The Wildflowers

by Harriet Evans

  ‘Oh, sweetheart. How old were you?’

  ‘Seven. Maybe six.’ She had considered the question seriously, staring up at the kitchen window. ‘It was her face. I realised no one would help me. Then I found you lot . . . I found you . . . And Aunt Jules came back.’ He had held her tight, but she pulled away from him. ‘I’ve been very lucky, really.’ That was always what she’d say. ‘I’m so lucky.’ And he didn’t believe her, not for a minute.

  Ben’s first job, working as a lowly second assistant director on a British comedy, which Simon had got for him, had gone well and he’d stayed in touch with the director. He was writing scripts in his spare time, and going in for meetings with whoever would have him for, even though he was young, he knew he wanted to direct. Big, splashy Jaws-style films, small, intense art-house films – anything and everything. Always had done. Through the director of the comedy film Ben was recommended for a gig as assistant director on a very successful soap made by BBC Wales. Everyone said this would be the best kind of experience, but it meant he had to relocate to Cardiff for three months; they pushed the wedding back a year. He found being able to concentrate on his job and on the screenplay he was writing an enormous relief, and Mads, who had just started working as a design engineer at the Rolls-Royce factory in Filton, confessed on one of his weekends back home in Bristol that she did, too. ‘I wish it was over already,’ she’d said, clutching his hand as they sat on the pavement of a crowded Clifton pub drinking strong cider, the very pub outside which they’d had their first conversation after all those years. ‘Already married, snug as bugs in our little flat, nothing else to worry about other than being together.’

  Despite that she had wanted a large wedding, a party. That was what you did, of course, these days, though Althea kept pointing out that in her day weddings weren’t the five-ringed circuses they’d become today. ‘I was married in a dove-grey bouclé suit at Chelsea registry office with no bridesmaids. I wore the suit for years after and there were fifteen guests and we had lunch afterwards at the Arts Club and then we all went home,’ she was fond of saying to absolutely anyone who’d listen whenever the subject of the wedding came up. And to Ben, she’d add: ‘Mads wants a huge wedding because she thinks it’s what you ought to do, not because that’s what she wants.’

  Ben agreed, but he thought it was more than that. Mads wanted what Cord had called a ‘Look, I’m Officially Part of This Family Now’ party and though his sister had said it in a rather cutting way, there was truth to what she said. So the bridesmaids were four old friends of Mads’s from school whom he’d never met and Mads scarcely saw, who were to be decked out in huge coral taffeta affairs with crowns of baby’s-breath; the church was vast, enough to hold Mumma and Daddy’s theatre friends, and just right for Cord’s voice for while she had point-blank refused to be a bridesmaid, she’d reluctantly agreed to sing.

  ‘I don’t want people looking at me, when it’s your day,’ she’d said.

  ‘I do,’ said Mads. ‘The more people looking at you the less they’re looking at me, and you don’t mind it, and I absolutely hate it.’

  The reception was at Marble Hill House, a few hundred metres from River Walk, and they would come back to his parents’ house afterwards for more drinks and music, and a lunch for family and close friends the next day – Ben made a note to check that the chaps from Oddbins had put the champagne in the vault, where it would remain cool.

  That set him to wondering whether, if they hadn’t, there would be enough time to chill it later, and eventually the director in him realised it might be best if he got up and did it himself. He knew he wouldn’t sleep any longer. Ben pulled on his Levi’s and a T-shirt and padded silently downstairs, past the cavernous drawing room, scene of so many Wilde parties but now still, grey-yellow in the morning light. In the hall he put on his old wellington boots, gazing up the stairs at the huge window that ran up the back of the house. The first time Madeleine had come back to River Walk, only a few months ago because they really weren’t in London that often, she’d been rather overwhelmed.

  ‘I stayed here once, the night before I went off on a French exchange. I remembered you lived in a massive house,’ she said, squeezing his arm as he guided her over the porch and into the kitchen. ‘But, God, it’s actually rather terrifying, isn’t it?’

