The Sweetest Thing

by Susan Sallis

  She held up her hand to silence him. ‘Listen. There are four of us, Harry. Can you stay tonight?’ When he nodded emphatically she closed her eyes with sheer relief. ‘I am so glad.’ She gathered strength visibly, then said, ‘Tomorrow, go home in Matthew’s car. See to things. Come back the next day on the bus. Take my car. Come to see us . . . often. Will you?’

  ‘My dear girl . . .’

  ‘Thank you, Harry.’ She put her head back on the pillows, eyes still closed. He held the tea to her lips but she was already asleep. He gathered a glass and an empty aspirin bottle and crept downstairs.

  It worked out exactly like that. Harry knew a deep contentment that transcended all the sheer hard work of the next three weeks. He knew all the Pardoe females were going to be well, given time and loving care, and simply to drive the green car from one coast to the other every day made him supremely happy. He left when it was dark and came home when it was dark but he still found time to do his normal chores and to get the house ready for . . . anything. Avis’s solicitors sent him half the sale price of the house and he immediately bought a large freezer and gradually filled it. The cowman on Home Farm let him have three single beds and he began to furnish the bedrooms. Matthew offered him a television one of the parishioners had thrown out; at first it did not work but Harry spent time perched precariously on the roof turning the aerial this way and that until magically there was Andy Pandy getting into his box. He watched it avidly.

  At the end of November the girls went back to school for the final weeks of term. They were still listless and on their first Monday Denny wept because she had missed the school party and Ellie was very quiet because she was missing Gus all over again. Barbara told them they were wet wallies and they hadn’t missed the carol singing on the quay, nor the shopping, nor Christmas. Ellie managed a smile and Lucy said weakly, ‘Well done, Barbara!’ And Harry, wheeling in a trolley loaded with tea and sandwiches, said, ‘Listen, all of you. How would you like to come and stay on the farm for Christmas? I’ve got the rooms all ready and I’ve put up new umbrellas everywhere and all down the hallway I’ve stuck pictures of Santa Claus in his sleigh. And . . . guess what . . . I’ve got a television set! I’m longing for you to see everything. It’s different in one way but in another it’s probably back to how it must have been when your grandmother was a little girl.’

  Denny cheered up instantly and Barbara clapped her hands; Ellie and Lucy exchanged glances. Ellie said, ‘We’d love it, of course. But Mum . . . she is still very weak, Harry. And everything is laid on here. Wouldn’t it be better if you came to us?’

  ‘Of course, if that’s what you would prefer.’ Harry forced a grin. ‘Christmas is Christmas wherever we are.’

  The little ones were disappointed for only a moment. Harry was always right and Christmas certainly was Christmas.

  When he arrived the next day, the girls had already left for school and Lucy was lighting the fire in the living room. He was horrified and reminded her that she was not well yet by a long chalk. She was on her hands and knees and she looked up at him and smiled. ‘Help me on to the sofa, Harry. And then sit and let’s see if that fire will behave itself.’

  He shrugged out of his coat and lifted her easily; she had lost a great deal of weight. When they sat down he put his arm round her and she did not move it. The fire worked its way through the paper knots and the kindling and licked around the coals and her head was still on his shoulder. He held her carefully, leaning back so that they were both resting against the cushions. The centre of a flame burned bright blue and he said quietly, ‘Frost tonight.’

  He felt her face stretch into a smile. ‘Where did you hear that old wives’ tale?’

  ‘From you. After my accident you lit a fire in my room at the rectory and you told me. Blue flame today, frost on the way.’ He held her closer and she rubbed her forehead very gently against his chest.

  ‘Ah. Harry. That must have been when the seed began to germinate.’

  He waited, then prompted her. ‘Go on.’

