The September Garden

by Catherine Law

  Nell

  She woke up to the bleary vision of Strawberry Thief wallpaper surrounding her bed as if she was sleeping in a medieval bower. Drowsily following the green and pink tendrils where thrushes perched, stealing fruit, she longed to have awoken amid the fairy tale inside her mind. She was still wrapped in a dream of velvet wonder: she and Alex, birdwatching in Lednor valley, picnicking on a rug, with cheerful little John-James, his baby flesh chubby and pinchable, sitting on a fat nappy. Her father’s framed watercolours of birds on her bedroom wall, including, she noted with a half smile, a yellow hammer, created their own little menagerie and became the stuff of her dreams. The sound of an alarm clock along the landing broke up her slumber. And the little snuffling from the cot drew her from the bed, as if the child was made of metal and a magnet was attached to her heart.

  He was tiny, scrawny, Diana had said. He could not see her yet, she guessed. His eyes were blank and dark, his skin peppered with blemishes, his hand as wrinkled as an old man’s. And yet, he was beauty.

  She shuffled her fingers under his ribs and lifted him; he was light and empty, curling onto her shoulder, wheezing mindlessly, as yet unaware of the love that oozed from her bones into his tiny, kitten-like frame.

  Her father tapped on the door. He looked flustered; nicks of blood on his chin.

  ‘I’m leaving now. Getting the eight-thirty.’

  ‘What time will you be in Norwich?’

  ‘God only knows. It’s such a hazard these days. Never mind that, how is the little man?’

  Nell tucked the knuckle of her little finger into the hard opening of his mouth.

  ‘Hungry, I think.’ She rested her nose gently on his scalp and inhaled.

  Her father said, ‘I’m sorry I have to go.’

  ‘Diana needs you. Give my regards to Mrs Blanford, won’t you? At least you can rest up before the funeral tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s still a shock, you know, even when a person is quite old and has been ill.’

  ‘I know, Dad.’

  ‘Marion will be here at midday. She’s to come in every day. Listen, Nell, wouldn’t you rather go back to your mother’s?’

  ‘I don’t want to traipse all the way up there. He’s settled here. Too tiny to travel.’

  ‘Diana is worried. You know how sodding bad those public telephone lines are. But I could tell from her voice. She won’t say.’

  ‘She’s got enough on her plate. She’s just lost her father. Dad, it’s eight o’clock.’

  He walked over, his embrace enveloping both Nell and John-James, a tear in his eye.

  Marion made her a lunch of cold meat and potato salad and brought it in for her on a tray in the back parlour.

  It tasted reasonably good, Nell conceded, but she had no appetite at all. She ate what she could, battling with the clogging cloth of misery that filled her insides.

  ‘How’s the bubba?’ the maid asked as she came to take the tray away, peering into John-James’s cot.

  Nell told her that he was not feeding too well at the moment.

  ‘Well, to look at you, miss, seems like you aren’t either.’

  Nell smiled brightly and said that she was all right. She found it peculiar that this girl who hardly knew her was cooing over her son, calling him bubba and offering her opinions, when her own mother knew nothing about him at all.

  A hard point of disagreement between Nell and her father. He was worried that her mother would think he’d forced her not to tell her, to keep her in Harrow all to himself. But, all Nell wanted to do was keep her head down and try to ride out the storm facing her; abandoned and unmarried, a fallen woman. It would drive her mother mad with shame. Wherever she was, she decided – at Lednor or in Harrow – she was on the wrong side.

  ‘Mother thinks I’m working in a factory here, making parts for Spits,’ Nell had reminded her father. ‘Doing my bit.’

  ‘She has to know sometime,’ Diana reasoned and Nell had agreed but insisted that that time was not now.

  Her mother’s letters to her were sporadic, rambling and barely coherent. There was never any news about Sylvie, but she understood from her mother that Mrs Bunting was spending far more time away from Lednor with her sister, who had lost her husband in the North Atlantic.

  ‘It seems everyone has their troubles,’ Nell told Diana. ‘I don’t want to add to anyone’s.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you consider yourself a burden,’ said Diana. ‘For you know that would be a right ruddy lie.’

  ‘What about Sylvie?’ her father had asked. ‘Didn’t she start doing something very secretive and important out in Berkshire?’

  ‘She did, Dad,’ said Nell. ‘Last I heard she was getting married.’

  ‘Such a shame to lose touch, isn’t it?’ he observed.

  ‘We weren’t that close, really.’

  He told her she surprised him. ‘Be nice to tell her about little John-James.’

  Once Marion had left the room, Nell went quickly to the cot, prickling with possessiveness that the maid had stood over him and breathed on him. She let her finger touch his fluffy dark hair. So new, he was, so fragile. His infant breath was pure and soft and rhythmic. ‘Yes, it would be nice to tell her about you,’ she whispered. ‘For you will also have a second cousin by now … or is it first cousin, once removed, or—’

  ‘Just off now,’ Marion called from the hallway.

  Nell returned her ‘cheerio’.

  ‘And one day, John-James,’ she whispered to her baby son, ‘it will be nice to tell your daddy about you.’

  She settled into the armchair and picked up her father’s newspaper from yesterday. She read the headline, before folding it away and deciding that the war was an absolute brute. Brings out the worse in everyone.

  She allowed Alex to sit by her for a while. Her mind swayed like a pendulum between her memories of him. He had told her of his mistake with Sylvie and she had forgiven him. After all, the war had made him do a stupid thing, and she knew that once Sylvie had a hand in any dealings they tended to muck up for everyone else. And she had forgiven him. It made her love him more, his confession in Pudifoot Cottage. But then, his duplicity was like a horrific jack-in-the-box rearing up to mock her. Of course he chose Sylvie in the end, who wouldn’t?

  Her thoughts degraded her, wearied her. At last, she dozed, and they disappeared into the clog of an ill-remembered dream.

  When she woke, the springtime sunlight had shifted and a shower was sparkling silver over the garden. She went to the french windows and stretched, relishing a brief moment when her head wasn’t full of Alex and of Sylvie. Glancing at the clock, she realised John-James would need another feed. Her breasts felt heavy, she noted with pleasure. She was ready to feed him up.

  ‘Here we go, little man,’ she told him softly as she reached into the cot, tucking her fingertips under his back.

  It was wrong, immediately. So fiercely, incredibly wrong. She withdrew, her hands still poised in the air. She heard the moaning; it surprised her, as if it was coming from nowhere, and then above her head, inside her head.

  ‘Not this little one,’ a voice said. She said. ‘Not now.’

  She fixed her eyes on his cheek where a bloom of red flushed like an angry burn. Above it, his eyes were closed and sunken far too far. Eyelashes skimming rosy cheeks. The snuffling had ceased, the fragile breath no longer the rhythm that had measured her days and nights. He’d curled up his little body, as if he had fought it. The sudden hush of the afternoon was absolute and rotten with horror. Rain drizzled onto the window and she dragged her eyes away from John-James to stare cold and hard at the drops coursing down the panes. Beyond, bright daffodils in her father’s naked-earth flower beds dipped their faces under the downpour. Cold and hollow, she remained at the window. Not one ounce of her strength would make her turn again and look at the cradle and face the truth. She shivered, shaking, as reason began to drain from her. Her face tingled with creeping, icy horror. The springtime evening began to fall
, like a veil around her, to darken her sky.

  She bought her ticket, asked for a single.

  ‘Last train to Aylesbury. Platform one,’ said the railwayman. ‘Leaving in five minutes.’

  She’d left the note, Gone to my mother’s, propped up against the kettle where Marion was sure to see it in the morning.

  She thought of Kit, and how he might have missed her. How he might have forgotten her. Picking up her overnight bag she walked down the steps with a sure ringing sound at her heel, and waited on the echoing midnight platform. Flagrantly dim lights hardly cut through the darkness, made the world unreal. The tracks glistened in the last of the rain, curved away into the night, into nothing. She breathed the scent of new rain on tarmac, new rain on concrete. Seeking shelter in the waiting room, she was confronted by a poster on the wall shouting at her: Is your journey necessary? She decided that she’d prefer to wait outside.

