The Lost Garden (12 page)

I can’t sleep. After the dance is over and the men have straggled back up the hill to their house, I help the girls tidy the dining room. Everyone has had a good time. Golden Wonder is still having hers, out there in the dark saying good night to the soldier she’s sweet on. I think it was her I originally discovered with the soldier in the barn. I try not to think of this, of where she and her soldier might be now, as I make my exit. The others are still laughing and joking, taking their time pushing the tables back in place, emptying the ashtrays. They are weary with exhilaration, and I leave them to it, to each other, and go back to my room.

Tonight nothing will work to ease me into sleep. I lie under
The Genus Rosa
but am merely irritated by the weight of it. It must have felt like this to Ellen Willmott sometimes, I think, at least metaphorically, all those years she spent working on it. How oppressively heavy it became.

I try to read some of
To the Lighthouse
, but the words sink out of sight the moment I say them in my head, cannot buoy me up as they used to.

I look, from my bed, out the window at the night. I sleep with my curtains open now, even though I know I shouldn’t. But the war isn’t here the way it was in London. There are barely any sounds of war, any evidence. It is hard to believe in the necessity of keeping one’s curtains drawn.

There’s a moon tonight. I can see the faint cast of its light over the quadrangle. Is Raley lying in bed looking out his window at this same moon? I can still feel the residue of alcohol in my body, its heat moving in my veins. I feel riven with desire.

I get out of bed, dress hastily, and run down the stairs and out into the night. If I can’t sleep, I might as well do something useful. I will go over to the walled garden and stand guard in case the chicken-thieving spirit dares to show up again. I am suddenly revived, seized with purpose, rushing through the cool night air, over the grass of the quadrangle. I am once more a woman of action. I hurtle myself willingly forward to my fate.

My fate is to crouch next to the old gardener’s office in the kitchen garden, wishing I’d brought something to sit on because the ground is so cold. I lean up against the rough skin of bricks, peer out across the dark patch of dug earth towards the chicken coop. I can make out the shape of it. The moon sheds enough light so that I will be able to see anything or anyone approaching the enclosure. I wrap my arms around my knees and wait.

I remember being a child and sitting outside the house in the dark. The flowers in the beds were shadowy beside me, swaying slightly in a way I was used to, a way I found comforting. I was hiding from my mother, waiting for her to discover my absence and come looking for me. Eventually the ground would get too cold and hard and I would go back inside the house to find my mother asleep in her chair, or worse, reading a magazine. “Where did you come from?” she’d say.

I wasn’t there when my mother died. I was due to visit her in the hospital that evening but I’d stayed late in my office, working on my notes. My mother died alone. The hospital telephoned me at the Royal Horticultural Society just as I was putting on my coat, to tell me that she’d died, and that she’d been asking for me. I didn’t go to the hospital right away. There seemed no point. Instead I walked to Russell Square and sat on a bench near to the flowers. I sat there until someone found me and asked me if I was all right. I had been shaking, and a man walking by the bench had thought I was cold. “You should go home,” he had said, and he’d touched me lightly on the shoulder, as if he knew me.

Now, sitting here in the dark of Mosel, my back cold from pressing into the garden wall, I wish I’d been there for my mother when she died. Once, a few days before that, she’d asked me to tell her the names of the roses in
The Genus Rosa
. I couldn’t be bothered to lug the heavy books over from my office. But I wish I had. I could have done that, on her last night. I could have held her hand and whispered the names of the roses to her, amid the hospital clatter of her dying.

I am awakened by a noise from outside the garden wall. I wasn’t aware of falling asleep. Have I dreamed my mother? There’s the clatter again. I leap to my feet, hurl open the garden door, and rush out.

It’s Jane. She’s sitting on the black horse, reins in hand. I have startled them by bursting out of the garden. The horse flares sideways off the path.

“Gwen,” says Jane, bringing the horse back under control. “What are you doing?”

I am suddenly at Mosel. This isn’t the hospital. My mother is dead. “I’m trying to catch the chicken thief,” I say, remembering. “It’s not you, is it?”

“Gwen.” Jane hops down from the horse, stands beside me on the path. “Of course it’s not me. What would I want with a chicken?”

“Well,” I say. “What are you doing with the horse?”

“I can’t sleep. This is what I do at nights. I ride the horse over the fields. He gets exercised. I have something to occupy me. It’s mutually beneficial.” Jane puts a hand out and strokes the neck of the horse to calm him. I remember how easy they have always seemed together. And then I remember something else.

“I’ve seen you,” I say. “From my window at night, racing across the quadrangle to the stables.” That mysterious figure that I was on the verge of deciding was a ghost has been Jane on her way to ride the black horse.

