The Lily in the Snow

by Jackie French

  He tucked his scarf into his coat. A well-cut coat, even fashionable. But then all his clothes must be relatively new. ‘Do we need to talk?’

  ‘You know we do. And I think your brother and his wife need more time alone.’

  He nodded at that. They crossed the courtyard. The breeze hit as they left the shelter of the buildings, the scent of ice and pig and omnipresent turnip. Sophie sat on the rough wooden seat. Dr Greenman hesitated, then sat as far away as the seat would allow.

  ‘You recognised your brother?’

  ‘What?’ He had expected her to talk of them. ‘Yes. Almost at once. The set of the shoulders, the shape of the feet. Even the same stubborn set to his chin when he wouldn’t acknowledge our voices. But I didn’t want to force him into a life he didn’t want.’

  ‘He longed for it,’ said Sophie. ‘He simply didn’t want to be a burden to those he loves.’

  ‘I see that now. Thank you,’ he said grudgingly.

  A breath. A moment only, but such a long one. ‘You said he was your twin.’

  ‘We always thought of ourselves as twins. We were born on the same day, to different parents. His father died, and my mother. My father and his mother married when we were two years old, though he kept his father’s surname. We even looked so much alike we were taken for twins, especially in school uniform.’ He shrugged. ‘In times of stress we tend to go back to the beliefs of our childhood.’

  ‘I searched for you when I woke up that morning,’ she said quietly. ‘I thought you had fled from me. I left, thinking I had hurt you, forcing you back to a life you didn’t want. The telegram about Nigel had arrived at Thuringa by the time I arrived home . . .’

  ‘And a month later you had married him. Countess of Shillings. You must be proud.’

  She couldn’t see whether he meant to sting her with that. ‘I am proud of my husband. He is not his title and nor am I mine. Except, perhaps, in our sense of duty to the people of the Shillings estate. Nigel needed me. He was ill, probably dying. I owed him more than I can say.’

  ‘And loved him?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sophie. ‘Though it’s not as . . . simple . . . as that. Nigel had asked me to marry him before I went home to Australia. I loved him then too, but knew my life was elsewhere.’

  ‘And then it wasn’t.’

  ‘In the years since then I’d learned how to be myself. I no longer risked losing that by staying in England with Nigel.’ Except I have, she thought, a little bit. But perhaps that always comes with marriage and parenthood. She took a deep breath. ‘I loved you too. If you had asked me to marry you, I would have accepted.’

  ‘Marry a swaggie who lived in a hut?’ She noticed he did not say he had loved her back. Had she loved an illusion?

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘I would have married you, if you had asked. Though I would have gone home to bathe if you’d insisted on continuing to live in the hut by the gate.’ Her tone was not quite facetious.

  ‘You had children the year after you left Australia,’ he said flatly. ‘I read about the birth. Your marriage was quite a sensation in Australia. But the newspapers were tactful. No one mentioned that their birth date was just a little too close to your marriage.’

  She did not tell him that she and Nigel had only those few days of physical love, before the surgery necessary to save his life made it impossible. ‘Midge keeps me up to date on the Australian news. So does Maria, my old governess, who’s returned there. There is no need to be tactful. Yes, Rose and Daniel may be your children. They may also be Nigel’s. Nigel knows this, by the way; and had I been able to find you I would have talked to you about the . . . situation . . . as well. At least,’ she added honestly, ‘I think I would have. John, look at me.’

  ‘That man no longer exists.’

  A man she had loved; still loved in memory and dreams. A man who’d seen beauty all around him, and touched strangers with his compassion.

  ‘Dr Greenman, then,’ she said, glad her voice stayed steady. ‘Would you have asked me to marry you if I had told you I was pregnant? Or even if I’d stayed and waited for you to return that morning?’

  He looked at the turnip fields, not at her. ‘I dreamed of asking you to marry me all through that night we had together, and no, I didn’t expect we would stay living in the hut. I dreamed of marrying you until the moment I found you’d flown away. Quite literally.’

  But who would I have married? she thought. John or Dr Greeman? Who is Dr Greenman?

