The Kissing Garden

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘You’ve always been mad on gardens. Remember our famous garden? When we were small? You asked Old John if we could have a patch of our own?’

  ‘All children do that, George. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about that.’

  ‘Not all children grew what you grew. Even Old John was amazed. He said you had the greenest fingers he’d ever seen on anybody.’

  ‘Plants do seem to like me, I suppose. Let’s go and look over there – where that high hedge is. I can’t make out the lie of the land there at all.’

  Amelia pointed to the hedge which they had been forced to skirt in order to return to the house earlier in the day, and led George over to it.

  ‘I thought so,’ she murmured, peering round the far end where they had not been before. ‘It’s a square – look, George? Do you see? It goes all the way round a square of ground, as if it had been planted that way deliberately.’

  ‘Perhaps it was?’ George strained his head to see over the top, which he failed to do, even given his height. ‘From the look of how straight it is, it certainly suggests that it was planted quite purposefully.’

  ‘Even though it’s wild,’ Amelia mused. ‘It’s not a formal hedge, at least not any more. It seems to consist mainly of bramble and hawthorn. But bramble and hawthorn doesn’t grow in such an orthodox way. It would only grow this way if once there had been a proper hedge here. And yet even then—’ Amelia stopped and frowned, looking back at the hedge behind her. ‘Even then you would think that by now it would just have become nothing more than a tangle of scrub.’

  ‘How strange!’ George ran a hand through his hair. ‘Why should it have kept its shape? When everything else around it has simply shot and run riot, how strange that it should be – kempt.’

  ‘Look, George,’ Amelia said suddenly. ‘Look this end here – it isn’t flush with the other side. It grows out two foot or so further, yet all the other corners, even though they’re overgrown – you can see they’re symmetrical.’

  ‘Perhaps there’s something behind it. Let me try . . .’ He took hold of her arm, easing Amelia away from the corner. ‘It doesn’t matter if I get scratched.’

  Wrapping a handkerchief round and round one hand, George pulled some thick and vicious-looking brambles out of the hedge and turned them back into the main growth to see what lay behind and beyond. Next he bent back some hawthorn branches, catching his fingers on the prickles as he did so, and complaining under his breath while making another attempt to clear a way. This time he was more successful and managed to raise a hefty-looking branch of hawthorn up above his head, fixing it in the growth there so as to make an entrance in the hedge itself.

  ‘You’re right, Amelia. There’s a gap here, which again isn’t completely overgrown. Look.’

  Amelia ducked under the arm that was holding up another large bramble and saw the entrance.

  ‘It’s like one of those entrances to a maze – and yes – it is an entrance, George. It overlaps that hedge, see? And then beyond—’

  She eased herself through and gasped.

  ‘Come and see, George! It’s a hidden garden!’

  Inside proved to be a perfect rectangle of long grass threaded with wild flowers. There were no dandelions or docks, no nettles or bindweed, just delicate, pastel-coloured wild flowers which swayed in the gentle evening breeze. The grass was knee height meadow grass, lush, thick and green without a trace of cooch or briar, and was surrounded on all four sides by the hedge which seemed to level itself off at about seven feet. Amelia and George stood at the entrance in silence, both of them trying to work out how such a thing could possibly be.

  ‘It must be the height of the hedge,’ George said finally. ‘It must act as some sort of buffer. It must protect this little patch. Preserve it.’

  ‘I don’t see how, George,’ Amelia replied, without any answer herself. ‘Seeds are carried on the wind. Why should the weeds bypass this place? And why haven’t the brambles and briars overtaken the inside? By rights, as I said, this should be nothing but scrub.’

  ‘Well of course!’ George laughed. ‘Somebody has made it their own! Someone has been tending it, for some reason or other – that has to be the answer!’

  ‘I suppose so. But why just this place? Why not the rest of the gardens?’

