Where Earth Meets Sky (41 page)

Lily sat beside Piers Larstonbury in the front of the Daimler. Little Hubert was so exhausted that he was asleep with his head on Lily’s lap before they had even left the race ground. Even so, Lily kept her head bent low, stroking his hair to hide the tumult of feeling going on inside her. Sam . . .
Oh God, seeing Sam again . . .

After a while she looked out of the window, but it was not the trees and fields of Surrey she was seeing but Sam’s face, the way he had looked at her, searching her eyes in pain and bewilderment. Why should
he
be in pain when he had hurt her so badly? She gripped the edge of the seat until her left hand ached. All the agony of those years, of Sam, the baby, she had locked away deep in herself.

Don’t ever look back
, she had told herself.
Forget. Don’t ever think, don’t expect anything from life, not of love, of having a real life of your own. Just take what you can wherever you can.
She had never expected to see him again, but suddenly there he had stood, those deep grey eyes staring into hers, filling her with an agonized sorrow and anger and longing. She had loved him – God how she had loved him. And their child, little Victoria. All of it came back, searing through her.

‘Are you all right, my darling?’ Piers Larstonbury asked.

‘Yes – thank you. Just a little tired.’ Lily managed a calm voice. ‘I think I might have a little doze if you don’t mind.’

‘Of course, my dear. You rest. It’s been a demanding day.’

She was not in the least sleepy but closing her eyes would give her refuge. Before doing so she turned to look at his gentle face, frowning slightly as he steered the motor car. He was a good man, she knew that. An unlikely looking man to have been a soldier, like so many who were thrown into it, but all she had ever heard of him was praise for his complete dedication to his men and his kindly way with them. He had had a reputation for it. And he was utterly besotted with her. But although at times she appreciated his kindness, her gaze held no returning passion. He was another man she allowed to use her. It had become her way of surviving.

Laying her head back, she thought instead of the young person who had been her one enduring passion. She felt a surge of satisfaction. At last today she had managed to achieve something for Cosmo, to please him, set him on the road to a life he really wanted. The thrill of seeing his face when Piers and Sam had shook hands on their agreement to let him race was reward enough. It had been she who had engineered that exchange, who had taken Piers’s hand and looked deeply into his eyes, knowing that in those rare moments, when he thought she was truly responding to him, she could ask of him almost anything. Major Piers Larstonbury was an unhappily married man and Lily, as he told her endlessly, was the true light of his life.

‘I just don’t know what I’d do if you were to leave,’ he told her sometimes. ‘My darling Lily, I simply couldn’t bear it.’

And she remembered almost the same words on Sam’s lips, and those of Ewan McBride and Harold Arkwright, in whose household she had worked briefly when she first came back to England: those same old words, she thought, quite empty of meaning, and in the end, so cruel. Never ever would she believe anyone again who said those words to her. But she knew Cosmo would not leave her. He depended on her in a way he had never been able to do with his mother. She had been the one who had held him in her arms for so many days of his childhood. She had written to him faithfully at school, she had been the one to visit him during the war when Susan Fairford was in France, trying to bury her own grief in her work as a VAD. Lily knew Cosmo needed her, even though he was so often rude and disagreeable. And just occasionally she was repaid by him becoming sweet and vulnerable, his buying her bunches of flowers and apologizing for his behaviour.

‘You’re the only one who’s ever really bothered about me, Lily,’ he’d say despondently, looking wretched in a way that melted her heart. ‘You’ve been like a mother and sister to me in one.’

Yes, he was her boy. She needed no one else and she would do anything in her power to help him. That was her mission in life, other than her own survival: her devotion to Cosmo. Anything else that might truly have been hers had been cruelly snatched away.

Piers Larstonbury was simply a means to an end. She had gone to his house to earn her living and as the months passed he had become more and more obsessed with her, as men always seemed to. And in her need to earn a living, and seeing his wealth as an opportunity, she had given in to him, becoming his lover, allowing him to quench his loneliness with her. She would not admit to her own loneliness. Her heart was cold and closed now, since Ewan McBride and above all since little Victoria. She was untouchable – and that was how she had intended to remain, and had done. Until today, when Sam Ironside stood in front of her and looked into her eyes, and she was torn open again.

Once she had stepped out of the Bethel Home that day, leaving Birmingham for London, knowing that she would never see her baby Victoria again, Lily had vowed that she would not look back. If she did, she would not be able to go on.

She had secured her job with the Arkwrights, in a comfortable home in Islington. Harold and Letitia Arkwright had three small daughters. Letitia Arkwright informed Lily on her arrival that the last nanny had ‘got herself into trouble’ and had to depart. She was a thin, wrung-out-looking woman even though still only in her twenties, who looked perpetually anxious, screwing up her face as she spoke as if the sun was too bright, even though they were in a darkened room.

‘I must be sure of having someone of good character this time,’ she said.

Lily, who had no desire to go near another man ever again, had no difficulty in reassuring her.

A month passed and she and the three girls, who were not too difficult a challenge, all got used to each other. But long after that, things went quickly to the bad when Harold Arkwright started on her. It began with long, lingering stares from his mud-coloured eyes when he met her on the stairs or when she presented the girls to their parents in the evening. Lily soon realized the cause of the last nanny’s ‘trouble’, though poor Letitia Arkwright seemed not to have recognized the rabid womanizer she was married to, even though his attempts at seduction happened quite blatantly under her own roof. Harold Arkwright owned a number of successful millinery businesses in different quarters of London. He also displayed a shrewd ability for making money on stock and shares and the family were certainly comfortable, if not extravagantly, wealthy. He was a short, stocky man with very thick, black hair, an impressive moustache and an air of urgent muscular energy which contrasted rather pitifully with his wife. Letitia spent most of her evenings reclining on the couch exhausted, reading a novel and not inviting company. Harold, as soon as he came home from attending to business, began to spend his evenings in pursuit of Lily. Though she slept in the nursery she had her own tiny sitting room, very simple, with just a couple of easy chairs and a small table, and an old Turkey rug partly covering the dark floorboards. Over the little leaded fireplace was a shadowy oil painting of chrysanthemums. Mr Arkwright started appearing there in the evenings, tapping discreetly on the door. At first she didn’t feel she could refuse to open it.

