Consider the Lily (8 page)

Daisy flicked her scarf across her shoulders.

‘Are you burnt?’ Kit edged closer so that his thigh almost touched hers.

‘To the bone,’ she replied. ‘Sun, sea and the prospect of a garlicky dinner tonight. Perfect.’

Kit marched his fingers up and down the flat rock. ‘No one will kiss you,’ he said under his breath.

‘Won’t they?’ Daisy teased and dared him, and Kit’s fingers came to an abrupt halt. What are you doing to me? he asked Daisy silently, his wanting of her mixed with an elixir of sun, wine and liberation from confining clothes.

‘Your cousin,’ Flora was asking Marcus. ‘Will she be coming this evening?’

‘I expect so,’ said Marcus.

‘Is she enjoying herself?’ Flora was curious. ‘She seems... she seems, well, not to very much.’

‘Matty,’ said Daisy, ‘always feels left out. It’s her life’s burden and there’s nothing we can do to help.’ She got to her feet, brushing dust and pebbles from her skirt. ‘Come on. Why don’t we go to the port to dine tonight instead of staying at the villa?’

It did not take much to persuade Susan Chudleigh to abandon the role of chaperone for an evening. The business of nannying the youth was tedious and tiring. She imposed one condition. ‘Matty goes with you,’ she said, thinking that she could not bear to spend an evening alone with her niece. ‘She needs bringing out of herself.’

Marcus and Kit handed the girls into Ambrose Chudleigh’s black saloon and negotiated the coast road with more dash than skill. Marcus drove and Kit hung out of the passenger window to give warning of rocky outcrops over the road. Their destination was the Café de la Marine in the port – ‘So authentic, so
nostalgie de la boue,’
remarked Daisy. After that, they planned to go in search of a casino.

They dined outside in the airless dark, overlooking the fishing boats and the harbour wall. The tables were occupied by regulars, a few tourists and a swelling contingent of English exiles – artists affecting short-sleeved cotton shirts, their women in striped fishermen’s jerseys, writers and journalists who declared their creative engines rusted up in stifling England. Kit placed himself next to Matty at the table: Daisy’s earlier remarks about her cousin had made him curious.

‘I haven’t had a chance to ask you if you are enjoying yourself. You look as though you are feeling the heat.’

Matty’s hair hung lankly over her face, and her face powder clung to a rime of sweat. She pushed away the china bowl containing
loup de mer,
and crumbled bread between her fingers. ‘Yes,’ she said in a low voice. ‘I am finding the heat difficult.’

‘It’s a matter of will power,’ Kit told her. ‘Tell yourself not to mind.’

It was a novel approach for Matty and she floundered for something interesting with which to respond. ‘I see.’ Bread crumbled furiously onto the tablecloth.

‘Do you?’ Kit gave one of his lazy smiles. Only one corner of his mouth went up when he did that: amused and hinting at irony.

The smile was part of his charm, and at that moment the unused bits and pieces of Matty’s heart went click, and she fell in love. Candle-light patched their faces and with a new greed Matty fastened her gaze on him. Kit drank some wine and tried again. ‘Tell me what Daisy was like as a little girl,’ he said in a low voice.

His question was transparent, and burrowing among the tangle of new feelings inside Matty’s breast, she was conscious of despair.

‘
Did
you get on as children?’

‘No,’ she said with the characteristic shake of her head. ‘We didn’t. We are too different. I’m very quiet.’

‘Are you?’ said Kit thoughtlessly.

‘Daisy had the friends. I didn’t so much because... well, I was ill a lot when I was a child.’

Kit pushed Matty’s wine glass towards her. ‘Have some,’ he said. ‘It’s rough but invigorating.’ He watched as she obeyed. ‘Why were you ill?’

‘I don’t know. Ever since I was a small child in Damascus—’

‘Damascus! What were you doing there?’

‘I lived there,’ she said. ‘My parents bred Arab horses, and grew roses in a small way until...’

Kit put down his glass. ‘Until what?’

The chatter of the other diners seemed very loud. ‘Until they died, of typhoid. When I was five.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Kit sounded very distant and Matty was quite sure she had said something wrong. As if he did not
want
to accept what she had said. The moment passed, and he resumed. ‘Roses, you say?’

Matty smiled and the candle-flame lit up her face. ‘Autumn damasks. They have a very rich scent.’

‘Yes, I know.’ For a moment, Kit was back in a courtyard in Bokhara where he sat drinking tea, a mass of roses spread under the olives, and an old restlessness stirred. Daisy’s laugh brought him back.

