The balanced life of authority, physical work and intellectual discovery was at least temporarily so satisfying that Rachel hardly felt her isolation from her fellows. But to Bisto the position was intolerable. Cut off from Rachel, her worried face assumed an air of perpetual and unassuageable grief. Bampfield, which she had always hated, now held for her the horrors of a concentration camp. Her work, never brilliant, became almost moronic, and her behaviour so erratic and absent-minded that she was perpetually in the hands of Miss Christian Lucas. Bisto was, however, at least in Rachel’s house. It was still possible to speak to her during the informal house dance every Friday night. She could see Rachel when she was on ‘lights’ duty as a prefect and had to parade the dormitories. If it was no more than a few words she spoke, they were a comfort to the unhappy Bisto.
‘How’s Willy?’ asked Rachel one night, idly. Bisto’s eyes filled.
‘I haven’t seen him for ages. I expect he’s dead,’ she replied. ‘I don’t like going down to the stables by myself.’ Rachel switched off the light abruptly and closed the door. It was not possible to discuss the matter. Out in the darkened passage she paused for a moment, thinking of afternoons spent with Bisto in the stables; hours in the secret paths with Margaret, smoking and talking; long walks outside the park during the previous autumn when they raided orchards and lay against warm ricks, munching stolen fruit. It all seemed very far away. Of Margaret Rachel saw nothing now. She was in another house and their paths seldom crossed. But Rachel began to notice that the grass at the spot where Margaret entered the shrubbery was well trodden down. It looked as if she had been there a good many times this term, and she wondered a little that their visits had never coincided.
One fine morning in June, when the sun was drawing up a pale vapour from the marshy park, Rachel came away from her coaching with Miss Naylor, carrying Coleridge’s poems under her arm, and ‘Xanadu’ in her head.
‘Where Alph the sacred river ran …’ she repeated to herself, and the words brought to her mind the stream running through the Chinese garden. The broken pagoda glittered again with gilt and colour and copper bells, and the ornamental bridges glowed between the ferns and berberis.
‘I must go there this afternoon,’ she thought, and absented herself from games, ostensibly to go for a walk.
There was no one about. With a distaste for Margaret’s well-worn track, she entered the shrubbery from almost the opposite side. She undid the wire, pulled out a paling and began to force her way through the cool, damp undergrowth. There was no path, of course, and amid new-growing brambles and pithy elders, she lost her way. At one moment she paused and heard in the silence the faint trickle of water. ‘Alph, the sacred river,’ she murmured and turned towards it. She came out of the undergrowth on the side of the lake where the river carried its water out towards the fence again. Some confused memory of Greek tradition mingled with Kubla Khan in her mind, and she stooped on the bank of the stream and scooped some of the water up into her hands. She wetted her forehead, drank a sip of the water, and poured the rest out ceremoniously on the ground, as a libation to the gods of the place.
She was astonished and moved by the powerful effect of this sudden emergence upon the well-known scene. Her mind full of ‘Xanadu’, she felt her armour drop from her and knew herself willingly vulnerable to the assault of this strange world where poetry was ‘felt in the blood and felt along the heart’. She lay down in the long grass at the side of the pool. A little above her, if she inclined her head, she could see the drooping eaves of the pagoda. There was the bridge, and beyond it the green surface of the second pool, with its weeping willow and boathouse. There was no wind. Birds were busy in the trees and bushes. The scent of earth, broken by rising shoots, the warm aromatic smell of the berberis, the vivid, incongruous carving of the bridges, set down amid quiet elders and moss, all were caught up in a web of poetry. The garden seemed to hang in mid-air like Coleridge’s sunny dome. In this compelling reality, Bampfield seemed no more than a dream.
She began to read, turning over the pages of the complete Coleridge she had brought–Kubla Khan, Frost at Midnight, This Lime-tree Bower my Prison, and then … Christabel:
‘And in my dream methought I went
To search out what might there be found;
And what the sweet bird’s trouble meant,
That thus lay fluttering on the ground.
I went and peered, and could descry
No cause for her distressful cry;
But yet for her dear lady’s sake
I stooped methought the dove to take…’
She heard the sound of branches being pushed aside and looked up to see Margaret emerging from the undergrowth near her. No thought of their school relationship entered her mind. Margaret was caught up as easily as Christabel, and with hardly a greeting to her she went on reading, as though both had a right to the garden. It was Margaret who was disconcerted. She stared at Rachel, and after a moment came up to her and looked over her shoulder.
‘“When lo! I saw a bright green snake
Coiled around its wings and neck.
Green as the herbs on which it couched,
Close by the dove’s its head it crouched;
And with the dove it heaves and stirs,
Swelling its neck as she swelled hers!
I woke; it was the midnight hour,
The clock was echoing in the tower;
But though my slumber was gone by,
This dream it would not pass away –
It seems to live upon my eye!”’
Margaret was reading the words aloud, and she added, ‘I didn’t know you came here. I suppose Chief’s given you the key?’ She sounded annoyed.
‘No, I get in like you do. Through the fence.’
Margaret’s eyes brightened. ‘But – you’re a prefect!’
‘It doesn’t count here. Forget it.’
