A ride is easier to come by than I would have thought. A Canadian captain is picking up one of his men at the station—the soldier who was seated several rows in front of me on the train.
“Give you a lift, ma’am?” he asks me. I am dragging my bags across the station platform, the effort of this taking so much time that there is now no one on the station platform except for the soldiers and myself.
“Thank you, yes. I’m going to Mosel.”
“That’s easy, then. So are we.” The captain is tall and fair-haired. When he bends down to grab my bags there is a faint murmur of alcohol on his breath.
“What are you doing there?” I say, rather rudely, I know, but I had been told only that the estate had been requisitioned for food production. There had been no mention of soldiers.
The fair-haired Canadian heaves my bags into the rear of the motor car. “We’re billeted there,” he says, holding the door open for me. “In the house. Waiting to be posted. And you?” He looks at me then, really looks at me, and I lower my eyes.
“Posted,” I say. It sounds better than saying I volunteered. “I have come down from London to supervise the gardens.”
“You’re with the Land Girls, then?” He shuts the door on me and lets himself into the driver’s seat. “There’s quite a pack of them up there already.”
“But they weren’t meant to arrive until next week.” I was supposed to have had time to inspect the grounds and formulate a work schedule. “They’re not meant to be there at all.”
“Well, then, they’re imposters, but there are certainly some Land Girls on the estate,” the captain says cheerfully. The soldier from the train climbs into the front passenger seat and we begin our drive away from the station, up the long, winding hill to Mosel.
The estate is larger and more separate from the small town than I had imagined. I am glad I didn’t attempt to walk when I see the long steep hill that leads towards it. There is a river at the bottom of the hill. I think of Mrs. Woolf. “There’s a river,” I say, rather pointlessly.
“Stream,” says the fair-haired soldier, who has just told me his name is Raley.
“Brook,” says the other one. This is the first word he’s spoken since getting off the train.
“That’s because he’s from Newfoundland,” says Raley. “Right, David?” He nudges his fellow soldier with his elbow.
“Well, it is a brook,” says David again. “I can’t help it if you’ll be getting it wrong, Captain Raley. Sir,” he adds as an afterthought.
I bristle a little at the insubordination, but Raley just grins.
Ascending from the river, elms line the sides of the driveway. Through them I can see the tidy fields. Beyond the fields, woods. The elms have been very purposefully planted to funnel the gaze forward up the rise of hill, up and up into the angled blue sky.
“Here you go, then.” Raley stops the car abruptly, and both David and I lurch forward in our seats and then lurch backwards again.
We have stopped in front of a stone archway. Through the archway I can see a clipped square of lawn, what must be the centre of a quadrangle.
Raley carries my bags effortlessly out of the car and deposits them on the cobbles under the arch. “Shall I bring them in for you, ma’am?” He is unfailingly polite. I can’t tell how genuine he is from this one brief meeting, but I am grateful for his care of me.
“Thank you, but I think I can manage from here.” The truth is that although I am tired from my journey, I want to see this place for the first time by myself. “And if I can’t, I’ll find an imposter to assist me.”
Raley smiles at me. “Come and see us sometime,” he says. “We’re just up the hill.” He is very handsome and he knows it. I can tell that. He is the kind of man who gets pleasure out of watching himself be chivalrous and charming to an unattractive older woman.
“Thank you.” I shake his hand, which is clean and strong. No dirt under his nails.
“Good luck, then.” Raley waves as he gets back into the motorcar. David has remained in the passenger seat throughout our little farewell, looking straight ahead and clutching his small rucksack to his chest. He does not appear overjoyed to be back at Mosel.
I leave my bags on the cobbles and step through the archway into sudden sunlight, and my first look at the place that will change my life forever.
Everything is larger than was expected. I stand on the strict, flat lawn. To the right is a two-storey wing, windows at regular intervals. To my left is a small barn, and attached to that, running the whole left side of the quadrangle, are low, stone stables. Ahead, at the bottom of the quad, is a fancier version of what is on the right-hand side, which must have been apartments or rooms for the employees of the stables and gardens. The gardens are nowhere in sight.
There is a gravel path around the grassy rectangle. All along the edges of the path, up against the grey stone of the buildings, I can see what is left of an impressive mixed border.
This estate was originally made to function very efficiently. A closed world of human industry. The odd thing about standing here now is that I am the only person in this courtyard. Where is everyone? Perhaps that soldier was wrong about his sightings of the Women’s Land Army.
I abandon my luggage and go in search of people, starting with the grander portion of the quad opposite me, across the stretch of lawn. Each of the stone steps up to the heavy wooden doorway is worn in the middle into a smooth hollow. All those years of weight in the same place, like a promise kept and kept and kept.
There’s no one to be found in this building. Downstairs there’s an enormous kitchen. Upstairs a cavernous dining hall with a massive fireplace at one end and huge, leaded windows, as grand as a church’s. I stand at one of the windows and look out over what seems to be the gardens. Overgrown yews take up the foreground. Beyond the yews I can see the large enclosed rectangle of what must be a kitchen garden. There is a tangle of greenery over the brick walls. The grounds are much bigger than I had originally supposed. All around the kitchen garden are clusters of shrubs, signs perhaps of other smaller gardens. There are hills and hollows to the right. To the left, the flat scrape of fields leading down to the river.
