The Garden Path (37 page)

True enough, or partly. Susannah had dropped off soon after they left Kennedy. She had awakened, obligingly, each time the stewardess had brought sustenance—drinks, then dinner, then more drinks, then breakfast—too quickly, time out of joint, dawn outside the plane windows almost before the movie was over. But Susannah had dropped rapidly back to sleep between distractions, leaving Rosie to the movie—
Kramer vs. Kramer
, which she had already seen, with Peter—and to the attentions of the man in the third seat, a Nepalese economist from the International Monetary Fund who was going to a conference on Third World debt at the London School of Economics. “And to do a little swinging without my wife,” he confessed to Rosie in a thick but not impenetrable accent. He smiled blandly at her and asked where she was staying in London.

“I'm not going to London.”

“Not going to London! Your first trip to England, and you're not going to London? Then where
are
you going?”—as if the land sloped away from London, on all sides, into empty sea.

“I'm touring the countryside with my daughter,” she said, indicating Susannah, who slept sweetly on.

“Ah—that's your daughter,” he said, rising in his seat a little to look at Susannah's legs. “Yes—but why the countryside? Excuse me for my nosiness, but I see that you, like me, can't abide movies and also find it difficult to sleep. So tell me—why in the world the countryside and not the joys of London?”

Rosie sighed, and chatted with him, let him buy her a drink but not put his hand on her knee, and watched Dustin Hoffman silently make French toast for his little boy, argue with his ex-wife, race through the streets of New York to the hospital with his son in his arms. She was tired, but she knew she couldn't sleep if she tried, and she was even grateful for the company of the economist. While he explained Britain's economic problems to her, she kept wondering why she wasn't thrilled to be on this plane, after all this time, heading for the land of her birth; why all she felt was fatigue, dejection, and the faint, tamed, but never wholly absent throb of pain in her left arm. When he asked, she told the economist she had broken her arm in an automobile accident.

She felt wiped out when they arrived at Heathrow. The economist disappeared, hustled through Customs, no doubt, by international officialdom. Rosie leaned on Susannah's arm as they waited in lines, and she was glad to sit on a bench while her daughter picked up their rental car. The crowds, the strangeness, tired her further—and the weather. It was ten in the morning, but England looked gray and dismal; it could have been dusk. Rosie watched an emotional reunion between a man in a UCLA sweatshirt and a woman wearing a paper pinned to her coat that read “
égaré
”. They stood locked in a long embrace, and the woman uttered heedless sharp little moans at intervals, like a puppy. Then Susannah returned and left Rosie on another bench—outside, under a shelter, where she watched a group of students negotiate endless satchels and backpacks into a tiny car, joking in a language she didn't understand: Swedish? When Susannah finally brought the car around, Rosie didn't recognize her—a blonde woman with a wide, thin smile, driving a little red automobile.

“This is such fun,” she said, holding the door and an umbrella for Rosie. “Everyone has the most wonderful accents. The rental-car lady actually called me
love
, and I am about to stow our luggage in the
boot!
” She did so, and drove through the airport maze to the main road, adapting with apparent ease to the wrong side of it. “I've never been such a great driver on the
right
side of the road,” she said cheerfully. “So it's not that hard for me to switch.”

Rosie struggled to stay awake, only vaguely aware that the gray dismalness of the airport had given way to lush, wet green. She fell quickly into the position of dependent, knew she was doing so, and decided not to care. She had been nearly a month with Susannah, almost since leaving the psychiatric ward. Susannah had come to stay with her, replacing Miss Poole, the nurse who had been hired to care for her at first. Rosie's house had been a refuge for Susannah, whose ambiguous life with Duke the chef had gone, somehow, mysteriously askew. Susannah had, to Rosie's grateful relief, substituted her own kind of comfortable, sloppy efficiency for Miss Poole's condescending and antiseptic vigilance—getting the meals, tending the gardens, washing Rosie's hair for her, tracking in grass clippings, keeping the house filled with slapdash arrangements of the flowers she cut every few mornings, and finishing her story upstairs in her old bedroom. Rosie had come to rely on her—this placid, messy, gifted, resurrected daughter—as she had never relied on anyone: not parents, husband, lovers, son. She didn't resist; it was, she figured, part of her recuperation, a treat she was entitled to because her arm hurt, and because she had just spent two indignant weeks being grilled by a psychiatrist with the brain of a turnip. And it was a gift she could give Susannah, who seemed to need someone to care for.

