Where Earth Meets Sky (43 page)

‘Not at all!’ Lily had been surprised how much she had enjoyed it. She had, as ever, not given too much away about herself, but it was a pleasure to sit and talk to someone. Her job could be a very lonely one.

‘Well – goodnight, Miss Waters. I hope the children are not too restless in the small hours.’

‘We’ll all get on all right,’ Lily said.

Before leaving the room he gave her a sweet, grateful smile.

He fell in love with her during the grey chill of that winter.

Piers Larstonbury was not like other men Lily had met and at first she did not recognize his growing devotion to her. She did notice that he was about the house more, and thought the children’s illness, from which both of them recovered well within a week, had drawn him close to them and he wanted simply to spend more time with them. Sometimes he came to the nursery and sat quietly looking at a story book with Hubert. But every so often his gentle voice reading the story would become halting and Lily might look up and find his gaze resting on her as she played with Christabel and her doll on the floor.

If she met him anywhere in the house he made a point of speaking to her now, when before he had seemed absent or almost unaware that she existed. And gradually she saw in his eyes something she did recognize: the deep, helpless stare of a man who had become strongly affected by her.

She first realized it at Christmas. There was a very festive atmosphere in the house. Virginia Larstonbury was lavishly hospitable and liked the house to be decked out with a tree and boughs of greenery and holly, streamers and candles and vases of winter blooms. The children were very excited. Piers’s two older children, Elspeth and Guy, were home for the holidays. They did not see a great deal of Guy, who spent much time either visiting his friends or in his room at the top of the house, where he painted in watercolours. Elspeth, however, was much in evidence, particularly in her explosive rows with Virginia. She was small in stature, with long, mousy hair, and looked as if she should be gentle and timid, but she was in fact highly temperamental, especially in the presence of her stepmother.

‘I don’t know why I bother coming back at all sometimes!’ Lily heard Elspeth storming at Virginia one afternoon. Lily and Lottie the maid met on the stairs in the middle of this particular spat as raised voices came from the drawing room. ‘When you treat me like some kind of
servant
. You don’t want me here! I feel like Cinderella in my own home!’

‘Oh, don’t talk such utter nonsense, you ridiculous girl!’ they heard Virginia snap at her. ‘You really are the end, making everything into such a drama, when I’m doing all I can for you – and you making me into some kind of witch in a fairy story.’

‘Well, sometimes you are just like a witch!’ Elspeth shrieked. ‘
Just
like! You don’t really care – not about Daddy or anyone. You only care about those queer people at your coven, or whatever it is you do . . .’

As Virginia exploded in outrage, Lottie raised her eyebrows comically at Lily. ‘I don’t know where she gets it from,’ Lottie said. ‘Miss Elspeth, I mean. They say her mother was the gentlest woman you could meet . . .’

Lily had learned that Piers Larstonbury’s marriage before the war had lasted until Cecily Larstonbury died after a long illness in 1912. The couple’s children had been brought up by a succession of mother substitutes against whom Elspeth had evidently perfected her skills in verbal combat. Lily kept out of Elspeth’s way as much as possible. So far as she was concerned, her job was with Hubert and Christabel and no one else.

The house was full of visitors over the Christmas period, people from various branches of the family, and the children were sleepless with excitement for several nights before. The evening before Christmas Eve there was a party, the house lit up, music and comings and goings, loud laughter and chatter until very late. Lily stayed in the nursery trying to distract the children into sleep. On Christmas Eve there was another row about who would be going to church. Virginia did not hold with Church of England religion any more. Piers Larstonbury, who was more conventional, wanted to go to the midnight Eucharist. Elspeth, it appeared, was also prepared to go, chiefly in order to fall out with Virginia about it, and the evening was punctuated by bad-tempered outbursts between the two women.

In the midst of all this, Lily, having just got the children to sleep, heard a tap on the nursery door. With Christabel’s little frock that she had been folding still in her hand, she tiptoed to the door.

