“My father’s party, too,” Daisy quickly replied. “It’s their wedding anniversary, Reggie.”
Daisy glanced at Howard, who smiled back at her, and Reggie laughed. “Of course. I didn’t mean to leave the old feller out, you know.”
When Mabel finally rose to her feet and said that if everyone didn’t mind she was going to go to her boudoir and check on a few things, Daisy took her cue. “And if no one minds, I think I’ll take a breath of fresh air before I retire—early, Reggie,” she added.
“I’ll join you,” said Ben, pushing out his chair.
“No, please. You stay here . . . have a glass of port. I’m sure you’d rather,” she said, offering him her best smile.
“You sure?”
“Quite.”
She swept through the kitchen—offering a quick hello to Mrs. Jessop—before moving down the red tile–floored passageway and slipping out of the open door into the courtyard. She glanced to the door of the coachman’s flat and then headed on, in the direction of the kitchen gardens. She knew he’d be there. When she saw him, standing by the cold frame, a watering can in one hand, cigarette in the other, she stopped and smiled and then moved slowly toward him.
He had dispensed with his hat and his jacket and tie, and his shirtsleeves were rolled back. His dark hair was cropped short at the back, and a thick, long wave hung over his forehead. As she approached him, he turned, and the frown she caught only a momentary glimpse of was replaced by a languid smile as he raised his forearm to push back the dangling lock.
She moved alongside him and stood with him in silence for a moment.
“So . . . ,” he said.
“So,” she repeated.
“Tell me.”
She smiled, reassured by their understanding and that undeniable frisson. And then she quickly reminded herself of the facts: the hideous possibility—likelihood, she corrected herself. But if he is my brother, is my love—affection—for him any less valid? she wondered. She glanced to him: a young Howard, Iris had said, but Daisy couldn’t see it. They were both dark, but Stephen’s jaw was longer, leaner, and his nose and the line of his mouth were quite different.
“Tell you what, exactly?” she said.
The sun was beginning its descent, pouring molten gold over the tops of the trees, bouncing off the panes of the greenhouse. She lifted her hand to her brow.
“Shall we start off with . . . how you are, whether you’re happy and how you feel about your impending marriage?”
“We’re not . . . not exactly, not properly engaged,” she stumbled, lowering her hand, glancing down to the yellowing grass.
“Ah, not properly engaged? So what is it, then?”
“Well, it’s an engagement, I suppose . . . a sort of engagement. But I hadn’t realized people knew. No one’s really meant to know, you see . . . not yet.”
“You mean it’s a secret?”
“No. It’s not a secret,” she said. “It’s just that it isn’t official yet. Only a few people know.”
“I see.”
“But that’s not why I’ve come out here, not what I came to say.”
He put down the watering can and turned to her. He reached out, touched her hair with his finger. “You had it cut,” he said, staring back at her and tilting his head to one side.
“It was a birthday present from Iris. But I still have it all . . . in a bag back in London,” she added.
Despite the fantasy—the image she’d sometimes had of herself with short hair and painted lips—Daisy had been stubborn, had steadfastly refused to follow fashion and have her hair bobbed. Iris had despaired, had told Daisy that no one other than old ladies and little girls had long hair now. “And as for those eyebrows . . . ,” Iris had said, shaking her head, “we really must do something with them.” Daisy hadn’t a clue what she meant. Did people actually have their eyebrows trimmed too? “They simply must be done. They’re quite mothlike, darling,” Iris had said.
Iris had won in the end—with the hair, at least—and an appointment with Marcel had been her birthday treat to Daisy. “You’re going to look so pretty, so fashionable and chic, darling,” Iris had told her in the taxicab en route to Harrods.
Daisy had had her hair cut a few times before, each time by Nancy, each time in the kitchen at Eden Hall and each time by only a few inches. But when she was twelve years old, more than six inches had fallen onto the kitchen floor, with a tearful Mrs. Jessop gathering up each discarded lock and loudly blowing her nose. Later, after seeing herself in the mirror, Daisy had been banished to her room for what Mabel deemed a “ridiculous hysteria.”
So, after Marcel, after she’d seen the lengths of her precious hair lying on the floor of the salon, it felt like the severance of something far greater to Daisy, and she’d cried again. Marcel had flicked his hand, said a few words in French that Daisy did not understand and then had someone gather up the hair and place it inside a paper bag. As Iris settled the bill and pacified Marcel with enough kisses to twitch his sulky pout into a smile, the bag was handed to Daisy. Now the severed hair lay in the drawer of her dressing table at Sydney Street.
“Well, that’s good,” Stephen said. “Perhaps you can give your bag of hair to your fiancé—as a wedding present.”
“Don’t be like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like . . . this.”
“This?”
She saw his eyes, curious, defensive, and longed for him to make a joke, to smile or laugh.
“This is how it is, isn’t it?” he began again. “You and me and life . . . Me, standing here with a watering can and a fag; you, coming to tell me that it’s all fine and that we’re still friends. Isn’t that what you came out here to tell me? That we’re still friends? And that it’ll all be fine and dandy after you’re married?”
