The Wildflowers

by Harriet Evans

  ‘I say,’ Bertie had said, not sitting down. ‘Weren’t we going to catch that show?’

  ‘Some bored girls wiggling in wee frilly knickers and taking ten minutes to remove a glove really isn’t my idea of a grand way to end the night, Bertie,’ she’d said, shaking her head ruefully. ‘I’d rather stop here with these gentlemen, especially since one of them is apparently famous.’ She smiled at him. ‘You’re not cross, are you?’

  Bertie had rolled his eyes and Tony watched his friends opposite him at the booth as Guy and Dougie had stared at her, open-mouthed, at the fresh-faced charm of her words, and at her staggering beauty, which simply kept rolling over you again and again in waves, the more you looked at her. But it was her manner, her smile, her sense of humour, the twinkle in her eye, that was so immediately attractive to him. He wanted to laugh, and he didn’t know why.

  ‘I have to go, need to see a man about a dog there,’ said Bertie, huffily. ‘But this means your card is marked. You owe me dinner, darling. Ditching me for these three reprobates.’

  For the first time her eyes widened and she looked uncertain. ‘Yes—’ And Tony could see her wondering whether she ought to stay here alone with three men about whom she had claimed with pride to know nothing. Bertie, the bounder, didn’t help but, spotting someone he knew, called their name and simply melted into the throng. He saw her fingers clutch at her black-and-gold silk evening bag.

  ‘Miss Moray, I’m Tony Wilde, and I’m a gentleman, not a scoundrel, I promise you. And these fellows are my friends, Guy de Quetteville and Douglas Betteridge.’ They shook hands with her, formally. She nodded, lips pressed together, as though she were trying not to laugh. ‘If you agree I’d like to escort you home. We’ll take the night bus too, with other people, so you can see I don’t want to try to murder you.’

  ‘You aren’t putting your life in danger, are you? What if we’re accosted by hysterical fans wanting a piece of your jacket?’

  He frowned, then saw her irrepressible smile, and grinned, unable to stop himself. ‘We’ll risk it.’

  Outside her hostel in Dorset Square, he’d taken her key and unlocked her door, then removed his hat, and said, without thinking, ‘I say, would you like to come to the seaside with me some time? I’ve a place there. It’s awfully jolly.’

  She’d paused, her gloved hand on the door knob, calmly looking him over. And then she said, ‘I’m working on Saturday. I could go next Sunday. Yes, I’d like to.’

  ‘Sunday it is, then,’ he’d said.

  When he told Guy, with whom he shared a dilapidated flat in Onslow Square, South Kensington, Guy had said, ‘You’re crazy. Taking a girl you’ve never met before tonight down to the Bosky? I thought that was for sure things only?’

  ‘Oh, come on, Guy,’ Simon Chalmers, his other flatmate, who had turned up later in the night at the club and met Althea, chimed in. ‘She’s worth it, old boy. And she’s a terrific actress.’

  ‘She’s an actress?’

  ‘Well, she’s at Central. But she’s doing the Open Air Theatre this summer. Viola. She’s got special dispensation.’

  ‘And she’d never heard of you?’ said Guy, in mock tones of outrage, and then he’d laughed.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ said Simon, taking a cigarette from Tony’s packet, and Tony smiled at him with gratitude, and not a little surprise, Simon being well known for stealing a girl from under one’s nose if he could. Privately, they had christened him the Waltzing Snake after he had literally waltzed off with Guy’s first great love, a willowy blonde deb called Candida.

  ‘Thanks, Simon old man,’ said Tony.

  Simon said, with a straight face, ‘Well, you know how difficult it is for Tony. He can’t rest until he’s personally deflowered every virgin in London. Poor old chap. I say, bring her to the flat some time, let me have another look at her, will you?’

  ‘Do shut up, Simon,’ said Tony, staring out of the window on to the garden square, where the first blossom of spring was emerging. ‘Not this one.’

  And now they were almost there and as ever, his heart sang with joy at the swallows darting out from the hedgerows across the fields, the vast barrow rising behind them, the curving lanes thick with flowers, and eventually they turned down the small track and Tony switched the engine off.

