The Lost Garden: A Novel

by Helen Humphreys

  Ever since the decision to take control of our own cooking, there has been a mood of self-sufficiency among the girls. There is a marked improvement in their attitude, or perhaps they have just become more adept at their various deceptions. I cannot tell. But I am grateful they have decided, under Jane’s prodding, to work the garden. I periodically forget that we are meant to be doing all this agricultural production for the war effort, and have to stop myself thinking that it is just for our own survival. It appears that everyone feels much the same way. Our food, we say to one another. Our potatoes. When our harvest is ready.

  In a day or so, when the kitchen garden is fully planted, the girls are to move on and prepare the South and North gardens for potatoes. After the land is cleared it will have to be ploughed. There is no evidence of a tractor on the property. Perhaps it broke, or was loaned out to a neighbouring farm. But there is an old plough in the barn, and when the time comes, Jane has assured us the horses can be relied upon to pull it.

  While the girls are busy in the kitchen garden, I sneak out to work in the hidden garden. In just under a week I have made great progress with it. I have cleared out the insulating layer of nettles that was covering the whole bed, and I have had a good look at what is underneath.

  The garden has been purposefully planted. I can tell this immediately from the balance of flowers already in bloom and those that have yet to show themselves. Until I can work out the meaning of everything, I am making my way very methodically up the bed from the anemones I first discovered. I am cutting back plants, trying both to account for natural growth and not slaughter them entirely, and to tidy their shapes so that no one plant is completely dominated by another.

  I work most of the day in the hidden garden. I have told no one of this place, pretend to the others that I am roaming the estate looking for suitable planting areas. Sometimes I say I am working in the orchard, since it is on the other side of the wall, and if I am spotted, it will be where I am spotted.

  Work stops for the day by five o’clock. In the two hours before dinner the girls have baths or sit outside, talking or writing letters. After dinner it has become customary to gather in the room with the wireless and listen to the nightly broadcast. I think we do this partially to remember that there is a war on and that this is the reason we are here.

  Tonight is Saturday night. It is the first dance with the Canadian soldiers up at the house. There is great excitement in the halls after dinner as the girls prepare themselves for the evening. I can hear them rushing in and out of each other’s rooms as I stand at the window in mine.

  “Aren’t you going?” It’s Jane, at the door of my bedroom.

  “Yes, I’m going.”

  “But you’re still all grubby from crawling through muddy ditches, or whatever it is you do in the day.” Jane comes into my room. “It still stinks in here,” she says, sitting down on my bed and lighting a cigarette. “The least you could do for all those eager lads is to put on a clean jersey.”

  “But I’m not good at this sort of thing.” I had actually been thinking of not going to the dance at all, until I realized that I needed to make a visit to the estate house and the dance would provide a good cover for my true intentions.

  “Not good at what? Dressing? Or life?” Jane flops backwards on my bed and there’s a solid thump as her head hits The Genus Rosa. I had fallen asleep last night with it in the bed with me and had forgotten to remove it this morning.

  “God,” says Jane, putting a hand to her head. “What do you have in here? Souvenirs from the garden? A few stones from the field?”

  “Sorry,” I say, and slide the one volume of The Genus Rosa away from her before she can get a good look at it. “Let me change. I’ll meet you downstairs.” I don’t want to be asked or to have to answer any questions about Miss Willmott’s weighty botanical nemesis. “I’ll just be a few minutes. Please.”

  “A few minutes,” repeats Jane. She gets up from the bed, still rubbing her head. “Don’t change your mind, Gwen. Don’t let me suffer that moony pack of puppies alone.”

  I don’t change my mind. I put on a clean jumper, as instructed, and I meet with Jane in the quadrangle in exactly ten minutes. The Potatoes have left already, the whole cheery group of them halfway to the house by the time we get out to the driveway. Even in the thickness of the early dark we catch glimpses of them on the road ahead of us. They are like one big, blousey flower, swaying this way and that, over the road and back again. Each one of them a moving petal in the dark.

