The Scent of Water (3 page)

Then abruptly Mary forgot the shock, for there in front of her was the thicket of lilacs behind the garden wall of The Laurels, taller and wilder than ever. The arched door in the wall was still green, though the paint was peeling off it, and the bell was still there too. Mary got out of the car, went slowly to the door, took the old brass handle in her hands and turned it. She was aware of nothing in the world at this moment except that she had come home.

The door had dropped yet more on its hinges and it screeched wildly upon the paved path beyond when she pushed it, opening only enough to let her through. Inside there was no gardener in a leather apron and she missed the old man. But the curtains of wistaria were the same, and beyond them was the garden, green and wild. The fluted pillars on each side of the path were moss-grown and two of the beams above had cracked with the weight of the vine. The front door stood open but there was no friendly figure to welcome her, and when she came to the threshold there were no lilies of the valley in a silver tankard to make light in a dark place. She had forgotten just how dark this hall was. It seemed like a cave, and from the depths of it there came a dank breath of mildew and mice.

It was then that Mary had her one moment of panic, frightful panic, as though the earth were suddenly opening under her feet. What had she done? Exchanged her comfortable modern flat for decay and mice. It would probably cost a small fortune to make the house habitable again. But it was too late to turn back now. She was committed. If she gave up now she would break faith with Cousin Mary and John.

Mrs. Baker had promised to meet her here. Where was she? She called aloud but there was no answer. A mouse scurried in the wainscot and in the depths of the wild garden a thrush was singing. She stood and listened to him for a moment and his song, twice repeated as though in reiterated welcome, made up to her for the loss of the lilies in the silver tankard. Was the oak chest still there? She stepped over the threshold of the house and came into the stone-flagged hall, and it was gone. In its place stood a hateful little bamboo table. She was growing accustomed now to the darkness of the hall and she stood and looked about her. As a child she had not noticed the position of the rooms. She saw now that the staircase was in front of her, with that remembered curving dip in the center of each tread. There were two doors to the left, the dining room and parlor she supposed, and to the right two stone steps led up to a door which like the one in the garden wall was set within a stone arch. It drew her, it was so attractive, and she went quickly up the steps, lifted the latch and stepped suddenly into warmth and light.

It was a big old-fashioned kitchen, stone-flagged like the hall. There was an oak dresser filled with cheap china, a large table covered with a scarlet cloth and a low whitewashed ceiling. She saw to her relief that the original range had been replaced by a modern Rayburn that was alight and filling the kitchen with warmth. A kettle was singing on the hob and a white cloth covered one half of the table. On it was set out an exquisite Staffordshire tea service, deep mulberry color with a pattern of vine leaves. One plate was filled with doorstep slices of bread and butter and another supported a grocer’s cake of a strange shade of yellow. There were milk and sugar and a painted tin tea caddy. Mrs. Baker’s tea? Or hers? She had left the door into the hall ajar and the smell of lilies of the valley was drifting in to her. Yet there had been none in the hall. She told herself she must be getting tired and confused. There was a window opening onto a small walled kitchen garden, beside the half-open back door, and she went to the door and looked out. There was a bed of lilies of the valley growing under the window, nearly strangled by weeds but smelling like heaven. She was tired and confused indeed, for the next thing she knew she was outside on her knees grubbing up the weeds to give the lilies light and air. And then she was picking a bunch of them.

“There now,” said a voice behind her. “I’d just gone down behind the apple trees to bring in the tea towels, what I washed this morning, and just that minute you come. Would you believe it? And I’ve been to the front door ten times if once this last hour, to welcome you like. Had a good journey, dear?”

Mary got to her feet and found herself confronting a little woman whose head scarcely reached her shoulder. Sparse gray hair was done up in an old-fashioned bun and very bright hazel eyes twinkled in a brown wrinkled face. She wore a white apron over an electric-blue cardigan and a purple skirt, and her hands were full of clean tea towels. Her smile was wise and loving and there breathed from her whole person that sense of comfort and security, spiced with severity, that in the days of Mary’s childhood had characterized the best nannies. She knew in one glance at Mrs. Baker that she had met her best friend, the best she had ever had or would have.

“Yes, I had a good journey,” she said, “but it seemed a long way and I’m dying for a cup of tea.”

“Come along in then, miss,” said Mrs. Baker. “It’s all ready.”

Mary paused for a moment to look at the kitchen garden. Gooseberry bushes, a few apple trees, an old fig tree growing against the wall and the rest a tempest of weeds. But it appeared that someone had tried to do something, for in one place there was a cleared patch. “Taties,” said Mrs. Baker, following her glance. “Baker put ’em in on Good Friday. Thought you’d like ’em. He’s done what he could in the garden, mowing the grass and such, for love like, but he couldn’t do much, not with his tubes affecting his heart. And he’s a bodger by rights, not a gardener. But he’ll carry up your luggage later. I’ve told him to come along.”

