The Garden of Lost and Found

by Harriet Evans

  ‘But why was it such a popular painting?’

  ‘John, I couldn’t tell you.’

  ‘Experts,’ Matt said. ‘Save us from experts.’ Juliet smiled. She stood, arms folded, as close to the radio as she could.

  ‘. . . undoubtedly struck a chord with the British public when it was painted . . . It was supposed to be the most moving painting in the world, that was its USP. Grown men would stand and weep in front of it. The artist’s children, caught in a moment of innocence in his garden, like magical sprites . . . as you’ll probably know, they both—’

  ‘Mum, what happens if you put a marble up your bum?’ Isla bellowed, from just opposite her.

  ‘That’s great, darling – shh a moment . . .’

  ‘. . . dead years later,’ Henry Cudlip was saying. ‘It’s really a meditation on childhood—’

  ‘Who was dead?’ said Isla, instantly. ‘Shut up, Sandy!’

  ‘No one. Someone a long time ago. Nothing for you to worry about,’ said Juliet, automatically, and she reached around to pat Sandy, who was lying on the floor, screaming ‘JUICE!’ and banging his IKEA plastic cup on the ground.

  ‘Why did they die?’

  ‘How awful. And I suppose what everyone will want to know is –’

  ‘Because their bodies wore out and they’d lived a good long life. Eat up, faster, darling—’

  ‘– are there any other sketches or images left of the original?’

  ‘Alas no!’ Henry Cudlip sounded almost pleased. ‘We have nothing else, which is why the discovery of this piece is so important.’

  ‘Now we’re also joined by Sam Hamilton, unveiled last week as the new director of the Fentiman Museum in Oxford, which has one of the most important collections of Victorian and Edwardian art in the country. Sam Hamilton, thank you—’

  ‘Oh no way,’ Juliet hissed. ‘God. God! Bloody Sam Hamilton? Classic man swanning in to – ow! Shit! Shit!’ Her fingers were resting against the boiling hot kettle: she swore, sucking them and wincing, but did not move from her place beside the radio.

  ‘The Fentiman going to bid for this today then?’

  ‘Hi, John, thanks for having me. No – it’s a little out of our price range, I’m afraid, but we’d love to borrow it from whomever does acquire it. It’s—’

  ‘Why do you hate that man?’

  ‘I was at university with him,’ said Juliet, forgetting to censure herself. ‘He was Canadian. Jesus, that guy. Classic. He was a total social-climbing know-it-all. He only ever wore two T-shirts, one of Justine Frischmann, one of Pulp, and socks with Birkenstock sandals. And he dumped my friend.’

  ‘I don’t understand what any of that means, Mum.’

  ‘Never mind. It’s that he was really patronising and he dressed like a – but anyway! It’s not nice to be mean, is it? I’m sure he’s perfectly nice now . . .’

  ‘What’s dumped? Like what Adam did to Darcy in Hollyoaks?’

  ‘Why are you watching Hollyoaks?’

  ‘I’ve never heard you mention him,’ said Matt.

  ‘I haven’t seen him for twenty years. He’s a – well, he would be director of a museum and vying with Henry Cudlip to be on Radio 4. He’s –’ She shook her head. ‘Sam Hamilton. Typical.’

  ‘Any lover of Victorian art would want to own it. Ned Horner is greatly underrated today because of the success and then loss of The Garden of Lost and Found and the accusations he sold out in later years . . . he was very bitter about it and so was his widow, Liddy Horner, the artist’s wife. They were a remarkable couple, they met very young, in extraordinary circumstances—’

  Henry Cudlip interrupted. ‘In fact, his great-granddaughter works at—’

  ‘Mum!’ Bea called from upstairs.

  ‘One minute, just one minute – Oh Sandy, do shh, darling.’

  ‘Juliet Horner, she’s one of our experts on Victorian art.’

  ‘One of his descendants works for you?’

  ‘At the moment, yes. We were always asking her if she had any other paintings in the attic she could bring out, haha.’

  ‘That’s me!’ Juliet said, trying to sound excited, but Sandy was playing with half an onion that had somehow ended up on the floor and Matt apparently wasn’t listening. Only Isla looked up, and said sweetly,

  ‘Of course, Mummy!’

