The Garden of the Villa Mollini

by Rose Tremain

  On this May Sunday, when he lit his feeble fire, Anthony was fifty-four years old and had held his faith in a forgiving and accessible God for more than twenty years. He had entered the Church at the age of thirty-three, the age of Christ’s death. (He liked the events of his life to reverberate.) He had never regretted it. He had always imagined his faith would last him out. God was tangible to Anthony. When he snuffled on his pipe, he felt God in the embers and in his saliva. When he dreamed about his boyhood, he saw God in that space of bony flesh between the hem of his flannel shorts and the turnover of his grey socks.

  You might suggest that, because he was a man who felt God to be so much a part of the physical world, he was bound to feel the presence of God diminishing as his middle age advanced. Though a good preacher, he wasn’t a truly spiritual man. His faith was instinctive, not cerebral. And this fact seemed, in part, to explain what was happening. For some reason, his mind, his rational self had started to question, or at least to worry about, the existence of God. Being the man he was, he sought to reassure himself by finding God in His usual places – in his pipe embers, in the dry, sweet smell of the altar rail, in the vicarage garden, and most of all in his own blood. So, when he found that he felt cold, it was natural that he also felt afraid.

  The vicarage, where Anthony and Olivia had lived for nine years, was a solid, Victorian, well-ordered house. Olivia managed it well, yet inhabited it lightly, keeping a careful distance from Anthony’s study, which, as visiting parishoners usually sensed, was the only ‘serious’ room in the house. It had never been suggested that Olivia might occupy a ‘serious’ room of her own. ‘For what?’ Anthony would have asked. ‘To write the W.I. Newsletter in?’

  But then, after Olivia had discovered Anna, she began to have a recurring dream in which she walked aimlessly through her house, topping up the flower water, polishing coasters, plumping cushions, readying each room for someone else, always for someone else, till her own presence in the house became as faded as chintz and the rooms were like lazy strangers, just sitting about, offering nothing. So she turned a guest room into her ‘serious’ room. She removed the bed. She bought a cheap desk, a filing cabinet and a worklamp. Bookshelves were put up. She took down the chintz at the window. She put A Life of Anna of Didsmill, alone as yet, in place on the new bookshelves.

  Anthony came and stared at these changes and stared at Olivia and pulled his cardigan closer round his body.

  ‘What’s it all for?’ he asked.

  ‘My work,’ she said lightly.

  ‘You’ve got no curtains, Olivia,’ was his only comment.

  Her ‘work’ progressed faster than she’d imagined. Making constant trips to her library and inspirational demands upon the chief librarian’s time, she discovered numerous references to Anna in detailed histories of the Civil War. One of these books mentioned that Anna’s prison Treatise (or what remained of it) was kept in the Bodleian Library. Two days after learning this, Olivia was in Oxford, holding twenty-three yellowed and stained pages of Anna’s words in her hands. She felt, as they were unlocked from a glass case and handed to her, as if she was about to faint. She sat down and ate a peppermint. A research assistant brought her a magnifying glass.

  It was early June now. While Olivia was away, Anthony wrote to his friend, Canon Stapleton in Winchester, whose footsteps into the Church he’d once followed. ‘I feel,’ he said in the letter, ‘as if the great bird that is the Trinity, its warm body and its two protecting wings have flown away and left me.’ He thought that writing these words to Canon Stapleton might comfort him, but it didn’t. He got up from his writing desk and walked, his face set hard, up to Olivia’s study. He stood at the door. One shelf was almost filled with books now. Anthony stared and stared. His wife’s endeavours filled him with dread. He wanted to scrumple up the papers that now littered the desk and hurl them out of the window into the June wind.

  Unluckily for Anthony, this particular summer was cool. Sunlight on the garden, particularly sunlight on the grey-green poplar leaves, shivering, flashing, he imagined as ‘God’s currency’. He loved to sit in a comfortable chair, his eyes two thin slits just open on this glory. But, in June, there didn’t seem to be many glorious days. The sky was moody. Anthony looked up at the sunless blanket and said, ‘Why, oh my Redeemer, have you hidden your coinage from your servant?’ Then he glanced at the window of Olivia’s study, wide open. She worked on, oblivious of weather. She had a title for an article, she told Anthony: Anna of Didsmill, A Heroine for Today. If the article was published, she would try to gather enough material for a book. When she talked about these things, her bulgy eyes were wide, like a child’s eyes open on her first sight of the sea. And Anthony shuddered. How well he recognised that shining light. He had grown used to finding it, many times a week, in his own face in the mirror. ‘I used to be the one!’ he wanted to say to his wife. ‘I should be the one!’

