E-Book, Englisch, 544 Seiten
Buchan Consider the Lily
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ISBN: 978-1-83895-540-3
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Winner of the Romantic Novelists' Association Novel of the Year Award
E-Book, Englisch, 544 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-83895-540-3
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Elizabeth Buchan was a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prize-winning Consider the Lily, international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman, The New Mrs Clifton and The Museum of Broken Promises. Buchan's short stories are broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published in magazines. She has reviewed for the Sunday Times, The Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She was a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She is a patron of the Guildford Book Festival and co-founder of the Clapham Book Festival. elizabethbuchan.com
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CHAPTER TWO
POLLY DYSART ENTERED THE CHURCH OF ALL SAINTS, Nether Hinton, on the arm of Sir Rupert, her father, to the expectant hush that normally greets the arrival of a bride. Unlike her more fortunate younger sister Flora, she was not a good-looking girl, merely passable in a healthy, rather jolly manner. Yet today her looks had risen to the occasion. Granted, Polly was a shade too broad for her grandmother’s remodelled satin dress and, being tall and large-hipped, of a different shape from the corseted waist and bosom for which it had been made, but it sat well enough and the Honiton lace veil (washed carefully in tea by Robbie) billowed around a face rendered soft and pink from emotion.
The Reverend Mr Pengeally made his opening remarks and Flora allowed relief that Polly had made it to the altar to wash over her. Her father had been against the marriage, for no better reason than that James Sinclair, stockbroker, was, in Sir Rupert’s opinion, nowhere near good enough for a Dysart, even if he was ambitious. James’s family did not matter a twopenny toss to her, Polly had sobbed into Flora’s shoulder after a tense encounter between her fiancé and father – she was desperate not to lose the one man who was likely to marry her. Flora, who knew Polly and her permanent grudge against life better than any, had remained silent.
She stole a look at her bridegroom’s unremarkable profile. The situation had been delicate. James was ambitious, but also sensitive, and not unnaturally he had taken offence at the implication that he was lacking in both social and financial credibility – particularly as the Dysarts were known to be as poor as church mice. But they possessed something very desirable: breeding, stretching way back through a history of leet courts, manor houses, knighthoods, internecine wars, and the armorial bearings reposing in the College of Heralds.
‘Do you take this man . . . ?’ asked Mr Pengeally, levelling his short-sighted gaze onto Polly’s face beneath the veil.
, thought her sister. Half choked by the smell of lilies, Flora grasped her bouquet tightly in her gloved hands, and the nightmare receded of processing with Polly into the church from which the bridegroom had bolted.
‘I do,’ said Polly loudly, and Flora made a mental note to search out the charity for distressed stockbrokers and make a large donation.
Too provincial, considered Susan Chudleigh from her vantage point at the end of the pew. (Susan possessed only one yardstick with which to measure things: the notion that anything outside London was not worth considering.) This wedding is too provincial for words. She turned her head forty-five degrees in order to target the guests on the right-hand side of the church, and saw no one that she recognized or who looked worth pursuing. At least, Susan thought complacently, assessing Polly’s clumsy hips and half-grown shingle under the veil, my children are good-looking. Her face hardened, however, when her gaze encountered a diminutive figure standing beside Marcus. Try as she might, and God knew she had tried for twenty years, Susan could not bring herself to love her niece, Matty.
Because the pew was full, Daisy was pressed up against her mother. Susan’s surreptitious sweeps over the guests and a certain rigidity of her lips gave her away and Daisy had a shrewd notion of what Susan was thinking. Even at a wedding – no, especially at a wedding – Susan concentrated on the business of social analysis and it never failed to amuse her daughter.
Religion held little appeal for Daisy, or, more precisely, the Church of England variety rendered her angry and frustrated. It preached nothing to her except and and, in the end, when she tried to dissect the meat from the bone, its certainties slithered away. Thus Daisy occupied herself during the theological bits of the Reverend Mr Pengeally’s address by counting the number of polka-dot frocks in the congregation. There were five: black on beige, black on white, two whites on black and daring red on black. Daisy tugged at the skirt of her own geometrically patterned frock with its fashionably longer hemline so that it appeared even more so.
