Rosie

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘Do you know what was the nicest thing tonight?’ Norah said much later that evening, back in Piccadilly. Donald had gone to bed – one glass of champagne and he was almost asleep in the chair.

  ‘What was that, my dear? That our bid for fifty guineas for “Wild Rose” has almost certainly been beaten by someone?’ Frank said, slurring his words slightly.

  Rosie gasped. She knew they had put in a bid for it, but she hadn’t known for how much.

  ‘No, dear, not that. And I did tell you to buy the little girls with the pram, just in case, but you didn’t listen,’ Norah said reprovingly.

  ‘I wouldn’t have let you buy one of my paintings,’ Thomas said with a slight hiccup. They were all a little tipsy but he was the worst, as people had been plying him with glasses of wine all evening. ‘I’ll paint one specially for you.’

  ‘You can’t give your work away,’ she said indignantly. ‘That’s like asking Frank to give you a tractor for nothing!’

  ‘What would I need a tractor for?’ Thomas laughed. ‘Besides, I know you’ll show it to everyone and I might get a few commissions. But to get back to what you were saying, what was so nice about tonight?’

  Norah looked a little embarrassed now. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t bring up the subject, but it was just that absolutely no one mentioned the murders.’

  Rosie had also noticed this and been surprised by it. She and Donald had had their faces appear in enough newspapers, and Thomas’s connection hadn’t gone unnoticed by the press either. She had braced herself for someone to bring it up. But there hadn’t been even the vaguest allusion to it.

  ‘Arty Hampstead people are too polite,’ Thomas said. ‘Or maybe they just don’t read newspapers.’

  ‘I don’t think it was that at all,’ Norah retorted. ‘It’s because it’s all forgotten. No one talks about it any more in Mayfield either. It’s finally over.’

  Rosie didn’t comment for a moment. She wanted to believe Norah was right. ‘Don’t you think it’s more likely they forgot because Thomas was the star of the evening, and he’s such a fascinating man in his own right?’ she suggested. She had seen the wealth of human interest in every single one of his paintings. Each one had a story behind it, enough to keep anyone’s interest well away from her and her family. ‘We’ll have to wait and see before we get too complacent; we don’t know what the press will drag up yet.’

  ‘None of them asked me anything about it’ Thomas said. ‘I was prepared to snap their heads off if they did, but there was nothing. In fact they didn’t even drag up the old stuff about me being a prisoner of war.’

  Frank stirred in his chair. He looked sleepily content, his fat belly bulging over his cummerbund. ‘I think you two should stop fretting about the past and look to your futures,’ he said. ‘My Norah’s always right, or so she’s very fond of telling me. The whole business is forgotten. The Suez crisis and the sale of premium bonds are the only hot news now. If you want my advice, you two should get yourselves married and concentrate on living happily ever after.’

  ‘Frank!’ Norah said sharply. ‘It’s not for you to put forward such a suggestion.’

  ‘Best one I’ve heard all year,’ Thomas grinned. ‘Will you marry me, Rosie?’

  Rosie’s heart leapt. She had already made up her mind to tell Thomas she intended to come and live with him. But even though she felt she was brave enough to fly in the face of convention, she would be doubly happy with a ring on her finger and calling herself Mrs Farley. She looked at Thomas and smiled, then glanced across to Norah and winked at her.

  ‘As soon as you like,’ Rosie replied.

  Frank got out of his chair. ‘The champagne’s finished, but there’s some brandy for a toast,’ he said, a beaming smile spreading across his face. ‘We haven’t had a wedding at The Grange since Susan’s, and that was so long ago I’ve almost forgotten it.’

  On the following Friday morning, Thomas took Rosie with him to the gallery to collect a cheque from Paul Brett.

  It had been a frantic week. Thomas had stayed each night with Rosie, then early in the morning he’d had to go back to the shop in Flask Walk to fit in a few hours of clock-mending before Rosie joined him at one for a hasty lunch. In the afternoon he had to spend a couple of hours at the gallery to meet people who were interested in his work. All but one of the paintings on display were now sold, but Paul hoped he might get some further commissions. On three evenings they had been invited out to dinner, and on the remaining ones Thomas had taken her out to show her a little of London’s night life. But now it was at an end. The exhibition was closed. One by one his paintings were being taken down and carefully wrapped for Paul to deliver to their new owners. Tomorrow another artist’s work would be hanging there.

