The September Garden (12 page)

‘Is it the chimney? The woodpile?’ she cried and raced around the side of the house. ‘Oh God, where is everyone?’

The airman was right behind her. ‘Take care, miss. Take care.’

She was greeted by a ferocious bonfire scorching the centre of the lawn. It crackled and roared like a wild animal. Tongues of flames licked upwards, sending sparks into the sky. Her mother, a slender silhouette against the 
raging blaze, bent to grasp something from a pile of debris and sling it into the fire.

‘Mother, what are you doing?’ Nell cried.

Sylvie and Mrs Bunting came hurtling from the kitchen door with buckets of water. They stopped, breathless, then braced themselves to hurl the contents into the bonfire.

‘We’ve got to stop her!’ cried Sylvie as she turned to retrieve more water. ‘She’s gone completely mad! Oh, who’s that fellow?’

Nell raced over. The heat scorched her face as she gripped her mother’s arm. Mollie turned on her, her face alight and ravaged, her hair and skin and blouse speckled with soot.

‘Worthless!’ cried Mollie, her teeth gritted. ‘They’re all worthless anyway. We don’t need them any more!’ She flung two watercolours onto the fire. ‘As for this …’

Nell looked down. Amid the heap of her father’s paintings, with frames cracked, canvasses peeling and shredded, was her parents’ wedding album. Without hesitation, her mother grabbed it and slung it into the flames, screaming, ‘We don’t need any of this any more. Just like we don’t need
him
!’

‘Mother, Mother, please stop.’

The airman was by her side. ‘You’ll have the ARP round here after us, madam,’ he said, composed and quietly authoritative.

‘It’s like a beacon, a bloody landing strip,’ cried Nell. ‘Do you want to be bombed?’

‘Yes, yes, I do!’ her mother screamed. ‘And who the hell is this?’

Mrs Bunting darted past them to launch another pailful of water that sizzled and hissed ineffectively amid the flames. 

‘We’ve got to put this fire out!’ ordered the airman. ‘Do you have a stirrup pump?’

‘Yes,’ said frantic Mrs Bunting, ‘in the kitchen. We haven’t been able to—’

He raced towards the house.

Nell tugged at her mother’s arm. ‘Oh, come away, please, Mother. Let’s get inside. We should call the fire brigade.’

‘Leave me alone,’ she hissed. ‘You’re on your father’s side, I know it. You’re with him and that slut with her fur coat and no knickers.’

‘Really, Mrs Garland,’ admonished Mrs Bunting, ‘there’s really no need for that kind of talk.’

Nell heard Sylvie at the back door. ‘Thank goodness you’re here! It’s all tangled up … We simply couldn’t—’

He took control. He grasped the pump – on standby in case of air raids – and lugged it over the step. He expertly began to repair it, check its workings. In a flash, it seemed, he’d fixed it.

‘Don’t you
dare
interfere!’ Mollie screamed at him.

‘Mother, please. He’s trying to help.’

‘As for you!’ Mollie yelled at Sylvie. ‘You’re deserting me, too. Going to London. Too good for this place, are you? Everyone’s leaving!’

‘No one is leaving, Mother,’ Nell uttered, suddenly hopelessly tired. ‘Please come away, so Mr … so Flight … so he can deal with the fire.’

‘You, you’re going to go too.’ Her mother turned on her. ‘You’re going to live with your father, too, aren’t you?’

‘How can I when he hasn’t told me where he is? Oh, please stop this.’

Mollie bent to the pile of fragments that were once her 
father’s paintings. Nell saw the incomplete watercolour of the dog rose, exquisite still, just a moment from obliteration.

Mollie lifted it up and held it to the peculiar light from the fire. ‘Half done. Half-hearted. Half finished, just like him.’

Mrs Bunting pulled the painting out of her mother’s hands. ‘You are finished, here, tonight, Mrs Garland. You must stop this, and come inside and calm down and have a cup of tea.’

‘A cup of tea?’ Mollie heckled her. ‘That’s all you think about, you stupid woman. Is that going to mend all of this? All this damage? A nice cup of bloody tea!’

Mrs Bunting’s hand flashed out and slapped Mollie’s cheek. In an instant, she was silent. She hung her head with a whimper. Her shoulders sagged and her knees buckled. Nell caught hold of her and drew her away. They trotted across the lawn together towards the kitchen door, just as the airman, his jacket discarded, his face glowing and concentrated, passed them, spraying water from the stirrup pump in a huge quenching arc.

