Bad Girls Good Women (69 page)

It was early evening when they reached Ladyhill. Long shadows lay beyond the stone gateposts and the avenue of trees, and midges hung in clouds in the patches of buttery sunlight. In the paddock beyond the trees Lily’s pony stood in the deep grass, idly swishing his tail.

‘I’m home,’ Lily shouted.

Alexander carried in her belongings while she made the circuit of the quiet house. He could hear her feet scrambling on the floorboards over his head, and the doors along the gallery banging in her wake. It was like having a crowd of people surging through the rooms, instead of one child.

Crowds of people. Mad parties
.

Abruptly, Alexander put down the armful of luggage. There was another housekeeper to take care of the house now, living in the rooms where Alexander and Julia had camped in the years just after the fire. She came through the inner door, looking for Lily, and Alexander shook off the memory of the crowds and the party. He told Mrs Tovey that Lily would have supper in an hour or so, when the excitement had worn off a little, and went into the drawing room to pour himself a drink.

The carved panelling, bought at a sale of the contents of a much grander house, had been ingeniously adapted by Felix. It looked as though it had never belonged anywhere but here, in this room, and the ceiling plaster had been replaced, remoulded to echo the motifs in the panelling. It had cost thousands of pounds. Alexander had met the bills, somehow, most recently by selling land. With the tumbler of whisky and soda in his hand he studied the room, instead of opening the newspaper.

Bits and pieces, he was thinking. Carefully put together to make the house look the same as it always had. He had given it all his attention, and there had been satisfaction in seeing the room finished, and the pieces of furniture being brought in, one by one, from the sales and auction rooms. There had been satisfaction, but it was a dry, finite sort of pleasure.

Drinking his evening whisky, alone in here, over the last few months Alexander had wondered whether the recreation of his childhood’s shell was a worthwhile achievement, or merely a refuge.

Lily’s reappearance broke the sombre chain of thought. She stood in the doorway, panting, her flushed face split by a huge smile. She ran across the room and rubbed her cheek against his, bumping and spilling some of his whisky.

‘I do love you.’

She ran out, and when she had gone he wondered why he hadn’t hugged her and told her that he loved her in return. Julia would have done. His own reluctance was his father’s legacy, his father’s and China’s.

Julia was never afraid to let her love show. The expression of it came naturally to her – the obviousness of her love for Josh Flood was what had hurt him so deeply long ago. He had seen another manifestation of it today as they stood on the pavement outside her house. Love radiated out of her, all directed at Lily. Julia had lost none of her directness over the years, nor any of the intensity of her reactions to the people she cared for. Her loves and fears and needs were as unconfined as they had always been, in contrast to his own, ever more carefully preserved invulnerability.

It was Julia’s clarity that made her lovable; he had loved it from the day Sophia brought her to meet him. The fresh recognition of it had made him want to kiss her today. He had wanted to do more than that, but her startled expression had convinced him that he should step back, return his hands to his pockets, and concentrate on Lily and the drive to Ladyhill.

And now he was home again, in his impeccable recreation of what had been before. Alexander stood up and walked to the window. The paving of the courtyard still shimmered with warmth. Beyond lay the yew trees and a sweep of gravel, then mown grass dipping into the shade of trees. Ladyhill was beautiful, but he knew that it needed Lily, other people too, to bring it alive. As Julia had said, long ago. Without them it was empty, dry of juice, like a museum. Like himself, Alexander reflected. He had turned forty. It seemed that the chances were all Lily’s now, not his own. He felt stiff, and awkward from having been absorbed in the house for too long, and dull from having worked too hard without diversion.

There had been other women, of course, since Julia had left. Two or three of them had been connected with the music business, but they had been based in London, and one of them in New York, and in the end the distances to be travelled and arrangements to be made had outweighed the satisfactions, and the affairs had petered out. After that there had been a local girl, the schoolteacher daughter of a doctor, and their discreet relationship had lasted more than a year. But in the end, with her charity projects and her community work and her noticeably proprietorial enthusiasm for Ladyhill, Jenny had reminded him much too strongly of his stepmother. Alexander had disentangled himself as gently as he could, and since then, for the last seven months, there had been no one at all.