‘May I come in?’ he whispered. Piers Larstonbury was always very polite, almost as if he found Lily intimidating.

Hesitating, she said, ‘The children are already asleep,’ but she stepped back to let him in.

‘I thought they might be by now.’

She closed the door and went to lay Christabel’s dress on the little white wicker chair in the corner. Close by, on a table, a dim light was burning.

‘Actually, it was you I wanted to speak to.’

From his breast pocket his brought out a small package and held it out to her, though she stood across the room from him.

‘This is for you – a little Christmas gift.’

Lily felt a sense of panic rise in her. She knew that all the servants in the house would be given small gifts in the morning – but all together, by Virginia, not like this.

‘Please,’ he said, seeing her hesitation. ‘Take it. It’s just a token, but when I saw it I knew it would suit you.’

Lily was full of confusion, but also of curiosity to see what he had thought would suit her. She took the slender, tissue-wrapped gift from him, her fingers trembling, aware of him watching her intently.

Within the folds of tissue lay a silver object, studded with turquoise stones. Lily gasped.

‘Oh – it’s so beautiful!’ Then, foolishly, ‘Is it a hairslide?’

Piers Larstonbury lifted it from the paper. ‘Perhaps I can show you. Your hair looks marvellous like that – so modern.’

Just two weeks earlier she had had her hair cut much shorter, into a fashionable pageboy level with her ear lobes. Piers Larstonbury stood on her right and drew the silver slide in past her temple. For a second it felt cold against her scalp.

‘Perfect.’ His voice was quiet, somehow awed. ‘I knew it would be. It’s perfect.’

Lily put her hand up and felt it. The clip was so beautiful – she knew somehow without him telling her that it was silver, that he had bought her something expensive and beautiful – and she had no idea what to do next.

‘Thank you,’ she said, her cheeks burning as she turned to him. ‘It’s lovely. I don’t know why you . . .’

‘No – you don’t, do you?’ They were standing close and his gaze was fixed intently on her. ‘You don’t know, you don’t see – that’s one of the things which makes you so extraordinary, my beautiful Lily. You’re so lovely, so innocent, somehow.’

Her heart began pounding with panic.
Oh God, no, not this again.
Not another man . . . What he saw as innocence was really the fact that she was closed to people, to men especially. She had built a rampart round herself so that she need never feel pain again – or thought she had.

‘You’ve no idea what I feel for you, have you, you lovely, lovely woman?’

From this reserved, gentle man the words began to pour out. He was worked up, his face tight with emotions, ‘You captivate me, Lily. You’re so very beautiful, so gentle . . . I feel as if you’ve given me life back again . . . Your presence in the house has made the difference to everything . . . I need to see you, to keep looking at you . . .’

She stood under his words as if they were a shower of rain, not knowing what else to do. She knew that she had no feelings of this kind for Piers Larstonbury, but his words filled her with yearning to feel herself loved and to be able to love after these long, lonely years. And they also made her afraid and suspicious, because she knew that men’s words of love meant nothing and she must not give way to them.

At last he stopped, and stood looking down at her. ‘I couldn’t hold back from telling you how I feel any longer. You’re all I think about. I’d forgotten it was possible to feel like this, to love like this.’ He laid his hands on her shoulders, looking at her with burning longing. ‘Oh, Lily, let me kiss you, please do!’

‘Major Larstonbury . . .’ She struggled for words, and in the difficulty of it all felt anger rising in her. He had given her a gift as a bribe, something to force her to give into him! ‘We are in your house, under the same roof as your wife, and your children are asleep here . . .’ She waved her hand towards the sleeping children’s beds.

‘I’m sorry . . .’ He lowered his hands to his sides abjectly. ‘I’ve offended you. I’ve been clumsy and foolish. I’m just so much in love with you, so overwhelmed.’

