Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
Kit asked himself often if his father’s attitude stemmed from mere bloody-mindedness or whether he disliked his children so much that he was not prepared to yield them any autonomy. If asked, Rupert might have told his son that nothing was more certain to needle middle age into bloody-mindedness than keen, competent youth, and that Kit could wait his turn.
‘Can I interrupt?’ Flora was a little breathless.
‘If you must, Flora.’ Reluctantly, Rupert acknowledged his daughter’s presence. I wish, thought Flora not for the first time, that money had never been invented. ‘Is it urgent?’ he asked, resuming his contemplation of the kitchen courtyard through the window. Caught at certain angles, his daughter’s face rang a peal of distress and guilt in Rupert’s memory, so he tended to avoid looking at it.
‘Kit. Father. Mrs Chudleigh has asked us to join a houseparty near Antibes for the summer. What do you think?’
Kit leant back against the chair struts with just a hint of triumph. ‘I thought she might.’
‘
Kit!
’
He rolled the pencil across a bill. ‘It doesn’t take much to work out Mrs Chudleigh.’
‘Awful woman, fit only for neutering,’ commented his father from his position at the window. Rupert was sometimes surprisingly coarse. ‘I suppose you want to go?’
Kit’s expression became quite still. Watchful, even.
‘If you don’t want us to, Father,’ said Flora quickly, ‘we won’t.’
‘Well, I would like to go.’ Kit mouthed ‘Shut up’ to Flora, and addressed his father’s turned back, a stonewalling tactic of Rupert’s that he and Flora knew well.
‘Sir,’ said Kit. ‘Why don’t you nip up to Ardtornish for some stalking? The change will do you good.’
It was at this point that Flora realized how important the outcome was for her brother. Troubled and a little apprehensive, she looked at her watch. ‘I must go. I have masses to do.’
‘You have a standing invitation, sir,’ Kit pressed on. ‘You told me that yourself.’
Kit had calculated correctly: the idea of damp, peaty Highlands, sweeping palls of rain, sodden ferns and mosses and the rusty, almost blood-coloured water of the Morven peninsula diverted Rupert. ‘I might do that,’ he said. ‘I could take Danny.’
He and Flora had won, but it was prudent not to linger on the subject. Kit pulled the account book towards him and resumed their previous conversation. ‘Shall we sell the Lady Meadow then, sir?’
‘No.’ Lighter than his son’s, Rupert’s blue eyes assumed a belligerent expression. ‘Never sell your land. You must cling on to it, even if the ship is sinking. Do you understand?’
Rupert was about to climb on his hobby horse, and to forestall this Flora intervened. ‘If we’re short of money why don’t we ask Cousin Andrew in Boston to help us? We all know he has pots.’
As soon as she had spoken, Flora knew the extent of her stupidity. Cousin Andrew was second cousin to their dead mother, rich, condescending, and as unlikely to dispense charity as Rupert wished to receive it.
‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ said Kit, shooting a look at his sister which asked, Why undo my good work?
‘No,’ said Flora.
Rupert whipped round and wrenched the pipe out of his mouth. Flora felt her stomach dive at the prospect of a confrontation. But all Rupert said was, ‘That’s enough, Flora. As usual you speak out of turn.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, and again looked at her watch without seeing it. ‘I didn’t think. I mean, it was just Cousin Andrew—’
‘Cousin Andrew has nothing to do with us,’ said her father, in the way he had of dismissing something of no account, and Flora felt even more miserable. She looked at Kit for help but he jerked his head towards the door. The message was unmistakable: Leave Father to me.
‘Go away,’ said Rupert. ‘We are busy.’
Nothing was ever said, but it was there, always there: the tissue of misunderstanding, of habit hardened into the immutable, of repression and unshriven grief. Plait unravelling, hands bunched inside her cardigan pockets, Flora hovered on one foot then another. Too young at eighteen, too inexperienced and lacking in knowledge to untie the threads that tangled her family, she grasped at the only available straw.
‘Well, France will be lovely,’ she said brightly.
At Eton Kit had been solitary but not in the sense that he had no friends. A cricketer, regular overspender in ‘sock’, prize winner for the English essay, and witty in a dry, subversive manner, he attracted the attention of other boys. Onlookers never knew what to expect. Sometimes, Kit was a ringleader in the thick of it, sometimes so cool and distant that he barely spoke. Other times, at crucial points, he hesitated, felled by an inner crisis, and if he got away with this failure of nerve with the boys, it infuriated the masters who expected better of a boy so promising.
