Beneath a Burning Sky Read online

  ‘Fine then,’ said Clara, ‘we’ll have to amuse ourselves here. How about bridge?’

  There were times, as they played, when Clara fell quiet, her face weighted; whenever Olivia asked what was worrying her, she’d give a quick smile, say it was nothing, she was splendid.

  ‘No you’re not,’ Olivia said. Then, thinking of the discord Clara often alluded to between her and her husband, she asked, ‘Is it Jeremy? Has he upset you?’

  ‘No more than usual,’ said Clara, ‘and I can’t have you worrying about me, Livvy. Absolutely not.’

  She’d move the conversation on, distracting Olivia with stories of the boys (You should have seen Gus this morning… ), or plans for things she and Olivia might do together. (I’d like to go to Cairo, I’ve never been, not since Mama and Papa died and you and I had to leave. But it might be nice to go back together now. We could stay at Shepheard’s, a little holiday, perhaps even go and see our old house.)

  Neither of them mentioned Alistair. Olivia felt freer though, now she’d admitted how she hated him. She was glad she’d told Clara that. She sensed Clara would ask her to talk again, that she was biding her time, just as Olivia was biding hers in getting Clara to admit whatever was nagging at her. They were treading a careful path, the two of them, still learning how to know one another better. Olivia told herself they would get there, of course they would. They were together, they had time.

  For her own part, she thought she might be more honest next time Clara asked about Alistair. It’s just words, isn’t it, Livvy? She needed to find the courage, her voice, and put Clara’s look of relief when she’d lied from her mind.

  Perhaps.

  She never spoke of Edward. Clara asked after him, though. Teddy. ‘He hasn’t called,’ Clara said. ‘I’m very cross. Tell him that. Tell him to call on me, please.’

  ‘All right,’ said Olivia.

  She didn’t.

  She forced herself to avoid him entirely when he was in the house. For how could Alistair detect anything was wrong – how could there be anything wrong – if she never went near him?

  She breakfasted in her room, waited until he had left for the morning before she swam, and then made sure she was upstairs well in advance of him returning in the evening.

  Dinners were hard. They sat opposite one another at the table, Alistair between them at the head. Edward asked her so many questions, his northern voice soft, probing: what had she done with her day? Where had she visited so far in Alex? Did she swim – yes? Where had she learned? She, conscious, so conscious, of Alistair, never once allowed herself to meet Edward’s eye. And even as she yearned for him to go on talking, asking, if only to know he was looking at her, wanting to know more, she said very little in response, hoping her coldness would be enough to put him off, terrified in case it should.

  It was after dinner on the fourth night that Alistair went to the club and Olivia, assuming from the silence in the house that Edward had gone somewhere too, went to the drawing room, grateful not to be in her bedroom for once.

  As she sat down at the piano, fingers tracing over the keys, she started at a sound on the terrace. It was Edward, coming up the stairs. He stopped short, looked in at her through the open doors.

  ‘I thought you were out,’ she said, surprise making her forget she wasn’t supposed to be speaking to him.

  ‘I was.’ He nodded in the direction of the outhouses where his man kept a room. ‘I went to see Fadil. My horse threw a shoe.’

  ‘Oh.’ Olivia couldn’t think what else to say. She tensed her body, preparing to get up.

  He came into the room. He sat opposite her in the candlelight, took out a cigarette, offered her one.

  She shook her head.

  For a few moments, there was silence. In the distance, the sea rolled. He struck a match, inhaled.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I’d better —’

  ‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  ‘I shouldn’t.’

  ‘You should,’ he said. ‘This is your home. I hate seeing you like this.’ He leant towards her, arms resting on his leg, cigarette in hand. ‘Talk to me, Olly.’ His brow creased, surprised. ‘Can I call you that?’

  ‘If you like.’ And then, since Alistair wasn’t home, and because the past few days had been really unutterably long, and she’d never wanted to do anything more than, as Edward said, stay, talk – to let him have something of her – she added, ‘My friend, Beatrice, at home called me that.’

