Consider the Lily E-Book

Elizabeth Buchan

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 763

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Lose yourself in the captivating novels by bestselling author Elizabeth Buchan, perfect if you love Harriet Evans or Deborah Moggach. When a choice must be made between love and duty, solace comes in unexpected forms... Summer, 1929. The Hinton Dysart estate is dying from lack of money, and Kit Dysart, the heir, sees no way out. Then, at his sister's wedding, he meets the vibrant Daisy Chudleigh and her cousin, the heiress Matty Verrall. In love with Daisy but troubled by his family's decline, Kit chooses to marry Matty, though neither Kit nor Daisy is able to forget the other. When Matty, growing increasingly unhappy in her troubled, empty marriage, decides to re-create the estate's garden, she discovers solace and a gift of which she never dreamt. A haunting, passionate story played out between three people, Consider the Lily is also a poignant and beautiful novel of England between the wars that propels the reader into its own rich and nostalgic world.

Leseprobe

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.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

eBook ISBN: 978 1 83895 540 3

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

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www.corvus-books.co.uk

For Eleanor Rose, my particular flower

In the garden, more grows than a gardener sows

Spanish proverb

PART ONE

DAISY1929–30

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 trying 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.

Gripped by the memories, mine and others, I stare at him and my dream changes into the old nightmare.

Again I ask myself: who am I? Where do I belong in all this?

CHAPTER TWO

POLLY DYSART ENTERED THE CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS, Nether Hinton, on the arm of Sir Rupert, her father, to the expectant hush that normally greets the arrival of a bride. Unlike her more fortunate younger sister Flora, she was not a good-looking girl, merely passable in a healthy, rather jolly manner. Yet today her looks had risen to the occasion. Granted, Polly was a shade too broad for her grandmother’s remodelled satin dress and, being tall and large-hipped, of a different shape from the corseted waist and bosom for which it had been made, but it sat well enough and the Honiton lace veil (washed carefully in tea by Robbie) billowed around a face rendered soft and pink from emotion.

The Reverend Mr Pengeally made his opening remarks and Flora allowed relief that Polly had made it to the altar to wash over her. Her father had been against the marriage, for no better reason than that James Sinclair, stockbroker, was, in Sir Rupert’s opinion, nowhere near good enough for a Dysart, even if he was ambitious. James’s family did not matter a twopenny toss to her, Polly had sobbed into Flora’s shoulder after a tense encounter between her fiancé and father – she was desperate not to lose the one man who was likely to marry her. Flora, who knew Polly and her permanent grudge against life better than any, had remained silent.

She stole a look at her bridegroom’s unremarkable profile. The situation had been delicate. James was ambitious, but also sensitive, and not unnaturally he had taken offence at the implication that he was lacking in both social and financial credibility – particularly as the Dysarts were known to be as poor as church mice. But they possessed something very desirable: breeding, stretching way back through a history of leet courts, manor houses, knighthoods, internecine wars, and the armorial bearings reposing in the College of Heralds.

‘Do you take this man . . . ?’ asked Mr Pengeally, levelling his short-sighted gaze onto Polly’s face beneath the veil.

She does, yes, she does, thought her sister. Half choked by the smell of lilies, Flora grasped her bouquet tightly in her gloved hands, and the nightmare receded of processing with Polly into the church from which the bridegroom had bolted.

‘I do,’ said Polly loudly, and Flora made a mental note to search out the charity for distressed stockbrokers and make a large donation.

Too provincial, considered Susan Chudleigh from her vantage point at the end of the pew. (Susan possessed only one yardstick with which to measure things: the notion that anything outside London was not worth considering.) This wedding is too provincial for words. She turned her head forty-five degrees in order to target the guests on the right-hand side of the church, and saw no one that she recognized or who looked worth pursuing. At least, Susan thought complacently, assessing Polly’s clumsy hips and half-grown shingle under the veil, my children are good-looking. Her face hardened, however, when her gaze encountered a diminutive figure standing beside Marcus. Try as she might, and God knew she had tried for twenty years, Susan could not bring herself to love her niece, Matty.

Because the pew was full, Daisy was pressed up against her mother. Susan’s surreptitious sweeps over the guests and a certain rigidity of her lips gave her away and Daisy had a shrewd notion of what Susan was thinking. Even at a wedding – no, especially at a wedding – Susan concentrated on the business of social analysis and it never failed to amuse her daughter.

