The September Garden (2 page)

The boy and girl glanced at each other.

‘
Non
,’ said the boy, ‘
On ne nous permet pas
.’

And then Nell remembered. Estella and Edmund Androvsky next door were different, Sylvie had told her, and they were not allowed to visit. Nell stared at them. What was wrong with them? They were only the neighbours’ children.

‘
Au revoir, mademoiselle anglaise
.’

Edmund and Estella ducked back and Nell padded along the path. She lifted the iron latch on the door in the back wall and sneaked into the cobbled yard. Opposite her was the old barn, now used by Uncle Claude as a garage for his car; next to it, the two stables built of silvery Normandy stone, commandeered as sheds. These stables didn’t have the doors she was used to, cut in half so that the horses could peer over. Here, at Uncle Claude’s, the doors were like any other door, solid but with a metal grille for the top half. They had once been deep cherry-red, Nell guessed, but the paint had faded long ago. Above each was an old painted sign, nominating long-departed horses:
demi-sang
Tatillon and
demi-sang
Ullis. Between the two stable doors
a narrow set of steps led up into the darkness of the hayloft above. She opened the door to Ullis’s stable and entered its cave-like chill. Whiffs of hay, leather and horses, as if their ghosts still lingered, greeted her. Nell imagined Ullis’s heavy iron-shod hooves ringing on the cobbles and, in the stable next door – now Uncle Claude’s carpentry workshop – Tatillon’s soft pliable lips pulling hay from the iron hay-rack still there on the wall. She blinked her eyes in the gloom and saw Sylvie’s lop-eared rabbit peering out from his hutch in the corner.

‘
Bonjour, Monsieur le lapin
,’ she sang. ‘You understand me, don’t you? What a fat, overfed, spoilt French rabbit you are.’ She reached for a carrot from the trug on the floor and, squatting down, pushed it through the chicken wire. The rabbit shuffled forward and reached with yellow teeth. Chewing steadily, the creature took so long to devour the carrot that Nell soon grew bored. She sat back on her heels and looked around her at Uncle Claude’s polished garden forks and spades lined up against the stone wall. Cobwebs, grey with dust, choked the corners; fronds of ivy crept through a gap under the eaves. Above the beams in the ceiling, the old hayloft, reached by those narrow steps between the two stables, Nell guessed, colonised by rats and spiders. She listened to the snuffling and chewing of the rabbit as she breathed in the earthy smell of the stable, counted the onions strung from the beams and watched a solitary cloud drift overhead through the tiny window.

Then, suddenly, an unearthly shriek. The rabbit threw himself against the door of the hutch. Nell stared, her scalp shrinking tight to her skull, as he turned violent circles, his claws scratching, his rump banging the sides. She took
a step towards the commotion, but then, terrified, turned instead and ran. She slammed the stable door shut and raced back through the garden door, up the path, ignoring the calling of Edmund and Estella from behind the wall. Breathing hard, her curls plastered to her scalp, she slipped quietly back into the vestibule and up the stairs to the inferno of her room.

In the stifling shuttered dimness, Nell finally slept, dreaming of Lednor Bottom, of her green valley, of her tree house above the cool bourn, of her father’s gramophone music. She was jerked awake by the screaming. Pulling herself up, groggy and confused, she went back downstairs, meeting a sleepy Adele in the vestibule.

‘
Qu’est-ce que c’est maintenant, ma petite Nell
?’ the maid asked, rolling her eyes, wiping a plump hand over her hair in a brief effort to tidy it.

They hurried along the path towards the crescendo of cries, the banging and crashing from the stable yard. Edmund and Estella’s faces appeared once again over the wall and Adele told them to go away. Sylvie was pummelling the door of Ullis’s stable with her fists, her face red and enraged, her eyes flashing with fury. Her dark ponytail swung like a whip over her shoulders.

‘
Monsieur le lapin est mort!
’ she screamed. ‘
Il est mort!
’

Adele thought that she’d better go and find Madame and hurried back to the house.

‘Dead?’ Nell asked her cousin in wonder, feeling a strange twisting in her stomach. ‘When I left him, he …’

She was going to say ‘fine’ but realised he’d been somewhat deranged. She peered into the gloom of the
stable to see the door of the hutch wide open, the fat, limp, brown body of the rabbit, his ears crisscrossed. The partly digested carrot amongst the straw.