  To Ben it was just home, where he’d spent most of his life. He neither loathed it the way he loathed walking through the gates of his school, where the legend Huc Venite Pueri Ut Viri Sitis (they come here as boys, but leave as men) in huge letters greeted every boy as he arrived; nor did he adore it and dream of it the way he did with the Bosky, the way they all did, wishing away the dull and grey months of winter, praying for summer to come so they might be there once again . . . River Walk was where his Lego was stored and his school books stacked neatly into the bookcase in his room; it was where he had slept the most nights in his life, but after he’d left home and gone to Bristol University he’d barely thought of the place, much less come back. It was just easier to stay away.

  The champagne was perfectly safe in the chilly, damp vault under the garden at the rear of the house.

  Not quite sure what to do with himself now he was up, Ben walked through the long, dew-sprinkled garden and let himself on to the lane which led down to the river. It was very quiet and, when he reached the Thames, utterly still. It seemed as though the weeping willow at the bank was being sucked into the water, inky black and hardly moving. Across the river, the side of Ham House glowed a fierce flaming red in the rising sun’s glare. A moorhen moved silently through the water. He could hear a dog barking, far away. Ben sank his hands into the pockets of his jacket and gave a deep sigh, which juddered as he exhaled.

  He was twenty-three, and he would be married today, and after that everything would be different. To many of his friends it was a ridiculous age to be settling down. Several of them were still studying. A couple of them had never been to a wedding at all and were incredulous.

  ‘Why do you need to get married?’ his old school friend – his one friend from school in fact – Bingham, had asked him, only the night before. They’d gone for a drink at the White Swan on the banks of the river. Bingham was heavily into metal, he’d even been to Berlin to watch Motörhead and had a tattoo of the Ace of Spades of which he was inordinately proud. By day George Bingham was a trainee solicitor. He had a girlfriend called Louise, also a Home Counties girl, who was now a punk, with an actual safety pin through her ear – Ben had met her, and she’d taken it out for him, described in minute detail the process of piercing her own ear. She was training to be a nurse, so she’d known what she was doing, she explained. It seemed so normal to them, to be living that life, where you worked and then you played in the evenings and didn’t care much about other stuff.

  ‘Why?’ Ben had answered. ‘Because – I love her, and she loves me, and we want to start our lives together. You know, when you can see the horizon—’

  This was how Mads had explained it to him.

  ‘You’re the horizon. There’s a big empty space in the sky and you’re what I’ve been walking towards my whole life,’ she’d told him one freezing winter’s night in her little bedroom in Bristol, not long after they’d got together.

  Most of Ben’s friends who’d studied Drama and Film with him lived in squats off the Gloucester Road and went on marches and had Nelson Mandela posters up on their walls, and watched Spitting Image whilst recovering from hangovers on Sunday evenings: it was just what you did. But Mads had a huge South African flag draped out of the window in her tiny flat that she shared with another Engineering student, and a calendar marking the days Mr Mandela had been imprisoned. She wrote letters to the South African embassy every month and to the Chinese about political prisoners, and to the Turks about the Kurds – she wrote a lot of letters. She felt things deeply, he’d always known that about her. Since she was a child.

  Ben sat on the curving branch of the willow, shivering in the chill, and w
atching the light change on the river.

  He felt strange, not quite right. He wished he could talk properly to Cord. But she was never there. Since her triumph in The Marriage of Figaro she had worked non-stop. When Ben looked back on it, it made complete sense: Cord was born to be a star, a diva on her own terms.

  And she used her fame, and her busyness, as a shield to keep them all away. She was quieter, the jaw less firmly set, and her dimmed blue-grey eyes had a weary tinge; her lovely, curving mouth drooped now.

  He and Hamish had gone together to the Albert Hall, after she’d telephoned him that day to explain about the previous night.

