Free Consider the Lily by Elizabeth Buchan Page B

stirred in Matty and, appalled by its intensity, she remained seated.
    Holding out a hand to Kit who captured it, Daisy waltzed along the waterfront. ‘Angel, angel boy,’ she sang. ‘I think I’m squiffy.’ Behind her, Flora smiled into the darkness and allowed Marcus to tuck his hand under her elbow.
    ‘So you’re squiffy,’ said Kit, pulling Daisy to him. ‘But I like it.’ His hands slid up her wrists. The sea went slap, slap on the waterfront and around the harbour it was lit with reflections from the lights. Beyond that was darkness. Daisy drew in her breath.
    ‘It’s too, too lovely,’ she whispered to the head close to hers.
    If Susan Chudleigh had not allowed the sun to dull her wits, she might have had second thoughts and nipped the affair in the bud. After all, Daisy was practically engaged to Tim Coats. But she did not. After an exhausting year of social rounds, charity work and organizing unsatisfactory domestics, she was content to let her guard slip and complacency take over. What did it matter that Kit and Daisy were obviously head over heels? He was a good catch. Socially he was very desirable, far more so than Tim Coats – Susan visualized how Lady Dysart would look on the envelopes. Hinton Dysart was a landmark, a little dilapidated perhaps, but everything had disadvantages. Where Kit did not score was in the matter of finance for, courtesy of his father who had made money manufacturing carpets, Tim was rich. Nevertheless, Kit and Daisy made a visually exciting pair, and, despite her worldliness, Susan was affected, as they all were in the Villa Lafayette, by the erotic charge between them.
    Ambrose Chudleigh was clearer-sighted, but even more fatigued. He was seriously worried about the state of the world’s economy – the Americans had called back all their loans in Europe and demand was slackening in the States itself. What, he asked his wife, did this forebode? Don’t ask me, Susan replied. That’s your problem. So concerned was Ambrose that he made arrangements to cut short his holiday and to depart at the end of August back to London on a salvage operation. He did not feel disposed to interfere with his daughter’s love affair.
    ‘But,’ said his wife, as they lay in their twin beds and listened to the diners threading their way through the garden, ‘if the markets are going to crash, we must get Daisy married off to one or other of them.’ She reran calculations in her head and wondered if she had made a mistake in favouring Kit.
    There was silence, broken only by a smothered giggle from Flora under the window.
    ‘What are her investments in?’ she asked.
    ‘Matilda’s?’ Ambrose sighed. ‘Don’t be obvious, Susan. You know I can’t give you that sort of information, and, anyway, who knows what is going to happen?’
    ‘I just wondered.’
    ‘Well, don’t.’
    ‘Will we be all right, Ambrose?’
    Ambrose’s answer was accompanied by the rustle of starched sheets. ‘We don’t have anything much to lose. You know that.’
    Silence.
    ‘Nothing’s the same,’ said Susan into the dark.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Since the war. It broke things up.’
    Realizing he was not going to get much sleep, Ambrose switched on the light and reached for his sleeping pills and the glass of water. The water made his moustache gleam. ‘Since you mention it,’ he said, ‘I must check Matty’s portfolio. We have a duty to safeguard it.’
    ‘She would,’ said his wife bitterly for the thousandth time, reflecting on the skin-of-the-teeth operation that kept the family swimming in the kind of society to which Susan aspired. ‘She just would have the money and not you.’
    This was not fair. It was not Ambrose’s fault that his sister Jocasta had married a rich man. (What is more, Jocasta had been generous to her brother, to the extent of bequeathing him the leasehold of Number 5 Upper Brook Street.) Not fair at all. Ambrose crunched the pill between his teeth, winced at its