The Garden Path (41 page)

They had two days left when Susannah suggested they go back to Silvergate. From something in her voice Rosie was aware that the idea hadn't been dead in Susannah's mind but only dormant since that dismal day in the rain.

“Oh, Susannah—what for?” Even as she spoke, though, she knew they would go, and she was willing. She felt newly minted by their slow traveling, her shoulder nearly twinge-free, her soul refreshed. She dreamed of preparing a garden, working through the dirt with trowel and gloved fingers to pull out roots and rocks. In her one dream of Ivan he was as distant and untouchable as a priest; he was very tall, so tall she couldn't reach him, and he was dressed in black.

“For the gardens,” Susannah said. “For your memories. For the hell of it.”

“Oh—all right,” Rosie said with a reluctance that fooled no one. Her heart was light.

They were in Somerset, and—the decision made—they proceeded east in the little red car, a day's trip through Wiltshire—across Salisbury Plain where they saw, in the distance, the familiar, awesome shapes of Stonehenge from the A344—and into Hampshire and the Sussexes to Kent, retracing their steps and reminiscing, now that it was coming to a close, about the high points of their trip.

“Cathedrals,” Susannah said. “I would happily visit a dozen more. Next time I'm going north, to see the one at York.” And then, without transition, “I miss my cats. I hope Duke's taking good care of them.”

“We'll collect them first thing.” The three cats—Rosie still couldn't tell them apart—had moved in with her when Susannah had, immediately taking over the yard and intimidating the Sheffield's tabby. “I sort of miss them myself.”

“They seem to like Duke awfully well. I hope he hasn't alienated their affections.”

Susannah, Rosie suspected, wanted to talk not about the cats but about Duke. “You've written him a lot of letters,” she said tentatively.

“I'm trying to get him to fall in love with me,” Susannah said.

“
What
?”

“By way of my glorious prose. I'm trying to win him with words.”

Rosie studied her surprising daughter. They were driving through West Sussex in the late afternoon. The hills were dotted with sausage-sheep clustered together, the sun was low in the sky behind them. Susannah, pink-cheeked in a black turtleneck, smiled sideways at Rosie.
Pregnancy becomes her
, Rosie thought for the hundredth time.

“But why, Susannah? Are you in love with him?”

“Yes, I am,” said Susannah. “It's one thing I've learned on this trip.” Her little smile broadened out. “I've learned to identify woundwort and goose grass and hawthorne. I can tell the apse from the transept from the choir. I've gotten to like ale and kidneys. And I've discovered I'm in love with Duke. Travel is so broadening.”

“He's a nice fellow,” Rosie said lamely. She had met Duke twice and had liked him—a quiet, self-possessed man with occasional flashes of impish humor. He had reminded her, in fact, of Susannah. She remembered that he was a touch shorter than her daughter, had grayish eyes and square, competent-looking hands. She remembered the pâté Ivan had brought her, and the meal she had eaten at Duke's restaurant. He and she and Susannah had sat on Rosie's back porch. She and Duke had talked about mulching. Later, she had been surprised to learn there was anything between him and Susannah; he had seemed so purely her friend. “I thought he already wanted you to come and live with him,” she said.

“Oh, he does,” said Susannah. “But he doesn't think he's in love with me. And I don't want to shack up with someone who isn't.” She spoke lightly, almost as if mocking herself, but Rosie wondered what lay behind the casual words. She wondered what Susannah's journal said about it all, and what the letters to Duke contained. How could you make someone fall in love with you by writing him letters?

“Is it—” She looked for a word. “Is it fierceness you want?” Thinking she understood.

Susannah considered. “No,” she said after a minute. “That's the last thing I want.”

Oh, I do
, thought Rosie, surprising herself. She was homesick all of a sudden—not for home so much (though she'd be glad to get back and relieve Kiki of her garden duties) as for her old self. She wanted to get dressed up and go out with a man who told her she looked good; she wanted to sit by her fire drinking with some man who would make her laugh; she wanted to climb the stairs to her big, welcoming bed with a man close behind her admiring her legs. She wanted the old game to begin again.
I'm only fifty
, she thought. Her shoulder was better, she had lost a few pounds walking the lanes of England, the ancient countryside stretched out in the sun around her, and she felt young, young.