‘Don’t be absurd, Marcus.’ She addressed her brother across the table. ‘We will never have another war. It was all decided in a railway carriage.’

Marcus lit a cigarette. ‘My sister’s ignorance is profound so don’t take any notice of her.’

‘I, dear brother, am entitled to hold an opinion. Whether or not it is a good one is another matter.’

‘
Touché
.’ Kit raised his glass to Daisy, who was as pink and flushed as the roses he had been remembering. ‘If I were you, Marcus, I wouldn’t be so rude to your sister. They have a way of exacting revenge.’

‘My saviour.’ Daisy kissed the tip of one fingertip and blew it across the table to Kit.

With an effort, he turned back to Matty. ‘You know about roses?’

‘Only a little,’ she replied seriously. ‘I’ve kept my parents’ notebooks and records, but I’ve never actually grown them.’

‘It sounds as though you should try.’

And it sounds as though you are bored, thought Matty, and drank as much of the wine as she could manage.

Kit looked out at the forest of masts, and the lights flaring at the end of the harbour. A fishing boat was coming in and the crew’s conversation sounded clearly over the water. Fuelled by the wine, Matty grabbed her chance. ‘You know the East?’

Kit swivelled back to her. ‘Quite well. It gets to you the East, doesn’t it? Especially the desert. Clean and unforgiving. I’ve stayed in Damascus twice. You must remember what it is like?’

‘Oh, yes.’ At least, thought Matty, I share this in common with him. It was followed by a less worthy thought: Daisy did not. ‘Did you know that martial law has been declared in Jerusalem and that the Arabs are crossing the Syrian border?’

‘Really!’ Kit looked at her with sharpened interest. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Gambling, I think,
mes amis.’’
Daisy scraped back her chair and stood, her arms spread as if to embrace the world. ‘
Allons.’

Kit laughed at her impersonation of the
patron
, got to his feet immediately and Matty lost him. She took another gulp from her glass and felt it trickle down her throat. She had always known there was a dark edge to her spirit: a place where anger and jealousy met and cohabited. She had so little, so very little, attention or affection, and Daisy who basked in these things was given them just like that. Anger stirred in Matty and, appalled by its intensity, she remained seated.

Holding out a hand to Kit who captured it, Daisy waltzed along the waterfront. ‘Angel, angel boy,’ she sang. ‘I think I’m squiffy.’ Behind her, Flora smiled into the darkness and allowed Marcus to tuck his hand under her elbow.

‘So you’re squiffy,’ said Kit, pulling Daisy to him. ‘But I like it.’ His hands slid up her wrists. The sea went slap, slap on the waterfront and around the harbour it was lit with reflections from the lights. Beyond that was darkness. Daisy drew in her breath.

‘It’s too, too lovely,’ she whispered to the head close to hers.

If Susan Chudleigh had not allowed the sun to dull her wits, she might have had second thoughts and nipped the affair in the bud. After all, Daisy was practically engaged to Tim Coats. But she did not. After an exhausting year of social rounds, charity work and organizing unsatisfactory domestics, she was content to let her guard slip and complacency take over. What did it matter that Kit and Daisy were obviously head over heels? He was a good catch. Socially he was very desirable, far more so than Tim Coats – Susan visualized how Lady Dysart would look on the envelopes. Hinton Dysart was a landmark, a little dilapidated perhaps, but everything had disadvantages. Where Kit did not score was in the matter of finance for, courtesy of his father who had made money manufacturing carpets, Tim was rich. Nevertheless, Kit and Daisy made a visually exciting pair, and, despite her worldliness, Susan was affected, as they all were in the Villa Lafayette, by the erotic charge between them.

Ambrose Chudleigh was clearer-sighted, but even more fatigued. He was seriously worried about the state of the world’s economy – the Americans had called back all their loans in Europe and demand was slackening in the States itself. What, he asked his wife, did this forebode? Don’t ask me, Susan replied. That’s your problem. So concerned was Ambrose that he made arrangements to cut short his holiday and to depart at the end of August back to London on a salvage operation. He did not feel disposed to interfere with his daughter’s love affair.

‘But,’ said his wife, as they lay in their twin beds and listened to the diners threading their way through the garden, ‘if the markets are going to crash, we must get Daisy married off to one or other of them.’ She reran calculations in her head and wondered if she had made a mistake in favouring Kit.

There was silence, broken only by a smothered giggle from Flora under the window.