  ‘But, no, this sketch was a total surprise to her – to all of us, when it was brought in by our anonymous seller.’

  ‘Fascinating. Well, good luck today with it, Henry Cudlip, of Dawnay’s auctioneers, selling that sketch . . . Now, it’s two minutes to eight on Tuesday, May the seventeenth, and over to—’

  ‘What did he mean about you working there “at the moment”?’ Matt said.

  ‘What?’ Juliet started clearing up the breakfast things, the brown flecks of processed cereals already stuck fast to the different bowls.

  ‘That guy, your boss. It was like you don’t work there any more.’

  Juliet shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’ But her heart was thumping so loudly in her chest she thought they must all be able to hear it.

  ‘Can you get Sandy’s shoes on, and Isla’s teeth cleaned—’ She was backing out of the cluttered kitchen, towards the stairs.

  ‘I have to go, Juliet. You know that.’

  Just this once! Could you just this once clean Isla’s teeth for her, you lazy –

  At the top of the narrow stairs Juliet took another deep breath, feeling rather light-headed, and knocked on Bea’s bedroom door.

  ‘Darling, you wanted me? I’m afraid it’s time to go to school.’

  Bea was on the floor next to the doll’s house, sucking her thumb, curled up like a comma. She had covered herself in a thick woollen blanket. It had been on the sofa at Nightingale House, the very one Juliet used to wrap herself in when she was tired, or sad.

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘I know you don’t but it’s the second-to-last day before half-term. Then we’ll do fun things.’

  ‘Fun things. Bullshit.’

  ‘Don’t swear.’ She stroked her daughter’s soft, smooth forehead, the baby hair around the temples, before Bea pushed her hand away. ‘Bea, darling, could you just maybe tell me a little bit about what’s wrong and then I can—’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.’ Bea sat up and opened the front of the doll’s house, and it swung open on the huge hinge that was made around the great chimney. Her nimble little fingers gathered up the figures inside. Carefully, she stood each one in the hallway: two children, their smooth wooden limbs still pliant after a hundred years, one in a tiny smocked dress and wings, worn silver fabric wrapped around rusting wire, the other in a billowing linen shirt and teal-coloured velvet knickerbockers that swamped his tiny figure.

  The doll’s house had been a gift to Juliet’s great-grandmother Lydia Horner’s mother, Helena. A local craftsman had been commissioned to build it for the vicar’s children after they moved into the new manse, so the family story went. Thus it was at least a hundred and seventy-five years old and Grandi never had to tell Juliet to be careful whilst she was playing with it: Juliet understood. There had been other dolls; grown-ups, perhaps. She remembered some from when she was a child, but along with favourite teddies and hats and books, they had been lost.

  Grandi had kept the doll’s house in the Dovecote, where she rarely went. She hadn’t ever liked playing with it as a child, she said. It was Juliet and her best friend Ev who wasted hours with it, dragging it out on to the grass, making up worlds around it, having their characters survive extraordinary events: plague, fire, bankruptcy, betrayal – penny-novelette rubbish, Grandi used to call it as she tidied away the pieces, closing the great hinge of the chimney shut, chivvying them out of the Dovecote to wash their hands, eat their tea, or whatever tiresome activity grown-ups insisted upon at regular intervals . . .

  Absent-mindedly, Juliet stroked the fish-scale pattern of the roof. She had gone up on the roof of the real Nightingale Hous
e when her grandmother was still alive – When? The terracotta-coral tiles periodically required replacing and when they did two specialist roofers were summoned at great expense from Tewkesbury. The first stage was that they’d spend several days erecting the scaffolding. It was a precarious affair, terrifyingly rickety. One of the roofers, Laurence, had been doing this since he was sixteen; his father, as a boy, had known the men who’d tiled the roof in Dalbeattie’s own original pattern, layering the glazed tiles so that they seemed to shimmer in the sun. ‘Weren’t no roof left, whole place were a shell. He’d make ’em do her and redo her till it were right.’

  One day they’d come back from lunch at the pub and asked Juliet if she wanted to come up on the roof with them. She wasn’t afraid of anything then. It was the best house in the world – why wouldn’t she want to see the roof?