  ‘I shall miss your pictures,’ Paul said and the mournful look in his eyes showed his sincerity. ‘It’s been one of the most successful exhibitions I’ve ever staged, both in sales and in the public’s response, but I shall miss coming in and seeing them all here. Each one had become special to me.’

  He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out an envelope. ‘This isn’t the final amount. Some people won’t pay me until I deliver the pictures to them. But I’ve got a feeling you have something pressing to buy your young lady.’

  They were out of the gallery and off up Heath Street before Thomas opened the envelope. He took out the cheque and the attached statement and let out a low whistle. ‘Bloody hell!’ he exclaimed. ‘It’s for four hundred and fifty-eight pounds! And there’s another eight hundred odd to come.’

  He caught hold of Rosie by the waist and twirled her round, breaking into wild laughter, regardless of a group of women shoppers who were watching.

  ‘Put me down,’ she yelled, afraid he might fall over.

  He lowered her to the ground, but still held on to her. ‘Do you know what this means?’ he said, his voice bubbling with excitement.

  ‘That you can buy me a ring?’ she said. ‘That we can go to Venice or Paris?’

  ‘All that,’ he gasped, showering kisses all over her face. ‘But better still, we can find somewhere of our own to live. I can give up mending clocks and you’ll have enough to start a proper gardening business and employ someone to help with the heavy work.’

  Rosie kissed him deeply and lingeringly. She didn’t care that the group of women were staring.

  ‘I love you so much, Thomas Farley,’ she said, cupping his face between her hands. ‘I’d love you even if we had to live in a cottage with no electricity and I had to take in washing. But do you know what means most of all to me?’

  ‘What? The fact that I’m on my way to being as famous as Monet?’

  ‘No,’ she laughed. ‘Because you said that about the gardening. I thought you might suggest I give it up.’

  His face was suddenly serious. ‘I would never suggest that,’ he said. ‘You and your plants are like me and the paints – inseparable. One day you’ll be as well known as Gertrude Jekyll and I’ll paint your gardens.’

  Epilogue

  1963

  The chambers of Wentworth, Dupree and Brownlow in Chancery Lane were somewhat cold, dark and Dickensian, with book-lined walls and heavy wooden furniture from the last century. But Charles Dupree, the senior partner, had a roaring fire in his office, and the heavy snow falling outside his long, narrow windows merely enhanced the cosiness of the room.

  ‘Let me top up your sherry,’ Charles said, taking Rosie’s glass before she had a chance to refuse. ‘We have every reason to celebrate, don’t we?’

  Rosie smiled. There was a time in her life when she would have been intimidated by anyone in the legal profession, but Charles was not only her solicitor, he had become a true friend. He was short and fat, with thinning hair and a purple nose, and well over fifty, but his jolly personality and deep, resonant voice were what she saw and heard.

  Rosie had met Charles at a party in Paul Brett’s Hampstead home just six weeks after she’d married Thomas in December 1955. A
t that time they were still living above the shop in Flask Walk, and because the flat went with the job, Thomas was still trying to juggle mending clocks with painting in his spare time.

  Although Rosie had made contact with several people she’d met at Thomas’s exhibition almost as soon as they returned from their honeymoon in Paris, and she’d made tentative plans to start work on their gardens in the spring, she was a little frustrated by living in such a confined space with no work of her own to do just yet.

  Over a few glasses of wine, she’d found herself confiding this to Charles. At that time she’d had no idea he was a solicitor, or that he had just bought one of the rambling, neglected houses she’d admired in Fitzjohn’s Avenue on her very first visit to Hampstead at the time when she worked at Carrington Hall.

