Stories (85 page)

But she felt something else that she was ashamed of, that she had to wrestle with, in silence and in secrecy. She could not stop herself thinking that if Henry could die without warning, apparently in full health, then why not Frederick?

Althea was by nature a fussy and attentive wife, but Frederick did not like this in her. She longed to say: Take it easy, work less, worry less—relax. She knew he believed that he ought to be doing all this: duty ordained otherwise.

Often she would wake in the night out of dreams full of terror: if Frederick was on call, she would see the bed empty beside her, and think that this was what she could expect from the future. Then she would go to the stairs to see if Muriel’s light was still on; it often was, and then Althea would descend the stairs to Muriel’s kitchen, where they would drink tea or cocoa until Frederick came back. Muriel did not ask what drove Althea down the stairs so often at night, but she was always gay and consoling—kind. She was kind. Well, they were all kind people.

Sometimes, on those rare evenings when they could all be together, without pressures from Frederick’s work, Althea, having cleared the table and come to join those two people, her husband—a large, worried-looking man in spectacles sitting by a lamp and piles of medical magazines, engaged on his futile task of keeping up with new discovery—and a lean restless woman who was probably helping one of the youngsters with homework, or a psychological problem—sometimes Althea would see that room without its centre, without Frederick. She and Muriel were alone in the room with the children. Yes, that is how it would all end, two ageing women, with the children—who would soon have grown up and gone.

Between one blink of an eye and another, a man could vanish, as Henry had done.

In the long evenings when Frederick was at the clinic, or on call, and it was as if the whole house and its occupants waited for him to come back, then Althea could not stop herself
from looking across the livingroom at Muriel in the thought: Coming events cast their shadow before. Can’t you feel it?

But Muriel would look up, smile, laugh, offer to make tea for them all, or would say that she heard Frederick’s car and she was tired and would take herself to bed—for she was tactful, and never stayed on in the evenings past the time she was wanted.

But this is our future, Althea would think. Their future, hers and Muriel’s, was each other.

She knew it. But it was neurotic to think like this and she must try to suppress it.

T
here were rumours another garden was hidden among trees.

Before finding it you speculate, make pictures of it in your mind. Perhaps it is hidden because it is so unlike everything else in the Park that it would strike people as discordant? And if it is unlike, or out of key, then in what ways? The Park already holds so much variety. The world’s birds and animals are there. A tree will turn out to be an immigrant from Lebanon, another from Canada. Gulls come from the sea, migrating birds plane down to the many water surfaces on their way from one continent to another. There is wilderness near the canal where blackberries may be picked, there are fields of rough grass for lying on, or rolling on, or loving on, or running the dog or playing football and cricket. There are parts like Italy and parts that could not be anything but England. An island full of docketed plants for gardeners to bend over is reached by a little bridge that must have been copied from a teacup. Roses, miniature waterfalls, poplars, lakes, fountains, a theatre … what could possibly not be appropriate, be considered bizarre? A sand garden, as they have them in the East? But surely that would be hard to keep free of blown leaves. A garden of pebbles, coloured and matched? A sculpture garden, with metal and stone among gravel?

There is nothing you can’t imagine the Park accommodating with no more of a jar than you get now, turning your eyes from oaks and beeches to bears on their rocky ledges or the head of a
giraffe staring over a flowering bush, then to a small boy racing under a kite shaped like a yellow dish with a face on it.

Small children will take from their mother’s kitchen a sprouting onion and a couple of carrots and, finding a few inches of bare soil in a corner, will plant them. Mother offers packets of seed and a garden fork and expertise, but the children fiercely guard their own conception: in the night the onion will make many, the carrots multiply. “No, no, this way, we want it this way, we don’t want your old seeds. You say a few weeks? But that’s for ever … we want them to grow now!” Perhaps this was man’s first attempt to manipulate nature? No, you can’t imagine that garden, but the houses of the gardeners and keepers are tucked away all over the Park and around these, probably, are samples of these embryo gardens. In a bombed building, rebuilt years ago new, a small girl used to dawdle on her way to school. She had made herself a house of a dozen bricks and some mortar rubble. Around the house she had a garden, spikes of wilting forsythia and blades of grass. Each morning she ran in with a new plant, a crocus pulled from her mother’s garden, then a twig of cherry when it appeared in the spring. Everywhere was flowering growth, and the child came in daily in her purpose to make her own garden: a few square inches of dust with some withering fragments of plant. She scattered water on them from branches that had been rain-soaked in the night, she shaded them with a plank pulled from the debris of the building. Nothing helped, they had to die. So she brought shells, bits of glass and china, pebbles, beads, and made a pattern that said to her garden, one that would not die or dry out and vanish away.

Well then, if the other garden is not concealed because it is exotic, perhaps it is the quintessence of the Park, a concentrated statement of it? And so, at last, it turns out to be. Strolling in the Park, looking at trees and shrubs, you turn your head and see it. There it is.

It was a January day I saw it first. The night had been cold, the sky was chilly blue, full of racing cloud.

I was looking at a wide oblong of formal grass, with a deep border on either side. At the other end, shallow steps, almost the width of the grass, lifted the garden to its next level. The width of the steps, enough for a dozen or so to go up abreast, gives this reticent and secret place a look of welcome, as if it were waiting for guests. Yet there is no one in sight.

