Consider the Lily (54 page)

At Brignoles he stopped for lunch, and ordered an omelette flavoured with shavings of white truffle. Half-way through the meal he regretted it and pushed the plate aside, his appetite drained. He lit the umpteenth cigarette of the day.

Smoke drifted upwards into the still air as Kit pondered on the nature and complexity of his feelings. He knew he was risking the relationship he and Matty had begun, so painfully, to build. Which... Kit drew in a lungful of smoke... he
wanted
to build. On the other hand, Daisy had called him, and he was responding. With no shadow of doubt, no hesitation.

He stubbed out the cigarette and got to his feet.

The car surged over the road and bucketed over occasional pot-holes. A breeze blew in at the window with the hint of rain in it that spring winds often have. It cooled his cheek. As he drove, Kit reflected at length on the stepping stones that had brought him to this point: the hesitations, the epiphanies and false turns, the moments of rapture and despair, and motives that were less than clear.

At Antibes he drove to the post office and procured the address that had been left there for him. Unfamiliar with the town and its narrow thoroughfares, he had difficulty finding it and it was late evening before he drew up in front of a typical town house, in a dismal state, with wrought-iron balconies.

The concierge was fat and bad-tempered, and Kit’s enquiry after ‘Miss Chudleigh’ made her even more so. She heaved her bulk out of the minute office cluttered with knitting, newspapers and a large board for hanging up the keys, and sighed at the prospect of the climb in front of her.

‘Bad thing,’ she informed Kit. ‘This
mam’zelle.
Ill, too. She owes me money.’

‘Has she had a doctor?’

‘We had to get one, and his bill isn’t paid.’

The concierge assessed the Englishman in his rumpled linen suit. How much would
he
pay? How did he fit into the story upstairs? She was not to know that Kit had taken one look at her and lapsed into appalled silence.

What had happened?

On each floor the atmosphere grew frowsier, with the staleness of trapped air. On the half-landings, the
cabinets
gave fair warning of what it would be like when the summer heat took over.

Kit’s mouth tightened. What was Daisy doing here – fastidious Daisy – in a peeling lodging house with bad smells? He did not know, could not imagine.

A faint odour of anis overlaid all other impressions as Kit entered Room
on the top floor. It was small with a sharply angled ceiling and Kit ducked. The concierge shuffled in behind him and observed Kit blanch visibly as he surveyed... what?

A room with a single bed, a chair and a heavy, rather good, chest of drawers from better times. There was no mirror, no decoration to speak of. No carpet. Nothing except for Daisy asleep on the bed in a garish kimono.

She lay with one cheek turned into the pillow and her hair, less chestnut than he remembered, trailing in strands across the linen. A tin bowl and a rumpled towel lay on the bed beside her.

At the sight, Kit’s heart turned inside out with love for Daisy, with pity, with a sense of ineluctable loss.

‘Go away,’ he said to the concierge, pushed her out into the corridor and shut the door. He stood still for thirty seconds or so then went over to the window and tugged at the
étincelette,
releasing a shower of rust from the rotting iron balcony above. Salty air streamed into the room, and Daisy woke with a start.

‘Kit,’ she said, articulating through the tail-end of sleep. ‘You took your time.’

‘If you will send me telegrams when I’m at the other end of the earth.’

With an effort, she held out her hand. ‘Joke.’

‘I know.’

He sat down on the bed and took her hand. ‘Daisy, what have you done? Is this my fault? Tell me.’ He gestured at the room. ‘Why here?’

‘Why not? It’s an experience.’ Daisy seemed lethargic and reluctant to talk much. She put up a hand and tugged at the hair that had fallen over her face. ‘But if you insist on explanations, you could say I have mismanaged my life. It happens to a lot of people.’

Under the pulled-back hair, her face sprang into relief. It seemed to Kit that all her brightness had drained away, leaving only a wan imprint. Daisy dropped her hands and wrapped the edges of the kimono over her breasts. ‘Miss Daisy Chudleigh’s diary of a social outcast. From Number Five Upper Brook Street to rue de la Coin, downtown Antibes.’ Abruptly she changed the subject. ‘Where have you been?’

Kit concentrated hard on the kimono because he could not bear to look anywhere else. ‘Iraq.’

‘Matty? Does she know you’re here?’

