Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
The guests – Polly, James and young William, Great-Aunt Hetta, Lady Foxton, Max Longborough – arrived together on the 3.40 from Waterloo to be collected by Tyson at Farnham station. Immediately on entering the hall, all of them remarked on Hinton Dysart’s renaissance and proceeded to divest themselves of a mountain of coats, gloves, boots and scarves.
Lady Foxton dropped a huge, fabulously expensive and hideous mink coat into Ivy’s arms and told her to be very, very careful with it.
Polly ran a critical eye over the waxed floorboards, painstakingly restored banisters and plaster ceiling. ‘Gosh, Matty. You have made a difference, hasn’t she, Kit?’ She pecked Kit on the cheek. ‘I mean I wouldn’t have recognized the house. So... so expensive-looking. I do hope something of the old Hinton Dysart is left.’
Her remarks echoed Flora’s, and Matty, who had stepped forward to welcome her, froze and found herself saying, ‘How sweet’, meaninglessly to the baby.
Very early in their marriage, Kit had asked Matty whether she minded if they kept to separate bedrooms. He spoke as if it was a formality, as if he did not expect anything else. Thus on Christmas Eve she woke alone to the dilute darkness of early morning in Hesther’s old bedroom, and smelt winter in the garden outside. For a time she lay warm and untroubled, from habit expecting to hear noise – clattering milk pails, the rasp of a car’s gears – only to luxuriate in the silence. She remembered that life had changed.
After a minute or two, Matty opened her eyes and pushed the sheets back from her face. The roses on the chintz curtains swelled and then shrivelled in the draught from the open window. Eddies of freezing air washed over her face.
Perhaps... perhaps
this
time. Matty concentrated her forces and hoped that she felt sick. But, hard as she tried, she did not and when she rolled over she understood why. Then she hauled herself upright, switched on the light and examined the stain on her nightdress.
‘I won’t cry,’ she said to her concave stomach and smeared thighs. ‘Not this time.’
She had wept twice before, when the red blotch arrived to disfigure her underwear and sheets in Egypt and when the English doctor in Rome had said, ‘There, there, patience. With your problems and physique, Mrs Dysart, it doesn’t do to count chickens.’ Matty did not feel patient or resigned, only frustrated, despairing of her body and ignorant because she did not know enough about it to try to put things right.
Instead she fell into the old habit. ‘You can’t sparkle, Matty, nor play tennis, nor get your husband to love you. Nor...’ a deep doubt had rooted, ‘nor become pregnant.’
What if... what if she could not bear a child?
Matty pulled her nightdress down over her legs. The pleasure and comfort she had experienced on first wakening dissipated into the uncertainties of her new life.
After she had washed, Matty slipped between the curtains and looked out of the window. Slivers of opal light slanted over the garden, smoothed flat by frost and winter. Gooseflesh stippled her arms and marched up her legs.
Last night she had waited a long time, willing Kit to come to her, if only to say goodnight. She heard him walk up the staircase and down the corridor. She knew it was him because she had learnt the sound of his footsteps, and, shuddering a little with nerves and hope, she waited for a knock on the door.
It never came.
Matty put out a finger and drew a heart on the frosted window pane. Its lines did not quite meet and it was misshapen, more like a lump of stone. She stared at it and acknowledged what she had not dared to acknowledge previously – that when she married Kit she had not understood what she was taking on. She had no idea that unhappiness could stretch indefinitely like a piece of knicker elastic.
Daisy’s face hovered in the frost-spun patterns on the window. Kit will be thinking of me, she had warned. Oh, yes, Matty had thought in her ignorance. Don’t you think I don’t know? I’ve thought it all out, Daisy. But she hadn’t: she hadn’t known what it would be like to hold the nettle of unreciprocated love day after day, night after night. Or to feel that there was another person in your bed.
‘It’s a new one,’ Kit had explained to Matty, folding a blue silk Paisley dressing gown over the chair in the bedroom of the Dawlish hotel, and coughed. In contrast, his pyjamas were well worn and washed into softness. For that matter, so was Matty’s nightdress, a much-loved Viyella one which buttoned up to the neck. (‘For goodness sake, Matilda,’ Susan had expostulated. ‘You can’t take
that
on honeymoon.’)
