The September Garden (18 page)

The landlady pressed Alex, telling him that Nell should stay there and rest up.

‘I just want to get out of here,’ Nell replied. ‘I want to go home.’

He drove as fast as he could through the night, negotiating roadblocks, police signs, slowing for the ringing ambulances, being bellowed at by an air raid warden for nearly running him over. Alex knew his way out along the short cuts out of town, through the tight grey suburbs and onto the A-road deep into Buckinghamshire.

Parked by the verge now, Nell could indeed feel the sultry heat of the storm approaching. She felt as if the heat 
of the fires of London was still upon her. Burning into her mind, her clothes, singeing her hair. Those people. Those poor, wretched people. Cold sweat broke down her back. She took the landlady’s cardigan off and tossed it out of the window.

Alex fired the engine and turned down a lane. The narrow unclassified road unfurled before them like a rich purple ribbon as they meandered through dark beech groves.

‘I want to cry, Alex,’ she said in the gloom, ‘but I just can’t.’

‘It’s the shock, my love,’ he said, reaching for her hand and pressing it tightly in his.

It took her a few moments to realise he’d called her
his love
, and yet in her turmoil, her earlier confusion and doubt began to reform and grow like a filthy stain.

‘Nearly there,’ said Alex, cheerfully. ‘Nearly—Oh.’

The car shuddered, the engine made a whining noise and cut out.

‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘Run out of petrol. What a fool.’

Nell stood in the blanketing, dark silence under the trees, while Alex unloaded her coat and suitcase from the boot. She decided that it would do them good to walk. They needed to breathe some good Chiltern air.

They began to walk down the lane. Meadows and hedgerows emerged from the gloom, their shapes shifting, and shadows melting and re-forming at every switch and turn in the lane. All the time, a great billowing bruise of cloud rose against the darkness of the western sky. A breath of cold breeze was chased by warm, stifling air. Nell could feel her forehead grow sticky and then cool in another instant. 

‘Hear that?’ Alex asked, cocking his head. ‘That’s a nightjar.’

She wondered aloud if they were going to have another birdwatching contest and told him she hoped not for she was shattered and her skills were compromised.

‘Don’t you miss being a pilot?’ she asked out of nowhere, her mind leaping among a thousand thoughts.

He told her no, that his new job was far more interesting and suited his background.

‘And that is?’

‘Do you remember that I told you I read geology at university? Well, I was called upon to lead a study in that field.’

‘A study of utmost importance to the war effort,’ she said, blandly, ‘as you were posted away from Bovingdon last summer in the blink of an eye.’

‘I’m going to tell you, Nell,’ he said, his voice grave in the stillness of the dawn, ‘for I would trust you with my life.’

‘You know me better than that,’ she said, cockily. ‘You can trust me with your soul.’

He stopped her and turned her towards him. ‘Nell, it seems an age since I arrived at Sylvie’s house, with this on the tip of my tongue. I wasn’t there for a night out on the tiles. That was my perfect excuse. I was there because I wanted to see you. Was desperate to see you. I was there to say sorry and to try to explain everything. Will you let me do that now?’

She told him of course. She looked up at his face and her doubts shut themselves away again. She began to love every angle of his face, every curve of his lip. Everything. 

‘Last summer, I was tasked with the audacious mission of crossing the Channel and collecting samples of sand and earth from the beaches of Normandy.’

She nodded along, understanding the premise of what he’d just said. And then she froze and gripped his arm tightly. And then whispered in breathless disbelief, ‘
Normandy?
’

He pressed his finger playfully over her lips.

‘Shush now. Careless talk.’

‘But, but how … ?’

‘It’s been a whole year in the planning. That’s all I can say. I went to ground, really, stuck in a darned office near my lodgings on Baker Street mulling it over. Building the team, poring over the intricate details: weather, tides, prevailing winds. My team is in the Highlands now, training.’ He urged her to walk on, his arm over her shoulder. ‘And quite soon it will be time for us to cross the Channel.’

Nell put her hand over her mouth to try, ineffectually, to smother her distress.

‘Let’s just get you home,’ he said. ‘Number one priority for the moment.’

He took her hand and began to lead her.

Nell’s scalp prickled then with fear, and her instinct caught a sudden change in the air around them. Deep in the sky there came a rumbling.

