Consider the Lily (12 page)

‘Daisy.’ In panic at the peremptory leavetaking, Kit moved too fast, slipped and fell onto a knee. Wincing, he scrambled to his feet while Daisy’s diminishing figure slid in and out of the shadows, insubstantial and unearthly. Then he limped after her, caught up and grabbed one of the straps of her pink dress. ‘Don’t say it like that.’

Daisy waited for Kit to drop his hand. ‘I understand, Kit, really I do. Look, I’ve been meaning to tell you. There’s someone else... someone who wants to marry me.’ Her beauty had returned and in the stormy afternoon, she seemed lit up by the drama of the moment and by an emotion he did not recognize. ‘His name is Tim, and I’m probably going to say yes.’

Kit’s grip on her shoulder was savage and she cried out.

‘You’re making it up.’

‘No.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

With a shrug Daisy moved away. ‘It was fun, wasn’t it, Kit? I enjoyed our time together.’

‘Fun...’ The word hung in the dusk. Kit stood motionless as she walked towards the house. ‘Yes, it was,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘I shall think of it when I’m back in London.’

‘Daisy. Listen to me...’ Kit was planted into the stone.

‘It didn’t take much, did it?’ A thin, disembodied voice floated back to him.

‘To do what?’ he called out, forgetting there were other people in the villa. ‘To do what, Daisy?’ he bellowed in bewilderment.

‘To be put off.’

Daisy vanished through the curtains at the french windows.

No sponging on their good will. No sponging on their good will.

The overnight train from Nice to Paris clacked out the message and Matty, a book unread in her lap, listened to it. Sometimes it sounded as hard and metallic as Aunt Susan, and at others it whispered as the train glided over points and down gradients.

Perhaps she was a little light-headed with fever from the infected bites, for strange thoughts filtered in and out of her brain. They drifted, tantalizing and out of reach, and she tried to catch them — rebellious, daringly coloured butterflies in the bell-jar of her mind.

The mirror in the compartment swung to the rhythm of the train, and her reflection became a many-angled composition. There was her blotched face, so different from Daisy’s beauty, which Matty would never have. The demon of jealousy stirred. So unlovable compared to Daisy, it whispered, so uninteresting, so unformed.

No sponging on their good will.

Outside the window, France slid past, the lights of towns and villages beaded along the track. Already it was cooler, and when they nosed between foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes a scent of pine overlaid the smoke.

Matty poured water into the basin and began to wash for dinner. Two years ago, she had been browsing through a selection of American periodicals and had come across an article by the American feminist, Emma Goldman, which she had never forgotten. Emma had said: ‘True emancipation begins neither in the polls, nor in the courts. It begins in a woman’s soul.’

Matty well remembered her shock when she read the words – a sense that she had encountered something daring and grand in scope. Of course, she did not consider they applied to her – Emma was much too heroic for the soul that huddled inside Matty’s delicate frame, the stepping stones to Emma’s bold state of mind too far apart.

And yet. And yet.

No sponging on their good will.

She thought back to the Villa Lafayette, criss-crossed with vivid sensation — sun, sea, the intensities of falling in love, jealousy. Marcus and Flora. Daisy and Kit. Mosquito bites. Sweat-bathed nights. Unfamiliar longings.

He wouldn’t want me, Matty told herself, hugging a mental picture of a remote figure who made conversation about Damascus and roses. Never. But then, she added, that was not surprising. She wouldn’t have wanted herself.

She began to dress.

With a shriek the train steamed into the station in Paris and came to a halt. For a moment there was peace, and then porters began to move down the platform to the sleeping compartments. Steam spread in layers under the roof, windows released from leather straps and doors swung open. A trickle of passengers descended from the train.

Matty paused before negotiating the drop to the platform in her high-heeled shoes, and a porter came to her aid. Despite no sleep, for she had sat up thinking all night, she was stylishly dressed in a grey georgette suit and a head-hugging hat. A green silk scarf fluttered from her neck, and emerald earrings glinted in the early light. She was followed by Flora, feeling unwieldy and all elbows in a silk coat and matching dress.

