The Wildflowers

by Harriet Evans

  I look back on the honeymoon all the time. We were happy. And I found myself wondering for the first time if it’s the pull of the place, whether there’s something about it, some dark magic that made us want it all the time, both of us. On the porch where we’d sit until the stars were out. In the sitting room – where the ghosts of other summers seemed to drift into and out of view as we twined around each other on the tiny yellow silk couch where we’d lounged in our childhoods, scabbed legs & sunburned arms, watching the Ashes and old Westerns, where we were now husband and wife trying to make our own family and sometimes I would find myself out of my own body, watching us and wondering if he found it as strange as I did. The only other sounds the waves and the wind & the wood pigeons calling out to each other.

  We were making a fresh start, we told ourselves this, as the honeymoon went on. I was in no doubt that we’d pack up the house & return to Bristol with our child inside me. And we’d always know they were made here, my Book. Where we first met. Where I found my family. Where you saved me, Book, and they did too . . .

  But it’s eighteen months later now. And no children have come.

  * * * *

  15 August 1990

  I always start by saying it’s been a long time since I wrote in you. Well, I’m running out of space, Book. And when I look all the way back in this book, back to the start of it all, oh, it breaks my heart. You are like my child, Book, I wrap you up safe every time to keep you away from harm. My only child.

  The lab called today.

  They gave me the test results. Annie said not to tell anyone – she could be sacked for testing a friend. I said, well, they can’t do that, we’re not friends. I tried to joke about it. It’s hard to have conversations at the Bosky, there in the hallway where anyone could be listening. I don’t think Tony would care, but Althea moves silently & Ben must know something’s up, mustn’t he?

  Book: will I tell Ben? I wish you’d decide for me. I think I know him so well but this – this waiting and not understanding, it’s very hard. For both of us, for I am used to science being able to explain what I can’t understand & he is used to action, to directing what happens next. Neither of us can make sense of it. In fact, Ben is more convinced than ever that it’s going to happen. It’s since these new pills we’re taking, some rubbish the actress on his new film got him into. You go to a Chinese herbalist in Willesden Green – she sends you away with a huge bag of strange-smelling herbs. All these women, alone, in the waiting room. Just there for hope. Because this might be the answer – who knows? I’ll look at the women and they’ll avoid my gaze, as though no one wants to admit why you’re there – you’re not working properly because you can’t make a baby.

  You pay £50 a time for this bag of herbs. You boil them up into a huge soup and drink it and it makes a baby come – whoomp. Ben’s convinced of it. Oh, Ben. Sometimes I wish you I’m doing it for him, I don’t believe in it. I should be glad he’s not shagging around like Tony, but a tiny part of me has begun to wish he’d do that instead of making me drink this vile stuff every morning.

  Sometimes when he touches me I want to scream. And when he strokes my stomach, and whispers in my ear that one day we’ll have a baby in there . . . I feel sick now about it, not excited. He’s the one who won’t have IVF, or consider sperm donors, he wants it this way, but he won’t even talk about what might be wrong. Or consider it might be him – that’s funny, isn’t it? He won’t talk about it but he wants me to do all the work on it. Just wants it to be sorted out, like a box that’s ticked. Oh Ben, I thought you were perfect, of course you’re not, are you?

  That’s why I’ve gone behind his back. Because I have to know. I can’t stand this much longer.

  It’s not too much to ask, is it, Book? To sit here on the porch with my children. To feed them proper food, macaroni cheese, soup, to sew name tags into their clothes, to read them stories. I’d do it well. I’d do it better than Althea, who spent their childhood drinking cocktails and flirting with Simon and Bertie. That’s awful, that’s not kind. Sorry, Book. Sorry sorry sorry.

  But it’s not fair.

  I have to make that family. I can’t keep living like this.

  Every month, thinking my breasts hurt more than usual and finding it’s just PMT. Every month, taking my temperature like the women’s magazines say and judging when it’s just the right moment to do it with him. Which isn’t sexy, let me tell you. Every month swearing off drink for two weeks so that people raise their eyebrows and say, casually, “No wine, Madeleine? OK then.”