Since it was freezing in the bedroom and a maliciously inclined draught whistled under the door, Matty had buttoned it up to the neck and tucked it over her feet. Kit shivered and kicked off his slippers. Matty took a quick look at his feet and was pleased: as she suspected, Kit had nice ones, bony and strong, with pedicured toenails. She liked that. He coughed again, finishing with a distinct wheeze.
‘Do you mind if I turn off the light?’ Matty shook her head. Kit flicked the switch and remained for a second or two beside the bed before sliding in beside her.
This is it, she thought, surprised at the ordinariness of the event.
‘Kit,’ she said, twisting the hem of the top sheet round and round her fingers, ‘I know this is not what you wanted.’
He did not move. ‘Matty, do you think this is the right time to talk about this?’
‘Not if
you
don’t want to.’
‘Do you want to?’
Matty reconsidered the Pandora’s box the conversation would open. ‘No,’ she said hastily. ‘No.’
‘Agreed.’ Kit unbuttoned his pyjama jacket and pulled it off, so that it lay in a bundle between them. Holding her breath, Matty reached over and touched a smooth shoulder with a fingertip. The blood thudded in her ears. Kit did not move, and she lay petrified at what she had done. Eventually, he rolled towards her and put his arms around her. She was cool to touch but he felt burning hot. His mouth brushed her neck, and Matty inhaled a male scent of cologne and tobacco, and felt the shape of a male body with unfamiliar steppes, terraces and plains. Uncertain whether or not to put her arms around him, she waited.
‘Try not to be frightened,’ he said, and coughed into her ear. ‘I’ll take care of you.’
Because Matty loved Kit she had not been able to prevent herself cradling her palm around the back of the fair head above hers and Kit recoiled. Not much, but enough. ‘Sorry,’ she said, and snatched away her hand.
‘Look. Could you take this thing off?’ Kit grappled with the buttons of the nightdress. ‘I think it would be easier without it.’
She tried to help him, but the material had tangled round her ankles. ‘Good God,’ he said, ‘it’s more effective than a chastity belt.’
The final button released, and Matty struggled free. In the dark, she heard Kit draw breath, and he touched her on her breast.
Topped by an almost pre-pubescent nipple the breast beneath his hand felt as flat and cold as a china doll’s. She’s so small, he thought, like a child. And what desire he had summoned, died. In an effort to rekindle it, he bent over Matty and kissed her, his mouth dry and hard on hers.
‘Please,’ she whispered, ‘please.’
Kit shut his eyes and held tight to the memory of an Arab boy and hot excitement. He thought of Daisy in a shabby bathing costume at the Villa Lafayette, full-breasted and bright-haired. Lit from within. A vice squeezed at his heart. He lay on the china-doll breasts of his wife and groaned – and felt her hand slide down his back.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘You will have to help me.’
Shocked by Matty’s predicament as well as his own, lightheaded with the onset of fever, Kit ran his hand down the bird bones, which barely lifted the skin at the hips, and between her legs. ‘It’s all right, Matty,’ he said hoarsely. ‘I’ll make it all right.’
Imprisoned by ropes of jealousy, self-pity, illness and a starved heart, Matty made a supreme effort to disentangle herself, and strove to give Kit the gift of her love. And he, in his turn, surprised by the generosity and fervour he unlocked in the small body, was comforted.
Later when they both lay separate and awake he said, ‘I think I’ve got flu.’
He had not hurt her then, or on subsequent occasions, but the flash of intimacy between them had never been repeated. Their couplings were guarded, increasingly skilfully accomplished, but never again with that surrender to emotion. Once or twice when Kit rose above Matty and looked down into her haunted eyes, he caught a certain expression – of hurt and yearning. Then the suspicion that Matty loved him nudged, unwelcome, into his mind and Matty, realizing that this was so, hid her feelings.
RIP. Matty’s finger scratched on through the frost patterns and traced the names of her parents, Jocasta and Stephen. Then she drew a baby’s cradle. ‘Rockaby,’ she wrote and then scrubbed it out with her fist.
She was empty, empty, empty.
Ten minutes later, correctly dressed in a tweed costume, hat, gloves and thick stockings, Matty slipped down the back staircase and bumped into Ivy bringing up the first relay of early morning tea.
‘Excuse me, ma’am.’ Surprised at the sight of her mistress up so early, Ivy flattened herself against the wall.