‘She sent on the telegram.’ Kit flicked up an eyebrow. ‘Does that surprise you?’

A smile curved the pale mouth. ‘Well, life is strange, isn’t it, my Kit? Will you prop me up, please?’

He bent and slid his hand under Daisy’s shoulders. Obviously weak, her head fell back and Kit was forced to support her with his shoulder. Automatically his hand sought, and found, the bump at the base of her spine. ‘Are you going to tell me what has happened?’

‘As you see I became ill.’ Daisy sighed with pleasure against his shoulder. ‘For a variety of reasons. Not much food and perhaps... lately, a little too much to drink.’

‘I can smell it.’ Kit chose his words with care. ‘Daisy. Anis – any spirit for that matter – isn’t a good drink. It mashes the liver. If you want to drink you should tipple on something less punishing to the system.’

‘Experience learnt in the kasbah?’

‘Something like.’

‘Don’t lecture, my darling. It doesn’t suit you.’

His fingers closed over her shoulder and gripped it. ‘Why are you here? Do your parents know? Why didn’t you call on me sooner?’

‘What? And be bailed out with Matty’s money? Now, that would be too much, Kit.’ Daisy’s hand crawled slowly up her body, found and covered Kit’s.

‘Don’t avoid the issue.’ Privately, he acknowledged the point. ‘I have the American shares. I’m told by Raby that I’ve made a bit from wirelesses.’ His fingers bit into her flesh and she yelped. ‘Why, Daisy? What’s going on?’

‘The money ran out after I was evicted from my respectable lodgings in Nice.’ Daisy’s eyes slanted away to the window and looked beyond. ‘Very character-forming,’ she added softly.

‘Bloody hell, Daisy.’

She shifted in his arms. ‘Don’t, Kit. I haven’t the energy to deal with the recriminations and the whys. These things happen. Just be here, that’s all.’

So Kit gathered his frail, white, ill Daisy to him, and buried his face in her hair. Close to, her skin had a yellowish tinge, there were tiny lines at the corners of her eyes and a thumbprint of fatigue below them. What disturbed him most was that her kimono was unwashed. Perhaps that more than anything raked up the old feelings which flared, caught, and blazed with the intensity of what had been – and what might have been.

Kit eased Daisy’s head back onto his shoulder, cupped his fingers round her chin and smoothed the damp, sticky hair that he would swear had not been seen by a hairdresser for a long time. There was a tidemark at the base of her neck and her fingernails were cut inelegantly short... evidence of her suffering which washed Kit in an ache of desire that went far beyond the physical.

He gazed down at her, understanding that once and for ever the power to love had been unleashed in him by Daisy – and thus, unknowingly, she had given him reparation for the wounds dealt by Hesther.

He wanted to tell her. He wanted to thank her.

Instead, he held her so close that again she was forced to protest and he loosened his grip. ‘Why didn’t you send for me sooner?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied tiredly. ‘I thought about it, but somehow I didn’t. I can’t explain. Perhaps I like extremes. Perhaps I need them.’

The days – even more the nights – had been long ones for Daisy and she drifted in and out of sleep, dreams flickering across an interior landscape menaced with shadow.

‘I can’t explain, Kit,’ she repeated. Then she said, ‘Yes, I can. At least I can show you the reason.’ She tugged at his jacket sleeve. ‘Kit, I have a present for you. It’s over there.’

He frowned, and Daisy’s mouth lifted in one of its quick, teasing smiles, edged with tenderness. ‘Before I give it to you, there’s one thing. You must think hard before accepting.’

Puzzled, Kit eased Daisy back onto the pillow and straightened up. He smiled down at her in the old manner. ‘A present?’ he said.

He went to look into the open drawer of the chest – and everything was understood.

‘Your son,’ said Daisy. ‘He was born two weeks early.’

‘
Trente secondes, Monsieur. Attendez, s’il vous plait,
’’ said the black-robed portress at the door. She snapped shut the grille and was gone a long time before the huge, nail-studded door opened and Kit was allocated a space to enter. He followed the silent, gliding figure, who stopped every few yards and beckoned him on.

The sanctity in the convent was almost palpable, flowing over the Romanesque arches and worn flagstones. Impatient as he was, Kit found himself both curious and impressed. This was a place where outwardly nothing happened but where beneath the ordered fabric he could sense a pulse, presumably directed at God. The idea intrigued him.

