The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  Wellcome looked at me with pitying animosity. ‘I shouldn’t interfere, if I were you,’ he said. ‘Not like that.’

  ‘Why not? Isn’t so much intuition – in Lindsay’s world, and yours? The theories about Eng. Lit. you profess – you can’t actually prove them, can you? Or are you a Leavisite?’

  I thought Wellcome was going to slap my face. Instead he looked at me in amazed horror for a moment before hurrying away over to his wife, where he picked up the squealing Bonzo. Caroline trailed after them, casting backward glances at the gallant tennis players.

  Was it a second marriage, I wondered? If so, it seemed unlikely to turn out any better than his first. Wellcome was a liar through omission, where the greatest untruths bloom. No marriage would survive that. Yet it seemed Lindsay’s had done, or had he simply been more skilful than Wellcome in his evasions because he had much more to hide?

  11

  I said, ‘There’s something phony about Wellcome, that’s all. I thought he was a close friend of Lindsay’s: he spent most of his time denying it.’

  Rachel stood over by the window in the big first-floor drawing-room in Hyde Park Square, riffling through piles of old sheet music kept in the window seat there.

  ‘Can’t find the damn thing. Must be here: Telemann, Telemann, where for art thou?’ She started to go through the dusty music once more.

  Madeleine had gone up to Glenalyth by air the previous day: she couldn’t stand British Rail. George and Max had already left too, travelling to Liverpool by car to see some new musical there prior to its London opening before joining us at Glenalyth the next day. Rachel and I were alone in the empty house, a huge white ship becalmed in the dazzling afternoon streets of Paddington.

  ‘I’ll have to buy another copy, that’s all.’ Rachel let a pile of music fall with a thump on the floor, the dust rising up in sunlit motes, then put her hands on her hips and stood with her legs apart like a big letter A against the light with her back to me.

  ‘You don’t mind going by train,’ she said without turning, still preoccupied.

  ‘No.’ I stood up. ‘I was talking about Wellcome. He was hiding something.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. I told you you’d get nothing, rummaging through all Lindsay’s old colleagues like that. Most of them are awful bores. MacAulay and Willis Parker for example: absolute stiffs.’

  Rachel seemed pleased by my lack of success in these enquiries. She turned at last.

  ‘What am I going to do with George and Max round the piano, with a toot and a flute for a whole week?’

  ‘Yes. What are you doing? I wondered …’

  “Nearer my God to thee”, I think. George likes the idea of having me under his eye for a while.’

  ‘It’s unpleasant –’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry! George’s wife is coming: Marianne, and Max’s wife, June. At the weekend. A real little house party. And you.’

  Rachel looked at me pleasantly and then, walking over from the window, she put her hand on my shoulder for a second. But still she searched the room with her eyes distractedly.

  ‘I don’t fancy playing the man between.’

  ‘George might bonk you one, you mean? Yes, he’s a big fellow.’

  ‘Has he spoken to his old friend in British Intelligence yet? Fielding, wasn’t it?’

  Rachel had gone over to the mantelpiece now and was tinkering with the silver music boxes there.

  ‘Yes. He has, he says. He’ll tell you all about it.’

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘The man was surprised to hear from him.’

  I thought again what a liar Basil was. Or had he genuinely forgotten George and their college days? But who could forget George? At college he was probably even more memorable, creating juvenile alarms at the debating society and frothing at the lips afterwards in the local boozer. I wondered when anyone would ever start telling the truth.

  Rachel said, ‘George is just a Saint George. He believes in miracles. As if this old friend of his could help. Probably never heard of Lindsay. But everyone wants to help, don’t they? Especially George.’

  ‘Don’t you want the help?’

  ‘Lindsay will turn up somewhere, sometime. I wonder sometimes if any of us can do much about it meanwhile.’

  She lifted the lid on one of the music boxes and a delicate tune emerged, a Viennese polka which spread through the warm airs of the room, someone else’s sweet memory invading the silence. I had never heard the tune before.

  ‘All these music boxes were Eleanor’s, you know. Daddy bought them for her before the war – there was a man in Zagreb who had a whole collection. Do you remember them?’

