Gordon turned the page abruptly.
‘…Bittermints. He probably doesn’t touch chocolate. How about a bottle of something? More coffee?’
The top of Gordon’s grey head, which was all she could see of her husband, moved from side to side.
‘I’ll have a look in that shop at the bottom of the hill – the one that used to be the fishmonger’s. They sell all that in the supermarket now. Cadeaux. They’ve got leather things and cake plates and silver pillboxes in the window. I don’t suppose a silver pillbox…?’
Margaret was talking to herself. It was not unusual. The Financial Times lay folded against the marmalade jar, Gordon’s chair was empty, and he was already in his rose garden.
Growing roses was Gordon’s hobby. It encompassed the world of propagating and exhibiting as well as paying regular visits to the great rose gardens of the world. The diversion occupied most of his leisure moments, enabled him to forget his disappointment in his marriage, and provided a suitable antidote to the stresses of the City. His roses, on view annually to the public in aid of the National Gardens Scheme, were at the moment faring a great deal better than his bank.
As he selected a rose for the buttonhole of his pinstriped suit, a daily decision not taken lightly, he contemplated the dismal state of the British economy. After the euphoria of the eighties with its global markets, indiscriminate asset stripping, and sky-high share indexes, which had been followed by the seismic flutters of Black Thursday and the catastrophic nose-dive of Black Monday (when £100 billion was wiped from shares and thousands of job losses were triggered in the City), the spacecraft, which had been launched so optimistically, to break through the sound barrier with the Big Bang, had finally crashed to earth. With the collapse of the markets, the entire financial sector had suffered one of its biggest setbacks on record and was now undergoing the sharpest decline of the century. In the light of the gloomy forecasts and massive lay-offs, the party was well and truly over. There were few indications that the situation was going to improve.
In the past three months alone there had been almost 16,000 personal bankruptcies. Liquidations and receiverships were escalating, car sales were disastrous, house prices had dropped, consumer confidence had fallen, and people feared for their livelihoods. There was no area which had not been hit. The building trade had empty order books and showed the worst figures for a decade; Rolls-Royce aero-engine had closed two plants, imposed a six-month pay freeze – with the warning of more cuts to come – and drastically reduced its workforce, and thousands of civil engineering workers, highly qualified staff among them, had been paid off.
It was not only industry which was affected. There had been wholesale redundancies in publishing, insurance, advertising, television, and hospital services. Professionals, no longer able to honour their agreements with the mortgage companies, were in serious difficulties, and qualified lawyers, particularly those specialising in commercial property in London where thousands of square feet of office accommodation lay empty, were finding themselves out on the street.
Solicitors were not the only ones soliciting. Gordon excused himself the pun. Not since the time of Dickens, or the days after the First World War when amputees and gas victims rattled collecting boxes on every street corner, had London seen so many beggars. White-faced girls with shaven heads and youths with tattered trousers, had joined the winos and the bag ladies in the shadows of underground stations and shopping malls. They squatted in the doorways and declared themselves hungry. Gordon did not believe them. Many of the scavengers had been revealed to be con artists, with perfectly decent homes to go to, who belonged to begging rings and waged terror campaigns on the legitimate homeless. Be that as it may, the mendicants were a symptom of an economic climate which was as dismal as any that Gordon, at the age of 63, could remember. Although profits would be meagre and the appetite for debt, both amongst companies and personal customers, severely limited, he hoped that Sitwell Hunt International, backed as it was by so many years of family tradition and – if push came to shove – by the Bank of England, would be able to ride out the storm.
In his garden, laid out forty years ago when he had brought Margaret to Tall Trees as a young bride, Gordon Sitwell could forget the bank. Margaret, who came from Cornwall, had wanted a country garden, hollyhocks, sunflowers, foxgloves and delphiniums, such as she had been brought up with, but Gordon was unable to tolerate such rampant chaos and had settled upon a garden devoted to roses, for which he bought the best possible stock from the most reputable growers.