‘I won’t say anything.’ There was an urgency in Margaret’s voice.
‘It never occurred to me that you would.’
‘Rachel, do read me some more of that poem.’
‘Don’t you know it?’ asked Rachel.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Margaret, sitting down beside her on the moss. ‘At any rate, I don’t recognize that bit. Read it to me.’
‘It’s rather long,’ answered Rachel. ‘I don’t mind reading a part of it, though.’
She began near the end, reading the verses which describe Bracy’s dream.
‘“A snake’s small eye blinks dull and shy;
And the lady’s eyes they shrunk in her head,
Each shrunk up to a serpent’s eye,
And with somewhat of malice, but more of dread,
At Christabel she looked askance! –
One moment – and the sight was fled!
But Christabel in dizzy trance
Stumbling on the unsteady ground
Shuddered aloud, with a hissing sound;
And Geraldine again turned round,
And like a thing that sought relief,
Full of wonder and full of grief,
She rolled her large bright eyes divine
Wildly on Sir Leoline.”’
Absorbed, Rachel read on, unaware of Margaret’s face, so close beside her own. She shut the book, and looked up. ‘There, that’s all. He never finished it.’
‘It could have happened here, couldn’t it?’ said Margaret. ‘If the pagoda were a castle? One can imagine it. I found a grass snake here in the autumn, just like the one in the poem. Why do they look so evil? They’re beautiful, yet they’re evil.’
Margaret was pulling up the moss in tufts as she spoke, and filling one palm with the green feathers. Clenched in her hand, they looked like the tousled body of a dead green bird.
‘Rachel, tell me why the most beautiful things are often evil?’
‘I don’t know that they are.’
‘I do.’
‘This garden isn’t. It’s perfect, in a ruin
ed, desolate way. I can’t see that it’s evil.’
‘Yet I found a snake in it,’ said Margaret.
‘A snake isn’t really evil.’
‘It’s a symbol of evil. And it’s an omen. You’ll see. They’ll find us out and then they’ll tear back the fence and admit evil – they’ll turn it all into something foul.’
Rachel did not know what to reply to this. She had never thought very seriously about the problem of evil. Indeed, her rebellious atheism, propped up by classical reading, inclined her to regard evil as a creation of the Church.
‘Where did you find the snake?’ she asked, her curiosity aroused. ‘He ought to be awake now. I’d love to see him.’
‘He was near the pagoda,’ answered Margaret. ‘He probably went to sleep under the floorboards for warmth.’
‘Let’s go and look,’ said Rachel, and they climbed the rotting wooden steps up to the little building.
‘Perhaps if he hears our footsteps he’ll come out.’
Rachel made a noise with her feet, and the two girls walked slowly round the pagoda, tapping the wooden sides and knocking the floor softly. But no snake appeared.
‘Perhaps,’ said Margaret, ‘it’s a she-snake and once was a kind of Christabel. She lived at Bampfield and used to come here to meet her lover and then as they swooned in each other’s arms in ecstasy, she dropped down to the floor, a snake, and glided away into the undergrowth.’
‘Why should she?’ asked Rachel, in whom the stream of poetry set flowing by Christabel was now only trickling slowly. ‘Why on earth should she?’
‘Because,’ said Margaret slowly, ‘her love was evil in the eyes of the world.’
Rachel looked at her watch. ‘Oh, lord, it’s time I was getting back.’
‘Rachel, will you come again?’
‘I expect so,’ said Rachel warily. She did. not wish to commit herself to clandestine meetings with Margaret.
‘Can I meet you here?’
Yes, she might have known Margaret would extract that. Rachel moved awkwardly away from her, aware suddenly of the intrusion of school into this enchanted place.
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Oh, God, you are stuffy!’ cried Margaret angrily, and Rachel felt ashamed and hurt. ‘As if I’d tell anyone we met. I never see you. You are the only person in this lousy hole that I can talk to, that can talk intelligently.’
‘Well, if you go on coming here,’ said Rachel, ‘I suppose we’re bound to meet.’
‘Please meet me, next week at this time.’
‘Why are you here, anyway?’ asked Rachel, suspiciously, the prefect in her rising up.
‘Oh, I got out of games,’ said Margaret evasively.
‘I must go,’ said Rachel. Something was threatening the garden. She was no longer at ease there. It became an urgent matter to get out.
‘Look, we can’t be seen going back together. You go first,’ she said to Margaret, ‘otherwise you’ll be late for something.’
Margaret disappeared down the path and Rachel turned her back on her and looked across the green lake. At one corner stood the derelict boathouse and a shallow boat still lay within it, embedded in mud. She had never explored it. She walked slowly over to it, wondering if the boat could by any chance be floated again. When she reached it, she was surprised to see that it was quite clean inside, and that someone had made a bed of dried fern in the bottom of it. But it would never be floated, she thought. The planks were rotten and one side broken down almost to the duckboards. If the water had not drained away to the lake, leaving it much shallower than its original state, the boat would have been under water. For a moment, Rachel stood looking down at it, wondering at the dried ferns. Then she packed up her books into a leather case and made her way to the fence.
