The Lost Garden: A Novel Page 10

  “Good to know this war is driving them insane as well,” says Jane.

  I look around the room at the girls. Here we are, crowded round the wireless, like any family anywhere in Britain. Behind us the blackout curtains are dripping with our stories. British Queen has drawn a picture of her family home in London, complete with drawings of the members of her family in the various rooms. “I miss them,” she said when she drew this, and I realized how young these girls are and how, for most of them, it’s their first time away from their homes and families.

  Golden Wonder has drawn her favourite meal, composed of food that has become almost impossible to procure since the start of war. It could be years before she can glut herself on cheese again. Or tins of condensed milk. Or puddings made with heaps of sugar. She draws the plate of food and then, above it, she draws the individual items on the plate and labels them accordingly. It looks a lot like a diagram in a nutrition pamphlet.

  Salad Blue has drawn the London Zoo. It is the place she loves most in the world, she said. No one asked how many places in the world she had been to. Her lion and tiger peer balefully out from behind their cage bars. The largest section of her drawing is given over to a wolf, drawn in profile, pacing in his prison. “I liked the wolf best of all,” she said. “At night, sometimes, when the moon was full, he would howl. In the middle of London there could be a howling wolf. Think of that.” Salad Blue had carefully traced the shape of the wolf as though she wanted to get every contour of his form right. The white-chalk wolf looked almost ready to howl, pacing up and down the permanent night of the blackout curtain at Mosel. In the bottom corner of the wolf’s cage, Salad Blue had drawn the sign that was affixed to the cage of the wolf at the Regent Park Zoo. “Do not touch this animal,” the sign says. “But I did,” said Salad Blue proudly when she added the sign to her drawing. “He rubbed his sides against the cage bars and I scratched him behind the ears, like a dog.”

  I remember the first day I was at Mosel, how I wandered through the girls’ bedrooms, looking for one that was free. The room with the stuffed dog must have been Salad Blue’s.

  Victualette Noir draws the kitchen of her father’s hotel in London. She draws herself in at all the workstations. “That’s me,” she says. “Making pâté. And there I am puréeing vegetables.” She is the worst illustrator of the lot of us. Her self-portraits look like an electrified cat, a kitchen utensil, and a letter from the Chinese alphabet.

  There are only three stories left to be told—the Lumper, Jane, and myself. Tonight, after the wireless has been turned off, May Queen holds the dressmaker’s chalk out to Jane. “Your turn,” she suggests, but Jane shakes her head no.

  “Why not?” asks Salad Blue.

  Jane looks at the section of curtain that’s been designated as hers. “I like it black,” she says. “I like it as it is.”

  “I’ll go.” The Lumper swipes the chalk out of May Queen’s hand. She is bursting with her good idea. The first few times we engaged in this storytelling, she looked positively stricken that she might be called upon to tell something of herself, and that she had no notion of what to say. But now she knows. She draws five long, sideways parallel lines. One of them, propelled by the Lumper’s enthusiastic rendering, goes right through the wall of Victualette’s hotel and spears the brain of the electrified cat making pâté.

  “Careful,” warns Victualette. “That’s my head.”

  But the Lumper is oblivious to her clumsiness. Her arm is positively lyrical as she sweeps it along in pursuit of her line.

  “This is the piece of music I’ve been learning to play,” she says, and starts dabbing great circular notes onto the bars. “I’m not very good at it, but I do know it by heart.” She draws a tail on each note, an upward flourish, like a wing.

  It is strange to think of the Lumper playing the piano, sitting poised on a bench, stretching her huge hands over the span of keys.

  “What’s the piece?” asks Golden Wonder, and Doris writes the name of the composer, Ravel, and the word “Pavane” under the bar of musical score. “It’s got a long, funny name I can’t say,” she tells us. “But it means ‘Dance for the Dead Princess.’” She stands proudly beside the bit of music she’s written out. The bit of music she’s given us, suspended in this room, in the air we breathe, for as long as we are here.

