Wild Lily (2 page)

Antony told his father all about it over supper. For once he had something to talk about; they usually ate in near silence. When his father was home they ate together in the dining room at one end of a vast mahogany table that seated forty. It was too big to move out and had obviously been built on site. It was hideous, but neither Antony nor his father had ever really noticed. They ate at the end nearest the door that led, after a long walk, to the kitchen.

‘Mr Sopwith wasn’t there, but we had a great time. They showed us all sorts and I was allowed to drive one. “Roll it,” they say – just along the ground, not taking off. It’s how you learn. They’re quite hard to control, strange. I signed up for lessons, so I can fly it home – when I’ve decided which one to have. If I have lessons, I can try them all, see what’s best.’

‘Very good.’ Mr Sylvester was surprised at his son’s sense for once, having half expected to find an aeroplane sitting on the drive when he came home.

They had an uneasy relationship, neither quite sure what
to make of the other. They did not meet very often, and there was no third party to ease the contact, no jolly wife or quarrelling siblings. Claude Sylvester’s wife had died, quite suddenly, soon after they had moved to Lockwood. She had been excited about the vast prospect of turning the echoing rooms into a comfortable home, but perhaps the whole thing had been too much for her, for she died of a heart attack immediately after a meeting with a firm of interior designers who came down from London and exclaimed in horror at the task that faced them.

She had made a pretty flat upstairs for Helena – a prime consideration – but that was all she had managed. Antony had been eight when his mother died and Helena four years older. He had already learned at that early age to live his own life, as his mother – not unnaturally – was almost totally taken up with Helena. How could it be otherwise? Antony accepted the situation without rancour, but tended to avoid seeing too much of Helena – the atmosphere up in her quarters was not to his taste and he found it hard to please her, foundering in his own inadequacy to understand what on earth it was she was saying, or trying to say, or what she wanted, or how to please her. She laughed a lot and he thought she mocked him. He was sorry for her, of course, not to be able to see or hear. How did she imagine the world, he wondered, not ever having seen it?

His friends were always nosy about her, dying to meet her. He had been in the habit of bringing his Eton friends home in the holidays to stay – but none of them had ever wanted to
come twice after they had found themselves banned from the freak upstairs, and only just managing to survive the discomfort of life in Lockwood Hall. Antony stopped asking them, but at the back of his mind he had always harboured the idea of a huge midsummer party by the lake, using the amazing grotto as a base. That would be quite something, especially if he got an aeroplane. That would impress them. They would come then.

The grotto was amazing, built a century ago by the master of the original Lockwood Hall – a very beautiful Queen Anne mansion which had been brutally destroyed to make way for the present monstrosity. Old engravings of the original house were displayed in the corridors, but were hard to make out in the ill-lit passages.

The new house was entirely panelled in dark oak, impressively expensive but also impressively gloomy. Cosy was a word that did not spring to the tongue. Many of the servants gave in their notice quite soon, especially in the winter when the great boilers in the cellar struggled to keep the chill out of the huge rooms. Antony was used to it, but was always surprised that his father seemed fond of the place and never considered moving. It must have sad memories for him, his wife dying so soon after they had moved in, but Mr Sylvester was not a sentimental nor sensitive man. Antony wondered sometimes if he took after him. He rather hoped not, for his father was not much liked, he noticed, not one to spread bonhomie and delight.

He spoke little, rarely smiled. He was not imposing to look
at, only of average height and build, with fading, disappearing brown hair, severely trimmed, and a large dark moustache that hid most of his lower face. He wore dark suits, impeccably tailored and obviously expensive, and used little round-framed spectacles for reading. Most of that reading was confined to the financial pages of the daily newspapers – Antony had never seen his father reading anything else. It was not surprising that they had little conversation when they did meet, and Antony guessed that his father was relieved when the holidays were over and his son went back to Eton.

For himself, he preferred being at home and mucking about with his village friends and the wild Lily when she came gardening with her father. He did not work hard at school, got into scrapes, got beaten and harangued that he did not use his intelligence for better things (than making stink bombs and writing rude riddles). He was popular and did not lack for friends, so had no complaints.

