by K. M. Peyton
‘I told you. I’ve brought a visitor. This is Lily. She lives on the estate.’
‘Pleased to meet you, miss. Come in.’
Amazingly, Helena’s quarters were as inviting and beautiful as the rest of the house was hideous. High windows gave on to the lake and filled the room with sunshine. Comfortable armchairs were smothered with colourful cushions and beautifully embroidered antimacassars and a gorgeous Persian carpet patterned the floor in rich reds and pink and purple. Matching curtains fell in swags beside the windows and lots of bright paintings hung on the white walls – yellow sunflowers, landscapes of hot, wild places, and one of boats pulled on a beach beside an impossibly turquoise sea. As well as the sunshine the room was warmed by a bright fire and a small table was laid with scones and cream and a coffee pot gave off a lovely aroma.
Lily was so enraptured by the sight – even Simon’s mother had not risen to such heights in her beautiful home – that she quite forgot what she had come for and just stood there with her mouth open. Why ever was the rest of the house so bleak when someone had made this paradise?
‘My mother did it all,’ Antony said, although she hadn’t asked. ‘Bought the pictures and everything, Van Gogh and all. “Just because Helena can’t see them,” she said, “she can be surrounded by beauty just the same.” Bit daft really. Pity she didn’t do the same for her old man. And me.’
Lily had never guessed that Antony’s mother had been anything but a disappointed invalid, keening over her poor daughter, but she now took on a completely different guise with her eye for beauty and elegance. Oh, why had she died! Just like her own mother. But mothers were needed …
‘Here’s Helena.’
Helena was another embellishment to this beautiful room, outdoing all else. No wonder the Eton boys thirsted after invitations, having set eyes on her. She was as fair as Antony was dark, with corn-gold hair loose in thick curls over her shoulders, a porcelain, creamy complexion, and full curving lips. Her cornflower blue eyes gave no hint of their uselessness. She was slender, tall and full of grace, and she smiled as she was guided towards Lily by the other harridan, who was a carbon copy of her sister.
Antony stepped forward and hugged her and kissed her and laughed and ran her hands over his face. He kissed her fingers one by one and Helena laughed again. He laid his cheek on hers, both sides, and caressed her hair.
Watching them, Lily was filled by an overwhelming awareness of her love for Antony, as if it were her face he was kissing, her hair he was running his fingers through, his cheek against hers. Why was she so stupid, so hopeless? It wasn’t as if he was terribly nice, after all, the maverick Sylvester whom nobody could quite put a finger on. You knew where you were with Simon, and dreary old John and even dull Cedric, but you never knew where you were with Antony. This lark about the party was, after all, quite mad – in that creepy grotto, and having Helena there among all those crazy Eton boys … and where did she stand in such a gathering? Was she to be Antony’s guest or the serving maid? She did not think he would enlighten her, and how could she ask, when he dismissed her doubts with an off-hand, ‘Of course you’ll come, idiot.’
While all this confusion was making an upheaval in her brain, Antony reached out for Helena’s hands and placed them on Lily’s shoulders. ‘Stay still,’ he said softly, ‘and she will feel your face, get to know you.’
The hands were cool and delicate, so soft, slow, into her rough hair, gently down her cheeks.
Lily felt herself trembling, looking into the blank blue eyes so close to her, feeling her own eyes smarting with tears at the emotions that were almost overcoming her.
Antony, noticing, said quietly, ‘It’s all right.’
But it wasn’t – how could it be? Only to forget Antony, which wasn’t possible.
Helena was smiling. She reached for Lily’s hands and kissed the palms.
‘There, she likes you.’
Lily instinctively put her arms round Helena and hugged her and Helena hugged her back, and laughed. And then Lily felt all right again, back on balance.
Antony argued with Helena’s two keepers for permission to take his sister for a walk, which they granted with great reluctance. Lily could see how they thought they owned her, and how bad it must be for Helena to be in the hands of such – if not harridans – inward-looking, timid people.
