16

1976

IT STARTED WHEN PHILIP WOULDN’T get out of bed. Lydia didn’t realise until later that it was because he couldn’t.

‘Come on, everyone else is up. Lazy bones.’ She reached under the covers to tickle him and felt his sodden pyjamas, the hot skin of his back. Philip muttered something and pulled his knees up to his chest, facing the wall.

‘Philip, come on. You’re much too hot under there, time to get up.’

‘No, thank you.’ He was still caught in sleep, eyes closed.

‘I shan’t tell you again.’

He sighed. ‘My throat hurts. And my head.’

Lydia put her palm to his forehead, flushed and too warm. ‘Your throat?’

‘It’s scratchy. I want to go to sleep.’

In the family bathroom, Lydia pulled the medicine box from the Formica cabinet mounted above the enormous, clanking radiator. She rummaged among the sticking plasters and aspirin packets for the thermometer, bulky and sinister inside its beige plastic case.

Lydia snapped the case shut and looked at the bath, the dry enamel and the slightly rusted chain of the plug. No trickling water, no distant sound of water draining. The room was quiet. She hadn’t heard the voice again, although she had listened out for it. Something would have to be done, someone needed to know what was happening to them here in this house. She made a list in her head – the sounds, the marble, the woman. The singing, the inexplicable running feet. And the time was coming to tell someone (who? Anyone), but this must be dealt with first, and then she could think.

She held the thermometer out to Philip. ‘Right, just sit up for a minute, my love. I’ll take your temperature and then I’ll bring you some barley water, okay?’

Philip opened his mouth obediently, drowsy and pink. Lydia stroked his damp hair. The colour in his face alarmed her: high bright spots of pure red along his cheekbones and under his eyes. When she pulled the thermometer from his mouth and saw that the mercury rested against the tiny black letters saying 100, she shook it vigorously and went to find Sara.

‘Sara? Sorry – I think Philip is poorly. I think he’s quite poorly.’ Sara looked up from feeding mashed banana to Owen on the wicker chairs in the orangery, still in her own pyjamas.

‘Like a cold?’

Lydia gestured towards the hallway, impatient. ‘No, not like a cold. Can you come, please? I’ll take Owen.’

Sara handed her the baby and Lydia followed her up the beautiful staircase, shining in the bright summer sun.

Philip had fallen asleep again, sitting upright against his pillows. The curtains were closed still, which made the room feel like a sick bay, but it seemed wrong, somehow, to open them. Lydia stood in the doorway with the baby in her arms.

Sara put a hand to her son’s forehead. ‘Did you take his temperature?’

‘Yes – one hundred exactly.’

‘Oh.’

‘That’s why I came to get you.’

‘No, that’s the right thing. Doctor time.’ And Sara went off to telephone the surgery in the village.

Lydia called to Philip across the shadows of the bedroom. ‘Do you want anything, my love?’

No answer; Philip slept on.

The doctor, a harried and very thin young man, who spent only a few brief moments examining the patient, advised them to keep an eye on him and telephone again if the fever rose. ‘Probably a summer bug, something flu-like. Loads going round at the minute. Keep the other children away from him for now, plenty of fluids, lots of sleep. One paracetamol every four hours to help with the temperature. Really, only one of you should be going in and out.’ He looked at the two women, who looked at each other.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Lydia.

Sara smiled. ‘Thanks.’

The doctor didn’t look back towards the house as he climbed into a rusted Morris Minor and disappeared.

‘Well, he was no bloody use.’ Sara laughed, but Lydia heard the strain in it.

‘Nothing we didn’t already know, right?’ Lydia tried to sound reassuring.

‘Are you sure you’re okay playing nursemaid?’

‘Of course – and it makes sense. Don’t want Owen getting it, or the girls. Much better if I do it.’

‘Thank you, Lydia. What would we do without you?’

