The September Garden (4 page)

‘Only pleasant talk at the dinner table, please, Sylvie.’ Nell’s mother cut into the pie and spooned the slivers of meat dotted with carrot chunks onto a plate and topped it with a slice of crust. ‘Here you are, dear. Do help yourself to vegetables.’

Sylvie waited politely while the other plates were filled and passed around. Mollie poured water into the girls’ glasses, and then splashed wine into hers and her husband’s.

Looking satisfied, Sylvie forked a morsel of meat into her mouth and delicately chewed.

‘Oh, my favourite,’ announced Nell as she cut through the crust on her plate.

‘Mmmm, it is lovely. What is it?’ asked Sylvie.

‘Rabbit pie,’ said Mollie.

Sylvie’s shriek was eclipsed by the crash of her plate as she upended it and it splintered on the floor. Gravy splashed up her socks. Expletives flew from her mouth.

‘You did it on purpose!’ Sylvie screamed. ‘You spiteful,
nasty
…!’

Nell covered her mouth with her hand to muffle her giggle of shock.

Marcus grabbed his wine glass and pulled it out of reach of Sylvie’s flaying hands.

‘Well, really,’ exclaimed Mollie, her fork stopped halfway to her mouth. ‘Whatever’s the matter?’

Sylvie’s dark eyes, bright with tears, flashed venom. ‘My rabbit. She killed my rabbit. And now you make me eat a rabbit! How could you! You ice-cold English
bastards
!’

With a throaty sob she turned, grinding cooked rabbit flesh into the carpet with her heel, and fled from the room.

After a moment, Marcus cleared his throat and said quietly, ‘I’m not one to profess to being an expert at French, but …’

Mollie took a great gulp of wine.

Nell lifted her fork, not wanting to let any of her favourite meal go cold and said, ‘Yes, Dad, I don’t think that was very ladylike, do you?’

Far into the evening, Sylvie wept, her eyes swollen, her nose the colour of Marcus’s red madder paint. Nell, from her own bed, watched across the lino bedroom floor, with the knotted, circular, wool rug dead centre, as her mother knelt by the head of Sylvie’s bed. Mollie smoothed her niece’s hair over her forehead. She never does that for me, thought Nell, even when I’m being sick. Dad always looks after me, and gets me a bowl.

‘Come now, Sylvie. No more tears,’ said Mollie, trying her best to sound soothing.

‘I don’t like it here. I don’t like
her
! I’ve
never
liked her.’

Nell cringed and pushed her head under the pillow.

‘Try to sleep and you’ll feel better in the morning,’ Mollie sighed.

‘Bring Uncle Marcus in,’ demanded Sylvie. ‘He should tell Nell off.’

Mollie said, ‘Uncle Marcus is indisposed.’

Probably, thought Nell, with his head under
his
pillow.

Mollie tried again, reminding her wearily that it was getting late. She reached out and switched off the bedside lamp.

In the now darkened room, Nell saw that the moon had risen, the big, white, summer moon, and it was sending a silver pathway across her bed.

Sylvie relented. She snuffled, blew her nose loudly and turned over to face the wall, muttering in French as her sobs faded.

Nell looked up to see her mother standing over her, her face in shadow but her anger fizzing from her fingertips. The light from the landing behind her made her silhouette enormous.

‘You really,
really
should have told us about the rabbit.’

The seagulls’ cries were sharp and melancholy over the rooftops and a faint tang of the sea drifted through. Drenched by sleep, her eyes tightly closed, she imagined the gaps in her shutters letting in crooked beams of light. She smelt the lavender-soap scent of her boudoir, fleeting but pungent. Wobbles of sunlight danced across the honey-coloured puzzle of the parquet floor. Occasional muffled footsteps fell along the corridor outside her door. For one clouded, confused moment she was there. Right there. But then, she dropped like a stone back to reality and lay pinned to the spare bed in her cousin’s meagre little room.

