The Lost Garden (4 page)

After supper has been cleared and several of the girls have gone to do the washing-up, I head downstairs with Jane to collect my Land Army uniform from the cupboard by the laundry room.

She hands out items of clothing. There are many more pieces of apparel involved in being a Land Girl than I had anticipated.

“Two green jerseys. Two pairs of breeches. Two pairs of dungarees.” Jane hurls these at me in rapid succession. “The size might not be right, but there are extras in here to sort through, and someone else might swap with you. Look at this.” She waves something in front of my nose. It’s the hat, a limp fold of felt. Jane tosses it on top of the pile in my arms. “Not even fit to be a tea cosy,” she says.

I watch Jane in the cupboard, shirts and trousers swirling around her like weather. I want to ask her about the other girls, about what’s been happening here in my absence, but her energy leaves me speechless. A mackintosh flies out of the cupboard and drapes itself over one of my shoulders. There seems to be no end to these clothes. “Why are there so many things?” I say.

Jane kicks a pair of wellingtons towards me. “It’s hard to stay clean and look smart,” she says. “In such a healthy, happy job.”

I recognize this line from a Women’s Land Army recruitment poster. It’s almost as bad as the song about the hoe.

“Why are you here?” I ask.

Jane removes the rain hat she’s jammed on her head and looks straight at me. “Why do you ask?”

“You don’t seem like the others.”

“Thank God.” She throws the rain hat onto the peak of my clothing mountain and fishes a package of Gold Flakes out from a jersey pocket. “Cadged them off a soldier,” she says. She offers the package to me and I shake my head no. “You’re right.” She lights a cigarette, inhales deeply, exhales a stream of smoke at the stacks of carefully folded bed linens. “I’m not here for a big adventure. Or to ‘do my bit.’”

“Then, why are you here?”

“I grew up on a farm. My parents thought it would be a good environment for me to return to. Especially now.”

The cupboard is getting very smoky. I back out into the hallway and Jane follows me. “Why now?” I say. We lean against the hall wall, facing each other. I rest my chin on the heap of clothing in my arms.

“Because I’m in distress. That’s what the doctors call it. The ones they took me to see. Distress.” Jane leans her head against the wall. There’s a blue vein pulsing in her left temple. The fingernails on her hand lifting the cigarette to her mouth are bitten down to the bleeding point. “And it’s true, I suppose,” she says. “I have a fiancé who’s missing. Andrew. ‘Missing in action,’ they call it. Since March fifth.”

This makes me think of Virginia Woolf. Missing in action. That’s exactly what’s happened to her. She seems definitely to be a casualty of war at the moment. Like any other.

When I used to work more actively in private gardens I was always criticized for how slowly I developed a new one. I was a very slow planter. I liked to plant one kind of flower at a time, giving it a season or two to expand into whatever space it required. Living things know what they need. I have always thought this. Why crowd something from the start, when it has had no chance yet to even become itself? Gardening, which needs patience, is often the domain of the impatient. I was sometimes not kept on in those private gardens, where the desire was for instant beauty.

I could ask Jane all the questions of curiosity and concern. But I don’t. I lean against the wall and watch her smoke her cigarette. The oily canvas of the rain hat is sticking to my chin. I am suddenly very tired. This war has gone on for so long, I think, that this endless waiting is life now. There is nothing else. “Sometimes, I think that everything we always wanted comes to us in the disguise of this war. What are we waiting for? We’re waiting to recover. We’re waiting to go home. We’re waiting for someone to return to us. Solace and love. What else is there?” I realize, too late, that I’ve said this out loud.

Jane looks at me intently. “Are those our choices?” she says.

“Yes, I think so.”

“What are you waiting for, Gwen?”

I am embarrassed by having said so much to this stranger, but I am too weary to stop now. “Love,” I say. It is the truth, and I have never said it out loud. “And you?”

Jane’s voice is soft, quiet, as though the wisps of smoke she breathes out are the words gone from her body. “I’m waiting for love too,” she says. “I’m waiting for the love I had to come back to me.”

I remember the room in the west wing I’d walked into earlier, the one with the photograph of the airman by the bed. How he looked both edgy and at ease. How I had touched his face. That must be Andrew. “Love,” I say again, because now that I have admitted it, I cannot stop confessing.

Of all my books that I have dragged down to Devon from London, the grandest is
The Genus Rosa
. Miss Willmott’s encyclopedia of roses is in two volumes, each huge and heavy, weighted down with her botanical earnestness. I haul them from my luggage, lie on the floor, and pull one volume onto my chest, one onto my stomach. I did this in London when the German bombing became more frenzied this past winter. Actually I started the ritual of comfort a few months before that, when my mother was dying in hospital.

