The Flowers of the Forest

by Joseph Hone

  ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘No? Well, not telling me the truth then.’ I gave another twist. ‘That’s worse than lying – when I’m trying to help. It’s all too serious now. You better tell me!’

  I was furious. But I knew I’d really hurt her if I kept on turning her arm. So I relaxed my grip a fraction. And taking this as a first sign of my relenting, Rachel started to cry suddenly and I let her go entirely as streams of anguished sound filled the afternoon, a well of some terrible emotion breaking out as she lay in the bush covering her eyes, trying to wipe them with one arm, the other lying numbed beside her – so that I felt I’d be sick with horror – and the hatred I now felt for myself in hurting her so, someone loved, that I had stalked to a death, it seemed, lying like a broken doll now in the Philadelphus bush.

  And then, as in the past – when some blazing row had finally released each to the other – we found the threads once more that held us together, quicker now than before, when several days might pass without a word. Anger became a key to peace in a matter of minutes here and I wondered if we might be growing up at last.

  ‘I’m frightened,’ she said eventually, sitting up in the orange bush and brushing the petals off her tummy.

  ‘I can see that – drinking that way in London, letting off revolvers at me. But why?’ I touched the tip of her nose, then ran my thumb gently down from the corner of her eye, taking the last moisture away.

  ‘I suppose I wanted to find Lindsay in my own way. And when you turned up – I knew I couldn’t.’

  ‘Yes. But why?’

  She licked her lips in the dry heat, as if tasting something. ‘In the past,’ she said. ‘It must have been when you started talking about Aunt Susan – just before you swam off.’

  ‘That was why you fired at me?’

  ‘I told you I didn’t mean it. It scared me much more …’ She looked at me vacantly. I could sense that at any moment she might stall, go back on the truths that I felt were just about to emerge from her.

  ‘Come on, Rachel. It must be more than an accident. You told me in London how you had this terrible sense of insecurity and didn’t know why –’

  ‘I still don’t know!’

  ‘But you were close to it–just then, before I swam out, when I mentioned seeing Aunt Susan.’

  ‘Yes – yes, I was,’ she admitted.

  ‘You have such recall – over other things. But not this. The classic case of a block.’

  She nodded. But then she said, ‘A block?’

  ‘Yes – I was talking about fishing, you remember – about our trolling for pike and you said it was too hot. And before that we’d talked about people being incompatible, even though they so wanted to be together. And then I mentioned Susan. That was the sequence: affairs going wrong, pike-fishing and then Aunt Susan.’ And I rushed on now, certain that I had isolated something important. ‘And remember in London – that day you told me about: you were up in the copper beech and you saw your father going down to the loch and you followed him and saw him – alone – trolling for pike. But afterwards, you saw Aunt Susan with him in the back of the boat. It was she who was fishing for pike and it suddenly all made sense to you, because Lindsay never went out in the boat fishing alone. You saw all this in your mind afterwards, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘Well – yes – so it’s because of something to do with Aunt Susan that you don’t want Lindsay found. Or at least, you don’t want him found in any way through her. That’s what it amounts to: she knows something – and you know it too, unconsciously – to Lindsay’s disadvantage. And I know all this – or sense it at least – which is why you felt like shooting me just now.’

  ‘I didn’t! It just went off!’

  I thought I was losing her then, that she had become afraid of the truths she felt rising in her, was finally unable to face them. So I leant forward to kiss her, as if to rescue the truth in this way before it drowned again – and draw it out, once and for all, from that darkness which she had maintained for so long about her father.

  And she kissed me, too – putting her arms about me, so that we both fell into the broken orange bush.

  Afterwards, when we’d pushed our way back through the undergrowth to the jetty and she was putting on her bathing costume, while I was untying the boat, she said ‘When you first kissed me then I had such a surprise, such a strange feeling, my mind going all woggly.’

  ‘The earth sinking?’

  ‘No. When you kissed me, I saw –’ She stopped. ‘Can you clip this up for me? I can’t –’

  I came up and fixed the straps at the back of her costume and then she said, ‘Of course, it was all clear back there – when you kissed me: it was Aunt Susan who was being kissed. That’s what I saw when I went down to the lake that afternoon as a child – that’s what Lindsay was doing, there – in that boat.’

