1969
On Sunday mornings, the house filled with the sound of church bells, as if it stood on some village green, instead of in a London terrace. In fine weather, the sun reflected off the canal and cast ripples of light on the tall ceilings, heightening the rural atmosphere.
Julia stood at the long window on the half-landing, looking down into the little garden. The daffodils in the tubs had faded, but the muscari still lay in sheets of Oxford blue. In the shade beneath the fences were the plum-dark clumps of hellebores, to Julia the most beautiful of all flowers, Around them, overnight competition for the unemphatic hellebores, were the new spikes of brash green growth. At the end of the garden was the Regent’s Park Canal and the willows along the towpath showed the first pale fronds of green.
The house was quiet, except for the bells. Julia stood watching the water and the movement of the leaves, and when the bells had wound after each other through the last peal and into humming silence, she turned away from the window and went slowly downstairs. As it always did, the scented, insistent stirring of English springtime made her feel restless.
The ground floor had been opened out, at Felix’s suggestion, into one big, L-shaped space, kitchen and living room and dining room all together. There was a chesterfield under the tall windows that looked out over the garden, and an old pine table with a wicker-shaded lamp pendent above it. The sun shone in through the windows that faced on to the quiet street, making yellow squares on the floor, and the stripped and polished boards felt warm under Julia’s bare feet.
Lily was sitting at the table, in the T-shirt she slept in instead of pyjamas, reading. She looked up when Julia came in. Her hair was cut short now, emphasising the shape of her face. Lily was almost nine, and the adult lines were beginning to emerge from the babyish roundness. Her colouring was her mother’s but her features, even to the high bridge of her nose, were Alexander’s. She resembled him in other ways, too. She could be reserved to the point of detachment, and then blaze into sudden anger. Alexander and his daughter were very close. Julia and Alexander had been divorced for four years but with Lily she lived, schizophrenically, with his constant presence.
‘I’ve had my breakfast,’ Lily said.
‘That’s good,’ Julia answered, refusing to interpret her daughter’s words as a complaint or as a criticism of her own late appearance. Some days, they could make the simplest remark into material for a battle. Not today, Julia thought, not with the spring sun shining. On good days, Lily’s company was more enjoyable than anyone else’s. Julia went to the hob to heat herself up some leftover coffee. Lily had brought in the Sunday newspapers and they were lying in a neat pile on the table. With her mug of coffee in one hand, Julia flipped through them. Then she stopped short. Mattie’s face stared up at her from the cover of the Sunday Times magazine. The picture must have been taken last year, in Mattie’s high hippy phase. Her hair was knotted with flowers and colourful scarves, and she was wearing some sort of flowing ethnic robe. Julia looked at it carefully, and then held it up for Lily to see. ‘Look at this.’
Lily’s face broke into smiles. She loved Mattie. ‘Hey, that’s great. D’you think Marilyn’s seen it? Shall I take it down?’
The basement of the house was Marilyn’s separate domain. Hastily, Julia said, ‘Wait until I’ve read the article. Anyway, it’s a bit early for Marilyn on a Sunday.’
She wasn’t quite sure who Marilyn might have down there with her, and she preferred Lily not to know either. Or at least, to appear not to know. There was very little going on around her that Lily missed.
‘What’s it say?’ Lily asked now. They sat down side by side on the chesterfield and read the piece together. It was a standard showbiz interview, pegged to the release of Mattie’s latest film. It touched only lightly on Mattie’s reputation as a feminist and political activist, and made no mention of her private life at all. Julia guessed that her PR agent had seen to that. The interviewer did retell the story of her Oscar nomination for her last role as the heroine of a lush Thomas Hardy adaptation. Mattie had made no secret of her intention to refuse the reward as a protest against American involvement in Vietnam, but in the event the Oscar had been shared by Woodward and Streisand, and Mattie had been deprived of the chance to make her defiant gesture.
‘Not very interesting,’ Lily pronounced. ‘It doesn’t make her sound like Mattie.’
‘These things never do,’ Julia answered. ‘Not to those of us who know her.’
She closed the magazine again and studied Mattie’s face. Seeing it there reminded her of Mattie’s first spurt of fame, with One More Day. Kitchen sink dramas, and Jimmy Proffitt. How long ago, and how quaintly archaic, viewed through the distorting glass of the Sixties. Julia remembered how equivocal she had felt about Mattie’s success, and how guilty for not being able to rejoice completely. She was just married to Alexander then, just pregnant with Lily. Before the fire. When Ladyhill was seemingly invulnerable, and Flowers was still alive.
Julia tried to remember why her memories were of unhappiness. I could have been happy. There was no reason not to be, except for Josh.
When she thought of him now, still too often, it was with a mixture of impatience and scepticism, but with much more powerful elements of sadness and loss. There was a kind of reverence, too, for something that had once been valuable, and was still too precious to bundle up and throw away like an outmoded dress.
She hadn’t seen Josh since the days in the little white house that had marked the effective end of her marriage to Bliss. Julia frowned at the rawness of the memory. They had written to each other, once in a while, but they had never met. Strangely, Julia had once been invited to a party in the little mews house. She had recognised it with a painful shock. Josh’s friends, whoever they were, must have sold up and moved on long ago. The white walls had been overpainted with psychedelic designs and the white furniture had been replaced with Afghan rugs and beaded cushions. The cushions had come from Julia’s shop. The new owners were customers of hers. The odd cycles that life moved in. Julia felt old as she leaned forward and laid the magazine on the floor; Mattie still stared at her sideways through the tangled hair and scarves.
