Consider the Lily (24 page)

‘Don’t worry, Kit.
Please.’

‘I mean...’ Kit dropped onto the sofa beside his wife and fielded slopped coffee from his saucer into his cup. The newly decorated morning room was now grey with rose silk curtains bordered to match the walls. Dominating it was a flower painting by Gluck in shades of white. Kit found Matty’s taste in painting almost disturbing, and he was repelled by this picture’s bold, flaring femaleness. He eyed it with dislike and turned back to her. ‘I just don’t want you overdoing things, that’s all.’

Matty said nothing and returned to the contents of the box. She held up a sepia studio portrait of a woman dressed in Edwardian evening dress and a many-stranded pearl choker. The waistline was cruelly laced in, the bosom magnificently pouter, and a pair of sloping shoulders rose from the silk and lace. Yet, despite the jewels and the ostrich feathers, the face seemed unhappy, hinting that its owner found life difficult, even painful. On the back it read, ‘Mayfair Portraits. 25 Piccadilly. March 1915’. Matty turned to Kit. ‘Who’s this?’

He glanced at the photograph and became quite still. ‘My mother,’ he said at last, and Matty knew that Kit did not wish to talk about her.

She examined Hesther’s jaw-line, both delicate and curiously stubborn, high cheekbones, a mass of blonde hair – and felt the jealousy of a newcomer who could not hope to compete with the past.

‘She was very good-looking, Kit.’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t like talking about her?’

Kit rose to his feet. ‘No,’ he said curtly. ‘If you don’t mind I’d rather we didn’t.’

Matty sneaked another look at the photograph. ‘Most people say something about their parents,’ she pointed out. ‘You have told me nothing about your mother.’

‘Please, Matty.’ Kit put down his cup and got to his feet. ‘Leave it.’

Baffled, Matty scrabbled among the rest of the photographs. Horses, cars, weddings, shooting parties, all with their whiff of ancient history. She pulled out one at random. ‘It’s of all of you as children,’ she said.

Topping them by a head, dressed in a Norfolk jacket and stiff collar, Kit stood behind his two sisters who were dressed in smocked tartan dresses, identical plaits tied with identical ribbon. In the fashion of the time, his hair was meticulously parted and plastered to his head. The camera had caught him grinning: Look at me, he seemed to be saying, isn’t life wonderful?

‘You must have been nine or ten?’ Matty looked up at her husband, tried to puzzle out the adult in the child’s image and failed. Then she said, ‘The photograph’s been torn, it looks as—’

‘Drop it, Matty.’ Kit had paled and he was breathing quickly.

At first she did not understand what he meant. ‘How odd...’

Kit removed the photograph from Matty’s grasp. ‘Please don’t,’ he said, and threw it back into the box. ‘It’s none of your business. It’s not worth bothering about.’

Matty pushed the box aside. ‘Can’t I know about your family? You know about mine.’

Kit shook his head. ‘Please, Matty. It’s not your fault, but it’s better left alone.’

Although he pushed them into his pockets, she was sure his hands were shaking and her bewilderment deepened. Matty leant towards him and touched his arm. ‘I’m sorry, Kit, if I’ve upset you. Truly.’

For a moment, she imagined the shutter he had pulled down lifted for a few seconds and she gazed inside. Then it closed, leaving the Kit who hid his secrets well. ‘Dear Matty. It’s all horribly boring for you.’

‘Boring for you’ translated for Matty into ‘mind your own business’. It was as if he had put out his hands and pushed her away, hard.

Too late, Kit realized what he had done and tried to salvage the situation. ‘You silly old thing,’ he said in an effort to gloss it over. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about.’

He wished that he felt differently, that he was making Matty happy, and put out his arm, drew her towards him and aimed a kiss at the top of her head. ‘You will tell me if you need to go to London, won’t you?’

‘Yes,’ she replied in a flat, dispirited way.

Matty should have left the subject of the photograph alone, but she did not. Greatly daring, she returned to the morning room, took out the torn photograph, hid the box and went in search of Flora who was checking tack in the tack room.

‘I found this,’ she said. ‘I wondered who was missing?’

Flora replaced the top on a tin of dubbin. ‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘Some ghastly relation, I expect.’