There was a great deal more to roses than simply digging a hole and planting a bush. Before he even lifted a spade, Gordon evaluated his site, made blueprints of his layout and set about making the necessary improvements to the soil. Now, a formal bed, flanked by an emerald frame of grass paths, traversed the centre of the garden. His instinct had been to fill the rectangle with a single shade, a single variety of rose, but common sense had prevailed. Taking into consideration the unkempt appearance which a paperwork of different colours would create, Gordon had staggered his planting, interspersing the bushes of red Hybrid Teas with clumps of white, yellow, and pink. For added interest, and bearing in mind the fact that a bed, unlike a border, had to be viewed from all angles, he had placed a column of standard Chrysler Imperials (the full fragrant flowers of which bloomed from June to November), at intervals down the centre. He did not allow underplanting. When Margaret had tentatively suggested that they might put in a few violas, some clumps of primulas, a little ageratum or lobelia beneath the Cologne Carnivals and the Summer Sunshine, or that he consider Super Star, or Sterling Silver, as suitable for indoor decoration, he had told her that if she wanted flowers for the house he would give her money to buy them, and that the next thing that she would be asking for was gnomes.
Selecting his roses, and increasing his stock, represented only a fraction of Gordon’s extra-curricular activities. He protected his plants from disease and, keeping an eye out for blackspot, blind shoots, scorching, and reversion, tended them when they were sick. In the mornings, the dew soaking his slippers, he dusted the leaves against pests, and in the evenings he sprayed them. He hoed and mulched, tied and watered, deadheaded and disbudded. He waged war against the froghopper, the sawfly, and the aphids, and drew up his battle lines at the first sign of mildew, canker or rust.
Pruning was his forte. Taking care not to do it so early as to risk injury from frost, nor leave it so late that the sap had begun to flow, he carried it out at the first sign of new growth. He was a ruthless pruner, attributing the success of his roses to the efficiency with which he annually cut them back.
Now, as he contemplated a perfect bloom for his buttonhole, one which would reflect his mood and set the tenor of his day, he was aware of Margaret walking towards him across the York stone terrace, between the pergolas of Golden Shower and Albertine. She was wearing a print frock, the garishly coloured flowers of which went ill with the deep, rich crimson of Madame Louise Laperrière and the orange-yellow of Beauté, and overpowered the creams and ivories of Virgo and Pascali. He disliked the frock almost as much as he disliked her candlewick dressing gown.
Marrying Margaret, forty years ago, had been a mistake. With roses you got exactly what you paid for, bushes of good breed, purchased from a reputable grower being a guarantee of success. Margaret, a young rose from Truro, deliciously perfumed, deep-bosomed, falsely promising to flower over a long period, seemed perfect for bedding. He had been beguiled by the short-lived radiance of her bloom.
It had been a lacklustre marriage. Once the novelty of Margaret’s suffused white breasts, minuscule waist, and thighs hardened by riding on the Cornish sands, which he thought would squeeze the life out of him, had palled, the children began to arrive, and she had turned her limited intellect to the romances of Mills & Boon, Gordon had found little to engage him in the girl he had married. She had been a good wife, he could not deny Margaret that. But their only meeting points, now that the children we
re grown up, were discussions about the grandchildren, their holiday plans, or what they were to have for dinner.
As far as sex was concerned, sleeping with Margaret was like making love to an aquiescent mound of well-risen dough, and was equally exciting. He gave her her ‘jollies’, which, aroused by her reading matter and lost in her own fantasies, she still expected, but for his own gratification he cruised the pavements of the London streets at night, appraising, but not handling the goods. Once, as he kerb crawled, he had found himself staring into the face of a smooth-chinned police officer through the window. Ordered out of the car, he had stood abjectly amongst the flaccid condoms and used syringes that littered the wastelands of King’s Cross, while he was questioned. He had been let off with a caution, but aware of the scandal which his arrest would have precipitated in the banking world, he had restrained his nocturnal activities for some time.
‘What do you think, Gordon…’ Margaret said, holding out the shiny pleats of her skirt before him.
Gordon noticed that she had applied lipstick in much the same shade of scarlet as the poppies on her dress, and that it had leaked into small unattractive tributaries around her mouth.
‘…for Freddie’s party?’
