“And aren’t ghosts meant to be spirits? How can a spirit get hungry? Why choose chicken?” I can’t get my mind around the concept of a chicken-thieving poltergeist, but I can see that Jane is no longer really listening to me. “Where’s the money?” I say again. “And should you be smoking in here?”
“I know it’s called the Women’s Land Army,” says Jane. “But it’s not really an army, you know. We all volunteered, or were volunteered, to be here.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re acting like a sergeant major.”
What I can get away with in dealing with the Potatoes obviously won’t wash with Jane. She is not the least bit afraid of me. This cheers me. “I’m just a bit fired up about the chickens,” I say.
“Yes, I can see that. Come on, then.” Jane grinds her cigarette out under her heel, leads me past the row of cows to the end of the barn. We stand in front of the two horse stalls. “Older workhorse,” says Jane, pointing to the massive beast on the left. “But this boy—” She reaches over the right-hand stall door and the black horse nuzzles against her hand. “This boy knows how to run. He was made for it.”
Even though he is partially obscured by the stall door, I can see that the horse is a magnificent creature. “What’s his name?”
“Don’t know.” Jane unlatches the door and slips into the stall. The horse buries his nose in her hair and she reaches up to stroke the side of his face. They seem very familiar with each other. “They probably have names.” Jane is now down on her hands and knees at the back of the stall. “But I don’t know what they are, and I don’t want to confuse them by giving them new, temporary names.” She comes back to me, brushing straw from her clothes and carrying a metal box. “This is the money for the care of the animals. I suppose chickens would come out of this lot. The Land Army coffers are in a box I’ve hidden in the laundry room. Under the mangle. I suppose the money for the potatoes would come out of that lot.” She hands the box over to me. “I didn’t tell the others,” she says. “It’s the sort of thing that can cause trouble.”
“Quite right,” I say. I am anxious to make up for my earlier bossiness. “We’ll keep it to ourselves, shall we?”
“Just you, me, and him.” Jane leans back against the black horse. She looks so small, resting against his shoulder. “I liked what you said, Gwen,” she says. “Last night. About love and solace. About waiting. I’ve been thinking about it this morning.” She looks over the stall door at me, in that clear way I’m almost used to now.
I feel a bit embarrassed about what I said last night to Jane. I don’t usually confide in people. In fact, I usually don’t even like most people. But perhaps some of why I don’t like people is that I think they don’t like me.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Of course.”
“What do you think…” I almost can’t say the words. I have to swallow and start again. “My looks,” I say. But I can’t go on with it. I stop there. I feel shaky, have to rest against the rough wooden door for support.
Jane’s features soften. I can’t read the emotion. Pity? Sorrow? Sympathy? “Oh, Gwen,” she says. “You’re not half as bad as you think you are.” She reaches into her jumper for another cigarette. “I spent most of February in the hospital ward, watching my cousin die. He was essentially blown apart, although he took a long time to actually die. Just lay there screaming. Écorcher, isn’t that what they used to call being flayed alive? Colin’s skin was peeled back in places, like he was a laboratory specimen. I could see right into him. Do you know what we are, Gwen?” Jane lights her cigarette. Her hands jump as she moves match to tobacco. “We are a mass of purple worms. Veins. Intestines. A mass of twitching, stinking worms. That’s why he was screaming, because he could see that for himself. He could see what he was made of, what was there inside him.”
“Jane,” I say, because she’s crying now and I don’t know what to do. “Jane.”
She leans against the horse, and he lets her. I clutch the metal cash box. I think of the word the doctors had used for Jane’s grief. Distress. What exactly was that word meant to include?
Grief moves us like love. Grief is love, I suppose. Love as a backwards glance.
After a few moments Jane dries her eyes on her sleeve, turns to me. “Really, Gwen,” she says. Her voice is hard and closed now. “You have no idea what beauty is.”
