Eden's Garden

by Juliet Greenwood

  Women lacked the mental capacity, Uncle Jolyon would say. It shrank their delicate feminine organs, I heard him once add, as my aunt and I withdrew after dinner to leave the men to their cigars and the freedom to talk of politics and other such matters likely to offend female delicacy. And where would Society be without the true flowering of womanhood and the appearance of the precious little ones? That’s what all this talk of female emancipation and women being given the vote utterly failed to recognise, he added, with particular loudness, and which Aunt Beatrice pretended not to hear.

  Uncle Jolyon could keep his opinions. Time and opportunity seemed far more likely culprits to me.

  In the end, I gave up the attempt to hide my occupation. Lily watched me as she woke of a morning to find me frowning over scraps of paper, and at night, in a few precious minutes of candlelight as she made ready for bed.

  ‘Is that me?’ she demanded one evening, as I bent over a portrait I was attempting from memory of one of the patients I seen walking through the corridors that afternoon.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh.’ Her voice held disappointment.

  ‘Would you like me to draw you?’

  ‘Would you?’ I might have offered her gold. She pulled a face, tugging at the hair she had just turned up tightly in rags. ‘But not like this.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ I smiled at her. Lily would be easily pleased and be an uncritical eye to my attempts. The thought gave me a sense of safety. And I knew from the frequency she gazed into her little piece of mirror of the pleasure such a thing would give her. ‘I can work quickly. I need only a few minutes each night before you tie up your hair, and I can still work on your face.’

  ‘A real portrait!’ Lily’s eyes glowed with excitement. ‘Like the ladies in the newspapers!’ I’d never thought such a simple thing could give so much pleasure. I found it strangely touching.

  ‘A real portrait,’ I agreed.

  We started the next evening. As I promised, I worked fast. And if I made her lips a little fuller, her eyes a little larger and her hair more luxurious and more curling than in life? What portrait painted for money doesn’t flatter the client just a little? And suddenly it had become important to me not to hurt Lily’s feelings.

  This, I had come to see, was Lily’s time of glory. And a poor glory it was, it seemed to me, snatched as it was between scrubbing floors and holidays spent helping her mother in tenements an hour or so walk away. For now, her youth was noticed and courted. Once married, her life would be an endless round of cooking and cleaning, with children to bear and raise, and she would soon become the unnoticed drudge I passed so often in my wanderings. Not necessarily unhappy, but with no time or income to call her own. I swore to myself I would never again pass by such a woman without noting every line of her face and committing it to memory. After all, to the outside world, was not that just as I seemed too?

  Absorbed in my task, I had not noticed how Lily had been watching me closely as I worked.

  ‘Who’s Judith?’ she asked suddenly.

  I looked up, the point of my pencil splintering on the page. ‘Judith?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice was hesitant, as if this were a question she had been building up to for some time, and was half-afraid to ask. ‘It’s a name you call out in your sleep sometimes.’

  My pencil was beyond mending, for the moment at least. ‘I’m tired,’ I said, placing the half-finished drawing on the chest of drawers between us. ‘We can begin again tomorrow.’

  But I should have known Lily was not to be distracted, not even by the prospect of her emerging eyes and hair on the paper before her. ‘And there’s other names, too,’ she went on, in a kind of rush. ‘Ones I can’t make out. And you always sound so…’ From the corner of my eye I glimpsed her bite her lip. ‘So afraid.’

  ‘We all have nightmares,’ I replied, pulling the covers tight around me.

  ‘But not like this. I wondered …’ She paused, but only for a moment. Lily and her curiosity. Sharp-eyed Lily, who was a born story-maker, who always wanted to make the pieces of a pattern fit to a familiar mould. ‘I wondered if maybe Judith might be your daughter?’

  I turned my face away from her, toward the hard cold stone of the wall. ‘I have no children,’ I said.

  Despite my fears, Lily did not pursue her questioning the next day. And, thankfully, as her portrait neared completion, her impatience served to distract her.

