Legends of the Lost Lilies

by Jackie French

  ‘Annie’s probably in there cutting a few more roses for the church. Yes, there she is. Pull the curtains before she sees you, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Hoppy’s doing well, anyway,’ said Daniel. ‘I didn’t know how mobile he’d be after a broken tail.’ He peered about the bedroom floor again. ‘Did you see where I put my tie?’

  Sophie grinned. ‘It’s on the chair, under your trousers.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Daniel glanced back at her. ‘Isn’t it time you dressed?’

  Sophie pulled up the sheet, scented with lavender from the bushes that grew around the clothesline as well as the sachets in the linen cupboard, and stretched luxuriously. ‘The grandmother of the groom has no duties, except to get to the church on time.’

  Her hair had been freshly permed and coloured the day before. Her dress hung waiting for her in her dressing room, a soft gold silk shift that would float about her still extremely good legs, and that had no buttons or even a zip, both of which were possible with only eight fingers, but a nuisance. Make-up would take two minutes. Make-up should enhance one’s beauty, not disguise one’s age, Miss Lily had said.

  She glanced out the gap between the curtains, where spring’s gum tips tried to taste the blueness of the sky, suddenly wistful. ‘I wish Midge had lived to see this.’ Today Midge’s daughter Jennifer, an unexpected post-war blessing, would marry the young man whose parents had met in the days of his family’s greatest desperation.

  ‘Midge knew,’ said Daniel confidently. ‘Jelly was always going to marry the girl next door.’

  Just as a boy who been taught to fly in his teens by Sophie’s old — in both senses — friends Miss Morrison and Mrs Henderson, had inevitably become Aeroplane Jelly at school. The nickname had stuck, though in Debrett’s he was still the Honourable Nigel Vaile, as he’d been known during the year he’d spent back in England, living in the cottage that had once housed Bob Green, working on the farm managed by Joe Hereward that was all that was left of the Shillings estate, the greenhouses put to growing out-of-season lettuce for sale, sheep wandering the garden and orchards and between the crumbled walls, their mellow stones still beautiful.

  That year had convinced Jelly not just that his roots ran deep in the Thuringa soil, but that he was more an artist than a farmer. Jelly now painted the landscapes that bush pilots and eagles saw. But Jennifer was the daughter of two farmers and sister of another, and a farmer herself. She and Danny were already managing Thuringa together. She had also carved out her own niche as founder of the new Old Baldie Winery, already with a first prize in ‘Syrah/Shiraz’ at the Paris Wine Exhibition, with its distinctive ‘bald’ labels of hairless men, women, dogs and startled sheep, created by Jelly, his sole contribution to the vineyard that had been planted on the steeper rocky slopes of the Harrison estate.

  Sophie had made her last visit to England while Jelly was working there, walking under the apple blossom as white petals sifted about her cheeks. She’d made a cherry cake for Jelly that morning — Mrs Goodenough’s recipe — but not brought a slice to eat in the orchard. Memory was enough.

  The first time she had seen Lily. The last time she’d kissed Nigel. There were so many last times as one grew older. That visit would be the last time with her friends in England, for she would not make the journey again.

  The last tea with Emily Sevenoaks MP, MBE, just the two of them, toasting crumpets by the fire and spreading them with butter and Shillings honey in memory of their days with Miss Lily. Emily was chair of the parliamentary Security Committee. ‘The committees are where true power lies, darling.’

  The last cup of cocoa with Ethel, CEO of Carryman’s Cocoa, patron of a network of women’s refuges, the School Breakfast Programme, the Women’s Health Network and a Dame of the British Empire for her ‘services in feeding England’. James’s family might refuse knighthoods, but as Dame Ethel had pointed out, she was still a Carryman, and after all the word ‘dame’ still had a pantomime quality, so he may as well enjoy the joke.

  She and Sophie had shared a vast old-fashioned Sunday lunch of roast lamb and apple pie and cheese with George and his wife Linda and their children. Sophie’s namesake had not been there. Sophie Carryman-Lorrimer had been a most glamorous debutante — that custom had still not quite died away — but was now working with a voluntary agency in Africa. James was also absent, called away unexpectedly to a meeting at Whitehall that morning. The post-war world had new enemies, and James Lorrimer would never consider the word ‘retire’.

  ‘He sends his apologies,’ said Ethel. ‘Or he would have if he’d had time.’ She smiled. ‘We’re there for each other if needed. It’s worked well, in its way.’

  The last time she had looked across the wind-tossed wave caps of the English Channel . . .

  ‘Sophie.’ Hannelore barely knocked as she entered. ‘I knew it. Not dressed yet! Daniel, put your trousers on.’

  ‘Teutonic efficiency,’ complained Daniel. But he fastened his trousers, then waited while Hannelore arranged his bow tie.

  ‘You wish for a housekeeper who is not efficient? There. You may put your coat on.’

  ‘Did you know there is a kangaroo in the rose garden?’

  ‘Where?’ Hannelore pulled the curtains back again. ‘Ah, Hoppy is doing most well, isn’t he?’

  ‘Mum?’ Danny, Earl of Shillings, wandered in, tie in hand. ‘Oh, Hanne. Can you make this wretched tie sit straight? Annie’s taking more flowers over to the church. Judith is in the kitchen making a cuppa,’ he added. ‘And Mrs MacDonald is still trying to get into her step-ins.’

  Hannelore shook her head. ‘It is not good for the body to be confined.’ She wore a long blue taffeta dress, loosely belted, a gift from Sophie made by a new designer Rose had found in Sydney, Carla Zampatti. ‘Come, we will be late! Hoppy, time to go back to your enclosure!’ She floated out.

  ‘Like bloody Central Station,’ muttered Daniel, sitting to put on his shoes. Outside in the marquee the caterers unfurled white damask tablecloths for the reception and the Bald Hill florist hung garlands of everlastings along the verandah. She’d had half-a-dozen helpers scouring the hills for enough all week.

  Sophie cried, just a little, as they took their seats in the front pew. Midge’s absence was a sword cut today and yet of course her old friend was here, as long as love and memory lasted, and so was Lily.

  She touched the tiny lily engraved on the ring Daniel had given her, a few months after she had shown him Lily’s letter on one of the long quiet shared walks through the bush, which had helped to ease her nightmares, just as they had once soothed his. Since then she had always worn the thin gold band under her wedding ring.

  This was the best time of the year, after the frost whiskers on the barbed wire fences, and before the first horde of bushflies. The church was full already. Jelly was president of the Bald Hill Life Drawing Society, founder of the Bald Hill Arts Society, secretary of the Thuringa Bushfire Brigade, and part of the collective painting a mural on the changing rooms of the new swimming pool. Admittedly those organisations shared at least half their members, but it still made quite a crowd.

  Jennifer was the treasurer of the Progress Association, as well as vice-president of the board of the Bald Hill Hospital that had replaced Daniel’s clinic. It had taken nearly a decade for Jelly’s mother to come back to Bald Hill permanently to take up a job at the hospital, while neighbours tactfully asked Danny, ‘How are you and Annie going?’ as they saw him at the cattle sales holding his niece’s hand while cradling his own baby in his other arm, with no full-time mother for either in attendance. Thankfully after Annie began diagnosing the district’s haemorrhoids, broken legs and had delivered Mrs Murphy’s triplets, no one needed to ask again.

  Sophie nudged her husband firmly — he was asking Annie far too loudly about the results of Mr Taylor’s colonoscopy. Daniel refused to admit he was going deaf. Sophie had to signal him a dozen times a week when he made some comment about a neighbour in full hearing of ev
eryone in the Moon Dog café.

  Rose and Paul came in with Lily-Anne and Meg, and now it was Sophie on the receiving end of Daniel’s lifted eyebrow. No, she, Rose and Lily-Anne would not discuss business in church, how could he possibly think she would? Though she might have a word with Lily-Anne at the reception about the new ‘boil in the can’ self-saucing chocolate puddings, made with only the best Carryman’s Cocoa. Corned beef was possibly the smallest department of Higgs Industries now. Sophie did not miss it.

  Hannelore sat behind them with Judith. She looked even more beautiful with white hair than blonde, but Judith kept hers dyed defiantly dark. Her dress was her favourite Dior, rows of stiffened silver satin with a collar like a silver cape. Higgs’s Senior Industrial Chemist’s one extravagance was clothes.