A porter ordered their taxi, stowed luggage and installed them inside. Hung-over from the brandy he had consumed after dinner and exhausted after a sleepless night, Kit gave an over-large tip and climbed in after the girls.

It was still early, but the gas-lights in the city had already been extinguished. A night-army was in the process of dispersing – cess-pool cleaners and street-car track repairers whose acetylene torches spluttered violet sparks which turned yellow in the dawn – but for this half-hour or so, the city hovered, half nocturnal, half diurnal, in the pearled light.

A horse-drawn cart had misjudged its path and was slewed across the street outside the station, so the driver chose an alternative route, which took them through back streets and shabby, peeling
quartiers.
Kit caught the scuttle of a prostitute and her pimp, and the opium stagger of a woman emerging from a
fumerie
in the Avenue Bosquet. The beauty in the sinister caught his attention, not for the first time. The Parisian underworld, for instance: secret, violent, full of mysterious
oubliettes
and paradisical dreams, erotic, drug-filled and often fatal. He wished that he, too, was staggering into the dawn.

The car pushed across the Quai de la Meglisserie where the
clochards
were stirring, and roosters in the seed stores crowed. The sun was rising behind Notre Dame and the smell of bread and ground coffee perfumed the air.

The beauty of the buildings and the Seine caught at Kit. His limbs and head hurt from the brandy, and the aftermath of alcohol and weariness was indistinguishable from the ache for and loss of Daisy.

‘Oh, look,’ said Flora, bunched into her corner of the car. ‘Flowers. Masses of them.’ Kit peered obediently through his window into the sun. But all he could see were the slippery lines of a distorted face. His own.

On deck the breeze sharpened as the ferry drew out beyond the confines of Calais harbour. A skein of gulls followed the wake, chorusing to each other. Every so often they dived for fish and scraps, and rose gleaming into the sky.

Because he was tired, Kit felt the change in temperature more acutely. He turned up the collar of his mackintosh and pulled his trilby low over his eyes. Below the ferry, the water churned ice-green, flecked with rubbish and orange peel. The coast of France was fading out of sight. Drinks were being served in the first-class bar and lunch in the restaurant. Kit wanted neither and, unless his hangover wore off, the odds were that he would never eat or drink again.

He slumped on the rail, and allowed the spray to spatter him. A gull rose, with a piece of melon rind in its beak, and it was now that Kit realized he was deeply and bitterly angry.

Kit darling, dearest. Don’t pester me. I can’t... I can’t take it. Why don’t you run along and play with your sisters? Leave me alone, dearest, there’s a good boy.

The echo of an old memory, its lies and betrayals mixed with the new ones, fermented in Kit’s mind. With it was the knowledge that he should have said something to Daisy but had failed to do so. It was too late.

Tim Coats. Well, Flora had warned him.

A heave from the ship brought him up sharply against the rail. He retched. Acid burned in his stomach, as corrosive as the mental picture of taking Tim Coats by the throat and of squeezing until the skin flowered bruises and Tim was broken. Whoever he was, of course.

Concerned for him, Flora watched Kit out of the restaurant window. Matty and she were eating lunch, which was good. Especially the salted English butter and mint sauce. Flora fell on them as eagerly as on long-lost friends, ate lashings and enjoyed every mouthful. After she had finished she left Matty to a second cup of coffee, went on deck and sat down out of the wind where she could keep an eye on her brother.

Kit was bent over the rail, and Flora’s feeling of well-being was eclipsed. God knew what he was thinking, and where he had left it with Daisy, but she suspected it was at a point satisfactory to neither. The breeze had swelled into a wind, and she pulled her hat down firmly onto her head and drove the pin into the thickest part of her coiled plait to anchor it. She was glad to be going home. Villa Lafayette had been fun, but it was an odd place. She had glimpsed adult feelings and their consequences – which had made her uneasy. At this point, a less than pleasing recollection of Marcus’s moustache tickling her upper lip intruded on her thoughts. Under the protection of her hat, Flora turned red.

Flora yawned and leant back. One of the first things she would do on her return was to check on Danny and the hounds, and take a look at Myfanwy, the foal. With luck, the blackberries would be at their peak and she planned an expedition up Itchel Lane. How soothing, she thought, and how English I am. The mellowness lasted precisely a minute and a half. Flora had forgotten they were returning to a financial crisis, to Rupert and the manoeuvres that would have to be made to resolve their problems. What manoeuvres? she asked herself, failing, yet again, to come up with a solution.

