by Teresa Crane
She shook her head. ‘No. Isobel didn’t tell.’
‘Didn’t tell what?’
‘About you. Look, I tell you what – I’ll drop the stick, you throw the grass.’ She shoved a handful of grass into his hand.
Obligingly he took it. ‘Shout when you want me to throw it. What are we trying to do?’
‘Seeing if the grass beats the stick. Is the wind blowing faster than the water’s running?’
‘I see. I think. What do you mean that your sister didn’t tell about me? I thought you’d get into trouble for being late?’
‘Oh, no. I’m almost always late. I don’t think anyone expects anything else any more, and they’ve given up telling me off about it. Well, almost. Now!’
Obediently he let go of the grass. It fluttered and fell. ‘But you thought you might get into trouble for being with me?’
She cocked her head to look at him solemnly. ‘I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure. But I didn’t want to take the chance. Isobel agreed. In the end.’
He grinned and ruffled her hair. ‘You’re an old-fashioned little thing, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know. But I think I probably am, because people are always saying so. Have you finished sketching for the day?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you like mushrooms? There are some huge ones in the top meadow. Well, there were. The hoppers have probably got them by now but it’s worth a try.’ There was a week left of the picking season. The year was closing in.
They set off companionably, side by side, along the path. Kit waited for a moment before asking, carefully, ‘Did Isobel – say anything? About the other day?’
Poppy had picked a stick from the hedge and was energetically swiping at thistle-heads with it. ‘Not much. She said I shouldn’t talk to strangers and I said you weren’t a stranger, you were my friend. Then I told her about you. Then she said Mama and Papa wouldn’t approve and I asked her not to tell. And she said, “We’ll see”,’ exasperatedly the child mimicked her sister’s soft voice. ‘Why do grown-ups always say that? Then she asked—’ Poppy stopped in mid-sentence, ‘Oh, look! Blackberries. What lovely great big ones! Can you reach them?’
Dutifully Kit pulled the bramble down with the hook of his stick. The blackberries were indeed big, and very sweet. There were a few moments’ silence.
‘Asked what?’ Kit was casual.
‘Sorry?’ Poppy’s fingers and mouth were purple with juice.
‘You said Isobel asked something.’
‘Oh, yes. She asked if you were married.’
Did she, indeed? Kit’s lips twitched a little. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said no.’ The child looked suddenly uncertain.
‘You aren’t, are you?’
‘No.’ All at once the laughter was gone from his eyes. ‘I’m not.’
‘Mmm! I love blackberries. Especially in apple pie. Mrs Butler makes lovely blackberry and apple pie. It’s a shame we haven’t got anything to carry them in.’
‘Here.’ Kit sorted through his satchel, came up with a tattered paper bag. ‘Will this do?’ He stretched the stick out to another bramble.
‘Golly, thanks.’
‘So – that was all?’
Poppy hesitated with a berry poised at her lips, thought a moment, then nodded vigorously. ‘Yes. Then I had to go and see Mama. She wanted to hear me play the piano. To see if I had improved.’
‘And had you?’
She shook her brown head. ‘Of course not. It was terrible.’
Kit laughed softly at the depth of feeling in the word. ‘Don’t you like the piano?’
‘I like listening to it. I just don’t like doing it. I can’t, you see. Not like Isobel can. That’s the kind of thing she’s good at. Things that girls are supposed to be good at.’
‘And – she hasn’t mentioned me since?’
The child directed a sudden, steady look at him. ‘No,’ she said shortly.
Something in her tone warned him off the subject. In silence he reached for a blackberry.
It was later, as they strolled back to the bridge, that he asked gently, ‘Poppy? Would you do something for me?’
She was nursing the disintegrating, juice-soaked bag in stained hands. She smiled up at him, nodding. ‘Of course.’
He hesitated. She waited.
‘Would you – ask Isobel—’ He saw the flicker in her face, saw the sudden straightening of her blackberry-stained mouth, but it was too late to stop. ‘Would you ask her if she’d let me sketch her? It’s what I used to do, you see. I used to paint portraits. Perhaps one day I will again. I’d like to try.’
