The Memory Garden (43 page)

I loved Merryn from the moment I set eyes upon the place. Cornwall seemed Paradise to me after the fog-filled streets of our capital city. And Elizabeth and Cecily, my two cousins, were biddable and amusing, Elizabeth promising to grow into pale willowy beauty, little Cecily a dark solemn faery child who could yet be coaxed into merriment when teased. Elizabeth, I believe, came to develop some feeling for me, and a tacit agreement hovered in the air that, should in time matters progress further between us, her parents would not stand in our way. My Aunt Emily was a lively, restless woman, champing at the bit with which Fate had tamed her. It could not be denied that Uncle Stephen, whilst a devoted husband and father, was a dull man, and how they came to marry I could not guess, though I knew her family were moneyed parvenus, and my uncle a socially established landowner in need of hard cash. He was bewildered by my Aunt Emily’s pretensions in society, flustered by the grand dinner parties she held, critical of the ‘fripperies’ she ordered down from London, though she was not reckless, instead taking care to account for the money she spent to the final penny. His main interest was the farm, but this was the rock on which my relationship with him was to founder.

If Uncle had had his way, I would have spent every hour ofevery day shadowing him in his work, pacing the acres he kept under plough, inspecting livestock, administering the estate, keeping accounts, wrangling with tenants and lawyers and bankers. He insisted on involving me in all these tasks. How it all bored me.

There came a time when my pretence to go along with it began to flag. I made mistakes with simple addition, rode a valuable horse when it was lame. One night I refused to countenance going out in the pitch darkness in search of some wretched lost beast and his exasperation with me grew.

Still, if something else much more tumultuous hadn’t happened, I might have ridden this storm. But the seeds of my downfall were planted with the arrival of Aunt’s latest project.

Her name was Pearl Treglown, and she was meant to replace Joan, the chatty sparrow of a housemaid who had set sail for South Africa in search of her sweetheart. But Aunt Emily had further ambitions. Pearl was to be trained up as Aunt’s personal maid, to do her hair, look after her gowns. She was no common farmworker’s daughter, this one, she carried herself like a duchess, albeit one fallen on hard times. Later, she told me how she believed her father to have been a gentleman, one of the artists who had visited Newlyn, and there was something about her that made me believe it, too. Not least her ability to draw like an angel.

I was very young then, and entertained the radical ideas that many young men have, that romantic love conquers all, that humble birth should be no barrier to success, that beautiful words and high-minded ideals, passionately held, are worth more than the common virtues of hard work and faithful duty that any dolt can possess.

And so I, too, conceived a new task in life. Aunt might turn Pearl into a lady’s maid, but I would turn her into an artist. She proved an easy and willing pupil.

Despite lack of time, for a long while we made progress. Pearl was a wonderful miniaturist, could record the tiniest details of a flower stamen and charge the slightest blush of a petal with her brush. And soon she was drawing likenesses of faces alive with expression, faithfully reproducing the faint lines that betray character, the glint of knowledge in her subject’s eye. I showed her sketchbook once to Mr Knight and he studied it intently and pronounced the drawings fine.

Where all this might have led, I don’t know. I had vague thoughts that perhaps the Knights and their friends might take Pearl under their protection, encourage her, perhaps give her money, but the reality was that they didn’t have much themselves and, anyway, they couldn’t see her as I did then. They knew her only as a shy presence who served them tea or lemonade, not as one of themselves. Still, something might have worked out, had not tragedy struck.

The tragedy was that I fell in love with her.

I had gradually become aware that she doted on me, followed me with those great dark eyes of hers, hung on to my every word. I was used to Elizabeth’s attentions, of course, the giggling, the flirtatious glances, but Elizabeth was only an innocent girl, trying out her grown-up tricks on the first safe man she had come across after her father. Pearl, with her quiet still ways that hid deep passion and suffering, was a woman.

