The Lost Garden (11 page)

My mother was very beautiful. Even when she was dying. She had wanted to go on the stage and couldn’t, because of me, but that desire had remained, become part of her character. Wherever she was, it was as if she was just about to be called onstage to deliver her lines. There was always an air of anticipation about her. The expectation of applause.

There are many ways to tell a story. In opposition to. In sympathy with. What to leave out. What to put in.

My mother was beautiful. I was always plain. “How could I have produced such a creature?” she said more than once. Some days she locked me outside because she couldn’t bear to look at me. I played in the gardens, among the flowers of white and blue—the same colours my mother used to like to wear. I would chase after her in the house sometimes, anxious when she left a room without me. Her flowing dresses of white and blue waving up ahead of me like semaphore.

My mother was beautiful. I can never get away from that fact. If there is one thing to say about my mother, that is it. And whatever choices I make in telling my mother’s story, this is the soil they are planted in. My mother was beautiful.

No one knows why she married my father, a much older friend of her father’s. Money? Safety? The idea that the security offered within such a marriage would allow her the chance to pursue her artistic ambitions? He had once told her she had “dramatic arms.” What she said about the marriage to me was, “It was a moment of weakness.” And I always knew I was the product of that weakness. My mother became pregnant. My father died. All her hopes of becoming an actress were emptied.

The moment opens. The moment closes. There is sunlight. There is frost. There is the brief idea of roses amid the patch of weeds.

I thought that if I could cure my diseased parsnips in the Royal Horticultural Society laboratory, I could cure my mother’s cancer in hospital. I know there was no real link between those two things, but I felt that there was. Instinct and wish. How to pull them apart.

I often didn’t go to visit my mother in hospital in favour of staying in the lab at night, staring at my jars of parsnips, making my detailed notes that became, in the end, just a catalogue of death. All I was doing, really, was watching something die.

“You’re not taking care of me,” my mother would whisper, when I did go and see her. But this refrain on the edge of death had also been her refrain from life. She would say it to butchers and taxi drivers, to shop assistants and waiters. And always to me. I did my best. I did. But what could I give my mother that would make up for the fact that my birth, my existence, had denied her the life she could have given herself?

My mother locked me outdoors and her love denied became my profession. The garden became my home. I would lie on my back in the grass near the beds, name the flowers that swayed tall above me in the sun. Phlox. Foxglove. Hollyhock. Each name a word that opened the moment. I lay on my back at the edge of the flowers. I knew what to do to take care of them. It was easy to learn this. The simple tasks required to keep the garden alive and thriving were easy to master, and always effective.

There are many different stories to tell. It’s never the same. Every day weather blows in and out, alters the surface. Sometimes it is stripped down to a single essential truth, the thing that is always believed, no matter what. The seeds from which the garden has grown.

My mother was beautiful.

I ruined her life.

The Garden of Loss blooms in May. It is a simpler construction than the Garden of Longing. It contains fewer species, but more plants. The middle of the three gardens, it begins with a great, breaking wave of peonies. The blooms are white and pale pink, grow upright for now, giant buttons of brilliance festooning green leafy tunics. But soon their heads will become too heavy for the thin, weed-like stalks on which they rise with such hope, and the peonies will crash to the ground in a wave of grief. They are too much for themselves, and soon they know it. I have always loved peonies. There is something almost heroic in their reckless collapse. And there is nothing sadder than a crowd of stricken peonies, their heads full of rain.

The more time I spend studying and tending this garden, the more respect I have for whoever planted it. What they knew of longing was that it sprang from the earth at odd moments, unplanned and unexpected, borne on different carriers. But loss was more uniform than that. It surged up and carried one along. Loss was a choir. Loss moved in harmony. It struggled heaven-ward. It crashed to earth.

The tag for “Loss” is scratched onto a metal stake, jammed into the earth in front of the low wall of peonies. The word is written vertically.

Behind the peonies are clumps of purple irises. There are many varieties of iris and I am required to take a specimen back to my room in order to identify it from my reference books.
Iris graminea
. This iris likes to grow in leafy soil in partial shade, making it well suited to this flower bed hewn out of the surrounding woodland. What distinguishes this iris from others is that the flowers smell like plums. After reading this in my book I think of the Sweet Briar Rose with its apple-scented foliage. Surely this cannot be mere coincidence? Having seen how carefully this garden has been planted, I have to believe there must be a connection between those two plants, and a reference to something else, something unknown to me. Something outside the confines of the garden.