He left Eton unscathed by the attitude of his friends, some brilliant, who regarded the College and Oxbridge afterwards as the glittering prize in life. For that instinctive recoil, Kit was grateful. He looked forward, not back. He did not like to look back. Ever.
Chimeras, however, have many forms, and Kit’s visited him in the summer of 1926. Riding with Max Longborough from Constantinople to the Yemen over fever-ridden plains, through mountain defiles, past starvation and poverty, and places where flowers grew through eyesockets in skulls by the wayside, he had fallen in love with the Middle East and, above all, with the desert. Max and he had been hungry, dry-lipped, sand-blind and thirsty, but the desert’s harshness and its demands had slipped into Kit’s bloodstream and flowed alongside his rootedness in Hinton Dysart. Should he, could he, settle there instead? Kit wrestled often with the idea – but to abandon his home
would
be to cut out his bone.
Provence in August reminded Kit of the Middle East – almost. There was the same clear, intense air coruscating a terrain that had not seen rain for months, and the same heartless expanse of enamel sky with scrub etched below, blanching to white in the dawn. There the similarities ended. Provence was languorous with scent: resin, crushed thyme, garlic and new bread, hot stone and hot earth. At night cicadas played until the sun slid round the corner of the Villa Lafayette and laid a finger of light on the turquoise swimming pool and the carved stone pot planted with geraniums.
From his bedroom window, Kit stood naked and watched the sun and smoked his first cigarette of the day. It was five thirty in the morning and it had been too hot to sleep much that night. He stretched until his bones cracked, reached for his bathing costume and, towel over his shoulder, walked barefoot along the ‘boys’ wing’ and let himself out of the house.
He padded along the terrace and looked up at Daisy’s window. Villa Lafayette was a two-storeyed house with shuttered windows which had been left to weather in peace for generations until the South of France began to be fashionable. Luckily, the original tiles and the archways had survived the frantic installation of new bathrooms, a billiard room, and the all-white decor so fashionable just now.
There was a trace, the merest hint, of chill as Kit slid into the pool and struck out for the far end. Bubbles of light broke across his vision, and the water parted with a slap. At the end, he turned and began the second lap. When he surfaced Daisy was waiting.
She had on a bathing robe of cornflower blue that exaggerated the colour of her eyes and emphasized her chestnut hair. ‘Shush.’ She placed a finger on her lips and then pointed at the house.
He trod water and looked up. During a wakeful night he had visualized Daisy’s slender but full-bosomed body in detail, and wondered if anyone else found the combination of its voluptuousness and the suggestion of boyishness in her forthright manner as fascinating as he did. He hauled himself over the edge, sat down beside her, scraped back his hair and pinched his nose.
‘Isn’t this fun?’ Daisy leant back on her hands and let her feet dangle in the water.
Kit smoothed the hairs on her goosefleshed forearm with a finger. ‘What are you doing up so early? I imagined you treasured the beauty sleep.’
‘I was waiting for you.’
‘Good.’
‘It’s going to be hot again.’
‘Whenever is it not?’
Daisy lifted her cooled feet onto the stone, and clasped her knees. ‘I love the heat. I love the smells. I love being here.’
‘
Nothing
to complain of?’ Kit observed the bit of Daisy’s neck which ran up into her bobbed hair.
‘Why should there be?’ Daisy hesitated while she decided whether to be frank or not. ‘Except for the bad stomach when I arrived.’
‘I suffered in Constantinople, and there were no bathrooms to speak of.’
She smiled uncertainly at the intimacy of the subject. ‘Will you go back?’
‘I’m tempted to spend my time travelling. But there is the house to think of.’
Daisy surprised Kit with her next comment. ‘You need an anchor, Kit Dysart. Otherwise you are the sort that drifts for ever.’
He sat up, intrigued by the novelty of her viewpoint, and considered it rather profound. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Am I right?’
‘I don’t know, Daisy.’
‘I am right,’ she said simply. Daisy was on territory that she understood. It was not a knack she was particularly proud of because it was no effort: the instinct to form these conclusions was something she happened to possess.
‘Perhaps,’ he said.