11
When I get back to the walled garden there’s no one there but the Lumper. The beds are still covered in a tangle of debris. There are several hoes lying haphazardly on the path through the centre of the garden, as though the people attached to them have suddenly evaporated.
“What happened?” I ask the Lumper, who’s sitting on a bench in the sun. “Where is everyone?”
“They left.”
“Left?”
The Lumper shifts a little uncomfortably on the bench. “They didn’t feel like weeding, ma’am.”
“It’s not a question of what they feel like.” I can’t believe such downright cheek. “Why didn’t you stop them?”
The Lumper looks at me blankly. “How?” she says.
“But I left you in charge.”
“Well, I did stay behind to report to you.”
“Well, that’s not good enough, Doris.”
The Lumper looks at me blankly again. “Isn’t it?” she says. From anyone else this comment would carry the sting of sarcasm, but from her it is full of a kind of fumbling confusion.
“Where did they go?”
“Probably up to the house, ma’am.”
“Right.” I turn and start to leave the garden. “You wait here. Don’t go anywhere. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The Lumper kicks out with one of her feet, like a petulant child who hasn’t been invited to a party. “But it’s not fair if I’m to do all the weeding.”
I’m almost at the door to the garden. “I don’t care what you do,” I shout back, over my shoulder. “Just don’t leave.” I march across the quadrangle, take the stairs two at a time up to my room, and have to pause for breath on the landing. I march into my room, retrieve the crumpled letter sent by the WLA head office from the floor, and start on my journey to the estate house, for the second time in one day.
This has all become like some terrible grown-up version of boarding school, I think, as I march up the hill. That same sense of being apart from the others. That same feeling of being punished for that exclusion.
Captain Raley is standing by the window in the drawing-room. He seems to have been standing there for quite some time. There’s no sign of anyone else about.
“Where are they?” I say.
“Choosing a site for a picnic,” he says, without turning around.
“Why didn’t you stop them?”
“It’s a nice day for a picnic,” Raley says. “I didn’t feel like stopping them.” He does turn from the window now, turns to face me, and I see how tired he looks. “I don’t really know these men,” he says. “We’ve only been together a short while. They’re leftovers, extras from other regiments. We’re being assembled here into a new regiment, and then we’ll be shipped out. But we’re a disparate group.” He gives me a small smile. “Why not have a picnic?” he says.
“Because there’s work to be done. Your men might have nothing to do, but my girls are meant to be seeding potatoes.”
“You’re just annoyed because you’ve lost control of them,” says Raley.
He’s right. “I never had control of them,” I say. “That’s the problem.” I look around the room and don’t see what I need. “Do you have a telephone up here?” I ask. “I can’t find one down where we are.”
“In the hall.” Raley waves his arm in the direction I’ve come from, and I walk back out, unrolling the crumpled letter as I go.
I call the local WLA office, and when I get the county rep on the line and am just about to launch into my complaint of the girls, she practically yells down the pho
ne. “Gwen Davis! What happened to you? You were meant to have arrived a week ago. I was just about to send out a replacement for you.”
“Well, there’s no need,” I say. “I just got a little mixed up about the arrival date, but I’m here now.”
“We can’t have this sort of thing,” says Mrs. Billings. “We are an organization that prides itself on efficiency.”
“Well,” I say, ready again to deliver my speech about the girls.
“I hope you will demonstrate proper conduct from here on in.”
“All right,” I say.
“I’ll be up to see you at the earliest convenience,” Mrs. Billings continues.
To check up on me, I think. “All right,” I say again, and replace the receiver to avoid any further lecturing.
“May I suggest a solution?” Raley is standing behind me, startles me with his nearness.
“Please,” I say. My hand is still on the phone. I feel near to tears.
“Offer them something,” says Raley. “The dance. An outing. Give them what they want and they’ll be more co-operative.”
“But how do I know what they want?” I am thinking now that I much prefer parsnips to people. They are infinitely more reliable. The stupidity of vegetables is preferable to the unpredictability of people.