She had slept for far too long; her face, covered with a fine film of dampness, had sunk into the pillow. Her scalp was soaked with perspiration, her temples ached and her mouth was dry from weeping. She squinted across the room she was resigned to share with Nell for the summer. Where was the lace, the delicacy, the flowers she was used
to? The rag rug had seen better days, the grey lino was split here and there, and the crocheted patchwork quilt that Nell boasted she’d made last winter was rumpled at the end of the empty twin bed. And it looked like it would smell of mothballs.

Sylvie fingered the thin cotton sheet and compared it to her lace-edged counterpane. Her insides emptied in loneliness. She begged herself not to think of her mother. She got out of bed and grabbed her silk dressing gown, wrapping it around her nightgown which had been stitched by the nuns of the Abbaye du Mont-Saint-Michel. She sat down at the kidney-shaped dressing table which Uncle Marcus had made in the year after the Great War, Nell had told her proudly. It was a way of keeping himself occupied. He made lots of things, apparently, painted a great deal of pictures, and dug in his September Garden. It was a child-size dressing table, really, and Sylvie’s long legs poked through the gap in the seersucker curtain at the front. She knocked her knee and sucked an oath through her teeth.

The mirror was foxed around its edges. It could do with a polish, she thought as she leant forward.

‘
Zut
,’ she whispered, staring at her puffy eyes and crumpled skin. Her pillow – rough linen, not the fine silk cotton she was used to – had marked her cheeks and forehead like a road map of Normandy.

Tears returned to singe her eyes. How could they? How could they make her eat
lapin
? Nell knew. And Nell had
laughed
.

Sylvie brushed furiously at her hair and reached for her pink ribbon to make a ponytail.
Maman
said her hair was as dark and as glossy as the midnight hour.
Papa
said so also.
Maman
said that that particular shade of ribbon contrasted so beautifully with the colour of her hair. She shook her head, whipping the sleek lock of hair over her shoulder, irritated now by the thought of her mother and the way she said things. Irritated by her ineffectual presence.

As Sylvie fumbled with angry fingers at the ribbon, retying it tight and low at the nape of her neck, she heard her uncle and cousin’s voices lifting from the hallway below. The morning was moving on without her, and she wanted to be part of it.

Her suitcase was on the floor, its open lid resting against the wall, her clothes still unpacked. Adele would have sorted her out by now. Adele would have hung her clothes, pressed her clothes. Folded them neatly in drawers. She knelt to extract her underwear, summer dirndl skirt and third-best blouse, her stomach empty and yawning with hunger. She’d eaten just one mouthful of rabbit flesh many hours before.

At last presentable, Sylvie left the bedroom and quietly walked along the sloping landing floor, loose boards heaving under her feet, towards the sunlit well of the stairs. She stopped. She could see the top of Nell’s curly head below her in the hallway. Her cousin was speaking excitedly as Uncle Marcus, in tweeds and a jacket with leather patches on the elbows, packed his knapsack by the front door, muttering, ‘Pencil, notepad, field glasses, flask.’

‘Oh Dad, you’re going birdwatching.’ Nell was particularly bouncy. ‘Can I come? Please, Dad. I want to see if we find the yellow bird again. Do you remember, last year I saw it? Maybe we’ll see it again.’

Uncle Marcus told Nell, ‘I overslept. Should have been out hours ago. Where’s Sylvie?’

Sylvie flinched back into the shadow of the landing, suddenly, inexplicably desperate to melt away.

Nell mumbled something about her, surely, still being asleep.

‘We can’t go without her,’ said Uncle Marcus, ‘she’ll be upset. Even
more
upset. You better stay here and wait for her to get up.’

Sylvie’s throat contracted at his kindness. Uncle Marcus, as lean and wiry as a willow osier, was kneeling down and checking his knapsack on the floor. What slender wrists he has, thought Sylvie, for a man. She thought of her father and his paunch and his drooping moustache, his ruddy nose. He had particularly fat wrists.

‘Will you take your rain thingy?’ Nell was asking, extracting a green rubber jacket, crumpled and stiff, from the hall cupboard.

‘No thank you, Nell. It isn’t going to rain. Now give me a smile, and hand me my book of British birds. There, look, on the hall table. Now go and see if Sylvie wants some breakfast. I hear Mrs Bunting has some duck eggs.’

