Consider the Lily

WARNING STOP CHUDLEIGHS DON'T HAVE A
BLOODY PENNY STOP RUPERT

Across his mind flashed an image of Hinton Dysart on a spring morning, set in tangled green and serenaded by ring doves. It was followed by the darker image that always made him want to run away... as far and as fast as he could. He hovered on the edge of anger. 'Be patient, Daisy.'

He's been warned off. As sharp as a razor, Susan's words cut into Daisy.

'Daisy.' Kit slid his arms around her and held her tight. Dust blew in from the road and the wind whipped around them. Daisy shivered inside the prison made by his body.

'Luggage labels, Kit, and telephone calls. That's what it boils down to. I think we should end this conversation. There isn't any point in it.

Kit took Daisy by the shoulders and forced her to face him. 'But you do understand?'

Wild with hurt, and with despair because it had all gone wrong, she lost her temper. 'What is there to understand?' she blazed.

In the fading stormy light, her face turned pale, foxlike and unreadable. Her eyes narrowed in rage, and her hair lost its brightness. For a moment, her beauty and sureness were gone, and she seemed out of her depth.

As quickly as it had erupted, Daisy's anger died. 'Kit, I'm sorry. That was unforgiveable.'

'I have to go home to Hinton Dysart,' he repeated, teaching her the fact as if to a child. 'I cannot abandon it or my father, and I have nothing to offer a wife at the moment except a mountain of debt.'

It was on the tip of her tongue to ask, 'Since when did a huge house and garden constitute nothing?' Instead she said, 'And I have nothing to offer you?'

'Please. Don't'

She stood by the carved stone pot and deadheaded the geraniums. As she watched the faded petals yield to the mistral, she contemplated the wounds of a love affair - its humiliations, its quicksands, and spoilt promise. 'I thought it would be different, Kit' she said miserably. 'I thought we would make it.'

Her mother was right. Kit had been warned off.

'Daisy!' All rivers, however clear, flow over mud, and mixed into Kit's passion for Daisy was a sediment - and a wariness - that stemmed from a long time back. 'I wish I could make you understand, my darling Daisy. Everything's all right. Truly.'

'Oh Kit.' With one of her graceful, unpredictable gestures, Daisy turned to Kit, and her arms snaked up his chest and around his neck. 'Are you sure?' She pressed her body into his and willed him to say: Come with me.

Tempted to say 'to hell with it', aching from the contact, Kit hesitated - and thirty seconds passed that were to colour the rest of his life.

With a waft of bruised geranium, Daisy released him, turned and made her way across the lawn to the terrace. 'I'll see you in London,' she called.

'Daisy.' In panic at the peremptory leavetaking, Kit moved too fast, slipped and fell onto a knee. Wincing, he scrambled to his feet while Daisy's diminishing figure slid in and out of the shadows, insubstantial and unearthly. Then he limped after her, caught up and grabbed one of the straps of her pink dress. 'Don't say it like that.'

Daisy waited for Kit to drop his hand. 'I understand, Kit, really I do. Look, I've been meaning to tell you. There's someone else... someone who wants to marry me.' Her beauty had returned and in the stormy afternoon, she seemed lit up by the drama of the moment and by an emotion he did not recognize. 'His name is Tim, and I'm probably going to say yes.'

Kit's grip on her shoulder was savage and she cried out.

'You're making it up.'

'No.'

'I can't believe it.'

With a shrug Daisy moved away. 'it was fun, wasn't it, Kit? I enjoyed our time together.'

'Fun...' The word hung in the dusk. Kit stood motionless as she walked towards the house. 'Yes, it was,' she called over her shoulder. 'I shall think of it when I'm back in London.'

'Daisy. Listen to me...' Kit was planted into the stone.

'It didn't take much, did it?' A thin, disembodied voice floated back to him.

'To do what?' he called out, forgetting there were other people in the villa. 'To do what, Daisy?' he bellowed in bewilderment.

'To be put off.'

Daisy vanished through the curtains at the french windows.

No sponging on their good will. No sponging on their good will.

The overnight train from Nice to Paris clacked out the message and Matty, a book unread in her lap, listened to it. Sometimes it sounded as hard and metallic as Aunt Susan, and at others it whispered as the train glided over points and down gradients.

Perhaps she was a little light-headed with fever from the infected bites, for strange thoughts filtered in and out of her brain. They drifted, tantalizing and out of reach, and she tried to catch them - rebellious, daringly coloured butterflies in the bell-jar of her mind.

The mirror in the compartment swung to the rhythm of the train, and her reflection became a many-angled composition. There was her blotched face, so different from Daisy's beauty, which Matty would never have. The demon of jealousy stirred. So unlovable compared to Daisy, it whispered, so uninteresting, so unformed.

