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a
half-destroyed museum. The vase was taken from a shattered glass case and
presented in gratitude. There was no refusing, however inconvenient it might
have seemed to fight a war with
Meissen
porcelain under one arm.
A month later the vase was left for safety in a farmhouse, and Lieutenant
Tallis waded across a river in spate to retrieve it, returning the same way at
midnight
to join his unit. In
the final days of the war, he was sent on patrol duties and gave the vase to a
friend for safekeeping. It slowly found its way back to the regimental
headquarters, and was delivered to the Tallis home some months after Uncle
Clem’s burial.
     
    There was
really no point trying to arrange wildflowers. They had tumbled into their own
symmetry, and it was certainly true that too even a distribution between the
irises and the rosebay willow herb ruined the effect. She spent some minutes
making adjustments in order to achieve a natural chaotic look. While she did so
she wondered about going out to Robbie. It would save her from running
upstairs. But she felt uncomfortable and hot, and would have liked to check her
appearance in the large gilt mirror above the fireplace. But if he turned
round—he was standing with his back to the house, smoking—he would
see right into the room. At last she was finished and stood back again. Now her
brother’s friend, Paul Marshall, might believe that the flowers had
simply been dropped in the vase in the same carefree spirit with which they had
been picked. It made no sense, she knew, arranging flowers before the water was
in—but there it was; she couldn’t resist moving them around, and
not everything people did could be in a correct, logical order, especially when
they were alone. Her mother wanted flowers in the guest room and Cecilia was
happy to oblige. The place to go for water was the kitchen. But Betty was
preparing to cook tonight’s meal, and was in a terrorizing mood. Not only
the little boy, Jackson or Pierrot, would be cowering—so too would the
extra help from the village. Already, even from the drawing room, it was
possible to hear an occasional muffled bad-tempered shout and the clang of a
saucepan hitting the hob with unnatural force. If Cecilia went in now she would
have to mediate between her mother’s vague instructions and Betty’s
forceful state of mind. It surely made more sense to go outside and fill the
vase at the fountain.
    Sometime in
her teens a friend of Cecilia’s father who worked in the
Victoria
and
Albert
Museum
had come to examine
the vase and declared it sound. It was genuine
Meissen
porcelain, the work
of the great artist Höroldt, who painted it in 1726. It had most certainly
once been the property of King August. Even though it was reckoned to be worth
more than the other pieces in the Tallis home, which were mostly junk collected
by Cecilia’s grandfather, Jack Tallis wanted the vase in use, in honor of
his brother’s memory. It was not to be imprisoned behind a glass case. If
it had survived the war, the reasoning went, then it could survive the
Tallises. His wife did not disagree. The truth was, whatever its great value,
and beyond its association, Emily Tallis did not much like the vase. Its little
painted Chinese figures gathered formally in a garden around a table, with ornate
plants and implausible birds, seemed fussy and oppressive. Chinoiserie in
general bored her. Cecilia herself had no particular view, though she sometimes
wondered just how much it might fetch at Sotheby’s. The vase was
respected not for Höroldt’s mastery of polychrome enamels or the
blue and gold interlacing strapwork and foliage, but for Uncle Clem, and the
lives he had saved, the river he had crossed at
midnight
, and his death just a
week before the Armistice. Flowers, especially wildflowers, seemed a proper
tribute.
    Cecilia
gripped the cool porcelain in both hands as she stood on one foot, and with the
other hooked the French windows open wide. As she