He was lonely, but he reminded himself with irritation that he had no one to blame for that but himself. If he really wanted company, it wasn’t too difficult to find. Abruptly, he turned away from the window. Contemplation of Ladyhill’s summer evening tranquillity was giving him no satisfaction at all. Alexander went back to his chair, with its cushions covered in a needlepoint fragment rescued by Felix from a junkshop in Salisbury, and very deliberately picked up the newspaper.

Lily was here, at least, for the two months of the summer. Her warmth would animate the dry bones of the house.

He heard her coming back long before the hour was up. He put his paper down again, smiling, but when she burst into the room he saw that her face was red with anger, and smudged with the grubby marks of tears. ‘Those bungalows,’ Lily wailed.

Eighteen months ago, Alexander had sold six acres of land on the border of the estate with Ladyhill village. The land had been bought by a developer who had, in record time, sought planning permission for a small estate of eighteen bungalows. The local council had granted the permission, and the excavators and site levellers had moved in just after the end of Lily’s last stay at Ladyhill. The bungalows were almost complete now. They had steep pitched roofs and picture windows, and neat little plots of garden around the neat little boxy buildings. Two or three of them had been bought by young couples or pensioners from the village, but most of them would be occupied by incomers.

If he had had a choice, Alexander would have preferred the estate left unbuilt. He had put off the sale of the land for as long as possible, but the point had come when he knew he couldn’t undertake more work, and a further injection of cash into the house had been essential. The developer had paid very good money. The village had accepted the development as a symptom of modern times, and Alexander had got used to seeing it as it rose on what had once been open ground.

Lily’s outrage surprised him for a moment.

‘There are houses on our fields. And fences all round them.’

‘I know, I’m sorry, I should have told you about it.’

She stared at him, uncomprehending. ‘But why? What are they doing there?’

Alexander drew up a stool and made her sit on it, next to him. She perched on the edge of it, still watching him intently, as if her concentration could make the houses disappear.

‘You remember that there was a fire at Ladyhill, long ago, before you were born?’

Lily nodded impatiently. The fire was rarely mentioned. Almost all the talk she had half listened to as a child had been of mending and restoring. She had one fragment of a memory, of wandering in dark, crumbling places in the house that had smelt frighteningly, making her choke in the back of her throat. Then Julia had come from somewhere and lifted her up and taken her away.

‘The fire damaged the house very badly. It burned the beams that hold up the roof, and melted the lead of the windows and gutters. The smoke blackened everything, and the water the firemen used to put out the flames soaked the furniture and the pictures and the covers. Those that hadn’t already been burned.’

Lily watched her father, forgetting the bungalows for a moment. His voice was quite calm and level, describing the terrible things. He didn’t sound angry, or sad. Yet, for the first time, Lily imagined what it must have been like. A fire, with all the heat and greedy speed of logs blazing in the hearth, only a thousand times bigger. Running away, and devouring their house. She looked up, involuntarily, as if she expected to see the orange tongues of it licking over her head.

‘The fire was put out, of course,’ Alexander comforted her.

Lily looked down again, and saw the mysterious puckers of shiny pink and greyish skin on the backs of her father’s hands.

The truth suddenly fitted together, like an adult eye opening. ‘Your hands were burned.’

‘Yes. But I was lucky. They mended.’

‘Then what happened?’ Under the adult eye everything seemed clearer, but with cold, sharp edges.

‘Then the house needed to be mended. I wanted to make it the same as it was before. It’s taken a very long time, and a lot of money. The last money, because I couldn’t get it from anywhere else, came from selling the village fields. And the man who bought those fields has put up the houses for people to buy, and live in. People need houses, Lily.’

But she wouldn’t accept the sugaring of the pill. Her face turned red again and she was almost crying. ‘But they’re horrible. They’re like … like chickenpox. And you can see them from everywhere, once you get past the garden. That means they can see us. And I used to ride Marco Polo in those fields. I don’t want the houses there.’

‘Lily,’ Alexander said firmly. ‘Those houses are needed, and we needed the money that comes from having them there. I understand that you’re angry, and I’m sorry, because I should have warned you that they were being built. But you are also being selfish. You have plenty of room to play, and to ride your pony. We’re very lucky. Don’t forget that, will you?’