They were in the kitchen now and Mrs. Baker was making the tea. What is a bodger? Mary wondered. And what did Mrs. Baker mean by saying that Mr. Baker had mowed the grass for love? “You’ll have tea with me, Mrs. Baker?” she asked.

Mrs. Baker’s sallow face flushed a little and she answered with quiet dignity, “If you wish it, miss. Or would you prefer me to say madam?”

“I’d rather you called me dear, as you did at first,” said Mary. “It made me feel at home.”

“It slipped out,” said Mrs. Baker. “You had a look of poor old Miss Lindsay, standing there.” She regarded the elegant woman pouring out the tea. “She had your figure and kept it to the end. Lonely she was, poor old soul. People were scared of her but in her good times she was as sane as I am.”

“And the bad times?” asked Mary.

Mrs. Baker hesitated. “She suffered,” she said. “But afterward, she never spoke of it. There are those who tell you the sick in mind don’t suffer like you think they do. Well, dear, all I can say is, they lie.”

“Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own,” said Mary. “I think it’s fear. We don’t want to come too near in case we’re sucked in and have to share it.” She was silent, but she did not feel the shrinking of which she had spoken. She wished she could have shared Cousin Mary’s bad times. She was ashamed that she had not and presently she said to Mrs. Baker, “I only saw my cousin once. My father brought me to see her when I was a little girl. Then he died and I never came again. When she left me her house I could not believe it.”

“She knew what she was doing,” said Mrs. Baker. “Such as poor Miss Lindsay, they’ve their own wisdom. Often they’ll know what’s right when a normal person would only know what was expedient.”

Mrs. Baker’s understanding both astonished and supported Mary. She was aware that her new life was not going to be altogether a pastoral idyl. She was going to need Mrs. Baker. “You will help me as you helped my cousin, won’t you?” she asked. “How many hours a week did you work for her?”

“Miss Lindsay’s lawyer, Mr. Judson, paid me to come for two hours three mornings a week, dear,” said Mrs. Baker. “Would that suit you?”

“Could it be every morning just at first?” pleaded Mary. “Could you manage that, or have you other people to work for?”

“I don’t work for anyone else,” said Mrs. Baker. “I do oblige occasionally here and there but nothing regular. You see, the old lady—” She caught herself up. “Yes, I could come every morning until you’re straight.”

A suspicion began to dawn in Mary’s mind and she remembered that Mrs. Baker had said her husband had worked in the garden for love. “I believe you worked for my cousin for many more hours than you were paid, Mrs. Baker,” she said.

“Well, I was in night and morning,” agreed Mrs. Baker. “She needed me, poor soul.”

“We must put that right,” said Mary.

She had said the wrong thing, for Mrs. Baker stiffened. Her mouth tightened and her eyes flashed. Mary inwardly quailed before her, and she was not by nature a quailer. There was steel and fire in Mrs. Baker, she realized, and a sense of what was right and proper that could not be outraged. This indigenous country pride was something she had not encountered before and she would have to learn about it. “I understand,” she said gently. “I’m sorry. You loved my cousin, of course. And Mr. Baker, will he be so good as to continue to do a bit in the garden?” She smiled. “Not this time for love.”

“You could ask him,” said Mrs. Baker. “He’ll be around soon to carry up your luggage. Come to that, he’s here now.”

Mr. Baker was knocking at the back door. He was as tall as his wife was tiny, and cadaverous as Don Quixote. He had ginger hair, a walrus mustache, a sad thin mouth and receding chin. He wore corduroy trousers tied below the knee with string and a strange duffel coat that hung so loosely from his gaunt shoulders that Mary was sure it had been bought at a jumble sale. When she smiled and held out her hand his answering smile was so gentle and deprecating, and the stare of his china-blue eyes so sweet and blank, that for a moment she wondered if he was perhaps a little childish. Then his great hand took hers in a fearful grip and his eyes abruptly focused upon hers with a hard and penetrating look that seemed to come out at the back of her head. She was extremely alarmed but she managed to ask him if he would continue to help in the garden. There was a long pause and his Adam’s apple began to work in his long thin throat. His voice, when it came, was that of a bronchitic corncrake.

“Might do,” he said at last.

“I don’t know the rate of pay here,” said Mary, “but you and Mrs. Baker will tell me.”

Mr. Baker’s Adam’s apple was again working. “I’ve never worked in this garden for pay,” he brought out.

“But you will now?” Mary pleaded.

“I think the lady would prefer it, Baker,” said his wife.

