Consider the Lily (45 page)

‘No.’

‘That’s all right, then. I didn’t think you would. And Daisy did look very odd. Perhaps she’s sickening for something.’

‘And the other guests?’

‘They left as soon as possible. I think they were all very shocked. I must say, Matty, it
was
quite dramatic. Picture the scene. Kit was holding you in his arms. You were dripping all over the terrace looking like Ophelia and Kit was as white as a sheet. Your aunt Susan screamed, Daisy chose that moment to faint, and Danny was staggering around, because he’d been at the whisky, leaving wet footprints all over the carpet. Naturally...’ Flora could not resist an opportunity to bring his name into the conversation, ‘we telephoned Robin, I mean Dr Lofts. There was nothing else for it.’

‘Kit?’

‘He’s been in and out while you were sleeping. I think he’s all right. I can never tell with Kit. Would you like to see him?’

‘What do you think people are saying, Flora?’

Flora struggled between honesty and the lessons she had learnt from Robin on patient care. ‘Nothing too terrible. After all, it was an accident.’

‘Yes. It was.’

‘Did you wish to see Kit?’

Matty turned her head towards the window and did not answer. Troubled by the undercurrents, Flora watched her for a minute and then tiptoed away.

During the night, Matty’s temperature rose sharply and Robin was again called in. He diagnosed acute shock, possibly pneumonia, perhaps a recurrence of rheumatic fever, but it was too early to tell. The following day she was no better, and Robin began to talk about hospital.

In the early hours of the second night, Robbie was roused from her chair by Matty’s groans and mutters. She sponged her down, gave her lemonade to drink and, with an effort, Matty raised her head from the pillow where, in her fevered fancy, nightmares clustered on the lace edging waiting to leap.

‘There,’ said Robbie almost tenderly, and her plait of pepper-and-salt hair swung over her shoulder. ‘There’s a good girl.’

And because she was ill and lonely and hurt beyond words, Matty forgot she did not like or trust Robbie, and clung to her hand for comfort.

‘Robbie...’ she whispered. Robbie’s expression took on a tinge of triumph, for Matty had always called her Miss Robson. ‘Robbie. I can’t get to sleep unless I know.’

Robbie spooned more lemonade between Matty’s lips. ‘What do you want to know?’

Matty’s bird hands plucked at the sleeve of Robbie’s uniform. ‘Why does no one go into Lady Dysart’s garden?’

A drop fell onto the sheet and Robbie made a fuss of fetching a towel. She scrubbed at the patch. ‘Don’t you know, Mrs Kit?’ and Matty could tell she was enjoying her advantage. ‘Surely you do? Hasn’t he told you?’

‘No. He hasn’t.’

Robbie paused for fuller effect. ‘Lady Dysart died there.’

‘Mother.’ Daisy knelt by the chintz armchair in the drawing room of Number 5, Upper Brook Street. ‘Mother.’

Susan put down her fountain pen, looked up from the account book and, alerted by Daisy’s tone, which did not suggest good news, stiffened. ‘What is it, Daisy?’ she answered, anxious to avoid unpleasantness.

As she talked, Daisy clung to the back of the chair for support. ‘Mother, I’m going to have a baby. It will be born in the spring. May, I think.’

My God, thought Susan, her eyes snapping shut with shock, this is the result of all my efforts. She sank back onto the cushions. ‘You little fool,’ she said softly. ‘You little thankless fool. I thought I could have trusted you.’ She opened her eyes. ‘If you couldn’t control yourself, why at least weren’t you careful?’

‘You’ve got to help me.’

Her mother’s eyes refocused. ‘Of course I have to help you, Daisy. What else would I do?’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Daisy truthfully, and let out a sigh of relief. She pressed her hand to her stomach which, these days, was permanently at war with itself, levered herself into the chair, decided that made her feel worse and stood up again. ‘I had no idea what feeling sick all the time was like,’ she said, one hand on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s impossible to think of anything but your body.’

‘I thought there was something odd about you.’ Susan reached for her address book and began to leaf through it.

Daisy picked up the box of Bryant and May matches lying beside the reproduction statuette of Canova’s
Three Graces,
and rolled it between her fingers. Round and round. ‘Aren’t you going to ask the obvious question?’

‘Be quiet, Daisy. I want to think.’ Susan did not look up.

‘Don’t you want to know who the father is?’ Daisy had a hysterical thought that she was participating in some madly modern play where no one connected with anyone else.