  By the time Jane and I arrive at the house there’s no one left at the front door to greet us. The soldiers must have assumed that the first group of girls was the only group. It suits both Jane and me to let ourselves into the house. We stand together in the hall. From within the house there are the sounds of a gramophone, laughter, the slick tattoo of shoes on a wooden floor. They must have rolled the carpet back in the dining room.

  “Right,” says Jane, beside me. “I’m going to see about something to drink. You coming?”

  “In a minute,” I say. “There’s something I have to do first.”

  “You are ever mysterious,” says Jane. She starts along the hall. “But I do find it endearing. Come and rescue me when you’ve completed your mission.” She disappears down the long panelled hall into the noisy throng at the end.

  I find what I’m looking for on the second floor, at the front of the house. The room is dark. The door is open. I slip inside and gently pull the doors closed behind me, then begin my search at the large oak desk by the window.

  “Well, hello.” It is Raley. He’s sitting in a wing chair by the fire. I am so startled I almost scream. I do jump a little and knock my hand against the desk lamp.

  “Captain Raley,” I say.

  “Captain Davis.”

  “Why aren’t you dancing?”

  “I’m not really one for dancing.” Raley turns on the lamp beside his chair and we can see one another clearly now. “I came up here to do some reading and I must have fallen asleep.” There is a small book on his knees. “I always feel that I’m defending myself before you. Why is that?”

  “I think I attack when I’m on the defensive,” I say. “Out of nerves.”

  “You would make a good soldier with those instincts,” says Raley. “Why don’t you go instead of me. I would be quite happy to dig for potatoes.”

  I remember what Jane said to me the other day. “It’s called the Women’s Land Army,” I say, “but really it isn’t anything like an army at all.”

  “Except for the uniform.” Raley pulls a flask from under his jacket, uncaps it, and drinks. He holds it out to me.

  “No, thank you.” I have never been much of a drinker. The one time I did imbibe too much, at a Royal Horticultural function put on by the Narcissus and Tulip Committee, I became very sincere. Too sincere. I sat beside an elderly couple and rhapsodized about spring flowers. I think I might have quoted Wordsworth.

  “To your health, then.” Raley takes a swallow on my behalf. “What can I do for you, Captain Davis?”

  “I’m looking for a plan of the estate. I need to find information about some of the gardens. Have you seen a plan of the estate anywhere?”

  “No, I haven’t. But you’re welcome to search. And you’re right, this would be the place to find it.” Raley picks up his book. “I’ll just sit here and read and keep you company, shall I?”

  “If you want,” I say. I never know with Captain Raley if he’s joking or not. He is very hard to gauge. My first instincts are to not trust him, to treat his politeness and courtesy as suspicious. But I do find him likeable, in spite of myself. And I do respond to his kindness with such appetite that I realize I have been starved for kindness. “I didn’t mean to just barge in,” I say.

  Raley waves his book at me. “Search away,” he says. “It really isn’t my house either, is it. It’s a place we live in for now. That’s all.”

  Like our lives themselves, I want to say, but I don’
t. He’s picked up his book again. I start poking through the drawers of the desk.

  There’s nothing in the desk. There’s nothing on the shelves beside the desk. The books on the walls are in alphabetical order by author and I am confused by this. Would a plan of the estate be on those shelves at all? And under what? P for Plan? E for Estate? I look under M for Mosel, but there’s nothing there beside William Morris. I move around to search the low shelves on the other side of Raley’s chair.

  “What are you reading?” I ask.

  “Tennyson. That poem he wrote about his friend who died.”

  “In Memoriam?” I bend down to scrabble through the shelves near the floor where there appear to be sheaves of paper stacked up in piles.

  “Yes.” Raley clears his throat. “‘Our little systems have their day;/ They have their day and cease to be.’ Isn’t that what we are doing here, Gwen? Creating little systems. To pass the time, I sometimes force the men to do a scavenger hunt, or play word games—to stop them creeping down the hill to you, or stabbing their bayonets into trees.”