An invitation to Chester Terrace was a high spot in Margaret’s life. Although she and Gordon rattled in Tall Trees now that the children were gone, and had sufficient china and glass to feed a regiment, few people came to dinner. When they did, although Margaret was a good cook, it could in no way be compared with an evening at the Lomaxes’. No matter how hard Margaret tried, she could not turn her house into a palace and herself into a queen, not even for a night. She could not move through a room delighting the women and riveting the men, convincing each one in turn that he was the guest of honour. She could not sparkle and dazzle, giving the impression that everything that came out of her mouth was either stupendously important or devastatingly witty. She could not flirt and seduce, fascinate and entrance, captivate and charm. She was neither attractive nor animated, neither elegant nor graceful. Her eyes were not green and her hair was not red. Her skirts were not short and her legs were not long. She was not Jane Lomax.
Gordon, walking ahead of her with his pruning knife, was contemplating the orange-veined Bettina and the gilded Gail Borden for his buttonhole, with a gravitas equal to that he gave to the affairs of the bank. He would not cut a rose for Margaret and she knew better than to ask for one. Margaret did get roses. The first rose of summer, the last rose, remembrance of things past, left wordlessly by Gordon, in a tumbler on the mantelshelf at Christmas time.
She had been lucky really in her marriage to Gordon. Once they had set sail on the high seas of their life together, their ship driven by the wind of Gordon’s conditioned responses, she did not have to exert herself. Once, a very long time ago, she could not now remember what it had all been about, Gordon had threatened to leave her. Had started packing his suitcase although he hadn’t the first idea what to put in it. Margaret had threatened to kill herself. Notwithstanding the fact that each of them knew that the other was bluffing, they had played the game through to its predictable end. It left them, via tears on her part, and recriminations on his, back on home ground, where the daily confrontations had long ago been worked out and a lazy switch to automatic pilot was the only effort required.
Sometimes, usually inspired by a film she had watched on television, or an article she had read in the newspapers, or in her young days with the spirit of rebellion engendered by her hormones, Margaret would temporarily abandon the subordinate position she had willingly adopted and make waves. Deliberately defying Gordon, usually over some comparatively trivial issue, she would bring his wrath down on her head and a little excitement into her own bleak existence. It was not a tactic she adopted too often. It was not worth the candle. She did not expect a great deal of life and anything that was lacking was compensated for vicariously by Messrs Mills & Boon.
Gordon had decided upon the green-tinged white of Message as being an appropriate rose for the day. Standing before it, an executioner with his knife, he stopped and stared, for a long moment, at Margaret. He rarely entered into dialogue with her and never discussed the affairs of the bank.
Misreading his look, she let the skirt with its poppies fall. ‘I suppose I could always wear my black.’
As she turned back to the house, Gordon advanced towards Message. Raising his knife, and adroitly choosing his spot, just above an outward-facing bud to avoid weakening the bush, he severed her head.
Three
Lilli Lomax sat by the window of her flat in the Water Gardens, off the Edgware Road, with the mohair rug Freddie had bought her round her knees, while Mrs Williams – she insisted for some reason on being called Mrs Williams although sometimes Lilli could not remember her name at all – cleared away the breakfast dishes. Although Lilli appeared to be concentrating on what was going on in the street below, her vacant eyes were watching her latest carer’s every move and paying particular attention to the fruit bowl which stood on a crocheted mat in the centre of the table. You could not trust these women. Certainly not as far as the fruit bowl was concerned. The last one had gone through several pounds of apples in a week. The previous one had eaten her out of house and home. It was not as if she kept them short of anything. She gave them money for the shopping – there were only the two of them except once a week when Freddie came for dinner – and insisted upon checking the receipts. They always seemed to have propensities, however, some of them quite bizarre and all of them extravagant. There was the girl from Australia who drank nothing but Diet Coke and stashed the cans beneath her bed, and the widow from Aberdeen who was allergic to yeast and refused to touch bread but filled up on cake. There was the helper who helped herself to Lilli’s favourite biscuits, the divorcée who purported never to be hungry but who raided the refrigerator the moment she thought that Lilli was asleep, and the avowed teetotaller who nipped silently away at the gin. Some of them smoked – although they swore that they did not, Lilli could smell it a mile away – none of them knew how to clean a room properly, and all of them made free with her telephone. The one thing they all seemed to have in common was that they did not stay very long. Lilli had not the slightest idea why.