Antony said they only took her for walks in the grounds, never down to the village, and rarely down to the lake. She had her own garden on the other side of the house.
‘We’ll go there, don’t worry,’ Antony said sharply, not wanting an argument.
Lily knew he would do what he wanted, as usual. Strangely, she had never worked on the other side of the house and her father, in fact, had rarely gone there. It was nearly all gravel drive and grass – which the farmer kept cut. The drive, after sweeping grandly up to the rarely opened front door departed towards the farm. The nearest buildings were a rather grand stable block, which now housed the Rolls-Royce and a more modest ‘shopping’ car, as well as the farm machinery and ten carthorses. Beyond was the farm proper, the threshing barn and the haystacks and the farmhouse, mostly hidden behind a clump of trees. Helena’s garden was at the side of the house and had once been the kitchen garden for the house, enclosed by a wall, but it no longer produced vegetables, only a lot of weeds, some tangled roses and ancient fruit trees. It was, in its disarray, quite pretty, even the broken glasshouses sprouting rampant vines, and there was a seat amongst the unpruned roses whose scent still graced the air. Helena made for this seat unaided. She obviously knew every footstep of the way.
‘My mother took her here, when it was a proper garden. It was beautifully kept when my mother was alive. She spent all her time up this end of the house. She hated the rest of it, not surprisingly. If I wanted to see her I used to come up here, but she didn’t want me, I could tell.’
Antony spoke quite plainly, without a hint of self-pity, but Lily found his words excruciating. This awful bleak house and not wanted by his mother in the only place where there was comfort and beauty … and not much rapport with his largely absent father: it was amazing that he was still a mostly cheerful soul.
‘Since she died, those women have taken Helena over. Before, they looked after her, but only did whatever my mother said. They came from the village, live in now, and I can see that this job is their meal ticket, and I suppose they do it well. But they think they have taken my mother’s place, and of course they are wrong. Nobody could. They are called after flowers, would you believe, Rose and Violet. More like Hemlock and Deadly Nightshade, I’d say.’ He laughed. Then he took Helena’s hand. ‘We’ll go down to the lake. Take her other hand, she will like that.’
They walked with Helena between them, and Helena swung their arms and laughed, and wanted to run when the lawn started to slope downhill to the water. They ran with her, and when they got there they put her hands in the water and splashed, and took their shoes off and paddled where there was a strip of sandy beach. They showed her how the water deepened, took her out until it was up to her knees, and she understood to go no further, and stood wriggling her toes in the sand, laughing. It wasn’t difficult to give her pleasure.
When they took her back, her keepers were dismayed by her splashed dress but Antony was short with them. ‘She loves the lake. Why don’t you take her there? It’s your job to make her happy.’
‘We do our best, Mister Antony.’
‘She needs to go out more.’
‘Yes, Mister Antony.’
That evening, when Lily was back home and was sitting at the supper table with Squashy and her father, having scraped out the last of the rabbit stew she had concocted with the limp carcass her father had brought home from the harvesting, she asked Gabriel about Antony’s mother. Her father had been in the pub and she knew he was more talkative with the beer inside him.
‘Did you know her?’
‘Yes, she was always in the garden. She loved the garden and the flowers
. I was a proper gardener in them days, not just a maintenance man like I am today. There was more of us, for a start. And the herbaceous beds – they was a picture. She loved them so. And the walled garden where she went with Helena – it was all beautiful. And she was beautiful too, a real lady. It was all different in those days.’
‘Antony said she spent all her time with Helena, and didn’t want him.’
‘I think that was true. He spent more time with us servants than with his mother, poor kid. But you could understand it, I suppose, the girl needing all that care. It don’t seem to have done him no harm though, not as I can see. Cocky young bastard.’
‘What did his mother die of?’