Lydia could tell that Sara was relieved – she was never very good with illness. In those final, abject weeks at home with Doug, Sara pretty much came undone. She was handed the role of grieving wife, nurse, priest; compelled to listen to Doug’s last ramblings, his thoughts and wishes made inexplicable by drugs and pain. He’d confessed to Sara about an affair, very early on in their marriage and never repeated, and she was obliged to offer him absolution. Sara said to Lydia that she had a feeling Doug only told her about the affair because he thought she was someone else.

Doug insisted on being cared for at home – no rancid hospice for him – and Lydia wondered if he knew what he was asking of Sara, and, if he did know, why he was punishing her.

Sara’s distaste for Doug’s decaying body ate away at her as she washed and fed her husband, as she held the bowls for his vomit and stripped him of stained underwear. They hired a nurse to help, and she was wonderful, but she wasn’t there for the evenings or for the early mornings, when Doug was sickest. He wanted his wife, only.

Lydia watched all of this from the periphery. She held the children’s hands and distracted them from this most grotesque of endings, shielded them from their mother’s bitter despair and their father’s selfish dissolution. Even on his deathbed Doug was in charge, and Lydia hated him for it.

She left Philip sleeping and went out through the orangery to find the twins in the garden. ‘Tabs! Clover!’

White legs flashed against bark as they scrambled down the monkey puzzle tree. She knew they wouldn’t mind so much about Philip, they’d be happy to stay outside. They hopped about in front of her on the back patio, chafing against the notion of standing still.

‘Listen, girls – I said listen, Clover, will you pay attention for one minute, please? Your brother isn’t well, he has some sort of bug. So you’re not to go into his room, is that understood?’

‘Why would we want to go into Philip’s room?’ Clover picked at a scab on her elbow.

‘I’m just telling you, don’t. We don’t want you catching whatever it is that he has, all right?’

Tabitha waved her hands, impatient. ‘All right, Lydia. Can we have a snack?’ They pushed past her towards the kitchen.

‘There’s digestives in the tin, you can have two each. No more until lunchtime. And another thing – I want to hear about your friend.’

‘What friend?’ Clover wrestled with the biscuit tin. The lid fell and clattered against the tiles.

‘Philip said something about a child that comes here, that you play with. Who is it? Is that who taught you the song?’

Clover knelt to scoop up shattered biscuits. ‘What song?’

‘Give those to me, please, the floor is dirty. The song about the devil, I heard you singing it. Where did you learn that?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do. Give me that – give me that. Disgusting. Don’t eat off the floor.’

Tabitha rolled her eyes. ‘We dreamed it.’

‘You dreamed the song?’ Clover nodded and Lydia took the tin and replaced it on a high shelf on the dresser. ‘You didn’t learn it from the little boy? Philip said you have a friend, that he comes here and you play in the garden.’

‘Philip is telling tales.’

‘No, he’s not telling tales, he feels left out. Tell me about your friend, please, I need to know if there’s extra children to take care of. Your mum wouldn’t want you playing with strangers.’

‘He’s not a stranger.’ Tabitha crammed the other half of Clover’s biscuit into her mouth. ‘He lives here. He lives in the garden. We play hide-and-seek.’

Lydia rubbed the back of her neck, tight with fear. ‘Well, he can’t live in the garden, no one lives in the garden. He has a house somewhere.’

Clover shrugged. ‘He says this is his house.’

‘What’s his name?’

The twins looked at one another. ‘We don’t know.’

*

For three days, Philip lay in bed and sweated. Sara helped Lydia bring up the cushions from the stiff corduroy couch in the drawing room to make a bed on Philip’s floor, and for three nights Lydia lay in the dark and listened to the breath whistling in and out of him, and the cries when he woke in the night and thought he was alone.

Philip’s bedroom smelled of cut grass and hot breath and sweet child sweat. He lay very still under the covers, and Lydia set the box of paracetamol and glass of barley water down on the nightstand. He moved a little when she sat on the edge of the bed, and he put his hand out of the blanket to take hold of hers.

‘My mouth hurts.’

‘I know, I’ve brought you some nice barley. That will help.’

