The Insistent Garden

by Rosie Chard

  “No.” I examined Dotty’s profile again; the hearing aid seemed more prominent seen inside the tiny car. “This is the first time.”

  “No need to shout, darling.”

  “Sorry.”

  “So,” she settled her thighs deeper into her seat. “It’s about fifteen miles to the manor, so there’s time to tell me.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Why you look so sad.”

  The beginning was easy. My first and second names came out in the right order, my street name was marred only by a slight pause when the ‘t’ in Forster caught on the roof of my mouth, but as I reached the word ‘father’ I paused.

  “You don’t have to go on if you don’t want to,” said Dotty.

  I studied the hearing aid one more time. “I want to, I haven’t told anyone, well. . . not anyone like you, about this before.”

  “Why not?”

  “I had no one to tell.”

  “Don’t you have any friends?”

  I hesitated. “I have Una, but I’m not sure when I will see her next. I have Archie too, but he knows everything already.” I hesitated again. Archie knows everything already.

  “Who’s Archie?”

  “He’s my neighbour, . . . one of my neighbours. My friend.”

  “Does Archie get on with your father?”

  I tried to remember the last time he and my father had last stood in the garden together. “No, I don’t know. . . I left school this summer and I look after the house and my father, and my aunt. She comes to stay. She likes things neat and clean and —”

  “I thought your fingers looked sore.”

  “It’s the soap.”

  “Go on.”

  I drew in a breath. “We’re building a wall.”

  “What sort of wall?” asked Dotty, perking up.

  I felt tired, the sort of tiredness where it becomes an effort to breathe. “It’s made of brick, and bits and pieces, anything we can get hold of, and it’s quite high.” I glanced at her profile again. “We’re not actually building it. The wall’s already built. We just work on it.”

  Dotty’s smile vanished. “There’s probably a perfectly simple answer to this I know, but. . . why do you work on a wall that’s already built?

  I stared at the road ahead; old puddles lay there. “My father can’t seem to finish it. It runs down one side of the garden —”

  “Why only one side?” asked Dotty.

  “It stops my neighbour coming in.”

  “What! Not Archie?”

  “No, the other. . . person.”

  “Who?”

  “Him.”

  Dotty’s eyes abandoned the road. “Edith, what magnificent mysteries you have!”

  “I don’t want mysteries,” I replied, aware of the dullness of my voice.

  Dotty braked, pulled into the side of the road and turned towards me. “What about your mother?”

  “My mother is dead.”

  “Darling, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s alright, I never knew her. She died when I was a baby.”

  “Edith, shut me up if I’m being too nosy, but how did your mother die?”

  “She was ill. She went into hospital, but I’m not sure what the illness was.”

  Dotty frowned. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ask?”

  “I asked my father, but he doesn’t like to talk about her and —”

  “What, never?”

  “No, never.”

  “But, you visit her don’t you, at her grave?”

  “No, I. . . don’t. She. . .”

  “It helps you know, having a place you can go and remember her.”

  “I already have a place to remember her.”

  “Where is that, darling?”

  I fingered the edge of the seat. “Down in the. . . down in. . . my head.” I looked at her profile. “Dotty, do you think you can love a person you’ve never met?”

  “Oh, yes,” she replied, smiling broadly. “Most definitely.”

  The groups of houses thinned and fields filled every view, lining the flat-topped hills with swaths of grass that disappeared beneath groups of trees before emerging again on the other side. The car slid inside a fold in the hills and Dotty started to crunch through the gears as we navigated the slopes, the engine growling on the up, before emitting a wild whistle from somewhere by the spare tyre on the way down. Piles of wild geraniums lined the road like spectators in a bicycle race; they slumped forward ahead of the approaching car then arched backwards in the small wind that slid out from under the wheels. The hills grew higher with each bend in the road, and I felt a sachet of vomit form at the back of my throat. “Dotty, could you slow down a bit?”

  “Oh, sorry, yes. It’s not far now.”

