‘I don’t think it ever will be.’ Violet hugged herself and twirled around on the spot. ‘Everyone jumping in fountains and getting drunk. I’m still soaring, I tell you. I have never been kissed by so many fellas in all my life.’
Nell would have her know that she didn’t quite believe it. She told Violet that she was feeling under the weather.
‘Oh, suit yourself. You know, I’ve never known any one as plain miserable as you.’ Violet flounced out, slamming the door.
Nell lay back down on the bed. Violet was right. She was miserable. Bloodless. Her skin an empty husk. There was no joy, no reason to celebrate. There was nothing inside her. As her tears fell, soaking her ears and her hair, and finally her pillow, she wondered how many more she would have to shed before her mourning would stop. It was, quite frankly, getting beyond reasonable.
Another tap on the door. ‘What is it this time?’ she called.
A wide-eyed ward maid looked in.
‘Sorry to disturb you, Nurse, but you have visitors. They’re waiting in Matron’s office.’
‘Visitors?’ Nell glared at the girl who shrank away and closed the door behind her.
‘For crying out ruddy loud,’ Nell muttered, as she slipped on her uniform, realising she had to dress correctly if she was being summoned to Matron’s office, and then she paused mid button. Who on earth had found her here?
She knocked on the big oak door with its opaque glazed panels and slipped in. There was no Matron, or any other member of nursing staff there. Just her mother, sitting in an armchair by the grate, and Sylvie, pacing and agitated by the windows, her tailwind positively shaking the pot plants on their stands.
As soon as Nell closed the door behind her, Sylvie pounced on her.
‘This is where you’ve been! All this time – why have you done this, telling people the wrong name? Why are you here?’
Her cousin gripped her shoulders, her face, close to Nell’s, pinched with anger.
‘Sylvie please,’ said Mollie, quite calmly, rising from the chair.
Nell looked from one to the other, not comprehending for a painfully stretching moment that these two women could actually be standing here, in an office at King’s College Hospital, speaking to her, demanding answers from her.
Bewildered and giddy with panic, Nell spluttered, ‘Have you been down for the VE celebrations? I heard it was quite a party.’
‘What the perishing hell are you going on about?’ Sylvie cried. ‘We haven’t seen you for years and you are making small talk.’
‘I think VE day is quite big news actually,’ Nell remarked. She rested her trembling hand on the back of a chair by Matron’s desk, registering the relatively warm wood against her icy flesh. Her mother moved towards her. My, thought Nell, how grey she is now, but looking much better. There was colour in her cheeks and a fire behind her eyes.
‘Nell, we have been out of our minds. We had no idea where you were.’
‘Well, now you do.’ Nell tried for a smile, but was stifled by nauseating shock.
Sylvie huffed and sat down on the chair, folding her arms, crossing her leg and kicking her foot out sharply. ‘Henri told me in the end,’ she said. ‘You know you’ve broken the law.’
‘Probably more than you realise, Sylvie.’
Mollie glanced nervously between her daughter and her niece, let out an awkward laugh and settled her thin hand on Nell’s arm.
‘You do look lovely in your uniform,’ she said. ‘Of course, we knew you were nursing. It’s just been so confusing. Not being able to contact you. Not knowing where you were. I’ve spoken to your father.’
‘Finally,’ Nell sighed.
‘Yes, and he told me something that utterly shocked me. So utterly, that I could not speak.’
‘Is it true?’ Sylvie pressed. ‘What your father tells us?’
Mollie interjected, ‘You know that isn’t in question, Sylvie. I believe it to be true, because it is what Uncle Marcus said. And, even though he is a prize spineless cad, I would not allow that of him. He would not lie about such a thing, it’s ridiculous. Nell, my dear …’
Nell looked at mother, drawn sharply by the unprecedented kindness in her tone, the concern in her voice. ‘Please, oh my dear girl, did you have …’ her whisper was as soft and as vulnerable as Nell’s memory of cradling John-James ‘… a baby?’