  She said, ‘Your love . . . gentle, undemanding. I thought it was irritating me and then when you went missing, I knew that it wasn’t. I still couldn’t admit that I loved you. I was frantic but did not connect it with anything but guilt. He was my father, that was all I saw or understood, and I had to make amends somehow.’ She sighed. ‘Often I felt cross with you, Harry. As if you ought to take a part of that guilt.’ The fire was established now and she held out her free hand to it. ‘If I told you about the frost-flame, which was something my mother told me, then . . . then I must have started to let you into my life properly. That must have been the beginning. Do you see?’ She tilted her head so that she could see his face; he nodded slightly.

  She snuggled down again, dropped her hand back into her lap and was silent for a long time. The flames seemed to be dancing; there were three of them; they leaped and then intertwined. She took another breath.

  ‘Did you understand about Margaret? I did not. Perhaps I still do not. She had to leave England because she was in love with me. In love with me. I loved her but she was in love with me.’

  His hold tightened. She whispered, ‘It’s all right now. I was terrified at first . . . but then I felt . . .’ She buried her head in his shoulder and tried to laugh.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, holding his breath, his eyes on that centre parting in her hair.

  She whispered, ‘Desirable. I felt desirable.’ She looked up, put her hand behind his head and reached with her own to kiss him.

  They held each other until the room was warm. And then they both began to talk at once. Then they laughed and inevitably, with infinite care and tenderness, they made love.

  Christmas 1963 was very different from the previous one. Eventually they decided to spend their joint Christmas at the farm and they drove over on Christmas Eve, tired after the end-of-term festivities. The girls loved their room and the umbrellas spilling over with ivy and trailing berberis. Lucy had told them that one day she and Harry would be married but they would keep the Truro house and live there until things ‘were settled’. Barbara and Denny had been overjoyed; Ellie a little less so. Her face flamed when it became obvious that Harry was sharing her mother’s bedroom. At the farm it was different; Harry had put single beds in all the rooms to accommodate his ‘over-nighters,’ as he called the Flower People. She preferred that somehow.

  For her, the dunes and the enormous seas brought something unique to the usual quiet joy of the nativity. And then something happened that changed her view of . . . everything.

  Christmas morning was a jumble of paper and string and dolls’ clothes and jigsaw puzzles. Matthew came over after the morning service and said how good it was to see them minus spots. They opened presents, ate one of Harry’s hens and listened to Ellie reading from her Charles Dickens complete works. Then they went out and walked the length of the beach and watched the spray being whipped from the top of the enormous rollers crashing along the rocks. Ellie had let her hair grow for almost a year now and she climbed on a rock and let it stream out behind her and the girls ran around screaming for no reason at all except the joy of being alive.

  ‘Someone else up there!’ Ellie shouted against the noise of the sea. ‘It looks like . . . no, it’s all right. Just another walker.’

  Lucy too had seen him and her thoughts had run with Ellie’s. As the boy drew into view, she too saw it was not Egg. Nothing like Egg. Summer-bleached hair dulled to brown, nose and fingers red with cold. It was the lilac man.

  Ellie remembered him from last year’s cathedral service. She was as excited as if they’d met in the desert. ‘D’you remember, Mum? You told me he was the lilac man!’

  She jumped off the rock and ran to him and he let himself be included in the gathering.

  ‘I remember you,’ he said to Lucy. ‘You and your friend. And the cats. You were growing all your own vegetables and I thought you must be one of us – our first converts!’

  He laughed,
suddenly coming alive. The girls jumped up and down around him and Harry insisted he must come back for tea. He shook his head; he had to get to Truro before complete darkness.

  Matthew said, ‘I’ll run you to Truro. I’m a visitor too.’

  ‘I came to your service this morning, vicar.’ The young man pumped Matthew’s hand. ‘I’d heard about your sermons and I wanted to hear one. You really are inspirational.’

  Matthew looked shocked. He had been in Cornwall for nearly four years and had felt often that he was completely out of touch with his parishioners.

  But Lucy nodded as if he really was inspirational and said, ‘We could not manage without him.’

  And they all trooped back to the farm.

