The Lost Garden (13 page)

There are only two stories left to be drawn onto the blackout curtains in the wireless room. Mine and Jane’s. Despite much pleading and coercion, Jane has stuck to her refusal to tell a story. “I just like it as it is,” she will say to repeated requests for her to take the chalk in hand and fill in her allotted segment of curtain. “I like it black.” And there is no convincing her otherwise, although we do tell her pointedly that we will just leave her space blank until she changes her mind.

I have debated about the filling in of my particular space on the curtain. There I am, a vertical rectangle next to the Lumper’s piece of music. The black of the drapes seems so funereal that, at first, I think I should use the space to do some sort of memorial to my mother, or to London. But although I did love both my mother and the city I lived in, I no longer suffer any illusions that I was loved much in return. So I fill my space with what has responded positively to my love. Flowers. I fill the space with flowers. I pin them onto the fabric and make a garden. And because I don’t want to be limited only to flowers that will dry well, I change what is pinned to the curtain almost daily. Some days I make a garden for colour—say, a garden of yellow with dahlias and lilies, snapdragons and yellow geums. I make a garden just of variegated leaves and a garden that is long, trailing tendrils of ivy. Inspired by the lost garden, I sometimes make gardens to a specific theme and then have the girls try to guess what it is I’m attempting to show. I fashion a garden just of plants used for medicinal purposes. I make a garden of flowers beginning with the letter
M
. I try to get it all done in the afternoon, so that when the girls come down after supper to listen to the wireless, it is a surprise. And just as their enthusiasm for the maze on the estate plan made me realize how much closer to children than adults the girls really are, it is much the same with the blackout-curtain garden. They love seeing the new arrangement. They love having to guess at the mystery I’ve created for them to solve. They are so easy, these girls. It’s just a question of working with them rather than against them. It’s so much simpler than it was at the beginning of our acquaintanceship.

Today I’m pinning a clutch of irises to the curtain. I am making a garden of flowers that are also women’s names. I hear a noise behind me and turn around to see Evelyn in the doorway. “Oh,” she says, embarrassed that I’ve caught her here well before time. “It’s only me. I’ve been thinking of this all day. I just couldn’t wait until after supper.”

They were never the enemy, these girls at Mosel. If I had been more generous when I first arrived here, instead of being so defensive about my deficiencies, I would have seen this sooner. They weren’t unwilling to like me. I just never gave them the proper chance to do it on their terms.

“Well, now that you’re here,” I say, “why don’t you come and help me pin these up.”

The Lumper’s father comes to see me. He shows up one day after breakfast, waiting outside the walled garden, cap in hand. He is a big man, in his middle forties, with the rough, weathered skin of someone who has spent his life working outdoors.

“Miss Davis?” he says. He looks nervous. “Doris said I’d be finding you here.”

I wonder how Doris has described me to him. I offer him my hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Frant,” I say. “Thank you for coming to see me.”

“It’s a pleasure, ma’am. Good to be able to have a look at the old place again.”

“Well, come on, then. Let me show you around properly.” I take him through the kitchen garden first, show him the neatly humped earth under which the potatoes slumber, the stakes for the runner beans. He makes no comment on this labour, but when he sees the chickens out in their run, pecking disconsolately at their kitchen scraps, he stops walking.

“Oh,” he says. “Chickens are not a good idea. There’s a ghost what takes them in the night.”

“Even when you were working here?” For that is almost twenty-five years ago.

“Oh, yes.” Mr. Frant twists his cap in his hands. Instead of smoking, I think. He wants to have a cigarette but thinks it might be bad manners. “I never saw it, mind you. But several of the others did.”

“Well, never mind about the ghost,” I say. Really, I am a little sick of the whole chicken-thieving-spectre spectacle. I’ve a good mind to have the whole lot slaughtered and made into
coq au vin
by Victualette Noir. I lead Mr. Frant away from the chicken run and steer him towards the small brick gardener’s office. I open the door and let him peer inside.

“Mr. Thoby’s office,” he says. “It was always very tidy. Everything in its proper place. Mr. Thoby was a bit of a stickler for order.”

