Consider the Lily (19 page)

It was quiet and still out in the fields. She sped between the hedgerows — timeless, almost untouched — over leaf mould crisped on the top, damp and tender underneath, and through grass frozen into still life, materializing from out of the mist by the cottage. To someone watching she might have been a flaxen-haired emissary from a time when the land was river and forest.

Brazen, the retriever bitch, whimpered in her pen at the end of Danny’s garden and Flora stopped to whisper, ‘Good girl’, and to remove a burr from the tangle of cinnamon hair at her neck. Brazen nudged her shoulder in response, pushed a wet nose into her neck and Flora smiled.

Danny had been up for an hour or so, seeing to what he called his family. The local hunt was a rich one and Danny had been employed as kennelman since Rupert had transplanted him from London to the village. Rupert had provided the tied cottage and, in return, Danny helped out with the Dysarts’ horses. (Occasionally, he stood in for Tyson as chauffeur but passengers had to be sure he had not been at the whisky.) Since both hounds and horses were Danny’s meat and drink it was a lazy-daisy job, as he said in his broad Cockney.

Danny had been waiting for Flora, who always came to see him before a meet, and in the cottage the kettle was on the hob. He was pouring warm milk into buckets for the pregnant bitches which were staying behind when she arrived and nodded in greeting. In the other pen was a whirlpool of dangling tongues and flailing tails, and the noise was deafening. Stirred by it, Flora laughed because the day was beginning, because she was cold and it was fun to be cold sometimes – because it was all such fun.

‘How many couples running?’ she shouted above the din, and picked up a bucket of milk. ‘Ow.’ She winced at the warmth stinging her fingers. ‘That’s hot.’

‘Fifteen.’ Terse to the point of silence at the best of times, Danny never bothered to say good morning. Flora turned her back on him because she knew he did not approve of anyone spoiling his hounds, put down the bucket, stuck her milky fingers through the netting and let Bouncer lick them.

‘There, boysie. Nice, isn’t it?’

‘Stop it, Miss Flora.’

Danny never bothered with good form, nor with being polite to his superiors, for Danny was a free spirit who had alighted on their hearth. With the exception of Rupert, no one really
knew
Danny, only that he had limped into Hinton Dysart from a trench on the Somme, a stranger with trench-foot and a mashed-up leg, an unshakeable attachment to Rupert, a taste for sentimental poetry, solitude and drink. All of which Rupert (uncharacteristically) supplied and told the family to bugger off if they raised the subject.

Danny unlocked the first pen and beckoned to Flora. She picked up the bucket, pushed her way through the palpitating flanks and wet muzzles and poured the contents into a trough. The noise level fell dramatically.

‘There, my lovelies.’ Danny wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and ran it down the flank of the bitch huddled at his feet. ‘Not so good, Lady, luv? What’s the matter?’

Lady whimpered and Flora hunkered down beside Danny on the concrete. ‘Is she ill?’ Danny gently shoved Lady over so he could examine the opposite flank.

‘Maidy-Lady,’ Flora stroked her, ‘we can’t have the best nose in the pack out of action.’

Lady buried her head in Danny’s breeches and with the tenderness of a lover, he spread his fingers over her chest and listened.

‘Danny, look.’ Flora pointed at a red patch between the toes of one of Lady’s front paws. ‘She’s lame.’

Danny never addressed a human if he could address an animal. ‘How did you get that?’ Danny took Lady’s muzzle in his hand and said, ‘You stupid bitch. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

In the old days, Danny’s uncanny gift would have landed him at the stake and, awed as ever, Flora watched as man and animal exchanged information and concluded how much easier it would be if she concentrated on animals and gave up the struggle to understand her family. Or herself, come to that. Lady dropped her nose, and her tail went slack. Danny pushed her aside and got up.

‘Knacker’s yard for clapped-out bitches.’

Flora sniffed at the air, and looked up. ‘Should be a screaming scent,’ she said. ‘Just right.’

‘Depends,’ said Danny, and she knew he had gone silent on her. She scrunched her fingers under her armpits and waited for him to collect the pans and lock up the pen.

Danny stopped to stick a Blue Prior cigarette, made from local tobacco, in his mouth and smoked it as they walked through the yard, scattering hens. By this point, he had unbent enough to tell Flora the latest gossip.

‘The new farmer over at ‘Amptons’ ‘as put three of the fields to plough. It’ll foul the scent.’ He picked tobacco off his lip. ‘Probably doesn’t ‘old with ‘unting.’

