Consider the Lily (47 page)

Kit relaxed his shoulders and lost the hunched look. ‘I find it incredibly difficult to talk about,’ he said and spread his hands out in a gesture which said: Forgive me. ‘Nor do I want to. Neither did Polly nor Flora. We didn’t discuss it, but there was a sort of tacit agreement we wouldn’t talk about it. I was only eleven when Mother died, Polly a bit younger and Flora was four.’ Matty made a noise at the back of her throat. ‘The girls know Mother killed herself, but I’ve never told them the details. I thought it was unfair.’ He paused to tuck in a stray edge of rug around Matty’s bottom. ‘It’s the old reaction to this sort of thing, I suppose. I told myself if I ignored it, pretended it hadn’t happened, I would forget about it.’

‘I understand about losing a parent, parents,’ said Matty. ‘But not about the... the other thing. I can’t imagine.’ She was beginning to make some sense of the puzzle; the wounds of children deprived of their mother in such a fashion. ‘What about your father?’

‘You know how we are with him, and he with us,’ said Kit flatly. ‘He was never the same when he came back from France – he was invalided out in ‘sixteen and sent off to Craiglockhart hospital in Scotland. Shell shock. He returned to find Rose dead. Uncle Edwin was dead. But I think he gave up on us, and Mother. Gave up on life.’ He balled one of his fists and punched it into the palm of the other hand. ‘How can one stand in judgement knowing one’s own shortcomings? But I do, I do. I know it’s unfair, Matty, but I felt Father should have known better. I think he should have tried harder with us, not retreated. I think he should have tried harder with Mother.’ He went silent. ‘I blame him.’

It was impossible to digest everything at once, and Matty did not want to. Later she would have to think over what he had told her.

‘After Mother’s death,’ Kit said, ‘my grandparents cut off contact, which left the estate considerably poorer. You know about that, too.’

‘Do you know why?’

‘No, I’ve never discovered. They died soon after and left their money to a third cousin. I don’t think my grandfather liked Father very much.’ Kit flashed a look at Matty. ‘He probably regretted selling his daughter off like a prize heifer.’

I think I know, thought Matty. They must have found out about Hesther and Edwin.

‘From then on, Father ignored us, really. We were a reminder and a nuisance. It’s funny. He cut quite a figure in those days and I wanted him to be proud of me. But he wasn’t. He preferred Danny to us, certainly he gets on better with him. You must have noticed.’ Matty nodded. ‘They fought through the war together, you see, and he rescued Danny from some hospital or other and brought him to Hinton Dysart.’

Kit had lit another cigarette. The strain of remembering and talking showed clearly in his face.

In killing herself, thought Matty, Hesther had committed more than an act of self-destruction. She had left the survivors, the children, the knowledge that she had not loved them enough to live. She remembered her flight from the garden – her expulsion from Eden – after she had seen Kit and Daisy and went hot with the realization that she, too, might have done something similar.

‘Poor Hesther,’ she murmured. ‘But I think she was wrong.’

Kit flashed Matty a look which she thought was dislike and she knew she risked this new-found intimacy between them. ‘I don’t think you should blame my mother,’ he said.

‘She was wrong,’ interrupted childless Matty fiercely. ‘Don’t you see? Whatever she felt. Whatever she suffered. Because she had children, Kit. Don’t you see?’

Her conviction got through to him and his touchiness subsided. He returned to his stance by the window and stood looking out over the garden. ‘I might as well tell you that I found her,’ he said.

‘Oh, my God.’ Matty pushed back the rugs and heaved herself to her feet. Knees trembling with the effort, she edged her way towards him. ‘Oh, my God, Kit. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

He was standing with his arms pressed up against the window. Matty tugged at his sleeve forcing him to turn round and then, sweating with weakness, clumsy, she pulled him into her arms. ‘Tell me,’ she insisted.

‘I’d been looking for her all morning,’ he said into the space above her head. ‘There had been a disagreement with Father earlier, and I was going off to stay with a friend from school and I wanted to ask if everything was all right. She had not been well since Rose’s death... and we were worried. The house was full of convalescent officers because Mother had wanted to do her bit. In a way, I think that had something to do with it, too. Everywhere you turned in the house there was a limping or bandaged man. Some of them had been blinded, others were scarred or mutilated. They gave Polly nightmares. The worst ones sat for days on end without moving and were carted about by the nurses like lumps of meat. One of them went mad, and began to howl and twitch and nobody could shut him up. He was sent off somewhere, Craiglockhart, I think, where Father had been...’