At the inn she went immediately to sleep, and awoke at teatime to find her shoulder hurting and Susannah combing out her wet hair in front of the mirror.

“England is the most beautiful place in the world,” Susannah said. “It's all true, what everybody says. And those pictures in the guidebooks. It really
looks
like that. You should see the gardens—the flowers!”

“Oh, I know—I know,” Rosie said, hoisting herself up in her bed, and, in spite of her aching shoulder and the rain blurring the window, the exhilaration she had anticipated took her over in a rush; she felt invigorated, and ready. The gardens of England, in all their autumn glory, were hers to see after all these years. And Silvergate, the loveliest of them all. She swung her feet over the side of the bed and went to the window. It looked out on the inn courtyard where, even in the rain, and with the daylight nearly gone, a border of coreopsis and purple loosestrife glowed with its own radiance. “Just look at those flowers,” she said to Susannah. “I've spent my whole life in gardens, and I still can't get over them, how beautiful they are.” Looking out, with Susannah at her side—was it something about the light? or the scent of the air coming through the crack of open window?—she was back for one brief trick of memory in the cottage with her parents and her grandparents, surrounded by flowers.

And now here she was at Silvergate, disoriented, peering through the drizzle at an alien landscape. Had she lost it, then? Her entire childhood? Would nothing come back to her? And how could memory be so fickle? “I don't know, I don't know,” she said vaguely, looking around. Far beyond the wide flat stretch of patchy lawn, the low Kentish hills, yellow bordered with deep green and topped with a black fringe of trees, edged the gray horizon. In the distance she could just see a brick structure like a tower, with a cone-shaped roof:
an oast house
. The word came to her as if from underwater, and she clutched Susannah's arm, and pointed. “They dry the hops in those,” she said excitedly. “Oast houses. That thing on the top is for ventilation—it turns in the wind. I haven't thought of them in years.” It was a vision from her childhood, intact; it was like coming upon a photograph of an old, lost friend.

Susannah said, “That one seems to have been converted into a people-house. See? You can just make out curtains in the windows, and two cars.”

“Oh, Lord, yes,” Rosie said, and felt depressed again. It was all wrong, that the oast house, that eccentric-looking edifice, should be inhabited. She tried to remember the farm that used to be part of the estate. She should be able to recall the farmer, his family, there must have been children. But she could retrieve nothing, not even, for sure, where the fields had been—over there, surely, and stretching over toward the desecrated oast house? The right photograph refused to reveal itself.

“It must be fun to live in a place like that,” Susannah was saying. “I'd love to have the room up in that tall tower part, to write in. It would be perfectly round, and the ceiling would slope up to a point—like living in an ice-cream cone. And I would make up mysterious, circular plots for my stories—but with a point to them.” She laughed, and Rosie laughed with her, halfheartedly. Maybe it was Susannah's enthusiasm that was wearing her out. “And what a view!” Susannah swung around, in the rain, to look at the rest of the scene. Her hair hung down in a wet braid over the back of her yellow slicker. She refused to wear a hat.
She's such a child
, Rosie thought—though she was impressed with the way the child negotiated car rentals and maps and the perverse and narrow English roads. And she was pretty, too, Rosie thought, with her hair neatly braided and her eyes bright, and the damp weather obviously good for her complexion; her cheeks were pink, for once. She never would have predicted this fragile prettiness from her plain, whiny daughter—not to mention such relentless high spirits. What had happened to the sullen, grasping hippie whose arrival from California she had dreaded? And the deserted wife? The two of them had still, after all these weeks, not spoken Ivan's name.

