The Garden of Lost and Found

by Harriet Evans

  ‘He must do for he is my brother.’ Mary gave a small smile. ‘But – oh dearest, it is—’ She could not speak.

  Liddy’s face was pale. ‘Whatever it is, I will understand it, I am sure.’

  The joy, of being with one who knew it all, the one person who did! ‘Oh, Liddy. H-his heart is black, my dearest. I never knew until I went to keep house for him quite how black.’

  Liddy pushed a lock of hair from her sister’s face. She said seriously, ‘Does he – hurt you?’

  Mary laid down the cup. ‘Hurt me? Yes, in a thousand different ways but he does not mean to. We know how we grew up, Liddy, the three of us, and I try every day to forgive him, when he spends the housekeeping money on absinthe – do not be shocked.’ She found she was shaking with the liberation of talking freely. ‘Even if I could speak French there is no one to whom I can say these things, for I know no one. I am his silent sister who keeps house for him and lets the people with whom he fraternises come and go. Such people, Liddy!’ She knew she must hold back, but she could not conceal the whole truth from her, or Ned, for she knew Dalbeattie must say something to them when he next visited, too. She could not keep it all to herself. ‘Thieves and cads and downright dirty sots, and g-girls whom I cannot like, some I do.’

  ‘Girls from where?’ Liddy said, mystified.

  ‘Oh darling. They are not quite proper, do you understand, and they – they seem to me to be so young. Sometimes – anyway. I am not allowed to be there when he entertains, but often I cannot help but hear, or see. Our rooms are not large.’

  Liddy was shaking her head. ‘But what of the painting? He writes to Ned and Dalbeattie that he has commissions a-plenty! He painted the daughter of the conductor of the Paris Opera!’

  ‘He did, and he was drunk, and tried to kiss her, and her father has spread it around that he is no one to be trusted.’ Mary bit her lip. ‘It was so unfortunate, for the portrait was finished but for a few strokes, and it was awfully good – he is good, Liddy, not as good as Ned, but he has a real feeling for faces. If he could have held out for five more minutes, only until the painting was removed to their salon.’ She looked sadly down at her hands. ‘I used to imagine he needed a piece of luck. But now I am not sure. I think he is damaged and it can’t be undone. He misses Mother the most of us, I think. He often talks of her. He was the oldest, after all.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ said Liddy. She was silent for a moment, pressing her fingers to her lips. ‘Oh, my love. This is all awful. How do you live?’

  ‘He translates crude novelettes and magazine stories from French into English for a publisher, who brings them out over here.’ Mary stumbled on the words. ‘They are horrid, Liddy. It pays very little – I don’t know if it would be worse if it paid a vast amount, but I don’t believe so. He reads them to me – he forces me to listen. He is without shame—’ She buried her face in her hands.

  ‘How cruel, how rude he is.’ Liddy was red. ‘Tell him he must come to us tomorrow. If not, I shall write to him. He never answers me, but I shall persevere! Dearest, you must not be treated so. We will make him see the error of his ways.’

  Mary looked up at her sister, brushing the dead embers from the grate and flinging open the casement to empty the ash on to the daffodills outside the window. Liddy was strong, a core of steel running through her tiny body, and Mary saw for the first time that she herself was not made that way.

  ‘When he is well, oh – Liddy! He is my dearest brother again. It is extraordinary, the change in him, in the atmosphere in our little house.’

  ‘How are the lodgings?’

  ‘In a quite pretty part of Paris, not far from Abbesses. We are in a cité, a small courtyard off the street, and it is charming.’ Mary gave a small smile. ‘You see, I am quite dreadful at housekeeping and I do dislike it so! Oh, that I were a man and someone else shifted for me. I am overcharged for bread, the meat is frequently gone bad. I do not get the best candles, the linen is not of the right quality, because I do not know how to ask for better things.’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, Liddy, I do not know. Around the time of Epiphany they were selling sugar biscuits in the cité, patterned doves, iced with little coloured strands of sugar. There was a young man with an accordion, and dancing. It was all so lovely. I watched the couples from my window and I wanted to go down and ask for a biscuit, one or two . . . But I can’t really speak any French, I try to learn, but I see so few people. It is a silly thing, but it stuck with me. I keep seeing that pretty scene, only a few feet from my window. Just out of reach, but Pertwee was in his cups and I could not leave –’ She bowed her head, then looked up. ‘Enough of Pertwee! He tires me, even in absentia. He takes all my energy. When I think what plans we used to have for ourselves, what plans Mother had for us – that you would teach, and I would train in medicine, do you remember?’