I lie under
The Genus Rosa
on the floor of this, my temporary home. I can see all the dust under the bed next to me. The room still smells strongly of fire. The books press down on me. Surely no one could weigh as much as
The Genus Rosa
? But this is what I imagine—someone. This is what I think about—love.

The Genus Rosa
was the only gift my mother ever gave me. The only gift I truly appreciated. The size and heft of it would have suited her fondness for theatricality. As a gesture, it was superb. She gave it to me when I graduated from gardening college. The books were so heavy she couldn’t carry them into the hall, had to pull me from the reception to come and fetch them from her car. But I didn’t mind, not when I saw
The Genus Rosa
sitting on the back seat of the Austin. “There,” she said, flinging open the door. “Isn’t that the most fabulous present?” And it was. It was. Perhaps I have never been as happy as I was that day. I remember the sharp smell of the leather seats, my hand on the smooth side of the car as I leaned in. And there it was,
The Genus Rosa
, propped up against the seat back, each volume as sturdy as the wall of a small house.

I am only a few years older than the first volume of
The Genus Rosa
. I like thinking that when I was born, Miss Willmott was deep in the writing of it. Was there a particular rose she was working on the exact moment of my birth? The
Arvensis
perhaps, or the
Phoenicea
? Maybe even the
Rosa rugosa
itself. I like to think that the moment I first breathed in the air of this world was the moment Ellen Willmott wrote
Rosa rugosa
at the top of a blank piece of paper.

Dear Mrs. Woolf.

Of your books, I must say that I like
To the Lighthouse
best of all. It is a perfect garden. The right mix of order and chaos. I admire (No) I love how the lighthouse, always in the background of the story, is to some extent Mrs. Ramsay herself. How the strokes of light are part of the emotional rhythm of Mrs. Ramsay.

I would say (No) Is it true, perhaps, that this book is really about the haunting of memory? This is also what makes it a perfect garden because that’s what flowers are sometimes to us, ghosts.

Did you once walk through Tavistock Square, seven years ago now, in June? This is what haunts me. And now that you are lost. (No) Now that you’ve gone missing, I might never know your answer.

I liked in
To the Lighthouse
that the big questions Mr. Ramsay asked, about art and civilization, were directed to the escallonia hedge.

But I am thinking now of Tavistock Square, of London. I cannot go on with this letter in my head, this endless letter I go on thinking up and never actually send. And why do I continue to do this when the person to whom I would send it is perhaps not even still living? Habit? Need? Because it links me to that night in June seven years ago, when there was no war, when all the buildings were still in place on my particular route through the city. How I would link London up for myself as a series of green squares on the way to the river. Sunlight on grass. The white stone of the city churches against the night sky. Like bones, I could say they were like bones. I could say the city was a body I pressed to mine. The fine hair of the tall grasses in Highgate Cemetery. The smell of the river. That world as it was, that I will never inhabit again.

I locate the letter from the Women’s Land Army head office as I’m putting my books and clothes away in my new room. When I open it and read through it, I find that the mistake has all been mine. I was meant to have arrived at Mosel a week ago. Somehow I had muddled the date. No wonder there was no one to meet me at the station.

I sit down on my bed, the letter in hand. How could I have been so foolish? All the disorganization of today is my fault and could have been avoided.

“Why are you such an idiot?” my mother used to say to me when I’d failed to grasp some adult nuance. It always felt like such an unfair question. If I was such an idiot, how would I be able to answer that?

I had wanted a new start. I had wanted a return to gardening. I had wanted to be useful and liked for what I knew. Now I had ruined my chances before I’d even begun. I crumple up the letter and hurl it at the wardrobe.

Outside the air is cool, prickles a little on my skin as I walk out into the quadrangle. No wardens here. No screech of bombs, clatter of bricks falling. I tilt my head back to see the stars, but the gesture makes me feel so lonely I almost start to cry. “Idiot,” I say, instead. “You’re such an idiot.”

I walk slowly along the gravel path that borders the quadrangle. It has been so long since I walked anywhere at night with such ease of purpose. If I was in London walking at night, in these days of the Blitz, I would, at some point, have to hurl myself dramatically down some shop’s cellar stairs, or scurry home to burrow under Mrs. Royce’s dining table.

As I walk around by the stables I hear a noise. It’s a noise I unfortunately recognize from Mr. Gregory, whose room next to mine on Denbigh Street was separated only by a regrettably thin wall. I push open the stable door and see them lying on the straw. They are thankfully both still dressed. “What are you doing?” I say loudly, even though it is perfectly clear what it is they are doing.

