“At present,” she said. “Bob Hewitt, my man, is sick, and the boy who comes up from the village is not much good. Do you like pigs?”
“My acquaintance with them has never been intimate,” said Michael.
“Nothing but pork and a receptacle for devils, you think. There you are wrong. A pig, young man, when properly treated and rightly understood, is one of the most intelligent and lovable of God’s creatures.”
She was leaning back against one of the urns beside the steps, regarding him shrewdly and kindly, but he could see how tired she looked.
“Mistress Wentworth, I won’t keep you,” he said humbly and gently. “I have no message. I was simply trespassing.”
“Why do you call me Mistress Wentworth?” she asked.
“It should be Mistress Margary Wentworth.”
She knew what he was quoting and smiled. “I’m not married,” she said. “And I am Maria, not Margary. My great-great-niece is Margary. And why were you trespassing?”
“I was going to ask you to take me on as your gardener,” said Michael baldly, stating a fact and exerting no charm.
“Do you know anything about gardening?”
“Very little.”
“Then why should I want you for my gardener?”
“I was not thinking about it from your point of view,” said Michael.
“And how were you thinking about it from your own?” she asked. “Did you by any chance think this would be a good place to get rid of those devils you spoke of?”
“That’s exactly what I did think,” said Michael.
“My dear boy, devils are not so easy to get rid of as you seem to imagine.”
“I realize that,” said Michael.
“How long have you been in Belmaray?” she asked.
“Since this morning.”
“Have you met my great-nephew the vicar?”
“Yes.”
“Did he suggest that I might take you on as my gardener?”
“No,” said Michael. “The suggestion was mine. He thought I was joking. And so I was then. But now, well, I’m not joking.” He paused and forced himself on. “Though I don’t know much about gardening I could learn,” he finished desperately.
“You might, of course, be good with the pigs,” she said, considering him. “Are you staying anywhere?”
“I had high tea at the Wheatsheaf.”
“You left your luggage there?”
“I haven’t any luggage except what’s in my pocket, just a tooth brush and so on that I bought yesterday in Silverbridge. I spent last night in Silverbridge.”
“And where did you spend the night before that?”
“In prison. I caught the afternoon train from Paddington and left everything I possessed in London.”
“Did you possess much?”
“No, not much. A flat and so on. And something in my bank balance. It accumulates while you’re in prison.”
“So I’ve heard. But how very odd to leave London without any tooth brush.”
“Leaving was a very sudden decision.”
“So I should imagine. How much of this have you told my great-nephew?”
“None of it. He found me hungry on Pizzle bridge, fetched me breakfast from the farm, and then we walked down the road and talked about your rhododendrons. I like rhododendrons and I said in joke that I’d like to be your gardener.”
“Then you can’t know much about rhododendrons. When you’ve planted a rhododendron in the right soil you’ve planted it in the right soil, and that’s all there is to it. With pigs, now, it’s different. The proper care of a pedigree pig is a life’s work for an intelligent man. Where’s Josephine?”
“Still in the gazebo.”
“What’s your name?”
“Michael Stone,” said Michael, gazing down the field with a face as still and hard as his own name.
“Never heard of you,” said Miss Wentworth. “And I would be obliged if you would take another cigarette and stop gazing into the middle distance like that tiresome young man Orestes.”
“It was not murder I was in for,” Michael assured her. “Though I was in for a very serious offence.”
“There are worse things than murder,” said Miss Wentworth placidly. “And all those Agamemnons were better dead. Do you want the whole of Belmaray to know you’re just out?”
“No I don’t,” said Michael.
“Then why did you tell me you’d been in? Don’t you know all old maids tittle-tattle?”
“You don’t,” said Michael. “You are like the sundial.”
“This is a most peculiar affair,” said Miss Wentworth.
“I wouldn’t know if I were awake or asleep,” said Michael.
