The September Garden (8 page)

Involuntarily, Adele glanced at the clock.

‘Yes, you can go now … Are you meeting Jean? Of course you are. You look so happy. Where are you meeting?’

‘At the Petite Auberge. We will have dinner together.’

‘That’s nice …’ Madame’s voice trailed off as she spooned the sauce into a jug.

‘Oh, Adele.’ Her command stopped Adele at the threshold. She turned back to see Madame draw back her shoulders and assume authority. ‘I want you to clean Sylvie’s bedroom tomorrow. Clean the carpets. Scrub them with soap. I want you to make sure there is not one feather sticking through the mattress that might scratch her. I want everything to be ready for her. Fresh, clean and new for her.’

‘But, Madame, surely—’

‘No argument. I want her home in the spring.’

She watched her father pop the cork at exactly twenty to one on Christmas Day. She waited patiently as he went round the room filling glasses, anticipating her first taste of champagne.

‘I might put a dash of Angostura bitters in mine,’ said her mother, heading for the silver drinks trolley, brimming glass in hand.

‘Steady on, old girl,’ Marcus said, glancing at his wife with a careworn look. ‘Mrs Bunting, here you are. Sylvie? Nell? Just a splash, I think.’

‘Put some orange cordial in it,’ said Mrs Bunting. ‘Might take the edge off.’

‘No, that will ruin it,’ proclaimed Mollie returning with her flute now cloudy. ‘What a waste of good champagne to mix that sweet muck with it. Let them have it straight.’

Nell thought how nice her mother looked in a cream
fine-wool dress that flared out prettily over her hips. On her feet were black patent Mary Janes.

‘Just the one for me,’ said Diana, taking the glass that Marcus offered her. She had borrowed one of Sylvie’s peacock-blue silk dresses – as she ‘had nothing to wear, absolutely nothing’. The colour transformed her, contrasting with her dark hair so that it gleamed. Her lips were ruby-red, she informed Nell earlier, courtesy of the latest Elizabeth Arden. Diana’s parents had wanted her to go home to Harrow for Christmas, and she had chosen to stay here at Lednor. ‘Oh goodness,’ she giggled, sipping the champagne, ‘I’ve never had the like.’

‘Really?’ said Mollie. ‘You’ve never had champagne? That does astonish me.’

Nell thought that her mother did not sound at all surprised.

‘Port and lemon is my usual tipple. If, and only
if
, I drink. But this is splendid … Ooh, it just went up my nose.’

Nell’s father cleared his throat and stood by the hearth, poker-faced.

‘I just want to say how delightful it is to have our visitors with us this Christmas. Dear Sylvie, and our new arrival, Diana.’ He raised his glass in the teacher’s direction. ‘I wish us all a very happy Christmas. These are uncertain times and times ahead might be hard …’

‘Oh God, morbid,’ muttered Mollie.

Marcus glared at her. ‘As I was saying, good luck, everyone.’

‘Happy Christmas,’ they all chimed, raising their glasses.

Marcus paused, his glass in the air. ‘Absent friends,’ he said. 

Nell saw Sylvie’s eyes darken. She must be thinking of Auntie Beth and Uncle Claude and Adele’s roasted goose. Her mother looked away and dabbed at the corner of her eye with her fingertip.

‘Absent friends,’ everyone repeated.

Mrs Bunting wiped her eyes. ‘I better go sort that turkey out,’ she said, and quickly quit the room.

Mollie took her seat by the fire, elegantly stretching out her long legs as she crossed them. ‘I was thinking, Diana,’ she said, holding out her glass for more champagne just as Marcus walked past her, ‘that you might like a little more privacy. It must be hard living with a strange family in this rambling old house. I was thinking you might like to move into Pudifoot’s cottage in the new year.’

Miss Blanford perched upright in her chair and began to exclaim and blush, her eyes darting in surprise.

‘Really?’ interjected Marcus as he caught a drip of champagne from the bottom of his wife’s glass with his handkerchief. ‘Is it in any fit state?’

‘It was in a fit enough state for poor old Pudifoot,’ countered Mollie, holding her husband’s stare, her eyes inscrutable.

Marcus spoke quietly through his teeth. ‘But, Mollie, dear, he was our
gardener
.’

‘I don’t see your point,’ Mollie exclaimed loudly, tapping the side of her glass with her fingernail to indicate that his top-up was ineffective. ‘I don’t see your point at all.’

Sleepy from the dinner, Nell curled up in the armchair, with the weight of the glorious turkey filling her tummy. The champagne she’d had earlier sat like warm embers 
inside her head. She closed her eyes for a moment.

‘Come on, Nell. Chop chop.’

Nell looked up to see Diana standing over her.

‘I need some air. Looks like you do too. Let’s go for a walk. I’ll just fetch my coat.’