At least, she reflected, she felt only pride and pleasure in Mattie’s success nowadays. Perhaps greater equanimity was one of the few compensations for getting older. At the height of a generation’s youth-worship, to turn thirty had seemed almost a criminal offence. And Julia had her own success, too. If she was neither as rich nor as famous as Mattie, she was at least established and comfortably off. She had opened a second Garlic & Sapphires in Kensington High Street, then others in Brighton and Oxford. Astutely Julia had recognised the appeal of Eastern mysticism almost as soon as the Maharishi did. She travelled to India and on to Afghanistan, buying up the necessary beads and fringes, mirrorwork fabrics and tinkling bells. The prevailing scent in Garlic & Sapphires now was slow-burning joss sticks. Even the shop name, so ridiculous to her first bank manager, had the right hippy-mystical overtones.
Julia travelled widely, searching out stock, leaving the shops in the care of capable managers and Lily in the care of Marilyn or Alexander, depending on whether it was term time or holidays. Marilyn had come to Gordon Mansions and she had stayed. She was neither a nanny nor a companion nor a housekeeper, but she was good for Lily and, in her own way, she managed to organise the house in NW1 that Julia had bought with her business profits.
Usually, Julia and Marilyn worked together amicably. Julia could make up the domestic shortcomings herself, shopping when Marilyn had forgotten to do it, scrubbing the bathroom floor when she could no longer stand the grime.
‘I’m glad you’re not my real wife, Marilyn,’ she would joke, still able to acknowledge that the younger sister’s presence, a pale imitation of Mattie even down to the domestic slovenliness, was welcome for the sake of the reminder. Especially when Mattie was away, which she often was. It was only over Lily that they disagreed. Once, at the beginning, Julia had had to work late even though Lily had been ill with a feverish cold. She had come home to find the Gordon Mansions flat empty. She had leapt to the conclusion that Lily must be worse, and that Marilyn must have rushed to the doctor’s with her. She was dialling the surgery number when the two of them came in. They had been out to a boxing match. Marilyn’s current love was an amateur boxer, and they had been to see him fight at a hall in Finsbury. Lily had sat on Marilyn’s knee in the front row and had been petted and fussed by all the managers and their female hangers-on. Her eyes were wide open with excitement and the reflected drama.
‘She enjoyed it,’ Marilyn said. ‘Made her forget her cold. Dave won his bout.’
Julia was furiously angry, and she had vented it on Marilyn. ‘You’re not fit to look after a child,’ she had stormed. ‘You’re thoughtless and selfish and careless.’
But Marilyn had retaliated. She had drawn herself up, looking even more like Mattie, and shouted back, ‘I’m fitter than you are. And you’re supposed to be her mother. Never here, are you? You put your shop first, and your own life, don’t you? Don’t think you can tell me off, just for taking her to see a fight. You could take her a few more places yourself, only you’re afraid she’ll be a nuisance.’
They had stared at each other, shocked into mutual silence.
She’s right, Julia had thought. Half right.
The over-familiar chains of guilt, self-justification and fierce love had clanked morbidly around her. Only it wasn’t that she didn’t want Lily with her. The truth was that she wanted to keep her apart from Thomas Tree. Thomas was her mother’s lover, but Julia believed that the empty space of father, for Lily, could only properly be occupied by Alexander. She didn’t want Thomas even to begin to usurp that place, even if Lily might have let him. She kept her loyalties to Lily and to Thomas separate, doubling her obligations and the necessary efforts to fulfil them. Even when Thomas had lived with them in the house overlooking the canal, she had tried, deviously, to keep a space between them. Julia knew that was one of the reasons why Thomas had moved out, almost two years ago.
‘We just split,’ she told her friends, anyone who asked, even Mattie. ‘One of those things. Time to move on, you know?’
Back at the beginning, Julia had accepted Marilyn’s criticism. It had never been mentioned again, but she never forgot it. On her part, Marilyn tried harder to fulfil Julia’s conventional ideas of how Lily should be looked after.
All through that one argument that they had had in front of her, Lily had watched them in silence. Even then, she seemed to have the mature ability to watch, and assimilate, and judge for herself. Lily’s ideas and opinions were always all her own. Julia was sometimes frightened by the vehemence of them, more often made angry by her calm stubbornness. She was like Alexander in that, too.
‘What are you thinking about, Mum?’ Lily stretched her legs, hitching the T-shirt around her. She was already tall for her age; she would have long legs and a slim figure. Teazle, the fat little pony kept at Ladyhill for her to ride, had long ago been replaced by a neat cob that Lily adored. There was a photograph of Lily cantering, in a hard hat and a hacking jacket, in a silver frame on the mantelpiece. Julia joked about it and called it the National Velvet, but she was proud of the picture.
‘What am I thinking about? Nothing. Time. Getting old. Boring things like that.’
Lily looked critically at her. ‘You aren’t old. Not compared with some people’s mothers. You’re still quite with it.’
‘Thank you, darling.’
Lily was fidgeting, pirouetting around the room, picking things up and putting them down again.
‘What can we do today?’
Julia sighed. Sundays like this one should be peaceful, empty of obligations. But Lily needed to be busy. Julia knew where her daughter’s restlessness came from.
‘We could ring someone up; ask some people to come to lunch. Would you like that?’
There were plenty of friends. She had made sure that the house was always welcoming, that it was often filled with people who came to eat and to talk. Nor, after the years that had just gone by, did many of them belong to tidy, static families. Even Sophia and Toby had separated. Almost as soon as Sophia’s boys had gone off to boarding school, Sophia had met a painter and moved in with him. Lily had never felt odd because her father and mother happened to lead separate lives. Nor had she ever felt trapped with Julia in an empty house. Julia remembered too vividly how no one had ever come to Fairmile Road, and how Betty had kept the little rooms stiffly arranged for a celebration that never happened.
‘Can I cook something?’ Lily asked.
‘You’d better. I’m not doing everything. Well, who shall we ask?’
But before they had decided, the telephone rang.
Julia? It’s Mat.’ There was a busy silence before the words, static crackling over them.