  When it was finished, I was pleased that Lily delighted with the result of my effort. But I should have known her delight would not be contained. First one, and then another of the maids came up to me, shyly, hesitant. Some with a few coins to offer me. I did not take the coins, but I made their portraits, thankful for their momentary stillness and the necessity to please, which overcame self-doubt.

  And I had more reward than any coin could have brought me. Apart, perhaps, than paper and the luxury of watercolours. My hand was soon regaining its old fluency. With each portrait my confidence was returning. And with it, I began to see a distant hope of regaining some inner peace.

  I should have known better, of course.

  ‘Mrs Smith?’ He called to me as I crossed the corridor, with my usual accompaniment of a bucket of dirty water sloshing at my heels. ‘If you wouldn’t mind just stepping this way, for a moment.’

  His tone was even, and not harsh. But I knew it meant trouble.

  ‘Yes, Mr Meredith,’ I murmured, setting down my bucket carefully in a nook under the stairs where it would not be tripped over and dirt mar the hard-won cleanliness of the tiles. I followed him into the little office.

  ‘Please sit down.’ He was polite. I feared the worst.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ But at least the weight off my feet was bliss. I wriggled my toes, wishing I dared kick off my boots. He turned back to the desk, lifting a piece of paper. I swallowed hard.

  ‘This is yours, I believe, Mrs Smith?’

  ‘I did it in my own time. And Ruby’s.’ He was watching me. He had an open face. Not handsome, not striking. Pleasant, I think is the word that might be used. Apart from those restless blue eyes of his, that seemed to pierce through to the heart of me. ‘And I didn’t ask for any money,’ I added, for good measure.

  ‘I’m sure you didn’t.’ He smiled. ‘And have no fear, I’ve promised faithfully to Ruby I shall return this to her before she goes home tonight.’

  ‘Oh.’ If anything, this was worse. I cursed myself. Well, and that was the last act of kindness I’d be trying. Virtue definitely did not bring its reward. Quite the opposite, in fact. And I didn’t mind standing and saying so in church on Sunday, if I was asked. Or, indeed, ever attended.

  ‘You have quite an eye.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I muttered.

  ‘And you always draw faces?’

  Without meaning to, I glanced over towards the watercolour of that house of his, Plas Eden, glimpsed between trees, the lavender haze of mountainside sweeping up behind.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, firmly. ‘It amuses me.’ I met his gaze, defying him to ask if I’d been tutored. Which I’d flatly deny, of course. And we’d both know I was lying.

  Well, at least, I reflected, as his eyes returned to the portrait in his hands, that show of wilfulness would curtail any interest he might have had for me.

  I was wrong.

  Those blue eyes were watching me as closely as ever. And I could have sworn I glimpsed a flicker of amusement in his smile. I wished I’d tipped my bucket over his polished, and no doubt highly expensive, shoes, and been done with it. Reference, or no reference. I could see another question arriving. I clenched my fists hard under the table.

  ‘And are you squeamish?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ He’d caught me on the hop with that one, and no mistake.

  ‘Well, are you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Those eyes of his! ‘Well, at least I don’t think

  so,’ I muttered. I didn’t like the way his smile was going. ‘What do you mean
by squeamish? I don’t faint at the sight of blood.’

  ‘And the dead?’

  I gasped before I could stop myself.

  ‘I’m sorry. That was uncalled for, Mrs Smith. I’m not interested in the dead, but in the living.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘But when I say ‘living’, I mean where death is only ever a day or so away, whether it be the very young, or the very old, from accident or pestilence.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, blankly. Did he mean me to train as a nurse? For the most part, my work had not yet taken me deep into the wards. This, I was not ready for. My stomach clenched.

  ‘The charity is undertaking a study of the housing conditions around the hospital. Have you heard of Friedrich Engels?’

  ‘No,’ I said. Truthfully, this time. Uncle Jolyon could at least be proud of my carefully cultivated ignorance.

  ‘A translation of his study of the condition of the working class in England was published earlier this year. Much easier reading than my poor attempts at German. It seemed an opportune moment for the Meredith Charitable Foundation to undertake our own study.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, warily.