‘What are
her
investments in?’ she asked.

‘Matilda’s?’ Ambrose sighed. ‘Don’t be obvious, Susan. You know I can’t give you that sort of information, and, anyway, who knows what is going to happen?’

‘I just wondered.’

‘Well, don’t.’

‘Will we be all right, Ambrose?’

Ambrose’s answer was accompanied by the rustle of starched sheets. ‘We don’t have anything much to lose. You know that.’

Silence.

‘Nothing’s the same,’ said Susan into the dark.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Since the war. It broke things up.’

Realizing he was not going to get much sleep, Ambrose switched on the light and reached for his sleeping pills and the glass of water. The water made his moustache gleam. ‘Since you mention it,’ he said, ‘I must check Matty’s portfolio. We have a duty to safeguard it.’

‘She
would,’
said his wife bitterly for the thousandth time, reflecting on the skin-of-the-teeth operation that kept the family swimming in the kind of society to which Susan aspired. ‘She just would have the money and not you.’

This was not fair. It was not Ambrose’s fault that his sister Jocasta had married a rich man. (What is more, Jocasta had been generous to her brother, to the extent of bequeathing him the leasehold of Number 5 Upper Brook Street.) Not fair at all. Ambrose crunched the pill between his teeth, winced at its aloe taste and then lay back to deal with the hot night.

The
bouillabaisse
contained mullet and langoustines, and the sauce was very thick and red. At an adjacent table a sailor with a disfigured mouth scooped up the fish with a spoon and dunked his bread in the liquid. The misshapen lips stretched over the metal and each time the sailor swallowed he grimaced. The restaurant, a crowded, dimly lit
boîte
on the quay at the Cap, was that sort of place, thought Daisy: as fascinating to observe as it provoked easy conversation.

‘Delicious,’ she said, intrigued by the informality of the candle and paper tablecloth. It fitted in with the picture of France that had evolved in her mind: colour, heat, freedom and lack of constraint. ‘It’s just right.’

In order to have some time alone with Daisy, Kit had bribed Marcus to take Flora and Matty to the restaurant further along the quay. I’ll behave, he promised, and he was sure Mrs Chudleigh would not object. Marcus was no slouch. On condition, he bargained, that he get some time with Flora. Done, Kit had said. A gentlemen’s agreement. It was nothing of the sort, said Marcus who, from time to time, displayed flashes of humour.

One of the waiters wound up the gramophone which sat on the zinc bar, and the record scratched out a song about love spoilt and betrayed. Its despair affected Daisy and she put down her spoon. ‘It’s so sad, it bothers me.’

The door opened and the draught blew out the candle on their table. Kit relit it with his cigarette lighter. The shadows thrown by its flare did a St Vitus’ dance across the white paper. ‘I don’t like to think of you being sad. Especially now,’ he said, snapping the lighter shut.

Daisy watched him drop it onto the table. ‘One must be sometimes,’ she said. ‘Afterwards there is the luxury of being happy.’

‘I know that,’ said Kit. ‘But I have a request. You are not to be sad this evening.’

‘Have you got something to write with?’

He tossed her a pencil from his jacket pocket and she drew a face on the paper, a round with two big eyes.

‘A question, Kit. Which is more foolish? Being too sad or too happy? Is someone born with a tendency to unhappiness or is it something they acquire, like teeth?’

With a stroke, Daisy added a mournful downturned mouth to her creation.

She had a way of asking provoking questions, things which were near the bone, and he threw this one back at her. ‘Can you be too happy?’ he asked, knowing that he was overwhelmingly so, sitting in the babble and darkness with Daisy, tempting the mothy old goddesses who sat on Olympus and controlled human fates.

She pulled a piece of wax off the candle. ‘It’s probably unwise to be too happy but that is not to say that one should not be. I don’t think you can avoid discomfort or pain.’

‘
Daisy!
Will you stop it?’ Kit tugged the pencil away from her, and slashed a grin across the face on the paper. ‘There. Here I am, having carried you off by stealth, and you talk of pain and misery.’

She wrinkled her nose at him. ‘But, Kit, you have to think about these things sometimes.’

‘Not tonight,’ said Kit, who did think of these things.

The door swung open and shut like a metronome until the barman propped it open and the flat, shiny sea was framed like a picture. The
boîte
was packed and smoky. At the bar fishermen with weatherbeaten arms and blue trousers were drinking
marc.
At the tables older men in linen suits dined young men in tight trousers and skimpy sailor shirts.