‘Oh, it was sudden, very unexpected. We was all shocked. It was one of them illnesses – her heart, I think, or summat like that. Meningitis? I dunno. Here one minute and gone the next. She had a lovely funeral, though, and all the flowers from our gardens – I was right proud, and she would have loved it, so pretty. They dressed Helena all in black – just a young girl she was then, your sort of age I suppose, or even a bit younger – and she stood by the coffin with all the white lilies, and then she lifted them up, a great bunch, and held them and started to sing – did you know she could sing? Such a weird sound, like a bird in the night time, standing there, and no one moved – made me think, what they say about swans singing before they die, not that I’ve ever heard it like, but it was like she was singing for her mother and she knew all about death and she just stood singing for her mother, not really sad but sort of triumphant – I don’t know how to explain it, but we was all dumbstruck. Not just us servants, but the old man as well. I thought he were going to pass out.’
‘Was this in the church?’
‘No. Outside the front door when they lifted the coffin into the hearse. It was an open cart from the farm, all covered in flowers and ribbons, with our own horses to pull it, and we was all going to walk behind it, even the old man with young Antony holding his hand, and that Aunt Maud, the old battle-axe, Mr Sylvester’s sister. Only half a mile to the church, but with that weird singing we was all sort of paralysed like and no one moved, until that Aunt Maud called out in a loud voice to the coachman, “Drive on! Drive on!” and that sort of broke the spell. Helena stopped singing and old Maud got hold of her and brought her back to her father and they held her hands between them, and Antony had to drop back out of the way. I remember then feeling right sorry for him, pushed back, and no one to hold his hand when he were crying like. Weird it was, I can tell you.’
‘Antony’s never told me this.’
‘Reckon he’s tried to forget it, the way it was for him.’
Lily was stunned, picturing the scene, after having been so close to Helena and Antony that afternoon. And the lilies. And the coffin cart, all covered in flowers. What else did her father know, his link to this strange family going back so far … or, perhaps, not so far, in reality, twenty years or so? He had had a wife then. Was her mother alive then, to attend this funeral?
‘She stayed at home, to look after you. And she were big in her pregnancy then with Squashy. A couple o’ months after, she were gone too. And another funeral.’
Lily’s mother was buried in the village churchyard under a simple stone, not far from the grand, angel-embellished tomb of Antony’s mother. Lily went there often, with wild flowers for her mother, crushed into a jam jar. Poor Mrs Sylvester, after the first few months, no longer had flowers. Antony said she didn’t need them: ‘She’s got angels, much better than flowers.’ But Lily didn’t think so. Flowers, often, meant you remembered. Not that Lily could recall her mother very well now, save as a quiet, comfortable sort of person and a good cook, nice for her father to come home to. Perhaps, if she had lived, she – Lily – might have been pushed to one side, like Antony, in favour of the more needy sibling.
‘Did she have the farm cart and the farm horses too?’
‘Yes, she did. Mr Sylvester was very kind, and also paid for the food and drink.’
Lily was sad that she had not been able to provide her father with such good care as her mother had. She did her best, but she couldn’t help being a rowdy, untidy, slap-dash sort of girl. At least she had a lot of energy and managed to keep things going, as well as work quite hard for a living. She wasn’t a droopy useless thing like some of the girls, Melanie Marsden for example. And her father rarely complained and actually, every now and then, called her a good girl. He was very forbearing.
‘Is Mummy coming back?’ Squashy asked.
‘No, not ever. She’s gone to heaven,’ Lily said.
‘What’s it like up there?’
‘Very nice. She’s very happy. If you’re good you’ll go there one day.’
Squashy wasn’t impressed. ‘I’d rather go to Guildford.’
Lily cleared away the dishes and took hot water from the range to wash up. Her father went out to water the young cabbages and Squashy went out with his catapult to try and kill something. So far he had had no success.
SEPTEMBER, 1921
8
Just before he went back to school Antony talked to Lily about the parachute he had acquired along with his aeroplane. He seemed to be fascinated by the thought of flying high and jumping out to float serenely down to earth.
