‘What’s that?’ said Dave.
‘Welcome angel or something,’ said Frank, gazing at the little square panel. ‘Yep, that’s it. The old girl who lived here before was an archaeologist.’
‘What old girl?’
‘The one in the floppy hat. She’s his aunt. Lived here with Sir Anthony during the war. Dad remembered her, right crackers she was. Now . . .’ He scratched his chin, holding the panel in his hand. ‘Can’t remember her name. But I remember this from when I was a lad, remember it hanging here.’
‘Shouldn’t it be in a museum?’ said Dave. He didn’t like the way the huge eyes with their uneven pupils gazed balefully at him.
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Frank looked at it doubtfully. ‘It’s not real. Course not. I’ll give it to Lady Wilde.’ He peered into the hole again. ‘There’s something down there, under the porch.’ Squatting with difficulty, he pulled out a tin. ‘What’s this, I wonder.’
It was a metal tin, so rusted away in places that it fell open easily. Inside was a square of black plastic sheeting, and inside that – Frank tugged at the strips of tape that bound it up, and then he pulled out a thick, battered book the same shape as an exercise book, with a piece of elastic over the front making it into a folder. The Children’s Book of British Wild Flowers, it said. Someone had added an e after Wild.
‘What the hell’s all that?’ said Dave.
But Frank shook his head, after staring at it for a moment, and said repressively, ‘I don’t know, my boy. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I’ll pass it all on to Lady Wilde.’ He wrapped the angel in a handkerchief, shaking his head. ‘Sad. Makes me sad,’ Dave heard him mutter.
As Frank slid the angel and the tin into his satchel, Dave exhaled.
‘Tell you what, I don’t care who they were. I got a bad feeling, being in there.’
‘Like I say,’ said Frank, casting one last look back at the wooden house as they descended the rickety steps, ‘it wasn’t like that, once.’
II
Dorset, July 1975
The Children’s Book of British Wilde Flowers
Sunday, 9.15 p.m.
I have done something bad.
The Wildflowers left the book out on the porch last year when they went. It’s a book for children. It has pictures in it of the wild flowers you get in the countryside. And an elastic thread with a wallet inside it and another exercise book. For drawing in. Cord has drawn in it. Then you put the elastic round to keep the whole book shut.
I stole it. I am good at writing, they told me I am at school. I will write in it things that I have Noticed about the whole family. It will be useful.
There is a loose floorboard on the porch of the Bosky. I found it yesterday before they arrived. I will leave the book in a tin there at the end of summer. I will make the tin secure so that water cannot get in. I will wrap it in plastic sheeting & put the board back. I will go away & they will go away & it will be safe there, all year. Then I can write what I’ve Noticed about them next year.
They have been here a week, Althea & the 2 children. He came last night, just for a night, he is in a play. I watched them arrive and I have been watching them all week, last night I watched most of the night. I don’t have anything else to do.
My stomach hurts all the time. I tried eating grass. It’s disgusting but perhaps that’s because a dog peed on it. I will try blackberries again only they make it hurt more. But Daddy’s not back till tomorrow & I’m too scared of the ghost in the kitchen to go in there and the food is in there. I miss Aunt Jules in summer, I miss her so much it hurts my stomach even more. That’s why I like thinking about other things to not think about being on my own & the ghost making noises & being hungry.
Cordelia: new Osh Kosh dungarees, pale orange-pink stripes. She had blue stripes last year. An apple-green T-shirt, canvas T-bar shoes, same as last year. She doesn’t remember me. I want to say, I remember playing with you on the beach two years ago, don’t you? She’s very loud. They call her Cord.
Benedick: red & yellow striped towelling T-shirt, blue cotton shorts to the knee, rubber-soled plimsolls, yellow socks. Wore the shorts and socks last year. He hasn’t grown as much as Cordelia. He was carrying a book on ships. SHIPS and BOATS it said across the front. They call him Ben.
