Consider the Lily (30 page)

Yes, what about it? Daisy lay in bed remembering when she and Kit had walked up the path from the Villa Lafayette to the cliff top above, discussing love. Kit had been excited over the idea in Plato’s
Symposium
which made a distinction between romantic and sacred love, the latter being the most perfect and refined. Daisy had not agreed. If you love, you love, she argued. It is not more or less. One thing or another. More perfect, less perfect. It is total and there was nothing to be gained by teasing it out.

Kit had gone quiet. He stood, heat beating on his skin, eyes screwed against the glare, tossing stones down onto the rock below.

‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said.

‘If you mean I don’t understand some bore from Ancient Greece, then perhaps you’re right.’

He laughed at that and pulled her close. ‘You’re perfect,’ he said, nuzzling her neck. ‘And divine.’

Still, she had been troubled by the distinction, afraid that Kit was ashamed of his passion for her. In the dark, Daisy clenched her fists and felt the nails graze her skin. Where had that left her?

She awoke from a dream, gasping and sobbing. After a while she quietened, and lay crying quietly, her hands still smarting.

Oh, Kit.

Robbie ran her finger along the map frame on the wall which was thick with dust.

‘Don’t touch it,’ said Rupert from the bed.

‘You know me better than that, Sir Rupert.’ Robbie waited until he had returned to his newspaper before replacing her finger and running it firmly along the wood. She wiped the resulting ball of grey onto her handkerchief. It was always the same: no one was allowed to touch objects hanging on the wall. Robbie did not mind: it was part and parcel of Sir Rupert and she loved every quirk. At night she held those idiosyncrasies suspended in her drowsing mind and turned them round and round – he likes that, not that – until she fell asleep.

She moved on to tackle the paraphernalia of sickness cluttering a room which, until now, had been Spartan. Bottles, glasses, extra blankets. A heap of letters. A pile of bills brought in by Kit and neglected.

She picked up the spoon with which she had administered Rupert’s medicine: a distorted face looked back at her from its curved surface and the fancy that her lips were positioned where Rupert’s had been sent a
frisson
of excitement through her. Only just in time did Robbie stop herself from putting the spoon in her mouth. Holding it between finger and thumb she placed it on the breakfast tray.

‘You haven’t eaten your porridge, Sir Rupert.’

Rupert did not bother to reply and Robbie looked concerned. The patient was quiet this morning, too quiet really. Robbie cleared her throat – a preface to one of her let’s-make-the-best-of-things-and-ignore-nasty-topics conversations – and Rupert, recognizing the signal, squeezed his eyes shut.

‘The village is up in arms over the business of putting in overhead electricity cables, Sir Rupert,’ she said. ‘They don’t like the notion. What with that and the telephone wires, the village will be a forest of poles.’

‘If you want electricity,’ said Rupert, wondering how long the circles of rage and frustration floating behind his eyelids would last, ‘then you have to put up with it.’ The door rattled and in came Flora. Rupert opened his eyes in relief.

‘Ah, Flora,’ he said, and her heart sank at his tone. ‘Finished gallivanting, then? Does the social timetable allow a minute for a knocked-up parent? Is that it?’

‘Now, Sir Rupert.’ Over by the table, Robbie clinked the medicine bottles together in a sickroom symphony. ‘You mustn’t be nasty to Flora.’

‘Father,’ protested Flora. ‘It’s what you wanted me to do, so you can get me married off.’

For the umpteenth time, Rupert tried to move his legs and failed. ‘Where’s that Binns woman this morning?’ he said. ‘Or,’ he shot a look of inordinate cunning at Robbie, ‘have you routed her?’

‘I’m going to ignore that, Sir Rupert.’

Rupert ground his teeth and Flora suppressed a desire to giggle, her habitual response to the awfulness of her father’s predicament – a reaction that both shocked and worried her. Over Rupert’s head, Robbie wagged a finger at Flora to take care. The patient was touchy today.

Flora sat down in the chair by the bed. ‘What would you like me to tell you, Father?’

‘Did you behave yourself?’

‘Of course.’

‘Any suitables?’

Flora suppressed a sigh. ‘Only spotty ones and the rest are not exactly queuing up.’

