The Peacock Summer

by Hannah Richell

  ‘What did you tell him?’

  ‘The truth: that you’re spending your days cloistered away and that you only emerge for sleep and sustenance.’

  Jack seizes her arm and nibbles the crook of her elbow. ‘I suppose that makes you sustenance, does it? It’s your fault, you know.’

  ‘My fault?’

  He nods. ‘Ever since the sparrowhawk . . . since that day . . . you’ve released something in me.’ He clears his throat, as if embarrassed, but he doesn’t stop. ‘For days I was all angst and despair, tortured by the blank walls, uncertain how to cover such a vast space. Then, after that first night together, it was there; the idea arrived, almost fully formed. It’s exhilarating, and terrifying.’

  ‘Terrifying?’

  ‘Yes. I’m so gripped by it that I don’t want to spend too much time away from the room. I’m terrified I will lose the thread of it if I don’t keep going. There’s a moment when you’re creating, when you lose yourself in the act of it, when you know you’re finally hitting the flow of the piece. That’s what I’m desperate to hold on to. Though it’s quite a challenge. The size of the room means I have to work a little differently. It’s all an experimental process, a sort of unfolding.’ He reaches out to stroke her bare shoulder. ‘I’ve never felt so inspired, so excited by a piece’s possibility.’ He glances at her, that wry smile of his just visible in the darkness. ‘I think I may have discovered my Muse.’

  ‘Cloudesley?’

  He laughs and shakes his head. ‘No, you clot. You.’

  Lillian smiles. She can’t think of a greater or more unexpected compliment than being called Jack’s Muse. ‘Can I see it?’ she asks and instantly regrets the question.

  He hesitates. ‘Yes. But not yet.’

  She rolls over onto her stomach, her hair falling across her face as she props herself up on one elbow. Jack reaches out and tucks a loose lock behind her ear and she leans her cheek into the curve of his palm. ‘Then promise me one thing,’ she says softly. ‘Don’t finish it too quickly.’

  ‘I told Charles I would need the whole summer and that hasn’t changed.’

  The summer. There are still weeks ahead of them, but she knows even now that it isn’t enough. It could never be enough. She is greedy for him – for all of him. The hours they are apart are torture. Her head is full of fantasies. She can’t imagine him packing up his belongings and leaving her here.

  ‘Is it like this with him?’ he asks.

  Lillian lies back against the pillow wondering how to explain. Should she tell him about Charles’s screaming nightmares? How the war has had a private, lasting impact on her husband? How his night terrors mean they must sleep in separate bedrooms? Are there words to explain how different their intimacy is? Could she even begin to tell him how she had tried to read her husband’s cues and understand his desires, but Charles only ever wanted her to lie silently, her nightdress around her waist, her head pressed into the pillows. Something perfunctory. Something to be endured. And afterwards, how he insisted she leave him, leaving her aching and feeling somehow more alone than if they had never shared the moment in the first place.

  How can she explain the complexities of the man she shares her life with? She’s not sure she even wants to. Somehow it feels shameful – a gross failing on her part – unable to satisfy her husband or make him happy. These are things that should be kept in the dark; not brought to light in this precious moment with Jack.

  ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have asked that.’

  ‘No,’ she says, after a moment’s pause. ‘It’s not like this with him.’

  ‘Do you intend to have his children?’

  Lillian closes her eyes. ‘I can’t. I can’t have children.’ She feels the loss rise up in her, then settle like a heavy stone in her stomach. Her hands move unconsciously to her belly. ‘I was pregnant but there were complications. I lost the baby and I’m not able to conceive. The doctor said so.’ She says it matter-of-factly, trying to disguise the ache of grief at the back of her throat. She will never hold her own baby in her arms. Never hear a child call her ‘Mama’.

  He pulls her close. ‘I’m sorry.’

  She blinks back the tears. ‘I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself. Fate has been kind in lots of ways. I have Albie. He is all the more precious in the face of my own loss.’ She smiles in the darkness and they are both silent for a while, lost in their own thoughts until Jack speaks again.

  ‘There’s something about you, Lillian. If you don’t mind me saying, it’s as if you don’t seem to quite fit here. Most women would revel in their status as mistress of this grand old house. Yet you seem detached from it. You glide through these rooms and corridors as if you were a visitor.’

