Consider the Lily (23 page)

‘Danny is not to set foot inside this bedroom, Miss Flora,’ she said, ‘so don’t try and persuade him. The doctor said no visitors.’ When Flora protested that this was unfair to her father, Robbie silenced her. ‘Do you wish me to go against the doctor’s orders?’

These days Robbie exuded power, like a cat ready to pounce and what she said held.

Deprived of Rupert, Danny’s drinking bouts became more intense and it was seldom that Flora did not find him, either spectacularly drunk or hung-over, hunched on the floor of the pen with his hounds.

‘Danny,’ she begged, troubled by his decline. ‘This isn’t doing any good.’ She led him back to the cottage, put on the kettle and made him drink tea. Danny settled into a chair with a neatly mended cover – how he managed to keep his house she did not know – and quizzed Flora with a pair of bloodshot eyes.

‘What’s wrong, Danny?’

‘Nothing, Miss Flora. I like whisky, that’s all.’

She looked round his home. Nothing much there, but all very clean. On the table lay one of his treasures,
Marching Songs for Soldiers, Set to Well-known Tunes.
Danny saw her looking at it and because he was still drunk, sang,

‘
D’ye ken John Peel, with his khaki suit,
His belt and his gaiters, and his stout brown boot,
Along with his guns, and his horse, and his foot,
On the road to Berlin in the morning.’

‘Promise me something,’ demanded Rupert when Flora, rendered almost inarticulate by contradictions and hesitations because she was not used to talking to her father, eventually reported this state of affairs to him.

‘If I can.’

Angry blue eyes focused on her. ‘Damn you, Flora.’

‘What is it, Father?’

Rupert turned his head restlessly from side to side. ‘Since I can’t any more, promise me to look after Danny.’

It was on the tip of Flora’s tongue to cry out:
But you never looked after us.
Instead she found a lump rising into her throat because Rupert’s request was so sad. ‘Of course. Danny is quite safe.’

The eyes shifted to the map on the wall. ‘I don’t expect you to understand.’ Cruelly, the pallor of illness had bleached Rupert’s florid complexion, and an odour that Flora associated with the elderly emanated from the bedclothes – a smell she had tried to avoid in the past but now could not.

The wall opposite Rupert’s bed was sacred to his private gods: no maid was ever allowed to touch the maps and photographs which covered it. The photographs were mostly of scenes taken under fire, or in the awkward intervals between, the sort that was beginning to appear in books about the Great War, and exuded a lost quality. There was one in particular of Grenadier Guards near the Messines Ridge, fighting their way towards an unsteady camera with Croonaert Wood, a burnt-out chapel and a litter of the dead and wounded in the background. Whoever held the camera had been frightened, under fire, or both. Beside it hung a map of the western front in 1914.

Rupert as supplicant presented Flora with a new, and not altogether welcome, side to her father and to her position as a daughter. She stood beside the bed, looked down and said the only thing she could think of. ‘I know, Father. I know Danny is your friend. And mine.’

Primed by the drugs, Rupert was drifting into sleep. ‘Then take care of him. I am asking you, Flora. Not Kit.’

Why not Kit? she thought, but was pleased that he had asked
her.

As Rupert drifted into unconsciousness, the Oxfordshire Hussars staggered up towards the cavalry’s position, and the London Scottish marched into battle, their pipes a gallant, heart-breaking sound. Rupert was back in the noise, smoke and rings of fire lighting the landscape by the Messines Ridge near Ypres in Flanders. The air vibrated with the staccato of machine guns, and the London Scottish, who had whooped and skirled their way through London and then northern France, played on as they were decimated by German infantry. Until only one pipe rose from the Ridge. Then it, too, was silent.

All day the battle raged and by sunset of what came to be known as Ypres Day brigades had been whittled to battalions, battalions to companies, companies to platoons. The Royal West Kents had four officers left (all subalterns), the 1st Coldstream two, the Scots Guards, Borderers, Gordon Highlanders and Grenadiers five apiece, and Rupert was shaking with exhaustion. Eighty of his company had gone but he was alive and so was Danny Ovens. Both were filthy, hoarse, thirsty.

Neither of them had any idea that the war would last four years – or that they and the remaining troops now burrowing like animals into the earth would end up longing for death.

