The Lost Garden: A Novel Page 14

  If only I could read while out here, then I’d be less likely to fall asleep. It’s the boredom of remaining motionless for so many hours in a row that sabotages me.

  Tonight I am restless. I can’t seem to get comfortable in my makeshift burrow. I wriggle around on the cushion, wrap the blanket around me, rip it off. I want to drink the tea, just for the sheer relief of having something to do, but I’m afraid to do this too early because of the lavatory problem—the fact that there isn’t one out here and at a certain point in the night it becomes a problem.

  I stare over the moonlit garden to the chicken run and try to will something to happen, but it doesn’t work—all is as inert as ever.

  I am so ridden by the tedium of my task that the moment I hear the sound of the horse outside the walls of the garden I lurch to my feet and rush through the door. Jane is just riding slowly past. “Wait,” I say, running beside the horse to keep pace with her. “Where are you going?”

  Jane reins up and the horse stops his forward gait. “You know where I’m going,” she says.

  “Wouldn’t you like some tea first?” I have nothing else to offer, and often by the time I actually get around to drinking the tea, it’s already cold.

  Jane grins at me. “A little bored, are you?” she says. “No ghosts to keep you company?” She swings down from the horse. “All right,” she says. “I’ll come and sit with you for a little while.” She leads the horse off the path and wraps his reins around a tree close to the lawn.

  “You have the cushion,” I say, once I’ve lured her inside the walled garden. But she’s so small that my act of generosity is unnecessary. There’s room for both of us to perch on the square of padded green.

  Jane looks out over the earth of the beds. “It looks quite nice at night,” she says. She turns to me. “What about that tea, then?”

  I pour her tea into the one cup I’ve brought and I use the metal top of the Thermos for myself. We sit on the cushion, in the dark garden, sipping our tea. I am so grateful to have company that I keep forgetting I am on a vigil, keep wanting to talk the silence away.

  “Shush,” Jane keeps saying. “We’re waiting for the ghost.”

  After a little while I calm down, am able to sit quietly and watch. Jane calms me down. I thought that when I listened to her read through the door of the wireless room. How calm and steady her voice was as she read Virginia Woolf to David. How her reading voice was like a cool hand laid against my burning forehead. I want to tell her that I heard her read, but I don’t know how much she would mind my spying on her and David, for this is how it could be perceived, as nothing more than spying.

  “Why don’t you eat?” I say instead, for I am remembering the thinness of her body when she pulled her sweater over her head. And when I thought about it later, I realized that I’d never actually seen her eat a full meal. She always had an excuse to push the dinner plate away from her.

  Jane looks at me. “Don’t,” she says. “I eat enough to stay alive. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

  She has no margin of safety around her. I saw that very clearly the night she handed her sweater to David. No protection. I suddenly feel afraid for her. “What if Andrew doesn’t come back?” I say.

  There’s a noise from outside the garden. A squeal from the horse, as though he’s been startled. Something white flashes in front of the chicken coop, leaps over the fence of the run. I am too surprised to surge to my feet as planned. It has all happened so fast I can’t be sure of what I’ve seen. Jane has grabbed my hand, and we watch as the white figure reappears from the coop, a chicken fluttering in panic from between its jaws. The ghost of Mosel is an albino fox. Having cleared the fence, it dashes off to the side, and disappears through what must be a hole in the wall.

  I look at Jane. She looks at me. She hasn’t let go of my hand. “That was so expertly done,” she says. I think of what Lewis Frant remembered, how one of the yews marking my hidden garden had been clipped into the shape of a fox. Perhaps there have always been these albino foxes on the grounds of Mosel. And probably Jane and I aren’t the first to sit out here in the walled garden, waiting for the ghost to show up. I’m beginning to feel as though everything has happened before, that our story has already been told. Just as we were powerless to stop the fox stealing the chicken, so there seems to be an inevitability to all that takes place at Mosel. This is a ghost story. And we have somehow become the ghosts of these young men who worked this estate before the Great War. The living are the dead.