Rupert attempted to reach his cup of tea. Flora leapt up again to help close his fingers around the handle and lift the cup to his mouth. The skin around her father’s nails was drying out, and she fought an impulse to drop the cup and run away. He dribbled a little and she wiped him with a square of muslin left for that purpose by the bed. ‘So you’re back,’ he repeated in the confused way of invalids.

‘I needed a rest, Father.’

‘Just like... just like your mother.’ The words shot out and took Flora by surprise. Tea slopped over the rim of the cup and down onto Rupert’s pyjamas. ‘No stamina,’ he said, watching the puddle. ‘Never did have. No loyalty either. No idea... of what she...’

‘Head up, Sir Rupert. Quick march.’ In a miasma of starch and disinfectant, Robbie surged forward, removed the cup and saucer from Flora and deftly fed the rest to Rupert. ‘Down the red lane.’

Pinioned and helpless, Rupert gave off world-embracing despair. Robbie patted his hand. ‘You’ll do, Sir Rupert.’ She held his hand a little longer than necessary. ‘Now, no more of this talk. It only upsets you.’ She went out of the door, a creamily satisfied smile on her lips.

‘Flora. Do me a favour. Ask your brother to shoot that woman and stuff her.’

‘Father!’

‘On second thoughts, forget about the stuffing.’

‘Father... tell me.’ Amazed to be tackling Rupert, adult to adult, she asked, ‘Is Robbie driving you loco? I could do something if she is. Pack her off to Polly, maybe.’

Rupert’s mood did an abrupt volte-face. ‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

There were too many years of distance between father and daughter for Flora to ask Rupert what he meant.

Groaning a little, he tried to haul himself further up on the pillows. Flora tugged at him and patted his pillows into shape. She found it an awkward business dealing with the invalid body – all unexpected dead weight and imbalance. Since the accident, Rupert had lost much of his bulk, and now the skin sagged over his cheekbones and jawline in the manner of the chronically tired and ill. White flakes were trapped at the corners of his mouth and in his eyelashes, evidence of his decline which drove a skewer of pity into Flora – and repelled her. But she knew also that she
could
cross the distance and walk towards him. Greatly daring, she took Rupert’s brown-blotched hand into her own.

‘Don’t drool over me,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear it.’

‘Since you mention Mother, can we talk about her?’ she asked with an obvious effort.

Rupert’s fingers pulled free of his daughter’s. He did not know why he had referred to Hesther, only that memories choose damnfool moments to resurface. ‘Forget what I said.’

‘But—’

‘I said forget it.’

‘Matty will be here soon to read to you,’ she said, accepting, yet again, that the questions about her mother which sometimes tormented would remain unanswered. She got up to fetch his library book and gave it to him.

‘Danny all right?’ Rupert could not prevent himself asking. His voice cut through the silence made by their last exchange.

Flora picked up the book again and traced the sticker on the front. ‘Boots Circulating Library,’ she murmured. She looked at her father. ‘I saw Danny yesterday. He’s fine. Lady’s whelped with three bitches and a dog. I told him you’re allowed visitors. He said he’d think about it.’

‘Damned cheek. Give him an inch.’ Rupert paused. ‘Told him to come and see me, did you?’

‘I don’t think he likes sick rooms, Father. And Robbie goes on the warpath whenever he’s mentioned. Danny’s clever, Father. He doesn’t want to provoke a major scene.’

‘No, I don’t expect Danny likes sick rooms, the old bugger.’ Rupert went quiet. Just before he fell into an untidy snorting sleep he gave the order. ‘Tell him to come all the same.’

Flora watched her diminished father and sighed.

Rupert was back in an old nightmare, inching up a muddied, shell-pocked road on the Somme, nicknamed Pall Mall by one of the wags in the company.

The company, which included Edwin, was back from three days’ leave in Amiens. There, the camouflage units worked nonstop; the
estaminets
were open during the day and most of the night, journalists, would-be novelists and anxious relatives swelled the hotel population and, smelling of raffia and glue, girls from the factory offered their services. Clad in hastily acquired khaki – not many remained of the original 80,000 who had fought at Ypres in 1914 – Kitchener’s recruits took up the offers. Why not? Chastity was a waste of time.

They drove out from the city in double-decker buses towards the town of Albert and the front line. The road was clogged with motorcycles, messengers and vehicles; in the fields beyond Albert a solitary farmer inspected his crops and ignored the traffic. Outside one of the villages on the route was a first-aid station and someone had raked over a flowerbed and planted it with daisies. As they drew closer to the fighting the noise of the guns swelled from a subdued thud into thunder.