‘Mattie? How fabulous, where are you?’
‘New York, of course.’
‘Must be telepathy. We were talking about you. Also your face is all over the colour mag.’
‘Is it this week? Is it that picture that makes me look like a freaked-out gippo?’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘Bloody hell. Just when I’m trying to look straight so someone’ll offer me some Shakespeare or something decent.’ Mattie was talking too quickly, and laughing a lot. She sounded slightly drunk, or high. Julia peered at the kitchen clock. A bar of yellow sunlight lay across the face of it.
‘Mattie, what’s the time there?’
‘Umm. Ten past six. In the morning, dear.’
‘Up early, aren’t you?’
Mattie laughed louder. ‘How many dollars a minute is this chat about my bedtimes costing? I haven’t been to bed, actually. Came back from a party, and knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep in this hotel room. So I’ve watched an old movie on the TV – they have old movies on all night, isn’t it clever of them? – and then I thought I’d telephone my old friend.’ Mattie’s real voice suddenly broke through. ‘I just wanted a talk. Felt a bit lonely, to tell the truth. It was a straight choice between ringing you and having another Scotch. What’s it like in London this morning?’
Smiling, Julia told her. She told her the news of mutual friends, and the snippets of gossip that Mattie loved. She told her about Lily’s part in the school play.
‘That’s my girl. She’ll knock their socks off,’ Mattie crowed. She was never afraid to let her pride or partiality show, as Julia was. Mattie thought Lily could do no wrong, and regularly said so.
‘Go on,’ Mattie prompted. ‘What else is new?’
And so Julia told her about the latest buying she had done for the shop, about the house Felix was decorating for Bill Wyman, anything else she could think of that would make Mattie feel closer to home. They had always been able to do it. All through their successful years that had kept them apart more than they had been together, they had kept the links by telephoning each other. Even when Mattie had been inseparable from Chris Fredericks, and Julia had been wary and awkward with the two of them, they had been able to talk on the telephone when they couldn’t do it face to face.
At last Mattie sighed, ‘That’s better. I feel a bit less mad now. Hey, there’s something I haven’t told you. I’m coming home, to dear old Bloomsbury. I can’t bear this town any longer.’
And into the hum of the transatlantic connection, as if the idea was fully formed instead of just having stirred in her head with the restless reminders of spring and the enticing sunshine, Julia said, ‘Well, that’s a pity. Because I’m coming to the States.’ Across the room, blurred by the bright light that showed the winter’s accumulation of dust, Julia saw Lily’s head jerk up. Just for an instant, her small face seemed set in an alarming mask of anger and anxiety.
‘I haven’t been before, that’s why,’ she answered into the receiver. ‘I want to look for some new ideas, make a few contacts. Look ahead to the next decade, like a shopkeeper should.’
‘And see the aviator.’
Lily had bent her head again, seemingly to her book. Julia was relieved, because she could feel the foolish flush of colour rising in her own cheeks. Like a teenager, she thought angrily. Watching Lily’s dark, smooth head she thought that the strange expression must have been a trick of the light.
‘I honestly hadn’t thought of that. It’s very old history, Mat.’
Far away, Mattie chuckled. ‘D’you know how often you still talk about him? And you’ve sat there all these years, just like Patience on her bloody monument, waiting for him to come back for you. Not very liberated of you, is it?’
‘That’s your department, not mine,’ Julia said tartly, but Mattie only laughed again.
‘Think about it. D’you know, I think I could go to sleep now. Thank God for that. Can I have a talk to Lily first?’
‘Sleep well, my love. I will think about it, although I wish you’d never mentioned it.’ She held the receiver out to Lily. ‘Here. Talk to the wild woman.’
Julia went out of the room, and when she came back Lily had already finished the conversation. She was sitting calmly on the sofa, cross-legged, waiting. Julia opened the address book she had been upstairs to fetch.
‘Who would it be nice to see today?’
‘I don’t mind,’ Lily said politely. ‘You can choose, if you like.’
The friends came to lunch, two women and a man, and three children of various ages. Julia made lasagne and they sat around the pine table talking, the adults drinking wine after the children had got down and disappeared upstairs to Lily’s room. At the end of the afternoon they went to Regent’s Park and walked in the sunshine. It was a cheerful, convivial day, like dozens of others Julia and Lily had spent. Julia liked inviting people, and feeding them, and making them feel comfortable in her house. The parties were different now, she reflected, but there still were parties.
Lily was quieter than usual, but if anyone except Julia noticed, no one mentioned it.
The light was fading when Julia went out to see the last pair of guests into their car. After they had driven off she stood for a moment under the plane tree outside the house, watching the lit-up windows of the house opposite, and her neighbours passing to and fro behind the uncurtained glass. The little tableaux made the street seem cosy. She breathed in a satisfying lungful of damp, leafy air and then went back up the five steps to their front door.
It was dim in the big living room after the brighter light outside. Julia blinked and hesitated, and then saw Lily sitting on the rug in front of the chesterfield. Her knees were drawn up to her chin and one cheek rested on one knee. Her shoulders were hunched forward as if to hide something, or protect something. A corner of the rug was pulled up underneath her. Julia was particularly fond of the rug, an old Anatolian kelim in soft, faded garnet-reds and cobalt-blues. It had long, hand-knotted, bobbled fringes, and an expert had told her that the design represented the tree of life. She was proud of the rug, too. She had bought it on one of her first trips, when she was still nervous of travelling alone, from a market in a little hill town. She had haggled and bargained with the old man who was selling it, and then had walked away because his price was too high. Then she had turned back because she knew she wanted it, and he had disarmed her by accepting her offer and rolling the rug up to press it into her arms, as if he knew it was going to a good home. There had been no question, after that, of it going into the shop. It exactly fitted the space on the sanded floor.