‘Don’t want duck eggs.’

But I
love
duck eggs, thought Sylvie, swallowing hard on a twist of hunger.

Sylvie ate her breakfast alone at the kitchen table. Mrs Bunting had left out dry toast and a dab of jam. Not a duck egg in sight. Afterwards she went into the drawing room where her auntie was taking her morning coffee.

‘Ah, there you are. Go and find Nell,’ said Mollie, barely glancing up from
The Times
. ‘I think she’s sulking in the tree house.’ 

‘I’d rather sit in here with you and read the paper …’ Sylvie began, liking the grown-up scent of the coffee, the sedate rustle of the newspaper. She often sat with
Maman
on quiet mornings, just like this, when
Papa
was on his shift at the gendarmerie. Just the two of them.

‘Nonsense, I won’t have
two
girls sulking. And anyway, it’s all rather grim today …’ Mollie folded the paper and looked up at Sylvie. ‘Have you breakfasted?’

‘
Oui
– ah, yes.’

‘Well, get yourself outside into the sunshine. If Uncle Marcus had had his wits about him he’d have got you girls up early with the lark and taken you with him. As it is, he is very self-absorbed these days.’

How curiously like her mother Auntie Mollie was, Sylvie thought. And yet, at the same time, so very different. Yes, they were both slender and long-limbed, and yet her own mother’s attractiveness was hidden behind large aprons, severely tied-back hair and stout shoes. Auntie Mollie’s allure was blatant, gorgeous and imperious.

Sylvie wandered out through the french windows and across the lawn. A warm and pleasant odour emanated from Mr Pudifoot’s herbaceous beds where bees were congregating in the morning sun. She was conscious that Nell would have spied her already from the tree house and was possibly descending the rope ladder, to escape and vanish for the rest of the day. She wouldn’t blame her after the names she called her yesterday.

But to her surprise, when she reached the willow tree, her cousin’s sandals and socks were still there in an untidy telltale heap on the ground.

She grasped the rope ladder and pulled herself up,
relishing the pleasure of suddenly getting the hang of it. Nell was lounging on an old mildew-reeking eiderdown laid across the floorboards reading
Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse
. At Sylvie’s sudden, stealthy approach, Nell turned on her, her green eyes like shards of glass, and the book was swiftly hidden under a fold in the quilt.

Ducking her head and crawling into a sitting position, Sylvie brightly said hello and asked her what she was hiding. She wanted to forget her rage, forget the rabbit pie. She was tired of being angry and so out of place.

‘Aren’t you a bit old for it?’ Sylvie observed, moving closer, trying to be friends. ‘Isn’t it a children’s book?’

Nell retorted that she liked it, that she read it over and over again. And, anyway, it was none of Sylvie’s business.

‘Even though you know what’s going to happen?’

Nell tilted her chin, her innocence brisk and pert. ‘I like to know what’s going to happen. I like the way the little horse keeps trundling on even when he goes down the mine and the children try to drown him. Even when his wheels fall off. I want to write about a horse one day. Like the horses who used to live in the stables behind your house.’

Sylvie told her that she had never really thought about them and, anyway, weren’t they dead? Then, unable to stop herself, boasted, ‘I’ve read
Pride and Prejudice
and I’m now on
Rebecca
– in
English
.’

‘Well, I will be soon. If Mother can’t find her old copies, then Dad is going to borrow them for me from the library.’

Sylvie, weary of competition, tried for something more cordial and told Nell she was hungry. Without a word, her cousin reached over to draw out a biscuit tin from under the tree house eaves. She popped the lid off and Sylvie 
peered in, catching a peculiar dusty, sweet smell. Among her cousin’s treasure – jacks, tiddly winks, the cat’s cradle string from yesterday, plus some scurrying woodlice and a transparent dead spider – was a haul of toffees.

‘I stole these from Dad ages ago. He’s never noticed.’