Sylvie came close to Nell, helped her with Mollie. She was nearly in tears but she was smiling her secret smile.

‘Nell,
Nell
,’ she whispered in admiration. ‘Where did you find Rhett Butler?’

She surveyed the clothes in her wardrobe, dividing them in to ‘keep’ and ‘discard’ piles. Nell, lounging on the bed, watched her with barely suppressed eagerness. The mews cottage in town hardly had any storage space and so Sylvie had to leave lots of things behind. She had two good suits, a pair of wool trousers and a jacket. She’d definitely take them and buy some new blouses in Selfridges. Her best black shoes looked a little crumpled across the toes, but perhaps they’d do for now.

‘I didn’t wear this skirt last season,’ she told Nell, tossing it onto the bed. ‘And this blouse has a scorch mark from the iron on the cuff. Mrs B thinks that I haven’t noticed. You can always turn it up. No one would ever know.’

Her cousin thanked her, her eyes round with appreciation.

Sylvie delved into the wardrobe and realised with a start that, as well as her Uncle Marcus, Diana Blanford had also run off with her blue silk dress.

‘Oh, the piffling liberty!’

From along the landing they heard the wireless in the study hum and then crackle into life as Auntie Mollie tuned it in.

‘Is it nine o’clock already?’ Sylvie glanced outside at the light evening sky. ‘Time for the news. How I hate the news.’

The clipped tones of the BBC announcer barked from the study,
London calling
.

‘It’s become a bit of a ritual for her,’ said Nell, fingering the burnt cuff of the blouse. ‘Going into Dad’s study every evening.’

Sylvie glanced at her cousin. ‘You’d think she wouldn’t want to, wouldn’t you? I tried to cheer her up earlier. Mrs B told me some frightful gossip. Did you hear? Miss Hull and Miss Trenton forgot to close their bedroom curtains one evening, as reported by Mrs Oliver in the village. Saw something she said she’d never seen before and never wanted to see again.’

Nell smiled. ‘She told me too. What did Mother say?’

‘Well, she certainly didn’t laugh. She said live and let live, or something. In the old days, she said, she would have been completely affronted and then hooted with laughter. But she said the war is changing everything. And how awfully right she is,’ Sylvie sighed.

Truth was, the sound of the radio news made her feel sick. She’d sat through the reports of the soldiers being evacuated from France by a fleet of ‘little ships’; and she listened while Mr Churchill told them it was their finest hour. She refused to believe the newscaster when he said that the Nazis were parading through Paris. When the headline stated
Allies Blow Up Cherbourg Docks As They
 
Retreat
she stood by the radio and cried, ‘But why don’t they stay and fight? Cowards. They’re all cowards!’

Her aunt and cousin did not know how to comfort her. The thought of her mother stuck there in Montfleur was brutal. If Uncle Marcus had still been at Lednor, he’d say something, anything, to make her feel all right again.

‘I am desperate to start this job, Nell,’ Sylvie confessed, pulling her suitcase from under the bed. ‘I can’t sit around here while all this is going on. I’ve got to get up to London and start
doing
something.’

There had been nothing since early December, no word over Christmas. Her last letter to her mother was ‘returned to sender’. She had a mad idea about heading for the south coast. Just for one day, to stand on a beach, somewhere in Hampshire, or Dorset. She knew it would be all mines and barbed wire, but she would stand and watch the tide go out, draw itself away from England. Across the water in Montfleur, the tide would be coming in. The harbour water would be deep and still and the fishing boats resting at anchor. Along the sea wall, seaweed would be floating; and along the coast, waves would be breaking across the long white Normandy beaches.
Je veux être au bord de la mer. Je veux sentir la mer.

‘What was that, Sylvie?’

‘
Rien
, ah, nothing.’

Down in the hall, the telephone grumbled into life, ringing shrilly up the stairs.

‘Quick!’ cried Nell. ‘It might be Dad. Every time I think it might be Dad.’

Sylvie followed her cousin quickly along the landing, 
stopping at the top of the stairs as Mrs Bunting puffed along the hall and picked up the receiver.

‘Lednor House. Ah, bad line. Sorry. Please repeat. Oh, Mr Hammond. Yes. Certainly. Hold the line.’

‘Sylvie, my love, it’s for you. That fellow. The airman.’

She exclaimed with surprise and a bubble of excitement and thundered down the stairs.

Mrs Bunting and Nell both stood by, arms folded, watching her.

‘Hello, hello?’ the line crackled abysmally. ‘Sylvie speaking.’