  “Gwen,” says Jane. “What’s the matter? You look as if you’ve just seen a fox.”

  That dissolves it. The patina of present over past lifts and it is just now. I am here in the garden, in the dark, with Jane beside me. The furrowed earth looks wet with moonlight. I let go of her hand. “Yes,” I say. “That was so expertly done.”

  35

  The work on the grounds progresses nicely. By the end of June they are beginning to resemble themselves again. The weather, though a little cool at night, is good enough that we decide to have one of the dances with the soldiers outside on the lawn behind the dining hall.

  There is a great discussion about light for this dance. The girls want to stud the lawn with torches, for romantic atmosphere, but because of the war we are not supposed to have any light outside at night.

  “But the war never comes here,” says Golden Wonder, when I remind them of the light restrictions we are meant to be obeying. “Adolf is busy invading Russia. Couldn’t we just put the torches out if we hear a plane?” She is involved in a serious romance with one of the Canadian soldiers and wants everything to look as nice as possible when the men come for the dance.

  It is now easy for us to ignore the war. Our work on the estate has shifted from war effort to restoration. We live at Mosel as though it is where we really live, not merely where we are posted. And Golden Wonder is right, the war is distant here. The war is the nightly radio broadcast, and sometimes, lately, we’ve even been turning this off before it’s finished. We have been, mistakenly as it turns out, believing that the war has become a choice and we can simply choose not to participate if we feel like it.

  So I agree to the torches and Golden Wonder’s rather idiotic suggestion of extinguishing them at the first hint of bombers overhead. For my own peace of mind, I do insist on only half the number of torches the girls had originally wanted. This pleases everyone, and the Women’s Land Army spends ages making the torches and planting them in the lawn. I have to admit that, on the night of the dance, when they are all lit and glow like fireflies on the stretch of grass, there has never been anything more beautiful. After we light them we just stand there on the lawn, almost in shock, I think. It has been years since we have seen benign light at night. Years. The most ordinary event has become this extraordinary moment where we stand silently together on the lawn, watching the flames from the torches ignite the dark.

  We hear the men come down the road from the house. The music from the Victrola spooling through the darkness. Evelyn and Alice and Golden Wonder, whose name is really Daphne, rush out to the road to meet them.

  “Thank God no one from the higher-ups can see us now,” I say to Jane, who stands beside me on the lawn by one of our bright, illicit beacons of folly.

  “Don’t blame yourself,” she says. “All societies sink into the mud of hedonism if you let them.”

  “Well, exactly,” I say. I’m starting to feel guilty again, feel that I should have put a stop to everything before it got so out of hand. I look at Jane standing calmly beside me. If I said this to her, she would just tell me that I think I’m more powerful than I actually am. And isn’t that it? I’m one of many, not one above many. “It’s a mixed border,” I say to Jane.

  “What are you talking about?” Jane lights a cigarette. The men come around the corner of the building. Daphne is already dancing with her soldier. The man carrying the Victrola walks behind them. I see Raley near the end of the line and I feel ill.
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br />   “Get out your dance card,” says Jane, and we move forward to greet the men.

  36

  Before the dance gets properly underway, while the girls are still fussing with the torches and the soldiers are fussing with the music, I stand off to the side of the grassy dance floor with David. He is smoking a cigarette. We are both watching Jane as she flits about, from torch to torch, with her box of matches.

  “What happens to your jumpers?” I ask.

  “What?” He looks puzzled.

  “Your jumpers,” I say. “The ones you knit.”

  “I send them home to my girlfriend.” David stamps out his cigarette and reaches inside his jacket pocket. “She wears them in the places we used to go together. Her sister photographs her doing this and she sends me the picture.” He pulls out a handful of small photographs, taps the top one. “That’s her. That’s Abby.”

  I look down at the image of a young, dark-haired girl standing on a large black rock.

  “We used to row out there in the spring to look for birds’ eggs.” David taps the photograph again. “That was the best sweater I ever made. You can’t tell from this, but it’s the night sky from above that rock. The sweater I knitted in black, with bursts of white for the stars overhead. I even got the constellations right,” he says.

