Today I’m pinning a clutch of irises to the curtain. I am making a garden of flowers that are also women’s names. I hear a noise behind me and turn around to see Evelyn in the doorway. “Oh,” she says, embarrassed that I’ve caught her here well before time. “It’s only me. I’ve been thinking of this all day. I just couldn’t wait until after supper.”
They were never the enemy, these girls at Mosel. If I had been more generous when I first arrived here, instead of being so defensive about my deficiencies, I would have seen this sooner. They weren’t unwilling to like me. I just never gave them the proper chance to do it on their terms.
“Well, now that you’re here,” I say, “why don’t you come and help me pin these up.”
31
The Lumper’s father comes to see me. He shows up one day after breakfast, waiting outside the walled garden, cap in hand. He is a big man, in his middle forties, with the rough, weathered skin of someone who has spent his life working outdoors.
“Miss Davis?” he says. He looks nervous. “Doris said I’d be finding you here.”
I wonder how Doris has described me to him. I offer him my hand. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Frant,” I say. “Thank you for coming to see me.”
“It’s a pleasure, ma’am. Good to be able to have a look at the old place again.”
“Well, come on, then. Let me show you around properly.” I take him through the kitchen garden first, show him the neatly humped earth under which the potatoes slumber, the stakes for the runner beans. He makes no comment on this labour, but when he sees the chickens out in their run, pecking disconsolately at their kitchen scraps, he stops walking.
“Oh,” he says. “Chickens are not a good idea. There’s a ghost what takes them in the night.”
“Even when you were working here?” For that is almost twenty-five years ago.
“Oh, yes.” Mr. Frant twists his cap in his hands. Instead of smoking, I think. He wants to have a cigarette but thinks it might be bad manners. “I never saw it, mind you. But several of the others did.”
“Well, never mind about the ghost,” I say. Really, I am a little sick of the whole chicken-thieving-spectre spectacle. I’ve a good mind to have the whole lot slaughtered and made into coq au vin by Victualette Noir. I lead Mr. Frant away from the chicken run and steer him towards the small brick gardener’s office. I open the door and let him peer inside.
“Mr. Thoby’s office,” he says. “It was always very tidy. Everything in its proper place. Mr. Thoby was a bit of a stickler for order.”
I go into the office and remove the gardener’s ledger from the desk drawer. I take it back outside to Mr. Frant and open it to the list of names in the front of the book. “Do you remember these men?” I ask him.
Doris’s father poises his hand over the list of names and I notice how his hand shakes. He hadn’t been twisting his cap in his hands. His hands had been shaking. “Of course,” he says, and puts his finger down overtop of one of the names. “Look, there I am.” And there he is—Lewis Frant. “I was one of the labourers, that’s why I’m near the bottom.” He moves his finger up the row of names. “Foreman at the top. Then the five gardeners. Then two under-gardeners. The rest of us were labourers, though some had more knowledge of horticulture than others.”
“Will you walk with me?” I tuck the ledger under my arm and lead Mr. Frant out of the walled garden. I walk him along the path and across the lawn to the South Garden. He keeps looking around, pointing out where trees used to be that must have met with disease or fallen down in a storm. Wandering with him over these grounds that are now so familiar to me is like imposing an imaginary landscape over a real one. A similar experience, in many ways, to my reading of the estate plan.
When we get to the South Garden we walk among the cherry trees. They have all dropped their blossoms now, a spray of pink covers the grass. Mr. Frant stops at the edge of the field, looks out across the vast sweep of land. “This place has not changed,” he says. Perhaps because the meadow is planted with bulbs and the trees need little managing, this garden that is half wild and half cultivated has managed to survive as it was. Its balance has saved it. Anything too wild would have grown rampant. Anything too cultivated quickly would have lost its civilized form.
I take Mr. Frant to the orchard. He runs his hand along the limbs of the espaliered fruit trees on the wall. His hand moves across the limbs as though they were rungs on a ladder. “I never liked the look of this,” he says. “Unnatural, that’s what it is.”
“You worked in the orchard?”
“Sometimes. We were rotated around the grounds, but there were some who worked better in certain places.”
“Who worked here more than the others?” The orchard is the closest area to the hidden garden, and because of the various connections between the flowers growing in it and the fruit growing here, I believe there to be a connection between whoever worked in the orchard and whoever made the hidden garden. I believe they could be the same person.
Mr. Frant pushes his hand through his hair. “We were lads, weren’t we?” he says. I don’t answer. They would have been boys near to twenty years old, the garden labourers on this estate. They would have been the same age as the girls here now. “There were three who were in this orchard more than the others. One under-gardener and two labourers.”
I open the ledger to the list of names at the front of the book. “Who were they?”
Lewis Frant touches the three names lightly, the way he ran his hand along the limbs of the espaliered trees. “Thomas Walton. Samuel Hood. William Allen.”
“Did anything unusual or particularly noteworthy ever happen in the orchard?” I ask.
“What sort of thing?” He looks confused by my question. Love, I want to say. Was this a place where lovers met? Was this the place that inspired the hidden garden? Whatever happened here fuelled the planting of those coded flowers, the writing of those words on the pieces of metal and stone. I am sure of that.
