The September Garden (30 page)

‘I always think of trees as such lonely figures, shedding their leaves every year,’ said Sylvie. ‘Known only to the rain and the wind.’

Nell almost laughed. ‘Sylvie, you are getting rather sensitive in your old age.’

‘Still in shock from last night. I think we should have called the doctor.’

‘But Auntie Beth insisted she was all right. Once she’d had a bath and one of Mrs Bunting’s hot toddies. We tucked her in, didn’t we? She would have been out like a light.’

‘She would have got through the night, yes,’ said Sylvie. ‘But there are all the days and nights, and many hours to come. To get through.’

‘It takes time. Lots and lots of time,’ Nell said bravely. ‘We know that, don’t we?’

Kit crashed through the ferns sending a shower of fallen raindrops over them. They exclaimed, they laughed.

‘What have you found, Kit? What is it?’ Nell scolded him. ‘Should have brought his lead. It’s as if he’s having another adolescence.’

They’d reached the deepest, most secret depths of the wood where the air was no longer fresh, but tangy and wood-scented. Daylight had escaped, leaving behind an eerie green gloom.

‘This is where Auntie Moll comes ’shrooming,’ observed Sylvie. ‘I recognise that big old tree.’

Nell pressed her hand onto her cousin’s arm. She saw the knife first, a harmless little penknife lying brightly on the leaf mould in a cleft of the thick root. Beside it, a crop of fungus. Pure-white Destroying Angel.
Neither vegetable nor animal
, she thought. Such inert devilish things.

Auntie Beth lay curled beneath the tree, her brown coat disguising her within the depths of the undergrowth, her back to them, her face buried under her arm.

‘Maman!’
Sylvie screamed.

They ran, and knelt, tugged at her arm. Auntie Beth’s face turned as Nell hauled at her sleeve. Her head dropped sideways, unnaturally. Her cheeks were white, bright with a film of sweat, her eyes tight. Her lips were dried, shaped appallingly. By Nell’s knee was a matted pool of blood-black vomit.

Auntie Beth’s face was monstrous. Her body contorted.

‘
Maman
, what have you done? What have you
done
?’ Sylvie shrieked, her voice bouncing around the glade, scattering pigeons. There was no answer; never any answer. She simply wasn’t there any more.

She arrived earlier than expected. The taxi driver, a Monsieur Oliver, dropped her off by the shop in the little village and she walked towards the church.
So this is Great Lednor
, she thought: a row of cottages bowing under undulating red-tiled roofs. It was, as these things always are, so very different to her expectation. Smaller, somehow, than it had been in her mind’s eye. Everything, from the lane, to the doorways, to the casement windows, was more petite, and a little worn and ramshackle. There was not a soul around. Respectful silence behind the closed front doors. The church stood up on its rise, serene in the slanting sunshine. She breathed the dark scent of woodsmoke. So this was an English village, an English autumn. This was the sort of day Madame loved. Yellow light patterned the leaves in the sycamore canopy over the churchyard; leaves were like jewels against the sky. Fallen winged seeds crushed under her shoes.

Mollie Garland had written to her. The coroner had stated:
Amanita. Death cap.

Her mistress’s knowledge of mushrooms was outstanding. Adele remembered the foraging expeditions in the
bocage
. Madame had eaten, deliberately, the most deadly she could find. She had walked the woods of Lednor, the coroner had deduced, bided her time, let the poison seep through her body.
A punishing death
, thought Adele, opening the lychgate, feeling the damp of its wood through her glove.
A penitent’s death.

She found a bench under a spreading yew and waited. Mourners started to arrive in little groups. Two ladies of a certain age, almost identical in tweed suits, left the slate-roofed cottage over the way together and walked, with arms linked, up the church path. The taxi driver arrived with his wife. Other people congregated with hushed voices: an older, tall, wiry man in uniform, with a very young and very short pregnant wife beside him.

And then the hearse. Adele stood and watched its silent black shininess invade the space beyond the brick and flint wall. The pale-wood coffin in its rear looked small and humble.

The murmuring voices in the churchyard quieted. A large-bottomed woman got out of a car behind the hearse, hurried through the lychgate and bore down on her.

‘Are you Madame Ricard?’ she asked. ‘I am Iris Bunting. So glad you could make it. How was your journey? Are you quite well?’

‘Ah, Madame Bunting,’ Adele said. ‘Where is Sylvie? Oh, Sylvie.’

