by Tim Pears
Leo looked up at the pallid sky and closed his eyes, then dropped to his knees and leaned forward, until the earth took the weight of his head, and wept. Whether for the betrayal by his friend or the loss of the horse or just his loneliness he did not know. All, probably. After a while he rose and wiped his muddy face. Leo retraced his steps back to the fire and gathered what morsels of food Wilf had left, then he turned west, and walked on.
Part Seven
THE GARDEN PARTY
1
Lottie, May–June 1914
Lottie Prideaux discovered that she was invisible by degrees, during the fifteenth year of her life. It was not a sudden revelation. She was already accustomed to passing through the rooms and along the corridors of the manor house unnoticed by the maids, or riding her horse Blaze unseen by the stable lads or farm workers, for all were busy with their chores.
When Ingrid Goettner requested a word with her employer, one day in April, the subject of their conversation stood behind the curtain in her father’s library. ‘Her studies she is neglecting, Lord Prideaux,’ Ingrid told him. ‘She is cutting up dead animals instead, and shooting birds with your under keeper, and so on and so on.’
Lord Prideaux murmured to himself, then said that he would have a word with his daughter. No doubt his cousin in Weimar would organise a more rigorous education but he assured Ingrid that he had every confidence in her in the meantime.
Neither father nor governess seemed able to see Lottie, though her feet could surely be spotted easily enough by anyone who wasn’t blind.
‘Also, she is growing prettier by the day, your lordship,’ Ingrid said. ‘Yes, it is hard to believe but she is becoming like her mother in this portrait. Lottie might have been eine hässliches entlein, but not any more. And one must not blame swans for getting up to mischief.’
*
When William Carew came to visit later the same month, Lottie remembered him well enough from the shooting party the year before last. He was a brilliant shot, but so shy that he had not said a word to anyone. Now, he told them stories of his travels in the United States of America. In the state of Montana he had shot a huge bull elk with antlers like a leafless tree. He had shot an alligator in a South Carolina swamp. The sole remnant of his old reserve was that he did not look them in the eye as he spoke but gazed elsewhere, as if he had spotted some blemish upon the ceiling, or found the stitching of the tablecloth more agreeable than their faces. He also spoke quietly, so that both lottie and her father had to lean towards him.
‘I stood on a cliff top in California,’ he said. ‘Looking down to where a whale had been beached. Dozens of grizzly bears had come to feast. They went inside the great whale to eat. When they were replete they slept on the beach, until their hunger returned.’
Perhaps Mr Carew had acquired the art not merely of conversation but of exaggeration, too. Lottie wondered why he was visiting. After lunch she changed her clothes and stalked the men as they walked through the garden, listening to her father explain how many farms there were upon the estate, what arable or grazing land each farm possessed, how many sheep or cattle. Perhaps they caught a glimpse of someone in the vicinity but, absorbed in their tedious conversation, merely took her for the gardener’s boy.
*
The girl knew that she possessed a talent for stealth. But it was on Sunday the third of May in the year 1914 that she believed herself to be entirely invisible, through no agency of her own, while seated in the drawing-room taking tea with her father and Alice Grenvil. Her father said that he had never been happier in his entire life. Alice said neither had she but she did not believe it out of the question that further happiness yet lay in wait.
‘In fact, dear Arthur,’ she said, ‘I believe it likely.’
‘Our wedding, my darling,’ he said, ‘shall be attended by our friends and relations, of course, but I should like to throw a party to mark our engagement for all the people of the estate, to share with them this propitious event. In a certain sense the news is as good for them and their future as it is for myself.’
Alice said she thought this was about the most thoughtful gesture she had ever heard of. She would be glad should this be the first of many parties, in this beautiful house, of which she would be the proud hostess.
Lottie crunched ginger biscuits, apparently making no noise, and listened in disbelief as her father said how much he enjoyed attending the theatre and that he looked forward to many such visits with Alice on jaunts to the capital. How could he have uttered this brazen lie unless he was unaware of the presence of his daughter, who might reveal it for what it was?