  It was Monday. Anthony walked in from the garden. On Monday evenings Anthony always held a ‘surgery’ for his parishoners. Today, the thought of the surgery appalled him. He needed to receive advice, not give it.

  He poured himself a glass of sherry and sat down in the sitting room. He held his glass up to the light, and stared at the liquid. One of his most secret ways of finding God was in sherry. He lit his pipe, warming his hands on the bowl. The warm pipe, the cold, strong sherry, he calmed himself with these, filling and refilling his glass and muttering peculiar prayers as, upstairs, Olivia worked on.

  Not long after this Monday (Anthony had been too ill with his sherry drinking to hold his surgery and the people who came talked to Olivia instead), Olivia declared that Anna had ‘instructed’ her to make a trip to Greenham Common.

  Anthony stared at his wife.

  ‘No, Olivia,’ he said.

  She stared back at him. Colossal she seemed. A warrior. She’s becoming a man, Anthony thought.

  ‘I’m sorry, Anthony darling,’ she said, ‘I’m just telling you that I am going to Greenham on my birthday, July 16th. I am not asking for permission.’

  ‘I can’t have it,’ said Anthony, ‘a vicar’s wife simply must not take part in this kind of political antic.’

  ‘It’s not an antic,’ said Olivia, ‘and anyway, churchmen and politicians are more closely linked over the question of peace than over any other, as you yourself should be aware.’

  And she strode out of the kitchen where they had been eating supper and bounded upstairs to her study. Anthony heard the key turn in the lock, got up from the table, went to the Welsh dresser which, since Olivia’s mother’s death in 1971, had proudly displayed a Wedgewood dinner service, took down five plates and a gravy boat and smashed them on the stone floor. Olivia did not come down. He took up two more plates and hurled them at the chimneybreast. Olivia unlocked her door, ran down the stairs and into the kitchen and hit her husband in the face. He sat down among the broken china and started to cry. Olivia stared at him, disgusted. Children! she thought scornfully. Men are children! But then, he reached out for her hands and held them to his face. ‘Help me, Olivia,’ he sobbed. ‘I’m losing Jesus.’

  Olivia postponed the trip to Greenham. Instead, Canon Stapleton (whose reply to Anthony’s Trinity letter had been vague and dismissive) was persuaded by Olivia to come and stay with them. The weather brightened in July, and Anthony and Canon Stapleton went for long walks in the Didsmill beechwoods. ‘Something,’ said Stapleton to Anthony, ‘has made you angry with God. That’s all. You’re angry with Him and through your anger you’ve lost Him. If you can remember why you’re angry with Him, then you’ll be able to forgive Him and beg His forgiveness and you will find him again. Tiffs with God are more normal than you imagine.’

  On they walked, under the green fanlights of beech, and Anthony listened and felt hope revive. But, search as he tried, he simply couldn’t remember why he was angry with God. He knew why he was angry with Olivia, but he couldn’t remember why he was angry with God, or even if he was angry, a
nd after some days, Canon Stapleton had to return to Winchester and at his departure Anthony felt invaded by despair.

  That same day, Olivia’s outline for her article was accepted by History in Perspective, a monthly history magazine. As Olivia showed Anthony the letter, her eyes were luminous with joy. He stared morosely past her, so envious of her happiness he couldn’t utter. She smiled. She crowed. ‘I’m determined there’ll be a book,’ she said.

  ‘Beware of pride,’ he muttered and handed her back the letter. A look of disbelief crossed her face. ‘Anthony,’ she said breathlessly, ‘this quarrel of yours with God, please don’t turn it into a quarrel with me!’

  You might say that the events described so far represented the ‘first stage’ in the odd case of Anthony and Olivia Kingswell. From this point, they entered the ‘second stage’ or ‘second act’, if you like, of what some would later describe as a tragedy.