  ‘I’m so sorry. I couldn’t say a thing. Not in that restaurant either – I was sure there was a critic behind us. But I’m going on, Ben, I’m going on. Isotta wouldn’t leave her hotel room. Said it was too cold in London and they hadn’t provided a driver for her and she couldn’t risk getting a black cab.’

  Mads was too nervous on Cord’s behalf to go, and Mumma and Daddy wouldn’t Prom, and couldn’t get hold of a ticket, so contented themselves with organising a party-cum-reception back at River Walk. So Ben and Hamish had stood with the other Prommers jammed in towards the back of the oval arena. Ben was glad he was with Hamish. He liked him.

  The Countess doesn’t appear in the first act. She opens the second with one of the most beloved and difficult arias in opera, ‘Porgi, amor’. Ben and Hamish, pushing their way towards the front as the music began again, to the utter disapproval of their fellow concertgoers, had stopped as Cord began to sing, standing stock-still.

  There she was, in a long, bullet-grey dress of raw silk, her dark black-brown hair swept in waves away from her heart-shaped face, her serious eyes so grave the blue in them was almost gone. When she sang it was extraordinary: everything seemed to be right with the world, and yet the sound was so sad.

  ‘Restore to me my loved one – or in mercy let me die.’

  The surtitles that appeared above the stage as she sang pierced his heart, the slight catch in her voice, the bowed head, the clasped hands . . . she was Cord, yet something else, and her voice was pure, old, everything beautiful.

  In that moment Ben loved her completely, but knew that she had left him, that she was different now. He could never explain it out loud – a higher plane seemed so pretentious. But she was special, to be set apart, because of the gift of her voice, and he understood that. He, Ben, was nothing special, a clever chap, with ideas and drive, he knew that. But he was Mads’s and she was his, first and foremost.

  What it also gave him, starting that triumphant yet melancholy night, was an understanding of his father, too. He saw, in a way his sister could not yet, that Tony was touched by some genius that he, Ben, didn’t have, that Althea, talented as she was, also didn’t have. That it tortured him, defined him in some way. And from then on he tried to forgive him for things, to love him. He tried.

  The following day the Evening Standard alone had had three separate mentions of Cordelia Wilde, daughter of Sir Anthony Wilde, and the ravishing performance she gave having stepped into the shoes of the now miraculously recovered Isotta Cianfanelli. They said she was the next Kiri Te Kanawa. The Times critic said she was the most richly enchanting and heartbreaking Contessa he could remember, the perfect blend of acting and singing combined.

  I have no idea how she is able to reach out and so profoundly clutch at my heart when I am seated more than thirty yards away and in the deadening goldfish-bowl acoustics of the Albert Hall. But she does, and it is wholly moving, and electrifying. Yes, I do not know how she does it.

  But Ben, hardly breathing, squashed in on either side there in the audience next to a totally still Hamish, had known the answer. He understood then that it was her, that it was simply Cord being herself up there, singing for the love she desperately wanted but was unable, for whatever reason, to take.

  He and Hamish had walked together to the tube station, in silence, and at the entrance Hamish had shaken his hand.

  ‘I’ve an audition tomorrow so I’m not coming back to your parents’. I’ve phoned them,’ he said. He clapped Ben on the shoulder; he was tall and strong, and it made Ben wince. ‘Goodbye, Ben. Give her my love.’

  ‘Give it to her yourself,’ said Ben, trying to sound light.

  ‘No, no,’ said Hamish. His jaw was set. ‘It’s not our time. That’s it, really.’ He took out his wallet, fiddling with something in it, not meeting Ben’s eye. ‘I’ve told myself she might have loved me, in another life, if she hadn’t had her singing. And I wouldn’t want her to be without it, would you?’

  Ben shook his head, not sure if he agreed or not.

  ‘Oh, Ben. Good luck to you, laddie, and your lovely Madeleine. I hope you’ll be happy. Look after her.’

  And he’d walked away, past the V&A, his tall frame setting him apart from the other pedestrians crowding the streets. Some of them gave him admiring looks, and he was oblivious; it was one of his nicest qualities, that he was so unaware of his own presence.