Religion held little appeal for Daisy, or, more precisely, the Church of England variety rendered her angry and frustrated. It preached nothing to her except Do and Don’t and, in the end, when she tried to dissect the meat from the bone, its certainties slithered away. Thus Daisy occupied herself during the theological bits of the Reverend Mr Pengeally’s address by counting the number of polka-dot frocks in the congregation. There were five: black on beige, black on white, two whites on black and daring red on black. Daisy tugged at the skirt of her own geometrically patterned frock with its fashionably longer hemline so that it appeared even more so.

Five pews ahead, on the opposite side of the aisle, sat the bridegroom’s family. From the back, they presented an unbroken line of stiff collars and regimented haircuts, interspersed with rather dull dresses and trimmed straw hats. Directly across from them sat the Dysarts and Daisy applied herself to working out who was who. She fixed on a figure in a grey morning suit with fair hair slicked well back and concluded that that was Polly’s brother, Kit. At the other end of the pew sat Sir Rupert, a bull-necked, broad-shouldered man who, judging from the angle of his head, was gazing not at his daughter but at a point above the altar. Behind him was a woman in a navy-blue coat and a hat that could only be described as lacking, who appeared to be staring at something on Sir Rupert’s shoulder.

The previous evening the Lockhart-Fifes had let drop at dinner that Sir Rupert had fought in the Great War and had suffered from it, although they had been vague about how. The information had been delivered in a hushed tone and Daisy had understood: the Chudleighs also had friends who had survived, some burnt, some missing limbs or coughing phlegm, and it had often struck her that a component of their spirit had also been blown to bits in the stink and carnage over a decade before. They frightened Daisy, these survivors; today’s men who, by some trick of history, had become yesterday’s.

‘Love is a bottomless well . . .’ said Mr Pengeally, nearing his conclusion.

Is it? If this was true, Daisy had not observed her parents drawing upon it, more like a teacup, and she considered nudging Marcus to share the joke but thought better of it.

Beside Daisy, Matty’s small gloved hands tapped her prayer book – ‘claws’, Marcus called them in his kindly but patronizing way. She looked down at her lap: it was true. The leather concealed their dry, papery skin. She smoothed out the wrinkles in the glove and tried to ignore her hands.

At the altar, Polly climbed to her feet and allowed James to lead her into the vestry. Seven minutes later, exactly as Rupert had allotted on the timetable, they walked back down the aisle.

Outside, a mild June sun poked at intervals through billowy clouds and sent shafts of light through the avenue of limes that led up to the church door. It had rained earlier that morning, and the hoofprints left by the horses on the mud road were filled with water. The guests chatted in groups about scandals, hunting and farming practices, leavened with gossip, and Polly would have been hurt and offended had she known how little her wedding featured compared to these important topics. Nevertheless, the villagers, many of whom had abandoned their Saturday tasks to walk up to the church gate, took in every detail.

Mrs Dawes, the Dysarts’ cook and housekeeper, scraped a slick of mud off her boot and watched the bride and groom pose for the photographer in front of the double doors. ‘Not bad,’ she commented. Mrs Dawes had no particular affection for Polly.

Ellen Sheppey clutched at her handbag and scrutinized Polly. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But not as pretty as my Betty, is she, Ned?’

A little washy from two pints in the Plume of Feathers, her husband, who worked in the kitchen garden at the big house, could not be bothered to answer.

‘Well, I admit, your Betty does have an edge.’ Mrs Dawes sounded a shade waspish. A widow of many years, she had never managed to produce any children before Albert was taken from her. She lapsed into silence at the might-have-been and then said, ‘It’s not like the old days, is it, Ellen? When Sir Rupert got married, me mam took me to look at the huge tent on the lawn and the wedding breakfast laid for five hundred.’

‘No.’ Ellen raised herself on tiptoe. ‘It was different then.’ She turned to Ned and said crossly, ‘Cat got your tongue, Ned?’

The photographer issued a request and Dysarts and Sinclairs clustered around the couple. The Sinclairs were of middle height and inclined to plumpness and the Dysarts towered beside them. Inch for inch, Polly matched James; Flora, overdressed in her bridesmaid’s silk georgette, was taller even than her sister, and Sir Rupert, chest braced in military fashion, seemed huge. An example of the rumpled good looks in which Saxon men specialize, Kit dominated the group. Sunburnt from a recent trip to Turkey and Albania, he kept himself a little apart from the others, and gazed over the fields as if he wished he was somewhere quite different. Long-nosed with blue eyes under heavy lids, Kit’s was almost a lazy face. But not quite. It had charm, yes, a hint of an unsettled depth, kept private – the face of someone, perhaps, who was a loner.

