A Garden of Trees (38 page)

Authors: Nicholas Mosley

BOOK: A Garden of Trees

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People were drowned in the sea. I walked up the cobbles with a pain in my leg like a cramp and a soldier tried to stop me and I went past him. In the square were soldiers and dirt and the upturned platform. A few policemen were helping to move the injured whose cries came like gulls across the spaces. By the platform were Marius and Annabelle and Mr. Palmerston. An officer was with them. Marius lay in the dust with his legs folded and his hands on his chest. The officer was saying, “It was nothing to do with me.” Marius had a large open wound in his stomach and he was not yet dead and I turned away as if to be sick. Annabelle was tearing up her shirt as if to bandage him.

I sat by his head while Mr. Palmerston prayed over him and the soldiers came to watch. The bells of the church had ceased and Marius's eyes were open to the sky with the flies settling on his eyelids. I waved my handkerchief above his eyes to keep the flies away and his face never moved and it was as if his body was not part of him. Mr. Palmerston leaned over him and put his ear close to Marius's mouth but the lips did not speak and then Mr. Palmerston touched his forehead with oil. The flies came to settle on the oil and I waved at them with my handkerchief. Then Marius drew a breath which seemed to come up from his torn stomach past his chest where the hands were folded into his dead staring face and he groaned and closed his eyes and said “I have not loved my beloved.” He spoke very clearly and he did not speak again and soon the eyes swam open and the flies settled on them and I did not have to wave at them any more. Mr. Palmerston was praying again and Annabelle covered Marius's face with the shirt that she had torn to put on his wounds.

That evening Mr. Palmerston came to see us and we sat beneath the palm trees while the rain waited. “He is at rest,” Mr. Palmerston said. I thought of the big brass bells of the church that had killed him or perhaps had welcomed him. “I do not know how it happened,” Mr. Palmerston said.

Later the rain began and we stayed in the house. Annabelle's father lay in bed all day doing crossword puzzles and chess problems from the papers. His cigarette holder had been broken in the riot and he had patched it with sticking-plaster so that it appeared somewhat bent. It was like a limb that has not properly healed.

We went to Marius's funeral. The whole town turned out and the rain ran down like tears across their faces. Mr. Palmerston read the service and the coffin went down into mud. “He should have had a child,” Annabelle said. Later we were asked to go through his personal belongings since he had no relations, but there was not much to do. Anna-belle found a packet of her letters to him, and she took them. His wife's clothes were hanging in a cupboard and when we shook them the cloth fell away in lumps where the moths had eaten them. I took all his papers and gave the business ones to Mr. Palmerston and kept myself the ones between him and his wife. Mr. Palmerston wanted me to burn them, but I did not do so. All Marius's property went to the Mission which Mr. Palmerston represented. There was nothing further of which the Mission could make use.

One day when the wind stopped Annabelle and I went out in a boat and sailed up the side of the island to the promontory where Marius's house stood against the sea. It was a blue day with clouds like flowers and we landed on the beach where the crabs ran. Annabelle went up to the huge empty house and I stayed on the rocks in front of the palm trees. Below me there were fishes that were striped like silk and weeds that seemed to grow as the water washed them. Annabelle sat on the verandah watching me and I took all the letters that Marius had written to his wife and that she had written to him and I tore them up and threw the bits of paper on the water where the fishes came to nibble at them like bread. Annabelle came down and sat beside me and I put my hand into the water and the water was icy.

We left the house and sailed out onto the open sea and Annabelle sat in the front of the boat with her back to me. I furled the sail and we drifted and there was a terrible ache in my body as if my life had been taken away from me. I lay in the bottom of the boat and watched the enormous hills of the island that arose like sphinxes from a desert, and then I closed my eyes and went back into the centre for the last time and prayed to God and to myself to forgive me. I thought of the last words that Marius had spoken and I knew that they were true for everyone. Memories came in like agonies of the garden and above them all was set the image of Annabelle not far from me with her seldom-smiling face like a swan upon the waters. Above the movement of the sea was a hard dead rock with nothing on it living and nothing on it loving and nothing on it working; and when memories became unbearable I stopped them. I went outwards again because it was the only thing to do and I knelt and kissed Annabelle because it was the only thing to do and I unfurled the sail because it was the only thing to do and we drove towards the land. From the hills above the huge bay the bells of the church boomed out again and summoned us to quietness. The sea was no good for us and we crawled to eternity.

POSTSCRIPT

I re-read this story some sixty years after it had been written; and then I came across the letter from the publisher's reader giving his reasons for turning it down. I thought I could now see more clearly his reasons for doing so, though these might or might not be a good reason for wishing that it might be published now.

The publisher was Rupert Hart-Davis, and his reader David Garnett, who had written to meâ

I have read
A Garden of Trees
with interest and despair. I think it is a failure and that publication in its present form would be a mistake.

The action is always excellently written and alive; the conversation generally bad and dead. Of course belonging to such a much older generation I am not the most sympathetic reader. But I should like to discuss it with you.

I had of course been disappointed, and had argued. Now sixty years later I was feeling I could understand what he meant about the conversation being dead.

At the time of writing, 1949-50, I was in my mid-twenties, and had had a bad stammer since childhood. This had often held me speechless while I listened to what seemed to me to be the often inane conversations of others. As I grew up the chattering political and social world seemed as a whole to be inane; and I wondered if speech might not be part of the curse acquired by humans when they were expelled from the Garden of Edenâor when they descended from being apes in the trees, or whatever. (Might not apes be protected from knowledge of good and evil? Whereas humans have the empowerment of telling lies.)

Anyway, it is true that the young protagonists in my story do not seem very trustful of speech; and the two characters at the centreâMarius and Annabelleâwere, I remembered, drawn from two people in real life who at the time seldom spoke, but to whom I and others were mysteriously and strongly drawn. Perhaps now, in this overt age of celebrity, there might be some recognition of the strength of inwardness rather than clamour.

About the Author

NICHOLAS MOSLEY
was born in London on June 25, 1923 and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He served in Italy during World War II, and published his first novel,
Spaces of the Dark
, in 1951. His book
Hopeful Monsters
won the 1990 Whitbread Award. He resides in London.

First edition, 2012

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mosley, Nicholas, 1923-

A garden of trees / Nicholas Mosley. -- 1st ed.

Â Â Â Â p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-56478-718-7 (cloth : acid-free paper)

I. Title.

PR6063.O82G37 2012

823'.914--dc23

2012003304

Partially funded by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency