The Insistent Garden

by Rosie Chard

  “Call an ambulance,” shouted Vivian into my face. “Now!”

  The dial on the telephone resisted my finger so I forced it, dragging back the nine three times until I heard a ringing tone. A serene voice answered, methodical, quite bored.

  “My father’s collapsed!” I cried.

  The telephonist requested the details in a measured tone. I rushed them out, ‘chest pains,’ ‘Forster Road,’ ‘June 1910,’ then a frantic, ‘Are you coming?’

  They were coming. ‘Soon,’ the woman promised. I returned to the kitchen floor to find Vivian attempting to undo more buttons on my father’s shirt. His eyes were open when I knelt down in front of him. But he did not look at me; he just stared at the bottom of the kitchen table. I followed his gaze. Something was attached to the underside, but I could not see what it was.

  Movement nearby distracted me and I turned to see Vivian stroking my father’s forehead. It was mechanical. I had seen the same gesture many times before as she brushed fluff off her skirt.

  “Edith, fetch a pillow,” she said. Her tone was business-like; colour had returned to her cheeks.

  I ran upstairs, pulled a pillow from my bed then returned to the kitchen floor. The back of my father’s head felt greasy as I lifted it up.

  “What’s wrong with him?” I said.

  “How would I know?” replied Vivian.

  I stared at my father’s face. The moment was testing me, a test of love. Without warning, orange light animated his face, objects quivered, and a siren let out a brief, plaintive cry. I jumped; ambulancemen have a loud knock.

  “I’ll go,” said Vivian, making an offer for the first time in her life.

  I felt intense anxiety as my aunt left the room, not knowing what to do, where to look, or how to be. My father’s eyes were closed; orange creases lined his lids.

  “This way, please.” Vivian’s returning voice was unusually civil.

  “In here?” asked the first ambulance man who walked in behind her.

  “Yes, yes, down there.”

  A stranger knelt before me. I briefly forgot the stress of the moment and relished the unfamiliarity of him. A stranger’s haircut, a stranger’s voice, and a stranger’s hands moving inside my father’s shirt. I looked up to see more people, made large by uniforms, entering the room. Suddenly a crowd, they were setting up camp. Tubing, masks, an oxygen tank were all dragging my kitchen into the twentieth century; I caught the glint of chrome. Two men crouched over my father while a third rummaged in a bag, its wide pockets oozing importance. I relaxed as they started work, placing an icy-looking stethoscope inside his shirt and slipping a thermometer between his lips. The blood pressure cuff sighed as it was tightened over his arm. Then my father’s blood, brick-coloured and thick, was sucked up into a syringe. Finally, the questions started; how old, how heavy, what pills does he normally take? I felt confused as Vivian left the room and returned moments later with a tray loaded with bottles. Leaving the ambulancemen to inspect the hoard — sucking pens and deciphering worn labels — I inched towards my father’s body and looked into his face, now incased in an oxygen mask.

  I went through the motions. I touched his shoulder; I pushed a hair off his eye, yet nuggets of power were rising in my chest. There was nothing to stop me leaning over and spitting in his eye. His eyelids flickered but didn’t open so I sat back on my haunches and watched for changes in his expression. There was nothing to stop me leaning over and kissing his face.

  “Edith, I’m going with him to the hospital, you stay here,” said Vivian.

  Common decency required a protest. Even a fleeting show of feeling might have quelled the puzzled looks coming from the men carrying my father out of the room, but I had nothing, nothing to give.

  “All right,” I said.

  The silence in the room was earsplitting after the sound of the ambulance siren had faded away. I pulled back a chair that had been shoved against the wall and opened the window. I thought of the tray of medicine. But the tray was empty, its contents slipped into the pockets of strangers and taken away. Then I picked up a couple of discarded instrument wrappings boasting sterility, went into the living room and sat on my father’s chair, my hand on the wall.

  Time passed, I don’t know how much; then the phone rang. Vivian, irritable and talking too loudly, described the wait at the vending machine before she mentioned my father had suffered a heart attack.