  She turned and we both looked with surprised disbelief at the old green rowing boat which had drifted out a little from the island while our backs were turned, as if inhabited by some life of its own now – or by some other life – moving gently away across the water.

  I picked the little revolver up from the jetty and opened the chamber. She had only put one shell in. Had she really wanted to kill me, I thought, she would surely have filled the chamber up, waited until I’d swum nearer the island and then had six shots at me. I had to suppose, in the event, that she’d told me the truth, that it had been an accident – or a game – taken from childhood and spiced here with a more elaborate, adult danger: a dangerous charade which we had finally defused and whose message we had interpreted at last in the shape of Aunt Susan being kissed in a boat thirty years before. Yet there remained, for all that, some ambiguous residue about the events of the afternoon – a matter left still undecided, some unresolved notion or frustration on Rachel’s part, a kind of madness which our renewed loving hadn’t cured.

  3

  All the same, Rachel took up the search for Lindsay again, there and then. At least, she came with me up to the attics that evening and together we sorted through more of her father’s papers.

  ‘It’s funny,’ I said, as we made our way through the minute, white-washed maids’ rooms before going up the narrow staircase into the attics themselves, ‘Lindsay used to keep his old train sets up here, all those wonderful big black clockwork engines and yellow carriages. But there’s none of them around at all here now. Just a few rails.’ I prodded a rusty example lying on the floor with my shoe. ‘And a broken signal.’

  ‘They must be somewhere about.’

  ‘No. I’ve looked.’

  ‘In some cupboard, then. The house is full of cupboards.’

  We’d come up into the first of the attics then where I’d put a box aside with one or two things I thought might be important in it. ‘This is the only railway thing I found – this membership card.’ I showed it to Rachel. ‘You see – “The Oxford and Cambridge Model Railway Society, 17 The Rise, Bow Brickhill, Bletchley, Buckinghamshire.” With Lindsay’s name. And the date at the bottom: 1932. I don’t follow it.’

  ‘What is there to follow?’

  ‘Why is the Society in such an out of the way place? Why not in either Oxford or Cambridge itself? And why was there such a society in the first place? For children, yes. But for undergraduates?’

  ‘Daddy was always mad about trains. And I suppose the two Universities joined together – there wouldn’t have been enough members otherwise.’

  ‘But why in Bletchley?’

  ‘Why not? Maybe it was halfway between Oxford and Cambridge. Buckinghamshire, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ I suddenly saw the reason for this unlikely site. ‘It must have been on the old Oxford to Cambridge line, so the members could get to it equally well from either university.’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘That explains it.’ Yet still there was something unexplained about this society which irked me. ‘Even so, it must hav
e been quite a trip to make just for a club evening. A train journey each time you wanted to play with your model engines.’

  ‘Part of the fun, surely, if you were train-mad.’

  Afterwards we started through some more old cardboard boxes and suitcases, squatting on the rough wood, a single light-bulb above us. I’d been looking, without success, for some evidence of the Yugoslav in the Brigadier’s tale, of the Croat who had tried to kill himself on the rail siding in Austria just after the war: Lindsay’s friend from his time at the Zagreb Consulate in the thirties – a teacher, the Brigadier had thought. But there had been no sign of him anywhere, not even in a case full of Yugoslav papers, and I’d given up trying to identify him.

  But then I came on some old folders packed tight with papers dealing with Lindsay’s bee-keeping activities before the war: Ministry of Agriculture pamphlets and other advisory texts for the most part, together with a number of catalogues from bee suppliers in the home counties. And it was while thumbing quickly through one of these that the letter dropped out: a neatly folded but badly typed letter, in English, with the heading ‘Harvatski Narodni Univerzitet’ and dated April, 1936.

