The Wildflowers by Harriet Evans (34)

Chapter Thirty-One

January 1993

Mads had few clothes; as a child she had been dressed in either school uniform or outfits cobbled together from charity shops and presents from Aunt Julia. Being a young girl concerned with science and experiments and not with her own appearance she had never acquired an interest in fashion herself, which Ben always thought was strange, as she’d always noticed what his mother and sister wore. Still, he told himself, clearing out her wardrobe would be straightforward.

The bedroom was at the front of the house; Ben could hear the faint noise of cars in the distance, and his daughters downstairs with Elsa, the nanny. Otherwise it was very quiet. He looked at his watch. Ten-thirty. In a couple of hours a group of friends were taking him out to lunch to say farewell – a table for ten at Le Caprice. Movie friends, whom he’d see in Los Angeles anyway. Movie friends who’d never known her and who didn’t have children and who had no idea about his life but the gesture was kindly meant and one of them was a producer on the upcoming Robot Master 3: Robots Attack. Tragedy didn’t spare you from work, nor would he have wanted it to, but it made everything harder to negotiate, made you a leper. He remembered this from when he’d run away and had his accident, with an ache of recognition, that people were terrified of you if you were different in some way. Sometimes over the previous six months he’d just wanted to give people a card, with a series of instructions on it.

The wardrobe was a vast mahogany thing that had come from Ben and Cord’s old room in the Bosky. Ben squared his shoulders, and drew in his breath, slowly, as he had seen his father do sometimes, before he went on stage. Then he opened the great mahogany door and, feeling like Lucy Pevensie, leaned as far in as he could go.

The scent of his dead wife hung in the black air inside: sweet, musky, a faintly sour note at the edges. As his vision sharpened in the dark, so did the knot of pain around his heart and he blinked, his eyes sharp with tears at the smell of her again. It was chaos inside, clothes shoved in anyhow, jumpers rolled up inside out, T-shirts and plaid shirts balled up in crumpled heaps. Gently, he began dropping each item on to the floor in separate piles. Here was the Kate Bush T-shirt, which they had bought in duplicate, and those loose plaid shirts she liked, which drew no attention to her and her extraordinary, impish beauty, and the battered 501s, and shapeless maternity smocks and there was the baggy, faded blue sweater she used to hunch her entire body into, knees pulled up under her chin, until it became her favourite item to wear in the last stages of her pregnancy. All of it his Maddy’s, uniquely hers. The task of going through her clothes had seemed like a chore; now he understood why he had avoided it. It was the closest to her he’d felt since she’d died. It was painful, so painful it actually hurt. He found the green silk shirt-dress she had worn to the girls’ christening right at the back, shoved into a plastic bag; he pulled it out, and it was stiff with breast-milk and blood. She had bled for weeks after the birth. Methodically, Ben began sorting the clothes out, but the majority were either missing a button or dirty or torn beyond repair, and still the faint scent of her hung over them all and if he put the soft fleece of the inside of the sweater to his cheek it was like smelling her, touching her again.

So when his mother appeared, five minutes later, Ben was sitting on the floor, surrounded by Mads’s clothes, his head in his hands, sobbing in wheezing gulps he could not control.

Althea sank to her knees. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said. She wrapped her arms around him. ‘I know, darling. I know.’

Ben wiped his eyes. He didn’t want to stop crying. When he was crying, keening, he was acknowledging how black and final it really was, facing up to it. It was getting on with living, day by day, that was what was so hard. ‘They’re all filthy,’ he said. ‘There’s blood on most of the jeans and in the T-shirts.’ Althea winced.

‘Awful.’

‘She was in so much pain. And I didn’t know,’ he whispered, for what must have been the hundredth time since he lost her. ‘I knew it was tough for her but I had no idea. I didn’t try hard enough to find out.’

‘You did. You’d hired Elsa,’ said Althea patiently. She sat back down on the floor carefully and, with a jolt, Ben noticed for the first time the stiffness of her movements.