They stayed at an inn just outside Chiddingstone, and had dinner there overlooking a garden that sloped to a silver rope of a stream banked with green, and beyond it deep green meadow.

“Does it stay green all year?” Rosie asked the innkeeper. “Doesn't it ever get brown and bare?”

He laughed, serving their fish. He was a thin, mustachioed man who had told them he was originally from up north, a Shropshire lad, but had moved to the mellower south where his wife's people were. “We get winter,” he said. “We get our share of snow and cold, though it comes later here than some places.” He asked where they were from, confused Connecticut with Cleveland, and had a cousin who had once been to California.

“That's where I'm from—sort of,” said Susannah with a look at Rosie.

“That's where I'd like to go,” said the innkeeper.

“Don't. Go to Connecticut.” Susannah had already tucked into her dinner, and she spoke chewing. “Go to New England.”

“Ah—New England. Now that's where I'm always told the autumn is so glorious.” But he looked fondly out on his own green garden.

I'll come back, thought Rosie. I'll marry an inkeeper and grow an English garden and talk about the States with homesick American tourists. But at the moment she wanted to go home.

“I miss it,” she said to Susannah the next morning. “I miss all the reds and golds and browns. Do you think we'll be back in time to catch some of it?”

“You're asking
me
?” Susannah laughed. “The expatriate? I haven't seen a New England fall since I was ten years old.” They were on the road to Silvergate. “I think you're in just the right mood for this excursion, Rosie,” Susannah added. Rosie had talked her into giving up on
Mom;
it had always sounded as if there were quotation marks around it. “If you're busy missing New England you won't get too upset about
old
England.” She gave Rosie a quick smile, her small anxious one. “I hope it'll be better this time. At least we'll see the gardens. And we'll take notes for the book, and photographs. And tomorrow we'll be home.”

They drove along the yellowing woods and into the car park. The sun was out, the brick manor house glowed pink, the octagonal cupola was there after all with its perching stork. The trees beyond the house were green and gold, and the gardens were open. Susannah and Rosie paid their admission again—to the same National Trust guide, who recognized them, smiled, said the gardens were especially lovely just now, before frost. They went straight through the house, feeling at home, out the double doors at the back of the Great Parlour to the terrace, and there before them, in a series of descending terraces, were the gardens of Silvergate: clipped and green, deserted, the turreted hedges blackish against blue sky.

They walked down to the formal rose beds—tidy and flowerless now, dotted with orange rose hips—and beyond them to the lily pond. The pond was perfectly clear, the colors of the trees reflected in it just as vivid in the water as on the shore, the surface ruffled by a light wind that gathered itself now and then into a gust. Rosie almost went up to the pond, knelt beside it and peered in to see her face, age fifty, where years ago her young eyes had looked back at her. But she refrained. It would be too much, somehow, of either ecstasy or pain, and the only logical culmination of such an act would be to throw herself into the water, and sink below the reflections of the trees.

The garden was perfectly quiet, not a guide was visible, or a gardener, or another tourist. Rosie and Susannah inspected all the little gardens, walking the graveled paths and admiring their neat regularity, their patterns, their variety.

“I remember them all,” Rosie said, but she didn't say much more than that. Susannah was silent also, taking photographs and, eventually, wandering off by herself.
Tactful child
, thought Rosie to herself, turning down a path, and there before her was the battened green door in the yew hedge behind which, she knew—how could she have forgotten? it was as familiar, suddenly, as her own place back home—was the brick path that led to the gardener's cottage.