  ‘It has struck me, in our attempts, that a photographer, although useful, is not always the best way to document living conditions. A camera is such a novelty, it draws attention to itself. But someone with a skill for catching faces…’

  ‘No!’ I said. Loud enough to make myself jump. ‘My post here,’ I added, feebly.

  He turned away, so he was looking out of the window into the little garden. ‘One of the women on the wards – Alice – has nowhere to return to. At least, nowhere she would care to return, or the charity, in all conscience, could wish to force her to go.’

  It was like a blow to the stomach, taking my fragile safety away. ‘I work hard,’ I protested, suddenly back to fighting for my life once more.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he replied, turning to face me. ‘But I take it you can read and write?’

  I opened my mouth to hotly deny it. But of course there it was: Eden. The moment I had stepped inside his office on that first morning, I had read the name beneath the painting. I could, I suppose, have sworn blind I knew my letters enough to read the Bible, and it was the Old Testament that had enabled me to recognise the word. But meeting his eyes I saw he wouldn’t fall for that one.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Then there is other employment here, far more suited to you.’ He grinned, almost a boyish kind of grin I had seen once before, warming the customary seriousness of his face. ‘Cleaners I can find by the dozen: but the Meredith Charity Hospital is not exactly a hotbed of literacy. So you see I cannot really afford to let any possibility pass me by.’

  ‘I see,’ I said slowly. I could feel the temptation, drawing me in. No more ceaseless activity. Time to sit. Time to think. And to earn my living – at least part of my living – by my sketching. I would be given paper and pencils to work with. Maybe, in the future, even watercolours.

  Diamonds I could have walked away from. The latest fashions from Paris and the finest shoes money could buy would not have tempted me in the slightest. But now I had the passion in me again, paper and pencils I would die for.

  ‘Think it over,’ he said. Like a fisherman who feels the line already taut and ready to reel in.

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’

  He meant so well. I could see he meant well. It was the way his mind worked, ceaselessly, in the running of the Meredith Hospital. Another woman they could keep from the streets. And another skill they could use.

  I wondered, as I made my way back to my scrubbing brush, if all that working out of his had warned him the danger he was in?

  He was a kind man. A gentle, kind man. Not much older than myself, which, for a man, is still young. Still not yet in the prime of life. He was a man who deserved the happy fireside of wife and children, so beloved of the novels of Mr Dickens.

  If I had been a noble, self-sacrificing Agnes or Little Dorrit, I would have slipped out of my bed at dawn, and vanished forever into the ether to keep him safe.

  Which, of course, I didn’t.

  Chapter Four

  When summer finally arrived, it came all in a rush, as if it couldn’t apologise enough for the despair of ice cream sellers along the coast and the shops full of untouched sundresses.

  A clear, blazing heat settled over sea and mountain alike. Within days – or so it seemed – the sheep-fields around Plas Eden turned a rich green. In the narrow lanes between Talarn and Pont-ar-Eden, honeysuckle and dog roses climbed high into the hedgerows, sending their delicate fragrance through the open windows of passing cars.

  Carys pulled into one of the parking bays in Pont-ar-Eden Square and watched the rays of sun streaming through the village, her mood lifting slightly. It was that clear, early-summer light she remembered so well from her childhood: the kind that always roused the faded blues and yellows of the terraced houses into soft glow, and the dark grey slates of the roofs into a newly-washed smartness.

  But there was no time for lingering, not with a car-full of shopping and a million things to be done before Mam’s return to Willow Cottage this afternoon. Carys sighed and pulled herself a little stiffly out of the car. She’d intended to have several days in her mother’s house before Mam was released from the nursing home. Time to get things in order. Time to adjust. But, somehow, the arrangements in Chester had taken far longer than she’d imagined.

  And then there was Joe. Carys grabbed her handbag and zapped the car shut. Joe was making no bones at being unhappy at her choice. The atmosphere in the flat over the past weeks had been unmistakeably that of hurt and resentment. His hurt, her resentment. She wasn’t proud of the fact.

