The Lost Garden (15 page)

The soldiers leave the estate the next morning. We hear the engine of the car as it winds up and down the hill, ferrying the men to the train station. We sit at the table, long after breakfast is over, listening to this particular song play over and over again. There is a small, grim knot of us at breakfast. Daphne has not appeared this morning. Jane hasn’t emerged from the barn. I think the rest of us are afraid to be alone, even though we’re also having trouble speaking to each other. We just sit together in our uneasy assembly. It’s so quiet in the dining hall that I can hear the birdsong from outside the windows.

It is Raley who comes to say goodbye. Most of the men have been taken to the train. He is the last to go. He comes to the door of the dining hall, a brown paper package in his hands. And even though I don’t want to talk to him or see him, I can’t stop myself from rushing over to him the moment he moves into the door frame. He is all turned out, all neat and trim in his uniform, hair slicked down, ready to go into war looking like the soldier he is supposed to be. Only when I am close to him and smell the familiar blossom of alcohol on his breath am I reassured that he is still himself.

“Hello, Captain Davis,” he says. His voice is warm and charming as usual.

“Hello, Captain Raley.”

He smiles at me, a slow, sad smile. “‘Never morning wore/ To evening, but some heart did break,’” he says. “It’s from that infernal poem.”

“I thought you’d gone off poetry.”

“Poetry is a little slower to go off me.” Raley reaches out and touches my cheek. “I did love that,” he says. “That night I read to you from that infernal poem.”

I almost start to cry, right there in the morning, in the dining hall with the cluster of girls behind me at the table. That night Raley offered me as compensation, I remember mostly as my mad scramble to find the plan of the estate. I was barely listening to him read to me. I think of how intently I have been listening at the door of the wireless room to Jane reading to David. I have missed my chance. There is no other way to say this. I have missed my chance at the closest thing likely to come my way under the category of love.

“Right,” I say, because I can think of nothing else. But it is not right at all.

Raley takes his hand away from my face. He holds the parcel out to me. “Could you give this to Jane? David couldn’t bring himself to come in person.”

“Of course.” I take the parcel. The paper crackles like fire as it passes between us. Raley’s good manners brought him here to say goodbye. His good manners have translated, in this instance, into courage. “Good luck, then,” I say.

“Thank you. I’m sure luck is what I’ll be needing. Goodbye, Gwen.” Raley lifts his hand and waves to the girls over my shoulder.

Don’t go, I think, as he is turning in the doorway and going. I hear his shoes on the stone steps as he walks away from me. I stand there for a moment, the package for Jane in my hands, and then I run through the dining hall, run through the passage that connects to the west wing. I race along the corridor to my room, grab what I’ve come for, and fly down the staircase outside, past Mr. Frant’s mixed border, through the arch, and out onto the driveway. The car with Raley in the passenger seat is just pulling away. “Wait!” I rush up, completely out of breath, and thrust the book into his hands. We don’t speak. I am too out of breath from my frantic dash to say anything comprehensible. He looks at me with what I can only interpret as tenderness. My usual barrage of self-deprecating protectiveness surrenders completely before that look of his. He tucks my copy of
To the Lighthouse
inside his jacket. The car drives off. I stand on the driveway, long after the car is down the hill and gone. Past the stream and through the village. Long after it has turned into the entrance to the station. In some measure, I am always standing watching the car with Raley in it drive away. I am always there. Even now.

I leave the parcel for Jane in her room. I can’t face anyone right now, even her. I just put the package down on her neatly made bed, sheets all crisped up straight, and I go outside, walk through the orchard to the lost garden. There is nowhere else for me to go.

What I’ve always found interesting in gardens is looking at what people choose to plant there. What they put in. What they leave out. One small choice and then another, and soon there is a mood, an atmosphere, a series of limitations, a world. I would not have chosen the same plants as the anonymous gardener if I were planting a garden of love, but there are some flowers we have in common. Peonies for loss. I too would choose the breaking wave of peonies for loss.

I sit on the bench, facing the garden. I have sat here for so many hours. I have looked and looked at this one patch of planted ground, trying to figure out what it meant, trying to break the code. But in searching for the story I have also made my own story here. This is my garden now.

It is a low, cloudy morning, this one which the soldiers have left us at Mosel. The air is warm and humid, noisy with insects and birdsong.

In the end I will have to make a choice about how to tell my story. And I will have to make a choice about how to tell the story of the person who made this garden, and the garden itself. There has to be a moment of going forward, when all the possibilities are left behind.

This is what I have made of the story of the garden. I think someone was in love with Thomas Walton. Perhaps someone from outside Mosel, but more likely someone who worked on the estate. It could have been one of the women who worked in the kitchen. It could have been a maid from the house. It could even have been the mistress of the estate herself. It could also have been one of the other gardeners. Perhaps Samuel Hood or William Allen. Whoever was the lover, the love itself was fuelled by something that happened in the orchard. Something very powerful. A moment of recognition that would alter a life.

