The Lost Garden (2 page)

One of the worst things about the war has been the paranoia about being invaded by the enemy. This has been directly translated into making travel as difficult as possible for all civilians, on the odd chance there might be a spy among us, sent ahead to gain information on where to invade first. To confuse these spies, all the signs in rural England have been removed. No markers for villages or towns. No signs at the train stations. Children have been strictly cautioned to never answer any stranger who begs for directions, and there are posters up everywhere warning that “Careless Talk Costs Lives.” No one seems to have considered that a spy might come equipped with a map.

It is difficult to set out for somewhere new. The concession the railway has made to people such as myself, who are travelling to an unfamiliar location, is to attach a small, practically invisible label bearing the station’s name to the base of a lamp standard at the far end of the platform. Unless you are in the first carriage and it is daylight and you lean half your body out of the window and have remarkably good eyesight, the label is impossible to see. It is completely impossible at night, when all the lights in the train are routinely turned off and the darkened carriage-loads of people hurtle through the unknown landscape to certain geographical distress.

The war has made us all nervous, jittery rabbits. I look on my fellow train travellers with sympathy. No one had expected the war to last so long, and now, with Hitler poised to invade Yugoslavia and Rommel launching a desert offensive, it seems more widespread and endless than ever—more hopeless than ever. The effort of the citizenry to remain alive and alert to all possible danger has transformed us all into twitchy, apprehensive, exhausted creatures.

“I was counting,” says the woman opposite me to her husband. “But now I can’t remember if it’s five or six stations we’ve passed.”

I was counting too, and when she says this, I immediately can’t remember either. The train plunges further southwest towards the Devon countryside, and I realize that probably no one in this carriage has the faintest idea where we are.

The man doesn’t reply to his wife’s irritation. He is ignoring her. This is how I know they are married. He turns his newspaper over, and I read the front page of
The Times
. “Half Abyssinia Conquered” one of the headlines says, and then, under that, I spot something that makes me lean forward in my seat.

“We announce with regret that it must now be presumed that Mrs. Leonard Woolf (Virginia Woolf, the novelist and essayist), who has been missing since last Friday, has been drowned in the Sussex Ouse at Rodmell, near Lewes.”

I think of the letter I was writing in my head this morning to Mrs. Woolf.
This felt moment. Our brief selves
. All the letters I write in my head. All the letters never perfect enough to actually send. And now I’ve missed my chance to let her know how much I have loved her books, and to tell her that one evening, seven years ago, I think I followed her through the streets of London. Now the answer to the question I was always on the brink of asking—
Was it you?
—will never be known to me.

I remember that the moon was up, and that when I crossed Tavistock Square the gardens were flooded with light. It took me a while to even notice the tall shadowy figure of a woman, walking ahead of me through the gardens of the square. But when I did notice her, it was as if I also noticed everything else for the first time. The June air was soft on my skin, and the watery flume of traffic streaming by in the Southampton Row was suddenly hushed. The air smelled of flowering trees and that scent was the scent of possibility, of hopefulness.

There is a vocabulary to existing, to taking up living space in the world, that cannot be translated over the chasm of death.

I saw the tall, slightly stooped figure of Virginia Woolf walking through the night square in a flowing dress the colour of dusk. What words can I possibly use to truly cover this experience?

A mauve dress. The colour of lilacs. It hangs around the body, drapes it like smoke, ghostly in the rise of moonlight over the London houses. We were alive. We were on fire. I sit in this rocking train carriage, years later, words floating around me, wisping down in thin, grey threads. Nothing I can hold in my hands. Smoke, these words are smoke.

I rest my head on the window. I can see a faint image of my face in the glass, through it the countryside churns a soft green. Strange to see fields again, trees knotted above water, a kingfisher over the river. No ruined buildings, air thick with masonry dust. Strange also to see my face again, in the train window. I don’t often gaze at my reflection.

When my mother knew she was dying, she made me remove all the mirrors from her house, stack them in the conservatory, glass to the wall. “I don’t expect you’ll want them,” she said.

I lift my head from the window. I have left her too, my dead mother. She belongs with the burning city, the ash and broken stone of London. Her house was bombed while she was in hospital. That house in Richmond I grew up in. “I wish I’d been there,” she said when I told her.

A few rows ahead of me in the carriage I can see the uniformed arm of a soldier. The rest of his body is hidden by the seat. I suddenly feel completely miserable. This is all I have—a carriage full of strangers, a landscape disarmingly lush and unfamiliar, memories that bring no comfort.

There is no one to meet me at the small country station, even though, when I first made the arrangements, someone had been promised. Another example of the rampant unreliability this war has wrought on even the simplest of promises. “There’s a war on,” people will say to explain away almost any behaviour.

I was told the estate was not far from the train station, and if my luggage were not so heavy, I would attempt to walk the distance. But the weight of my books necessitates transport. I do not have much for being thirty-five years on this earth: mostly books, a few photographs. My clothes are few. But my books, my books are so many it looks as though I am on my way to open a small lending library.

