The Lost Garden: A Novel

by Helen Humphreys

  Mosel seems such a world of its own. It is hard sometimes to imagine or remember another one. But this estate is quite far south in Devon. It must be near the sea, and tonight there is a wind blowing from that direction. I can smell the tang of the sea. The air has a salt fuse. It reminds me of the Thames, of leaning over the Embankment balustrade and smelling the river smoking by, below me in the dark.

  Leaning over the sill into the dark above the courtyard, I see again a figure rushing over the quadrangle. The same figure? I think so, but I am too high to tell who it might be. I pull back into the room, race to the door, and hurl myself down the flight of stairs, practically kicking open the door at the bottom.

  I stand out on the gravel path beside the grim memory of the mixed border. Nothing. The figure has completely vanished. How could it disappear so quickly? I remember that Land Girl rushing out of the darkness towards me, how shaken she was by what she had convinced herself she’d seen. A ghost. Is that what I have seen? I was quick to scoff at the idea of ghosts with her and Jane, but I have felt something in the garden I discovered. I have felt the presence of something other. And now, standing in the dark, with a salt wind blowing up from the invisible sea, from the remembered beloved river, I don’t know what to think. Am I wish? Am I instinct? Has something forgotten suddenly remembered itself. Longing. What is longing if not the ghost of memory?

  16

  My discovered garden is really three gardens. They are joined together, each naturally flowing out of the other. But the other two are not yet in bloom, so it feels wrong to explore them until they have fully revealed themselves.

  The person who planted the Garden of Longing was clever. There are no simple, declarative statements in the plantings. No forget-me-nots or bleeding hearts. The message is much more subtle than that, has to be worked at for meaning.

  The more time I spend tending this garden, the more aware I am of how deliberately it has been planted. If not grouped by an emotional category, these plants would never be arranged together. To the eye, it is not a pleasing array. But this garden has not been planted for the eye. It has been planted for the heart. And here I think I am instinct. I follow the line of what I feel in relation to what is planted here.

  Erysimum semperflorens is native to Morocco. It grows in scrub and rocky places. It grows in dunes by the sea. It has narrow leaves and dense spikes of small four-petalled flowers. It is vigorous and hardy. It flowers almost continuously. Semperflorens means ever-flowering.

  I trim the sides of two adjoining yews to create a space to squeeze through every day, without risking injury to myself, but making the entrance small enough so that it cannot be seen by anyone who might happen by. The more time I spend in this quiet refuge, the more private and secret it becomes. And the more convinced I am that it was meant for me to find. Jane is the only one of the girls who pays close enough attention to me to wonder about my daily whereabouts, but I cover myself by moving freely about the estate and making sure I’m seen in a variety of places. I only duck into this garden when I am quite sure there is no one else about. And really, it is easy. No one ever seems to venture down as far as the orchard. The girls are more interested in going up the hill, away from our quarters and towards the big house, in the hopes of meeting up with a soldier, than they are in coming down here.

  It is a sunny afternoon in late April. I am weeding the Garden of Longing, turning the earth to break up the clods. If you allow it to do so, earth becomes rock.

  There is heat on my back, and the muscles in my arm feel stretched and taut; used, they feel used. I had forgotten how good it can feel to grow tired in one’s body from using it up. Spent. Down on my knees at the edge of the flower bed with a slight ache in my shoulder and the sun on my skin, I feel spent.

  Lathraea clandestina grows in wet woods or in meadows near streams. Seeds lying in the soil are kept moist and germinate easily. It is a leafless plant. Nothing to protect the flowers, which emerge directly from the ground.

  17

  At the end of the week the kitchen garden has been fully prepared and planted, and we shift our combined attentions to readying the ground of the North Garden. For this, I need the energies of everyone. Even Jane. Even the horses. We spend most of the morning assembling and finding the necessary pieces of equipment for ploughing, hooking the horses up to the traces. No one really knows what they are doing, but everyone has a little piece of information about the procedure, enough information for us to continue with my plan—although, in retrospect, we should never have attempted what we did.

  Jane remembers ploughing from her childhood on the farm. But what she remembers is watching it, as a child, which is not much use. British Queen had a boyfriend who was a farmer. What she knows is how to unhook the horses from their traces and leave the field for the day. I think, How difficult can it be? Victualette Noir says, “It’s only digging,” as we stand around inside the barn, contemplating the strips of wood and metal that make up the fact of the plough.

  My idea is a simple one. Even though it is not the right time of year to plough the ground, I want to use the plough to turn the earth of the North Garden, to make the ground easier to prepare for a crop of potatoes. A few times up and down the pasture with the horse. The furrows don’t even need to be straight. It should be easy.