  ‘You must have some idea which of us is the children’s father.’ She could feel the effort he was making to keep emotion from his voice, but his fists were clenched in his lap.

  She shook her head. ‘Truly, I don’t. My journey to Australia was . . . irregular. My body was irregular too. I hardly knew night from day. Rose and Danny were born slightly late for you to be their father, and slightly early if they are Nigel’s.’

  ‘Twins are more likely premature than overdue. Which conveniently makes them your husband’s.’

  ‘There speaks a doctor. But firstborn children are more likely to be slightly overdue too.’

  ‘Psychiatrist,’ he corrected.

  ‘Ah. I should have guessed. But doesn’t that mean you’ve qualified as a doctor as well?’

  ‘Yes. And served as such in the war. Sadly, the armed forces in their wisdom had little use for doctors of the mind.’ He hesitated. ‘How did you know my name was Daniel?’

  ‘What? I didn’t know.’

  ‘But you called your son . . .’

  ‘I called him after the song you sang. “Danny Boy”. Oh Danny Boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling . . .’

  ‘My mother used to sing it to me. My stepmother, but I always thought of her as Mother.’

  ‘I sing it every night to Rose and Danny. It’s their lullaby.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. Nothing more, but his hands relaxed. His body moved infinitesimally towards her.

  They sat in silence, each at their end of the seat. At last she said, ‘Do I call you Dr Greenman or Daniel?’

  ‘Do I call you your ladyship or Sophie?’

  ‘Sophie.’

  ‘Then I am Daniel.’

  Was that the beginning of a smile?

  ‘May I write to Midge, to tell her you are safe? She cared about you. So did many people.’

  ‘Yes. I must write to her too.’ Daniel gazed at the men, limping around the yard or being pushed in wheelchairs, drinking in the thin French sun. ‘I wasn’t quite sane, back then. I knew it. Being someone else helped me keep all that Daniel Greenman couldn’t cope with locked away. Not just John’s death, but all the others.’

  Sophie thought of those thousands of crosses he had carved. She had presumed they were for each man he had ordered to his death. But he had been a doctor — were they for the ones he had not been able to save?

  ‘Then you appeared,’ Daniel said simply. ‘And I found I wanted to live, not as a swaggie by a gate, but as myself.’

  ‘And then I left you. I’m sorry. I’ll always be sorry. I didn’t understand.’

  ‘How could you? What I was, who I was, wasn’t entirely rational.’

  ‘And now you are rational?’

  He looked at her with honesty. ‘Most of the time. There are still difficult nights. Times when I am — discombobulated. I . . . I’m still not quite able to reconcile my life as “John” with my life as Dr Greenman, though I know I owe Midge and others both apologies and gratitude. Sometimes I need to spend a day or more just walking through the bush. That seems to bring me back to who I am and when I am, not back in 1918.’

  ‘You can’t walk in the bush in France. Is it worse being back here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She wished she could help him, hold him through the nights. Why couldn’t a woman have two husbands, if she loved them both? Or even just be there, to hold him as a friend? Suddenly, with anguish, she wished he’d find a woman who could help keep him in the present, safe, happy, not back in all the tumu
lt of the war.

  But he had found one, a woman who had been trained by Miss Lily to understand, to have compassion, grace and charm. And that woman had abandoned him, might even have stolen his children, the ones he had longed for. She imagined walking along the riverbank at Thuringa, each of them holding a child’s hand. Daniel, who looked like a baby Nigel, Rose, who had Daniel’s eyes, green as his name . . .

  But come ye back when summer’s in the meadow

  Or when the valley’s hushed and white with snow

  It’s I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow —

  Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy, I love you so!

  ‘Thank you for not asking me to leave Nigel so you can claim the children.’

  He looked startled. ‘It never occurred to me that you might agree. You’re a countess, after all.’