  She remembered climbing the shaking scaffolding, how it felt like clambering up a skeleton. Then she was standing up on the apex of the roof, staring out at the whole of the house and its land – at the two long beds they called the Wilderness that were in fact a cleverly planted riot of flowers with the thin path between them that led down to the apple and quince and mulberry trees, and thence to the little river that was the boundary of their land. To the left was the Dovecote, with the glass roof Ned had put in himself obscured by the spreading fig tree above it. And the roof of the house itself, moving and spreading underneath her like a creature, a broad-backed salamander. Below and to the right was her grandmother, working in the vegetable garden, blue-overall-clad back curved like a hoop. Mum and Dad, at some remove on the lawn to the right of the Wilderness, sitting reading on the rusting, striped deckchairs. The call of some woodpigeon in the trees behind her that divided the house from the church. Which summer was it? And she remembered then. 1981, the summer of the Royal Wedding. This had taken place the day before. She had watched the wedding with Ev.

  And the door to memory, once opened, led her further down those paths – Juliet shivered suddenly. The old man who’d arrived, the shouting . . . Juliet remembered showing him the doll’s house, there in the Dovecote.

  She hadn’t thought of it for years. The Royal Wedding, blasting from the TV and every radio in the house. Grandi absolutely furious, ordering the old man away, yelling at Mum and Dad. She and Ev hiding like little birds in the garden. The next day everything changed, and she and her parents left Nightingale House right after breakfast. Juliet had cried all the way home. She had thought, for the first time, then, that she should have lived with Grandi, and not with Mum and Dad. That she belonged to her, not them . . . She remembered breathing on the window and writing ‘Nightingales’ in the condensation, as she wept, the plastic seats of the rickety Renault sticking to her thighs. They’d done Paradise in R.E. the previous term at school: Juliet, sacrilegiously, always imagined Paradise being like the garden of Nightingale House.

  But her children had never seen it, and she had not been there since Grandi died. What a funny day today was going to be. Juliet blinked, aware Bea was still methodically moving the figures in the house around. She put her hand on her daughter’s, bringing herself back to the present.

  ‘Is it Amy again? Do you want me to have a word with someone?’

  ‘No. No, please don’t. Don’t say anything.’ Bea shut the doll’s house with a slam, and there came the sound of the figures inside clattering to the ground. She pressed her fingertips into her eye sockets. ‘Don’t, Mum, please don’t.’

  ‘I won’t – darling, I won’t. But if someone’s being nasty to you—’

  ‘She’s not. I mean, sometimes . . .’ She swallowed again. ‘Promise me.’

  ‘What about that boy Fin? Daddy said Fin was your friend too—’

  One of the texts from Amy that she had managed to read the other day before Bea caught her had said:

  Tell them about Fin, Baby Girl or I will! Tell them what you’ve been up to with Fin! Lool

  ‘No. Oh God. Just – please, Mum, I know you’re trying to help but please just leave me alone. Please. I can sort it out by myself. I don’t need you.’ Bea stood up, and stalked out of the room.

  Feeling sick, Juliet made her daughter’s bed and put away her pyjamas, folding them up under the pillow and putting Bea’s beloved old Mog toy carefully at the centre of the duvet. She kissed the worn old cat, whose fur was grey and bobbly, hoping some of the love she kissed into the toy would magically disperse out. You are loved, so much, I don’t know how to make it all better. Though she was late, she could not stop herself from opening up the front of the doll’s house again and propping the figures upright, so they were leaning against the shelves. Then, shutting the door and leaning on the sturdy chimney pots, she stood up and followed her daughter downstairs.

  Matt, with a great show, said he didn’t mind taking Sandy to nursery as it was on his way. Bea insisted on travelling to school by herself these days so it was just Isla whom Juliet dropped at the primary school along the road. Since Isla only partly trod in the dog mess that was always freshly plopped outside their door, and since Juliet managed to put her hands in her coat pocket before she heard the familiar sound of the stolen moped engine that presaged the youth with a line of spots exactly following his jawline about to swipe your phone from your grasp, and since they weren’t the last to arrive as usual, she chalked the morning up now as a raging success.

  ‘Perhaps today we will learn about Egyptians,’ said Isla hopefully as they approached Cheddar Class. ‘Where did Cleopatra put the snake that bit her, Mummy? Where did she actually put it?’