  It was written to Lindsay in his official capacity at the Consulate – a formally polite enquiry asking him if he could send the address in London of the appropriate library or Ministry where the writer could obtain some bee-keeping information he needed not then available in Yugoslavia – and particularly instructions on how to deal with a new variety of foul brood. The letter was signed: ‘Dr Ivo Kovačič’, Assistant Lecturer in English at Zagreb University. Here, I thought, must be the Croat whom Lindsay had betrayed on the rail siding thirty years before – who’d then been sent packing, back over the border, into the merciless arms of Tito’s partisans. There was nothing else on him, however. Rachel had never heard of him and I had to assume the Brigadier had probably been correct: this old Croat nationalist had ended up in a lime quarry thirty years before.

  Throughout our searches that evening we were looking, too, for some evidence of Lindsay’s apparently close relationship with Susan.

  ‘It may have been nothing more than a friendly peck on the cheek you saw in the boat that afternoon,’ I said, as we went on through the boxes.

  ‘But they weren’t friends – that’s the whole point. She always loathed Daddy. I can remember the silences when they were together, like ice.’

  Rachel wiped the sweat off her hands with a hanky. We were close together on our knees, perched under the eaves and the long day’s heat had made it oppressive. ‘We thought Susan an old dame, all dressed in brown like a stick,’ Rachel went on. ‘But that’s only because we were very young then. In fact, she can’t have been more than forty – she was a year or so older than Eleanor. To an adult she would have seemed quite young and attractive.’

  ‘You think she had some affair with Lindsay, that he dropped her? And that’s why she was so cold with him?’

  ‘Might explain the awful unease I felt at the time – some sort of great stress in the household then.’

  ‘Don’t forget, Patrick died at the end of the war.’

  ‘This was before Patrick died, I’m sure.’

  ‘The kissing in the boat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which means Lindsay must have been up here on leave – which means, if they had any sort of relationship or affair, it must have started before the war.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rachel said decisively.

  ‘I’m not so sure I believe it, you know. Much more likely just a placatory offering, that kiss. Not important. Or you’ve got it mixed up and it was Madeleine you saw in the boat that afternoon.’

  Rachel eased herself on the bare floorboards and folded her hands in her lap. ‘You think I’ve invented Susan as a rival for Lindsay’s affections, don’t you, in order to justify what you see as my own insatiable love for him? That I’ve set Susan up as a wicked temptress taking Lindsay away from me.’

  ‘You’ve put it better than I could, I think.’

  ‘Well, who can tell?’ Rachel looked as if she truly couldn’t. ‘But I don’t think I’ve done that,’ she went on.

  Certainly there was no documentary evidence in the attics to substantiate Rachel’s claim. I don’t know what we seriously thought there would be. What did we expect? Old love letters, a diary? Certainly there was nothing of the kind. There was only one particular photograph in a trunk among a lot of others in old yellow Kodak folders – the excess snaps of three or four decades that hadn’t made it into the family albums downstairs in the drawing-room. I’d looked through this trunk quickly before. But now, with Rachel with me, I studied the photographs more carefully, helped this time by her comments and interpretations.

  The photograph was on its own, not part of any sequence, as though it had slipped from a folder or had been sent to the family as a holiday memento by some outsider who had taken it. It showed Lindsay as a young man (his hair combed sideways and quite dark, while I had always known it straight back and half-white) with two women on the deck of a river steamer somewhere. It looked like the Rhine, for there were steeply rising hills, criss-crossed with vines, on either side of the water.

  ‘Yes,’ Rachel said. ‘That’s Lindsay. With Eleanor and Susan.’

  The two women were sitting at a deck table, with Lindsay standing between in a Fair Isle sweater and a baggy pair of pants that looked like cricket flannels, his hands lightly on the women’s shoulders, bending down towards the camera with a confident, almost cheeky smile.

  ‘Some jolly holiday down the Rhine, that’s all,’ I said. ‘Mid-thirties, by the clothes.’

  ‘So – they had the opportunity. Didn’t they?’ Rachel looked up at me enquiringly. ‘Just the three of them.’ She had changed subtly, I thought, from her father’s supporter to being his prosecutor. And so I reversed my own role and became his advocate.

  ‘How do you know? There were probably four of them – the person who took the snap as well. A friend of Susan’s.’