  ‘No. They must have been kept down here. Not at Glenalyth.’

  Rachel nodded. ‘That’s why Aunt Susan didn’t get them. She took almost everything else of Eleanor’s: has a sort of shrine of her things at Dunkeld.’

  ‘I never went to her house. We never did, I think.’

  ‘I hope we never have to. She’s a vicious old party. I never really liked her: one of those “not to” people when we were children. Full of revenge: I should have been Eleanor’s child – and Patrick, her own nephew, was dead.’

  ‘Why did Lindsay ever have her at Glenalyth then?’

  ‘To be kind, that’s all. Kind to everyone.’

  Rachel closed the music box decisively, killing all the past, the tune stopping half-way through a phrase.

  ‘Come on, are you packed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Country clothes? You can borrow Lindsay’s gumboots.’

  ‘Hardly need them, this weather.’

  I looked out on the bright square. Already the grass was browning slightly though June was hardly begun.

  Rachel had a white, tightly pleated cotton dress on, and now she twirled round in it, the material opening like a fan for an instant, displaying a lacy petticoat beneath.

  ‘You’re worried. Why?’ She looked down at me before starting to check through her shoulder bag. ‘Now; tickets, bank card, chequebook, pills, sunglasses, latchkey. All we need is the Telemann sonata and some food. There’s no food on this night train, can you imagine? Well have to buy some.’

  ‘What do I owe for the tickets?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m keeping a note. It’s quite cheap anyway. I had to take a double sleeper, second-class, you don’t mind? The first-class ones were all full.’

  ‘No.’ I laughed. ‘But why?’

  Rachel stopped rummaging through her bag. ‘Why what?’

  ‘I just wondered – going by the night train, that’s all.’

  ‘Is that strange? I don’t like aeroplanes, you know that.’

  ‘I’d forgotten. Of course Lindsay always had a thing about trains and railways, I remember that. All those toys in the attic at Glenalyth – great black LMS clockwork engines and things.’

  ‘Don’t start all that again.’

  ‘But it’s true, isn’t it? You like trains as well.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ She smoothed the already very smooth pleats in her skirt.

  Rachel was making this journey with me in memory of better times, I thought – of other travels with her father along this same route from London to Perth, secure in a first-class corner seat with him, flying past the ugly Midland towns, the dark railway sidings and slag-heaps, clattering over the points, northwards to the clean blue lakes and moors, ever closer to that meeting with Henty in the big green Wolseley and the sudden magic of the Highlands – bright morning after the long sweet night. And now I was to play the same role for her. I thought how successfully Rachel had gratified herself – ignoble envy rising in me again for her ability to discover and live in so many secret, self-sufficient worlds within herself, where time – and people too – could be changed about, shuffled and re-lived at will. I have rarely done better than to move rather slowly forward in my life.

  ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with going in trains,’ I said with sudden enthusiasm, ‘I
t’ll be great fun.’

  The Telemann sonata we picked up at Musica Rara in Great Marlborough Street, and the evening’s goodies were packed into a big shopping bag for us at Robert Jackson’s in Piccadilly. I chose a dry Aligote to go with the Chef’s Terrine and the cold roast halves of wild duck, and Rachel said there should be a good Beaujolais to follow with the slices of underdone spiced silverside and the Normandy goat’s cheese: she chose a Fleurie and then added a jar of real orange juice for the next morning …

  *

  The big electric engine throbbed quietly away on its own, at the end of a long line of blue and white carnages, a louder sonorous echo rising up into the stuffy night air. And now the platform, though there were ten minutes to go before the train left, was an impatient bustle of passengers pushing and shoving all along its length. Rachel had hired a porter. ‘You could have taken one of those trolleys,’ I said. She didn’t hear me.

  Already, with a face divorced from reality and too many magazines tucked under one arm, she had started on her journey, her pace quickening unconsciously, drawn irrevocably into all the nervous magic of departure – checking her watch, her tickets, looking up at the carriages, searching out our number with the bright eye of a gambler at a fixed wheel who alone knows he must win.