I walk through the orchard. The apple trees are just stepping out of their blossom. There are a few plum trees near the stone wall. I stand under them. I move around them, searching their bark and limbs for evidence. But there is nothing for me to find. Or perhaps, because I don’t know what I’m looking for, I have missed it altogether. I look up through the twisted branches to the patch of blue sky overhead. Did lovers meet here? Was that it? Why couldn’t I look up into the crown of this tree and see all the words ever said beneath it etched into the purple bark? Nature is a mute witness and therefore, for me now, completely unreliable.

What I can’t decide from studying the garden is whether it was planted to remember somebody or something, or to show somebody. Was it for someone? And who was it for?

There is one final planting in the Garden of Loss. It is not nearly as dramatic as the other two groupings of flowers. A straggly clutch of potentillas, growing next to the majestic rush of irises. But these potentillas draw me closer than ever to the invisible gardener, make our connection more certain and alarming. The flowers have the proper name of
Potentilla nepalensis
. They are commonly called “Miss Willmott,” after Ellen Willmott, author of
The Genus Rosa
.

Ellen Willmott had been a gardener since she was a child. As a daughter of wealthy parents, she had the money to indulge her passion, to finance all her fertile schemes. She also inherited the large family home, Warley Place, where she put many of her gardening dreams into action. Unmarried, wealthy, and with a passion to drive her, she had a free and purposeful life. An enviable life.

Miss Willmott had a long history with the Royal Horticultural Society, and it was from this part of her life that I had my connection with her. She had been a long-standing member of the Narcissus and Tulip Committee and her earliest fame was as a daffodil grower and hybridizer. At gardening college, and later, when I worked at the Royal Horticultural Society, I frequently heard her referred to as the greatest woman gardener who ever lived. The ‘Queen of Spades.’

The potentilla in the Garden of Loss is not the only plant to be named after this famous and enthusiastic gardener. There are dahlias, narcissus, a peony, lily, delphinium, iris. And there are the roses that bear her name, for roses were her true passion. Roses were the flower, out of all the others she tended and cultivated, that she truly loved.

The Genus Rosa
was Ellen Willmott’s testimony to her passion for roses. A tremendously ambitious undertaking, it was to be a comprehensive listing of all the roses in existence, including the genetics of every rose, its derivation and its kin. All known botanical and historical detail was to have been included in this magnum opus. She intended it to be the definitive work on the genus rosa.

The enterprise was a struggle from the start. Miss Willmott began the work in 1901, at the age of forty-three. She had trouble collaborating with her illustrator, who she felt was not painting the ideal example of each rose. She had difficulty enticing a publisher to invest in so huge and costly a venture. She ended up by partially subsidizing the production of the book herself. In 1910 the first volume was released, and in 1914, the second. Initial sales were disappointing, and then the advent of the war scuttled the whole project. Ellen Willmott, never one to economize, was bankrupted by the war and by her failure to curb her extravagance. Although she managed to hang on to her house, she sold a lot of her possessions and couldn’t even afford to keep a gardener on, so that the once beautiful grounds of Warley disintegrated into a ruined paradise.

Sometimes our passion is our ruin.

The thing with roses is that they were just too unmanageable for Ellen Willmott—indeed, for any single person—to pin down and categorize, to fix on the page. They kept fluctuating, changing their names and associations, refusing to lie still. The roses kept growing, even on paper. They were a living language. And Ellen Willmott couldn’t hope to contain them.

The Genus Rosa
is peppered with names of roses with a line drawn through them and then another name written in over the original. All of Miss Willmott’s life had been in service to roses, and to find that this seemingly simple task of classification was impossible must have been devastating. Surely understanding provides mastery. Isn’t that what we want to believe? Isn’t that how we explain our very lives?

What I love about
The Genus Rosa
is that it got away. That even with a lover as devout and determined as Miss Willmott, it would not be tamed into human hands, into this human world.

Near the end of her life—she must have been in her mid-seventies at the time—Ellen Willmott gave a lecture at the Royal Horticultural Society that I attended. She was on the Lily Committee at this point, and so the talk was on lilies. This is where I was going, that night I walked through London, that night I followed the ghostly figure of Virginia Woolf through Tavistock Square.

The thing about Ellen Willmott that is not well known—or if it is, is never given much consequence—is that her deepest and most important relationship in life was with her younger sister. That sister’s name was Rose.

The language of roses shifts like sand under our feet. It blows in and out like the wind. It carries the fragrance of the flower and then it is gone.
Rugosa. Canina
.
Arvensis
. It is how we learn to speak about something that is disappearing as we say its name. It is a trick, a false comfort.
Humilis
. It is what we think we need to know and how we think it needs to be known.
Involuta
. It is where we want to go, this name, and stay there, safely held forever.
Inodora
.
Alba
.
Sancta
.