  It was a subject she had been mulling over all the way from Chester, without coming to any useful conclusions. Carys pushed the thoughts from her mind. That was for another day. For now she had quite enough to be getting on with, what with Mam, in her current emotionally fragile state, to deal with in a few hours and Joe, in his emotionally hurtful state of this morning, to be placated into some kind of peace this evening. If that were possible.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said with an appearance of cheerfulness, as she walked into Jones the Grocers.

  ‘Ah, good morning, Carys,’ replied Sara Jones, white-haired and round faced, seventy if she was a day, briskly stacking loaves and scones on the wooden shelves behind the counter. A delicious smell of baking filled the air, sending Carys’ stomach into a sudden rumble of hunger. ‘Today’s the day, then,’ remarked Sara, as Carys chose Mam’s favourite crisp white loaf, still warm from the oven.

  ‘Yes it is,’ said Carys. ‘And may I have a bara brith and a chocolate cake as well, please.’

  ‘Certainly,’ replied Sara. ‘I know your mam has been looking forward to this day,’ she added, as she wrapped the bread and the little rectangular fruitcake in tissue, placing the slightly uneven cake, sleek with icing, into a white cardboard box. ‘She’ll be glad to get home, I’m sure.’

  ‘Yes, she will,’ smiled Carys. With a final choice of a double choc chip muffin (for medicinal purposes only), she put her purchases in her bag and made her way back out into the street.

  Despite the sun, there was no mistaking that Pont-ar-Eden high street was clinging onto its existence by a whisper. In between the few defiantly open small shops and the larger Low-Price convenience store lay rows of boarded up and abandoned premises, with several already transformed back into houses or flats.

  As long as Carys could remember, there had been something of the spirit of the blitz about the beleaguered Stryd Fawr. Mam’s Talarn Herald was always full of articles on how the big supermarkets were strangling village high streets out of existence, invariably accompanied by the same photograph of Pont-ar-Eden looking particularly rain-swept and bleakly empty. Even the bantering comments of the remaining shopkeepers flying across the street from their doorsteps on sunny days, seemed almost a checking between them of who had survived to battle for customers another
day, and who had succumbed to the last rise in council tax and the hike in the electricity bills.

  There was, Carys remembered with sudden vividness, more than one reason for that flight of hers from Pont-ar-Eden all those years ago. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Mam, she’d have been out of there this minute, bearing Sara Jones’ infamous (if you were watching your waistline, that is) chocolate cake home to Joe as a peace offering.

  But there was Mam. So she made her way into Prydderch’s Newsagents instead, in search of Mam’s favourite story magazine and usual TV guide, both of which – despite her list – she’d managed to miss in her mad dash around Sainsburys that morning.

  Prydderch’s was just as she remembered it. The same cadaverous gloom, crammed full of dog-eared birthday cards and dust-laden boxes of Monopoly and Scrabble. She could have sworn that nothing – not even the faded boxes of after-dinner mints – had moved since she and Gwenan and Nia had piled in there after school for their weekly fix of Love Hearts and Strawberry Bootlaces. Even the smell of newsprint tinged with Parma Violets was unchanged.

  Evan Prydderch himself eyed her closely, with the world-weary air of a man who just knows half his stock of Pear Drops and a tube of Smarties will have vanished into thin air by the time she left the shop.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Carys, brightly. ‘Lovely day, isn’t it.’

  Evan grunted in disapproval at such unnecessary cheeriness. As a child, Carys had been terrified of him, as had even the toughest of self-styled toughs in Pont-ar-Eden Primary, although they would never admit it. She wasn’t quite sure she felt at ease in his presence, even now.

  Evan Prydderch was tall and stick-thin, bent over at the shoulders as if permanently lifting heavy stacks of newspapers. Like his shop, he scarcely seemed to have aged, having appeared ancient in the first place. Gloom hung about him in the cloud of stale tobacco clinging to his patched tweed jacket and the black, newsprint grubbiness of his fingers. In the early hours of each morning, come rain or shine, for as long as Carys could remember, Evan Prydderch had stalked the village; shopping-trolley of newspapers rattling along behind him, tails of his black trench coat flying, like some retired Nosferatu taking a sniff at the night air for old times’ sake.