Raley touches my arm and my hand lifts from the phone as though pulled up by an invisible wire. “They want a picnic,” he says. “Act like you gave it to them.”
Doris is still sitting on the bench exactly where I had left her when I walked out of the walled garden. She is tapping her shoes with a stick and humming something unrecognizable. I look around the garden. It is such a mess. “Come on,” I say to Doris. “I want you to help me with something.”
The Lumper stops humming, looks at me in that blank way of hers that I have difficulty reading. “All right,” she says, and lumbers off the bench.
I enlist the Lumper to help me break into the small shed in the walled garden. We pry open the rusted lock with the steel tines of a pitchfork. I had expected the small brick building to be nothing more than a tool shed. In fact, there are no tools in it at all. What is there is far more useful than tools.
The door has settled down on the frame, so the Lumper has to use her rather impressive brute strength to shift it open enough for us to squeeze into the interior. The floor is carpeted in mouse droppings. Along one wall, beneath the only window, is a desk, its pigeonholes having become nests and depositories for the rodents who have lived here most recently. There are still bits of paper resting in some of the slots above the writing surface. A chair is pushed up neatly to the desk, as though someone had just popped out to get a cup of tea and was expected to come right back. The walls are sprouting nails. On one nail hangs what’s left of an old pair of gardening gloves. On another nail there’s a chewed bit of paper, one word still visible in faded ink—Sweet. Sweet peas, I think. Sweet William.
“Do you know what this is?” I say to the Lumper, who’s cuffing cobwebs out of her curly hair. “This is the head gardener’s office.”
“Is it?” she says with complete indifference.
I pull out the chair and sit carefully down at the desk. The wooden surface is patchy with mould. What must once have been a blotter is now a dissolved map of green and brown, stuck quite firmly to the oak desktop. The building must have a leaky roof. “You can go if you want,” I say to the Lumper, who’s breathing noisily behind me. I hear her inhale loudly as she squeezes through the margin of door and door frame on her way out.
Sitting at the desk I can see the brick wall at the end of the garden opposite, through the filthy, cracked window. The tips of the trees beyond the wall. If I crane my neck, I can make out the roof of the chicken coop.
I don’t want to touch the top of the desk, keep my hands curled together in my lap. I look down at them, and at the desk drawer that lies snugly closed just above them. The single, brass handle that fits my right hand perfectly.
What I find in that desk drawer, unharmed by creatures or weather, is the head gardener’s ledger.
I take the book outside and sit on a bench in the sun, against the warmth of the brick wall, the gardener’s journal open on my knees.
The ledger is a week-by-week job allocation for the estate garden. Everything is marked down in meticulous handwriting on double-page spreads. The book covers the years from 1914 to 1916. At the beginning of the volume, on the opening page, is a list of the twenty-five men who were employed to work in the gardens. Twenty-five men. I look around at the kitchen garden. If I had willing workers, it could be put to rights in a little over a week. What an incredibly busy, productive place this must once have been. I read some of the jobs the men were required to do. Clip the yews. Train the apples to the wall. There were North and South gardens. An orchard. There was a lavish mixed border around the quadrangle. There were plans for a water garden on a lower lawn that is now disappeared. I turn to the end of the book. Blank pages. I flip back from there until I find the last entry, written in September of 1916. The last entry, like the first entry, is a list of names. The same names, only the later list has many of the names crossed out. A name with a neat line drawn by a ruler through the middle of it, like a river cleaving its banks. In small lettering beside the names, the word Killed. There are only six of the original twenty-five names that have not been crossed out. At the bottom is one sloppily handwritten line. We will now keep only to the kitchen garden.