The girls are running out of things to do. The agricultural labour that in the beginning seemed so daunting, and which they once so fiercely resisted, has been dispatched with alarming efficiency and expediency. The North Garden has been cultivated and planted with potatoes. The kitchen garden is fully under control. When I make one of my rare visits to that walled space I find the girls stretched out on blankets in their underclothes, sunbathing. My lieutenant, the Lumper, is fast asleep on a bench by the runner beans. The girls eye me with a weary reluctance as I step over their beached bodies on my way to Doris.

The Lumper is too big for the bench. Her calves and feet hinge over the end of the stone, so that her body has followed the contours of the bench and she has become a fleshy sort of bench herself. I shake her by the shoulder and she bolts awake.

“Oh,” she says, straining upright. “I must have dozed off. It’s very hot today. I’m sure I was only out for a moment. Before that I was pruning.” There are no secateurs anywhere in sight.

“It’s all right,” I say. “I know there’s not much to do now. I must look into that. But first—” I sit down on the bench beside her. “First I have to ask you a favour.”

“What?” She looks at me with relief. Doris is always so worried about getting in trouble. I thought it would have helped, her being in charge of the others, but she hasn’t taken to authority very well. She seems mostly fretful, except for the night she wrote out her piece of music on the blackout curtain. Then she seemed happy. “There is a piano at the house,” I say. “You might be able to practise up there. I haven’t seen anyone else using that piano.” Mostly I’ve been there to see Raley and haven’t concerned myself with anything else.

“You want me to play the ‘Princess’ piece for you?” Doris looks at me suspiciously.

“No, no. Never mind.” Now I’m thinking of Raley, have to drag my mind back to the reason I had for seeking Doris out today. “It’s not about music,” I say. “I want you to ask your father to come and see me. Will you do that? I have some questions about the estate that he might know the answers to.”

“Oh, yes,” says Doris. “He’s been asking me that himself. I think he’s dying for a look round.”

“Good. I’ll leave it to you, then.” The Lumper may not be very good at dispensing authority, but she is good at following orders. I look over at the other girls, napping in the sun. “One thing you could do,” I say, “that probably wouldn’t meet with much resistance, is to decorate the dining hall for the dance tonight. That would stir their torpid flesh.” It is the soldiers’ turn to visit our humble abode, and I know it is one thing in the immediate future that the girls are looking forward to.

“All right,” says Doris, doubtfully.

“They’ll want to,” I say as I get up from the bench. “It won’t be a bit like asking them to prune. You’ll see.” I leave her to struggle with her anxiety about how to give an order, and go back to the Garden of Loss.

I am hoping that Doris’s father will have a clear and vivid recollection of what the estate was like before the Great War. That he will remember the men who were employed here, details of their characters and lives. And that he will be able to tell me enough so that I can work out who made this lost garden. And why. It is impossible now to be satisfied with the anonymity of the creator. I won’t rest until I’ve learnt all there is to know. Perhaps, I think, with surprise, I am falling in love with the garden.

The Lumper needn’t have worried. The girls are only too happy to decorate for the dance with the Canadian soldiers. They have chalked stars and a moon on the blackout curtains. Tables and chairs have been moved aside to create a generous area for dancing. When I come into the dining hall the hour before the men are due to arrive, it looks wonderful. Someone has woven a nice criss-cross of branches over the fireplace mantel. The floor has been swept.

All the girls are off having their baths, or dressing for the evening. I place the flowers I have brought in their pail inside the fireplace hearth. I have cut some of the pink and white peonies from the Garden of Loss. They look soft, almost buttery, in the low light of the room.

Will Raley come? I would be a fool to think he would ever dance with me, but will he come and stand by the soft light of these flowers in this room of white stars?

Most of the other girls have clothes of their own with them, clothes appropriate for an evening such as this. May Queen even has a beautiful blue dress from the dress shop where she once worked. Only Doris and I wear our regulation Land Army trousers and shirts. Even Jane wears several of her own jumpers over her dungarees. “I’m always cold,” she says in response to my saying that she must be boiling under all those layers.

The truth is that the Land Army uniform is smarter looking than any of my ordinary clothes. I don’t know what the Lumper’s excuse is, though I suspect she just really likes the uniform and wants to be in it all the time. She probably sleeps with her green armlet on.

