Apple Blossom Time (42 page)

There were no notices, none of the expected arrows on the walls to point me to Reception or anywhere else. There were no rules pinned up, no numbers on the doors. Nervously, I looked through a couple of open doors. Through one, I could see into a conservatory where four people were playing a game – ludo, I thought, although I couldn’t clearly see from that distance. It was, I reluctantly admitted to myself, quite pleasant – for what it was.

I don’t know what I’d expected. Not this. I hadn’t anticipated, either, the very ordinary woman who came along a passage towards me. She was plump, untidy, with greying fair hair caught up by slipping combs. She had a sweet smile.

‘Heathcliff, you naughty boy,’ she scolded, ‘you know you’re not supposed to be out here. Off you go. I’m so sorry, Heathcliff is awfully old and smelly, but he can’t help it. Now, can I help you at all?’

‘I’m making enquiries about one of your…’ Oh God, what should I call him – patient, guest, inmate? I ought to have worked out what I was going to say before I opened my mouth. ‘… one of your past … about Edwin Ansty. I understand he used to be…’

‘Oh, Edwin. You’ll find him in the church. Just pop out of the french windows and turn right. You can’t miss it.’

So here I was, at the door of the little mock-Gothic church and at the end of my search.

*   *   *

It was very cold inside, full of dead, still air that scarcely stirred as I passed through it. In the eastern wall, a coy Victorian stained-glass window told the story of Mary Magdalene in the garden on the first Easter Day. In the morning, with the sun behind it, it might have lit the chancel. In the afternoon, it was only dull slabs of colour, shapeless and ugly. Mary’s red hair, badge of her shame, looked like rusty barbed wire. The chrysanthemums on the altar didn’t have to compete with the smell of old dog.

I stood for a moment, to allow my eyes to grow used to the gloom. Then I saw that the whitewashed walls were patched with memorial tablets of all sizes. Methodically, I began to work my way round them.

Some of the tablets, those nearest the altar, were as old as the house and commemorated the family.

Eugenia Mary and Edith Elizabeth, aged 3 years 2 months and 1 year 4 months, infant daughters of grieving parents, called to their Saviour … Suffer little children …

Robert Cranley Stokes, aged 88 years, in sure and certain Knowledge of the Resurrection of the Body …

Then there were smaller plaques, dating from the years of the Great War and immediately after, marble or brass, simply worded with names, dates and regiments. The house must have become a hospital then, I imagined, or a convalescent home, like so many at the time. Here, among these memorials, dated some time after 1927, I would finally find Edwin Ansty.

And when I had read them all, I went back to the beginning and read them again. I pulled back the curtain that shielded the bell tower, but there were none in there. I looked in the porch, but there was only one, above the inner door:
Remember before God the Men of this Estate who went to War in defence of Honour, King and Country and who never came Home.

I sat on a bench in the porch and wanted to cry, but the effort was too much. It was the end and I hadn’t expected to reach it so soon. I was drained. I had followed up hearsay, listened to gossip, rummaged through papers, travelled miles, talked, pleaded, cajoled, argued. For nothing.

Yet the woman in the hall had been so positive. Perhaps she’d been thinking of someone else, of a similar name. Perhaps she hadn’t really been listening to me, but thinking about something more important – the dog’s walk or evening meal. Green-tops must have regular visitors, looking for lost relatives or friends. And it had all been so long ago.

I could go back and search the tablets again for a name that could have been confused with the one I’d been looking for. But I didn’t have the heart to try. It was too late.

My instinct to stop had been the right one. There had been nothing to gain by following a letter from a man who’d spoken to a man who’d heard from another man … But Geoffrey had been very persuasive. No, it was wrong to blame him. I’d been easily persuaded. Too easily.

I’d wanted too much for too long. It had taken over my life. I’d been living in a curious, self-imposed limbo since the end of the war. I had thought about nothing else. I had no job. My army terminal grant was running out. My mother was wearing herself out trying to keep things going. And Martin was waiting for me to make up my mind to marry him, but he wouldn’t wait for ever. I’d already kept him waiting for a lifetime.

It was time to see sense. It was time to stop.