Poppy marched on. ‘Poppy?’
She lifted a shoulder. ‘We’ll see,’ she said.
*
‘Have you seen your – friend – Kit again?’ Isobel was arranging flowers. Poppy had hauled herself up on the wooden table and was sitting, small booted feet swinging, watching her. The rain sheeted against the windows in vicious gusts.
Poppy’s swinging feet stilled. She cocked her head in characteristic manner. ‘What are those? The pink ones?’
‘Peonies. There are still some in the greenhouse. Have you?’
‘Yes.’
Isobel waited to see if her sister might be about to embellish the terse reply. When it became obvious that she would not, she asked, ‘Did he say anything?’
‘Well, of course he did.’ The child was scornful.
‘What’s the point of seeing each other if you don’t say anything?’
Isobel’s long eyelashes fluttered. She took a slow, pained breath. ‘I mean – did he say anything about – well, about the other day?’ About me. About me.
‘No,’ said Poppy. ‘We talked about me not being able to play the piano. And picked blackberries.’
Isobel adjusted a bloom, stood back to survey the effect. ‘I see.’
Poppy, nonchalantly, swung her feet again. ‘I was right,’ she said, as a concession. ‘He’s not married.’
*
The Germans were finished, and everyone knew it. They had lost more than a million men in a series of disastrous defeats since the spring. Everywhere the Allies were advancing steadily, through drenching rain and in mud that in places was waist deep and voracious enough to swallow a horse. Yet still they fought on, and still men died, needlessly, for a cause long lost.
‘Your leg seems a lot better.’ Poppy wriggled impatiently, drummed her heels on the parapet of the little bridge. ‘Does that mean you’ll have to go back to the war?’
‘Yes. Probably.’ Kit’s pencil stilled for a moment then moved again, quick and light on the paper. ‘Keep still, you little fidget. Just a minute longer.’
With elaborate patience she sighed and stilled her movements. A moment later he lifted his head. ‘There. Do you want to see it?’
She jumped from the wall and ran to him, craning her neck to look at the sketch. ‘It’s very good,’ she said, approvingly. ‘Even better than the mouse one.’
‘That was a joke. This is a proper portrait, or at least a sketch for one. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to paint you properly.’
‘I’d like that. Perhaps Mama and Papa would pay you to do it. They paid lots for the pictures of Hugh and William that Mama has in her horrible Orangery thing – and they aren’t as good as you could do,’ she added, sturdily loyal.
There was a sudden, small silence. Kit tucked his pencil into a tin box and slipped it into his satchel, folded his sketch-pad.
‘Do you know when you’ll have to go back?’ she asked, reverting to the original subject of the conversation.
He did not answer for a moment. His eyes were thoughtful.
‘Kit?’
‘Sorry?’
‘I asked if you knew when you might have to go back?’
‘Oh – no. I’m still under the doctor at the moment. A few weeks yet, I should think.’
‘I’ll bet you don’t want to go.’
‘No. I don’t.’
‘Papa says that it will all be over soon. He says—’ Poppy stopped. Kit lifted his head. A tall, slender figure moved gracefully towards them along the footpath. Isobel was wearing a cream linen outfit of similar cut to the one she had worn before, and this time she carried a wide-brimmed straw hat by its pale silken ribbons. Her hair gleamed like spun gold in the October sunshine. The pair on the bridge watched her in silence.
‘Well!’ The great flower-blue eyes moved from Poppy’s face to Kit’s, and stayed there. Isobel smiled her most bewitching smile. ‘Hello there! Poppy’s pestering you again, I see.’
‘I’m not pestering!’ Poppy said, hotly indignant.
‘Kit’s been drawing me. He wanted to. Didn’t you?’
He ruffled her hair affectionately. ‘Yes, I did. And no, you aren’t pestering me.’ He looked back at Isobel. His eyes were very bright. ‘Would you like to see it?’ She half-shrugged, affecting indifference, but nodded nevertheless.