“Anything,” I say. “Anything out of the ordinary. Even anything ordinary.”
Lewis Frant stands very still under the apple trees. “We were lads, weren’t we?” he says again.
I wish I could see what he sees as he looks back over twenty-five years, back to when he was a boy working here among a whole staff of boys, back to when this orchard would have been properly managed, when the whole of Mosel would have looked easily magnificent in the way that is possible when so much effort is being made to make everything appear effortless, appear completely natural. Back to a time before the wars.
“No,” says Lewis Frant. “I don’t remember anything of note ever happening in the orchard. But I wasn’t down here enough to really know. I was mostly set to work on the lawns and on the beds around the quadrangle. They’re completely ruined now, aren’t they, ma’am? I was having a look before I came to wait for you.” Lewis Frant twists his cap through his shaking hands again. “That’s where I used to be,” he says. “I remember that area of the estate very well. Would you like to know who worked with me there?”
“No, that won’t be necessary.” I feel defeated. I’m convinced that something important did happen in the orchard, but Lewis Frant is my only connection to that possibility and he is turning out to be as disappointing a witness to history as the fruit trees themselves.
“I was the only one of us who didn’t go,” says Lewis Frant.
“Didn’t go?”
“To the war. All the other lads went off when they were called, but I have a touch of the palsy.” He holds out his hands in front of him to demonstrate and I see the shiver in them. “Aggravated by nerves,” he says. “Not a useful thing in a nervous situation such as war.” He lowers his arms. “What’s that?” He’s looking over the stone wall and has spotted the top half of the topiary angel.
“Oh, that,” I say. “One of the girls had a go with the shears, just to see what she could do.”
Lewis Frant just stares at the green angel. “Well,
” he says. “That’s something I’d forgotten.”
“What?”
“There used to be something else there. Not an angel, but something. One of those yews was cut into some kind of a shape.” He frowns, trying to bring the memory back.
Anything in that spot would have been to mark the entrance to the hidden garden, I think—one of the yews clipped into a shape. A reminder of where the entrance was? A signal for someone else to find it?
“What?” I say. “What was it?”
“An animal,” says Lewis Frant. “Yes, that’s it. One of those big yews was carved into the head of an animal. A fox. It was the head of a fox.”
After Lewis Frant has walked out of the orchard, back towards the quadrangle and the buildings to visit with his daughter, I go past the green angel, squeeze through the yew hedge, and enter the hidden garden. I was tempted to show it to Lewis Frant, but I resisted, reasoning that if he knew of its existence, he would have mentioned it.
I sit on the bench by the edge of the garden and open the head gardener’s ledger. Mr. Thoby, I think. It’s Mr. Thoby’s record of his garden. I look at the list of names at the front of the book and then flip to the last entry, the one made in 1916 when the gardens were essentially shut down. Thomas Walton, Samuel Hood, and William Allen all have lines drawn through their names. Straight, unwavering lines. All three men were killed in the war.
32
The last garden in the trilogy of gardens blooms fully in June. It is the Garden of Faith and it consists of only one thing. An enormous, tangled wash of white rose. Now it completely engulfs a bower fashioned together, much like my rustic bench, out of sticks and branches. At one time the rose must have been sweetly woven through the wood and there would have been a nice balance between the tumbling white blooms and the clean, straight lines of the sticks. Now the rose has completely taken over its support and one side of the bower has collapsed under the weight of blossom and vine.
I don’t interfere with the rose. I don’t trim it or tie it up or stake it along the contours of the bower. I cut a few of the blooms off to pin to my section of the blackout curtain in the wireless room, but that is all. After I scrabbled around in the earth beneath the bower and found the name for this portion of the garden on a stone, I decided that Faith should be left to find its own way.
The rose is called ‘Madame Hardy.’ It is a Damask Rose, with large, double blooms that are often as wide across as the span of a hand. It has a very strong, haunting fragrance, with a hint of lemon under the musk of perfume. Though a shrub rose, it is tall and can be used as a climber, as it has been here in the hidden garden. A distinctive feature of this beautiful rose is the small, emerald-green eye in the centre of the bloom. Bred by Eugene Hardy at the Luxembourg Gardens in France in 1832, it was named after his wife. In a twist of irony it is not a very “hardy” rose, often needing to be staked and supported, easily damaged by wind and rain. Perhaps this is why it was entwined around the bower.
I sit on the bench in the sun and look at the flurry of white, anchoring one end of the garden. Why this rose and not another? I look out over the flower bed, beyond to the woods, the thin spires of trees rising into the blue and promised heaven. I don’t know what to think any more. I had been hoping that Doris’s father would have some answers, but the only interesting and vaguely useful piece of information he had to relay was about the yew in front of this garden being cut into the shape of a fox. And I still don’t know to what purpose.
