II
1972
Miss Cordelia Wilde, six years old, sat gloomily in the window seat staring out at the cloudless sky. Laid neatly next to her on the floor were her shrimping net, her new blue spade with the wooden handle, and a jar with the little crab that she and Daddy had caught the previous day when they’d arrived, hot and sweaty after the long car journey from London. The crab was not moving. It had not moved since she’d brought it back.
‘It’s not fair,’ she said again, for the tenth time. ‘Why can’t I go for a swim yet?’
‘Life isn’t fair,’ said her father, not looking up from his paper. ‘It’s utterly unfair, as you’ll discover. However, as I have said to you now about fifty times, old girl, the moment I’ve finished me coffee and me paper I’ll have a shave and we can go out.’
‘I can go swimming on my own.’
‘You’re six years old,’ said Daddy. ‘You haven’t been in the sea for a year. You can’t go on your own. Even someone as intrepid as you, my sweet girl.’
Cord picked up her square of toast from the cushion, and chewed on it. ‘It’s not fair.’
‘Look,’ said her mother, turning the page of her book. ‘While Ben’s got his temperature he’s staying in bed and you can go to the beach with Daddy. He’s nearly finished his cornflakes, look, darling.’ Tony didn’t move. ‘Haven’t you, darling?’ She shoved her husband’s chair with one slender foot.
‘What? Oh. Yes.’ Tony’s head appeared above the paper, and he looked at his wife, and then patted her calf. He leaped out of his chair. ‘My dearest, you are ravishing this morning,’ he told her, spreading his arms wide and then, with a quick glance in the mirror at the top of the stairs, tightening his cravat. ‘You make me the happiest of men.’
‘Stop talking like you’re in a play,’ said Cord, disgusted, but her mother was laughing.
‘Oh, your highness,’ she said, putting down her coffee. ‘You flatter me, and I am not worthy of your affection.’ She stood up, and he caught her in his arms, and they waltzed for a little. Cord watched, half appalled, half entranced, at their figures whirling in the darkness of the kitchen-diner, Mumma’s bright green silk dressing gown swinging behind her, a second after their steps.
‘Shall we take a turn upon the verandah, fair maiden? The moon glows tonight, soft silver like your burnished tresses.’
‘Which I never understood,’ said Althea, sitting back down again and picking up her novel. ‘He’s saying her hair is grey, isn’t he? Jolly rude. She’s only nineteen.’
‘Well, you were only nineteen when you played her,’ he said.
‘Still, she’s not an aged crone, is my point, darling. Now, off you go. Please, remove that crab from my sight.’
‘Absolutely,’ said Tony, and he drained the last dregs of coffee and disappeared for a few minutes, and when he came back, shaved and rubbing his palms together with excitement, he held out his hand to his daughter, who scrambled off the window seat with a huge grin, gripping her father’s fingers. So they left, Tony tutting at the soft rumbling of the porch as Cord thundered down the steps.
‘There’s a loose board somewhere there,’ he said, and he picked her up and swung her around and she screamed with delight. ‘Come on, love. Let’s open the beach hut and put our swimmers on.’
It happened like this. Her father and she had swum in the sea, drying quickly in the scorching heat of the mid-morning sun, and Tony was having ‘forty winks – don’t tell your mother’ in the chair on the porch, handkerchief over his face. Cord had found a nice boy called Tom to play with who had an engaging mongrel called Tugie with fluffy brown ears who kept digging himself into holes and had to be rescued. They were making a complicated castle with a vast moat, ignoring the encroaching tide and the still-lifeless crab, which she had placed in a home-made pool. She was absorbed in what she was doing, singing softly to herself, when a shadow covered her, and she looked up.
A woman was standing in front of her, holding a little girl by the hand. The little girl’s face was stained with tears, and she wore a mulish expression.
‘Well, good morning. And may I say you have a beautiful voice,’ said the lady.
Cord scratched her face, embarrassed, as though caught doing something naughty.
‘My friend would like to play with you, Cordelia,’ the old lady went on. ‘Would you let her?’
Cord stared at the girl. ‘All right then, but you can’t touch my castle. You’ll have to build something else, please, if you don’t mind. Thank you so much.’
‘I don’t want to play with you,’ said the girl, her small face creasing into a furious snarl. ‘I want to play on my own.’ But she looked hungrily at the marvellous new wooden-handled spade.
‘There you go,’ said the old lady, and she smiled at Cord. ‘Thank you, dear. Very kind. What’s your name, little one?’ she said to the other girl, who was twisting her long, silvery hair into a spiral.
‘It’s Madeleine,’ said the girl.