  That audition was for Afternoon of the Raj, the TV series that would, when it was released the following year, make his name. It took him away from England to India for seven months’ filming and was where he met his wife, Sunita, whom he married a year later in Bombay. Ben had heard from him, a battered postcard sent a couple of weeks ago wishing him luck for his own wedding and telling him of the marriage, of their impending parenthood. No mention of Cord. It was as though he had put as much distance between them all as possible. As though he’d known he had to get away from them while he could . . .

  Ben shook himself. No point thinking about that on a day like today. He stood up, swinging his arms around him, smiling at the thought of Mads, still sleeping soundly, with any luck. He hoped she wouldn’t have lain awake, worrying about things. Biting those thin, furious fingers, those fingers that never ceased activity, whether pulling at hair, touching anything that caught her eye, making him groan in ecstasy. He had seen her in the lab at Bristol once, utterly still, like a dancer, lowering a filament of metal into a test tube, other hand steadily holding the tube. The rest of the time, she was intense, impatient, nervous, and when she did sleep, it was like a child, curled up, feet tangled in her nightdress, hair wrapped around her, face utterly peaceful for once. She was his future. Him and her.

  ‘Ben?’ A voice behind him, far enough away that at first he thought he was hearing things, and then again, ‘Ben, darling boy, that’s you, isn’t it?’

  Ben jumped, guiltily, as though he’d been caught misbehaving. ‘Dad?’

  Through the dripping fronds of the willow he could see his father, standing at the end of the lane by the towpath, peering at him. He was in his old gumboots, as he always called them, and the faded blue smock he wore around the house, covered up with an ancient mac that hung by the back door. ‘What on earth are you doing up at this hour?’

  Ben stood up. ‘Oh, I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ His father took a cigarette from the smock. ‘Want one of these?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Swig of this?’ Tony waved a hipflask, produced from the other pocket of his smock. An old bloke bicycled past them, staring at Tony; Ben flushed. His father did look rather eccentric.

  ‘It’s six in the morning.’

  ‘Is that a yes or a no?’

  ‘No, thanks, Dad.’

  ‘Oh. Mind if I do?’

  Ben shrugged, in a neutral fashion. By mutual unspoken assent they began to walk south, the rising sun covering them with golden light.

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Nervous. Bit nauseous, actually.’

  ‘Yes, I remember it well.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Absolutely. Your mother had an ear infection on the day itself. I took her to the doctor. And I was glad, really, though I felt sorry for her of course. But I’d been sitting there in my tiny bedsit feeling sicker and sicker and when she telephoned to say I had to take her to the surgery
in Hammersmith it’s no exaggeration that I was halfway to running away.’

  ‘No.’ Ben looked at his father. ‘You didn’t mind that it might be bad luck?’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘To see her on the wedding day.’

  ‘Oh, that. Well, we’re so superstitious already, we actors. I think that one sort of passed us both by.’

  ‘I never knew that,’ said Ben, wondering. ‘About the trip to the doctor’s.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘No.’ I know nothing about either of you really, Dad, he wanted to say. ‘Didn’t she have family, someone else who could take her?’

  ‘Listen, weddings weren’t the productions they are now, cohorts of bridesmaids, cakes with twenty tiers, eight-piece bands and the like. It was small. We wanted it that way, both of us. Nice lunch afterwards, at the Chelsea Arts Club. Bertie made a speech . . . Her family retired at about five. We pootled off in the car to the Bosky that evening.’ Tony’s head sank on to his chest, his lips pursed, and he looked upwards. ‘I do remember it. So well. Wonder if she does.’

  Ben said, suddenly, ‘What about your family?’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘I mean, who was there from your family?’

  ‘Oh, Simon, and of course Bertie, Guy and Olivia, and dear old Kenneth –’

  ‘But your family. Didn’t you have anyone there of your own?’

  There was a short pause. ‘Nope. My parents were dead. And Aunt Dinah – well, she wasn’t there.’