The blank wall in her mind began to crumble, her empty body to fill with the pain that she had stuffed behind it. Her mother’s question echoed, like a voice, long lost from years before. The scolding of Miss Hull, perhaps, or a telling-off from Mr Flanagan at the paper.
‘He would have been four by now.’
‘What?’ Mollie’s face wobbled. ‘Been? We thought perhaps you’d had him adopted …?’
Sylvie cried out and leapt to her feet. ‘Are you saying the baby’s dead?’
Nell groped her way to the armchair her mother had vacated and sat down. Mollie perched on the arm, and pulled her head to her lap.
‘There now,’ she said, stroking her curls repeatedly and saying over and over again, ‘there now.’
Nell stared, dry-eyed, over at Sylvie whose face was disintegrating through realms of disbelief and horror. Her mother’s words in a soothing voice just above her ear meant nothing to her, and yet they seemed to resonate with her, to pave the way for her to begin some sort of journey.
Nell swallowed dryly before she could speak, searching for her voice: ‘He’s called John-James.’
‘Ah.’ This from her mother, and a convulsing weeping made the strokes of her hand through Nell’s hair ever more agitated.
Sylvie started to sob with her face quite still and her mouth wide open.
Nell stared at her cousin for a moment longer and then squeezed her eyes tight.
‘He’s in the September Garden,’ she said.
She heard her mother’s shuddering breath above her. ‘Well then, that’s where we must take you. Take you home.’
She hadn’t seen the harvest for years. Each morning she woke at Lednor that summer, under the cool first breath of the day, the countryside was remade. A field of barley, of oats, had been cut down, reshaped by the men working on it, gathering it in. There was a ripening glow like golden mist on the horizon, orchards were plump with plums and apples and there was plenty in the larder for Mrs Bunting to make the meals that were so comforting and familiar to Nell that she found it hard not to cry as she ate.
In her numb and meandering state of mind, she observed the skies change too, the stars shift in their bed. She watched the mean slice of crescent moon rise and alter, waxing undiscernibly every night. She watched her become fatter until the true harvest moon revealed her full, shameless, naked glory to light up the entire deep night.
And her father came back to Lednor, ‘just for the afternoon, mind,’ her mother was quick to add.
Nell met him on the lane near Pudifoot’s cottage, taking Kit with her, off the lead, for he clung to her side, her unquestioning companion. Her fears had been unfounded: he had never forgotten her.
She and her father walked the way they used to walk, around the curve of the valley, up the steep hill to where the oak meadow lay, now under plough and the old tree’s spindly offspring grubbed up to make way for it.
While Kit sniffed around roots of trees and thrust himself through hedges, they leant on the gate and talked about John-James. As Nell struggled to explain, her father, perplexed and muddled in his deferred grief, assured her she didn’t have to.
‘Should I have a word with the vicar, Nell?’ he asked. ‘It’s best I do. He can sort something out. Something fitting for him.’
She was weary beyond belief, but one thing she fought over was the need to leave him in peace. ‘But it will be questions upon questions, Dad. Questions I can’t answer for I did not know what I was doing. It is so true when people say it: I lost my mind.’
Her father’s face reddened, his eyes glowed with water. He looked away.
‘I
can’t bear to dig him up, Dad, even to put him in the churchyard,’ she whispered, her words clumping together. ‘And he is perfectly safe. He is wrapped in your old rubber raincoat. You remember, the one with the big poacher’s pockets.’
‘She drove me mad,’ Marcus uttered, suddenly, bitterly, as if Nell had not been speaking. ‘I had to go. I didn’t want to – but she told me to go.’
Nell waited and acknowledged her father’s guilt; his disjointed admission. She listened to the cranking of a tractor engine, reaching them way up here from the valley floor. It stopped abruptly and a curiously heavy silence fell on them, the whole weight of the sky.
‘Listen, Dad. Did you hear that? A yellowhammer?’
‘I do believe it was,’ he said, sounding strangely shrill. ‘Now if only I had my field glasses.’
They strolled back down and walked up the gravel path, her father saying that he’d like to take a stroll in the September Garden. Nell waited for him, perched on the bench under the dovecote, Kit spark out in the sun at her feet.
