The Sea Garden (2 page)

2

The Domaine

Monday, June 3

I
n the morning sun, the Place d'Armes was an empty white expanse. Activity was confined to the shops and cafés under the trees. Ellie bought a guidebook and a large-scale map from the nearest
tabac
and sat on a low wall in the shade to open out the map. When she couldn't locate the Domaine de Fayols immediately, an unwarranted spike of panic rose. But there it was, marked on the southern rim of the island, close to a cove and a lighthouse. Until then she'd had only the word of Laurent de Fayols that the place would exist when she arrived.

By ten o'clock she was waiting outside the hotel. No cars were permitted on the island, and most people who passed were on bicycles: dented, clicking, cumbersome machines of uncertain vintage, used by countless people on countless holidays. The only alternative was a horse-drawn cart. Ellie watched as the driver jumped down and ran inside the hotel. Minutes later he came out with Jean-Luc, who waved her over.

“This will transport you to the Domaine de Fayols.”

The driver pulled her up into the seat next to him, his work-callused hand rough against hers as they touched, then he tutted and murmured to the elderly black horse, brushing its flank gently with the whip. They set off, swaying high above the road. The wheels winnowed up puffs of dust that trailed the cart as it jolted along the track. Ellie clutched her bag and folders tightly.

Neither of them spoke. The driver kept his eyes ahead. Scrubby evergreen bushes released a strong scent of resin and honey; forests of pine gave way to gentle south-facing vineyards disturbed only by the ululation of early summer cicadas. Sitting up tall on the seat, she craned around eagerly to see what plants thrived naturally.

It was a wild and romantic place, Laurent de Fayols had written, the whole island once bought as a wedding gift to his wife by a man who had made his fortune in the silver mines of Mexico. One of three small specks in the Mediterranean known as the Golden Isles, after the oranges, lemons, and grapefruit that glowed like lamps in their citrus groves.

There were few reference works in English that offered information beyond superficial facts about the island, and those she had managed to find were old. The best had been published in 1880, by a journalist called Adolphe Smith. Ellie had been struck by the loveliness of his “description of the most Southern Point of the French Riviera”:

The island is divided into seven ranges of small hills, and in the numerous valleys thus created are walks sheltered from every wind, where the umbrella pines throw their deep shade over the path and mingle their balsamic odour with the scent of the thyme, myrtle and the tamarisk
.

She inhaled deeply.

 

T
hey turned off the track and up a drive spiked by Italian cypress. Soon the driveway opened onto a turning circle in front of the house. Inside the circle, in front of the house, stood a venerable olive tree surrounded by a bed of lavender. On either side of the house, towering pines, eucalyptus, and more cypresses stood guard.

“
Ici, la Domaine
,” said the driver.

“
Merci
.”

Ellie accepted his chapped hand, and climbed down. The facade of the house was rendered in pale terra-cotta with butterfly blue shutters. It was a substantial property, three storeys high, under a traditional tile roof. Sculpted clouds of box hedge in galvanized planters lined the steps to the front door.

She had hardly started to take it all in when her host emerged, advancing down the shallow stone steps with his hand extended. Laurent de Fayols must have been in his sixties, not particularly tall but slim and elegant, with deep brown eyes that she knew at once would be persuasive.

“Come in, come in, my dear Miss Brooke—and welcome! At last you will be able to see for yourself what we've been speaking about.”

There was no doubting his enthusiasm. His tanned face looked young behind designer sunglasses that he pushed onto the top of his head. Despite the heat, he had slung a jaunty yellow pullover across his shoulders.

“I can't wait.”

He led her into the house, across a hallway, and through the centre of the house. A few moments of relative darkness, and they emerged on a wide terrace of pale stone. The sharpness of the sun made her blink, then her eyes adjusted to a glistening panorama of sky and sea framed by palms and parasol pines.