  Her coat wasn’t adequate. It was an old one of Sylvie’s: a summer rain mac, really, and not thick enough for the brittle spring night. Her shivering that had started a few hours before seemed to seep inwards now, so that her insides quivered with sickening persistence. At last, the train eased in beside the platform with a noisy, swelling head of steam. The carriages were jammed with soldiers and sailors on their sing-song, snoring way home on leave. She found a corner in third class and sat, her thigh pressed against a snoozing private, her bag heavy on her knees. One kind soul offered to put it above her on the luggage rack, his words mixed up by the cigarette at the corner of his mouth. She thanked him, refused him, and held on to it even tighter.

  There were no buses at Aylesbury. She was hardly surprised: it was quarter past one in the morning. Olivers taxis would long be in bed. The train cruised on through the night with its blackout down, into the Midlands, where the men and boys would find the salvation of homecoming at dawn. She began to walk.

  The night was so black, the sky so deep above her, that she decided that the stars had drowned in it. On the silent main road, hardly a car passed her. And when she turned into the smaller country road, she had the darkness to herself. She talked to John-James and told him all about the kites that ruled the air. How, now, they’d be in their treetop nests, waiting for that first sight of pale eastern sky when they would rouse, stretch their wings, fly and shriek. That call. The frightened child. She told him to listen, for there was the voice of a tawny owl, spine-chilling and tremulous from the wood. She told him how his daddy would know that voice. Any bird voice; he knew them all.

  She stopped in the centre of the lane, as if she suddenly realised where she was, her legs trembling, her mouth gaping with the silent sobbing that rose from her chest. Tears washed her face, and she took a step, and then another. Soon, the walking became easier, the endless striding, the journey, became easier, as the gaps in the hills – like black sleeping beasts on the shadowy horizon – grew more familiar.

  There was the rumble of a plane up above and then another to join it. Listen, John-James, do you hear that? Are they leaving or coming home, I wonder?

  Great Lednor appeared out of the gloom as a familiar tableau, the cottages huddled and pale in the now dusky light before dawn. The churchyard was thick with yew and the evergreen smell was heartbreaking in its seduction. Beyond it, the meadow where the fête had been held was lightening, its rolling contours reversing out of the night.

  The first birds were piping by the time she reached the ford. She took the stepping stones – Sylvie’s sensible way – mindful of how cold the Chess would be. She reminded John-James that his daddy had enjoyed his evening with her by the stream. ‘We even saw a bat,’ she told him. ‘Fancy that.’

  She hurried past Mr Pudifoot’s cottage, as quickly as her savaged feet would allow her. The pain caused by her pressing shoes shot up her legs, and the small of her back was burning. Yet, still, she kept up a good pace, up the gravel as dawn began to feel her way through the sky, coming down from above, so that pockets of night still lingered among the trees.

  Her key turned easily in the lock. Her home’s very own soul cloaked her in clock-ticking, coal-fire, furniture-polish familiarity. From the depths of the kitchen, she heard a cough from Kit in his basket, and a stirring. She hurried then. In the darkness of the hall, she stooped quickly to take what she needed from the cupboard. Then she slipped back out and followed the path around the west side of the house and into the September Garden.

  It was a cold place, during an April daybreak. The bulbs were not as advanced as they were back in Harrow, and tight-budded narcissi glowed like baby angels in the half-light. The ground was compacted, firmer than she expected, and she worked hard to break it with the little trowel, all that she could lay her hands on in the cupboard. When she decided, finally, that the hole was big enough, a beam of new sunshine found its sleepy, pale way into the garden. Broken winter-dead plants and grasses formed skeletal shapes around her as she sat back on her haunches and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Even though digging had made her hot and exhausted, she shivered still, inside Sylvie’s inadequate coat.

  She sat there, breathing, and finally turned to John-James. She took him from the overnight bag, a horribly impromptu cradle, and wrapped his fragile form in her father’s forgotten rubber coat, found by her groping in the cupboard.

  ‘Warm and dry, at least it is,’ she breathed on him. ‘It is the best I can do, little man.’

