Authors: Elizabeth Buchan
Kit got out of bed, grabbed his dressing gown and took up his favourite stance by the window. With a mixture of weariness and hunger, Matty gazed at him. ‘If divorce is unthinkable,’ she said, ‘maybe we could get an annulment.’ She added painfully, ‘Because of no children.’
Kit shrugged on the dressing gown. ‘Do you really want a divorce?’
‘I think it might be the best thing. But what I want, Kit, is to know your feelings. I never know. You never tell me. I feel I am living in a one-sided world, or with a block of wood.’
He spoke with his back to her. ‘We have never discussed this, Matty, but have you ever considered the lack of children may be my fault?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘Dr Hurley was adamant on that point.’
Kit tied a knot in his belt. ‘I mind, you know, Matty.’
‘Oh, Kit.’ Matty’s heart gave its lurch of pain. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘I thought I didn’t, but I find myself looking into prams to see what’s inside.’
Half tearful, half angry, thinking how typical it was that Kit had never said anything, Matty said, ‘And I spend my time not looking into prams because I can’t bear it.’
Kit undid the knot in his belt and retied it, and then he said with an obvious effort, ‘I’m sorry if I never let you know what I’m feeling. I find it difficult.’ Pause. ‘I have told you some things, though, Matty.’
Although it was an apology, the hint of justification in Kit’s tone made Matty see red. She beat the pillow with her fist. ‘
You
may find it difficult, but you don’t know what it’s like to wake up every day and know that your husband wished another woman lay under your roof. Do you? You don’t, so you can’t possibly understand.’ The pillow sagged under its pummelling and she shoved it towards him. ‘You don’t even like taking anything from me. Not even a pillow, I daresay. Although, I note, you take it in the end.’
In a detached way, Matty noticed she was operating on two levels: an upper level where she shrank from the scene, a lower level where a surge of astringent emotion washed away the detritus in her mind. ‘The worst thing is that I asked for it. I arranged this marriage.’
She clamped her full bottom lip shut. Kit stood absolutely still, his face unreadable, then lit another cigarette.
Anger having temporarily lanced the wound, Matty felt relief at having spoken out at last. But, before she subsided completely, she threw one last missile at her husband. ‘What’s more, you standing there, Kit, is going to make me say I’m sorry, and I promised myself I wouldn’t. There is no need for me to apologize. It’s a habit. So would you please go away.’
He shrugged and said quietly, ‘I imagined what we have was what you wanted. You seemed so self-contained, Matty. I didn’t realize.’
‘Well, you’re blind and unfeeling, and you never bothered to ask. Now please go away.’
‘That’s not very kind, Matty.’
It wasn’t, but Matty summoned all the anguish of the past two years and threw it at him. ‘I don’t care.’
Incredibly, Kit gave a snort of laughter, and checked himself. ‘Matty, I shouldn’t laugh. But you looked so furious and... it rather suits you. Sorry,’ he added when he saw he had gone too far.
‘That is unforgivable.’ Matty now began to shake with hot, releasing rage. ‘How
dare
you?’
Kit suddenly became very serious. He finished the cigarette and stubbed it out. ‘You’re quite right, Matty, things do need to be sorted out. And I am to blame, I know that.’ He pulled back the curtain with a jerk. ‘You love this garden, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she answered from the bed. ‘More than anything.’
He twitched the curtain further back. ‘Go to sleep, Matty,’ he said roughly. ‘Go to sleep.’
To her surprise, Matty did just that and was woken only by Kit slipping into the bed in the early morning. He was shaking with cold, and his hands beat a frozen path up her body as he pushed up the nightdress.
‘Don’t go, Matty,’ he whispered into the hollow of her shoulder and kissed the
café-au-lait
eyes. ‘I know I’ve hurt you and I didn’t know how much. Wait a little. I’ll go on this trip, and when I come back things will be different.’
‘Kit,’ she said, sleepy and bewildered. ‘Why? Why are you doing this?’
‘Because—’ Ice-cold and urgent, Kit made love to Matty with a passion that she had not experienced before. Afterwards he pulled her to him and kissed the soft hair, and she cradled him like a child on her breasts. ‘Listen, Matty,’ he whispered. ‘Promise me not to decide anything until I get back. I’ve never asked you anything before, and in many ways I don’t have the right, but I’m asking now.’
Did she trust Kit? Did she care any longer? Had Matty become so weary with her great, heavy, burning love that she wanted only peace?