It’s an old story, isn’t it? The master taking advantage of the servant. But it wasn’t like that, I tell you, it wasn’t. She wanted me as much as I came to want her, but she craved something else, something she couldn’t take for herself, something which in the end I couldn’t give her: to escape from her present life. And it’s that which, most of all, I blame myself for awakening. Her ambition.

Even before our affair was discovered the knowledge grew inside me. How could she, a penniless young woman from a lowly background – yes, despite the tales of her siring – with little education and a country tongue, expect to become independent, to earn her living and the respect of society without a husband of means or the patronage of wealthy friends? We talked of going away together, to France, maybe, or Italy, where no one would know us, where we could forge our own future. But without money, all this was a silly dream. What in the end could I, with no more than tuppence to my name, do to help her or even to help myself?

Marry her? I could not have married her and kept my place at Merryn. Even my gentle London aunt would have closed her door to me, horrified by my choice of bride.

When Pearl told me she was with child, I knew at once our idyll was over. That night, I dreamed. Of working as a clerk in a dreary office with dreary fellows, stumbling home in the dark each night to gloomy rented rooms full of whinging brats, my disappointed wife with no time but to wash and scrub and dandle. We would be miserable. Poor, miserable and frustrated. I awoke in a sweat, crying out in anguish.

In the end, the decision was taken out of my hands, for we were spied upon and betrayed, and I was packed off, back to London on the train with my bags and trunks and canvases, without being allowed to say goodbye, back to throw myself upon the mercies of Aunt Margaret and her lugubrious spouse. She found me rooms and a job – not a clerk’s job, thank God, but piecework illustration for a publisher. Light servitude, perhaps, but servitude all the same.

Then fell the great shadow of war, blotting out every young man’s hopes. I will not speak of those years still to anyone. Sufficient that, even now, I dream some nights that I am trapped in a long dark tunnel where the screams of men in agony are only muffled by gunfire and exploding shells.

I would see the same knowledge in the eyes of other men I met, men less lucky than I, wheel-chair bound, limbless, and men who appear whole but aren’t.

There came a time when, on a mission into enemy territory, my nerves shattered by shellfire, I became separated from my platoon and wandered aimlessly for many miles in the ruined countryside, somehow miraculously, evading capture. Eventually I sheltered in a tumbledown barn and fell into a sleep like death – the deepest sleep I had had for months. There the farmer found me and took me in, nursing me for what must have been many weeks. My dreams were filled with horror, of blood running down ruined faces, of corpses blown into gobbets of meat. To calm myself in the moments of sanity I would think of Merryn where, I knew now, I had been happy. And Pearl’s face would rise before me, oh God, beautiful but ravaged with sadness and pain, her arms lifted out for help uselessly. How I writhed with guilt and misery, in the knowledge of the hurt I must have done her. What had happened to her? I had no idea.

When I recovered I knew I must return to the Front or risk being branded a deserter. But when I followed the farmer’s instructions and tried to find my way back, I was taken prisoner by an off-duty patrol. The rest of the war I spent in a German camp.

It was March 1919 before I found myself at the docks in Dover in a worn set of working man’s clothes that hung off my wasted body and boots two sizes too big. I had money in my pocket and my freedom, but nowhere to call home. It was obvious to me that I should go straight to Aunt Margaret, especially since theirs was a house of mourning. A letter from her had finally caught up with me in the camp, expressing relief that I was alive and conveying the news of the loss of my two former roommates, her eldest sons, in France. Her youngest son, Duncan, had returned home wounded.

On the train to London I overheard a young officer mention Penzance to the train guard and so I asked him if he knew Lamorna and we fell into conversation. He knew many of the places so dear and familiar to me, so that by the time we reached London I was sick with desire to see Merryn, to find out what had happened to Pearl. And so, cruelly deserting Aunt Margaret in her own time of need, I crossed London with my new friend, stayed in lodgings in Paddington overnight and took the early train down to the West Country.