Mademoiselle hurried up the path in heels, severe in a
jet-black suit, a veil of lace over her ghostly face. Lips redder than they should be. A tall, good-looking, sharp-suited man trailed her.

‘Oh, ma petite, je suis désolée.’

Adele felt Sylvie dig her chin into her shoulder as they embraced.

‘This is Henri,’ said Sylvie, breaking away. ‘And Nell’s here, see.’

Adele shook hands with the Frenchman and hugged the little cousin in turn. ‘And Madame Garland? Oh, shall I meet her later? Afterwards?’

‘Yes, yes, let’s get inside,’ said Sylvie.

‘After you,’ said Adele, holding back. Someone had caught her eye. Behind the hearse, on the other side of the road, a large expensive-looking car had parked in front of the cottages. Adele squinted, retrieved a memory. Greying temples, extraordinary blue eyes, boots that had seen better days. Her mind swayed in confusion.

‘I know him.
C’est lui,’
she whispered to herself. ‘It’s him.’

The church was pretty full for the funeral of a non-parishioner. Behind her the congregation was breathing as one, like a many-eyed beast. All the cold familiarities of the place of worship dripped reality and mortification into her: the carved pews, the smell of old books, the tombs in the ground. She knew that if she stayed here much longer, the chilly air would seep into her heart and stay there. Henri, comforting and solid beside her, put his hand on her knee. Sudden and totally inappropriate desire sliced through her body. She recalled his lovemaking over the years. She had always allowed him to drive Alex out of her mind. Did he know that of her? Even so, if he did, here he was still, by her side.

She bowed her head in shame as she remembered the desire that had made her take Alex away from his love, from his life – just for that moment. She felt a cynical laugh bubble in her throat.

‘Are you all right?’ Henri whispered in her ear.

She shivered, couldn’t look at him.

The coffin was born aloft up the aisle. She lifted her face to watch the vicar walk to the pulpit and take a breath. Over her mother, he boomed,
‘I am the resurrection and the life.’

The service was over. The church emptied but Sylvie remained sitting in the pew, her back against the hard wood. She kept shivering.

‘How are you,
ma chère
?’ Henri asked her.

She picked up the service sheet:
In loving memory. Elizabeth Annabel Orlande. 1905 to 1945.

‘Not all right,’ she said. ‘Not all right at all.’

‘Of course you’re not.’

She glanced at him, at his kind questioning face. Minutes seeped by. A long yawning silence.

‘They’re burying her now.’

‘Do you want to go out there?’

She did not know how to answer him. Instead, she said, ‘I was happy when I heard that my father was dead.’

Henri’s arm came round her shoulder.

‘I know.’

‘But even then, I did not know the full extent of what he had done in the war.’ She twitched involuntarily as memory bit her. ‘He made me bad. He made me misbehave. I’m glad he’s dead. But not
Maman
, for she didn’t deserve this.’

Henri’s lips pressed her temple.

‘Oh, Sylvie.’

‘We all know now that my father was a Nazi sympathiser. The whole of France knows it. But no one knows about
this
.’ She balled up her fists and crushed them to the centre of her chest as her insides began to boil. ‘It is
unspeakable
. Yes.’

She glanced at Henri. His expression questioned her, but he didn’t press her. She knew, then, that she loved him.

‘My father …’ she began, and her mind was sharp and bloody. ‘He called it
le petit sommeil.’

‘
Pardon
? The little sleep?’

‘The days he was not working, the days he was at home, he insisted everyone had an afternoon nap. He visited me in my room. I’d be curled up, a tight little ball. I’d pretend to be asleep. It didn’t work, though. It never worked.’

Henri held her hands tightly. She felt his whole body shudder in shock.

‘Your mother?’ she heard Henri ask quietly, as if his mouth was full. ‘Did she know?’

‘I don’t know if she knew.’ A sob tore at her voice. ‘But now I’m older I think, how could she not have known? She bought me rabbits. I always had a rabbit.’

She listened, strained her ears for more of Henri’s words of comfort. When he did not – could not – speak, she tried again.

‘That summer, the year before the war, I was so worried he’d go for Nell,’ she whispered. ‘So I did what he said, always what he said, so he wouldn’t go into her room. Perhaps I deserved it. I am such a spoilt little bitch.’

Henri held onto her shoulders, turned her to him. She shied away from his eyes because she knew he was about to speak the truth to her.

