The Memory Garden (11 page)

‘Poor man. Irina sounded fond of him. He left her money, she told me.’

‘And to the nurse, yes.’ Patrick sat down once more. ‘They were devoted to him, despite his fussiness. Even when he was dying he could be charming, amusing. I was the only beneficiary in the family – not that there was much money left after the taxman had taken his tranche – just this place really.’

Mel wanted to ask whether the rest of the family minded Patrick inheriting Merryn, but felt this question to be too intrusive.

‘Come on,’ Patrick said, putting down his empty glass. ‘If you’d like me to show you round we’d better do it now, before it gets any darker.’

He led the way out of the drawing room and across the hall, where he threw open the double doors of a dining room. The huge walnut table was battered and chipped. An assortment of chairs was pushed back against the sides of the room. The walls looked like those of a classroom after the end of term, when all the work has been taken down, for it was studded by drawing pins that still held the corners of torn posters.

‘Soldiers were billeted here during the war. They obviously used this as their operations room,’ Patrick explained. It was almost as though the soldiers had left only yesterday. ‘It’s astonishing that the last Miss Carey left it untouched. Val hardly came in here. Sometimes he and I sat at opposite ends of the dining-room table for our meals when we fancied pretending to be grand. We would slide the salt and pepper up and down like shot glasses in a Western saloon bar and bark silly comments at one another like mad Regency squires.’

Mel laughed.

Patrick showed her a big office down a corridor where several dented filing cabinets sagged next to two huge desks and a wall of empty shelves.

‘What do you suppose this was before?’ Mel asked, gazing round. On one of the desks, Patrick had installed a computer. On the other he’d dumped half a dozen boxes of papers.

‘Probably the estate office. I read in the solicitor’s files that the Careys owned hundreds of acres of farmland round here. Most of it was leased out to tenant farmers, so I imagine a lot of the work was only admin, but until after the First War they kept a dozen acres to farm themselves.’

Closing the door of the office, Patrick led Mel back up the corridor and into a small sitting room at the front of the house.

‘It’s lovely and sunny here in the mornings,’ he said. ‘Val used it as his den – until he was bedridden and couldn’t get downstairs.’

The room looked as though it had last been decorated thirty years before. Orange and brown paper in a geometric design bubbled with age or damp. There was a , eyebrows raiseder of low flat sofa with wooden arms, a scallop-backed cane chair with a stained cushion and, by the fireplace, another reclining armchair, clearly the partner of the one in the drawing room. The grate was obscured by an old-fashioned, double-barred electric fire. Shelving units bearing books, photographs, an old hi-fi system and a large vinyl and tape collection filled the two alcoves.

‘Like being in a time warp, isn’t it?’ Patrick said, stabbing at a button on the hi-fi. The lugubrious tones of Leonard Cohen filled the air and he quickly pressed the stop button.

‘Weird,’ Mel agreed. She looked out of the window to where Patrick’s gleaming new ultramarine sports car brought her firmly back to the present.

‘You know, I think of this house,’ he said, escorting her through the kitchen to see the larder, pantry and scullery, all painted a sludgy olive green, ‘being like a dowager duchess, dreaming of the gracious past, too frail to shrug off the monstrosities of post-war decor.’

Mel eyed the beige Formica cabinets, of the same ilk as those in the Gardener ’s Cottage and nodded. ‘All in the name of progress,’ she sighed.

‘Wait till you see the avocado bathroom upstairs,’ he grinned suddenly.

Mel laughed. ‘It’s strange, isn’t it, how people reach a certain period of their lives and get stuck. Your uncle decorated this house in what was the latest fashion when he moved in and stayed with it ever after.’

‘The only thing he updated regularly was the television. Do you want to see upstairs or have you had enough?’

Upstairs didn’t take long. There were six bedrooms on the first floor, sparsely furnished, and two attic rooms above.

‘I gave Irina some of the furniture,’ Patrick said, ‘and I moved some things over to the Gardener ’s Cottage when I decided to rent it out.’

‘Did anyone live there before?’

‘Val let it out to a local couple, until a few years before he died. But there was some argument about money and they left. Then Irina lived there for a bit with her daughter.’

‘And the pictures,’ Mel said, thinking about the flower paintings. ‘Where did the pictures in my living room come from?’