  He stayed. Ellie fell in love with him. She was still weak from the chicken pox and his wiry strength seemed to strengthen her. His name was Peter but she called him Lilac and teased him constantly and he smiled and smiled at her till she thought she might faint at his feet. Lucy was anxious and Harry told her not to worry. ‘She’s just a child still,’ he insisted. She said, ‘How would you feel if it was Rosalie?’ And he had no answer to that.

  Every day Lilac walked over the dunes and around the holiday camp grounds to the rectory. Ellie went with him whether he liked it or not. And she talked to him properly, no longer a provocative schoolgirl but a serious young woman, concerned for the people around her. She was surprised when it seemed he knew all about Egg.

  ‘Harry used to speak of it all the time. He wanted to become your mother, live it for her. He was obsessed. Are you obsessed too, Ellie?’

  ‘No. We were all right. We were fine. Gus was my best friend and her mother was like a sister to my mother. But then . . . he came back. Harry. And the kids love him and I do too. Sort of. But he’s there. All the time. They’re going to get married when he gets divorced from Avis. And I suppose his two girls will live with us sometimes. I don’t know what I think about it. I need Egg again. I need Egg badly to tell me how to feel.’

  ‘Shall I try to tell you?’

  ‘Yes. Oh yes. Please, Peter – please.’

  He smiled at her use of his name. Then he said very deliberately, ‘Live each day as if it were your last, Ellie. From what I hear, that was what Egg did. He lived every moment, didn’t he? I’ve talked about him to people in the village and that’s how I see him.’

  ‘You’re right. That’s how he was. Every grain of sand was precious to Egg.’

  His face lit up. ‘I would have liked him for that alone.’ He stopped walking and looked around him. They were on top of the dune that led down to the towans. Across the bay they could see the cove and in the watery sunshine two boats with a spinner trailing behind for mackerel. Ellie looked where he looked, saw what he saw; and something more. She drew a sharp breath and then let it go. It was a random wave, small, curling, lit for an instant by the gold of the sun. She whispered, ‘I thought . . .’ And he said, ‘You probably saw what you thought you saw.’ And she looked into his blue eyes and nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I think I did.’

  He went on walking and she ran after him and said breathlessly, ‘Do you want to be a vicar, Peter?’

  He laughed. ‘Why on earth would you think that, little girl?’

  ‘Because you come to see Matthew every day. And I am fifteen now.’

  ‘And I am twenty. Would you like to join our group in the summer? Live on the beach and worship the sun? Swim naked and eat magic mushrooms and reach beyond meditation to the everlasting?’

  She hesitated. Her face was pale. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  Every bit of colour left her skin. She took a breath and blurted, ‘Because I would be with you all the time.’

  ‘And if I tell you that you are not going to do that . . . that you are going to finish school and go to university and make a career and marry me and be a vicar’s wife, what would you say to that?’

  Quite suddenly the blood rushed back via her neck until she was so hot she could hardly bear it. She looked at him and said, ‘How dare you treat me like this – as if I were Barbara – even Denny! Do you think I don’t know about you? That you don’t believe in marriage or commitment of any kind? That when people eat those mushrooms they think they can fly and every now and then they try it and they’re killed? Haven’t you got a conscience? Is that what you’re looking for at Matthew’s? Well . . . get on with it then!’

  She turned and hurled herself to the top of the dune again, then fell and rolled down the other side to the beach where her mother had gone into the sea to look for Egg. She lay there, stunned, feeling unutterably stupid. She looked back and saw he was not following her. She began to cry and could not stop.

  Eighteen

  IT TOOK ANOTHER three years before Rosemary and Greta between them could arrange the holiday in Cornwall. By then the 1960s had reached Birmingham with a vengeance, Flower People were out and hippies were in and the news – instantly accessible on the television – was rarely good. Arnold mourned the loss of Bechuanaland. ‘Yes, I know it hasn’t “disappeared”,’ he said irritably. ‘But Botswana will be totally different. Like Zambia and Malawi!’ He rolled his eyes. His mother’s family had all been in the diplomatic corps. Although decolonization was morally right and proper, he mourned the loss of those red blobs on the atlas.

  He and William worried together and quite differently about Vietnam. Maurice, strangely, about the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.

