Consider the Lily (37 page)

Never, thought Matty fiercely, forgetting about everything else. I’ll never allow that to happen to my beautiful
grandes dames,
my ‘Fantin-Latour’, my ‘Queen of Denmark’, my Jacobite rose, my ‘Comte de Chambord’. My tamed, thorned, crumpled beauties.

Every reason, then, to search for the invader. How could she tell? she asked Ned. He replied that suckers usually produce seven leaves to the spray instead of the normal three or five. ‘You can spot ‘em a mile off, like,’ he said. ‘Be on your guard, Mrs Kit.’

Gouge out stem suckers with a penknife, said the murderous-minded
Home Gardener’s Year.
Merely to break them off is to invite their reappearance.

Matty’s secateurs closed around one stem sucker and clicked shut. It fell to the ground and that was that. Easy to kill the invader when you knew how.

She stood up and rubbed the palm of her right hand where new blisters punctuated the skin. It was late afternoon, the sun had shifted and she was thirsty for tea. A heap of prunings lay at her feet ready to gather up into her trug. It was quiet. This was England: cool, damp, full of hidden life, her garden here a speck in the flowing continuum of growing things. And she was a part of this process which was as physical, as spiritually satisfying, as
felt
as any love affair.

‘Matilda?’

‘Aunt Susan. How lovely.’ Matty’s voice always rose when she lied on the telephone.

‘I haven’t spoken to you for months, Matilda. How are you?’

‘Actually rather good.’

An impatient sigh came down the line. ‘I always said you fussed too much. You shouldn’t think so much about yourself.’

There was silence while both women digested the exchange so far. Although it was tea-time Susan was not at her best, having imbibed one too many White Ladys at luncheon.

‘How is Uncle Ambrose?’

‘Well, but very busy.’

Another silence. Susan reached for the cigarette box. ‘Matilda. I would like to come down for a Friday to Monday visit. How about next week?’

Matty searched frantically for inspiration in her diary, which was deliciously blank except for entries such as: ‘Visit the Craddocks’ rose garden’, ‘Send off for bulb catalogue’, and ‘Take cuttings of pinks’. Get out of this one, Matty Dysart, and you are in line for the Foreign Office... The sighing had been replaced by exhalations of expensive Virginia tobacco. One thing was certain: Matty did not want her aunt Susan anywhere near her for the time being.

‘I am afraid it isn’t possible, Aunt Susan. I’m booked up until the first week in September. Would that do?’

‘I see.’ Susan mustered the chilling note that, in the old days, had never failed to shrivel Matty and glared at the telephone, impatient that the new Matty irritated her as much as the old one. ‘Couldn’t you manage a little sooner?’

Matty lied with a sense of relief that she felt free to do so. ‘I’m afraid not, Aunt Susan. September really is the earliest. You are welcome then. Shall I write it in?’

‘Goodness, we
are
busy.’ Susan had been looking forward to relaxing at the Dysarts’ expense – after all, Matty owed her an upbringing. A desire to wring her niece’s neck hardened. ‘But if you say so, September it is. Write us in, please.’ She stubbed out her cigarette and lit a new one immediately. ‘Have you and Daisy been in touch?’

Matty pushed the diary away. ‘No.’

‘You know she’s in America? In New York, actually. She was run down and a little depressed and wanted a holiday. I packed her off for a change of scene. One of Marcus’s friends invited her to join the houseparty at Great Neck and they went down to Charleston and New Orleans for a week. I must say they appear to have had a very good time.’

‘Ah.’ Matty noticed that the knuckles on the hand holding the earpiece had gone white.

‘So you didn’t know? Of course you wouldn’t if you haven’t been in touch.’ Susan was going to enjoy her revenge. ‘Funnily enough, she met up with Kit at a dinner party. Wasn’t that a coincidence? I wrote back at once and told her to be careful which, I think you would agree, Matilda, was the right thing to do.’

How can she be so cruel? Matty thought. Both to me
and
to Daisy.

Susan went on smoothly, ‘In the letter that came yesterday, Daisy said that a party of them were planning to travel back on the
Île de France.’

