Camomile Lawn

  ‘And what shall you tell them?’ Hamish sipped his drink, smiling at Iris, who was less beautiful than her mother, far less beautiful than Calypso.

  ‘I don’t think they are going to be interested,’ said Iris, ‘it’s all so long ago. We are only interested on occasions like this when the funeral stirs up Mother’s memories.’

  ‘And Helena’s,’ said Hamish.

  ‘Yes, I daresay. Poor old thing, but when she’s gone—’ her voice trailed.

  ‘There’s my mother, there’s Sophy, your—er—your fathers. Are they coming, by the way?’

  ‘They may not be back in time, they are in Vichy. I don’t think they can make it.’

  Hamish remembered that Paul and David seldom turned up at family gatherings, using their arthritis as an excuse.

  Thirty-five

  PAULI ERSTWEILER DROVE UP to the house in his Mercedes. He slammed the door of his car. Sophy heard his heavy steps in the hall. He paused by the hall table then went to look at his father, who had been in England while he, Pauli, had been in the concentration camp. She could feel Pauli’s bitterness sweep into the house with him, wrap its icy silence round her like a shroud. She shrank back into the nearest room and stood behind the door. She heard his heavy tread come down the stairs, heard him lift the telephone, dial, speak, ordering the undertaker to close the coffin. Then: ‘Thank you. Ja, Ja. Two-thirty tomorrow. What?’ He listened. ‘Yes, yes, the house will be for sale. Do you know of a buyer? Tomorrow then, thank you, tomorrow will do,’ his heavy accent.

  He went into the drawing room, his tread the tread of ownership. He lifted the lid of the piano, played a few blurred chords with fingers crushed by the camp guards, their music expunged from his life. He let the lid slam and again heavy footsteps to the door, the door opening, slamming shut, the car door slamming, the engine revved, the crunch of tyres, the sound of the wind drowning the sound of the car, rain sheeting against the window.

  Poor Pauli, so full of bitterness, she had thought, lying in his arms. How can you love when you are filled with hate?

  How could he believe he would have been a musician when he had no love? He had made himself a millionaire, they said, wheeling and dealing in tanks, planes, guns. She went back to stand by Max, lying silent, his music stilled, his grief for Pauli over. There had been such joy over Pauli’s survival. She remembered the skeletal young man, Monika and Max’s joy turning to fear, pain, sourness.

  ‘He needs love,’ Monika had said.

  ‘He needs love,’ Max, too, had said.

  ‘He needs rest,’ the Floyers had said, ‘and peace.’

  ‘He needs a good smack,’ Helena had said.

  They had watched Pauli grasp at life and use it, careless of the hurt he inflicted, greedy, cruel, selfish, worldly.

  ‘He was a cruel, selfish young man,’ she said to Max lying in his coffin. ‘I made a fool of myself trying to wake love in him. Calypso was right when she called him “the sow’s ear”. He is still those things. Calypso when she first met him had said, “He is not one of us.” Polly had said, “He is not the Jew the twins fought for,” and Helena sized him up immediately, saying it would have been better for Max and Monika if he had died, leaving them with their memory of him unscarred.’

  Gently Sophy stroked Max’s face with her finger, feeling the cold cheek, the mobile mouth. It would have been better to bury Max without Pauli’s arrogant presence.

  Made restless by the wind, uneasy by Pauli’s abrupt visit, she wandered the house, refurnishing it in her mind as it had been in her childhood. She went up to her bedroom and, looking along the branch of the Ilex tree, she remembered the years when she had dreamed of Oliver, Oliver who loved Calypso. She tried to pin down a time when she had not loved him, or the time she had ceased to love him, and failed. She could not remember when she had last seen him, or where it had been. Long years ago, another life, she thought, moving into Uncle Richard’s room. Poor old man, too ill to wipe his tear. Why did I not do it for him, why let him die with a smeared cheek? she reproached herself.

  ‘Sophy.’ Calypso’s clear voice. ‘Are you still here? Are you mad?’

  ‘I thought I’d better stay with him tonight.’ Sophy went to meet Calypso on the stairs.

  ‘Morbid, but please yourself. Can you give me a hand? I’ve brought the booze for tomorrow. Can you help me unload the car?’

  Sophy followed Calypso out. ‘Goodness, champagne.’

  ‘He liked bubbly. D’you remember he called it bubbly? D’you remember when we heard Hector was not killed we celebrated?’