A ride is easier to come by than I would have thought. A Canadian captain is picking up one of his men at the station—the soldier who was seated several rows in front of me on the train.

“Give you a lift, ma’am?” he asks me. I am dragging my bags across the station platform, the effort of this taking so much time that there is now no one on the station platform except for the soldiers and myself.

“Thank you, yes. I’m going to Mosel.”

“That’s easy, then. So are we.” The captain is tall and fair-haired. When he bends down to grab my bags there is a faint murmur of alcohol on his breath.

“What are you doing there?” I say, rather rudely, I know, but I had been told only that the estate had been requisitioned for food production. There had been no mention of soldiers.

The fair-haired Canadian heaves my bags into the rear of the motor car. “We’re billeted there,” he says, holding the door open for me. “In the house. Waiting to be posted. And you?” He looks at me then, really looks at me, and I lower my eyes.

“Posted,” I say. It sounds better than saying I volunteered. “I have come down from London to supervise the gardens.”

“You’re with the Land Girls, then?” He shuts the door on me and lets himself into the driver’s seat. “There’s quite a pack of them up there already.”

“But they weren’t meant to arrive until next week.” I was supposed to have had time to inspect the grounds and formulate a work schedule. “They’re not meant to be there at all.”

“Well, then, they’re imposters, but there are certainly some Land Girls on the estate,” the captain says cheerfully. The soldier from the train climbs into the front passenger seat and we begin our drive away from the station, up the long, winding hill to Mosel.

The estate is larger and more separate from the small town than I had imagined. I am glad I didn’t attempt to walk when I see the long steep hill that leads towards it. There is a river at the bottom of the hill. I think of Mrs. Woolf. “There’s a river,” I say, rather pointlessly.

“Stream,” says the fair-haired soldier, who has just told me his name is Raley.

“Brook,” says the other one. This is the first word he’s spoken since getting off the train.

“That’s because he’s from Newfoundland,” says Raley. “Right, David?” He nudges his fellow soldier with his elbow.

“Well, it
is
a brook,” says David again. “I can’t help it if you’ll be getting it wrong, Captain Raley. Sir,” he adds as an afterthought.

I bristle a little at the insubordination, but Raley just grins.

Ascending from the river, elms line the sides of the driveway. Through them I can see the tidy fields. Beyond the fields, woods. The elms have been very purposefully planted to funnel the gaze forward up the rise of hill, up and up into the angled blue sky.

“Here you go, then.” Raley stops the car abruptly, and both David and I lurch forward in our seats and then lurch backwards again.

We have stopped in front of a stone archway. Through the archway I can see a clipped square of lawn, what must be the centre of a quadrangle.

Raley carries my bags effortlessly out of the car and deposits them on the cobbles under the arch. “Shall I bring them in for you, ma’am?” He is unfailingly polite. I can’t tell how genuine he is from this one brief meeting, but I am grateful for his care of me.

“Thank you, but I think I can manage from here.” The truth is that although I am tired from my journey, I want to see this place for the first time by myself. “And if I can’t, I’ll find an imposter to assist me.”

Raley smiles at me. “Come and see us sometime,” he says. “We’re just up the hill.” He is very handsome and he knows it. I can tell that. He is the kind of man who gets pleasure out of watching himself be chivalrous and charming to an unattractive older woman.

“Thank you.” I shake his hand, which is clean and strong. No dirt under his nails.

“Good luck, then.” Raley waves as he gets back into the motorcar. David has remained in the passenger seat throughout our little farewell, looking straight ahead and clutching his small rucksack to his chest. He does not appear overjoyed to be back at Mosel.

I leave my bags on the cobbles and step through the archway into sudden sunlight, and my first look at the place that will change my life forever.

Everything is larger than was expected. I stand on the strict, flat lawn. To the right is a two-storey wing, windows at regular intervals. To my left is a small barn, and attached to that, running the whole left side of the quadrangle, are low, stone stables. Ahead, at the bottom of the quad, is a fancier version of what is on the right-hand side, which must have been apartments or rooms for the employees of the stables and gardens. The gardens are nowhere in sight.

There is a gravel path around the grassy rectangle. All along the edges of the path, up against the grey stone of the buildings, I can see what is left of an impressive mixed border.

This estate was originally made to function very efficiently. A closed world of human industry. The odd thing about standing here now is that I am the only person in this courtyard. Where is everyone? Perhaps that soldier was wrong about his sightings of the Women’s Land Army.

I abandon my luggage and go in search of people, starting with the grander portion of the quad opposite me, across the stretch of lawn. Each of the stone steps up to the heavy wooden doorway is worn in the middle into a smooth hollow. All those years of weight in the same place, like a promise kept and kept and kept.

