Flowers in the Rain & Other Stories (22 page)

“It was so funny,” Priscilla chimed in. “When you left for Rosemary’s, we were all waiting in two cars at the bottom of the drive, with everything switched off so you wouldn’t see us. Just like playing hide and seek. Then, as soon as you were safely on your way, we shot up the drive and set to work.”

“And how did you get in?” Henry wanted to know.

“Tessa still has her key. And Bessie Digley’s here. She’s going to make up all our beds. You don’t mind if we stay the weekend, do you? Rodney can stay longer, of course, because he’s got two weeks’ leave, but I can’t leave the children too long, and Tessa has to get back to work.”

Champagne corks had been popping. Somebody handed Edwina a glass. She hadn’t even taken off her coat yet, and she had never felt so happy in her whole life.

*   *   *

A little later, Edwina slipped away from the laughter and talk and champagne. She looked into the dining-room and saw that here, too, the fire had been lighted, and the great mahogany table laid as though for a royal banquet. She moved towards the kitchen and looked in around the door. Bessie Digley turned from the stove. “Now this was a good surprise,” she said, with a smile that Edwina had never seen on her dour face.

She went upstairs. On the landing every bedroom door was ajar, and every light blazed. She glimpsed open suitcases and clothes lying about in a heartwarming muddle. In her own room, she took off her coat and laid it across the bed. She thought about drawing the curtains, then decided against it. Let the whole world see and guess what was happening! She stood with her back to the window and surveyed her large, familiar, faintly shabby bedroom. Her dressing-table, the huge double bed, the towering Victorian wardrobe, her desk. She saw the plethora of photographs, which seemed to cover every surface. The children at all stages and ages, and now grandchildren, too, and dogs and picnics and reunions and celebrations.

A thousand memories.

After a little while, she went to the mirror, fixed her hair, and powdered her nose. It was time to join the others. But at the top of the stairs, she paused. From the drawing room, voices and laughter floated upward, filling the air with happy sounds. Her children were here. They had come to tear the dust sheets from the empty rooms, and fill the vacant bedrooms. Henry had been right. There were still years of life to be lived in this house. It was too soon to be thinking of leaving. Too soon to be thinking of growing old.

Thirty years. She touched her new ear-rings, found herself smiling, and ran downstairs, excited as a bride.

M
ARIGOLD
G
ARDEN

He had not planned to go to Brookfield. It lay deep in the Hampshire countryside, fifteen miles from the motorway between Southampton and London, and he had seen himself simply speeding past the turn-off, without, as it were, a sideways glance.

But somehow—perhaps by memory, perhaps by the familiar countryside drowsing in the afternoon sunshine—he was seduced, beguiled. After all, now it was over. Finished. Julia and her new husband would still be away on their honeymoon, basking in the nailing heat of the Mediterranean, or sailing some boat across turquoise-blue, glass-clear West Indian waters. She was now out of his reach. It was over.

The huge road curved ahead of him, poured behind. On either side villages, orchards, farms, sliced in two by progress, lay untouched, unchanged. Cows stood in the shade beneath clumps of trees, and fields were thick and yellow with ripening corn.

The sign came up at him.
Lamington. Hartston. Brookfield.
Miles eased his foot from the accelerator. The needle on the dashboard dropped from seventy to sixty to fifty.
What the hell am I doing?
But the image of the old red brick house smothered in wisteria, the lawn sloping down to the river, the heady scent of roses, pulled him like a magnet. He knew that he had to go back. Now he saw the turnoff, the bridge across the motorway. He glanced into his driving-mirror to check the traffic behind him, and then, inexorably, slid across into the slow lane, and so up onto the ramp.

He grinned at himself wryly.
Perhaps you always meant to do this.
But why not? It was too late for memories. Ten days too late.