I go into the office and remove the gardener’s ledger from the desk drawer. I take it back outside to Mr. Frant and open it to the list of names in the front of the book. “Do you remember these men?” I ask him.

Doris’s father poises his hand over the list of names and I notice how his hand shakes. He hadn’t been twisting his cap in his hands. His hands had been shaking. “Of course,” he says, and puts his finger down overtop of one of the names. “Look, there I am.” And there he is—Lewis Frant. “I was one of the labourers, that’s why I’m near the bottom.” He moves his finger up the row of names. “Foreman at the top. Then the five gardeners. Then two under-gardeners. The rest of us were labourers, though some had more knowledge of horticulture than others.”

“Will you walk with me?” I tuck the ledger under my arm and lead Mr. Frant out of the walled garden. I walk him along the path and across the lawn to the South Garden. He keeps looking around, pointing out where trees used to be that must have met with disease or fallen down in a storm. Wandering with him over these grounds that are now so familiar to me is like imposing an imaginary landscape over a real one. A similar experience, in many ways, to my reading of the estate plan.

When we get to the South Garden we walk among the cherry trees. They have all dropped their blossoms now, a spray of pink covers the grass. Mr. Frant stops at the edge of the field, looks out across the vast sweep of land. “This place has not changed,” he says. Perhaps because the meadow is planted with bulbs and the trees need little managing, this garden that is half wild and half cultivated has managed to survive as it was. Its balance has saved it. Anything too wild would have grown rampant. Anything too cultivated quickly would have lost its civilized form.

I take Mr. Frant to the orchard. He runs his hand along the limbs of the espaliered fruit trees on the wall. His hand moves across the limbs as though they were rungs on a ladder. “I never liked the look of this,” he says. “Unnatural, that’s what it is.”

“You worked in the orchard?”

“Sometimes. We were rotated around the grounds, but there were some who worked better in certain places.”

“Who worked here more than the others?” The orchard is the closest area to the hidden garden, and because of the various connections between the flowers growing in it and the fruit growing here, I believe there to be a connection between whoever worked in the orchard and whoever made the hidden garden. I believe they could be the same person.

Mr. Frant pushes his hand through his hair. “We were lads, weren’t we?” he says. I don’t answer. They would have been boys near to twenty years old, the garden labourers on this estate. They would have been the same age as the girls here now. “There were three who were in this orchard more than the others. One under-gardener and two labourers.”

I open the ledger to the list of names at the front of the book. “Who were they?”

Lewis Frant touches the three names lightly, the way he ran his hand along the limbs of the espaliered trees. “Thomas Walton. Samuel Hood. William Allen.”

“Did anything unusual or particularly noteworthy ever happen in the orchard?” I ask.

“What sort of thing?” He looks confused by my question.
Love
, I want to say. Was this a place where lovers met? Was this the place that inspired the hidden garden? Whatever happened here fuelled the planting of those coded flowers, the writing of those words on the pieces of metal and stone. I am sure of that.

“Anything,” I say. “Anything out of the ordinary. Even anything ordinary.”

Lewis Frant stands very still under the apple trees. “We were lads, weren’t we?” he says again.

I wish I could see what he sees as he looks back over twenty-five years, back to when he was a boy working here among a whole staff of boys, back to when this orchard would have been properly managed, when the whole of Mosel would have looked easily magnificent in the way that is possible when so much effort is being made to make everything appear effortless, appear completely natural. Back to a time before the wars.

“No,” says Lewis Frant. “I don’t remember anything of note ever happening in the orchard. But I wasn’t down here enough to really know. I was mostly set to work on the lawns and on the beds around the quadrangle. They’re completely ruined now, aren’t they, ma’am? I was having a look before I came to wait for you.” Lewis Frant twists his cap through his shaking hands again. “That’s where I used to be,” he says. “I remember that area of the estate very well. Would you like to know who worked with me there?”

“No, that won’t be necessary.” I feel defeated. I’m convinced that something important did happen in the orchard, but Lewis Frant is my only connection to that possibility and he is turning out to be as disappointing a witness to history as the fruit trees themselves.

