The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and other Strange Stories (16 page)

Quinton was tinkering innocently with the lawnmower on the gravel drive. As she approached he looked up casually and said ‘Hello, Antonia’. He seemed to be pretending that they had never exchanged glances when she was at the upper window. The word ‘insolence’ formed in her mind, even as she realised that such a term did not belong to the present egalitarian age. Tonia made a conscious effort not to sound feudal as she spoke.

‘Peter, what was it you were showing Millie and Tam just now?’

‘Oh, that! Just something I picked up.’

‘Can I see?’

Quinton took the bandanna from inside his shirt and unwrapped it to reveal a thin, irregularly shaped slab of black stone with a flat, highly polished surface. He only showed it to her for a few seconds before putting it away again, but in that time Tonia had noticed that it had been finely engraved—so finely you could barely see the lines—with some kind of geometrical figure.

‘Where did you pick that up?’ she asked.

‘Oh, you pick these things up.’

‘The girls said you were playing a game with them.’

‘A game? Well . . .’

‘What is “scrying in the stone”, Peter?’ She was watching his expression carefully now, but he gave nothing away.

‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘We were just seeing if they could see theirselves, like in a mirror. Just a game.’ Tonia paused before replying, hoping that the pause and the quizzical look she gave him would imply scepticism without her having to express it verbally.

‘I’m not at all sure about these games of yours, Peter,’ she said eventually. Tonia’s intention was to make it quite clear, without being heavy handed, that she was telling him off, but she failed. She managed only to sound petulant and condescending.

‘Right you are, Antonia,’ said Quinton starting up the lawnmower and thereby putting an end to all further conversation. Later in the day he left a note in the hall to say that he would be unavailable the following Thursday.

That night Millie and Tam had nightmares. This was not unusual as they were both highly strung, imaginative children. What was odd was that their nightmares were almost identical. They said that in their dream they were running through the garden at nightfall and wherever they went faces would suddenly poke out at them from the hedges and undergrowth. What kind of faces? White faces, said Tam. Old-fashioned faces, said Millie. What did she mean, ‘old-fashioned’? Like the faces you see in old art books, said Millie, with curly lips and beards, sometimes with little horns. Laughing, said Tam. But not nice laughing, added Millie, horrible laughing, like they were playing a game with you that they knew, but you didn’t. Jules read them to sleep again with a story and made a mental note to talk to Quinton when he next came.

But he didn’t. Quinton, for all his faults, was invaluable. There was so much clearing and tidying to be done before the Spring. The garden was slowly yielding up its secrets, some of which were agreeable to Jules, others, like the Herm, not. For such a large area it had very few open spaces. Adrian Clavering had gone in for features, most of them, especially those involving water, very decorative. But even these tended to be over-elaborate: water did not merely emerge from a simple aperture, it was belched from the mouth of a grotesque head, or was blown from the conch of a Triton, or cascaded over a shell grotto. Quinton’s uncanny ability to restore these and get them flowing and splashing again reconciled Jules, up to a point, to both them and Quinton.

The problem was, as Tonia said to Jules, that Wyvern was not one garden, but many: rose gardens, knot gardens, walled gardens, water gardens. There was also a maze which neither of them liked, though neither said so to each other, even when Millie had run in one afternoon to tell them that there was an old woman with long grey hair crawling about in the maze, carrying a bottle. No such woman was found, of course, and the story was briskly dismissed as fantasy. Millie was a very imaginative child.

And there were statues everywhere, all of fine quality, but none of them entirely likeable. If there was a cherub carrying a basket of fruit, he was, unaccountably, weeping. A faun leered at you aggressively. A serene seated greybeard, in classical robes, was contemplating a skull. Mithras in his Phrygian cap was slitting the bull’s throat in a peculiarly violent manner. It goes without saying that there were several representations of Priapus, the god of gardening, with his erect penis, most of them mercifully small and easily concealed, but one of them was a fountain. Even the leaden urns on the terrace were decorated with low relief scenes in which Centaurs carried off struggling Lapith women, or nymphs fled in terror from lustful satyrs. Tonia found a curious marble version of Leda and the Swan in one of the old stable buildings. Zeus in the guise of a swan seemed to be perpetrating a rape rather than a seduction. Tonia locked the outhouse, grateful that this sculpture at least had not seen the light of day.