  ‘I heard your name on the radio this morning, Juliet!’ called Katty, a nice newish mum Juliet mentally categorised as Boden Tribe, outside the classroom. ‘How exciting, today’s the day, is it?’

  ‘What’s today?’ demanded another mum, deftly tucking some stray hair under her headscarf. ‘Oh, of course, your sale. I hope it makes millions. Remember I’ve always been a good friend to you. Always. Even when you went through that dungarees phase.’

  ‘What makes millions?’ said Isla, jumping up towards her mother. ‘Have I got an apple in my book bag?’

  ‘My sale that was on the radio this morning. No, I don’t get anything, and, Zeina, you know that perfectly well, so it’s immaterial to me whether it goes for a fiver or five million.’

  ‘It won’t go for five million, I assure you,’ said one of the fathers, a heavy-set man in the City.

  ‘Oh right,’ said Juliet.

  Zeina shook her head, mock outraged. ‘I’m still here if you need a lawyer to say you’re entitled to a cut of the proceeds as sole descendant. Whoever it is, selling it and coining it all in. Justice for Juliet!’

  The other mums laughed. The City dad walked away, shaking his head, as if they were all a gaggle of silly women, not variously a lawyer, an expert in Victorian art, a doctor. Juliet saw his wife, a small, dark-eyed woman named Tess, bend down and kiss their daughter goodbye, and the look she gave him, rolling her eyes at her retreating husband’s back.

  Juliet kissed Isla’s cheek. ‘Bye, darling.’

  Isla paused in the class doorway and turned. Her eyes shining in outrage, cheeks flushing, she said dramatically, ‘It doesn’t matter about my apple, Mummy, or that you forgot to answer me as ever or that you ignore me and only listen to Bea. I am a person too. Goodbye.’

  ‘Oh – darling – it’s just that Bea –’ Juliet said, starting forward, but Andrea, the teaching assistant, said firmly:

  ‘Thanks Mum! Don’t worry!’

  ‘What’s the drama today, Juliet?’ Tess said, in her low, clear voice.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said Juliet, uneasily. ‘The sale was on the radio, and it’s . . . you know! Just one of those mornings.’

  Though to be honest it was one of those mornings every day.

  Tess smoothed her hair back. ‘Robert thinks it’s a sham, the whole auction. Says the sketch isn’t real.’

  Juliet, not sure how to respond to this – your husband voluntarily wear
s pinstripes two inches apart and once told me the Candy brothers were pretty decent people when you got to know them – instead did the face she reserved for retired men in red trousers who turned up at Dawnay’s with a murky landscape they’d researched extensively and were positive was a Constable: a serious nod and noncommittal ‘Mmmm. Right. Mmm.’

  ‘It’s so romantic, isn’t it?’ said Katty, smiling at Juliet. ‘I was reading about it in the paper. Do you remember it?’

  ‘No. He burned it—’

  ‘I mean the sketch. Your grandmother lived in that house, didn’t she, do you remember the house? Was she one of the children in the picture? Oh, it’s like Manderley, or something!’

  Katty’s eyes bulged slightly too much with excitement and Juliet wondered if she’d categorised her wrongly, and whether she should be moved from Boden Tribe to Hidden Weirdnesses Tribe, to which, distressingly, new members were added with alarming frequency.

  ‘I remember the house very well, yes. The sketch was in her study when I was little. I don’t remember what happened to it, you don’t pay attention when you’re little, do you? It must have been sold when she died.’

  ‘Oh! Oh right! Do you have to do anything today?’

  Juliet frowned. ‘My boss wants me to have my photo taken with the sketch for the press. Because of the family connection. I’ve said no.’

  ‘Why not, babe?’ cried Dana (Jobless Through Choice Yogic Tribe). ‘Oh, that’s so sad if you won’t.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Juliet shrugged. She could hear Henry Cudlip’s voice in her head.

  ‘One of his descendants works for you?’

  ‘At the moment, yes.’

  ‘It makes me feel a bit strange.’ She added. She didn’t say her office was on the ground floor and several times a day she would, almost involuntarily, creep out to stare at the picture, hung in Dawnay’s opulent lobby, stare so hungrily at it her eyes were paper-dry afterwards. Trying to drink in details – of the golden house, the curved roof upon which her own feet had been planted, the children . . .