The September Garden by Catherine Law Page B

and moustached, had just been seconded to Scotland Yard for a year, from the French gendarmerie. Marcus was to be decommissioned and was looking for an army desk job that would allow him more time to paint. Claude’s elegant accent contrasted with his stout, imposing figure. He danced very well, was surprisingly light on his feet, said Mollie, and told jokes, which made the girls giggle. Marcus was silent and sensitive. He made sure that their lemonade was topped up and fetched them each a tot of punch. When they danced, Mollie said, she felt like she was flying. She said she felt like a princess in his arms. The sisters made their choices: Auntie Beth to travel to the other side of the Channel to the village in Normandy; her mother to live as the wife of a captain in the Chilterns.
    How attractive, how dashing her father had been in his officer’s uniform. Dashing, her mother had said, and yet underneath it all so very fragile.
    He didn’t look fragile now, thought Nell as she helped herself to another glass of champagne and shuffled back deep into her armchair. She felt her toes tingle from the heat of the fire. Her eyelids fluttered heavily as the warm whirling room closed in on her. And all the time her father laughed and danced in the arms of Diana Blanford.
     
    The cold valley lay in shadow; the trees were silhouetted against the horizon the colour of watery buttermilk. In the silence of the afternoon, Nell strained her ears for the sound of the Chess, sluggish within the wintry chill.
    The red-brick and grey-flint walls of Pudifoot Cottage were bright amid the dull landscape as she turned the corner. A lamp was on in the kitchen. Diana had renamed the cottage in honour of its late tenant and Marcus had painted the sign for her; he’d even got out his hammer and nails and tacked it up above the door.
    ‘Here I am,’ Nell called, tapping on the door as she went in. ‘I come bearing gifts. Put another way, some of our household cast-offs.’
    Diana looked up, beaming, her hair tied up in a turban. She wiped her blackened hands down an old apron of Mrs Bunting’s. There was a smudge of dirt on her nose.
    ‘I’d make you some tea if I could get this darn range going. Your father promised to look at it for me. Just needs a certain knack, he said. Obviously something I have not. How’s Sylvie? She seemed so down the other day. Am I right she has not heard from her parents this Christmas? Tell me to mind my own business if you like, but I do feel for her.’
    ‘Mother’s keeping her busy. She’s told her she has to take over from Mrs Bunting today and try her hand at rabbit pie. I just left her just now jointing the little fellow in the kitchen.’
    ‘So, you expect to eat dinner some time today, then?’ Diana smiled.
    Nell handed her a bag, telling her that it contained the last of the sheets, and a couple of pillows that were a bit saggy but she thought they were all right. ‘Shall I pop them upstairs?’
    Diana handed her a broom. ‘You wouldn’t give it a good going over for me would you, while you’re up there? I’m behind schedule already. I wanted this place shipshape by sunset, but I’m failing admirably.’
    Upstairs, Nell opened the window to give the little bedroom a good airing. Diana had hung her clothes in the wardrobe and set out her hairbrushes on the shelf. But the room was a mess. There had been a fall of soot in the little cast-iron fireplace and black footprints proceeded across the lino. It would need more than a ‘going over’, Nell conceded. She tugged the corner of the metal-framed bed to move it a few feet before running the broom along the skirting. But how nice her mother’s old patched curtains looked at the window, she decided. And maybe a lick of paint would do the trick. Diana would be cosy here, in no time.
    She heard the clatter of the range lid downstairs and Diana exclaim in delighted surprise. Then she heard her father’s voice.
    ‘How are we doing,