‘That’s all right, Ivy. I’m... just a breath of fresh air...’ Matty brushed past and hurried, brogues clicking, down the kitchen passage to the back door.
Once she had left the protection of the house, the cold grew sharper. The air streamed into her lungs and Matty dug her hands into her pockets and walked over the lawn towards the river, feet crunching on the frosted stones. Already she felt better.
She halted by the bridge and gazed upwards through the frozen still-life of the plane tree. Nothing moved in the trees or flowerbeds. No pulsebeat in the tangle of dead things and crusted earth. Only the white frost rime on the grass blades appeared to possess life as light played on the ice crystals. Matty’s breath streamed into the air, and the blood flowed out of her onto the rag, which grew wet and heavy.
Her feet were turning numb, and she walked back across the lower lawn and through the yew circle towards the house, leaving a trail of footprints on the white carpet. She stopped by the terrace to take a last look at the slumbering garden – and, suddenly, her hands clenched inside her gloves.
Even in the patchy, uncertain light Matty could see that hers were not the only footprints on the lawn. Beside them was a second pair: small, neat, perfectly matching marks.
I’m mad as well as barren, was Matty’s first thought. Her second was more rational: somewhere a child was playing a game. She swivelled at the sound of pebbles clattering down the stone steps behind her and gasped. There on the steps was a child.
She called out, ‘Who are you?’
Like a struck tuning fork, the air vibrated in Matty’s ear with a high pitch of the F sharp, so high that it hurt. She shook her head to clear it, and the objects surrounding her – steps, yew hedge, lawn – subtly distorted like reflections in an old mirror. Disorientated, she grabbed at the stone balustrade and, although its texture, encrusted with moss-like growths, made an impression through her glove, she also knew without question that her hand was resting on air. Her fingers and toes turned icy cold.
The child turned and fixed on Matty a pair of disturbingly familiar light blue eyes. She was dressed in a good coat with a velvet collar, gaiters and bonnet. Strands of flaxen hair escaped under its rim, and her chin was chapped from the cold. As far as Matty, who had no experience of children, could assess, she was about five years old, and possessed the seriousness of a child concentrating on something important to it. After scrutinizing Matty, she continued up the steps.
‘Wait,’ called Matty. ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’
The child paid no attention and scrambled up to the top where she stopped, held out her coat skirts and performed a little skipping step by one of the stone vases. She appeared absorbed and contained; but every so often the blue eyes flicked in the direction of Matty.
‘Please wait.’ Matty ran up the unreal-feeling steps and her hat went flying onto the grass. She left it there. ‘Where do you come from?’ she asked.
The child smiled, and Matty found herself rooted to the flagstone. The F sharp was now so high and so painful that she pressed her hands hard against her ears, struggling with a force that appeared to be sucking and emptying her body. In the Matty shell that was left behind was immeasurable misery.
But it’s not my pain.
On her knees, Matty squeezed her head so hard that everything went black. When she opened her eyes the child had vanished. She scrambled to her feet to look across the lawn, but she was too late: the footprints were dissolving.
In the background, remained an echo suggesting all manner of unease. Then it stopped.
Knees smarting, Matty sat on the steps and found herself sobbing: from fright, for the child that was not in her body, for her longing to have something, someone, who needed her – because she was obviously going mad – for her bitter grief when, as a five-year-old child, she had found herself alone. For the ragbag of her life.
‘Are you all right, madam?’
Matty was crying so hard that she failed to register the creak of a wheelbarrow, or the figure of Ned Sheppey, muffled up against the cold in a corduroy jacket and scarf.
Ned picked up Matty’s abandoned hat and repeated his question and she flushed at being caught with tears freezing on her face by the gardener, and of what he might say to Ellen and Mrs Dawes. ‘Thank you, Mr Sheppey,’ she said. ‘I was just going inside. I like an early-morning walk.’
‘Shall I call someone, Mrs Kit?’
He seemed both incurious and kind. Common sense came to Matty’s aid and told her that it did not matter what Ned had seen or not seen.
‘Thank you.’ Matty accepted the hat, jammed it onto her head and asked, ‘Mr Sheppey, do you have any grandchildren?’
He did not appear to think her question odd and answered at once. ‘Yes, ma’am, but not living here.’
‘Does Ivy have a little girl that she brings to play round here, or Mrs Dawes a granddaughter?’