‘They made me,’ Thomas said, his face screwed up with rage as they processed past their aunt; their usual way into the grounds was through the drawing room and its French windows. Catherine caught her son’s head and rumpled it as it passed. He looked back: shame, fright, secrecy all melded in his look. They would find an excuse not to come next time they were asked.
‘It’s rather nice to see them all getting on, the cousins,’ Blossom said, emerging from the servants’ quarters. ‘There’s no accounting for children and whether they’ll get on with each other. I always tell my children it’s just not on to be fussy about food, to like this food or that food, and it’s not on to like some people and think you don’t like others.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Catherine said, following Blossom towards the morning room. ‘I think you’re allowed to like some people more than others.’
‘If you’re grown-up you are,’ Blossom said. ‘Good morning, Mrs Bates. Everything all right? Good, good. If you’re grown-up you’re perfectly permitted to have likes and dislikes about people or food or anything else. I’ll make a confession to you – I absolutely can’t bear desiccated coconut. I can’t bear it. But I’m sure that I wasn’t allowed to say that I wouldn’t have this or I wouldn’t have that when I was a child. And it was exactly the same with people. Get on with everyone and the world will be a much easier place. That’s my motto.’
‘Leo’s absolutely stiff with likes and dislikes, what he won’t eat, and who he gets on with at work and who he can’t abide.’
‘Well, there you are, then,’ Blossom said illogically. As so often, when she talked grandly but vaguely about her past, she seemed to have an invented, imaginary life in mind, one with ponies and acres and grandparents with Victorian principles. She had forgotten, perhaps, that Catherine had been married to her brother, and knew all about the reality of the doctor in the suburb of Sheffield and his self-pitying, indulgent wife with the hands fluttering as she spoke. ‘We’re all so fond of Josh – he’s such a nice little boy. And so fair-minded, as you say. How is he at school?’ She plumped herself down behind the writing table. On it were any number of curiosa: a set of miniature furled flags, a miniature reproduction Buddha in marble, some Japanese porcelain dishes ‒ corporate gifts that had ended up here. The better ones were in Stephen’s study. Catherine pulled the armchair out of the direct sunlight. It was still a little bit like a job interview, the way Blossom had situated herself.
‘He likes it,’ Catherine said. ‘He seems to be thriving there. It’s a lovely atmosphere – you can’t help feeling how friendly everyone is. There’s a proper feeling of helping out and thinking of everyone.’
‘Oh, Brighton,’ Blossom said. ‘I can well imagine. It sounds absolutely lovely. I know those schools, putting everyone’s welfare first, making sure no one’s left behind … I sometimes wonder, though.’
‘I know it’s not much like the sort of schools we went to,’ Catherine said.
‘Or Tresco’s school,’ Blossom said. ‘To be honest. It’s a terrific school, you know. They’re introducing Mandarin as an option. Have you ever thought about what Josh could be doing? My children can be little swine, I know, but they’re constantly vying to outdo each other, speak better Japanese than each other, run faster, survive a day in the woods without anything to eat or drink. Do they have sports day at Josh’s school?’
‘Well, sort of,’ Catherine said. ‘It’s called the Summer Festival. There are races, or there were last year, but they arranged it so there were all sorts of things that the kids could be good at in their own way. Someone won a prize for the happiest smile of the year.’
Blossom lowered her head. The sound she made could have been a cough or a suppressed snort. She concentrated for a moment on the papers on the desk – letters, mostly. She shuffled them, squared them off, plucked one from the pile and placed it on top, squared the pile again. She looked up and gave Catherine a brave, watery smile, as if beginning all over again. ‘I should have done all this yesterday, I know,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking and thinking about the kitchen garden – I just can’t make up my mind.’
‘The kitchen garden?’ Catherine said. Around the unpicturesque back of the house there was half an acre or so where, once, vegetables had been grown. The half-acre had been abandoned to its fate long before Stephen had bought the house. The major-general and his sister Lalage, the twin white mice to which the family had been reduced, had retained the kitchen garden, which in an Edwardian heyday had fed a family a dozen strong and a small army of helpers, carers, serfs and labourers with asparagus, beans, potatoes of waxy salad varieties as well as the floury mashing kind, tomatoes, turnips, lacy clouds of carrot tops, cucumber and lettuce; there had been a long, crumbling brick wall of soft fruit, raspberries, blackcurrants, whitecurrants, redcurrants, apricots trained against it, a full half-acre of once beautifully tended vitamin C, running up to orchards of apple and pear and plum, and the hothouses where grapes had once been grown. All that had been abandoned by the time of the major-general’s withdrawal, and that of his mouse-like sister Lalage. (How had he ever commanded anyone, with his bright, inquisitive eye, his neat and fey, almost girly moustache?) The shape of the garden remained, but the major-general and Lalage had cleared a couple of beds, and grown a few sad roots and a couple of tomato plants and lettuces. Beyond that, the tendrils and shoots and wild-flowering mass of vegetation climbed and clambered, untrimmed and unprotected; the vines pressed against the glass of the greenhouse, many panes now smashed. Stephen had instructed the gardener, Norman’s predecessor-but-seven, to get it in order, but he had taken most of an autumn to do nothing but strip it bare, or almost bare: the apricot tree had survived, espaliered against the wall, and now spread there, its branches unfurling over the blank domain. The flowerbeds in the front had been more urgent, and their care had proved a nearly full-time occupation for Norman, the new gardener, and his seven predecessors. ‘Really,’ Blossom was practised in saying, ‘we ought to have three or four gardeners, not just one. We’re never going to get anywhere. Now, the kitchen garden … I would love to do something with it. I can’t think what.’
‘You could do exactly what it was meant for and grow vegetables in it,’ Catherine said. ‘I always think there’s something so lovely about a really well-kept allotment, even, with neat rows of things. And you could have a lot of exotics. Plant an olive grove. Make English olive oil.’
‘The children are using it as an awful sort of pet cemetery. I found a little array of crosses down there next to Moppet’s grave – it turns out to be Thomas’s gerbils and some dead birds that they found in the woods and christened posthumously for the sake of the burial service. I hate to think how the gerbils met their end. Olives wouldn’t grow down here. The trees might, not the olives themselves. What about a rose garden?’
‘So much work,’ Catherine said. She had had the bright idea, when they moved into the house in Brighton, of growing yellow roses up the back wall. The pruning and trimming, and the array of murderous insect life that had to be fended off with sprays and drips and feed had been exhausting. Jasmine grew there now, which nothing much killed.
‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Blossom said. ‘I do think the children – they’re growing up wild, I know, but they have a sort of confidence. I worry about Josh.’
‘Josh?’ Catherine said, taken by surprise.
‘He’s so charming and delightful, but he’s just so – what’s the word I want? – different. No. Diffident. He doesn’t put himself forward, he goes along with things. It does him so much good, being in a gang of ruffians, running riot through the woods instead of being alone with a book. I really wonder …’
Blossom set down her pen and looked, with a frank, open, rehearsed expression, at her sister-in-law. Catherine had experienced this expression before when, for instance, Blossom had asked her whether things were quite all right between her and her brother, whether she might like to come and spend time with them in the country, whether Josh might