  I wish there was someone I could talk to. Apart from you, Book. I hate living in London.

  We’re in Primrose Hill, because that’s where Ben wanted to live. We’ve been there two years & I don’t think I know a single person on our street. Ben is always away, first shooting the Irish film and now in LA doing that idiotic-sounding robot film. So I’m alone a lot. I’m used to it but I miss Bristol. In Bristol, we had his actor and director friends and my lab friends and I knew the city from school. I had the memory of Aunt Jules, too. I wish I could talk to her more. I don’t call her enough.

  Work is dull. I don’t want to work for Glaxo, I don’t like driving to Brentford every day and wandering round an industrial park for my lunchtime. I want to solve things, crack mysteries, understand diseases. Not make more money for rich men.

  How did it become like this? That’s what’s funny. All the dreams I had on the morning of our wedding are still true but becoming thin, sad, I hate it.

  So yes, I wish I could talk to someone. & we’re here, and it’s gorgeous to be here again but I can’t seem to relax. & you’re supposed to relax – it helps, along with the vile tea and the lying with your legs in the air and taking vitamins. (Again from some doctor in LA that Ben has been put on to by this time the screenwriter of his new stupid film. I hate LA people. I knew I would and I do.) Relaxed people make babies. That’s what they say. So be calm. Serene. Don’t do aerobics, don’t have hot baths, don’t eat this, don’t drink that – and above all, relax. I want to scream. SCREAM AT THEM, I have never been a relaxed person in my life!! I have been too busy looking out, watching, seeing what comes next and what I need to do to protect myself before the world caves in.

  I was six when I first saw Cordelia & Benedick playing on the beach the morning after I ran away. I never told them this. I sat on the steps of someone’s beach hut and watched them for what seemed like hours. They were playing Waves – we played it lots over the years. (You have to dodge the waves. That’s it.) I practised when they weren’t there. Just in case they saw me and wanted me to play with them. Just so I’d be prepared, be ready. I have always been ready. I am now. And nothing happens.

  I feel totally on my own again, isn’t it strange. Ben is so busy annotating his script and keeps having to go downstairs to fax his producer in LA. The machine whirrs and spits, slowly, beeping and threatening. Cord is supposed to be arriving tomorrow—

  Perhaps I could talk to her about all of it. I should try. If I don’t, I’ll go mad, or explode, all these things I want to say inside me, it’s worse than ever, Book. But I still have my old habit of trying to learn everything about all of them, especially her, & she finds it irritating, I know she does, when I ask her about playing Dido again or some more technical question about the score or singing with Thomas Allen or meeting the Queen. I don’t know any of these things. I’ve looked them up and saved them to roll out later as always, like a squirrel hoarding nuts for winter.

  “Don’t crawl, Mads,” she said to me once. “You’re family now, you don’t need to sneak around.” It hurt me so much, her talking like that. But I can’t help but ask. I want to know. I used to think she didn’t know how much it hurt me, when she was brusque and cutting with me. But the last couple of years I think she does. I also think she, of all of them, understands the most that I’m damaged beyond repair. Shoddy goods like the way the mum looked at me that day on the beach.

  That sounds mad!
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br />   I can’t discuss it with Althea. I adore her, but she’s like a beautiful picture on the wall, delicious to look at, lovely, rather wonderful, but increasingly not an actual person you can talk to. She’s bonkers, really, staring for hours at the mirror and lying on the porch swing practising her accent – she is in The Glass Menagerie this autumn & rehearses most of the day with Tony. Tony is scared, I know, because she’s good. He is playing Hamlet again, doing his first great role. At his age. I can’t help thinking it’s a strange thing to do but . . . He’s directing it too.

  What about talking to Tony? Oh, I love him but I can’t exactly confide in him about my problem. “Hello, Tony darling. Me? Oh, fine, thank you. I spoke to my friend Annie at Imperial College today. She’s confirmed the lining of my cervix is thin and that’s part of what’s wrong but not all. The actual problem is Ben’s sperm. (Collected in a condom, when he wanted sex and I told him I was worried I had thrush – you see, I am as cunning as ever when I want to be and Cord is right about me.) They are abnormally low, according to Annie, & the motility and morphology are also poor. In the meantime, in short, there’s no chance we’d conceive naturally. So that’s that then . . . How are rehearsals going?”