By the end of that year nearly all the ground had been cleared of its accretion of weeds and superfluous growth. Many parts of the garden had been restored almost to their former picturesque selves, and in this Quinton was invaluable. Though he was still determinedly against innovation, he had a genius for restoration. With the aid of a few old black-and-white photographs, and some sketchy plans, he was able to tell what had been planted where. He even proposed a compromise solution over the Herm. He had been able to find an attractive variegated ivy which would grow fast enough up the Herm to cover its offending appendages before the following Spring.

At the beginning of the following year Tonia and Jules were fairly confident they would be able to open in June, but there was still much to be done. All gardens have a habit of suddenly revealing some hidden area of neglect just as one is beginning to believe that it is at last tamed, but Wyvern had this habit to excess. One Friday in mid March Jules found that he had not really investigated what was to be found at the bottom of the steep bank behind the Temple of Pan which they called the Folly.

He was delighted to find that a meandering path led down to a dell through a thick planting of crocuses. At the bottom was a hollow surrounded by a grove of poplars and sweet briar, in the middle of which, embedded in undergrowth, was an oblong object that looked from a distance like a tomb. Closer inspection showed it to be the statue of a reclining figure on a plinth.

It was a sculpture in lichened marble of a sleeping girl with an exquisite figure and small, beautifully formed breasts. She lay on her side, one arm carelessly thrown over the delicate features of her smiling face. Jules was charmed. This at least was a tasteful addition to the garden. He would make a feature of this one. There was nothing to shock or alarm. But then he saw to his dismay that there was. Between the almost crossed legs the sculptor had carved a penis and testicles. It was a hermaphrodite. When Jules had cleared some moss and ivy from the plinth he found a carved inscription:

       HERMAPHRODITUS

And whosoever hath seen thee, being so fair,

Two things turn all his life and blood to fire;

A strong desire begot on great despair,

A great despair cast out by strong desire.

It was at this point that Jules suddenly felt he hated the Wyvern garden. Everywhere he saw beauty, but the beauty always seemed to be twisted out of true, like this hermaphrodite, or pitched towards the grotesque. If this garden was going to live again it could not be restored, it must somehow be reformed.

Jules was surprised by his own thought. Up till then morality to him had been a banal, utilitarian entity to do with loving Tonia and the children, not being ruled by money, donations to charity, offering his seat to pregnant women in the tube. He had been reasonably good at most of these, and he was content that this should remain the limit of his ideal. Now he was seriously considering the idea that an environment could be a force for good or evil: that leaf and stone and water were spiritually charged. If that was the case, where would it all end?

His mind went giddy at the idea.

Suddenly he became aware that he was being watched. He looked about him. The air was still, no leaf stirred, no twig cracked. He looked again up the steep bank to where he could just see the rear of the Temple of Pan. The setting sun behind it threw up a backdrop of gold onto which an intricate tracery of leaves and branches had been printed. Into this another shadow had been inserted, the figure of a man who looked grotesquely large in the waning light. Jules shaded his eyes to see who it was. The figure moved and he saw that it was Quinton.

‘Hello, Peter!’ said Jules. ‘This isn’t your usual day.’

‘I was wondering if you might be wanting me for an extra one,’ said Quinton. ‘Seeing as the time is creeping on.’

Jules walked up the serpentine path and onto the lawn behind the Temple of Pan where Quinton stood. If it were not for the odd thoughts he had just been having he would have accepted eagerly. As it was, he was not going to turn the offer down. It was arranged that Quinton should come the following Monday.

Over the weekend Jules and Tonia drew up plans for a new garden at Wyvern. The serpentine paths, the dark shrubberies, the little enclaves and grass theatres were to be cut down in favour of more open borders, more light, broader, more sweeping curves to the paths. The maze would be levelled to make way for a rockery. Perhaps they couldn’t do everything that year before the opening in June, but they would try. Both of them thought as one: it was to be transformation not restoration.