  The music began. There had been . . . earnest discussion . . . about the wedding march. The groom had won finally over the wishes of his mother, grandmother and Aunt Hannelore, who hoped for something traditional. The bride’s father, Harry, had not joined the argument, on the grounds that he wouldn’t be able to hear it anyway. The bride had simply laughed, and declared that she was leaving all the wedding planning to her fiancé, because he liked that sort of thing, and anyway she was busy with the cattle sale. The Bald Hill organist now made dutiful strides with the version of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, not because Jelly or Jennifer had even read Nietzsche’s work of the same name, but because they believed that each marriage was its own strange odyssey. Sophie agreed.

  And there was Jelly, in a floral shirt, white tie and green bell-bottomed trousers, his hair pulled back in a long pony-tail, with Jennifer’s nephew Lachie as his best man.

  The crowd craned their necks to look back as the bride appeared in a long high-waisted dress made of patches of antique silk in shades of white and cream and parchment that the groom had designed himself and the Bald Hill dressmaker had made, crowned with roses, her two bridesmaids in green lace miniskirts that matched Jelly’s trousers. Harry looked wonderful in his dinner jacket next to his daughter — he and Danny and Daniel had agreed that no matter what Jelly’s psychedelic Dress: optional invitation said, weddings demanded a dinner jacket. A final guest slipped into the church behind the bride and her father, quickly genuflecting before she took her seat, dressed in a plain skirt and blouse, her age impossible to guess. She looked familiar, yet Sophie could not place her. A lecturer from Jennifer’s days at agricultural college?

  Sophie cried during the ceremony, with a small sob when Jelly smiled at his bride with Lily’s smile as he said ‘I do’, but that was happiness as well, remembering her wedding to Daniel at the Shillings Church, her marriage to Nigel there. Our grandson is getting married, she thought to Lily, to Daniel, holding tight to Daniel’s hand. He passed her his handkerchief.

  She cried just a little again into her oysters Rockefeller, their shells sitting on a bed of sea-blue jelly; her Coronation Chicken; her potato salad, avocado salad, jellied pineapple salad; and Bombe Alaska served on raspberry jelly and adorned with flaming eggshells at the reception — all easy to eat neatly for a grandmother whose left hand could not quite manage a steak knife, as well as being the bride’s and groom’s favourite dishes, to go with the three-tier wedding cake with pale green icing, adorned with roses that matched the bride’s bouquet, made and decorated by the bride’s gran. (Lily would have smiled at the menu as far too rich, then said softly that any meal designed with love should be enjoyed.)

  More jellies were passed around to the guests as the evening progressed. Each of Jelly’s mates, it seemed, had brought a jelly tonight, obviously a group joke: green jelly with small plastic cows in it, a whisky jelly, which would have sent any true Scotsman into a frenzy, an Old Baldie Moselle jelly, and undoubtedly more to come. The long table of family faced so many friends and neighbours, Higgs stalwarts, a small bevy of retired psychiatrists discussing golf and the hazards of sleep therapy, agriculture college graduates, young women brown from horse riding or dagging sheep, young men with shoulders like Hereford bulls. The rock band thudded. She wanted to put her hands over her ears or borrow a little of Harry’s or Daniel’s deafness.

  The formal seating was breaking up. Daniel had gone to yell companionably with another member of the hospital board, as deaf as he was. Sophie slipped over to the shadows under the pergola, still dripping with late spring wisteria, and relaxed into a cushioned cane banana lounge, her feet up comfortably. Her toes pained her when she stood too long in closed-in shoes. She was no longer embarrassed by her scars — Daniel had slowly convinced her again that she was beautiful, and if she was beautiful then every part of her must be too — but despite modern informality she could not convince herself that sandals were proper for a wedding. She might even slip off her heels . . .

  ‘Sophie?’

  Sophie turned. It was the woman she had glimpsed in church. Plain-faced, no make-up, grey hair trimmed close to her head. Only the crucifix on her lapel proclaimed her vocation, now that Vatican II meant she had dispensed with robes. But the simple clothes she wore separated her even more than a nun’s old-fashioned garments might have from the girl Sophie had known.

  ‘Violette! I mean Sister Margaret. I was afraid . . .’

  ‘That I would not accept your most kind ticket and invitation, once the inestimable Mr Lorrimer finally found out where I was?’