He refused to swallow the paracetamol directly, claiming that his throat had grown much too small, so she dropped the tablet into the glass and stirred with her finger until it dissolved into a gritty powder. Philip drank rapidly, and lay back down and stared up at the ceiling.

‘Am I going to die, Lydia?’

‘Of course not, don’t be silly.’ It came out harsher than she intended, so startled was she by Philip’s morbid query.

‘I’m not silly. Daddy died.’

‘Your dad was very sick for a long time, it was very serious. You just have a little bug, that’s all.’

‘I’m not poorly like Daddy was?’

She stroked his hair and pulled the blanket round him. He shivered. ‘Not at all, you’ll be fine. I promise.’

The air in the kitchen hung ripe and heavy with acrid plant smells; boiling water steamed in two vast saucepans on the stove and in the sink an armful of blowsy elderflower lay sodden. In Dot’s linen apron, barefoot on the tiles, Sara rinsed the stalks under the tap. The counter was piled high with wet flowers, fat and creamy and fragrant in the sunlight pouring in from the orangery.

Sara didn’t turn when Lydia entered, and barely seemed to hear her name being spoken.

‘Sara? I said, have you seen the girls?’

Sara sighed, busy with her task. ‘No. Not for a while.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m making tea. For Philip.’

‘Tea?’

Sara turned off the tap and shook her fingers over the sink. ‘You sound a fool, Lydia. Repeating after me like that, like a parrot. Yes, tea.’

‘What kind of tea?’

‘What kind of tea?’

Sara laughed, but it was short and brittle. ‘What kind of tea does it look like? Elderflower.’

‘Right. Did Dot help you?’ Lydia examined the heap of plants and prodded at the pile. The blossom had an oddly green tinge in the tiny whorls of white, and purple spots punctuated the long stems.

‘No, why would she? I picked it myself – I’m perfectly capable of boiling some flowers in water, Lydia. I thought it would help his throat. I know the children like Dot’s elder-flower cordial.’ The muscles in Sara’s arms slid beneath pale skin as she stirred the flowers into the hot water, and a bitter cloud rose and filled the kitchen. ‘Should I put some sugar in, do you think?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘It doesn’t smell very nice, does it.’

‘I suppose. You could ask Dot – she’d know what to do.’

The saucepans remained on the stove until suppertime, when Sara peered into the pale-green liquid and declared it perfect. She upended a snowfall of sugar from its paper packet and closed the plate cover. Lydia, who was laying the table, disliked the abstract look on Sara’s face as she hunted in the dresser for a suitable mug.

‘Can we have some, Mummy?’ Tabitha pushed her plate away and looked to Lydia, who shrugged.

‘No, my darling. This is for your brother because he is poorly.’

Tabitha frowned, but Clover didn’t seem too put out. ‘It smells like the bathroom. I don’t want it anyway.’

Although they had agreed that Lydia should be the one to nurse Philip, Sara vanished upstairs to pour her tonic down the throat of her eldest son. Nature, surely, would cure him, Lydia thought sourly. She clattered dirty plates into the sink and wished for Dot. Philip’s sickness seemed to have sparked something in Sara, some poisoned memory of caring for Doug, and it had made her difficult and distracted. Lydia knew it was caused only by fear, but it remained unpleasant. The girls stayed out of her way.

‘Ungrateful.’

Lydia looked up, surprised. Sara had reappeared silently in the kitchen, and tipped the mug of tea straight into the sink, across Lydia’s outstretched hand holding forks under the tap.

‘Wouldn’t even touch it. Said it smelled horrid – horrid!’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean –’

But her voice followed Sara out of the kitchen as she retreated back up the stairs and into her office, where the door shut with a thump. Lydia looked at the two pans of Sara’s tea on the stove, the spill of leftover flowers drying on the window-sill, and sighed.

In the morning, when Dot arrived with her eggs and good cheer and Lydia could share the burden of being the only truly present adult, she recounted Sara’s efforts with an edge of humour that she hadn’t felt at the time.