‘Where do you live, where’s your mummy and daddy?’
‘My mummy’s in the ground because she died and my daddy’s still asleep and I don’t have anyone to play with. There.’
She pointed at the large old house with turrets that stood behind the Bosky. Cordelia, at six not yet entirely confident with distances and neighbourly relations, stared at it.
‘Our house is there,’ she said, jabbing a figure in the direction of the Bosky. ‘That’s my daddy there. He’s asleep too.’ She stared at the little girl. ‘How old are you? I am six.’
‘I’m actually seven,’ said the girl. ‘Seven,’ she repeated for emphasis, swinging her hair about.
‘Your hair is silvery,’ said Cord, surprised. ‘Not grey at all.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It’s funny, but I can’t explain it.’
The old woman loomed high over them, watching them, then she crouched down. Cord noticed her knees creaked and clicked. She was old, but not as old as Bethan in the village’s granny, who didn’t move, not even to speak, and who had a face like an apple left too long in the fruit bowl, yellow and wrinkly. This old lady had something about her still, and her tanned, weather-beaten face was watchful and alert. She had long, brown fingers and she clasped Cord’s shoulder. She knelt on the sand, in her rather loud floral trousers. She had a pointy face, and her hair was short and shingled. Her eyes were green, and danced. She looked, in short, like a witch, only a rather nice sort of witch. Cord smiled involuntarily at her.
‘What’s your name?’ she said.
‘Oh, I’m too old to have a name now,’ she said. ‘You’re Cordelia, aren’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Cord said again.
‘Look after Madeleine, won’t you?’ said the old lady. ‘Be her friend, now I’ve introduced you two. She doesn’t have many friends, and she’s not like you. You’ll be all right, I can tell.’
‘Yes, OK then,’ said Cord, not understanding much of this.
‘It was lovely to see you, Cordelia. You should sing more. Sing and sing till your throat hurts, then carry on singing. It’s the only way. Will you remember that?’
‘Yes.’ Cord thought for a moment. ‘How do you know who I am?’
‘I’ve always known about you.’ The woman shifted the bag on her shoulder. ‘You’re the Wildflowers and that’s your house and it’s a place to be happy and be kind. Don’t forget that.’
‘We’re the Wildflowers,’ Cord said, nodding in agreement. ‘It is our house.’
And they stared at each other for a moment, in perfect understanding, though one was dying and would be gone by the end of the year, and the other would forget the meeting in a few short hours.
‘Listen, Cord, dear,’ the old lady said. She put her hand on Cord’s shoulder. ‘Can you – will you do something for me?’
Cord shrugged. ‘Course.’
‘Can you give this package to your father? It’s for him.’
‘He’s over there—’ Cord pointed with her finger. ‘He’s asleep.’
‘I know, I saw. I – I don’t want to wake him. So will you give this to him? It’s very important.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s for the house. You tell him, I took it away but it didn’t belong there, so I brought it back. It’s to look after him. I always said it was. Now, don’t forget.’
She handed her the parcel, with a note wrapped around it, tied in string.
‘Yes, of course,’ said Cord politely, but already a little bored. ‘Thank you,’ she added automatically because that seemed to make grown-ups shut up or go away. ‘Thank you very much for the delicious – thanks.’
The old woman chuckled to herself, then heaved herself to her feet, shaking the sand from her wide trousers. ‘Thank you, dear Cord. Now, I will be off and away.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I am going back to my home. I wanted to see this place one last time. Thank you again, dear. Don’t forget, now, will you?’
Then she was gone, walking slowly towards the beach hut, and Cord turned to the mutinous little girl beside her, suddenly feeling wild and carefree and absurdly happy, not sure why. ‘Come on,’ she said with a gurgle of pleasure in her voice. ‘Let’s make up a new game.’
The girl’s dirty face was suspicious. ‘A new game?’
‘Yes,’ said Cord, decisively patting the heavy little parcel on her lap. ‘Let’s call it – hmmm . . . Let’s call it Flowers and Stones. Yes, and we’ll have scores, for the different flowers and stones. Can you write? Sorry, what’s your name again?’
‘Madeleine.’ The girl shook her head. ‘I sort of can spell words but I hate writing them out. I hate practising letters, too.’
‘You can do the spelling then.’ Cord jumped up, and the old lady’s parcel fell out of her lap on to the ground, the twine and the note sliding off the package, the old lady already forgotten. ‘Oh, yes. I need to give this to . . . Now, let’s go to the beach hut. Here, come with me. I’ll write out the rules, I’m really good at three things, hula-hooping, handwriting and blowing bubbles with bubblegum. And singing. That old lady’s right, I’m really good at singing!’
