by Unknown
Now, he laid the address book aside. The thought of a boy – any boy – in his bed made him feel tired. His body was having difficulty enough with mundane, everyday things. The base of his spine ached from sitting all day at the back of the shop. To walk as far as Knightsbridge made his feet sore. His sight was deteriorating so fast, he could hardly read his own price tags, even with his glasses on. So why on earth did he imagine that it could suddenly be overwhelmed by ecstasy or caught unawares by love?
He imagined it because, somehow, he had to find the means to go on, to persist. And what better thing to furnish the future than love of some kind?
Anthony rubbed his eyes, poured himself a tumbler of dry sherry and began to gulp it. He got up and walked about among the beloveds in the near darkness. He caressed them as he passed, his hand reaching out and reaching out again. He knew that he just couldn’t, at this moment, envisage a future of any kind. All he could envisage, all he could see waiting for him – for the once celebrated Anthony Verey – was a slow and lonely decline.
He thought about Lal’s grave in Hampshire and the beech tree that grew nearby. He longed for the sound of Lal’s voice, for the touch of a certain silver cake-slice against his cheek.
He paused beside a gold-framed engraving of an Italian garden (‘Li Giardini di Roma, one of 30 plates by de’ Rossi from the originals by Giovanni Battista Falda, 1643–1678’). He stared for a long time at the ordered alleys and parterres and at the happy sepia people walking at leisure there, with the soft hills beyond.
‘V,’ he said aloud. ‘I need rescuing. I’m sorry, darling, but I think it’s going to have to be you.’
Veronica Verey was a garden designer. Her latest project – not yet completed – was a book about gardens in southern France. The book’s working title was Gardening without Rain.
Veronica lived with her friend Kitty in a fine old stone farmhouse, ‘Les Glaniques’, in one of those villages south of Anduze, in the Gard, where the 21st century hardly seemed to have arrived and where Veronica went about her life in a mood of robust contentment. She was getting fat (as a girl, both she and her pony, Susan, had been described as ‘chunky’) but she didn’t mind and Kitty didn’t mind. They went together to the market at Anduze and bought bigger clothes.
Kitty, the only child of sad parents who had spent their lives trying to run a guest house on the Norfolk coast, was a watercolorist, who made a barely adequate living and who now, in a passionate response to the quality of the light in this part of southern France, was teaching herself photography. Kitty hoped to contribute all the pictorial material to Veronica’s book. She had waking dreams about its thrilling title page, with their two names side by side:
GARDENING WITHOUT RAIN
by
Veronica Verey and Kitty Meadows
Kitty felt that all her life, until she’d met Veronica, she’d been a kind of no one, a watery nonentity, her habit of quietness, of self-effacement, formed early, when she’d been told as a child to stay out of sight and sound of the clientèle of the guest house. Now, at last, in her late fifties, she’d become visible to herself. She loved Veronica and Veronica loved her and together they’d bought their house and made their extraordinary garden, and so Kitty Meadows felt as though she was beginning everything again: beginning it better. At the age where many of their friends were giving in or giving up, Kitty and Veronica were trying to start over.
The house was half a mile from the village of Sainte-Agnès-la-Pauvre. From its terrace, looking west, you could see the great blue-green folds of the Cévennes hills, dense as a rainforest. Moments spent on this terrace, sipping wine and eating olives, listening to the swallows, face to face with sunsets of blinding red, were, Kitty Meadows felt, like no other moments in her life. She tried to find a word to describe them. The word she came up with was absolute. But even this didn’t quite capture what she felt. One night, she said to Veronica: ‘Part of me would like to die right now, this is so beautiful.’
Veronica laughed. ‘Tell that part to shut up, then,’ she said.
