My plot – a different kind of plot – was quite clever, though I say so myself.
At the noise of the fight in the main bedroom the rest of the party began to stir, though not all of them. Some roused themselves and padded about in the apartment, trying to shake their lethargy and their hangovers and find their clothes and other belongings to make a getaway.
Gradually, the others woke up, too, as their friends gave them warning prods. At last, Charis was alone with her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend, the man old enough to be her father.
‘She is seventeen,’ said Charis. ‘And you, how old are you? Forty?’ She’d spat out the word.
‘I’m old enough to get married,’ cried Bella. ‘My mother was my age when I was born. You told me so yourself. And Piero loves me, he says so. We’re going to go and live far away from here, far away from you.’
Weariness set in quickly. Charis was soon begging them to forgive and forget, as she would do, she promised. She’d experienced a terrible shock, but they could both work through it with time – and with love. They should live with her, or at least near her.
She was grubby with tears; she knew she couldn’t command Bella’s love exclusively. She had to let go. But not now, not yet.
Piero had taken Bella with him to Italy, where they were now living; Charis had tried to prevent him by making Bella a ward of court, but he pre-empted her legal moves, and true to what he had sworn that terrible night ten years ago, he indeed married Bella on her eighteenth birthday, the day of her majority, when Charis could no longer exercise any jurisdiction over her daughter. Except love, and her love no longer equalled his in her daughter’s needs.
Since then, Charis’s letters have had no answer, and there is no point in her trying to telephone, since her calls to their mobiles are blocked, and in the house and in his offices Piero employs staff, and the staff have instructions not to take calls from Charis.
Yet Charis still moves through Bella’s dreams, though she never tells Piero, because he always falls into a rage at the thought of her. Charis also appears to Bella by day: even though they are living far from Manhattan, where Charis still lives, Bella in Italy sees her mother’s quick step in someone crossing a street in front of her, or in the lithe contours of a figure in the crowd passing by on the television in the background of some event. But it’s an illusion; in fact they have not seen one another since that morning when Piero gathered her up with a few scraps of her things and planned everything – the honeymoon in Venice, the house in the hills outside Siena, and then the old palazzone in the country near Milan, where he had inherited from his dead parents an apartment with cracked frescoes on the high walls that told ancient stories of the gods, how they changed shape to make love to human girls who struggled to escape: changing their form, turning into trees, rivers, animals, flowers – and stars.
Then Daisy was born.
Daisy is ten years old now and she wants to know her granny.
‘How much do you love me?’ Daisy asks Bella. ‘Show me!’ She holds her arms out wide. ‘I love you this much.’ She retracts them a little bit: ‘And I love Pappi this much.’
‘And I love you this much!’ Bella imitates her daughter, throws her arms out as wide as she can and then brings them together around her and squeezes her tight.
Daisy gurgles and wriggles and squeals.
‘It’s too tight, you’re crushing me too tight!’
Bella lets her go.
When she was a child, Bella began to realise that some of the other kids she knew had a father, and she only had a mother, and her mother was old, old enough to be her grandmother, or the mother of her school friends’ mothers. Charis could look all haggard and witchy at the school gates, with her long white hair in a frizz and her dungarees and her grimy fingernails, so Bella ordered her not to come and stand near the exit but some way off, if she insisted on coming at all.
But once she began to pester Charis with questions, Charis told her that her birth mother had not been able to keep her, because she was ill and poor and tired; that she had wanted Bella to have a better life than she could give her, and had loved her too much not to want the very best for her.
But Charis never told Bella how it had come about; how she had plotted long and hard, how her need had rendered her lucid, rational, and resolute; how she had persevered, examining and re-examining the situation until the right candidate turned up, and she knew she had found the right woman to be the mother of the child that was going to be hers.