Rosie sat down on a stone bench and let the tears come to her eyes. Behind the door—and looking at the handle she recalled precisely the amount of pressure your thumb must exert, and the vigorous push it took to open it—behind the door the path curved to the right and then turned left, and there was the stone cottage with the tile roof, and the two squat chimneys, the heavy oak door, and the tiny-paned windows on either side. In this October sun the cottage would be tawny brown, and the Michaelmas daisies would still be in bloom by the door, and the Virginia creeper by the wall would be reddening. And her mother's gardening basket used to stand there, with her dirty blue gloves and the battered straw hat her father said belonged on a horse.

“Well? And how is it?” Susannah sat down beside her, camera around her neck; her blonde hair, unbraided, was tangled in her face, and she pushed it back and hung on to it.

“It's just fine,” Rosie said, and blew her nose. “It's as it was. That's all I wanted from it.”

Susannah nodded, and pointed to the birch trees behind the pond. The wind, blowing through them, flung their leaves into the water. “‘
Goldengrove unleaving
,'” Susannah said.

“My mother used to say that,” Rosie murmured, shyly but with delight. “Every fall.” She smiled suddenly. “And ‘
worlds of wanwood leafmeal.
' That's what she called her compost heap. I'd forgotten.”

“They're from a poem,” Susannah said.

“Not Keats?”

“Gerard Manley Hopkins. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,' is Keats. And something something dum de dum ‘
the vines that round the thatch-eves run.
' And then something about apples and bees.” Susannah let go her hair and rested her hands comfortably on her little stomach. “Why are you crying? Is it so sad?”

“I was missing my parents,” said Rosie, her eyes wet again. Susannah's hair blew against her face. “And then you sat down and said that, just like my mother.”
Wanwood leafmeal:
the crunch of leaves underfoot, and the bonfires of her youth, her mother with a square of red wool tied under her chin, her father heaping leaves with a rake, the woody smell of the smoke, the magical look of the smoke rising, thinning, disappearing. Her mother holding her hand.

“My grandmother,” said Susannah. “I remember her so well. Her pretty English voice.”

Rosie regretted, not for the first time, that because of her Susannah hadn't known her grandparents for so long. But there had been, she thought, enough regrets and apologies. She didn't speak of it, touched Susannah's arm. “Behind that door is the cottage where we lived. Down a brick path lined with rhododendrons. A stone cottage with flowers out front, and a maple tree in back, and a wooden bench painted green, and my little strawberry patch.”

“Let's open it,” said Susannah, getting up. “Is it locked, do you think? Let's take a look.”

But Rosie pulled her back. “No—please,” she said. “I'd rather we didn't. I have it all in my head, Susannah, and we'll put it in the book. But I don't want to open the door. Unless—”

“I could look!” Susannah beamed at her, and stood up. “Great idea. You start back, up the path, and I'll open the door a crack and have a look, and I won't say a word. And if the National Trust swoops down on me with a paddy wagon you come and rescue me, and say it's part of our research for an important book.” She paused, and looked closely into Rosie's face. “Okay? Or would you rather I didn't?”

“No—have a look.” Rosie smiled, and put out a hand for Susannah to pull her up. “I'll head back to the terrace and meet you there.”

The chrysanthemums were over, she could see that, and frost would come soon and cut down the loosestrife, the daisies that were left, the verbena in the stone urns. She stood on the terrace, not looking back down the garden path, looking up at the house rising above her in all its magnificence, and blew her nose. For a dozen reasons, it was time to go home.

Susannah came up behind her, light-footed, her hands in the pockets of her jacket. “It's getting chilly,” she said.

They walked across the terrace together, but just before they went back through the double doors—through them they could see a party of tourists entering—Rosie turned to her daughter. “Just tell me,” she said. “Is it the same, Susannah? Is it the way I remembered?”

Susannah impulsively hugged her. “I knew you'd want to know,” she said with glee. “And yes,” she told Rosie. “I couldn't see the back, so I don't know about the strawberry bed and the little green bench, but it's a stone cottage, with flowers out front—don't ask me what kind—and a chimney with smoke coming out of it, and not a soul around. Down a brick path lined with rhododendrons.”

Rosie smiled, dug out her handkerchief and blew her nose for the last time. “All right, then,” she said. “Let's go home.”

Chapter Eight