But they hated her. Sitting there in silence they would have done murder if they could. For this was their garden. The one behind them, utilitarian and impeccably tidy, was Father’s garden, but this was theirs and they had played in it ever since they came to live here. The old lady hadn’t minded and after she became too ill to leave her room it had become more their own than ever. Provided they avoided the times when Mr. and Mrs. Baker came they had had it all to themselves, and what it had meant to them, with its wild beauty and deep quiet, only Edith of the three of them would be able to express in years to come.
For only she would really remember this garden. The other two with their happy, objective minds would always be absorbed in the moment but she would look backward and remember, and look forward and be afraid, and the present would always confuse her because she would never entirely live in it. She sat a little apart from the others, her chin cupped in her hands. She was a brown girl with smooth acorn-colored skin, no color in her cheeks and straight dark hair cut in a fringe across her forehead. She was small for her nine years, her body all sharp angles, her eyes a greenish-hazel fringed with dark lashes. She was the adopted sister of the other two, and though the children’s parents took great care that it should make no difference yet it did. She felt unsure of herself and she hated her old-fashioned name, Edith. People said it suited her and that made it worse. It was difficult to remember that Rosemary, whom they called Rose because she was so round and pink, glowing and good-humored, was a year younger than herself. It was always Rose who seemed to be the eldest, for it was she who decided what they should do. Jeremy was six, sandy, fat and freckled. He was a comfortable child at present but he had a will of his own and might not be so comfortable later.
“It’s been our garden for years,” said Rose. “And now she’s come. I’d like to put poison in her tea.” She tried hard to speak venomously but venom being foreign to her nature she could never manage to sound nasty however nasty she wanted to be.
“I could shoot her with my catapult,” suggested Jeremy.
“Perhaps she will let us still play in the garden,” said Edith.
“What will be the good of that?” demanded Rose. “It won’t be ours any more.”
Edith wondered. A garden had to be your own before it would let you in, and even your own garden did not give up its secrets unless it liked you. But if a garden had once been your own, did it disown you when somebody else took possession of it? She did not think so.
They were silent until Jeremy turned his head toward home and sniffed. The open kitchen window was not very far from the mulberry tree. “There’s a cake baking,” he said hoarsely. He was always hoarse when desire consumed him, and just at present in his growing state he yearned after food like a saint after heaven. Luckily he had the kind of mother who did not use her palette knife too efficiently when transferring her cake mixture from the mixing basin to the tin. The forefinger of her youngest, if washed first, was expected to have a good wipe around. Jeremy silently disappeared. Though possessed of an astonishing capacity for noise he could be as silent as a Red Indian in pursuit of food.
“I think I’ll put Martha to bed,” said Rose. Martha was her hamster, who lived in a mansion with stairs on top of the bookcase in the living room. And Rose too disappeared, leaving Edith alone.
She got to her feet, walked along the wall and climbed into the branches of a stout crab apple tree. She could climb trees as nimbly as a cat. Even now, all sharp points and angles as her body was, she could move with a sure-footed ease that would presently be grace. She climbed down the tree without even faintly disturbing the thrush who was singing in the highest branch. The birds seldom took any notice of her as she came and went smoothly as a sunbeam among them. At the foot of the tree she was on the rough grass and primrose leaves that carpeted the little copse, spun around with birdsong and gossamer shadow. In her smoke-blue slacks and blue jumper she looked like a shadow herself as she slipped through the trees, ran a few steps over the bright green grass and sat down on the edge of the pool.
She sat with her hands linked around her knees and her feet in the empty moss-grown basin. She did not look toward the house, for she knew it was all right. There were no faces at any of the windows. They had gone away. She always knew if she was being looked at, for she felt at once awkward and unsure of herself. When no one could see her she was relaxed and happy. She looked up at the boy, one of the best friends that she had, for he could be relied upon never to look at her. He looked only westward, for he aimed his arrow always at the heart of the sinking sun, that on some evenings would poise itself like a flaming orange on top of the garden wall. His smooth limbs were of greenish bronze and his face was absorbed and remote. Close curls covered his head and his wings were spread. As soon as he had loosed his arrow he would be gone. Yet Edith was sure he knew she was here and liked to have her sitting on the edge of his pool. She had shared the ownership of the garden with him only, for though she had acquiesced when Rose and Jeremy said the garden belonged to the three of them yet in her heart, with a small secret scorn, she had repudiated their ownership. And with an angry leap of the heart she denied even part ownership to that woman with the clear pale face and gray hair whom she had seen at the window. I was here first, thought Edith. She can walk in it if she likes, I’ll let her, like I let the old lady, but it’s mine, not hers. And the little things are mine. All of them. Not only Queen Mab and the ivory coach and the tea set of blue glass but all of them.
