Consider the lily, p.1
Consider the Lily, page 1
Elizabeth Buchan was a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prize-winning Consider the Lily, international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, The New Mrs Clifton, The Museum of Broken Promises and Two Women in Rome. Buchan’s short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She has reviewed for the Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She was a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival.
Also by Elizabeth Buchan
Daughters of the Storm
Light of the Moon
Consider the Lily
Against Her Nature
Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit
Perfect Love
Secrets of the Heart
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
The Good Wife
That Certain Age
The Second Wife
Separate Beds
Daughters
I Can’t Begin to Tell You
The New Mrs Clifton
The Museum of Broken Promises
Two Women in Rome
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 1993 by Macmillan, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
First published in paperback in Great Britain in 1995 by Macmillan, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.
This eBook edition published in 2022 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Elizabeth Buchan, 1993
The moral right of Elizabeth Buchan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
eBook ISBN: 978 1 83895 540 3
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For Eleanor Rose, my particular flower
In the garden, more grows than a gardener sows
Spanish proverb
PART ONE
DAISY
1929–30
CHAPTER ONE
IT BEGAN WITH A WEDDING IN JUNE 1929.
Matilda Verral – who hated waste and anything to do with horses and who was always known as Matty – stepped from the path across the ironwork bridge over the river and into the south garden of Hinton Dysart. Behind her lay the grassy hump that hid the remains of an earlier Tudor building, a cluster of oak and beech trees and the pink-red wall that the original Sir Harry Dysart had ordered built around the house and garden to enclose it. In front of Matty was the new house, although that was a comparative term, surrounded by a wilderness of tangled and rampant plant life which threw itself against the house’s beautiful walls, and sucked life from the wood and stone. Couch grass, nettles and creeping convolvulus embroidered the terrace under the south-facing windows and the parterre below, in which a few woody-looking roses struggled for survival. On its east wall a Clematis montana throttled a ‘Bobby James’ rambling rose. Lush and clover-filled, the grass swished up against the trees and through the once-perfect yew circle that sealed off the top lawn from the lower.
It was an Eden, an English Eden, from which the magic had been leeched through neglect. A spoilt Paradise from which hope had trickled away.
Matty stood drinking in the scene, a small, well-dressed, nervous figure, chilled by the sight, but not sure why. Perhaps it was the waste. Perhaps there was something in the atmosphere. Or perhaps it was the cool, weed-filled river which reflected the trees in a dappled spectrum which made her shiver.
She jumped as a couple of guests, stiff and hot-looking in their outfits, walked over the bridge and stopped beside her.
‘Just follow the path,’ said one of the men to Matty, assuming she was lost.
‘Thank you.’ Matty shook herself into attention and, treading carefully in her high heels through the blighted garden, did as they suggested.
Only two hours earlier, the cousins had been dressing in the spare bedroom of their hosts who lived just outside the village of Nether Hinton. Neither Matty nor Daisy had brought a maid down from London and the Lockhart-Fifes had none to spare – so shocking, said Daisy who loved to tease, how one has to make do in the country.
One leg crossed over the other, she sat in the puffed chintz bedroom chair and buffed her nails while Ivy Prosser, a village girl with ambitions to better herself, coped with the challenge of dealing with Londoners.
‘Matty. Those earrings don’t suit the dress, nor do they suit you.’ In general, Daisy said what she thought, but since she was rarely malicious and because she talked good sense, she was often consulted and always forgiven. It was part of her charm. ‘Lend them to me instead, Matty. Do.’
Her cousin looked up from the jewellery case on the dressing table littered with silver-topped pots, brushes and a powder bowl. The mirror reflected a comfortable, but Englishly shabby, bedroom, the sash window wedged open with newspaper and two beds covered in unfortunate pink cretonne. Ivy was brushing Matty’s fine, foxy-coloured hair with hands that were not quite steady. The triangle of face beneath an unflattering bob did not register anything, but inside her Matty felt her black demon stir. Picking up the earrings from the box, she screwed them into her ears where they hung, opulent and too large.
‘I want to wear them,’ she said with the nervous shake of her head which always made Daisy’s teeth grit.
A tension in the room deepened. Daisy looked at her cousin – at the bird bones of her wrists and ankles, at the pale face with its prominent café-au-lait-coloured eyes that were so frequently scared and troubled, at the surprisingly full lower lip – and shrugged. Ivy helped Matty out of her dressing gown to reveal a crêpe-de-Chine, lace-edged corset which made absolutely no impression on Matty’s sparse figure. With a swish of silk, Daisy, who had been endowed with long limbs, slenderness and a full, firm bosom, got up, took Matty’s place on the stool and began to spread Elizabeth Arden’s Ultra Amoretta foundation over her cheekbones.
‘Is marriage an outdated institution?’ she asked her reflection in the mirror. ‘The Archbishop of Canterbury puts the question to Douglas Fairbanks Junior, nineteen, and Joan Crawford, twenty-three, film star and cigarette card pin-up. Neither party will comment but get married all the same.’ She pulled a face.