Julia went across and put her hand on Lily’s shoulder, intending to say something about supper, and schoolday tomorrow. Then she saw that Lily was methodically snipping off the knotted fringes, one by one, with the big pair of kitchen scissors. A pathetic pile of fraying ends lay on the floor beside her.
Julia snatched the scissors. They fell, and slithered out of sight under the chesterfield. Julia gave Lily’s hand a stinging slap. She didn’t flinch, but stared up at her mother, her face, a set, triangular mask of defiant unhappiness. Julia saw the unhappiness, but her own possessive anger was much stronger. After the instant she was ashamed of it, but then it was too late.
She held on to Lily’s hand, and shook her. ‘You stupid girl. Why have you done it? It’s a beautiful rug, and you’ve wrecked it. You’re a thoughtless, stupid vandal. Just to sit there, and cut it up. Don’t you care about people’s things? It’s not your rug to ruin. It’s mine. I …’
Coldly, Lily cut her short. ‘Everything’s yours. Your house, and your shops, and your friends. Well, I’m not yours, so there. I’m Alexander’s. I wish he was here. I hate you.’
Lily broke free and scrambled to her feet. She bent down and scooped up the severed fringes then flung them across the room.
‘It’s only a mat,’ she shouted. ‘It’s not a person.’ The coldness had gone. She was crying now, and the puckering of her face made her look as she had when she was a baby. Helplessly, Julia held her hand out to her, but Lily pushed it away from her and ran out of the room.
I’m Alexander’s, Julia thought heavily. There had been other times, many other rows, of course, when Julia had forbidden something or enforced some discipline, and Lily had wished for her father. The bond between them had always been strong, and it was strengthening all the time as Lily grew up in her devotion to Ladyhill, and the green, folded countryside around it. Lily’s pride in the rebirth of Ladyhill’s splendour, artfully aged and faded by George and Felix, was no less fierce than Alexander’s. After each visit she came back full of the details of the latest room that had been cleaned and reopened, or of some nineteenth-century oil of the house that had passed out of the family, and Alexander had managed to buy back again. Julia had accepted it all, as she had made herself promise she would at the beginning, and she had encouraged Lily to talk about her father, as well as to think of Ladyhill as home, her other home.
But this was the first time that Lily had said, I’m Alexander’s.
I hate you, Julia comforted herself, that was ordinary enough, wasn’t it? All daughters told their mothers that, sometime. But not, I’m his, not yours.
It had begun, then, as Julia had been afraid that it would. The measuring of one of them against the other, and as soon as the measuring had started there would be judging, and then choosing. She didn’t want to think of what that would mean. To push the thought away she moved, stiffly, to pick up the scattered ends of fringing from where Lily had thrown them.
She is mine, she thought. I was there when she was born, out of me, even though I don’t remember it. Even though I’m a bad one, I am her mother. She looked down at the shreds of wool and silk in her hands. They smelt of dust, and there were pieces of fluff trapped with the fibres. It is only a mat. Lily’s right.
She went quickly and threw them into the dustbin. Then she retrieved the kitchen scissors and put them away in their proper place.
Suddenly a memory stirred and revived. A wonderful firework display of coloured stars, spreading across some flowered wallpaper. The gummed stars that she had brought home, as a little girl, from somebody’s birthday party. And then had stuck all over the bedroom wall. Julia remembered Betty’s boiling anger, and her accusations, and the way that she had shouted, ‘It’s our house, not yours.’ Julia realised that always, up to this moment, she had believed that she just thought the stars were pretty, that the bright colours improved the insipid wallpaper.
But now, as if she had become someone else altogether, she realised that she had wanted to deface the order of Betty’s house. She could see herself, licking and sticking the stars, knowing that they would make a mess, knowing what Betty would do. She had wanted to assert herself, and distance herself, testing Betty and rebelling against her at the same time.
Poor Betty, Julia thought. All along, I made her the villain of that story. I told it to Jessie, once, and I made myself out to be the innocent little thing who saw no further than the bright, beautiful stars. How much did Lily understand of what she had done, how much did she mean? The same? The same test, and rebellion?
Julia frowned, trying to tease out the threads of significance. Lily had no need to rebel against petty domestic tyranny. Julia wasn’t houseproud. She had been, briefly, very angry about her kelim, as surely anyone would have been? She liked and valued pretty things, and clearly remembered the days when she hadn’t been able to afford them. But the moment was past, now. It wasn’t the mat that was important.
She could talk to Lily, at least. Betty had never talked to her.
Julia went slowly upstairs. Lily was lying on her bed, stiff, looking very small. She had been crying, but her eyes were dry now. Julia sat down at the edge of the bed, looking down at her. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked gently. ‘Can you tell me why?’
Lily turned her head away, to stare at the wall.
Julia waited, but the silence began to solidify between them. She knew from experience how stubbornly silent Lily could be, when she was angry, or sulking about something. It was quite possible that she wouldn’t speak until tomorrow morning, and Julia didn’t want to let that silence happen, not this time. To break it, she began talking herself. ‘Do you know something that happened when I was a bit younger than you? Something I did to Granny Smith? I went to a birthday party, and I was given a packet of coloured sticky stars. The kind that teachers stick in exercise books, for good work …’ She knew that Lily was listening, although she kept her face turned away. ‘Until tonight, you know, I always thought Granny Smith was wrong. But I’ve just understood that I knew what I was doing. I wanted to serve her right for something, although I didn’t know what it was. Not properly.’
Julia stopped again, and waited. Lily was quick enough and perceptive enough to make her own conclusions.
Without warning, in a little, toneless voice, she said, ‘You didn’t tell me you were going to America.’
It was so unexpected that it left Julia breathless. ‘I …’
‘You didn’t tell me. You just said it on the phone, to Mattie, Like it didn’t matter, whether you were here or not.’