  “Aren’t you meant to be training?” I ask.

  “Training,” says Raley derisively. “Marching through the fields with heavy rucksacks on? There’ll be time enough for that when we get over there. I’d rather rest the men than tire them out.”

  The stacks of paper are sheet music for piano. A Bach prelude. A Chopin étude. “Did you have a friend who died?” I ask, still on my hands and knees beside Raley’s chair, pawing through the shelves above the sheet music.

  Raley reads from the book, his voice rich and slow. “‘And thy dark freight, a vanished life,’” he says. “‘An awful thought, a life removed,/ The human-hearted man I loved,/ A Spirit, not a breathing voice.’”

  That is my answer, then. “The poem sounds better than I remember,” I say.

  “Yes,” agrees Raley. “He says these very lovely things, like: ‘He put our lives so far apart/We cannot hear each other speak.’ And has vivid images, such as how ‘the trees/Laid their dark arms about the field.’ But it’s all an ascension to God. He can’t live with his grief unless he surrenders it to a higher purpose.”

  I can hear Raley unscrew the top of his flask and drink. “On the shelf right next to In Memoriam,” he says after a moment, “I found this monograph by a Reverend F. W. Robertson. It’s an odd little analysis of Tennyson’s poem. Some of his observations are quite touching. Some are so blatantly simple that they seem utterly pointless. Listen. He will say something not bad, like: ‘First mood of sorrow. The eternal gloom of the yew tree is felt to be congenial.’ And then he will say something clumsy and rather stupid: ‘The heart finds relief in metrical expression.’ Or, ‘The quiet English grave. Funeral feelings.’ What exactly is a ‘funeral feeling’?”

  I think I have found the estate plan. It’s in a cardboard tube, labelled on the outside “Plan of the Grounds.” I remove the metal cap from one end and begin to extract the roll of paper. “What’s the point of it, then?” I say. Raley must be drunk. This is the most talkative he’s ever been.

  “The point,” says Raley slowly. “Captain Davis, you are a trifle pedantic. The point.” I can almost hear him thinking beside me as I unroll the paper, confirm that it is indeed a plan of the estate, and drop it back into the tube.

  “‘There are truths which are to be proved only by faith and feeling.’ That was one of his better observations,” says Raley. “The Reverend F. W. Robertson. The point, dear Davis, is that sometimes what you want is nothing more than to put your name beside someone else’s, someone whom you love. Stretch your name out alongside theirs as though it was you, lying next to them.”

  I stand up. The room is hot and it suddenly seems hard to breathe. Raley is quiet now, beside me. I don’t mean to, but I lean over and touch his hair. It is waxy with hair creme. “Come downstairs with me,” I say. But he shakes his head no. He has his eyes closed. I gently push a lock of hair away from them, the way my mother once brushed the rain from my forehead. And he lets me. When he speaks again his voice is soft with emotion.

  “Poetry is no use,” he says. “I thought it might be, but the poetic moment is a static one. It’s watching through a window while the action happens elsewhere. And then the poet turns from the window because the poem is done. Or turns to God. Or turns from the poem itself. It cannot unflinchingly stare grief down. At some point, by necessity, or design, it must turn away. How can I remember if I can’t keep pace with the loss?” Raley opens his eyes and looks at me. His face is open and vulnerable. I can see now why it is necessary for him to hide behind a veneer of charm and easy manners. At heart he is unprotected, has been growing precariously on a rock face somewhere in a bitter winter wind.

  “I need something to keep pace with me,” says Raley. “I need something to move as quickly as I am moving away from him.”

  The fire crackles in the grate like gunshot. I take my hand from Raley’s forehead. I don’t know what to say to him. While I was intent on finding the map of the estate, pawing through the shelves, he was reading to me. He was reading to me. And what can I say about poetry? He’s right in what he feels. I have often thought that poetry is a way to name loss, but it cannot accompany one on the journey of loss.

  “Come downstairs with me,” I say.