For an estate of this size, there must be an orchard. I scan the landscape around the kitchen garden for the telltale twist of apple trees, but there is so much untended and overgrown that I cannot single out any fruit trees from the mess of trees and shrubs.
I keep remembering that Virginia Woolf died. But it didn’t actually say died in that article in the Times. It said presumed, which means they have not found the body. Her body.
The sun emerges from behind a cloud and anchors the great, unruly yews to the lawn by their shadows.
There must be a way that the dining hall connects to the west wing, but I can’t find it and have to go back outside to re-enter the right side of the quadrangle. The first floor of the long, stone building is broken up into various useful areas—vast cupboards containing linens and blankets, a laundry, a room full of coal scuttles. Upstairs are lavatories, two baths—one at each end of the lengthy hallway—and a series of bedrooms. All the bedrooms appear to be under ownership. I open the door of each room and see clothes strewn over the furniture or hung neatly in the wardrobes. In one of the rooms there’s a stuffed animal on the bed, a rather threadbare dog with a single glass eye in its plush head. Another of the rooms contains yards of fabric draped over a chair. Silk. I touch the soft slipperiness of it and think of the flicker of sleeve I glimpsed this morning from the taxi. The sleeve. The hand.
I move down the hallway. There’s a room with music books, and a room with a very neatly made bed. Beside the bed, on a small white table, is a photograph of a young man in an RAF uniform. He has his arms crossed in a casual manner, but his face is unsmiling, and has a hungry look that could be tiredness, or fear. I don’t know why I do it, but I touch his face with my finger, gently, the way one touches something very delicate. The thin crepe skin of a poppy. A winegl
ass with a spidery web of lines breaching its surface.
Finally, near the end of the hall, at the part of the building that is closest to where the Canadian soldiers dropped me and where my luggage still waits, there is an empty room. There’s a wardrobe and a dresser, a basin, a bed near the dormer window that looks down into the courtyard and beyond to the stables opposite. There’s a small fireplace and a great arch of old timber that obviously supports the roof. It is carved up and battered, as though it grew here, open to the elements, long before there was a building for it to hold up.
I open the dresser drawers and the wardrobe doors. Nothing. I stand in the centre of this room, which might, if unclaimed, be mine, and notice that there’s a particular odour. The room smells as though it has recently been on fire, although there’s no physical evidence anywhere to support this. But the smell of burning is unmistakable. I go out into the hall, where it smells like a normal musty, damp building, and then go back into the room where it smells like scorched wood.
Out in the hall again, I finally see another human being—a young woman, hurtling at great speed towards me.
“Hello,” I say. She skids to a stop. She is small and dark, slight, under a layer of jerseys.
“Hello,” she says. “You’re new.” She doesn’t wait for me to answer, peers into my new room. “Oh, right,” she says. “No one wanted this one. It stinks.”
“What happened?”
The jersey girl shrugs. “Mystery,” she says. “Human sacrifice. Cooking gone disastrously wrong.”
It’s all a mystery. Where anyone is. Who they are. Why nothing has aligned with the written information I received when I volunteered for this position.
“Who are you, then?” I say. I have lost patience with all this.
“Jane.” She looks hard at me, meeting my impatience with a certain strictness of her own. “Who are you?”
“Gwen Davis. From the Royal Horticultural Society.”
“The Royal what?”
“Horticultural Society.” I say it very slowly, as though I’m talking to an imbecile. I can’t believe she hasn’t heard of it. We’re famous. Our reputation extends all over the world. At least, I think it does.
“What did you do there? At the Horticultural Society.” She draws out every syllable of the last two words, mimicking me.
“I was working for the Fruits and Vegetables Committee.”
“Doing what?”
“Trying to find a cure for parsnip canker.”
The truth is that I was nowhere near a cure of any sort. This is part of the reason I wanted the job here, taking charge of the wartime agricultural production of a requisitioned country estate, because I was failing so abysmally at my real work. For months now I had been meticulously observing parsnip canker. I had made copious notes. I had many specimens. But I could not bridge the chasm between my long row of parsnips in the laboratory, all in various stages of fetid death, and the remedy that might exist for all this rotted vegetable flesh on the opposite shore of science. Or miracle.
Jane looks at me, then suddenly grins and skips quickly down the staircase.
“Dinner’s at seven,” she calls up from the bottom. “Sorry about your cancer.”
4
The best gardens are a perfect balance of order and chaos. The tension created by this constantly threatened balance is the pulse of the garden itself.
I have not worked in many gardens since my time at the Royal Horticultural Society. And since my observation of vegetable canker began a year ago I have not even seen much besides my ward of terminally ill parsnips. But I only have to open the door of the walled kitchen garden to know that this is a garden in complete chaos.
There is a cross of weeds, once a path, dividing the large expanse of ground into four equal parts. At one time this vegetable garden must have been organized around a classic four-year crop rotation. It could be that, under the weeds and bits of debris, the soil is still healthy. I kneel down at the edge of a bed, push my hands beneath a tangle of dead tree branches into the cool, moist earth.