They halted in front of a door. ‘If you will wait here, Monsieur.’ The nun spoke in heavily accented English. She disappeared through it, and Kit was left alone in the corridor.

He had not seen Daisy for a week, not since he had peered into the face of his son and staggered with the shock of the encounter. And as he had stood there, reeling and disbelieving, Daisy slid down the bolster into unconsciousness, and there was no time to think.

Within an hour a doctor had come. He pronounced Daisy under-nourished and still weak from the birth, ordered that she should return to the convent where she had had the baby, and stay there until she recovered her strength. Telephone calls were made. An ambulance arrived and Kit, scooping Daisy up in his arms, carried her down to the waiting vehicle. Behind him, on her swollen feet, shuffled the concierge, a smile softening the outer reaches of her mouth at the prospect of the bills being settled.

At the convent, Kit had been banished because Daisy was too ill for visitors – and because his relationship to her had been detected at once as scandalous.

Inhaling town smells of garlic, tobacco, fresh bread and watered dust, Kit spent most of the week in the Café Oriane in the centre of Antibes, drinking wine and brandy, absorbing the fact that he had a son and considering what was to come next. Twice a day, at noon and at six o’clock, he abandoned his table and made his way to the convent to enquire after Daisy. For a week the answer was the same: improving, but not yet, Monsieur.

It was a long wait, in many ways, and Kit journeyed deep into himself, as he had never managed when journeying across Iraq.

The portress reappeared and stood to one side to allow Kit into the room. He blinked at the contrast to the dim corridor outside: painted stern, unyielding white, the room was scrubbed very clean. There was a chair, a painting of the Madonna holding a bunch of lilies, a bed with a cradle beside it, a wooden table with a crucifix, but the sparseness was entirely different in its essence from the poverty at the rue de la Coin.

At the sound of the door, Daisy turned her head. She looked much better, but still alarmingly pale. ‘Hallo, Kit.’ He proffered a bunch of mimosa. The heavy scent wafted over her.

‘Kit,’ she said, with a trace of laughter but with her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m sorry, but the smell makes me feel sick. Don’t worry, lots of things do at the moment.’

Kit threw the flowers into the cloister outside the window and Daisy laughed properly.

‘Oh dear, and they were so beautiful. The sisters will be horrified.’

‘Too bad,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to hear you laugh.’ She held out her hand and he took it, rubbing each finger gently in turn. ‘I’ve spoken to your parents on the telephone. Your mother is on the way.’

Kit did not elaborate on the conversation, but he was quite sure that he and Susan Chudleigh would never willingly speak to each other again. We gave her money, Susan had protested to him, and Daisy never got in touch. Of course we were worried. Very worried, but Daisy is not a fool, nor is she a child.

Kit terminated the conversation by informing Susan that she was contemptible and that, if she could not bring herself to visit her daughter, then at least she could have ensured that someone else did.

‘It’s none of your business,’ retorted a sharp, bitter Susan.

‘But it is,’ said Kit. ‘I just didn’t know it.’

‘The only business of yours,’ said Susan, slashing back at him for having put her in the wrong, ‘is to pay up. Daisy will need it.’

Kit was silenced and put down the telephone. It was not so much Susan’s coarseness or, even, her grasp of the essentials, it was that, in the end, always, always, he and Daisy came down to money.

Daisy retrieved her hand and tucked it back under the sheet. She searched Kit’s face for clues. ‘It’s all right darling,’ she reassured him. ‘I’ll live.’

He drew up a chair. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

Daisy told him. Not everything, but enough. Of staying with the respectable acquaintances, contacted by Susan, on the outskirts of Nice, who were, so they said, very broad-minded and willing to help. Unfortunately, Madame Fauçonnier’s broad-mindedness had not extended to her husband, who had pursued Daisy with the logic which held that since the ship was already in port why did she object? Turned out, Daisy was unwilling to contact friends – partly because she now understood precisely how far friendship stretched when it came to unmarried mothers, and partly because a voice in her head was urging her to see her Gethsemane through alone.

Daisy sent letters to Susan informing her that she was fine, the money would last. Of course it did no such thing, but Daisy made no effort to contact Ambrose for more.

‘These extremes, I suppose,’ she said. ‘A test I set myself.’

‘How did you eat? Where did you live?’