  It seems louder on the ground floor than when I was there before. The gramophone seems louder. The voices. Laughter. The scuff of shoes on the wooden floor. I stand briefly at the doorway of the dining room, with Raley behind me. “Where’s Jane?” I ask British Queen, who’s dancing near to me.

  “Kitchen,” she shouts over the shoulder of her blond dancing partner.

  I stand at the doorway for a moment longer, before leading Raley down the hallway. I feel a sudden wash of responsibility. I should be more carefully chaperoning these girls. They are getting out of hand again. But I look at the room of moving bodies. The room is lit with their youth and laughter, with their carefree energy. I cannot say no to a room like that. “Come on,” I say to Raley, and we head for the kitchen.

  Jane is in the kitchen. She is standing behind a soldier who is seated in a chair. They are in the middle of the room. There is no one else around them. I recognize the soldier from the train station, my first day in Devon. David. That is his name. David from Newfoundland. It occurs to me that I’ve never asked Raley where he’s from. I almost do this now, almost turn to him behind me in the doorway, when I see the scissors in Jane’s hand above David’s head. She’s cutting his hair.

  Change the scene and this story could be different. This could be Jane’s house, or mine. She could be married to David. Raley and I could be joining them for dinner. The thing with war is this—we cannot change ourselves enough to fit the shape of it. We still want to dance and read. We hang on to a domestic order. Perhaps we hang on to it even more rigorously than before.

  David has his eyes closed. His hair is the colour of wheat. Jane’s hands move like slow birds over it. I can see how much she wants to land there, how much she wants to touch him. I can feel the heat of Raley behind me, feel his breath in my hair. And I almost lean back. I almost do. But at that moment Jane looks up and sees me standing in the doorway, and the moment is over. She has that dazed, vacant expression that I recognize from when my mother was dying. It’s waking up and not knowing where you are.

  “Gwen,” she says, her hands still raised above David’s head, his eyes still closed. “I need to go home.”

  Outside, Golden Wonder is kissing a soldier on the front step. They don’t seem to notice Jane and me at all as we step around them, step off the ledge of stone into the watery dark.

  “I didn’t know you could cut hair,” I say to Jane as we start down the hill.

  “It’s what I did in that other life,” she says. “Remember that other life?”

  “Barely.” It does seem that each day folds up a little more of that life I used to have.

  Jane is quiet beside me. There are the dark blurs of trees on eit
her side of the road. Stars seeding the night sky.

  “I have to love him fiercely in absentia,” she says finally. “I cannot falter, or he won’t come back.” She might be crying, but I cannot tell. I shift the tube with the estate plan in it from one arm to the other, and reach out with my free hand until I find hers. I hold on to it for our whole journey down the hill.

  “Look,” I say. “Look out there, at the night. This night.” For maybe this is how poetry can be of use. Though it can’t move with us, we can move it between us, pass it among us, so it is held up by our voices, so it moves with our very breath, our living breath. “Look how the ‘trees have laid their dark arms about the field.’”

  15

  I cannot sleep. The night grows huge around me as I sit up, in my room, with the estate plan spread out on my bed. I use The Genus Rosa to anchor it securely to the mattress.

  The plan is from 1900, and it shows a very detailed rendering of the gardens. The North and South gardens are much as I have imagined them. There are plans for a water garden, and plans for a maze, drawn onto the diagram with dotted lines to show that they exist only on this paper and in someone’s imagination. I like this, like that what is there and what is imagined can lie side by side on the same sheet of paper.

  The orchard is drawn, with its stone wall. Behind it the row of yews and paved walkway, called, appropriately enough, Yew Walk. But behind the fence of yews nothing is marked on the plan, nothing to indicate the garden I have found. “Woods,” it says, for that entire area. Whoever made that garden made it between 1900 and 1916, when the estate was emptied of its gardeners by the war.

  I am restless. I pace the room. I lean my head against the wardrobe. For once, even the thought of lying under The Genus Rosa does not calm me. I roll up the estate map and slip it back into its sheath. I walk to the window and fling it open.