‘Doesn’t sound like Sara, she hates cooking.’ Dot tipped half a dozen eggs into the wire basket shaped like a chicken and lifted the lid from one of the saucepans to peer in. She sniffed deeply and turned to Lydia. ‘Did you say this was elderflower?’

‘Apparently. She brought in a huge load, there’s bits of it everywhere.’

‘Where’s the rest?’

Lydia motioned to the windowsill, where the remaining blooms had curled and shrivelled overnight. Dot picked up a few of the stalks and rubbed them between her palms.

‘Lydia. Lydia. This isn’t elderflower.’

‘No, it is, Sara said she picked it.’

‘Picked it where? Where?’

Lydia took a step back. Her hip hit the countertop. ‘The garden, I suppose? Dot, that’s elderflower, it looks exactly –’

‘I know what it looks like, but it isn’t. Lydia, this is hemlock. It’s poisonous, really nasty stuff. Really nasty. Has anyone else touched this?’

‘No, no, just Philip.’ A great weight compressed Lydia’s chest.

‘How much? How much did he have?’

‘Almost none, I told you – Sara was so cross because he wouldn’t drink it.’

Dot tugged at the ends of her plaits. ‘Help me chuck this out.’

They took a pan each, liquid slopping over the sides, and carried them out on to the patio.

‘Can we just tip it out here?’ Lydia nodded towards the lavender border.

‘No. No, it won’t be good for the plants. We’ll sling it into the pond.’

Lydia emptied her pan, gently, at the water’s edge. Dot threw hers outwards with great force, and the arc of the poison caught the sun like a bridge made of glass.

When they returned inside, Sara was open-mouthed and red with annoyance. ‘What do you think you’re doing? What’s going on? I made that, you know.’

‘I know, Mrs Robinson, and I’m sorry.’ Dot didn’t look her employer in the eye, and took the other pan from Lydia to put them in the sink. ‘I know you think that was elderflower and I don’t blame you at all because they do look similar. But that was hemlock – poisonous. None of you want to be eating that stuff, or drinking it neither.’

‘How do you know?’ Sara twisted her fingers in her cardigan, buttoned up tight despite the warmth of the morning.

‘Different flowers. Different stalks, the colours and all. You can tell when you get up close. Didn’t smell like elderflower either, did it.’

Sara had to concede that no, it hadn’t.

‘Where did you get it? Surely not from the tree?’

‘No, not from there. Down by the pond, there was a huge clump of it. And I saw it and thought it would be perfect. So I cut it all.’

Dot shook her head. ‘If you want to make something for Philip, like an infusion, I can help you?’

‘No,’ said Sara, faintly, ‘no, it’s all right. I don’t know why I thought –’ She trailed off.

‘Well, there you are, then. But look, no harm done, right?’

Sara looked out over the garden, into the bright morning, and a shadow of something that Lydia couldn’t identify crossed her face. ‘No. No, I suppose not.’ She left them both in the kitchen; they heard her hollow steps heading back up the staircase.

Dot looked at Lydia. ‘You want to watch her. Something’s not right there.’

‘I know.’

On the fourth day, the thermometer said 103, such spiteful little figures, and Sara telephoned again for the doctor. They waited, and Lydia sat with Philip on top of his quilts and rocked him while Sara stood in the doorway with her arms folded tight against her stomach. After a long moment, during which neither woman spoke, Sara left to shut herself in her office.

They hadn’t mentioned the hemlock episode again – Lydia understood that Sara was embarrassed by it and therefore angry, and Sara didn’t bring it up either.

Philip talked nonsense words about the moon and a cottage and how it was too bright now and would they all live on the moon together? Lydia fed him more barley, and when she took the glass from his lips the liquid was pink with coils of blood, like smoke in the water. Inside his mouth, Philip’s tongue was swollen scarlet and white, and blood blistered on the insides of his cheeks.

When she stripped him of his wet pyjamas, she saw the livid welts all over his chest and legs – tiny red marks like nettle rash, like scarlet bites. As if someone had pinched him all over with mean little nails.

