介绍:
There was really no point trying to arrange wildflowers. They had tumbled into their own
symmetry, and it was certainly true that too even a distribution between the irises and the
rosebay willow herb ruined the effect. She spent some minutes making adjustments in order to
achieve a natural chaotic look. While she did so she wondered about going out to Robbie. It
would save her from running upstairs. But she felt uncomfortable and hot, and would have
liked to check her appearance in the large gilt mirror above the fireplace. But if he turned
round—he was standing with his back to the house, smoking—he would see right into the
room. At last she was finished and stood back again. Now her brother’s friend, Paul
Marshall, might believe that the flowers had simply been dropped in the vase in the same
carefree spirit with which they had been picked. It made no sense, she knew, arranging
flowers before the water was in—but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around,
and not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when they
were alone. Her mother wanted flowers in the guest room and Cecilia was happy to oblige. The
place to go for water was the kitchen. But Betty was preparing to cook tonight’s meal, and
was in a terrorizing mood. Not only the little boy, Jackson or Pierrot, would be cowering—
so too would the extra help from the village. Already, even from the drawing room, it was
possible to hear an occasional muffled bad-tempered shout and the clang of a saucepan
hitting the hob with unnatural force. If Cecilia went in now she would have to mediate
between her mother’s vague instructions and Betty’s forceful state of mind. It surely made
more sense to go outside and fill the vase at the fountain.
Sometime in her teens a friend of Cecilia’s father who worked in the Victoria and Albert
Museum had come to examine the vase and declared it sound. It was genuine Meissen porcelain,
the work of the great artist H?roldt, who painted it in 1726. It had most certainly once
been the property of King August. Even though it was reckoned to be worth more than the
other pieces in the Tallis home, which were mostly junk collected by Cecilia’s grandfather,
Jack Tallis wanted the vase in use, in honor of his brother’s memory. It was not to be
imprisoned behind a glass case. If it had survived the war, the reasoning went, then it
could survive the Tallises. His wife did not disagree. The truth was, whatever its great
value, and beyond its association, Emily Tallis did not much like the vase. Its little
painted Chinese figures gathered formally in a garden around a table, with ornate plants and
implausible birds, seemed fussy and oppressive. Chinoiserie in general bored her. Cecilia
herself had no particular view, though she sometimes wondered just how much it might fetch
at Sotheby’s. The vase was respected not for H?roldt’s mastery of polychrome enamels or
the blue and gold interlacing strapwork and foliage, but for Uncle Clem, and the lives he
had saved, the river he had crossed at midnight, and his death just a week before the
Armistice. Flowers, especially wildflowers, seemed a proper tribute.
Cecilia gripped the cool porcelain in both hands as she stood on one foot, and with the
other hooked the French windows open wide. As she stepped out into the brightness, the
rising scent of warmed stone was like a friendly embrace. Two swallows were making passes
over the fountain, and a chiffchaff’s song was piercing the air from within the sinewy
gloom of the giant cedar of Lebanon. The flowers swung in the light breeze, tickling her
face as she crossed the terrace and carefully negotiated the three crumbly steps down to the
gravel path. Robbie turned suddenly at the sound of her approach.
“I was away in my thoughts,” he began to explain.
“Would you roll me one of your Bolshevik cigarettes?”
He threw his own cigarette aside, took the tin which lay on his jacket on the lawn and
walked alongside her to the fountain. They were silent for a while.
“Beautiful day,” she then said through a sigh.
He was looking at her with amused suspicion. There was something between them, and even she
had to acknowledge that a tame remark about the weather sounded perverse.
“How’s Clarissa?” He was looking down at his fingers rolling the tobacco.
“Boring.”
“We mustn’t say so.”
“I wish she’d get on with it.”
“She does. And it gets better.”
They slowed, then stopped so that he could put the finishing touches to her roll-up.
She said, “I’d rather read Fielding any day.”
She felt she had said something stupid. Robbie was looking away across the park and the cows
toward the oak wood that lined the river valley, the wood she had run through that morning.
He might be thinking she was talking to him in code, suggestively conveying her taste for
the full-blooded and sensual. That was a mistake, of course, and she was discomfited and had
no idea how to put him right. She liked his eyes, she thought, the unblended mix of orange
and green, made even more granular in sunlight. And she liked the fact that he was so tall.
It was an interesting combination in a man, intelligence and sheer bulk. Cecilia had taken
the cigarette and he was lighting it for her.
“I know what you mean,” he said as they walked the remaining few yards to the fountain. “
There’s more life in Fielding, but he can be psychologically crude compared to Richardson.
”
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