  ‘I do,’ said Liddy quietly.

  ‘But you are my concern now. When are you to be brought to bed?’ Liddy flushed, a hot pink. ‘I may be a cloistered spinster, Liddy, but I can use my eyes. Your figure is not increasing merely because of the sweetmeats Ned brings you, my love! You are to have a child, are you not, before too long?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Liddy, in great confusion, and she stood up. ‘I – I do not know, and have not seen the doctor – Ned wants to call someone named Dr Corps, but I cannot deal with a man with such a name. And here’s the thing. I wanted to go into town to ask old Dr Forsyte, though it mortifies one, rather, the idea . . .’

  ‘Oh, I quite see. What does he say?’

  ‘He wouldn’t answer my letters. And so I went to see him in Marylebone, having written, and I heard him tell his nurse I was not to be let in.’ Liddy leaned against the wall and the light from the window threw her swollen shape into greater relief. ‘He has had the care of us since we were children and he would not even see me. Father has told all his acquaintance to cut us out, you see. I wonder – don’t you? Is he controlled by Nurse Bryant, do you think? Who rules the house?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Mary, quietly. ‘I cannot think of them, I find, still. It will be a great many years until I can.’

  ‘We will be revenged one day, do not fear,’ said Liddy, evenly. ‘Ned does not understand why I wake sometimes screaming, and I cannot stop. The house. When I think of being back in that room I—’ She pulled at her collar. ‘Sometimes something will happen; a horse neighing, for example. It reminds me of the sounds of the horses outside the Flask. While I was still allowed to have the shutters open I used to watch them for hours on end when I was cold, and hungry, even though leaning on the windowsill hurt my bones. Now I jump, when I hear one, and I feel nauseous. You understand.’

  ‘Yes – Oh, Liddy. Don’t torture yourself.’

  ‘Or tapioca. If Mrs L. makes tapioca I must absent myself, for even seeing it makes me faint. I wish it were not so – I cannot tell her why.’ She laughed. ‘How would she ever understand?’

  ‘She would not. No one would, quite, not even Ned, I am sure.’

  The smoking log in the grate seemed to have extinguished itself. Liddy said:

  ‘You know I’ve come to see Bryant might have gone to another family, and she might have destroyed them. But she couldn’t finish us off. I think about that, often, you know. When I was missing you one day, and feeling really quite tragic, dear Dalbeattie told me there is a saying in the Koran. God never gives you burdens greater than you can bear. He understands everything, you see.’ Beside her, the little dog whimpered. ‘It is oppressive in here, when the fire smokes,’ she said, suddenly. ‘I want fresh air! Let us walk towards Ham House, and see the river.’ Liddy stood up and struggled into her cape. ‘It moves inside me, Mary, it is most strange!’ She ran to the door, and flung it open, Ophelia yapping wildly at their heels.

  The feeling of liberation after the dark, dank house was almost intoxicating. The sisters linked arms up the long walk that led towards Ham House, glinting in the silver spring light. ‘I often take myself out to remind
myself – I am free, we are all alive –’ She turned to Mary. ‘We will triumph over Nurse Bryant yet, my dear love.’

  Mary nodded. ‘I hope so.’ She squeezed her sister’s arm. ‘May I come again tomorrow? We still have four days together before Pertwee and I must return.’

  Liddy’s glowing face fell. ‘Not tomorrow. We have – Dalbeattie is coming for tea.’

  ‘I know,’ said Mary, shyly. ‘Pertwee told me, for he hopes to see him here, if he is welcome.’

  Liddy cocked her head on one side. Mary thought she was watching Ophelia, chasing a duck around the pond in the distance. Then she saw her face. ‘My love. Dalbeattie was married last week.’

  Mary raised her head up, looking at the treetops above her. ‘I – oh, I see. This is wonderful news.’ She gave a small smile. ‘Please, Liddy, will you give him my best wishes.’

