I didn’t know then what the walkers were saying was: I don’t want to look at this sad-looking girl with no hair and lavender-ringed eyes. She can’t be sad, or ill, because that would ruin my day. It’s easier to think she must be difficult, a weirdo, must have brought it on herself.
As I fumbled in my pocket for my headscarf, Merry gave out a gushing ‘Hello, it’s my dad’s birthday today!’ Sylvia, with Rory on a lead, smiled and nodded vaguely. The path was very narrow. As one couple passed me, I heard the woman, in a knitted green jumper, whisper:
‘Poor thing. I do think she should wear a hat, if she’s out and about.’
‘Good afternoon!’ came a voice behind me. ‘Your shoes are on the wrong way round.’
I turned, to see Kitty, pointing at the feet of a thin, tall man with knobbly ankles, the woman in green’s husband. His wife, still gazing at me, backed into him, knocking him over. As we passed by, leaving the two of them wrestling awkwardly together on the uneven ground, I thought I heard Kitty snort, but I was sure I couldn’t have. She didn’t make noises like that.
We ate delicious fish and chips, sitting out on the wall before the pier, listening to the clanking boats, the cry of gulls, watching oystercatchers out on the marshes. It was discombobulating, being away from the house, seeing other houses and other people, and I realised with a start that, beyond walks on the cliffs, I had not left Vanes since my arrival.
It was a fresh day, bright sunshine mixed with splashy showers that rode in suddenly across the bay out of nowhere – one of the last days like that before the humid still heat of August set in. Joss was next to me, our bodies decorously separated, our legs studiously not touching, and the tension of that gap between us was intoxicating.
Last night, I had come out of my room to brush my teeth after I thought everyone else had gone to bed and had found him in the corridor, waiting for me.
‘H-hello,’ he’d said, in a soft, husky voice. He was nervous, his eyes huge, something determined about his expression I found attractive. His hands had held my breasts, through my T-shirt, and he had kissed my neck, his lips fluttering over my skin, then my patchy, prickly head, nuzzling it, as I leaned against him, woozy at the softness and the firmness of his touch. Today we were like strangers. It was extremely exciting.
‘Happy birthday, PF,’ Merry said at one point, leaning against her father and stealing a chip. He put his arm round her, squeezing her almost affectionately. ‘Little Mer,’ he said. She kissed his cheek, then popped the chip in her mouth and said, after she’d swallowed: ‘It’s properly summer now it’s your birthday, PF. I thought that last year, too.’
‘Why, when was his birthday last year?’ said Joss, faux-serious.
‘Very funny. Come on, Joss,’ said Charles.
Next to Charles on his other side, Sylvia was banging her foot against the harbour wall, humming to herself, in another world as ever.
I often wondered whether Sylvia actually enjoyed her husband’s company. One would say obviously she did, I heard them every night, her panting, mewling ecstasy. ‘Now,’ she’d say, frequently in fact. ‘Now, Charles, do it now.’ As if it – lust? – was an immediate requirement. But I didn’t understand it. She was lovely, witty, bright, beloved by everyone, from the landlord of the Good Leper to the holidaymakers who came up to say hello to Mrs Red and her children, to dogs and babies. Everyone smiled when Sylvia appeared.
The only way I can describe it is that she was mechanical around Charles, whose glamour for me had dulled with familiarity, whose red veins on his nose and cheeks reminded me of the tiny cracked patterns on the china, who believed he was right about everything. He displayed no interest in anyone unless it related to the bees, or Farrars, or the local populace and land, and was virtually asleep after every meal before being roused by Sylvia and marched off to bed. Even the suspicion that he was the butt of a family joke could ruin a hitherto amicable evening. He, however, thought nothing of mocking his own wife and children, as often as possible. In particular Kitty.
‘You’d better lay off the cream cakes, hadn’t you, Kits?’ he’d said the second night I was there, jabbing a long finger into his daughter’s side as she sat at the table in a crop-top.
‘Shut up, Joss, you tell a story once and it’s fine and you get a reaction and then you ruin it by making everyone listen to it again. Pretty dull. Don’t be dull, old boy.’