Moments like this, when she was left to herself, Alex inevitably walked through her mind. She let him, giving in to him, for all of her energy was spent on the basic activities of sleeping, eating and putting one foot in front of the other.
She thought of the starry convictions of that first summer, and of the following year when they were caught in the raid and the rain together and had sheltered from both. How the love they created was now transformed like the land around her, into something teetering on the boundaries of madness.
His letter was ragged with her fingerprints; his explanations known by heart and absorbed painfully into her mind. His great love for her, and yet his duty to Sylvie. And then, there was his duty to King and country. He’d described the intense course in the Highlands, back in ’41, where, even in training, they expected five per cent fatality. And yet Henri had told her he wanted to find her. She deduced now that that had been simply to check she was alive and well. After all, who could blame him when her telegram warned him to never contact her again?
Sitting by the dovecote, that August afternoon, it was easy to feel angry with him, for that gave her a sense of reality she simply could not find anywhere else.
Her father approached her, his face transfigured in a way she had never seen before. She decided to distract him from it.
‘I forgot to ask, Dad. How is Diana?’
‘Well, after her lengthy stint moonlighting as a nurse,’ he said, and Nell’s sudden laugh surprised them both, ‘things have settled down a bit for us. She has left the factory, of course, now the munitions race is over. She is expecting a baby.’
The front door opened and Mollie came out onto the step.
‘Marcus, would you care to come in for some tea?’
‘Er, oh, yes, if you like. Of course. Thank you. Yes.’
Nell held back and watched her father’s meek progression towards the house that had once been his home. Her mother stood back, dignified, with an air of courtesy as he went through the door, ducking his head as if the entrance was lower than it really was.
Her mother glanced at her, enquiring, and Nell held up her hand in negative response. Let them talk about me, she thought, let them consider John-James. She sat back down on the bench beneath the lullaby purring of the doves and pushed her foot under the dog’s breathing rump as the front door softly closed.
The news of Uncle Claude a few days later threw the consequences of war right onto the doorstep of Lednor House. When word came through from Montfleur in the winter of 1944, Auntie Beth had written of their ordeal – of her own shocking stint in prison, that Uncle Claude had been incarcerated by the Allies and was awaiting trial.
And then, that August, soon after VJ day, they heard of his attempted escape, the guards shooting him on the wire. Auntie Beth wrote that she was packing her suitcases, she was leaving the damned despicable, ungrateful country for good. And would someone get the steamer over to bring her home.
Sylvie was hysterical, telephoning from the mews.
‘I want to go, I have to go, and I wanted Uncle Marcus with me. What a perishing idiot he is! Breaking his leg falling down the stairs. Carrying the new cot from Peter Jones. That’s what delivery men are for! I turn to Henri, but, oh no, he is ensconced in some military intelligence. Something to do with the Russians, although I screamed at him, I thought they were our friends. Nell, Nell, will you come with me? I need you. I need to get Maman home.’
No mention of her father and his crude demise, Nell thought, as she put down the telephone.
Nell pressed her hand to the strip of grass. It felt springy, alive. She whispered to it, to the patch of earth, It is time to go.
Sitting in the back of the Olivers’ taxi taking her away from Lednor, she watched the smouldering beech woods captured in the velvet wonder of the autumn morning. She stared at their stupefying beauty until the colours blurred and shifted out of focus. Tears splashed down onto her empty palms.
What on earth was she doing? She had vowed never to desert her baby again. When she gave up nursing and returned to Lednor, she’d promised him: that was the last time she’d ever leave. And what was a vow worth if she could break it so easily like this? She wiped her eyes, leant forward and opened her mouth to say to the driver, Stop, please turn around, but Mr Oliver spoke first.
‘I know, lovie. Always hard to leave this place, isn’t it?’ She saw the taxi driver’s kind eyes glance shyly at her in his rear-view mirror. ‘Must be the most beautiful valley in the whole of Bucks, if not the world.’ He winked. ‘But just remember, it’ll all still be here when you get back.’
