Authors: Rachel Hore
And sat, with her face buried into her hands. Why did Jake’s name still have the power to disturb her so deeply?
After a while she slipped outside into the rain and relieved her feelings with half an hour ’s angry weeding, ripping ivy and bindweed as though she were scratching her ex-lover ’s flesh.
She was making a sandwich for lunch when a piteous mewing started up outside the kitchen door. She opened it to find the ginger cat padding up and down in the drizzle. An offering of a dead mouse lay upon the mat.
‘Thanks for that, cat.’ She picked the little corpse up by the tail, whilst the cat watched her curiously. What should she do – drop it in a dustbin or throw it into the undergrowth? No, it would have to be properly buried. She found a trowel and, using last night’s foil dish lid as a bier, walked up a path she had not tried before, searching for a patch of bare earth.
A tangle of high trees that might mark the boundary of the garden were as far , I’m afraid.’Q it allas she could go. Below these, a belt of rampaging rhododendrons began. She stooped under one huge bush, cleared the dead leaves and dug a shallow grave in the damp earth, then, still crouching, found herself looking through a new world of gnarled trunks and roots spreading out all around. It was like a playground for children – or for Cornish piskies, she thought – low boughs for sitting on or swinging, secret dells for dens and hide and seek where the rain didn’t reach, all bathed in a magical greenish dusk.
Wobbling suddenly, she shot out one hand behind to balance herself, and hit something sharp. She snatched her hand back and examined the cut on her palm, already welling with blood. With her other hand she brushed away the dead leaves until she found what had hurt her – a thin shard of metal sticking out of the soil. She pulled it out and examined it, sucking her cut. The stick was T-shaped, blackened, with patches of green. Turning it over, she considered its flatness, its pointed tip. A plant stick, she guessed. Copper probably, judging by the green, and topped with some lumpy design that formed the rough cross of the T.
Back in the cottage, she calculated the date of her last anti-tetanus injection as she dressed the cut and cleaned up the plant stick as best she could under the kitchen tap. The cat, as though remembering her annoyance at the mouse, was still reluctant to come in, and sat on the doorstep licking its haunches with long rasping strokes.
‘Look, cat,’ she said, holding the plant stick up. ‘A mermaid.’ There was no doubt. The handle of the stick that formed the cross of the T was a swirly-haired woman with a fish’s tail.
The cat stopped washing and sat, one hind leg in mid-air. It stared at the stick without interest, its eyes today as mysterious a blue-green as the sea.
***
It’s the first time he’s given me a present. Apart from paint and canvas, of course. I will cherish it for ever.
‘A friend in Newlyn made it for me,’ he said, ‘as a joke, I think, because I love gardening. But it’s not much use in the garden – it’ll spoil. You have it, I’d like you to have it.’
It is so pretty, the little copper mermaid. Her hair flows all around her serene face like seaweed, her bare breasts are masked by the mirror she holds ... I must hide her, though. It wouldn’t do for anyone to know. And I mustn’t think about the heat that spread through me when our fingers touched or wonder whether he guessed.
***
‘Where did you say you found it?’ Patrick had appeared early that afternoon.
Mel, fed up with her own company, spotted him from out of the side window of the kitchen and leaped up to open the door.
‘Well, if you’re making yourself some,’ he said in answer to her offer of tea, ‘then yes, please, though I haven’t found you a teapot yet. Even mine’s broken. I came to fix that kitchen light if now is a good time.’ He stepped out of his wellingtons and stood them next to her ankle-boots by the back door. His feet were bigger than Jake’s, Mel noticed, and his boots dwarfed hers – menacingly or protectively, she couldn’t decide.
As she poured boiling water onto teabags he threw his thick gardening gloves on the table and climbed up on a chair. She watched him twist the fluorescent bulb, and obediently pressed the light switch when he told her to.
‘That seems all right now,’ he said, stepping down.
‘Thanks,’ she said as he turned the chair round to sit down. She passed him the mermaid plant stick. ‘I found it in the rhododendrons.’ She explained about the mouse. ‘Whose cat is it, anyway?’ she asked. The animal didn’t seem to mind Patrick’s presence and was lazing on the mat, inside the open door.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s a witch’s familiar.’ He poured milk into the tea she passed him.