All of today has felt unreal to me. Leaving the boarding house—which I can’t quite bring myself to call my home, though it is where I have lived for the past two years. Leaving the city I adore. The train journey down to the West Country. The news about Mrs. Woolf. The oddness of this place, where there is evidence of other people, but only that one rude girl named Jane to be found. None of it has seemed to belong to my experience of life at all. And now, for the first time today, with my hands full of rich, clotted earth, I actually feel attached to my life again.
I rub the dirt between my fingers. The red earth of Devon is thick and full of texture. I put a little on the tip of my tongue and taste the wormy, metallic tang of soil choked with nutrients. It will be fine. All will be fine. I tilt my head back to the sun and close my eyes. I have missed this, forgotten how much I love to be down on the ground among the living things, my hands plunged up to the wrists in the sweet, sticky earth. I am a gardener who has essentially been indoors for the past ten years. Where’s the sense in that?
There’s the cheerful song of a bird in a tree by the garden wall. When was the last time I heard a bird in London? Here, the war seems not to exist at all. It is too far west for the drone of bombers on their way over the Channel. Was there a world like this before the war? A quiet world. A slow garden.
Suddenly I can remember birds in Green Park, before the war, when I had walked down from my lodgings in Bloomsbury, on my way to work in Vincent Square. Birds in Green Park. Birds in Russell Square. Trees pooled in daffodils. I could thread myself through London moving from leafy square to leafy square.
There’s an old chicken coop and run against one of the garden walls. A small brick shed against another of the walls. The door is secured with a rusted padlock and the window too sheeted with grime to see through. It bears further examination, this building. There might be tools in its dark confines. I’ll have to return later with something to pry the lock off.
As I’m leaving the garden I meet another girl, hurrying past the wall towards the entrance of the quadrangle. She’s as big as Jane was small, has a strong, lumbering gait, and masses of curly hair that bounce with each huge stride. She looks a bit like a giant child, has her head down, doesn’t see me at all. I stand in her path and she very nearly knocks me over.
“Stop.” I put my hand out.
“Sorry.” She seems utterly surprised to see me.
“What is going on here?” I say. I take my hand away from her shoulder and see the smudge of dirt I’ve left on her cardigan. “I have come down from London to take charge of a group of agricultural workers, none of whom are meant to be here yet, and when I arrive it appears that all the girls are already here. But I can’t find anyone. What is going on?”
The big girl seems genuinely frightened by my outburst. She steps backwards. I step forward. She steps backwards again, and we proceed in a strange, halting dance along the path towards the garden. Finally she backs into the wall. “They’re all up at the house, ma’am.”
“What house?”
“The house full of Canadian soldiers.”
“And what are the girls doing there?”
“Visiting.”
“Visiting?” I can’t believe the nerve. “This is a war, not a Sunday outing,” I say, although with the sunshine and the bucolic fug of nature, it really does more closely resemble a Sunday picnic.
The big girl looks down at her shoes. So do I. They are huge shoes, man-size. “I’m sorry,” she says. “We didn’t know what to do. There didn’t seem to be anyone in charge.”
“Well, I’m in charge. And I’m here now. I want you to go back up to the house and tell the others to get down here. No more visiting. There’s work to be started. I will speak to everyone at dinner tonight.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The big girl sidles along the brick wall towards the quadrangle. This is the opposite direction from where I believe the house is.
&n
bsp; “Where are you going?” I can’t believe, after her submissive attitude, she would so soon disobey me.
“To the house.”
“Isn’t the house that way?” I point past the garden, up the hill.
“There’s a shortcut behind the west wing. A path through the woods.”
“How long have you been here?” What if the Land Girls have been at Mosel for weeks? What chance will I have to ever gain control over them?
“Four days.”
“And you already know a shortcut to the house?” This is all much worse than I had thought. The girls have probably moved in with the soldiers.
“I’m local.” The big girl looks at me with a small flash of confidence. “My father used to work here. In the gardens. I know this place.”
This is a stroke of good fortune. Deciphering the garden will be easier if there is someone who is familiar with it to help me.
“Is your father still alive?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And does he live nearby?”
“In the village.” The big girl thinks I’m on the track of something else. “I could stay there, ma’am, I know that, but I’ve never had a chance to be away from home before. And to stay at Mosel is so exciting.”
I could remind her that we’re staying in what were probably the servants’ quarters, and that staying on an estate such as this only truly counts if one is living in the main house, but there is no point being deliberately cruel. I need this girl. She will prove useful.
“Of course, you can continue to stay here,” I say. “Just go and fetch the others from the house. I’ll see you all at dinner.”
5
I have been touched three times in my life. Intentionally touched. Firstly by my mother, although I don’t remember much affection when I was small and certainly none after I was sent away to school. The second instance was at boarding school. It involved a fellow student. I was fourteen years old. The third time of purposeful physical contact was with Mr. Gregory, under the makeshift bomb shelter of the dining-room table at Mrs. Royce’s London boarding house.
The Lost Garden: A Novel Page 2