Nell was rather unenthusiastic. The fire in the hearth was radiant; out of doors looked chilly, brown and dead. But, by the time they had reached the September Garden, Nell was filling her lungs deeply, gratefully, as the cold air stopped the swaying effect of the champagne.

A storybook hoar frost had gripped the Chilterns. Inside the September Garden, the bare branches of the apple tree were frozen like the arms of ballerinas in a sheath of white. Red hips and haws glowed through icy fur in the tangle of bushes. The borders were brittle, encased in frost. Diana’s red-as-a-fox fur coat glowed against this glistening winterscape. She was wearing a pair of Mrs Bunting’s boots and an old woollen hat with ear flaps that she’d found in the hallway cupboard. It used to belong to Mr Pudifoot but Nell dared not tell her so.

Diana was making conversation. ‘I read in the paper that meat and sugar will be rationed after Christmas. So we better make the most of it. Doesn’t Mrs Bunting do a lovely dinner? She must be so sad. Her first Christmas without Mr Pudifoot. To think I never met him when he was actually alive. Only saw him lying there, dead. Oh, I’m so sorry. Listen to me rattling on.’ Diana linked her arm. ‘You’ll learn that about me, Nell. “Boisterous Blanford” they called me at school. I don’t tend to
think
before I open my mouth. Tell you what, show me his cottage. Show me where your mother wants me to live.’ 

They walked out of the walled garden, along the drive and out onto the lane. The winter sun was low and slanted like a beacon through the skeletons of the beech copses. A deep winter hush made the hills and valley hold their breath. On the lane, Mr Pudifoot’s cottage stood empty, its windows blank and cloudy with frost.

Diana shivered. ‘Oh well, I’ll make the most of it.’ Her frozen breath made it look like she was smoking. She went to the front door, with its peeling paint and mossy step, and bent down and looked through the letter box. ‘Get a good fire going in there. Should be rather cosy.’

‘I’ll help you,’ conceded Nell. ‘We all will.’

Diana continued to shiver, turning up her fur collar and holding it to her chin. ‘Well, my coat will keep me warm. Ha, I must tell you. The fact of the matter is, I stole this coat.’

Nell burst out laughing and admonished that, really, Miss Blanford couldn’t have.

‘I’m a simple poorly paid teacher. Did any of you think that I could really afford
this
?’

Nell spluttered out her questions of where? How? And what on earth was she thinking?

Diana laughed, her pale face highlighted with two points of blush on her cheekbones. The lipstick was still in place. In the light of the sinking sun, Nell thought, she looked beautiful in a mischievous sort of way.

‘I was in Simpsons on Piccadilly, finishing off Christmas shopping for my parents’ presents last year. And I was freezing. I had got wet waiting for the bus, then I got splashed by a taxi. And I was shivering. I was trying to cheer myself up and looking at the Christmas lights. I went 
into the shop and walked up this gorgeous curving staircase to the third floor. I just wanted to warm up, you know.’

‘You stole the fur from Simpsons?’ Nell was incredulous.

‘Not exactly. There was a lady looking at woollen coats. You know those long ones with a clinched-in belt and wide shoulders? Latest fashion. The assistant was a bit flustered. I sat on the window seat with a mind to look at the lights on Piccadilly while I dried off. This customer was making a bit of a fuss, raising her voice. Insisted on taking ten coats to try on in the changing room, when I think you are only supposed to take three. She’d discarded her own coat, the fur, complaining at how hot she was. I thought, nice to be
too
hot. She flung it at the assistant who didn’t quite know what to do with it so she laid it on the seat next to me. I gave her a smile. Poor girl hurried off to wait on madam. I waited. And waited, watching the traffic, watching the lights. I reached out to touch the fur. Let my fingers sink into it. Then I stood up, slipped off my own old coat, and slipped on the fur.’

‘Goodness, Diana, how ever did you have the nerve?’

‘Search me. I surprised myself, walking out of that shop, slowly, with dignity. Head held high. Back down that beautiful staircase.’

‘Oh dear. Don’t tell Mother, she might throw you out the house,’ Nell laughed. ‘She might not even want you in Mr Pudifoot’s cottage.’

‘Thing is, it’s so beautiful and warm. And I think I can look the part in it,’ said Diana, caressing the collar against her cheek. ‘Trouble is, it still stinks of that old bag’s perfume.’

Nell was back in her armchair, warming herself from her walk, when Sylvie came over to her holding out a brown paper package.

‘Happy Christmas, Nell.’

‘Oh, happy Christmas …’ Nell muttered.

‘No,’ Sylvie jiggled the package up and down and thrust it on her. ‘
Happy Christmas
. You’re meant to open it, Nell.’

She peeled away the paper to reveal a book, a pristine, brand-new copy of the
Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse.

‘I ordered it especially from Foyles,’ said Sylvie and she went back over to the card table where Mrs Bunting was setting up snakes and ladders.