She looked away. Daylight was fading. The sun had sunk farther beneath the beeches and pines, casting dark shadows about the pink walls where the nectarines and peaches hung full and ripe. “Yes,” she said. “I did.”
“Well, you don’t need to. We’ll always be friends, you and me. We both know that. And no matter what happens, I’ll always be here for you . . . or perhaps not here, but there—wherever there is. Anyway, you know what I mean,” he added, sounding vaguely irritated.
“Yes. And that’s exactly what I wanted to say to you.”
He nodded, as though agreeing more with himself than with her. “As long as you’re happy,” he said.
“What about you? Are you happy?” she asked. Though he didn’t seem it at that moment, it was only polite to ask, she thought. And she wanted to know. And she wanted him to be happy. As she waited for his response, as another silence descended over them, she realized that she wished for him to be happy more than she wished for her own happiness.
“I’m not sure what happiness is,” he said at last, staring into the distance. “I reckon there are good moments and bad moments, that’s all. And I experience both, just like everyone else.”
“I think it’s all to do with love,” said Daisy without thinking.
“And marriage?” he asked quickly, turning to her.
“Yes,” she said. “That as well.”
He looked away and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his pocket.
“What about Tabitha?” she asked.
“What about Tabitha?” he repeated, lighting his cigarette.
“I just wondered . . . it seemed to be quite something last Christmas.”
He sighed. “It wasn’t how it looked.”
Right at that moment she wished she could pull back; she wished she could speak to him about nothing and anything, but it was impossible. She couldn’t. From somewhere deep within her came a shrill little laugh—one she’d never heard before—and then she heard herself say, “Yes, well, it did rather look like something, and the
timing of your decision to . . . to spend the night with her was a little curious, Stephen.”
She couldn’t quite believe what she’d just said, and yet there seemed to be more, desperate and bubbling, that had to be said: “And let me just tell you this,” she began again, “if you’re going to go round telling girls you love them and inviting them off to . . . to foreign places, and then sleep with some of them, and write letters to the other ones, and then . . . then . . .” But it was all too much. It boiled over and out of her in a strangely gurgled scream.
After that, she had no alternative but to make a hasty exit. She marched off in the direction of the house, then swiftly turned toward the woods.
She paused for a moment, mortified by her outburst, clinging to the silky old wood of the gate; then she pulled it open and walked on. It was cooler, more tranquil there. The sun shone low through the branches, breaking up the shadows with iridescent jets of shimmering light, illuminating desultory cobwebs floating in the warm evening air. The path was soft underfoot, narrowed by the season, by the dust-covered nettles and ferns and the wildflowers, thick and abundant and undisturbed. The remains of fallen trees lay rotting in sinister shapes, their ragged bark peeling off them like ancient wallpaper, and the little wooden bridge was green with moss.
As Daisy stood on the bridge, she pictured other evenings, nights such as this, when she had been there with him, building a dam, searching the water for unusual pebbles and fossils, chattering on openly, uninhibitedly, about anything and everything. How uncomplicated life had once been, she thought, moving toward the ridge from where, months earlier, she had thrown her globe. Then the surrounding valley had been white and thick with snow, the stream gushing in an icy torrent; now purple heather once again covered the slopes and the water trickled slowly across the boulders and rocks. She looked down over the precipice. Was it still there, or had someone found it and carried it off? She heard the sound of a gun reverberate across the valley, and then she heard her name.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he stepped up onto the ridge and stood alongside her.
“My snow globe is somewhere down there.”
“Your snow globe . . . the one your father gave you?”
“I threw it from here. It landed near those trees,” she said, pointing.
He didn’t ask why, didn’t ask anything more. He said, “Come, I’ll walk you back.”
They took a different path and for a while they walked in silence. It was so easy, she thought, to be with him and be silent. Ben would have accused her of being antisocial or sulking, but there was never any such accusation from Stephen. Not that night, not ever.
At the top of the hill where the track met the tarmacadam road was an old broomsquire’s cottage. Daisy had visited it once before—years before—with him. At that time it had been inhabited by an old man called Jethro, whom Stephen had reckoned was close to one hundred years old. The place was still the same dirty pink and still had the same untidy thatched roof. A woman stood in the open doorway, smoking a pipe, holding a large baby on her hip. She smiled and nodded to Stephen as he moved toward her. Daisy remained on the track and waited while they spoke. She heard Stephen laugh, say, “No,” heard him say her name and saw the woman peer over at her with renewed interest. He stroked the child’s head as he spoke, then turned away and rejoined Daisy on the track.
“What did she say?”
“She asked if you were my sweetheart,” he said, looking downward. “But I told her who you were and that you were engaged to be married. That was all.”
“I suppose old Jethro’s long since passed away.”
“Yes, a good few years ago . . . That’s his great-granddaughter, Rosie.”
“You know everyone . . . you’ve always known everyone, which is surprising considering . . .”