At last Polly and James broke free from the photographer and made for the waiting car, leaving the guests to pick their way down the path fringed by drenched shrubs to Hinton Dysart. Over the centuries obstinate Dysarts had refused to take the longer way round to the church and slashed their way with small swords and canes through the scrub until the path had become part of the local topography.

Her hat pulled down over her eyes as usual, Matty lagged behind because, she told herself, she wanted to look around. Having lived in London for most of her life, interspersed with quick dashes for the country Fridays to Mondays, her experience was urban and the smell of the churchyard whirling with blown lime blossom was pleasant. In the end, she could not put off the difficult part of the proceedings any longer and tagged on with the last of the guests.

She crossed the bridge, stopped and looked through the fringe of trees. Further up, there was a tiny boathouse and a landing stage made from a couple of planks. Even from that distance it was obvious the landing stage was rotting and the river in need of dredging. Several centuries ago it had cut a loop around the piece of land on which the house was built, before slicing through a mixture of clay and chalk towards Bentley. Matty watched the weed flap to and fro and tried to assess how deep the water was.

Then she turned her face towards the flat-fronted house – a dreaming house – whose windows reached almost to the lawn, surrounded by the tangle of vegetation and moss-encrusted statuary. It must have been beautiful once, she thought, mentally realigning a stone urn and clearing a path. It still was, in its rundown way.

A flotilla of cars was parked on the gravel in the drive and chauffeurs talked and smoked. Polly was posed on the steps up to the main door and her veil lifted and flurried in the breeze.

‘Hold it,’ ordered the photographer, and a puff of light exploded in the guests’ faces and made them blink. The group fractured and, with a nervous laugh, the bride picked up her dress and ran inside.

A scent of damp grass and of heavy, loamy soil filtered up to Matty. Starlings chattered under the huge plane tree by the river and a string of raindrops slid down the balustrade of the stone stairs. Slowly, Matty climbed the steps.

She placed her high-heeled shoe over the threshold of the hall and again she stopped. For as sure as she knew anything, she knew that turbulence and old grief were trapped within the walls of the house, imprisoned and unexorcised. As much in surprise as in dismay, for these feelings were quite new, she drew in a sharp breath. Then, as quickly as they had come, the dissonance faded. Only an echo remained. Head down, she passed quickly on to the dining room.

Whereas Daisy, ushered into the hall by several interested male guests, gave an exclamation of pleasure. She saw a square, beautifully proportioned room, with a plaster ceiling worked into flowers and pineapples, shabby Persian runners on a stone-flagged floor, an Adam fireplace, family portraits and a sofa, upholstered in faded brocade, set against the fireplace.

‘How . . . how complete,’ she said.

‘Good,’ said a voice behind her, and Daisy turned round.

‘I’m glad you like it,’ said Kit Dysart.

‘I do, very much.’

Kit found himself the focus of a pair of blue eyes so dark that the iris melted into the pupils. They were offset by lashes which were thick and glossy but not nearly long enough, according to their owner, good cheekbones, a wide mouth and a long neck. It was a fresh, vivid face, flushed with health, and rendered a little mysterious by the angle of the tilted hat. But it was not so much the arrangement of features that made Daisy, rather a fusion of spirit and body that lit her from inside.

She was used to scrutiny and she waited for a second or two before asking Kit, ‘Has your family always lived here?’

‘Yes. Originally there was a Tudor house which a great-great-great grandfather, Sir Harry, demolished. He had made a pile in India and came home to build a house in the latest fashion.’

‘I hope not slaves?’

‘Good heavens, no. Sir Harry made his fortune trading in spices. Besides, slaves, poor souls, came from Africa.’

Daisy laughed and Kit thought he detected genuine relief in the sound. ‘Well, that’s all right, then. You’re quite respectable.’

‘We haven’t been introduced.’

‘Daisy Chudleigh, and who cares too much about introductions?’

‘Hallo, Daisy Chudleigh.’ Her smile hit Kit in the region of his stomach. Glowing, set off by her pink dress and hat, seemingly unconscious of the effect she was making, Daisy was not at all ordinary.

He stared at the carmined mouth as he said, ‘Of course, this kind of house is no longer fashionable.’

‘That’s what I like.’

At that Kit smiled back: the house was important to him, so much so that if he was asked to describe how important, he would have retreated in monosyllables. Pressed, he would have said it was part of his blood and bone.

‘Will you take me into the wedding breakfast?’ she was asking. ‘Providing you don’t have to field a great-aunt or something.’