Alex Hammond’s voice was small and far away. She pictured him straight away: his blue smiling eyes and softly handsome profile. She remembered his calm efficiency in dealing with Auntie Mollie when she went temporarily round the bend. The way he took tea with them after the bonfire incident with such charm, such good humour. The way he made them laugh in the face of all the commotion. How even Auntie Mollie had been quick to smarten herself up and return to the drawing room for another cup of tea in his company.

Down the line, he said, ‘Hello, Sylvie. Awfully sorry. It’s Nell I wanted to speak to. Is she there?’

Sylvie’s heart dropped like a stone. Her flesh felt peculiar and cold with shock. Speechless, she held the receiver out to her cousin.

‘It’s for you,’ she said, unable to mask her disappointment. Nell just stood there, her mouth gaping.

‘Come on, lovie,’ cried Mrs Bunting, shoving her forward. ‘You only have three minutes.’

She sat next to Alex in the darkened cinema, aware of his arm close to hers, stealing a glimpse or two of his profile in the flickering light of the screen, thinking that perhaps this was not the best choice of picture. They should have seen a comedy or a musical, not the slow-burn, intense mystery of
Rebecca
. The first thing she’d said as they waited in the queue was, ‘This is Sylvie’s favourite book.’ And had then wittered on about how many times each of them had read it, as if it was some sort of competition.

Alex Hammond then asked if she really would like to see the film and she had said, but of course. She wanted to see how well they portrayed the book. And that, aside from Clark Gable, Laurence Olivier really was her ideal man.

How smart, buttoned up and composed Alex was in his blue uniform, the colour of which made his eyes extraordinary. He hadn’t told her how old he was, but she guessed he was over twenty-five. After all, he had come up
the ranks. He fell quiet then, miles away, she thought. And then pondered that perhaps he had meant to ask for Sylvie on the telephone after all. Perhaps it was one big, awful mix-up.

They emerged from the matinee to a pretty, sunny afternoon.

‘Goodness,’ she blinked. ‘The sunlight always surprises me. I expect it to be night-time, after all that time in the cinema.’

‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked.

She felt as gauche and as awkward as the child bride in the film, and then thought of the awful buns in the tea room. How could she let him eat them? And how could they have the inevitable conversation over tea about their respective families, the usual way people find out about each other, when she’d have to admit her father was no longer at home. All that, and God-awful tea.

‘Oh no, I think I’d better go back,’ she said. ‘I’ll get the bus. There’s one in ten minutes.’

And so she thanked him for a marvellous time and left him.

As soon as she sat back for the ride, her loneliness returned. The thought of being taken out by the flight lieutenant had sustained her for a good many days. It had distracted her, and gave her a spring in her step, made her love the start of summer and all its sweet promise.

And now their date was over, all she felt was disappointment. Perhaps she wasn’t who he thought she was and maybe he wasn’t the person she had expected him to be.

‘Hurry up, Nell,’ urged Sylvie. ‘Your mother and I are going for a walk, and you’re coming too.’ She lowered her voice. ‘We need to get her out of the house. She cried all yesterday afternoon, while you were out at the cinema.’

Nell felt her guilt blossom as Sylvie filled her in. She told her that her mother had been brushing her hair in front of her bedroom mirror and that Sylvie had offered to do it for her. Mollie told her that, in the old days, Marcus would brush it for her at bedtime.

‘She broke down. Wouldn’t stop. Kept talking about calculated duplicity. What was I supposed to do, Nell? It was Mrs B’s afternoon off, and you were out cavorting with your airman.’

Nell was about to tell her that it was hardly cavorting when her mother came downstairs, ready for the walk, and took her by surprise. She had applied lipstick and combed her hair. There was a brightness in her cheeks; her skin looked less fragile, less transparent, although her eyes darted a little fast for Nell’s liking.

She linked her mother’s arm. ‘You look well, Mother. How are you feeling?’

Mollie replied, bluntly, ‘I’ve sent Mrs Bunting off with a letter for the post. I’ve just instructed my solicitor.’

A dense fist of sorrow ground inside the pit of Nell’s stomach as they stepped out into the balmy June morning.

‘Breathe that air, Auntie Mollie,’ Sylvie said kindly, ‘Isn’t it plain
merveilleux
.’

‘There was a time when I would have told you off for that, my girl, using your language so casually. But it makes me appreciate how very clever you are. Even though you 
will be leaving me for London, I realise now it’s all for the good. But at least Nell is staying, aren’t you?’

