Trespass by Rose Tremain Page B

listened to the stillness of the night.
    In front of her on the kitchen table were half-finished sketches of a garden she was designing for clients at Saint-Bertrand. She wasn’t working on the drawings exactly, just moving her pencil around, shading in stands of box and a line of yew buttresses over which the clients had rhapsodised. Veronica knew that these buttresses would take three years to look solid enough to form the architectural shape that had so thrilled Monsieur and Madame, but she hadn’t dared to mention this. She got tired of repeating that gardens took time, that they weren’t like interiors, that you had to have patience. She knew she didn’t live in a patient world. Even here, where life went along more slowly than in England, she could sense the restless agitation people felt to make real and tangible to them the fugitive wonders that flickered into their minds.
    Tonight, Veronica’s own heart was agitated. The day had begun well, ended badly. She’d had to be severe with Kitty in the car in Ruasse, had to say to her that nothing, no, nothing would stop her from caring for Anthony, because he was her brother, and if she, Kitty, expected her to stop loving him, then they were all in grave trouble.
    She knew Kitty had been crying and this upset her. Whenever she remembered where Kitty had come from, and allowed her mind to form some torturing image of Kitty laying breakfast tables in the Cromer guest house, waiting on a shabby clientèle who left stingy tips, then toiling off to her lowly job in the library, her heart felt like breaking. She wished she could have changed Kitty’s past, retrospectively. But the past was the past. You couldn’t change it. And this was what she’d had to remind her in the car: ‘You have your past and I have mine and Anthony was a part of mine and I’m never going to push him away. Not for you. Not for anybody. Never.’
    Never.
    She saw the word have its effect on Kitty. And knew that Kitty still hadn’t understood how strong was Veronica’s need to protect Anthony – from the world and from himself. So she began to explain it again: how, when they were children, Raymond Verey, the handsome father who was so often missing from home, bullied his son, called him weak, puny, babyish, kept asking him when he was going to ‘become a real boy’. Lal, still enslaved by Raymond Verey, had mainly stood silently by when he did this, but she, Veronica, had formed the habit of speaking out for her brother.
    ‘I hated my father for tormenting Anthony,’ said Veronica. ‘It wasn’t Anthony’s fault that he wasn’t sporty or strong. I was those things, but he wasn’t. He was thin and dreamy. He liked doing little domestic pastimes with Ma.’
    Veronica remembered very vividly Anthony’s obsessive love for Lal. She’d had to protect him from that as well, she explained to Kitty. On days when she saw him almost dying of hurt, she’d had to try to protect him from his own feelings.
    ‘What about you?’ asked Kitty. ‘Who protected you from anything or anyone?’
    ‘I told you: I was OK,’ said Veronica. ‘I was impervious to a lot of things. And I had my pony, Susan. I talked to her. Susan and I would go and tear round the jumps and I’d forget everything. I was fine. But when Ma turned away from Anthony, he died.’
    She evoked one such day. It had been Anthony’s eleventh or twelfth birthday and Lal had driven them to Swanage beach for a birthday picnic. It had been just three of them. Raymond was in London, as usual, living his own distant life. And it was high summer, with a hot sun shining and the sea calm and blue. And they ate the delicious picnic Lal had prepared, everything except the birthday cake, which they were saving for later, and then they went swimming.
    Lal, elegant as ever, was zippered into a skin-tight, lime-green bathing costume. But when the swim was over and she tried to get out of the wet costume, the zip jammed, and there she was –