Of course, to see it in January means that you are imagining it in June; the dislocation you have suffered by seeing the garden there, where you didn’t expect it, is sharpened by seeing two gardens at once, summer superimposed on this winter scene: easy, that morning, because of the sunlight everywhere, and the noise of the birds, bathing in it.

The grass of the lower garden, on its west side, and in shade, was filmed with ice that would not melt that day. The winter-flowering viburnum, pink crumblike buds, shed a faint sharp scent, like wind off snow.

The sound of footsteps is absorbed in grass: you walk in silence.

The steps are shallow and curved, and on either side are low pillars, and on them scrolls of stone, like frozen water-chutes. Above each scroll are shells, like those in Salamanca on that wall where people come to stand and watch the shadows move on dulled pink stone, the same colour of the stone that is used in the Cotswolds.

The green oblong of the pool of grass now lies behind, with its borders where the plants are all cut back. In spring, what will they be? And in summer? Of course, lavender and pinks, rue and rosemary, marjoram, thyme, catmint and peony. They will be scented, butterfly-filled, bee-visited, and people will stand hanging their noses over them, as drunk as the insects. The grass will be warm. Behind the borders now are stark bushes and trees, but when the leaves come this lower part will be enclosed twice, first by hedge, and then by a shimmer of green.

Even now, when you are well into the garden, on the steps, it is not possible to see the shape of the whole.

The second level has a fountain, as a centre to many roses—and grass, grass again, the roses will bloom over grass, not tarmac, and no footsteps will ever intrude here. A glossy black boy with a mermaid echoes the statue of the chestnut avenue, boy-with-dolphin, and also the spouting fishes of the poplar fountain. The water is frozen, but the ice has been broken for the birds. The thick water holds glassy plates that balance and slide, and on the coldly sunny edge a thrush and a blackbird wait for me to go so that they can drink.

Everywhere are birds. A blackbird uses his yellow beak in the soil under the roses. A fat pigeon holds his chest into the sun. Sparrows are quarrelling as if it were spring. Crows are
making a fuss in some trees. And a squirrel, who surely ought to be hibernating, is watching what I shall do next.

At the edge of this round garden is another statue, of a girl holding a kid, its horns still in bud.

It is the kind of statue that can only arouse thoughts of the kind that true artists despise, such as: How the sculptor must have loved that girl!—She is beautiful, with a strong-boned face. Her hair looks wet. It is impossible not to imagine the sculptor saying: “Now wet your head. I’m going to do your hair today.” And the owner of that face will surely have said at some point during the sitting, with the controlled commonsense that sounds like dry humour: “For goodness’ sake, this statue is going to look as if the goat keeps turning its head to have a quick swig.” But of course the artist went sternly on, ignoring her. The kid is tucked under one arm, very high, and close to her bare breasts.

It is the gentlest, most charming of statues, and it is

It is in darkened bronze. The girl looks at the little animal, which is looking across to the shining black of the boy and mermaid rising out of the frozen water.

Some weeks later, on a day when the skies were low and dark, everything soaked and dismal, there was a wreath around the baby goafs neck. It was of daphne, fragrant pinkish-mauve on pale brown naked wood. Someone had reached up to garland the goat, and recently, for the flowers were fresh.

Soundlessly over grass into the next circle of this delicate garden, which is like a series of bubbles one above another. But you still can’t make out the plan of the place; you can never see all of it at once. This “bubble” is smaller than the first. The person who said that this other garden was here said, too, that it was laid out in the shape of a man. This second bubble would be the chest.

It is like Queen Mary’s rose garden, but an exquisite copy, segments of earth filled with roses in grass: these round gardens are like garlands laid on grass. It is enclosed by an espalier of limes, a lacing of black knobby branches that are horizontal and stiff on either side of the central stems. The black wood glistens and drips, the sunlight makes crystals of the scattering water. Each knob is already sprouting the yellowy shoots that
when spring comes will make wands of green: the theme of garland will be repeated again.

A variety of birds sit on the cold wood, waiting for spring to start. The sky churns and tumbles.

At the very end of this series of grassy shapes is a very small circle or bubble—the head. Roses again. It is an intimate gay little place, and in summer it must be like being caught in a bunch of flowers and greenery. You look up into blue past black twigs, and out into the next bubble through the elegant bareness of the spreadeagled limes.

The design is still not evident, though you know it now: you are holding it in your mind, a tiny circle, a larger one, a larger one still, then the grassy oblong bordered and hedged on either side.

A small breeze lifts a dozen of last autumn’s frozen leaves and clatters them on the icy film where the shadow is. In summer they will be butterflies and rose petals.

Silently back, over grass, with the blackbird hopping behind: you might be a gardener, and a gardener means turned soil. There is nobody else here, no one at all.

Back through one circle after another, then across the grass that lies beyond the steps. As you leave, the place draws itself in behind you, is gathered in to itself, like water settling after a stone has disturbed it. There it is, whole, between its hedges, its bare trees, repeating and echoing like a descant, using every theme that is used in the great Park outside, but used there roughly, in crude form.

A long way off now, the pigeon holds out its shining chest, and the blackbirds and thrushes probe the earth.

But the squirrel comes fast to the gate, and holds up its paws, as if it were begging; then it rakes my legs with its front paws like a cat wanting to be attended to, or to be fed.

Turn your back, turn a corner—it is all gone.