That evening was the weekly house dance. As always, Bisto claimed Rachel for a number. It was the high spot of the week for her, the only moment when she could talk to Rachel and forget that she was a prefect.
‘Margaret cut games today,’ she began conversationally, as they waltzed slowly round the room, while the pianist thumped out ‘When you and I were Seventeen’.
‘Yes,’ said Rachel, without thinking.
‘Did you know?’ asked Bisto quickly.
Rachel recovered herself. ‘I heard the others talking about it. Did she get into a row?’
‘She’s got P.D. for it tomorrow.’
‘Poor devil!’
‘I’ve got it too,’ said Bisto miserably.
Rachel looked down at her, moved for a moment with sympathy and some of her old tenderness for the faithful, anxious creature.
‘You’ve got it? Oh, lord, Bisto, I suppose Christian will take it out on you.’
‘I suppose so. And you won’t be there. It wasn’t so bad when you were there too, or at least free to meet me afterwards.’
‘Ah, that’s one of the blessings of being a prefect. No P.D.’
‘Do you enjoy being a prefect?’
Rachel felt slightly uncomfortable. Bisto was too much like her conscience. She did enjoy being a prefect. Alas, she enjoyed all the wrong things. The dance came to an end, and Rachel went off to dance with a fellow prefect, thoughtful and a little depressed, remembering with regret the old days of feeding Willy in the stables, strolling in the shrubbery paths, and smoking in the corn bins in the evening.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The summer is ended and we are not saved.
JEREMIAH
RACHEL was beginning to be conscious of a split which ran right across her world, like a brown crack in a plate. The garden now became more and more a necessity to her and she visited it almost with a sense of urgency, as though any message it had for her must be sought now or lost for ever. The garden itself was changed. It was very lush, and overgrown with new shoots. There hung over it a rich, rather sickly smell that came from the many fungi growing in the mossy earth, and between the cracks in the boards of the pagoda and bridges. Something of the corruption of Bampfield itself had soaked down into the red earth and was drawn up again in the vapours which wrapped the shrubbery in the early morning and evening during that hot, damp July, as though veiling it from the world’s eyes for some secret and appalling rite.
One afternoon, when Rachel was standing near the boat-house, she noticed that the stern timbers had fallen off the punt, and someone – Margaret presumably – had stacked them neatly against the boat’s side. The fern in the bottom had been recently renewed. After a moment’s hesitation, she stepped in and lay down on it, propping herself on one elbow to read.
She found it difficult to give her attention to the page. The garden was full of sounds, and her heightened sensibilities were alive to each one. She stirred restlessly, and for the first time since she had come there, felt herself afraid of intrusion. She had deliberately avoided meeting Margaret again, and assumed that she, like herself, had taken the trouble to find out times when it was impossible for them to meet. Ill at ease, she felt compelled at last to leave the boathouse.
It was then that she saw Margaret sitting on the steps of the pagoda.
‘I’ve been watching you for some time,’ said Margaret.
‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘You were reading. I didn’t want to interrupt. The boat’s comfortable, isn’t it?’
‘Very. I suppose you often lie in it.’
‘Not often. But sometimes. We haven’t met for ages, Rachel. Have you tried to avoid me?’
Rachel said nothing.
‘I want to talk to you badly sometimes. And this is the only place one can escape to.’
Helplessly, Rachel saw the indefinable magic of the garden being reduced to the mere status of an escape from school. Was it no more than this to Margaret?
‘Have you read this yet?’ asked Margaret suddenly, and held out a book. Rachel looked at the title. It was Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t.’
‘I’ve
nearly finished it. I bought it in the holidays. I keep it in the pagoda, in a box.’
A series of images began slowly to draw together in a pattern, incomprehensible as yet – the fern-strewn boat, the book in the pagoda, the picture of Cleopatra, the green snake.
‘Will you read it if I leave it here?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Rachel.
‘You ought to read it. It’s a marvellous book.’
‘It’s getting near the end of the term. I’ve a lot of reading to do. I don’t think I’ll have time.’
‘Well, I’ll leave it there,’ said Margaret. ‘Please read it.’
‘I can’t promise,’ said Rachel uncomfortably. ‘I’ve got such a hell of a lot to do.’
She rose, anxious to prevent Margaret from saying anything further. When she looked back from the edge of the pool, Margaret was walking slowly over towards the boathouse, reading as she went.
Rachel did not go to the garden again that summer term. She threw herself into her work and her prefect’s duties with immense energy. She tried to see Bisto whenever she could, for it was her last term. She was leaving early to finish her education abroad. Rachel realized with a pang that she was going to miss her. So many of her contemporaries were going either that term or next. She herself would shortly be a house captain, and most of the prefects would be younger than her. There was the staff, of course, with some of whom, by virtue of her age and her special university work, she was on fairly intimate terms, but there were few that she liked really well.
The prospect of eight weeks away from Bampfield endeared the place to her, and brought her back on to old, familiar terms with it. She made two or three surreptitious expeditions with Bisto to various haunts, especially to Willy, who was left enough food (at the expense of almost a total dinner) to last him, it was hoped, for at least three weeks.
The Chinese Garden Page 11