Matty groped with her free hand for the pile of letters on the desk and pulled the top one towards her. Working her fingers into the folds, she spread it across her knee. It was dated two weeks before and headed ‘Fifth Avenue Hotel’. She skimmed the contents: apparently the Dewey arch beside the hotel took its inspiration from the Roman arch of Titus and Vespasian, Delmonico’s was
the
restaurant, Tammany Hall was named after an Indian chief, etc., etc. Her eye travelled over the page. Kit’s face filled her vision and her ears rang with the sound of his voice.

There was no reference to Daisy.

‘Oh, really,’ she said weakly. ‘What a surprise for them both, Aunt Susan.’

Susan smiled at Daisy’s silver-framed photograph on the table beside her. ‘Yes, Matilda, wasn’t it?’

Matty clattered down the stone steps and ran across the lawn. The yew encircled the grass in a dark grip, and beyond it flowed the river. She stumbled on towards the mound that hid the remains of the earlier Tudor building.

It seemed to Matty that she was back where she had started.

At the river bank, she paused, turning blindly this way and that, not sure where to go.

‘Mrs Kit...’ Ned came into sight with the wheelbarrow full of prunings, but she brushed past him.

‘Not now, Mr Sheppey.’

Slipping on the dry summer grass and hardened mud, Matty half ran, half walked up the path towards the boathouse.

It was tiny, hardly more than five feet wide, with a door that hung on one hinge propped shut with a length of wood. Mould and decaying wood showered her face and hands as she pulled it open and plunged inside. Constellations of dead flies lay on the floor and the single paned window had turned green.

No one had used the boathouse this year. Matty surveyed the decay, shrugged, picked up the oars, manhandled them outside and lowered them into the rowing boat tethered to the wooden post.

‘We used to go out in the boat a lot as children,’ Kit had told Matty. ‘With Mother. We’d take a picnic and Tyson would row us up to the big field. When I was old enough I went out to fish, particularly when I felt rattled. It was soothing.’

When they had returned from honeymoon, Kit had taken Matty out once or twice and taught her the rudiments of handling oars. It will toughen you up, he had teased. Develop muscles which you didn’t know you possessed.

Bugger you, Kit, she thought, using the strongest language she could muster. Bugger you. Trapping the oars in their cradle, the rowlocks screeched from disuse.

Rocking from side to side, the boat, only just in Matty’s control, swung out into the river and brushed through the reeds. Her blisters stung and wept, but she rowed on, away from Hinton Dysart. Slowly, shining in the sun, its freshly painted windows like royal icing, the house diminished.

The handles of the oars slipped and bucked in her hands. The boat rocked and the water made slippity-slap noises against the wooden sides.

Kit and Daisy. Dancing together. Talking together. Eating together. What else were they doing together? Matty rowed harder until the boat glided through a bed of bulrushes and shuddered to a halt. There she crouched over the oars and gave herself up to the agony in her heart.

It was hot and quiet. Hogweed and blackberry bushes rampaged over the banks, and above stagnant caches made by fallen branches, trees spread green canopies over root boles. Mayflies skimmed over the water, and a cloud of midges nipped and stung Matty’s flesh. Marbled in greenish brown and patched by sunlight, the water looked cool. Here and there a ripple betrayed a fish. The river bed was full of hidden things and washes of underwater reed. Matty raised her head. There was nothing civilized here, she thought, no depilation of grass and plant, only the natural vigour of wild things competing for the right to exist.

Like the deceptive sucker on a rose.

Jealousy was a cruel emotion. Matty should know, for it was tearing her in two. She looked up at the sky. She wanted Kit to love her. She wanted to be his wife, and the mother of his children. She wanted peace, contentment, domesticity.

She wanted to be old so that none of this mattered any more.

After a while, she manoeuvred the boat out of the bulrushes and rowed back, listening to the thump and squeak of the oars in the rowlocks. At the boathouse, she stood up. The boat tipped and the river came up to meet her. She grabbed the edge of the rudimentary jetty with her stiffening hands and, groaning, pulled herself up onto the bank and tied up the boat.

It was too much effort to return to the house, and Matty sat there with her feet hanging above the water. A chill crept into the breeze, as it often did at this time of day, and she shivered.

She turned her hands palm upwards, stared at the blisters burning her skin, before inspecting the backs. Ned said you should always put soap under your nails if you garden, otherwise they will never be clean. True. Next time, she must take his advice. Deliberately, Matty spread her fingers wide and bit her lips when the raw skin cracked apart.