First Charis had taken the idea for the book to her agent, and then the agent had submitted the plan to a publisher, the right enterprising young publisher for such a strong marketing idea, one that combined so neatly two best-selling lines, ‘Gardening’ and ‘Mind Body Spirit’. Then, with the advance, Charis had leased a waste ground between two buildings on the Upper East Side in Spanish Harlem and brought in tons of earth to plant her Well Woman’s Garden. Herbs and spices, teas and berries, flowers and bushes with properties that eased menstrual cramps and regulated cycles, that sweetened tension and lightened moods, softened skin and strengthened nipples of nursing mothers; her garden had different geographical zones, some under cloches and glass frames to protect them against the New York frosts, some inside in two conservatories warmed by bulbs that glowed in the night like cat’s eyes.
She studied monks’ herbals and Caribbean wise women’s manuals; she consulted the local curanderas from San Domingo and Dominica in the neighbourhood and travelled to Guadalajara and Mexico City to talk to the stall holders in the street markets there who sold remedies in coloured twists of paper.
In the Well Woman’s Garden she planted saffron crocus and the spiky aloe; jojoba and echinacea; all the familiar culinary herbs and some not so familiar – alongside rosemary and parsley grew tansy and lovage and comfrey and sorrel and scabious. She scattered seeds of evening primrose by the wall facing west as the yellow trumpets drank in sunshine, and planted henbane in the crannies where it would cling to crumbs of earth. Queen Anne’s lace, foxgloves, poppies were to grow wild, as if in a meadow.
All her plants were common, and all of them could be used to poison – as well as to heal.
She was greening the granite city.
In the more formal beds, she planted belladonna and vervain, rampion and rue – this was the part of the garden that was especially concerned with gynaecological troubles. She watched rampion begin to follow its name and climb vigorously up the wicker obelisks she provided: this was the king’s cure-all, one of the most versatile of helpers, with a profound sway over the menstrual cycle. It was only one emmenagogue among several others: botany tuned in to biology. After all, plants were not so far from humans in their metabolism and their chemistry. Charis herself always felt brighter on clear days, and low cloud overhead made her droop.
The bed where belladonna and rampion grew was the part of the garden that was the heart of the project: her book The Difference in the Dose focussed on the principle that Charis had gleaned from the great Swiss physician Paracelsus, that sometimes the distance between boon and bane, between remedy and poison, between a comfortable pregnancy and a miscarriage, is a simple matter of a level teaspoon or a heaped one.
This part of the garden was controversial; rumours spread on the street (and Charis did nothing to discourage them) that what she grew there had power over babies growing in the womb.
She had assistants; she had sonar sensors to alert the presence of intruders, and a guard on duty at night as well.
Bella’s mother was one of the visitors who came by one day, as others had done before her, and began to ask about the garden and that particular patch. She needed help, she said, help with morning sickness, which was making her life a torment. Charis saw her and understood her, felt the mixed fears of a young girl who was having a baby she hadn’t thought to have, not yet, not now, and craved a medicine. Charis o
ffered her an alternative, and as they talked, Charis recognised that at last she had found someone who would understand her own craving. They would exchange their needs; one need for another. She would provide remedies (and something more besides) for the cramps and the nausea and the fear of what was coming; she, the younger woman, would give her, Charis, who had left it all too late, the baby when she was born. Charis knew it was a girl: she used a herbal diagnostic from Trotula’s famous book of recipes.
So when Daisy asked to meet her nonna, Bella thought of Charis on the one hand and of the nameless mother on the other, and both of them haunted her day and night.
As Bella combed her daughter’s hair before she put her to bed, maybe Daisy felt the lost mothers through her fingertips and was beginning to hum along to Bella’s inward tune, amplifying her nascent yearnings in reciprocal exchange with her, and a song swelled up between them, about the rift in the past and a way to heal it.
Bella began to make enquiries, moving through thickets, struggling over hurdles. When Daisy first declared loudly and firmly that she was looking for her grandmother, the official in the United States consular office in Milan, whom she and Bella went to consult, assumed Bella must be searching for her birth mother. Bella realised the mistake and almost immediately understood that Daisy had divined her own curiosity, her own longing to fill the vacancy.