We hear the music before we see the men. They have brought the windup Victrola with them and are playing it as they walk down the road from the house. We stand very still in the hall and hear the approach of the soldiers as a thin thread of music, unwinding in the dark. It is almost like birdsong and, like birdsong, we listen to it attentively because we don’t know when it might stop.

Raley does come. He leads the parade of men and gramophone up the stone steps and into the dining hall. He looks lovely. I know this is not the sort of thing one thinks about a man, let alone says to him, but he does. He looks lovely.

There are some soldiers I don’t recognize from the last dance. New additions to the community at the big house. They stay back at first, shyly, but that only lasts as long as it takes for the dancing to begin. The soldiers outnumber the girls by at least three to one, so while the girls are always dancing, there is always a clutch of men standing around smoking cigarettes.

Jane doesn’t dance. She and David are sitting at a table, as far away from everyone else as they can possibly get.

“It looks beautiful,” says Raley. He is suddenly beside me. I can feel the heat of his body next to mine. “I like the flowers,” he says. “They look like promises, don’t they? Like soft promises here in this darkened room.”

“Are you sure you’ve gone off poetry?” I say.

He laughs and passes his flask over to me. “Go on, Gwen,” he says. “Be a devil.”

I swallow a hot balloon of alcohol. Whisky? Brandy? I’m so unaccustomed to drinking that I’m not exactly sure what it is. But whatever it is, I feel a flush right away. I remember my evening with the Tulip and Narcissus Committee and feel I must warn Raley of the possible consequences of giving me alcohol. “I’m liable to get very sincere,” I say, “and there’s a good chance I will mention parsnips. More than once.”

Raley laughs again. “You’re in fine form tonight,” he says. “I didn’t want to come to this dance, but you’ve redeemed the evening for me.” He passes the flask my way again and I swallow gratefully.

There’s a burst of clapping and we both watch as May Queen dances the length of a table and back again. Once more to applause and then she launches herself from the table into the arms of a tall man with dark hair. He catches her deftly, swings her around, and sets her safely on the ground.

“Dancing fools,” says Raley. It is almost a sneer.

“You don’t dance?” I am disappointed. Even though I’d tried not to wish for it, I had hoped that Raley would ask me to dance, especially since he seemed to be enjoying my company so much.

Raley holds out the flask to me again. I shouldn’t, but do. I take it and drink, pass it back. “I choose my moments to be falling-down drunk,” he says. “I’m allowed two a month. Dancing would increase the number, make it noticeable.”

“Make what noticeable?”

“For your ears only, Gwen,” says Raley. “Most of the time I am just drunk enough to balance on the line.”

“What line?” I like how he says my name, softly but with a little snap at the end. Like wind in the trees, I think, and then can’t recall what we’re talking about. “What wind?” I say, but he’s already in the middle of answering my first question and doesn’t hear me.

“The line between remembering and forgetting,” he says.

I can’t drink any more. I feel as if I’m a tree being blown by the wind. “Am I swaying?” I ask Raley.

“Oh, Gwen,” he says, and I just want him to keep on saying my name in that nice Canadian way. But he takes me by the elbow and leads me out of the dancing fray, over to a table. “Come and sit down.”

It’s the same table that Jane and David are at. They’re at one end, huddled close together, side by side. We sit at the other end, opposite one another. Jane is blocking David from my view, but I can see the flicker of something, can see his arms moving up and down. “What’s he doing?” I say.

“Who?” Raley looks at me and then down the table where I’m looking. “David? Yes, he’s a bit of an odd one. Knitting. He’s knitting. That’s what he does all the time. It’s a strange sort of thing for a boy to be doing, but no worse than poetry, I suppose.” Raley takes another swig from his flask. “That day we met you at the station,” he says, “David had been up to London to order some special sort of wool he’s been wanting. That’s how he spent his day off. Buying wool for his knitting.”

“What’s he knitting?”

Raley shrugs. “Don’t think I’ve ever cared enough to ask,” he says. “Knitting tends to rank right up there with dancing for me.”

I lean my head on my hands. Candles have been lit and placed on the tables and the flickering light makes the white-chalk stars on the blackout curtains shimmer as though they were real. I think of Mrs. Woolf and that night I followed her through Tavistock Square. Now that she is dead, I am more sure than ever that it was really her. There were stars that night, I remember that, remember that first she looked up and then I did and there were stars above us.

“Those roses,” I say to Raley. “The ones you saw in my room. The ones on fire. What colour were they?”

“White.”

I think of one of the letters I was writing in my head to Mrs. Woolf.
Stars a white lace above the courtyard
. “Yes,” I say. “A white lace.”

Raley looks at me strangely. “What lace?” he says.