‘Really, Rachel, I’ve a right to put it on my door if I want to. Please go to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.’
‘I can’t go to bed. I want to talk to you.’
‘It won’t help to talk about it. There is nothing to say.’
‘There is. There is.’ Rachel was speaking with extreme difficulty. But the habit of self-control which Bampfield had given her stood her in good stead now. Her muscles taut, she was able to maintain an expression almost of indifference. Only her words had difficulty forcing their way out of her rigid mouth.
‘I had to come and ask you
‘Look here,’ interrupted Georgie, with a voice which shook with what Rachel thought to be anger. ‘Listen. You lied to me. You come to me now because you are frightened, because Chief has frightened you. Did you tell her, as you told me the other day, that no one else knew about the Chinese garden?’
‘I couldn’t betray Margaret.’
‘In other words, you lied to me?’
‘No, no. I didn’t he. Not exactly.’
Rachel sat down uninvited and put her head in her hands. Georgie stood up and moved away from her, out of range of the firelight.
‘I don’t understand,’ said Rachel. ‘Why don’t you explain to me? They must have felt love for each other, surely?’
At the moment, it was this that hammered at her mind, far more than her own predicament. ‘They must have loved each other. Couldn’t they have been forgiven? Why was it such a crime?’
‘It was nothing but nasty experimentalism,’ said Georgie.
‘You didn’t hear them – Rachel went on – ‘crying in the infirmary. It was a terrible sound. They must have loved one another to cry like that. What will they do now?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Georgie. ‘I am surprised you should be thinking about them. I hope you won’t try to communicate with them. Your letters will be intercepted.’
‘There’s nothing to say. I don’t want to write to Margaret. She probably hates me now.’
‘Then you must have known,’ said Georgie quickly.
‘If I tell you I didn’t, will you believe me?’
‘I’d rather you thought it over before making such a statement.’
Self-control even of the Bampfield quality reaches its limit. Rachel could not go on. The gulf between their understandings was too vast. There was no means of bridging such a chasm.
‘You’d better go,’ said Georgie at last. She was sympathetic now, moved by Rachel’s obvious distress. ‘You’d better go. Think it over. Don’t see me again until you’ve thought it over.’
And at the door of Rachel’s mind still stood the Judas figure, whom she would not admit, whose features she could not bring herself to equate with Georgie Murrill’s, who had promised to say nothing of the Chinese garden and had immediately betrayed the trust.
Next day, from her study window, Rachel looked down over the lime avenue to the stables, where she and Bisto had gone so often to feed Willy, and over the dark mass of the shrubbery in the heart of which lay the Chinese garden. She sat at her window most of that day. It was late in the afternoon when she saw three figures approach the bridge to the shrubbery and go over it to the locked gate. The unlocking of the gate gave them some trouble, it seemed. No doubt it was rusty after so many years of disuse. The garden and Rachel waited. One figure, that of Tarrant, pushed ahead. He was carrying something that looked like a bill-hook. The other two were Chief and Georgie Murrill.
In acute pain, Rachel saw their figures disappear under the dark leaves. Straining her eyes, she thought she could descry, every now and again, slight movements in the dark mat of branches and leaves. The ornamental ponds, though they could not actually be seen, were indicated by a small break in the density of the leaves and by lighter green of the trees and bushes that surrounded their moist shores, so there seemed to be two fairy circles on the dark carpet of the shrubbery. From the parapet outside her window where she was now leaning, Rachel thought she could see what she had never noticed before, a small pointed pinnacle, the top of the pagoda. They were there, walking round it, Chief prodding the soft wood, no doubt, with her shooting stick, Georgie looking with disgust at the boat in which she believed Rachel had witnessed and condoned, if not actually taken part in, perversities of whose nature she was even now largely ignorant. And Tarrant, what did he make of this expedition, of the dried fern in the boat, of the atmosphere of feverish curiosity and disgust?
It was almost dark now. The shadowy figures came out and locked the gate behind them. Next day, Rachel saw others, two of the estate men, and the boy with whom she had collected wood in the park, with barrows and tools. The garden was being destroyed.
