The Garden of Lost and Found

by Harriet Evans

  He supposed it was no surprise she was so adept at creating all of this wonder: control was what she had longed for all her life. When he said this to her once she had laughed. ‘Dearest Ned. I longed to write, and be free. To walk and smell the flowers. I did not long to sew ruffles back on to pinafores which is how I spend most of my days.’ She had stood up and come over to him, slipping her hands into his pockets, drawing him close for a kiss. ‘But you are right. I wanted to make a home. So did you. They must change the world, these children, not I.’

  The following year they came to the house John was born, and in the same year Ned had sold both Spirit of the Age and his entry to the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition the following year, The First Year, of Eliza surrounded by the chaos of her toybox, grinning widely. So there was money, more money than before, and they hired servants. Liddy had found a housekeeper, Zipporah, a cousin of Hannah’s from Godstow village and a good, sensible woman whose own father had been baptised by Liddy’s grandfather, the Reverend Myrtle. There was a maid, Dymphna, from County Cork, and a gardener, Darling, who was old as the hills, sprightly as little John himself, and knew everything there was to know about the clay soil and the plants best suited to it. They had no nursemaid.

  Their life was very simple, day to day. They did not seek company: in those early, happy years, they only wanted each other. Besides, Ned was always working, and Liddy was content. Every day there was some new joy: when John said ‘Dolphin’; when they found the dormouse, sleeping in the corn the day before the fields were harvested. The first roses they grew themselves, and Ned’s joy when the glass ceiling went into the Dovecote. Midnight mass, and carol singers gathering outside the door on Christmas Eve . . . more and more lovely things every day, week, year, rolling forward, time speeding up . . . Of course, there were visitors too: lovely, jolly Hannah came, when she was released from Highgate, and the children’s adored Aunt Mary, who would read stories from The Arabian Nights to the children for hours on end, making the nursery at the top of the house – ‘The Birdsnest’ – recede and a palace in the desert, a cave of thieves, or a magical genie come alive. There too was Uncle Lucius, Ned’s best friend, who came at other times, and shut himself up with Papa in the Dovecote, smoking his cigars and talking till late. No other family. There was no one else. Just them.

  And so it came to be after long enough in that beautiful place that Ned found himself wanting to capture this feeling, if not the specifics of his children’s faces, but unsure how to do it. Until he came upon them, that June day when the summer heat rose from the old stones and that and the scent of roses and honeysuckle flooding his senses acted like a powerful drug: he stopped, and stared, quite transfixed.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, softly to himself. ‘Yes . . .’

  Then he turned and ran back to the studio for his sketchpad.

  Perhaps he knew how astonishing the finished painting would be – glimmers of golden late-summer sunshine flecking the long grasses of the garden, the nodding silver-purple rows of lavender, the pink-and-white daisies that sparkled in lichen-crusted pathways and on the steps up to the house. That it would be his greatest work, perhaps the greatest Victorian painting – that by the time it was destroyed, eighteen years later, millions would have seen it around the world. Men and women for decades after it was gone could say with a smile: ‘I saw the fairies.’

  For they queued for hours on end, in Johannesburg and Toronto and New York and Adelaide to see The Garden of Lost and Found, to marvel at the coral-gold light, the little figures with their backs to the viewer, one with the lopsided silvery wings glowing in the late-afternoon sun. People would stare for hours at these children who represented hope and childhood, an innocence that despite everything else in this terrible world had not yet been snatched away.

  Perhaps he knew this, too. They were his children: quiet, determined John, golden forelock falling in his face, one hand outstretched towards the windows, and Eliza, one leg dangling, the haze of hair, the fine sculpture of her cheek and ear, the hunched, curved shoulders in concentration, watching the figure in front of them. It could only be them.

  Their mother, having finished her writing, was called upon to entertain her poor children while they complained bitterly about having to stay still for yet another of Father’s ‘monstrous paintin’s’, as John put it. For three days she wandered in the garden as he sketched first with pencil then with oil on a tiny primed canvas, right there, singing to them while he worked. She would sing old folk songs, songs of the countryside her mother had taught her. ‘Tomorrow shall be my dancing day’, ‘I had a little nut tree’ and songs she adapted herself:

  ‘John John, the painter’s son

  Stole a cake and away he rund.’

