The garden was bare, the box and lavender and roses ripped out. The lion door knocker had gone, there was a bare square of wood where it had once been nailed in.
After a minute or two, the front door opened, very slowly, and a figure appeared. She passed between the bare beds set into the flagstones, and stood on the other side of the railings. She looked up at Liddy. Liddy blinked, and found she couldn’t see her. She was just a blur.
‘This is your child, I take it, Lydia.’ And she gave a shuddering, drawn-out sigh.
‘Yes,’ Liddy said. She wondered, for the first time, if this was a dream. She snatched her hands from the iron rails as if they were molten hot, the sun blinding her. Eliza’s body against her was warm, almost stifling, and she gave a small cry, and Liddy opened her eyes.
Nurse Bryant was in a purple tea-dress, cream lace at her throat and cuffs. The dress was too rich and smart for a Friday lunchtime, too opulent for her short frame.
She was a small person really, nothing to her. Not fat, nor thin. Her face, too – it was not the face of nightmares, but a plain, simple face. Grey eyes, a slightly potato-ish nose. Her mouth was unusually wide, her jaw square. And yet she was everything evil in the world. To be in front of her, now, made Liddy understand something with startling clarity: evil comes in disguise, it seems drab and grey at first, and then it blossoms, transforms, assumes new ribbons and bibbons and lace at its throat.
Nurse Bryant’s smile widened. The pale-brown eyes, like buttons in her head, were without expression. ‘Come inside, Miss Lydia. Your father will be delighted you are here. Let me call for some tea. Hannah!’
On the way there Liddy had thought of so many things to say. As she felt the weight of the sleeping little body against her, she knew she could not go inside the gate. She could not step into the garden, walk up the path.
‘I won’t. I don’t want to come inside,’ she muttered.
‘What’s that? I don’t hear you. What do you say, Lydia?’
‘I said: I don’t want to come inside.’ Liddy raised her chin. ‘I just want to look at you again. I’m glad to have seen you. This is my daughter. Her name’s Eliza. She is mine. You can’t touch me, now.’ Her voice trembled, but she smiled on, matching Bryant’s manic one with her own. ‘I’m very well. I’m very happy.’
Bryant lowered her voice, and frowned, muttering something Liddy couldn’t hear. ‘. . . a shame . . .’ Then she called out again. ‘Hannah! Well, the servants will be most disappointed not to see you, Miss Lydia, and your father. Allow me to tell you your treatment of him has been most cruel.’ She put her head on one side, fingering the lace at her collar. The sun cast her hollowed eyes into relief. Liddy hadn’t realised before, how high and soft her voice was. ‘And you shall receive the judgement of God when the last trumpet sounds. He is your Saviour and Lord and you will be found wanting when we are all called to answer for our sins.’ She was nodding. ‘For your sins can never be made clean. You murdered your mother and nearly did the same for your sister. Yes, Lydia dear.’
‘No I didn’t,’ said Liddy, shaking her head, her vision blurring again. ‘I – I didn’t.’
‘Oh, but you insisted she take you out on the Heath that day when she was tired and it’s there she stopped to help the little boy whose nurse was ill with the smallpox. But you know that and have prepared for the Day of Judgement.’
Liddy steadied herself against the railings. She could see Hannah, appearing at the door, her face a picture of disbelief.
‘Where’s your lovely clean-faced artist now?’ Nurse Bryant said, closer than ever at the railings, as Hannah bustled towards them. ‘When does he come home? He’s bad, Lydia, bad to the bone. Rotten, like you, my dear, everything you touch is rotten.’ Her tongue passed over her lips, quickly, and she inhaled; she knew she’d hit her target. ‘So you deserve each other. I hope he comes back to you, so you can make each other happy.’ She laughed, showing a bottom row of rotten, brown teeth.
Liddy turned her daughter towards the house. Much later, she wondered if she should have done, if showing her child to this woman had, in some way, cursed her.
‘Good day, my darling Hannah.’ She fumbled in her pocket, as Hannah, bringing her apron to her mouth, pressed a sob down into her throat, and Liddy pressed the bolt of paper with her address into Hannah’s hand. Bryant was staring into the middle distance, muttering to herself. Liddy cleared her throat and said: ‘I say it again, for you. Here is my daughter. Here am I. We are well, and happy, and healthy. You didn’t win. You couldn’t break me. Please tell my father he has a grandchild. He will never meet her.’