Out of sight and sound of the motorway, the surroundings were, almost at once, familiar. He knew this road, that village; had drunk beer in that pub after a cricket match; had once been to a party in the house that lay beyond a pair of impressive gates. It was four years ago when he had first made this journey, but, idling along the country lanes, he could remember every moment, every nuance of that drive. Excited he had been, and a little anxious, because he was fresh out of Agricultural College and going to an interview for his first job, as manager of Brookfield Farm, working for Mrs. Hawthorne.

When they eventually met, she explained her position. Her husband had recently died. Her son, who would one day take over the farm, had taken a short service commission in the Army, and was at present stationed in Hong Kong.

“… but when he leaves the Army, he plans to go to agricultural college, but meantime I must have somebody to help me … just to keep things going until Derek’s ready to come home again…”

Privately Miles decided that she looked far too young to have a grown-up son, but he said nothing, because this was a business matter, and no time for personal compliments.

“… so you can see, I must have a manager. Now, why don’t we go and have a look around?”

They had spent the day inspecting the farm. There were good outbuildings, a tarmacadamed yard, well-kept cattle-courts, modern tractors. Beyond lay fields of arable land, some stock, sheep and cattle. In a little paddock horses grazed.

“Do you ride?” he asked Mrs. Hawthorne.

“No. Julia’s the horsy one in our family.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes. She’s got a job in Hartston; she works in an antique shop there. It’s nice for me, because she lives at home, but I expect before long she’ll get restless and go and find herself a flat in London. That’s what all her friends seem to be doing.”

“Yes, I suppose they do.”

She smiled. “You never wanted to work in London?”

“No. I never wanted to do anything except farm.”

She showed him the house where he would live, a brick cottage with a small and totally unkempt garden. “I’m afraid it’s rather a mess…”

He eyed it. “It wouldn’t take long to get straight.”

“Are you a keen gardener?”

“Put it this way: I don’t like weeds.”

She laughed at that. “I know. I spend most of my time pulling the beastly things up.”

“My mother does that too.” They looked at each other, smiling. It was the beginning of friendship, of liking.

Finally, they were back indoors, in the house, in the farm office that had been her husband’s. She did not sit in the impressive leather chair, but leaned against the desk, with her hands deep in the pockets of her cardigan, and turned to face Miles.

“The job is yours if you want it,” she told him.

Against all sense, because he wanted to work there more than anything else in the world, he heard himself suggesting that perhaps she would be better off with a man older than himself, someone with more experience. But she had thrown back her head and laughed, and said “Oh, heavens, I’d be terrified of someone like that. It would end up with
him
telling
me
what to do.”

“In that case,” said Miles, “it’s a deal.”

*   *   *

He stayed at Brookfield for a year. He would have stayed longer if it had not been for Julia. He was twenty-three. He had never seriously considered meeting a person, and falling in love, and wanting to spend the rest of his life with her. It happened, he knew, to other men. It had already happened to several of his friends. But somehow he had always imagined that, for himself, such an occurrence was a long way off—he would be thirty, or more. The time would be ripe, he would have made his way, built for himself a solid future, which he would then offer to some suitable female, as though he were giving her a present which he had made himself.

But Julia was suddenly there, in his life, and all his pre-conceived ideas, floating like soap bubbles around the back of his mind, instantly burst and disappeared forever. Why did it have to be Julia? What was it about her that was different? What was it about her that made everything magic? He had heard a word, “propinquity,” and he looked it up in the dictionary, and it said
nearness in place; close kinship.

They were indeed near. He saw her, if only briefly, every day. Helped her start her little car on frosty mornings; rode with her on April Sundays; swam with her in the river, when the leaves were thick and heavy overhead, and the brown, slow-moving water danced with sun-shafts and midges. They swept leaves together in the autumn, and built bonfires fragrant with wood-smoke. He remembered her at haymaking time, wearing a tattered old straw hat like a hobo, and with her arms sunburnt and her face running with sweat. He remembered her at Christmas, in a holly-red dress, her eyes as bright as an excited child’s.