His father showed rather more interest in the impending flying lessons than anything his son usually had to tell him and actually said, ‘I wouldn’t mind trying it out myself if I had the time.’

‘When I know how I’ll teach you.’

Antony could in no way envisage this and knew it wouldn’t happen, but his father gave one of his rare smiles in agreement. They ate and then went their separate ways, his father to his study and Antony to his own room. There was a sitting room, but it was never used. There was no family life in Lockwood Hall.

Lily was helping her father in the grounds of Lockwood Hall. When she didn’t have other jobs to do – cleaning at the vicarage, running errands for Mrs Carruthers, washing pots in the Queen’s Head or mucking out the livery horses – she helped her father. Squashy trailed along with his dog, Barky, as usual. Squashy was eleven, useless but cheerful. Barky, a small brown mongrel of countless crosses from a village litter, was also useless and cheerful and the two were never apart.

Gabriel had been instructed to make a smooth strip beyond the lake for Antony’s aeroplane, when it came. ‘I’m a ruddy gardener, not an aerodrome designer,’ her father grumbled. ‘It’s a farm job, flattening and rolling.’

They stood in the spring sunshine on the side of the lake, looking out away from the house. The lake, clear and deep, ran like a wide river along the natural valley below the house. On two small islands on the far side from the house, someone a long time ago had made the once-fabulous but now decrepit grotto. Antony wanted to land his aeroplane ‘somewhere near
the grotto’, on the far side. He was planning to build it a hangar, which would be hidden from the house by trees and the high mound of the grotto itself.

‘We’ll ’ave a look at it, and tell Mr Butterworth the state of it, and ’e can make it good,’ Gabriel decided.

As they were standing outside the house, ‘having a look at it’ entailed a twenty-minute walk to the end of the lake where a bridge crossed it, and back down the other side. Where the bridge crossed over, near to the village road, there was a row of small workers’ cottages that faced the lake, one of which was the home of Gabriel and his children.

Mr Butterworth was the man who farmed the estate. The estate staff tended to be closely related, descended from the estate workers before them, father to son. They had been severely decimated by the war and were still mainly the old and the young, only half a force, the strong middle contingent lost and buried in French soil. There had once been twelve strong young gardeners, but now there was only Gabriel and six what he called ‘useless young dopes’ from the village, just out of elementary school. He reckoned Lily was worth all six put together, although it wouldn’t occur to him to tell her so.

They walked along what was to be the landing strip, up as far as the grotto, Gabriel marking the required distance as ordered by Master Antony, and deciding on the best site for the hangar. The space was certainly wide enough, bounded on the far side by the hedge that marked the estate boundary and a lane beyond.

While Gabriel was pacing out his plans, Lily and Squashy
went out to the grotto, attracted as always by this strange, creepy figment of the weird Georgian imagination. There were two islands quite close to the shore, and so close to each other that there was just a strip of water between them. They had been covered with great rocks, imported at great expense, built very high and now covered with a thick canopy of trees and undergrowth and swags of rampant ivy so the water between them was in a tunnel of verdancy.

On one of the islands the famous grotto had been built inside the rocks. Its entry was beside the water at its narrowest part, a yawning cave mouth, now blocked off with a securely locked iron gate. A landing had been built at the waterside outside the cave mouth for visitors who came by boat, but the island with the grotto in it was near enough to the shore to be connected by a rickety wooden bridge. Lily and Squashy used the bridge, although Lily always thought it would be very romantic to arrive by boat from the open lake, through the tunnel. The lake was supplied with various boats, kept near the house, which the boys used to lark about in, but it was forbidden to go to the grotto. ‘Dangerous!’ they all said on the estate. ‘Horrible!’ ‘Do not go there!’

Of course they went. Antony knew where the key to the iron grille was kept, and once he had taken them right in there – but all Lily remembered was the awful smell of the underground, the enfolding chill like wings of death, the frightening echo of dropping water, the terrifying dark and Antony’s scornful laugh ricocheting off distant walls. There had been narrow passages going off in all directions, lit only by Antony’s
feeble torch. She had been petrified but, as ever, determined not to show weakness in front of Antony, her hero.