  Sometimes it seemed that nobody noticed Connie.

  In the summer of 1965 she had another miscarriage. She ‘took it well’, according to William and Rosemary. But that winter and into the following year she had a persistent cold and began to lose her schoolgirl face. Something less tangible went out of her too. It was as if she was being drained of vitality; the sturdiness in her small, capable body was going. Yet she made fancy dresses for the children’s playgroup and put on another wonderful Christmas for them all.

  Rosemary tried to rally Greta, who was starting to worry about Connie doing too much. ‘She is always smiling – haven’t you noticed? She is a fully fledged member of the society of grown-up women now, Greta. She’s got past the froth of life and this is the real stuff . . . contentment.’

  Greta was unconvinced. She and Connie had taken the children to the pantomime the week before, and May, as usual, had been proactive while Frankie watched with all his being. Greta egged May on to louder screams of delight and turned to Connie to share one of these moments. ‘Look, Connie – they’re playing just to her – they haven’t had an audience like this all week!’ Connie was smiling as usual; she turned and let her gaze sweep over Greta and May, then put her chin on Frankie’s head. That was all. Greta told herself she must not dramatize such a moment. She tried to explain how it had been to Maurice. How she had felt the sheer nothingness flow from that gaze.

  He said, ‘She didn’t enjoy it then?’

  ‘I don’t think enjoyment comes into much at the moment. But she didn’t dislike it either. She was . . . sort of . . . disconnected. In some way.’

  Greta could not do better than that. Rosemary might have understood in spite of her determination to see Connie as merely stoical. But Greta could not talk to Rosemary about her own daughter. Sometimes Rosemary still made her feel like an outsider. So she mooted the holiday plan again and wrote off to Mrs Pentwyn, who said she could not take them all but her neighbour would manage any overflow. They booked two weeks in September when the visitors would be thinning out. But in August Connie had a third miscarriage.

  She smiled at William as if it was an achievement. ‘It’s the actual anniversary of our first time together.’

  He looked at her and hated what was happening. On the pretext of inspecting their holiday digs he had gone down to the cove only the previous week and had visited Harry Membury and all the Pardoes at the farm. He learned of their peculiar domestic arrangement, which, apart from short breaks for Ellie’s activities, meant that they spent all school holidays on the f
arm, and during term time Harry was with them in Truro as often as he could manage it.

  William had kept in touch with events through John Carthew; he remembered that all those years ago Harry Membury had accompanied Josh to Pardoe Cottage to tell the women that they had lost their dearly beloved Egg; he himself had been inclined to put Lucy Pardoe on a pedestal and the way she instinctively recognized the difference between goodness and expediency yet juggled the two so expertly made him smile appreciatively. Somehow her triumphant survival seemed to vindicate some of his personal horrors. Human beings, on the whole, were worth fighting and even dying for.

  Now, down at the house in the dunes, he saw those two mismatched people caring for each other. It had taken time and a near-tragedy before it had happened, but they were there, together, evidence of true compassion.

  He told them about the holiday. ‘Late. We’re not keen on crowds.’

  Harry said, ‘Marvellous. Wish I’d known earlier. I’ll be most nights over with the family –’ William loved the way he said that ‘– but if someone could have seen to the hens, you could have had this place all to yourselves.’

  William was regretful. The farmhouse had no stinging memories for any of them, in fact it had a fairytale charm that would entrance Frankie and May. ‘We’ll see something of you, won’t we?’ He looked at Lucy as he spoke, deliberately not mentioning Connie.

  Even now, after six years, she hesitated. ‘Come to tea with us in Truro,’ she said suddenly. ‘We’ve got plenty of space. And you might meet Lilac as well.’

  ‘Lilac?’ William thought this was one of Ellie’s schoolfriends.

  ‘Ellie’s in love with him. He’s training to be a priest.’ No other explanations, typical of Lucy.

  William smiled. ‘How . . . wonderful,’ was all he said.

  And now he looked at Connie and said brusquely, ‘Did you stop taking precautions?’