Ellie went straight to the balustrade. The flat area immediately below was broken up into a formal pattern of beds containing oleander and more clipped clouds of box, a southern imitation of the grand parterres of aristocratic châteaux. A rose garden beyond was the first in a series of gardens created on descending levels, apparently linked by a magnificently overgrown wisteria. Dense lines of cypress hid any farther areas from view, including the memorial garden that was her special brief. As a whole, the garden was charming, luxuriant, but—from a professional point of view—dilapidated.

“A great deal of work needed,
non
?” said Laurent.

She relaxed a little. At least he was under no illusions. And his command of English was even better than she remembered from his phone calls.

“Now, you will take coffee with me? Come!”

She found it hard to draw her eyes away from the exquisite vista. The light brought semitropical flowers into keen focus: spiked and veined and pulsing with life.

Laurent de Fayols led her along the terrace and around the corner. He had the brisk walk of the older man who takes pride in his fitness.

“This is west-facing,” he said. “We sit here in the evening.”

Flaking pillars formed a wide loggia, an inviting spot. One wall was smothered by jasmine. On a table sat a coffee pot, cups, a jug of iced water, and an untidy pile of papers weighted down by several old books with metal clasps.

“And you can still see the sea!” She wanted to swim there, immediately—she had a childlike surge of excitement at the sight of water so clear the rocks at the foot of the cliffs looked like clumps of turquoise flowers growing on the seabed.

“Yes, the position is perfectly chosen. That's the Calanque de l'Indienne down there. And this is the book I told you about on the telephone.”

With an effort, she returned her attention to her host. He pushed a tome the size of an atlas towards her across the table. The leather binding was scuffed, but the marbled endpapers were a startlingly vibrant red with no sign of damage. It was a photograph album full of foxed images of the garden—and of its makers. The figures pictured flanking the dark arches and horticultural opulence were dressed in heavy clothes that seemed to deny the heat and the density of the humidity. Here and there were blank pages between which botanical specimens had been pressed long ago; flowers that in life had once been extravagantly scented and vibrantly coloured were flattened and bleached on the page. Yet the shapes of these brown, crisped flowers—the canna lily, the agapanthus, the rose—spoke of succulence.

She accepted the small gold-rimmed cup of coffee that Laurent handed her.

“It's going to be quite a challenge.”

“I would not trust anyone who claimed this was an easy job.”

He came round the table and stood next to her. “This is the memorial garden just after it was laid out in 1947, in memory of Dr. Louis de Fayols”—he flipped to the right page with an ivory letter opener—“and here it is in bloom for the first time in 1948, though obviously the Italian cypresses are still small and the boxwood has yet to establish. But this shows very clearly the spaces in the planting.”

It was a formal garden designed around a
bassin
edged in stone, a rectangular pool captured as a sheet of black in the photograph. A carved stone bench of Italianate design was placed at one narrow end. At the other stood two lichened statues, one that might have been Venus, the other Mercury, to judge from the wings on his ankles. A large stone urn was placed in each corner of the garden. No flowers had yet been planted.

“Typical of its time,” she mused. “So many of the grand gardens were created when the Riviera was populated by rich foreigners—who wanted outdoor temples to wealth and the imagination.”

“I know you have the sensitivity to do this.”

It was not the first time Laurent de Fayols had invoked her sensitivity. She took note. Sometimes when clients spoke about her qualities, they were really speaking about themselves.

“You have a sense of history, too,” he went on. “You respect that.”

“If you mean the Chelsea garden,” she said, knowing full well that he did, “that was very different. It was a modern impression of an era, not historical fact—a stage set, if you like.”

The exhibition garden she had designed for the renowned Chelsea Flower Show in London, gold-medal-winning and much admired in the media, had brought in more business than she could take on, and a host of misconceptions.

“Of course. You know I'm not looking for you to reproduce that. It was the small details in War Garden that spoke to me. The gramophone. The woman's jacket hanging on the spade in the tiny vegetable patch. The crinkled photograph of the soldier, and the man's cigarette case left as a keepsake.”