  “Doesn’t it sound lovely?” she says.

  22

  Another chicken disappears.

  “This has got to stop,” I say at breakfast, after Victualette Noir has reported this fact.

  “Well, don’t look at me,” says Salad Blue. “I don’t even like chicken. Or eggs, either, if you want to know.” She goes back to scraping her toast with margarine.

  Now that the chickens are once again trouble, no one has time for their predicament. There was one brief day, when Victualette Noir made an omelette for supper, that I was popular.

  After breakfast I go out to the chicken coop to see if I can find any evidence of the missing chicken. But, as with the other two chickens, this one has just vanished, leaving no clues behind. There are no feathers or blood to suggest a fox. I poke my head into the coop itself and the hens squawk and flap at me. Have they seen a ghost? How could I possibly tell this? “Animal, vegetable, or mineral?” I say to the nearest chicken, and she pecks me on the hand. I back out and hit my head on the top of the entrance.

  “Any luck?” I jump at the voice behind me. It’s Jane. She’s standing on the path, smoking a cigarette.

  “No.”

  “Ghost,” she says calmly.

  “That’s so ridiculous,” I say, rubbing the back of my head with my hand. I’m bound to get a lump. “How can it possibly be a ghost?”

  “Don’t you believe in anything you can’t see, Gwen?”

  “No.” I’m starting to feel irritable because of banging my head. “Well, yes.” Seeds, I think. Love. “But not ghosts,” I say.

  Jane throws her cigarette end on the path. “Ghosts are the easy part,” she says. “How to keep someone alive is more difficult.”

  “Is that what you are doing?” I ask. “Keeping Andrew alive?”

  “Yes.”

  I let myself out of the hen run and walk over to join Jane on the path. She looks particularly tired this morning. The natural light of England is blue. There is a slight blue mist over everything all of the time. When the sky is dark, as it is today, this is very evident. Blue light makes Jane look worn out.

  “How do you do it, then?” I ask. “Keep him alive?” I am actually thinking more of the chickens at this moment—of how to keep them alive, keep them from disappearing.

  “Write letters to him in my head. Think of him always and everywhere. Love him fiercely and absolutely. Believe him alive.” Jane looks at me, the blue light sad on her skin. “What else can I do?” she says.

  I can see the tension in her, how her small body is a thin, tight wire she is keeping ready for Andrew to make his way across. Back to her. There is nothing I can say to calm her, so instead I turn her gently with my hand on her back and we walk together out of the garden.

  We meet May Queen in the quadrangle, on her way to work in the North Garden. “Did you find the ghost?” she asks.

  “There is no ghost.” How many more times must I repeat this? I feel like stamping my foot.

  “Ghost,” Jane whispers to May Queen.

  I walk with Jane to the stables, then leave her there and head back to the west wing. With all my interest in the lost garden, I have been neglecting my domestic chores. My room is cluttered. My clothes are in need of laundering.

  As I’m passing by the arch I hear a noise from the driveway. Marching feet. I look through and see the column of Canadian soldiers, each one wearing a rucksack. They are headed down the hill. Raley is at the front of the column. He is training them after all. I want to wave to him, but he doesn’t see me standing on the cobblestones under the arch. Eyes front, he and the other men march past me, on down the hill.

 
; I spend the morning washing my clothes. Then, after they are hung to dry and all the mess in my room has been herded into new order, I go to the kitchen, scavenge an apple and a couple of biscuits, and make for the garden.

  It is a grey, windy day. The sky seems low enough to touch. It has rained while I’ve been indoors. I walk through the orchard. There are blossoms on the fruit trees. They scatter their scent upon me as I walk beneath them. I think of the Garden of Longing, of the Sweet Briar Rose and how it smells of apples when wet. Was the person who made that garden saying something about the orchard? Was the planting of the garden a kind of map? But the more I explore of the garden and its associations, the more the line is blurred between what is the gardener’s story and what is mine. Planting a garden is about making a series of choices, and then the interpretation of those choices also becomes a series of choices. I need to know more about the person who made the garden or I won’t be able to decipher any more from the choices that were made there.