‘My relations are dispensable,’ he said. ‘And Great-Aunt Hetta has just lost her escort.’ He offered his arm to Daisy.

‘Won’t she be mortally offended and rewrite the will?’ Daisy laid a finger on his arm.

‘That is a gamble I’m going to take.’

For a second, Kit and Daisy looked at each other, and then he led her into the dining room.

Uncharacteristically, Polly had set her heart on a large wedding, but her wish had not been granted. Rupert was too stretched financially and it was not, he informed his daughter, as if she was marrying a duke’s son. At this reproof, Polly burst into tears, a habit she had acquired during her engagement, and Rupert, gazing down at her shingled neck where the hairs were just beginning to grow, gave himself up to irritation.

‘Of course,’ he said in his cold way, which actually concealed powerful emotions, ‘it might have been different if you were marrying Bowcaster’s son.’

In the end, Rupert sold a pair of candlesticks, and, in return for their outlay of silver card cases, leather blotters, fitted luncheon baskets and toast racks laid out in ranks in the library, the guests were served consommé Madrilene, filets de sole Bercy and selle d’agneau bouquetière (or, as Rupert put it, French muck), washed down with a Château Haut-Brion 1913 and Château Yquem. The less-favoured guests were placed at tables in the library and drawing room. The more fortunate were in the dining room, one of Hinton Dysart’s most remarkable features as each of the four walls were covered by oil frescoes, so fashionable in the 1760s. They had been painted, went family lore, by an Italian artist who ill-advisedly fell in love with Sir Harry’s youngest daughter and hanged himself in the cellar when Sir Harry banished him from the house. The frescoes were still lustrous and dominating, deflecting attention from the smoke marks on the ceiling, the flakes of paint scattered under the windows, and the lacework of mould on the wooden shutters.

Matty noticed these details. Those were the sort of things that caught her eye, and as the conversation and bursts of laughter (mainly from Daisy’s end of the table) rose and fell, she built up a mental picture of the house. Clearly it required attention, from the grimy plasterwork, to the linen tablecloths whose hems had unravelled. Instinctively, she understood that this was a house whose bones were beautiful, would always be so, but which, like age spots, imperfections were beginning to mar. She directed her gaze through the window to the garden and found herself wishing she was out there, walking through the damp grass over the shadowed lawn.

‘Miss Verral?’ Her neighbour touched her on the elbow. ‘You’ll have the hot news from London. Is it true the Prince of Wales is selling up his steeplechasers because the King requested it?’

The two subjects, Aunt Susan had taught Matty, that will always get you through sticky conversational patches are the Royal Family and ghosts. Falling at the first hurdle, Matty was regretful. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know.’

‘Oh.’ Her neighbour, a young man with a crop of freckles and greased-back hair, was disappointed.

I must try, thought Matty frantically. ‘I did hear someone say—’ she began, but was interrupted by an elderly gentleman who exclaimed, ‘Socialism?’ Then again on a higher note. ‘Socialism?’

‘Mr Beaufort.’ An earnest woman with plaits coiled like earphones tried to argue. ‘It is a fact of life. Socialism has arrived, and we have to live with it. Now we have a Labour government again.’

‘And a woman in the cabinet,’ said Matty, who did, however, make a point of reading newspapers.

‘Good God,’ said Mr Beaufort and turned away. Over the bowls of fruit, Matty’s eyes met the woman’s and they exchanged a smile. Matty felt better.

An hour later, Polly stood in her bedroom in her petticoat. Her abandoned wedding dress lay on the floor beside her. Flora knelt to pick it up.

‘You next,’ said Polly brightly, to mask the nerves that had begun to jangle at the prospect of being alone with James – and the other business. Flora brushed at the creases in the dress and draped it over Polly’s single bed.

‘I should jolly well hope so,’ she said.

The bride sat down on the bed with a thump and kicked off her satin shoes. ‘Did my dressing case get packed . . . and my night things?’ Her wedding ring was very obvious on her left hand. ‘Flora . . .’ She looked up at her sister. ‘You will come and visit us? Often, I mean. For a decent stay.’

Flora squeezed Polly’s hand. ‘Course, silly.’

Polly fingered the bedspread. ‘I’ve always hated this colour,’ she said in a tone that indicated she was making discoveries. ‘But now I don’t want to leave it.’

‘Get dressed, Polly.’ Flora held up Polly’s chiffon going-away dress.

Polly shivered. ‘I’m a bit nervous.’

Flora fastened the tiny buttons up the back and began on the sleeves. ‘Everyone seems to survive it,’ she said carefully, drawing on a knowledge of married life that was vague in the extreme.