I look at the heads of the peonies, fallen to ground under the weight of themselves, under the weight of a grief too heavy to bear. How they become their own grief and then can no longer bear it. Whoever made this garden would have loved absolutely, whether or not that love was returned. To make these choices in the plantings required a great deal of thought and effort. For everything that was chosen, others would have been eliminated or passed over.

Someone truly loved Thomas Walton. This is the story I will make of this. Someone truly loved Thomas Walton and perhaps couldn’t tell him, meant to show him with the making of this garden. Perhaps before showing this to him, the gardener cut some of the white roses and attached them to the timbered arch in my room, which was also Thomas’s room.

What I can’t know is if Thomas ever saw this garden. But I would say that he did. The garden had been fully planted. It was finished before the Mosel exodus to the Great War and, unless the gardener completely lost his or her nerve at the moment of unveiling, I am almost certain that Thomas would have been given this work of love. What he thought of it is impossible to guess. Was he flattered? Was he horrified? Was it like Raley and me, or was it a happier ending?

The roses look lovely in the low light, all soft and plumped up with the humidity of the morning. How could anyone turn away from that gift? No, in my story Thomas is overwhelmed with love and happiness when he is shown this garden. He will walk around it, looking at the plants and easily breaking the code of this love. He will crush the leaves of the Sweet Briar Rose between his fingers and release the scent of apples. He will understand the peonies without needing to read any descriptive label about that portion of the flower bed. He will stop before the roses. He will stop before the roses. What else is there to do?

I sit in the garden all day, well into evening. I am not hungry, don’t make the journey back to the kitchen for food. At one point in the late afternoon I hear a car on the driveway, hear it stop outside the arch, and my first thought is that Raley has come back. But since he is the one person who would know where to find me, and he doesn’t appear, I give up on that thought. I just sit there at the edge of the garden, watch it change under the shifting light of the day. When evening comes, the light leaves the ground first, moves upwards as though it’s climbing out of a hole.

It is Jane who discovers me. The sun has almost gone down and the garden is murky with the early dark. There’s a noise behind me in the hedge and then Jane is through the space and standing on the other side of the yews. At first I think she has come to find me, but she looks at me with such stricken surprise that I realize immediately she wasn’t expecting to meet anyone here. She is wearing the sweater David was knitting those nights she read to him in the wireless room. I recognize it, and can see, even in the low, blurry light, the flecks of green in it that came from the sweater she gave him to use. This is what was in the parcel Raley delivered.

“So, this is where you’re always off to,” says Jane slowly, as though she’s just now working it out. “I thought I was the only one who knew about this place.” She comes over to me and I make room for her on the bench.

“You’ve been here before?” I am astonished. This is my secret place.

“Only for the past week or so. I was trimming the angel and I caught a glimpse of white over the hedge, so I slipped through and found the roses, and all those dead things.” She takes out a cigarette. “Did you make it? Is it yours, Gwen?” She looks at me, her eyes dark and hollow. I have never seen her looking so bad. “Because it’s exactly how I feel,” she says. “It’s the only thing I’ve found here that is exactly how I feel.” She hasn’t lit her cigarette yet, is plucking at the sleeve of the sweater where a thin strand of wool is starting to unravel.

Jane has discovered the garden backwards, with only the roses still in bloom. Faith to Loss to Longing. In this order it isn’t a garden of love but a garden of death.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

“Did you make it?” she says again.

The light is draining from the roses. They look silver, then mauve. I can no longer see the stems connecting them to each other.

“Yes,” I say. “Yes, I made it.” For I have felt this afternoon that the garden does belong to me now. My story has been told here. And I am alive and the person who made the garden is most likely dead. I can look after this place, keep it tended, keep its meaning going. It is my story now.

“Come with me, then,” says Jane. “I want to give you something.”

There are many things I don’t know yet, as we walk through the orchard to the stables, many things to come. There was a car that stopped here in the afternoon. It was the county rep, Mrs. Billings, with a letter for Jane. The letter said that they’d found the body of Andrew. He hadn’t been over the ocean as expected. His plane had crashed over land. His body had been found in the woods in France, hanging from a tree by his parachute. He had been dead for months. He had been dead the entire time of his having been reported missing. He had probably only flown the first hour of his mission before being shot down. His body was badly decomposed. There was a letter from Jane in his pocket.

Jane saddles the black horse, leads him out of the stable. I don’t know any of what she knows yet, but we don’t speak. She helps me up onto his back, slides into the saddle in front of me, and we ride through the quadrangle, down past the walled garden, down towards the South Garden, and to the fields beyond.

