Lakeland Lily (44 page)

The three women remained trapped in the winter-bound house with nothing resolved, and no hope of rescue.

Bertie spent his days in his room, or being waited upon hand and foot by his adoring mother. More often he was out of the house altogether, propping up the bar in some hostelry or other, if Lily was any judge. It was a worry to know how to persuade him to take their plight seriously. Perhaps, Lily decided, the answer lay with Rose. Certainly something had to be done. Bertie needed help, and Rose might just be the one to give it to him.

Lily found her still working her vegetable stall on the market. She timidly approached, not knowing what to expect.

‘Well, well, look what the wind’s blown in.’ Rose stood, hands on hips, as the two of them took stock of each other. Time had not been kind to her. There were dark bruises beneath her eyes, her hair had lost its shine and the old coat which Hannah had made over for her lay in a crumpled heap on a pile of rotting cabbages.

Rose offered terse condolences over the loss of Edward then turned her attention to serving a couple of customers while Lily patiently waited.

When the customers had gone, she paid excessive attention to paring off the outer leaves of a red cabbage, letting a grim silence fall between them. At last she felt driven to ask, ‘I hear Bertie’s home?’

‘Yes.’ Lily glanced at her closed face, lips tightly pressed together like a young bud that refused to open. ‘It’s about him that I’ve come to see you.’

‘He’s not ill?’ She glanced up then, the knife still in her hand. ‘I heard he’d no injuries, no missing limbs, naught to worry over but a few old shrapnel wounds.’ There was anxiety in her tone from which Lily took heart.

‘He’s well ... physically at least.’

‘Thank God for that.’

‘Yes.’ Lily picked up a red apple, rubbed it against her sleeve, looked as if she might bite into it, then placed it back on the pile. ‘I know we’re not exactly friends any more, but I wondered ... Could we talk?’

‘I’m listening.’

Lily glanced about at the crowd, all no doubt discreetly listening too. ‘Somewhere a bit more private?’

‘I’m due a ten-minute break. We could take a turn along the shore?’

They walked beneath the canopy of trees by the lake, as they had done on the day they’d first met so many years before, when Rose had explained the facts of life to Lily. Now it was her turn to relate her concern for Bertie, including a frank account of their failed attempt to resume marital relations. Rose directed all her attention on peeling a fat orange, the juice running over her fingers, while Lily kept her gaze upon a bank of clouds ganging up on Fairfield.

‘He’s got it into his head that he’s impotent.’ There, she’d said the word.

‘Impotent? Bertie?’ Rose almost choked on the orange. ‘I wouldn’t have believed such a thing possible.’

Lily had the grace to smile. ‘Me neither.’ Here she paused, afraid to go on, to explain what she needed. Unfortunately Rose was way ahead of her. She gobbled down the last of the orange, licked her fingers and, wiping her sticky hands on her apron, drew herself up, stiff and straight-backed.

‘And you reckoned I might make him better, eh? Take up wi’ your Bertie where we left off?’ She gave a funny little laugh that sounded coarse and cold. When she folded her arms across her thin chest it might have been her mother Nan standing there. ‘What sort of a request is that to make of an honest woman? Oh, aye, I’m honest. I haven’t taken up me mam’s profession, for all there’s been plenty of opportunity. And, unlike you, I certainly could’ve done wi’ the money.’

‘I never suggested you had.’

‘So what are you asking exactly?’

Lily sighed. ‘I don’t know. I came to you for help. Advice perhaps, from a friend.’

‘You want me to give him back his manhood. Is that it? You must be mad!’

Confused, Lily acknowledged that the idea had been in her mind. ‘I know it would be a lot to ask.’

‘It’s a bleeding cheek, that’s what it is. And why? So you can carry on wi’ your fancy man, undisturbed by conscience?’

Stung by this, Lily jerked up her chin but the words rushed out before she could stop them. ‘How did you know? I mean - that’s not the way of
it at all.’

Rose’s chuckle deepened. ‘Oh, I reckon it is. Tell me I’m wrong then? Tell me you’re innocent? Go on. I’ll believe you where thousands wouldn’t.’