He ruminated over this for a long time. “Might do,” he said. Then suddenly he stumped into the kitchen and went stalking through it like doom, his coat swinging behind him, out through the hall to the front door and down the passage to fetch her luggage.

“Could I put these in water, Mrs. Baker?” Mary asked shakily, picking up the lilies. She felt shaky, so awe-inspiring was Mr. Baker when set in motion. “Is there, do you think, a silver tankard that I could put them in?”

Mrs. Baker opened the door of a cupboard in the wall where a row of jugs and mugs hung on hooks. The tankard was among them. “This do, dear?” she asked, taking it down.

“Thank you,” said Mary with extravagant gratitude. She filled it with water, arranged her flowers in it and carried them out and put them on the bamboo table in the hall. Then she had to move hastily aside, for Mr. Baker was coming back into the hall with her hat box on his back, hung around his neck by the strap, two heavy suitcases one in each hand, and two more cases, her dressing case and writing case, gripped to his sides under his armpits. Thin as he was, the weight seemed nothing to him. He tramped by like a prophet, not glancing at her, his head up and his eyes probing the darkness of the staircase as the eyes of Elijah probed the thunderclouds. He mounted the stairs two at a time and strode heavily down the passage above. Then she heard him enter a bedroom and there was a resounding crash as he dropped the lot.

Mrs. Baker was beside her. “I’ve put you in Miss Lindsay’s room, dear. The other bedrooms, they’re not really habitable now. It’s a comfortable bed. She died in it and it’s well aired.” Mr. Baker came tramping down the stairs. “That’s right, Baker. If there’s anything else in the car put it in the hall. Then you can go. You can get the tea for me at home if you’ve a mind. There’s kippers in the larder. I’m taking the lady upstairs. Leave your car outside tonight, dear, and we’ll find somewhere to put it in the morning.”

Mr. Baker tramped away with a muttered “Good night, miss,” but without a glance in his wife’s direction. But Mary did not doubt that he would get the tea. That Mrs. Baker was accustomed to be obeyed she could see already, yet she felt that Mr. Baker was no yes man. He obeyed under no compulsion but because he had deliberately chosen the path of peace.

They climbed the stairs and came to the room where Mr. Baker had flung the luggage on the floor. Mrs. Baker gathered it together again and put it tidy, while Mary looked around the room, with its two windows looking east and south on the garden. She thought it must be the same room where she had washed her hands because on the old-fashioned marble-topped washstand stood the honeysuckle china she remembered. “Has it always been there?” she asked Mrs. Baker. “It’s not been brought from another room?”

“It’s been there as long as I remember, dear,” said Mrs. Baker. “And I was always in and out of this house even as a child. I used to help my father bring the milk around and I was very friendly with Mrs. Kennedy who looked after Miss Lindsay.”

“Did she wear a white mobcap, very old-fashioned even for those days?” asked Mary, and as she poured out the hot water that Mrs. Baker had put beside the basin in a brass can, and washed her hands, she could feel again the soft scented towel against her face.

“Yes, dear. She died fifteen years ago, and then I came to look after Miss Lindsay. Mr. Postlethwaite the gardener, he lasted longer. You could see their graves from your window if the trees wasn’t so tall and thick.”

Drying her hands Mary went to the east window. It looked out over the lilacs to the church. The square tower rose straight in front of her, against a sky that was now golden, but the trees hid the gravestones. She leaned at the window, with the covered way just below her to her left, sniffing the scent of the wistaria and gazing down at the rose garden directly below her. There was a flutter of wings down there, and the blue and rosy hues of chaffinches and tits. She went to the south window and saw a garden held between tall old walls of rosy brick, with the remnants of what had once been a herbaceous border against one wall, flowering shrubs, overgrown and wild, against another and a green lawn between them. A mulberry tree and a weeping willow grew on the lawn and at the bottom of the garden was a copse of hawthorns, cherry trees, and tall old crab apples in bloom. A mist was rising now and the shadows tangled in the trees were blue and mysterious. She fancied there was another garden over there, and another mulberry tree beyond her copse, and that she saw the chimney of a house, but it was difficult to see with the shadows so blue. They were as blue as the lawn was green, an intense and almost burning green in the evening light. Just at the end of the lawn, poised between the green and the blue, was a winged boy with bow and arrow raised, delicately beautiful and very strange. He stood in the center of what had once been a lily pond, but there was no water there now. Mary heard again the ringing of birdsong. They were singing in the trees behind the cupid. Then she had the curious feeling that eyes were watching her from the depth of the copse. And the eyes were hostile. She drew back and turned and faced the bed. The eyes had given her a creepy sensation and the bed did nothing to reassure her.