Miss Wentworth looked at him shrewdly. “You’d be better asleep,” she said. “A good deal to make up by the looks of you. And that’s a nasty cough you have. But I’ve a good deal to do before I can get your sheets aired. My pig man is sick, as I told you, and Jane Prescott only comes in the mornings.”
She got up more nimbly than he did, and his mingled shame and reluctance made him stumble awkwardly as he came up the steps and held out his hand. “Good-bye, Miss Wentworth,” he said. “I won’t say I didn’t mean it, because I did. I did come here meaning to impose myself on you in some capacity or other. I thought I’d try it on. I don’t know what I expected to happen. Not what has happened. I didn’t know I had enough decency left in me to feel so profoundly ashamed.”
“Shame is a good thing,” said the old lady, taking his hand. “When it’s your own, that is. To shame another is one of the worst of crimes.”
He had a good hand, well shaped, broad and long, while hers was frail, light and dry as an autumn leaf, yet his shook so much in hers that she tightened her grip. “Even that can be forgiven,” she said. “Shame can be offered for shame. No, I am not saying good-bye. I am holding you where you are. I shall find an able-bodied young man exceedingly useful, however ignorant.” Feeling his hand once more steady she dropped it abruptly. “Josephine!”
Obedient as a dog Josephine appeared from the gazebo and trotted towards them, and Miss Wentworth handed Michael the stick. “Now take her up to the house. Don’t strike her. Touch her gently on the right flank if you want her to go to the left, and the other way on. Let me see if you have the makings of a pig man in you.”
“Now, angels and ministers of light,” murmured Michael desperately below his breath, “if it be that you exist at all in contraposition to the terrestrial furies, be with me now and grant my hand and eye and resolution that perfect co-ordination which shall project this pig—in through the front door?” he asked Miss Wentworth in interpolation.
“Through the front door and out of the garden door,” said Miss Wentworth, following serenely after.
“Through the front door,” whispered Michael. “Amen.”
Josephine went sedately along the flagged paths, obedient to every light touch of the stick. Coming after her, observing her noble proportions from behind, Michael perceived that she was indeed a magnificent animal with a skin like pale pink satin. “I expect I wash her,” he thought. “Lux?”
Following at the tail of the procession, where he could not see her, Miss Wentworth said gruffly, “I should apologize too. I was brought up never to mention money in conversation, never to mention health and never to ask questions. I asked at least twenty. I ask your pardon and I will never put another question to you except this final one—do you like your coffee black or white?”
“Black,” said Michael.
“Good,” said Miss Wentworth. “I never trust a man who takes his coffee white.”
Michael, who had known many trustworthy men who did, had no wish to argue the point. It was enough for him to know that she trusted him.
“Do you really mean through the front doo
r?” he asked.
“I always mean what I say,” said Miss Wentworth. “Let us get that clear before we make a start. It’s a short cut and when you get to my age you save your steps.”
Led by Josephine, who was now heading for home, they came up the last flight of steps to the mossgrown court in front of the house. A carriage drive, overgrown upon each side by the tall untrimmed flowering laurels that edged it, approached the court from the east, winding uphill from the village, and a balustrade separated it from the garden. There were urns on the balustrade and moon-shaped beds in the court, but they were full of nothing but weeds. “They’ll be full of something better very soon,” vowed Michael, and he felt a little dizzy with sudden visions of geraniums, scarlet, white and salmon pink, sturdy and strong and smelling like heaven in the hot sun.
“You like geraniums?” he enquired.
“Cannot abide ’em,” said Miss Wentworth, and then paused. “Plant ’em where you like,” she added abruptly, with a keen glance at him. “I mean that.”