  ‘I can dispense with the countess bit,’ she said drily. ‘It is the least important part of my life. But Nigel is important,’ and Miss Lily, she thought, who I love as much. And Jones and Green, who are family too. Their lives would be ripped as far apart as Nigel’s if I left him. ‘I married Nigel because he needed me more,’ she said. ‘Or I thought so then. And, looking at you now, I think I was right. You’ve survived. Nigel . . . I don’t think he would have.’

  ‘I heard about his surgery.’

  Ah, she thought, Midge told him that too, probably when he heard of my marriage, before he so suddenly left Thuringa. And possibly, as a doctor, Daniel might also guess that Nigel and I no longer have a physical marriage. But love and a life together? We have that. The ways we are bound may not be entirely conventional but they will hold.

  ‘I’m not saying I have no regrets,’ she said slowly. ‘I . . . dream of you sometimes.’ He was watching her now, his hands trembling again, but not reaching for her. ‘I dream of Thuringa too, and sunshine and proper dusty sheep, not ones that look like they’ve been washed in Sunlight soap. We’ll go back to Thuringa, probably next autumn — English autumn, in time for the spring wattle bloom at home.’ She met his eyes. ‘But I have never once felt that marrying Nigel was the wrong choice to make, for him or for me. Or for the baby I knew I was carrying. I did try to find you, you know. But you didn’t make it easy.’

  An uncomfortable silence for a second or two too long. And then, ‘I miss the gate, sometimes,’ he said. It sounded like forgiveness, and an apology. And suddenly it was as if winter had lifted, and she smelled the crackling bark beneath their feet at Thuringa again. For this was John, and Daniel too.

  She tried to keep her voice light. ‘You are welcome to go back there, at any time.’

  ‘I might, you know. A kind of camping holiday. But I’ve returned to real life now.’

  ‘That was real,’ she said.

  ‘It was, wasn’t it?’ He seemed to be only just realising it himself. ‘And wonderful.’ He was silent for a while, then added, ‘I will never regret those years.’

  ‘A beautiful time,’ she agreed.

  They sat in silence, still as far apart physically, but strangely together now. Something that had niggled at her for months clarified. She took a breath.

  ‘Daniel, as a doctor . . . I haven’t even asked Nigel this. I haven’t suggested it to anyone, in case it is insane. But the twins . . . they look so different from each other. I know fraternal twins are no more similar than any other brother and sister. But is it medically possible for twins to have different fathers?’

  He looked startled, then thoughtful. For the first time she saw him assess the question as a professional, and that expression was familiar too. I should have guessed he was a doctor back then, she thought, thinking of all who’d come to his hut for help, how he had managed each man with such expertise.

  ‘I’ve never heard of such a case,’ he said at last. ‘But then for a case to be known, a woman would have to admit that she’d had . . . relations . . . with two men within a single month. Medically . . . yes, it is indeed possible that you produced two eggs — you must have anyway, to have had non-identical twins. It might be possible that each was fertilised by a different man at different times. But I doubt a court would accept it.’

  ‘Why should it go to court —?’ she began, then realised. ‘You’d sue for custody?’

  ‘No. But your husband might decide to repudiate an heir he felt was not his own, especially if you have another son.’

  ‘Danny looks exactly like Nigel did at his age.’ She would not say that Nigel needed an heir to ensure his cousin never took the property. But the question would not arise anyway, she thought. Nigel could never repudiate a child, even one who was not his own. Nor could he not love either baby he had held so often in his arms.

  ‘And Rose?’

  ‘She looks a little like you, especially her eyes. A lot like me.’

  ‘Lucky girl.’

  She flushed, hoping it was a compliment. ‘Do you want to meet them?’

  ‘Of course.’ For the first time his eyes met hers, and his face was gentle despite the certainty, even urgency, in his voice. ‘Would that be possible?’

  ‘Of course,’ she repeated.

  ‘What will your husband say?’

  ‘We have already discussed it.’ She smiled. ‘He said of course too. Nigel is a good man, Daniel. A wonderful man.’

  A lark sang, somewhere behind them, the first she had heard in all her years in France. Daniel reached across the seat, took her hand and kissed it.

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said.