‘And I’m going to open up the Folly,’ said Jules. ‘We’ve neglected it for long enough.’

‘Is that wise?’ said Tonia.

‘What do you mean?’

Tonia did not know what she meant; she felt afraid, but offered no further objection to Jules’s decision. She did not want to stand in the way of her husband who seemed to have found a new spirit. She wondered at this. During all the time they had known each other, she had been aware of being the more mature and rounded person. When they met at Oxford, she had been the star: academically brilliant, beautiful, a leading player in OUDS. Emotionally she was far more experienced than the clever, callow ex-Wykehamist who had been lucky enough to catch her eye. She had been the senior partner in the marriage, and initiated the move to Wyvern; but lately she had been conscious of a subtle shift in the balance of power, of which his decision to make the garden more their own was the most striking example. She found to her surprise that she welcomed the change, and that acceptance enhanced rather than diminished her own strength.

That night two occurrences unsettled the family. The first was that Hermes the cat did not come in for his evening meal. Then at eleven, just as Jules and Tonia were going to bed they heard Millie screaming. It was a nightmare. She said she had dreamed that she was being chased through the garden by a man with spindly legs and hooves instead of feet.

**

They looked and asked everywhere for Hermes over the weekend, but he had gone. Millie and Tam, who had paid him little attention when he was around, were distraught. On Monday morning Tonia drove to the station at Moreton-in-Marsh to fetch her mother who was coming to stay. When Quinton arrived he found Jules standing alone on the steps of the Temple of Pan.

‘I want to open up the Folly, Peter,’ said Jules.

‘You mean the Temple of Pan?’

Something about the way Quinton insisted on the name alerted Jules. What a fool he had been! It was now so obvious to him that Quinton must have known Wyvern in Adrian Clavering’s time.

‘The doors seem to be locked,’ said Jules.

‘Ah, well then,’ said Quinton turning away. ‘Perhaps it’s best left alone.’

‘No. I want it open.’

‘Why would that be?’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t see no point, that’s all. There’s other work to do. That brick walk in the rose garden . . .’

‘Peter,’ said Jules quietly. ‘We are going to open the Folly. I want it open. I can’t understand why you’re so reluctant. I have a sledge hammer here. If we take it in turns, I’m sure we can break the doors down.’

‘Don’t you think we should try and find the key first?’

‘Where would we look? I don’t want to waste any more time.’

‘I got an idea where it might be. There’s a big old key hanging on a hook in the stable building where the statue of that swan and the woman is.’

‘Then you’d better fetch it, Peter. And if that doesn’t work we try the sledge hammer.’

As Quinton went to fetch the key Jules contemplated his victory. In the past it might have made him light headed; today it simply hardened his determination.

It only needed a small application of oil to the lock for the doors of the Temple of Pan to creak open. The interior was a rectangular space with windows on either side so caked in dust and grime that they barely let in the light. The air was damp and chilly. At the end of the chamber at eye level was a niche in which rested a sculpture of polished black basalt. Unlike the statues in the garden it was not in imitation of the classical style, but had the smooth stylised lines of an artist from the 1930s.

It represented Pan crouched, goatish knees brushing his cheeks, blowing the pipes. His frowning, saturnine features showed enormous concentration on the work of making music, and yet his eyes seemed fixed on the spectator. Jules could not decide about the look, whether it was malign, domineering or merely curious; perhaps a subtle combination of all three. It was a work of art.

An inscription on the base showed that it had been carved by Gilbert Bayes in 1933. Jules decided there and then that he would sell it. It was a fine work by a once eminent artist now coming back into fashion, but it no longer had a place here in the Folly. Jules planned to turn the place into a shop selling postcards and lavender bags and home made jams. The money from the sale would help pay for the garden’s transformation. How neat.

‘You don’t want to get rid of that,’ said Quinton.

Jules gave a start at this adroit piece of thought reading, but he remained calm. He asked Quinton what he meant. Quinton mumbled something about leaving things be.