  The road narrowed, more flowers flopped onto the edges of the tarmac and nettles stung the sides of the car. We drove on, only slowing when branches began to tap the windscreen. A groan from the handbrake marked the end of our journey.

  “Where are we?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “But, are we there?”

  My companion rummaged in her handbag. She pulled out a pair of leather gloves and then levered her body out of the car, her skirt zip pulling angrily at its seams. “Come on, darling. This way.”

  A vague feeling of unease came over me as I scuttled behind Dotty’s green-clad figure. It was hard to keep up and I felt relief when a wide stone wall came into view between the trees.

  “Can you climb?” asked Dotty.

  “Climb?”

  “Up and over.” She flashed a smile and pointed at the wall.

  “Is this the way in?”

  “Our way in,” she replied, conspiratorially.

  The zip at the back of Dotty’s skirt loomed into view again, straining against its stitches as she bent down to pick up a log. She shook out terrified woodlice then placed it against the base of the wall. Finally, with a hitch of her skirt, she scrambled over — her heels slipping from her shoes — and emerged on the other side, straightened her jacket and brushed lichen off her shoulder.

  “Come on, darling. We don’t want to be spotted.”

  My body had a lightness to it as I climbed up onto the wall. The stone cap was fat like a horse and I straddled it for a second, not caring that one of my shoes had fallen off on the other side. I caught a glimpse of a large grey house through the trees; solid and majestic, it matched the stone horse I sat upon. “Is that the manor?” I said.

  “That’s her. Quite lovely, isn’t it?”

  “How do we get to the garden?”

  “Come down and I’ll show you.”

  Dotty walked fast for someone so stout and I was rushing to catch up — concentrating on the back of her speeding ankles — when she came to an abrupt halt. “We’re here.”

  I clutched her sleeve. “Dotty! The garden!”

  My view cut through a wooden doorway, down towards a valley, half hidden by trees. Mown grass dotted with bushes dominated the area closest to us, but further down pieces of garden had broken loose from the hill and fallen into a depression at the base of the slope. I could see fragments of it, an ancient tree hugging a younger sibling, a troupe of dusty pink valerian poking out from beneath a collapsed peony. A path eked away into blue distance.

  “See that,” said Dotty, pointing upwards.

  I looked up to see an inscription carved into the top of the doorway.

  A gardyn walled al with stoon

  So fair a gardyn wot I nowhere noon.

  “It’s. . . oh, let’s go in!” I released Dotty’s sleeve.

  “Wait. Edith, close your eyes.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Just for a second.”

  Images projected onto the insides of my eyelids: a drop down onto a stone pavement, brittle steps loose with age.

  “Now smell,” said Dotty, wafting something beneath my nose.

  I leaned into mid-air
and sniffed my friend’s hand like an obedient horse. “Lemons!” I cried, opening my eyes.

  “Lemon Verbena,” she said, “strengthens the nerves.”

  “Dotty, I can’t wait a second longer.”

  I moved into the doorway; then stopped.

  Someone had made an Elysium. Someone had gathered up the loveliest plants in the land, sifted through them, and laid them out as a garden of unimaginable beauty. I suspected I saw an invisible hand arranging the simmering brew of colour that seemed to drift across the ground. From our new vantage point we looked down upon a cluster of little garden rooms, exposed to the weather and connected like the remains of a ruined house. Grass carpeted the floor, rain-bleached benches sat empty at the base of buttresses wallpapered with ivy and columns of yew held up the sky. A mock orange flower nudged my arm, begging to be sniffed. Breathing in a large lungful of garden air, I set off down the slope. Dotty followed; neither of us spoke.

  Intimacy arrived fast. Leaves rubbed the undersides of my hands as I hurried down the path, the steps seemed to fit my feet and chickweed seeds clung to my sleeves like sticky crumbs. Walking more slowly, I squeezed down a narrow corridor of delphiniums and admired a distant church that had jumped into view. Finally I stroked my hand across the back of a clipped yew ball, feeling an earthy happiness.

  “Like it, darling?” Dotty’s voice was close.

  “It’s perfect.”

  “This is my favourite place in the whole world,” she said.