  Her voice, rising and falling, hypnotised them into some kind of quiet, sometimes clear and cool, as she walked in front of them, feet crunching on the gravelled path, waving solemnly to them but saying not a word, while behind them their father frantically worked.

  She would collect flowers, heavy, nodding sunflowers, fluttering hollyhocks, dahlias like puffballs in coral, cerise, midnight purple. She would wander back up towards the house with her arms full, looking up at the steps where her children posed, that natural moment of childish rapture now frozen, now posed, an artificial scene. ‘Just a little longer,’ Ned would mutter, steadying the easel on the sloping ground, and Liddy would echo him. ‘Dears, just a little longer.’

  For three days they posed, until they rebelled and said they could stand it no more. Liddy agreed – once Ned had the bit between his teeth it was impossible to persuade him otherwise, and she had suffered at the hands of his intense concentration, standing for hours on end till her shoulders ached, her head swam, her foot went numb. ‘The poor children, they’ve had enough,’ she told him, though in truth she had loved those days, when she could look up at the dear, warm, curved house, french windows flung open, all over the south-facing wall the dark green creeper and the scrambling hydrangea flecked with white, star-like flowers.

  The moment the children, released but still complaining mightily, climbed down from the sloped coping of the steps they fluttered away like birds, into the garden for more adventures, with the promise of Welsh rarebit for tea. Later it was discovered that Eliza immediately tore off the wings, threw them into the stream. Ned picked up his easel and the finished sketch and almost ran towards the studio. He had prepared the main canvas the previous night, stretching and clipping it firmly himself over the wooden frame, priming it himself, covering it in a brilliant white.

  Now Ned rested the canvas on the easel, staring at the blank space. This was the purest piece of the process – the moment of empty calm. Then he picked up his palette, mixed his paints and, like a man possessed he did not stop painting until a few days later when the work was completed.

  This painting was the culmination of his life’s work: truth, beauty, naturalism, humanity combined. For the only time in his life he did not care if it sold. He kept the oil sketch and the pencil drawings, for every scrap of preparation relating to The Garden of Lost and Found was to be treasured, as representations of his wife, his darling daughter with her cloud of soft honey hair and quizzical smile, his solemn little boy with the light mop and darting, anxious, dark-blue eyes.

  When it was finished, Ned brought the painting out into the garden, and left it amongst the flowers and the summer heat to begin the long process of drying. It remained there for two days, and this was part of its mythology: they said that trapped in the layers of paint were flecks of seed, of grass, pollen, the golden dust of summer. It was a living work of art.

  While he kept it outside Ned would walk past it, first thing in the morning, last thing at night, chewing on a pipe, looking at it, searching for flaws, but he found none, for it was to him the perfect expression of what he wanted to say about the life they had made.

  Perhaps that is why he painted the picture. Perhaps he knew he had to capture it, the four of them together. Perhaps he knew
.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  June 1901

  There were puppies at the farm.

  ‘Aunt Mary won’t ever notice! We shall be away, and back again by the time she realises we’ve gone!’

  John shifted awkwardly, his corduroy culottes rubbing against the damask of the dining chair with a strange squeak. He clapped his hand over his mouth. ‘Aunt Mary notices ev’rything, though.’

  ‘I think it’s because she’s not used to children.’ Eliza, whittling a piece of wood with an old rusting penknife shook her ringlets, biting her lip in concentration. John nodded, though he liked that about their aunt, her intense alertness over them. She was different to their mother, the calm centre of their world. ‘Mama says we aren’t ever go to away from the house by ourselves.’

  ‘She won’t know! It’s up to you, Johnny. Well, I’ve told Mrs Tooker I’ll come to see them this afternoon.’ Eliza pushed the chair away and stood up. ‘They won’t be puppies for ever. They’ll grow up. Don’t you know about nature?’

