Consider the Lily (21 page)

Over the centuries inscriptions have come and gone, some defaced by Parliamentarians who threw entrenchments round the church. A handsome brass under the east window commemorates the lords of the manors of Itchel and Eweshot. As soon as I could read, I traced the names. Giffords, Lefroys, Eggars, Knights, Smitherses, Kings, Snuggses and Varndells – the roster of an English village, yeoman and squire.

If you search on the wall dividing the school from the churchyard you will find a small plaque. It says: in memory of HESTHER DYSART, NÉE KENNEDY. Poor, troubled Hesther, who came all the way from America to better her social standing. She, too, is part of the history that makes up this place.

In winter, the garden is like the churchyard, stripped to its skeleton, buff, flat brown, a wasteland, a place of death – and also of rebirth.

Rupert did not die that night, nor during the ensuing weeks when nurses at the hospital kept a twenty-four-hour watch, and the doctor left instructions that he was to be fetched at any hour of day or night if necessary.

A hush fell over the house. The Christmas guests were dispatched home, telephone calls were conducted in crisis-ridden tones, and meals snatched in spare moments. The Christmas tree remained in the hall long after Twelfth Night had come and gone, and Mrs Dawes was forced to give away dozens of mince pies.

‘It is likely your father will never walk again,’ Robin told Kit in a tense interview. ‘His back is broken and he will require intensive nursing care for the rest of his life.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure. What you must decide is if you are willing to have him at home with you, or if you wish to place him in an institution which specializes in this kind of patient. Great advances have been made in this area, and we could find one that is absolutely up to date.’

Kit was exhausted. As often happens to those closest to the victim, the accident had both galvanized and depleted him: he was motoring twice a day to the hospital, and wrestling with the business affairs of the house. He pushed his hair back from his forehead and took Robin’s measure.

‘There is no question of what we should do,’ he said, grimly.

Robin approved the decision. ‘I will arrange for your father to come home as soon as possible. You accept that you must engage a nurse?’

Shock had rendered his emotions precarious and unpredictable and Kit felt angry about the accident; delighted – and guilty at feeling so – that, at last, he was in charge; worried by the consequences; haunted by an extraordinary idea that his mother had taken revenge from the grave.

Perhaps if Kit had felt able to talk to Matty, he would have found the solace of thrashing things out, a catharsis from confession. But he did not. Neither did Matty have the courage, nor the wisdom, to take matters into her own hands. Into the vacuum between them slipped Daisy – a memory as powerful and seductive as the lost Grail. Because Kit meant to be honourable, he tried to censor his thoughts – but discovered that no one can guard the unguardable.

Nevertheless, it was Matty who waited up for him to return home, whatever the hour, with a Thermos of soup and sandwiches, Matty who ensured that the fire was kept burning, that the whisky decanter was full and who invited him into her bed when he needed release. Matty dealt with telephone calls, letters of condolence, reorganized meals, took Flora’s coming-out at the forthcoming Season into her own hands, gave Kit her capital and urged him to settle business matters as he wished.

Kit should have been grateful. In one sense he was, deeply so. But charity is hard to accept, and Matty was doling it out. Sometimes he looked up at his wife opposite him at the table, or in her chair by the fire, at the pale face, incongruous lower lip and vulnerable eyes, at the
smallness
of her, and was shaken not by affection but by irritation, and wondered how he was going to get through this marriage.

Guiltily, he set out to treat her with scrupulous politeness and consideration.

‘What did she say?’ Ellen was filling in a coupon and gave Ned only half her concentration.

‘She asked me how I made the plants grow. How did I look after them? How did I make a garden? I said it was a lifetime’s work. Then she said a very strange thing. “Good,” she said. “It might last me.” Then she said I wasn’t to pay any attention to anything she said.’

‘How odd, Ned. The garden’s your job.’

‘I said my knowledge had taken me a long time to get, not wishing to be rude, like, but I didn’t want to waste it.’

‘I know
that.’
Ellen spoke from over thirty years of marriage.

The stove at Clifton Cottage was giving off a satisfactory heat and Ned pulled his chair closer. As usual, he sat with legs akimbo, exposing the patch where his thighs had rubbed the corduroy bare, nursing his beer. He looked as though he was thinking hard. Suddenly alert, Ellen abandoned the coupon. It was an expression she recognized, a compound of obstinacy and suppressed excitement. Once upon a time – when they used to walk up towards Barley Pound between the billows of dog rose and honeysuckle – that look had been directed at her. These days, it was reserved for the dratted garden. Sometimes Ellen minded, like she minded about the creases folded into Ned’s skin, the slackening under his chin, and his hair, once so thick and tawny. Sometimes she didn’t.

