Where Earth Meets Sky (50 page)

‘My goodness!’ Lily said as he took her along it at high speed. ‘This is steep – oh, do slow down a bit, Cozzy. You’re frightening the children!’ Hubert was clinging to her skirt, his hands clenched into fists.

‘You have to go fast to keep up the momentum,’ Cosmo retorted, not slowing down at all. ‘Like the track at Brooklands – remember the slope on that?’

‘Yes,’ Lily said sharply, ‘but we’re not racing now.’

She had expected that alone with her, Cosmo might soften and become his more boyish self, the sweet Cosmo who she loved. But he seemed even more on edge.

‘You’ve been doing so well,’ she said trying to appease him. ‘I’m so very proud of you.’

Since the event at Shelsley Walsh, Cosmo had entered various events at Brooklands and come home in a very respectable time – in one case, in second place. He was riding high and very pleased with himself at the time, but now he seemed morose and unsure.

Lily watched him as he drove, his expression grim with concentration. He looked forbidding. His face, which she had thought of as distinguished, with its Grecian nose, now seemed hard, his forehead more enlarged as he grew older. In fact, she recognized with a shock that in profile he looked very slightly like his Uncle William. She had never connected Cosmo with this part of the family before. William Fairford was an unbalanced, melancholic fellow. Surely Cosmo was not taking after him?

‘Darling,’ she said softly, trying to reach the Cosmo who would respond to her. ‘You’re doing so awfully well.’

‘Oh, don’t mumsy me, Lily,’ Cosmo snapped. ‘I’m not your little boy any more.’

Lily tried not to show how much he had hurt her. She was also trying not to notice how fast he was still driving. She held Hubert’s hand, reassuring him.

‘All right. But you are doing so very well.’

‘We’ll see, won’t we?’ he said grimly.

After that she was silent, trying to understand him, and why, when he was surrounded by so much wealth and now he was doing all the things he had always wanted to and doing them so well, his mood seemed to have such an edge of despair.

Once they got back, Susan Fairford had arrived and she greeted Lily affectionately.

Mrs Rainbow had set out an impressive meal of cheeses and cold meats and pickle on the long, gleaming dining table and Lily felt the weight of silver cutlery in her hands. There was a silver tureen of creamy watercress soup and they all ate ravenously. The men all stuck together, talking motor cars and aeroplanes, and she heard Cosmo promise to take the others up in it over the weekend. Lily stayed at the other end of the table from Sam and the others, but she was acutely aware of his presence as he sat talking with Piers Larstonbury. She could see from the tensed hunch of his shoulders that he was not entirely comfortable in these surroundings. Sam had always had a chip on his shoulder about wealthy people.
Toffs
, she could hear him saying. Another thing they had had in common, not being sure where they fitted in. His eyes met hers along the table, just once, a deep look when he thought she was not aware, but as soon as her gaze met his he looked away.

She spent the afternoon with Susan Fairford, who was very tired, and the children, who had a nap and then were taken off for some of the afternoon by Mrs Rainbow, who seemed to be on pins to get her hands on them.

The two women sat in an exquisitely decorated sitting room which Susan said was barely ever used. The room looked out to the flower garden at the side of the house through long glass doors edged with cream muslin curtains, delicately embroidered with pink and gold flowers. Susan eased the doors open and they sat on comfortable chintz-covered chairs on either side of a marble fireplace, enjoying the faint breeze in an otherwise baking afternoon. Susan kicked off her shoes and at her invitation, Lily did the same, stretching out in the chair and luxuriating in the feel of the thick Chinese rug under her stockinged toes.

They talked idly in the heat, dozing for a while, and at four o’clock Mrs Rainbow brought in a tray of tea, accompanied by Hubert and Christabel, both looking unmistakably floury.

‘Look what we made!’

Hubert was proudly holding a plate of jam tarts.

‘Oh, how delicious, dear!’ Lily cried, smiling at the child’s proud face. ‘Thank you so much, Mrs Rainbow.’

‘Shall I take them out to the garden for a while?’ Mrs Rainbow said.

‘Well – yes, if you’d like to!’ Lily was delighted.

‘Ooh – it’s a treat. Come along, ’ubert, Christabel! I’ve got summat to show you.’

Susan smiled wistfully after her. ‘She misses her brood.’ Then, suddenly, she said, ‘Sam Ironside has come a long way since he first arrived in India, hasn’t he?’

Startled to hear his name mentioned, Lily found herself blushing.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, trying to sound neutral. ‘I suppose he has.’

‘I realize I know so very little about him. I suppose I never cared to ask before.’

Lily could not think of anything safe to say in reply. In the pause which followed, they heard a dove calling from the roof in the hot, sleepy afternoon, accompanied by the distant hum of an engine.

‘He was rather sweet on you at one time, wasn’t he?’ Susan rearranged the skirt of her pretty floral dress. ‘I suppose that’s all over with by now?’

‘Oh – yes,’ Lily said lightly.

‘And he’s not really in the same class as the major, is he?’

Lily blushed, full of confusion. Her relations with Sam Ironside and Piers Larstonbury were both things she felt quite unable to talk about, but as she sought desperately to think of a way of changing the subject, Susan raised a finger and said, ‘What’s that noise?’

The sound was growing louder and the two of them got up and went to the doors. The scent of honeysuckle and lavender wafted from the warm garden. Against the mellow stone nearby grew a profusion of sweet-smelling yellow climbing roses.

Susan, looking a thin, girlish figure, put a hand to her forehead and squinted upwards.

‘Oh Lord – it’s Cosmo. He must be taking someone up. Oh dear, I do so worry about him . . . He can fly as well as he can drive, but all the same . . .’