*   *   *

When I came out, the afternoon was past its best. The sun had hazed over and there was a new nip in the air that smelt of bonfires and blackberries. I thought of Geoffrey, waiting in his car, and knew that I didn’t want to talk to him. Not yet. I needed more time to myself – just a little longer, I promised myself – but away from that ugly, empty little church.

I walked on, aimlessly. Like most gardens, this had been dug up during the war for vegetable production, but it had been converted with an eye for beauty. The old herbaceous ribbon borders, planted with cabbages, purple and iridescent blue, with wigwams of runner beans for focus, were sheltered by a mellow brick wall. The lawn had been dug into a chessboard of squares, edged with dwarf espaliered apples and pears, with grassy paths between them. Onions, their necks twisted, their roots pointing towards the sun, lay on the surface to dry for storage. The beetroots were ripe. Their purple shoulders pushed through the earth. Someone had been digging up carrots. The fork still stood at the end of half a row of feathery leaves.

A ha-ha, crossed by a narrow, gated bridge, divided the garden from woodland. There, the trees were widely spaced, allowing plenty of light and air, and formally planted. Some were quite tall and well grown; others had been more recently planted. None seemed to have reached its full height. I could see there was a pattern, but it didn’t make itself clear to me.

A man was digging a hole. For a shocked moment, I thought it was a grave, but then I could see that, although it was an imposing hole, it was nowhere near long enough to hold a coffin. He had a barrowload of rotted manure, gently steaming, beside the hole. I leaned on the gate and watched him.

He worked slowly, handling the spade easily and steadily, with none of the energy-wasting attack of a novice. He looked as though he could have kept up that bend, stretch, toss all afternoon. When he was satisfied with the size, he half-filled the hole again with manure mixed with some of the earth and a couple of handfuls of white powder that I knew, from watching Tom, was bone-meal. Then he picked up a small tree that had been leaning against the wheelbarrow and heeled it into the hole, backfilling and stamping down until he was content with the planting.

The little tree added to the pattern that I still could not understand.

And when, pushing the barrow with the spade balanced over it, the gardener passed me, he smiled and asked if he could help me. He had a shy smile, slow, as though rusty from lack of use.

‘You look unhappy,’ he said. It was an oddly innocent remark, unexpected from a stranger. People don’t usually comment on what they see. It isn’t considered polite to notice. Only children and madmen really say what they think.

‘Thank you, but I’m all right,’ I answered. There are rules, after all. Just as it isn’t done to mention a stranger’s sorrow, it isn’t expected that one should confess to feeling anything at all – not to a stranger, not even to a friend. Emotion is embarrassing and best kept secret. ‘I’ll go in a moment. I was looking for someone’s memorial in the church, but I couldn’t find him.’

‘That’s not the church,’ he replied. ‘That’s just the chapel. This is the church.’

I looked around, but saw nothing.

‘Here. Look.’ He sounded impatient, as though talking to a rather backward child.

But I only saw trees.

‘Come with me.’

*   *   *

He led me through the great west door. A pair of holly trees, small yet already formally clipped, guarded its portals. We walked down a nave of lime trees. Their leaves were yellowing and spinning down like coins. In the early summer, greedy bees would burrow into the scented blossoms. Their branches would, one day, interlace overhead, complex and perfect as fan vaulting. The transepts were marked by a double row of horse chestnuts. Conkers split beneath my feet as we walked. Spiky shell, glossy seed, white heart crushed into leaf-spangled grass.

And the pattern that had evaded me from a distance became clear at last. A tree church. A tree cathedral.

‘The walls are oak, English oak. And here is the oldest,’ the gardener told me, ‘here, the yew, the altar. I planted it in 1921. It might live for a thousand years. And the youngest you saw today. That won’t live so long. Long enough, though. A little pear. For Clive.’

‘Clive?’

He looked at me and smiled. ‘Clive who used to cut his toenails in public and let the pieces fly across the floor. Sometimes I was unkind to him. I laughed at him. He didn’t deserve that. The trees all have names, you know. Does that make me sound utterly batty? Each one is a memorial to someone I knew, once, a long time ago. Come into the porch. I’m rather pleased with it.’