Julia peered into the windy expanse of misunderstanding that seemed suddenly to have opened between them. Lily was still frowning at the wall; her hand lay loosely, palm up, on the bedcover. Julia took hold of it and squeezed it between her own hands. ‘I’ve been away before,’ she said. ‘To Turkey, and India, and Thailand, and all the other places. I didn’t think you didn’t want me to go.’ Julia tried to recall. Lily had always let her go quite cheerfully. Seemingly cheerfully. Sometimes she had said, ‘Wish you weren’t going, Mum,’ but that was all. She had seemed happy with Marilyn and Alexander, relaxed and welcoming when she came home again. Julia had even congratulated herself on that. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said sadly. ‘I’m sorry.’ She was thinking of the cut-up rug, the vehemence of the silent protest.
‘I hate it when you’re not here,’ Lily burst out. ‘You shouldn’t have to go away.’
‘Lily, I’ve had to earn a living, to support us both.’ That was the truth, she reflected, but only the partial truth. Lily ignored it.
‘You’re my mother. You should be here.’
The selfishness made Julia ache for both of them. Lily’s needs and her own, Betty’s and her own. Colliding head on. Poor mothers, she thought. Can’t ever get it right. And poor daughters, too. We want things from each other, and we want to give them, but the gestures are so clumsy that they knock themselves awry. Gently, she let go of Lily’s hand and stroked her hair. As she seemed to do more and more often, she wondered about her own natural mother. Where was she, and what would she say? ‘I won’t go to America,’ she promised.
She felt the stiffness of Lily’s neck and shoulders, knew that she was trying not to jerk her head out of reach of her mother’s hand.
‘Oh, go,’ Lily said, dismissing her. ‘Just tell me properly. I don’t like hearing about it when you’re having a chat with Mattie.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Julia said again, humbly. ‘The idea just came to me there and then, and it seemed a good one, so I said it.’
My own selfishness, equal and opposite.
Lily had picked up a book and was staring at the jacket picture. Julia knew that she wouldn’t say any more. She stood up, saying something about supper, and went to the door. As she reached it, Lily mumbled, ‘I’m sorry about your rug.’
Julia was surprised, and grateful.
‘You were right, it’s only a thing, not a person. Anyway, it’s our rug.’
‘Not mine. I don’t care about stuff like that.’
Julia half smiled. ‘You do if it belongs to Ladyhill.’
The answer came back without a second’s hesitation. ‘Ladyhill’s different.’
Julia nodded. She waited for a second or two, but neither of them said any more. She closed Lily’s door and went downstairs, moving as if her limbs hurt. The light had faded, and the big room seemed gloomy and cold. Julia wrapped her arms around herself and walked to the window, staring out without seeing anything. She wanted to talk to Alexander. She wanted to pick up the telephone and say, ‘This is happening. What can we do?’
She wasn’t surprised, any more, to recognise the importance that Alexander still held for her. She had told herself that he was still her friend, even after all that had happened, and much more than that, he was Lily’s father. But it was only recently that Julia had understood that she needed the reassurance, however remote, of his influence on her own life, as well as on Lily’s. Alexander had become a kind of measuring scale, a mark of permanence and stability. She would judge, Alexander would like this, or believe in that, or enjoy the other. The link with him was comforting, and strengthening for Lily’s sake. She thought it was harmless, after so long. They saw each other rarely, in London. Julia had never been back to Ladyhill. She avoided it, out of a kind of superstition, although there had been times when she might have gone, to see Lily compete in a gymkhana, or to Faye’s sixtieth birthday party. But she had never gone, and they met when Lily was on her way to Ladyhill or coming back again, or when Alexander happened to be working in Town.
Julia valued the loose, unspoken but continuing ties. She wondered if perhaps Alexander did too. He had met Thomas Tree but he had never spoken of him, and he must have noticed his disappearance, but he had never commented on that, either.
It never could have worked, with Thomas, Julia thought wearily. There were too many ghosts.
And now, when she wanted to share tonight’s particular fears with Alexander, it was impossible. Because Julia was certain that the truth of this evening was nothing to do with the Anatolian kelim, nothing, even, to do with America or her own absences from home. The truth was, I’m not yours, so there. I’m Alexander’s.
Everything else, whatever Lily might protest, because she didn’t yet understand it herself, was just a symptom of that.
Lily had begun to compare, and to judge, just because she was old enough. Her parents were separate, unconnected, and so represented different choices. And if a choice offered itself, wasn’t the childish instinct to make it? Children didn’t equivocate, or conciliate, Julia remembered, thinking of herself and what she had done to Betty. The thought of Lily with her fierce, childish allegiances, choosing between herself and Alexander, was unbearably painful. But it seemed, equally unbearably, quite inevitable. Julia felt cold, swung away from the window, and walked the length of the chilly room.
She was thinking that everything, this pretty house and its careful contents, Garlic & Sapphires, four shops with their window displays and managers and staff, the warehouse full of stock and the office and filing cabinets, even the Triumph Vitesse parked in the street outside, had been assembled for Lily’s sake. She had been a bad mother, she thought, in her efforts to be a good mother. Without Lily, nothing mattered, and yet everything else had been made to matter.
And none of it made any difference. She couldn’t tie Lily to her, or insist on her love and loyalty, or stop them flowing away elsewhere. Nor could she confide any of these terrors to Alexander because, in this, he was her enemy.
Julia was lonely, and loneliness made her helpless. Then her arms dropped to her sides. If the room was cold, then she should turn the heating on. Lily would need supper, and to be reminded to find the contents of her gym-bag, ready for school in the morning. Julia turned the lights on and drew the curtains to close out the street, then deliberately fixed her attention on the little, domestic jobs that would fill the spaces for this evening, for a while longer. She made boiled eggs and toast, and called Lily down from her room. She came jumping down the stairs and then sat in her place at the table, her feet folded under her, munching toast and watching the television.