Mr Wilde (Anthony): suit, some sort of check, pale grey-green with black squares on it, very faint. Wore it last year. ‘He’s very dashing,’ Aunt Jules said to me once when she would still talk about him. ‘Oh, Ant was very dashing.’ **Use this word.** Brown shoes, a yellow shirt, red tie, a felt hat, yellow ribbon trim. Wore that last year. He has sunglasses. I don’t ever remember seeing a man in sunglasses. He left today to go back to London to the theatre, I heard him say it this morning at 11.46 a.m. He dropped them off and now has to go back to be in Tony & Cleopatra, a play.
Mrs Wilde (Althea): beautiful shirt-dress, in silk, deep royal blue, rippling & sort of black when it hits the sun. Espidrilse, or some kind of shoe like that, the soles were cork. A lovely string belt. All new. She’s very slim. I am very slim. Dad calls me String or String Bean. She had sunglasses on too.
Althea looks kind. Like a mother should be. Her hair is waved, but I think it’s like that naturally. It is beautiful & thick, red-gold coloured & swept up into a huge bun & her eyes are dark green & hooded & sparkling. Her cheeks are like apples. She’s beautiful (but she looks in the mirror too often & she shouldn’t, Daddy says it is vain). They all seem so jolly. We should all be friends together. But they don’t need anyone else as they are the Wildflowers and they are not lonely.
I don’t really remember being a four, or at least I remember Mummy a very little bit but not the baby, as it wasn’t here for long enough. So sometimes I think what it would be like to be part of a four. Or be in their family and be a five. I like the number five, even more than four. Five is a prime number.
It would be nice to all sit together when the sun goes over the cliffs & have cocoa in different coloured mugs. They have their own mugs. But I could bring my own one too if they asked me.
Mr W – white with a message on it
Mrs W – blue
B – plastic beaker, blue
Last night they had a special meal but I couldn’t quite see in to see what it was but it smelled delicious, crusted meat & onions & baking. I think a pie, or shepherd’s pie. My tummy hurt smelling it & watching them. Then they listened to some music. They have a record player on the porch & a tape cassette player in the kitchen playing songs. **Get the tape of the musical Oklahoma from the library and listen to it as it kept saying Oklahoma & I think that must be what it was.** I heard the children talking in bed. I listened outside their bedroom because it’s on the lane.
Cordelia: likes someone at school called Jane, likes Wonder Woman & ABBA.
Benedick: likes the Rolling Stones and Jennings. And ships.
Both like: the film the Jungle Book & It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.
Then it was silent & they went to sleep. I didn’t realise until I looked at my watch that it was eight-thirty. At school, we’re asleep at eight. In the holidays I do what I like. When I tell the girls at school they’re so jealous of me staying up late. I don’t tell them I really hate it or about Daddy leaving me alone.
I wonder what I could do to be part of them.
Mrs Wilde: leave her a present, some flowers perhaps. Last year she smelled some honeysuckle outside our house & told me it was lovely. **Nothing to do as honeysuckle is already there.**
Mr Wilde: ask him a question about Shakespeare because he is an actor. He has been in Macbeth this year.
Cordelia: show my Sindy that I got from Aunt Jules. She has a tennis skirt on and sneakers and a woollen cardigan with blue and red stripes on the cuffs and the edges. The Sindy I mean.
All of a sudden I think something important as I watch them eating and the smell of good food & Althea stroking her son’s head like she loves him. I am determined to go inside the house this summer. This summer
will be a great summer. It will be the summer I become one of their family. Aunt Jules will be amazed when I tell her. Aunt Jules has come back from Astraylia to look after me. The summers here are my time with Daddy but I hate it because he leaves me on my own and hits me, it hurts & he is so nasty when he is cross. So if I can be friends with the Wildes I won’t have to see him. I will tape this book over at the end of summer so no one reads if they find it.
These are all very well organised plans. But I do get very tired of being me sometimes & I’m glad to write it all down. I am tired now.
III
Perhaps the reckoning with her past would always have happened but when it came, it seemed quite out of the blue and it was only afterwards Cordelia Wilde realised how strange it should be that she had been singing the Messiah when the phone call came. She had sung it on the night of her father’s death and it always reminded her of him. He had loved it as much as she did and for a long period afterwards it broke her to hear the first aria and its gentle, hesitant opening chords. Comfort ye, my people.