  ‘A good friend?’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘You must miss her.’

  ‘I try not to think about her actually.’

  ‘Because it’s too hard?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, pleased that he understood, ‘exactly.’

  He drew again on his cigarette, let the smoke go. ‘I used to be the same,’ he said. ‘I’ve got five sisters.’

  ‘I remember.’

  He smiled. He seemed to like that she’d done that. ‘They write, every week. They never miss. They’ve got hundreds of children between them.’

  ‘Hundreds?’

  He laughed. ‘Quite a few. God knows how they find the time to write.’

  ‘But they do.’

  ‘Yes, they do. And they tell me these stories: the ice-skating trips, the point-to-points. I’m missing it all, and I hate it, I can’t tell you how much, but it helps, you know, to think of it all going on.’ He looked over at Olivia, eyes appraising her. She sat quite still on the piano stool. He tapped his cigarette in the ashtray. ‘Sometimes it’s better to hold on to the things you’ve left behind. It keeps you who you are.’

  ‘Does it?’ Olivia traced her fingers over the piano keys, thinking about it, about him. She pressed one, then another; the hollow notes filled the room. ‘The first day I arrived in Alex, Clara came to meet me here at the house.’ She spoke without knowing she was going to. ‘I hadn’t seen her since I was eight years old. There were no letters, I had no address to write to, our grandmother never gave Clara mine.’ She paused briefly, thinking of all the notes she’d penned then thrown away. The awful loneliness. ‘I was desperate to see her again,’ she said. ‘I never thought I would. But I was so nervous too. I didn’t know if she’d even want to know me. My grandmother told me she never asked after me…’

  ‘She did,’ said Edward softly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Olivia, ‘Clara’s told me that now. But when I arrived here, I had no idea what to expect. And then there Clara was, waiting in the driveway. I can’t tell you what it was like, that moment I saw her. She looked so… different to how I’d imagined her. I think I’d half expected a fourteen-year-old.’ Olivia broke off as the dislocation of that moment struck her afresh. ‘She had a suet pudding with her,’ she said. ‘She told me it was my favourite as a child, but I couldn’t remember ever eating such a thing. I was too… shocked, I suppose, at her caring so much, and being there, real, to pretend I could.’ She frowned. ‘You should have seen her face when she realised I’d forgotten. She tried to make out that it didn’t matter, lots of “absolutely understandables” and “not to worry a jots”.’

  ‘I can picture it.’

  She shook her head. ‘All these years, she remembered my favourite dessert. She held on to it, to everything. And I’ve just let it all go.’ She thought of Clara’s recent silences, the shadows on her face. ‘It must hurt her,’ she said, ‘the way I’ve been. I hate the fact that I’ve done that to her. I think she’s got enough to upset her as it is.’ She looked down at her fingers. ‘I don’t know why I’m saying all of this.’ She gave a small self-conscious smile.

  He studied her, appearing to think. His eyes were full of the candles’ soft light. He said, ‘Clara’s worried about you for as long as I’ve known her. It was one of the first things we ever spoke about when I moved here. She tried so hard to find you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No one understands all that happened to you better than her.’

  ‘I know,’ Olivia sa
id again. The words came out taut. A strange mass was building in her throat. She swallowed, hard, pushing it down.

  ‘I asked Clara once,’ he said, ‘why your grandmother did it to you. Separated you like that.’

  ‘Did she tell you?’

  ‘She said it was because of your mother. That your grandmother hated her.’

  Olivia nodded slowly. ‘I think she always will.’ Her mind moved over all she’d been told about her parents. She didn’t normally like to think of them – having no memories for herself, it always made her feel horribly detached, as though they were characters in a story – but tonight, with Edward looking at her, she felt more able to. ‘Father was an archaeologist,’ she said, ‘he came out to Egypt on a dig. Mama was already here, she grew up in Alex. They met, married, moved to Cairo, and Father never went home.’

  ‘But your grandmother wanted him to?’

