Consider the Lily (42 page)

‘Budge up.’ He pushed Flora’s legs aside and sat down. Then he reached over and took one of her hands in his. ‘Can I help?’

She turned her face towards him and Kit was shocked by her unhappiness. ‘I’m so angry,’ she said, pulling at her ungovernable hair.

‘You look awful. Who are you angry with?’

‘With Father. With you. With everyone in this – this family. With myself,’ she added.

Kit sighed. ‘Robbie told me about it.’

‘Did she also tell you that she sneaked on me to Father?’ Flora spoke through gritted teeth.

‘Sooner or later,’ said Kit practically, ‘something would have come out. The question is, old girl, has it forced you into action you didn’t want to take?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Try and see it from that angle, won’t you? If you want to do something, make sure you want to do it.’

Flora concentrated on her face. Everything was sore. Her eyes, her mouth, her skin. ‘Bloody, bloody hell.’

Kit’s eyebrow shot up. ‘We’re two of a kind. Rotten love affairs...’

‘Don’t.’ Flora moved restlessly. ‘Rotten love affairs for bad eggs.’

Kit squeezed her hand.
‘You’re
not rotten.’

She looked sceptical and then relaxed a trifle. ‘Scrambled, rather,’ she said and blew her nose.

‘Rotten joke, though.’ Kit dropped a kiss on her cheek. ‘Poor old girl. Are you going to tell me about it?’

‘There isn’t much to tell.’

That was true, Kit thought. When you boiled down into words the feelings and sensations, probings, speculations and dreamings of a love affair, they did not add up to anything much. That was the paradox. Or was it tragedy?

They sat in silence for a minute or two. The sun cast a shadow over the house. Beyond it, exposed in the full sunlight was the circular lawn with the river beyond. As they watched, Matty came into view pushing a wheelbarrow. She stopped to adjust the load and bent to retrieve something from the ground. Then she lifted her face to the sun for a moment before hefting up the wheelbarrow and turning in the direction of the old rose garden. A few seconds later Ned came round the side of the house, dressed in the corduroy suit which never varied from summer to winter. His trowel was stuck into his belt and he carried a pair of shears. Matty saw Ned, stopped and they fell into conversation. Both seemed interested in the path on which they were standing. Eventually, Ned went down on one knee and began to scrape at the ground with his trowel.

Flora turned to Kit. ‘What are they doing?’

‘I imagine,’ said Kit, ‘they’re trying to trace where an old path crossed that one.’ He pointed to the path which led from the old rose garden. ‘I found a map of the garden as it was in Mother’s time and showed it to Matty this morning.’

‘Really,’ said Flora. ‘Why? And what on earth is Matty doing with a wheelbarrow?’

‘Well,’ said Kit, ‘Matty wants to be let loose on the garden. She seems to have made a conquest of Ned and they spend hours discussing it.’

‘Matty’s clever,’ said Flora. ‘She’s found something to do.’ Flora’s bottom lip began to quiver again.

‘So have you,’ said Kit pointedly. ‘Family planning?’

‘Oh, that,’ said Flora. ‘That’s over now.’

‘Matty’s right,’ said Kit. ‘We will have to tackle the garden some time.’

Flora shot her brother a look. The habit of reticence between them was ingrained, but they understood each other well enough. Flora suspected that Kit still thought about Daisy – although it had not occurred to her that he had been adulterous. With unconscious irony, she said, ‘Eases the conscience, Kit?’

By this time, Matty had joined Ned on the ground and their heads were close together.

‘If only it was so easy,’ said Kit bleakly, but Flora was too busy contemplating her own predicament to take note.

She blew her nose. ‘Kit, I’m not angry with you.’

‘I know.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’ve been through it all myself.’

It was Flora’s turn to take Kit’s hand. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to bring it all up again.’ She pinched the tanned fingers. ‘But you’re quite happy now, aren’t you? I mean, Matty’s all right. I like her.’

‘Good. So do I.’

‘Then it is all right?’ She searched her brother’s face for reassurance. ‘Do you suppose all children are in hock to their parents’ wishes?’ she asked.

‘Listen, old girl,’ said Kit. ‘Only you can make the decisions, don’t forget that.’

Flora thought that she had never felt so alone. ‘Not if you are an unmarried daughter you can’t,’ she came back tartly.