  ‘I remember well.’

  ‘So I thought,’ said Calypso, moving towards her car, ‘we’d have bubbly tomorrow, he’d like that.’

  ‘He would.’

  ‘Guess who I saw in the town—Pauli.’

  ‘He’s been here. I hid.’

  ‘Don’t blame you, he’s a right sod. I think he’s a changeling. When you think of Monika and Max you think he can’t be theirs.’

  ‘Almost.’

  ‘Not almost. Quite. Quite not theirs. D’you know—can you carry all that, it’s heavy—d’you know he made a pass at me once.’

  ‘I slept with him.’

  ‘How could you? What possessed you?’

  Sophy laughed at Calypso’s astonished expression. ‘I thought I’d teach him how to love,’ she said wryly.

  Calypso put down the case she was carrying and let out a shout of laughter. Momentarily she looked as she had long ago before the war. ‘But darling, you love Oliver, you always did, nobody else ever mattered.’

  ‘As a child. How did you know?’ Standing in the rain and wind, holding the champagne, Sophy grasped at her privacy, trying to protect it.

  ‘We all knew.’ Calypso pushed open the front door. ‘Your enigmatic little face, your eyes. Where shall we put it?’

  ‘In the kitchen.’ Sophy, carrying the case of champagne, led the way, glad to turn her back on Calypso. ‘In the larder it’s cool, let’s put it there.’

  ‘Oliver’s such an ass. Have you seen him lately?’

  ‘Not for years.’

  ‘Both his wives. Awful.’

  Sophy said, ‘Are there more cases like this?’ wishing to drop the subject of Oliver.

  ‘Yes, in the car. He got over me years and years ago when the penny dropped,’ Calypso persisted.

  ‘What penny?’

  ‘The penny that said Hector.’

  ‘I always knew you loved Hector.’

  ‘No, no, not love. He suited me, nobody else did.’

  ‘That’s your version.’ Sophy sniffed.

  ‘When we’ve finished unloading I’m going to take you off to dinner.’

  ‘I thought I’d stay the night here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Max is all alone. He always needed one of us there.’

  ‘Very well, we will have bacon and eggs and I’ll keep you company. You can’t stay here alone, Pauli might come back. Why d’you think he came?’

  ‘To look at Max. I heard him tell the undertaker to close the coffin and that the house is for sale. It’s his now.’

  ‘Doesn’t let the grass grow. Not that it matters, it will never be the same. I always think of it as Richard and Monika’s. In the war when Brian fired the gun.’

  ‘Monika and Max’s. Latterly Max alone, with Helena visiting.’

  ‘Of course, but our roots are on the lawn. D’you think it smells now?’

  ‘Faintly.’ Sophy smiled at Calypso, glad she had come back.

  ‘Let’s finish unloading, then we can have a bottle with our supper. He would approve.’

  ‘I don’t like leaving him in the dark.’

  ‘Candles, then. Electric light wouldn’t look right. Wish I had some holy candles.’

  ‘The only time he used holy candles was during power cuts. He’d make a dash to the Oratory. Helena was shocked.’

  ‘I’m sure the Church wouldn’t mind.’ Calypso rummaged in a cupboard. ‘Her
e we are, pity they are red.’

  ‘The light is much the same.’ Sophy took them from her and led the way upstairs. ‘We’ll use the candlesticks we had at his first dinner party here before the war.’

  ‘D’you remember that?’

  ‘Yes, the full moon. You held Oliver’s hand.’

  ‘You noticed?’ Calypso laughed.

  ‘And Uncle Richard toasted absent friends, meaning Pauli,’ said Sophy.

  ‘And the lawn smelt delicious after the heat of the day and Max looked us all over.’ Calypso struck a match to light the candles.

  ‘Aunt Helena wore a long dress and kicked Uncle Richard when he was tactless about Pauli.’ Sophy set the candlesticks by Max’s head.

  ‘And Monika’s eyes were huge as she sat thinking about Pauli left behind in Auschwitz. Why do you think they left him behind?’ Calypso, lighting the last candle, stood with the lighted match looking across at Sophy.

  ‘A friend they trusted had sworn he could get him out and send him to join them. It didn’t come off. The friend ended in a camp too.’

  ‘Ow!’ Calypso dropped the match which had burned her fingers. It fell on to Max’s chest.