Grief absorbed everything. It was like a blob of black ink, always there, wobbling slightly in front of him in his mind’s eye, and then something would happen and it’d suddenly spread through him, as though on blotting paper, like tea leaves, colour swirling through the water. Emily and Iris would never know their mother, wouldn’t see her grow old. He would never know her change; she was fixed as she had been the last time he’d seen her: a pale, hollow-eyed wraith, almost ghost-like already even before death, moving slowly about, crippled with some kind of pain that bent her forwards, almost double. The more the babies thrived, the older they became: the more it seemed to eat at her. He’d thought he’d understood her better than any of the other Wildes, but he’d been wrong.

Althea began putting the clothes into a plastic bag in forceful, punching movements. ‘No,’ he said, stopping her. ‘They need to be washed, or mended.’

‘I know,’ she said, carrying on. ‘That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? I said I’d help you sort her things out, and I will. I’ve got the car and I’ll take them to the charity shop – is that all right?’ She put her hand on his arm. ‘Darling. It’s best to do this, you know. You’re leaving in three weeks. You must clear her things out.’ She looked down at a soft cream silk shirt. ‘Look at it. So small. She was just a little thing, wasn’t she?’

Ben was just beginning to get used to the idea that Mads was gone for ever, though it sounded stupid when you said it like that, as if he couldn’t understand she was dead. But she had been such a vital person, so alive and so very unlike anyone else, with her solemn face, half monkey-like, half beautiful, her quick movements and yet her great capacity for stillness. She had slept a great deal before she killed herself, sometimes with the babies, curled up in the bed when he was away, and her sleep was deeper than theirs – she did everything totally, utterly – when he had first found her that morning he hadn’t believed she was dead, because so often before he had had to shake her awake from the deepest sleep.

That last time – the curled, hunched figure, the hands tightly clenched, the hair that spilled over the coverlet and almost to the floor . . . her soft, pale face, the dark gold lashes resting on the cheek . . .

She had been buried in her wedding dress. It was Cord’s idea. She was quite insistent about it. ‘She didn’t have nice things for so long,’ she’d said, standing in the doorway of the sitting room biting her nails. ‘Her wedding dress was awfully expensive, for her. She paid for it herself.’

‘Did she?’ Ben hadn’t really known, hadn’t asked. He remembered it – a simple cream taffeta dress with a long skirt and a velvet bolero jacket, tightly tailored, in leaden silver. He remembered her shining hair around her face, her pink cheeks, her heart-stopping smile as she reached him at the front of the church . . . It’s just us, she’d seemed to say, just us now . . .

‘Yes, and she had three extra fittings at Liberty, because she kept losing weight.’ Cord had torn off the corner of a nail and winced – Ben always remembered her, plunging the bleeding hand into her pocket again. ‘She used all her savings to afford it. She’d want to be buried in that. I know she would.’

Now, looking into the wardrobe, Ben wished he still had the dress, something of Madeleine’s to give to the girls, something that wasn’t old and tatty and stained. There was nothing really left of her, other than them. What else could he give them, to remember her by?

The sound of one toddler crying floated up to them, and he closed his eyes, briefly overwhelmed as he sometimes was by the thought of both of them, needing him so much. He breathed in, smelling her scent one last time. It was already fainter than before and he shut the wardrobe door with a slam, that he might preserve what little of it there was. Perhaps before he left for LA he’d open it again.

Althea was tying a knot in the second bag. She stood up, dusting herself off, and a letter fell to the ground from her handbag. She picked it up, hastily. Ben glanced curiously at it.

‘Downing Street?’ he said, anxious to change the subject, to chase his misery away, for one second. She stuffed it into her bag. ‘Why is John Major writing to you, Mumma? Is he asking you out on a date?’

She shook her head. ‘He’s not.’

‘What on earth is that?’ He scanned her face, touching her playfully on the arm. ‘Come on. Tell me!’

Althea twisted away from him, staring into the wardrobe. ‘Oh, it’s nothing, darling. Let’s talk about something else.’