‘It must be a terrific feeling. I would love to do it. I’ve asked around at Brooklands if someone would take me up so that I can try it, but no one would. They all say these chutes work so well it’s as safe as houses, but they won’t let me try. I think they’re scared of my father. I tell them he need never know, but they won’t.’
He had never taken Lily up again, much to her disappointment. Simon and John were forbidden, but Cedric enjoyed it and went up a few times. Lily knew though that Antony found Cedric boring with his obsession of spying on all the neighbouring farms. If he had taught her to fly too she could take him up and he could jump out with his parachute. She pointed this out to him, but he laughed her to scorn.
‘Teach you to fly! You’re mad, Lily! That’s why I like you so. But, for a treat, I could take you up and you could jump out with the parachute – how would you like that?’
Lily tried not to show how the idea frightened her. The awful thing about her relationship with Antony, she recognized, was what a puppet she was: if he said dance, she danced. Anything to please him. But to jump out of the aeroplane … the idea was terrifying.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said tightly.
‘You’re such a good sport, Lily. It would be great. Just us two. No one need ever know. We can find a nice airstrip, a private one where you can land safely, and I can come down after to pick you up. What a lark, eh? Until I can find someone to take me up, that is.’
Lily prayed that this might happen. But she doubted it. And, strangely enough, after the first shock, the idea that Antony had voiced was not completely unappealing. If she could really believe it was safe, the thought of swinging down through the sky from a great height had a fascination she could not deny. The more she thought about it the more the strangeness and the beauty of it took hold in her imagination. After all, she had been terrified with her flight, but it had turned out to be magic, something she would never forget. Her life was so boring and, as far as she could see, would always be so, without an education to take her out into the world, her father and Squashy to look after all her life and the unrelenting hard work – perhaps these moments that Antony offered, when her muddy heart took flight into realms she would never ordinarily reach, should be taken willingly, greedily, to feed great memories into her dull future. All this only came to her long after Antony first broached the idea.
He said, ‘I’ll try and find the right place, and we’ll do it, if you’re not afraid. I suppose we’ll have to wait until the spring, because of the weather. Not much good at Christmas. Aunt Maud is coming at Christmas, God help us, but after that, in the summer, we’ve got the party to arrange – that’ll be fun, and your jump – great stuff.’
�
�I thought you were supposed to be thinking about your career. You’ll be leaving school soon. What are you going to do?’
The ever-present thought of Antony’s departure from her life haunted Lily more and more these days. However long did these boys take to be educated? He never spoke about going to university, like Simon and John.
‘Do? Enjoy myself, of course,’ was the flippant answer.
If he went, Lily thought she might as well die.
When Antony went back to school Lily counted the days until Christmas. If he wanted her to jump, she knew she would. Strangely, she started to look forward to it. She wondered if she was capable of actually doing it when the moment came – she might be too petrified and seize up, unable to move. It occupied her thoughts all the time she was working at the mindless tasks she spent her days with: cleaning, digging, shopping, cooking, weeding, washing, running errands. Although she had thought she might spend more time with Helena, Rose and Violet thought differently and turned her away if she tried to visit. She hated going into the big house on her own and decided she couldn’t persevere with it, in spite of Antony’s wish that she should. He didn’t own her, after all.
‘What’s this Aunt Maud like, that’s coming at Christmas?’ she asked her father. ‘Is she nice?’
‘Battle-axe. Old battle-axe.’
Just Antony’s luck, Lily thought.
‘Funny a brother and sister being called Claude and Maud. I suppose if you called one they both came. Save breath.’
‘They were orphaned quite early on, left a packet. There’s only money in that family, no love.’
Antony’s got me, Lily thought, feeling warm and devout. He will always have me.
She didn’t tell her father about the parachute jump.
DECEMBER, 1921
Aunt Maud arrived before Antony came home and made her presence known at once. She had a very large dog with her which needed exercising.