There is a mad scramble and they unexpectedly shoot past me, clutching their undone pieces of clothing to their bodies. The soldier. The Land Army girl. In the darkness I can’t get a good look at the girl as they’re now running across the quadrangle. The worst thing of all is that they’re laughing. I close the stable door firmly behind them. I would lock it if I could, but there’s no lock.

I continue my walk around the quadrangle. I feel too shaken to go back to my room and don’t know what else to do. After my third time around the courtyard I tire of this and head out into the darker surround of the kitchen garden. I run my hands along the brick wall beside me, remembering how I felt my way along Denbigh Street one night when there was no moon. House to house, each dark stone smooth under my hand, until I reached the iron railing that bordered Mrs. Royce’s house. How I never turned a light on once inside, felt my way up the staircase to my room, undressed in the dark, slid into bed—as though the whole journey was the same moment, extended and unbroken. It is light that dismantles each moment, I had thought then. Light proves it one thing or another. Darkness does not judge.

I have reached the end of the garden wall. Just as I turn the corner to continue walking around the wall there’s a scream. A young woman materializes ahead of me in the darkness.

“What?” I say. The scream has startled me and I stub my hand against the bricks. It is a Land Army girl. I can’t tell if it’s the same one I just caught in the barn with the soldier or a different one altogether. She’s rushing towards me. “What is it?” I say, and she stops.

“There’s something out there.” She’s a little breathless.

“What sort of something?”

“A ghost,” she says. “All white and misty and moving quickly between the trees.”

“There can’t be a ghost,” I say, but she’s not really listening to me any more. Her fear has propelled her past me and she rushes off towards the buildings.

I do not believe in ghosts. It’s more likely that the foolish girl spotted another Land Army girl skulking through the woods. They seem distressingly nocturnal, these girls. Just to set my mind at rest, I continue along the length of this wall, out to the place where the trees begin, and I stand very still, peering into the darkness. Nothing. No movement. No sound. No ghost, I think, and turn back for the quadrangle, satisfied in my belief that there is only this world and nothing beyond it. But I have never been more wrong.

The next morning I walk back over the cobblestones, under the arch, and onto the driveway that leads up the hill to the big house. I am relieved that the house is further away than I’d thought. It is at least a mile distant and I am glad it takes me so long to reach the circular drive. Even with Doris’s shortcut, the girls couldn’t be dashing up here every five minutes, as I had feared they might do. I remember last night and reprimand myself for wishful thinking.

The house is large and made of grey stone. It looks to be eighteenth century, with its strict proportions—three generous windows each side of the front door and the upper-storey windows aligned with these. Three dormers in the roof, and the house flanked by two enormous chimneys.

Framing the massive front door are a pair of concrete urns. Nothing is growing in them, and a soldier leans up against the left-hand one. He has his eyes shut.

“Excuse me,” I say, and he opens his eyes but doesn’t get up. He probably thinks I’m a local woman, sent to clean the house. I bristle at this, and I don’t like the way he looks at me.

“I’m here to see your CO,” I say, with all the imperiousness I can muster. “Would you be so kind as to inform him that Gwen Davis of the Royal Horticultural Society is here.”

The soldier is not impressed. “He’s in the drawing-room,” he says. “Go on, then.”

“I have no idea where the drawing-room is.”

The soldier sighs and rises slowly to his feet. “All right, ma’am,” he says.

The house is infinitely grander than our quarters. Crystal chandeliers. Polished mahogany. Passing the dining room I can see a sideboard gleaming with silver serving dishes. Our food last night was served on chipped plates. Our silverware is tarnished. Amid the stately features of the house, evidence of its new inhabitants. A row of heavy boots in the foyer. A rucksack on the piano bench.

I follow my reluctant guide to the back of the house, to a drawing-room that overlooks the garden. Standing there in front of a gramophone playing what sounds like Mozart is the handsome man from the train station who gave me a ride to Mosel.

“Captain Raley, ma’am,” says the soldier, and he disappears back up the hall.

“You?” I say. “You’re the CO?”

As the man turns to me, he lifts the needle from the spinning record. “Hum that,” he says.

“What?”

“Hum what you just heard.” He looks at me intently and I warble over what I think were the last few bars of the piece. “God,” he says, stepping away from the gramophone as though bitten. “That was truly awful.”

“Well, I didn’t come up here to hum,” I say, working myself back up into a huff.

“No, of course not.” Raley steps up to the gramophone. He places the needle carefully on the record and the music moves into the space between us. We don’t speak. Then he lifts the needle again and the music disappears. “Mozart,” he says. “The
Requiem
, even. But gone nonetheless. Completely gone. The air is not altered by it. Music is not rain, as the poets insist, because when it rains you can tell that it’s rained. With music, there’s nothing to show accurately that it was even here.”