Looking at her, Julia thought that she was as oblivious as she had been herself, blithely sticking the stars on Betty’s wallpaper. Nor had she recognised the little truth under the layers until the great age of thirty-one. Why should Lily be any different?
Julia reached across the table to clear the plates.
It took a long time to grow up, she told herself. A bloody long, painful time.
‘I’ll send you a postcard of the Empire State Building.’
‘And the Statue of Liberty. And I want some proper American T-shirts, that everyone will know you can’t buy here.’
‘Status snob,’ Julia teased.
‘Why not? What’s wrong with wanting groovy gear no one else has got?’
Lily faced her, wide-eyed, perfectly serious. Remembering the expeditions to Brick Lane market, the rummaging in Jessie’s old finery and the inexpert dressmaking of years ago, Julia had to smile. ‘Nothing at all. I used to be just like you.’
‘Really, Mum? Even in your day?’
Alexander was sitting on the chesterfield, with his long, thin legs stretched out in front of him. Alexander’s wardrobe seemed to have changed very little since 1959. He still wore corduroys, sweaters and Tattersall-check shirts, and in winter a tweed coat that had belonged to his father. ‘I’m so out I’m in,’ he used to proclaim, with clear satisfaction.
Julia appealed to him. ‘That’s true, isn’t it, Alexander? Even in my day. Distant though that is.’
He lifted his head, looking at her. ‘Quite true. When I first saw your mother, Lily, she was like some exotic butterfly. She always had extraordinary clothes. Either very complicated, or perfectly simple, but always completely different from what the other girls were wearing, and about fifty times more glamorous. And she had wonderful legs, which she still has.’
‘This is Mummy?’
‘Of course.’
Julia had already turned away, hiding her face from Alexander’s scrutiny. The floor was heaped with Lily’s bags and possessions, ready for the trip to Ladyhill, and she rummaged gratefully amongst them, wondering what she was pretending to look for. ‘Yes, well. Thank you. A hundred years ago now, Lily darling.’
She knew that Alexander was still looking at her. She felt awkward, disconcerted, and separated by much more than a hundred years from the exotic butterfly that Alexander remembered. She glossed the moment over with unnecessary fuss over Lily’s belongings as they were stowed into Alexander’s car.
But then, when that was done and Lily’s bicycle was safely roped to the roof-rack, they had to go back into the house to fill the empty moments before saying goodbye. Lily ran down the basement steps to look for Marilyn, and Julia and Alexander stood by the window looking into the garden. It was full of roses, and lavender, and honeysuckle, and the wash from pleasure boats on the canal slapped and rippled against the towpath.
‘Your garden looks pretty,’ Alexander said.
‘Thank you. It’s funny, I enjoy it now. Who’d have thought I’d turn into a gardener?’ She laughed. ‘It must be old age.’
‘You talk too much about getting old. You’re still young, Julia. Everything could happen.’
With sharpened hearing she listened to the words, thinking what could? She was very aware of him standing beside her, his arm almost touching hers. Don’t be a fool, she warned herself. You’re getting weak and sentimental, as well as middle-aged.
Alexander sighed. ‘The long border at Ladyhill looks a mess.’
‘Does it?’ Julia said neutrally. ‘You should get a proper gardener again.’
That was better, she thought. Safe ground.
‘Yes. Perhaps I should.’ He put his hand on her shoulder. She had to turn to him, smiling, or seem unnaturally stiff. ‘Don’t work too hard in the States.’ He was looking at her face too closely.
‘No, I won’t work too hard.’
‘Do you have friends there? People to see, who can look after you if you need it?’
‘Oh, friends of friends. Contacts. I’ll meet people, I always do.’
It was impossible to say, ‘I thought I’d look up Josh Flood.’ How could she be honest with Alexander, when she wasn’t truly honest with herself? Julia moved away, distancing herself, seemingly fixing her attention on securing the open window.
‘That’s good,’ Alexander murmured, ambiguously.
Lily raced into the room, followed by Marilyn. Marilyn was wearing jeans and a Marvin Gaye T-shirt, with her hair pulled back in a knot behind her head. She looked like a younger, simpler Mattie, and Julia saw Alexander glance at her.
‘Come on, Daddy,’ Lily was shouting. ‘It’s time to go.’
‘Can’t wait to get away from us, can you?’ Marilyn joked. ‘Here, give us a proper hug. How’m I going to bear eight weeks without you?’
Marilyn would take care of the house while Julia and Lily were away. For the tenth time, Lily embarked on the complicated instructions for managing the hamsters that lived in a cage in her room.
‘Have you seen Mattie?’ Alexander asked, over their heads.
‘We had a boozy lunch last week,’ Julia said. ‘She’s been offered a play that she’s excited about. A try-out at Chichester in September, then perhaps a West End transfer.’
‘Give her my love,’ Alexander said.
‘You’re more likely to see her than I am. I’m just off to the States for six weeks, remember?’
‘So you are.’
They all went out into the sunny street. Lily hopped from one leg to the other, and Julia bent down to her level and put her arms around her shoulders.
‘Have a lovely summer holiday. Be good for Daddy.’
Lily hugged her back. However hard she searched, Julia could see nothing in the child’s face but happy anticipation. As it always did, the moment of parting seemed much harder for Julia.
‘You know you could have come to New York with me?’ There was no need to say it, but she couldn’t stop herself. She had planned the trip. They could have travelled together. Lily was old enough now. They would have enjoyed sharing the adventure, and Julia would have fitted in the business when and where she could. But Lily had refused even to be tempted. ‘I couldn’t miss Ladyhill,’ she had said. ‘Not in the summer.’