  The moment slipped past her, too fast for her ever to be able to remember it properly. And far too soon, far too finally, John-James was tucked away.

  She could scarcely feel the warmth on her cheek from the early sun as she made her way back to the house. The morning revealed the peaceful red-brick facade and comfortable windows snug under the roof but, illuminated in the grey, tranquil light, her home looked like a painting, flat and rather unreal.

  Inside the hallway, the gentle light revealed to her a letter, there on the telephone table. She’d recognise the neat curling handwriting anywhere. As she reached her hesitant hand to it, she realised it was covered in a film of dust. It had been there so long it left a ghost of an outline on the polished wood. The postmark was dated last August.

  She glanced up the stairway, and put the letter deep into her coat pocket.

  ‘Mother,’ she called, her voice breaking. ‘Mother, are you awake? I’m home.’

  Sylvie

  ‘It’s good to see St Paul’s still standing,’ she told Henri as they walked together across Waterloo Bridge. She stopped for a minute to take in the sweep of the river, curving past the Houses of Parliament and the ruins of St Thomas’s Hospital on the opposite bank, under the bridge and round the bend to the City. She breathed in the whiff of exhaust fumes from the buses and cars rattling past her north to Covent Garden. ‘The most perfect view of London,’ she said.

  Henri took her hand. ‘Some say, the most romantic view of London,’ he replied. And then, ‘Oh, you’re still wearing that damn thing!’

  Sylvie laughed, pulled her hand away from his and touched her fingertips onto the modest diamond of her engagement ring. ‘He did propose rather reluctantly, as well you know.’

  ‘And yet here you are, still waiting for him,’ Henri snapped. ‘You might as well be engaged to a dead man.’

  Sylvie looked at Henri sharply. She hadn’t seen him for a good six months, but that was how it was. War work kept everyone apart. He was always there for her, trying too hard, she conceded. But now, in that instance, she’d had enough.

  ‘Henri, thank you for picking me up from the station,’ she announced, ‘but I really have to go now.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Sylvie.’

  ‘No, it’s getting pretty tiresome. You and me. Pretty tiresome.’ Sylvie stalked off, heading north over the bridge.

  ‘But we’re going to go to the 400. I’ve booked a table.’

  ‘Go on your own, there’ll be plenty of girls there who I’m sure would like to share your champagne.’

  ‘But it’s your first nig
ht back in the city. We have to celebrate.’

  ‘Don’t feel like celebrating.’ She was out of breath now, her suitcase weighed a ton. She’d not had to carry it since she left the headquarters in Berkshire. One of the officers there who was keen on her carried it out to her taxi; the porter at the railway station loaded it onto the train. Another unloaded it at Waterloo. And then Henri had taken care of it for her, eager as always, overwhelmed, as always, to see her. Dear Henri, she thought as she heard him hurrying behind her, how he took care of everything.

  She’d grown bored of Berkshire and had requested her old job back. A year in the sticks was enough for her. She’d given her tenant at the mews notice, was pleased it was all still standing after that really heavy raid last summer, and couldn’t wait to get back into the swing of parties and nightlife. The London crowd were more jolly, more daring, more up for anything, she decided. It was time to get back into the fray.

  A bus rumbled past her, slowing to stop for the lights at the junction with the Aldwych. She quickened her step and, as it pulled up, she hopped on board, leaving Henri pacing after it along the pavement, his disgruntled face red with exasperation. She stood on the backplate as the bus swung round the corner, her suitcase at her feet, and lifted her hand in wry apology.

  Sylvie was impatient to be home, but the bus crawled along through the traffic. She had to change buses at Holborn to go west and it was eight o’clock before she stepped onto the cobblestones of her mews. The evening shadows were dark, the blackout heavy. But all at once, she felt at home as her heels rang on the stones. Her own little mews was intact, just a couple of windows boarded up next door. She smiled softly, humming to herself, and it took a while for her to realise that the pinprick of red light she saw ahead of her was the glow of a cigarette.

  She wondered, who could be there to welcome her? It could be any of the fellows from the office. They were expecting her back today, after all, and were all very much looking forward to it. It was just like any of them to be there to greet her.