Matty handed it over. With a smile, Flora took it, examined the image. There was a pause and her smile vanished. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, at last. ‘I remember it being taken.’

‘Who’s missing?’

If Matty had expected an answer to the mystery, she was not going to get it.

‘No one,’ said Flora and she sounded quite savage. ‘No one is missing.’

‘Are you sure?’

Flora gave back the photograph and swung round so that her back was to Matty. ‘I am quite sure.’

Matty re-examined the photograph. It was mounted on thick cardboard and to tear it, someone had needed to apply considerable force. She ran her finger down the jags. What clue was she missing? ‘I’ll see you later, Flora.’

‘Fine,’ said Flora, busy with a bridle. But after Matty had left, she dropped down onto the bench. The room was full of comforting things: saddle soap and leather, saddles and bridles used by the family – almost breathing, she always thought. Flora continued to stare at them, her face suffused with an angry red.

Matty went outside. The garden was a mixture of greens and browns and it was cold and damp, but not with the savagery of winter. Over by the tennis court, tits were busy in the cherry blossom, and worms had heaved casts all over the grass. Just for fun, Matty stood on one and surveyed the flattened patch. Her shoes squelched and collected mud. A clump of late aconites was in bloom under the plane tree and she stopped to examine a yellow head — those under the tree were less glossy than the ones growing further out.

Over by the river, the witch-hazel was out and she stared at the spiky-petalled, purple-centred blossom. Its scent drifted through the air towards her and she drew in deep breaths. Crocuses had naturalized by the river bank, and under a clump of leaf mould Matty discovered the mottled leaves and reflexed petals of a dog-toothed violet. She knew that because Jocasta had drawn one in her notebook.

Matty plodded along the river bank until she came to the bridge over which she had first crossed into the garden. Then, as last night’s rain splashed on her cheeks from the trees, she turned right and walked beside the trickle, known, for some reason, as Harry’s stream. In the wild area at the south end of the garden, the scrub was thickening with spring – an avant-garde sculpture of branches and whippy offshoots. Pinpoints of light darted from the raindrops hanging off branches, and Matty skimmed some off with her finger and sucked, as a child would.

She reached for her handkerchief and encountered the photograph, the junction between image and stiff cardboard. Photographs were not supposed to tell lies, but this one did. It said that here was a happy family. The torn edge caught under her nail, and like, a seismic register, she absorbed old anger and disturbance.

What connection was she failing to make?

A bird in the laurel hedge chattered and she looked up. It was then she realized that the scrub in the south-west corner — where she had seen the flash of blue the day after Polly’s wedding – concealed a path. In high summer, leaves blocked it off, but now it was just possible to see it through the bare branches, threading away from the lawn towards the wall skirting the southern perimeter of the garden.

Intrigued, Matty stamped down the worst of the scrub, and pushed herself backwards through the breach she had made. After fifteen yards or so, the scrub thinned and where Matty expected to meet the wall, the path turned a sharp right, through a cluster of silver birches into a clearing.

Surprised, she tried to take her bearings. Instead of running north towards the tennis courts and the walled garden, the perimeter wall curved to create an enclosed and sheltered space. You could not see it from the garden, nor had she noticed it from the road.

She was standing on a rise, and in the dip below rioted ivy, nettles, brambles and elder, at the centre of which was a lump of stone. Puzzled, Matty turned back to reassess the path along which she had come and it occurred to her that the trees fringing it had been planted as a walk.

She swung round and took another look at the sunken area. Something about it suggested that it had not always been lapped by a green shroud. Her thoughts assembled into a conclusion: this had once been a garden.

Without warning, a chill drove deep into Matty’s breast, undamming an anguish that forced itself through her body. She wanted to run away, but fear locked her knees. She wanted to scream, but her throat was too dry.

When, at last, she had gained control enough to focus, a child was standing by the stone at the centre of the abandoned garden, solemn and flaxen-haired, dressed in a warm coat with a bonnet and gaiters. Even from that distance, Matty recognized the lost expression in the eyes, and knew the child was in need.

‘Wait,’ she breathed, and slithered clumsily down the bank. ‘Wait for me.’ She slipped, swayed and fell backwards. Scrambling to her feet, she held out a hand. ‘Wait.’

But the child paid no attention. She backed away from the stone, her feet making no sound.

