Consider the Lily (50 page)

‘This is awful,’ confided Flora to Matty, seesawing between hysteria and hilarity. ‘It’s as if I’m a murderess. The dreadful thing is, I was always her favourite, and I didn’t care two twopenny hoots. But I do now.’

‘Leave Robbie to me,’ said Matty, basting the hem of Flora’s wedding dress. ‘I’ll try and talk to her about it. You concentrate on your wedding.’ She snapped the scissor blades shut and tried a joke. ‘If Robbie is difficult, I’ll cut her plait off.’

‘Lady F. telephoned after she saw the notice in
The Times.’
Flora sat down beside Matty. ‘She said some awful things about letting down the family.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Matty.

‘I was tempted to say that she should give thanks that I hadn’t inflicted a James on you all.’

The pressure was on Flora: unspoken criticism from tactful relatives was just as telling as more forthrightly expressed views. Marcus was especially curt in his congratulations and Susan Chudleigh had written a masterpiece of discreet
Schadenfreude.
It was not, Flora thought, sewing savage stitches into her dress, as if Polly had made a good marriage – or that her father had followed his own rules. After all, he had spent more time with a London Cockney than with anyone else.

Delivery vans crunched their way up the drive burdened with butter dishes, paper knives and various exotica, including a lizard-skin umbrella stand and a Chinese lacquer hall table. Flora surveyed the booty laid out in the library and took fright. They would never cram it all into the cottage in Dippenhall Street – and somehow the haste and the pell-mellishness of the wedding seemed wrong. She begged Robin to wait until Rupert was better.

She had taken him upstairs to show him the old nursery where she had been made, so to speak, and, as gently as he could, Robin had pointed out that Rupert would never get better.

‘More than likely the stroke would have happened, anyway.’ Robin was careful to be absolutely honest. ‘It was possible that a blood clot was floating around his body waiting for a chance to block up an artery.’

‘We — I – gave it the chance,’ said Flora bleakly.

‘Thank you,’ said Robin with more than a tinge of irony. He flicked the ugly central light with his fingernail and its metal shade rattled. ‘Flora, we can’t take responsibility for your father. You mustn’t.’

‘No,’ she said uncertainly, feeling that nothing would shift her guilt.

‘Look at me, Flora. It’s important you mean it.’

The light swung to and fro. With a little cry, Flora flung her arms around him. ‘Anything might have done it,’ he said into her neck. ‘Anyway, it
has
happened. We have to go forward from there.’ He retrieved his tie from Flora’s stranglehold. ‘Do you see what I mean?’

‘No and yes.’

‘I thought you didn’t like your father very much?’

‘Even if I hated him, I wouldn’t want to be the cause of his death.’ Flora released Robin. ‘In a way, loving or hating has nothing to do with it. I’m attached to Father in spite of those feelings. Now he’s so ill and I’ve made the break, I feel more, not less, bound. Does that make sense?’

‘Perfect sense.’ Robin leant over and kissed the soft bit at her temple. ‘All the more reason for you and me to get married as soon as it’s decent and then everyone can get on with their lives. Including us.’

A fortnight later, Flora and Robin were married very quietly in the church. Up the lime avenue she walked like her sister before her, but on Kit’s arm, her veil blowing in the wind and her hem dragging along the wet stones. Except for the blaze of candles in the aisle and on the altar, which Matty had insisted on providing, it was dark inside the church. The smell of hot wax mingled with that of the white freesias and narcissi that she had also arranged to be flown in from the South of France.

The guests bunched in the front pews – rangy Dysart relations on one side, short, sandy-haired Loftses on the other. Rolly was in his best suit and Ada had sewn bunches of artificial cherries onto a green velour cloche.

Wearing her funeral hat, outraged and stony-eyed, Robbie sat as far back as she could manage, beside the nativity tableau in pipe-cleaners and cardboard that the children had put up for Advent. Smelling of dog and spirits, Danny sidled into a pew opposite and stared straight ahead throughout the proceedings. Only Matty, soft, tawny and wearing dusty pink silk, looked really weddingish – better, in fact, than she had at her own. Under her hat, she smiled gently.

Flora was happy. The light filtering into the chancel was tinged with December murk, the church was cold and the carpet frayed, but Flora felt cradled in its antiquity, part of a chain of men and women who had stood in the same place, saying the same words, full of hope for the journey ahead. For change.