  I asked. “He’s going to be alright, isn’t he?”

  “Of course. I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’ll need a hot breakfast.”

  “Of course.” As I returned to the kitchen I tried to picture him, lying on his back in a strange room, tucked inside a strange bed. Where would he lay his hands, I wondered, across his chest, or down by his sides?

  Sunlight was glancing the hedge when I wandered out into the front garden later. I looked up at my neighbour’s house. The bedroom window was blank. Yet I sensed the presence of a recently vacated space at the front of the room, a curtain dropped, a window ledge still warm, a pocket of air filled with the scent of a voyeur. I sat down on the front step and looked up at the rinsed-out sky. Twilight. How I loved that time of day. The house at Snowshill came into my head and I remembered a fragment of a poem carved into a lintel above the stairwell. Well out of sight.

  For me today

  For him tomorrow

  After that, who knows?

  I thought of my father lying in a hospital bed. I thought of the high wall, stretching its shadow right across the garden. Finally, I thought of the petal floating inside my teacup. I knew the time had come.

  Part Three

  71

  How could I fill hours that were empty? What could I do for an entire evening when the door had been opened and it was possible to go out?

  I had never brought one of my mother’s books out of the cellar before. I felt like a thief as I carried it up the stairs to my room, held close to my chest. Natural light sharpened the words on the page and two lines caught my eye immediately.

  Rose, rose and clematis,

  Trail and twine and clasp and kiss.

  I slammed the book shut and pushed it beneath my pillow. Those words, so quiet down in the cellar, seemed to shout at me up here in my bedroom. I lay down on my bed and felt my body slip into the sleeping ballet dancer pose, hands above my head and the sole of my foot pressed against my knee. But I could not sleep. I could only succumb, not just to a creeping fear of being alone in the house for the first night of my life but to that anxious feeling. The feeling that waited by my bed. My heart beat a fraction faster, no longer content to sit quietly inside my body along with the other organs, the silent liver, the mute kidneys, but making its presence felt with a fluty beat that seemed to be right inside my throat. Holding a finger to the side of my neck brought a measure of reassurance but still my thoughts churned. My blood felt different too as I remembered the events of the past few hours. It fizzed, like sherbet thrown into milk. And my fingers tingled around the joints. I knew I was seeing things in an odd way, seeing them in the way they were not. But my brain, flushed with sherbet blood could not turn things round in this state, to the way they actually were.

  Sleep would solve it, I felt sure of that. A deep sleep would wipe the slate clean. How I longed to wake in the morning with fresh thoughts, opening my eyes onto a laundered world. Then the feeling welled up again so I pulled my knees up to my chin, closed my eyes and willed sleep to come.

  Midday, the meridian hour, arrived. The dress slipped easily over my head and I stood on a chair and inspected little bits of myself in the bathroom mirror. A pale plate looked back, yet when I leaned closer I could see something new in my eyes, a colour that I had never noticed before. I hadn’t combed my hair so thoroughly since I was a little girl and I realized it felt nice, the way the strands flew and the knots fell out as if they’d never been.

  Cotton caressed the back of my legs when I stood at the gate of number thirteen. The sunshine hid all trace of
curtains and the windows hung heavy, like sheets of slate nailed to the brickwork. I approached the front door — identical to mine. Already I knew the weight of the brass knocker and the texture of the patterning. Yet, I could not begin to imagine what lay on the other side of the door. I lifted the cold metal and let go; a tinny thump broke the tranquility of the garden. I pushed my hair behind my ears for the hundredth time as the door opened, not fast, not slow, just opened. Edward Black stood before me.

  Solace can always be found in clothing. I ran my hands across my stomach, fumbling for the security of a button, and then I felt for my collar, giving me time to take in the face in front of me. The young face.

  “Miss Stoker.” The face spoke; my name was in its mouth. I dropped my hands to my sides, and looked directly at the man standing on the doorstep. “Edward Black?”