‘When you
what
?’ asked Sylvie, turning on her, her cheeks brick-red. Tears squeezed from her eyes; her perfect teeth gritted in startling whiteness. She poked Nell in the chest.

‘I came to see him,’ said Nell, ‘when everyone was asleep. He … he ran about a bit.’

Sylvie took a sharp breath through her teeth. ‘You murderer!’ she screamed. ‘You killed him. You killed
Monsieur le lapin
! You just looked at him, and killed him! What did you do, what did you do? You
killed
him.’

‘No, no I didn’t,’ Nell countered.

Sylvie picked up the trug, scattering carrots, and hurled it at her. When Nell ducked and it hit the wall behind her, Sylvie lunged forward and smartly slapped her face.

‘Don’t come near me again. I don’t know why you came here. I don’t want you here. Get away, don’t even look at him. Look what you’ve done!’

Eyes watering, her cheek burning, Nell turned, bumping into Auntie Beth, who was followed by a panting Adele. Auntie Beth brushed past her and gathered Sylvie up in her arms, planting kisses all over her head.

‘Oh, ma chère, ma chère.’

Choking on her tears, her mouth pressed to her mother’s shoulder, Sylvie cried, ‘She killed him, she killed him!’

Auntie Beth swept her hands over her daughter’s forehead as if to iron out the agony. She looked over Sylvie’s head and gave Nell a dark stare. She gave her a
quick and critical shake of her head. But all Nell could think of was how her mother never held her in that way, or in any way at all.

Nell watched from the landing window as Uncle Claude brought out the small wooden coffin containing the body of
Monsieur le lapin
, which he had spent a whole day making in Tatillon’s stable. Sylvie clung to her mother’s sleeve, wiping her tears, as the box – complete with dovetail joints – was placed in a hole dug behind the bean frames. Adele was standing to one side, looking bemused, while the dark heads of Estella and Edmund bobbed up and down above the high garden wall. Nell could see, from the landing window, that they did indeed have a ladder and were taking it in turns.

They saw her at the window and Nell excitedly exchanged their waves, bubbling with giggles. She put her palms above her head to indicate bunny ears but stopped abruptly when Adele sent a frozen glare up from the garden. Adele was trying not to laugh.

Within days, Uncle Claude bought Sylvie two new baby rabbits; they were duly installed in Ullis’s stable. At the quiet breakfast table the next morning, Nell sat alone with Sylvie, who was spreading thick butter over a chunk of bread.

Her cousin glanced slyly at her. ‘So, do you want to see my rabbits, then? Do you want to stroke them, cuddle them?’

‘Oh … yes. I do.’ Nell was confused and relieved. She brightened. ‘They’re babies still, aren’t they? Are they very sweet?’

Sylvie shrugged and sank her teeth into the bread.

The door opened and Auntie Beth came in arm in arm with Uncle Claude. They poured their coffee, opened their newspapers and ate in silence.

‘Maman,’ said Sylvie.

‘What is it?’

‘Maman, Nell wants to see the rabbits. She wants to hold them. She told me, she wants to pick them up and squeeze them.’

Auntie Beth’s newspaper crumpled with a crunching noise. ‘What? Oh, no. Not at all. No.’

Uncle Claude looked befuddled and bored, and snapped his paper to shield his face.

‘It won’t be safe for them, will it,
Maman
? Nell is not safe with them,’ Sylvie insisted. ‘Isn’t that right,
Maman
?
Papa
?
’

But her parents had stopped listening to her and returned to their newspapers. Sylvie sank her little white teeth into the crust and chewed laboriously, fixing Nell with a hateful stare.

Nell’s morning cup of chocolate clattered back into its saucer. The cold feeling returned, fingers dragging at her stomach. She felt queasy, belittled and as unwelcome as the cuckoo in Lednor woods.

The weather in Normandy held throughout August and grew hotter, clinging to Nell’s limbs and the back of her neck with a sultry embrace. She circled Sylvie, kept out of her way. She rode the spare bike alone in the cool early morning through the village and out to the rolling, impossibly green fields where creamy-brown cows lumbered peacefully and
stared at her with luminous eyes. She read her book in the deep-green shade of the bean frames in the garden before noon and ate in unbearable silence at the table, politely, just as Mother and Dad would have wished. And then she endured afternoons cloistered in her stifling bedroom for
le
petit sommeil
– supposedly sleeping.