Despite herself, Matty smiled. Daisy so often put her finger on the funny or irreverent side of things, on the slant that Matty often considered but never had the courage to express. The unexpected, provoking gibe or aperçu that made people laugh and contributed to Daisy’s mystique.
‘After all, we don’t know the Dysarts.’ Daisy turned her attention to her neck. ‘So why are we here? Getting married should be an intimate business. I don’t want strangers staring at me when I give away my life.’
Matty raised her eyebrows. ‘I thought you wanted a big wedding.’
‘Yes. And then again no.’ Daisy, who certainly planned on a substantial affair, took off the lid of the powder jar and shook out the swansdown puff. The sweetish odour in the bedroom intensified. As she powdered her nose, Daisy shot her cousin a look.
‘Anyway, we do know the Dysarts,’ Matty plodded on. ‘We met Polly and her father at the ball last year, and the Lockhart-Fifes can’t not go as they are such close neighbours and made such a fuss about bringing us.’
‘We could stay behind.’
Ivy moved away, picked up Matty’s discarded dressing gown, smoothed it with reverent fingers and hung it up.
Unintentionally, the cousins’ eyes collided in the mirror. A childhood of misunderstanding was contained in the exchange, an accumulation of irritation and impatience – exasperation on Daisy’s side, stubbornness born of desperation on Matty’s. The moment passed: Daisy lowered her lids, applied Vaseline liberally and questioned, not for the first time, the Almighty’s wisdom in so arranging it that one could never choose one’s relations. Matty lowered her hat onto her head, speared it with a hat pin and picked up her handbag and gloves. It was too late to remove the earrings which did, indeed, look wrong. As she let herself out of the room, Matty acknowledged that, once again, she had been manoeuvred into taking the wrong decision. It would have been so easy to agree with Daisy, even to have lent her the earrings. Instead, she had taken refuge in a pride that had never served her well.
Assorted prints of horses and birds lined the staircase, interspersed with photographs of hearty Lockhart-Fifes in cricketing gear or colonial uniforms. Matty pulled on her gloves as she went down, reflecting that it was so much easier not to have to deal with people, how much better the world would be if she were the only person in it, and shuddered at the prospect of a whole afternoon tryin g to keep conversationally afloat.
Upstairs, left to the undivided attentions of Ivy, Daisy sprayed herself liberally with Matty’s L’Origan scent and directed the girl to sprinkle some onto her handkerchief.
HARRY
CONSIDER THE LILY, MY MOTHER SAID.
It is one of the most famous and celebrated of flowers. Sometimes confused with other plants that steal from its lustre – like the Guernsey lily – it is, to be strictly precise, a bulbous, herbaceous perennial whose genus is closely related to the amaryllis, irises, orchids and, surprisingly, not so far removed from grasses and sedges.
And yet . . . and yet, it is a flower that keeps its secrets.
Swaddled by three outer sepals, the bud conceals three inner petals, and on each is traced a nectary furrow leading to the heart of the bloom. There, attached to a trilobed stigma is the ovary surrounded by three filaments. At the tip of the filaments are the anthers. Weighed down by their sticky pollen these swing freely and shower golden rain.
And the flower itself releases an erotic, haunting scent that drifts, half remembered in dreams, half captured in the olfactory memory – but never quite. That, of course, is its power.
Long ago the lily was used as a fertility symbol. Later, it was stolen by the Christians and used in their worship of Mary, the Mother of Jesus: and the lily, both fertile and pure, became the perfect symbol for the Annunciation. One of the many lily legends runs thus: when the Virgin Mary died and ascended into heaven lilies were found massed in her tomb.
St Catherine’s vision of Paradise was characterized by angels wearing lily wreaths and when she died her blood was said to have flowed as white as the lily. Lilies were grown in monastery gardens and, in a suitably English variation, in rectory gardens, used by the clergy for Lady altar and Lady chapel decorations.
But I think the lily is too strong and too flamboyant for chastity.
You see, it is not a flower to grow in woods alongside the violets and drifts of bluebells. The lily belongs in a garden where it can be seen: elegant, intoxicating and airily poised. For the sweet, short summer season before oblivion.
Consider the rose.
Found wild over the northern hemisphere, it is a flower more than usually susceptible to domestication and ripe for use in literature and painting. Obedient, voluptuously varied, beautiful.
It was said that the red rose was the emblem of the Goddess of Love, a symbol of the blood of the martyr and also the ‘flower of God’ – the five petals representing Christ’s bleeding wounds and its thorns, his crown. To the medieval mind, the rose embodied many things. A wreath woven from the mystical rose represented the closed circle: the inviolate womb of Mary into which only God could penetrate. Roses were used as tokens of love and grief, and monastic burial grounds were planted as rose gardens. Rose legends reached their peak in the twelfth century, and were woven into the medieval preoccupation with the Virgin and her rose-dowered sanctity.