‘Oh God,’ she whispered. ‘Not again, please.’

Her body began to tremble, her bones turning to ice. Alex was going away again and the storm was approaching. She was helpless. She pressed her hand to her throat. A flash of light signalled over the rolling hill like a silent beacon, and immediately a great crack of thunder exploded overhead. 

‘Christ, Alex … oh God.’ She pressed herself to him and he began to laugh gently in her ear.

‘It’s thunder, that’s all.’

Warm air billowed around them, shaking the treetops. Eddies broke over the meadows at the bottom of the valley, stirring it like a sea. A great drop of water hit Nell square on top of her head, another on the end of her nose. The breaking dawn grew dark, suddenly, and they began to run. They hurried through the village, where flashes of lightning repeatedly lit the roof of Miss Trenton and Miss Hull’s cottage, past the church which looked surreal in the strange yellow light, and plunged on down the lane to Lednor Bottom. Rain bounced back off the tarmac, and shattered the leaves in the hedgerows.

Another crack of thunder and another followed, as brutal and as violent as the air raid, and yet Nell suddenly laughed, turning her face up to the quenching rain, letting it wash through her hair and over her skin.

‘It’s scaring the life out of me!’ she cried as they reached the ford. ‘But it feels wonderful. Come on, don’t bother with the stepping stones, straight through!’

They splashed through the shallow water, both still in their shoes and then stopped, both panting, as another rumble bowled across the sky like a great iron ball.

Nell pressed her hand to her chest. ‘I’m alive! I’m alive!’ she cried, jumping up and down and giggling. ‘My God, I’m alive!’

Alex was laughing hard, his hair plastered to his head, his shirt almost transparent with rainwater.

‘I can’t go any further,’ he said. ‘You feel alive, I’m half dead.’ 

She grabbed his arm and urged him on.

‘Round this bend, nearly there, here we are.’

She opened the gate to Pudifoot’s cottage as the rain continued to pound them, lifted the doormat for the key and unlocked the door.

She was greeted by the tranquil, still air of the kitchen, with a lingering scent of vanilla and coal dust.

‘Not too bad, considering it’s been empty a year and a half,’ she said. ‘There’s no electricity, though.’

Alex shut the door behind him and told her to come here.

The little cottage was in darkness, its tiny windows unable to afford them much of the dawn light at all, as the clouds continued to roll over. The rain was hammering on the roof. They heard a scuffling of tiny claws behind the dresser.

‘You’re not afraid, are you?’ he asked her.

‘Not of mice, no,’ she told him.

She felt his fingertips touching the collar of her dress. He remarked how the fabric was sticking to her body. His hands moved around the back of her neck and lifted her sopping hair free. The cool air breathed onto her skin. Her instinct was to close her eyes but she dared not for she wanted to look at Alex and watch his face.

His lips found her throat and he breathed on her that he was sorry.

‘For what, though, Alex?’ she whispered.

‘I’m sorry, but I need you. Have always needed you. There seems to have been a perpetual catalogue of misunderstanding between us, I—’

She laughed then and pressed her finger over his lips.

‘Now who is talking carelessly.’

He held her shoulders and told her to stop joking.

‘I know I can dance a lot better than I did last night.’ He was laughing gently.

He kissed her softly first, as they reacquainted with each other, re-explored each other. And as he pulled her wet dress open, excitement ran like a hot dart up her body. She cried out and tears sprung from her eyes. She whispered to him that she was crying; at last, she was crying. He wiped her tears for her, and held her, rocking her.

They lay down together on the rag rug in front of the cold, dead range and he cradled her while the rain continued to beat down and the clouds finally rolled away.

The morning light was fresh and quenched, and found its way through Mr Pudifoot’s windows and onto Nell’s naked shoulders. Alex caressed her skin with his fingertips, moving in tiny, exquisite circles.

‘This is no way to treat a lady,’ Alex said quietly. ‘And this rug has seen better days. You must be longing for your bed.’

‘Alex I am, but nothing matters when I’m with you. I’m perfectly fine when you’re here.’ She felt honesty spilling out of her. ‘So fine that I don’t understand why I keep walking away from you. Look at me. I have just come through the worst day and night of my life, when my fear could not have been any greater than it was … but here you are, still beside me. And I feel fine.’ She sat up to get a better look at his face, confident in her nakedness. ‘But the lesson is, I suppose, I should not fall in love with someone so very important.’ 

