Eden's Garden

Home > Other > Eden's Garden > Page 33
Eden's Garden Page 33

by Juliet Greenwood


  ‘It’s possible, I suppose.’ Carys sounded dubious.

  David retrieved his iPhone from his back pocket. ‘I know the hospital won’t be there any longer, but the building might have survived.’ He clicked onto Google, trying first one search, than another. ‘Aha!’ he exclaimed triumphantly at the third attempt. ‘There it is. Meredith House, Lambeth. That’s got to be the one. It seems to be the head offices of several charities. Why didn’t I think of that before? If there is an answer, I bet that’s the one place it can be found.’ He met her eyes. ‘Well? Are you up for it?’

  ‘Up for what?’

  ‘Going back on the detective trail. Only in London this time.’

  Carys nodded. ‘Okay, count me in.’

  ‘Great. We’ll sort this out between us. I know we will. We make a good team, eh?’

  ‘Mmm,’ replied Carys absently. She appeared to have forgotten him already. Her eyes, he found, were searching the stone faces once more.

  He took her hand. ‘And Cari, whatever you decide, whatever we find in London, whatever happens with Eden…’ But Carys, he saw, wasn’t listening. She was lost in a world of her own.

  ‘The statues,’ she breathed, in a voice that came from a long way away.

  ‘Cari?’

  She turned back to him at last. ‘The statues, David. The statues: I know who they are. I know who they all are.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Meredith House, it turned out, was a tall, unpromising red-brick building, darkened by the fumes of city streets. David and Carys made their way through the imposing gateway into a small paved area used as a car park, following the signs to reception.

  The young woman seated behind the clean lines of the reception desk was sleek and efficient, but with a relaxed and friendly air about her.

  ‘Ah, Mr Jackson,’ she said, nodding as David explained their appointment with the archivist. ‘He’s left a message for you. His meeting has overrun, so he’ll be another ten minutes, I’m afraid. He suggested you might like to wait in the garden.’ She indicated a corridor with a revolving glass door at one end. ‘There’s a café in there, so perhaps you would like a coffee while you wait. Their cakes are pretty awesome,’ she added confidentially, and with some regret.

  They made their way along the whitewashed corridor, past a wooden banistered staircase, and out through the revolving doors.

  ‘It’s so pretty!’ exclaimed Carys in surprise, as she and David emerged into a little courtyard, where the leaves were turning to a soft yellow around them.

  ‘It must be a real oasis in the summer,’ he agreed. ‘It feels weird that this must have hardly changed since the Meredith Hospital was here.’

  It had turned into a blazing autumn in London. Heat still hung between the high walls of offices grouped around the courtyard. It was lunchtime, and on the benches placed between beds of lavender and the last bloom of roses, office workers chatted quietly as they ate their salads, accompanied with the skinny-lattes-to-go from the café.

  The café itself took up one corner of the space, its outside tables filled with men and women in dark suits, deep in discussion over their paninis or lasagne, and accompanied by a dance of hopeful sparrows around their feet. Pigeons burbled contentedly in the eaves, landing every now and again in the hope of crusts or abandoned remains of carrot cake. A burst of laughter echoed around the walls, interspersed with the buzzing of text messages, backed by the faint hum of traffic and the howl of sirens.

  In the unseasonal heat, a few people were even perched on the rim of the central fountain, bottled water and an apple in hand, faces turned into its cooling spray.

  ‘Look, the hospital hasn’t been completely forgotten,’ said Carys, motioning towards the statue of a nurse holding a small child in her arms at the centre of the fountain. The statue looked as if it had been made in the 1920s or 30s. The nurse gazed out heroically, in suitably monumental manner, while a group of particularly wretched-looking women and children crouched at her feet.

  ‘In Memory of the Staff and Volunteers of the Meredith Charity Hospital’ declared a weatherbeaten legend around the fountain’s base.

  They looked up as a small, rather bent figure made his way through the revolving door. He stood for a moment, halfway between the offices of ‘The Honeybee Trust’ and ‘Safe Birth for Mothers and Babies in Africa’, to peer around, until, spotting the two of them, he began to walk briskly across the courtyard.