Rupert sighed in his sleep.

Danny’s welfare concerned their undemonstrative father far more than the news that the fall from his horse had broken his back, and Kit commented on it more than once. Matty suggested that Rupert was still in a state of shock so he did not understand. Kit rather agreed, but Flora was not so sure.

As for Rupert, he stepped up the calls for whisky and drove the family, and Miss Binns, the hired nurse, almost demented. Strangely enough, Robbie was the only one who could handle him when he got bad.

‘No, Sir Rupert,’ she said, the energy positively crackling through her blue serge uniform. ‘No.’

And Rupert would quieten.

One day Flora’s patience gave out and she smuggled in a couple of fingers of Glenmorangie in a glass. Rupert attacked it in two mouthfuls and demanded more. Flora did not give it to him, but later he ran a temperature and she spent most of the evening sponging his face and wrists.

The following morning, penitent, she cornered Robin Lofts outside the sick room and confessed to her crime. She was surprised at how much she minded Robin’s look of contempt.

He did not bother to be polite. ‘That was a stupid thing to do, Miss Dysart,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry. Truly sorry, Dr Lofts. But I couldn’t bear it any longer. He needed comfort of some sort. Can’t you see?’

‘Why don’t you talk to him instead of giving him whisky? That’s what he needs.’

‘Talk to Father?’ she exclaimed, as if he had suggested learning Hebrew. ‘I don’t think he’d like that.’

‘How do you know, Miss Dysart?’

‘Dr Lofts, I know this sounds silly, but I wouldn’t know what to say. Father doesn’t seem to like us very much.’

Robin absorbed the information and reckoned that he had done enough for the moment by introducing the idea. ‘That’s up to you, Miss Dysart. But please don’t ever give your father alcohol without checking with either me or the nurse.’ He became very serious. ‘It could have killed him.’

To her surprise, but not to his, Flora gulped and burst into tears. Robin reached into his bag, extracted a clean handkerchief, handed it to her and instructed her to cry as much as she liked. Flora, who would contort herself into knots rather than break down in public, discovered that she did not mind letting down her guard in front of Robin. In bed that night, she went hot at the memory, but while she was snuffling into Dr Lofts’s handkerchief, she had had an illusion of being safe. When she offered it back, Robin had said, ‘Keep it as long as you want. I have a supply in my bag for anxious relatives and patients.’

Flora resolved to order a dozen from Elphick’s in Farnham and donate them to the surgery.

As she drifted towards sleep, it struck her that Robin Lofts was the type of good person against whom one measured oneself – and that was both an exhausting and exhilarating prospect.

These days Robin was even more than usually occupied, both with Rupert himself and with the negotiations required to ensure that matters ran smoothly between Miss Binns, who was used to having things her way, and Robbie, who felt she had high command of the sick room. So far, Robbie had won the skirmishes and Miss Binns had been relegated to night duty.

Even with his additional responsibilities at Hinton Dysart, the surgery and rounds in the village, Robin found time to consider Matty, whom he liked. He also scented a challenge. Matty had not enjoyed good health, and it did not take much for Robin to divine that she was unhappy. Hesitating to draw conclusions, he wondered if what he diagnosed was the understandable, and hopefully temporary, depression of the newly wed discovering that intimacy has its black side as well as pleasures. Or something else?

A couple of weeks later when he bumped into Matty coming down the big staircase, he drew her aside on the landing.

‘Dr Lofts,’ she said. ‘Is Sir Rupert better today?’

‘If you mean, is he in any danger, the answer is no. How he progresses is a different matter. Up to a point, he will get as well as he wishes to be.’

Together they went down the stairs and Robin tried to explain himself. ‘You see, Mrs Dysart,’ he said, ‘I am increasingly drawn to the conclusion that patients can take charge of their illnesses and manage them with their minds.’

One hand on the banister, she looked up at him. She seemed to be inviting guidance and he plunged in.

‘Mrs Dysart, I wondered, what with one thing and another, if you’re getting enough sleep?’

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Is it that obvious?’

By now, they had reached the foot of the staircase where they came to a halt. Matty was growing her hair and it had reached the stage where it was neither one thing nor another and she put up a hand to pat at the wisps. Despite a faint fretwork of lines around her mouth and eyes, she looked child-like and out of her depth.