  ‘Look out, you’ll set fire to him.’ Sophy snatched at the match. ‘You’ve singed his suit.’ She brushed at the dying match.

  ‘Horrid smell, pooh.’ Calypso blew on her fingers. ‘Monika was very clever,’ she said thoughtfully, looking across Max’s body at Sophy. ‘She and Helena ended by adoring each other. Attraction of opposites? Mutual interests? She was clever. Good, too.’

  ‘Also artful. When the guinea pig scandal was on she moved into the General’s house.’ Sophy smiled in recollection.

  ‘But he started it, horrid old thing,’ Calypso exclaimed. ‘What d’you mean “moved in”?’

  ‘She packed a small case, walked across the cliffs to his house and put it to him that as the press were on to the story, as an English gentleman it was up to him to protect her, give her asylum.’

  ‘Oh my, how crafty.’

  ‘She knew and he knew he’d look pretty silly if the press got the story, so he stifled them. I thought it quite fly of Monika.’

  ‘I bet Max put her up to it.’

  ‘No, no. Max, Helena and Uncle Richard arrived here to find her holed up with the General.’

  ‘I never knew.’

  ‘No one did. She put him on his mettle to do the English gentleman bit,’ said Sophy.

  ‘Always putting his arm round our waists for a squeeze. How did you find out?’

  ‘David and Paul’s mother. She said she thought it a just punishment for his pro-Nazi views.’

  ‘Oh, yes. One forgets.’ Calypso looked thoughtful. ‘Used he not to make passes at Monika too?’

  ‘Yes, he did, but never after the guinea pig affair. I wish you could join in this conversation.’ Sophy looked down at Max. ‘I don’t think the burn will show.’

  ‘Let’s open a bottle. We’ll remember even more after a drink or two.’ Calypso moved towards the stairs. ‘If we weren’t so old we’d be off on a moonlight run. My goodness,’ she said, catching hold of Sophy’s hand, ‘we were an ignorant lot in those days.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Who did you sleep with first? Who was your first lover?’ Calypso bit her tongue, seeing Sophy’s face close blankly shut. ‘Mine was Hector,’ she plunged on. ‘Nobody believed it but Hector was my first, and it didn’t take me long to find he was the best, too.’ She watched Sophy relax warily. ‘They thought I grew stuck-up when I married, perhaps I did. Being rich went to my head.’ The danger’s passed, she told herself. ‘Let’s crack a bottle,’ she said, moving down to the harsh light of the kitchen, where she looked quite old but a lot more human since her stroke than the girl on the camomile lawn.

  Thirty-six

  TOO EARLY FOR THE service, Sophy strolled in the churchyard in her green gumboots, the wind whipping her skirt round her knees, her head wrapped in a shawl.

  Among the local Penhaligans, Boscences, Penroses, Tremaynes and Tredinnicks she sought the Floyers, Uncle Richard and Monika. She read the Floyers’ names, the dates of their births and deaths. Rector of this Parish R.I.P. Someone had planted the grave with daffodils. In spring they lay under a yellow duvet. Others had planted colchicum. Now, in the rain, the Floyers rested under a shocking pink spread which reached across to neighbouring graves as their spirit had enveloped the parish. Sophy marvelled that they had never criticized or interfered with their sons and Polly. Their acceptance of an unusual situation had silenced waspish tongues as effectively as foam suffocates fire.

  Richard Cuthbertson lay apart, his grave planted with spring and autumn cyclamen, fluted pink heads thrusting up through marbled leaves.

  ‘Uncle Richard, salute, and Ducks.’ Sophy ran her hand over the cool leaves. Richard, tap dancing with the Rectory evacuees round the hot water boiler, had overheated and caught a chill leading to pneumonia and death. ‘Putting on my top hat—’ Where, when the time came, would they put Aunt Helena? It seemed a pity to disturb the cyclamen so well established.

  Sophy, holding the shawl close under her chin, observed the pit dug ready for Max, dark earth piled to one side, a pit which already held Monika, now lined with plastic grass. Was there room for three? Sophy suppressed a smile as she walked back past the Penhaligans, Boscences, Penroses, Tremaynes and Tredinnicks. Which among the many Penroses was the Penrose who had not been a proper husband, who had exposed himself to a terrified child, who had fallen or been pushed over the cliff? In the church porch Sophy took the shawl off and shook the rain from it. The lingering memory of a man’s shout flipped away with the raindrops as she looked across the fields to the cliffs and the grey Atlantic raging in from the western approaches. Replacing the shawl, Sophy moved into the church, her eyes adjusting to the semi-darkness.