It would help, she thought. When he’d made a clean breast of it he must go back where he belonged and take up again the burden of his circumstances. “A body hast thou prepared me.” It did not only mean a body. It meant character and what came of it, gifts, health or the lack of it, one’s position in the soil, in the shade or the sun, bearing fragrant flowers or scentless. But you didn’t come back to it easily when you’d been plunged down into that germinal suffering where men are locked in equality like roots in the soil. After being cramped in the dark you needed to stretch yourself, do something different, do perhaps what you wanted to do, even if it was planting geraniums in unsuitable soil. . . Nothing had even grown in those urns. . . Then a sense of direction was restored to you again.
The front door of grey weathered oak was closed and while Josephine sat patiently on the rusty wire mat they looked up for a moment at the house. It stood so high that it got the full force of the Atlantic gales from the southwest, and was scarred and battered. The subsidence of the soil through the centuries had given to its walls in places a perilous tilt and buttresses of old weathered brick shored it up here and there, while its steep strong old roof pressed down upon it with determined firmness. It was rather like Miss Wentworth, a combination of fragility and indomitable strength. Like her it looked worth knowing. Like her it had weathered many storms and was serene in its old age. The E shape of the house gave one a sense of being gathered in and it was not in keeping with either of them that the front door should be shut.
“I left the garden one open,” explained Miss Wentworth, “and even when there is no wind there is a draught.”
She turned the handle and preceded by Josephine they went into the old porch, as large as a room with its recessed windows with seats in them. The inner door was open and a wide flagged passage led through the depth of the house to the open door into the kitchen garden. Josephine trotted purposefully down and Michael followed after.
“Come back when you have shut her in her sty in the orchard,” Miss Wentworth called after him. “You will probably find me upstairs in the linen closet.”
The linen closet, thought Michael as he tramped down the passage, his feet and Josephine’s trotters ringing on the stone flags. Was there a stillroom? He was aware of panelled walls on each side of him hung with portraits. He caught the gleam of a white ruff above Elizabethan armor. He especially noticed one of a woman with curls on her forehead whose pale face seemed vaguely familiar. There were pearls twisted in her hair and she had a sprig of rosemary fastened in her grey silk dress. He noticed too a young man with a long melancholy face, wearing a cuirass crossed by a scarlet sash. Then he came to the further door and stepped out into what was to his modern mind the impossibility of the kitchen garden.
3
His parents might have been familiar with such old gardens but he had never seen one. It was completely enclosed by the house, and the high cob walls that sheltered it upon the three sides, and it held warmth within it as a house does, as though it were itself a living thing. The other garden had had no frontier, it had enlarged itself to meet the fields and the river and to look to wide horizons, but this garden was warm and luxuriant within prescribed lines and its solidity had a most comfortable and comforting beauty. Nothing could get in here, thought Michael. The furies might visit the outer garden but they would not get in here. The place was so stuffed with potential food that there was simply no room for them.
The walls were covered with old fruit trees, peaches, plums, apricots, nectarines and pears. Beyond the kitchen garden he could see the tops of the apple trees in the orchard, still with their winter beauty of old bare branches twisted into strange shapes that seemed to have language in them, some rune or other written against the parchment sky, full of wisdom if one had the wisdom to read it. “But what the dickens does she do with all the fruit?” wondered Michael. There was more of it in the kitchen garden; two old mulberry trees held up with chains, an ancient quince and two medlars that he gazed at uncomprehendingly, never having seen such things, strawberry beds, raspberry canes, gooseberry and currant bushes.
Entirely forgetting all about Josephine he began walking round the garden and found the vegetables, a jungle of cabbages, broccoli and spinach, and neat inner spaces in the jungle where his ignorance supposed that seeds were coming up. There were traces of a herb garden in one place, perhaps one of the Elizabethan knot gardens, where the herbs were grown in the shape of fantastic knots. They would all have grown here once, marjoram, rue, sage, cumin, thyme, hyssop, marigold, balm, camomile, basil and all the rest of them. He had known all the good old names once but he had forgotten them with other good things. There were several of them here still, and the air was rich and heavy with their scent. Mossgrown paths, edged with miniature box hedges about a foot high, wandered in and out through the jungle and as a crowning glory there was a large magnolia tree facing the sun in the angle of the wall. Though there were weeds everywhere the kitchen garden was not neglected like the flower garden in front of the house. Michael felt no sadness here, only a profound astonishment that Bob Hewitt, if it were he who labored here, should be only sick and not dead. And what did they do with it all? he wondered again. And where the dickens was Josephine?