‘You are wicked. Wicked through and through. And you will suffer for it. May the Lord bless you,’ intoned Nurse Bryant, shaking her head.
‘No,’ Liddy said. ‘May the Lord bless you. I am free of you now! We are all free of you.’
‘I said, you will suffer for it!’ Her voice rose, cracking as she screamed. ‘You can never leave me behind.’ But Liddy did. She turned away, blowing a kiss to Hannah. ‘Don’t you understand?’
Liddy simply pretended she had heard nothing. She sang sweetly to Eliza, as she tramped towards the Heath, and, taking a hunk of bread from her pocket, she ate it. She walked and walked, until her legs gave way and she had to sit down on a hillock, staring out over the city. I am free of you. We WILL be happy. Just you see.
When she arrived home she was very dusty and tired and Eliza was crying, and Liddy wondered if she ought to have gone. She soothed Eliza, kicking the bootscraper out of the way to pass through the tiny door to the sitting room so she could sit down and feed her, her wails growing louder while Ophelia barked: she hated the baby’s crying. Only then did Liddy notice there was a paper package on the mat. Untwining Eliza from her sling, she set her down carefully on to the floor while she undid the string. Eliza protested even louder.
‘You’ll have to wait a moment, girls, I’m sorry,’ said Liddy, fondling Ophelia’s ears. ‘A curse, indeed. I must write and tell Mary – no, I won’t tell her, she takes these things to heart. Now, patient for a moment while I unfasten this and—’
Out of the brown paper, falling on to the floor with a sharp clatter so that Eliza’s mouth opened comically into a little O, tumbled three wooden carvings. A smooth, plump baby, in a dark wood, fat with grain and polished to silk-smoothness. A cradle, of lighter wood, into which she fell, and which rocked perfectly within a wooden frame. A switch of hazel, thin and curved, which stood in a stand, upon which was fixed at the top a kite, in light sycamore, and a tiny real ribbon, fluttering down. It bobbed in the spring sunshine as Liddy, legs splayed, baby gurgling, possessions around her, read the note that was tied around it.
In haste my beloved
I will come to collect you later. Be packed – be ready to leave ‘The Hovel’ – pack Eliza’s things. I have made us a home – our home Liddy, I can’t wait for you to see it.
I have agreed to sell some paintings (I am very tired). 4 of ’em, scenes of Ham and Richmond. I didn’t give them to the Academy, but to the Grafton Galleries – well, I barely unpacked them from the crate and someone – remember his name, Liddy, Sir Augustus Carnforth, who has made all his money in steel, bought them all for £500! There and then! I wish you had been there to see it. They are my best work and cheers to it that a chap like Carnforth, who has money and wants to buy taste but not old fangled dead and gone men but a taste of something British, something new. He is to hang them in his new house – Dalbeattie is building it – it is in Richmond, very grand, and he likes the views of Ham House you see. Well he is welcome to them, for we will not live with them for much longer. The Hovel is to be our home no more. I am sending this by messenger.
Kiss to Eliza, all other kisses to you – I live for you – I work only for you – everything is for you – please, Liddy, believe me!
She felt rather odd. She gazed around her at the little house, rather astonished at the day she had had, then back at Eliza, at the sling and at the floo
r. She swayed a little and suddenly her ankle gave way underneath her, with a tearing rip of agony that caused her to scream, Eliza to cry out, Ophelia to commence barking most pathetically.
When he came, the lines of strain were etched on his face as though drawn on by charcoal. It was an hour later, and she had not moved from the floor, though she had managed to pull herself over to a rigid, screaming Eliza and had picked her up and fed her. She had fallen asleep, Ophelia curled up reproachfully beside them. It was quite peaceful, on the wooden floor, the call of birdsong outside, and for once the walls seemed to have stopped moving in on her. When he came, Liddy had fallen asleep, holding the baby, and she woke to find him lifting the child out of her arms, and she grabbed at her, fiercely, and then felt for the second time that day what maternal love was – a primal, odd instinct, one she was not quite used to, but now as much a part of her as the scars and the tears and the fatigue.