  I walk past the espaliered apple trees along the orchard wall. They reach out their twisted limbs to me. But they have been too long trained to the wall. They need that structure and support. Even if they were cut loose from the wires, they would still choose to grow up against the stone.

  I turn the corner of the wall, to enter the yew walk and leave the orchard behind, when I suddenly see it huge above me. An angel. A green angel. One of the giant yews has been clipped into the shape of an angel. The body is slight, flares out at the base. The wings are huge, muscled out from the shoulders, two majestic sweeps of green. The head is round and without features, merely there for balance of the whole. It is the wings that are the overwhelming aspect of this living sculpture.

  I stand in front of it. On the other side of this topiary angel is my hidden garden. But no, I slip through the hedge and look at the angel from behind. It is on the edge of the woods, one of the first yews on the path. The garden would remain out of sight to anyone clipping the yew.

  Back up at the stables Jane is putting fresh straw down for the horses. She has her back to me.

  “What’s the angel for?” I ask.

  “How do you know it was me?” she says, not turning around from her task.

  How do I know it was her? “It didn’t occur to me it could be anyone else,” I say. “No one else knows me as well.” I want to say, cares about me, but what if this isn’t true and Jane only humours me because she’s bored with the others?

  Jane stabs her pitchfork into the pile of straw. The stables seem very quiet and still with the animals out grazing the South Garden. “Come on,” she says.

  We stand on the yew walk, under the green angel. The sun has appeared for a moment and rests on one of the wings.

  “I’ve only ever cut hair before,” says Jane, squinting up at the angel. “But it’s not bad, is it?”

  “What’s it for?” I still don’t understand why Jane would take a perfectly good morning and use it to fashion this piece of hedge into a heavenly creature.

  “It’s for you,” she says simply. “To keep you company. I know you’re always down here by the orchard, on your solitary secret missions.” Jane reaches a hand up to her creation and touches the tip of a wing. “A sentry,” she says. “Someone to watch over you, so you don’t get lonely.”

  I look up at the angel. I don’t know what to say. I hope that Jane hasn’t seen the garden that lies behind the hedge. But maybe, even if she had, she wouldn’t think much of it. It is an odd collection of plants, and the words that define the garden, that give it context, are not that visible, being jammed into the soil at the edge of the bed.

  “Why an angel?” I ask.

  “Well, I can’t very well do a ghost,” she says. “It wouldn’t be very visually impressive.” She looks over at me. “Don’t you like it?”

  It’s not that I don’t like it. There’s something lovely about this massive hedge suddenly becoming something other. It’s like a silent crowd of people and one of them spontaneously breaking into song. So, it’s not that. It’s more that I don’t know what to make of Jane for doing this.

  “Well,” says Jane. “It was a challenge to see if I could hone something from all this green. That’s all.” She looks away from me. I have taken too long to reply to her question.

  “I like it very much,” I say, but it is too late for that now. It sounds completely insincere.

  “The thing about angels,” says Jane, “is that they can read one another’s thoughts.”

  I try not to think of anything. The sun flickers out behind a cloud. The patch of light lifts from the angel’s wing.

  “Andrew and I used to discuss angels,” says Jane. “When we were reading philosophy at university.”

  This surprises me. I had assumed that Jane, like the other girls, was from working-class roots.

  “I didn’t know you went to university. I thought you were a hairdresser in London.”

  “That was after.”

  “After what?”

  Jane fishes a cigarette out from under her jumper. She has spent her entire pay from the Land Army on Gold Flakes. When we went to town for the magnolia tree, she cashed her pay and exchanged it all for packages of cigarettes. “I got a bit overwhelmed in university,” she says. “I had to stop going.”