Nature’s polluted:
There’s men in every secret corner of her
Doing damned wicked deeds.
Georgie Murrill’s broken trust, monstrous though it was, could now at last be accepted in the light of this final, logical destruction of the garden – accepted as part of that adult world in which Rachel had never fully recognized that Georgie had her natural place. She could turn away from it now, almost with relief, to regard the problem of her own innocence. For she was not convinced that she was not guilty. She was assailed with a horrible doubt that she had in some way encouraged this nameless vice in Margaret and Rena by her own irreligious views and critical rebelliousness.
She could not trust her own armour against the forces which were moving in to the attack. Deeply soaked in the phraseology of the psalms, she sat alone in her study, her head in her hands, and repeated over and over again:
‘“Deliver me from mine enemies, O God: defend me
from them that rise up against me.
O deliver me from the wicked doers: and save me
from the bloodthirsty men.
For lo, they he waiting for my soul: the mighty
men are gathered against me, without any offence or
fault of me, O Lord.
They run and prepare themselves without my fault:
arise thou therefore to help me, and behold.”’
The truth slowly began to clear. The bitter lamenting of Rena in the infirmary still haunted Rachel’s ears. She had loved Margaret, and that love was nothing but a dirty device. Far more than technical innocence was involved. Primal innocence, the primal innocence of Traherne’s orient and immortal wheat, was destroyed. What was whole had disintegrated. What had been perfect was irremediably stained. Rachel felt a bitterness against Margaret and Rena which strove within her against her sense of pity for their predicament. Her world had been a small one, but entire. If there was corruption, it had not appeared on the surface. If she could have advanced step by step into adulthood, her armour would have grown with her and protected her against later adversaries. But Bampfield was her armour and within it she lay naked like a white nut in its wooden shell. The walls of her fortress cracked, and in a moment she was beset.
Perhaps the bitterest thing of all was that no one came to her rescue. She was immediately cut off from her fellow prefects. She had no close friends among the girls. No one on the staff stood up in her defence. Her private coachings with Miss Naylor and Miss Burnett ceased, and she was told to work by herself for the time being. Even when she went out into the gardens, desperately tramping the lime avenues when the rest of the school was indoors, she was denied company, for the wood sheds were empty, and Punch looked away on the one occasion when she met her. She was hedged about with silence. Her study silence became a palpable oppression. She knew that she was left to prove her own innocence and felt betrayed by Bampfield itself, the setting of her misery and humiliation.
Death appeared as the one comprehending force, the one invariable and certain refuge. She realized, with awe, that he was always within call. Unable to reassemble from the ruins of her world a habitation in which to continue life, she decided to end it. She went about her business carefully. It was the third day of her agony and she was no longer enervated by doubt.
/>
She needed a rope. Her trunk was kept in her study, and with a rug and a cushion it passed for a divan. Inside was a substantial piece of box cord. She locked the study door, took out the rope and made an efficient noose and slip-knot. Behind the door were three pegs and to one of these she fixed the rope. She had to tie it with the noose nearly touching the peg, for she was tall, and the hooks had not been designed for this purpose. She then removed her school tie and undid the collar of her blouse. She put a chair against the door, mounted it, and slipped her head through the noose. Fortified by the noble words of the Stoic wife: Paete, non dolet (Paetus, it doesn’t hurt), she leaned forward a little and the noose tightened round her neck. Like a bather taking a plunge, she jumped forward and kicked over the chair. She found herself standing, with the noose drawn tight, but no more than mildly constricting her. The peg, after all, was not high enough to accommodate her.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
For being not mad, but sensible of grief,
My reasonable past produces reasons
How I may be deliver’d of these woes
And teaches me to kill or hang myself.