‘True. I’ll not deny that.’ Kit took her chin in his hand and swivelled her face close to his. ‘Remember, you don’t have to accept what Father says. You can fight. If you wish to marry this man, I will back you. Don’t make the mistake I did.’

‘But... you said Matty and you...’ said Flora.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

She broke in again. ‘You don’t understand, Kit. What I hate most of all, what I can’t bear about myself, is that I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure if I was brave enough to stand up to Father if Robin asked me to marry him and I just let him go when Father was so rude. Really rude and abominable to him.’

‘I know,’ said Kit.

‘No, you don’t know,’ she said, rearing up from the seat and staring wild-eyed through the window. ‘There is something worse about it which makes me feel awful. It’s been bothering me for a long time. You see, I wasn’t sure if I could give all this up to become a doctor’s wife in a tumbledown cottage. That is what was awful about it. Don’t you see?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Kit from behind her. ‘Oh, yes, Flora, I do see.’

Robin presented his bill to Rupert with his compliments, wrote out detailed notes for his successor and sent them up to Hinton Dysart. He did so with misgivings and anger, for he had been wounded far more deeply than he cared to admit.

In one sense, however, he had been hauled back from a precipice. He suspected then, as he certainly knew now, that opposition to his marrying Flora would have been formidable and, having tasted the battle, even Robin shrank.

Nevertheless, his treatment at Rupert’s hands gave him a jolt and he castigated himself for having grown smug. One look at Flora’s half-defensive, half-terrified expression as she stood between her father and her lover had been enough to convince him that he had misjudged the affair. Flora was not ready to make that kind of choice, worse, perhaps never would be. There had been — was – no point in pressing the issue.

Since then, Robin had caught glimpses of her at odd intervals, riding towards Horsedown, but he made no effort to join her. Neither did she him and that hurt. Robin did not want to see her, but he wanted to know that Flora wished to see him, and he wanted the pleasure of denying her. Once she sent him a note, saying she would no longer be helping out at the surgery. Robin threw it in the wastepaper basket and did not reply – which made him feel ashamed and about two years old.

He made enquiries in the village to recruit a helper, and, since there is never any shortage of applicants to assist marriageable village doctors, was able to employ Anna Tillyard from Eweshot, to the fury of the Nether Hinton maidens.

Anna was tiny, efficient and a hard worker. She had a mass of red hair, a good complexion, and a giggle which echoed through the surgery door. She was an efficient employee and perfect for a doctor’s wife. In due course, word of Anna filtered back to Flora and she found herself saddling up Guinevere for long, solitary rides which achieved nothing except to try Tyson’s patience.

August came to a close with gales and floods, in which fourteen died, and with freak synchronicity the country was plunged further into financial crisis. A run on the pound reached desperate proportions and national bankruptcy was considered by the governor of the Bank of England to be only a hair’s breadth away. Amid the dust of soured promises, the Labour government collapsed and a government of co-operation was formed to deal with the emergency.

‘ “In all modern times”,’ Kit quoted from
The Times
over the breakfast cups at Hinton Dysart, ‘“there has never been such a party convulsion.”‘ He looked down the table at his wife who seemed particularly pale this morning. ‘No, I suppose there hasn’t. God knows what’s going to happen.’

‘That’s what politics is,’ said Matty, making one of the statements she made from time to time. They always surprised Kit. ‘Convulsion, I mean.’

Kit folded the newspaper and shoved it across the table. ‘Aha,’ he said. ‘A political philosopher.’

‘ “New York bankers agree to give Britain sixty million pounds in short-term credit”,' he read out some days later and, by the end of the month, reported to Matty that Ramsay MacDonald had been ousted as Labour leader.

‘Money,’ said Matty, ticking off dishes on Mrs Dawes’s proposed weekend menu. ‘Money, money.’

‘Yes, money,’ said Kit.

‘Don’t forget Aunt Susan and Daisy are arriving on Friday,’ she said, as Kit headed for the Exchequer and the telephone.

‘No,’ said Kit, who had not.

‘Dust to dust,’ said Daisy to her reflection. Since the storms, a heatwave had settled on the south of the country and her hand felt burning hot as she traced the violet circle under her right eye. ‘Do I see wrinkles?’

She spread her fingers across her cheek and pulled at the flesh under her chin, which was perfect. ‘No,’ she said to the image. ‘I’m afraid, desperately afraid, I see something much more serious.’