A long silence, then Lily drew in a shaky breath. ‘All right, it’s true. How did you guess?’

‘Nay, lass, it’s common gossip. Did you really think they’d forget all about it, just because your husband has come home?’

‘I must have him, Rose. I need him. He’s in my thoughts day and night. Sometimes I can’t eat I feel so sick with wanting him. I’ve tried to give him up, but I can’t. I must see him again or I’ll die!’

‘By heck, you
have
got it bad.’

Lily looked at her one-time friend with pained eyes. ‘But how can I leave Bertie with no money, no home, no child, and after all I’ve done to that family.’ The tears that had been held back all winter finally flowed. Rose stood for a moment, nonplussed by such loss of
control,
 
then she gathered Lily close in her scrawny arms, tut-tutting and patting her shoulders as if
they were girls again.

‘Nay, don’t tek on so.’ When the tears had been mopped up by the dearly familiar red handkerchief, now more of
a washed-out pink, Rose brought forth a bottle of
cold tea from her capacious apron pocket and gave a sip to Lily. Well laced with gin, it warmed her stomach and steadied her nerves.

But for all her words of comfort, Rose held fast to her principles. ‘You should be honest. Tell Bertie what you feel.’

‘I can’t.’

Rose wagged a finger reprovingly. ‘I’ll tell you why. Because you enjoy living in that fancy house, with the money and status that goes wi’ it.’

‘There isn’t any money.’ Lily spoke so quietly that Rose had to ask her to repeat it, more than once in fact, with long explanations in between, before she was finally convinced.

‘By heck, that’s a facer! ‘Ow did it come about? And ‘ow are you managing?’

The situation at Barwick House, Selene’s sour sulks, Margot’s refusal to face reality, was fully described. ‘I must do something to help,’ Lily finished. ‘I feel responsible, you see.’

‘I thought you hated the Clermont-Reads?’

‘I do. I did. Though I never hated Bertie. Or Edward, in the end. He had his faults but we became good friends and I miss him. It was all my fault he went bankrupt. Everything is.’

‘Nay, that’s going it a bit strong. He must have made some mistakes to lose so much.’

But Lily wouldn’t consider the idea, she was far too busy blaming herself. ‘I must have spent thousands on The Cobbles. Now there’s Thomas to think of. Bertie adores him. I couldn’t take him away, let him think that...’

‘Thomas weren’t his, like?’

‘Oh, Rose, don’t ever say it.’

‘You’ll have to tell him, about Nathan at least.’

Lily shook her head. ‘Not just now. When he’s himself again. I don’t think Margot has said anything yet, but I know she intends to. She’s waiting for the moment when it’ll do the most damage, I expect. Though the gossip-merchants might have got to him already and he’s simply keeping it close to his chest.’ She wiped away the last of her tears with the flat of her hands, an action more suited to the young Lily than the smart young woman in double-breasted blue costume and tilted hat that she now was. ‘I know it seems silly that once I was out to damage them, to get my revenge, and now I feel I have to work to save them from disaster. But I set it all in motion. D’you see?’

‘You mean, you didn’t mind getting your revenge so long as it didn’t affect you?’ Rose’s bluntness, as always, made Lily cringe with shame.

‘I dare say that is what I mean. I wanted to teach them a lesson for being so heartless over Dick. Margot blames me for everything that goes wrong and she does have a point. It was all because of me that Bertie and Selene got diphtheria, and little Amy died. My determination to bleed Edward dry has left them all, my own son included, with a heap of debts and not even the money to buy a pound of sausages. It’s all gone too far, and now I feel it’s up to me to save them from disaster and Bertie from despair. Perhaps then he’ll be a man again. Not that I want him to make love to me, you understand, but he does, so it hurts us both. I thought you might be able to talk to him, cheer him up. Oh, I don’t know.’ Her agitation was mounting, tears starting up again.

Rose, sobered by this sorry, if confusing tale, said, ‘By heck, you are in a pretty pickle if you can’t afford a pound of sausages!’