‘My wife?’ he’d said, when I’d asked, tentatively, where she was, a few days into my stay. ‘Staring vacantly out of a window when she should be making lunch or doing something to help me, I expect. It’s like living with Eeyore.’
He was friendly to Merry. I didn’t understand why at first, then I came to see it was because in his eyes she was still a young child. He preferred her to stay that way.
Charles liked people to believe he was a gentleman of leisure, but he sold antiques on the side. He’d got very lucky with a piece in the sixties: an oak sideboard which he’d found at a house clearance in Chelsea, and bought for five pounds. It turned out to have been early Tudor and he sold it on for over five thousand pounds, enhancing his reputation no end. He freely admitted this. ‘It’s all luck of the draw really,’ he’d told me. ‘Right place, right time.’ And times were lean, when I stayed with the Hunters. Money was in short supply and there was a constant worry about school fees, and on Charles’s part a rampant curiosity about other people’s money. I remember seeing scores of statements, in piles around the study, and cheques, which Sylvia scratched her head over, and sighed, and occasionally took in a carrier bag to the NatWest in Minehead to pay in. It was Sylvia, I think, who paid for a lot of things – I remember her, silhouetted in the long hallway leading out to the back garden, handing her husband a cheque with an unintentional flourish, the paper wafting in the breeze. Him kissing her on top of her head, then patting her bottom. ‘Good girl.’
I think it was her work that paid for the boarding schools, the repairs to the roof, Charles’s suits, and of course money had to be found to pay Mrs Red to come in to change the sheets and push a duster around. She paid for everything. Yet at Vanes her job wasn’t ever talked about. You’d never hear it mentioned that Habitat had sold her prints for years. She designed cushions, and placemats, and children’s clothing, but her first real love was textiles. She worked in the mornings, whilst Charles was in his study reading the paper and doing whatever work he did and whilst Mrs Red bustled around the house, before Sylvia had to lay down her pen to start on lunch. It was all, always, squeezed into the demands of the day.
Last year, there was an exhibition of her work at the Textile Museum in London. I went to see it, though I was nervous throughout, wondering if I’d see anyone there.
Afterwards, I sat out in a café on Bermondsey Street, still relishing this sense of freedom, thinking about Sylvia, about my own escape. I ate tiny pickles, and scraps of garlicky salami, and had a cold, malty lager, and I read the blurb from the catalogue, the sun shining on my face.
Sylvia Lestrange: Stranger in her Own Land
The diminished reputation of Sylvia Lestrange should be a national scandal. One of our foremost post-war designers, famed of course for her best-known print, ‘The Hive’, her eye for stark detail was doubtless fomented during her childhood, the daughter of a broken marriage, an alcoholic mother and a brutal, yet largely absent, army captain father. She grew up in fifties Chelsea, then a quiet bohemian backwater favoured by artists and writers, before training at what was then the Central School of Art and Design, where her eye for simplicity and elegance was noted. Coming of age at the height of the Swinging Sixties before her early marriage, Lestrange was hugely influenced by the colourful bold prints of the Scandinavian designers such as Josef Frank. But Lestrange was very much her own woman, in the glorious tradition of other English visionaries and eccentrics from Blake and Morris to Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen.
After witnessing the violent deaths of her parents in a horrific accident,* Lestrange was alon
e and almost entirely without support, relying on the income from her mother’s boarding house until a family friend assumed the role of guardian, pushing her towards art college; she took his name professionally as a mark of gratitude. Sadly, however, her decision to marry cut short her degree. After her marriage she relocated to Vanes, her husband’s family home in a remote corner of Somerset by the Bristol Channel, where for many years she was preoccupied by motherhood. She was able, when her children were older, to begin designing again, and produced some of her most famous prints, which endure to this day: ‘Rose at Dusk’, ‘Lion’, ‘Summer Rain’ and, of course, ‘The Hive’, often anonymously. She made all her own clothes, and those of her children, for years; her youngest daughter, Melissa Hunter, who supervised the loan of much of Lestrange’s archive for this exhibition, remembers the cotton print smocked dresses they wore as children:
they were better than Laura Ashley, which was rather old-fashioned for girls like me and my older sister, who wanted to roam the countryside, and didn’t like ruffles. They were designed for girls and boys who liked climbing trees. They lasted ages – we always outgrew them. And then, later, she made us dresses. Even my sister Catherine, who, like most teenagers, wasn’t easy to please, happily wore the dresses.