‘Would anyone like a refill?’ Lottie asked, lifting the teapot. Both of the others said that they would, waving vaguely at their cups and saucers as they might to a maid.
‘And I,’ said Alice, ‘look forward to getting to know all your horses, Arthur. Your noble steeds.’
2
All the farms on the estate spread the precious manure from their animals upon the fields, but a number of cartloads had to be delivered to the big house, as the gardener demanded. Then he and his under gardener and the gardener’s boy dug the muck into the vegetable and the flower beds.
The gardener Mister Satterley was much envied for his independence by the other workers on the estate, for the manor’s garden was unaltered since the death of Lady Prideaux. His Lordship did not interfere. Mister Satterley had been liberated from oversight. The garden was immaculate. Terraced lawns led from the back of the house into shrubberies and woodland. The flower beds were shaped into crescents and stars and featured plants of different colours blooming all at once. Small tight clumps of blue lobelia, pale yellow calceolaria, scarlet verbena. Pink geraniums flourished in stone urns. The steps down to the second terrace were festooned with aubrietia and alyssum cascading down each side. The lawns were mown constantly, or so it seemed to Lottie, for any time she looked out of a window one of the gardeners was clipping an edge or pulling the roller or riding the Ransomes’ New Automaton like some parody of a carter cutting the hay.
The garden looked just as it must have done in 1899. ‘This be how your mother liked it,’ Mister Satterley told Lottie. ‘And this be how it is.’ Alf Satterley was a dour bachelor of less than medium height but so straight a back as to make up an inch or two. He wore an old grey suit and tie. From a distance he might be mistaken for a gentleman amusing himself, but the closer one came to him the more ragged one saw his clothes to be. Yet he was always clean-shaven, his neat moustache freshly clipped. On his head was a scruffy cloth cap the girl could not remember him ever removing, not even while conversing with her father.
Since Mister Satterley allowed no innovation in his domain, so his under gardener and the boy had become accustomed to the yearly calendar of tasks. There was little need for communication beyond terse orders at the beginning of each day, so that Lottie thought of them as monk-like, silent members of some closed order of gardeners, their days spent in prayer. What could be more conducive to contemplation of the Lord’s creation than wheeling barrowloads of seedlings from the greenhouses or mowing the lawns, endlessly, to and fro?
Alf Satterley had no friendships to speak of at the manor, yet he had a soft spot for the girl. Her earliest memories were of being pushed in his wheelbarrow on a bed of pungent grass clippings. When her cousins came at Christmas he patrolled his garden and shooed them off into the woods, yet once they had gone Lottie returned, and to the incredulity of the members of the household she would chase her hoop deep into the flower beds with no reprimand. Flowers were sent to the house each morning in flat baskets. Two china vases, each with a fresh bouquet, were taken upstairs. One for the mantelpiece in the girl’s bedroom, the other for that of her great-grandmama, lying motionless the day long in her bed.
3
‘You looks like you stepped out of a bandbox, Miss Charlotte.’
Lottie looked at her reflection in the mirror, seeing a girl with but a passing resemblance to herself. She w
as dressed in a long white gown, with a huge hat upon her head and a feather boa wrapped around her neck.
‘Then I should prefer to step right back in,’ she said.
The maid Gladys approached her with a hatpin, but Lottie said that was quite enough for now and divested herself of this uncomfortable attire. Gladys laid the dress upon the bed and marvelled aloud at its beauty.
‘It’s easy for you to harbour such an opinion,’ Lottie said. ‘You don’t have to wear it. I shall have it filthy within minutes.’
Gladys shook her head. ‘You must not, Miss Charlotte,’ she said.
‘I shall.’
She had gone with Alice to London for each of them to be fitted with dresses for both engagement party and wedding, at which the girl was to be a bridesmaid. She believed herself as much corrupted by the role as honoured. Gladys said that she would love to visit London again, as she had when they went to the Derby last year. Once was not enough. Lottie said that she herself wished never to go again.