The sun whitened the stone coping bordering the pool, and spread across their backs. A hush had fallen, the anticipatory moment before the sun gripped the day. Already brown, Kit’s skin was silky and warm-looking and Daisy wanted to touch it. She turned her head to look at him.
‘An anchor?’ he said, and Daisy suddenly shivered.
‘Shush,’ she said again, and glanced at the house. ‘They might hear us.’
Matty looked out from the bedroom she shared with Daisy. Woken by the echo of voices over the water, she got up to investigate and regretted it. As she watched, Kit leapt up and pulled Daisy to her feet. She gazed at him with the look that, Matty knew, drew the recipient into an intimacy impossible to resist. Daisy struggled for balance on the stone and her robe fell open to reveal a well-worn bathing costume – but it never mattered what Daisy wore, for she wore anything well. Kit tugged at the robe, Daisy resisted, then pulled it off and dropped it into the pool. She stood, laughing at Kit, her hair a bright splash of colour, before slipping into the water. Kit followed and pulled her, a wet, chestnut Nereid, towards him, and the space between their faces narrowed and blotted out. Like a huge flower, the robe billowed and sank.
Matty allowed the muslin curtain to drop back into place and sat down on her bed. The sheets were damp and crumpled from the night, most of which she had spent sweating and staring into the darkness. The heat made her breathless and dark circles had formed under her eyes within days of their arrival. She noticed with distaste the beginnings of a pink heat rash on her arms.
She went into the bathroom, ran the cold tap and threw her nightdress onto the floor. The bath was far too big, and she was forced to stretch out her foot, ballerina fashion, to steady herself, but the water was life-savingly cool. Taking a deep breath, she slid under the surface and stayed there as long as she could.
The old dream of her parents had returned during the night, of the last time she ever saw them when Matty was five. Mounted on their Arab mares which they had bred at the family home in Damascus, their well-bred faces matched their tailored khaki desert suits. Her mother carried her notebook filled with jottings on flora and fauna — Matty still had it – and her father’s saddlebag bulged with empty specimen jars. In her dream, she watched them ride the horses up the sand dune and pick their way along the crest and knew, from her dream vantage point, that they had forgotten all about their daughter.
Matty surveyed her outstretched foot. She was not sure if she could ever forgive Stephen and Jocasta Verral for making it obvious to her at that moment that she was not important to them — nor had Matty’s need for them struck them either. Particularly when they lay dying, in a stuffy tent, of typhoid picked up by drinking bad water at the Sann’aa oasis.
Matty sat up straight in the bath and addressed her parents’ bodies laid out on Army and Navy camp beds as she had last seen them. ‘I never knew you were so small, Mother, but I expect that is the effect of death. We all shrink in death, I suppose. I just want to say that, somehow, I will be a credit. I’m making a muck of it at the present, I know, but I’ve just got to grow older. I’m trying. It’s partly the result of missing you, partly because I don’t think either of you gave me your best gifts, just a mixture of the bad.’ She paused and then added, ‘You have no idea what it is like to be left alone.’
The bath towel, huge and white, enveloped Matty. It ruffled along the ground as she waddled into the bedroom. The day ahead seemed a long one, full of noise. Flora’s jolliness. Marcus’s practical jokes. Her aunt’s ever-present cool contempt. Kit and Daisy. The towel drifted to the floor and Matty allowed herself to look out through the window.
The pool was empty with only the scarlet comma of a stray geranium petal to break its glassiness.
With her pleated cotton skirts and geometrically patterned tops, her cheap straw hats which she turned into the impossibly chic, and her trick of making people want to look at her, Daisy dominated the holiday. They were young and, Matty excepted, full of energy, and Daisy led them, with Kit a close collaborator, on swimming parties, picnics and evening expeditions up scree-peppered paths and over aromatic scrub where they walked for miles along the cliffs, watching the sun slide under a darkening sea.
It was too hot one evening to go far and they sat down to rest. Thyme and sage scented the air and in the water below fish pushed in and out of the rocks. Marcus sat on a rock by the cliff edge and tossed stones into the water below. Flora passed him ammunition and rubbed a twig of thyme between her fingers. Even at six o’clock the sun was still fierce and she pulled her hat down over her face. It allowed her to watch Marcus who was beginning to intrigue her, and she wondered what went on behind his clean, English complexion and impeccably trimmed moustache.