‘I found those by accident,’ said Patrick, as they walked back into the corridor, ‘all packed away in newspaper in a hidey hole in one of the attics. There was one more, which I’ve got in my bedroom. Hold on, I’ll fetch it.’

Mel, waiting just outside the door, wondered why Patrick had taken for himself a stuffy small bedroom at the front of the house rather than, say, Uncle Val’s bigger room. The curtains were still closed, and through the crack in the door, she could see that the bed was unmade. Patrick switched on the light. A few books were sprawled across the floor, and Mel, who liked to learn about people from their choice of reading matter, peered at the titles. A literary crime thriller, a politician’s autobiography and a couple of popular science bestsellers.

‘I like this room,’ Patrick answered her unspoken question, as he emerged bearing a canvas a yard square, ‘because it reminds me of my room when I was a kid.’ Mel followed him back into Val’s room where he propped the canvas up on the mantelpiece. They stood back in silence to look at it.

P.T.’s seventh picture was quite different from the others, an oil painting of a young man standing in a walled garden in summer. The flowerbeds were a riot of colour and the plants so carefully painted one could identify delphinium and lupins. A white rose rambled across an arch above a wooden gate. The young man, smiling slightly, was smartly dressed in a light jacket, waistcoat and trousers, but his white shirt was open at the neck and his head, unusually, was bare. He was holding something in one hand that might be a pen or a pencil. She stepped back a little to bring it into focus. No, she couldn’t see it clearly and this fading light was no help. She liked the painting. It glowed with summer warmth – she could almost hear the humming of bees – and the whole was dappled with sunlight falling through leaves.

‘What do you think?’ Patrick was saying, almost anxiously. ‘I find it . . . draws you in.’

‘It’s wonderful,’ Mel said. ‘There’s something about the light. It’s so uplifting – ecstatic, almost.’

Patrick nodded, slowly. ‘That’s how it takes me, too.’ They stood in silence, studying the painting.

‘His clothes look Edwardian. I suppose it’s the turn of the twentieth century,’ said Mel, after a moment. ‘It’s not unlike some of the more famous Lamorna paintings.’

‘Oh? In what way?’

‘The loose brushwork, the idyllic treatment of the subject. I’d need to see this in better light. It is definitely by P.T., isn’t it? Yes, look, here are the initials. Do you know who P.T. was?’

‘Absolutely no idea.’

‘Was there anyone in the Carey family with those initials?’

Patrick shook his head. ‘No one I’ve come across. Perhaps he was one of the artists passing through, or a drawing master here.’

‘Might have been a she,’ Mel said absently. ‘The garden is this one, isn’t it? Look at the shape of the arch here. We must be looking at the old Flower Garden.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Patrick. ‘In its glory days.’

Mel moved over to the window and looked out. The sun was sinking behind the valley, throwing the garden into shadow. After a moment’s hesitation, Patrick came to stand beside her. There was a new easiness between them now. Together they surveyed the wilderness.

‘Are you a gardener?’ he asked, glancing at her. ‘I’m afraid I know more about crops and vegetables than flowers. Though we used to grow bulbs on the farm.’

‘Mum was the gardener. She was a botanist, in fact, so a brilliant person to learn from. I’m the only one who inherited her green fingers.’

‘I was sorry to learn about your mother ’s death,’ said Patrick. ‘I only met her once. She came down to Exeter to see Chrissie. Chrissie was going out with Nick then, and your mother invited me along to lunch as well so Nick wouldn’t feel outnumbered.’ He smiled. ‘I was very shy and awkward, didn’t say much but I remember being impressed because she supported Watford F.C. and they were doing pretty well then. She could remember the result of every game in the division that season!’

Mel laughed. ‘She would.’ Her voice was a little shaky. ‘She supported them for the rest of her life, you know. One of the last big outings she had was when my brother took her to a home game last spring.’

She was silent for a moment, remembering their large garden in Hertfordshire. It backed onto a railway embankment, the sound of the trains only slightly muffled by a belt of trees. The end of the garden was a deliberate wilderness where she and her brother and sister played hide and seek or squabbled over whose gang should take a turn in the rough wooden treehouse they had cobbled together in a huge old apple tree. The lawn had been a muddy patch for ball games – only after her children left home did Maureen succeed in coaxing it into a smooth green sward – and the rest of the quarter-acre plot was their mother ’s. A rockery, a shrubbery through which their mother would vanish for hours on end into the vegetable garden beyond.