Mrs Pengeally touched the keys of the wheezy organ and Flora turned to her bridegroom, the waistband of her dress pinching her sturdy frame. The corners of Robin’s eyes narrowed as he smiled at his bride, whose scraped-back hair under the Honiton lace veil was doing its best to escape. It will be all right, he tried to say silently to her, and Flora was at peace.

‘Danny.’ Back from three days’ honeymoon in Bath, Flora ran up the path to the cottage at Jonathan’s Kilns and banged on the door. ‘Danny.’

‘I’m coming, Miss Flora. I’m coming.’ Danny stood blinking on the threshold with a glass in his hand.

It was a dark afternoon in the week before Christmas. In the distance the gas lights in the village shone a hazy yellow. It was cold and the temperature was falling. Flora waved her torch in Danny’s face.

‘You must come, Danny. Dr Williams says Father’s getting worse. You said you would.’

‘Dying?’ Danny glanced at the thick gold band on Flora’s finger and she flushed.

‘Come on, Danny. Don’t waste time.’

‘Wait, then.’ Danny’s mouth did its gin-trap trick. He pulled down his corduroy jacket from the hook and slammed the door behind him. ‘That woman’ll be there?’

‘My brother promises that there will be no trouble.’

Matty was keeping watch in Rupert’s bedroom while Robbie snatched some rest. Rupert appeared to be sleeping, and she shuffled through a pile of his books on the table –
Decisive Battles of the Western Front, Mr Britling Goes to War.
Rupert had annotated the margins of the latter with black ink. ‘Youth and common people shone,’ she read. ‘For the sons of every class went out to fight and die, full of a splendid dream of this war.’ Further on, there was a heavy underscoring:
‘It is a war without point, a war that has lost its soul
...’

She put down the book. If the war had not finished off the body of this soldier, it had done a good job on his spirit.

Earlier, Matty had helped Robbie to wash the body that no longer had jurisdiction over itself, and rubbed it with alcohol to avoid bedsores. Then they made Rupert as comfortable as they could. Robbie had arranged his hands so they rested on the sheet – like the disembodied marble hands so favoured by Victorians. Rupert seemed mummified and inert from the inside out but Matty wondered, with panic for him, if it was true that the comatose were cursed with a mind that was still active.

Flora poked her head round the door. ‘He’s here.’ She ushered Danny in and went over to the decanter on the table. ‘Have this,’ she said, and poured him some whisky.

Danny drank it. Matty had not seen him for some time, and he seemed more lined and red-eyed than she remembered.

‘I’ve rung Polly,’ she told Flora. ‘She’ll try and get down tonight, if not first thing tomorrow morning. Apparently she’s expecting again and not feeling well.’

‘
Again?
’ Flora drew up a chair beside the bed. ‘Here, Danny,’ she said. ‘Talk to Father.’

Danny reached over and took Rupert’s limp hand in his own. ‘Sir?’

Not surprisingly, there was no answer.

‘He’s normally a little more responsive,’ said Flora. ‘That’s why Dr Williams thinks we ought to say goodbye. He’s slipping away.’

Danny said nothing, but rubbed his fingers gently to and fro over Rupert’s palm, and Matty was touched by the tenderness of the gesture.

‘How long did the doctor give ‘im?’ Danny asked at last.

‘Dr Williams couldn’t be sure.’ Flora poured out two more glasses of whisky and gave one to Matty. ‘It might be a long night.’

The phone rang in the hall and Flora went down to answer it. She returned to say that there had been a bad car crash the other side of Odiham, Dr Williams would not be able to come as he had promised and, Flora silently dared Matty to contradict, she had telephoned Robin to tell him to come instead.

‘Of course,’ said Matty.

Suddenly, Flora covered her eyes with her hand and sat down.

‘You must have known Sir Rupert well,’ said Matty, standing beside Danny.

‘You could say that, Mrs Dysart.’ Danny fixed his gaze on the figure in the bed. ‘We saw things together.’

Over Danny’s head Matty and Flora exchanged glances, aware that they were not admitted to what Rupert and Danny had shared – a world narrowed down to a trench or a mud track through a wood, a penny whistle playing in the twilight, a damp cigarette, the creak of leather harness, the smell of wet documents in a canvas message pouch. Two fat, sated bluebottles.

‘Yes,’ said Danny. ‘We saw some things, Sir Rupert and I. I saved ‘im and ‘e saved me. After it was over, when I’d nowhere to go, ‘e brought me ‘ere and gave me an ‘ome.’

‘You never said,’ said Flora. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Danny shrugged.