  ‘There’s quite a lot of garden here. Maybe someone thought this was a special place, someone who loves wild flowers. And they tended it – I mean obviously that’s what’s happened, because otherwise as you say it would be completely overgrown.’

  ‘I suppose you must be right. But it is peculiar.’

  ‘We’ll ask around. Somebody will know. There’s obviously a logical explanation.’

  ‘Why?’ Amelia took his hand and pulled him back so that he faced her. ‘Why does there have to be a logical explanation, George?’

  ‘Because there has to be. Everything’s explicable.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Including love?’

  ‘To the scientists I suppose so,’ George agreed, reluctantly.

  ‘You don’t really believe that. Not for a moment.’

  ‘I’m not altogether sure I even know what love really is.’

  ‘Nor me. So, perhaps it’s time we found out.’

  At this she kissed him. George did not kiss her. Amelia kissed him. Taking her emotional life in her hands, she put her arms round him, drew him to her and kissed him. She kissed him sweet and slow, slow and sweet, then long, long and ardently. As she kissed him she became him, entering into him and becoming one with him.

  Now, he kissed her, he kissed her with long, strong kisses, his arms round her, his mouth on her mouth. Their kisses turned to one kiss, one long breathless kiss until, at last, they loved each other fully, passionately, and completely on the warm grass while in the hedges, which gently moved with the warm breeze, bees sucked the pollen from wild honeysuckle as high above them swallows swooped and circled in the kind English sun.

  Beyond the thick green leaves and twisted branches of the ancient hedgerow two men moved in shadow. Neither spoke as they moved noiselessly over the grass, but before they disappeared the Noble One turned to smile at the unseen lovers and raise one open hand in farewell, while the Bearded One stooped down to pick up a brilliant clear stone from the spot where it had fallen from the sky and replace it in his purse of jewels.

  After which they vanished into darkness, high in a tree overlooking the secret place where the lovers lay, as a small brown bird sang a song it had never sung before, filling the air with thrilling music, while at the bottom of the thick wild hedgerow an ancient white rose began at last to grow.

  Eleven

  Now at last life was exactly as Amelia had always hoped. Not only had George and she found a beautiful place to live, but most important of all they were finally and properly man and wife. Reality was in fact even better than Amelia had privately imagined it, George proving himself to be a gentle and imaginative lover while The Priory was turning out to be a more enchanted and magical place than either of them had dared to dream.

  With Archie and Mae departing their house the day after George and Amelia had moved into the enchanting little thatched guest cottage, they were left with the place to themselves. So while the purchase of The Priory was being legalized, inevitably they had time on their hands, time to take what turned out to be a proper honeymoon.

  Of course neither of them made any reference to their previous problems, nor to the fact that George now seemed to find no difficulty at all in making love to Amelia. Privately, though, both of them believed that their ecstatic experience in the little hidden garden in the grounds of their future home had somehow exorcised the memory that had been haunting George.

  Now there was no sign at all of his previous inhibition. Since that magic moment in the hidden garden it was exactly as if he was someone who had previously lost his nerve, only to suddenly recover it and to such an extent that often the mere exchange of a l
ook would find them hurrying back hand in hand to the sensual privacy of their little cottage in the woods, where once, famously, they remained for a night and a day without re-emerging.

  Amelia had never known such happiness, and she delighted in discovering the joys which resulted from their mutual passion. No longer was she just George’s friend; now she was also his lover, and with the transformation Amelia too changed, from a girl into a woman – a woman who she was privately thrilled to discover was soon able to beguile her man as much as her man was able to enamour her.

  Together they voyaged on a sea of discovery, finding themselves constantly amazed at the endless wealth of treasures the ocean of passion seemed to contain. What astonished them perhaps more was that, long-standing friends though they had undoubtedly been, they now seemed to be discovering each other properly for the first time, so that they spent as much time talking as they did making love.

  ‘When one of us goes,’ George said suddenly one day, ‘we will know that a lifetime’s talking is over, will we not?’