Sylvie’s gesture left Nell shy and bewildered. She stared down at the cover for a while, relishing the familiar illustration and listening to the tapping of the counters on the board as the game progressed. When she looked up she noticed her father was watching the frosty afternoon grow darker from the french windows. His shoulders were down, his hands were in his pockets. He seemed very relaxed, looking, Nell thought, so unlike himself.

Mollie was lounging on the sofa in stockinged feet, remembering the time Mr Pudifoot forgot to put the handbrake on the car and it rolled back into the dovecote. Mrs Bunting laughed at the memory as she rattled the dice in the cup. Nell exchanged hesitant smiles with Sylvie and relaxed back into her chair.

Diana, in her heels, came into the room and walked over to the windows, yawning and stretching as she went. She stood close to Marcus. 

‘What a lovely walk I just had with Nell,’ she told him. ‘Lovely how a good walk refreshes you and makes you inordinately tired at the same time. Just now, when I went upstairs to change my shoes, it was all I could do not to lay down on the bed and fall asleep.’

Diana gazed ahead of her through the misty windowpane. Marcus turned his head and looked down at her for what, Nell decided, was a very long time indeed.

‘Parlour games!’ cried Diana suddenly and made Marcus jump. ‘That will wake me up – wake us all up.’

Mollie put her fingertips to her forehead and muttered, ‘Oh no.’

‘I’ve got a good one,’ said Diana, excited. ‘Sylvie, come on, snakes and ladders can wait. I need your help. Come with me.’

‘Don’t know about everyone else but I’m ready for a snooze,’ yawned Mollie, standing up, ‘I’m going upstairs.
Marcus
?’

‘Oh, I’m staying here,’ he said casually, shrugging his shoulders with a boyish grin. ‘I want to see what Diana has in store for us.’

Her mother left the room.

‘If looks could kill,’ muttered Mrs Bunting, sinking her nose into her champagne glass.

Ten minutes later, Diana and Sylvie carried Marcus’s easel into the drawing room, knocking the paintwork with it and grimacing with mirth. Attached to the easel was a large sheet of his best art paper.

‘But that’s my …!’ he started and then sat on the sofa, highly amused. ‘Oh, never mind.’

Diana had used charcoal to draw a huge face with 
squinting eyes, a bulbous nose and a shock of black hair over its forehead. But no mouth.

‘Oh, it’s—’ Nell said.

‘Yes,’ said Diana, holding up a square piece of black card, filched from Marcus’s cupboard. ‘And this is his tache.’

She’d taken the scissors to it and cut the exact hilarious shape of Mr Hitler’s moustache.

‘We’re playing pin the tache on the dictator,’ she cried. ‘All we need now is a blindfold.’

Sylvie relinquished her silk scarf, allowed herself to be blindfolded and the game began. Diana and Nell, giggling together, turned her around and around and led her outstretched arms towards the easel to complete Adolf’s face. Sylvie chuckled and protested, muttering in French.

‘Hey, Sylvie,’ chastised Marcus, ‘none of that. Remember where you are.’

‘Oh, tell me, have I done it?’

Marcus couldn’t answer her. He was laughing hard with Diana, his face open with surprise and utter delight as he looked at her.

Diana said, ‘I noticed your gramophone up there, Marcus. Can we fetch it down?’

Nell wondered whether it would wake her mother.

Marcus ignored her and hurried upstairs for it, bringing with him a case of seventy-eights.

‘Oh Dad, you’re not going to play Debussy, are you?’ she protested.

‘No, I most certainly am not. Sylvie, pull the blackout. Nell, help me roll back the rug. Mrs B,’ he extended his arm to her, ‘would you do me the absolute honour of partnering me in the first dance?’ 

As the jazz beat swung out around the room, Marcus spun the housekeeper across the parquet until she was red in the face, protesting.

‘Pudifoot could dance, Nell,’ she called out. ‘You never would believe that of him, but oh, could he dance.’

Diana clapped them. ‘Put something else on,’ she urged Nell.

‘How about “Okay Toots”? Or …’ Nell pulled a disc out of a sleeve and peered at the label, ‘“Anything Goes”.’

‘Isn’t that all a little bit racy, Uncle Marcus?’ asked Sylvie.

‘Oh, it’s all good fun. How about “Cheek to Cheek”. That’s it, that one.’ Then he held out his hand to Diana. ‘Put that glass of champagne down and dance with me. Mrs B, you’ll have to sit this one out, I’m afraid.’

The housekeeper collapsed into the fireside chair, waving her hand and insisting that he shouldn’t mind her.

Marcus pulled Diana into the centre of the floor and twirled her so that her blue silk skirt lifted to show surprisingly pretty knees. He was quite the expert, thought Nell. His back straight, his arm cocked just so.