  If I peer hard at the photograph in David’s hand, at the girl on the rock and the sweater on the girl, I can see stabs of white breaking open the black. I can see the stars he means. I can see too how their love works for them. How he makes a mystery for her to solve. How she sends back the proof.

  “David!” Jane waves from across the lawn.

  David grins at me, hastily re-pockets his photographs. “Duty calls,” he says, and he bounds down the slope towards the waving figure of Jane.

  The lawn behind the dining hall is low, slopes down towards the South Garden. As the night cools, the air becomes misty, cocoons of fog float above the grass. Several of the torches go out because of the damp and have to be relit.

  Later, I stand with Raley in the same place I’d stood with David. Couples appear suddenly out of the fog, then recede just as suddenly. The music announces then mourns them. “I saw the Mosel ghost,” I say to Raley. “It was a white fox.”

  “Well done, Captain Davis.” Raley drinks from his flask, forgetting to offer it to me. He has been distant all evening, just standing here watching the soldiers and the Land Girls dance.

  I take the flask out of his hand and drink from it. He looks at me in surprise. “You forgot your manners,” I say. And then it strikes me that he is the most well-mannered person I have ever met. Under all situations he has always been exceedingly polite. “What’s the matter?” I pass the whisky back and he drinks from it again.

  “We’re to be posted,” he says. “Tomorrow they’re moving us to Sussex. From there we’ll go into the war. I haven’t told the men yet. Thought I’d give them one final carefree evening to enjoy themselves.”

  I watch the dancers spin through the fog. The glow of the torches behind them, like a candle someone has left burning in a window to wish them home. “Don’t go,” I say, but thankfully he doesn’t hear me.

  “Look at them,” says Raley. “A year from today and we could all be dead. Doesn’t it seem impossible to believe?”

  A slight wind swirls the fog gently in front of us, as though it’s being stirred. The wind is from the south. I can smell the sea. “Come with me,” I say to Raley, and I take his hand and lead him away from the dance.

  Even in the dark, with the moon slipping in and out from behind the clouds, I am able to find my way through the orchard and around the stone wall. The green angel looks sombre in the darkness, rising on its stalk of hedge. I’m not sure Raley even sees it, as I pull him through the gap in the yews.

  The garden is all silvery with the mist and moonlight. It looks like something seen underwater, blurry and fluid. I still have Raley firmly by the hand, walk him around the perimeter of it. “This is a secret,” I say. “No one knows it’s here. It was planted by someone who worked at Mosel around 1916.”

  “What is it?” asks Raley.

  “It’s a garden of love.” I guide him slowly from one end of it to the other. “This is Longing, much of it no longer in bloom. This is Loss.” I stop in front of the wave of peonies, frozen in the act of crashing to the ground, of going overboard.

  But Raley isn’t looking at the Garden of Loss. He’s looking ahead to where the roses glisten bright as stars at the end of the flower bed. “Those were in my dream,” he says. “That night I was drunk and fell asleep in your room. They were burning above my head, and I swear they were still burning when I woke.”

  Again, as I did the other night with the fox, I feel as though we have fallen into spaces opened by the past. I feel that our story has already been told. Perhaps the person who made this garden had slept in my bedroom. Perhaps what Raley dreamt had actually happened there, or been thought about enough for it to slip through the wall of time into this reality. We are our own ghosts already, I think.

  “I don’t want to go, Gwen,” says Raley. “I’m afraid.”

  I lead him to the bench and make him sit down. He leans his head down to my shoulder and I reach up with both arms and hold him while he cries. His head is heavy, full of rain. I touch his cheek, the strong bones around his eyes. I touch his lips, gently, so gently, and then I kiss him. I kiss him and he lets me. Then he kisses me back. We push against each other and topple off the bench onto the grass. I scrape my arm on the wood on the way down. I will have that scratch longer than I will have anyone, and in the weeks to come I will open it and open it, never let it heal, let the jagged seam of blood fill and fill, and empty.