He was watching her with barefaced longing.

She asked him, ‘Do you understand at last how I feel?’

‘I know now how
I
feel,’ he said, his voice choked with sorrow. ‘And now I have to do it all over again: this
being important
. Of all the bad timing, I have a meeting today in town. In a bunker no less.’ He reached for his watch. ‘Christ. The meeting is in two hours. I have to go
now
.’

‘With all those other important people,’ said Nell, willing herself to smile. She reached for her dress and slipped it over her head.

‘You are so brave,’ he said. ‘So very brave, and I just keep leaving you. The assignment is imminent. In the next week or two.’

She smiled at his earnest face. ‘Alex. It’s all right. I don’t like it, but I understand.’

He sat up and reached for her, held her face tenderly in his palm, cupping her chin. He kissed her eyes. ‘But it’s not all right, is it?’

She watched his face suddenly close in shyness.

He hesitated, then said, ‘Sylvie told me you had a boyfriend?’

‘
What?
’

‘A newspaper man? She didn’t mention a name. That’s why I left you alone. Let things go. I thought you should grab your chance of happiness with someone steady and sensible. Someone whose life expectancy—’

‘She didn’t mention a name because there
is
no newspaper man.’ She laughed then. ‘Oh, Sylvie.’

Alex got up and stretched, deep in thought, not mindful, Nell decided, of his effect on her. She gazed at him with total and assured certainty that she loved him. 

He tugged on his shirt and began to sigh. ‘It’s wretched,’ he muttered in agitation. ‘So damnably wretched.’

‘It is,’ she said, sensing an enormous bravery at her core. She sat on Mr Pudifoot’s fireside chair, registering a vague scent of mildew from it. ‘But you will get through this one, and we will see each other again. After last night, I think we’re invincible, and we will—’

He squatted beside the chair and grasped her hands.

‘Nell, please, listen.’

The tone of his voice stopped her mid breath. She waited. The look on his face sent an acute arrow of pain through her chest.

‘What is it?’

‘I had relations with Sylvie.’

A laugh yelped out of her. She put her hand over her mouth and stared at him. When she could no longer bear to look at his eyes – their clear blue veneered with torment – she gazed beyond his shoulder at the bare little kitchen. There was the stove blacked by Diana Blanford, the dresser where Mr Pudifoot’s medals had been found; on the floor, the rag rug where, two hours ago, she’d made love for the first time ever. Made love with Alex. And her father had stood right there and broken faith with her mother, broken faith with
her
, by kissing Diana Blanford. And then heaped betrayal upon betrayal.

‘It was a mistake. She was weeping,’ Alex was trying to explain, dragging his hand through his hair. His mouth was loose with regret. He looked dazed with sorrow. ‘She was sad for her parents. I was lonely, I admit, amazed at the coincidence of bumping into her. London these days is a minefield of frantic liaison and passing strangers. But I 
drink alone. I keep myself to myself. To see her was a link back to you. To
you
, Nell. She had told me that you had this boyfriend. I actually felt sorry for her.’

Nell put her hand up to stop him. ‘This is true to form,’ she uttered, chilled and hard. ‘Sylvie’s brazenness knows no bounds. I expect it was a beautiful performance. Beautiful.’ She covered her hands with her face, rested her knees on her elbows. ‘She is sick. She must be ill. She deliberately toyed with us. Got us to meet again. She left your handkerchief where she knew I would find it. Strange how her mind works. Strange how she wants to play with our misery.’

Nell’s mind drained of its despair and a calm steady glow of compassion replaced it. She looked up at Alex.

‘But I won’t let this happen again to us. Not this. Never this.’

‘Nell, you are—’

‘This is the story of our lives. Sylvie and me.’

‘You don’t know how lovely you are.’

Alex gripped both her hands in his and rested his head submissively on her lap.

His voice was lacerated. ‘This has been killing me.’

Nell sunk her fingers into his hair, looked down on to the top of his head.

‘You are with me, Alex,’ she said. ‘No one and no one thing is going to remove you now.’