“Considering I’m not from here—wasn’t born here? Maybe that’s why,” he said, turning to her. “Maybe I’ve had to make more of an effort . . . or maybe I’m more interested. Anyway, your family don’t exactly mix with the locals, do they?”
Daisy stopped. “Yes, we do. Most of my parents’ friends live round here.”
He smiled. “But how many of them were born here, work here, have lived here for generations? Rosie’s family have been here for hundreds of years, not a couple of decades . . . and I don’t suppose your parents or their friends have any idea who she is.”
Daisy said nothing. It was true enough; her parents didn’t and never had mixed with the local working people, those families who had lived off the land and eked out an existence over centuries. And she had been brought up with only a few vetted friends, children whose parents her mother knew and approved of. And yet Mabel had also been the one to have all of those children from London each summer and during the war.
“My parents are not prejudiced that way; they’re not snobs, Stephen,” she said.
“No, they’re not,” he said quickly, emphatically. “And I didn’t mean that. What I meant was, there’s . . . there’s this divide, and everyone has their group, their place, and they never mix. And I’m stuck in the middle, or that’s how I feel. I’m not sure which group I belong to, but I know I don’t wish to belong to one—to the exclusion of the other . . . if that makes any sense.”
“Yes. You’re a little like Ben in that way. He said something similar to me recently.”
“No, I’m nothing like Benedict Gifford.”
When they reached the yard, he lowered his head and said good night in what seemed to her an overly courteous manner. The air had grown colder and her bare arms were goose pimpled. Bats swooped over the darkened courtyard. Unable yet to face Ben, unable yet to enter that realm and make small talk, she walked on, round the house, and took the path to the Japanese garden.
She sat down on the bench by the lily pond, listening to the evensong chorus of birds until the lingering twilight dissolved and black dusk descended like the final curtain on the day, and only a solitary owl called out, and her thoughts blurred, deeper and more elusive than ever.
The moon was not quite whole and had a slice missing from its top, like the moon on the night of the Victory party so many years before. That night, when she had pointed it out to Stephen, he had said it was like the men who had been in the war and returned home with parts of their heads missing.
“But the moon will be whole again . . . and so perhaps those men will be too. The doctors will be able to help them,” she’d said, reassuring herself.
But Stephen had told her that the doctors could only help with the physical wounds and, even then, only the appearance of those wounds. “You can’t make someone forget everything they’ve seen or done,” he’d added.
“I don’t believe in war,” she’d said. “I’m a conchie.”
She wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but she knew it was the term for someone opposed to the war, and what Iris claimed to be. But when he’d turned on her, told her that it was unpatriotic to be an objector, that only cowards took that stance, and that she should be ashamed of herself for saying such a thing—particularly then, that night—she’d cried. And not for herself or for his harsh words, but for the moon—with its missing top, and all those men with their missing tops who could never be mended.
For Daisy, the war—initially—had simply meant the departure of servants, and they had all waved them off with small flags and glad hearts. It had meant a relaxation in the timetable of lessons, a new bedroom and more unlikely playmates from London. Meals had been different, fires restricted. But from time to time she had caught a glimpse of the newspaper, the long numbers, the photographs and images of that place, the war. She had been to church and prayed hard, as hard as she could, for those over there, and she’d relied on and listened to Stephen for analysis and commentary, just as she did on everything else.
When Daisy emerged from her trance—because that was what it had seemed like to her,
as though she had been lost in some state of disconnectedness—she was clearer. She remembered the last time she had sat in that place, shivering, cold, hot with jealousy and still trembling from the ripples of an anxious rapture, still trembling from a single meaningless kiss, still trembling from those furtive words of love; yearning for some distant freedom that would make sense of life. But freedom, she had discovered, was a lonely place. A rattling window out of which one viewed more windows and other people, strangers. Freedom was invisibility, she thought now.
She had lost track of the time and wasn’t sure how long she had been sitting there when she heard the footsteps behind her.
“Waiting for someone in particular?” Ben asked, sitting down on the bench by her side.
“Just taking some air.”
“Oh yes, air. You like taking air. I forgot.”
She heard him sigh, but she could think of nothing to say.
“If you’re still sulking about the station,” he said, “about me not waiting for you, I’m sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry.”
“I’m not sulking, Ben. And it was probably better that we traveled down separately.”
He laughed, a strange, hollow laugh, one that lent the night a newly foreboding feel. “It’s getting cold out here and you’re going to get chilled. Let’s go inside,” he said.
“I don’t want to, not yet.”
“Well, I’m not leaving you out here on your own.”
“Why?” she asked, turning to him. “What do you suppose might happen? That I’ll be eaten by a badger?”
“Don’t be facetious, my dear. It’s not becoming in a woman. It’s late and we should go and be sociable . . . It’s only polite.”
The don’t be facetious annoyed her; the my dear even more. She closed her eyes and then rose to her feet. As they walked up the driveway, neared the bright light of the front door, he reached for her hand and cleared his throat. “Daisy, dearest, I wondered if later you might allow me to come to your room to . . . to say good night to you?”
The Snow Globe Page 24