  Still, Cord arrives tomorrow. Then we’ll all be together again. Three weeks. I must convince myself of what I know, deep down: it’ll be like the old days again. She needs rest, I know she does. Althea and Tony need to learn their lines; here’s the perfect place to do it. And Ben and I could still yet make that baby. I’ve seen the pathology & I know it doesn’t look great, but a will to win can move mountains. We can still have a baby, it’ll just be harder. But it has to happen. I will make it happen.

  17 August 1990

  There has been some terrible news from the other side of the world, Book. Darling Aunt Jules is dead.

  She’s dead.

  Dead, dead. She fell in her garden, they said, and hit her head.

  A rhyme.

  She felt fine and then died suddenly the following day, in an ambulance.

  It was fast, they said. There are worse ways to go. But she was only sixty. I always thought she’d come back one day. And I’d be her family. I’d look after her. She’d help me look after my children, the way she did with me. We talked about it. It would have been nice to look after her and to have my own bit of family again. And it’s strange to think I won’t ever see her. The funeral was over there – they said the church was full and that her dog Schmitty went, wearing a black bow. He howled during the hymns – she’d taught him to sing, she’d play the piano when we spoke and he’d howl away. Oh, Aunt Jules. She was not like others, bit of a free spirit, you might say. She didn’t care what other people thought. Truly—

  She had curly hair and a gap in her teeth and pink cheeks. She was slim, and always on the go, typing furious letters, striding out of the house, plucking weeds.

  She loved Australia, and hated England. She read Oz and Private Eye and didn’t trust governments. She wrote poetry & had a beautiful garden. I’ve a photo of her in her garden – she’s in pink and turquoise and so are the flowers.

  I should have gone to see her. Shouldn’t be mouldering here worrying about every month going by, every new chance to make a baby. I should have seen her again.

  20 August 1990

  There’s one extraordinary thing in Aunt Jules’s will. I’m the sole beneficiary, not that I care about that.

  “To my dear niece Madeleine Fletcher I leave my estate. With the sole instruction that she should try less hard, care a little less, eat a little more.”

  I’ll write the rest out:

  “I direct that after my death my ashes should be scattered on the beach at Worth Bay in the Isle of Purbeck, in Dorset, by Sir Anthony Wilde (if he is willing to perform the task), in sweet memory of our summers together. Will he, please, recite that verse from The Tempest he performed so long ago one of the first nights we met. Our revels now are ended. They were revels, weren’t they? Please inform him of my wishes and excuse him should he decline to carry out the task.”

  Aunt Jules & Tony? Apparently so. I remember after our wedding, Ben said his father had hinted as much to him, but I never really paid it much attention, head full of wedding nonsense. Dear Tony. Dear Jules. I wonder what happened. I really can see them together, even though they’re so different. They have a zest for life. They had, I should say. Darling Aunt Jules, oh, how I miss you. Something dies with you. Something that can’t be brought back.

  Well, I’ll ask Tony today – & today’s the day, time to get Ben to do his duty.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Dorset, July 1943

  Down the dusty lane he dragged his trunk, through the beautiful, familiar little meadow of nodding wild flowers, the cheery yellow ragwort, orange and red poppies, and baby-blue scabious – Dinah called them pincushions, Ant didn’t know their name. He had been travelling for twenty-four hours to get home and had wondered whether he’d ever make it, but now he was here, after the months and months of longing for the place. The sky was a soaring pale periwinkle blue; swallows looped above him. From here you could not see the dragon’s teeth concrete defences that led down to the shore, only the sound of the sea below him, the wind in the grasses.

  Instead of coming in from the lane Ant hastily hauled his trunk up the porch steps, hoping to surprise her and – there she was, standing over something in the kitchen! He raised his hand to knock on the French windows, but then suddenly paused and looked back. Something wasn’t right.