They certainly had been in there a long time. Some of them were fused together. Nell snatched one up and began to unwrap it. Sylvie copied her, peeling with fingernails at the sticky paper, popping one after the other into her mouth until the sugar made her giddy.

Digging toffee out of her back teeth, Nell asked her if she was homesick.

‘That’s a stupid question.’ Sylvie watched the flickering willow leaves surrounding the tree house. She liked the way the branches seemed to hold her in a haphazard yet sturdy embrace. At that moment, she knew, her mother should have come with her.

Nell announced that she hated staying in Montfleur.

‘And I hate it here,’ Sylvie snapped back.

The sun came out then and the tree house was dazzled suddenly with droplets of yellow light, vibrating through the leaves. Sylvie could hear the bourn splashing and bubbling below. It rested on her ears, settled her.

‘But it feels good up here in the tree house,’ she ventured, confused and hesitating over the truth.

‘Well, I liked it a
little bit
by the harbour,’ Nell conceded. ‘The church and the statue. So we’re even, then.’

She put the lid back on the tin and reached for an exercise book with curling pages and ink stains on its cover.

‘I want to write in my diary now,’ she declared, fishing a pen out of her pocket.

‘What will you write about?’

Nell supposed that she might write about the horses.

‘How can you, when you didn’t even know them?’

Nell told her to not be so nosey. Sylvie recoiled and her anger bubbled. Unlike their mothers’ similarities, she decided, Nell was
completely
different to her. Nell did not know she was pretty. Nell did not care. Her hair was so very curly and everyone loved those curls. They would never be alike, they would never be friends.

‘I’m going back down,’ Sylvie said, shuffling awkwardly to the top of the rope ladder.

Nell immediately brightened, not bothering to rein in her relief. ‘Take the
Little Wooden Horse
if you like.’

Sylvie took the book and withdrew in silence. As she inched her way down the rope ladder, the bourn chattered below and the breeze twitched her hair. She held on tightly to the rungs and felt her body floating in a restless limbo. When the ladder swung and she grazed her knee on the bark she barely felt the sting of it.

She sat down at the bottom of the tree and opened the first page of Nell’s book.

‘Tatty old thing,’ she muttered.

Years before, Nell had written her name in large looping letters,
N
ell M. Garland, aged 9. Her book
. Slowly, with great care, Sylvie began to tear up the book, page by page, and scattered the pieces into the bourn.

Long weeks passed at Lednor Bottom. Long weeks of sunshine and showers. Time was drawing on and Sylvie noticed a gentle slipping of the sun. The season was changing, the light had altered a degree, slanting golden 
yellow over the front of the house. By now, she should have been home. By now she should have crossed the water on a cross-Channel steamer. There should have been a great expanse of choppy grey water between her and Lednor, between her and Nell; a great distance between their squabbles and spats. But the letter that arrived last week from her mother changed everything.

…
Sylvie, ma chère, children are being evacuated from Paris, the whole of France is in turmoil. Your father and I feel it’s just not safe for you to travel back home. Who knows what the ports will be like, what the state of the roads will be? Stay with Auntie Mollie, and we’ll think of something, ma chérie
… we
miss you so dreadfully.

Next week, she and Nell would be at school together. She would be sitting in an English classroom, with English girls, and all because the Germans were getting
tetchy
, as Uncle Marcus put it.

The doves were purring contentedly, obliviously, on the cote. She counted the windows along the front of the house, all with their blackout curtains. It had taken a week to do; even Uncle Marcus had got out his stepladder, hammer and tacks in the end because Mr Pudifoot couldn’t do it all himself. Uncle Marcus’s involvement had saved the day and made it all far less boring for everyone. A few fractious words from Auntie Mollie, but that was to be expected. Each and every pane was crisscrossed with paper strips; that had been yesterday’s task. The house now had a dismal, patched face.

Amid the languid morning, she heard the clatter of pans from the kitchen. Mrs Bunting had started a roast dinner. She thought of Adele’s deep, rich pork casseroles, 
laced with cream and cider; the fish that Jean brought to the house, which Adele sprinkled with tarragon; the sweet butter her mother made. She thought her stomach would split open with longing.