Five pews ahead, on the opposite side of the aisle, sat the bridegroom’s family. From the back, they presented an unbroken line of stiff collars and regimented haircuts, interspersed with rather dull dresses and trimmed straw hats. Directly across from them sat the Dysarts and Daisy applied herself to working out who was who. She fixed on a figure in a grey morning suit with fair hair slicked well back and concluded that that was Polly’s brother, Kit. At the other end of the pew sat Sir Rupert, a bull-necked, broad-shouldered man who, judging from the angle of his head, was gazing not at his daughter but at a point above the altar. Behind him was a woman in a navy-blue coat and a hat that could only be described as lacking, who appeared to be staring at something on Sir Rupert’s shoulder.
The previous evening the Lockhart-Fifes had let drop at dinner that Sir Rupert had fought in the Great War and had suffered from it, although they had been vague about how. The information had been delivered in a hushed tone and Daisy had understood: the Chudleighs also had friends who had survived, some burnt, some missing limbs or coughing phlegm, and it had often struck her that a component of their spirit had also been blown to bits in the stink and carnage over a decade before. They frightened Daisy, these survivors; today’s men who, by some trick of history, had become yesterday’s.
‘Love is a bottomless well . . .’ said Mr Pengeally, nearing his conclusion.
Is it? If this was true, Daisy had not observed her parents drawing upon it, more like a teacup, and she considered nudging Marcus to share the joke but thought better of it.
Beside Daisy, Matty’s small gloved hands tapped her prayer book – ‘claws’, Marcus called them in his kindly but patronizing way. She looked down at her lap: it was true. The leather concealed their dry, papery skin. She smoothed out the wrinkles in the glove and tried to ignore her hands.
At the altar, Polly climbed to her feet and allowed James to lead her into the vestry. Seven minutes later, exactly as Rupert had allotted on the timetable, they walked back down the aisle.
Outside, a mild June sun poked at intervals through billowy clouds and sent shafts of light through the avenue of limes that led up to the church door. It had rained earlier that morning, and the hoofprints left by the horses on the mud road were filled with water. The guests chatted in groups about scandals, hunting and farming practices, leavened with gossip, and Polly would have been hurt and offended had she known how little her wedding featured compared to these important topics. Nevertheless, the villagers, many of whom had abandoned their Saturday tasks to walk up to the church gate, took in every detail.
Mrs Dawes, the Dysarts’ cook and housekeeper, scraped a slick of mud off her boot and watched the bride and groom pose for the photographer in front of the double doors. ‘Not bad,’ she commented. Mrs Dawes had no particular affection for Polly.
Ellen Sheppey clutched at her handbag and scrutinized Polly. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘But not as pretty as my Betty, is she, Ned?’
A little washy from two pints in the Plume of Feathers, her husband, who worked in the kitchen garden at the big house, could not be bothered to answer.
‘Well, I admit, your Betty does have an edge.’ Mrs Dawes sounded a shade waspish. A widow of many years, she had never managed to produce any children before Albert was taken from her. She lapsed into silence at the might-have-been and then said, ‘It’s not like the old days, is it, Ellen? When Sir Rupert got married, me mam took me to look at the huge tent on the lawn and the wedding breakfast laid for five hundred.’
‘No.’ Ellen raised herself on tiptoe. ‘It was different then.’ She turned to Ned and said crossly, ‘Cat got your tongue, Ned?’
The photographer issued a request and Dysarts and Sinclairs clustered around the couple. The Sinclairs were of middle height and inclined to plumpness and the Dysarts towered beside them. Inch for inch, Polly matched James; Flora, overdressed in her bridesmaid’s silk georgette, was taller even than her sister, and Sir Rupert, chest braced in military fashion, seemed huge. An example of the rumpled good looks in which Saxon men specialize, Kit dominated the group. Sunburnt from a recent trip to Turkey and Albania, he kept himself a little apart from the others, and gazed over the fields as if he wished he was somewhere quite different. Long-nosed with blue eyes under heavy lids, Kit’s was almost a lazy face. But not quite. It had charm, yes, a hint of an unsettled depth, kept private – the face of someone, perhaps, who was a loner.
At last Polly and James broke free from the photographer and made for the waiting car, leaving the guests to pick their way down the path fringed by drenched shrubs to Hinton Dysart. Over the centuries obstinate Dysarts had refused to take the longer way round to the church and slashed their way with small swords and canes through the scrub until the path had become part of the local topography.
Her hat pulled down over her eyes as usual, Matty lagged behind because, she told herself, she wanted to look around. Having lived in London for most of her life, interspersed with quick dashes for...
