Consider the Lily (46 page)

The irony of the gesture did not escape Kit and it made him feel worse: everything he gave Matty was second-hand.

But it pleased Matty, and she held up her other hand. When he had finished, Kit pulled up the chair and suggested that he read to her. But Matty wanted to get something straight.

‘Are you going to leave me for Daisy?’

Dr Lofts had issued stringent warnings about tiring or exciting the patient and Kit leant over Matty. ‘No, I’m not going to leave you.’

‘I need to know so I can fix my mind on what I’m to get well for.’

‘Matty, don’t.’

‘The truth?’ Her fever-ridden eyes stared up at him. Robin’s orders forgotten, Kit slipped to his knees beside the bed.

‘Matty, I am so sorry, so very sorry.’ He cupped his hand around her face and his thumb rubbed gently against her cheek.

The blood pounded through Matty’s frame, releasing rivulets of poison into her flesh. Sweat gathered in her armpits and between her legs, vanishing before it had a chance to cool her heated skin. Her lungs laboured. The bedroom wavered between eyelids that had grown too heavy, and Kit’s face, with its blond lick of hair, hung disembodied above her. Despite the fever, though, the lump of grief and outrage in Matty’s chest refused to dissolve.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Kit was saying. ‘I’m sorry I hurt you.’

Matty closed her eyes. ‘I don’t want to talk any more.’

After a while her breathing deepened. Inexpertly, Kit pulled the sheet up over her arms, and got to his feet. Stiff and chilled, he went over to the window and lifted the curtain. Dawn was breaking and the garden wore the dewy, soft look of autumn. Kit caught his lower lip between his teeth: he wanted to punch his fist through the glass because he had hurt someone so badly, because he had blundered.

Curiously, of all the emotions Kit experienced when his mother died, the strongest had been the sense that his body did not belong to his mind, that both operated at a distance from one another. He felt that now. Kit raised his hand, looked at it, balled it into a fist and pushed it towards the glass where it came to rest. His feeling of loss was so great that he felt he would never recover.

A child was crying in Matty’s ear, a heartbroken sound, and Matty could not understand why. Determined to find out, she walked down the path towards the garden,
her
garden – only to find it had vanished. The garden was not there, and where there had been beauty and peace there was nothing.

The sobbing went on and on.

‘Hush now,’ said Robbie. ‘You’re crying in your sleep again, Mrs Kit. It won’t do. It upsets me, and Mr Kit here.’

Matty woke with a start and lay blinking at the ceiling. It was late afternoon and tea-time. Each time she woke, she was forced through the process of remembering. She had been ill, very ill, for six weeks, but was now better. To be more precise, without knowing how or why, Matty had willed herself to recover. Yesterday she had been allowed out of bed to sit by the fire.

‘Tea,’ said Robbie firmly, ‘and here’s Mr Kit to read to you.’

Behind Robbie’s back, Kit raised an eyebrow at his wife. ‘You’d better be a good girl and eat up all your bread and butter.’

Matty smiled. ‘Do I get sent into the corner if I don’t?’

She pulled herself upright and allowed Robbie to help her on with her dressing gown. Robbie tucked the folds modestly around Matty’s legs and pulled back the sheets. Matty held out her arms and Kit lifted her up from the bed and placed her in the chair by the fire. Robbie tucked an army’s supply of rugs around Matty and went over to attend to the bed which apparently required an inordinate amount of pillow banging.

Kit held up a copy of
Time and Tide
magazine, which was currently serializing
Diary of a Provincial Lady.
‘More?’

‘Yes,
please
,’ said Matty.

Kit read: ‘“Call from Lady Boxe who says she is off to the South of France next week as she Must Have Sunshine. She asks me Why I do not go there too...”‘

Kit was a good reader and Matty gave a sigh of pleasure.

‘“Why not just pop into a train, enquires Lady B., pop across to France and pop out into the Blue Sky, Blue Sea and Summer Sun. Could make perfectly comprehensive reply to this but do not do so, question of expense having evidently not crossed Lady B.’s horizon...”‘

Not France, thought Kit. Not a good subject.