  ‘She tried to convince him, many times apparently, especially after Clara was born. She kept on at him for years. She even came out, when Clara was six; she’d arranged for him to be offered a post in London. But, well,’ Olivia gave a small shrug, ‘my mother fell pregnant with me, she didn’t want to leave Egypt. My fault too, I suppose.’ She dipped her head, thinking of how completely Mildred had exacted her revenge in the years since. ‘I just wish,’ she said, ‘so much that I had something of my parents still. If I could just remember one thing.’

  He squashed his cigarette into the ashtray. ‘Do you know why you’ve forgotten?’

  She didn’t answer straight away. She was disoriented by how much she was saying, the strange way it was making her feel – light somehow, like when the laces of her corset came undone, able to breathe, yet dizzy with it.

  He didn’t rush her. Just kept his eyes on her.

  ‘It was the day Clara and I arrived back in England, after our parents died,’ she said at length. ‘It was so awful, freezing cold rain.’ She looked to the ceiling, seeing that grey morning briefly, the image shouldering itself in: a young Clara, screaming at the foot of the gangplank, face twisted, restrained by their grandmother. And herself, thrashing in her black mourning dress, being carried away by nuns she’d never met, sobbing and choking in panicked terror. ‘It was such a long carriage ride, with those nuns. They didn’t speak to me at all. The school, when we got there, it was huge. Dark. I can’t tell you how cold. I got lost in the corridors. I was trying to find the latrine, you see.’ She drew breath, seeing herself running along, remembering how she’d not got there in time; the way Sister Agnes had told all the other girls she was dirty. ‘I stayed awake all night, I was afraid…’

  ‘Of the dark?’

  ‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘of Clara coming to get me and not being able to find the way to where I was.’ She looked over at him with eyes so dry they hurt. ‘Please don’t tell Clara that. She’d hate it if she knew.’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you.’ She placed her hand to her throat. The lump there seemed to have eased. She gestured at his cigarettes. ‘I might have one of those after all.’

  ‘Yes?’ When he smiled, the air seemed to loosen around them.

  He lit a cigarette in his own mouth and passed it over to her. Their fingers brushed.

  She inhaled, coughing.

  He gave her another crooked smile. ‘Don’t do it if you don’t like it.’

  ‘I just need to get used to it.’

  ‘I hate those nuns,’ he said.

  ‘So do I.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘Tell me about Beatrice,’ he said.

  So she did.

  She didn’t know how long they talked after that. Only that the hours passed and the candles turned to puddles in their holders.

  Eventually, thinking reluctantly of Alistair on his way back, Olivia said she must go to bed.

  Edward stood as she rose. ‘I can’t stand to think of you, you know, here all day. You must be going mad.’

  ‘Clara comes. I swim.’

  ‘But don’t you want to get out?’

  ‘Alistair doesn’t like it if I take the carriage.’

  Edward frowned. ‘That’s no good.’

  She made to leave.

  ‘Olly,’ he called after her.

  She turned.

  ‘Did you see what we did?’ His tone was serious, but his eyes were alight. ‘We talked. And it wasn’t so bad, was it?’

  ‘No,’ she smiled, ‘not so bad.’

  The next morning, she watched him leave the house. He saluted her, like he had that first morning. She waved back.

  She ate breakfast, sat at the piano for some time, reliving their conversation the night before, biting her lip on her smile of shock that it should have happened at all.

  She was married, m — She squashed the voice within her. She didn’t want to hear it.

  Deciding she needed air, she went swimming. Afterwards, she sat on the rocks, drip-drying, bath sheet spread out beneath her. Her shoulders baked under the warm morning sky. The sun was getting fiercer with every day. She could feel her skin growing taut, crisp with the heat. She raised her face to the sky, eyes closed, wondering where he was.

  ‘Hello, Olly.’

  Behind her, apparently.

  Her head jerked around to see him. She grinned before she could stop herself, too delighted at the surprise of his being there to even attempt to hide it. He was several feet away, on the lawn at the foot of the rocks, tunic undone, a white shirt beneath it, long boots. He held his hands to his eyes, shielding them from the sun’s glare.