  Raley lies on top of me. His body is heavy and insistent. He kisses me and I feel as if I have never breathed before now. That all this time I was only dying. I wrap my arms around him, feel his ribs under his shirt, pull it up and run my hands over his skin, soft as petals. Don’t go, I think, as I slide my fingers over each blunt thorn in his spine. Don’t go. The moon moves out from behind a cloud and turns his blond hair white in the milky dark, in the thin milky dark. And then the wind stirs and I can smell the roses. I swear it is that, it is the scent of the night roses that makes me say what I feel but never meant to utter. It is the scent of roses, and I swear this has happened before. The roses have made this happen before. They are burning above me. Raley is burning above me. “I love you,” I say.

  I will think later, over and over again, that if only I hadn’t said those words we would have been lovers that night. But my telling him I love him has made Raley stiffen and roll off me, lie on his back on the grass beside me with his hands up to his face. “Oh, Gwen,” he says. “No.” And then he sits up.

  The feeling of him gone from my body is the loneliest I have ever been. And there will never be anything to relieve it. For one moment I was no longer empty. For one moment I was alive. Until I made the mistake of calling it love.

  “I’m sorry,” says Raley. “I’m truly sorry.”

  I can’t get up. I lie on my back in the grass. I can feel the sting of the cut on my arm. “I’m not so bad in the dark. Am I?” I just say it, because it doesn’t matter if I say the truth now.

  Raley kneels beside me. “Gwen,” he says, and he picks me up and holds me against his chest while I cry. “You’re wrong about yourself. But I can’t,” he says. “It would be so unfair.”

  “But I don’t care,” I say, into the space between his collarbone and neck. I don’t care. I don’t care if he doesn’t love me back. I don’t care that he’s leaving tomorrow. I just need him to lie on top of me again. This is all I need. But I’m crying too hard to get the words out.

  “Gwen,” says Raley. I can feel the tension in his body, can feel the sweat from his hands through my shirt. “My friend who died. Peter. He wasn’t just my friend. He was my lover. We have been, had been, lovers since we were young. I’ve tried, while I’ve been here at Mosel, I’ve tri
ed to get over it. But I can’t. There is nothing else for me.” Raley lets go of me and we look at each other across this great distance that has seemed to open between us. I remember the first time I went to see him at the house, how he was listening to the Mozart Requiem. I see how I have just been another attempt at comfort. Another sort of poultice.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, “I never meant to hurt you.” He stands up.

  I wipe my sleeve across my face to staunch the tears and struggle to my feet as well. Behind Raley I can see the mocking white of the roses. And just as I had always thought the garden was made to commemorate love between someone who worked at Mosel and someone from the village, between a man and a woman, now I see how that story could have been different too. Thomas or Samuel or William could have made that garden for one of the other gardeners on the estate, or for one another. Nothing is certain. Nothing is known. The roses burn white in the darkness behind us. White as ashes.

  37

  The soldiers leave the estate the next morning. We hear the engine of the car as it winds up and down the hill, ferrying the men to the train station. We sit at the table, long after breakfast is over, listening to this particular song play over and over again. There is a small, grim knot of us at breakfast. Daphne has not appeared this morning. Jane hasn’t emerged from the barn. I think the rest of us are afraid to be alone, even though we’re also having trouble speaking to each other. We just sit together in our uneasy assembly. It’s so quiet in the dining hall that I can hear the birdsong from outside the windows.

  It is Raley who comes to say goodbye. Most of the men have been taken to the train. He is the last to go. He comes to the door of the dining hall, a brown paper package in his hands. And even though I don’t want to talk to him or see him, I can’t stop myself from rushing over to him the moment he moves into the door frame. He is all turned out, all neat and trim in his uniform, hair slicked down, ready to go into war looking like the soldier he is supposed to be. Only when I am close to him and smell the familiar blossom of alcohol on his breath am I reassured that he is still himself.