on the subject. ‘Scarlet, white and green would be appropriate colours. And you ought to reach it by crossing a little scarlet Chinese bridge across a square or circular pool. Strictly speaking, though these roses are lovely, if you want to be traditional the only flowers should be water lilies. Otherwise masses of ferns and rocks.’
‘Roberta, you’re absolutely right!’ Dickie looked delighted. He turned to Fleur and just missed seeing her sticking out her tongue at Billy. ‘Isn’t it marvellous to have found someone who knows? Won’t it be fun, darling? I’m determined we shall do the thing right. Now tell me, what should the bells be made of?’
‘Anything you like. Often they were wooden but you could just as well have brass—’
I was interrupted by the sound of breaking china. ‘Oh, bugger,’ said Fleur. A pretty pink and gold Coalport tea cup lay in pieces on the gravel. ‘Mrs Harris’ll have a field day.’ Then she giggled. ‘It’s your fault, Billy. You shouldn’t make those ridiculous faces.’
Billy chuckled, an unpleasantly lubricious sound.
‘Better pick up the pieces, darling,’ said Dickie. ‘Perhaps it can be mended. But be careful not to cut yourself—’ It was too late. Fleur was sucking her thumb. The unselfconsciousness of the babyish pose was utterly charming and seductive. When she took it from her mouth drops of crimson fell on to the wet cement. ‘Here’s my hanky.’ Dickie sounded alarmed. ‘Put pressure on it and hold it above your head. We’ll go in and get a plaster—’
‘Don’t fuss.’ Fleur stood up. ‘It’s just a little cut. I was going to see Stargazer anyway. You stay and talk gardens with Bobbie.’ She fluttered a hand at me. ‘See you later.’ Then she was gone through the gap in the hedge.
Billy put down his trowel. ‘If you’re going to put a pond in, is it any good me going on with the paving?’
‘Well, no, I suppose not. You’d better leave all this for the time being and go and help Beddows with the grass.’
‘I was thinking maybe I’d go and help Mrs Sudborough with the horse. She’ll be a bit unhandy with that thumb.’
‘Good idea. Off you go then.’
Billy gave me a last lecherous look, then strode from the garden. I gazed at Dickie’s round pink face with his guileless eyes, snub nose and small mouth pursed up in an expression of whole-hearted enthusiasm and innocent pleasure and could have wept for him.
‘I don’t know though,’ Kit interrupted. ‘My sympathies are with the beauteous Fleur. Think how grim to be young and filled with the joys of spring and to be tied to a decrepit old buffer – however decent – incapable of gratifying one’s appetites. Or did the dear old fellow wink an eye when the lickerish Billy put in a spell of overtime? If so, it was probably sensible of him.’
‘A typically masculine reaction,’ I said scornfully.
‘Isn’t that reassuring? I am after all a man.’
‘For one thing, you talk as though Dickie’s in his dotage. He’s only fifty. And even if he were too old or too infirm to gratify anyone’s appetite, as you so charmingly phrase it, you seem to assume that those appetites are important enough to justify Fleur sleeping with an ignorant lout for whom she cares nothing, and who doesn’t give a fig for her. Are you telling me that men and women can’t live entirely happily together without sex?’
‘Yes.’ Seeing that I looked indignant, he added, ‘Well, you asked. With affection, yes, contentedly, possibly, but entirely happily? I doubt it. Not unless they’re both over seventy.’
‘You’re entitled to your view, of course,’ I said with a superior air.
Dickie lost no time in putting into practice my proposals for the China House. He was anxious to consult me on every detail and soon it was taken for granted that I would go over to Ladyfield for lunch or supper once or twice a week. It was wonderful to escape the dullness of Cutham for a few hours and the Sudboroughs’ hospitality was never less than munificent. When the weather was good we ate on the terrace beneath a wisteria-covered pergola. When it was wet, in the dining room. Sometimes we had lunch in the China House. For a greedy person like me it was heaven to have straight from the garden tiny broad beans, carrots like baby’s fingers, beetroot the size of olives and little purple artichokes to be eaten with a green mayonnaise and followed by tender noisettes of lamb or roast chicken with tarragon or skate with black butter. Mrs Harris’s puddings were first class, too. I remember with particular fondness her omelette Rothschild, a wonderful concoction of nectarines, strawberries and kirsch baked inside a hot vanilla-flavoured froth of eggs.
Of course, the food was not the chief incentive for my visits to Ladyfield. I rapidly grew fond of both Fleur and Dickie and I thought they were often glad to have someone around with whom they were both … well, not intimate exactly, one cannot become that in a matter of weeks, but thoroughly relaxed. Three is only a crowd when two of the three are in love. Fleur told me she had never had a close female friend. At her smart and expensive school her farouche manners had not helped her to win popularity with staff or girls. Also she had hated tennis, dances and Radio Luxembourg and had been wholly uninterested in clothes, make-up and boys. Her experience of living as an outcast in an intensely conformist society had been enough to put her off other girls for good.
She excepted me from this comprehensive proscription, I divined, because her beloved brother had expressed a desire that we should be friends. For my part I found it easy to comply with Burgo’s wishes. Fleur was honest and affectionate, which I appreciated, coming from a family who would have preferred to be grilled over hot coals than show one any tenderness. And she was extremely generous. I learned not to praise anything for I would find it on the back seat of my car when I reached home. Once she gave me her favourite dress when I admired it, another time it was a beautiful emerald ring which had belonged to her mother.
I returned the dress on the grounds that it was too short. The ring I gave back to Dickie who promised to put it for safe-keeping in the bank. But he insisted I keep the Mennecy silver-mounted snuff box painted on the lid with sprays of roses. I have it still and treasure it despite associations of guilt. When Fleur was riding (often with Billy, much to my regret) or walking the dogs, again accompanied by Billy as often as not, Dickie and I would talk about gardens and draw up plans for the China House.
Though I knew quite a bit about the history of gardening and could just about tell a Lychnis from a Linaria, I knew little about the practical side of horticulture, never having owned a garden. Discovering this, Dickie loaded my car after each visit with gardening books with which I cheered the hours at Cutham. I learned the comparative virtues of a Portland rose and a Bourbon, the pruning requirements of various groups of clematis, which Michaelmas daisies were resistant to mildew and to recognize the absolute desirability of a Paeonia mlokosewitschii however fleeting its flowering. Dickie and I spent happy hours among the flowerbeds, planting, weeding, staking and dead-heading until our hands and clothes were imbued with the scent of catmint, rosemary, bergamot and thyme. Those seven weeks – was it only seven? it seemed like an entire summer – were a delightful respite.
I had news of Burgo occasionally. He sent Fleur a scribbled postcard from Leningrad, then one from Moscow, after that from Kiev and finally from the South of France. She always showed me the cards, assuming that I would share her pleasure in reading them. His style was laconic. Something about the traffic or the hotel, the view or the heat. My apprehensions about Burgo dissolved as I began to forget what he was like in relation to me, and saw him instead through Fleur’s eyes as an older brother, generally absent, preoccupied, wonderfully clever, sometimes impatient and unkind but just as often forbearing.
One evening – it was the beginning of August – Dickie rang to suggest a picnic in the garden of the China House. The cement was dry in the newly constructed lily pond and he wanted me to come and celebrate the turning on of the hose. I drove over to Ladyfield and walked out on to the terrace. Burgo was sitting at the table beneath the wisteria.
‘Hello,