‘Matty?’
‘I agree.’
With a groan, Kit turned on his side and fell asleep.
Kit’s letters arrived at irregular intervals. From Basra, after he and Max had come back from an expedition into the marsh Arab territory. From Baghdad, where they acquired pack horses and a donkey, plus a wayward Bedouin called Kiaszim as a guide. From towns on the trek between Baghdad and Damascus where, Kit wrote, sandstorms came and went like spring showers and the insects in their lodgings were the size of sharks.
‘In a strange way I feel cleansed,’ he wrote from Ghaymin in late March, after a bout of fever and the death of the little donkey. ‘Perhaps it is the experience of thirst and exhaustion.’ He added the PS, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever eat another boiled egg in my life.’
On 20 April, Kit wrote from Damascus.
Here we are, Matty... we have made it. The impressions are overwhelming, almost too much after the sparseness of the desert: almond blossom and the sound of fountains. Burning hot coffee in tiny cups, nut-filled Turkish delight and a scent of spices filtering from the bazaar. Squalor mixed with exquisite and civilized delights. Peace and noise. Comfort and terrible poverty. The luxury of surrendering my aching, blistered body to hot water and a soft bed. Kiaszim is heartbroken because he knows he will have to say goodbye to us, although Max is thinking of staying on. I am coming home via Marseilles. Cable or write to me there, poste restante. Dearest Matty, it is time I came home from the desert.
Ten days later on a lovely spring afternoon, Ivy laid out, as instructed, Matty’s new crêpe wrapover dress in navy blue. The hem reached almost to her ankles and the skirt flared out in a satisfying
frou.
Matty studied her reflection – she did not want to look swamped in the new-style length.
‘So pretty, Lady Dysart,’ said Mrs Pengeally, sizing up the dress, when she was ushered into the drawing room for afternoon tea. ‘But perhaps not terribly practical.’
While Mrs Dawes spread a tablecloth and anchored it with plates of scones, raspberry jam and Madeira cake, Matty and Mrs Pengeally discussed Spain, the awful kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the bun-throwing incident at the Odiham-Nether Hinton Scouts meeting and the mass break-out of Mr Sparrow-Wilkinson’s day old White Wyandotte chicks.
A snippet of gossip had reached Mrs Pengeally about the Dysart marriage and she was curious. She ate two scones and asked, ‘Sir Christopher will be back soon?’
Matty smiled politely. ‘He’s due back in a couple of weeks. He does like to travel.’ Before she could stop herself she added, ‘I might go with him one of these days. I’d like a trip to the East. I used to live there, you know, when I was very small.’
She wondered why on earth she had said that. Perhaps the glue made by habit and association in a marriage, however patchy, was stronger than Matty had supposed. She fumbled up her sleeve for her handkerchief and then stopped herself.
Ivy knocked, came in with a telegram. ‘Telegram for the master, madam. I thought you would like it straight away.’
‘Thank you.’ Matty turned the envelope over in her hand. Years of administering to the flock had toughened Mrs Pengeally. ‘Do open it, please, Lady Dysart. Don’t take any notice of me.’
‘Thank you, Mrs Pengeally.’ Matty crossed over to the desk by the window and picked up the paper knife.
The telegram was postmarked Cap d’Antibes in Provence and it read:
COME STOP ASK AT THE BUREAU DE LA POSTE STOP DAISY STOP
When she relived the moment, Matty congratulated herself on her self-control. She did not cry out, or gasp, or crumple the paper into a ball. She merely blinked a little faster than normal, tucked the telegram under the edge of the blotter and said, ‘A friend of my husband’s wishing to arrange a meeting.’
‘An old friend,’ she reiterated, and smiled vaguely in the direction of Mrs Pengeally’s inquisitive gaze.
When she had gone, Matty rushed upstairs to change out of her frock and went running down to her garden.
It was there, waiting.
If nothing else did, her garden needed care. The weeks of her illness in the autumn had set back her plans for it, smothered as it now was in spring abundance.
It needed Matty.
Half expecting to see Rose, she hovered by the statue and for an awful second imagined she saw the dying Hesther. She turned and skimmed back over the lawn, puffing breath through her cheeks to steady herself, across to the river, past the blue and white of the chionodoxa and anemones that she had planted, to the bridge and looked into the water, where acid green, stringy weeds floated. She made her way through the gap in the yew, across the circular lawn towards Ned trimming the box edging in the parterre below the terrace steps.
