The Garden of the Villa Mollini

by Rose Tremain

  Then Josie arrived. She was very tired and dirty. Olivia, gentle as a mother, ran a deep bath for her in the big, old-fashioned bath, put her to bed and brought her supper on a clean tray.

  In Muir Priory, away from his parish and its responsibilities, away from Olivia, Anthony began to feel calmer.

  Dean Neville Scales, warden of the Priory, was a long-limbed man with a passion for gardening. He liked to preach about God in Nature. He made sure that the Priory gardens were colourful and neat, his pride and joy being a grove of Japanese acers, scarlet and gold and purple.

  The first leaves were going from the acers as Anthony walked alone on the priory lawns. Dew on the springy grass: God’s moisture everywhere except on his own tongue. He wetted and wetted his lips. Prayer came to him lightly, its syllables flowing freely into his mind. This was a benevolent sign. He walked and prayed and, though the contours of the garden were mirror-sharp, he felt on his forehead some warmth from the sun.

  He liked the simple, stark routine of each day and he liked the emptiness of his room. When he thought about his home, it seemed like a place too cluttered with objects and with feeling. He saw Olivia in it everywhere – Olivia’s light. I hate her, he thought.

  To Dean Scales he confessed. ‘I still feel loving kindness towards all things, or at least to most things, but not towards my wife.’

  In the Dean’s silence, he detected shock.

  ‘God’s ministers cannot harbour hatred,’ he said, blowing his nose on a clean square of silk. ‘Whatever your wife has done, you must try to forgive her.’

  ‘I can’t, Dean.’

  ‘Are you telling me she’s in mortal sin?’

  ‘No, Dean.’

  ‘Then your hatred is petty?’

  Anthony sighed. He felt ashamed to say that his hate sprang from envy. The enviousness itself seemed, in the confessional, vain and silly, his idea that Olivia had ‘stolen’ God from him fanciful and stupid. He felt humble and sick. He longed, longed for some relief from his confusions.

  ‘Let me stay here till I find God again, Dean.’

  ‘We shall see how you progress.’

  ‘I can’t go back into the world.’

  ‘And your responsibilities?’

  ‘I can’t honour them, till I find Jesus . . .’

  ‘What makes you believe you will find Jesus here?’

  Anthony sighed deeply. ‘I must,’ he said, ‘or I shall go mad.’

  Two weeks passed. The leaves on the gold acers were edged with brown. In everything, Anthony strove for obedience – from the cleaning of his supper plate (one evening, the Priory cook served up hamburgers and the raucous, treacherous world came teeming back into Anthony’s head and made wounds in his fragile calm) to the hour-by-hour discomfort of kneeling. Each day was punctuated by fourteen ‘stations of prayer’, this punitive number echoing the fourteen Stations of the Cross. The first station was at five-thirty and the last at midnight. The time for sleep was short, but it was a grateful, dreamless sleep that Anthony slept. On the edge of it, in his curtainless room, he’d lie and look out at the stars and allow into his troubled head thoughts of heaven.

  Josie Mecklin was a tanned, freckled woman with the patient smile of a teacher. During her stay in Olivia’s house, she expected to instruct this middle-class vicar’s wife on the true meaning of hardship and deprivation. But, to her surprise, she found she spent a lot of time listening to Olivia talking about martyrdom and belief. Olivia, it seemed, didn’t need telling what had to be done. ‘I think,’ said this Great Dane, this stag of a woman, ‘we are the “new Amazons”. We’re middle-aged, middle-class, pampered and ignorant. But we’re strong. We’re strong because we’ve understood. We’ll fight to the death.’

  Josie stayed three days. She spent a lot of time lying in the bath. She’d talk to Olivia through the bathroom door. A plan emerged from the clouds of steam: on the anniversary of the death of Anna of Didsmill, October 3rd, two hundred women would march from Greenham to the Didsmill base. They would take candles and brushwood torches. They would arrive at Didsmill as the sun went down and hold a silent, night-long vigil at the main gate. At first light Olivia would read aloud passages from Anna’s treatise. Then they would disperse peacefully, many of them to walk the twenty-three miles back to Greenham.

