Consider the Lily (60 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
‘What is it, Kit?’
Kit shoved his tell-tale hands inside his pockets, for he knew he was going to push Matty to the limit – and he had pushed her so often, and so far. Daisy’s tear-streaked face hovered in his mind, and he closed his eyes for a second. Then he opened them and looked at his wife.
‘I would go down on my knees,’ he said, with a hint of his uneven smile, ‘if it would help.’
‘No,’ she said.
He smiled properly at her vehemence, moved towards her, put out his arms and pulled Matty to him. She did not resist and he said, ‘Daisy is finished, Matty. For ever. I’ve come back home to ask, not only for forgiveness, but for
you
back and our marriage back. But before you make up your mind, I have something else to ask you.’
Matty gave a shuddering sigh and disengaged herself, almost, he thought, as if she could not bring herself to trust him. He searched her face for clues.
‘What I am going to ask you is so big, and will require such enormous love—’
‘What is it?’ she interrupted. ‘What more do you want from me?’
He winced at that. ‘A very big thing,’ he said. ‘Which I could only ask of you.’
She did not dare to reply.
‘Will you wait a minute while I fetch something?’ he asked.
She swallowed and fluttered a hand. ‘If you wish.’
‘Stay there, then.’
Matty watched as he disappeared up the path and, because she could not think of anything else to do, turned back to the clematis and chopped at it with frantic, jerky cuts.
Her back was towards him when he returned, carrying the white bundle. ‘Matty. Will you still allow me to ask you?’
He sounded so strange that she swivelled sharply, took in the shawl and the baby and understood the mystery of Daisy’s telegram. She swayed in shock and disbelief.
‘What
are
you asking me, Kit?’
Kit held out the sleeping baby. ‘Matty, you do not have to accept him. I will stand by whatever you decide. Believe me, that is my punishment. If you do not want him, can’t accept what I ask, then I will take him away for adoption and, whatever happens to us, I will never reproach you.’
Matty’s chest rose and fell.
‘Do you understand, Matty?’
Bitter anger clenched the muscles under her sternum. Agony. Jealousy. Pain that it was not she, never would be, whose body brought forth Kit’s son. Humiliation that she had been brought to a position where her husband offered her another woman’s baby. Daisy’s baby. Truly, oh, truly, she had come to the end.
Kit, she cried silently. Where have you taken me? Down a valley paved with ashes. Blindly, she turned as if to run away.
‘Matty!’ Kit cried out, despairing. ‘Matty. Forgive me.’
A note sang out from the field below Hook Meadow. Thin and uneven. Another followed. Then a third.
Matty stopped. The bugle band of the Odiham-Nether Hinton Scouts was practising, and someone – one of the boys? – was playing the Last Post.
It rose into the air, playing for the Hamps, the Wilts, the miners, sappers, messengers and bombers. For Danny and Rupert, Edwin and Hesther, Robbie and her Sergeant Naylor who never came back, for Rose, for Bert Stain’s missing lung, and Hal Bister’s missing mind. For all who had lost.
And with it rose a shadowy multitude, limping on rotting feet and gas-filled lungs through the crushed poppies and dog roses into the mist and smoke and roar of battle. An army — no, ten thousand, thousand armies, of crowding shades.
They had gone. They had all gone.
‘Oh, no,’ said Matty. She took a step back into the flowerbed and the earth sank beneath her feet. The sun slid a beam across the garden, lit up the plump rosebuds and threw a shadow from the statue – if you looked quickly it could almost be said to resemble the outline of a small girl.
The pulses in Matty’s neck, wrists and deep in her groin beat in painful time to her heart.
‘Your son?’ she said, a thaw more agonizing than her anger rushing in her chest. Slowly, infinitely slowly, she stretched out her blistered hands and accepted the weight of the baby as Kit placed him between them. ‘A son?’
The bugle stopped as abruptly as it had started, and in the silence that followed Matty looked up from the baby to Kit. Their eyes caught and held, each questioning the other.
Love was an act of will. You had to keep on living it. Each day, each moment, each second. It had to exist without conditions. It had to be carried, nurtured and suffered for. You loved, and that was it. Again, she stared down at the small human in her arms, who could confirm that truth. He stirred, and she shifted him so that his head rested more comfortably, and, then, propelled by an urge she could not control, drew him into her breast.
‘Kit?’ she said, painfully, tentatively. ‘I think... I think it’s all right.’
Kit picked up the fork lying by the ‘Queen of Denmark’ and drove it deep into the earth. He was crying — with relief, with gratitude, with aching loss, with the knowledge that he had been vouchsafed more than he deserved. He put up a hand to wipe the tears away, then he turned and drew Matty and the baby into his arms.
The shadow under the statue lifted and all resemblance to a child vanished.
With all its blood-lettings, its sudden passions and silences, with its longueurs, its ententes, its peaces, a marriage had begun.
Linked by old happenings and mistakes, families wax and wane. Like the flowering year, they are doomed to repeat the cycle – the omissions, the shortfalls, the lack of love and forgiveness.
I know because it happened in my family – and the wounds inflicted by one member are repeated in the next generation, until a chain is linked together.
Mine is a very English story which could only have happened at a particular time, and yet, I think, has universal application. I have written it to show you where it went wrong and where it went right, how the seeds set by one generation flower again and again. How, despite our quirks (Thomas) and disappointments (the loss of the house), in the end love can grant us a future, and serenity. The grace of a long, contented life, like mine.
Above all, there is the garden. An Eden of stone and brick, of brown and green, of forks and spades, of seed trays and compost heaps, conjured by rain and sun into beauty from which we draw nourishment. Life-giving, ever changing, always there, an indestructible source for the spirit. The garden triumphant, in which are found the lily and the rose locked into their spiral of fecundity, death – and resurrection. So, you see, it came right.
Elizabeth Buchan began her career as a blurb writer at Penguin Books after graduating from the University of Kent with a double degree in English and History. She moved on to become a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prizewinning
Consider the Lily
– reviewed in the
Independent
as ‘a gorgeously well written tale: funny, sad and sophisticated’. A subsequent novel,
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
became an international bestseller and was made into a CBS Primetime Drama. This was followed by
The Good Wife,
That Certain Age
,
The Second
Wife
and
Separate Beds
.
Daughters
is her latest novel.
Elizabeth Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She reviews for the
Sunday Times
, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes, and also been a judge for the Whitbread (now Costa) awards. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and of The National Academy of Writing.
She is currently writing a novel about the Danish Resistance during the Second World War.
Elizabeth Buchan loves to make contact with her readers. Join her on Twitter:
@elizabethbuchan
and on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/ElizabethBuchanAuthor?ref=hl
© 1993, 2012 Elizabeth Buchan
Elizabeth Buchan has asserted her rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
Published by Elizabeth Buchan
First published and printed in 1993
First published in eBook format in 2012
eISBN: 978-1-909270-16-9
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All names, characters, places, organisations, businesses and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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