The sun glints off the pure white of the roses. ‘Madame Hardy,’ I think. Thomas Hardy. Thomas Walton, the name of the under-gardener whom Lewis Frant remembered working often in the orchard. But I have lost the thread of this garden. I have not found it in its original language. I have discovered it in a foreign script and I have tried to translate it so that it makes sense to me, in this world, but it won’t come down to me. The past won’t come down to me as I sit in the middle of this bright June afternoon in 1941. The past is a language I don’t know how to read or answer.
33
Jane has almost finished reading To the Lighthouse to David. I can’t bear the story to be over. I’m down there every night now, outside the room where they sit, my ear pressed to the closed door. I don’t know what David thinks of Virginia Woolf for he never says anything I can hear. There’s just the click of his knitting needles underneath the smooth rhythm of Jane’s reading voice, like the noise of a small machine or a cricket in the dusk.
I am hanging on to everything now, every scene, every word. I hear the pause Jane makes at the end of a page and I experience such a sense of loss I almost cry out. Goodbye to Mrs. Ramsay, and to Lily Briscoe on the lawn. Goodbye to the boat finally sailing to the lighthouse with Mr. Ramsay and his two youngest children. The wind has just dropped and the children are watching the evidence of this in the sails of the boat. Their feelings are slowing with the momentum of the boat. Mr. Ramsay, oblivious to this, is reading a book.
I lean my head against the door and it moves open a crack. I can see Jane reading to David, how she sits close beside him, her head bent over the sweater he is fashioning from his skeins of wool.
There is Lily Briscoe on the lawn, trying to finish her painting, looking up from her easel to a memory of Mrs. Ramsay on the steps of the house with James. Her hand holds a paintbrush as a conductor holds a baton. This is the music of the moment, these words and images, and all of a sudden I know that it doesn’t matter whether or not it was Mrs. Woolf I followed through London that June evening seven years ago. I will never be closer to her than now. The book is the shared experience, the shared intimacy. There is Virginia Woolf, dipping her pen in ink, looking up from the page with Lily on the lawn, to the view out her window. Here am I, looking across the room to the summer dark beating against these mullioned panes. There is Jane reading the words aloud to a young soldier sitting beside her. It is a place we have all arrived at, this book. The characters fixed on the page. The author who is only ever writing the book, not gardening or walking or talking, and while the reader is reading, the author is always here, writing. The author is at one end of the experience of writing and the reader is at the other, and the book is the contract between you. And this is what you’re doing, being in the book, entering it as one enters a room and sees there, through the French doors to the garden, Lily Briscoe painting on the lawn.
When a writer writes, it’s as if she holds the sides of her chest apart, exposes her beating heart. And even though everything wants to heal, to close over and protect the heart, the writer must keep it bare, exposed. And in doing this, all of life is kept back, all the petty demands of the day-to-day. The heart is a river. The act of writing is the moving water that holds the banks apart, keeps the muscle of words flexing so that the reader can be carried along by this movement. To be given space and the chance to leave one’s earthly world. Is there any greater freedom than this?
I wipe my hand across my face. I am crying. I don’t want to sniffle in case I am heard. I lean my head into the door and it opens an inch wider.
The story is over. Jane closes the book. She had been reading more slowly as she approached the last scene, as though she didn’t want to leave the book either. She doesn’t say anything, just closes the book and holds it in her lap, still looking down at it.
I should leave, but I can’t move from the doorway. I feel rooted here.
David lays down his needles. “That was nice,” he says. And then, “I’m out of wool. I should go back up to the house.”
Jane raises her head. “Here,” she says. “Use this.” And she takes off her jumper with one fluid movement and hands it to David.
It’s as if I’ve never seen Jane before, never known her. With just an undervest on, she looks unbelievably thin. Arms no wider around than the sticks of the bower. A collarbone protruding from the skin in all its detail. And with that one gesture I learn the fundamental truth of her. When she takes off her sweater and, without thinking, hands it over to David to use
as wool, I can see how Jane loves. And I know—with all my heart I know—that there is no protection in the world for someone who loves like that.
34
The chickens are disappearing at the rate of about one per week. There are now only three left in the coop, only three chances to discover what is happening to them. I am determined to solve this mystery, and start spending every night in the walled garden. I bring out a cushion from one of the chairs in the wireless room, and a blanket for the colder nights, and I make myself a sort of nest positioned between the wall of the garden and one of the walls of Mr. Thoby’s office. I bring a Thermos of tea and a battery-powered torch in case I need to surprise and apprehend the culprit, although I get so stiff from sitting on the ground all night that I would have trouble springing to my feet and surging dramatically across the garden in pursuit of the thief. I am not proud to say that periodically I have fallen asleep while on watch, but that, luckily, nothing untoward has occurred while I’ve been snoring against the bricks.
It is now the third night of my vigil. The moon is high and bright. I will not even need my torch if an intruder arrives tonight. I can see clearly all the way across the garden to where the chickens are no doubt cowering in fright in their straw beds.
I have told only Jane of my plan. The past two nights I have heard her clatter by on the horse on the way to ride across the darkened fields. I have to admit that last night, when she rode by the garden, returning to the stables in the very early morning, the noise of the horse on the stones woke me up.
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