‘For two days the city was shrouded in a thick yellow fog,’ she said. ‘If I held my arm out in front of me, I could not see my fingers. The Grenvils closed all their windows but still the curtains and furniture were covered in greasy dirt. All the silver and brass was tarnished.’ Lottie pointed to the ceiling. ‘If you looked up you could see a black film had settled on the mouldings. And when you thought about it, you realised that we had to breathe these foul vapours into our lungs, Gladys. Along with the smell of gas. Their entire house is lit by gas, which I hope we shall never have here.’
The maid took other items of attire out of the wardrobes and chests of drawers. Each one was held up and Lottie shook her head to indicate that it should not be thrown away or else nodded to confirm that it was something she had grown out of.
‘I fear Alice will try to move Papa up to London,’ she said. ‘Especially once I’m sent to Germany and am no longer here to protect him. Oh, don’t look so rattled, Gladys, he’d never give up the estate. But I can see her parading in the park every Sunday after tea, with Papa on her arm.’
‘And little ones in a pram soon enough, with a bit of luck.’
‘Stop it!’ Lottie cried. ‘Oh, you should see those awful parks, Gladys. The Londoners make so much of them but they’re pathetic imitations of our countryside, only they have metal railings instead of wooden fences or hedges. The bark of the poor trees is black and the sheep are weighed down by grimy, sooty fleeces.’ She stopped, and frowned. ‘The only good thing is the damp pleasant smell after water-carts have sprayed the dusty paths.’
When they had finished sorting through Lottie’s clothes the neatly folded stack of discards stood waist-high. ‘To whom will you give those?’ she asked. ‘Shall we take them to the poor of the parish?’ She shuddered and said, ‘That was another thing I noticed in London – beggars everywhere. Much worse than last year. In doorways. Outside shops, theatres. We went to the restaurant in Debenham and Freebody’s, Gladys. One beggar accosted us on the way in, another on the way out.’
Gladys explained that such clothes formed part of the junior staff’s salary. They would pass them on to their families. Their mothers would make them up for themselves and the children.
Lottie asked whether there were other such hand-me-downs. Gladys said that there were.
‘Such as what?’
‘Tea leaves, Miss Charlotte.’
Lottie asked what she meant and Gladys said, ‘Tea is made for the drawing-room, miss, then after that tis watered down for the kitchen. Cook likes a brew and so does Mister Score.’
‘Well, and why shouldn’t they?’ Lottie said. ‘They both work very hard, they deserve an occasional restitution. I see nothing wrong with it.’
‘Then the leaves is dried and given to Missis Budgell, the gamekeeper’s wife, for Mister Budgell likes his tea and all. Bones is another thing.’
Lottie asked what a person would want with bones.
Gladys gathered the clothes in a pile. ‘When Cook’s made soup,’ she said, ‘her’ll wrap up what’s left in the stockpot and give em to one of us if we’re goin home to visit. The same with hambones or beefbones.’
The maid lifted the clothes in one great armful, and bore them away.
4
‘Lottie, darling,’ Alice Grenvil said, ‘would you introduce me to the gardener?’
Alice wore white gloves and a wide hat tied with a chiffon veil under her chin. They walked out of the French windows and across the stone-flagged terrace onto the upper lawn. The gardener’s boy was digging out moss from between the steps down to the lower lawn. Lottie asked him where Mister Satterley was. The boy said that he believed the gaffer was in the greenhouse. Lottie turned to go in the direction of the walled garden at the southern side of the house but Alice put a hand upon her arm and said to the boy, ‘Fetch him for us, would you?’
The boy put down his trowel and stiff brush and walked away. Lottie sat down on a step and Alice said, ‘Yes, there are no seats here.’
Lottie looked around. ‘Where?’ she asked.