  Amelia pretended that she hadn’t heard him. Quite simply, the thought was unbearable. She refused to embrace it, and instead she started to sing and fool about to make George laugh, to make them both forget what he had just said.

  Contracts had been exchanged on The Priory, and with the help of one Ambrose Philpotts, an architect friend bequeathed to them by Archie and Mae prior to their departure, George and Amelia set about looking for a capable builder. They finally settled on one of several craftsmen well known to Ambrose, a local stonemason and now master builder called Robert Stanley, someone to whom neither Amelia nor George initially warmed since he seemed both slow and truculent, but who Ambrose assured them, for all the apparent shortcomings of his personality, was in fact the most reliable and helpful of men. His problem was, Ambrose told them, that Bob Stanley himself did not take easily to people, particularly outsiders.

  ‘And as far as Bob goes, that is anyone whose family wasn’t living here prior to about twelve hundred.’

  ‘AD or BC?’ Amelia asked ruefully, having just been exposed to some of Bob Stanley’s apparent inflexibility.

  ‘His other trouble is he doesn’t understand why a young couple such as you should possibly want to restore a place like The Priory. To him it’s nothing more than ruins. He told me he should be building you a nice warm, modern place, with all the conveniences.’

  The idea was to restore the outside of the place while removing all the more modern additions that had been made inside. In place they intended to create a comfortable interior which would still be in keeping with the ancient house, using whatever old materials they could salvage from the site while at the same time scouring the countryside for wood and stone to match what they had found around the place.

  In the event there was plenty in the immediate vicinity, the young Dashwoods getting the impression that whenever feasible and economically possible the local people seemed to prefer to start again and build from scratch for themselves. Luckily they also seemed to take little care as to where or to whom they disposed of what they considered to be the old rubbish, so that with patience and a lot of diligent searching Amelia was able to unearth practically everything they needed from old joists to unwanted floorboards, all thrown into barns, cowsheds, stables or outhouses, once or twice even on bonfire sites, just waiting for petrol and a match. On one expedition they even returned with a perfect Gothic stone window frame which Amelia had discovered being used as a doorway in a piggery and had purchased from the farmer for the sum of exactly thirty shillings.

  Happily most of the original stone windows and old doors in The Priory were intact and undamaged, other than missing panes of glass and the odd locks and latches from some of the external doors. The only blank they drew was on the question of matching roof tiles, since the roof had been repaired with a very catholic assortment of shingles.

  After much prompting Mr Stanley finally admitted he knew of a place where he might be able to find old tiles while making it perfectly clear that he found it incomprehensible as to why anyone would prefer old to new. And so it was that by the time the day arrived for the building works to begin, all the necessary materials had been tracked down. By a combination of foresight and meticulous planning, George had mapped out an exact campaign for the restoration, much to the delight of Ambrose Philpotts who admitted that few if any of his clients had ever worked with such precision.

  ‘And Mr Stanley isn’t anywhere near as bad as we’d imagined,’ Amelia told George one evening after he and his team had departed. ‘He really loves this part of the world and little wonder. He told me Stanleys have been here since Domesday, first as farmers on Exmoor and then at Glastonbury where they moved in the seventeenth century, and where they learned their stone-masonry.’

  ‘In that case you’d think he’d jump at the opportunity to restore a place like this. Instead of forever grumbling and wondering why.’

  ‘It’s only his way. People who live as deep in the country as he does are naturally suspicious of people like us. They see us as fly-by-nights. People with a whim in which they might or might not indulge. And they’re afraid of being taken as fools, which is why they’re so taciturn. Townspeople make fun of yokels. After all, you did – we both did, when we first came here.’

  ‘I shall look at Mr Stanley differently from now on,’ George promised.

  While George concentrated on the actual building works, Amelia began a study of the part of The Priory which was going to be her province, namely the gardens.

