by Rosie Thomas
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 cam
e 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.’