  Olivia, sitting on a hard chair in the passage, felt her heart begin to race. No moment in her life now seemed as meaningful as this one – her marriage, the birth of her two sons, Anthony’s ordination, none of these milestones had knocked with such strength on her ribs. She put a hand to her chest. ‘Let me not die, God, before these things happen.’

  Pink and shiny from her baths, Josie ate hungrily in Olivia’s kitchen. Over cups of coffee, maps came out and a route from Greenham to Didsmill was decided on. It was also decided that Olivia would return to Greenham with Josie and spend a riciprocal three days there, talking to the women about Anna and enlisting volunteers for the Didsmill march. In her loft, Olivia found a sleeping bag used by one of her sons at scout camp. It smelt of mothballs and it had a damp, cold feel. But already, Olivia could imagine her body inside it, warming it up.

  On the morning of Olivia’s departure with Josie, a letter arrived from History in Perspective. ‘Thank you,’ it said, ‘for your interesting and excellently researched article. We would like to offer you the sum of £150 and we will hope to include the article in our February issue.’

  Olivia drew Josie’s hard shoulders towards her and let her excitement crackle in an impulsive kiss on her new friend’s cheek.

  On October 2nd, God returned to take up temporary lodging in Anthony’s body.

  He was in the Priory library, searching for a book Dean Scales had recommended to him, called Nazareth and 20th Century Man. A young curate, a withdrawn person Anthony had never spoken to, was sitting at one of the library tables. As Anthony passed him, he noticed that the curate was reading the very book Anthony had come into the library to find. Anthony stopped. He sat down opposite the curate and stared at the man’s lowered head and at the book under his white hands. He felt like a supplicant. ‘I have made,’ he said in prayer and with a strange confusion of metaphor, ‘my willow cabin at your gate, Lord. In it, I stand and wait. I serve you, but you do not come to me.’ At this point in Anthony’s prayer, the curate looked up at him and smiled and handed Anthony the book. The young man then got up without a word and walked out of the library. Anthony held the book to his chest. It was warm from the other man’s touch. At last, at last a sign had been given. Tears came to his eyes. The tears were hot. With a sob of joy, he felt God streaming down his face.

  Anthony left Muir Priory with the Dean’s blessing on the late afternoon of the following day.

  It seemed very strange to him to be driving his car. It was raining. His hands fumbled to find the windscreen wipers. The noise of the car distressed him. The houses he passed seemed ugly beyond imagining. He began to long for the beauty of his garden and the peace of his church. He was full of anxiety. The world, he thought, opposes God’s habitation in me. He drove on. In the cloudy sky, the light went early and the road in front of Anthony grew pale, its contours indistinct. But as darkness came on and blotted out the landscape around him, he felt calmer.

  As he neared Didsmill, the rain ceased. Anthony stopped the car on a quiet road and got out, hoping, before the world and Olivia sprang at him again, to catch a glimpse of the same stars he’d seen from his window in the Priory. But the sky was uniform black and Anthony felt disappointment change to fear. He needed reassurance. He needed a sign. The stars, in place above him, would have been a sign.

  He was about to get back into the car, when, far along the road in front of him, yet seeming to lie exactly in the path of the car, he saw a flickering light. It was a fluid, yellowy light, moving, beckoning. ‘There it is,’ Anthony whispered, ‘my sign.’

  And he began to walk towards it. As he neared it, he saw that the light was moving across the road, not towards him as he had be
lieved. He squinted at it. It undulated under the trees. And now there was a faint sound accompanying the light, a shuffle of feet, and Anthony knew that, far from being alone on the road as he had thought, he was with a great shapeless, hidden gathering of people.

  He could see them now: a slow procession, a long, long line of marchers holding candles and torches. He stood in the shadow of the trees, hiding. He could hear hundreds of voices, whispering, laughing. Women’s voices. He turned away. The lights and the voices seemed to follow him, mocking. You took us for a sign! He tried to pray, but all his mind would construct were the four syllables of his wife’s name: O-li-vi-a!