She was terrified but excited. Daisy was enraptured at the thought: they would find Bella’s real mother and she would have a nonna of her own.
The process was complicated because they were now resident in Italy. But after toiling up mountains of documents, after a DNA test and paying out several expensive search fees to lawyers in America, a letter came with a name, an address – in Danville, California – and a photograph, a kind of mug shot, taken before Bella’s birth, in which Bella saw nobody she knew or resembled: a thin-faced girl with a mutinous mouth and a back-combed bob, who could have been thirty years old, not the mere eighteen the certificate declared.
It was looking at her mother’s face that made Bella decide she must see Charis, too. The two women’s meeting in that time before she was born and at the moment of her birth bound them together for ever in the same story, and the story was theirs and couldn’t be split in two.
Her resolve formed inside her like a flame; she felt her heart kindle and soar.
The blaze of her realisation gave her the force she needed to inform Piero and warn him that he could not oppose her in this enterprise.
‘I am going to New York to see Charis again,’ she said. ‘It’s been long enough.’
He struggled against her; he poured vitriol on Charis. But he was passing his hands over his eyes, as if trying to rub out what he saw there at the same time as he summoned up all the rancour of his memories. And so, beneath all the sound and fury, quietness set in, and Bella understood with a lurch that he would not stop her going.
Not that she would have let him stop her, not now.
So she ran to Daisy’s room and scooped her up and cried out to her child, ‘How much do I love you?’ She was running from one side of the room to the other and all the way round and round – ‘Like this, like this!’ – as Daisy jumped up and down, howling with laughter. ‘And you’re going to meet your nonna. We’re going to find her.’
She had not dared admit to Piero that she was searching for the other mother in her story, not Charis, not the one he knew, but the one with no name, the one who had given birth to her and then given her away.
She did not show him the copies of the documents she had procured, nor the tickets from New York to San Francisco that she had bought for herself and Daisy; she hid them in a wallet tucked it into its inside pocket, and then thrust the whole thing deep down in the zipped-up lining of her suitcase, a part she never usually used.
She didn’t tell Daisy either, not yet. It would depend on what happened when they reached Danville.
Scenes of their reunion danced in a frenzy before her eyes as she tried out the woman in the photograph in different settings:
– they would arrive at the door of a small house with a garden path, crazy paving, and a smoking chimney, and a street lantern haloed to one side. Bella and Daisy would skip towards her, hand in hand … There would be shock, astonishment, then bliss, bliss, bliss as they would fall into one another’s arms –
Or – she was opening doors in the possible time ahead, doors with different scenes behind them – they would find the house empty because, yes, her mother, her real mother, would be at work. So they would knock at a neighbour’s door and then go to another address, in downtown Danville, a shop or a bank or a business where she would be working, and they would wait in line for an appointment and then –
The same, the recognition that filled the heart to bursting.
Or:
– she would be living in squalor, in a doss-house, with drunken companions, a school of alkies falling among the debris of empty cans and bottles and roach-ends or worse – needles, carbonised spoons, aluminium foil singed with smoke.
Bella would save her. She would appear in a glow at the door – Daisy would be sheathed in golden light, too. Together, they’d beam out love and warmth, cherishing and nourishing, and the years of separation would dissolve. The discovery of Daisy’s existence would bring her hope and a reason to live. They would help her into rehab; they would bring her home with them.
In every one of these scenes, Bella saw her own face slipping to eclipse the features of the woman in the photograph; she found she could not envisage her mother as she might have grown over the last twenty-seven years. She tried greying the dark hair of the woman in the picture; she tried adding lines around her mouth; she tried bowing her shoulders and tensing her neck till it turned scrawny.
The images tumbled through her mind as the plane crossed the world and Daisy fell asleep beside her in her seat, her furry lamb held close to her cheek, which lay against her mother’s arm.
