Read Online Consider the Lily by Elizabeth Buchan - Free Book Online Page B

she said again, and glanced at the house. ‘They might hear us.’
    Matty looked out from the bedroom she shared with Daisy. Woken by the echo of voices over the water, she got up to investigate and regretted it. As she watched, Kit leapt up and pulled Daisy to her feet. She gazed at him with the look that, Matty knew, drew the recipient into an intimacy impossible to resist. Daisy struggled for balance on the stone and her robe fell open to reveal a well-worn bathing costume – but it never mattered what Daisy wore, for she wore anything well. Kit tugged at the robe, Daisy resisted, then pulled it off and dropped it into the pool. She stood, laughing at Kit, her hair a bright splash of colour, before slipping into the water. Kit followed and pulled her, a wet, chestnut Nereid, towards him, and the space between their faces narrowed and blotted out. Like a huge flower, the robe billowed and sank.
    Matty allowed the muslin curtain to drop back into place and sat down on her bed. The sheets were damp and crumpled from the night, most of which she had spent sweating and staring into the darkness. The heat made her breathless and dark circles had formed under her eyes within days of their arrival. She noticed with distaste the beginnings of a pink heat rash on her arms.
    She went into the bathroom, ran the cold tap and threw her nightdress onto the floor. The bath was far too big, and she was forced to stretch out her foot, ballerina fashion, to steady herself, but the water was life-savingly cool. Taking a deep breath, she slid under the surface and stayed there as long as she could.
    The old dream of her parents had returned during the night, of the last time she ever saw them when Matty was five. Mounted on their Arab mares which they had bred at the family home in Damascus, their well-bred faces matched their tailored khaki desert suits. Her mother carried her notebook filled with jottings on flora and fauna — Matty still had it – and her father’s saddlebag bulged with empty specimen jars. In her dream, she watched them ride the horses up the sand dune and pick their way along the crest and knew, from her dream vantage point, that they had forgotten all about their daughter.
    Matty surveyed her outstretched foot. She was not sure if she could ever forgive Stephen and Jocasta Verral for making it obvious to her at that moment that she was not important to them — nor had Matty’s need for them struck them either. Particularly when they lay dying, in a stuffy tent, of typhoid picked up by drinking bad water at the Sann’aa oasis.
    Matty sat up straight in the bath and addressed her parents’ bodies laid out on Army and Navy camp beds as she had last seen them. ‘I never knew you were so small, Mother, but I expect that is the effect of death. We all shrink in death, I suppose. I just want to say that, somehow, I will be a credit. I’m making a muck of it at the present, I know, but I’ve just got to grow older. I’m trying. It’s partly the result of missing you, partly because I don’t think either of you gave me your best gifts, just a mixture of the bad.’ She paused and then added, ‘You have no idea what it is like to be left alone.’
    The bath towel, huge and white, enveloped Matty. It ruffled along the ground as she waddled into the bedroom. The day ahead seemed a long one, full of noise. Flora’s jolliness. Marcus’s practical jokes. Her aunt’s ever-present cool contempt. Kit and Daisy. The towel drifted to the floor and Matty allowed herself to look out through the window.
    The pool was empty with only the scarlet comma of a stray geranium petal to break its glassiness.
    With her pleated cotton skirts and geometrically patterned tops, her cheap straw hats which she turned into the impossibly chic, and her trick of making people want to look at her, Daisy dominated the holiday. They were young and, Matty excepted, full of energy, and Daisy led them, with Kit a close collaborator, on swimming