They didn’t see the old lady climbing the path back up from the beach, and the arthritic salute she gave the old house as she passed by. They didn’t see her gingerly ascend the steps of the porch one more time to stare at the man fast asleep there. Nor that she touched him, very gently, long thin fingers grazing his forehead so that he shifted slightly, swatting the hand away as though it were a fly.
They didn’t see her bowed head, her puckered mouth, and the way she vanished past the profusion of wild flowers beside the house, nor the same hands picking ragwort, knapweed, dried grasses, lavender. She got into a waiting cab, wrapping the flowers up in her handkerchief as the car drove away down the uneven lane, drove her far away from them.
She was a long way away by the time the rules for Flower and Stones were being finalised, scrawled on to the back of a piece of paper Cord had found and fixed to the wall of the beach hut by piercing the paper on a rusting nail.
They spent the rest of the morning playing Flowers and Stones – a surprisingly easy and hilarious game where you put Daddy’s old sunhat from the beach hut over your eyes and ran into the wild-flower meadow below the house, gathering as many flowers and stones as you could while the other person counted to ten. Madeleine’s hair was covered in leaves and petals, and Cord was breathless with laughing and yelling instructions, and it wasn’t until Madeleine’s father appeared, curt, bad-tempered, that she abruptly vanished back to her house without even saying goodbye.
Cord closed the beach hut and walked back to the house, very pleased with herself but rather exhausted. At the foot of the steps to the porch she saw her father, rubbing his chin and stretching his arms into fists and she paused – what was it she had to tell him? The old lady – that strange old lady. She’d told her to sing. And wild flowers. They were good.
‘Hello, Cordy, did you have fun on the beach?’
The parcel. The figure. Cord stood stock-still. ‘Yes – oh, Daddy, wait a minute.’
She scrambled back down through the flowers and the gorse towards the beach huts and, hunting desperately, crawled around outside the beach hut, looking for it. Oh, dear – oh, dear, the trouble she’d get into—
But the figure was not to be found, and her knees ached, and her arm hurt where she’d scraped it along the side of the beach hut, sprinkling it with splinters like iron filings. She stood up and stubbed her toe, exclaiming, and just as tears formed in her eyes she looked down and saw the little angel with its huge wings and big bird eyes and the owls on either side of it. Cord scooped her up and stared at her. The stone was warm though the sand under the hut was cool. She carried her carefully back to the house.
‘Here – Daddy.’ She put the angel in his lap. Her father looked at it, casually, and then froze.
‘Where did you get this?’ A vein throbbed in his tanned cheek. He turned towards her, his eyes huge.
‘At the beach.’
‘Who gave it to you at the beach?’
‘A lady. Can I go inside, I’m really hungry.’
‘Cord – little one?’ He took her hands. ‘Can you remember about the lady? And about this angel? It’s very important.’ He stroked her cheek.
‘Of course,’ she said, standing up straight. Though her stomach was grumbling, she tried her best to please her darling daddy. ‘An old lady gave it to me by the beach hut. I was playing with that girl from the house down the way. The one whose daddy you don’t like. She appeared, anyway. She had big feet, and the pattern on her trousers was flowers in brown and orange and green and yellow – it was quite nice actually.’ Cord scrunched up her eyes, trying to remember. ‘She said she wanted me to give this to you. I said, you should give it to him, and she said you were asleep and she wanted me to. And something about Wildflowers. She said this was for the house.’ The smell of chicken pie drifted out through the kitchen window and her mouth watered – actually watered, so it was right, what Ben said, that had never happened before. ‘We played a game . . . Daddy, I’m really hungry. Is lunch—’
‘Darling . . . please, can you finish telling?’
‘About singing too. She said I should sing and sing till my throat hurts, then sing some more.’
He was clutching the angel so tightly his hands were white. ‘Cord – well done, darling. What else? Can you remember what else?’
‘She said it was to look after us or something.’ Cord stood on one foot. ‘Daddy – please, I’m so hungry.’
Daddy was smiling. ‘Yes, of course. There – there wasn’t anything else?’
Cord thought for a moment. ‘Well, yes, I’m trying to tell you. We invented a game called Flowers and Stones,’ she said eventually, because that was what she’d been wanting to tell him, she was sure. ‘I wrote the rules, I put them up on the beach-hut wall. I wrote them out myself, all the spelling and everything. That’s what I was going to say. I want you to come and look at them.’
Her father kissed her gently on the forehead. ‘That’s wonderful. Flowers and Stones, eh?’