‘It’s irrelevant who the father is,’ said Susan. ‘You won’t be having it. But I imagine Kit Dysart isn’t a million miles away from the problem. And I suppose all that nonsense with Matilda in the river was something to do with it. It would have been too much to hope that Tim was the culprit who at least could have married you. Now, I’m not sure that Brayfield still practises.’

‘Practises?’

‘For goodness sake, don’t repeat things.’ Susan marked the ‘B’ section in the address book with her finger. ‘Harley Street, Daisy. Don’t be stupid. You must know what I mean.’

Feeling better now that the confession was over, Daisy stood upright. ‘I’m not stupid, Mother, and I have no intention of paying a visit to your man in Harley Street.’

It took a minute or two for the implications to sink into Susan. ‘Great God,’ she said, staring social ruin in the face. ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Daisy. ‘But I am frightened. About coping. About having it.’

‘I have never heard such nonsense. You can’t possibly keep a baby. You’ll be branded a trollop, admittedly by women who are no better themselves, but at least they’re discreet about this sort of thing.’ Susan seldom appeared agitated – in fact Daisy could not think of one instance when her mother’s shiny carapace had been breached – but Daisy’s news had succeeded in making her manicured hand shake as she reached for a cigarette. ‘You have no right to think of exposing us like that.’

‘I can’t kill it,’ said Daisy flatly.

‘My dear Daisy, you won’t be the first or the last.’

Daisy walked up and down the cluttered drawing room. ‘How much did you love Father when you married him?’

‘Very much.’ Susan was an expert liar but, in this instance, she did not sound convincing, so she repeated it. ‘Very much.’

‘Describe what you felt.’

Susan threw her daughter a look which said, I’d better humour you. ‘Well. Your father was very suitable. He promised to look after me. He was pleasant and good-tempered and I wanted to be married. Your father has been all of these things, of course, and considerate.’

Daisy thought of her stiff-collared father, his perpetual frown and the half-hearted conversation made over breakfast in a concession to fatherhood. Yes, Ambrose had been a father who did his best, and she was not ungrateful.

Daisy stopped prowling, and held her stomach. ‘Did you feel as awful as I do when you were having Marcus and me?’

‘Yes.’ Susan was not one for sharing intimacies and she did not elaborate.

‘The sickness comes in waves. Like being on a boat.’

Like being on a boat.

‘Will you be quiet, Daisy.’

Daisy moved away from the cigarette smoke and stood under the open window. ‘Matty doesn’t know about the baby, Mother.’

‘Daisy...’ All Susan’s cleverly acquired, cold-heartedly applied social arts went into her plea. ‘This is serious. You have
got
to be sensible. Listen to me. I am your mother and I know the world. It will kill your father, give him a heart attack or something, and the scandal will affect business. You can’t keep this baby.’ Susan perceived she was not making progress. ‘You can’t be so thoughtless.’

‘Do you know what happens when I see Kit?’ Daisy asked the window pane. ‘When I see him across the room, at Ascot, at a ball, wherever, the breath leaves my body, Mother. That’s how it is with me.’

‘Oh, Daisy.’ The armour-plated Susan almost sobbed. ‘This is suicide. This is selfishness—’ She seized on a straw. ‘Does he know about it?’

‘No.’

‘Then tell him, for God’s sake. He’ll tell you what’s what.’

‘No.’ Daisy was in the grip of a combination of exaltation and nausea, which had worked on her until she was light-headed and dizzy from the notion of sacrifice and the world well lost for love. ‘Falling in love freed me, I think.’ Daisy faced her mother, still rolling the matchbox over and over in her hand. ‘It freed me from myself, and all the torment and anguish I have felt since cannot take that away. I will not do anything to harm his baby.’ She touched her stomach. ‘And I’ve decided not to tell him either.’

‘Think of Marcus. It will ruin his standing in the regiment.’

Daisy raised her head and Susan was reminded of a saint imprinted onto stained glass at the moment of religious ecstasy – impassioned, tunnel-visioned and immovably obstinate.

‘Get rid of it,’ she repeated. ‘Marry Tim and have another one quickly.’

Daisy shook her head and there was pity for her mother in her face. Slowly, the address book slipped from Susan’s grasp onto the carpet.

‘Perhaps I will marry Tim in the end,’ Daisy said thoughtfully.

‘But I am not going to kill Kit’s baby. That’s where you’re going to have to help me.’