‘It’s my son’s birthday today…’ Lilli said.
‘Is it now?’ Mrs Williams, who had only taken up her duties the previous day, did not seem to be all that interested in Freddie’s birthday.
‘He’s 40 years old.’
‘My poor husband – may he rest in peace – always used to say that life was a two-week holiday. Forty was the start of the second week…’
Lilli was not listening. She was back in the maternity ward of the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital. Back forty years in time. She was still a student at the Royal College of Music when she had met Hugh, a junior hospital doctor. They had been married for six years when Adolf Hitler marched on Poland. During the nightly air raids on London, while Hugh was away in North Africa with the Royal Army Medical Corps, ‘Lilliane Lomax’ played the piano at the Queen’s Hall, keeping the audiences entertained until the all clear. Later she joined ENSA and gave concerts with the orchestra at air bases where overhead, at the rate of one every two minutes, the bombers took off for Berlin.
When the war was over, and Hugh was repatriated, they had used his demob money to buy a villa near the canal in Maida Vale, and took in medical students to help with the bills. There was plenty of room in the house for nurseries, and a narrow garden suitable for the toddlers who did not materialise.
It was only after eighteen years of raised expectations and dashed hopes, that Lilli had succeeded, when it was almost too late, in becoming pregnant. No one could imagine the anguish she had gone through. She had been one of four children. Hugh was the eldest of six. It was an unspoken agreement between them that they would have a large family and Lilli had refused to accept the fact that she would never know morning sickness or hold a child to her breast. Her dete
rmination to have a baby had overshadowed her life.
In her heart of hearts she thought that her failure to conceive was a penalty for wrongdoing, some kind of divine retribution for she knew not what. She had no idea why she was being punished. Hugh tried to act nonchalantly, as if it did not matter to him one way or the other, as if he did not care. But she knew that he was waiting, every bit as anxiously as she was, for her to bear them a son.
She had been engaged to play in a Vaughan Williams concert, when a bout of vomiting, which she put down to something she had eaten, prevented her from accompanying the orchestra to Bath. The incredible discovery that at the age of 44 she was pregnant for the first time, put paid for the time being to her professional commitments. Eight months later, on the hottest day of the year, she went into labour.
There had been no question in those days of giving birth under water, or in the upright position supported by her partner. Hugh had not been present at her confinement. It seemed only yesterday. There was no detail that she could not remember. The obstetrician and the anaesthetist, sweating, in their shirtsleeves, discussing the test match as they waited for her cervix to dilate. Herself, an animal, writhing in distress. During all her years of trying to conceive, Lilli had not considered, not for one moment, what it would be like to give birth. It was just as well. She had been in labour for what seemed a lifetime. Hugh had brought her into the hospital in the small hours. Leaving her in competent hands, he had embraced her tenderly and enquired about the frequency and severity of the pains. She assured him that they were not too bad. She was not going to make a fuss. She had waited too long for that. As the night gave way to morning and the contractions became more frequent, the pains more severe, her resolution weakened. By lunchtime she was tired. At two o’clock in the afternoon, as she clung to the nurse’s hand and swore that she was unable to go on any longer, they wheeled in the gas and air. She put the mask over her face and breathed as she was instructed, but it was little help. At three o’clock she was screaming uncontrollably. At 3.30 she knew for certain that she was going to die. They reassured her that everything was normal. Normal! And that she was doing very well. And that it would not be long. A wild thing, she wailed and thrashed, prayed, and begged for mercy. She wondered did she really want a child. Do something. Please do something. But they did nothing. Her body was being ripped apart whilst her attendants discussed the teatime scores. By five o’clock there was no break in her moaning. She had ceased to exist, consumed on some unimaginable rack. She cried, cajoled, pleaded, to be put out of her misery, out of her suffering which was beyond all human endurance. Suddenly it was quiet. Faces loomed at the foot of her bed. The test match was forgotten. There were other voices. Foetal heart. And something about distress. A trolley crashed into the room.
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