Lily raised her miserable face. ‘I didn’t mean that,’ she whispered. ‘They make everything different. You can’t stop looking at them, wherever you turn, because they’re so new. And … bare. I want everything to be the same for ever. And now it isn’t.’ Tears ran down her cheeks. She wasn’t nine any more, but a thwarted, uncomprehending baby.

‘Oh, Lily.’ Alexander put his arms round her. They felt as stiff as the rest of him. ‘Listen. I’ve spent years, almost all the time since you were born, think how long that is, trying to make Ladyhill the same as it was. So that it will go on for ever like it was when I was your age, for you, and your children. I’ve only just begun to realise that you shouldn’t try to make everything the same. It’s a … it’s a kind of weakness, wanting them to be. If you’re brave, braver than I am, you can let things change and make the best of them. Felix made the Long Gallery look beautiful with some of the land money, and I did all kinds of valuable things with the rest of it. Can you be glad about that, and try to accept the bungalows? I promise you, in a month or two you won’t even remember that they weren’t always there.’

‘I will,’ Lily said stubbornly, but she was scrubbing the tears away. ‘Yes, I will.’

She didn’t protest any more. Perhaps, Alexander thought, without Julia’s softness, that was a valuable lesson learned.

Lily had one more question. ‘Felix helped to mend Ladyhill, didn’t he? Why didn’t Julia?’

He paused for a moment, considering. Then he said, ‘Julia believed that I cared too much about it. In the end, because I didn’t make her happy, and neither did Ladyhill, she chose to go and live somewhere else. That was her right, you know. And we agreed to share you between us.’

Lily nodded, digesting the information. And then, surprising him, she asked, ‘You said that you weren’t brave. What would you have done if you were?’

‘I suppose I would have gone with Julia.’

Alexander wondered why it was easier to admit it to Lily than to himself.

Immediately, she said, ‘I’m glad you didn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, then we wouldn’t live here, would we?’

He smiled at her. ‘Is it so important?’

‘Of course it is. There’s nowhere in the whole world like Ladyhill.’

He looked at her eager, tear-grimy face. That was what he had wanted her to feel, wasn’t it? The satisfaction seemed less rounded than it might have done.

‘Go on,’ Alexander said gently. ‘Go up and wash your face. Then I think you should call in on Mrs Tovey. Your supper is probably ready.’

He telephoned Julia, to tell her that Lily was safely at Ladyhill. The conversation was brief. ‘Bon voyage,’ he said, at the end of it.

‘Thank you.’ There was a pause. ‘Alexander?’

‘Yes?’

Another pause. Then, ‘Nothing. I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter. Have a nice summer, both of you.’

The days of Lily’s holiday rapidly fell into their usual pattern. Alexander worked in the mornings while Lily went to see her friend Elizabeth, or Faye, or helped Mrs Tovey. In the afternoons the two of them picnicked, or walked, or swam in the river pool. Lily didn’t mention the bungalows again, but she refused to ride Marco Polo down there.

At the end of the first week, Felix arrived.

His visits were rare, now that the house was almost fully restored, but he still came for a few days in the spring, and again in the summer. He would bring pictures or rugs or pieces of porcelain, collected over the intervening months, for Alexander’s approval. Usually they were much too expensive, but they were always chosen with an exact niche in mind, and often looked so exactly right that Alexander ended up paying for them, protesting mournfully throughout. It was Felix’s achievement that Ladyhill glowed with more subtle splendour than it had ever done in Sir Percy Bliss’s dingy day.

And if the visits to Ladyhill weren’t strictly necessary any longer, Alexander understood that they gave Felix a proper pretext for leaving Eaton Square for a few days. George Tressider had developed a muscular disease that gave him considerable pain and limited his mobility. He suffered it tetchily. Felix ran the business and took care of George with perfect good humour, but they weren’t lovers any longer. Felix pursued his affairs discreetly but intently. Legality and opportunity were on his side, and the generous choice reminded him of Florence all those years ago. He didn’t come to Ladyhill in search of boys, however. There were enough of those in London. He came because he enjoyed the rosy, English beauty of the place, and because he and Alexander, for all their dissimilarity, had become friends.