  She wasn’t in the habit of talking about herself, but Charles was intensely interested in both her and Thomas. He had met Thomas at his exhibition, and in fact had bought a painting of the jungle in Burma. Since it had been hanging on his wall he’d found himself wishing to know more about the artist, and having discovered that this pretty young woman had recently married him, Charles went out of his way to engage Rosie in conversation.

  Charles was captivated by her. She spoke of gardening in the same passionate way women of his class spoke of ballet or the theatre. He found himself fully understanding her frustration at being shut in a cramped flat when she had been used to wide open spaces. He thought it a shame, too, that an artist of Thomas’s calibre should still be spending most of his time mending clocks. In the days that followed, this intriguing couple occupied Charles’s mind a great deal. He wanted to get to know them better and he felt they were worth helping.

  A couple of weeks later, Charles called round at the shop one evening and put a proposition to them both. They could have the semi-basement flat in Fitzjohn’s Avenue rent-free, in return for supervising the workmen he was getting in to convert the rest of the house into flats.

  As soon as Rosie and Thomas saw the flat they agreed. It was spacious, and the room overlooking the back garden would make a perfect studio for Thomas. Rosie eyed up the huge, overgrown back garden, and her fingers itched to transform it into something beautiful.

  They were ecstatically happy in that flat, especially the first summer. It was like one long honeymoon, with Thomas painting and Rosie working on the garden. They eked out the money Thomas had put aside from his exhibition with Rosie doing a few gardening jobs for other people, and the odd sale of one of Thomas’s paintings.

  Eighteen months later, when all the upstairs flats were finished and sold, Charles made a second proposition to them. The beautiful garden Rosie had created had increased the value of the basement flat dramatically, and Charles, ever a businessman, couldn’t afford sentimentality to stand in his way of profit. Yet at the same time he liked Thomas and Rosie too much to just give them their marching orders. As Charles had a client who wanted to sell a small cottage right in Hampstead Village, he suggested that he gave them a lump sum as a deposit on the mews cottage, and he would arrange a mortgage for it.

  Rosie and Thomas were delighted. The big flat, however lovely, was hard to keep warm, and the huge garden took up so much of Rosie’s time that she had little left to spend on jobs elsewhere which would bring in more money. They knew too that without Charles’s assistance they would not be able to buy a house of their own because their earnings were so erratic.

  It was love at first sight when they saw the cottage in Holly Walk: one large main room downstairs with an open staircase, and a smaller room to the side where Thomas could paint. Upstairs were two bedrooms and the prettiest bathroom Rosie had ever seen. The garden was small, but just as if it was intended for them, with a shed-cum-greenhouse at the bottom. Everything about it appealed to them – the stable door, the oddly Gothic windows. It was bathed in sunshine and a fat ginger cat was sitting on the window sill as though ready to take up residence with them. The previous owner had clearly been fastidious and a comfort-lover. Radiators ran from the kitchen boiler, the carpets he intended to leave behind were thick and new, every room was painted pristine white.

  Their friendship with Charles took a leap forward once they’d moved into the cottage. He and his wife Julia often came for supper, and Charles found a steady stream of clients for Rosie because he was always showing photographs of the garden in Fitzjohn’s Avenue, and praising her talent endlessly.

  That year, from mid-1958, was the real start of the change in Rosie and Thomas’s fortunes. There was another hugely successful exhibition at Paul Brett’s gallery, and as more and more people beat a path to Rosie’s door, she soon found herself in a position where she could pick the jobs she really wanted. She concentrated on those where the client wanted a complete make-over for their garden, giving her a free hand to plan it from scratch. She took on casual labour for the heavy work, and used local builders for laying paths and building walls. But the design, the choice of plants and planting out she did herself. It wasn’t long before she was regarded as something of an expert. She often heard herself referred to as ‘the plant lady’.

  But over and above the success and the security of knowing that once again they had money in the bank was the fact that she and Thomas were so blissfully at one with one another. They could be apart from each other for days on end, but they had the freedom to drop everything when it suited them, and take off for a picnic on the Heath, catch a train anywhere on an impulse, or just stay in bed on cold winter days.