  Lillian nods. ‘Yes. It’s a strange role, the second wife . . . second best. I’m a disappointing Lady of the Manor, I know. A disappointing wife now, too. Barren. Unfaithful.’

  Jack is quiet for a moment. ‘You don’t disappoint me.’

  She sighs. ‘Some days I wonder how it is I’ve ended up here. It feels like a strange dream.’

  ‘A good dream?’ he asks, after a long moment, and she hears the flat note that has crept into his voice. Is it jealousy?

  She turns away from him in the darkness, hiding her face. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Not a good dream.’

  Jack waits a beat before he asks his next question. ‘Do you love him?’

  Lillian shrugs. ‘I was twenty-one when Charles proposed. He was a widower with a young boy and this extraordinary house. I had only known him a matter of weeks, but he seemed so lonely, so in need of someone to love him. I was flattered by his attention. Charles can be very charming when he wants to be . . . very persuasive.’

  ‘Don’t I know it,’ murmurs Jack.

  ‘It’s a special place to be in Charles Oberon’s spotlight. And I suppose I thought I could help him. I thought he needed me. I suppose I thought that’s what love was: finding your purpose and making a better life, together. But I was wrong. Charles didn’t need rescuing. At least, not by me.’

  ‘How did you meet? You mentioned you came to Cloud Green as an evacuee?’

  ‘Yes. I was eleven years old when my sister Helena and I were sent to live with a lady in the village. Lucinda Daunt. She was a solitary type and quite elderly, but she was very kind to us, especially given Helena’s condition.’

  ‘Tell me about your sister.’

  Lillian smiles. ‘She was wonderful. So vibrant. So full of life. There are two years between us and from the moment I was born, she was there. A constant, effervescent presence. I drove her spare, following her around, copying her, wanting to be her. She could do the most precocious Shirley Temple impression, complete with terrible tap dancing.’ She smiles at the memory. ‘No one could make me laugh like Helena.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  Lillian sighs. ‘Our father died in France during the war and Mother was desperate for Helena and I to leave London; but we refused. We didn’t want to leave her, not in her grief. But we should have listened. Months later, our house in Pimlico suffered a direct hit in the Blitz. I was the only one who made it to the Anderson shelter. Mother was trapped in the house. She didn’t make it out. And Helena was struck by shrapnel as she ran through the garden. She was only a few yards behind me. It was the most awful luck. The doctors did their best but she was . . . she was quite changed.’ She glances across at Jack and sees his eyes trained intently on hers in the darkness.

  ‘How dreadful,’ he murmurs. ‘Is she in a hospital?’

  ‘No. She lives in a residential care home. Charles has been very generous. Cedar House is a good place and I can visit her as often as I like.’

  ‘That’s good of him,’ says Jack, his voice gruff. He curls his arm tightly around her shoulders. ‘You poor thing. To have your entire family so altered in the space of a few months.’

  Lillian nods and stares up at the ceiling overhead. She’s tried not to think of it for so long. She’s pushed all thoughts of
her parents’ deaths from her mind. She’s tried hard to forget her mother’s warm, perfumed hugs, the soft songs sung at bedtime, falling asleep to the low buzz of her sewing machine downstairs, gentle hands brushing her hair and tying ribbons, the laughter as they splashed through puddles on grey London pavements. Her father too – barely more than a shadowy memory of a tall man, his long legs folded into an armchair, face hidden behind a rustling newspaper; humming as he dabbed shaving foam onto his stubbled chin; a man of few words but always a ready smile. And Helena . . . beautiful, vibrant Helena disappeared with one flying piece of metal buried in her skull. Lillian has closed herself off from the grief for so long it’s as though she’s existed in a bubble, frozen from truly feeling. Numb loneliness has become a state as natural to her as breathing. But something about lying next to this man, being so open and vulnerable, brings the emotion back to her.

  She swallows the lump in her throat and steers the conversation onto safer terrain, back to Jack’s original question about Charles. ‘Lucinda Daunt was so kind. After the war ended, she insisted we stay. I think she was lonely, too. I worked at the local school and helped Lucinda with her library in the evenings. I read to her each night and cared for Helena as best I could. For a long time, life simply slid by. I worried about what we would do – where would we go – if something happened to Lucinda, or she should no longer want us. But I was busy – lonely, too – until I met Charles.’