There was a knock on the door and Ivy Prosser edged into the second-best guest room at Hinton Dysart with a pile of towels. The floor was a little uneven: the door banged shut and made Daisy jump.

‘Sorry, Miss Chudleigh.’ Ivy glared at the door. ‘Mrs Chudleigh is now finished and ready, and she sent me to you.’

Ivy was now Matty’s personal maid and Matty frequently lent her to her Friday-to-Monday guests. For this weekend, she had sat up late ironing her uniform and goffering the frilled apron and cap. Early that morning, half stupid with fatigue, she had set off from the cottage in Church Street to a chorus from her envious sisters – bring back any empty scent bottles or cast-offs. Ivy was now at home in the world of the well-to-do and experience had brought about in her a sea-change. It was now a confident Ivy who wielded a hairbrush and rolled stockings up sleek thighs, dreaming of the day when she would be independent.

Her capable hands smoothed and patted Daisy’s underwear into folds and stowed it in lavender-scented drawers. Ivy was going to make sure that Daisy had never been served so well, for Ivy’s sights were set on London.

Pretty, hard-working Ivy. Daisy’s gaze drifted to the cut-glass bottles on the table. Distorted in the curve of a silver top, her face slid into vision. Hard-working Ivy, who would probably never take a silly risk or fling a challenge at established order.

Sensible Ivy.

‘Shall I draw your bath, miss?’ Ivy asked, grave and important.

Afterwards, Daisy sat down again at the dressing table. Her discarded underclothes lay on the chair, and she avoided looking in their direction. She felt sick and nervous.

She waited until Ivy had laid out her evening dress on the bed then asked Ivy to brush her hair. The brush strokes were soft and reverential.

‘Oh, Miss Chudleigh,’ she said. ‘Your hair is lovely.’

Daisy’s eyes slid back to the knickers. Fear rubbed in her mind, like sand in a shoe. Her throat felt dry; she swallowed and asked Ivy for a glass of water.

It helped a little, but not much.

What did you do in such circumstances? How did people cope with the outside world when inside was chaos? How would she know which of the choices in front of her was the right one? How could she be sure that her courage would see her through? For the first time in her life, Daisy was at a loss and, also for the first time, wished she was religious. ‘How nice you are, Ivy,’ she said mechanically.

Later, Matty knocked and put her head round the door. ‘Do you need anything?’

Cyanide, thought Daisy savagely. Failing that, morphine.

Gowned in a black Dove creation, which suited her rather well, Matty checked the room for biscuits and writing paper before turning her full attention on Daisy.

For once, the sight of Matty flattened Daisy’s fighting spirit. Go away, she thought. Matty made her feel both guilty and angry — particularly with herself – and she did not want to deal with either at this low moment, between her bath and the first cocktail.

Matty felt the old apprehension slide into her stomach and settle: how much less clever, less interesting, less beautiful than Daisy she was. Would always be.

Kit and Daisy together on the
Île de France,
hooted her demon, and wrenched at the softest part of her heart. What had they been doing? Kit had not mentioned the voyage at all – nor had Matty asked.

Emma, Emma,
make
me stop it. Matty smoothed the black dress over her hips and asked, ‘Are you sure you don’t need anything, Daisy?’

‘No, thank you.’ Daisy dipped a swansdown puff into the powder. ‘You have made it all perfect.’ She dabbed gracefully at her face.

‘Hold the scarf so,’ Matty instructed Ivy, ‘so the powder does not go over Miss Chudleigh’s clothes.’

And stop being such a damn perfect hostess, Daisy screamed silently.

‘Isn’t it hot?’ Daisy began to apply her lipstick.

‘Just like France was, do you remember?’ said Matty and checked herself. Why had she mentioned France? She took refuge in the mirror, assessed her reflection and adjusted one neat diamond earring.

Daisy had a vision of snatching them off the small pink ears. ‘What happened to your mother’s earrings, the ones I liked?’

‘They’re in the bank. You were right, Daisy. They were too big for me. Do you want to borrow them sometimes?’

‘No.’ Daisy sounded savage. It struck Matty then that her cousin looked odd: brittle, anxious and white round the lips.

‘Are you feeling all right?’

No, went Daisy’s private monologue, I have never been so frightened in all my life. She looked up at Matty’s image in the mirror and forced a smile. ‘Absolutely fine. Never better. Who’s coming tonight?’

Matty stepped back from the mirror and swooshed out her skirt in a circle.