  John scratched his head. He really wanted to go and lie under the apple tree by the river and read his book. That is what he really wanted to do. It was most awfully good, about a boy called Alfred and his dog, Blaze, the runt of the litter, whom Alfred had rescued from drowning and hand-reared. It was John’s great ambition to have his own puppy . . . there were puppies at the farm, real, live puppies . . .

  Eliza was watching him, head on one side.

  Mrs Tooker’s sister was Hannah, and Hannah was up from London and was staying for a week. When the puppies were born Mrs Tooker had said they had to wait a month before they could have visitors – they were too small, their eyes hadn’t opened yet, and in a month Hannah would be there. Eliza preferred cats, but puppies were puppies, as she said to John. She had waited patiently, crossing the days off on a piece of paper in Mama’s study, and now a month had passed, and it was surely permissible to visit them, and Hannah too! They loved Hannah, who had known Mama and Aunt Mary as children. Sometimes she would tell them about when Mama had been a child. Tiny details, like the fact that Mama had wanted to own a hat shop and had once retrimmed Hannah’s best Sunday bonnet all over with lace.

  But Mama, who never said no normally, was very strict about such things. No wandering into the village alone, much less out past the village and down the lane to Marsh Farm. The Tookers were good people, and so was Hannah, but still – last year, two children had caught typhus from the well in the village and in April a young maidservant of thirteen had run away from Godstow Hall, leaving a note saying she missed her ma too much and was going back home to her. She had been found dead in the lane, torn to bits, her body scattered wide. John had overheard his mother and Zipporah whispering about it: killed by someone, or something.

  They had not been able to trace her parents, so she was buried in a strange village, with no family at the funeral. John could not stop thinking about her; he begged to be allowed to go to her funeral but was not allowed. Instead he left ox-eyed daisies and rosemary on her grave: Ella Watson, it said. At rest. 1886-1899. But she wasn’t at rest, he’d think. It bewildered him, and he used to lie awake at night blinking as he thought about it. Who could have done such a thing? To John life was a paradise. In his small span of existence he had seen only kindness and beauty.

  But Mama and Daddy were away, in London. Daddy was being given some food because there was a dinner in his honour. He was also showing his new painting at the Royal Academy summer show, the one of them waiting for Mama. The picture was already sold to Mr Galveston with the twirling moustaches, and this was marvellous news. Everything was better when Daddy sold a painting.

  ‘The puppies are going in a week, in a week, John. If we don’t go today we won’t get to go a second time. We’ll only go a first time. D’you understand?’

  Aunt Mary had refused to read him another story last night, and he was jolly cross with her. And the call of the puppies was so strong! He looked out of the window. He could see fairies dancing in the morning sunshine, dots of white-gold catching the light . . . and the stream would be sparkling and cool, and the path well-hidden . . . puppies! He looked at his sister, and then nodded.

  ‘Yes please. But let’s go now.’

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ said Mary, depositing them firmly in each chair on the terrace, and standing back, arms folded, glaring at them. ‘Bread and dripping for tea, and no cake. And no sardines, no, nor any cocoa! How could you, darlings! I’m heartbroken. What would Mama say if she’d caught you paddling upstream like that. She’d never ask me to look after you again and what would I do if I couldn’t come and see you, please tell me?’

  ‘You’d stay in London and sew those banners for the rowdy women who want to vote.’

  ‘Rowdy women, tsk. Well, I’d miss you, Eliza. And what about poor Mrs Tooker, having to entertain the two of you out of the blue, and then Darling, saving your lives like that?’ She clutched her hands to her chest, very swiftly, then let them fall, breathing slowly. Poor Aunt Mary – her face was still white. She had been standing on the terrace scanning the valley and had given a great howling cry of relief when Darling had appeared bearing two soaking children, black and wriggling like tadpoles, bellowing in outrage – well, Eliza bellowed, Johnny howled in contrition.

  Eliza had found the old boat in one of the outbuildings. They had only got as far as the almshouses beside the church when Darling spotted them – he was tending the graveyard. John was secretly relieved – was that terrible? But rowing hurt his arms hurt so much, and he was scared of falling in, and then Eliza had rocked the boat so they’d fallen anyway, and it was freezing cold, the chill biting your legs, green weed wrapping itself around you like mermaid’s hair . . . He sat on his chair, shivering, tears pouring down his small face.