  Donald often came up to stay, helping Rosie with her projects. Back in Mayfield he had continued looking after most of the gardens they’d started on together. His passion for rock ‘n’ roll continued – he’d even bought a guitar and learned to play it well enough to delight Rosie and his family with impersonations of Elvis Presley. He played darts in the pub, cricket in the summer, and he was supremely happy.

  Norah and Frank came up to stay for a weekend every couple of months. Michael, Alicia and the children visited for a day out every now and then. Clara, Nicholas and Robin had a week’s holiday on their own with Rosie and Thomas every Easter. Susan and Roger had two small girls now, but Rosie mainly saw them when she and Thomas went down to Mayfield.

  There were the theatre, films and concerts, meals in good restaurants, parties and fun. Hampstead was everything Rosie had ever hoped for, lively, full of interesting, off-beat characters, and yet it felt like the country. She had the man she loved, a wonderful home, and a job she never tired of.

  Now she had been offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance: an American financier called Arthur Franklin was having a mansion built in The Bishops Avenue, a road between Hampstead and Highgate often dubbed ‘Millionaires’ Row’. He wanted a splendid and ostentatious garden created, with grand terraces, pools and fountains. Money was no object; he simply wanted a garden that would amaze and delight everyone.

  She was here today to sign the contract.

  ‘I can hardly believe Arthur’s chosen me,’ Rosie said as she gulped down her sherry. She had spent the last six months, almost night and day, working on the plans. Thomas had transferred her scheme to paper, using all his artistry to convey the richness of her design and the magnificence of her dream.

  Charles looked at Rosie and smiled. He could take the credit for introducing Rosie to Arthur, for persuading him that such a small, young woman could indeed handle such a big job. He’d taken Arthur to view other gardens she had planned and created, and pointed out that though they were small projects compared with what he had in mind, her talent and imagination were obvious. But in the end it was Rosie’s personality alone which had swung it for her.

  She was dressed for the city today, in a dark green suit with a fur collar and a pert side-tilted hat. She had arrived in a taxi and her nails were blood-red talons. Anyone would take her for the owner of a chic dress shop or the wife of a rich businessman.

  But Arthur had met her for the first time when she was working in a muddy garden in Hampstead Village
, a twenty-five-year-old girl in torn dungarees and Wellingtons, with broken nails and her hands so dirty she couldn’t even shake his hand, her hair a tousled mop. Yet Arthur had been enchanted by her love of gardens, the joyful way she spoke of magnolias and Japanese maples, and he’d taken the next step to ask her to look at his vast plot of land.

  She had ridden there on a bicycle, wearing a shabby pair of men’s trousers and plimsolls on her feet. She sat down on a felled tree and asked Arthur what image he wanted to create. She hadn’t smirked at his grandiose ideas, or the fact that he didn’t know a rose from a tulip. She wanted to know about him, his dreams and aspirations. Arthur had already seen so many snooty landscape gardeners, he sensed that every one of them was laughing up their sleeve at his ideas of Corinthian pillars and grand terraces with statues in the undergrowth. He knew they thought him vulgar and pretentious, and their only reason for trying to get the contract was because of the money.

  Rosie did laugh about some of his ideas too, but with him, not at him, and she was hungry for the job, which he liked.

  ‘He chose you because he believes in you,’ Charles said. ‘He knows it will be years before the garden comes to full fruition. He’ll give you every support in getting you the more exotic materials needed and the craftsmen for the building work. But the designing and the planting will be all yours, Rosie. And you deserve such a wonderful opportunity.’

  Charles passed her the contract. As she bent forward to read it, he studied her with affection.

  Charles had been born with the proverbial silver spoon – educated at the best schools and Oxford, he then slipped happily into his father’s law firm. He had never known a moment’s hardship in his entire life. Until he encountered Rosie and Thomas at Paul Brett’s party, he had never met anyone socially outside his own privileged set. Rosie had enchanted him that first night, because she was so vivacious, warm and funny. Thomas took a little longer to get to know: he was more reserved, an observer rather than a talker. But once Charles had broken through that reserve, he found in Thomas the friend he’d always hoped for.