He looked dreadful as he bent over them, his thin, handsome face waxy with tiredness, his eyes sunken. He kept pinching the bridge of his nose. But he was smiling his tender, sweet, happy smile.
‘She is very like you, you know,’ Liddy told him, her voice stuffy with tears, for the twisted ankle continued to hurt. ‘She must be your child for when she smiles at me I am unable to do anything but grin wildly, like a fool.’
‘Shh,’ he said, looking down at his daughter, though Eliza still slept. ‘You must rest for a while, and I am going to pack our things and then put you in a hackney carriage. It is waiting outside.’
An hour later, she was sitting in the carriage, her possessions in a bag, the doll’s house figures in another bag, one trunk of books and painting materials strapped to the roof, waving fond but not entirely regretful goodbyes to ‘The Hovel’. They took an early evening train from Richmond, pulling out of the station into the late-spring countryside, a riot of cow parsley and blossom. Liddy slept, her foot bandaged by Ned and resting on a smaller trunk whilst he held Eliza, singing to her. Ophelia stuck her nose out of the carriage window, ears flying in the wind.
For the rest of her life she could not recall much of that first journey. They were met at the tiny station by a horse and cart – who was it? She was afterwards never sure. Late evening was spreading gold light across the hills, shadows were shifting and lengthening, and by now Liddy, jolted about by the carriage and the train and now the cart and already tired to the bone, felt very lightheaded.
The road out of Godstow village ran around a hill before disappearing into a small, secret valley. Then – a narrow, curling lane, a row of cottages, in honey-coloured stone, and next a sloping hill. After a high wall below a church, the cart drew to a halt in a driveway.
Ned lifted Liddy out of the cart. He was shaking. Ophelia had disappeared, shooting out of the carriage and bolting into the green mass below them. Liddy peered down the hill – they might have been at the edge of the world. It was silent but for birdsong and the sound of water somewhere. She peered ahead, blinking tiredly: she could see the side of a building. Yellow and white roses scrambled along the soft golden stone. She looked down: she could see nothing but green, and at the end the hint of landscape beyond, distant blue hills.
But the curving rose-gold roof of the house was visible, nestled further below them.
‘Can you put any weight on the foot yet?’ he asked, after the cartman had left, and they stood alone in the middle of this strange driveway.
‘No – no,’ she said. ‘I think it is sprained. Where are we, Ned? What is this place?’ And then she spotted the birds on the roof. ‘Look – Ned. Goodness. Mother’s doll’s house has the same birds, look—’
‘One moment,’ Ned said, and he took Eliza from her, and disappeared. When he returned, a minute later, he picked Liddy up, in his arms, and carried her down the bumpy drive towards the open door of the house where their baby daughter lay on the threshold, neither out nor in, staring up at them in utter surprise at this peremptory treatment.
The house was golden too, with a large porch and doorway, with a great oak door. The windows, leaded and pointed, glinted so brightly and exactly in the setting sun that the whole place looked as though it were on fire, or gilded by some strange force. A frill of slim roofing ran around above the ground floor like a ribbon. Beyond, a wilderness of a garden, sloping down towards an orchard, and the sight of rushing water through trees.
Ned gently set Liddy down, holding her arm. Her hands flew to her hair, where the pins were threatening to come loose.
‘This is Nightingale House.’ Ned pushed his hat back on his head.
‘Nightingale –’
‘That’s what I’m calling it, do you agree?’ He bent down to pick up Eliza, who was gurgling on the floor in front of them. ‘Liddy – listen! There are nightingales in the trees, I’ve heard them at night. I’ve heard the songs they sing.’ His thin face was extraordinary, part pain, part ecstasy, and she realised what an ascetic he was, for the first time, how single-minded his vision. ‘I hunted for it until I found it. I had so little to go on! But I had to try and find it, for you. It was a wreck. Dalbeattie and I have brought it back to life. We have no past, you and I, not now. We have to make our own family, out of the bones of what we have. Tell me.’ He was smiling, mischievously. ‘Does it remind you of anything yet?’