‘Does that make me the witch? Ha ha, thanks very much.’ With a mock scowl she plumped the sugar packet down on the table. ‘Perhaps it knows I can’t resist cats.’
‘It looks well fed, doesn’t it? Must belong to someone round here.’ He took a sip of tea. ‘Are you busy? Only I thought it might be fun to look for the Flower Garden. Try to work out where that painting is set.’ He patted the pocket of his jacket. ‘I found some secateurs in a drawer and we can use some of the tools you found.’
The rain had dwindled to a light drizzle as, armed with the billhook, a large fork and the secateurs, they marched up the path. Ripping and trampling their way through brambles and bracken, they clambered over piles of fallen bricks to where the half-arch hung – today sparkling with raindrops like a broken rainbow.
‘If this is indeed the arch in the painting, we must be at the entrance to the Flower Garden,’ said Patrick, testing with a practised hand a rusty hinge that hung from the brickwork. ‘And over there,’ he indicated a fallen wall further down the garden, ‘might be where they grew vegetables. It would make sense. Convenient for the kitchen.’ He bent down and fossicked in the undergrowth below until he dragged up part of a rotted door, across which woodlice scuttled in all directions. He threw it to one side and rubbed his forearm. ‘Ouch, these are killer nettles.’
A couple of minutes later he had hacked a way under the arch and they found themselves standing at the edge of an overgrown path gazing across the remains of a large enclosed garden. Here and there, sections of the wall still stood, peeping through trees and creeper. In one or two places, especially in the long walls at right angles to the arch, whole lengths had cracked away and keeled over like a child’s Lego, to become engulfed by the greedy greenery. In the rain, everything looked lank, swimming in a dark green sea.
‘It’s difficult to believe it was once full of flowers,’ Mel said mournfully. She walked further down the path then turned, mentally measuring her distance from the arch. ‘I think P.T.’s young man must have been standing about here. Which means over there was a flowerbed, and there would have been fruit trees trained against that wall. I suppose there must be a greenhouse somewhere under all that mess.’ She nodded towards the wall on one side of the arch where a flowering plant like a huge furry blanket hung down. It shrouded the skeleton of a crouching building like an ill-fitting hide. Through it poked a tangle of trees.
‘Difficult to tell, isn’t it?’ Patrick parted some of the vegetation. Underneath, the remains of a wooden frame could be glimpsed. They ducked inside the doorway to see. One of the window frames, its glass long gone, hung down shivering in the breeze. On the side against the wall, bunches of shrivelled black beads were embalmed by dense cobweb.
‘A vine, I suppose,’ said Patrick. He unfolded a small penknife and stabbed the blade into the wooden frame. It cut through like butter. ‘Completely rotten. We’d better be careful the whole thing doesn’t fall on us.’ He looked troubled.
‘How long do you think the garden has been like this?’ she asked, as they ducked back through the doorway.
‘Decades,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. It was certainly in this state when Val bought it. He had no interest in gardening. The couple who rented your cottage cleared some of the ground around and grew flowers and vegetables but Val did practically nothing.’
‘Who mows the grass down there now?’ she remembered to ask.
‘Oh, an old bloke called Jim who came round asking for work. I felt sorry for him. Strapped for cash, I think. Says he used to work here once, but his accent is strong and he mumbled. I couldn’t make out everything he said.’
Mel nodded. ‘I suppose it might be worth quizzing him sometime though.’ She turned and stared round at the wilderness that seemed to stretch in every direction. ‘It’s sad, it must have been so beautiful once. Have you found any photographs or maps of the place?’
‘I looked into all that when we wound up Val’s estate.’ He explained that Cecily Carey’s solicitor had been helpful. When the house had been requisitioned during the war, most of the contents of the estate office had been packed away in one of the attics for safekeeping. Then when Miss Carey had died, the solicitor had sorted through a lot of the material with her great-niece – and sent most of it to the Cornwall Records Office in Truro. ‘So I think that is where I have to look. When I have time, that is.’ His sigh was impatient.
Mel looked around the devastated Flower Garden, fascinated.
‘Come on,’ called Patrick, striding off towards the far end. ‘I’m going to see what’s down here.’