‘They’re giving you a gong,’ he said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? Which one?’

His mother shook her head again. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She patted the back of her head, where the perfectly lustrous hair was, as always, coiled up into a chignon, and then she picked up the bin bag. ‘Let’s put this in the car.’

Ben looked at her, curiously. He reached over, took the letter from her bag, and she didn’t protest.

‘A Dame?’ he said, scanning the page. ‘They want to make you a Dame? Oh, Mumma. That’s wonderful. Dame Althea Wilde – oh, it does sound good. Dame Althea—’ He took her hand. ‘Can I cast you in my next film? You’d add some much-needed gravitas.’

She said, quickly, ‘No, no. I’ve said no. I telephoned them this morning. Before I came. I’ve turned it down. Please, please don’t mention it again.’

Her face was red. She took the letter, and folded it up, over and over again.

‘Mumma. Why?’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Is it Daddy?’

‘I told them maybe another time. They weren’t very receptive.’ She put the wedge of paper back into her handbag. ‘I don’t think you can ask to have it in two years’ time because you’re not in the mood at the moment. But I can’t take it. I can’t do that to him.’ She rotated her head smartly around; Ben heard the clicking of her neck. ‘He needs me.’

Ben stared at her thoughtfully. ‘What you mean is he needs you to not be as good as him.’

‘It’s not like that. He’s awfully proud of me. But at the moment, no. Hamlet was so bad for him. You know, we knew he was taking a risk, doing it like that, the council estate, the animal masks . . . but oh.’ She put her hands over her face. ‘I couldn’t tell him I thought it was risible, that the audience wouldn’t get it. I was too afraid to tell him the truth, and I should have done. Saved him from humiliation.’

‘It’s not your job to do that, Mumma.’

‘But now he hasn’t acted since apart from the peas advert, and that was a terrible mistake after Hamlet, it only made things worse. Why do they get at him like that, the papers?’ she cried, the words tumbling out of her. ‘As if things weren’t bad enough with Mads, and all that. To mock him like that – he’s not well . . . I’ve been away too much, with Menagerie. They want to do a Christmas special of On the Edge but I’ve said no . . .’ She heaved the bag over her shoulder; she was as tall as him, and she faced him. ‘He’s not well. And he’s so stubborn. He won’t go out with his friends for dinner, or see anyone, won’t call Cord to come and visit him, though he talks about her all the time – all he does is ask when she’s coming and she never does, of course. I’ve pretty much given up with her.’

Ben lifted up the other bag. ‘I don’t know why she’s being like this,’ he said, bleakly. ‘I know she cares. I know she does.’ The weight of the bag pulled at his arm; he felt as though it were Mads herself, dragging him down, and he stood up straight.

‘Who knows what she’s thinking,’ said Althea, her eyes fixed on something far away, out through the window with its wintry sky. ‘Go, darling.’ She turned back to him, suddenly urgent. ‘Go to LA. Take the girls. Get away from here. Don’t come back. I’ll come and visit you, often. I’ll come out next month, after you’ve got there. But don’t come back. Let them grow up there, give them sunshine, make them forget it, forget this.’ She made a whirlpool gesture with her hands. ‘All of this.’

‘I wouldn’t want them to,’ Ben said, gently. ‘I want them to know about us, where they came from.’

‘No,’ his mother said. ‘You’re wrong. Please don’t ask me why, and please trust me. You’re doing the right thing. I’ll be with you. I’ll come out often. But you must go. Daddy and Cord – they don’t need you. They’ve shown that. But your children – your children need you.’

Ben kissed his mother’s hand. ‘Mumma, you’re a wonderful wife to him. I’d have taken the gong, if I were you.’ She clasped his fingers. ‘I won’t tell him about it, or Cord.’ He hesitated, then picked up the second bag of clothes. ‘Cordy’ll come round, I’m sure. She’s just stubborn as hell.’

Althea looked up at Ben. ‘She’s her father’s daughter, my darling,’ she said, almost sadly. ‘You and I both know that.’