  ‘What am I to do with you?’ said Mary, half smiling, but a frown creased her brow and she smoothed her forehead with one hand. ‘Oh darlings. Let’s go upstairs. You have been naughty.’

  ‘No we haven’t!’ burst Eliza, furiously, her face puce with shame, and misery. ‘We were being brave, and shouldn’t be chastised like this!’ She caught her lip in her teeth. ‘Besides, you mustn’t punish Johnny. I made him d-d-do it.’

  Mary hugged her niece’s wet head against her breast, stroking her hair, her cold cheek, her clammy hands. ‘My angel, you are brave, and wondrous, but you must listen to me, d’you hear?’ She looked down at Eliza’s tangled hair. ‘You musn’t go off like that.’

  Eliza pulled away and stood up. ‘I promise.’

  Mary smiled, and patted her damp front, the skin of her chest showing pale peach through the wet pintucked linen. ‘My love, you have your mother’s bravery, in any event. Tomorrow, would you like it were I to take you both in the boat up to the village? I can row – after a fashion.’

  ‘No! Perhaps!’ shouted Eliza, bursting into tears again, but a voice behind them said, ‘Well, well. What have we here? Has Aunt Mary lost control already?’

  John saw the look on his aunt’s face as she stared up at the tall figure on the terrace, who was watching them and smiling, hands in the pockets of a tweed suit. He advanced, and said pleasantly, ‘Good – good evening, Mary – Miss Dysart, rather.’

  She had turned pale, and looked down at her see-through blouse, hands clutching at her skirts and then she paused. She took a deep breath and walked towards him, holding out her hand.

  ‘Dalbeattie,’ she said, and her voice was different, light, not an aunt’s voice any more. ‘What a great pleasure it is to see you.’

  He had taken her hand in his, and was staring down at her, eyes fixed, his expression very grave, and for a moment they were both utterly still.

  ‘My dear Mary. I am so glad to find you here.’

  He gestured to the driveway, where a drayman was lifting a large wooden crate from a cart. ‘Into the hall, there’s a good fellow,’ Dalbeattie said. He turned to the bedraggled children, who were staring at him, eyes wide as saucers.‘I came to
deliver a commission of mine, knowing your parents are away – though I thought Zipporah would have the care of you, not your aunt.’ He spoke as if to them but he was looking at her. ‘Come and see what I’ve brought you.’

  In the round hallway, with the afternoon sun streaming in through the roof, Dalbeattie took the large case and set it gently down upon the tiles. His firm hands pressed the packing-case; his eyes, grey and steady, his back straight as he bent to the ground to catch each board of wood as it fell away, revealing the cargo within, and they gasped.

  It was a house – their house. It stood in the centre of the hall. As high as John’s shoulder, the roof rendered in dazzling carved fishtail pattern, the pointed Gothic windows fitted with real glass.

  ‘This is—’ Mary swallowed, and said quietly, ‘This was Mother’s. It was ours. How did you get it?’

  He nodded. ‘Ah, Mary. Pertwee carried it out, on his last trip home. I waited for him, in my carriage outside, while he asked your father for more money – it was the last time, and he was sent away pretty smartish, but he came out with this. I couldn’t work out what it was, at first – he’d thrown a rug over it and only his legs visible underneath – the poor chap was staggering along the path not able to see where he was going.’ Dalbeattie’s eyes crinkled at the edges. ‘Oh, that old nursemaid, she tried to stop him – but his blood was up: you should have seen the look on her face as we drove away!’

  ‘Pertwee did this?’

  He nodded. ‘He said I was to give it to the children. Well, I took it to Ned, and told him, and he agreed I should “do it up” – and here it is. Mary, I hope you don’t mind them having it?’

  She put her hand on his arm. ‘You are very thoughtful. I think it’s the kindest thing I’ve ever known. Poor Pertwee.’ Her eyes brimmed with tears. Dalbeattie, on the other side of the house, watched her, hands clutching and unclutching behind his back.