  ‘Go on.’

  She shrugs. ‘There’s not much to say. We met by chance. An accidental encounter on a country lane; one of those moments when life could go in a myriad of directions and for whatever reason, fate delivered me to Charles . . . or him to me. He proposed just six weeks after we met.’

  Closing her eyes, Lillian can vividly remember the romantic scene. Their morning drive through twisting Buckinghamshire lanes to a charming riverside village. Charles spreading a picnic blanket on the banks of the Thames. The clunk of oars moving in locks as rowing boats slid by on the water. There had been strawberries bursting with late summer sweetness and champagne poured into tall glass flutes. He had arranged it all, seen to every detail – a perfect riverside picnic – rounded off with Charles on bended knee, offering her a diamond ring dazzling like fire in the sunshine.

  It had been so unexpected. She had stared down at him, baffled. Charles Oberon wanted to marry her? ‘Albie and I, we need you. Say “yes”,’ he’d urged her. ‘Say you’ll be my wife.’

  But she hadn’t said yes, not straight away. Tears had sprung to her eyes. ‘I cannot marry you,’ she’d said. ‘I cannot leave Helena.’

  Charles had studied her, then smiled. ‘If we join ourselves in marriage, my darling, then our lives – our families – our burdens – become each other’s. I am aware that marrying me means sacrifices on your part. Albie, my son, is part and parcel of my offering to you.’

  ‘Albie is no sacrifice,’ she’d interjected quickly. ‘He’s wonderful.’

  Charles had nodded. ‘Just as you would agree to take on my challenges, a marriage between us would mean I too would shoulder the burden of yours. I will find somewhere for Helena to go. She will have the very best care. Let me help you, dear Lillian. Let me carry some of your load.’

  ‘It seemed like the answer to all my worries,’ Lillian says, opening her eyes, finding herself back in the darkness of her bedroom, Jack lying warm and still beside her. ‘Truthfully, it was the first real decision I’d ever made for myself. I thought I was choosing my destiny, creating my own life – a family.

  ‘We were married in the autumn of 1951, just a small ceremony in London, nothing fancy, it being Charles’s second marriage, and I moved to Cloudesley immediately after.’ She sighs. ‘I’ve been here ever since.’

  Jack gives a small laugh. ‘You say that like it’s a penance. A prison. And you’re an old lady.’

  She shivers and pulls the sheet up around her. ‘I was twenty-one. I thought love was a man on bended knee holding a diamond ring. I thought love was looking into a little boy’s eyes and promising to always care for him. I thought love was making sacrifices and offering kindnesses to each other’s family. And it was, for a time. But it wasn’t the love I had been hoping for. And a house that at first dazzles with beauty and promise can, after a while, feel quite different. Less fairy-tale castle and more gilded cage. Sometimes, it seems the promises we make to one another can start to feel less like love and more like binding chains.’

  Jack lies very still in the darkness. She notices how their breathing has fallen in sync, the rise and fall of their chests perfectly attuned. ‘And what happened to the fairy godmother? Lucinda?’ he asks, after a while.

  ‘She passed away six months after I was married and Helena had moved to The Cedars. She’d grown increasingly frail. I’ve often thought it was as though she’d been holding on until she knew we were taken care of. Such a kind woman. I miss her.’

  Lillian closes her eyes. ‘I’m sorry. I’m talking too much.’ She is revealing things she hasn’t shared with anyone before. It is a strange sensation, not least because she feels a giddy uncertainty with Jack, a teetering vulnerability that makes her heart race. Here she is revealing all of herself – even the sides that she knows are less appealing – her grief – her loneliness – and yet she cannot stop. She needs him to see her as she truly is – not the mask she wears for the rest of the world, but the soul behind it. For the first time in her life she wants to open herself up.

  ‘I’m glad you told me. I like knowing more about you. But it’s very late. I should go back to my room,’ he says, shifting slightly on the bed.

  Lillian reaches for his arm. ‘Don’t go. Not yet.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you.’

  ‘Stay then.’

  ‘I can’t be here in the morning. It’s too risky.’