And on the southern side, where a porch ought to be, laburnum had been trained over hoops to make a tunnel that would drip golden rain in May. It would be grossly, vulgarly, gloriously beautiful.

Trying not to look as though I were looking, I searched each tree for a plaque or a label. He saw me and guessed what I was doing.

‘No, no, they don’t actually have names. I’m not as mad as that. Some people said I was, but they were wrong. But I
know
who is represented by each one. And when I’m gone, it won’t really matter, will it? People can put their own names to each tree, remember their own friends. I won’t mind.’

He was very odd, but nicely so. We were well out of sight of the house, yet I didn’t feel afraid. I’d have thought I’d have been scared out of my wits, wandering through a wood with a stranger who was – well, unbalanced. I mean, it wasn’t
normal,
his obsession – he was planting a forest single-handed, for heaven’s sake – though he seemed harmless enough. But he didn’t scare me. We were comfortable together.

He was rather long, rather thin, rather bent. Middle-aged, not old, but with hands already knotted by arthritis, like so many gardeners – all that digging and damp. I had the impression that he was very strong, tough and knotty – like one of his trees, perhaps – but that didn’t worry me. He was curiously gentle, unworldly as a hermit.

I walked back into his church, back into what I supposed he might call the south chapel. The grass was patterned with shadows, long, reaching, twining shadows. The smell of decaying leaves was sweeter than incense.

‘It must have taken you a long time,’ I said, rather fatuously.

‘A lifetime.’

‘Have you lived here always?’

‘A lifetime.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘It’s very clear. There might be a touch of frost tonight. The first of the autumn. That’ll bring the leaves down. It’s beautiful when it’s bare, too, you know. Sparse. All bones and no flesh.’

And I knew him.

He looked down from the sky, across to me, with a smile that was as familiar as my own. How could I not have noticed at once? Perhaps I had been fooled by the grey, thinning hair and the swollen finger joints. I had looked, but I had not really seen.

I had expected that something would call to me. But it had not. I had expected some communion, some link. There had been none, except the friendly empathy of strangers. A changed angle, a tilt of the head, a trick of the light. Dear God, I might have missed it.

In twenty years’ time, I would look like this man.

The jolt of recognition was less of a shock than I’d expected. His was the face that had stared back at me, unrecognized, since I was old enough to stand on tiptoe to peer into the looking-glass.

‘I find that a comforting thought, don’t you? That something can be beautiful even when it’s dead.’ He held up his hand towards the dropping sun and turned it back and forth. The light shone through the loops of skin between his fingers, glowing red, full of life and blood. He clenched his fingers and opened them again, several times, seeming fascinated by the interplay of skin and tendon and bone. I thought he’d stopped speaking, but after a while he seemed to notice me again. ‘For ever and ever. Constant renewal. Eternal life. Now that’s where the trees score over us, don’t you think? If I had buried Clive in that hole there, instead of a pear tree, do you think that he would have risen again? Do you?’

He seemed to expect an answer. I shook my head.

‘Of course not. There would have been no new flush of life in the spring, no rising of his sap. Imagine – if he sprouted. You do understand – he’s not actually in that hole there. None of them are. You would need to be very stupid to think that. In fact, he’s in the bottom of a shell hole somewhere, drowned, not enough to piece together to bury. So are they all.’ He turned in a slow circle on the spot, looking at the trees, and I felt a flicker of fear, but his mind was not concerned with me. ‘Every one. Shreds. Blasted. Rags on the wire. But they tell me the grass is growing there again. And trees. I don’t know what to think. We only saw stumps, you know, half-buried, splintered and scorched, like broken fingers sticking out of the earth. Black and birdless. But it’s different now, they tell me. Green. Do you think so?’

I nodded.

‘Really? People tell such lies. One never knows who to trust. They should grow well, then. I always take care to put a good handful of blood and bone in the planting hole. It makes such a difference. They don’t thrive without it. You said you were looking for someone here? Who was it?’

‘I was mistaken.’

‘Pity. I know them all. I could have helped you. Come back and have tea. My wife and I always have tea together at this time of day. No? Then do come again. Won’t you? I have so much to show you.’