  The threads were gathering now. The ending of the story of Anthony and Olivia Kingswell was coming . . .

  All night, in the dusty, unkempt house he could barely recognise as his home, Anthony sat and waited for his wife. He grew cold. A wind got up. Anthony covered himself with a blanket. He dozed in the chair and dreamed of his future: his pulpit had been rebuilt in gold; it was higher than before. From it, he looked down on the potato faces of his parishoners. ‘I,’ he thundered, ‘am the ploughman, and I plough you into the earth!’ He woke shivering and trembling. He stared at the room, ghostly now in dawn light: dead flowers on the table, dust and crumbs on the carpet, old newspapers on the arms of chairs, boxes of leaflets piled up where a vase pedestal used to stand . . .

  When she came in at last, the room was filled with sunlight and she wasn’t alone. She stared at him. The woman at her back stared at him.

  ‘Anthony,’ she said coldly, ‘why didn’t you let me know you were coming back?’ And she crossed the room and kissed him and he could feel her hard forehead against his, bruising him.

  He said nothing. She pulled away and looked at him. So thin, he is, was her thought. ‘This is Josie,’ she said, and the woman smiled. Anthony pushed the blanket off his body and stood up. He was freezing.

  ‘There’s a fine wind, Olivia,’ he said. ‘Let’s go for a walk together. We can take a kite.’

  Sleep, thought Olivia. I have never wanted sleep so much as I want it now. But she agreed to go with him. Later, she would sleep.

  As she went out with Anthony, she heard Josie upstairs, running a bath and Olivia knew that, tired as she was, she was at last happy in her life.

  But the life of Olivia Kingswell had only minutes – twenty-three minutes exactly – to last.

  Anthony didn’t drive to the downs. He drove to a potato field, a large field spread round a deep pond, muddy and grim in its recent harvest, with a few rotting potatoes left among the cut stalks. Here, with his nylon kite string strong as wire, he strangled Olivia and threw her body into the pond. The body didn’t sink, but lay bobbing on the surface and the algae, displaced by its fall, reformed around it. Anthony felt the sour taste of this green, elemental weed on his tongue and vomited into the mud. Out of his mouth came pouring the chewed and mangled pieces of the body of Christ.

  Olivia’s murder, when it became known, caught the public interest for some time. ‘Why?’ the people asked. ‘Why did he kill her?’ But after the trial, it was quite soon forgotten. Even the question why, never answered to counsel’s satisfaction, was forgotten and Anthony started on his six year prison sentence in the same way as he had started on his Priory retreat – with a frail kind of hope.

  God, however, did seem to have left him, and the only feelings of wonder he ever experienced again were on windy days. He taught some of his prison colleagues how to make kites out of coat-hanger wire, newspaper and paste, and when the wind bellowed round the prison walls, these things could be seen dancing above the exercise yard. In the tug of their strings, Anthony could feel the pull of heaven.

  The Bellows of the Fire

  THE TWO THINGS I cared about most in the world until this morning were my dog, Whisper, and the bungalow under the viaduct.

  Whisper is black and white with black blobs round her eyes and my aunt Nellie Miller says she reminds her of a panda.

  Whisper is a one-person panda. The one person she loves is me. She waits for me to get home from school with her nose in the letter-box flap.

  The viaduct is about a mile from our house. In winter, I can’t get to it before dark, but in summer I take Whisper there every day. Trains used to go over it, but the railway line was torn up before I was born, so I’ve always known it like it is now, which is like a roof garden of weeds.

  On rainy days, I hardly stop on the viaduct to look at the bungalow, because down there in the mist and drizzle it looks a bit sorry for itself. But in the sunshine, you see that it isn’t sorry for itself at all and that the people who live there give it so much love and attention, you can’t imagine they’ve got time for normal life.

  Despite what’s happened and what may happen in the future, I still feel that if that bungalow was mine, I’d be one of the happiest people in Devon. The only thing I’d add to the garden would be a wall all round it to keep Whisper in, so that she couldn’t roam off to the sea when I wasn’t there and drown.