He found her waiting before a small door in the orchard wall and when he opened the door she preceded him with alacrity through it. The orchard too was enclosed upon three sides by cob walls, the fourth side being walled in by the back of the stables and the wall of the stableyard. Part of the stable wall had been taken down to make an entrance to the pigsties. Josephine hurried along there through the drifts of daffodils in the orchard grass, scattering the hens who bobbed among them, but when Michael opened the half-door to let her go in he saw that the word sty was an insult, and shutting the door again he leaned his elbows on it and gazed in admiration. Apartment would have been a better word than sty, such devotion had obviously gone to the preparation of accommodation for the goddesses who dwelt within. The walls were well scrubbed and the cobbles were covered with clean fresh straw upon which the other three matrons were taking their ease. They looked at Michael with the utmost benignity. Their eyes, if small, were bright and they had long wise faces that made him think of sibyls. The rosettes of their snouts had beauty if one thought about it; they might have been made of pink velvet. They were so clean that the smell of them was entirely pleasant and wholesome. “Ladies,” he said, “my thoughts have done you great wrong for many years. My profound apologies.”
A further door in the wall led through into the stableyard, where the door of a great coach house swung open on broken hinges and the cobbles were needing a wash. He looked through the door and saw loose boxes festooned with cobwebs, a dilapidated old governess cart and a lady’s rusty bicycle. It was almost as sad as the front garden. He went out through a big archway surmounted by a shield, of which he could see only the reverse side, and found himself in the same drive
that he had noticed sweeping round the front of the house. It wound away downhill towards the village through a tall beech wood echoing with bird song. Later in the year there would be a sheet of bluebells under the trees.
Standing in the drive Michael saw down below him a queer little round grey lodge. It had a circular sloping roof like a hat with a chimney at the apex to take it off by. He saw a tall lean stooping figure toiling up the steep road below it and drew back towards the archway, for it was Don Quixote. He was full of shame, for how was he to explain the way in which the joke had become a reality? There was no explaining it for the thing had just happened. Nevertheless he must have some sort of explanation ready. What should he say? But there was no need to say anything for the moment, for Don Quixote swerved aside and went into the lodge.
He turned and looked up at the device on the shield over the archway. At the top was a beehive shaped like a helmet and below it a broken sword. Round the bottom of the shield were the words, Dona nobis pacem, give us peace.
He went back the way he had come, through the stableyard into the orchard and from there into the vegetable garden. Under one of the mulberry bushes he stood still. It was intensely quiet and with the sky so overcast twilight seemed not far away. It was growing cold with already a hint of coming rain, and the scent of violets came to him from somewhere. It was that moment of a spring evening when the birds sing with such a piercing sweetness that the hour is charmed. The swift flight of the spring is halted and though one listens for only ten minutes of pure peace it might be ten years. The cold sweet spring, thought Michael, the cold sweet spring. Dona nobis pacem.
A window in the house opened and a gruff voice called, “Is there a broccoli down there?”
“A gross of them,” Michael called back.
“Bring me one. Do you like them with cheese?”
Michael, stooping to cut one with his pocket knife, called back, “If that’s a thing trustworthy men like, yes.”
In a few strides he was under the window and looking up at her. She had taken off her hideous hat and in the dim light her face had almost a look of youth. Mistress Wentworth. For a moment he wished with all his heart that she was young. Then he did not. Where would her deftness have been then, her wisdom and compassion? Like honey to the discarded helmet these things come to their full glory only when the pride of life is past.
The Rosemary Tree Page 11