Kit reached into his satchel and handed her the sketch-pad. She put her hand out for it, and their fingers touched. As she leafed through the pad the pages trembled a little, as if stirred by a breeze. She stopped at the drawing he had made of her sister, and studied it, her downcast lashes shadowing her cheeks.
He watched her.
The lashes lifted. ‘It’s very good,’ she conceded.
‘Thank you.’
Poppy had scrambled on to the parapet again and was standing beside Kit, leaning on his shoulder in an exaggeratedly proprietary way that brought an affectionate smile to his face. ‘He wants to make a proper picture. A portrait. I said Mama and Papa might pay him for it, like they did for the ones of William and Hugh.’
Once again two pairs of eyes met and held. Kit saw the sudden gleam of something bright and speculative and very close to mischief. For a moment the blue eyes widened even further. ‘Do you think they might be interested?’ he asked quietly.
Isobel did not answer for a moment. Then she lifted a slim, indolent shoulder. ‘I don’t know. They might, I suppose.’ She swung the hat thoughtfully, long fingers tangled in the ribbon. ‘They do already have one of me when I was little – about Poppy’s age, in fact.’
‘Then perhaps they’d like one of you grown up? And one of Poppy before she grows up?’
She laughed lightly. ‘A job lot? The Brookes girls on canvas?’
He smiled. ‘Why not? Nice things often come in twos, I find.’
Poppy pushed away from him. She was scowling.
They were doing it again. Shutting her out. It was as if they were holding a conversation of which she was no part; saying things that she couldn’t understand, despite the almost silly simplicity of the words. Kit noticed the movement, and held out his hand to help her down from the wall. She ignored it and scrambled down alone, grazing her knee in the process. ‘I suppose you’ve come to get me?’ she said, gracelessly direct, to her sister.
Isobel shook her head innocently. ‘No. I decided to go for a walk, that’s all.’
Poppy stared at her. ‘You don’t go for walks,’ she said flatly.
Isobel flushed a little. ‘Don’t be silly. Of course I do. It was such a lovely day, and after all the bad weather we’ve been having it seemed a shame to stay indoors.’ She settled the hat upon her curly hair, tied the ribbon beneath her chin. Her blue eyes lifted, alight with laughter, challenging and flirtatious, to the young man’s face. ‘Do you like to walk, Mr Enever?’
Kit surveyed the bright, flawless face for a long moment. Then, ‘I do indeed, Miss Brookes,’ he said tranquilly.
‘It doesn’t hurt your poor leg?’ Isobel turned and began to stroll along the sheep-cropped bank of the river, Kit falling into step beside her.
He smiled, entertained. ‘My poor leg is considerably improved, thank you.’
Poppy stood for a moment, stubbornly still, watching them. Birdsong rang in the sunny afternoon. Isobel threw back her head and laughed, the pretty sound a counterpoint to the birds.
Poppy waited to see if Kit would turn back and wait for her. He did not. Gloomily she trailed after them.
*
Over the next few days Isobel took a sudden and remarkable liking to walking – a pastime for which until now she had, to say the least, never much cared. Fortunately the weather remained fair and this new and unlikely interest went unremarked – at least by everyone but Poppy. She would sit in the window of her schoolroom as Miss Simpson droned on about apples at tuppence-ha’penny and pears at three-farthings and watch as her sister strolled apparently casually down the gravelled drive of the house and disappeared beneath the trees towards the gate that led out into the lane and on to the footpath to the river. That Isobel was meeting Kit the child did not for a moment doubt; and in the initial wave of resentment that beset her at what she perceived to be Kit’s unkindness she herself obstinately stayed at home. If he wanted to be friends with Isobel and not her, then let him. She didn’t care.
But she did. She cared very much. That in staying away from him she gave him no chance to continue their friendship did not occur to her for two or three days; and by then Isobel had started her campaign for the portraits.
*
They were in the Orangery: Isobel, Poppy and their mother. For all her forty-three years, Elizabeth Brookes was still an exquisitely pretty woman with the same blue eyes and fine-drawn features as her elder daughter. At the moment she was, as she did so often, inspecting the lushly growing plants that were her passion, a small black cat preening about her ankles. Never particularly robust, years of child-bearing had left Elizabeth in fragile health, and the tragedy of two dead babies and the brutal loss of the sons who had been her pride and her delight had given her an air of abstracted and delicate melancholy that Isobel tried in vain to replicate.