‘Do I look that bad?’ she asked.

‘Everyone in the family is under strain.’

It was impossible to take offence at Dr Lofts, and Matty did not wish to. He was kind, went out of his way to show he liked her and she felt at ease with him. Perhaps it was because he was not very tall and, therefore, did not dominate her physically as many men did.

Robin had discovered that if you stood perfectly still people did not mind looking at you. He made her look at him. ‘May I?’ He reached over and checked her pulse against his watch. Lying in his detached, unemotional grasp, her hand shook a little.

Then he examined the tissue-paper skin and checked the open cracks between the fingers. Robin had seen similar conditions on neurotics at the clinic in London where he had worked as a student. ‘Is your skin always so dry?’

‘It comes and goes.’

Matty allowed her hand to remain where it was, and it crossed her mind that, apart from doctors, not many people had touched her voluntarily. Robin checked the worst areas and, on spreading her fingers, a crack broke open. Matty winced.

‘I’m sorry. I’ll send up some cream for this.’ Robin released Matty’s hand. ‘I imagine it’s difficult for you, Mrs Dysart, marrying into a large family and having to cope with a major crisis?’

Again she brushed at the wayward strands. ‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘Everyone knows everyone else very well, of course. I am the outsider, if you like, looking in. But I’m used to that.’

So that’s it, he thought.

‘Well, don’t worry, Mrs Dysart,’ he said. ‘There is a remedy.’

Eagerness replaced the startled look. ‘I would be grateful if you would tell me, Dr Lofts.’

Now Robin was sorry he had tackled her, as the answer was not simple. He glanced up at the family portraits ranged on the wall of the staircase, and at the crossed swords just above their heads which had belonged to ancestral Dysarts.

‘Time,’ he said finally. ‘In a few years, no one will remember that you weren’t born a Dysart.’

Robin Lofts had not supplied the answer to Matty’s predicament because she had not told him the truth – a simple wish to be loved by her husband and to have his baby. During the day there were tricks to keep busy, but at night she had no defences.

In her dreams she circled round the outside of a garden full of flowers and fruit, prevented from entering by a hedge thick with sharp thorns. Inside, Daisy and Kit walked along the paths and sat on a bench in the sun, absorbed by each other. At their feet played the figure of a small, fair-haired girl. In the shadow, and desperate, Matty pushed against the hedge until the thorns pierced her flesh.

Matty sat up in bed, and pushed her hair out of her eyes. It was two o’clock in the morning.

But who will look for my coming?
But who will seek me at nightfall?

Where had she read the poem? She turned on the bedside light and blinked in the dazzle.

But who will give me my children?

Not Kit it seemed. Never Kit. Night and the raw defences of sleep blotted out reason.
You never expected him to love you. After all, you bought him.

For diversion, she shuffled through the books on the bedside table.
Tell England, Rough Justice, The Mysterious Affair at Styles,
her mother’s botanical notebook. None appealed, for no book could tell Matty how to cope with a marriage to a man who loved someone else.

But who will seek me at nightfall?

Matty drank a glass of water, turned off the light and lay staring into the darkness. Kit had unlocked many longings, including the sexual one. There, at least, she found it surprisingly easy to give of herself and to respond, however peremptory he was — and she knew that surprised him. It surprised Matty, too, that she found sex easy, enjoyable, not that she had ever discussed it. The problem lay in her craving for intimacy – lacking even when Kit was in her bed.

That – and, of course, her yearning for a baby.

‘Matty.’

‘Yes, Kit.’ Matty was in the morning room and at Kit’s entry looked up from the box of photographs on her knee. She pointed at the coffee tray. ‘Do you want some?’

He poured himself a cup and stood by the fire. Dressed in an old corduroy suit, Kit, who had been out inspecting a fence by Montgomery’s, was flushed from fresh air. He said, ‘I wanted to ask if you’re quite well. You look a bit off colour.’

On a foray with Mrs Dawes, Matty had discovered the photographs in the north attic and had brought them down to look through them. She waved a photograph at Kit of a dowager who appeared ossified by breeding. ‘I wish everybody would stop enquiring after my health. It’s kind, but unnecessary.’

More from guilt than anything, Kit pressed on. ‘You would tell me, Matty, if you needed to go to London to see someone.’