‘It is definitely a shed of some sort,’ said Patrick half an hour later. They were surveying an L-shaped wall of brick against a main long wall. ‘The potting shed, I think – look.’ In one corner, a great rack of earthenware pots had once collapsed and sunk to the ground, the pots falling forward, still lying where they had smashed.
Mel caught her foot on something that clinked. Shuffling the undergrowth she uncovered a rusted half-moon, the blade of a turfcutting tool, perhaps. There were more plant sticks, too, twisted and unreadable, but none of them decorated like her mermaid.
The previous half-hour had seemed like a dream. To Mel it was as though they had passed through a magic veil – the miasma of the past. Jake, Chrissie, her life in London . . . could all be another universe. It was partly, she decided, being within these walls that shut out the activities of the modern world. Here, she and Patrick were hidden; here, they were part of the plans and visions of other times. What had these walls overheard? The sound of hard industry, metal on stone, secret conversations, tears and laughter. Here, if you knew where to look, under the briars, were arcane signs to be read in the earth – the shapes of flowerbeds, the sketched lines of a busy household.
A cross of paths had once quartered the Flower Garden – a few minutes ago, walking across the centre, Mel had nearly wrenched her ankle when the vegetation gave way under her.
‘I think you’ve found the dipping pool,’ said Patrick, helping her to her feet. ‘Water for the garden. Look, there’s the pipe. I wonder where the water came from.’ But the pipe ran into the ground, preventing further investigation.
‘There’s the stream running near the bottom of the garden, down the valley to the sea. Perhaps they pumped water up here?’ Mel said, still rubbing her ankle.
‘There was a leat,’ he said suddenly. ‘I remember one of the neighbours complaining once to Val.’
‘What’s a leat when it’s at home?’
‘An artificial stream or channel. It would have come from a reservoir further up the valley, then run down by the side of those trees and fed one of the millponds below.’ The owners of Merryn apparently had a duty to maintain the leat so that one of the mills could operate. Val, of course, wasn’t bothered. The mill was no longer in use by then, but a neighbour had a garden that relied on the leat flowing properly and had threatened to take Val to court over it. Val had grumbled about paying a firm to clear it.
‘So the leat would have fed Merryn’s garden, too.’
‘Together with the stream, I expect, yes.’
Shortly after that, they found the remains of another greenhouse against the south wall, the pinioned arms of long-dead fruit trees half-shrouded by the nettles that reached to Mel’s chin. Here and there, scalloped glass panes remained, held in by ancient putty.
‘It’s extraordinary that it’s survived a century of storms,’ said Patrick. ‘I got an SOS call from Val after one five or six years ago. He lost about twenty huge trees, several falling right across the drive. I managed to find a tree surgeon – Val was useless at dealing with problems like that at the best of times, and he was quite ill by then. We’re still burning the last of the wood, you know.’
Patrick scrunched his way to the far end of the ruined potting shed where there was a gap in the garden wall. ‘I’d no idea this was all here,’ he called back. ‘Here’s the Vegetable Garden. And another hut.’ And he disappeared through the gap. Mel followed.
The hut was better preserved than the potting shed, most of its roof was still remaining. It smelled of damp earth and wet ashes. Patrick had ducked through a crumbling brick doorway halfway along and she heard his excited cry.
‘Mel, come and see this.’
She peered through the half-darkness of the hut to see where he had gone. When she reached him he was wrestling with the doors of a wall cupboard, on the right of which was a small fireplace full of rubble. Amazingly, a rusted kettle still stood on the hob.
‘This must be the Head Gardener ’s hut,’ he said, yanking open the cupboard doors. They both stared at the contents – rows of glass jars of seeds and a large oilskin-wrapped package. Patrick slid the package out from the cupboard and placed it on a desk in the corner of the room. Gingerly he opened it and pulled out two large ledgers. The top one, when he opened it, immediately tore at the spine, so he closed it again.
‘Logbooks, I think. Let’s take them back to the house.’
As they made their way back across the garden, Mel realised that the rain had stopped. A gust of wind soughed across the leaves. ‘It’s as if the garden is sighing,’ she said. ‘It’s starting to tell us its secrets.’
Patrick rolled his eyes. ‘You’ll be telling me next it has a soul.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Don’t be silly.’