She looked toward the house, remembering the day when she had first seen them, when the old lady had been still alive but upstairs in her bed. Jeremy had sent his ball in through the open door of the little conservatory where the vine grew and she had crept in to retrieve it for him, and through the window she had seen the little things. She had gazed at them with her heart beating in her throat, and then she had picked up the ball quickly and gone away again because she did not want the other two to know. They must not know, for they’d want them. And they were hers. No one must know about them but her. She came back again when she was alone, came back again and again. Kneeling in the green shade of the vine leaves, her arms propped on the low sill of the closed window, she would go into a sort of trance, staring and staring. She knew every one of the little things by heart, knew the number of them and how they looked when the sunbeams came through the vine leaves and how they looked when there was no sun. She adored them all, but especially Queen Mab in her ivory coach and the blue glass tea set. They were more to her than anything in the world.
And then the old lady became very ill and soon after that she woke up one morning with a sense of threatening danger. She had been dreaming about her little things and it had been a confused and unhappy dream. Were they safe? Had anything happened? She had felt sick with fear and later in the day she had been able to escape from the others, climb over the wall, and run to the conservatory unseen. They were there. As she sank to her knees she felt as sick with relief and joy as before she had felt sick with fear. They were there and for the first time since she had found them the window was open at the bottom. She climbed in and removed the glass shade. Now she could not only see them but with the tip of her finger touch them. She touched the ivory coach and the blue glass tea set, and then somewhere in the house beyond the little parlor a door closed and she heard a step on the stairs. Her heart leapt and then sank. Someone was coming to take away the little things.
It was then that she had committed her crime, the sin that had been secretly corroding her ever since, making her thinner than ever, giving her nightmares and sudden unexplainable attacks of sickness, and making her afraid of going to church because of that phrase “descended into hell.” Sometimes she forgot it and was happy, as she had been happy just now sitting by the pond, and she tried hard to forget, and then suddenly she would remember again. Yet she was glad she had done it, and she would have done it again, for when she had next crept up to the window the little things had gone.
H
ad they been put back to greet the new lady? She must know, for if they had not been put back then perhaps they had gone forever. She got up and moved toward the house, a wraith in the gathering dusk. Her way led her obliquely under the branches of the willow tree, for she would not have dreamed of crossing the lawn without going through the willow tree. Inside it was another of her special places. She stood for a moment with the gold falling all about her, as though she stood in the secret place under a waterfall, and then she parted the golden water and went on to the conservatory and kneeled down at the window. The table was empty. She felt very desolate and getting up she drifted sadly away through the willow branches, through the copse and over the wall, and the boy was left in sole possession of the garden.
2
I’m too tired to do any more, thought Valerie. She put down her brush and paintpot and straightened her aching back. Then turning around she leaned her arms on the top of the gate. There was no one to be seen, and nothing to be heard except that thrush singing in the little copse between the Talbots’ garden and the garden of The Laurels. For a moment she thought she saw a gleam of blue in the Talbots’ mulberry tree and thought, Those wretched children, but then it was gone. The silence oppressed her. They might all be dead, she thought, and then with a pang of bitterness, I wish they were. Paul too.
A few years ago, when such thoughts had trickled into her vacant mind, it had shocked her that she of all people could think such things, she whom everyone admired so much for her selfless devotion to her blind husband. She had pushed them down to wherever they had come from but they had kept coming up again, and now she no longer cared. What did it matter? They were not really her and no one knew, for Paul couldn’t see her face or read her thoughts. So long as she cooked his meals and slaved for two, that was all he cared about. Other blind men did things, earned good wages. With all the wonderful gadgets invented for them the blind could be as useful these days as the sighted. But Paul was idle, content to spend his days tramping through the woods with his dog or drinking with his cronies at the local, and his evenings droning into his tape recorder in the tiny room he called his study, or just mooning, imagining he was working and pleased as Punch if he was paid a small sum for a poem or article once in six months. Meanwhile they were poor, with nothing but his disability pension and the bit of money that Grannie had left her. They hadn’t even been able to afford a child, but for that she was thankful, for Paul would have been a rotten father. She flattered herself no one knew about the poverty. To keep the cottage and its tiny garden pretty as paint, herself smart and up-to-date and Paul as tidy as was possible for a man who had been born untidy, was what she lived for. But unable to afford any help in cottage or garden, she was sure the work was killing her. Let it. She didn’t care. When she was dead Paul might be sorry.
She glanced across at The Laurels. What was that woman like? She had caught a glimpse of her passing in her car. Old, as they all were. There was no one young here except Joanna and Roger Talbot and they were so wrapped up in each other and their wretched kids that they were no use to anyone. Old, it went without saying, but good-looking and a marvelous suit. But probably she was no use, and anyhow she wouldn’t stay. Anyone would go around the bend living in that ghastly house. No, she won’t stay, thought Valerie, and if she does I wouldn’t have time to be friends, I’m too tired to bother.
She picked up her paintpot and carried it to the little garage beside the cottage. Their car was a secondhand one and she was ashamed of it. However much she cleaned and polished the thing it still looked awful. But it was all they could afford and she had to have a car for the shopping. She wasn’t strong enough now to bike everywhere. She wished they could move to the town but Paul would not budge. A blind man was best in the country, he said, it was less confusing and he needed the quiet for his work.