‘Don’t even think of it,’ Kit had warned Flora at dinner on the train the previous evening when she suggested she went out to work, and he frowned at her for discussing family matters in front of Matty. ‘Women and work do not go together in Father’s reckoning.’

‘But it would make sense.’ Flora was aware that she was not very persuasive, but she persisted. ‘And lots of women are beginning to work these days.’

‘What would you do?’

‘Couldn’t she learn to type?’ interjected Matty unexpectedly.

She could, Kit replied, having considered the suggestion. But it probably would not get Flora very far.

‘Listen, old girl.’ Kit had flicked a finger against the wine glass so that it rang – a warning note. ‘You won’t get out of the front door. Father would chain you up like Bluebeard rather than have a daughter who worked.’

Muddle. Flora squinted through her half-closed lids. I muddle through. We muddle through. Typing? The notion of an office did not appeal. Medicine? She permitted herself a vision of driving around Nether Hinton in the pony trap with a black doctor’s bag beside her. But medicine involved rather more than cutting a dash around a village. Examinations for one thing. Father? Kit was right. He would chain her up – or the modern equivalent.

What it boiled down to was that Flora had neither the worldliness, the knowledge, nor the habit of taking charge of herself to make dramatic changes. Sobering but true.

She picked up her copy of Michael Arlen’s
The Green Hat
and smoothed the pages. Daisy had recommended it and she now knew why: its heroine was very like Daisy.

Her thoughts flitted this way and that and, after a while, Flora fell asleep.

Three other women were eating breakfast in the restaurant. One was young and expensively dowdy. The second, decked in unnecessary furs and made up with scarlet lipstick and Vaselined lids, looked no better than she should be – but since she was undoubtedly beautiful and exuded inviting sexuality, men hovered at her table. At a table opposite, an older woman in a grey felt hat and a sensible Harris tweed suit hugged a glass of brandy and soda as if her life depended on it.

To give herself courage Matty also ordered a brandy and soda. When the steward brought it the restaurant heaved with a clatter of china, and she braced her feet on the carpet. Her hand shook only a little when she raised the glass to her lips, and Matty was encouraged. Freed from the heat of Villa Lafayette, she felt better. Stronger. More determined. More like the women she wished to be like. She gulped down another mouthful.

If Matty was going to do what she planned, it had to be now while her courage was high and her inhibitions were down. The moment was right – a powerful instinct told her so – but her terror was such that she thought she was going to faint. Two minutes later, half the brandy and soda had disappeared, and fanned, warm and supportive, through her. Dear Emma, Matty headed her prayer, whoever you are, I want you to know you have a lot to answer for and I, for one, hope that you are right.

She got up, permitted the waiter to pull back her chair and to escort her out of the restaurant. Outside, the wind immediately attacked her hat and roared past her ears, and waves threw drifts of spume over her face. Kit was still standing at the rail, gazing back towards the vanished French coastline. Stepping carefully over the deck in her inappropriately high heels, Matty approached him.

‘Excuse me,’ she said softly.

Evidently Kit did not hear her for he said nothing.

‘Excuse me,’ she repeated, and touched his forearm. Puzzled by the interruption, Kit turned his head and looked down at his travelling companion. Later, he remembered thinking how badly she carried fatigue. She looked ill, frightened and very small. The wind whipped a strand of hair across her cheek and she pushed it back with a hand that trembled visibly.

‘I hope you don’t mind me interrupting you,’ she said.

Normally polite, Kit’s expression was not inviting and she shrank inside. ‘No,’ he said, barely concealing his reluctance. ‘Of course not. Do you need help?’

Matty lost her nerve and floundered. ‘I was just wondering what time we will dock.’

Kit pushed aside thoughts of the weary business of settling debts and making decisions about what to sell, what to keep, how to stay solvent, and consulted his watch. ‘Another hour,’ he replied. ‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘Perfectly, thank you.’

There was silence.

‘Could I get you something to drink?’ he asked over the noise of the wind.