Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
‘Oh no!’ said Ellen. ‘I’ve just scrubbed it.’
‘Quick, then. Tell me where the cloth is.’
‘Don’t bother, Miss Flora. I’ll do it much better.’
The last was true. Flora subsided and it was obvious to Ellen that she wanted to get out of the confining cottage: away from the china jugs and crocheted mantelpieces. Away from her guilt that her own body was young and healthy and Ellen’s was neither.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I’m not doing any good here. I’m just in your way.’
Ellen crouched painfully and scrubbed at the floor. ‘If you wouldn’t mind, then I could get on with Mr Sheppey’s tea.’
Flora met Robin letting himself in at the gate. He took one look at her face.
‘Not good, I imagine.’
‘I’m afraid I haven’t helped, Robin,’ said Flora. ‘Is it serious?’
Robin hesitated. ‘It’s possible,’ he said cautiously. ‘But I don’t think so. Poor Mrs Sheppey. Knees hurt and she’s never had an operation before.’
Flora kicked at a stone on the path. ‘Oh, Robin,’ she said. ‘She’s scrubbing the floor because I knocked over the tea.’
‘Well, it’s no use you getting in a state.’
Flora looked up at the sky bright with July sun and felt the breeze on her face. ‘How do you cope with things like this? Particularly when they’re really bad.’
‘I’m not sure that I do.’
When Robin put his head round the kitchen door, Ellen was still chasing tea puddles on the floor. Because it was an effort to pull herself upright, she called out, ‘Come in.’
He closed the door gently behind him. ‘I’ve arranged a hospital bed for you, Mrs Sheppey. I’m pleased about that. Only a few years ago I would have been operating on your kitchen table.’
Ellen glanced up at her things: the jug, the rugs, the kitchen range where Ned’s supper was cooking. If I have to be carved up, she thought, I’d prefer it here.
Robin made no attempt to help her up but asked if he could sit down. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s often the little things that bother patients when they go into hospital. So I thought I’d come and see if there’s anything I can tell you.’
Ellen spotted a suggestion of tea on the floor and bent to annihilate it — and a disconcerting flash that she had had her life made her heart beat harder.
‘What’s the morgue like?’ she said, groping for the edge of the table and hauling herself up.
‘Freshly painted, as it happens.’
Her laugh grated on both of them. ‘That’s one up on us. Ned has promised me for years that we could repaint.’
‘Well, he’d better do it, since you won’t be seeing the morgue.’
She twisted the floor rag between her hands. ‘Do they look at you with nothing on?’
‘Not unless they have to. You must remember that they’re trained to look at bodies differently.’
‘What happens if I talk in my sleep?’
‘They are under oath not to repeat confidences.’ Robin felt in his pocket for his pipe. ‘I would almost think you had a conscience, Ellen.’
Ellen flashed back at him, ‘If you’re trying to winkle my secrets out of me, Dr Lofts, you’ll get nowhere.’
‘Now, why would I do that?’
She stood, hands on hips, and smiled for the first time since she had gone into the surgery. She understood Dr Lofts and she fancied he understood her. ‘You look in need of tea, Dr Lofts.’
Robin Lofts knew that most people carry secrets, that Ellen would not be exempt — and he had no intention of ever asking...
At night, things are not so ordered and Ellen’s memories twisted a skein of disorderly echoes through her sleep and half wakings. Doused in sun, for it had been high summer, or in the magic of a summer dusk, the memories pulled Ellen back to the time when she lived with an unaccustomed exhilaration in her breast.
Oh, nothing had happened. Nothing bad, that is. Nothing that Betty – who had already left when Bill came into Ellen’s life — or Ned could accuse her of.
Nonsense, said the shadowy figure (which she thought sometimes was God or a queasy conscience), who hung over her sleep. You have sinned with your mind if not with your body, all because of a slow, serious smile and a cap of fair hair above a stocky body which turned her guts to water.
Among other things, that was what the war had changed.
Bill and his men had been on a route march: down Jackall’s Hill, past the Horns, left at the watercress bed and fallen to up Redlands Lane. Pulled by mules, the soup kitchen trundled behind them and came to a halt by the stile.
The men were queuing with their mess tins when Ellen lifted her skirts and swung a leg over the stile. She met Bill’s gaze full on. Steam from the soup kitchen meandered upwards and the cabbage in the boiling liquid was as pungent as she had ever smelt it. And Bill smiled.