‘The rectory in the countryside, an hour’s drive from Oxford. My sister and I used to get lost in the lanes, they were so narrow, the hedgerows were so high – it had a . . .’ She stopped. Her throat was dry. ‘It had a banqueting house. Part of the old house. You’d go in there and eat sweetmeats after dinner.’ Liddy shook her head. ‘You found the doll’s house. You found it. This is it, isn’t it?’
He nodded, slowly. ‘It is. No one’s lived here since your mother left it and came to London. Her parents died and it was abandoned. I don’t understand why, but I’m glad of it.’
Liddy put both feet on the polished new black and white tiles of the entrance hall, though it hurt her ankle greatly to do so.
‘It is our home now,’ she repeated, quietly, and she leaned gently against him, and the baby patted her cheek with a squeal of delight. She thought of Nurse Bryant – so fleetingly, her face passing before her like a creature on a carousel in the park – she shook her head, foot more firmly on the ground. The pain was receding.
Birds sang in the distance – oh the noise!
Chapter Twenty-One
Oxfordshire, six years later
Ned Horner’s idea for the most famous painting of the age came suddenly to him, without warning. Walking in the dappled shade of the rambling Wilderness to escape his baking studio late one afternoon he came upon his children, crouched on the lichen-spotted steps that led from the house into the garden.
‘Now, John,’ his daughter was saying. ‘Put on your wings.’
‘No thank ooo.’
‘Put on your wings please.’
‘Dolphin.’
‘No, John, not dolphin today. Let’s be fairies.’
Eliza was wearing a pair of wings Liddy had made from the old box of costumes Ned had kept for sitters in his Blackfriars studio. Gossamer silver gauze they were, purchased by him from Leather Lane market. She had made a pair for John but he refused to wear them, because he said he was afraid he’d turn into something with wings and fly away. He liked to stroke Eliza’s though, watching her as she flitted around the garden. Eliza was a do-er, John an observer.
It was their seventh summer at Nightingale House. Ned had tried to draw both children several times but the results were too arch, something Millais could have produced to great acclaim but which he couldn’t seem to pull off. Spirit of the Age, his vast panorama of the Strand, and Man and Wife, the triptych of a modern wedding painted at St Marylebone Church, had won him further acclaim and riches. He had sketched the children for his and Liddy’s own record, but not painted them: The Artist’s Wife . . . was the last painting he had made of his own family. It was also true that increasingly he wanted to pull up
the drawbridge, to keep this world private.
Liddy agreed. She was busy with the house, making, mending, cooking, gardening, for she did much of it herself. Most of all she was with the children, teaching them their abacus, how to tie bootlaces, to recognise birds and flowers, all done with an extraordinary kind of patience. Ned could only marvel at her self-taught aptitude: it was the vogue, in those days, to be a ‘natural’ mother, but in the county drawing rooms of the other families they knew it was clear from the brief, impressive appearances of the inhabitants’ offspring that most of them lived in the nursery ruled over by Nanny. Liddy simply enjoyed the company of young children, preferred it to that of adults, in fact. She adapted herself to their rhythm, she walked at their pace, she saw the world through Eliza and John’s eyes. Ned was, he knew, mercurial, impatient, wanting them to understand how lucky they were to live in these glorious surroundings; they tired of him more quickly. Their mother asked nothing from them, and in her company they flourished.
Liddy could persuade vegetables to grow in rocky, acid soil. She made clothes for the children, intricately smocked and trimmed. She found money from seemingly nothing, managing the household accounts with an eye for finance which Mr Gladstone would have found impressive. She had transformed the garden, which they had christened the Wilderness all those years ago, into an earthly paradise, where flowers seemed to burst out in different beads and splashes of colour year round. She even buried Ophelia, who dropped dead of a heart attack two years after they came to the house. Ned had watched her digging the grave, hacking methodically away at the frozen earth, lifting the small, grizzled brown-and-grey body into a sack and gently lowering it into the ground all without shedding a tear, shaking away his offers of help. ‘Thank you. I’ve watched enough gravediggers from Pertwee’s window to know what I’m doing. She was my dog; I must bury her.’
The Garden of Lost and Found Page 25