  The church was a blaze of colour, red, yellow, pink, orange, dahlias, lilies, chrysanthemums, michaelmas daisies, blue, green, pink and white hydrangeas, stooks of corn, stacks of vegetables, pots of jam, sacks of potatoes, bunches of carrots, vegetable marrows, pots of chutney, baskets of fungi, strings of onions, ropes of garlic, oranges, bananas. Harvest Festival tomorrow.

  Outside the wind screamed and battered. The rain slanted vicious rods from bulging clouds. Rainbow weather.

  In front of the altar two coffin stools waited to receive Max. Sophy sat at the back of the church to wait the hour. Soon they would all be gathering, the friends, the colleagues, the lovers, the curious, to bury the alien, the refugee, the man who had made this place his own, who had earned the right to rest among them. After nearly fifty years even Monika was forgiven her alien ways, vide the ropes of garlic, the baskets of fungi, mute testimony of quasi-acceptance. Sophy sneezed, breathing in the pungent smell of chrysanthemums, the earthy reek of potato sacks. Feeling chilly, she moved to the space under the tower where the bell ringers gathered, and danced a jig to whip up her circulation, her gumboots slapping on the stone floor. When she heard voices in the porch she sat down again, panting, well back in the shadows.

  Three or four pressmen gathered, pushing back the hoods of their parkas.

  ‘Won’t take long, there’s to be a memorial service in London. Only worth a paragraph or two.’

  ‘Depends who comes. Won’t be many celebrities, this weather.’

  ‘Never know. There are two coppers to direct the traffic. I saw several faces in the pub worth a mention.’

  The village came in twos and threes, middle-aged women with umbrellas, men in sober suits. They sat at the back near Sophy.

  ‘Looks lovely this year.’ They viewed the harvest decorations with pride.

  ‘I see Lorna Tremayne’s put three jars of her pickle by the font. That’s not like her.’

  ‘She’ll take un back after service. She’m so mean she won’t give you the drips off her nose if so be you might want them.’

  ‘Parson will have to look sharp if he wants ’em for the hospital.’

  ??
?Mrs Floyer always made a list, no flies on Mrs Floyer. New parson needs a wife.’

  ‘He’m too high. Higher than High Floyer ever was.’

  ‘Ah. Miss them when they’re gone, new chap don’t seem to have what it takes.’ The voices dropped to an inaudible whisper and suppressed laughter shook the row.

  More footsteps in the porch. The pressmen asked for names. A posse of well-wrapped women followed by their consorts in overcoats and hats, pausing a moment to give their names to the press, then moving in to find a seat, settle their haunches, look around, wave discreetly to friends, admire the Harvest Festival flora, peer at the vegetables.

  A group of young people carrying musical instruments came in a shy rush, the girls tossing back long hair, the young men ill at ease in formal clothes.

  ‘His master-class,’ said a well-informed woman in front of Sophy.

  ‘There’s to be music then. Ah.’

  Polly, followed by Iris and James. How fat Polly had grown; she looked funny wearing a brown hat, handing James her umbrella to shake, settling with her son and daughter in the third row from the front.

  An elderly man, rather shaky on his pins, with a large healthy consort. Sophy recognized Brian Portmadoc. Another vaguely familiar figure, hair trained from a low parting to cover his baldness, asking fussily, ‘Where shall we sit? Which side shall we go?’ By his voice Sophy knew him. Tony Wood, brave fireman, true friend.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, it isn’t a wedding, sit where we can. Here will do.’ Tony’s friend: he had finally settled for a male lover. They ran an antique shop in Brighton.

  Two identical figures, bald heads with a frill of white hair, both paunchy, both lame, both heavy on their feet. They looked about them, spotted Polly, Iris and James. Polly looked up and waved.

  ‘I didn’t know you were coming.’ Polly looked delighted, smiling her contagious toothy smile.

  ‘Move along a bit. We came by train. You’ll have to sit in the next row, James.’ Inflexion of parental affection.

  ‘No, no, it’s all right, nicer all together.’ Affection there, too.

  ‘Bit of a squeeze.’ Paul sat down smiling.