‘Mr Terence keeps poultry,’ Flora pointed out. ‘Of course he’ll be sympathetic.’

‘Bloody right.’ Danny pushed open the door and they went inside to the immaculately kept cottage that was Danny’s home.

Sloshing with tea, Flora made her way back to Hinton Dysart to a cacophony of renewed baying. Danny’s strangeness and his silences never bothered her as they had Polly, who considered Danny an intruder, and frightening. ‘He and Father always act so oddly together,’ Polly complained. ‘I don’t understand it. Danny seems more family to him than we do.’

Flora had to agree, and since she was at that age when her own feelings muddled her, she had no answer. What she did know was that Rupert, bottle in pocket, marched down the road like the soldier he had been, twice, even three or four times a week, to Danny’s cottage and had done so since she could remember. Later, flushed, sometimes belligerent, sometimes maudlin, the pair emerged. Occasionally, they went on a spree over by Odiham, and Flora sometimes saw them come home with exaggerated care in the twilight. The sight made her feel funny: awkward, embarrassed and, curiously, let down.

Once she had seen Danny naked, washing by the fire in his kitchen, a thin, white-skinned figure with a dusting of sandy hair on his chest and a scar on his thigh. Transfixed by the shapes swinging between his legs, and by the way he cupped them in his hands as he washed, Flora stared, only ducking away when he reached for a towel. She ran home, and never made the connection between the sight and the sensations in her own body. Even so, she hadn’t told Polly.

Well Road was slippery and she was forced to hug the centre. A car breasted the rise, drove towards her, weaving over the frozen puddles, and slowed down.

‘Morning.’ Robin Lofts wound down the window of a Ford which had seen better days. The handle gave an unoiled shriek.

‘Morning.’ Flora stopped. ‘Did you have a good Christmas?’

‘Christmas? What’s that? Never heard of it.’ Robin folded his arms across the steering wheel and smiled, and Flora knew that she was not meant to feel sorry for him. Under his hat, his face was grey with exhaustion. ‘I’m so tired, I can barely speak.’

‘Oh, I
am
sorry,’ said Flora. ‘Then you won’t be coming out today?’

Robin bent over so his forehead touched his hands and then looked up. ‘Good Lord, no,’ he said. ‘I never hunt.’ He added matter-of-factly, ‘I don’t like the killing.’

‘I see.’

‘No, you don’t,’ he said in the same tone that intrigued, and piqued, Flora, ‘but it’s quite all right.’ Clearly, Dr Lofts held strong views. Flora was aware that she was under scrutiny — a bug under a microscope? or an interesting arrangement of muscles? — and the knowledge that her hair was falling out of its plait gave Dr Lofts an advantage.

Their frozen breath met and swirled.

‘The way I feel,’ he was saying, ‘I shall go to bed for a week and never stir. It was a long night.’

He did not add: a panic-stricken episode filled with the cries of a labouring mother and the spectre of a nearly botched delivery because he, the doctor, had been too tired to notice that the baby’s heartbeat was dropping.

‘Nothing bad, I hope,’ she said, brushing away a wisp of hair trapped between her lips.

‘Only birth.’ Robin found himself wondering what it would feel like to plait Flora’s hair back into place. ‘A tricky breech.’

Flora hoped she was not blushing. After all, birth was
perfectly
natural. Nevertheless, her eyes slithered away from his gaze and fixed on the Gladstone bag on the passenger seat. ‘Will somebody give you breakfast, Dr Lofts?’ she asked, imagining she was on safe ground, and then realizing, with something approaching desperation, that he might think she was prying into his private life. ‘I mean...’ Now she did go bright red. ‘I’m sorry... but you might be called out again.’

Robin groaned theatrically, and covered his ears. ‘I instructed my sister, Ada, to keep bacon and eggs on the go and if anybody, anything, gets in the way of this man and his bacon...’

The idea of food made him feel more energetic. He sat up in the car seat and some of the exhaustion left his face. Flora noted that where his neck met his collar the colour of the skin was lighter and a scar puckered the tip of his chin. Now that made him interesting. Moreover, she approved of the way his eyebrows were unusually dark for his colouring. Back in the nursery, Flora’s book of jungle animals still sat on the bookshelf. Dr Lofts reminded her of a mongoose. A beautiful brown animal with telling eyes, which, with a flick of its head, could sink its teeth into the enemy and never let go.

‘Are you enjoying your work in Nether Hinton?’

‘Was it you,’ Robin’s interesting eyebrows questioned Flora, ‘who warned me I would have to live here for fifteen years before I would be accepted?’