  He saw now the porch was filthy, covered in bird droppings – rat droppings too, if he wasn’t mistaken – and littered with books, books splayed out obscenely on the wood, spines cracked. One even had pages torn out, and these had been blown into the four corners of the wooden railings.

  The yellow rose that smothered the side of the Bosky, that was gone too, cut off entirely so that all that remained was a brown fork at the base of the house. It made the place seem bare, open to the world.

  Dinah was singing, snatches of something, and she moved furtively, in odd, fast little movements, so unlike her usual expansiveness. She took a cylindrical-shaped piece of marble out of a wooden box and, crooning gently, wrapping it in muslin, put it into another box on the floor, and whispered something, smiling to herself. He peered intently at her, suddenly and unaccountably unable to alert her to his presence . . . Then she looked up and her expression changed, and Ant was terrified, and he didn’t know why.

  ‘No one’s been here for ages – I’ve become rather lazy,’ Dinah said, by way of explanation, as though that accounted for the dirty plates, the stale air, the shrivelled dead flowers in the glass vase on the dresser. ‘I’ve lost track of time, Ant dear – I should have prepared the fatted calf and there’s no tea.’ She laughed in a jittery way. ‘Rations are awfully slim at the moment. I did try keeping chickens again but they only lasted a few days, the foxes got ’em. I hope it was foxes, anyway.’ She looked up and around, slightly blankly, then wrapped the worn peacock kimono around herself. Moths had devoured it; huge bare patches bloomed across the pattern. ‘I’ll just put this in your room.’ She picked up the handle of his own trunk and pulled it along the parquet floor, carving a large scratch into the wood.

  ‘Aunt Dinah—! Careful,’ he said, impulsively.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The floor.’

  And she called back to him, a little sharply, ‘Don’t be a maiden aunt, dear. That’s my job. Gently she goes, into her cloth, hey ho.’

  Ant was very tired. He’d come from London where he’d gone with two schoolmates to see Blithe Spirit, a birthday treat for one of them, Campbell. In a little over twenty-four hours he’d taken six different trains with a wait of around an hour between most. On the last train they’d been held at a signal for over half an hour near Southampton. Ant had stood sandwiched between a group of raucous Land Girls, who’d tried to flirt with him in a way that made him uncomfortable as he didn’t understand many of their jokes, and a
slightly sinister-looking husband and wife, who were identical and who kept asking him where he was going and whether he’d be all right. He wasn’t confident enough yet to deal with either of them, and he was exhausted with the effort of assessing the behaviour of other humans.

  The show had been wonderful; Margaret Rutherford was awfully funny. But going back to London – seeing it in ruins, the false gaiety everywhere, the eerie calm now the bombing had stopped for the most part – had been more than strange; it had disturbed him deeply. For it was clear just how much time had passed, how everything was different. His schoolmates, Campbell who was half decent, and an idiot called Bailey, had both gone into a chemist’s and bought French letters – he had gone along with them, and bought one himself, because they’d teased him so much about not buying one, dead-arming him, laughing and ruffling his hair. This was what he hated about school – the crudeness, the cruelty. He’d never have told any of them about Julia, and he suspected from guarded, half-questioning boasts they made that not one boy in his class had any experience of girls, bar Elwood and he lived in a castle and had once forced a maid to kiss him, and that hardly counted.

  He hadn’t gone back to Camden – how would he explain it to his schoolmates? And besides, what was there but ghosts, and a neat gap in the terraced row of houses, like a tooth missing from a child’s mouth?

  ‘I might just get some water,’ he called, awkwardly, moving towards the kitchen. A fly buzzed unhappily amongst the listless curtains that hung over the window seat.

  ‘Sorry,’ Dinah said, reappearing. ‘I’ve been rather preoccupied. I wanted to make it all fine for you when you got here, dear Ant. And it’s not.’

  ‘It is,’ he said, weakly, staring round at the dingy kitchen where the thin curtains were still drawn and the mess of several days’ plates and meals adorned every surface of the kitchen. ‘Are you – is everything all right?’