The final notes were over; the church doors had been flung open, allowing the faintest breeze of the suburban summer’s night to ruffle the back of the aisle; the last audience member, arthritic and lame, had shuffled from his seat towards the exit, still blocked by elderly people dressed in cheesecloth, blowsy florals or pale linens: the summer dress code of the English middle class. While the choir retreated to the side chapel, changing and chatting, Cord busied herself with some new binding tape on her tattered score, ignoring their accusatory glances, delaying the moment when she would have to return to the vestry, take off her concert clothes, become her usual self again. She didn’t want to leave, to walk through the quiet streets bathed in the light from the huge August moon, a silver-and-gold ball in the ink-blue sky. To smell the end of summer in the air. She hated this time of year.
The conductor, a thin young man named William, approached. Cord smiled up at him, gesturing to the sticking tape and the score.
He watched her for a moment and then said awkwardly:
‘Ah – thank you, Cordelia.’ Pity, or embarrassment, coloured the words; he was nervous, she knew, for it was clear to him now exactly why he’d been able to book the once-famous Cordelia Wilde for his small suburban choir’s concert. She knew all this: it was always the same these days, after a performance. ‘It – it was a lovely evening.’
Cord tore off the last piece of tape from the spine of the score. ‘Oh, thanks to you too, William. Well, it’s the Messiah, isn’t it? Can’t go wrong with the Messiah.’
‘Um. Absolutely.’
‘My father used to pretend to be the trumpet,’ she said suddenly. ‘You know, in “The Trumpet Shall Sound”.’ She mimed playing, as he stared blankly. ‘I’d sing, you see, and he’d be the trumpet.’
Every Christmas, together on the sofa in the sitting room at River Walk where the light from the Thames flickered on the yellow walls. The crackle of the fire, the damp, sweet smell of chestnuts. Daddy made an excellent trumpet substitute: he could do most things, mend a kite, put a plaster on a bloody knee, run up a wall and flip back over . . . ‘Rejoice, you men of Angers . . .!’
Her mind was drifting – it did that a lot lately.
William smiled politely. ‘Several choir members are opera buffs and remember your Countess in Figaro, you know. It’s a real thrill to have you here.’
‘That’s very kind,’ she said politely.
‘I wish I’d seen it . . .’ He stopped. ‘It’s such a long time ago you must be awfully bored of people asking you about it.’ Behind his spectacles his eyes bulged. ‘I mean . . .’
Cord laughed. ‘You mean I’m old and washed up and some of your members remember me before my voice was ruined.’
William looked absolutely horrified.
‘No! No, Cor-Cordelia.’ He stumbled over the words, his face flushing a vibrant plum colour. ‘I assure you, I didn’t.’
‘I’m only joking,’ she broke in gently because though that was, of course, what he meant she knew it was the only way to get past moments like these, the intense, sharp pain she felt in her chest when she allowed herself to recall, even if just for a second, how it had been to open her mouth and have this godlike, glorious sound pour forth. Once, long ago, another age.
‘I did enjoy singing with you all. You’re a lovely choir.’ There was a tiny, strained pause. ‘Now, sorry to mention it but the filthy lucre. Do I send in the invoice, or—’
He coughed. ‘No, no, we have your details, the secretary will pay you as soon as the box-office takings have been processed.’
‘Of course. Wonderful!’ She heard the censure in his tone, but these days she had no shame: you had to chase small choirs like this for the money. She’d had one booking recently where they had tried to get out of paying altogether. The choir’s chairman had even left her a snooty voicemail saying she shouldn’t have accepted the gig knowing the state of her voice now: Cord had called in the Musicians’ Union and they’d paid up, albeit ungraciously. But she was long past the point where she could wait for payment; the triumph of Countess Almaviva had been twenty-six years ago and the most she could hope for nowadays, in addition to her teaching, was a concert every few weeks, enough to keep her in bills and food. Even then it was tight.