‘“... Reply to Lady B. with insincere professions of liking England very much in Winter, and she begs me not to let myself become parochially minded...”‘

Kit read on to the end of the extract, both of them enjoying the satire. No one regarding the scene by the bedroom fire would imagine that it hid a fault line. Not even Robin Lofts who looked in to be greeted by the sight of Kit’s legs splayed out in front of the fire. Matty was sipping tea from the best tea service which Mrs Dawes insisted on using – ‘As if that’s going to make her feel better,’ said Robbie.

‘Ah, Lofts.’ Kit got up and brushed crumbs from his lap. ‘I think my wife is better, judging by the giggles.’ He held up the magazine. ‘It’s excellent stuff. I’ll come back when you’ve finished with her.’

‘
Dearest darling Kit,
’ he read, in the privacy of the Exchequer, for the twentieth time. The letter had arrived two days ago, addressed in Marcus’s handwriting.

      
I cannot go without dotting ‘i’s’ and crossing ‘t’s’. I mean, I cannot say goodbye without giving some shape to what has happened between us. If you like, I want to put it in a frame so I can look at it properly – and then I will have done with it.
      Now, Kit darling. Both of us understands that one phase is over. We took risks that should not have been taken. I am sorry, truly sorry it resulted in such disaster, and I am sorry Matty had to know. But, and it is a big, big but, my love doesn’t stop there. It keeps on growing like Matty’s garden. It grows through me. I breathe with it. I sleep with it. It gives me happiness I never thought possible, and pain that is too intense to describe.
      I would not have it one drop the less. I am not a martyr and I wish desperately it had not turned out as it has. Despite the anguish I feel I would not go back, even though I can never have you, that I know I have hurt people, even Matty. For falling in love with you, Kit, has rescued me from being a silly and blank person. I believe that. Truly.
       When I was with you, Kit, and learnt to love you, I was never sure where I ended and you began. That is no small thing in a life and now I have time to reflect, I know just how precious it is.
      Listen, Kit. I am going away to France because I want to make a fresh start. I don’t know how long I will be there and I am not going to tell you where. You know how I love France. I will be perfectly safe and content.

For always,
Daisy

Kit folded the letter and put it back into the file labelled ‘Fencing’. Then he lit a cigarette and smoked it.

Upstairs, Robin turned his back while Matty adjusted her dressing gown. ‘Progress,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Did you eat lunch?’

‘Huge helpings.’

‘You’ve done well, Mrs Dysart. I’m proud of you.’

She gave him an unusually direct look. ‘If I can get through this crisis, I can get through most things.’

‘Yes, I think so.’ Robin did not insult her by pretending he had not heard the gossip. ‘Can you remember more yet?’ he asked carefully.

‘No.’

‘It’s no matter. These things take time.’

‘The funny thing is...’ Matty hesitated. ‘You might think this fanciful, but I think this illness has cleansed me in a strange way.’

Robin did not understand what she meant, but he stored the remark away in his memory. Outside in the corridor he met Kit.

‘Your wife is recovering,’ he reported. ‘I don’t think we will ever know what happened the night of the accident, and perhaps it is best that we shouldn’t. There is no point in remembering, if it brings distress. People do that, you know.’

‘Do they?’ said Kit.

‘Yes, they blank out what they don’t want to think about. However, Mrs Dysart seems very calm.’

The two men sized each other up. There was a query in Robin’s eyes and, Kit fancied, a hint of disapproval, but he was not prepared to answer any questions.

‘I see,’ he said shortly.

‘Under the circumstances, you won’t be requiring my services any more,’ Robin said. ‘I’m sure Mrs Dysart will be able to use Sir Rupert’s doctor.’

‘I’ll talk to her. I think it should be her choice.’

‘Of course.’

They parted, not exactly in accord, although they had come to be almost friends during the last weeks.

Matty was sewing when Kit rejoined her. Her hair was freshly brushed and anchored into combs, and she had put on her rose scent. Tea was cleared away and the fire freshly banked, and she was enjoying the solitude. With true English contrariness, the weather had turned raw and cold and it was difficult to imagine that only six weeks ago the house had sweltered.

She held up the canvas onto which she was tracing in
petit point
a fantasy of fruit and flowers. ‘See, I’ve put a ladybird on the hollyhock.’

Kit smiled at the poetic conceit. ‘You should embroider the garden here when you’ve finished.’