And as for kinship … if that meant laughter and companionship and keeping silence without constraint, then they had been kin. If it meant going to a party with her and glowing with pride because she was more attractive than any other girl in the room, then that was kin. If it meant not minding whom she danced with, because, inevitably, it was always Miles who drove her home; slowly, dawdling down the dark lanes, discussing, like an old married couple, everything that had happened—then that was kin.

Propinquity. It was he who had ruined it all. He thought of the old Frank Sinatra song. “And then I have to spoil it all by saying something stupid like I love you.”

*   *   *

It was a Sunday evening. Warm and dusky, and they were sitting down by the river. The sound of church-bells, ringing for evensong, reached them from far across the meadows.

“I love you.”

She had said, “I don’t want you to love me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t. Because you’re not that sort of a person.”

“What sort of a person am I?”

“You’re Miles.”

“Is Miles so different from other men?”

“Yes, and a thousand times nicer.”

“If you say you think of me as a brother, then I shall strangle you.”

“I have a brother. I don’t need another.”

“A dog, then. A faithful hound.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say.”

“What do you want me to say? We can’t go on like this forever.”

“I just don’t want it to be any other way than this.”

“Julia, grow up. Nothing can stay the same.”

“Why
me?
Why do you have to be in love with
me?
”

“I didn’t, actually, organize it.”

“I’m not ready for falling in love. I’m not ready for getting married and white wedding dresses and setting up house and having babies.”

“What are you ready for, then?”

“I don’t know. Change, perhaps, but not marriage.”

“What sort of change?”

She looked away from him. A lock of dark hair fell forward and hid her face. “I can’t stay home forever. I could go to London, perhaps. Sukie Robins … you know, you met her at that party. We were at school together. She’s getting a flat in Wandsworth—she wants someone to share it with her.” Miles did not say anything to this shattering revelation, and Julia suddenly turned and faced him in a sort of rage, but whether it was at him or herself, he could not guess. “Oh, Miles, it’s all right for you. You’re doing what you want, you don’t want to do anything else. You haven’t any doubts. You’re on your way, you’ve made your decisions. But I’m twenty-one and I don’t
know.
I haven’t
done
anything…”

He could think of no response to this outburst. “What about your mother?” he asked at last.

“I adore my mother. I adore her. You know that. But she would be the last person to want to pin me down, to be possessive.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“I don’t know. I only know that I don’t want to get married for years. Years and years. There are a thousand things I want to do before that happens and I want to start doing them
now.
”

After a little he said, “I shan’t always be a farm manager, you know. One day I’ll have a farm of my own. I’ll be self-supporting, independent. I won’t always be like this.”

“You mean money? You think I don’t want you because you haven’t got any money? How can you think anything so horrible?”

“Being practical isn’t horrible.”

“That doesn’t come into it.”

“We’ll see.”

“You can’t have a very high opinion of me to say a thing like that. I never thought you could be so materialistic.”

“Julia—I love you very much.”

“Then I’m sorry. I’m
sorry!
” With that, she burst into tears, springing to her feet. “I’m sorry for you and I’m sorry for me. But I don’t want to be like … like a dead butterfly, pinned to a bit of cork…” And with this extraordinary statement, she fled from him, away up the lawn towards the house.

And Miles sat on, alone, bitten to death by midges, and not caring; because he had spoiled everything, and nothing could ever be the same again.

*   *   *

He lived with it for a week, and then he went to Mrs. Hawthorne and gave in his notice. She was not a stupid woman and he respected her for her outspokenness.

“Oh, Miles. It’s Julia, isn’t it?”

As well, he respected her too much to lie. He said, “Yes.”

“You’re in love with her.”

“I think I always have been. From the first moment I set eyes on her.”

“I was so afraid that something like this had happened. Julia’s going to London. She’s got a flat, and she’s going to get a job there. She told me last night. So there is no reason that you have to go too.”

“I must.”

“Yes. I can see that. I’m sorry. I’ve been dreading this, and yet I wanted it too. I’ve grown so fond of you. I had silly dreams, like any sentimental mother. But I wouldn’t be any use as a parent if I tried to influence Julia.”