“There’s us,” I say. I clear my throat, but I’m not brave enough to attempt humming again.

Raley looks at me. “It’s temporary,” he says. “The effect on us.” He turns the knob on the gramophone and the record stops spinning.

“Well, aren’t we temporary also?” I say. I realize, after I’ve said this, that it is not the right sort of thing to say to a man waiting to be posted into the war. His face suddenly looks all hollow and sad. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m always saying the wrong thing. I’ve spent too long working alone in a laboratory.”

“Doing what?”

I think of the neatly labelled row of gangrenous parsnips. “Don’t ask,” I say. “It wasn’t good.”

Raley moves away from the gramophone, and the light from the French doors behind him rests on his head and makes him look otherwordly. “Would you like some tea?” he says, and I follow him into the kitchen.

He heats the kettle on the cooker, makes the tea, and we sit down on opposite sides of the big kitchen table. The early-morning sun makes a bright pattern on the surface of the wood. I have come up here before the Land Girls were out of bed, dressing in my new clothes, sneaking out undetected. “I have come here to see you,” I say, “because it appears my girls have been spending time with your men.” Understatement, I think, remembering last night.

“Your girls?” Raley smiles at me. “You? You’re the CO?”

I couldn’t feel less in command, but I did accept the weight of responsibility. Volunteered, I think bitterly. I volunteered for it. “For lack of a better term, I’m the CO.” The sun is heating up my green jersey and making me feel itchy.

“I see,” says Raley. “You think our two groups of soldiers should stop fraternizing with one another?”

“Yes. We all have our work to do. We should just get on with doing it.”

“But we are waiting to begin our work.” Raley leans across the table towards me, his face suddenly serious. “And the beginning of our work could essentially mean the end of our selves. Is it reasonable to expect such restraint from men faced with death?”

I can see how cruel it is to wait here in this beautiful grand house, on this gorgeous estate, to wait here to be sent into the war. The contrast will be so extreme. Better to have waited in a roadside shack or a makeshift shelter in the woods. “Is the waiting unbearable?” I ask.

“Yes,” says Raley. “And no, considering the alternative.” He settles back in his chair, a skitter of worry across his handsome face. If he were a flower, he would be something magnificent. A giant indigo-blue delphinium. A flower that knows, and practises, how to be in love with itself.

“You know how it is, Commander Davis,” he says. “What is outlawed becomes desirable. Forbidden fruit and all that.”

I have a sudden and terrifying image of a smiling, naked Roy Peake, arms outstretched, and sitting in the palm of each hand a perfect specimen of his Unknown Pear.

“What about a regular, organized event like a dance?” continues Raley. “Say, once a week, here at the house?”

I don’t say anything for a moment or two, let him think I’m giving it my deepest consideration, but I have been swayed to sympathy by his mention of death, and by the sight of him in the drawing-room with the sun tangled in his hair. War, too, is order and chaos. But the actuality of the war itself is only chaos. “Every two weeks,” I say. “And we can alternate the location. We have a large dining hall which would be quite suitable for dancing.” At least I’ll be able to keep an eye on the girls at an organized event. It won’t be as easy for them to sneak off with the soldiers.

“Yes, that’s right. I had a good look around down there before you all arrived.” Raley puts both his hands around his tea mug, looks into it. “In fact, I almost set fire to the place. Lay down in one of the rooms with some candles burning. I woke up and the timbered arch above my head was on fire. A long, shivering halo of flame. I barely got it out with the blankets.”

“I know that room. That’s my room.”

“Is it?” Raley looks up at me in surprise. “Well, fancy that.”

Last night I couldn’t get to sleep for a very long time. I lay there in the dark, making up letters to Mrs. Woolf, and all the time smelling the fiery char of the room. At one point it was all I could think of. I lay there and imagined myself as the smoke, brushed invisibly onto every surface of the room. Even words and thoughts must be coated in it.

Raley gets up to fetch us more tea. “Do you want to know something funny?” he says. He’s pouring out the tea, his back to me. The muscles in his forearm are thick and ropy as a tree root.

“What?” I say.

He hands me my refilled mug of tea, doesn’t sit down at the table, but stands beside me instead. I can’t see his face unless I look up. His voice sounds very far away, as if he’s in a different place from me altogether. “When I was lying in that room, sleeping, and the candles were setting fire to the wood above my head, I was dreaming, such a clear and vivid dream.”

“What of?”

“Roses.” Raley moves away from me, towards the window. I can’t see him at all now. “I was dreaming of a great tangle of roses, and when I woke, the first thing I saw was roses. That wooden arch above my head was a bower entwined with roses. A mass of roses. All on fire.”