SHAKESPEARE
I WONDER now how it was that I recovered so quickly from this episode which brought me for a moment so close to death. For two days I had lived, virtually alone, while I searched myself to my depths to find the evil of which I was accused. The issue was one which must, I think, have driven me towards suicide in any case, but whereas, if I had indeed been guilty, I might well have made another and more successful attempt, I was now assured of my innocence; I felt the hands of Death himself had saved me, and some of the irony of that most ironic power entered into my soul, slipped easily like a lancet under my tortured skin, and relieved the agony.
I freed myself, untied the noose, and put it away in my trunk almost with affection. The absurdity, the scientific solecism, of having gone to all this trouble over slip-knots and pegs, without first finding out the drop necessary for my own height, struck me as exquisitely funny. I was keenly alive to the ludicrous. My own behaviour seemed as false and incongruous as Chief’s sermons, and the impulse to destroy myself out of proportion to the circumstances, which were simply that an untrue accusation had been levelled against me. Truth was all that mattered. If Chief didn’t believe me, was I to kill myself for it? The truth remained the truth, even if no one on earth believed it. I turned back to the psalms which had been my sole comfort during these desperate hours, and read:
O Lord, thou hast searched me out, and known me: thou knowest my down-sitting and mine up-rising; thou understandest my thoughts long before.
I copied it out very carefully and slowly in a commonplace book I kept at the time. Who it was that had searched me out and known me, I did not pause to consider. It could not have been God, since I did not believe in His existence. It may have been Truth, emerged from her well to spy out all my ways. When I had finished the reading and copying of this psalm, I went down to the prefects’ room, and had tea with them in an embarrassed silence, broken only by orders to the fags, whose bright eyes darted from one to another of us solemn owls, and speculated no doubt on the responsibility which weighed upon our youthful shoulders. After tea, I took out the cards and suggested a game of bridge. The others were shocked at my frivolity and refused. I was relieved. I was only showing off, and what I really wanted was to have the cards to myself and play patience. I longed to have my mind made up for me, or at least confirmed in its secret decision, by the issue of a game. Should I go to Chief that night and take my stand on the truth, or not? I wanted the result of the cards (for my mind was in fact already made up) in order that I might regard it, if favourable, as a sign from heaven, or if unfavourable, as a challenge to my scepticism. So I played the games my father had taught me – Les Huits and Senior Wrangler. I really do not remember whether they came out or not. About an hour after tea, I rose and left the prefects sitting in a shy and dignified silence, not knowing what to think of me or what to say to me. I suppose they took it for granted that I was guilty of at least aiding and abetting Margaret and Rena in this nameless and abominable vice. I walked resolutely to Chief’s study and told her in a few words that I was innocent. She believed me, without further question.
In Chief’s silence – in the long silence which covered that episode during the remaining year I spent at Bampfield – I grew aware of the nature of the innocence which I had affirmed confidently that night, and which was accepted so readily. For me, at last, exposed and quivering, lay the lie which ran through the whole school like a nervous system. I was proclaimed innocent. I was once more part of the body of Bampfield, which like myself was declared innocent, uncorrupted. A diseased limb had been lopped off – as I should have been excised had I been found guilty – and the body was whole again. To myself, I was not innocent. I was corrupted with knowledge. Nothing I read, nothing I witnessed, nothing I experienced, would ever again have for me the radiance, the purity, the perfection which the Chinese garden had symbolized for me. The whole regime was based on a falsehood, in which I was ineluctably involved.
Years later, many years, in fact, since I had seen it on one of my periodic visits, I found myself travelling by car quite near Bampfield, now no longer a school. As I drove, first one and then another familiar name appeared on the sign posts, Long Clare, Clare St Thomas, Colverton, Stoke, and then, suddenly – Bampfield. An extraordinary sensation of weakness came over me. I slowed up, wondered, and then drove on. As I left the lane and its signpost behind me, all the pain of this symbolic rejection of the place, the overt acknowledgment that I would never again take the Bampfield direction, pressed palpably against my throat so that I could hardly breathe. It was as if that power whom I had cheated there had thrust out his hand to remind me of his presence, in a rough, almost uncouth gesture, recalling our old acquaintance. I drove on, and slowly there was rebuilt in my mind the picture of the garden, that thought had lengthened in my heart. Bampfield had destroyed it with bill-hook and fire, yet Bampfield itself was now ashes to me, and the Chinese garden arose again, like a phoenix.
Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclosed in cinders lie.
AFTERWORD
The period between the 1928 obscenity trial of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, perhaps the most famous lesbian novel ever written, and the 1969 Stonewall Riots, the event commonly accepted as the originary moment of the international gay and lesbian liberation movement, might be called the Dark Ages of lesbian literature. The notoriety of the trial and the ensuing public outrage led to a powerful and pervasive backlash against any explicit form of lesbian self-expression in literature, art, and the media over the next four decades. Nonetheless, any number of significant lesbian fictions were published in Britain and the United States during these years, even if most of them were quickly consigned to the realm of obscurity. For many years, Rosemary Manning’s The Chinese Garden has been known to lesbian scholars as one such work from this apparently dark period; yet even within this relatively small circle of critics, the novel was more known about than actually known. After its initial publication in 1962 by Jonathan Cape in Britain and Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the United States, the novel quietly went out of print—not, however, without gaining a few admirers, including the influential critic and author Anthony Burgess, a man not always kindly disposed to the lesbian novels and novelists of the 1960s. In 1984, The Chinese Garden made a brief reappearance, thanks to Brilliance Books, a small British gay and lesbian press; but despite this effort, the novel again vanished, ironically just before the first major wave of academic lesbian criticism and its reconstruction of the forgotten and obscured history of lesbian writing.
That the memory of Manning’s novel stayed alive at all is thanks in great part to an entry in The Lesbian in Literature, a bibliography catalogued by Barbara Grier, the founder of Naiad Press, who earlier, under the pseudonym Gene Damon, was the book critic for The Ladd
er, the newsletter of the Daughters of Bilitis, the pioneering lesbian organization of the 1950s and 1960s.1 Grier’s compilation was a guide for stalwart lesbian readers in search of texts reflecting their lives and interests in a period when lesbians seemed, for all intents and purposes, invisible if not nonexistent. Tirelessly classifying any work that even remotely acknowledged female homoerotic desire, Grier ranked texts both qualitatively and quantitatively (through a code comprised of letters and asterisks) according to their respective degrees of lesbian representation. The Chinese Garden was listed as “A**,” indicating “major Lesbian characters and/or action” with “very substantial quality of Lesbian material” (xix, xx). As such, it was deemed worth a potentially arduous search of libraries and used bookstores in order to find it.
For most of the novel’s history such a search would have been necessary. In an ironic twist, The Chinese Garden, because it received little academic attention and was difficult to obtain, remained obscure and, as a consequence, went almost completely unremarked in the major works of lesbian criticism of the 1980s and 1990s. The one important exception is Terry Castle’s The Apparitional Lesbian. In elucidating her theory that, historically, “ghosting” the lesbian object of desire (i.e., disembodying her or otherwise making her unreal) has been one of the few ways in which female homoeroticism could be represented without proscription, Castle glosses Manning’s novel, among others, as a work in which “diligent ghost-hunters will find much to ponder” (59). Ghost-hunters may now rejoice.
With the publication of the Feminist Press edition, The Chinese Garden is available once more. But because the paradigms of what we expect from a lesbian text have changed so drastically in the four decades since the novel first appeared, to reintegrate it into the canon of lesbian literature—not to mention the canons of women’s writing and twentieth-century British fiction—requires a bit of recontextualization. Manning’s novel is permeated with “corruption” and “evil” in the setting of a sadomasochistic girls’ school redolent—at times, literally—of decay and decadence. Nor is the book free from a certain level of melodramatic emotionality, which is hardly surprising in a narrative concerned primarily with the feelings and actions of adolescent girls in the throes of sexual awakening. Yet for many readers at the end of the century and the beginning of a new one, this does not present a very “affirming” or “positive” representation of lesbianism or nascent womanhood—which, understandably if sadly, has become the criterion by which many judge the intrinsic worth of any lesbian text.
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