  ‘Here it is. The Bosky,’ he said.

  Her hands were clenched in her lap. She smiled at him, thinly, and he realised she was nervous.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I won’t bite. Let’s go inside, get a drink.’

  He would have her, of course, but not yet, not until she was quite relaxed and sure it was what she wanted, perhaps even that it was her idea. Of course not.

  It was all part of the game and he had to keep playing. He was always busy, either working, or out with his friends, or down here having fun. He worked especially hard to avoid thinking about Daphne. Once, he thought he saw her in Coptic Street, by the British Museum, and simply turned and walked the other way. He dreamed of her, and that night, terrible, churning, sickening dreams. But he told himself he’d locked it away. That it was old news now, just as Dinah was. He barely thought about Dinah.

  He hadn’t been here alone with a girl since the Easter weekend – a plump, funny little receptionist at his agent’s office named Ann who was from Dover and whose father was, somewhat improbably, a clown: she was a limerick waiting to be made up, he told her. She was fun; he’d taken her into Swanage to see the amusements. As they bowled through Staines on the way back into town, he’d done his bit about ‘entanglements’, where he explained about his dead parents and usually made them cry and agree they mustn’t bother him ever again. Ann had taken out a powder compact and started making herself up.

  When he’d finished she’d said, ‘Tony, I’ve got a fella already. He’s doing National Service. He’s out next month. It wouldn’t do for me to see you again anyway.’

  ‘Oh – well, I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Yes. We’ll get married when he’s set himself up. He’s very into shoes. Wants to open a shop. So you don’t need to give me your sob story, honest.’

  ‘I just wanted you to understand that I—’

  ‘I know your sort, Tony. We’re the same, you and me. It was fun, wasn’t it? Thanks ever so. Don’t you worry, I won’t blab, but I can’t do it again, much as I’d like.’

  It was the clear, breezy assumption that they were the same – both in it for sex, fun, uncomplicated companionship – that stung. It was the truth, that’s what he loathed. In that instant he wanted to hurt her, or say something cutting, for he hated her for understanding what it was. Who he was. He had dropped her at Richmond, almost frostily. When the May Bank Holiday came around, he took a group from the play down, and achieved a successful result with both the Winslow Boy himself (in reality a young-looking actor of twenty playing a thirteen-year-old boy) and the actress playing his sister. He didn’t care that they were both annoyed and upset at the discovery of the other’s presence in his bed during the weekend. He gave them both the orphan speech and was richly rewarded both times. The less he seemed to care, the greater those rewards. It was a weekend of pure debauchery, the high-water mark for the Bosky, and at one point he came across Simon having his way with the Winslow Boy’s mother on the porch – which Tony thought a little unnecessary, but didn’t comment on. He never liked to seem a prude in front of Simon.

  No trace of any of this existed in the Bosky – he had Mrs Proudfoot’s newly married daughter, Eliza, coming in to keep the place shipshape while he was away and getting everything ready, and though the new Mrs Gage was a deeply conservative soul she never seemed to question any of his demands, nor the endless stream of bright young people who thronged the Bosky at Bank Holidays, leaving bottles of champagne stuck on to branches of the rose bush, or sheets filthy with scrambled eggs, gramophone records out of their cases and piled high for her to put away.

  You’d never have known that on his previous visit someone had been sick on th
e porch seat, or that ten people had crammed into the wooden house that previous Bank Holiday . . . Tony passed a hand across his forehead. He was glad Althea hadn’t met Simon yet.

  The honeysuckle was beginning to open, and scented lavender and rosemary sprang from the cracks by the house. Inside, a small vase of tiny sun-yellow roses, from the rose bush that had begun to climb up the side of the house after years of inactivity, had been placed on the wooden table. A cold chicken salad stood on the dresser, the table was set for lunch, the cushion on the window seat where someone had accidentally dropped a glass of red wine miraculously clean once more. Althea walked about the place, taking it all in. She didn’t exclaim breathlessly, nor flutter round him while he was opening the shutters and windows, she just stared. At herself in the mirror, out of the window, in drawers – not nosily, but calmly, with intense interest in everything but still revealing nothing of what she was thinking. He liked that about her. Oh, he liked her so very much and he hadn’t realised before that one ought to like someone, as well as wanting them. Not since . . . a long time ago.