  The sea’s second on my list of places I like, except that the sea does something to me: it makes me long for things. I sit down on the beach and stare out at invisible France, and this feeling of longing makes me dreamy as a fish. One of the things I long for is for time to pass.

  It was my fourteenth birthday last week. We don’t seem to celebrate my birthday in our family any more and I think this is because my mother says it only reminds her how fast her life is slipping away.

  The only birthday I remember well is when I was six. My mother still considered herself young then and we had a new car and we drove to Dartmoor. The plan was, we were going to make a fire and cook sausages in it. I thought this was the best idea my parents had ever had.

  But in the car, on the way to Dartmoor, my brothers bagged all the good jobs in advance. ‘Bags collect the wood.’ ‘Bags light the fire.’ ‘Bags be in charge of cooking.’ Only after a long time did my mother remember me and say, ‘What about you, Susan? What job are you going to do, dear?’ I didn’t know what other jobs there were. ‘She can’t do anything, she’s too little,’ said my brothers.

  We drove for ages in silence, but then my father had an idea. ‘You can be the bellows of the fire, Susie. That means you have to blow on it and your breath keeps it going.’ This didn’t seem like a nice job to me. Blowing out cake candles was horrible enough. So I thought, I’m not going to breathe on their fire. I’m going to be absolutely quiet and hardly breathe at all. I’m going to be as silent as a stone.

  Since then – or perhaps always, I don’t know – I’ve been very quiet in my family. I notice things about them, like how they all love noise and seem to believe that happiness is in noise somewhere and that misery is in silence. They think that I’m a miserable person. What I think is that there are millions of things they’ll never understand.

  Our house is a modern house in a terrace of identical ones. Noise and mess from these houses spills out all over the puny little gardens and all over the street. If you were a visitor from France or somewhere and you thought all of Britain was like our terrace, you’d say it was the most hideous country in the world. Getting away from our house is something I think about every day of my life. My brothers are trying to get work in this town. They’re trying to get jobs, so they can stay on and live in houses like these ones, or worse. And girls I know at school, that’s what they want too. They want to be beauticians or hairdressers in the crappy shopping arcade. If I thought that was going to happen to me, I’d drown myself.

  I took Whisper to the sea this evening. I throw things into the waves and she gets them out. She’s terrific at this, much better than other dogs we see. Then we lay in the sun while her coat dried and I told her the news that came this morning.

  I like secrets. I’m going to keep this one as long as I can. It’ll come out eventually, though, and then my mother will say, ‘Film, Susan? What film?’ And I will have to tell her the story.

  It’s a story about a com
munity. It’s set in a town like ours, not far from the coast. It’s based on something which actually happened, on a person who actually lived, a girl called Julie who was fourteen and a fire raiser. She was

  Being a Girl Guide and her Dad worked for the town council. These things were important in the story, because the places where she started the fires were the places where new things were getting done, like a new Leisure Centre was being built and a new Bingo Palace.

  Being a Girl Guide, she knew how to start fires without matches or paraffin or anything, so there was never any evidence left lying about, and this is why it took the police ages and ages to track Julie down. And also, they decided all the wrong things to start with. They decided the fires were started by a person from an ethnic minority, who resented the clubs and places where he wasn’t welcome, so all they were really looking for were young Indians or West Indian youths. It took them a year before they suspected the daughter of a town councillor, and by that time, seven fires had been raised and the Bingo Palace had burned to the ground. She was caught in the end only because she set fire to the Girl Guide hut.

  So, anyway, the thing is, they’re making a film about her. The TV company came down here months ago. They arranged auditions in all the schools. All they said was, you had to be about fourteen and interested in acting. I haven’t been in many school plays. When we did The Insect Play, I was only a moth with nothing to say. But I am very interested in acting, because in the last year I’ve realised that what I do all the time at home is act. I act the sort of person my family think I am, with nothing to say for herself and no opinions on anything, when inside me I’m not like that at all, I just don’t let my opinions out. I’d rather save my breath. I plan, though. At school with one or two of the teachers and then on my walks with Whisper to the viaduct and the sea, I plan a proper life.