‘You are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,’ he would murmur, hovering on the threshold. Bolder, he would then come in and close the door. ‘God, what a woman you are, Miss Waters. Come here, my dear. Come and sit beside me.’

‘No – I really must go and see if Lizzie has settled,’ Lily would say, or some similar excuse, and flee to the nursery. She became frightened and did not answer the door, pushing a chair up against it. Harold Arkwright took to mooning about outside the door. At first he was hesitant, polite. Then, as his ardour for her grew, it became extreme.

Lily endured several very lonely, desperate weeks at the Arkwrights. Though she never once succumbed to Harold Arkwright’s advances, she felt under continual sexual threat. Once only he pushed his way into her room one night, begging her to let him lie with her, but she threatened to scream and wake up the children and call his wife. He seemed surprised and very offended at her resistance to him. He never tried it again although she went to bed with a chair pushed under the nursery door handle. But she was not sleeping well, and was jumpy day and night. It felt like revisiting a nightmare.

Though she scarcely knew it, she was not very well. She was still in a raw state after all the grief and shocks she had endured. Also, she was not used to England, to the grey drabness of the city streets after the loveliness of Mussoorie, and she did not know another soul in the place to call a friend.

Worst of all, here she was once again being pursued in this gross way. Why did men behave like this to her? Was she giving them some abnormal signal which she did not recognize? She felt lost and contaminated, and at times like those she could believe all the cruel accusations those religious women had made in the Bethel Home, that she was dirty and shameful. Sometimes she looked in the yellow tinted mirror in the nursery and even though her same wide, dark eyes looked back at her, her strong brows and thick, waving hair, she could barely recognize who she saw. At night she lay in bed and wept until she was so tired that sleep had to come.

At the height of her desperation, one evening, while Harold Arkwright patrolled the carpeted corridor outside the nursery, she sat on a cork-seated stool in the children’s bathroom beside the nursery. It was quiet, except for a persistent drip from one of the bath taps, and for the first time she allowed herself to think, to remember.

In the dark winter gloom she often pined for India. Taking leave of it had been so painful and made all the more fraught because she had had the dreadful Eustace in her care. Unless actually asleep he couldn’t sit still for more than a few moments at a time and he fidgeted ceaselessly. He needed constant entertaining and, whether entertained or not, was rude and aggressive. The train journey to Bombay had entailed some of the most exhausting and trying hours she had ever experienced. She sat sweating by the window of the train as they chugged for endless hours south-west to the coast, intermittently trying to engage Eustace in games of ‘I Spy’ or noughts and crosses, or in his story books. It was only when he was actually asleep, in the afternoon, that she had enough time really to look out and think about her own farewell to India, and in doing so, she ached with sadness.

Five years she had been in this country, but England now felt a lifetime away. She thought about all her time with the Fairfords, and with a shudder the strange, dream-like months with the McBride household, yet all amid the loveliness of Mussoorie which had stolen her heart. She thought of Sam with an agonized longing which never left her. But, she reasoned, if he had really loved her and wanted her, he would surely have found some way to let her know. Had things been different, had Sam not changed her, opened her to her feelings, she could have made her life in India. But what would have become of her? She might have floated from post to post in the houses of British families whom she might admire or despise, but she would always be a servant, forever a foreigner, an old maid growing scrawny and strange. And now she was carrying a child and only difficulty and disgrace could follow. She had no fellow feeling, then, for the infant. There was no sign of it except sickness and exhaustion and all she could think of was that she had to be rid of it. She had to survive and struggle to find a new life. Staring out at the endless skies and plains of India, she felt her own aloneness and a surge of determination. She would go back to England; she would not let herself fall prey to maternal feelings – that would lead her only to disaster. She was going to survive and make something of herself, no matter what it took.

But when the P&O steamer pulled majestically away from the port at Bombay, Lily found tears pouring down her face. The hotchpotch of streets of the city, the ghats and hills all faded as they moved away on the deep green water, until the coast with its smells and sounds was lost to her, its colours only a line of blurred umber in the distance.

It all felt like a dream now: India, Birmingham, the bedstead factory. She could have found more genteel work, but she wanted something anonymous, where she’d be one of a crowd, and could disappear again almost without comment. These frightening, lonely months of waiting were something she just had to get through. She took a cheap room with a Miss Spencer, who, while haughty in manner, was also clearly very particular about cleanliness. Lily could not bear the thought of anything less, after all the lovely houses she had lived in. When she went back alone at night to her little attic, her legs and back aching dreadfully, her hands burning sore from handling wire all day, at least it was to an atmosphere of order and cleanliness even though it was poor. Even so, the musty smell of these houses, their dampness, the odour of boiled cabbage and potatoes spoke to her of a familiar poverty and meanness, so that sometimes when her eyes were closed she could believe she was back in Mrs Horne’s house, with Ann and Effie about to torment her the moment she moved.

Lily lay on her back and stared despairingly at the crack running along the dingy ceiling.

Dear God
, she thought.
What on earth am I doing back here?
All she had tried to be, and here she was, a fallen woman carrying the child of a man who she thought had loved her, but who had left her with no message, or hope of seeing him again. And now she was back where she started in the squalid Birmingham streets. But she pushed these thoughts away. She would not think. She would not feel. If she did, she would go mad.