It was July 1916, and at the front a dust-laden, fury-ridden night was falling early, blotting out men, observer planes and barrage balloons. Every so often flares lit the sky above the battle-line, the earth shook and rained dirt, flesh and chalk. Here, the crump of guns pounded iron on bronze into ear-drums and the screams of the wounded were lost.

And yet, between the barrages, doves cooed in barn eaves and larks sang as they wheeled in the clear air above the battle.

The company was detailed to join the Worcesters up by Thiepval Wood. None of the boys commented, but it meant that casualties were bad. After falling-out for cigarettes, Rupert gave the order to begin the slog up to the front line.

At the edge of the wood a humorist had erected a signpost which read: THIEPVAL-BAPAUME-BERLIN. An arrow pointed to the track leading across a marshy valley to the bottom of the ridge only half a mile away, but it took Rupert and his men over an hour to push over the mud-slicked causeways, past the junctions and through a battle haze which masked runners and the stumbling wounded.

‘Gas masks,’ he ordered, and stepped round the figures huddled on the ground, not knowing whether they slept or were dead. To Paisley Dump, Johnson’s Post, Elgin Avenue, said more notices whose humour wasn’t so funny any more. At the foot of the ridge, on the west side of the wood, communication trenches spidered towards the front line. It was here that supplies were unloaded, ammunition dumped and, between assaults, men circled in exhaustion.

They waited in the wood. Rupert counted his heartbeats, and thought of Hinton Dysart and of the wife who did not love him. And in the lulls between the screams of the shells filtering through the gas-soaked mist, Rupert was aware of another noise, the sound of fingernails screeching across enormous panes of glass, coming from the no man’s land between the lines.

It stretched from the orchards of Gommecourt, through the poppy-dotted fields to Beaumont Hamel, Thiepval and the valley beyond La Boiselle. From it rose the muted screaming, pain-filled sound of wounded Tommy and Hun, welded by blood into uniformity.

What was it Edwin had said to Rupert in the restaurant in rue du Corps Nu Sans Tête over the cognac? Bottles of cognac actually, as much as they could manage. It went something like this...

Why should there be this unnatural accumulation of men, animals and food? Why this methodical enterprise to fill mass graves? What has happened to the world? Nothing is in its proper place any more, said Edwin — who had volunteered, remember — neither things, nor ideas, nor human beings.

Then, brandy making his moustache glisten, Edwin had leant across the glasses and overflowing ashtrays. ‘If I should die first, Rupert, tell Hesther I loved her best.’

And Rupert replied, ‘What do you bloody well mean? She’s my wife.’

‘And my sister,’ Edwin answered in a low voice. ‘My sister, before your wife.’ And added under his breath, ‘I suppose that’s not in its proper place either.’

Oh, my brothers, a drunken Edwin addressed the uncomprehending French fields as they bounced back in the London bus to the front. Was it for this, all this blood, all this pain, all these shipwrecked lives, was it for this, O my brothers?

Edwin had been very drunk and that day he had gone out and died with a hangover near Thiepval Wood, not far from Rupert, as it happened, although it could have been a hundred miles, and Rupert wished it had been a thousand. After Edwin’s death, it was finished for Rupert. (And for Hesther, but he did not know that then.)

The shakes, as Rupert called them, came on by degrees and he hid them with drink, although Danny Ovens noticed. It was not just in his fingers, inconveniently failing to meet objects, or muscles twitching in sleep, it went deeper. The shakes went through to his soul, until all of Rupert was shuddering. Little things – a dirty billy can, an undone puttee, officers transferring badges from shoulders to cuffs so they did not present such obvious targets – had become his obsession. You see, explained Rupert in his dream, what was happening to me was so big that it was a relief to go barmy over the small things. Of course, he could not tell Hesther in his letters because he was not in the habit of telling Hesther anything. Especially not after Edwin was dead.

After the first assault when Edwin bought it, the men regrouped in the trenches and waited to go back over the top. Danny Ovens sat and combed his hair. Thick, it was then, and sandy with a tinge of red.

‘Give ‘em something to look at, sir,’ Danny said, pulling his helmet forward. ‘When I drive me bayonet through that lot...’

Along with Edwin, the company had lost ten men and were feeling battered.