Slowly, Julia straightened up and opened the car door for her. Lily scrambled inside. A shadow fell, and Julia gave a nervous start. But it was Alexander, moving between her face and the sun. She couldn’t see his expression against the brightness. He kissed her on each cheek. He never usually kissed her, when they met or parted. She smiled, confused, shading her eyes against the sun. Then Alexander was in the car beside Lily, and Julia and Marilyn were left side by side on the pavement. The car slid forward, and they waved, calling goodbye, until it had turned the corner of the street.
‘She’s lucky,’ Marilyn said. ‘Having Alexander for her dad.’
Julia remembered Ted Banner. Ted had died of drink, at last, four years ago. Mattie and Marilyn had gone to the bleak cremation and came back white-faced to Julia’s house. And Vernon. Vernon Smith, folding his newspaper into neat creases, with the clock ticking behind him. Vernon had just retired from his accounts office, and Julia wondered how he and Betty were stepping around each other in the house in Fairmile Road.
‘Yes, Lily’s lucky,’ Julia answered. Marilyn glanced at her, and her broad smile faded away into puzzlement.
Julia took her hand and squeezed it. ‘I suppose I’d better go and finish my own packing.’
‘Do you need any ironing done?’
They went back into the house together. It felt empty and silent, as it always did when Lily had gone away.
Lily watched the road intently as it unwound in front of the car. There were familiar, important landmarks to be greeted, secretly and superstitiously, as they flashed past. The journey was an essential part of each holiday, the time when she, transformed herself from London Lily into Ladyhill Lily. It always seemed a very long way from London to Dorset, but even though she was hopelessly impatient on other journeys, Lily always sat quietly through this one. She turned her head to look at Alexander. His face was red with the sun, which meant that he must have been doing his work outside. Perhaps by the summerhouse in the orchard. Lily liked it when he did that, because she could see him while she played. He was wearing one of his ordinary shirts with frayed bits around the sleeves and no tie, and his thin, fair hair was brushed smooth. Her father had never grown his hair long, like some of the other girls’ fathers. Even Felix had let his grow into a round ball called an Afro, at the time when he wore coloured caftans like women’s dresses, but he had cut it short again now and wore grey suits like Alexander’s.
Alexander always looked the same. That was one of the safest things about him, and he always behaved the same too. He could be very strict, and fierce if people didn’t do what he told them to do, but the things that made him strict or fierce were always quite reasonable and obvious. And it was easy to guess what would make him laugh, and what he would enjoy. Usually they were the things that she enjoyed herself, like Ladyhill.
All that was what made him different from Julia.
Lily drew a strand of hair across her mouth and sucked it, thinking about her mother. She loved her, of course. Everyone loved their mothers. And Julia was much prettier and more interesting than most people’s. It was being different, even looking different when she came to school, Lily supposed, that made her dangerous. It was only lately, perhaps since she had turned nine, that she had described it to herself as dangerous. But the knowledge had always been there, ever since she could remember. Julia could change so quickly. One moment she might be laughing and playing, and the next she could be blazing with anger. Lily was afraid of the changes. Julia could be gentle, and cuddly, but she could also whip round with a slap that stung and made her cry, or – worse – with words that made her feel small and wicked. And after that, almost always, she would look sad. Even cry, sometimes. It was confusing, and it made Lily wish for the ordinariness of a mother that people didn’t stare at, however admiringly.
Alexander was never like that. He didn’t cuddle, but he didn’t boil up and overflow with hot temper, either. He was always just the same. Like Ladyhill itself. Love for her father and the house knotted pleasurably, inseparably, together. Lily sighed with anticipation and settled deeper in her seat.
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.
Alexander was expecting him, and when he heard Felix’s white Alfa accelerating under the avenue of trees, he strolled out into the courtyard to welcome him. To his surprise he saw that the car, instead of being loaded down with precious pieces nested in wood-shavings, contained a passenger. He was even more surprised when she stepped out, and he saw that it was Mattie.
Simultaneously Lily appeared. ‘Mattie, Mattie, Mattie!’ she yelled, and launched herself at her. Felix looked at Alexander over their heads, smiling and shrugging.
When she had disentangled herself, Mattie took Alexander’s hands and kissed both his cheeks. After Chris Fredericks Mattie had discarded her jeans and working shirts, and reverted to Mattie-esque dresses. Today she was wearing a very short, shocking pink shift and pink leather gladiator’s sandals. She had heavy Indian silver bracelets and a matching necklace, and outsized round sunglasses pushed up over her head.
‘Bliss. Are you horrified? I had dinner with Felix, and he said he was driving down, so I came for the ride. There must be a pub in the village I can stay at for a night or two?’
Her face was turned up to him and so he kissed it. Her mouth was slightly open, and the soft brush of it sent a jolt all through him.
‘There are at least a dozen bedrooms in this house, all crying out for occupation. Stay for as long as you like. We’re very pleased to see you, aren’t we, Lily?’ Somehow, that seemed an understatement. Looking at Mattie he saw that her milky skin, too pale to tan, was powdered with faint freckles. The down of fine hairs was pale gold. He made himself look away again, shake hands with Felix.
‘What’s the time? Gone twelve. Pimms on the grass, don’t you think? You must have left very early.’ Inane remarks, Alexander thought. More like a boy of fourteen than a man of forty.
‘Before dawn, darling.’ Mattie’s throaty giggle was exactly the same as it had always been. ‘I’m ready for a Pimms.’
They sat on the lawn, facing the house. Mattie tilted her head to look up at it, and Alexander watched the line of her throat.
‘It’s so long since I’ve been here,’ Mattie murmured. ‘Do you know, this house is too beautiful to be real. You expect to step through the door and find it’s a Pinewood mock-up.’
‘It’s real,’ Felix laughed. ‘Every bloody brick and beam. It’s taken almost ten years of our lives, hasn’t it, Alexander?’