  ‘Oh, dearest.’ Liddy turned back to her and her face was a picture of misery. ‘No. I am wretched about it and furious with you! Forgive me, Mary. But I’ve been wanting to tell you since you arrived,’ she said, blinking. ‘He told Ned he’d have broken off his engagement and offered for you, only you told him most clearly you’d never marry! It’s not true, is it?’

  ‘It is, my love.’

  ‘Mary!’ Liddy actually stamped her foot, splashing mud on both their skirts. ‘Oh goodness, you are silly. You could have had Dalbeattie!’

  ‘Liddy.’ Mary hated this feeling of separation from her sister – a greater separation than the hundreds of miles that were usually between them. ‘I’m not like you.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  Mary said gently, ‘Oh, my dear. I couldn’t stand in his way! We barely knew each other.’

  They had reached the swollen, rushing river. Ophelia barked at it, and Liddy reined her in. ‘He – he told Ned that at first sight he knew he wanted to marry you.’

  ‘Well, oh – I will – I will never marry.’ Mary blinked, to hide the effect these words had on her, the heavy ache in her eyes. ‘Liddy, when I think of domesticity, and dogs, and babies, and laying a fire for tea – I cannot do it.’

  ‘It’s only because of Father, and that awful woman, curse them both. You do it already, for Pertwee,’ Liddy pointed out, sharply, and the sisters stared at one another, trying to fathom the other’s thoughts.

  ‘I have to. Without me he will die. He will die anyway, but I can help him. Please, Liddy. I – I can’t ever marry. I wish him all happiness. He is the best of men.’

  ‘Oh, Mary. He is and it’s wretched. He’s gone ahead with it for his family – he’s their only hope, he has to support his mother and siblings up in Perthshire somewhere. But I’ve met her. Rose. Rose. Oh, she was all wrong for him, all wrong, Mary!’ Her eyes were swimming with tears. ‘I used to think how very lovely it would be, us, Ned and Dalbeattie, working together, married, babies – everything just so. Everything just so.’

  ‘Rarely is everything just so,’ said Mary. Her neck ached from staring up above her. She looked down at the mud on her boots, her heart in her throat, not trusting herself to speak. She thought of her mother’s last words to her as Mary was carried out of her bedroom, away from the deathbed towards life, her whispered urgency. Never marry, my bird. ‘My darling, it’s of no matter. Let us keep on walking.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Summer 1894

  Very early one morning, at daybreak, Liddy woke to Eliza’s thin wail. She lifted her up out of her cot and held her close, waiting and watching in something like abstract revulsion as her daughter’s mouth searched for Liddy’s scaly, wet, long nipple and found it, settling down to suckle. Liddy gazed out of the window of her tiny bedroom.

  It was the first really warm day of the year. A deep-blue sky fanned overhead, and the budding trees swayed in the wind. The pulling, sucking motion of Eliza’s mouth on her breast lulled Liddy into a state of calm. She rubbed at her eyes with her free right shoulder: for the first time in days, weeks, she felt different, and then she realised what it was. She had slept. She had slept for a little over five hours. No wonder Eliza was hungry. Something crackled on the blanket beside her as she shifted around a little. She looked down; it was the letter from Ned.

  I am sorry to have left so suddenly but I must return to work. I love you dearest Liddy and I am sorry I make you angry. Hang it – all I seem to do is apologise! Please understand I work only for you – I think only of you, and Eliza. Now I have sold ‘The Artist’s Hovel, etc’ I am making plans for another series. These plans are very near completion Liddy. In the meantime, I meant to tell you, before the deterioration of our evening, that Galveston wants to produce a limited set of engravings of ‘A Nightingale’ and has paid me two hundred pounds. You will hang on walls around the country, my Liddy.

  I know that being a mother has not been what you expected and that you feel we live a hobbledehoy life in this little cottage. But you must be patient, dearest. Do not doubt me. Did I not say to you that I plan only for you? And now our Eliza, who will grow up surrounded by beauty and happiness, and for whom, along with her mother, I carve and paint and build a paradise. No more now –

  Do not be cross – for I love you most of all

  Liddy screwed the letter up into a ball, roughly, with her one free hand. Eliza sighed, giving a half-cry as she fed, and Liddy tensed. But she went back to suckling, and Liddy relaxed, hurling the balled paper across the small room. It bounced off the wall and under the bed.