After that, Bill had often walked up to Redlands Lane in his spare time where the women were working the osiers. White osiers, Ellen explained, had been soaked in the pond over the winter and stripped. The dries were used to give contrast in the baskets. Brown ones were kept for bicycle or dog baskets and garden chairs. These were boiled in the hop kiln by the Plume of Feathers and steam often blotted out the bottom end of the village.
White were the nicest, she said. Just like your skin, he said, and touched the inside of her wrist with the tip of his finger. Her forty-year-old heart jumped as if it had had an electric shock.
How many children have you got? she asked. Only one, he replied. And that made a bond between them.
Ellen never dared to ask what happened to Bill and the boys after they had been ordered out, almost certainly to the front in France, leaving her heart to beat normally again and her emotions to rearrange themselves around a space in her life.
Dreams won’t be ordered. Occasionally Ellen went with Bill to France, and dreamt of the horror there. She saw him, in a water-filled trench shouting at his men, watched him go over the top and weave over the pocks and dents, past the petrified remains of the trees into the gunfire.
She never got further than that. Bill and she were unfinished business, and she never questioned that it had to be so.
That night Ellen woke up in the dark. Beside her Ned breathed noisily. The doctor had said
not
to worry and she set herself the task of controlling her fear.
Telegrams backed up by letters arrived from Kit at regular intervals.
GONE TO CHARLESTON STOP THEY STILL TALK OF CIVIL WAR AND YANKEES STOP NEW ORLEANS NEXT STOP
‘Where’s the atlas?’ Flora asked. ‘I thought Kit was only going to visit New York and Los Angeles.’
‘He was,’ said Matty. ‘New Orleans is in the opposite direction.’
‘Correct.’
‘Then why?’
‘Obviously the mood took him,’ replied Matty, who wanted to ask the same question.
‘Oh, well, he always did have the luck.’
NEW ORLEANS HOT HOT STOP JAZZ STOP GHOSTS RESTAURANTS AND DECAY STOP DOUGHNUT AT CAFE DU MONDE STOP DINNER AT ANTOINES STOP
Flora looked down at her hips. ‘At least it won’t be me getting fat.’
‘No,’ said Matty.
As always, Kit’s letters were stuffed with observation and topographical information and said nothing about himself. America was not one country, he scrawled in one. It’s many. Down South, he went on, they are still living the great days when the Mason-Dixon line held and General Sherman had not yet burned his way through Georgia... slave cabins behind moss-draped antebellum mansions and people have very long memories.
It’s hot, reported a letter begun boldly in New Orleans and finished irritably in Los Angeles. (Kit was nursing an almighty hangover and a paradoxical relief at having let his hair down at last.) The New Orleans hotel was in the French quarter and boasted wrought-iron gates in the shape of a cornstalk fence and the ghost of a slave woman tortured to death by her mistress. The city reeked of history, voodoo and sex.
In California it was hotter still and heat massed in walls over the cotton fields. News was not good. The crash and the depression had dealt near death blows to the country. The value of stock was rock bottom. Buildings were empty. Rich men had turned into tramps and, as ever, the poor starved. For many, the diet consisted only of corn, nuggets of fatback pork and a few vegetables. On the prairies, the bread baskets of America, a drought had set in and the sky billowed with black dust rollers – or, as the locals called them, he said, ‘the wrath of God’.
The film industry, however, was flourishing. Which, Kit finished, was extremely good news and he would explain why when he returned. He signed off by saying that he looked forward to seeing Matty, hoped that Rupert was stable, and he would be home in mid-August on the
Île de France.
Matty read the last letter in the garden. A light wind ruffled the onion-skin sheets covered with Kit’s impatient writing. She looked up. Some of God’s wrath was gathering over Hampshire and a summer storm threatened to break the long spell of fine weather which had held through July.
She folded the letter and put it away in her jacket pocket. Kit seemed remote and, if she was truthful, Matty had enjoyed the break. For a little while she could be herself, free from hungering, free from watching Kit, from puzzling out ways to reach him, from trying to plait together the threads of a marriage. On a summer afternoon in a garden with plenty to do, there was everything to be said for the ease of solitariness.
Matty leant back against the statue. The corner of the plinth stuck into her bottom and made a greenish mark on her skirt.
Too bad, she thought. She had put on weight and under the material her thighs splayed against the stone. How satisfactory that was, and she poked one experimentally in the soft upper part and admired the indentation.