In truth there was no real sense in which Elizabeth could be described as strong. Through no fault of her own she belonged to a generation of women brought up in a society so strongly paternalistic that to question its ways and beliefs was tantamount to blasphemy. Marriage to a man whose adamantine opinions left little room for discussion, let alone for disagreement; had meant that she had never learned to think for herself; to be truthful, it could be said that she had never had the inclination. When she agreed with her wrathful husband that the women who were agitating for greater freedoms for her sex should be whipped through the streets it was not simply through docility; she believed it. She did not want the vote. She was certain that she would not know what to do with it if she had it. She could not see what possible difference it could make, except to be a worry, to change a status quo that in fact perfectly suited her; or it had before this dreadful war had erupted and taken away her sons, her visits to London and Paris and most of her servants.
She longed for the slaughter to be over, for things to return to normal – or as normal as they could ever again be. Meanwhile she had her girls, her memories and her beloved tropical plants. She loved the heavy, sweet-smelling air of the Orangery, loved to sit with her needlework or her magazines in the wicker armchair beneath the portraits of her sons that had been carefully protected behind glass from the moist air. She would spend at least part of each day tending the plants, all of them exotic, most of them rare, some of them reaching to the roof, twenty feet above. She touched a pale, gold-green orchid with a gentle finger. The little cat stalked away and settled itself in a patch of sunshine, licking a tiny paw.
Poppy wriggled in her armchair, scowling fiercely at a grubby sampler the execution of which, even to the unskilled eye, quite obviously owed more to motherly coercion than daughterly skill.
‘Poppy, darling, do stop fidgeting,’ Elizabeth said gently. ‘It’s most unladylike.’
Poppy’s face was as bright as the flower after which she had been named. Sweat trickled between her shoulderblades and her brown hair was lank with it. ‘I’m sorry, Mama. It’s just so hot in here—’
‘You wouldn’t get so hot if you didn’t fidget so much,’ Isobel
pointed out, irritatingly reasonable. She was sitting at a small glass table writing a letter. The silence broken, she laid down her pen and rested her chin on her long, curled fingers, her eyes wide and artless upon her mother. ‘Mama – did I tell you I met Mary Hilden in the village the other day?’
‘No, you didn’t.’ Elizabeth turned, interested. ‘How are they? I haven’t seen any of them for ages. Have they come back to the Hall?’
‘No.’ The word was very quick. Isobel picked up her pen and turned it in her fingers. ‘They’re still in London. They’ll be staying there, from the sound of it. Sir Robert’s doing something terribly secret and important in the War Office. Mary had just come down with Lady Hilden to check on the house. Her sister’s married, you know.’
‘Yes.’ Absently Elizabeth reached for a pair of secateurs. ‘Yes, I had heard.’
‘I heard it ages ago.’ Poppy had lifted her head and was watching her sister with a puzzled frown. ‘It was all over the village. It was in the papers. She married a Lord in the Life Guards or something.’
Isobel’s mouth tightened a little and she shot Poppy a look so fierce that it startled the child to silence. The cat started on the other paw.
‘She was saying—’ Isobel continued casually, ‘—that there’s a young man staying at the Rectory who’s apparently quite a well-known painter.’ This time the quelling look came from beneath lowered lids. Poppy, who had opened her mouth, closed it again, very firmly. ‘Or at least she said she’s sure he would have been if it weren’t for this beastly war. He’s—’ she hesitated, ‘—sort of vaguely connected to the Hildens, I believe. Mary said he painted a portrait of the two little boys, just before the war. She says Sir Robert and Lady Hilden are delighted with it.’ She studied the pen she was playing with as if it were the most absorbing object in the world; after a moment lifted her head. ‘He’s been doing war work, and was wounded.’ She sat back in her chair and lifted her eyes to the portraits of her brothers. ‘Mary’s sure he’ll probably be quite famous one day.’