Nell looked at her and felt tenderness shift inside her. She calmly told her mother that yes, of course, this was her home.

‘Well,’ said Mollie, ‘I can tell you now, Nell. I know where your father is. Living with
her
parents in Harrow. They don’t mind that he’s married. They are quite the bohemians, it appears. She’s been thrown out of her job, of course. Miss Trenton and Miss Hull could not express their disgrace and embarrassment more vehemently. But then, she said, what do you expect from suburbanites?’

Nell’s eyes wandered over the serene valley, the green sea of undulating copses and fields, and felt that she had been ambushed, forced to take sides. They had reached the ford with the water meadows beyond. She absorbed her mother’s flippant imparting of information about her father, gathering the scattered pieces as they were thrown.

‘And now I am going to shatter their sordid little world.’ Mollie breathed in with a drawn-out shudder. ‘I am going to be bloody.’

Nell was trying hard to understand her when Sylvie grabbed her arm and urged her to look up. ‘There, there! Can you see it?’

They all stopped and squinted over the treetops into the wide sky where far-off flashes of metal sparked against the blue. Two tiny planes, over Aylesbury way, were trailing vapour in great swoops and curves.

‘My God, a dogfight,’ said Mollie, in wonder.

Nell stared, mesmerised. The curling streams of cloud looked incredibly beautiful against the lucid summer sky, 
like some sort of macabre ballet. The sudden spectacle of battle – amid the quiet solitude of their valley – struck her, compelled her.

‘It’s coming closer and closer,’ she said.

She turned then, hearing an odd sound of hissing. Her mother stood next to her with a peculiar expression on her face. Mollie’s eyes were frozen, fixed on the sky, wild with excitement. She seemed to transform from elegant woman into something rather grotesque as she spat through her teeth, ‘Win! Win! Damn you, win!’

The Sunday afterwards, Nell set out with her pannier containing her secateurs and trowels to tend the September Garden. She had an urgent desire to make up for its neglect so far this year. She saw it as a way of working through sadness, keeping busy. Mrs Bunting had suggested, referring darkly to the war effort, that she herself was digging for some sort of victory. Dahlias were still tight-budded, sleeping, but the chrysanthemums were coming on, boosted by the hot sun. Sunflowers were stretching upwards, their stalks thickening by the day, with their faces still curled over and blind. She plucked at the weeds, and eased out dandelions, while bees serenaded her, congregating over the pink flowers of the brambles.

On the drowsy air she heard the sound of a car on the drive and wondered lazily if Mrs Oliver or Miss Trenton were paying a visit. But they would walk, surely, on a day like this?

Then came the clunk of a car door, footsteps shifting the gravel. She turned, peeling off her gardening gloves, to see Alex Hammond standing at the entrance to the walled 
garden. His hands were in his pockets, his smile bright and expectant, his head cocked to one side in humorous anticipation.

She thought how lovely he looked; she wondered, then, how tall he might be, before asking herself why he was here, and not at the airfield. And why here, at Lednor, and not with his crewmates in the pub? After all, it was Sunday lunchtime.

In a flash, Nell got to her feet and cried, ‘Oh hello, I’m so glad you came,’ astonishing herself with her own unexpected delight.

‘Sorry if it’s a bit rich, me turning up out of the blue.’ He strode over to her. ‘But the day is so perfect, and, don’t you think, so much nicer for not sitting in a hole of a darkened cinema?’

She smiled warmly. Oh, she was so glad he had felt the same.

‘I had a day pass going begging, was idling about the mess and I thought, I know a girl who—’

He stopped himself. Nell wiped the back of her hand fearfully over her forehead, worried there might be a smudge of dirt there or something.

‘Who might like to take a walk with me.’

The way he suggested it gripped Nell with joy. Of course, a walk. Why didn’t they think of it before? She left her gardening stuff where it lay, and went out with him, across the gravel and up the lane.

‘What’s in your bag?’ she asked, matching his strides and feeling buoyant in the sunshine.

‘I’ve brought a flask of tea, and some sandwiches. If you hadn’t been home, or didn’t want to come out, then I’d 
have sat in the car like a lonely old soul, with a full stomach and not much to say for himself. I must say, it is sublime around here, isn’t it?’

‘This is where I go cycling. Not so much now that my job gets in the way of my fun.’ She felt proud to show him her valley. They climbed up, away from the Bottom. ‘This is where I once saw a little yellow bird.’

‘With a brownish rump? A yellowhammer? I’ve never spotted one.’