Flora watched Polly do a passable imitation of floating down the main staircase, at the bottom of which the guests had bunched, and felt guilty. She did not like James and disliked even more the rented house on the outer fringes of Kensington.

The guests pressed forward to say their goodbyes. Polly extended a hand, glove voguishly wrinkled at the wrist, and muttered her goodbyes to the cheeks pressed against hers.

‘Good luck, Polly.’

‘Good luck, Mrs Sinclair.’

She touched her cheek to Flora who kissed her sister extra hard to make up for her disloyalty before Polly disappeared through a snowstorm of confetti into the waiting car.

‘Thank God,’ said Flora to Kit as they watched it disappear in a shower of gravel. Her shoes pinched and there were damp patches under her arms. ‘Now perhaps everyone will go.’ Kit gave her a nudge and Flora looked to her right.

‘Oh, Lord,’ she said. Matty, who stood beside her, had, quite obviously, overheard. ‘Sorry, but it has been a long day.’ Keen to make up for her rudeness, she continued, ‘I gather you and the Lockhart-Fifes are coming over for a game of tennis tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Yes,’ said Matty. ‘We are.’

The aftermath of any big event leaves a backwash and it was evident in the unnatural languor of the Dysarts the following day. After ordering the young to shake up their livers with a good game, Rupert took the adults off to the drawing room where he bored Susan Chudleigh with family history over anchovy toast and strong Indian tea.

Kit had hauled his old flannels out of the drawer, and Flora had located a dismal pair of shorts from Polly’s room. They faced an immaculately turned-out pair of Chudleighs who, after the first exploratory balls, proved excellent players. Dysart solidarity was called on. Kit, disregarding aching legs and the heavy feeling around his eyes, began the attack. Marcus riposted with punishing shots and Daisy proved equally fiendish. Although not as powerful a player as her brother, she was fast and accurate. The game swung this way and that. Flora hugged the back line, Kit guarded the net, the Chudleighs beat a path back and forth across the turf and shouted encouragement to each other and insults to the opposition.

‘Come on, Kit,’ said Daisy at one point. ‘You’re a walkover.’

Roused, challenged – and disturbed by the white figure – Kit shot a return over the net. Marcus lobbed the ball to the back of the court. Flora swooped low and sent it back.

‘Got you,’ Kit called.

Daisy laughed. ‘By no means.’ And so it went on. Back and forth went the ball and so did the challenges and Matty, who never played games because her heart had been weakened by rheumatic fever, watched and gained the curious impression that Kit and Daisy were holding some kind of private conversation.

She sat on the bench and sipped at the lemonade issued by an alarming woman whom the family called ‘Robbie’ and fell into her habit of negative reflection. Why am I not like Daisy, fast and free? Why do I lack that connection (Matty thought of it in terms of an electric plug) that would link me into life? That would make me like they are.

None of these questions produced sensible answers, and she thought of the mother she had never really known and wondered for the ten-thousandth time if Jocasta would have been the sort of person to help her daughter.

It was hot. Matty pushed the rug off her knees and fiddled with the glass. Her eyes with their slightly startled expression assessed the world over its rim. I’m rich, she told herself, I’m twenty-three, my health is, at last, under control, and I must stop seeing things so blackly.

‘Got you,’ shouted Daisy. ‘It’s all over, bar the shouting.’

The figure of Robbie carrying lemonade reinforcements emerged through the lime trees that edged the tennis court. A large woman who walked with a confident sway of her hips, with dark, wavy hair plaited and coiled on the top of her head, Robbie was well made and well covered.

‘I should imagine you’re enjoying yourself, Miss Verral?’ Robbie made it sound like an order. She put down the jug and dabbed at the sweat on her upper lip.

‘Thank you, yes.’

Robbie had already formed her opinion of Miss Verral: a poor thing if ever she saw one. She replenished Matty’s glass and then, on closer inspection, changed her mind. Miss Verral’s chin had an obstinate look so the girl couldn’t be all pap.

‘Have you lived with the family long . . . Miss . . . er?’

‘Call me Robbie, Miss Verral. Everyone does.’ Robbie tucked the rug back around Matty’s knees. ‘I’ve been with the family over twenty years and looked after all three. They’ve become mine really, though they don’t like me to say it.’ She straightened up. ‘Instead of my own, I suppose. My fiancé was killed in Belgium, you see. And after him I didn’t fancy marriage much. Besides there weren’t many to choose from the ones left. There.’