  “What do you mean by ‘overwhelmed’?”

  Jane lights her cigarette. “My nerves were under great strain. That’s how it was phrased at the time.” She looks at me, expelling a stream of smoke. “Breakdown, Gwen,” she says. “I had a breakdown.”

  The angel regards us sternly from the top of the hedge.

  “Why?” I ask. “What happened?”

  “I realized I wasn’t the brightest person there, and I just couldn’t go on, knowing that. Somehow it made everything seem so futile.” Jane looks at me. “Sounds rather pathetic, doesn’t it? But I need to be right next to something, right up against it. No gaps. And if I couldn’t be the one right next to knowledge, then I didn’t exist at all. That’s how it is with me.”

  This is a hard way to live, to feel. I can’t imagine living at the end of my nerves like that. At the end of my limits. I have never had to be the best at anything. I could never be the best at anything. I am certainly not the best gardener, and never have been, although I do have an instinctive affinity for plants. I do know this.

  “Tell me something else about angels,” I say.

  Jane brushes a piece of hair out of her eyes, gazes up at her topiary creation. “You’ll like this,” she says. “One of the debates by the thirteenth-century theologians was whether angels belonged to the same species, or whether each individual angel was a species of its own.” She looks over at me. “A great mystery. The genus angel.”

  23

  My mother was very beautiful. Even when she was dying. She had wanted to go on the stage and couldn’t, because of me, but that desire had remained, become part of her character. Wherever she was, it was as if she was just about to be called onstage to deliver her lines. There was always an air of anticipation about her. The expectation of applause.

  There are many ways to tell a story. In opposition to. In sympathy with. What to leave out. What to put in.

  My mother was beautiful. I was always plain. “How could I have produced such a creature?” she said more than once. Some days she locked me outside because she couldn’t bear to look at me. I played in the gardens, among the flowers of white and blue—the same colours my mother used to like to wear. I would chase after her in the house sometimes, anxious when she left a room without me. Her flowing dresses of white and blue waving up ahead of me like semaphore.

  My mother was beautiful. I can never get away from that fact. If there is one thing to say about my mother, that is it. And whatever choices I make in telling my mother’s story, this is the soil they are planted in. My mother was beautiful.

  No one knows why she married my father, a much older friend of her father’s. Money? Safety? The idea that the security offered with
in such a marriage would allow her the chance to pursue her artistic ambitions? He had once told her she had “dramatic arms.” What she said about the marriage to me was, “It was a moment of weakness.” And I always knew I was the product of that weakness. My mother became pregnant. My father died. All her hopes of becoming an actress were emptied.

  The moment opens. The moment closes. There is sunlight. There is frost. There is the brief idea of roses amid the patch of weeds.

  I thought that if I could cure my diseased parsnips in the Royal Horticultural Society laboratory, I could cure my mother’s cancer in hospital. I know there was no real link between those two things, but I felt that there was. Instinct and wish. How to pull them apart.

  I often didn’t go to visit my mother in hospital in favour of staying in the lab at night, staring at my jars of parsnips, making my detailed notes that became, in the end, just a catalogue of death. All I was doing, really, was watching something die.

  “You’re not taking care of me,” my mother would whisper, when I did go and see her. But this refrain on the edge of death had also been her refrain from life. She would say it to butchers and taxi drivers, to shop assistants and waiters. And always to me. I did my best. I did. But what could I give my mother that would make up for the fact that my birth, my existence, had denied her the life she could have given herself?

  My mother locked me outdoors and her love denied became my profession. The garden became my home. I would lie on my back in the grass near the beds, name the flowers that swayed tall above me in the sun. Phlox. Foxglove. Hollyhock. Each name a word that opened the moment. I lay on my back at the edge of the flowers. I knew what to do to take care of them. It was easy to learn this. The simple tasks required to keep the garden alive and thriving were easy to master, and always effective.

  There are many different stories to tell. It’s never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.