Lily met the teasing glance with a half smile. ‘It sounds silly but it’s true. We have grocery bills that would near bankrupt the Yellow Earl himself. I seem to be in a dreadful mess, with no one to turn to.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

Lily chewed on her lip. ‘I’ve one or two ideas, nothing definite. I’m not sure if I’m up to the job.’

‘You’re up to any job you put your mind to, Lily. Allus have been.’ They were back in the market by this time, having walked full circle, and the two girls sat, almost contentedly, side by side upon a pile of old boxes and cabbage leaves as they once used to do.

After a pause Lily quietly continued, ‘I’m sorry it came out all in a muddle. But you and I used to be good friends. I rather hoped we might be again.’

Rose rubbed at her nose, embarrassed by Lily’s frankness. ‘I reckon it were you what ruined our friendship, Lily, not the other way about. You got a bit above yourself and stopped calling on me.’

‘You’re right, I did, and I’m sorry. My father said much the same thing.’

‘As for Bertie, well, if you married him for any reason but love that’s your problem, lass. But it’s a bit naive to think I could sort out his problems wi’ talking. So I’ll not take him on, if you don’t mind. What his troubles are I couldn’t rightly say but they’re nowt to do wi’ me.’ Rose got up and started tidying her stall, quite unnecessarily.

After an even longer pause this time, she issued her final words on the subject, in short sharp sentences, as if she wanted to get them over with as quickly as possible.

‘I don’t reckon interfering between a man and his wife is a good idea. I’ve seen the black side of that. Got a mite too fond of him, I did. I’m not inclined to risk it again. Happen if you were to solve your other problem and let him go like, things’d be different. Till then, thanks but no thanks.’

Only when the remainder of the Clermont-Reads’ ever-patient suppliers finally and shame-facedly refused any further credit, when the telephone company threatened to disconnect their fashionable telephone, and the electricity company to cut off their supply, did Margot finally concede that perhaps, after all, they might just have a serious problem.

Selene’s solution was to throw yet another fit of hysterics then pack her bags and move out.

‘I can’t be expected to live in poverty,’ she announced to her startled mother, as if it were a mortal sin. ‘I’ve been offered a place as companion to Catherine Kirkby. Poor Marcus needs help. I intend to take it up forthwith. I suppose I may borrow the gig to remove my boxes and portmanteaux?’ By the end of the day, with no word of protest from Margot, she had gone.

‘What are we to do?’ Lily asked Bertie.

‘Thank my father for at least leaving us a well-stocked cellar.’

There seemed no help for it but to face the crazy idea that had been growing in her head all winter. Strangely, encouraged because of Rose’s confidence in her, it now seemed the only solution. What Lily needed was to discuss the matter with someone before attempting to put it into effect. And the best person she could think of was Nathan.

Ferryman Bob told her she looked as if she’d swallowed the sun, her face was that lit up as she climbed aboard his boat. Lily sensed he would have liked to tease her further, but recognising the way she had her eyes fixed on the far shore as if willing it closer, he held his tongue and concentrated instead upon his rowing.

She almost ran from the jetty, past the boat yard and up Drake Road to hammer on Nathan’s door without caring who saw her. But he wasn’t in. Of course not. At this time in the morning he would be working. Turning, she ran up Mallard Street, and once out of The Cobbles headed straight for the pier and the Public Steamer office.

She’d kept away from him all winter, out of respect for Edward and to help Bertie cope with the trauma. Now she was desperate to see him again.

Lily attracted a few appreciative stares as she flew across the wooden pier and up the steps that led to Nathan’s office. Dressed in a navy polka dot silk dress and wide straw hat on this bright spring day, she looked the picture of charming respectability, not at all the sort of girl to run after a man.

The sun glinted on the water and there was a queue forming already at the steamer terminus. A straggle of elderly couples wanting a leisurely cruise, a few families wishing to keep the children amused for an hour or two.

A breeze slapped against the lines of rowing boats, making them dance and jig about, and Lily could hear delighted squeals as girls and youths climbed gingerly aboard the rocking craft. For a moment she thought of Dick and his bright, eager young face gazing so adoringly into hers. She thought of her beloved baby and Lily’s heart contracted, even now, at the loss of this most precious part of her. I’ll make you proud of me, she silently vowed. See if I don’t.