  David took a deep breath. ‘Okay. Here we go.’

  Carys felt his hand creep into hers. She gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘Merediths don’t just sweep things under the carpet. Not when it’s this important. When it means the future of Plas Eden. Come on. Just you see: the answer will be here.’

  I stood in the little courtyard garden of the Meredith Charity Hospital that day and watched the leaves fall gold and crimson from the trees.

  ‘Mrs Meredith?’ I turned as the Matron emerged from the door next to the little office, and approached me hesitantly. She had changed over the long years between, as had I, but she was still the same.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Lily,’ I said.

  For a moment she continued to scrutinise me, then I saw the smile light up her face. ‘It is you,’ she said, as she rushed over and embraced me. ‘Of course it is. We knew it had to be, when we heard Mr Meredith had married.’

  ‘Was I that transparent?’

  She laughed. ‘Seeing the two of you together, it was impossible not to know.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, blushing despite myself. I held her hands tight. ‘I was so sorry to hear about your Tom.’

  Sadness came over her face. ‘Thank you. I miss him still. But we had so many happy years together. And two sons. Who are good boys and look after me.’ I saw a deeper shadow cross her features. ‘Although they say there is a war coming.’

  Even in far-flung Pont-ar-Eden, we had heard the rumours that had begun to shadow all our horizons. I could not tell her how much I felt for her. I could not tell her that, but for the storm in Treverick Bay that night, I, too, would now have a son not much older than her boys. One who, with the encouragement of his father and in the impetuosity of youth, might have seen a war as his duty and a schoolboy adventure.

  ‘Well?’ she said, pushing her gloom away. ‘Mr Meredith said that you had a favour to ask.’

  Until that moment, I had not been certain. The Lily I remembered had a good heart and a fair dose of common sense. But this Lily was a woman who had seen grief and loss and returned as a widow to work her way up on merit to be Matron of the hospital. This was a woman I could trust with my life.

  ‘I have.’

  She smiled. ‘Very well, then. I’ll fetch my hat.’

  ‘Don’t you wish to know what I am about to ask?’

  ‘No,’ she replied. Her smile was suddenly young and mischievous. ‘Maybe I can guess?’ I looked at her, and she laughed. I could see her old love of romance gleaming in her eyes. ‘There had to be good reason why “Mrs Smith” arrived such a lost soul, and left quite so discreetly. Besides, there was a man who came asking questions, not so long ago. He said he came from Cornwall. A private detective, he said he was.’

  ‘A detective?’ I exclaimed, unable to hide my alarm.

  ‘Don’t worry: he got nothing out of us, for all his questioning. Those of us left who could remember Mrs Hermione Smith loved you too well to say a word that might cause you harm.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I murmured, from my heart.

  She left, returning in a few minutes in her hat and coat. In her hand, she held a posy of red and white roses. ‘I always take flowers to my Tom in the churchyard, of a Friday,’ she said, by way of explanation. ‘But I feel sure, just this once, he will understand.’

  David and Carys followed Mr Jackson down to a little room in the basement of the building.

  ‘So you are a Meredith,’ the old man remarked, as they made their way between rows of shelves stretching f
rom floor to ceiling, each surface piled high with boxes and files.

  ‘Yes,’ replied David. ‘I decided it was time to find out more about my ancestors’ connection to this place.’

  The old man nodded. ‘And a good time, too. There has been talk, you know, of setting up a little permanent exhibition in one of the ground floor storerooms. Like the museum to Florence Nightingale in the grounds of St Thomas’s Hospital. The British Museum has been making noises about making a temporary exhibition as well, with all this current popularity for the social history of ordinary people. After all, the Merediths, among others, made a significant contribution to the idea of the National Health Service by setting up of a hospital free for all who need it. The mark of any civilisation worth the name,’ he added, severely.

  ‘Yes indeed,’ murmured David.

  ‘The staff records were what you wanted, yes?’

  David exchanged glances with Carys. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Right at the end here.’