The Romans brought roses to Britain to soften this outer reach of the Empire. The Crusaders captured the damask rose as a trophy of war from which sprang the perfume industry (a rose in your garden with damascene ancestry will always be sweet-smelling), and later the formidable women of Elizabethan and Jacobean manor houses pounded rose petals with precious gums, barks and balsams to make pomanders, toilet waters and pot-pourri powders.
During the thirteenth century Rosa gallica, the apothecary’s rose, flourished in Europe. From it were devised the things that soothe and comfort: sweet puddings, melrosette, rose petal water ices, rose cake, rose-scented liquors and, for the ladies, Oyntment of Roses. Rosa x centifolia (the original cabbage rose) first appeared in Dutch flower paintings in the early seventeenth century. The Empress Josephine helped to whip up the fashion for roses and when the repeating chinas and teas were introduced into Europe, rose breeding reached fever pitch. In 1867, the first hybrid tea, ‘La France’, made its debut.
See how much there is to know. How it takes a lifetime to find out. It never finishes, my mother said.
Rose names read like images from a poem, don’t you think? Gallicas, albas, mosses, Portlands, robust Bourbons, noisettes, climbers, ramblers, rugosas, polyanthas, floribundas, and, my latest passion, the English rose . . . and I love the shape and texture of the rose. From the scrambling wild varieties, to the blowsy dames of the deep-cupped hybrid musks.
And the rose twines its way into old tapestries, paintings, poems and myth. Simple and yet complicated, a gardener’s necessity and yet resonant with symbolism, beautiful but touched with danger, drawn from many sources, but English, English, to the last thorn.
All my life, and I am now over sixty, I have studied the lily and the rose. Their contrasts never fail to fascinate a tidy mind such as mine – but with a temperament which also craves the colour and mysticism.
As the visitors to the nursery come and go, I think about these things: echoes and illusions that have a bearing on the story. They don’t suspect that I know this place better than anyone, for I was brought up here. It is – it was – my childhood domain. No, the visitors see a shortish, middle-aged man with a moustache, a little faded, a little stooped, but healthy-looking and anxious to help. Sometimes I serve at the counter, and they queue up, clutching their roses, and ask questions which I answer as best I can. Then they leave, their cars and coaches rolling out of the lower field, and silence descends over a place whose past is slipping further and further away.
In my dreams, I return to the house and the garden as they were in the good years. Night after night, I walk across the circular lawn surrounded by its guardian wall of yew, and up the grey stone steps to the house whose windows shine pink in the dawn and purple and sheet gold in the evening, hoping to find the life that was once there.
You can’t ever go back, I know that. But I have learnt it is hard to be the last.
Because I am dreaming I hover as a winged presence above it: I can see everything . . . the pleached lime walk, the parkland beyond, the stone statue in my mother’s garden. On my right is the river, fringed by ash and willow and its border of anemones and fritillaries in the spring. I can see, too, the wild area, fretworked by poppies, and the kitchen garden, colonized by vegetables and blue starbursts of borage. I stop by the house and look over to the walled rose garden where the alba and Bourbon roses mass over a bed of old-fashioned pinks and penstemons. In my dream it must be June, for I am rolling a petal from the ‘Fantin-Latour’ between my fingers. It leaves a faint, clammy smear on my skin.
Time becomes jumbled. Sometimes I am young, sometimes the stooping figure I have become. But I know each plant here, as I know the smell of wet earth after the rain has swept in from the west, the dry, dust-laden smell of summer and the smell of frost-nipped rotting fruit in autumn – and my heart somersaults in pain because it no longer belongs to me.
Then I wake in the cottage in Dippenhall Street. In the next room Thomas is sleeping quietly, quite different from the mercurial person of the day, and I am alone.
Soon there will be a small army descending on the house to polish, mend and scour. Custodians in blazers will stand in doorways and direct the visitors. ‘How nice it smells,’ the visitors say, invariably, for Mother’s pot-pourri is famous, and walk around the Aubusson carpets in rubber-soled shoes and peardrop-coloured tracksuits.
Then I dream again.
Sun-filled and polish-scented, the house enfolds me, its silence broken only by the chime of the Tompian by the front door. Ageless, I run down the wide staircase into the hall, peer into the drawing room and turn left into the dining room. The table is laid for a ghostly gathering of twenty, monogrammed linen napkins standing to attention on the plates. At one end of the room, my mother’s portrait reminds me that I have lost her – and I don’t wish to be reminded. I turn away. At the opposite end of the room hangs the portrait of my father. Painted when he was in his fifties, his hair is still fair; the artist was kind and only suggested the age lines. He is dressed in riding clothes, one leg bent in front of the other, the impeccable cut of his jacket obvious even to those untutored in Savile Row. Only his hooded eyes, with their slightly troubled, distant expression, suggest that he was anything but an English country gentleman and respected member of Parliament perfectly content with his life.