The sun is warm on the page, warm on my skin. I put my hand on top of that list of men and trace their names with a finger. All those gardeners gone off to war. When I was in gardening college I heard someone remark that the only reason such a fuss was being made about training women to be gardeners was that half of Britain’s male gardeners had been killed in the Great War. And there was no real recovery from that slaughter. Estates such as Mosel were greatly diminished after that. Probably the kitchen garden was worked and a sort of general overall maintenance was in operation for the duration of the war itself. Then perhaps the estate changed hands and the new owner was primarily interested in the fields, in a high-yield agricultural production, did not want to keep a gardening staff employed. It is very easy to return nature to itself. The clean lines of a garden go first. Then the balance of what has been planted. What used to be a conversation between the different elements becomes a tuneless cacophony. No one thing distinguishable from another.
I spend the afternoon walking purposefully over the estate, the gardening ledger tucked under an arm. I find the North Garden behind the barn. It once must have been a flower garden, perhaps even a market garden. I can find evidence of dahlias, but little else. The garden has, obviously for years now, been used to graze animals, and it is essentially ruined. The same is not true of the South Garden, which lies under bits of broken trees, well behind the dining hall and kitchen garden. The South Garden had been envisaged as a wild garden. It was planted with bulbs and flowering trees. A meadow garden. Daffodils still brighten the ground, flashes of yellow from the sea of long grass. Beyond the South Garden the farm fields fall away in green shelves. This garden was the exit from the estate, just as the North Garden was the entry to it. This place was the transition between the order of the estate and the order of the natural world. Step away from this garden and you walked down through fields of tall grass, and then into the pleated furrows.
The North Garden would have been more formal. It would have been the first glimpse of a Mosel garden seen through the trees on the drive up to the house. There would have been flowers in rows, tall flowers to be moved by the wind and seen as a woozy sway of colour through the trees as the horse and carriage clattered past.
It occurs to me, standing here now, that I didn’t see much in the way of gardens when I was up to visit Raley at the big house. The usual shrubs to define the walkway to the front door, but nothing elaborate in front of the house. It is true I didn’t have time to poke around in the back, but I am struck now by the lushness and var
iety of the gardens here, and the scarcity of ornamental vegetation at the house, where it would seem to be required more. But perhaps the buildings where we are housed predate the house? Certainly the quadrangle is an old design, dating from the Middle Ages. Perhaps this fleet of gardeners were being loyal to a much earlier time than their own when they designed and tended these gardens. And perhaps they didn’t design them at all, but merely maintained or rescued what had already been here.
I stand in the middle of the ruined meadow garden. Soon the fruit trees here will be foaming with blossom. There are wild violets in the woods, and pools of blue-bells at my feet. It would have been just like leaving land, to leave this garden, to kick through the warm shallows here—flowers breaking like spray above my boots—and step out into the deep, flat ocean beyond. The smell of blossom in my hair like wind.
Whoever made these gardens originally, and whoever kept them going, reinvented them, knew what they were doing. And more than that, I think, looking over the ripple of fields past this meadow—more than that, someone loved this place.
The orchard is to the east, down the slope behind the stables, down the hill from the North Garden, in a small clearing, protected on one side by an old stone wall. Perhaps the wall once enclosed the whole area. There are a few limbs down, but generally the trees are in good shape. Mature trees. Apple and pear. Several have been trained to grow along the wall, their limbs fastened to the stone, made to grow in straight lines so that the fruit will grow evenly. I remember the notation from the book I carry under my arm. Train the apples to the wall. Espalier. That’s what this method of producing fruit is called. Some consider it artistically pleasing, but I’ve always found the splayed posture of the crucified tree very unsettling. All its movement is controlled and directed. The tree ceases to be itself and becomes merely the product of an entirely human desire.
The trees espaliered to this wall have been untended for years. Whereas the branches start firmly attached to the wall close to the trunk of the individual tree, they soon are free to move upwards, move out from the wall. It is as though the bodies of the trees are pinned to the wall and the limbs are reaching out for freedom.
The Lost Garden: A Novel Page 5