  He smiled. “No. My name is Alden. Edward was my father. Would you like to come inside?”

  I was inside. My shoes were on the doormat, my nose already breathing in the heady scent of the hall. “Lilies,” I said, without looking round.

  “Stargazer.” he replied.

  Before I could say any more he plucked a flower from a vase sitting on a side table and held it up to my face. I leaned forward, drawn by the intoxicating power of the scent and dragged the fragrance into my lungs. Then I pulled away, startled by the fingers wrapped round the stem, flat and masculine, their nails lined with soil.

  “Are you dizzy yet?” he said, smiling.

  “A little.”

  “It’s the scent. Please, come and sit down.”

  With the tips of his fingers hovering beneath my elbow, he led me to a room directly off the hall. The cloying scent increased, sharpening my senses and I could not resist running my hand across the back of the sofa. Velvet, like the skin of a newborn mole. A ruler of dust marked my sleeve as I sat down.

  “Let me.” He brushed off the specks.

  His hand, there was something about his hand. I breathed in more lilied air. “You are Alden.”

  “Yes.”

  “Alden Black?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is Edward. . . Black?”

  “My father is dead.”

  Dead? He couldn’t be dead. “When did he. . . ?”

  Alden placed two fingers across the face of his watch and looked at the carpet. “Twelve months ago”

  “So, it was you. . . ?”

  “Yes.”

  “For a whole year?”

  “Yes.”

  I had never been brought a cup of tea before. I could not recall a single occasion when I had leant back on a sofa, listened to the sound of water running out of the tap, heard the pop of the fridge door being opened followed by the clink of a teaspoon hitting china. All for me. One sugar, a dash of milk, two minutes brewing. Just how I liked it. All for me, and he was the first to ask.

  The scent of lilies seemed to rub my skin as I waited for him; my head ached with the heaviness of it. He returned with a tray and sat back down on the sofa, disturbing a puff of dust that lifted into the air. I was not expecting him to reach out and touch me. “Lily pollen,” he said. He brushed his fingers across the top of my nose. “I’ll get a cloth.”

  More dust rose up and as it settled I noticed the imprint his body had left on the cushion. The urge to lay my hand over the warm patch was immense but I held back, content to just fold my hands into my lap, and wait.

  “It won’t come off,” he said, after returning with a piece of cotton wool and dabbing the end of my nose.

  I did not care that it wouldn’t come off. I didn’t want it to come off. I wanted that powdery mark to stay forever. He sat down beside me and we stared ahead. The room didn’t look how I thought it would. Only a single layer of plain wallpaper covered the party wall and there were colours, lots of colours in the flowers that waited in the room.

  “You are comfortable to sit next to,” I said.

  He opened his mouth to speak then looked away and a silence started up. Not a stressful silence, not a tense, bullying, demanding silence, begging to be broken, but a gloriously restful segment of time in which I reveled like a cat stretching on a hearth rug. Time slipped by; I wished I could breathe more quietly. But the time gave me a chance to examine Alden Black in an oblique way; I could absorb vague pieces of him: the cotton of his trousers gathered behind his knee, the veins on his ankle. At last he spoke. “I was hoping you’d come.”

  “Have you been waiting for me?”

  “Yes, since the first day.”

  “Which first day?”

  “The day I first saw you.”

  I thought of the attic. “When was that day?”

  He sat further back on the sofa. “I came to live in the house after my father died and that’s when I first saw you.”

  “Where was I?”

  “You were pegging a shirt out on the washing line. Its arms wrapped your shoulders and then they touched your neck.” He looked at the floor. He seemed to have too many eyelashes; they crowded his eyes.

  “I need to ask —” I said.

  “Edith, wait. Before you say anything I have something to show you.”

  “What is it?”

  “Come and see.”

  Would I come and see? Parts of my life had always been covered up, the wrappings tight, the bindings secure. Would I go upstairs with Alden Black and see? “Alright.”