‘We all had our own little flowerbeds when we were kids,’ remembered Mel. ‘But I was the only one who was really interested. Now, I’ve only got a long thin strip of garden in Clapham but at least it’s south-facing and gets the sun.’

‘I’m not sure where to start with this jungle, to be honest,’ said Patrick.

‘What about taking some professional advice?’ Mel suggested. ‘Getting in one of those landscape architects, perhaps.’

‘I’ve thought about that. Maybe I will.’

Back downstairs again, she picked up her bag with a sense of reluctance. Going back to heat up the contents of a foil dish for supper in her lonely cottage suddenly had no appeal.

Patrick watched her and said, with effort, ‘You know, I feel I started off on the wrong foot this morning. You’re nothing like Chrissie really, are you? You are yourself.’

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Surprised, Mel almost opened her mouth to ask this question, but Patrick said, ‘Wait,’ and disappeared into the kitchen. ‘You’ll need this, city girl.’ He handed her a small torch. ‘I’ll walk you round now, if you like.’

‘Very gallant.’ She smiled. ‘But no, keep it – it’s not even properly dark yet. I’ll try not to fall down any rabbit-holes on the way. I’m used to the dangerous city streets, remember.’

He laughed, but as he said goodbye he seemed a little distracted, sad. He held the door open for her, then a phone started to ring deep in the house and he closed the door with an apology before she reached the bottom step.

As she made her way back round the great brooding bulk of Merryn Hall she passed the ruins of the walled garden, the ragged contours silhouetted in the misty dusk. The brick half-arch rose above like a giant question mark. A light breath of wind passed, so the coat of vegetation shivered like the fur of a sleeping animal and the leaves sighed in the trees.

She was relieved that she had accidentally left on her kitchen light, for it gave her the comforting feeling of going home.

***

He lets me use the oils in his studio by the stables and shows me what to do. I like the soft buttery feel of the paint, the smell of linseed oil. At first I painted fruit and flowers and pots and garden tools but now I’m trying faces and pictures of the garden . Nothing pleases me and I paint over the canvases when they are dry . He says I’m too hard on myself, but I’m sure he’s only being kind.

Only Jenna knows how I spend my Sunday afternoons when they’re all away visiting their families or going to chapel. She’s seen my sketchbook, but she promises not to tell. She doesn’t ask about Master Charles – does she know?

‘Is that all you do – draw? That’s lonely,’ she said. ‘You must come home with me sometimes. My ma would be pleased to see you.’

So I went once, to their bare cottage, and ate tea with them. They were friendly but there are so many of them and they argue and tease each other without mercy and I can’t hear myself think. I can’t chatter like Jenna, and the oldest brother mistook my silence for high and mighty airs, I can tell. I won’t go again. I would rather paint and see Charles.

Rain fell all the next morning and a curtain of mist hung over the garden. Mel sat at her computer, trying to shape the introduction to her book, but the sentences seemed clumsy, the ideas too banal. After an hour of this she sighed impatiently and looked at her emails instead. There was an automatic message from the St Ives art historian, saying he was away on holiday for a couple of weeks. That was a nuisance. One from Aimee, sighing that school was starting again next Tuesday and complaining about a dinner-party last night where she had been sat next to the spare man who had not asked her one single thing about herself all evening.

Mel stared at the screen for a moment. Already, London seemed another world. But rather than have to return to her writing, she called up her college webmail and typed in her password, dreading the list of round robins that she would have to scroll through, but concerned not to miss any real messages.

True to form, she deleted message after message about guest lecturers, computer network problems and the squash ladder, catching some information she had wanted from an American college librarian, an email about David’s planned retirement in June, before the name
Jake Friedland
popped into the box. INVITATION, the message was headed. Heart in mouth, she clicked on it, knowing even before it opened that she would be disappointed. And she was. It wasn’t even a message purely for her but a group email inviting Faculty members to attend a talk by a visiting writer. Stabbing the Delete button, she closed the webmail site.