  “Mine too.” I smiled. “Dotty, I want to stay longer but I should be getting home soon. My father will be back from work at five.”

  “But you must see the house first, I think it will surprise you.”

  I glanced up at my watch. “I can’t be too long.”

  “We can be quick; the entrance is just over there.”

  Dotty strode off towards the house, but I paused, unable to resist the elderly foxgloves nudging my sleeve. I eased off a seed head and slipped it into my pocket.

  A pair of stone eagles sneered down at me over disdainful beaks when I reached the steps to the house.

  “Wipe your feet before you come in,” said a voice from inside the entrance.

  I rubbed my shoes across the doormat. Other people in my garden?

  A woman’s head poked out the dark interior, fierce and pale, and perched on a long neck. “Sign here,” she said without preamble.

  The visitors’ book lay on a table, its cramped pages only just visible in the dirty light. I wrote my name beneath a flamboyant ‘Dotty Hands,’ then flicked through the book, smiling at the distinctive ‘Hands’ signature cropping up on the previous pages, not once but several times — summer, autumn, winter and spring.

  “That’s fine,” said the fierce woman, pulling the book out of my hands and snapping it shut.

  I waited, fretting that the ink was not quite dry, then made my way down the hallway towards the first room.

  Oh, the first room. Goose pimples sprang up on my arms as I entered it, looking for a sign of Dotty. The first room was full. Packed from wall to wall with strange, unlikely things, it caused me to stand for a second in the doorway, gauging the intimidating fullness of it. Everything was everywhere: plaster dolls stared at me from empty sockets, a suit of armour watched me through a slit in its helmet, and a life-size mannequin, slumped in a chair, gazed sadly at the floor. I struggled to recognize some of the objects in the room: ancient clocks with forty hours on their faces, timber locks ripped from long discarded doors, bottles sewn from leather. I bent down to read some labels, all written in a shaky hand: wax angel, donkey clamp, sky measurer.

  “Come on Edith, let’s delve,” said Dotty reappearing at my side. Ducking to avoid a bunch of dried flowers nailed to the top of the doorframe, I followed her through a narrow entrance that led to the next room.

  Slivers of sunlit garden seemed to pierce the darkness of the ground floor rooms and I couldn’t help but look out of the window during Dotty’s breathless descriptions of the artifacts. But I listened happily, fingering a dusty ‘don’t touch’ sign I found on the window ledge while absorbing the stories of the manor house: dinner guests too cold to hold their forks, secret marriage vows taken at the dead of night, and mischievous ghosts living inside the curtains.

  Dotty knew everything: the name of every curiosity, the name of every room: ‘Nadir’ glowing with Venetian lanterns, ‘Zenith’ ticking with the sound of a thousand bracelet clocks, and ‘Meridian,’ long, thin, ‘Meridian’ running through the centre of the house like a lost corridor. Her commentary had a pace of its own, slow and detailed on the ground floor, gathering speed round the tiny medieval beds up on the first floor before reaching a peak on the approach to the attic. Following behind the trail of explanations, I felt rising claustrophobia as the hallways narrowed and steps heightened and by the time we reached the top of the house my throat was dry.

  “This is the best bit, darling,” whispered Dotty, balancing on top of a high threshold. “The attic!”

  A draft of nausea flushed my throat as I ducked down to enter the room. I tried to focus on the walls; the walls were dancing.

  Dotty peered into my face. “Darling, you look pale.”

  “It’s the slope,” announced a man, emerging from the gloom. “Steepest floors in all of England.”

  “Can’t say I ever noticed,” replied Dotty sniffily.

  “It only gets the sensitive ones,” said the man, jerking his jacket cuffs straight.

  Dotty threw him a condescending glance, patted my arm and trotted off towards a massive iron contraption sitting quietly in the far corner of the room. I followed, trying to ignore the headache that was working its way down the side of my head. I felt disoriented: the sloping floor, the bright squares of sunlight dotting the walls, all disconnecting my mind from our guide’s monotone voice that accompanied us across the room. We halted in the far corner and just as Dotty launched into an explanation of the strange machine in front of us the man cut in with a dramatic, “Sheets!”