No sponging on their good will.

Outside the window, France slid past, the lights of towns and villages beaded along the track. Already it was cooler, and when they nosed between foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes a scent of pine overlaid the smoke.

Matty poured water into the basin and began to wash for dinner. Two years ago, she had been browsing through a selection of American periodicals and had come across an article by the American feminist, Emma Goldman, which she had never forgotten. Emma had said 'True emancipation begins neither in the polls, or in the courts. It begins in a woman's soul.'

Matty well remembered her shock when she read the words - a sense that she had encountered something daring and grand in scope. Of course, she did not consider they applied to her - Emma was much too heroic for the soul that huddled inside Matty's delicate frame, the stepping stones to Emma's bold state of mind too far apart.

And yet. And yet.

No sponging on their good will.

She thought back to the Villa Lafayette, criss-crossed with vivid sensation - sun, sea, the intensities of falling in love, jealousy. Marcus and Flora. Daisy and Kit. Mosquito bites. Sweat-bathed nights. Unfamiliar longings.

he wouldn't want me, Matty told herself. Hugging a mental picture of a remote figure who made conversation about Damascus and roses. Never. But then, she added that was not surprising. She wouldn't have wanted herself.

She began to dress.

End of 1st Extract

2nd Extract:

Three other women were eating breakfast in the restaurant. One was young and expensively dowdy. The second, decked in unnecessary furs and made up with scarlet lipstick and Vaselined lids, looked no better than she should be - but since she was undoubtedly beautiful and excuded inviting sexuality, men hovered at her table. At a table opposite, an older woman in a grey felt hat and a sensible Harris tweed suit hugged a glass of brandy and soda as if her life depended on it.

To give herself courage matty also ordered a brandy and soda. When the steward brought it the restaurant heaved with a clatter of china, and she braced her feet on the carpet. Her hand shook only a little when she raised the glass to her lips, and Matty was encouraged. Freed from the heat of Villa Lafayette, she felt better. Stronger. More determined. More like the women she wished to be like. She gulped down another mouthful.

If Matty was going to do what she planned, it had to be now while her courage was high and her inhibitions were down. The moment was right - a powerful instinct told her so - but her terror was such that she thought she was going to faint. Two minutes later, half the brandy and soda had disappeared, and fanned, warm and supportive, through her. Dear Emma, Matty headed her prayer, whoever you are, I want you to know you have a lot of answer for and I, for one, hope that you are right.

She got up, permitted the waiter to pull back her chair and to escort her out of the restaurant. Outside, the wind immediately attacked her hat and roared past her ears, and waves threw drifts of spume over her face. Kit was still standing at the rail, gazing back towards the vanished French coastline. Stepping carefully over the deck in her inappropriately high heels, Matty approached him.

'Excuse me,' she said softly.

Evidently Kit did not hear her for he said nothing.

'Excuse me,' she repeated, and touched his forearm. Puzzled by the interruption, Kit turned his head and looked down at his travelling companion. Later, he remembered thinking how badly she carried fatigue. She looked ill, frightened and very small. The wind whipped a strand of hair across her cheeck and she pushed it back with a hand that trembled visably.

'I hope you don't mind me interrupting you,' she said.

Normally polite, Kit's expression was not inviting and she shrank inside. 'No,' he said, barely concealing his reluctance. 'Of course not. Do you need help?'

Matty lost her nerve and floundered. 'I was just wondering what time we will dock.'

Kit pushed aside thoughts of the weary business of settling debts and making decisions about what to sell, what to keep, how to stay solvent, and consulted his watch. 'Another hour,' he replied. 'Are you feeling all right?'

'Perfectly, thank you.'

There was silence.

'Could I get you something to drink?' he asked over the noise of the wind.

'No. No, thank you. I've had a very good lunch.'

After that exchange Kit appeared to forget she was there, and gazed out over a sea heaving with white crests. Matty looked down at the deck, at her feet braced against the swell. Someone had dropped a raisin scone, and it lay squashed into a heap of black and white crumbs. Anger at Kit's indifference stirred life into Matty. She tugged at Kit's sleeve.

'There is something I would like to ask you,' she blurted out, but half her words were lost. Kit cupped a hand to his ear. 'Something I would like to ask you,' she shouted into the wind.

'Yes,' he said, tight-lipped.

Matty was almost deterred by his stony expression, but her anger was growing. Go on, it urged.

Propelled by its force, Matty began again. 'I wondered...' The spectre of Emma Goldman filled her vision with a grand and daring dream. Matty ground out between set teeth: 'I think you should marry me.'