She put down the canvas. ‘Kit,’ she said in the light conversational tone she had recently adopted with him, ‘I know now why you didn’t want me to have anything to do with that part of the garden, so perhaps you would like to tell me the story.’ She folded the canvas. ‘In the end I found out, like I found out about you and Daisy.’

Kit sat down opposite and fingered the fringe of a Paisley shawl that lay over the back. Matty persisted. ‘You owe it to me, Kit. In fact, I insist.’

He was taken aback by this new Matty. ‘Yes, I do owe it to you,’ he replied. ‘But it is a long story and a difficult one.’

Kit hesitated but Matty was ready for that. She handed him the tortoiseshell cigarette box and the lighter. ‘Go on.’

‘My father married my mother in 1900. She was an American, and rich, and my father met her when she was over here doing the Season. Lady F. had been taken on to present her at Court. For a fee, of course. Lady F. made a living presenting girls who were just wide of the mark, or from the colonies or America. It’s often done. Her father had made a lot of money importing cotton from the South and making it up into cloth. My grandparents were generous with their children. Uncle Edwin went to Harvard, and they thought that if my mother did the Season in England it would add to her social standing. That’s how she met my father. At Ascot. They were forced to share an umbrella in a rainstorm.’

Kit pushed the chair back and got up. ‘As you know, Matty, things are not always simple. Perhaps in those days expectations were different. People wanted things differently. I don’t know.’ He turned to Matty, an eyebrow raised as if she might know. She didn’t. ‘My mother and my uncle were very fond of each other. Extremely fond, and they didn’t like being separated. Mother constantly referred to Uncle Edwin and they met frequently. He was often over here and they wrote to each other most weeks. I think it irritated my father. They understood each other so well, you see, that I think he felt left out.’

Matty remained quite still.

‘Their marriage wasn’t happy.’

Yes, she thought. She loved another man. Her own brother. A man who told her that things would never be the same again after the war. And did not come back himself. Matty wanted to tell Kit what she knew – but it was not her secret.

Kit tried to describe what he meant by not happy. How the edginess and unease between his parents had infected him, the child. How he knew it was there, but thought it was normal.

‘They rubbed each other up the wrong way, although you would never guess from their behaviour in public. Then the war came and Father returned from it a changed man. That was after Uncle Edwin was dead.’

Kit cut himself off and was silent. After a few seconds he went on, ‘Did you know they had four children?’

‘
Four
children?’

‘Yes. We had another sister called Rose.’ It was growing dark and Kit moved away from the window. His voice was very bleak. ‘If you don’t mind, Matty, I don’t think I want to talk about this any more.’

Matty dropped her detached tone. ‘Please, please. If you have one ounce of affection for me,
try.’
He was silent. ‘You must try, Kit.’

‘Rose drowned,’ he said, after a long minute. ‘In the river, by the boathouse, like you nearly did. She had been playing on the jetty by herself and Mother told Robbie that she would watch Rose for half an hour or so. But she didn’t, she went down to her garden and left Rose alone.’

‘Ah.’ Matty’s heart was beating hard and she expelled a long breath. ‘Yes?’

‘That was after my uncle was killed in the Somme. I’ve always thought the deaths drove her mad. She blamed herself for both. Firstly for badgering Father to wangle a commission for Uncle Edwin. He shouldn’t have, you see, but it’s always possible to fix things if you know the right people. Then Rose.’

‘In the garden?’ Matty whispered. ‘That garden?’

‘In the garden.’ Pause. ‘By the statue.’

‘How?’

‘She took a knife from the kitchen. She was so desperate to die that she slashed herself more than twenty times.’

The pause this time was longer. Kit ran a hand over his hair and his shoulders hunched. He seemed to be gathering strength for what he had to say. His gaze swung back to his wife, and locked onto hers.

‘Matty, she was so desperate to leave us that she even stabbed herself in the face.’

Why didn’t you tell me?’ Matty sat motionless while she listened. Like many people on hearing shocking news, she fastened on trivia. ‘I’ve just ordered more roses for planting.’

Kit looked at Matty as if he did not understand a word she said. ‘It’s not important,’ he said. ‘Really.’

‘But it is, don’t you see?’ Matty had got into the habit of cradling her hands in her lap to give them maximum protection. She did this now. ‘It meant we were approaching each other from the opposite ends of a pole. You should have told me, Kit. I would have understood, however things are between us.’