No, I don’t suppose there were many tough enough, thought Matty, as Robbie attacked the cushions behind her back. Retrieved from their winter dormancy in the shed, they released clouds of dust. ‘Of course,’ said Robbie, banging a cushion in emphasis, her body shaking with the movement, ‘things are quite different here now.’ She banged a second. ‘Money,’ she added cryptically.

Matty was not sure that she had heard correctly and if she had she did not want to discuss it. She deflected the subject.

‘Lady Dysart,’ she asked, ‘when did she die?’

‘When the children were small,’ replied Robbie. ‘She was American, you know. She had money, but of course that’s all gone.’

‘Thank you, Robbie,’ said Matty. ‘The cushions are very comfortable now.’ On occasions Matty could sound adamant and, once again, Robbie’s gaze flicked to the obstinately cast chin. The two women measured each other up – one small and nervous and on the brink of discoveries, the other used to running things to her satisfaction.

‘Leave some lemonade for us,’ shouted Flora from the court. ‘It’s blistering.’

Matty leant back against the bench. The sun was gathering strength by the minute, and the figures of the tennis players were outlined sharp and clear against the startling green of the limes. The ping of the ball on gut, the flurry of pigeons and, above all, a sense of encroaching summer laid a gentle compress on Matty.

After tea, Kit offered to show the Chudleigh party around the garden. ‘The house is being cleared up after yesterday and we would only get in the way.’

He led them down the pleached lime avenue at the back of the house towards the ha-ha, which was the only barrier between the garden and the fields where cattle grazed. Then on to the old boathouse and the river glinting in the afternoon sun.

‘I’m afraid it isn’t what it was,’ said Kit, pointing at the garden. ‘But one day . . .’

Matty could tell that ‘one day’ mattered to Kit very much. Daisy blew out a stream of cigarette smoke and said nothing.

‘Oh, never mind, Kit,’ said Flora, ‘I like it as it is, all wild and how it wants to be.’

‘I agree,’ said Marcus, who didn’t but who was rather taken with Flora.

They made their way down to the river and walked along the fisherman’s path past the plane tree. ‘Look,’ said Kit at one point. ‘The view.’ Obediently they scanned the horizon which was marked by a low ridge that sloped towards Alton. The landscape was not luxuriant or deeply wooded, except for dark patches of green here and there indicating a pocket of clay. Otherwise the chalk ridges ran alongside fields already jade with corn.

‘Nice, isn’t it?’ said Kit abruptly to hide his feelings.

Daisy stamped out her cigarette. ‘You have deep roots here, Kit.’

He flashed her a look which said, Yes, I do. They retraced their steps around the back of the house towards the walled kitchen garden on the west side of the house. ‘There’s Sheppey, the gardener, over by the raspberries.’

At their approach Ned put down his secateurs and pulled off his hat. He was a thin man, weather-beaten and horny-nailed.

‘I hope you don’t mind us interrupting you, Sheppey?’

‘Oh no, Mr Kit.’ Ned did not smile, but he looked gratified. ‘I was just securing the raspberry canes. We shall have a good crop this year.’

‘Good,’ said Kit. ‘I’m sorry about the nectarine.’ He gestured towards the south wall where hundreds of nail holes pitted the bricks.

‘Yes, sir. That dratted bug got it.’

Daisy looked at her watch. Suddenly she felt out of place and thought longingly of London and of the Hansons’ house party she was due to join later in the week. She moved back a step and her foot crunched on splintered glass from an abandoned cold frame.

They left the walled garden and went to look at the grassy hump where the earlier Tudor house had stood. Matty was beginning to feel tired, and depression was drifting over her. Earlier Dysarts had worked on this garden. One of them had planted the roses, another the irises. Still another had put in the yew-encircled lawn and clipped it into conformity, while someone else had planted the pleached limes. Now the spirit of their efforts had slipped away and vanished.

At the south end of the lawn, the path petered out into dense bramble mixed into overgrown laurel. Daisy waved a finger in its direction. ‘Is there anything behind that?’

His eyes hooded, Kit said flatly, ‘Only another bit of overgrown garden.’

Puzzled by the note in his voice, Matty looked at the scrub and her attention was caught by a movement in the thicket – a flash of blue among the green. She peered harder and, without warning, abject misery streamed through her body. An anguish and desolation that she recognized from her own loss so long ago. Then it vanished, leaving Matty white and breathless.

‘Are you all right, Matty?’ Daisy asked, and then explained to Kit and Flora that Matty sometimes had ‘turns’. Matty went as red as, a moment before, she had been white.

‘I am perfectly fine, thank you,’ she said.