  ‘Here it is!’ she called, like a look-out on a whaler, and we climbed up into a sleeper near the front of the train with only a parcel van between us and the engine.

  I tipped the porter when he’d settled our bags and thought the compartment seemed rather small for two people. Then, right behind us, the sleeping-car attendant poked his nose through the door, a small pixie of a man with a very shiny thirties band-leader’s hair style, parted straight down the middle, an almost cheeky fellow with some deep northern accent.

  ‘Yoo tweo travellin’ together?’ He looked doubtfully at his booking sheet. ‘Mr Marlow. Miss Phillips?’

  I nodded. He remained doubtful. It was so long since I’d gone through any of this – years before in a hotel in Paris with Rachel where they had never given a damn about such unlicensed relationships. But here, for a moment, I thought the man was about to separate us, invoking some old northern railway bye-law or Presbyterian canonical. I put my hand in my inside pocket, thinking to tip him at once, before I noticed Rachel’s amused expression of patrician disdain. ‘My good man …’ I fully expected her to say. But all that emerged from her firm lips was, ‘Yes, we are together.’

  But then the attendant, still, I suppose, thinking me an interloper and smelling money somewhere, gave the game away.

  ‘I cuid get you a sleeper in first class, Madam – if ye wished. There’s several available.’

  ‘No,’ Rachel said. ‘This will do. Thank you.’

  ‘Shall I make up the beds now then?’ the band leader asked.

  ‘Later. We intend to dine first.’ She pointed to Robert Jackson’s bag on the seat: the Beaujolais bottle had slipped out, its dark neck thrusting along the couchette. The man noticed it.

  ‘Will ye want a corkscrew?’ he asked without the slightest change in his dour expression.

  ‘We have one, thank you. I think.’ Rachel looked at me and I nodded, before the train gave a lurch and we were off.

  ‘Well, call me if you need anything,’ the attendant said, looking at me with a change in his eye now – either of envy or amusement, I couldn’t say.

  Rachel had kissed me firmly before the train had properly got out of the station. ‘Childish train fantasies indeed – and George,’ she said. ‘It never crossed your mind, did it, that it simply might be you. Travelling like this. Just you.’

  It was almost too warm in the narrow compartment and Rachel at once started to take off her soiled cotton dress – leaving the lacy Victorian petticoat beneath. Then she picked up the Aligote.

  ‘It won’t be very nice,’ I said. ‘Not chilled at all.’

  ‘It’ll do,’ Rachel said. ‘It’ll do.’

  *

  One doesn’t expect love these days on night sleepers, even first-class, and I would have been surprised in any case by Rachel’s sudden sweet affections.

  I said later, ‘There were other more comfortable occasions – your flat upstairs in Hyde Park Square, or you could have come down to the cottage.’

  We were fingering our way through the first courses, the Périgord terrine and then the wild duck, licking our thumbs over the paper plates, sitting opposite each other in the corners of the bottom couchette, she with her feet up on it, a big hanky spread out over her petticoat. The train’s movement had become firmer and faster some time before. And now, reaching its cruising speed, it settled into its long night’s run with an immutable constancy – a huge metal necklace being dragged across the earth, which nothing now could ever impede and whose passengers, equally without appeal, shared the same sense of the inevitable.

  ‘Why? Why not before?’

  ‘Because we couldn’t have got to Perth at the same time, that’s why.’

  Rachel fluffed her dark curls and the smile was barely there, hiding nervously behind her too-straight nose. She started to eat the duck then, pulling a leg apart with her fingers, and her hands trembled. I thought: a nervous little girl at the start of a dorm feast. She seemed, without her shoes, in her lacy petticoat with her feet tucked up beneath her, to have become younger and smaller now, an Alice fallen into some Wonderland, finished with the magic potion and shrinking by the minute; a Victorian Miss in a frilly nightie before bed, waiting for a story. Her other intents – whatever other adult schemes she nurtured just then – seemed far out of place with her present juvenile manner and dress.