  ‘As we’re compiling a social history,’ put in Carys, casually, as they followed their guide along the nearest row, ‘we thought we’d also like to find the names of the churches the staff and patients would have attended? And maybe see if any are still standing. I know church-going would have been an important part of their lives, and it would add a little local colour.’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you that straight off,’ replied Mr Jackson. ‘St Catherine’s. It’s only a few minutes’ walk from here. I can show you on the A to Z.’ David handed over his copy, and Mr Jackson flicked through without hesitation. ‘This is the page. If you walk back from here towards Waterloo Bridge, you’ll more-or-less pass it. There it is. It’s a bit of a maze, but once you get to Lambeth Palace Gardens you’ll soon see the sign.’

  ‘Thank you.’ David folded down the page of the guide and placed it back inside his jacket pocket.

  ‘And if it’s social history you’re interested in…’ Mr Jackson paused in his tracks and dodged down a side route through a break in the shelves. He stopped at an old-fashioned iron safe built into the wall. Squatting down in front of the safe, he began to turn the dial rapidly, this way, then that, with an expert flick of the wrist. ‘There’s a copy in the British Library, of course, but we still have the original.’ The last number clicked into place and the door swung open with an impressive creak. Reaching in, their guide lifted out a large box file, placing it almost reverentially on a table to one side. ‘This is what we should be displaying. There’s been talk of it ever since I started working here, and that’s – oh, thirty or so years ago.’

  ‘Oh?’ murmured David.

  ‘Indeed. It was quite famous in its day. Quite influential, in fact. It was undertaken in the last years of the nineteenth century by the last Meredith to take charge of the hospital in a personal capacity.’ He peered at the top sheet of paper. ‘Ah, that’s it: David Paul Meredith.’

  ‘My great-grandfather,’ said David, exchanging glances with Carys once more. ‘I was named after him.’

  ‘Were you indeed?’ Mr Jackson eyed David with a definite new respect. He opened up the box, laying out a series of smaller files on the table with reverential care. ‘It is a detailed study of the living conditions in Lambeth in the last years of Victoria’s reign. There were others, of course. But this was one that really seems to have caught the imagination. Your great-grandfather was a shrewd man. He employed an excellent photographer. Some of those images are shocking, even today.’

  Carys looked down at the photographs set at regular intervals between close lines of text, punctuated with graphs and lists of statistics. Mr Jackson was right: the gaunt faces of children gazing out from broken-down streets and crowded rooms with plaster peeling from the walls reached out with a desperate pleading across the years.

  ‘And then, of course,’ said Mr Jackson, opening the next file with an even deeper reverence, if possible, ‘there are these. They’re the originals,’ he added, as David and Carys bent over the sheaves of drawings, some in pencil, others with a wash of watercolour. ‘The faces are quite remarkable.’

  ‘Does anyone know who did them?’ asked David, gazing down at the old woman hunched in a corner, the mother with her huge, misshapen hands, pulling washing from a copper, almost extinguished in steam.

  Mr Jackson shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not. They are only signed with the initials ‘HS’. Pity. There have been several attempts to identify the artist, but none have been successful. Whoever ‘HS’ was, he was a remarkable talent. But then so many promising young artists were killed at the front in the First World War. So many of that generation never reached their potential.’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said David. And this time he could not keep the excitement from his voice. ‘But maybe not this one.’

  ‘That’s the story,’ said Carys, eagerly, as they finally said goodbye to an excitable – if slightly bemused – Mr Jackson, promising to return in a few weeks’ time, and made their way towards St Catherine’s Church. ‘That’s the story to bring visitors flocking to Plas Eden. That, with the statues, and the drawings from Ketterford. It’s more than just Pont-ar-Eden. It’s a whole picture of the lives of people – ordinary people – that most of the time are never seen. And seen from a woman’s viewpoint, too. It’s so rare for anything a woman did in the past to be valued enough to survive. It’s totally amazing.’

  ‘I agree,’ said David. ‘But I can’t see that stopping Edmund. If Plas Eden and the statues become famous, he might see that as even more excuse to cause trouble or to try blackmail. We could find ourselves looking over our shoulders for the rest of our lives.’