Sylvia Lestrange’s career was curbed by her duties as a wife and mother and bookended by yet another terrible event: the tragedy that took place at Vanes in the summer of 1989, decimating the family. What is known is that she left behind a legacy that endures to this day, and a sense of potential unfulfilled.
* For more information on the accident at Harrods, and Lestrange’s lucky escape, see notes on Room 3: ‘The Teddy Bear and the Gloves’.
In Sylvia’s messy, warm, bright study, off the hall on the other side of the kitchen, was an empty honeycomb – she showed it to me once. Joss, aged eight, had solemnly carried it up to the house after the Collecting one year, sliced it open and handed it to her. It gave her the idea for ‘The Hive’, the rigid simplicity of the comb interior, but hand-drawn, giving it an imperfect tension. The bees, as drawn by her, were golden beads of light, crawling in and out of the cells. The skill of her draughtsmanship meant she could convey the 3D nature of the hive. It was intricate, delicate, beautiful, but modern – after she released ‘The Hive’, Conran called her the ‘William Morris of the Twentieth Century’.
I didn’t appreciate any of this when I stayed with her. Because she craved anonymity, at times she found herself selling many of her designs on to shops and manufacturers and losing her own copyright. If she’d been a man, someone else would have cooked, and taken care of the children. I used to think if she had been a different person, she would have been able to fight more for what she wanted. But now, knowing it all, I am not sure.
That day, down by Larcombe harbour, eating fish and chips and watching the weather fronts gather miles away over the Bristol Channel, feeling warm and secure, gave her the idea for ‘Summer Rain’, a splashy, joyous print of long, diagonal, sketchy rods of rain set against scattering people and green hills.
The catalogue continued, a better witness than I, even though I walked back up to the house with her that day:
She hurried back to the house, sketched out the basic idea and layout, before her husband asked about supper. Later that night, when Charles Hunter was asleep, his wife went downstairs and worked again on it, so that the next day, in the morning, she found an almost perfect rough waiting for her in her studio. She said this way of working was not ideal, but that it forced her to learn to distil the essence of a good idea as swiftly as possible.
‘Now we have to start worrying about the Collecting,’ Merry said, screwing the remains of her fish and chips and the paper into a ball. She dropped it into the plastic bag at Sylvia’s feet and tried to do an arabesque, there on the harbour wall.
‘No we don’t, Benny,’ said Kitty shortly. ‘Not yet.’
‘It’s Melissa.’
‘Sure, Benny,’ said Joss, through a mouthful of fish.
‘It’ll be here before we know it. The sixth today, normally do it on St Bartholomew’s day, but it’s a week later . . . yes, three and a bit weeks till the thirty-first,’ said Charles. ‘People have been asking me about it. The Culneys have said they can provide two hunters this year.’ He looked at me from under his brows. ‘Jane. One evening soon I should walk you round. Show you the bees, bring you up to speed. Not tonight, too thundery. And that reminds me. Where are the handbells?’
‘They’re in Mummy’s study,’ said Merry promptly.
‘How do you know that?’ said Sylvia, sharply.
‘I was looking for some Blu-tack in there yesterday.’
‘Oh, wow, how exciting. Is this for your Big Fun poster?’ said Joss, imitating a kiss with a loud smacking sound.
‘Rack off, Joss! I hate you!’
‘The handbells?’ Charles frowned. ‘They should be kept in the box in the hall, Sylvia.’ He turned to her, and I saw the pale eyes blazing in his red face. ‘You know the rules, Sylvia. Goddammit, can’t you keep the place a bit tidier?’
‘My study’s out of bounds, sweetheart,’ said Sylvia, calmly, to Merry. She smiled. ‘I was polishing them, Charles. Didn’t you ask me to?’
‘Don’t think so,’ said Charles, but he stood up abruptly, throwing his polystyrene carton away, and brushed off his trousers, then sat down again.