“Yes,” she says. “That was me.”

“But you must sleep?”

“A little bit, at the end of the night. Often, after we ride, I just sleep in the stable. There’s not much time between rubbing him down and then getting up to milk the cows.” Jane leans back against the horse. “I haven’t really slept since Andrew disappeared,” she says. “I can’t rest properly. Not until he comes home.”

The night is cool around us. The horse is restless to be moving. He clatters his hooves on the stones of the path. That was the noise I heard from inside the garden.

“I’ll walk you down to the fields,” I say, and we walk down towards the South Garden. I had originally planned to plant the South Garden for potatoes, to utilize all the available agricultural potential of Mosel. But the truth is that I prefer the mix of grasses and flowers, the froth of blossom in the cherry trees. I don’t want to ruin an aesthetic in favour of the bland practicality of planting potatoes. I have failed the spirit of the war effort. On bad days I chastise myself for this, but now, as we pass with the horse under the fragrant bower of the trees, I think there is no better choice I have made while here.

“What about David?” I ask, because I am confused by Jane’s relationship with him. They seem so intimate. They seem as though they are falling in love.

“David?” Jane stops. We are at the edge of the fields. They fall away from us like the sea, awash with moonlight and their own dark vastness. “David is engaged to be married. He’s entirely faithful.”

And suddenly I can see how they have formed an alliance fuelled by their individual fidelities. It is not uncharged by attraction or desire, but it is tempered and controlled by these strict outside loyalties. How hard that must be to balance properly. How hard not to fall into the temptation of affection to hand, affection that’s tangible. “You love Andrew,” I say. I understand it so fully at this moment that I can almost feel it myself.

“It’s all I have. Isn’t it?” Jane puts her foot in the stirrup, swings herself back onto the horse. “How I treat it. How I serve it. My word. My heart. That’s all I have.” She pushes her heels against the flanks of the horse and they move away, out into the ocean of night. I can hear them long after I can see them. I watch them until they are gone.

After the midnight walk with Jane through the South Garden I make an authoritative decision. At breakfast the next morning I bring the plan of the estate, unroll it in the middle of the table, weighing the sides down with teapots, the toast rack, the pot of jam. “Right,” I say with much conviction. I look around the table at my willing accomplices and see the dread on their faces.

“Oh, what?” says Salad Blue. I ignore her petulance. She has become decidedly bad-humoured lately, Evelyn. Yesterday she even snapped at British Queen for looking at her too often during dinner.

“I just have an idea,” I say, by way of reassuring them. But it doesn’t seem to make any difference to their attitude.

“You had an idea before,” says Golden Wonder. To the girls, the chickens have become an example of failure, since they keep diminishing in number and the hens remaining are too traumatized by their missing sisters to lay properly.

But I am not to be silenced by their disapproval. I have thought about my idea, walking back from the South Garden last night, and I am sure it is a good one. I am sure it is the right one.

“Look,” I say. “This is a map of the estate grounds from 1900. As you can see, the gardens were much more elaborate and extensive then. They have shrunk considerably since that time. All I am proposing is that we restore some of that splendour, that instead of merely waiting for our harvest and the work of that, we put our energies into giving Mosel back some of its grace and grandeur.”

No one says anything for a moment or two, but they are all looking at the estate plan, heads bent over the unrolled piece of paper. “What’s this?” says Alice finally. She has her finger on one of the dotted lines on the lawn bordering the South Garden.

“That was the plan for a water garden,” I say. “And this—” I point to the other area defined by a dotted outline. “This was going to be a maze.”

“Oh, I like a maze,” says Alice.

And that is what sways them over to my side, the idea of the maze. I’ll never understand anyone, I think, as they’re all talking excitedly about the non-existent maze. But it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the girls are supporting my idea, and the fact is that I cannot make my idea happen without their support.

Jane hasn’t said anything during the whole episode. She seems distracted this morning, and now that I know her nocturnal habits, I also think she looks tired out. “What do you think?” I ask her. “Of my idea to restore the gardens?” I give her the gist of my idea in case she hasn’t been listening to me.

“Yes,” she says, pouring herself more tea and inadvertently rolling up a portion of the orchard. “Flowers instead of potatoes. I can see how that will be a good substitute.”

And even though she is giving her support, I feel quite dispirited by her comment. Perhaps she is right and it is merely a choice between one thing or another, one diversion or another. Perhaps there is no real difference and every activity is just a way of filling time while we wait to return to our altered, and perhaps unrecognizable, lives. But it is hard to keep living like this, to keep thinking this way.

“What else can we do?” I say.