  He made them both gimlets – not too strong, it wasn’t done to get a girl tight. They sat on the porch together, for the first time, the only sound the wind and the chink of her swizzle stick against the crystal.

  ‘So it’s your place, then?’ she asked, after a moment or two.

  ‘All mine.’

  ‘No family?’

  ‘My parents are dead.’

  ‘Yes. Bertie told me.’ So Bertie had been filling her in. ‘I’m sorry. I meant any other family.’

  ‘Nope.’

  Her stick clanked against the glass, mechanically. ‘Really no one at all?’

  ‘Dammit!’ He said, much louder than he’d meant. ‘No. I said no one.’ There was an awkward silence. ‘I’m so sorry. Would you like a refill?’

  ‘Not just yet.’ She stood up and looked over the balustrade. ‘When I was little, my sister and I used to catch trout off the jetty at the end of our garden, even though our father absolutely forbade it.’

  ‘Your garden?’

  She turned round to face him, leaning against the railings, her hair blowing about her face. ‘The house I grew up in Kirkcudbright. It had a long garden that led down to the River Dee. My father’s an artist. He had a studio at the bottom of the garden, and he sang all day long while he was painting.’

  He nodded, liking the feel of the prickling breeze on his neck, and the chink of metal on the wet glass.

  ‘There’s a castle just along the way, and a wee harbour. It’s a beautiful place. The sky’s bigger than here. I don’t know why. Anyway, one day my sister had a catch but she lost her footing and fell into the river, and I had to dive in to rescue her, and she’s bigger than me and I was only about nine. It was quite a job. But when we got back, absolutely drenched and stinking, Father dashed out of his studio and asked us why we were dripping wet and Isla said, ‘It’s best we don’t remember why.’ Father thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. He gave her a toffee.

  ‘The point is, sometimes one has to forget.’ She held on to the railings, and leaned towards him. ‘Just forget it ever happened.’

  ‘Mrs Gallagher, our neighbour in London,’ said Tony thoughtfully. ‘She lost her son in the Great War. She never mentioned him ever again. Her daughter told me. It was as though he’d never existed.’

  ‘I think it’s for the best, that course of action,’ said Althea, frankly, and she held out her glass. ‘I’ve changed my mind about the refill, if you’re offering.’

  He stood up and took the glasses inside, thoughtfully, and mixed more cocktails. The idea that one might simply never think of it again, of Mummy and how much he still missed her, of Dad and how he’d died, of Dinah and whether she was alive, safe, happy (but he knew she couldn’t be happy, because she wasn’t here) – of Daphne’s face as she left the house the morning afterwards. When he went back into his bedroom she had left her underthings behind, and he knew it was deliberate, so that he would have to get rid of them, so that he would think about her with no underwear on for the rest of the day.

  He never went back into that room again. Not once. Over fifteen years later, a grown man by then, in the darkness of the kitchen-diner, it seemed to Tony that it was the solution he had been searching for ever since that morning in wartime when he’d realised he was totally alone, for better, for worse.

  It became the metaphor in his head, the shut door of that bedroom where he and Daphne had sex, the same night he lost Julia. What if you simply pushed this all out of your mind, like shutting the door on that room? What if you pretended it had never happened, instead of enduring these periodic bouts of misery that led one to drink and treat people so badly, that meant one sometimes dried on stage, or couldn’t concentrate because of the shakes. What if one simply . . . tamped it down, like tobacco into a pipe, set fire to it, let it burn away?

  He poured the gimlet mixture into Althea’s and his glasses, reflecting that this was another thing it was best not to think about.

  ‘It’s best we don’t remember why.’ He gave a small smile, and went back out on to the porch with the drinks. Althea was talking to someone, and he paused in the doorway, watching her, how gracefully she turned round on the balustrade, how she left one white hand holding on to the railing, as though she belonged to this place, as though it was hers. He peered forwards to see who it was. Reverend Goudge, who had taken him in and made sure he got to Central, had died a couple of years ago, his kind wife had moved away, and there weren’t many others in the village now that he knew. The war had scattered people – some simply hadn’t come back. A hotel had been built further along the beach. People were starting to come here on holiday, not to live here all year round. Tony stared, and realised he recognised the stranger.