‘Wait!’

The child drew back further. Once again a painfully high note sounded in Matty’s ears and she clamped her hands to them. Ivy tangled round her feet, brambles tore at her stockings and her shoes filled with muddy water. Hampered, she slipped again, recovered herself, but when she looked up the child had gone.

With a tremendous effort, Matty reached the stone and fell against it.

‘Where are you?’

There was no answer and no noise at all. No birds. No rustling. No high-pitched note in her ears. Nothing, except for her own noisy breathing. It was very still, infectiously so, and Matty, too, quietened.

Gradually, shapes began to make sense. Over by the wall was the still discernible skeleton of a flowerbed. To her right, rusting but upright, stood a couple of wrought-iron arches smothered in greenery. She was standing on what must have been a lawn, metamorphosed by neglect into a wilderness of couch grass, clover and moss. Leaf mould, dank and grey-brown, carpeted the area, giving off its characteristic odour. The stone under Matty’s hand was lumpy with lichen. She took off her glove, scratched with a fingernail and a patch of marble appeared, grained with the lightest of dark veins. Matty took a step or two backwards and pulled up some stems of rosebay willowherb at the base. On close inspection, the lump took shape as a statue of a woman carrying a water jug on her shoulder. The figure was gazing down at something by her feet and the artist had caught life in her draperies and in the heaviness of her loose hair. She was smiling: a serene, confident smile. Enchanted, Matty brushed away the layer of leaves caught in the stone folds – and revealed a stone child playing by her feet.

She backed away over the wet grass, turned sharply and went over to inspect the flowerbed by the wall. She did not want to cry. Careless of her coat, she squatted down and stared hard at the earth. Time and neglect, deliberate it seemed, had done damage but not irrevocably so.

Ignorant of many plants though she was, Matty recognized a rose bush and a clematis ballooning up the wall. After a moment, she put up a hand and covered her mouth. She stayed like that for a long time. Somehow she had got to this point in her life, a barren, unloved wife in a family full of secrets. Under that lurked a suspicion that it had happened because she deserved it. Behind the diffidence, the passion for form and design, her vocation for suffering, behind Matty’s unused capacity to love, lay the fear that her life had fallen out like this because she was
unlovable.

A breeze blew over the ridge and ruffled her hair. Her thighs protested from the unaccustomed pose. Somehow, she was going to have to make something of her life – but she did not know how.
She did not know how.

She allowed her hand to trail along the edge of the flowerbed and encountered a hump. She looked down. Struggling through the leaves and grass was an oval green plant: neat, contained and dotted with yellow shapes. No special skill was required to recognize that it was an ordinary primrose. Bright and full of life – in direct contrast to the sickness in Matty’s spirit.

Trembling a little, she brushed the leaves aside, exposing the flowers. ‘Oh, yes.’ Jocasta’s voice floated up from a buried memory. ‘Toothed oval leaves, littly darling. Pale flowers with darker eyes and, see, a stem brushed with soft hairs. Write it in your book, Matty...’

Very gently, Matty placed a finger under one of the flowers and turned it towards her.

‘How did you survive?’ she asked it.

The hole left by Matty’s forced entry stopped Ned in his tracks. For a moment he stared at the flattened undergrowth and then put down the wheelbarrow and followed suit.

If it was those dratted Prossers playing hookey in the grounds then trouble was coming. Ned itemized in his head the precise form that trouble would take – and halted when he saw Matty’s figure crouched over the flowerbed. She looked up at him with a startled expression and time slipped a connection – and it was Betty staring up at her father. He went down the bank towards her. ‘Don’t take on, Mrs Kit,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to see it, lovey.’ He helped her to her feet and brushed leaves from her coat. She smelt of rain and leaf mould, and reminded him of nothing so much as a wren.

Matty gave a choked laugh. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. Ned produced one of his rare smiles and watched her pull herself together.

After a minute, she asked, ‘What is this place, Mr Sheppey? Why is it blocked off?’

‘You mustn’t worry about that,’ he replied.

‘Why, Mr Sheppey?’

‘I haven’t time to bother with it.’

She looked hard at Ned. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You win for the moment. There is one more thing,’ she added. ‘Are you quite sure there isn’t a little girl who lives round here?’