  The second stage really began that night when, lying in the dark beside his wife, Anthony Kingswell stumbled on the notion that it was Olivia who was responsible for God’s withdrawal from him, that it was Olivia who, by seeking to change the natural order of things with her wretched Martyr of Didsmill, was deflecting God away from him and towards herself.

  This was a strangely irrational decision for Anthony to come to. No one knew better than Anthony that Olivia’s faith was, at best, peripheral to her life. She’d always been happy to let him be the believer and had certainly never shown any sign of wanting to get closer to God than she already was. This, however, Anthony decided as he lay and looked at his wife’s sleeping body, must have been a deliberate deception. She must have been envious of his faith for years and waited, waited for her chance to deflect it . . .

  Without waking Olivia, Anthony got out of bed and went down to his study. Outside the window, he could hear the cry of a nightingale and he felt more at peace, more assuaged than he’d felt for months. He reached for his bible and turned to the Epistle of Paul to the Ephesians, Chapter 5, verse 24: . . . as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their husbands in every thing.

  Then, in his neat and rather beautiful writing, he wrote out these words on a card, tiptoed to the kitchen and propped the card up on the Welsh dresser in the exact place where the gravy boat used to stand. He breathed deeply. He could sense, through the Venetian blind, the approach of dawn and he knelt and prayed: ‘In the coming of morning let me feel you again, my true and only God. Like a lover who runs to the shore as the sails of his beloved are glimpsed on the horizon, let me run to meet you in the sunrise and find you there.’ He stayed in his attitude of prayer, with his chin on the kitchen table, till he could feel the room fill with soft, yellowy light. Olivia, in her dressing-gown, found him like this and touched his head gently. ‘Come back to bed, Anthony. It’s only half past five,’ she said. And he opened his eyes. It seemed to him that in the split second before Olivia touched him, he had felt it near him, waiting, the Holy Spirit. In another moment, as the kitchen filled with the dawn, it would have entered him.

  ‘You prevented it!’ he cried, and turned upwards to his wife a face of stone.

  Not long after this, Olivia went to Greenham.

  Courage in the midst of desolation had always moved her. She had remembered all her life a story her schoolmaster father had told her about a tribe of American Indians called the Ram Tiku, whose sacred valley had been destroyed by lumberjacks. Generations of these Indians, living now on dry, difficult earth, sent their braves in to reclaim the valley, until there were no young men left and the valley became a shrine in the mind, not a place anyone could remember. The perseverance of the Greenham women reminded Olivia of the perseverance of the Ram Tiku. The American soldiers had the tough, beefy faces of lumberjacks. The women’s ‘benders’ were like polythene tepees. And life – such as it could be there – congregated round little fires. Drinking Bovril, Olivia told a group of young women (some of their faces were like the painted faces of braves) the story of Anna of Didsmill. They listened eagerly. ‘Didsmill,’ said a stern-browed woman called Josie, ‘we must start thinking about Didsmill. Next year they’re building silos there.’

  The group round Olivia grew. Someone gave her a helping of bean stew on a plastic plate.

  ‘You know,’ said Olivia, ‘if Anna had been on the side of the King, as Joan of Arc was on the side of her King, she would have become a heroine, a saint perhaps. It’s what side you’re on that matters. I’ve understood this now.’

  There was rueful laughter. Olivia looked round at the squatting women spooning up their stew. ‘Forgive me,’ she wanted to say to them. ‘Forgive me my sheltered life. It’s going to change.’

  ‘I would really like,’ she said at length, looking round at the camp, with its mud and its urban litter, ‘to help begin something at Didsmill. I think it’s going to become an important place.’

  It was a warm but windy day. On the Didsmill downland the wind was fierce as Anthony came out of the vicarage, hurled his home-made kite into the car and drove fast to the rolling hills above the Didsmill base.