She returned to
Good Housekeeping
– lent by Mrs Dawes who, in turn, had been given it with a great deal of graciousness by Mrs Pengeally. ‘The fashionable hostess knows that by offering her guests Shelley china she is offering the best...’ she read. Casting a critical eye over the china, Ellen was thankful she was not a fashionable hostess.

‘Are you listening, Ellen?’

Good Housekeeping
would have to wait, and Ellen stacked it away. Then she noticed a puddle of beer on the table top and went to fetch a cloth. Ned drank his beer and watched his wife scrub the patch.

‘Stop fussing, girl,’ he said. ‘You’re always fussing and worrying.’

‘Get on with your beer, Ned.’ Ellen pursed her lips, then remembered it accentuated the furrows between her nose and chin and
Good Housekeeping
had said you should not do that. ‘I like to keep things clean, particularly if I’m out all day.’

It was an ancient battle between them – Ellen’s cleaning and Ned’s untidiness – and he did not reply. Instead he said, ‘I was finishing the compost when she steals up on me, as quiet as a little bird.’ Ned poured a second mug of beer from the stone bottle. ‘Do you know what I think, girl?’

‘What?’ Ellen wrung out the cloth over the sink and folded it before sitting down opposite her husband.

Gently she smiled at him, her touchiness forgotten. Ned was cold and pinched from a day spent outside, and his fingers even more swollen. Ellen’s hands clenched in sudden fright. They
were
growing older, the pair of them, and she wanted to protect Ned from what was going to happen, for Ellen found it easier to bear suffering herself than to witness it in others.

She helped herself to the beer. ‘I know one thing for sure. You’re going to tell me. What
do
you think, then?’

‘I think she’d been crying again. Like the other time I found her.’

‘Poor lass.’ Ellen took a sustaining mouthful. Her tone combined genuine regret and just a touch of smugness at the idea that the gentry had problems as well as ordinary folk. ‘I heard that Robbie woman talking to Mrs Dawes. I don’t think she or Mrs Dawes likes her. I don’t understand it. I think she’s a sweet thing, and quite nice-looking sometimes.’

‘He’ll get used to her. Especially the money.’

‘Ned!’

‘It’s true, girl.’

‘It’s a shame. Mr Kit is never at home. Still, they have had a bit of trouble. She must know we talk about her.’ The beer was relaxing, and Ellen finished hers. She was about to help herself to more when she saw Ned eyeing the bottle, and instead pushed it in his direction.

‘I feel sorry for her,’ she said. ‘She seems such a child among those great lummoxes. So what was going on, then, about the garden?’

Ned shrugged.

He had been working in the kitchen garden, digging over a pile of compost rotting down nicely in the bins, when Matty said from behind him, ‘Mr Sheppey?’

Panting slightly, Ned turned. Matty hovered on the path, pale and red-eyed, and when Ned came closer he observed that her eyelashes had clumped into points, giving her a young, uncertain look which made him want to put his arm around her.

Ned Sheppey, they clap people like you in jail, he thought to himself.

‘Mr Sheppey. I wanted to thank you for that time when... you will remember. I am sorry it’s taken so long to say something, but you know about Sir Rupert. You were very kind to me.’

He watched as her fingers pleated and unpleated her coat belt. ‘Is Sir Rupert doing well, Mrs Kit, now he’s back home?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s sitting up in bed and asking for proper meals. We were terribly pleased when he wanted a steak and kidney pie.’

It was one of those deceptive afternoons when the sun, shaking loose from the clouds, felt warm and springlike. Matty untied her headscarf and ran her fingers through her hair. The gesture was familiar and Ned searched in his mind for the reference. It came to him. His daughter Betty had always done that — taken off her hat in front of the mirror and combed her fingers through the hair by her ears. Sometimes, she had pressed her face close up to the mirror and sighed at the reflection.

Ned turned his attention back to the compost and spotted some dead couch grass caught in the prunings. He bent down to extract it.

Matty watched. ‘Why do you do that?’

‘Couch grass is a devil for compost, and I’m going to put these prunings into the bin when I’ve cut ‘em up small, like.’ Ned began to shovel crumbly, pleasant-smelling material into the right-hand bin and tossed in an extra forkful of horse manure.