  ‘I know . . . but just a little longer. Please.’

  Jack sighs again but he doesn’t move and Lillian relaxes a little, re-tuning to their breathing.

  Is what they are doing so very wrong? Of course, ethically, morally she knows she is breaking a code . . . breaking the sacrosanct tenets of marriage. And yet, if no one finds out, are they harming anyone? Can it be wrong to feel such desire and pleasure with another person? Can it be wrong to experience such happiness?

  She falls asleep with her head resting in the crook of his arm. Jack lies next to her, listening to the wind moving through the beech trees, watching the gauze curtains lifting in the breeze, gently tracing the delicate bones in her wrist as he stares up into the darkness overhead. It’s after four, just before the first birds begin their dawn chorus, when he eventually leaves her and tiptoes back to his room.

  Chapter 16

  The property developer arrives at Cloudesley in a gleaming black BMW and Maggie knows from the moment she opens the door to Todd Hamilton that she isn’t going to like him. There is something about his shiny grey suit, tanned skin and the efficient way he folds his sunglasses into his jacket pocket and shakes her hand, looking past her into the hall as if expecting someone more important-looking to appear, that makes her bristle.

  Maggie offers him tea but he tells her in his broad Texan drawl that he’d rather get on with the business of inspecting the estate, so she leads him outside, walking him briskly about the grounds, showing him the arboretum, the meadow and the orchard beyond the kitchen garden, before leading him back through the stable yard.

  He forgoes the offered tour of the house, opting instead for a coffee on the terrace, where he spreads his maps of the estate across the table and marks up points of interest with a red pen as Maggie outlines the boundaries. She notices how he circles the barns and stables with a red pen, then slashes through a large wooded area and the grey square delineating the house. She wonders what it all means. ‘Harry mentioned you were looking for a site to develop a new golf club?’ she asks, more to make conversation than anything.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, leaning back in his chair. ‘Could be a potential
gold mine round here.’

  ‘So you think Cloudesley might be suitable?’

  ‘It’s looking very promising. The topography is perfect. Exactly what we’ve been looking for.’

  ‘My family have lived here for several generations. We are, naturally, reluctant to sell, but for the right price . . .’ she trails off, still finding the whole conversation unpalatable.

  The American peers more closely at the map. ‘There are good travel links to London and I think I’m right in saying no other golf courses around here, not for several miles?’

  Maggie nods. ‘And the house?’ she asks. ‘You like it?’

  ‘The house?’ He dabs at his brow with one of the linen napkins Jane has supplied.

  ‘Yes, Cloudesley. You’ll turn it into a clubhouse? Or perhaps a small hotel?’ Then seeing his blank look she tries again. ‘Maybe a restaurant?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Oh no. It’s lovely, sure, but it would be commercial suicide to attempt to renovate this old place.’ He glances dubiously up at the rear facade of the house, as if doubting its ability to remain upright. ‘It would be far more cost efficient to rebuild from scratch. I’m imagining a new manor house perched on this hill. Something grand but contemporary. All the latest technology. Now wouldn’t that be something?’

  Maggie stares at him, barely able to conceal her horror. ‘You’d bulldoze the whole place?’

  ‘Trust me, once you start peeling back the layers of an old girl like this, it’s all over.’ He smiles at her, flashing a row of perfect white teeth. ‘These places are nothing but trouble. I doubt you’d find many developers interested in its restoration. It’s land everyone wants these days. Golf courses. Housing developments. Cutting-edge grand designs for overseas investors wanting their piece of the English countryside. That’s where the real money lies.’

  ‘I think you might find there are a few heritage restrictions around an estate like this,’ she bristles.

  But if he hears the irritation in her voice he doesn’t register. He laughs easily. ‘Oh don’t worry, Miss Oberon. You’d be amazed what throwing an obscene amount of money at a problem can do.’ He slurps noisily from his coffee cup then turns and looks out over the hills. ‘Yes indeed, a very fine golf course. Maybe even a spa, too. Something for the ladies. First manicure on the house for you, of course, Miss Oberon,’ he winks. Maggie glances down at her chewed nails and flushes an angry red. ‘I’ll have my lawyers get in touch with your Harry,’ he continues. ‘I’m sure we can come to a mutually agreeable deal.’