  Here, he got out and threw his head back and imagined, under the white bellies of the clouds, the earth turning. He felt a sudden lightness. His spirits lifted. He gathered up his kite and started to run with it, playing the string out behind him. It was an insubstantial thing and it began to lift almost at once. Anthony stopped running and held the taut line. He’d made kites since he was a boy, dragon kites, aeroplane kites, seagull kites. He knew how to handle them. And today’s wind was perfect. The kite was white and he watched it turn and dance, turn and dance, then stream off higher, tearing at the string. He ran with it again. It was almost at the limit of the strong nylon line now and Anthony felt weightless, so full of the spirit of the kite he almost believed he could follow it aloft, up and up into the fathomless blue . . . And then he saw what he hoped would happen: half a mile above him, the kite began to break up. The white paper sheets were torn from the fragile frame and came flying down to earth like a scatter of leaves. Anthony watched them fall, the twenty-three white pages of Olivia’s article, he watched them scatter and tear and go flying off over the curves of the hill. The kite string was limp in his hand and he was breathing hard. ‘Beautiful . . .’ he murmured. And he knelt.

  So she returned from Greenham to find her article (of which she had made no duplicate) gone.

  ‘Where is it, Anthony?’ she said, patiently.

  ‘On the downs,’ he said from the depths of his pillows.

  Returning from the kite flying, he had lain down exhausted on his bed and slept, and when he woke the exhaustion was still there and he slept again, and now he felt entombed in the bed and couldn’t move. He was pale and his eyes were hectic. He’s going mad, Olivia thought.

  He lay and stared at his room. He thought of autumn coming and then winter and he knew that his soul was filling up with ice. But it was clear to him now: the light he saw in Olivia’s eyes was his light. She had stolen it. It was God’s light and it belonged to him. Without it, he would grow colder and colder. On the windy down, destroying her article, he had stolen some of it back. For a few moments, it had warmed him. But it hadn’t lasted. And here was Olivia, strong as a stag beside his bed.

  ‘I’ll write it again, you know.’ she said through hard, set lips and she turned and bounded from the room. His door slammed. She was without sympathy for him.

  He didn’t speak to her for two days and she didn’t speak to him. He stayed in bed. She worked in her room. She fed him frozen pies and jelly on smeared trays she hadn’t bothered to wipe. On the third day, he left her. Weak and grey, he put a small suitcase in the car and drove to Winchester, where Canon Stapleton took him in. ‘All I can advise,’ said Canon Stapleton, ‘is some time in retreat.’

  So Anthony entered Muir Priory. He was given a tiny, white room with a narrow, uncurtained window. On one of the walls was an ivory crucifix.

  The second draft of Olivia’s article was completed in ten
days and she knew it was better than the first.

  September came, dry, windy and bright. Olivia typed out the article (careful, this time, to keep a copy of it) and sent it off to History in Perspective and waited. While waiting, she wrote to the Greenham woman, Josie, and asked if she would come and stay with her, ‘to make concrete plans for something at Didsmill’.

  When she thought about Anthony, she felt cross with God. He could be so spiteful, this supposedly loving Deity. It was mean of Him to have withdrawn from Anthony’s spittle. But she was aware that, among these thoughts, crouched her knowledge of her own withdrawal from her husband. He had always preferred God to her and she’d always accepted this. God was, as she’d so often imagined during Matins, Anthony’s camel; she was simply the mat, frayed by desert winds, on which the rider had lain. Now, she was tired of being a mat and she folded it away. The camel lay buried in an eternity of sand. The rider was hungry, lost. The nights were cold. Olivia felt wistful, yet unmoved. She tore the card on the dresser into pieces, made up her bed with clean sheets that held no trace of the smell of Anthony. Let the men heal each other, she thought.

  The vicarage, without Anthony, was very quiet. Olivia filled it with bowls of greengages and with whispered conversations to Anna. ‘Anna,’ she said, making sandwiches for the visit of the temporary vicar, ‘I am fifty-one.’

  The temporary vicar was a fat, pasty man. ‘I suffer from acidity,’ he said as he ate Olivia’s tea.

  ‘You know,’ Olivia heard herself reply, ‘I don’t think I’m interested in symptoms any more, only in causes.’

  The vicar belched and smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, wiping his mouth with his napkin, ‘fishpaste is one.’

  When he left, Olivia knew how glad she was to be alone. She got out the Ordnance Survey map and calculated the distance from Greenham to Didsmill. It was twenty-three miles. Anna was twenty-three when she was hung. Twenty-three pages of her treatise remained. While in prison, she wrote to her mother and father twenty-three times, asking for forgiveness.