‘Beautiful,’ he said to himself.

‘You make it sound very interesting,’ commented Matty from the path. ‘I’ve lived in London for most of my life, so I don’t know anything about gardening. Apart from the things in my mother’s notebooks. She was a botanist, you see.’

Ned drove the spade into the earth. ‘Takes a long time, Mrs Kit. Time and care. This garden has been let go for many years.’

‘I suppose the family couldn’t keep it up.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I’d like to know for sure. I must ask my husband.’ She laughed to hide her embarrassment. ‘I haven’t discussed this with him, but I am sure the garden is something we will wish to do something about.’

She
was
like Betty, Ned decided. Betty had worn that same expression when she wanted to know something: eager and bright-eyed.
I want to know, Dad. Tell me.

‘Could you take me round the garden, Mr Sheppey, please, and tell me about it and what makes it productive?’

Remembering Betty made Ned feel both prickly and yearning at the same time. He rubbed his arthritic finger. ‘Bend down, Mrs Kit,’ he said after a moment.

Matty hesitated, and the suspicion crossed her mind that Mr Sheppey might be a little eccentric.

‘Bend down,’ Ned insisted, forgetting who Matty was. ‘Take a handful of the soil.’ Still Matty hesitated. ‘Go on, Mrs Kit, it won’t hurt you.’

Matty did as she was told, scraped her fingers along the earth, feeling it cake under her nails, and brought up some soil. She proffered her palm to Ned. ‘What do I do now?’

‘What does it feel like?’

Matty gave it an experimental poke with her finger. ‘Wet.’

‘If you rub some between your finger and thumb what happens?’

‘It rolls into a ball.’

‘That’s good soil, then, Mrs Kit.’

Matty stared at the lump in her hand which did not tell her very much, but she had no reason to suppose that he was wrong.

‘That’s where you have to start, Mrs Kit. If you take away from the soil, even the good soil you have there, you must give it something back.’ Matty found herself nodding as if she had known these facts all her life. ‘Every garden needs good compost, otherwise it won’t give of its best.’

Matty dropped the ball of earth, and rubbed her hands with a handkerchief. ‘I think I understand. I hope you don’t mind me asking all these questions?’

Ned mixed a spadeful of grass cuttings into the compost to stop it turning slimy, and forked the mixture back into a compact heap to prevent too much air getting in. He seemed a little flummoxed by Matty’s enquiry.

‘It’s not my business to mind, Mrs Kit.’ Then he realized he might have overstepped the mark and said, ‘You must ask me what you like.’

Matty stowed her handkerchief in her pocket. ‘Mr Sheppey...’ She groped for what she wanted to say. ‘I would
like
it if you explained things to me.’

That was a new one on Ned: it tended to be the other way round with employers and it crossed
his
mind that the new mistress was soft in the head.

‘Do you see, Mr Sheppey?’

Do I? Ned asked himself as he dug. Down, swing, up; in the rhythm his father had taught him and his father before that. In the pause in their conversation, broken only by the thud of the spade, Matty and Ned absorbed each other. An interrogatory silence, which, if they had known, put down a milestone in a partnership.

Years ago, Betty had watched Ned fork compost, swinging her legs, tapping a twig against the wheelbarrow, impatient, runny-nosed, eyes screwed up against the sun. ‘Dad, come on. Mum’s waiting.’

Children were like strawberry plants. You wrapped them in straw and kept the frost off. Then they put down runners and moved on.

‘Ask me anything you like, then, Mrs Kit.’

There was relief on her face when she said, ‘Thank you, Mr Sheppey. You see, what with one thing and another, I haven’t really had time to look at the garden properly.’ Then after a moment, she added, ‘Show me where you work, please.’

Enclosed by walls, the kitchen garden was peaceful, a private place set apart from the public vistas seen from the house.

Matty remembered from her first visit the nail holes studding the walls where fruit had once been trained. In the sun the brick was a pleasing flowery pink but it was obvious that only half the area was in use. Ned’s carefully hoed rows of vegetables were already spiked with green, and the apple trees were in bud. Glass cold frames, some with the panes lifted to let in the warmth, were clumped in miniature villages over tender plants. In the smaller greenhouse Ned had planted out seedlings in discarded Tate and Lyle boxes. Hands in her pockets, Matty stood and observed, and felt herself relax.