  ‘Let’s see what we find at St Catherine’s,’ replied Carys, pulling his arm through hers. ‘You heard what Mr Jackson said: your great-grandfather was a shrewd man. It’ll be there. You see, we’ll find it. I just know it will be there.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  For my first wedding, I had a gown that cost a king’s ransom, and a carriage pulled by pure white horses, each sporting enough ostrich feathers to support a stricken Zeppelin in flight. For my first wedding, I arrived at a Treverick Church overflowing with flowers, guests sparkling with gold and jewels. After church came a sumptuous banquet in the great dining room of Treverick Hall, with a great tower of ice at its centre, and bowls overflowing with peaches, grapes and pineapples. Afterwards I accompanied my husband on a half-year tour of Italy, where I was paraded in my finery, for all to see.

  For my second wedding there was nothing but a quiet church, and a single bouquet of red and white roses. Afterwards, my husband and I walked along the banks of the Thames, arm in arm, looking exactly what we were: an old married couple, content in each other’s company. Unremarkable. Unnoticeable. And yet, perhaps not.

  Maybe it was the roses still held in my hand, or simply that pure, heartfelt joy cannot be concealed. Whatever it was, I saw intrigued glances turn, now and again, to follow us. The flower-seller by London Bridge pressed a bunch of lavender into my bouquet, waving away payment with a knowing smile. And as we reached the centre of the bridge, the young man in uniform standing there watched us with a wistful air. His attention was turned from us in a moment, as a young woman – no more than nineteen at most – ran towards him, holding her hat on her head with one hand. She was, I saw, dressed in the green, white and purple of the suffragette movement, whose banners we had seen draped in corners out of easy reach of the police, demanding equal rights and votes for women.

  The world was changing. Even in far away Pont-ar-Eden we had felt it, but here in London it was unmistakeable. The first years of this new century had heralded in a new world. And some of it, I could see in the faces of the men and women passing by, had brought unease. Even dread.

  He felt me shiver. ‘Shall we go, cariad?’

  ‘In a moment,’ I replied. In a moment; when I had laid my ghosts to rest.

  I looked down into the Thames, flowing beneath. How different I was now from the woman who had stood here, all thos
e years ago, life hanging in the balance between the oblivion of the river, and the Meredith hospital, just a few streets away. Then, I had nothing. Now, my life was rich beyond measure.

  I was glad that Judith had not accompanied us this time. Heaven knew where that private detective Lily had warned us of might be lurking, with his questions and his photograph, his holding out of a substantial reward and promise that Miss Treverick would find out something to her advantage, should she appear.

  It was old Mrs Meredith who had brought me the copy of The Times containing news of William’s death. She was a woman with sharp eyes, for all they were mostly focussed on her books and the current article she was writing. At first, she had been wary of me. Until, at last, we told her the truth.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ she had said, softly, putting her arms around me, with tears in her eyes. That was all she said. That was all that was needed. From that day we were drawn together tightly by our grief for our lost children, and regret for the things that neither of us had said or done to keep them safe.

  After that day, she had shared with me the stories that were her study, and her attempts to restore the wilderness of her garden. And maybe also she understood the restlessness that came over me when my work with the children’s hospital was done. I had, of course, been proud of the attention given to the Meredith Social Study of Lambeth and the praise heaped on the photographs and the drawings alongside the carefully gathered facts. But it had made me uneasy whenever I held a pencil in my hand, afraid that my drawings might attract a more unwelcome attention, the kind that might destroy my secret – and Judith’s – in an instant.

  Besides, in this new happiness of mine, all my senses seemed to have been given life, urging me towards more. Towards touch, and feel. It was Mrs Meredith who had given me the courage to approach the younger son of the village blacksmith, who had turned his hand to stone masonry. I think young Mr Humphries thought me slightly touched in the head. But somewhere between his little English, and my little Welsh, we came to an understanding, as he taught me the rudiments of his trade. He scratched his head at my explanation that I wished to make the small creatures that were part of the new garden design. But fortunately being a foreigner, and from the big house, seemed sufficient to explain this eccentricity of mine.

 

‹ Prev