There’s no one to be found in this building. Downstairs there’s an enormous kitchen. Upstairs a cavernous dining hall with a massive fireplace at one end and huge, leaded windows, as grand as a church’s. I stand at one of the windows and look out over what seems to be the gardens. Overgrown yews take up the foreground. Beyond the yews I can see the large enclosed rectangle of what must be a kitchen garden. There is a tangle of greenery over the brick walls. The grounds are much bigger than I had originally supposed. All around the kitchen garden are clusters of shrubs, signs perhaps of other smaller gardens. There are hills and hollows to the right. To the left, the flat scrape of fields leading down to the river.

For an estate of this size, there must be an orchard. I scan the landscape around the kitchen garden for the telltale twist of apple trees, but there is so much untended and overgrown that I cannot single out any fruit trees from the mess of trees and shrubs.

I keep remembering that Virginia Woolf died. But it didn’t actually say
died
in that article in the
Times
. It said
presumed
, which means they have not found the body. Her body.

The sun emerges from behind a cloud and anchors the great, unruly yews to the lawn by their shadows.

There must be a way that the dining hall connects to the west wing, but I can’t find it and have to go back outside to re-enter the right side of the quadrangle. The first floor of the long, stone building is broken up into various useful areas—vast cupboards containing linens and blankets, a laundry, a room full of coal scuttles. Upstairs are lavatories, two baths—one at each end of the lengthy hallway—and a series of bedrooms. All the bedrooms appear to be under ownership. I open the door of each room and see clothes strewn over the furniture or hung neatly in the wardrobes. In one of the rooms there’s a stuffed animal on the bed, a rather threadbare dog with a single glass eye in its plush head. Another of the rooms contains yards of fabric draped over a chair. Silk. I touch the soft slipperiness of it and think of the flicker of sleeve I glimpsed this morning from the taxi. The sleeve. The hand.

I move down the hallway. There’s a room with music books, and a room with a very neatly made bed. Beside the bed, on a small white table, is a photograph of a young man in an RAF uniform. He has his arms crossed in a casual manner, but his face is unsmiling, and has a hungry look that could be tiredness, or fear. I don’t know why I do it, but I touch his face with my finger, gently, the way one touches something very delicate. The thin crepe skin of a poppy. A wineglass with a spidery web of lines breaching its surface.

Finally, near the end of the hall, at the part of the building that is closest to where the Canadian soldiers dropped me and where my luggage still waits, there is an empty room. There’s a wardrobe and a dresser, a basin, a bed near the dormer window that looks down into the courtyard and beyond to the stables opposite. There’s a small fireplace and a great arch of old timber that obviously supports the roof. It is carved up and battered, as though it grew here, open to the elements, long before there was a building for it to hold up.

I open the dresser drawers and the wardrobe doors. Nothing. I stand in the centre of this room, which might, if unclaimed, be mine, and notice that there’s a particular odour. The room smells as though it has recently been on fire, although there’s no physical evidence anywhere to support this. But the smell of burning is unmistakable. I go out into the hall, where it smells like a normal musty, damp building, and then go back into the room where it smells like scorched wood.

Out in the hall again, I finally see another human being—a young woman, hurtling at great speed towards me.

“Hello,” I say. She skids to a stop. She is small and dark, slight, under a layer of jerseys.

“Hello,” she says. “You’re new.” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, peers into my new room. “Oh, right,” she says. “No one wanted this one. It stinks.”

“What happened?”

The jersey girl shrugs. “Mystery,” she says. “Human sacrifice. Cooking gone disastrously wrong.”

It’s all a mystery. Where anyone is. Who they are. Why nothing has aligned with the written information I received when I volunteered for this position.

“Who are you, then?” I say. I have lost patience with all this.

“Jane.” She looks hard at me, meeting my impatience with a certain strictness of her own. “Who are you?”

“Gwen Davis. From the Royal Horticultural Society.”

“The Royal what?”

“Horticultural Society.” I say it very slowly, as though I’m talking to an imbecile. I can’t believe she hasn’t heard of it. We’re famous. Our reputation extends all over the world. At least, I think it does.

“What did you do there? At the Horticultural Society.” She draws out every syllable of the last two words, mimicking me.

“I was working for the Fruits and Vegetables Committee.”

“Doing what?”

“Trying to find a cure for parsnip canker.”

The truth is that I was nowhere near a cure of any sort. This is part of the reason I wanted the job here, taking charge of the wartime agricultural production of a requisitioned country estate, because I was failing so abysmally at my real work. For months now I had been meticulously observing parsnip canker. I had made copious notes. I had many specimens. But I could not bridge the chasm between my long row of parsnips in the laboratory, all in various stages of fetid death, and the remedy that might exist for all this rotted vegetable flesh on the opposite shore of science. Or miracle.

Jane looks at me, then suddenly grins and skips quickly down the staircase.

“Dinner’s at seven,” she calls up from the bottom. “Sorry about your cancer.”