Lily stood, looking at him. She could hear Ewan McBride:
I love you, I need you, Lily
. . . And Harold Arkwright and Sam.
Samuel Ironside.
She was filled with a bitterness of pain that she had not allowed for a long time. It seemed to rise up behind her throat. Men betrayed, they took what they wanted, without a care for your feelings. Men were liars.

Her expression seemed to freeze him.

‘I’ll go,’ he said, to her astonishment. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been clumsy . . . A fool.’

Full of anger and of a longing regret, she watched him leave the nursery.

During the excitement of Christmas, she saw very little of him. He was there, in the parlour, standing in the background on Christmas morning when Virginia and Elspeth, in the shelter of a temporary festive truce, distributed little gifts to the servants. Lily received a little case of fine-quality writing paper and envelopes. She wondered who Virginia Larstonbury imagined she might have to write to, but she thanked her politely. She felt Piers Larstonbury watching her but she did not look at him.

He kept away from her for days, and she thought that that was the end of it. Then, gradually, as if nothing had happened, he made excuses to be near her again, to spend time with the children, even accompanying her to Hampstead Heath one Sunday afternoon when she took them out. He behaved with absolute decorum on all occasions and was also very attentive to his children.

‘I scarcely saw my own father, growing up,’ he said, as they strolled across the winter heath. Lily was pushing Christabel in a little carriage while Hubert trotted happily alongside his father holding his hand, awed by the treat of his being with them. ‘He died without me knowing him.’ He talked about his school, about having been sent away to board at the age of five.

‘It was why Cecily, my first wife, and I decided to send Guy so much later, when he was ten. She was so attached to him, she didn’t want him to go at all, but it’s the thing to do, of course. Boarding school makes a man of you. Certainly helps you fit in when you’re thrown into the army.’ As he spoke he didn’t sound altogether convinced. ‘But I do think they go too young: it breaks some bond with the parents which you can never quite mend again.’

‘Yes, I think you’re right,’ Lily said, thinking of Cosmo. ‘Sometimes children seem to be more attached to their nanny than their parents.’

‘Exactly so.’ He smiled down at her. ‘Which is why I want to be with them some of the time. I wasn’t with Elspeth and Guy enough. Guy’s remote from me, really.’

‘Will you send Hubert away?’

‘Perhaps.’ He sounded miserable suddenly. ‘I don’t know. That will depend partly on Virginia. She rather favours boarding. I suppose she’s not really very maternal. Not like you. You’re marvellous with children.’

Lily blushed. ‘I suppose I’ve always felt at home with them.’

She felt more relaxed with him that afternoon, though she could hardly forget his outburst of those weeks ago. And as they walked home along the smart London street, though, she realized she had not had such a long conversation with anyone in a long time, and he didn’t speak to her like a servant. As they neared the house again, he said, very politely, ‘It’s been a real pleasure, this walk, Miss Waters. I’ve enjoyed our time together a great deal.’

She had to admit to herself that she had enjoyed it too. Above all, it was his kindness which drew her in. But all the time, in his attention she felt an unspoken pressure. Although he was behaving like a gentleman, she knew the strength of his feelings for her and that they had not gone away. She had already become very fond of Hubert and Christabel: supposing she kept refusing to give in to their father’s desires and he got rid of her? It was a terribly painful thought. Each time she left a family, the separation from the children almost broke her heart. She was living under his roof and he was being so kind to her. Somehow, as the days passed, it seemed impossible not to repay him by giving him what he wanted.

It happened the first time when Virginia was away, staying with her sister in Hampshire. Very occasionally she took the children with her to be looked after by the sister’s nanny, but more often she went alone, in her colourful, drifty clothes, leaving the two infants in Lily’s care, seeming content not to see them for days at a time.

She made such a visit in the last week of January, saying she ‘simply couldn’t bear London and this filthy weather any longer’, and after a flurry of case-packing, disappeared in a cab to Paddington without saying when she would be back.