  She crunched into the leg of duck and then lifted the bottle of Aligote onto her chin and took a long swig. She handed the bottle across to me, wiping her lips with her bare arm.

  ‘You used to be so meticulous,’ I said.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About everything: wines, beds, napkins, life.’

  ‘I hated that ruined dump in Notting Hill, if that’s what you mean. You always thought it was “running home to Daddy” when I left. It was just I couldn’t face the scum on the bath any more. Anyway, wouldn’t it be awful if we all stayed the same?’ She grasped the mallard’s leg again. ‘You just can’t accept good fortune,’ she said.

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘Ours.’ She took the bottle back from me and drank once more. ‘I didn’t tell you, but when I saw you at the Flower Show that morning, you were a new person – I wanted to be with.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’d stopped worrying about me, at last.’

  ‘No risks with me, you mean, now. No hard lines, no broken hearts.’ Just a jolly romp on a night express, I felt like adding, but didn’t.

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  Rachel, though she’d drunk about a third of the wine, was still nervous, holding back, like someone afraid of their good fortune. ‘We’d stopped fighting at last,’ she went on. ‘You can suddenly want someone then.’

  ‘I fought in the old days because I was worried about you.’

  ‘Exactly. A lot of people call that love. Shall we try the beef? The Beaujolais must be getting cooked too.’

  I picked up the bottle where I’d opened it and put it next the hot vent on the floor. It had a faint, yet rich, flowery smell, like old roses at the end of summer. It struck me that with a bit of steady drinking on the good wines like this, she and I need never really get to grips at all that night. And in truth I didn’t feel I could touch her then, since Rachel, for all her confident words, had the air of a child prostitute at that moment: falsely confident, nervous – terrified even – just beneath the surface. The spiced silverside was tasty, though, and we had a tube of grain mustard to go with it. The Beaujolais was perfect.

  I sat back, determined to relax. If I wasn’t going to fight any more, I needn’t worry about sex – or love for that matter, either, for the two had always gone together before with her, and I couldn’t separate them now, even
though that was apparently what she expected me to do. She would be disappointed perhaps, but the various vineyards should dull the pain, I thought.

  ‘Try it,’ I said. ‘It’s perfect.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinking.’ She took the bottle but didn’t drink, balancing it in one hand, stroking it absent-mindedly with the other. ‘Enough of this and it wouldn’t matter what we both felt or thought. Your fighting and my wanting: neither problem would arise.’

  ‘I’m still something of a puritan.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you expect? I’ve not changed as much as you. I wish I could.’

  She drank from the bottle then, ending it up again on her chin, Carmen-fashion. ‘Yes. Just as serious as ever – counting your thoughts out like an old Jewish moneylender and wondering how many you can afford to spare the next client. Most people would give their eye teeth –’ She bit into a slice of the silverside. ‘You’re unreasonable,’ she said, her mouth still full.

  ‘I loved you. That doesn’t seem unreasonable. Even though it meant fighting. This is just going through the motions.’

  ‘“The more we are together, the happier we will be”.’ She looked up at the ceiling, hopelessly. ‘Well, we’re fighting all right now – good-oh! You’ve had me in your way. Thanks.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I love you, in that way.’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ she said sadly.

  ‘Let’s try the goat,’ I said lightly, trying to ease the situation. And the goat, too, was good: a long barrel of cheese in waxed paper, just crisp on the outside, but chalky-soft with a faint tartness running into the centre.

  We ate in silence as the train clattered over the points of some hidden Midland junction, and we were suddenly strangers now, new passengers looking over the remains of a boozy picnic left by some previous and unaccountably lively travellers in the compartment.

  And then, when it seemed that nothing further could happen between us that night other than to climb distantly into our separate bunks – when we seemed dead to each other, when we’d tidied up the debris and put the empty bottles back in the shopping bag, when there was absolutely nothing else left to do – Rachel turned away from me and started to undress with the quite unconscious provocation of a preoccupied strip-tease artist: first the petticoat, pushing the straps off her shoulders, pulling it up her naked torso, over the hills of her small breasts, then a suspender belt and seamed stockings, then her pants.