  Chapter 14

  When you are a child, you wait for the world to become simple when you are an adult and can do whatever you want. A young woman waits for life to be simpler when she is married, in charge of her own house. A mother waits for the simplicity that will follow when her children manage their own lives. But life continues to become more complex. How can it not, unless we stay walled up, with no connections growing between each other or the world?

  Miss Lily, 1913

  SHILLINGS

  HEREWARD

  Hereward the butler might have only one hand, and he’d had only two years’ experience as a footman at Shillings before he enlisted in the Great War. But he had lived at Shillings all his life, as had uncounted generations of his forebears before him.

  Hereward had heard whispers, which he knew how to ignore.

  He also knew his duty when a young woman appeared — of uncertain class, even uncertain nationality — in a much-mended white dress, with shoes and stockings that appeared new and a coat that would be suitable for a much older woman of the lower middle classes.

  ‘I am sorry, miss, but his lordship is not at home, nor is her ladyship.’

  ‘I do not want to speak to lords or ladyships,’ said the girl impatiently. ‘I am here to see Miss Lily Shillings.’

  This was interesting. It was also interesting that Hereward had never heard Miss Lily give her surname — nor anyone else use it. But it would be too much coincidence to have two ‘Miss Lilys’ — unless this girl had assumed a woman surnamed ‘Shillings’ must come from here. All intriguing, but his duty was clear. Hereward carefully let no sign of his eagerness show. ‘I am afraid Miss Lily has not visited Shillings since before the war, miss.’

  ‘Ah, so you do know her! Where is she then?’

  ‘I couldn’t say, miss.’ Hereward regretted giving more information than necessary. But the girl could have heard that a Miss Lily visited here from many people in the area. ‘Perhaps if you would like to leave a note for his lordship, he might know where it might be sent on to.’

  ‘And you do not?’ The words were imperious. Spoiled brat, thought Hereward. He’d put her over his knee if she were his daughter. Who did she think she was, appearing at the front door of Shillings?

  ‘I am afraid not, miss.’

  ‘When will this lord and ladyship return?’

  ‘I cannot say, miss.’

  The imperiousness vanished. Suddenly he saw the child, limp with weariness after a long train journey and an even longer walk,
the touch of desperation in her eyes, the chill as she dragged her coat closed over her dress.

  ‘If you would care to go to the back door,’ he said more gently, ‘I am sure Mrs Goodenough would give you a mug of hot cocoa and a slice of cherry cake. I will ask one of the men to give you a lift back to the station. There’s the 4.10 to London, stopping at all stations.’

  ‘Thank you, monsieur.’ The girl had lost all signs of arrogance now. ‘You are so kind. I would like some cocoa please, and the cherry cake. His lordship . . . do you think he will be gone days or months, monsieur?’ The blue eyes looked up at him imploringly.

  She had no right to ask; nor was it his job to answer. But he found himself giving her the information anyway. ‘Days, I think, miss. Now you go and get the cherry cake.’

  She dropped a curtsey to him and his heart melted. A sweet little thing, and probably it was all a mistake, and the Lily Shillings she searched for had no connection with the Vaile family’s Miss Lily. He must make sure she had enough money for the train journey, second class. It was too cold in third. And a brown paper bag of mutton and pickle sandwiches perhaps, from the leftover roast, and more of the cherry cake . . .

  Chapter 15

  Love comes in many ways, my dears. Never restrict yourselves to what society tells you love must be. If it is truly love, a love that gives and does not hurt, then it is good.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  Mother Antill wept a little as John McDonald, her Matthew, walked unsteadily to the car, arm in arm with his wife, but they were tears of joy. The other sisters and the ambulatory patients waved farewell.

  And now there are only seventeen, thought Sophie, as she and Miss Lily watched John . . . Daniel . . . drive the car down the track between the turnips. She lingered to make further financial arrangements with Mother Antill, then joined Miss Lily in the car. She drove slowly down the lanes, describing her conversation with Daniel, though not the gentle kiss with which it had ended.

  ‘A good man,’ Miss Lily said at last.

  ‘That is what I said of Nigel.’