained earlier that morning, and the hoofprints left by the horses on the mud road were filled with water. The guests chatted in groups about scandals, hunting and farming practices, leavened with gossip, and Polly would have been hurt and offended had she known how little her wedding featured compared to these important topics. Nevertheless, the villagers, many of whom had abandoned their Saturday tasks to walk up to the church gate, took in every detail.

Mrs Dawes, the Dysarts’ cook and housekeeper, scraped a slick of mud off her boot and watched the bride and groom pose for the photographer in front of the double doors. ‘Not bad,’ she commented. Mrs Dawes had no particular affection for Polly.

Ellen Sheppey clutched at her handbag and scrutinized Polly. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But not as pretty as my Betty, is she, Ned?’

A little washy from two pints in the Plume of Feathers, her husband, who worked in the kitchen garden at the big house, could not be bothered to answer.

‘Well, I admit, your Betty does have an edge.’ Mrs Dawes sounded a shade waspish. A widow of many years, she had never managed to produce any children before Albert was taken from her. She lapsed into silence at the might-have-been and then said, ‘It’s not like the old days, is it, Ellen? When Sir Rupert got married, me mam took me to look at the huge tent on the lawn and the wedding breakfast laid for five hundred.’