They stood by the stile at the oak meadow where the sheep grazed. The ford was a distant chunk of silver; the hillside was green and brilliant.

‘I wonder how long she has stood there, that oak, being home to so many blue tits,’ mused Alex.

‘Three hundred years, so my dad reckons,’ said Nell and then swallowed her shock at mentioning her father so casually. It didn’t feel normal to do so. ‘He always said how strange it is to stand in one place and look over one view for all those years. The things she must have seen. And look,’ Nell indicated the miniature oaks springing up in the meadow, ‘see her children are all around her.’

Alex looked at her. ‘Sorry if I am speaking out of turn,’ he said, ‘but I do hope that everything is settled now. That your mother is quite well after … after the rather unprecedented bonfire.’

Nell thanked him and said she appreciated that. She dipped her head, blushing, crushed into silence.

They walked on. It seemed to Nell that there was a relief settling over both of them; that they had at last mentioned the deranged episode of their first meeting where her mother acted fit for the lunatic asylum.

He opened his canvas bag and drew out a pair of binoculars.

‘Now I know you are a fellow birdspotter, let’s set ourselves a challenge. Five different species in half an hour.’

‘You’re on. Have you pen and paper, to write down the score?’

‘I do indeed. What do you take me for? And we have both to stay in one place, or it won’t be fair.’

Nell waded through the flat-faced daisies on the verge and climbed over the gate into the wheat field. The ears were tender, tight and green and, as the breeze caressed over them, stirring them, they whispered at her quite crisply. Alex followed her and they sat, as were the rules of his game, side by side in the short grass at the field bounds, their backs to the hedge of hazel, to watch for birds. He’d torn his notebook so they each had a piece of paper, and he produced two pencils from his pocket.

She teased him on how well prepared he’d come for an outing that may have proved completely fruitless. He assured her that, as an RAF man, he came prepared for anything.

‘Not sure this is the best of places,’ he said, lifting his cap to scratch his head.

‘Rubbish,’ she answered. ‘I know all the best places.’

They sat in silence, glancing this way and that like birds themselves, perched on a branch. Nell felt a little breathless; she was determined to win. Their companionable silence made her confidence fly. Each moment sitting next to him in the glorious sunshine was like a gilt-framed picture, captured for her for all time inside her head.

‘Well done. You win. I think it was the nuthatch that did it,’ conceded Alex, glancing at his watch a little while later. ‘Quite a scoop.’

‘I do work on a newspaper, you know,’ she laughed.

‘You know a great deal about birds, don’t you?’

‘That’s my dad,’ she said.

He’d taken off his cap and swept his dark hair back from his forehead. He looked sleek and far too good-looking, Nell decided, feeling shy again.

They retired to the shade of the hedge where curls of honeysuckle nudged through and spires of luminous wild pink foxgloves nodded a welcome. He broke out the sandwiches and poured the steaming tea. He lay down on his side, sleeves rolled up, propped on an elbow. She told him she’d wished she had brought her hat, for the sun was making her squint. He let her borrow his cap. It felt heavy, warm and rather comforting on her head.

‘Don’t let Winco see you,’ he smiled. ‘I’ll be booted out.’

They both fell quiet as they munched sandwiches.

Alex surveyed the field. ‘So beautiful, so brittle.’

She glanced at him and asked him what he meant.

‘What I mean is there’s a hard edge to all of this glory. The sky up there looks so benign … but things are hotting up. I don’t need to tell you, or anyone.’

Nell felt the war tap its finger on her shoulder. ‘But if you want to tell me … then I will listen.’

He looked at her with such open honesty that she was compelled to glance away.

‘Life expectancy is not good,’ he said. ‘For the likes of me.’

She struggled to form her next question into one worthy of his profound declaration.

‘For pilots, you mean?’

‘Yes and no. I mean, yes, I am a pilot and we have certain 
prospects that we have to accept go with the territory. And I always say I never want to be in tail-end Charlie’s spot. But, the
no
is that I am due to be posted elsewhere. Not as a pilot. For something … altogether different.’

‘You can’t tell me, can you?’ she said.

He shook his head.

The birds continued their business around them, instilling life into the air, the very fabric of the countryside. She thought of her father then, and experienced a spark of anger.

‘I think it’s horrific,’ she said. ‘Horrific that people have to go away. They are here, and then they go.’

‘Nell. I am so very sorry.’

She looked at his face and saw misery walk across his features.

He asked her if she was free next Saturday.

‘Mother needs me at the church fête. So not till after teatime.’