Direct as ever, Flora had already told Matty how much better she looked. ‘Pinker and less breakable. Less lost.’ (Less like a doll, Flora had wanted to say but desisted.)
A little self-conscious but pleased, Matty put up a hand to her hair and tugged at it. ‘Do you like my hair?’ she asked.
Flora took half a minute to answer. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s too crimped and too short. I think you would look better with long hair, Matty. Why don’t you grow it?’
‘If you think so, I will.’ Always well dressed, Matty’s confidence and flair for design did not always extend to herself, and she liked to ask advice. As she feared, the hairdresser in Farnham had not been up to the challenge of limpish hair but Matty did not mind Flora’s bluntness – rather, she was pleased that her sister-in-law felt close enough to be honest.
‘By the way,’ Flora stopped prowling, ‘where do you go to in the afternoons, Matty?’
Tempted by the idea of exchanging a confidence, Matty’s resolve wavered before Flora’s interested gaze. Then the habit of secretiveness asserted itself. No, she thought. The garden is mine. ‘Nowhere,’ she answered. ‘I walk a lot. To get healthy, you know. Dr Lofts said.’
‘Divine,’ said Flora, who was not fooled. ‘A woman with a secret.’
‘Very funny,’ said Matty.
‘Aha,’ said Flora in a knowing way, and went off for a ride singing Al Jolson’s ‘You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet’ to the tune of ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.
Matty smiled at the recollection and felt in her other pocket for the list she had made earlier. According to the catalogue issued by the Old Rose Garden in Colchester, ‘Transom’, an apple-scented coppery rose, would climb to fifteen feet or so. Matty levered herself upright from the statue and squinted at the wall behind the flowerbed. She knew that the orange-red spectrum in roses was fashionable just now and Ned approved them. (‘They warm me up,’ he said. ‘I like flowers with a bit of bottom, like.’) Matty saw his point, but could not match his enthusiasm and crossed ‘Transom’ off her list. Blush-pink ‘Himalayan Musk’ sounded nicer. She wrote that down instead and added to a second column ‘Metro Sulphate’ which
Popular Gardening
assured her was ‘Gentle Dame Nature’s Favourite Plant Food’, now available in dried crystals.
Underneath that she wrote ‘trowel’ and ‘Eureka weed killer’, decided that enough was enough and returned the list to her pocket.
‘Watch Out For Disease In Your Roses’ also figured in
Popular Gardening.
Matty was taking the warning seriously for her roses had been chosen with care, obtained with effort and planted entirely by herself. Ned had also given her a lesson on the subject and, mindful of his warnings, she knelt down beside the newly planted roses to search for the exotica of mildew, black spot and leaf scorch.
Something else Ned had said came back. Matty examined a leaf on the ‘Fantin Latour’. What was it? Her finger hovered over a colony of greenfly massing on the underside. ‘They were very alike to look at,’ he had said. ‘Lady Dysart was not the same after he was killed. Very fond of him, she was.’
Matty swept her finger over the greenfly and a mass of dead and dying insects clung stickily to it. She stared at the massacre, surprised that she did not feel any remorse.
Those letters. They must have been written by Edwin who loved his sister, and she him. Had they always been so fond of each other? Was
that
why Hesther had been sent to England to find a husband?
If that was the case, how stupid, Matty thought. Hesther would have been lonely over here in a foreign land. Exile is no cure for anything if you are not happy. Had Rupert known? And was that why he had written ‘Bitch’ on the letter and thrown his dead wife’s effects into the trunk?
Did loving your brother over your husband (over your children?) count as a disease, and how did you exorcize it?
Two ounces of soft soap in five pints of water, with one ounce of permanganate of potash crystals stirred into the lather killed the rust spore. Matty had that formula off pat: Ned had made her learn it. She had sat on the bench in his gloomy office, legs swinging, until she was word perfect. Ned’s garden lore was precious, and Matty was not going to waste any of it. Anyway, she could tell Ned liked teaching her, and pleasing an elderly man who missed his daughter was simpler than most things in her life.
Matty moved on to the problem of rose suckers. The sucker may look good to the inexperienced gardener, warned
Home Gardener’s Year,
but they are briar growths, stronger and more vigorous than the cultivated rose grafted onto them. Leave a briar shoot unchecked and it will kill off the rose proper whose place it is usurping. In other words,
Home Gardener’s
doom-tinged prose suggested, the rose will revert to the wild. Once that has happened, it is too late to save it.