Ten years, at the end of this year. Since the fire destroyed …
The shadow lay across the grass, as though a cloud had passed over the sun.
It was Alexander who swept it away again. He lifted his glass, sprouting the blue borage that Lily had run to pick from the garden. ‘Here’s to the completion of a magnificent undertaking.’
He leaned over to clink his glass around Felix’s, but Felix amended hastily, ‘Of course, these things are never really completed …’
Mattie and Alexander snorted with laughter, and after a moment Felix joined in. Mattie was thinking, There are only about three men in the entire world who are truly worth loving. And two of them are sitting here, under a blue sky.
Mattie and Felix stayed for five days. The sun shone, and in the sleepy heat they explored the countryside, walking and driving, played games with Lily, dozed on the lawns and swam in the river. They drove to Chesil Beach and collected a perfectly graded set of pebbles for Lily, and they wandered through the little towns where Felix rummaged in the antique shops and complained, as he always did, that the prices were higher than in London. In the evenings, after Lily was in bed, they ate and drank and talked, and Mattie sang while Alexander played the piano.
‘If only Julia was here,’ Mattie sighed, ‘it would be just like old times.’
On the fifth evening Alexander asked, ‘Can’t you stay a day or two longer?’
‘I must go back to George,’ Felix told him.
That evening Alexander opened two bottles of champagne and they drank them outside, with the scent of nicotiana drifting across the grass and bats dipping under the veil of the copper beech tree. Looking at their two faces, Felix felt for the first time that he made a crowd.
After dinner, Alexander played Chopin. Mattie, half drunk, swayed dreamily to the music.
‘Do you have to go?’ Alexander asked in a low voice.
Mattie stood still. The fanciful chiffon points of her skirt floated around her. ‘No, I don’t have to go. I’ll stay, if you would like me to.’
Sitting a little apart, as dark and immobile as if he was carved from polished wood, Felix wanted to whisper, Be careful. But he didn’t deliver his warning, because he guessed that it was already too late for that.
In the morning, Lily and Alexander and Mattie stood waving until the white Alfa had disappeared under the tunnel of trees.
And that evening, when Alexander went to lift the lid of the piano, Mattie put her hands over his, closing it again. ‘Don’t play tonight.’
‘What, then?’
But Alexander answered his own question. He put his hands on her shoulders, let his palms slide down over her bare arms. Her skin seemed soft enough to melt as he touched it. He kissed her, probing insistently with his tongue until her head fell back and her mouth opened to him. And then, as he had longed to do all week, he undid the front of her dress and let her breasts fall loose. They rested in his hands, ripe and heavy, moon-pale in the dim room. He put his mouth to them, tasting her rich, musky sweetness. He wondered why, in all the years, he had never noticed how sexy Mattie was, until now. He wanted her so badly that he could have pushed her to the floor and torn her clothes, stabbing himself into her and crying out, Mattie.
‘Come to bed, Mattie,’ he implored her.
She smiled at him, a surprising, crooked and sad smile. ‘Bliss. I’m not very good at sex, Bliss. Lots of other things, but not sex.’
With an effort, Alexander controlled himself. ‘You are, my darling. Look.’ He gestured at the pale, satiny smoothness of her. ‘You are so beautiful.’
‘I don’t want anything to be spoiled,’ Mattie whispered. ‘I’ve enjoyed these days with you so much.’
‘Nothing will be spoiled,’ he murmured. ‘Nothing. I promise.’ He kissed her neck and her throat, thinking that if he could take bites out of her flesh it would taste of ripe golden melons.
‘Bliss …’
He took her face between his hands. ‘Just answer one question. Is it the truth that you prefer girls?’
Her eyes were very soft now. ‘The truth is that I don’t know what I prefer.’
He smiled at her. ‘I’m not arrogant enough to say I’ll show you. Come to bed, Mattie.’
Almost inaudibly, she answered, ‘Yes. If you want me to.’
To Alexander, the naked abundance of Mattie in his bed seemed miraculous. Mattie had never been slim, and now the melting folds of her seemed to turn inwards and inwards, enclosing him and drawing him closer, submerging him in mounting, sensuous waves of pleasure. She filled his hands, and his mouth, and he wanted to feast on her, blind and greedy, until he couldn’t devour any more.
But Alexander clung to the last remnants of control. He bit his teeth together, and counting grimly from one to a thousand, as he had taught himself to do with the first girl he had ever made love to, he focused his attention on Mattie’s pleasure. He stroked her and cajoled her, and put his lips to the soft button of flesh, drawing it into the heat of his mouth. Mattie sighed, and smiled faintly behind the mask of her closed eyelids, but he couldn’t drive her any further.
Alexander reached one thousand. He knew that he couldn’t count much longer. He put his lips to her ear.
‘Mattie, I want you to come.’
Just perceptibly, she shook her head. ‘I can’t. But you can.’
Her smooth hand grasped him, and he groaned aloud. Then she guided him into her, lifting her hips to give him more of herself. It took just six long thrusts before Alexander came, his back arching and his breath shuddering out of him.
He was still for a long time afterwards, his eyes closed and his arms wrapped tightly around her, as if he was afraid that she would try to escape. Mattie lay still, thinking, Alexander. You’re as loving and generous as I knew you would be. I’m glad I found that out. I’m glad this happened, after all this time. I like you very much. Why didn’t I tell you?
‘Mattie,’ he whispered. ‘Why can’t you come? You gave me more pleasure then than I think I’ve ever had before.’
‘Hmm. That’s a paradox, isn’t it?’
He shifted his weight so that he could look into her eyes. ‘A paradox? How many film stars talk about paradoxes in bed?’
Brightly, Mattie said, ‘None of the ones I’ve had.’
They laughed, softly at first and then louder, gasping with it, lying in the darkness with their arms wrapped round each other.