Susannah faced her, beaming. “I'm so grateful to you for bringing me here, Rosie. And not just because I needed to get away. I love England—rain and all.” She laughed again, her angular face becoming softer, her eyes crinkling with glee.
Like Edwin when I first met him
, Rosie thought, horrified. Memory engulfed her and made her weak. She took Susannah's arm again with her good right one, and Susannah squeezed it exuberantly. “Let's walk up to the house,” Susannah said. “I'm dying to see the place.”

“I'm not so sure I am,” Rosie said. “It's like seeing a movie made from a book you liked. It's not the way you imagined.”

“You were here a long time ago,” Susannah said in her gentle voice. “It's bound to be different. But the house should be the same, at least.”

“We'll see.” She expected nothing. Or worse—the house turned into a Disneyland castle, all purple and pink and plastic, with gnomes. Nothing would surprise her.

They walked up the drive in their rubber boots, avoiding puddles. No one else seemed to be around; there had been only three other cars in the car park. “Not very good weather for tourists,” Susannah said. “We'll have the place pretty much to ourselves.”

The paved path was bordered on one side with trees, on the other with tree-studded lawn stretching out to the hills beyond. “I certainly don't remember it was so far,” Rosie said. Her left arm pulled heavily against the sling.

“Well, you probably didn't come up this way much,” Susannah pointed out. Rosie could see Susannah deliberately not referring to her mother's fatigue: she's
handling
me, Rosie thought; I've become someone who needs to be
handled
. But she was glad Susannah had developed tact—she was like Peter in that way. And she was relieved not to be coddled—not like that damned nurse, Miss Poole, whom she'd been forced to hire her first week home from the hospital and who had treated her like a demented child. At least Susannah helped her hide her weaknesses.

“I should think you would always have approached the main house from the back somewhere,” Susannah went on. “From wherever your cottage was. Not up the main drive.”

Of course. That was why it was all so wrong. Something buried deep in her mind turned over and half-revealed itself. Yes: that explained everything. How could she think the farm would be in
front
? That the main approach would have
hops
growing alongside it? She was completely turned around. She remembered now, distantly, the long back road in, a road lined with trees: evergreens? did she remember pine needles? or was that someplace else? were there rhododendrons, perhaps? But the road, she was sure, had divided, and one fork had curled around to the cottage.

“There!” Susannah said as they went around a bend, and Rosie looked up. There it was—Silvergate on its hill suddenly before them, with the mist still on it, the rosy brick glowing in the rain, and the massive chimneys and the little cupola and the steps widening out from the great front door to end in squat pillars topped with urns. The rain had let up a little, and they stopped to look at the house. Yes, this, at least, was right—the sober, tidy shape of it, the color of the brick, the soothing symmetry. It all matched up perfectly with something carved deep in her soul. Tears came to her eyes.

“It's lovely,” Susannah said. “Just what you'd expect an English country house to be.” She looked down at Rosie, still clinging to her arm. “Is it the way you remember it? It must be a strange feeling, to see it again.”

“Very strange,” Rosie said. “But it looks just the way it should look.”

“Does it look smaller? The places you knew as a kid are supposed to seem smaller when you see them as an adult. I know your house did, at first—the inside, especially. My old room. And the tool shed—the old playhouse. I couldn't believe how low the roof was—I can't even stand upright inside it.” She paused, as if uncertain whether to go on, then said, “It's funny, that you and I have both returned to the scenes of our childhood.”

Rosie glanced away from the house to her daughter. She hadn't thought of that—of how disquieting it must have been for her, to return to live in a place she had left with such cold impatience, so many years ago. And yet Susannah had seemed, during all those weeks, placid and content. What had it cost her, Rosie wondered, belatedly.

The rain started up again, harder. “Oh,
hell
,” said Susannah. “Shall we dash for it?”

“I'll try.”

Her bad arm bounced painfully under her coat as they ran over the lawn and up the circular gravel drive, and she had to stop, panting, at the top of the steps in the shelter of the overhang.

“I'll wager that made the old arm smart a bit,” Susannah said lightly in the exaggerated accent she had begun to affect as a joke. Her face was wet, her hair dripping, and her smile was replaced by an anxious squint Rosie was sure she wasn't aware of.