They both knew that it was borrowed: the view of hills; even the sunsets and the clarity of the stars. Somewhere, they knew it didn’t belong to them. Because if you left your own country, if you left it late, and made your home in someone else’s country, there was always a feeling that you were breaking an invisible law, always the irrational fear that, one day, some ‘rightful owner’ would arrive to take it all away, and you would be driven out – back to London or Hampshire or Norfolk, to whatever place you could legitimately lay claim. Most of the time, Veronica and Kitty didn’t think about it, until, suddenly, they found themselves objects of derision, sneered at as putains de rosbifs by a group of youths in a café in Anduze, or they remembered the time when the mayor of Sainte-Agnès-la-Pauvre had accused them of ‘stealing’ water from the commune.
Water.
For the sake of the garden, they’d been too profligate with it, testing to the limit local agreements about the use of hoses. ‘You have behaved,’ said the mayor, ‘as though you believed that, as foreigners, you were not subject to the law, or else pretended that you didn’t understand it.’
Veronica – as furious as when she and Susan had been drummed out of a three-day event for cutting a corner on a hurdles course – protested that this wasn’t true. They knew the law perfectly well and had kept within it, never watering before eight in the evening. ‘I agree,’ said the mayor. ‘You have kept within it – just – but not within the spirit of it. Your lawn sprinklers were overheard to be turning at midnight.’
It was true. They liked listening after supper, to the lawn sprinklers, as to a homely snatch of music, imagining the nourishment this music was giving to the thirsty grass.
Now, they sat in silence on the terrace, sunk in worry, staring at the vivid green, staring at their beloved flower borders until the only points of light that remained in them were the white petals of the Japanese anemones in the purple dusk. Veronica said: ‘Well, I suppose this garden will fail now. Half the gardens I’ve designed in this region will fail. I suppose it was all futile. How can anybody garden without rain?’
It became the question, then, the only one: how can you sustain a garden with such a low rainfall?
Kitty got up and paced about. Then she said: ‘There are ways of conserving and getting water that we haven’t thought about. We have to explore every one. We have to put certain bits of engineering in place.’
One of the many things Veronica valued about Kitty was her quiet practicality. She herself was clumsy, often confused by how things worked in the modern world; Kitty was orderly and resourceful. She could fix objects that were broken. She could mend the lawnmower and rewire a lamp.
So it was Kitty who set about solving the water crisis. She had their well cleaned and restored and bought a new pump that brought water up from nine metres down. She instructed work to begin on a second well. She installed new gutters, with underground conduits leading to a new concrete bassin beyond the fruit trees. New piping conducted bathwater into green plastic butts. Kitty and Veronica laid down heavy mulch on every centimetre of unplanted earth. They took out the thirsty anemones and substituted prickly pears and agavés. When the heavy autumn rains came, they religiously laid out barrows and buckets and bowls on the lawn and tipped every extra drop into the bassin. And, as if to compensate them for all this, the following summer was cool and wet, almost like a summer in England, and the new bassin filled to its brim. They invited the mayor down to the house and drank pastis with him and took him round the garden and showed him all their arduous work. It seemed to amuse him: all this for a plot of land on which hardly any vegetables were grown!
A quoi sert-il, Mesdames?
A rien, Monsieur. Mais, c’est beau.
But it was clear that they were forgiven. And it was after that night that Veronica announced that she was going to begin her book and she had the perfect title for it: Gardening without Rain.
‘The Engl
ish think that gardening’s going to be the same everywhere,’ she said. ‘In India, in Spain, in France, in South Africa, everywhere – but it isn’t. So I want to explore how best to make it work here. I’ll do it properly, experiment with different varieties of things. See what survives and what dies unless you pamper it with rivers of commune water. It’ll be a long project, but who cares? I like it when things are long.’
This early spring was warm at Sainte-Agnès. Five or six degrees warmer than at La Callune, in the hills, where Aramon Lunel came cadging wood from his sister, nine or ten degrees warmer than in London, where a light rain was now falling on Chelsea. Kitty took her easel outside and worked at a delicate watercolour of mimosa blossom. She sat in a worn canvas chair she’d owned for most of her life. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes, she could hear the sound of the seabirds she tried to paint long ago in Cromer, sitting in that same comfortable, sagging chair.