Kit, Polly and Flora sat on the main staircase and every so often pressed their faces to the banisters to hear better. The door to the morning room was open and their parents were quarrelling.

Polly had been thinking. ‘Couldn’t Mother have another baby?’ she asked Kit. ‘That would make her happy again.’

‘I expect so,’ said Kit, who was not entirely sure.

Kit and Polly thought about the proposition while Flora sang a song on the stair below. They missed Rose, of course, but death was not much more than a curiosity and they dealt with it briskly.

‘How do babies get here?’ Polly was aware there was a gap in her knowledge.

‘They just arrive,’ said Kit, who did not want to lose face, especially with his sister. ‘Through the stomach.’ He picked impatiently at the black armband on his jacket.

‘Oh,’ said Polly. ‘That doesn’t sound very nice.’ She added, ‘Poor Mummy,’ and ate the end of one plait as she contemplated the problem.

Nurses shepherded patients in and out of the dining room for breakfast. Kit watched Maggie, the under-housemaid, lug a bucket of hot water onto the front steps and begin the scrubbing. It seemed a pointless activity to him as the steps were dead white already.

‘I think I ought to shut the door to the morning room,’ he said. ‘We don’t want people to hear.’

The sound of his mother’s sobs rose above the melee in the passage. Before Kit could do anything about it, Hesther emerged in a swirl of black lace and muslin, a black-edged handkerchief pressed to her cheeks. She stopped, dropped her hand and revealed the face that Matty was to pore over in the photographs, ravaged and wet with tears.

‘I know it was my fault, Rupert,’ she said through the open door. ‘I know, I know, I know—’

‘Mother!’ Kit hissed.

But Hesther did not hear her son, and she vanished down the passage towards the kitchens. Rupert emerged from the morning room after her, a younger, slighter version of the thickset man he was to become. His colour was up which meant he was angry and even four-year-old Flora knew better than to advertise her presence. For thirty seconds or so, Rupert stood at the bottom of the stairs, his children frozen into statues above him, visibly pulling himself together before stepping past Maggie onto the main steps and out of sight.

That point marked, as precisely as a line on a map, the end of Kit’s childhood. And when, later that morning, he discovered his dying mother who, despite her efforts with the knife, had not done the job cleanly, he knelt down and took her bloody hand in his and screamed at the horror of the adult world.

‘She was too far gone to talk to me,’ Kit said. ‘I held her hand and I begged her, I begged her not to leave us. But she did. I had never seen anyone dead, but I knew when she was. She sort of collapsed inwards and her body stopped fighting the terrible injuries. Then I ran away and left her there, by the statue. I have never told anyone I found her first.’

Not even Daisy? Matty wanted to ask. She held Kit tightly until he had finished speaking and then she raised one of her half-healed hands and, daring him to shake her off, brushed away the tears under his eyes with her thumb.

‘Better?’

He squinted down at Matty and managed, half shamed, half defiant, a weak, lopsided smile. ‘Matty, I don’t know what you’ve made me say. Yes, I do feel better.’

‘Kit...’

‘Yes?’

‘Kit, I think I have to sit down.’

‘Good God,’ he said at once. ‘What have I been thinking of?’ He picked her up and carried her back to the chair and fussed. Matty sat back and concentrated on willing the stuffing back into her knees which had turned into the consistency of Mrs Dawes’s aspic jelly.

Kit knelt down in front of the chair. ‘I shouldn’t be upsetting you, Matty.’ With a gesture that took her breath away he laid his head in her lap. She breathed a life-giving gulp of air and ran her fingers through his hair, luxuriating in its thickness. He raised his head. ‘Enough, I think.’

His hair was soft on her fingers. ‘Just one more question, Kit. Please.’

‘If you wish.’

She gave the nervous jerk of her head. ‘You really love, Daisy, don’t you?’

‘Do you want me to answer that question?’ Kit raised his head, puzzled by her directness and when Matty nodded said, ‘Yes. I cannot deny it.’

‘And me?’ she asked, greatly daring.