  It was obvious that no-one had actually been near the estate since the last year of the war, at least not to cultivate it. Ever since the last owner had sold it off to the farmer, the buildings had remained uninhabited and the grounds untended, with the consequence that the whole place had inevitably become a jungle. A long and careful search of the books in Archie’s library finally yielded the one for which Amelia had long searched, namely a history of the locality which contained a whole chapter on The Priory, with detailed drawings of its elevations, interiors and – more important for Amelia – the grounds.

  It seemed that originally the place had been laid out in the fashion of other self-sufficient religious communities, with a large walled vegetable and herb garden on the south side, meadows for grazing cattle and sheep to the west and two large carp ponds on the northern side, each on one side of a stone dovecote which supplied yet another form of sustenance for the monks. The ponds and the dovecote had disappeared within what was now the woodlands which lay to the north, but Amelia sensed that further exploratory work might eventually reveal their location, in which case she would return them to their original state.

  To the south of the meadows there had also been a large lake surrounded by a thick belt of trees, in the exact spot where, when she and George had first walked the place, she had sensed the land turning to marsh, which seemed to indicate that the lake must lie within what now appeared to be just dense woodland. It was also quite clear from the drawings that in ancient times the lake was fed by a small river on its northern boundary.

  When she showed George what she had discovered his initial reaction was that the lake could well have turned to bog by now, and if so clearing it would be – as he put it – the very devil of a job. Furthermore as far as he was concerned George reckoned he had spent more than enough time in mud to last him a lifetime. Amelia agreed to bide her time as far as the lake was concerned, before turning the pages to show him her other discovery.

  ‘Our little hidden garden, do you see, George?’ she said, tapping the page with her finger, this time to show a portion of the grounds to the southwest of the house. ‘It was there all that time ago, as long ago as that.’

  ‘That being?’

  ‘When there first was a building on the land here. Which they think could have been as early as perhaps the sixth century.’

  ‘Round about the time when the Stanleys settled these parts,’ George grinned. ‘But yes – you’re r
ight, Amelia. There it is – our little magical garden.’

  Sure enough there on the page before him was a depiction of the rectangle made by the four hedges, the first drawing done as if from overhead and the second an elevation from the ground. The hedges seemed to have been as high then as they were now, the difference being that they appeared then to have been cultivated from privet or box rather than briar, hawthorn and bramble. It was a perfect geometric shape with what both Amelia and he assumed to be just grass in the middle, with the hidden entrance clearly shown from the overhead detail.

  ‘Odd, though,’ George added thoughtfully. ‘Monks were famous for using every scrap of land to produce their food, yet our little garden would seem to have been purely ornamental. I tell you what – let’s see if there’s any mention of it in the text.’

  Together they searched the chapter but could find no reference, other than the note in the plan of the grounds which simply described it as a hedged enclosure. ‘Let’s take a closer look at it tomorrow when we’re on site, shall we?’ George suggested. ‘Maybe we will learn a little more about this mysterious hedged enclosure. Now, come on – well past bedtime.’

  ‘It’s only ten past nine, George,’ Amelia protested, without thinking.

  ‘Exactly,’ George replied, lifting her up bodily in his arms and carrying her off to the cottage.

  The first thing that struck them on revisiting the hidden garden was the height of the hedges.

  ‘I don’t remember them being this high,’ Amelia said, staring above her.

  ‘Nor me. In fact I recall being only just unable to see over the top. Now they seem to be a good foot or two higher.’

  George stood by the nearest hedge. As soon as he drew himself up to his full height Amelia could see that the hedge was indeed over a foot taller than he. He could no longer see over.

  ‘It has grown beyond belief. It’s not just my imagination, is it?’

  ‘No, George,’ Amelia agreed, trying to find the entrance. ‘It’s not just your imagination. It’s as if the garden wants us to keep its presence hidden from everyone. As if only we are to know of it.’