‘St Bartholomew was the patron saint of bees,’ Sylvia told me. ‘You’ll have some honey to take home with you this year. Everyone gets some!’ She clapped her hands, making it sound like a jolly day out. Pretending I hadn’t been told this several times already, I smiled.
‘Not this year, remember,’ said Merry. ‘It’s ten days later, the twins’ birthday.’
‘Yes . . .’ Sylvia was frowning and I saw her dart a quick look at her husband. ‘I still think it’s too late, Charles. They’re restless already.’
‘Nonsense.’ Charles wiped his mouth, then crushed the paper napkin between his fingers. ‘The bees understand, as well as we do. Joss will take over the house, it’s right we mark his eighteenth birthday.’
‘Happy birthday, PF,’ said Kitty, smiling sardonically at him. He looked mistrustfully at her.
‘Thank you, Kitty,’ he said. ‘And thank you for my present. Mummy retrieved it. It looks rather good.’
‘My pleasure.’ I saw the reddening of her cheeks, how she rubbed her nose, awkwardly, suddenly a child again. I saw she wanted to love her father.
‘She gave him a book she thought he’d like. Some politician’s diaries. But he chucked it in the bin,’ Merry told me afterwards. ‘Said it wasn’t his sort of thing.’
‘Thank you for a delightful birthday feast,’ said Charles, standing up again. ‘Now, I must go and see a man about a dog.’
He wandered away past the Good Leper pub, down towards the Harbour Master’s office, with a casually raised hand, leaving us sitting on the wall. Sylvia clapped her hands. ‘Let’s go back to the house,’ she said. ‘Rory is tired, aren’t you, darling? I have things to do.’
Merry had already finished, Joss too, and Kitty and I were left eating our chips. We hurriedly scarfed down some more and then, adding the rest to the bag that Joss was carrying, followed the others along the uneven cobbles out of the harbour and onto the groynes, and the vast expanse of flat marsh giving way to meadow that formed the bay.
Once we had left the beach, Joss dropped the bag of rubbish in the lane, kicking it into a hedgerow. Some of the screwed-up wrapping fell onto the tarmac.
‘It smells. I can’t be bothered to hoick it all the way back up,’ he said, with a rueful smile. Sylvia shrugged.
‘Lazy boy,’ she said, unsmiling, and hurried in front of him.
It sounds so silly, but it was so shocking to me. I can feel the claggy taste of batter fat and acid in my mouth now, shame at myself for not picking up the bag.
‘I don’t understand about the bees,’ I said later that night.
‘It�
��s just always been something we do,’ Joss told me, as we sat outside on the terrace steps. We were holding hands, his thumb caressing my palm. ‘I know it sounds weird, but it’s a big deal around here. It’s about showing you’re part of the land, respecting the traditions of it and the villagers and everything.’ He cleared his throat, too loudly in the darkness. ‘So, everyone comes. We process at dusk, ’cause they’re more relaxed then. We light beeswax candles and we sing the song, and then we take the honey.’
‘You take their honey?’
‘It’s a tradition. We eat it all year, haven’t you noticed? It’s been that way since the old reverend first found the combs in the chapel.’
‘Who?’
‘The Reverend Diver. The portrait. Hasn’t Aunty Ros made you read the pamphlet about it yet?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you should. Their other sister wrote it when she was a girl.’ He was silent.
‘Their other sister,’ I prompted, after a moment.
‘Oh. Yeah – it’s good. She was into all that. Pammy, she was called. She’d go around collecting folk songs and the like. There’s all these stories about Diver – we have some, the villagers have others.’
‘Like what?’
‘Um . . .’ Joss stroked my hand again. ‘Like he was – oh, someone special.’
‘You make him sound like the second coming.’ I laughed, but he turned to me, solemnly.
‘No, seriously. Some people think he might have been.’
I stared at him. ‘Joss. You don’t believe that.’
‘Well, he cured the lepers. And there’s other stuff too. Listen, there are other people who think he was a charlatan. But he made the bees come in the first place. By promising them they’d be safe here.’ His voice was soft in my ear now. ‘And, you know. He’s dead, but they’ve stayed there for two hundred years. Why? Something obviously keeping them there. We have to respect that.’
The Beloved Girls Page 17