‘Always sketching away at something!’ her father used to complain. ‘As though your life depended upon it.’ It had depended upon it. That was what Kitty Meadows had felt as the years of her childhood and youth went slowly by and she took part-time jobs in a post office, in a chemist and finally in a library. The only moments when she’d been happy – or this was how it appeared to her now – were when she was out under the big, lonely skies, with her sketchbook and her colours, with the salt winds and the shifting dunes and the magnificence of the light. Painting had saved her. It had let her escape into a life she enjoyed. And it had eventually brought her, after years and years of waiting, into the arms of a woman she could love.
Now, she saw Veronica coming towards her across the terrace. On Veronica’s face was an expression Kitty recognised immediately: chin lifted and set, brow furrowed, eyes blinking anxiously. It made her, in Kitty’s mind ‘pure Verey’, with all the cherished ‘Veronica’ part of her suddenly missing.
Kitty rinsed her brush, kept staring at the sunlight on the fabulous mimosa tree. She knew that to Veronica’s family she was no one, just ‘that friend of V’s, that little watercolour woman’. She had to fight not to fade back into invisibility. She looked up at Veronica and said, as gently as she could: ‘What’s wrong, darling?’
Veronica snatched a cigarette out of the pocket of her gardening apron and lit it. She only smoked in times of anxiety or sadness. She walked up and down, puffing inexpertly on her Gitane.
‘It’s Anthony,’ she said at last. ‘I couldn’t sleep for worrying, after my phone call yesterday, he sounded so terrible. And he just rang me, Kitty. I was right to worry. He told me he feels . . . defeated. He sits in his shop all day and no one comes in. Imagine it! Alone like that and waiting and no one buys anything. He says the whole thing’s finished.’
It crowded Kitty’s memory, then, making her head ache, that glimpse she’d once had of Anthony Verey’s treasure house – all the wood and marble and gilt and glass, the turned-this and frieze-moulded-that – a princely stash of priceless stuff in the Pimlico Road he designated his loved ones, or some such sentimental epithet. How could such a mountain of expensive objects be ‘finished’?
‘I don’t understand,’ she said.
‘I know it’s difficult to believe,’ said Veronica. ‘He’s always made tons of money. But it’s gone wrong now. I suppose even the rich are reining back on Chippendale.’ Veronica stamped on her cigarette and came and laid her heavy arm on Kitty’s shoulder. ‘I know he’s spoilt,’ she said. ‘I know he’s not the easiest guest. But he’s my brother and he’s in trouble and he wants to come and stay with us. Just for a while. So I said yes. You’ll be nice to him, won’t you?’
What could Kitty answer to that? She rinsed her watercolour brush, reached up for Veronica’s hand. She wanted to ask: How long is ‘a while’? But even that seemed selfish. And there was no limit – almost no limit – to the things she would do for Veronica’s sake.
‘Of course I will,’ she said sweetly.
Their guest bedroom faced east, over their small orchard and, beyond this, towards fields of apricot trees and vines. It had a white tiled floor and a sleigh bed and a rickety wrought-iron side table. The beams were painted magenta.
For Anthony, Veronica emptied the walnut armoire of the winter clutter she and Kitty kept there, put white cotton sheets on the bed, vacuumed away the cobwebs, oiled the shutters, shined up the bathroom. Then she stood staring critically at her efforts. She saw the rooms as Anthony would see them: too plain and unadorned, too shabby, with a stupid colour ruining the beams. But there was nothing to be done about it. And at least the view from the window was good.
Anthony hated flying. He thought budget airliners should be shot out of the sky. He said he would take the train to Avignon and collect a hire car.
He insisted he would bring them Earl Grey tea and Marmite, even though Veronica told him they didn’t need these things. He said he was ‘unbelievably grateful’. He said he was sure the air of the south would make everything clear to him.
Clear to him in what way? Kitty wondered, but didn’t ask. Because Anthony Verey had always struck her as a man for whom everything was already clear, already decided, judged, categorised and appropriately filed and labelled. What more, in a life as apparently selfish as his, was there left to understand?
Audrun made her way slowly and carefully up to the old house, vigilant every step, alert to all that was there, to all that might be there . . .