‘You don’t deserve it. You deserve to be loved,’ he said, incredulous. ‘Do you know that?’

Sylvie could not speak.

‘Do you
know
that?’ he insisted. Now he was angry.

‘Show me, Henri. Because I don’t know how. Please, will you show me?’

She always thought the view from the churchyard was sublime. Through a chink in the trees, Lednor valley was dozing, making ready for the winter. Above the hills, rising pale and indistinct, the moon was fully grown but feeble-looking. It was an interloper, like a ghost appearing in daylight. The evening star shone steadily like a benevolent old friend.

As the chief mourners gathered around the hole in the ground, she wondered where Sylvie was.

Her mother, reading her thoughts, hissed in her ear, ‘She’s missing this. How
could
she?’

The clods of earth slammed on to the top of the coffin, the mourners peeled away. All around them, the sycamore trees were giving up their leaves to the breeze.

Nell felt someone slip their arm through hers and turned to see Anthea Challinor.

‘Hello, my dear.’ Her ex-colleague’s warmth reverberated
in her voice. ‘We read the report in the newspaper. Such a sad affair. Your poor aunt. I said to Syd, “we have to go to support that girl”. I don’t think you have ever met my Syd, have you?’

Anthea introduced her to a smiling, suntanned man wearing a camel coat. He doffed his hat.

‘I see you have a visitor,’ said Anthea, her face so close that Nell could smell her toothpaste. ‘So we’ll leave you to it. See you afterwards in the village hall for the sherry and sandwiches.’

She left behind a waft of perfume. Nell glanced around her in bafflement. A visitor? All she saw was Miss Hull and Miss Trenton in their tweed suits and hideous hats buttonholing her mother.

‘We are so sorry, Mrs Garland,’ Miss Trenton was saying, her eyes bright behind her smudged specs.

Miss Hull put her hand on Mollie’s arm. ‘If there’s anything we can do, anything at all, you know where we are.’

Nell’s father came close and put his hand on her shoulder.

‘Listen, Nell, Diana’s done in. And we think it rather inappropriate to stay on. Give my best to your mother.’

‘Come and see us soon,’ said Diana.

She watched them hurry away in thinly veiled relief, believing that no one would notice, and then she walked over to Adele who was sitting alone on a bench under the yew, dabbing her eyes. She’d travelled so many miles on her own, leaving her young children with her mother-in-law, to pay her respects to a former employer of whom she had lost all respect. Her broad-beamed body looked robust and capable, as it had always done.
Her glorious skin
, thought Nell,
just like uncooked dough
.

‘Adele, do you know where Sylvie is?’

‘
Mais oui, ma petite
. Still in the church with Henri.’

‘I’ll go and fetch her. See if she is all right. Wait here for us and we’ll go over to the hall together if you like. I think we can all do with a bit of a drink.’

‘Oh Nell, but I think there’s someone … someone there …’

Adele’s teary eyes focused past her shoulder with a confused blend of surprise and recognition.

‘This is all rather puzzling.’ It was Alex’s voice, behind her. ‘Madame Ricard? From Montfleur? Can it be?’

‘I’m sure, yes. It could be. But I think I really must find Mademoiselle at once. She must need me. Please excuse me.’ Adele stood up quickly and walked towards the church door.

In a daze, Nell took a step back as if to get a better view of the man standing in front of her. Alex wore an immaculate suit. His face bore deeper lines than she remembered. But his smile was as familiar and as devastating as ever.

‘You’re here?’ Nell croaked. ‘You’re
here
?’

He stepped towards her. ‘When you telephoned, to hear your voice was unbelievable. After all this time. I thought I’d never hear it again, let alone see you. The telephone call was rather bizarre, so then, of course, I had to come up to Lednor. Is this for Sylvie’s mother? Oh, I am so very sorry.’

Unable to speak, Nell glanced instead over her shoulder to see Sylvie leave the church and walk towards them down the path. She turned on Alex. Anger – illogical and frenzied – snapped inside her head.

‘Are you sure you’re not here to see Sylvie?’

‘Oh God, no. Oh Nell,
no
.’

Sylvie stopped in her tracks, still some way off, with Henri and Adele either side of her. Adele began to speak to her in hushed tones as Henri leant in, talking quietly. Sylvie shook her head at them both and then beamed at Nell, her face oddly serene, the beauty of it coming like a light from within. She nodded and lifted her hand to salute Nell, her eyes glistening, then turned and walked away towards her mother’s grave.