  Dotty and I turned as one.

  “Sheets,” he repeated, then pointed at the ancient appliance in front of us, “The bane of the scullery maid’s life.” He wiped a sticky-looking tongue across his lips. “A steel backbone was required to survive laundry day three hundred years ago. But this box mangle, as it was known, invented in 1785. . .”

  My head throbbed. I looked over the man’s shoulder, through the window and down into the garden. Shadows, thrown from the hedges, accentuated the shape of the borders and wide stone walls, invisible at ground level, were now thick lines on the earth. The attic seemed darker when I looked back at the man’s face. He was still relishing the two-hundred-year-old details of the scullery maid’s tortuous journey from the garden to the kitchen, dragging stones in a leather bucket, the burn in her shoulders as she heaved them up the stairs. . .

  The floor yawned upwards. “Dotty, I have to go home.”

  The magazine cover had suffered from friction in my pocket. Yet the details of the garden still looked sharp when I sat on my bed and pulled it out; the tree held onto its apples, the leaves still stuck to the grass. But now I knew what lay beyond the gate; I knew what cast a shadow on the lilies slumped in the bottom left corner. I turned the page over and re-read the last lines of the poem printed on the back.

  What fortitude the Soul contains,

  That it can so endure

  The accent of a coming Foot —

  The opening of a Door —

  10

  My body behaved normally as I made my father a cup of tea. My hand was firm as I turned on the tap and my fingers were steady as I spooned in the sugar.

  “It’s been a hot day,” I ventured. I’d walked on a chamomile lawn,

  couldn’t he see that?

  “Are all the tools clean?” He spread his newspaper out on the kitchen table.

  “Yes.” Cosmos petals had tickled my fingers.

  “Fish defrosted?”

  “Yes
.” Ruby peonies had been edged with gold.

  “Bathroom bin emptied? It smelt bad yesterday.”

  “Yes.” Heliotrope had reeked of sherbet.

  He shook his newspaper vertical, ending the conversation with a wall of stories. I glanced at the headline, ‘APOLLO 6: SHAKY DRESS REHEARSAL,’ then flipped the tea towel over the oven rail and stepped outside.

  Selecting a spot of dry-looking grass, I sat down and surveyed my back garden. Cement dust had powdered a skirt onto the hawthorn bushes closest to the high wall and the branches were ragged here, chipped off by the tip of the spade and trodden on by the feet of the ladder. Wild grasses grew in the leftover wedge of ground outside the back door. The Little Meadow, I called it. I liked to sit here when my father was at work and run my fingers along the grass stems, which shed their seeds at the slightest touch. A low brick wall ran down the west side of our plot. Archie’s garden lay on the other side; a place of great order. His vegetables stood to attention like an army awaiting orders. I could see neat rows of sweet corn lording it over marrows so fat they looked like overweight slugs abandoned in the sun. Tomato plants, gangly with produce, filled the next row. ‘The kings of broken promises,’ Archie called them, already displaying fruit, so potentially delicious, yet never to ripen beneath the overcast Billingsford skies. Just looking at them overwhelmed me. I envied the control he had over his garden, over his life. I wanted something like that. My own life, wringing out cloths, scraping out mortar, was out of my hands.

  I returned to my spot on the grass and settled my buttocks into the waiting imprint. My thoughts returned to Snowshill. To the army of gardeners who deadheaded flowers, who snipped at twigs, who controlled nature. A seed head tapping my elbow brought me back to the present. The air was thick with specks and balls of fluff. I plucked a dandelion head from beside my shoe, and blew out the time. One o’clock collapsed half the globe. Two o’clock sent a handful of seeds into the bucket of my skirt. Three o’clock launched a sheet of transparent umbrellas up into the sky while four o’clock, stubborn four o’clock, detached the final clump, which dropped straight onto the soil.

  It was not one o’clock that marked the moment. Two and three o’clock passed unnoticed. It was at four that I knew what I was going to do.