‘It is remarkably bare, isn’t it? A garden is a place where visitors should be able to find a pleasant spot in which to read or draw or simply enjoy the view.’
‘Papa and I don’t have many visitors,’ Lottie told her.
‘Or a quiet sheltered place for conversation, in greater privacy than in the house.’
Lottie pointed across the lower lawn to the shrubbery and wood. ‘We’ve got the jungle,’ she said. ‘I must have made a hundred dens in there.’
‘Dens are indeed for children,’ Alice said. ‘Places of repose are something rather different.’
Alf Satterley came walking out of the door in the wall. He did not cut diagonally across the lawn towards them, but took the path and thus the two sides of the triangle, his boots crunching on the gravel.
Lottie rose. ‘Hello, Mister Satterley,’ she said when he reached them.
‘Miss Charlotte,’ he said.
‘This is Miss Alice Grenvil,’ she told him. ‘To whom my papa is to be married.’
The gardener did not doff his cap nor bend forward an inch in deference as he said, ‘Honoured, miss.’
Alice untied the chiffon and pulled it from her hat and looked at the gardener. Lottie judged that his eyes were at the same level as Alice’s.
‘I was just saying to dear Lottie,’ she said, ‘what a wonderful job you have done here, Mister Satterley.’
‘Thank you, miss,’ he said.
Alice turned and gestured with a sweep of her arm to indicate the lawns and beds all around them. ‘It is in such gloriously regimented order. Which gives it something of the nature of a blank canvas, do you not think?’
Mister Satterley frowned and said he did not quite follow Miss Grenvil’s tack.
‘You have done all the donkey work, Mister Satterley, have you not?’ Alice said. ‘What Herculean labours must have gone into creating this.’ She shook her head, as if it were not possible fully to articulate her admiration. ‘No,’ she said, ‘one could really do something with this garden.’
The gardener said nothing nor did his expression change. He stared back at the young woman addressing him, though she was no longer looking at him but rather gazing around the garden.
‘A lily pond, for example, rimmed with rushes,’ Alice suggested. ‘In the middle of this lower lawn. A low brick wall around it, with all sorts of spiky plants, and goldfish swimming in the water.’ Alice furrowed her brow, indicating the profound intellectual effort being made behind it. ‘Break it up, you see, Mister Satterley. Remove a few of those trees over there, place a seat beneath a pergola with a view to the countryside beyond. Or over here,’ she said, pointing along the path so that the gardener had to turn to appreciate her vision, ‘create an alley of wooden arches with roses climbing all over them.’
Alice paused, to let the loveliness of what she proposed sink in. Lottie said nothing. She watched Mister Satterley. He turned slowly back to face Alice G
renvil. Lottie could not tell what he would say, or do, and waited. But before he might respond, Alice said, ‘Of course, such things are for the future, no doubt. Ignore them, Mister Satterley. Disregard my fanciful proposals. No, I am merely a messenger. Lord Prideaux wished to have your opinion on where to place the marquee. On the lower lawn, of course, but on this side, up against the hornbeam hedge, or on that side towards the stables?’
The gardener surveyed this section of his domain with narrowed eyes. He turned back to Alice. ‘I should say, miss, that his lordship may have the marquee whichever side you prefer. Please excuse me. I’d best be back to work.’
Mister Satterley turned and walked away along the same route by which he’d come. Lottie watched him go, leaning forward a little as if into a faint wind. When she turned back she saw that Alice had left her, and was walking across the upper lawn towards the house.
5
On the morning of the day before the party the timber and ropes and canvas of a white marquee were delivered by waggon, and four men armed with mallets began to erect it. A convoy of waggons arrived, some bringing trestle tables and folding chairs, others food. Lottie gazed at the list pinned to the kitchen wall. 150 lbs of beef. 90 lbs of ham. 8lbs of poultry.
‘Someone must be free,’ said Cook.
2 cwt of potatoes. 50 lbs of apples. 70 lbs of cherries. 80 lbs of mixed fruit.