‘Yep.’ Cord drew herself up. ‘Maybe we can play it after lunch. I wrote the rules. I stuck them up on the nail,’ she repeated, not quite sure why but she thought it was important. ‘Can I go and see Ben, can I tell him about the game, can I?’
But her father wasn’t really listening; he was turning the angel over and over in his hands. So Cord, tired already of his strange mood, ran inside to find Ben, to tell him she’d met the strange girl from next door and she was all right really, and they’d invented a game and Ben was going to love it, love it, only she had to go first when they played it.
Her father watched her go, heard her thundering steps rattle the stairs. He sat on the porch looking up at the rose climbing along the side of the house, and inside to the warm honey-coloured wooden walls. He looked at the angel again.
‘It must have been,’ he said, and, pulling away at the Virginia creeper that sneaked under the roof and along the guttering, he hung the angel above the front door on the hook that was still there even after all these years. He said nothing to anyone about it, though after lunch he went to lie down, and the sounds of bombs screaming, louder than hell, began in his ears, and when he closed his eyes all he could see were faces from the past, and he didn’t know how to stop them, how to stop the noises or the people from leaving, from going, though you cried out and begged them to stay . . .
It began that day, his slow decline, and he battled it for twenty and more years, trying to stay ahead of it, always looking over his shoulder for the moment it would overwhelm him, until at last it did. As he held the angel in his hands that windy, bright morning and hung her back up above the house, he knew she must have returned to him, that this was her way of saying, I am alive, I am OK. He saw then, that he had what she hadn’t been able to have – security, stability, success, a measure of sanity. He had given his own children a childhood both he and she would have dreamed of having.
Later, as he watched Cord drag Ben, blinking in the sunlight, down to the beach hut to play this new game, and as he heard their screams as they ran helplessly around in circles, falling blind into the flowers and crying with laughter, he felt that for that one afternoon at least he was doing all right.
The letter she wrote him hung in the beach hut, words facing the wall, as the rules of the game grew ever fainter with the passing of the years. No one read it, no one saw what she had written, until many years later that little girl and her brother, all grown up, took it down from the wall.
Dearest, dear Ant,
Years ago I left you. I took the angel and promised I would bring her back.
Here she is – hang her up above the house again in her rightful place. The Assyrians believed we should bury little figures around the threshold and the throne. To protect the house, to guard from evil. I say hang her high.
I am sorry for everything. I stole things, to get money. To survive. I didn’t steal the angel, though Daphne always thought I did. I told you the truth all those years ago which is that I bought her honestly for once though I knew her real worth and I suspect if you knew how old and valuable she really is you’d feel obliged to return her to the museum, where she’d be locked behind glass and stared at all day. No. I want her to protect you, instead.
I found her on a wayside stall, coming back from a dig, just before I got the telegram calling me back to you. I bought her from an old man who had a lizard in a jar. He gave me pomegranate juice to drink. She had been in his house for years. His sons were tall and strong, his family was safe, he said.
I knew the moment I saw her that she was old – much older than Nineveh, probably four thousand years or so. She would have been the greatest archaeological find of my career. Maybe they’d have named her after me. The Wilde Panel. But I kept her, I liked her, I wanted her to keep us safe. And she did.
Let those children be free. Let them make mistakes, let them be themselves, do not try to train them to bend one way or another. Wildflowers must be allowed to grow how and where they like. If you give them a childhood full of love and warmth, then they will weather whatever comes.
I decided when I went that a clean break would be better and so it must be. I knew I was dragging you down with me, filling your life with lies – I missed you so much when you went to school, it quite undid me, but it was for the right reasons, the same reasons that I left you. I find being normal rather hard. I’m not suited to family life.
But oh, Ant, to sit out there with you once more. To point out the stars, to talk about Julia and the war and the chickens and the bicycle and dear Reverend Goudge and the wild flowers and the times we had – if I could have had one more evening with you . . . For you were my dearest delight, my dear boy. In that terrible time we were safe, and happy for a while, were we not?
Dear boy, try to be happy. What endures after you are gone is not the striving, but the happy memories, the moments of sunshine, the warmth and the feeling of safety and joy in a loved one’s company.
I am sorry, dear Ant. I loved you very much. You did know that, didn’t you? And looking after you really was the greatest privilege of my life.
Hang her up high.
Your loving great-aunt,
Dinah Alexandra Wilde
The stone goddess made as an amulet for an ancient, long-forgotten king was hung back up in its place, above the door, by Tony that very afternoon. She remained there for forty years, becoming more and more tangled in with the wild flowers that slowly smothered the house until, one summer’s day, she fell to the ground. Someone picked her up, and so was set in motion the train of events which the goddess needed to finally, after all those years, help her mend the house, and its family.