‘Am I brave, Lydia?’

‘So brave, my love.’ She wiped sweat from his hairline with her thumb.

‘I want to be brave. Like how Daddy was.’

‘I think you’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.’

Dot appeared and gestured to Lydia. Very gently, she turned Philip over and laid him on the pillows.

Lydia stepped out on to the landing and pulled the door to behind her. The house was much too bright, and even though the front doors were open she felt suffocated in the dense, pollen-heavy air. ‘Everything all right?’

‘Sure, sure. Everything’s fine, just thought you might like some tea.’

‘Girls all right?’

‘God, they’re fine. They turn up for lunch and then bugger off again – you know how they are. Let’s go outside for a bit.’

Dot had picked up a lot of the slack with the twins over the last few days and Lydia was grateful. Sara was, too, and slipped an extra wedge of cash into Dot’s weekly packet. She’d blushed and waved her hands when she felt the extra weight, but Sara insisted.

Blond light washed the back patio and Lydia’s eyes stung. ‘It feels strange to be outside.’

She took a seat at the picnic table and Dot handed her a mug. Too much milk and too much sugar, that was how Dot made tea, but Lydia didn’t mind; it tasted like pudding.

‘Yeah, I bet. Those sofa cushions don’t look comfortable, either.’

‘My back is killing me.’

Dot laughed. ‘That’s because you’re old.’

‘Careful, this’ll be you one day.’

‘Don’t I know it. My mum keeps asking me about Lee, you know? Shall I book the church, Dot? Shall I fetch out all my maternity things, Dot? She’s unbearable.’

‘Well, should you book the church? You’d best let me know, I’ll have to ask Sara for the day off.’ Lydia wiggled her toes against the cool stone slab under her chair.

‘Christ, don’t you start.’

‘He seems very nice. Polite.’

‘Freddie liked you.’ Dot slipped the tip of her tongue between her lips, salacious.

Lydia laughed.

Sara came out of the orangery, pale and anxious, and handed Owen to Dot. ‘Lydia? The doctor’s here. He’s up with Philip. I thought you might want to hear what he has to say.’

They stood together on the landing outside Philip’s bedroom to watch the doctor as he leaned over Philip and did something vague with a stethoscope. When he came out, he said, ‘Bathroom?’ and Sara pointed down the landing. He returned carrying the hand towel, which he passed to Lydia, absent-mindedly.

‘Hospital time, I think. Scarlet fever.’

Sara took hold of the banister. ‘Now?’

‘Yes, now. You can follow me. I’ll take him in. He needs antibiotics and a drip. He’ll be fine, but it’s got on to his lungs and it needs sorting. Mum only, I’m afraid.’ He nodded at Lydia. ‘If the rest of you haven’t caught it yet, then you’re not likely to, but it can be contagious, so best to be safe.’

Sara turned to Lydia. ‘What shall I do?’

‘I’ll pack his things, clothes and so on, don’t worry. You just go with Philip. I’ll stay here with the rest. Don’t worry, we’ll be fine. You go. Go on, now.’ She pushed Sara towards the stairs.

Lydia undressed Philip to put him in fresh pyjamas. ‘You’re to be very brave now, all right, duckie? Just like we said. Your mum is taking you into hospital, for some different medicine. And I can’t come with you, but I’ll pack Paddington, is that okay?’

Philip sat quietly as Lydia fetched a clean pair of pyjamas, eyes half-closed and marbled with fever.

‘What about the little boy?’

‘What’s that, my love?’

‘I want the little boy to come too.’

‘Who’s the little boy, sweetheart?’ Lydia threaded one slack arm through the pyjama jacket.

‘You know him, Lydia. From the garden.’ Philip yawned and rubbed at his chest, where the rash flared against his skin. ‘He lives here. He lives with us.’

He says this is his house.

Lydia watched the convoy leave from the tall windows – the doctor’s Morris first and then Sara in her white Capri, dusted all over with pollen and sand, Philip rolled up on the back seat in his tartan blanket.

Then they were gone.