What possessed me to do this thing, to return to the place of my sins, of my humiliation, like a murderer to the scene of the crime? You’re crazy, you’re mad, mocked the sound of the train’s wheels as my new friend and I chain-smoked cigarettes or devoured the great hunks of cheese sandwich we had bought at the station and rejoiced in the simple fact of being free to do so. The Careys wouldn’t want to see me. I had heard nothing from them, the whole of the course of the war. But something drove me on, a perverse desire to face the past, to make reparation if such were possible. Or perhaps I’m fooling myself even now. Perhaps I merely wanted to see Cornwall again and the place where I’d been happy.

I left Merryn in disgrace all those years ago and returned like a thief, begging a lift from a carter on his way back from market. I skulked down the last mile of rutted track, my feet sliding in my capacious boots, keeping alert for curious eyes, but saw no one. The peace of the English countryside that late afternoon, broken only by birdsong and the distant lowing of cattle, was like a balm to my spirits after the eerie quiet between explosions or the mutinous silence of the camp. I walked slowly, drinking it in gratefully, still so weak from my confinement that even this short walk was exhausting.

When I stood at last at the gateway to Merryn, it was for a moment as though the years rolled back. I had come home. And yet as I surveyed the long Georgian windows of the house, the lawns rolling up to the courtyard, I could see something was wrong. The grass had been trimmed, but the vast banks of shrubs around were untamed and, here and there, weeds were growing up through cracks in the courtyard flags. The house itself seemed empty, dreaming, and as I crept around the border of the lawn, hiding in the shadows of the trees, I saw that the curtains were drawn across the windows, that the stableyard was clear, swept clean, the stables themselves a blank row of closed doors.

Curiosity overcoming caution, I slipped round the side of the house and stepped under the arch into the Flower Garden. To be struck by a scene of desolation.

By now the beds should be dug, ready for planting, but it was clear that they had been left untouched for many seasons, covered as they were by the remains of several generations of weeds. The greenhouses were empty, closed up. Only the espaliered fruit trees, dotted with emerging blossom, seemed pruned and the paths kept clear. This garden, like the house, was sleeping, its vital signs checked, waiting to be awoken – when?

Glancing towards the gardener’s hut, I noticed the door was ajar. And at that moment I was startled by a sound somewhere behind me. A shout followed by laughter. There was a child playing somewhere further down the garden. Quickly stepping back out of sight, I skirted the wall of the house and peeped around the corner.

Down near the Gardener’s Cottage, a boy ran across the grass after a ball, dressed in brown with a mop of fair hair. Behind him, a tall dark woman lugged a heavy bucket over to a flowerbed and swung the contents over some shrubs, her movements stiff and tired. She stood, pail in hand, watching the child who was now throwing the ball high in the air and trying to catch it.

‘Keep your eye on it, Pete,’ she called, as he missed the catch for the third time and at the sound of her voice, the scales fell from my eyes.

I fell back against the wall, heart juddering in my chest, and for a moment must have lost all sense of self. How had I not recognised her?

To be sure, she had changed, shockingly. She was scrawnier of figure and the years since I had seen her had worn away the bloom of her cheeks, sculpted hollows in her cheeks. I thought of her stiff movements. Was she ill?

When I looked again, they were moving away towards the little house, throwing the ball between them, the child still sometimes dropping it, making a play of tumbling to the ground with a shriek of delight when he chased it.

How old was he? I’m no good at gauging such things. He had lost the chubbiness, the rounded tummy of the very young, yet the way he wound his arms around his mother, and pressed his cheek into her belly, told me she was still his entire world. Five years old, perhaps, or six.

Why did it take so long for the truth to strike me? I peered at him as he ran, somersaulted, leaped and rolled. His hair was like mine in a photograph I’d seen of myself at that age, but his eyes were fine, dark, like Pearl’s. There was something about the shape of his head, his profile, that struck some note deep in my mind. Then I knew beyond any doubt, and once more shock prickled my limbs and I shuddered, and put up my hands as though bracing myself against a falling object. I slid down the wall and crouched, arms over my head. The child was mine. And, oh grief, not mine.