His tools were beside him on the path: a trowel whose handle had worn smooth and shiny with use, a slatted seed tray with a dibber, a battered trug, a galvanized watering can and a sack reeking of creosote.
Above Ned, the sky spread a blue wash of colour, and the breeze brought a smell of new life and growth. The sun was pale and not warm, but it was out.
The F sharp throbbed in Matty’s ears, plangent and ominous.
Ned did not notice her at first. He was concentrating hard, moving with economical steadiness, a spare figure with weather-beaten hands. Matty wanted to fling herself at the tough old chest under the rough jacket and cry until she was dry.
‘I’ll help you, Mr Sheppey,’ she said instead, and got down on her knees on the stone path.
Comfortable and easy with life now that Ellen was better, Ned said without looking up, ‘You do that, Lady Dysart. I could do with some help, like.’
There were so many ghosts in this garden. Matty trowelled at a dandelion forcing itself up through a crack in the flagstones, failed and resorted to her hands. The ghosts of wounded soldiers trying to put back the pieces of their lives. Irritatingly, the dandelion snapped at the top of the root, leaving a white circle wedged between the stones, ready to grow again.
She moved on to tackle a second growing between the angle of the path and the wall.
The ghost of Hesther, who had once written ‘Lovely, lovely’ about a rose and then killed herself. Of little Rose, the shade that teased and tormented Matty because she knew Matty was empty and burning with longing. This time, the dandelion root yielded with a snap and earth rained over her face and down her front. Matty tackled the rogue clump of grass beside it. Of an eleven-year-old boy who had found his dying mother and, at a stroke, lost his childhood and had searched for it ever after. Of herself, who came to Hinton Dysart wounded and frightened, and discovered both a centre and a spirit.
The scar made by the uprooted grass was alive with woodlice and earthworms.
‘Easy,’ said Ned looking up. ‘Don’t waste your energy.’
The F sharp swelled, drilled through Matty’s ear until she wanted to cry out and then, as suddenly as it had begun, died.
‘Matty, can you hear me? The line is terrible.’
‘Just about, Kit. Where are you?’
‘Marseilles.’ A pause. ‘Thank you for sending me the telegram. It was generous of you.’
She spoke crisply into the mouthpiece. ‘Of course I sent it, Kit. What else would I do with it?’
Her tone obviously worried Kit. ‘Matty, listen to me,’ he said. ‘I know Daisy must be in trouble, she wouldn’t send for me otherwise. I must go and see her.’ There was a silence at Matty’s end of the phone. ‘Matty,’ he said. ‘Are you there?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, eventually. ‘I’m still here.’
‘Do you understand what I am saying?’
Matty ran her fingers up and down the telephone cord and looked into the drawing-room fire. She considered cutting him off. ‘Kit, what can I say? I don’t want you to see Daisy, but I cannot stop you, and there is no reason why I should. But if you do, I can only think that I should begin to pack.’
‘That’s why I’m ringing you, Matty.’ Kit’s hotel room in the
vieux port
looked out over the seafront in Marseilles. A wind stirred the palm trees and whipped the sea into beaten cream. ‘Please don’t do anything until I get back. Please wait. Listen, I’ve got a rose for you. A beauty called “Blanchefleur” raised by someone called Vibert early last century...’
‘Goodness.’ Matty was startled. Kit must care something for her if he’d found her a rose.
‘Do you understand about seeing Daisy?’ Static intruded on the line and turned his words into nonsense.
‘What did you say, Kit?’
‘Do you understand about Daisy? If she’s in trouble I have to go.’
‘No, I don’t see.’ Matty clung to the telephone. ‘All right, I do see, but you must understand how I feel about it.’
Kit wanted to thump the table with exasperation. Instead he turned his cigarette case over and over in his hand.
The static intensified and in the background an operator talked in a monotone. Someone speaking in rapid French cut across their conversation.
‘For God’s sake, this is ridiculous,’ Kit shouted. ‘Wait until I get home, Matty, and then we can talk about it. If you want to go then, I won’t stop you.’
Because she could not bear to hear any more, Matty dropped the earpiece as if it had burnt her hand.
Kit armed himself with a map and plenty of cash, just in case. It took him some time to find a garage in Marseilles that would hire him a car but, eventually, he tracked down a Dion, heavy but roomy, with a reasonable-sounding engine. He settled behind the wheel for the drive over the aromatic, breast-shaped headland to Antibes.