Shading her eyes, Lily looked up into the soaring blue and saw the tiny white plane scratching its way across. Who had Cosmo taken up? Sam? . . .
tell me who that woman was in Mussoorie who told me she loved me
. . . His words throbbed through her.

‘They all love machines so much, don’t they?’ Susan said. ‘Come along – let’s go and see them land.’

They hurried, shoeless, following the plane with their eyes, out towards the wide hayfield at some distance from the house, where they found Mrs Rainbow and the children all staring upwards at the circling plane. Sam and Loz were nowhere to be seen.

As they reached the place where the children were standing, the plane landed bumpily in one corner of the field and Cosmo and Piers Larstonbury opened up the cockpit, Piers laughing with pleasure. Lily had never seen him so animated.

‘My word, it’s just astonishing!’ he cried, leaping down, running unguardedly to her and flinging his arms round her. ‘Darling, it’s the most astounding experience!’

Lily looked across to see Susan watching, and knew that whatever Susan had been guessing, she had now had her thoughts confirmed.

By the end of the afternoon, Lily was wishing she had never come to Cranbourne House.

She had wanted to see Cosmo’s home, his inheritance, but being near to Sam was a torment. She felt raw and sad, and that she had been wrong in rejecting his attempt to talk to her. But now it felt too late. Sam simply behaved as if she wasn’t there.

‘I think I’ll have an early night,’ she told Piers Larstonbury that evening, after Mrs Rainbow had served them a sumptuous meal of roast pork and a huge syrup pudding. Uncle William, it appeared, liked the best of solid, traditional food and nothing fancy, although he did not eat with them but took all his meals on his own.

Piers was about to join the other men in the smoking room and Lily caught him before he disappeared across the panelled hall.

‘All right, my dear,’ he said, mellowed with drink and the plentiful food. Moving closer to her, he whispered, ‘I’ll come to you later, darling one.’

Lily nodded, but kept her eyes cast down.

She lay in her bedroom at the top of the house. The children were in the next room, which had once been the nursery, Mrs Rainbow had told her. The window was open but it was stiflingly hot. She had nothing on but her bloomers and a camisole, but it still felt stuffy and unbearable. For a while she managed to doze, but then woke with a start, drenched in perspiration. Sitting up, she looked out at the dark garden. The house was quiet. She hoped that Piers had been well plied with brandy so that he had gone to his room and fallen fast asleep. Please, she thought, don’t let him come in here tonight! All she wanted was to be alone.

The night air smelled delicious and she leaned out of the casement window for a while, the air cooling her. Her room was at the back of the house, facing over the lawn, edged with trees. She could smell the sweet scent of cut grass where the men had been scything that evening.

Lighting a candle, she moved restlessly about the room. On the floor to the left of the window was a small wooden trunk and out of curiosity she lifted the lid, wondering if it contained more toys for Hubert and Christabel to entertain themselves with.

The box smelled strongly of wood polish and camphor. On the top, inside, there was a limp rag doll, not a girl doll, but one made to resemble a soldier, with a helmet and faded scarlet jacket. The face had fierce, staring eyes drawn on in ink and a curling moustache of black wool. She thought it didn’t look a very comforting sort of toy. Surely it had not been Cosmo’s? She did not remember ever having seen it before.

Underneath there were various little boxes and she opened the top one, which was wooden and full of tin soldiers rather like the rag doll soldier. So there were toys! The next was a box made of faded white card decorated with a painted garland of mauve flowers. Inside, she found a collection of old letters, the paper yellowed and barely holding together on some of the folds. Carefully she picked up the top letter and opened it, seeing a short, blotchy note in childish handwriting, with several crossings out. It was addressed from his prep school and dated December 1887.

There was a large collection of other similar notes, dated over several years, and as Lily read them, seeing the handwriting mature gradually, her eyes filled with tears.

‘I felt sick for weeks when they sent me to England,’ Cosmo had once told her. ‘It was that sort of misery that makes you feel as if you have a stone inside you. I thought about running away constantly. But how do you run away all the way back to India?’

The letters from Cosmo’s father, from a homesick little six-year-old, far away from his parents, his friends and pets, seemed to say so much by saying so little, the ache of it seeping between the lines. She felt very tender towards both father and son. And now Charles Fair-ford, the rather courtly man she remembered, who seemed happier on a horse out in the Indian countryside than anywhere else, had been laid to rest on the battlefields of France.

Closing the chest, she looked at the garden and was filled with a longing to be out in the night air. Slipping her dressing gown round her and her shoes on, she looked in to check that Hubert and Christabel were sleeping soundly, then crept out and down the long flights of stairs. Remembering her way to the little sitting room where she had sat with Susan that afternoon, she let herself out through the glass doors and into the warm, caressing air.

The sense of freedom exhilarated her and in the relative cool outside she felt full of life and energy. Following the path round to the back, she felt the brush of lavender against her nightdress, and smelled its scent mingled with roses, then the smell of the grass as she moved across the lawn and stopped to look back at the house. She could not see a light on in any of the rooms. A little bubble of laughter rose in her and she turned and ran lightly across the soft green expanse, feeling she might run and never stop. It felt exciting and free to be out so late.

At the far end of the long lawn the grass was longer near the trees and she stopped and looked back again. It was a slightly hazy night, but a half moon was visible through a chiffon of cloud. Its faint light showed the lines of the house. She thought she had never been anywhere more beautiful, not since India, and in the warm night she half expected to smell the dung fires and dry earth and scented oils of the Indian darkness. She thought of those sad little children sent away from home, aching for India in the darkness of English winter nights. Cosmo, she realized, knew as little as herself about family life, or how it felt to be loved and secure.