All the same, she allowed Marcus to slip his hand under her elbow. They returned to the house in silence, Matty holding tightly onto Marcus’s linen-sleeved arm, which felt so reassuringly normal, telling herself she had imagined the whole episode.

CHAPTER THREE

THE HISTORY OF NETHER HINTON CONTAINED A BLUE-print which, if you cared to explore it, matched many such communities in the south of England. Bypassed by great events, including the railway line, rocked now and again by small changes, self-sufficient, self-absorbed, myopic in the best sense, it was a community as bound by its own laws as if they had been enforced by Parliament.

Hinton Dysart was situated at the west end of the village on Well Road. Snaking between the fields bisected by hedgerows and in summer bright with poppies, corncockle, charlock and mayweed, the road was still paved in places so that occasional cars lifted blankets of dust. It led directly into the Borough at the centre of the village and out again, via Pankridge Street, towards Turnpike Road which, like many turnpikes, had a path beaten around the back by toll evaders.

At ploughing time, the rooks rose above windswept plough teams dancing on the turn of the land at the top of the ridges, and the dusk settled over horses plodding home to the rattle of chain and harness. In twilit winter days, the ground rang to the sounds of hoofs and the swish of the muck spreader, to the cries of workers harvesting ‘January King’ cabbages while lines of sugar beet and potatoes under straw and earth clamps shone in the frost. In summer flies rose in clouds over swaying crops, stooked cornfields and herb-rich meadows. The sweet smell of greenish flower-strewn hay and drying hops tickled the nose. Pigs rooted on the grasslands, poultry foraged under the sodden grass and fruit bushes, and the streams feeding the watercress beds ran clear and cold.

On a windy day, like this June afternoon, it was possible to hear the corn soughing, the crack of elm and oak branches over by the hop fields and the rusted tin-can caw of the rooks. And from Well Road, sheep and cattle dotted the horizon like the colourful, quirkily drawn images from a medieval book of hours. It was plain, unadorned southern England, content to be so.

The bakery at the top end of the village (known as Top Taylor’s’ in contrast to ‘Bottom Taylor’s’ at the other) was over-warm, and flour dust hung in the air. The shelves were stacked from the morning’s bake, and Jacko was loading up the oak wheelbarrow for the deliveries. In the back room, Mr Taylor was plastering strips of dough around the oven door to keep the heat in for the Coburg bake.

Mrs Taylor was coughing when Ellen Sheppey ushered Simon Prosser inside. She and Ellen exchanged a look over Simon’s head.

‘Slice of your rice pudding, please, Mrs Taylor,’ said Ellen and mouthed over the boy’s head, ‘Hungry again.’ She looked for her purse in her bag. Simon was half blind, had one foot turned inwards from a birth defect and a mother who did not care very much.

Mrs Taylor ceased coughing and reached under the counter for the circular baking tray in which she baked the rice pudding which had saved some of the villagers from absolute hunger in bad times. ‘I’ll give you an extra wedge to take home, Simon,’ she said, sweat glistening on her scraggy wrists. ‘But mind you eat it all. Don’t give it away.’

Simon took the pudding, pulled back the waxed paper, sank his teeth into the slab – and vanished. Wrung by the pity which always made her feel useless and disturbed, Ellen watched his progress along the street and longed to take him in her arms, absorb him into her sagging, generous body.

‘Those kids were having a fair old go at him,’ she said. ‘I gave ’em what for.’

‘Thank you is a foreign word in some places,’ said Mrs Taylor, replacing the baking tin. ‘Mind you, I wouldn’t expect anything else.’

Ellen laughed and the two women spent fifteen minutes or so gossiping: a minute analysis of the Dysart wedding and the forthcoming jam-making session at the bakehouse.

‘I’ll be seeing you, then,’ said Ellen. ‘But I’ll take one of your best lardy busters for the old man.’ Mrs Taylor put her hand over her mouth and coughed, creating another haze of flour dust. ‘Take care of that cough, then.’

Run these days by his middle-aged, and less popular, grandson, Mr Barnard’s brewery lay adjacent to the blacksmith’s yard, housed in a one-time corn-drying shed, a section of which had been set aside for making ginger beer and lemonade. The women, dressed in identical overalls and buttoned shoes, were already at work – a multiplicity of curves cancelling any pretence at uniformity. They talked quietly among themselves with an occasional rise in volume whenever someone made a joke. Clean cod bottles and their marble stoppers were stacked ready beside them.