The days dragged on like this until, one early evening, Auntie Beth called Nell and Sylvie down to the salon after
dîner
. She sighed up at them from her newspaper, appraising them over the rims of her reading glasses, making Nell’s skin prickle with discomfort. Beth told them to stop their sniping and just be friends, for goodness’ sake.

Beside her, Nell could sense Sylvie bristling; she could feel the buzzing of her protestation and her suffocated anger. But her cousin mumbled obediently, ‘
Oui, Maman
,’ scuffing at the carpet with the toe of her shoe.

Auntie Beth threw a silent demand at Nell who also nervously uttered her compliance.

‘Go out for a walk together before bedtime. Get out of my sight,’ said Beth, but smiling a kind smile. ‘You girls can’t stay cooped up in the house all day long.’

Nell wanted to correct her, and tell her that, actually, she managed to escape the house every day. But she lost her confidence beneath the onslaught of her aunt’s harrying.

‘You girls need more exercise. And it will be better for you, in the cool evening air. But don’t go too far, stay on the pavements, don’t go near the boats and don’t annoy the fishermen. Half an hour. Now, go on with you.’

Nell did not need to be told twice. She ran, released, down the hallway, hauled open the great front door and scooted across the courtyard. But Sylvie soon caught up
with her, and rapped her hard between the shoulder blades just as she reached the tall blue gates.

‘We’re going to the harbour,’ she told Nell as she barged through and turned the heavy metal handle.

‘But what about what Auntie Beth said. We’re not allowed. I want to go out to the woods. Anyway, the harbour stinks. Have you seen what they use for bait? In this heat it will be rotten.’ Nell considered the broken crab shells littering the bottom of the fishing boats; the pungent nets tangled in piles; lobster pots reeking.

Sylvie gave her arm a vicious pinch. ‘After what happened to
le lapin
, you have to do as I say. Never mind my mother.’ Nell rubbed her arm, wincing with delayed pain. Sylvie pushed her through and slammed the gate shut behind them. ‘I want to go to the harbour. We haven’t time for the woods, you imbecile.’

Nell heard the
mairie
bell toll eight-thirty as she dawdled reluctantly along the narrow pavement, following her cousin, trailing past the high garden walls of Montfleur.

‘We
are
devils!’ said Sylvie. ‘Out so late.’

‘But it’s still so light,’ said Nell, in awe of the sublime evening. She thought it so beautiful that the throbbing in her arm soon faded. She watched swallows swoop and dive in a pearly sky, carousing in little gangs. The stone houses of Montfleur glowed like silver in the soft light. Windows tucked under the eaves of steep roofs were shuttered. Great doors were closed, sheltered courtyards quiet; even the little stream under the stone bridge was drowsy after the heat of the day.

Nell guessed that everyone else was asleep.

‘Course they are not,’ snapped Sylvie. ‘Don’t be such an
idiot. Ha, see how many English words I know to describe you. All the
other
children might be asleep but
we’re
not because we are nearly grown-up, and the adults aren’t either. Look over there. There’s Madame Androvsky.’

Estella and Edmund’s mother was walking along the pavement towards them, her red headscarf bright in the fading evening. Her dark hair made her face seem paler, as radiant as a bride’s. She said good evening, her smile broadening.

Sylvie folded her arms and Nell heard her mutter ‘good evening’.

Madame Androvsky continued to smile and speak, although Nell could not grasp all of her gentle, rapid words.

Sylvie retorted, shrugged and pulled Nell on.

‘Oh, what did she say?’ asked Nell.

‘That shouldn’t we girls be in bed,’ complained Sylvie. ‘And I told her to keep her big nose out of it. I told her we were old enough to do whatever we like.’

Nell glanced back and, with a strange sour grinding in her stomach, watched Madame Androvsky hurry across the street with a humble dip to her head.

‘Come on, run, and don’t tell
Maman
what I said. It’s only Madame Androvsky. Don’t waste time. We only have half an hour.’

The terracotta-brick church stood at the entrance of the harbour, with curving domed roofs and rounded buttressed walls. Fishing boats, with lights swinging, made their slow way out to sea. Sylvie walked over to the harbour wall and waved at the fishermen.

‘Au revoir, messieurs. Bonne chance ce soir! Bonne chance!
That man there,’ she told Nell, ‘on the
Orageux
Bleu
. That’s Simon. And his mate is Adele’s beau. He is very handsome, isn’t he? His name is Jean. I often wonder how Adele can have such a handsome boyfriend when she’s so fat.’