  I glimpsed pieces of Alden’s life as we went up the stairs: a slice of kitchen floor, a draining board piled with rinsed-out bottles of milk, a slab of butter, a discarded straw. I knew my way but I followed him still. I knew where the bottom stair lay. I knew the bend in the banister. I knew my way but I followed him still. A bath, perched on lion’s feet, passed out of view. A towel lay trapped beneath a door. Then books began to narrow the stairs — a piece of worn carpet was loose — I almost tripped. I followed him upwards, watching the creases on the back of his trousers fold and unfold like accordions. Yet the familiarity of the route diminished as we climbed higher into the house and by the time we stepped onto the landing I felt disoriented. Stairs, as I’d never imagined in that part of the house, led the way.

  “Up here,” Alden said. “Mind the first step, it’s higher than the rest.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll see, not much further.”

  “Your hands are cold,” I said.

  “So are yours.”

  “Alden.”

  “Yes?”

  “What is up there?”

  “You’ll soon see. Just a few more seconds.”

  We paused in front of a locked door. As he searched for the key in his pocket I became aware of the heat from his body. His presence was stronger in the confined space and parts of me tingled, the insides of my fingernails, the backs of my hands, and my lungs silently heaved, drawing in his scent, slowly, deeply, quietly.

  “I hope you won’t be. . . upset,” he said, fixing anxious eyes on me.

  “Why would I be upset?”

  “Come and see.” He turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open.

  Harsh yellow sunshine picked out the shapes in the attic and we lifted our hands to our foreheads in unison. Alden seemed intent on showing me something out of the window but I held back, getting a sense of the place I was in; I saw a compressed sofa, all air pressed from its cushions; I saw black-painted floorboards, a lonely book and a coffee cup sitting on the window ledge, its inside brown. Eventually, Alden could wait no longer and while patting pockets of air behind my shoulders he ushered me towards the window. I went. I looked out. First at the sky, trailing shredded clouds into the distance, then at the oak tree bashing itself into the wind, then down, right down at the ground. I clutched my cheeks in disbelief. “The garden!”

  Nothing had prepared me for what I saw below. Not the visceral shock of meeting Alden, nor the intense, syrupy feelings that were lining my insides. After so many years wondering, of peeking, of angling to get a better view, I felt an
abrupt and heady elation. The view of Alden’s garden from my attic — so long hidden from me — was abruptly and completely revealed. The sun, resting high in the sky, had ironed the shadows and flattened the high wall to a narrow line, the thinnest of brushstrokes on a canvas of quiet beauty. I saw the garden behind Alden’s house for the first time: a circle of boulders, a semi-circle of trees, a blue flower border growing against the back fence. Alden Black had made a garden on his side of the wall, a mirror image of my own.

  Two gardens were one.

  72

  “You were never alone.”

  Alden and I sat beneath his apple tree, identical to mine. The sun had inched higher into the sky and shadows pooled beneath the plants, dragging the garden up into three dimensions. Something had fluttered beneath my collar bone the moment I had stepped out of Alden’s back door, something that dove and swooped and soared.

  His garden. So foreign, so familiar. Alden had continued to caress the air behind my back as we walked towards his semi-circle of trees. Now he was seated beside me on the grass attempting to put together his words over a pair of awkward hands that folded and unfolded in a cycle of anguish. It was he who had planted the bulbs at the end of my garden, he explained. It was he who had turned the boulder to mirror his and it was he, Alden, who had moved my semi-circle of trees to make a complete circle complementing his own. What did I think, he kept asking. Was it alright? And would I please say something?

  I was unsure how I felt as I looked up at his side of the wall. Grimace had changed to smile as its face rippled with inter-locking leaves of Humulus lupus. Rope-like stems thundered along its length and papery hops were everywhere, clinging to joints and blown into gaps between plants. My garden seemed to have been lifted up and flipped over. I could see it all: the trees, the blue flowers. Even the stone circle exactly mimicked the shape of mine.

  “I was always here,” he said, “You did not know me but I was here.”