The taxi was passing Mr Pudifoot’s cottage and Nell was struck by a strange glimmer of hope. Blind, stupid and futile her optimism might well turn out to be, but she suddenly decided that this was her last chance to patch things up with Sylvie. Her cousin needed her. The trip to Normandy would give her a purpose, give her strength to keep going. Give her strength to forget.
She’d said her goodbye to the valley, to Kit, to the September Garden, and promised to be home soon.
Stay like this, she told her valley as the taxi chugged on. Look after him, won’t you? Stay just as you are, in all your blazing glory, until I return. Then the leaves can fall if they want to.
Sylvie
She stood with Nell outside the gates. The blue was flaking to reveal the dull metal beneath. She remembered her father painting the railings in the spring before Nell came to visit, the year before the war. He had spent hours sanding down, stepladder out, shirtsleeves rolled up. Meticulous movements of his rather fat fingers getting into all the angles, all the tight corners. Her mother had said, ‘Let’s pay someone to do it: Simon the fisherman, or Jean Ricard.’ ‘No,’ said Papa, ‘I want to do it myself. Then I know the job will be done properly.’
She glanced at Nell with an urgent desire to thank her for being at her side, to tell her how sorry she was. But her cousin’s inscrutable expression made her mouth dry, her tongue a dead weight. Nell was dressed in a pale-green suit and looked as pretty as a button; she’d done something different to her hair, twisting it up inside a new hat. They had never spoken of Alex, and they had only skirted around John-James. Nell’s tragedy had done away with her childlike nature. Her new-found maturity placed a mask over her face which Sylvie could not see through.
She grasped a railing in her fist and peered across the short courtyard to the porch with the tall shutters either side, all so shabby now. Some tiles had slipped and fallen. Fragments of them lay scattered like rubbish in a corner. The shutters on the salle à manger were slightly ajar and she saw that the windowpanes were cracked. Behind the glass was darkness, a void. And yet behind that very glass had been her life, her childhood, her memory.
She opened the gate and stepped forward, with Nell mute beside her. There were cracks and pockmarks in the facade, the scars of the war. Someone had scratched a swastika into the wall by the front door. Beneath was carved one word, cru
de and misspelt: colabo. The door opened and her mother stood on the step, her arms outstretched. She looked weak and ill – more than ill, as if the light had been taken out of her. A weight of dread pressed hard on Sylvie’s back, like a heavy hand, pushing. She walked towards her mother, saw the opaque torment in her eyes and held her bony frame in her arms without speaking.
In the six years she’d been away, in her dreams she had returned to Montfleur. She walked the rooms and the staircases of her home as it had once been: gleaming parquet, slender windows, elegantly faded Louis XV chairs. The dreams often unfolded long into the night with a smothering sourness. Her unconscious journeys projected her here like a shadow on a wall. When she died, she thought, I will haunt this place, just like I do in my dreams. And now, the house she knew from childhood was gone. The bricks and mortar may remain, but the essence of it was gone. And yes, she thought, this was to be applauded.
As she hugged her mother, she was aware of Nell making her way past her, along the hallway and into the salon at the back. Sylvie’s ears pricked when she heard a familiar voice exclaim from within, ‘Ah, little Nell.’
She pulled away from her mother and looked at her.
‘Adele Ricard is here to help me pack,’ Beth Orlande informed her.
‘And you, Maman, are coming home with me,’ Sylvie said. ‘Thank God, you are.’
The salon was as she remembered: chairs placed just so, facing the large stone fireplace, the chaise at an angle, Maman’s secretaire in the corner. But everything looked bruised, Sylvie thought, an inferior copy of itself.
‘Now, we will have coffee,’ Adele announced briskly, bearing a tray, ‘and my apple cake. I expect you have missed the Calvados apples, Sylvie?’
‘Among so many things,’ said Sylvie, sitting on a fireside chair. She fumbled with the knot of her headscarf, her fingertips shaking.
Nell was by the window, peering at the wall that divided the gardens, finishing a conversation she’d been having with Adele.
The September Garden Page 27