  Sophie nodded. ‘Please sit.’ She gestured to one of the cane chairs. Impossible to call her Sister Margaret, and yet this woman was not Violette.

  ‘I hope you do not mind my coming to the wedding. In truth, I did not know if I could face you. But I prayed for courage, and anyway, who notices another woman at a wedding?’

  ‘I did. I’m glad you came. How is the mission in Brazil?’

  ‘Difficult. So many good people dead, so many bad ones powerful.’ A shrug: a ghost of the old Violette. ‘Europe thinks war finished in 1945, but there are wars as bad or worse happening right now. We try to help.’ The French accent had been replaced by what might be a hint of Spanish. ‘Thank you for your letter. It was so kind. You always have been kind, Sophie.’

  ‘No,’ said Sophie. ‘I was completely self-centred when I was young. I gloried in seeming to be kind, till I met Miss Lily, and learned to push down the wall of embarrassment about my corned-beef heritage and actually consider others.’ She gazed at the other woman. ‘It has been so long. Nearly thirty-five years.’

  ‘Since I betrayed you to the Gestapo?’

  ‘You had no choice,’ said Sophie softly. ‘Truly, Sister Margaret, as I wrote to you, I understood why you had to do it. It was a country at war. You needed to protect those who worked for you —’

  ‘I did not betray you.’

  Sophie stared at her. ‘I don’t understand.’ The Gestapo and Dolphie had been so definite that it had been Violette who’d called.

  The woman who had been Violette Jones hesitated. ‘I could not tell you this before. I had to be sure . . .’

  ‘Sure of what?’

  ‘That your maman . . . that she was dead.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Your mother was at the salon the day you were arrested. I did not like her, nor could she afford my prices after the Occupation when she no longer received money from Australia, but she was your mother, so I let her come and gaze at the parade of models and eat the pastries, and sometimes I would make her a dress for far less than its true cost. She recognised you that afternoon. I found her in my office, calling the police. She believed you had cut off her allowance, you see, though I tried to explain that it was not your fault. She was bitter not just about the money that afternoon, but that you had just refused to greet her. How could she understand that you could not risk a reunion? I took the receiver from her, but there was no denying what she had already told the police. All I could do was finish the call, have her shown out, and then call Kolonel von Hoffenhausen.’

  ‘But Dolphie told me you had agreed to contact hi
m — to betray me — in return for the safety of Maison Violette.’

  ‘I thought it safe to agree and most unsafe to refuse him. But of course I would not have done it. I did not think I would ever even have to make the choice. Why would you come to Paris? Or to see me if you did, when Lorrimer made it so clear I was not wanted?’

  The shrug once more. ‘But the Kolonel had also promised me he planned to keep you safe, that he and others wanted peace with Britain. I did not know if I believed him. But he had refused to have you killed once before, so I called and told him the dress with acacia flowers had already been collected. It was the only thing I could do to help.’

  ‘It was enough,’ said Sophie slowly. ‘Dolphie arranged for my escape.’

  ‘Your mother died eight years later. A heart attack. But I only found out about her death a year ago, when I made a visit back to France.’ Sister Margaret met Sophie’s eyes. ‘You thought I had betrayed you, but forgave me. I cried, when I saw that you had written that.’

  ‘Sister Margaret . . .’ How to explain that she had loved Violette, and cared nothing for the mother who had never deserved the name? Was there even any point after so long?

  Yes. Love mattered.

  ‘Sister Margaret, I didn’t even recognise my mother that afternoon. I had met her properly only once and found her empty of anything but self-absorption. I briefly glimpsed a woman who might have been her a few years later. She could only have known what I looked like from the newspaper photographs with the king, back in thirty-six.’ And, ironically, her mother’s allowance had even been reinstated after the war. ‘I cared no more about her than any person on the street. But I loved the girl Violette, and Violette the woman too. If that woman had called the police, I knew it must have been for the very best of reasons. I wanted to explain I understood so many times.’

  ‘But you could not find me? I had to vanish,’ said Sister Margaret gently. ‘Until the girl I’d been had gone. You might forgive, but I could not forgive myself.’ She hesitated. ‘You remember that I killed people in that war? I told myself that each deserved it, that the loss of every one of them brought us a little closer to freedom.’