She'd opened her mouth to protest when he preempted her. “I know. That is not garden design, it is more . . . a piece of theatre. But trust me, I saw that you were the person I had been looking for. Young, with fresh ideas.”

“Well, it's a question of understanding the period, doing the right research.” And it was true, she did enjoy that aspect. “I have been poring over old books in the British Library for references, but there are very few. The best I've found is a description of the island's indigenous plants in a Victorian travel account.”

It didn't amount to much, but it had probably been
Delphinium requienii
,
Genista linifolia
, and
Cistus porquerollensis
that lured her here to discuss the commission.

He was looking out at the garden, where exotic tree ferns unfurled like frozen green fountains on a path down to the shore. Impossible to guess what he was thinking. The sea breeze lifted tendrils of jasmine. So close to the sea, the scent was intoxicating: a heady blend of salt and musky sweetness. Ellie felt a wave of conviction that it was all possible. The restoration of the memorial garden could be achieved, the realignment of the great archways and evergreen walls, the reinvigoration of the rose garden.

Laurent flipped over a few more pages of photographs and stopped at one that revealed a doorway cut into a hedge, edged by topiary of a monumental triumphal arch.

“That is spectacular,” said Ellie.

“It stands at the southern end of the memorial garden. It wasn't yet made in the first photograph.”

“Is it still there?”

“The remains of it—very damaged now, but I can show you the place.”

“I'm curious to know what's on the other side of the arch. It draws the eye in and makes the visitor want to walk through.”

He tapped his nose, then winked. “Now you are interested, yes?”

She gave him a smile, feeling that they were beginning to connect.

This was the aim of an initial meeting with a potential client: to understand exactly what he hoped to achieve. The garden designer—like an architect—was the practical means of bringing the client's imagination to life. For that to happen, there had to be an understanding based on a clear sense of the pictures in his mind; but also, and perhaps trickier, there had to be a personal relationship. The connection between designer and client was crucial to the success of any project, and the lack of it very often a precursor to failure.

Laurent led the way back to the terrace. “After you,” he said when they reached the first of two wide stone staircases down into the formal parterre. Closer up, the box hedging clipped into interlocking patches was brown and patchy.

Through the rose garden, the path ran straight ahead to the mass of mauve wisteria, now past its best. At ground level, Ellie could see now that it formed a tunnel leading deeper into the garden, gnarled trunks growing over a long wooden frame that was rotten in places. At the end was a green space the size of a large room, walled by a hedge of clipped myrtle. From all sides white trumpets of datura hung down, smelling faintly of coffee.

“I've never seen such a display,” said Ellie.

“My mother planted them many years ago. Moonflowers.”

“Also known as devil's trumpet.”

“Angel's trumpet, too. Or so she told me.”

One garden opened from another in a series of secret rooms. Stone steps were made treacherous by creeping ivy. As they walked on, rotting leaves seeped from unexpectedly dank corners. The temperature dropped. There were no more flowers.

“And this is the memorial garden.”

It was a temple of darkest evergreen, scattered with an artless arrangement of broken pillars and statuary. The statues of Venus and Mercury were bigger than life-size. Mercury no longer had wings on his ankles, only tumours of lichen.

“That's astonishing . . . like ruins left by the Greeks or Romans.”

“The doctor was a great classicist. Some of the wells we have here were sunk by the Greeks and then forgotten under the scrub. He was very proud of reviving them.”

The water in the stone
bassin
was a black mirror, then silver as she went closer. Its magnetic stillness drew her in.

“Tell me more about the doctor—he was your father, grandfather?—and how he came to the island.”

“My father's uncle, in fact.” He stared out again, as if picturing the old man in the grounds of his estate. “You know already that Porquerolles has a long military history?”

She nodded. “The island of ten forts, a strategic defence for the south coast of France.”