Fastidious at all times, Ellen tied a calico square around her head and pulled the knot tight: it made her feel queasy to think of anything joining the ingredients in the vats. Kat Harris chose that moment to shake with laughter and the marcelled ridges on her head bobbed up and down like wood shavings in water. Ellen frowned and looked away.

She scoured out a red earthenware pan ready for mixing up the big order for ginger beer that had come in from Farnham. Into it she measured root ginger, cream of tartar, yeast and essences, added the correct quantity of spring water and covered it with one of the clean cloths stacked on the bench. Then she turned her attention to the contents of the pans she had made up two days previously. The liquid in them seethed and churned, and bubbles fizzing to the surface broke into the hush that had fallen over the shed. As Ellen skimmed, Simon Prosser’s blank-looking eyes haunted her, reminding her of dark things she did not understand and tried not to think about.

‘Hey,’ said Madge Eager, her friend, ‘did I tell you about Alf’s—’

Holding a full pan of ginger beer, Ellen turned and caught her foot on the iron bar that anchored the table to the wall. She staggered and overbalanced. With a whoosh the liquid cascaded onto the floor. The pan dropped from her hands and fell heavily on her knee.

‘Hey . . .’ Madge repeated.

Ellen sat in a mess of sodden cotton and sticky ginger beer. Pain thrummed behind her kneecap and sprouted up and down her leg. ‘Sweet Fanny Adams,’ she said, and bit her lip.

‘Here.’ Madge threw down her spoon and helped Ellen to the bench. ‘Clumsy coot.’

‘It’s my knee.’ Ellen leant against the wall, dislodging a spray of whitewash over her head, temporarily deprived of speech.

Madge yanked up the wet overall and placed a hand on Ellen’s already swelling knee. In an effort to gain control, Ellen rocked and clamped her mouth shut. She wanted to cry in great, noisy bursts, as much for the pain as for the dangerous feelings at the back of her mind, for the pity of all who were lost and hurt, and for the things that she was powerless to do or undo.

Madge wrung out a cloth in cold water and wrapped it round the injured leg. ‘It’s the best I can do, Ellen love,’ she said. ‘It’ll help the swelling.’

Ellen extracted a handkerchief from her pocket and blew her nose. ‘That was bloody cack-handed,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t concentrating.’

‘Never mind.’ Madge brushed at Ellen’s headsquare and wiped away the moisture under her friend’s eyes with the flat of her thumb.

By the end of the afternoon, the pain had receded into an ache, but the knee was difficult to bend. Ellen moved warily and did less work than normal.

‘Ladies, please.’

She was knotting a fresh compress when Mr Barnard junior entered and gave his customary bleat for attention, an anxious-looking man who conveyed the impression that his business was an insupportable burden. Perhaps it was. The brewery was one of the chief employers for the village and its produce, which included the ginger beer, lemonade and a little cherry cider, was well known in the area. Indeed, Mr Barnard was fond of boasting that their fame had reached Winchester, but Ellen never believed him.

Over the years, he had developed tricks to counterbalance his lack of natural authority, and he climbed on a chair to address the workers. His starched collar required attention and he seemed washed-out by the June warmth. One hand, with bitten fingernails, pulled at the pinchbeck watchchain draped across his waistcoat to check the time – a gesture designed to avoid having to look at the audience.

‘Listen, please, ladies,’ he addressed the upturned faces, ‘listen’, and the power he held over them gave him the spur he needed. ‘Things are not going so well at the moment, and it is necessary to lay off some . . . a few . . . of you.’

There was a profound silence in the shed, and several minds looped the loop for reasons why it should not be them. Barnard had been clever. Survival came before unity.

‘In the circumstances, it can’t be helped.’ Disconcerted by the hush that had fallen, stony and hostile, over the floor, Barnard trailed to a finish, ashamed of his poor performance.

‘That’s what the bloke said when he couldn’t bleedin’ get it up,’ Madge muttered to Ellen.

Ellen did not manage a smile.

‘It’s the times,’ Barnard said. ‘Things aren’t going well.’

His listeners knew he was speaking the truth. Last week, Dr Lofts had relayed the news that a blanket factory in Winchester had let go forty men, and Bob Prosser came back from visiting his brother in Southampton with news of worsening hardship in the docks. You couldn’t dispute facts. You could only hope that with Ramsay MacDonald back in government he would do what he said and reduce unemployment.

‘I only need four of you to go for the present.’ Barnard shifted from foot to foot on his perch. ‘You can’t say I’m not being fair if I say I’m going to choose four whose men are still in work.’

The joke of it, thought Ellen, was that Barnard’s suggestion was