  ‘What are you doing home?’ she asked, only remembering as she spoke how little she was wearing. She tried to pull her bath sheet up, but it was caught beneath her, and she couldn’t stand without exposing herself. ‘You went, I saw you.’

  ‘Now I’m back.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  He laughed.

  She pulled again at the bath sheet. ‘Edward.’

  He held up his hands and turned away so his back was to her.

  ‘I’ve had an idea.’

  ‘An idea?’ She stood quickly, scrambling to wrap herself in her towel.

  ‘I’ve brought you a present.’

  ‘Really?’ Her heart tripped. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Would you like to see?’

  ‘Can I get changed first?’

  He laughed again. ‘I think you better had.’

  He told her, on the way back to the house, to try and find something loose-skirted to wear.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘You’ll see.’

  He was waiting for her in the porch when she came downstairs, her body still damp beneath her cotton day dress.

  ‘Will this do?’ she asked.

  His eyes shone as they took her in. ‘I think so.’ He held out his hand, gestured towards the front door. ‘After you.’

  He led her into the stables; the air there was dusty and sweet, full of the sound of the carriage ponies shuffling on the hay. He came to a halt at a stall with a chestnut horse inside.

  ‘Yours,’ he said, opening the gate.

  ‘Mine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But,’ she said, ‘Alistair —’

  ‘We don’t need to tell him. I’ll say I bought her for myself, that I took pity on her. A brood mare, past her prime, that you’re welcome to borrow.’

  Olivia stepped into the stall, stroking the horse’s silken skin, feeling the muscles beneath. ‘She’s not though, is she? Past her prime.’

  ‘I wanted you to have her,’ he said, not answering the question.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to ride.’

  ‘I’ll teach you. I’d like to do that. We can do it when Alistair’s at work if it will make you feel more comfortable; tell him you learnt back in England, if he asks. Riding will be something for you. You’ll be able to get out, away.’

  Olivia’s hand moved over the horse’s neck, around its head; it nuzzled into her
palm, nostrils expelling damp, warm air. She thought, He’s done this. For me. Thought about it, planned it. She looked at him from the corner of her eye. He was watching her, a dent in his forehead, still waiting to find out if he’d done the right thing. Alistair will kill me if he guesses what this means.

  ‘Olly?’

  ‘Away,’ she said slowly. ‘I like that idea.’

  His face broke into a grin. ‘Then let’s go.’

  Her eyes widened. ‘Now?’

  ‘Now.’

  She hesitated, but only for a moment. ‘All right.’

  ‘What will you call her?’ he asked as they walked back out into the sunlight.

  ‘Bea, I think,’ she said impulsively.

  ‘For your friend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. It’s a good name.’

  He took her to a nearby field to teach her, kneeling and offering his hand to give her a leg up. He’d tacked Bea up with a man’s saddle. She hesitated, eyeing it dubiously; for the first time, it occurred to her to wonder how she was going to get her legs either side of it.

  She looked down at Edward, still kneeling on the ground. ‘Now I see why I had to wear something loose,’ she said.

  He smiled ruefully. He said he was afraid that he had no idea how to teach side saddle. He hoped she wasn’t scandalised.

  ‘No,’ she said, resolving not to be. She placed her foot in his palm. ‘Of course not.’

  Even so, heat filled her face as he hoisted her up and she struggled to get herself into position without revealing her undergarments. She spread her gown around her, covering her legs, and vowed silently to use her small allowance to procure one of the split-skirted riding habits she’d seen advertised back in London, as soon as possible.

  He helped her with her stirrups. She tried not to notice the way his hands moved as he adjusted the leather, his arm just skimming her stocking.

  He held Bea’s reins, walking them both on. The trees were thick with spring blossom, sheltering them from the roadside, from view. The flowers carried a fresh, sweet scent that mixed with the tang of the dew-dampened earth. After a while, Olivia forgot how nervous she was; she began to relax into her seat.