Jane unrolls the orchard and puts the teapot back among the apple trees. “Nothing,” she says.

The girls are surprisingly eager to be once more working with a purpose. I think they are secretly relieved not to be mouldering out in the sun for yet another day. They set off optimistically with pruning shears and secateurs. Doris sharpens the blades of the mowing machine very efficiently with a whetstone and happily pushes it over the unruly grass of the quadrangle.

In mid-morning I go into the kitchen to make them some tea, carry it out to the lawn behind the dining hall. There is a moment, just before I call out that the tea’s ready, when I stand on the lawn in the warm May sunshine, look down to where three of the girls are good-naturedly arguing about how much to clip off one of the giant yews by the path—there is a moment when I think of the last scene of
To the Lighthouse
. Lily Briscoe is standing on the lawn, painting the picture she’d first started ten years previous, feeling the past coalesce into the present and become a moment she can fully inhabit. The girls laugh from down the garden. I step onto the lawn, carrying the tea tray. The sun is clean on my bones. This is my life, I think. I’m not waiting for anything.

David starts coming down from the big house to spend the evenings with us. He says it gets too noisy up there, after dinner, when the men play loud, boisterous games and he just wants to be quiet. He usually arrives after the news broadcast, with his knitting tucked under his arm. He comes into the room that has the wireless and the chalked-on blackout curtains and sits in a chair by one of two lamps. The others usually disperse after the broadcast, except for Jane, who sits beside David while he knits, talking to him. He is making a sweater for his girlfriend. This is what he does—knits sweaters for her and sends them home.

“How many sweaters does she need?” I ask Jane. But I can see how this is a good way to remember someone and that David’s need to make something for his girlfriend probably corresponds with her need to receive something from him, from this world unknown to her.

On the third or fourth evening that David is here, I am in my room, writing out notes for the restoration of the gardens, when there’s a knock on my door. It’s Jane. She’s a little flushed from having run up the staircase. “Gwen,” she says. “I’ve decided to read to David while he knits. Do you have a book?”

“I have lots of books,” I say. “What kind of book are you looking for?”

Jane leans against the door frame, considering and catching her breath. “Give me something
you
like,” she says.

And so, in the evenings now, when the others have left the wireless room, Jane reads
To the Lighthouse
to David, while he sits in the chair by the lamp, knitting a sweater for his girlfriend. I am embarrassed to say that most nights I listen at the door. I didn’t mean to, I was just passing by one night and heard Jane’s voice reading those words I know so well and love so much. I had never heard anyone read Mrs. Woolf’s words and I just pressed my forehead against the door and listened. I couldn’t help myself. No one has ever read to me before. And the thing is, I’m sure that Jane wouldn’t even mind if I went into the room and sat there to listen. But she isn’t reading to me, and I don’t feel right doing that. So I stand at the door, leaning into the wood and almost forgetting to breathe, I am listening so intently.

Jane has a lovely reading voice. It is melodic and, unlike anything else about her, it is slow and measured. She reads as though there were all the time in the world to tell the story. And when I hear that voice polishing those words so that they shine inside me, I miss my old life—London, my mother—so acutely that some nights I actually cry. I haven’t read
To the Lighthouse
in so long, but I remember it all. I listen again, to the tale of the Ramsay family who are spending their summer at a house in what is meant to be the Hebrides but which I know from the flora really isn’t. The family are joined for the summer by several guests, including the painter, Lily Briscoe. The story concerns a thwarted expedition to sail to a lighthouse to visit the lighthouse keeper and his son.

Before, when I’d read the book, I liked the character of Mrs. Ramsay, but now, hearing Jane read it from behind the door, I find her pessimistic self-centredness very unsympathetic. Her great gift is that she responds to life, lives in the moment. She is spontaneous and enthusiastic, gets swept up with what is happening. Most of the other characters aren’t capable of this and so they are drawn to her. But she often connects to people emotionally by feeling sorry for them. I don’t approve of this at all because I am always suspecting people of this in relation to me. And yet Lily has laid her head on Mrs. Ramsay’s lap, has wanted her to be a sanctuary, as everyone else has.

Jane is reading the part where Mr. Ramsay, who is always pacing up and down on the terrace, reciting
The Charge of the Light Brigade
, looks out across the bay and compares himself to a sand dune. Later, his friend William Bankes will compare their friendship to the same sand dune.
The Charge of the Light Brigade
is a poem that pays tribute to a cavalry division that charged the wrong way.

I close my eyes and lean my head against the door. I can smell the wood and the mustiness of the hallway. There is no sound but Jane’s voice from inside the room, beating the air with words.