Going to the landing, as they did now, was nice, turning their backs on the grim cave mouth, sitting on the warm stones and dangling their feet in the water. Summer was coming and the water was warm.

‘Fancy Antony buying an aeroplane,’ Lily said. ‘I wouldn’t half like a go in it.’

‘I don’t want to go,’ Squashy said.

‘He’ll take the others. I doubt he’ll take me.’

Lily had no illusions as to where she stood in the group that made up Antony’s gang: she was only a girl, after all. But she strung along, in spite of the insults, because she loved Antony and wanted to be with him for ever. She adored him. Everything about him: the way he spoke, (Etonian), the way he moved (like a mountain goat, bold and free), the way he looked (like a Greek god), the way he laughed (loudly), the way he swam (like an otter), the way he regarded her (kindly enough). When they were alone together he was really nice; when the others were around he mostly ignored her, but did not send her away. When she told him that she loved him he laughed and said he loved someone else.

‘Who?’

‘Melanie Marsden. I love Melanie Marsden.’

‘Oh really, Antony.’ What a disappointment! Mostly for his taste. Lily knew she was worth six of Melanie Marsden. ‘You’ll grow out of it,’ she said.

‘So will you then.’

‘No. Not me, not ever, not till the day I die.’

‘Blimey. That’s a bit thick. What am I supposed to do?’

‘Nothing, really. But later on we can get married.’

‘I’m not sure about that. I’ve got to marry someone posh.’

‘Who says so?’

‘My dad would, if you asked him.’

‘I won’t ask him. You can make up your own mind when you’re older, surely?’

‘I daresay. Melanie Marsden.’

Lily hit him and they had a fight until Squashy started to cry and attacked Antony with a spade.

‘Oh hush, Squashy. It’s only for fun.’ She hugged him. ‘It’s not real.’

But when she lay in bed at night she thought about it and knew it was for real. Antony could scoff as much as he liked but it made no difference. She was born with it. Whoever he might choose to love Lily would always love him better.

As she sat now with Squashy, kicking her feet in the water, she laughed, thinking of Antony arriving out of the sky in an aeroplane. How gloriously rich the Sylvesters were! Mr Sylvester went up to London in his white Rolls and saw politicians and investors and bankers and likewise men of power and fame, and obviously he acquired enormous amounts of money – but what for, nobody knew. If they knew they probably wouldn’t understand! Antony himself had no idea how it came about. He took it for granted, being rich enough to have an aeroplane for his birthday.

Lily knew only too well the gulf that separated her from
Antony. He had never been inside her home, just as she had never been inside his, save for a few steps into the kitchen, to deliver flowers. Her home was a small cottage, built for the master workers. Most of the workers lived in the village, but as Gabriel was the head gardener he had been allocated a cottage. The cottage was well maintained, but the inside was Lily’s department and something of a tip, housewifery not being one of her passions. She had to do all the shopping and cooking and do the fires, as well as work for various people in the village and for her father too in the summer, when the gardens needed so much attention. Sitting dangling her feet in the lake by the grotto was a rare moment of idleness, lasting as long as it took Gabriel to survey what was going to be the airfield.

Not very long.

‘Crazy idea. The boy will kill himself for sure.’

Everyone in the village was saying the same thing. Lily disagreed. ‘He won’t. Aeroplanes are much safer now, since the war.’ If he killed himself, she would die too, she thought.

‘Come along. We’ve wasted enough time with this rubbish.’

And Lily spent the rest of the day on her knees in the herbaceous borders below the windows of the Hall, weeding, her large red hands expertly wrenching dandelions from their moorings, buttercups from their deep and wicked creeping roots, wandering ivy, chickweed, thistle and pernicious bindweed all consigned vigorously to the wheelbarrow, which Squashy trundled away to the rubbish heap. She was a
cauldron of energy, her thin, childish body working its way through the hollyhocks, long yellow hair swinging – ‘worth five boys at least’ they said of her – and she laughed as she worked, and shouted at Squashy, and Squashy laughed at his dog who sat wagging his silly tail, and Gabriel told them not to be so damned silly and – at last – go home and get some food ready. The old man was starving.

A typical day in the life of Lily Gabriel, aged thirteen.