Later, when it was almost dark, Kit came in and refilled the glasses. Because she liked catching the very last drop of light, and partly because she did not want to intrude, Matty stood by the window. Kit came over and slipped his arm around her.

‘Not too tired?’

She shook her head, enjoying the weight of his arm on her shoulders.

‘You will tell me if you are?’

The afternoon quickly turned into evening and Matty drew the curtains across the windows, shrouding the room in red velvet. Kit built up the fire, and it became very warm. Danny remained at the bedside. Flora played Patience opposite him on a portable card table and wished that Robin would come. The whisky was making them light-headed.

Shortly after eight o’clock – Flora knew that because she looked over to the clock – the form on the bed seemed to twitch. Then Rupert made a definite sound and his eyelids flickered open. Flora’s card table collapsed with a crack.

‘I wish Robin was here,’ she said.

Slowly and with obvious effort, Rupert swivelled his eyes and made a noise from the corner of his mouth that might have been ‘Danny’. Danny dragged his chair closer to the bed.

‘Talk to him, Danny,’ said Flora. ‘He wants you to talk to him.’

‘Do you remember, sir...?’ Danny was jumbled with whisky and emotion. ‘On the Somme, sir? The big push? Twenty companies of us, shoulder to shoulder. Remember Plugstreet Wood, Tram Car Cottage, Kansas Cross? Do you remember the beer and ‘ow the locals could never get the ‘ang of making tea?’

Flora made encouraging signals to Danny with her hand. ‘Go on.’

‘... Marguerite Trench where the bloody Frogs ‘ad let the flowers grow because they never went over the top? Like a bloomin’ flower shop it was. ‘Ow we marched, sir, through streams, culverts and woods. I remember you sayin’ it was good ‘unting land.’

‘Keep talking, Danny.’ Kit’s glass shook in his hand.

‘They loaded us up right and proper. I don’t know what they thought we were. Bloomin’ camels. Empty sandbags, shovels, grenades, rockets, cable, pigeon baskets and shittin’ pigeons. We woke on the morning it began and it was raining through a mist. We stood and watched the early mist ripple from the ‘owitzers’ shells. It was just like a lake with stones being thrown into it. Wasn’t it, sir?’

Again Rupert made a strange sound. Kit bent over him. ‘Father?’

‘The eighteen-pounders and four-sevens made us think, didn’t they? So did the fifteen-inch ‘owitzers coming down on Gommecourt Wood. Whole trees were being flung into the air, and the bloody ‘Uns sat in their dug-outs, waiting.’

‘Dear God,’ said Matty, ‘spare that
ever
happening again’. She reached up, snapped on a second light, and the bed was illuminated like an enormous painting.

‘Near as pickled, weren’t we, sir? From the rum, seeing that we never went into battle on a full stomach.’

Danny’s soft voice flowed on like a stream, pausing here and there, and Kit watched at the bedside as another man saw out his father’s life.

‘We did all right, sir? Didn’t we?’ Danny’s voice rose, an aching, keening note.

Matty watched Kit, and suffered for him.

Flora’s gaze riveted on her father’s hand. Slowly, with infinite effort, a finger uncurled, a white slug looping out from its leaf, hoping for anchorage. She hissed, ‘He’s moving.’

Once again, Danny took hold of Rupert’s hand and this time the bulging eyes obviously recognized him, for they widened and softened.

‘“We are the dead”,’ said Danny lightly. ‘Do you remember? We laughed at the bloke who read us that poem. I liked it. But I always liked the poems, though, didn’t I, sir? This one was a real Percival poet, even I laughed at ‘im. Still, it’s a good ‘un and ‘e died quite soon after. You always said, sir, my taste in poetry was rotten.

‘“
To you from failing ‘ands we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it ‘igh
If ye break faith, we who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders’ fields”’

‘Don’t,’ said Flora, tears falling down her cheeks, too proud to wipe them away. ‘Don’t, Danny.’

By midnight Danny was drunk, Kit verging on it and the others chilled and stiff.

‘If ye break faith...’ The line was tailor-made for Flora’s germinating guilt. She longed for the comfort of Robin’s presence. He had promised to come as soon as Violet Girdler in Croft Lane had produced her baby. The images that Danny conjured clung stickily in her mind, and she wanted to cry out that they should, all of them, forget these memories. Life could not be driven –
they
could not be driven – by this terrible war any more.

Robin arrived at last. He looked weary, with dark circles under his eyes. Flora took herself off to get him some tea and sandwiches.