A little piqued he hadn’t remembered she had told him that in Rolly Harris’s yard, Flora smiled nevertheless. ‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘It’s that bad?’

He was silent, tapping his finger on the steering wheel. ‘Yes,’ he said, and a hint of uncertainty in his voice made Flora’s heart quicken in sympathy.

By now she was sure she was frozen to the last toenail. ‘I really must go. I am sorry you won’t be following the hunt, it’s the tradition round here on Boxing Day, but I understand. I do hope you get some rest, Dr Lofts.’

Robin depressed the accelerator, and sent a cloud of black exhaust into the sparkling verge. ‘Thank you. I will.’ He shoved at the gear stick.

‘Dr Lofts, do you need any help at the surgery at all?’ Flora spoke off the top of her head. ‘I mean, if I helped at the surgery then people would—’ She came to a halt.

They looked at each other, and Flora imagined she detected a flash of impatience and offence, and thought: He is rather frightening. Then Robin’s face cleared and he smiled, and she saw beyond to a sweetness and gentleness she did not normally associate with men.

‘Thank you,’ said Robin. ‘I’ll certainly think about that.’

‘Goodbye, then,’ she said.

He watched her tall figure with its attractive, pear-shaped bottom walk away, and concluded that she had not meant to be patronizing. Rather, in keeping with her generous body Miss Flora Dysart possessed a generous spirit.

*

By ten thirty the drive was seething: sightseers, grooms, horses shifted and stamped over the gravel and left hoof indentations on the edge of the lawn.

‘Flora! Hallo, there. Is Polly here?’ Cecil Chanctonbury urged his mount through the crush alongside Guinevere.

‘Hallo, Cecil.’ Cecil always pronounced his name
Ceecil,
but Flora could never bring herself to do the same because it made her laugh. ‘Happy Christmas, Cecil. Polly’s over there.’ She pointed her whip in the direction of her sister. ‘Groaning, no doubt, at how stiff she’ll feel after today.’

‘Flora. There you are.’ Harry Goddard cut Cecil off and edged his horse neatly in between the two. ‘How are you?’

‘Excuse me,’ protested Cecil.

‘Bad luck, old boy,’ said Harry, and waved him away. ‘The spoils to the strongest and all that.’

Flora tried not to giggle. ‘Harry!’ she said reprovingly. Her habit caught on the end of Harry’s spur and she wrestled to free it. ‘I wish,’ she said for the hundredth time, ‘that I could always ride astride.’

Harry helped to rescue the black worsted. ‘I think you should know that when George Sand appeared on the hunting field in breeches,
tout
Paris observed she had the biggest bottom in France.’

‘Harry!’

‘Wish I could see yours, old girl. Would make my day.’ Harry touched his heels to his mount’s sides and it shimmied forward. Guinevere picked her hoofs up over the iced gravel and followed.

‘Where’s Father?’ Flora asked Danny, who was handing round the mulled wine.

Danny jerked a finger in the direction of the stables just as Rupert, whip held high, clattered into view on his raw-boned bay beast. Challenged by the noise and colour, the bay responded and backed up against the wall with an explosion of frozen gravel. ‘Keep still, damn you.’ Rupert slapped his horse’s neck.

The huntsman had driven the hounds into an untidy bunch by the corner of the house. The whipper-in cursed, and wielded his whip at the rogues who were determined to break ranks. Their baying took on a higher, more frantic, note.

‘Don’t bloody do that,’ shouted Danny above the noise, when the whip was used too enthusiastically on Jupiter.

‘Shush, Danny.’ Not wishing for a scene, Flora touched his shoulder. Frowning, he glanced up at her.

‘They’re
my
‘ounds, Miss Flora.’

She stared down at him, struck by the contrast between this taut, anguished Danny and the softened, naked man on whom she had once spied.

Danny handed Flora a glass of wine. It trickled down her throat, sweet, almost cloying, releasing its afterburn. Her senses flared in response, and when she looked up, her vision alcohol-edged, the world was twice as bright.

As if piped onto the trees and bushes by a master confectioner, the frost glittered silver white. Behind them, lit from cellar to attic, the house reposed on a carpet of ice, its paintwork gleaming. In front of it swirled the kaleidoscope of the hunt: scarlet and black coats, dripping noses, breeches strained over thighs, top hats, encrusted here and there with green. Warring with the scent of frost, was the odour of fresh horse droppings and the yeasty tonic note of horse and sweat. Voices, hounds, horses and movement counter-pointed against each other – so familiar and so much part of Flora.