‘You are a fool, then,’ said Susan bitterly. ‘A weak, selfish fool.’

Churned up, frightened by her own daring, Daisy said, ‘Don’t you see? It isn’t weakness at all. In choosing this way, by giving myself a choice, I have become strong.’

‘No,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t see.’

Guilt has several effects and one leads into another. Each long day while Matty lay burning with pneumonia ratified this uneven mental state for Kit. His first response was an evasion, a shabby hope: perhaps Matty had not seen Daisy and him in the garden and it
was
an accident. His second was anger. How dare Matty make such a public act — such a destructive act? His third was a despairing acknowledgement that certain events recycled, repeated, resurfaced, and were inescapable.

His fourth was to put as great a distance as possible between him, Matty and the house. Of course, he could do no such thing and Kit’s dreams were jumbled with images of smooth-branched gum arabic trees, of sand and raging thirst.

Instead guilt drove him into the sick room to watch over his restless wife and to share the night vigils with Robbie. Left on his own for those troubled hours, he nursed a tumbler of whisky and read. More often than not, he found himself staring at nothing. Details of the bedroom – rose chintz curtains, satin eiderdown, lace-edged sheets – etched onto his memory for ever.

Thus Kit experienced the catharsis of watching over a sickbed where every priority except one is leached away. In the shadow of the nightlight, he picked over the past and saw how blind he had been, saw how passion had made him selfish. But why, he asked himself, endlessly, had he not married Daisy?

Would he do the same again? Kit stared into his glass and tried to piece together strands of truth in the muddle, understand the motivations that drove him. Of course, whisky did not give good answers. It never does.

‘Robbie?’ Matty usually woke up for a drink and she was stirring now.

Kit put down his glass and got to his feet. Matty never asked for him when she woke. Why should she? But sometimes he hoped that she would – because it would make him feel better. ‘It’s Kit, Matty. Hang on. I’m coming.’

Kit poured barley water into a glass and moistened her lips with his fingertip. ‘Be a good girl and drink this.’ He eased a teaspoon of liquid between the drained lips. ‘Just a little.’ Matty swallowed. ‘And again.’

He eased her head gently back onto the pillow and pulled back the sheets. Matty’s nightdress had rucked up round her thighs and, very gently, he pulled it straight.

‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’ she croaked. ‘But thank you.’

‘Why not?’ Kit brushed damp hair back from her cheek. ‘Do you want some more to drink?’

Matty shook her head and closed her eyes. Kit replaced the netting top on the jug and went through to the bathroom to wash the glass. She had felt so tiny in his hands. So light and brittle — and he thought how much he had done to break her. He returned, checked Matty was still, sat down in the chair, adjusted the light and tried to reread the final passage from
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
It failed him.

‘I’m sorry, Daisy,’ he had said when the Chudleighs departed in haste the morning after the furore. ‘I’m sorry for the mess and the waste.’

They were in the hall at Hinton Dysart, and she looked up from her dressing case with that quick slanting look that held him enchanted. Her cheeks were dead white. ‘This
is
the end, isn’t it, Kit? We must not see each other again.’

‘No. I mean, yes.’

He must have looked as desperate as he felt, for she touched his hand and said, ‘You must not worry about it.’

He permitted himself to gaze at the beautiful face, a little mysterious under one of her hats, he couldn’t remember which one. She returned his scrutiny then turned away.

‘Goodbye, Kit,’ she said in a matter-of-fact way...

‘Why aren’t you in bed, Kit? Can’t someone else take over?’ Matty whispered from the bed.

Kit slid
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
onto the table and got up. ‘I thought you were asleep.’

‘I can’t see you very well.’ Matty was fretful. ‘Can I have the light on?’

He switched on the bedside lamp. Matty sighed and seemed easier. ‘It’s less frightening,’ she said. ‘I don’t like the dark.’

‘Are you feeling better?’

She moved jerkily under the bedclothes and winced because moving hurt, especially her chest. ‘Not much.’ She experimented with a smile, which proved too much effort. ‘Everything hurts. My hands hurt.’

He took one of her hands and examined it. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said and disappeared through the connecting door to his room. He returned with a pot of ointment.

‘I should have given this to you before but I didn’t think about it. Do you remember I told you about Prince Abdullah? Well, this was supplied by his personal physician.’ Kit unscrewed the lid and gently rubbed the paste into Matty’s skin. ‘That should help.’