“I was the only one of us who didn’t go,” says Lewis Frant.

“Didn’t go?”

“To the war. All the other lads went off when they were called, but I have a touch of the palsy.” He holds out his hands in front of him to demonstrate and I see the shiver in them. “Aggravated by nerves,” he says. “Not a useful thing in a nervous situation such as war.” He lowers his arms. “What’s that?” He’s looking over the stone wall and has spotted the top half of the topiary angel.

“Oh, that,” I say. “One of the girls had a go with the shears, just to see what she could do.”

Lewis Frant just stares at the green angel. “Well,” he says. “That’s something I’d forgotten.”

“What?”

“There used to be something else there. Not an angel, but something. One of those yews was cut into some kind of a shape.” He frowns, trying to bring the memory back.

Anything in that spot would have been to mark the entrance to the hidden garden, I think—one of the yews clipped into a shape. A reminder of where the entrance was? A signal for someone else to find it?

“What?” I say. “What was it?”

“An animal,” says Lewis Frant. “Yes, that’s it. One of those big yews was carved into the head of an animal. A fox. It was the head of a fox.”

After Lewis Frant has walked out of the orchard, back towards the quadrangle and the buildings to visit with his daughter, I go past the green angel, squeeze through the yew hedge, and enter the hidden garden. I was tempted to show it to Lewis Frant, but I resisted, reasoning that if he knew of its existence, he would have mentioned it.

I sit on the bench by the edge of the garden and open the head gardener’s ledger. Mr. Thoby, I think. It’s Mr. Thoby’s record of his garden. I look at the list of names at the front of the book and then flip to the last entry, the one made in 1916 when the gardens were essentially shut down. Thomas Walton, Samuel Hood, and William Allen all have lines drawn through their names. Straight, unwavering lines. All three men were killed in the war.

The last garden in the trilogy of gardens blooms fully in June. It is the Garden of Faith and it consists of only one thing. An enormous, tangled wash of white rose. Now it completely engulfs a bower fashioned together, much like my rustic bench, out of sticks and branches. At one time the rose must have been sweetly woven through the wood and there would have been a nice balance between the tumbling white blooms and the clean, straight lines of the sticks. Now the rose has completely taken over its support and one side of the bower has collapsed under the weight of blossom and vine.

I don’t interfere with the rose. I don’t trim it or tie it up or stake it along the contours of the bower. I cut a few of the blooms off to pin to my section of the blackout curtain in the wireless room, but that is all. After I scrabbled around in the earth beneath the bower and found the name for this portion of the garden on a stone, I decided that Faith should be left to find its own way.

The rose is called ‘Madame Hardy.’ It is a Damask Rose, with large, double blooms that are often as wide across as the span of a hand. It has a very strong, haunting fragrance, with a hint of lemon under the musk of perfume. Though a shrub rose, it is tall and can be used as a climber, as it has been here in the hidden garden. A distinctive feature of this beautiful rose is the small, emerald-green eye in the centre of the bloom. Bred by Eugene Hardy at the Luxembourg Gardens in France in 1832, it was named after his wife. In a twist of irony it is not a very “hardy” rose, often needing to be staked and supported, easily damaged by wind and rain. Perhaps this is why it was entwined around the bower.

I sit on the bench in the sun and look at the flurry of white, anchoring one end of the garden. Why this rose and not another? I look out over the flower bed, beyond to the woods, the thin spires of trees rising into the blue and promised heaven. I don’t know what to think any more. I had been hoping that Doris’s father would have some answers, but the only interesting and vaguely useful piece of information he had to relay was about the yew in front of this garden being cut into the shape of a fox. And I still don’t know to what purpose.

The sun glints off the pure white of the roses. ‘Madame Hardy,’ I think. Thomas Hardy. Thomas Walton, the name of the under-gardener whom Lewis Frant remembered working often in the orchard. But I have lost the thread of this garden. I have not found it in its original language. I have discovered it in a foreign script and I have tried to translate it so that it makes sense to me, in this world, but it won’t come down to me. The past won’t come down to me as I sit in the middle of this bright June afternoon in 1941. The past is a language I don’t know how to read or answer.