‘I was a fool with Sylvie.’ Alex was breathless, speaking quickly. ‘Wrong place, wrong time. I was, frankly, beside myself.’

She felt his hand touch hers, delicately by the tips of her fingers. She saw the pain on his face and knew, then, that she was going to make it worse.

He tried again. ‘You told me to leave you alone – to quite frankly get lost. And so I did, I suspect. I did get lost. The years, the war, just created that dreadful breach. But I can’t tell you, your telephone call made my head split with delight, with hope, I …’

‘Can we walk, away from here? I want to get away.’

He assented and they hurried together in silence out of the churchyard, along the lane, and left the village behind. The light of the November day was failing, and the damp air over the Chess spread its thin chilly breath to reach them on the lane. An owl called prematurely from the depths of the copse.

‘I remember this way,’ said Alex, endeavouring to be conversational. ‘When we walked back after my petrol ran out. What a night. I am so sorry that it has been like this. I have never forgotten.’

‘And neither have I,’ she said. With a jolt she understood
that whatever had happened between them, however long the years had taken to turn and turn, none of it had any bearing on how she felt about him.

Alex cleared his throat. ‘It must have been a horrible shock when you heard Sylvie’s news,’ he said cautiously. ‘And by the time it was all resolved, the misunderstanding between Sylvie and I, well, you’d gone. I wrote to you and you waited a year to send a telegram—’

‘Alex, please stop,’ she held up her hand. ‘You don’t have to explain. I know what happened. But you don’t know my side of it. What happened to me.’

‘I understand you threw yourself into nursing.’

‘I failed you, Alex.’

‘No, no, no.’

‘I lied to everyone. I lied to you.’

She pulled on his arm to make him stop walking. In the deep silence of the dusk, the cold river babbled in the shallows, and she breathed on the chill, her eyes adjusting to the gloom under the trees. She felt the air refresh her, restart her heart. Something changed inside her; shifted out of the way. She suddenly was profoundly grateful that Alex was standing before her. That they had both survived the war. It seemed like an absolute bloody miracle. She gazed up at him and held both of his hands. His face was expectant and rather placid. She could barely look at him and watch his expression fall away as she told him that she had borne his child, and that his child had died, and that his name was John-James.

Alex placed his hand over his eyes, resting his other on her shoulder. His chest shuddered as he suppressed a cry. She waited, her veins pumping ice.

After some moments he found his voice, and it cracked in his throat.

‘You must have been in hell.’

‘I was on the edge of it. I was blind crazy.’

‘Why didn’t you …? You must have needed me. Why didn’t you tell me?’

She could not answer him.

Instead, she took his hand and they continued on up the lane, negotiating the ford by walking carefully from one stepping stone to another, helping one another, using touch and instinct to cross safely. The memory of them splashing riotously through the water the night of the air raid, the night John-James was conceived, nudged her. How the closeness of death and terror had made them heedless, had made them laugh.

‘Your own hell would have been in France,’ she said. ‘I hear that you went twice?’

‘That woman. The French woman, back at the church, I …’

It was no use, the phantom of John-James rejoined them.

A numb silence fell around them. His arm went round her and she rested her head on his shoulder. It felt like a profound anchorage, as if she was home.

The house was in darkness at the end of the drive, except for the lamp in the hallway window.

‘Who’s this?’ asked Alex. ‘Oh, I know who this is.’

Kit, having taken to sleeping on the front step when no one was at home, lifted his long-snouted head and whimpered in recognition.

‘Oh, what a good lad.’ Alex knelt down to receive the sniffs and nudges and grunts of delight from the dog.

‘Come, Kit,’ said Nell.

As she pushed open the wooden door to the September Garden, the slow moon brightened suddenly inside a corridor of milky stars. The shapes within the garden slowly became apparent: the gnarled apple tree, drifts of spent dahlia, lanky sunflowers buckled and broken, silhouetted in the gloom.

Alex exclaimed and stumbled. ‘It’s too dark,’ he said with an edge of panic, disguising the fall of his tears. ‘How will I ever see?’

Nell gripped his arm and walked with him. She felt embalmed in comfort, floating alongside him. And his arm about her told her all she needed to know.

‘It’s all right, Alex,’ she told him. ‘Kit knows the way in the darkness. Let’s follow him.’