  Rachel picked up the photo again and I leaned over her shoulder, the yellow light above us illuminating this forty-year old holiday more sharply. The two women looked remarkably alike without somehow giving the impression of any similar temperament. They seemed divided, each in her own world – as Lindsay divided them physically, standing between them. One of them – Eleanor – was smiling slightly, while Susan’s face remained severe. Both of them in long cardigans and rather full-bodiced dresses, dark hair parted precisely in the middle, they nonetheless seemed to come from different worlds, as if the figures for rain and shine in a weather house had both come out at the same moment.

  Behind them were other groups at deck tables just visible. And here I could just see a man in uniform in the background, standing against the ship’s rail: a tightly belted jacket with a single line of braid right round the collar and a steeply raked, peaked cap. It might have been an SS officer’s outfit, I thought. And then I wondered: what were these three doing holidaying in Germany at this time? Especially Lindsay and Eleanor with such apparent socialist sympathies. It must have been about 1935, only a year after the fascist atrocities in Vienna which Lindsay had described in his letters to Eleanor. Why holiday in Germany just then – with such recent and unpleasant memories of what the Nazis were capable of? And if Eleanor was a serious socialist at that time, what of Susan? Was she socialist too? I asked Rachel.

  ‘Just the opposite, I’d say. Tory to her bones. She was very fond of Eleanor. But they were quite different.’

  ‘You can sense that in the snap: they feel different.’

  ‘Susan didn’t hold much with gadding about the place: very much the vicarage girl, the stay-at-home potential Lady Bountiful of the Manor. I’m sure she’d have been pro-Hitler then, at least to begin with – until Chamberlain said we’d have to fight him. She thought Eleanor was going to the dogs with her university life: quite the wrong thing. They were chalk and cheese.’

  ‘Then what were they all doing on tha
t boat together – in the middle of Nazi Germany?’

  ‘Trips down the Rhine would have been all right for her. And the Dutch tulip fields. And she’d have gone with Eleanor. She had this thing about saving her.’

  ‘From Lindsay? Surely he’d have represented every fine Tory, land-owning virtue for her – the Laird of Glenalyth.’

  ‘No. Saving her from … well, I don’t know.’ Rachel looked genuinely blank. ‘The perils of thought, I suppose; and perhaps you’re right – perhaps Eleanor was left-wing at College. And Susan would certainly have been annoyed by that.’

  ‘When were they married, Lindsay and Eleanor?’

  ‘End of 1935 I think. Or 1936. Patrick was born at the beginning of 1937 – the same year as Eleanor died.’

  ‘So when that snap was taken they weren’t married?’

  ‘No. I don’t think so.’

  ‘I wonder if your kissing in the boat on the lake doesn’t make some sense now,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘When you said Susan was a potential Lady Bountiful of the Manor: it’s possible, isn’t it, that’s why she wanted to be with Lindsay? You said she was keen on “saving” Eleanor: well, that’s what she may have been trying to do – going down the Rhine, saving her from Lindsay, so that she might marry him. And hence her sour look in that photo: she obviously wasn’t succeeding.’

  ‘She’s rather a formal old party, you know. She’d never have thought of marrying Lindsay unless he’d given her grounds for thinking it possible.’

  ‘Perhaps he did. And perhaps unwittingly. There’s often that sort of trouble between a man and two sisters.’

  And then it suddenly struck me what might have happened: Susan and Eleanor were alike in their striking, if rather severe good looks, yet quite opposite, it seemed, in their political views. If Lindsay, as I’d established, seemed to have embraced both the left and right wings at this time, what more natural than that each of these sisters should have become attracted by these quite separate parts of his personality: Eleanor reaching out for what was socialist in him, while Susan had taken to all the Tory elements in his nature. Yet there remained a startling flaw in this proposal: what person, by nature, can honestly embrace two utterly opposed political dogmas at the same time? By nature – and especially given Lindsay’s formal dispositions here – holding such political faiths simultaneously was surely as impossible as actually making love to two women at the same time. It followed, of course, that Lindsay had assumed one of these faiths – and that only one was natural to him. But which one? And which of the two sisters, given the truth of Rachel’s memory of the boat, had fallen for the genuine article? Aunt Susan herself was the only person who might help me to a closer view of the truth.