  Mention of The Hovel pricked at her tired ego. Ned had submitted a painting to the Summer Exhibition, and it had been a great success, but Liddy, while admiring it greatly, disliked it hugely. It showed Liddy, in her moth-eaten velvet walking cape, holding on to her feathered hat – which she had snatched back from Nurse Bryant’s room on the day of her wedding – on a breezy Ham Common, Ophelia pulling at her lead, in front of their little Gate House. The feeling of spring winds, of fresh air, of Ophelia’s desire to be off the lead, was very strong. It had been received rapturously, even by the stuffy old nabobs in charge. Ned’s ability to capture personality and light, to work quickly and skilfully, was extraordinary.

  But he had called it The Artist’s Wife, the Artist’s Dog, the Artist’s Hovel. As if it were all a joke. As if they lived only through him, existed because of him. Ned had said, smiling nervously, that it was a satire on English manhood. Liddy, tired, bewildered by Eliza’s screaming and fury, cross at constantly being told by visitors that the child should have a wet-nurse, stuck out in Ham not knowing anyone and missing Mary dreadfully, said he was being awfully pompous and she did not care to be part of a list that included a dog and a perfectly nice house that might be cramped and rather dark but was in no way a hovel. Ned, his smile more fixed, had repeatedly said that she’d told him hundreds of times that now Eliza was here the Gate House was not the home for them. He knew this. He was working all the hours he could to change this. She was being rather unkind.

  Oh, hang it all. She thought about what Ned might be doing, and the familiar ribbon of anger snaked through her. She was very tired, tired of being cross with him, of feeling so sad and the worst of it was he didn’t seem to care. Something was afoot, she knew this with a calm certainty. It wasn’t simply that he was enjoying a bachelor’s life without them, it was that in some way – and she understood this, because she knew him as well as she knew herself – he was hiding something from her, something fundamental. This hurt her dreadfully.

  Liddy held her little daughter close to her, and noticed for the first time, as the spring sunshine dappled the child’s bare legs, the plumpness to them, the pleasing perfection of her toes, like fat little beans. Her delicate hands, though, had fingers like her father’s, thin and quick. Love, pure love, flooded Liddy, like sunshine flowing in through an open door.

  It was sunny. She knew then she could not stay in bed. Not on a day like today. Not when she had had five hours’ sleep. Who knew when Ned would next be back? She would stop waiting for him now, and go out herself, do somethin
g herself. Liddy wiggled her toes. We will go out today, she said to herself, pulling Eliza a little more closely towards her. And I know where we shall go.

  She sat up, rather lightheaded at the thought.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, looking down at her baby. ‘One last time.’

  It really wasn’t such a big house after all. In the midday sun it seemed shrunken, the closed shutters like eyes sewn shut.

  ‘There,’ she whispered, out of breath from carrying Eliza the last several hundred yards up the hill. ‘There it is.’ Liddy caught hold of the railings, and peered in through them to her old home.

  She had taken the first train into town, and from there the omnibus which ran up past Heals on the Tottenham Court Road. As the crowded bus rumbled through North London, horses jostling on the road with other carriages and carts, she held the baby tightly in her arms, terrified for any bump, pothole, loose wheel. She was a stranger in this city now. An entirely different person.

  Somewhere towards Highgate Eliza opened her huge blue eyes and stared up at Liddy, taking in everything she was shown out of the window. ‘That is the church your grandmother attended, my sweet. Over there is the zoo, and we shall go there when you are older. This is the boundary mark your Uncle Pertwee used to jump from. You will meet him one day.’

  Eliza waved her fists at the window, swaying slightly with the motion of the tram, and Liddy held her tight, staring at her anew, bowing her head constantly to let her lips brush the perfect, slightly knobbly sphere of her silken skull.

  Alighting from the omnibus Liddy took her large silk shawl and made it into a sling for the baby, as Mrs Lydgate did when she’d stroll on the common to stop Eliza’s mewling. Eliza fell promptly asleep again, and so Liddy walked up the hill, looking around her as the old sights appeared, one by one: the Flask, the church, the same grand houses opposite hers . . . She turned to look through the gate at her old home.