‘Well, thank you again,’ said William, his high colour fading. He gave her a tiny, rather pompous bow. ‘Forgive me – I must go and join the others. We’re having a little party—’
‘Oh, lovely,’ said Cord, smiling at him.
‘Oh – oh, gosh. I’m awfully sorry, the numbers are rather tight in the pub. I fear—’
Cord patted his arm, torn between horror and wanting to laugh. ‘I wasn’t inviting myself along. Honestly.’
How quickly it becomes farce, she thought and she shivered, and tried to focus on shaking William’s hand, nodding as he backed away in almost comical relief.
Back in her dressing room – in reality a tiny curtained area behind the vestry where the vicar robed – Cord quickly changed out of her heavy velvet dress into linen trousers and a loose top, trying to buoy herself up, still shivering slightly in the chill of the old building though the night was warm. She knew churches like this all too well, their dreadful heating systems, the odd lavatory placements, their officious churchwardens and worst of all the harsh, unforgiving acoustics that seemed to taunt her, magnifying the flaws in that once-flawless voice.
Brushing her hair, Cord stared frankly into the spotted old mirror. For some reason she felt particularly blue this evening, more than her usual post-performance comedown. She was tired, sick of that London August dry, dead feeling: she knew why, of course, it was the same every year.
‘You silly girl,’ she said aloud.
It was also most likely performing the Messiah. Cord knew herself: singing was like a drug, it affected her, it pumped adrenaline and oxygen through her body so that sometimes she could almost capture that feeling, the feeling of triumph, of immersion in one’s art, the swell of exhilaration that made you feel you ruled the world—
Her phone rang and she jumped; it never rang. She fumbled clumsily for it in the bottom of her rucksack.
‘Hello?’
At first she couldn’t tell if someone was speaking or not, the background noise – like a wind tunnel – was so loud.
‘Hello? Anyone there?’ Cord was about to end the call and then she heard the voice.
‘. . . Cordy?’
She felt herself stiffen. No one called her Cordy. Not any more. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Cordy? Can you hear me now? I’m moving away from the beach huts.’
She said again, woodenly, ‘Who is this, please?’
‘It’s me,’ said the voice, clearer with every second, and Cord felt anxiety and fear envelop her, a blush of red that began on her breast bone, flooding her skin, burning her up. ‘It’s Ben, Cordy.’
‘Who?’
‘Your brother. Benedick.’ He was shouting.
‘Gosh, the reception’s terrible here. I couldn’t call you at all inside the house—’ More rapid footsteps. ‘I’m walking towards the lane. Can you hear me now?’
‘Yes.’ Her heart seemed to be in her throat. ‘Aren’t – aren’t you in LA?’
‘I’m back in England for a while. I’ve been trying you all day.’
‘I haven’t checked my phone. I had a concert. We rehearsed most of the afternoon.’
‘Really?’ The surprise in his voice needled her. ‘Hey, that’s great.’
Gazing at the reflection of her face in the clouded mirror, Cord watched the scarlet flush begin to creep up and over her jawline, saw the naked terror in her eyes and was astonished at how even now, years afterwards, it was like this. ‘What do you want, Ben?’ she said, struggling to stay calm. ‘I have to get changed.’
‘Oh, I see – oh, right.’ Unlike her, Ben had not inherited his parents’ ability to dissemble. ‘Well – the thing is . . . it’s Mumma. She’s not well. I wanted to let you know—’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘I’m so sorry, Cordy. She’s – she’s dying.’
‘She’s been dying for years, Ben.’
‘Not like that.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Oh, Cordy. She’s only got a few months at the most. It’s a brain tumour. A butterfly glioma, it’s called. So pretty-sounding, isn’t it? But it’s Stage Four.’ His voice was faint. ‘They’ve told us it’s inoperable.’
There was silence, waves and static crackling over the line. Cord swallowed.
‘I didn’t – I didn’t know.’
‘Obviously.’
‘What about chemo?’
‘Lauren and I asked her that today. She doesn’t want it. They’ve said it’d buy her some time, but only a few months, and the treatment is really rough.’
The Wildflowers Page 2