Valerie came around to the front of the cottage again and her habitual mood of sullen endurance was warmed by a glow of pride. It really looked very pretty, with the new turquoise paint against the pink walls, the small latticed windows and the steep hillocky old roof. It was a tiny place, and sometimes when Valerie complained of the vast amount of work she had to do her friends silently wondered why. For the garden was as small as the cottage. Behind the clipped escallonia hedge and the wrought-iron gate there were only two flower beds, filled now with tulips, and a paved path to the front door, and at the back of the cottage a little vegetable plot bordering on the orchard of the Dog and Duck. Yet her friends had to agree that there was never a weed to be seen in Valerie’s garden, or a speck of dust in her perfect rooms. One had to hand it to her that she did everything she did supremely well.
She went in to her sitting room, with the charming chintz curtains and covers that she had made herself and the horse brasses hanging over the old fireplace, consumed by a longing for a cup of tea, but when she glanced at the little gilt clock on the mantelpiece she saw there was no time if she was to have supper ready punctually. She cooked exquisitely and elaborately. In the early days of their marriage Paul, who had simple tastes and a shocking digestion since the war, had put in a plea for steamed fish and an occasional rice pudding, but Valerie had been so terribly hurt that ever since he had dutifully eaten whatever she set before him and taken bicarb afterward.
In her dainty kitchen-dining room, tying on her flowered overall, Valerie said to herself, No time even for a cup of tea. That’s married life. What’s to happen to Paul and me? Do we just go on and on like this till we go mad? Or I do, for he won’t. I don’t think I’d find him so maddening if only he’d realize how rotten our life is. But he never realizes anything. He’s self-centered as a cow. Her thoughts ran on in this habitual manner, a tragic Greek Chorus to the central figure, until there came a sudden check. . . . I liked that woman, she thought. She looked as though she’d had an interesting life. Not like me. . . . And then the Chorus was back and telling her what rotten luck it had been that she, at nineteen, not long out of school, should have married a man who a few months after their marriage was back on her hands a blind and nerve-shattered wreck. And his plane had been shot down in the last two weeks of the phase of the war. If it had ended a fortnight earlier it wouldn’t have happened. She could remember as though it was yesterday standing in the hospital corridor on VE Day, waiting for permission to go in and see Paul, trembling and reluctant, for suffering in any form terrified her, thinking that it was VE Day and everyone had been happy and rejoicing in the streets, and this had happened to her and Paul. Of course it had been awful for Paul but it had been much worse for her. It was always worse for the wife. Everybody said so. And it got worse still as time went on because people did not sympathize with you any more. They couldn’t do enough for you at first, and that helped, and then they got bored with your troubles. But your troubles went on just the same and you had to bear them alone. Again came the check. . . . That really was a marvelous suit. I wonder what she gave for it?
3
“A very good-looking woman,” said Colonel Adams to his wife as they sat over their late tea. They did not have supper, just cocoa and bread and butter when they went to bed, cocoa being cheap, so they had a late tea. It helped to pass the evening, for happy though they were together, the evenings did sometimes seem long, especially in the winter. The fact was that by the time they had done the work that had to be done in the cottage, cooked and eaten their frugal lunch and washed up afterward, they were tired and couldn’t do much more for the rest of the day except sit; out in the garden in warm weather, in front of the fire in winter.
Colonel Adams was eighty-two and crippled with arthritis. He had suffered with a grim and humorous heroism for many years though now the joints were fixed and he was in less pain; but it was difficult to get about on his two sticks. Mrs. Adams was younger, a little creature who hardly reached to her husband’s shoulder, but her physique had not been equal to the strain of bearing her four sons, losing three of them in the war and having the fourth turn out so disappointing. Then the
re had been the perpetual planning and contriving that had been necessary with the cost of living ceaselessly rising and Service pensions staying where they were. And so now she was delicate. They had had a little private money once but Charles’s debts had swallowed most of that long ago. One couldn’t refuse to help one’s own son, especially one so beloved as Charles.
But if life had been hard for Mrs. Adams it had never occurred to her to think so, and her soft face was serene as a kitten’s. It had never occurred to the Colonel to complain either. His lean brown face, with bushy white eyebrows and white cavalry mustache, was wrinkled in lines of perpetual good humor. It was only their evident exhaustion and the faded blue eyes of both of them that suggested suffering. Nothing else. They had each other. An unusually happy marriage, its selflessness strengthened by shared tragedy, had grown into something more, an identification so close that each could be said to have passed beyond the barriers of self and to live in the other with an immediacy that very largely shut out thought of the future. Largely, not entirely. The thought of death did come at times and they would smile at each other and say, “We’ll go together.” But in each was the fear, never expressed to the other, that it might not be so. They hardly realized the uniqueness of their love, and their good fortune in its possession, though they did know they were happy. The discontent and unhappiness of others was a great puzzle to them, especially if those others happened to have television. At the heart of their mutual content was this mutual longing for a TV. It was not an acquisitive longing, it was almost the mystical longing of a child for the morning star. On the few occasions when they had seen it, and had sat before it spellbound, it had seemed to them an unbelievable magic. And so their longing was not a corroding one, because no one expects to possess the morning star. They did not speak of it to each other because neither liked the other to think that they wanted anything more than the riches they had in each other.
The Scent of Water Page 4