He searched her face for a clue. ‘It’s different, Matty.’

With a sigh, Matty slid back into the chair and parts of her heart that she had considered dead stirred. But the feelings were too exhausting, and she closed her eyes, content just to be at that point.

‘I’ll ask you a question,’ said Kit. ‘I wouldn’t ask it now if the answer didn’t matter to me very much.’ She waited, braced, knowing what it would be. ‘Did you throw yourself in the river deliberately? Or did you slip?’

Matty’s eyes were extra large and brown as she looked down at Kit still on his knees by the chair, and their expression was stronger and more assured than he remembered.

‘Forgive me, but I need to know.’

‘Kit.’ Matty gripped his head between her hands and looked straight at him. ‘I have to be honest with you. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened after I saw you and Daisy in the garden.’

Later, when Kit had gone and Matty was eating supper on a tray by the fire, she realized she had got something wrong. Charles Kennedy, Kit’s grandfather, had not cut off the Dysarts because he had discovered the truth about Edwin and Hesther. That wouldn’t make sense.

No. It was far more likely that, after Hesther’s death, Rupert had written to his in-laws and told them what he suspected about their children, and they – church-going, God-fearing pillars of the community – had been so outraged by the accusation that they ceased all contact with their son-in-law.

That was one possible version of the truth.

Matty knew – she was sure – that Rupert had read Edwin’s letters to Hesther and had bundled them away with Hesther’s possessions and what he had read of their contents had driven him to write to Boston. Perhaps he had concluded that the worst had taken place between his wife and his brother-in-law. That would not necessarily be correct. People loved each other without even touching.

Unless Charles and Euphemia Kennedy had sent Hesther away for precisely that reason?

Matty would never know.

By November the shooting season was in full swing and the gamekeepers at the Redfields, Itchel and Eastbridge estates were frantic. Most of the land in the area was arable and running with partridges and hares, as well as pheasants. Itchel Manor and Redfields reared their own birds, plumped out with buckwheat, and with the aid of dummy eggs, a good tally of partridges. The pheasants this year were so fat they had grown cocky and sat in rows on farmyard walls and ran along the lanes in front of the horses.

It was early in the morning and a breeze blew down the valley from Alton way into the village. In Clifton Cottage Ned was out in the garden checking the crop of the red-cheeked harvest apple which had ripened at last. The harvest apple was a funny one: it cropped every other year and, compared to other varieties, was rather small. Still, he could rely on it until Christmas – unlike the Rhymer, a pretty striped cooker, which he suspected had developed canker.

The curtains at their bedroom window puffed through the open window in the draught. Ned looked up. Ellen lay behind them under a patchwork quilt, trying to sleep. He sighed and turned away.

That blasted knee of hers had brought them bad luck. First, the discomfort and dislocation of the operation, although Ellen had got back into her stride quick enough after she had learnt that the lump was only a cyst. But then it had introduced a warning note into their unity. Ned brushed a hand down the trunk of the apple tree. If you like, from now on, he and Ellen were prey to black spot, mildew and rust. And canker.

A week ago, Ellen tripped over his fork in the garden, and cut open the scar on her knee on the sharp edge of his trowel lying beside it. Now, she was back in bed with an inflamed leg and a temperature.

Its red breast looking as though it had been spread on with a palette knife, a robin hopped up to the back door and on to the step.

‘And bad cess to you, birdy, if you come in,’ said Ned automatically. Robins brought bad luck if they came indoors. The bird preened itself with a twitch of its head and hopped inside.

Ned sighed again and sat down on the stone by the doorway to lace his boots. Good tools were his life blood and he took care of his.

‘You’d sell me for a good pair of boots,’ Ellen said into his ear, her voice from a long way back, around the time they had married.

‘If you let me down, girl, I would, I would, girl, just try me.’

The boots were made with thick, soft leather and had that right degree of tackiness from incessant polishing but, just to be sure, Ned dipped a rag into the pot of dripping by the door and smeared it over them.

The fob watch that had belonged to his father said five to eight. Ned looked up at the sky to check the light and get a feel of the air. About now, the birds came down from their roosts, and he needed to get a move on.

He stood in the doorway and shouted up the stairs, ‘I’ll stop at the surgery and leave a message for the doctor.’