These things will happen. In August, Churchill will meet Roosevelt in David’s hometown of Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, and they will draft up the Atlantic Charter, unifying the war aims of the United States and Britain. At the same time Doris will go every day up the hill to the empty house the soldiers have left and she will play Ravel’s “Pavane” over and over again. Sometimes I will stand outside and listen to the music as it disappears in the dusk.

The fox will take the last two chickens. I will let it happen because it has happened before, because I respect the fox’s hunger and I know my need to save the chickens does not come near his need to kill them. That’s what makes something seem inevitable, that imbalance of hunger and fear.

I will finally write to Virginia Woolf, a real letter, on paper. I will write about listening at the door to Jane reading
To the Lighthouse
to David while he knitted his sweaters. Dear Mrs. Woolf, I will say. Jane read your book at night, to a boy who knitted a sweater, in the middle of this war you left. And sometimes, when the wind murmurs in the trees outside my window at night it sounds like Jane reading your words aloud.

When I finish the letter I will put it in an envelope, write “Mrs. Virginia Woolf” on the front, and drop it into a letterbox. It is the only thing to do. At the time it will feel like the only thing to do.

And on the evening that I write the letter, I will go down to the wireless room, restless with purpose. At this point Jane is too weak to leave her room. Even though I have written her parents, they arrive too late to save her. Her strict terms have been broken and her contract with the world is at an end. Before she goes, I will sit beside her bed, hold her hand, and read the names of the roses to her from
The Genus Rosa
. But before that, I go down to the wireless room and see her last act. She has finally told her story on the empty piece of blackout curtain reserved for her. Next to the others’ drawings of their homes and hobbies, Jane has simply cut a large square in the fabric, made a window through which I can see the late-summer sky. I stand there for a long time before that cut-out square of cloth. And it is a beautiful day outside, this one she has given us.

Dead flowers hold their fragrance. That is one truth. Sometimes our passion is our ruin. That is another.

Jane died. Raley died. David went home. I stay on at Mosel through the war, training new groups of girls to grow potatoes, restoring the gardens of the estate, so that when the war is finally over the returning owners are so impressed with the restoration of Mosel that they offer me a position as head gardener. And I never leave. There is money again, after the war. The gardening staff is enlarged and the gardens are restored to their original splendour. The maze and the water gardens are built. Later, admission is charged to view the gardens and visitors bump about, maps in hand, viewing such oddities as the topiary angel and the old, espaliered apple trees. What isn’t on the visitors’ guide is the lost garden. I keep it tended, but I keep it hidden. Some people find it. Some people don’t. Mostly it’s children or lovers. As it should be.

Over the years a few of my gardening staff will see the ghost, for there will always be albino foxes at Mosel. Sometimes, if I am walking in the woods at night, I see again the flash of white, moving like smoke through the darkness.

Raley was killed at Dieppe in 1942, but the tree Raley and I planted continues to grow. Every spring it loses its fragrance to the earth in one reckless gesture, like a young boy standing at the railing of a ship and saying to his friend—Let us take our coats off and throw them in the sea.

David will return to Mosel, years later, with his wife and children. I will show them the estate, and then he and I will walk the grounds at dusk and he will ask me why I never left. Home is the place where we’ve felt the most, I will tell him. And that can be anyplace. Or anyone. It doesn’t matter how long you lived there. It’s what you’ll always want to come back to.

I have been home twice in my life. Once when I lay under the living weight of Raley, the scent of roses beside us in the dark, and once when I rode with Jane over the fields.

Here we go, then.

My arms around her small body. The thin flame of her beating hard and clear beneath her skin. Lurch of the horse as he runs his own life down, running with that same dumb grace every night, perhaps forgetting himself and remembering himself with every stride, the way an engine spits and catches, spits and catches. Jane must be the lightest person he has ever had on his back. She must feel like no one at all, the whisper of her like the murmur of wind across his wet skin. When she stops eating and dies within two months, he will still wake at night, paw at the door of his stall, anxious for her soft weight on his back. And then, when she doesn’t come and doesn’t come, when the moon is full and the field ripples fluid under it like his own flanks, his own muscle pushing him across, when the horse stirs in his sleep, dreaming of running, Jane will be remembered.

I can feel Jane’s breathing now, under my hands. The ratchety rise and fall of ribs. Her ribs strong and knotted like the wings of a swan. The wild flight of her heart. Too strong for breathing, it is crying. Only the feel of it riding my fingertips. The sound lost under the heavy pounding of the horse, his wet breathing.

There is a moment, when Jane either forgets or remembers that I am there, when she leans into me, lets me hold her. Her spine cleaves my chest, and, for an instant, I imagine how she would feel lying on top of me. How her bones would seem hollow. How the wind would murmur through them. Soft wind blowing in from a night window.

The thing about gardens is that everyone thinks they go on growing, that in winter they sleep and in spring they rise. But it’s more that they die and return, die and return. They lose themselves. They haunt themselves.

Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.

And this is what I have remembered of love.