You could never predict what Aramon was going to do. One day, he’d chucked out his old television and bought a new one, wide as a wardrobe. Last winter, he’d taken delivery of a pile of sand but never said – never even seemed to know – what the sand was for. Already, weeds had sown themselves in its shifting and collapsing mass; the sand pile and the ruined old television sat side by side on the grass and the snow fell on them in January and the warm breezes blew on them in this new springtime, and Aramon just walked on by them. Sometimes, Audrun noticed, the dogs did their business in the sand pile, cocked their legs against the television. So the screen was yellowish now, a stripy yellow that occasionally took light from the sunshine, as though some old broadcaster were trying to get his faltering signal through.
When Audrun was a child, the Mas Lunel had been a U-shaped house. Now, all that was left of it was the back section of the U. The roofs of the two wings, where once the cattle had been housed and grain stored and silkworms reared, had been damaged in the storms of 1950 and the father, Serge, had said: ‘Good. Now we can get to work on them.’
Bernadette had told Audrun that she’d thought that ‘getting to work’ on them meant rebuilding them, filling the cracks in the walls, attending to the damp, relaying the brick floors, replacing doors and windows. But no, Serge had begun to dismantle both edifices. He tore off the clay tiles and stacked them up in his cart and drove the cart down the old, pitted road to Ruasse and sold them to a builder’s merchant by the river. Then he hacked his way through the grey mortar that covered the walls of the two wings of the Mas Lunel and began gouging out the stones. He proudly told his neighbours, the Vialas and the Molezons, that stones were his ‘inheritance’ and now – in this post-war time when nobody had anything left to sell – he was going to make his fortune out of this, out of selling stones.
Selling stones.
Bernadette had pleaded with Serge: ‘Don’t destroy the house, pardi! Don’t leave us with nothing.’
‘I’m not leaving us with nothing,’ he said. ‘You women don’t understand how the world works. I’m making us rich.’
But they never became rich. Not that anybody could tell. Unless Serge kept the money somewhere else: in an old fertiliser sack? In a hole in the ground?
On the ground, still, were the ghostly outlines of the former east and west wings of the Mas Lunel. It had been grand, a true Cévenol mas, with space for everything and everyone, with all the machinery kept out of the rain and all the animals sheltered in winter and, above this the magnaneries, the attics where, season by season, the silkworm
s were hatched and where they ate their vast quantities of mulberry leaves and spun their cocoons and were sent down to the last filature at Ruasse to be boiled alive as the precious silk was unwound onto bobbins.
Audrun could just remember the old magnaneries at the mas, the smell of them, and the chill in the air as you climbed the steps towards the well-ventilated rooms, and the sound of the thirty thousand worms chomping on leaves, like the sound of hail on the roof.
‘It was terrible work,’ Bernadette had told her. ‘Terrible, terrible work. You had to collect bunches and bunches of mulberry leaves every single day. And if it had been raining and the leaves were wet, you knew a lot of the worms were going to die, because the damp gave them some intestinal infection. But there was nothing you could do. Every morning, you just had to pick out the dead ones and carry on. And the stink up there, of the dead worms and all the horrible excretions, was vile. I used to gag, sometimes. I hated every minute of that work.’
Yet, she’d done it without complaining. Still hanging on the wall of Audrun’s small sitting room was a photograph of Bernadette with, on her lap, a basket full of silk cocoons and on her face not a trace of anguish or disgust, but only the smile of a tired and beautiful harvester, her labour complete. The picture was faded and brown, but the white of the silk cocoons still had about it an obstinate kind of light.
All the silk in France came from the Far East now. What once had been a flourishing trade, and had kept thousands of Cévenol families alive, had died in the 1950s. When Serge sold the stones of the Mas Lunel, he’d already known that it was finished. The wooden hatching trays were chopped up and thrown on the fire. The last filature at Ruasse was demolished. And though Bernadette had been terrified by the violent way Serge tore down the two wings of the U-shaped Mas Lunel, she’d sighed with relief once the magnaneries were burned and gone. She told Audrun: ‘When that ended, I slept easier in my soul.’