  Althea was talking to Ian Fletcher. He looked much older; the shock of unruly black hair that stuck up on his head was greying and his curling, untidy eyebrows were flecked with white. His face already showed signs of dissipation, a redness that he hadn’t had as a boy. Tony was used to him hanging around whenever he had visitors, literally an uninvited guest, but he never spoke to him. He’d walk past ostensibly on his way down to the beach and raise his eyebrows, as though wanting to come in, but he never did. He never said hello, just stared at Tony. It must have been well over a decade since Tony had actually looked at him properly, much less spoken to him.

  ‘Where in Scotland?’ Althea was asking him, politely.

  ‘Stirling, but we moved down to Bristol when I was eight, after my mother died, and we bought our place just along the way from here.’

  ‘So you boys must have played together then,’ said Althea, catching sight of Tony, as he advanced towards them with the drinks.

  ‘Me and Tony, yes, and my sister, Julia, though of course it was the war, and we were all away at school, and various other happenings,’ said Ian, and he didn’t look at Tony. ‘I had a letter from Julia, only yesterday.’

  Tony handed Althea her drink and she took it, and lightly touched his hand, and her calm certainty and self-assurance was like a raft in a churning sea, something to cling to, as black spots fizzed around the edges of his vision.

  ‘Oh? How is she?’

  Ian rocked on his feet. Tony wished he’d just scarper, clear off. But he seemed to be gearing up to say something.

  ‘She’s well enough,’ he said.

  ‘That’s good. Where’s she living these days?’ said Tony.

  Ian looked directly at him. ‘She lives in Melbourne now, she’s married, she’s got a dog called Buster, after Mottram.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tony politely, his heart hammering. Something was in his throat, closing it up, a ball of something.

  ‘Her husband’s English, tennis mad. They have it as their little joke against the Aussies, you know. And she’s working for an animal wildlife place. She likes bats,’ said Ian, to Althea, who was looking a little bored. ‘She’s running a campaign to get them protect
ed. Bats, of all things.’

  ‘She always did,’ said Tony. ‘Used to look out for them in the evenings when we were walking back from rehearsals and so on . . .’ He trailed off.

  ‘It’s not been easy for her,’ said Ian, suddenly. ‘You knew her, didn’t you, Tony? They were friends in the war, he and Julia.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Althea slowly. ‘I see.’

  ‘She wasn’t a bad girl, was she?’ Ian said innocently. ‘She wasn’t . . . you know, one of those girls. Just misguided and it was a jolly hard time, jolly hard . . .’ He shrugged.

  ‘I never heard back from her,’ Tony managed to say. ‘I did write to her, here, but she never answered. I don’t know if she got the letters—’

  ‘Father sent her to school in Scotland, and then of course she stayed there till the war was over. She wasn’t well for a while after that summer, the air in Scotland did her good. And then, then . . .’ His face clouded. ‘She was first to leave for Australia after the war, you know, they were looking for teachers. She went as soon as she could and she’s never been back. I don’t know if she ever will . . .’

  Althea had wandered to the other end of the porch, looking out over to Bill’s Point and the calm, grey sea.

  Tony said quietly to Ian, ‘I’m sorry to hear she wasn’t well. I trust she recovered.’

  Ian faced Tony, and his shoulders hunched, and he smiled, slowly; it was an extraordinary expression, a ghastly rictus.

  ‘She had an abortion,’ he said. ‘She nearly died. A nice place it was supposed to be, a wee house in Shepherd’s Market in London. Father took her. But they did it badly, I suppose – she was very ill, an infection. She nearly died, yes, and Father wouldn’t have her in the house afterwards. She stayed at school. They taught her alone, didn’t want her with the other girls, so she failed her School Cert. I saw her once before she left . . .’ He had lowered his voice, so Althea wouldn’t hear, or to draw Tony closer, Tony didn’t know. ‘My father died, soon afterwards. She never saw him again.’