You have to be taught happiness – and Matty had not been taught, either by parents or husband. Contentment she had taught herself, and had rejoiced in the pleasure she took from a painting, a fire on a winter afternoon, her garden. Her borrowed garden.

When they rode up the sand dune and out of her life, the Verrals could have not considered the legacy of loss they bequeathed to their daughter. ‘Just be patient, littly darling,’ Jocasta told Matty, her eyes already fixed on the horizon. ‘You’ll be fine by yourself and we’ll be back soon.’

Perhaps, then, it was right that Matty would never bear a child because how could she, so inadequate, teach it what she had failed to teach herself...?

The touch on her shoulder was the lightest imaginable, and Matty barely registered it. It came again — tentative, and as nebulous as thistledown. She raised her face from the dark shield made by her hands.

A familiar little figure stood on the river bank a couple of feet away from Matty, twisting the skirt of her dress between her fingers. The material was powder blue and heavily tucked, and the face above it was sunburnt.

Matty shivered. ‘For God’s sake,’ she begged, and knelt on the rotting wood, ‘for God’s sake, tell me who you are?’ She raised her arms and held them out to enfold the child into her empty, hungry body. ‘Tell me...’

Her arms encountered no resistance. Light streamed over the river, swallows swooped over the water, the breeze gathered force and sent ripples out from the jetty. High above, a curlew sounded.

There was nothing.

A woman who loved her brother more than her husband? A husband who both knew and did not know. A war. An economic crisis. A house that had been allowed to die on its feet. A broken love affair and an ill-advised marriage... A garden.

These are the ingredients of a story. They may be familiar, they may not. For families often share similar experiences – but not quite, for each family, as Tolstoy said, is different in its unhappiness. Because I am no longer young, I like to mull over the memories, the stories, the gossip, the residue of anguish and passion left by yellowing papers and I ask Thomas (with whom I discuss most subjects): Was this really us?

Each family is marked, I suppose, with a canker peculiar to itself.

The best ones survive. Like Alba roses which, for all their beauty, are extraordinarily tough. Albas thrive in semi-shade or against a cold north wall, and cock defiance at mildew and black spot. ‘Queen of Denmark’ is my
favourite
favourite, and I admire her strength and purpose. (Her one fault is straggliness, but that can be rectified by a hard prune in December.) Ruffled rosettes, the flowers are the colour of raspberries mashed into double cream, served on elegant grey-green leaves.

A feast, my friends.

Here let me.’ Kit extracted Daisy’s crocodile dressing case from her grasp. ‘The stewardess can deal with it.’

‘Goodbye, New York,’ said Daisy, relinquishing the case into Kit’s care.

‘Exactly,’ said Kit, ‘you mustn’t miss a second.’ He went off to see to the disposing of the luggage and left Daisy to make her way through the crush on the gangway up to the first-class deck. He rejoined her there within ten minutes and informed her that at least five bouquets were already in her cabin and more arriving.

‘The wages of flirting,’ she said, with a delicious laugh. ‘How nice.’

She lifted her face to the sky in an effort to gain some fresh air. New York had been as hot as hell, so hot that Daisy fancied the marrow had boiled in her bones. But fun. New York had been fun.

It was early morning, and already the haze around the Empire State Building and across the famous skyline was shredding. On the river, at least, there was the pretence of a breeze. Kit drew Daisy towards the rail and manipulated a space for them both in the crush. ‘OK, as they say here?’

‘OK.’

‘Good girl.’

‘Look. There’s Sally Allsop and Monty.’ Daisy pointed at the spectators lining the quay. ‘Beside the woman in the yellow dress.’

‘
And
, if I’m not mistaken, your admirer the Gurney chap is loitering in the hope of attracting your attention.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Daisy. ‘I gave him strict instructions not to come.’

The
Île de France’s
funnel emitted a shriek and Daisy jumped. In her cotton dress and jacket and white straw hat she looked every inch the fashionable woman, but Kit, watching her from under the brim of his panama, knew from the way she held her head that she was very tense. ‘Don’t you want to go home?’ he asked suddenly.

Daisy rubbed at the deck rail and left a smear. ‘Not much, if you must know. There are things that need sorting...’