Across the cloud floor stretched Bella’s dreams of their homecoming: her mother restored to them both, and she, Bella, restored to her – the dream was warm as a soft, sweet pudding straight from the oven, toasted sugar seeping from its fluffy edges; it was thrilling and made her tingle, creeping deliciously over her scalp and down her arms, like the times when Charis used to brush her hair before tucking her up and sometimes tease her by blowing softly on her neck and on her cheeks.
No, she told herself, don’t think of her, don’t think of Charis.
Bella began to doze, but uneasily. The encounter that lay ahead loomed, tall as a tall tower before them, a tower difficult to enter and hard to scale, a tower with no doors or windows.
They are driving along the freeway towards the address the bureau has given her after she sent them a sample of her DNA and proved she was who she was when she was born. The GPS map in the hired car is guiding them in a soft, motherly voice:
‘You are coming up to the exit. Two hundred yards, one hundred yards. Take the slipway. Take the next left, two hundred yards, one hundred yards.’
The twists and turns continue; they are advancing deeper and deeper into the countryside without a sign of human habitation. On all sides of them the land sweeps up to the horizon in a thick, rough pelt of shrub and undergrowth, bristling, thorny; on the crest of the hills the pine trees stand serried, pointing blades into the cloud cover.
The gentle, persuasive voice keeps directing them. They keep following her instructions, turning, turning again.
Thank God for these systems, Bella thinks. She would never have been able to map-read her way to this place.
Now they are driving into the forest itself on the ridge; the light hangs in limp rags through the lattice of the pines. She can’t hear them from inside the car with the AC on but she knows they are soughing. She turns on her headlights, even though it is still daytime.
Daisy begins to stir; Bella real
ises she doesn’t want her to wake up and see what they are driving through, that she is not a little scared herself.
Then a sign appears by the side of the road; the name of the house in the address she has from the bureau comes into focus.
There is an intercom on the gate, angled down towards the driver’s window. She presses the buzzer and realises it is mounted with a camera, into whose convex eye she stares, trying to smooth her face into pleasantness.
‘Who is it?’ says a voice, the sort of voice women used to have when they’d smoked all their lives.
Gripes twist Bella’s stomach. She does not recognise that voice. Yet she knows it.
‘Mum,’ yells Daisy all of a sudden. ‘Mum, where are we?’
‘I’ve come to see you. It’s been a long time,’ begins Bella into the intercom.
‘I don’t know you,’ says the voice. ‘Come nearer the camera. Intruders aren’t welcome here.’
Daisy snuffles, twists anxiously; after an interval, the electronic arm of the gate slowly rises with a low whirr.
Bella murmurs to her reassuringly, ‘We’re here. We’ve arrived – at your nonna’s.’
They drive over the rumble of a cattle grid and into a twisting side road, fringed with the same dense ranks of dark trees. The light has drained to a lemon tinge in the afternoon sky.
At the end of the road they can now see the house: a house in the woods, encircled with a palisade, and in the doorway, a tall figure silhouetted against the room behind, holding a torch with the beam pointed towards them.
Bella takes Daisy tightly by the hand and walks toward the house, following the slice of light the beam cuts into the path.
Acknowledgements
My profound thanks to Philip Terry, Julia Bell, and Sue Tyley for reading these stories and commenting most helpfully (as well as encouragingly) to Nicholas Royle, at Salt, for taking them on, and to Chris and Jen Hamilton-Emery for publishing the book; to Beatrice Dillon for all her support and thoughtfulness; to Liz Kuti and Adrian May for their encouragement and interest; to Charles Glass, who recommended to me Wilfrid Blunt’s Egyptian Garden: Fox-hunting in Cairo (London: Stationery Office, 1999), which inspired ‘The Family Friend’, and to the late Alan Howard who performed the story on the radio; to my family, Conrad and Carolina, and Graeme with my love, always.
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