  It takes a great deal of time and effort to get the plough out of the barn. It is much heavier than it looks and has to be lifted rather than dragged, in case we accidentally plough up the neat, flat surface of the quadrangle. It takes most of the morning to haul the plough around the back of the barn to the North Garden. During this time Golden Wonder pulls her shoulder out of alignment, and Salad Blue cuts her finger on a slivered piece of wood. There is a good half an hour lost while we examine and discuss these injuries. Then Jane slips back to the stables to get the horses, while we untangle the traces from where we’ve dumped them on the ground beside the plough.

  “Speed the plough,” says Salad Blue darkly. She holds her cut finger straight up in the air, as though she’s continuously on the verge of making an important point.

  It turns out that only one horse knows how to plough. The old one. The young black one gets all skittish in the traces. The old horse remembers the weight of the plough, and the slow, steady pace required to keep it moving certainly over the ground. The owners of the estate must have started ploughing by tractor in the time between retiring the old horse and acquiring the new one.

  It is the Lumper who knows the most about what is required to plough a piece of ground. She takes control of the plough, sets it firmly in the earth, and holds it steady in its slow journey forward. The rest of us bounce along beside her, touching bits of the equipment or the horse, more out of a need to reassure ourselves that we are doing something than out of actual usefulness. But, as we all bump along the ground together, all of us connected to the fragile machine we’ve barely mastered, all of us connected to each other, there is a feeling of strength among us. I can see the sweat on the Lumper’s forehead, and the straining muscle in British Queen’s arm as she pushes against the wooden handle of the plough. I can see the thin, bent body of Jane up ahead of us, leading the horse forward. Even Golden Wonder, who is skipping alongside us, clutching her bad shoulder with her good hand, even she is what we all are—equal to this moment, equal in this moment.

  And then we reach the end of the small field and realize we haven’t left enough room to turn the horse around.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” says Salad Blue. The horse is right up against the trees that border the driveway. We will have to unhook the traces and manually turn the plough around. There is silence.

  I should have known better. I shouldn’t have been carried along by my own enthusiasm. Now the girls will blame me for this, be all bad-tempered and unwilling. Our brief moment of unity will be gone forever. I have done it wrong. I don’t know what I’m doing.

  “Come on, then,” says the Lumper to British Queen. “Help me with this.” She is alre
ady at work detaching the horse from the plough. British Queen obligingly helps her out. Jane holds the horse steady. No one complains. No one looks at me as though it is all my fault. And even though we are unhooking the plough, I feel so elated by everyone’s good humour and cooperation that I want to just keep going. I want the horse to walk through the trees, across the road, over the fields, and down to the sea, a vein of earth opening behind him.

  There’s the sound of a car on the other side of the row of trees. It approaches slowly from the bottom of the hill, from the direction of the village. I hear it slow as it climbs the hill towards us—slow, and then stop completely.

  The plough is free from its harness, and we are all straining under its weight, lifting it from its furrow and turning it to face the opposite direction, when a short, plump woman in a mackintosh suddenly bursts through the row of trees along the driveway. “Girls!” she says, with a certain note of surprise in her voice, as though she could just as easily have stumbled upon some other exotic creature. Giraffes! Dancing penguins!

  “Oh, hello,” says Jane. She looks over at me. “Mrs. Billings,” she says.

  The county rep claps her hands, startling the horse, and says, with alarming cheerfulness, “What a perfect morning for cultivation!”

  Salad Blue snorts from behind me. “Hello,” I say, stepping forward. “We haven’t met. I’m Gwen Davis.” I leave out the bit about the Horticultural Society.

  “Ah,” says Mrs. Billings. “You’re from the Horticultural Society.” She looks me up and down, as though I am an actual plant specimen. “The one who took so long arriving.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, at least you’re here now. Where you belong.” Mrs. Billings steps briskly around the horse, looking down at our one wobbly furrow. “I see you are all keeping busy. Good.” She looks like some sort of beetle in her shiny mackintosh. “And how are Mrs. Purvis and Mrs. Crane working out?”

  “Who?” says Jane. She has moved over, closer to where Salad Blue and I are standing.

  “The women from the village who cook for you,” says the county rep. She has turned to face the group of us, her little beetle antennae bristling. I feel as though I am back in primary school.

  “We got rid of them,” I say. “We’re doing for ourselves now.”

  The beetle puts her hands on her hips. “You can’t get rid of them,” she says.

  “Chaperones,” Jane whispers in my ear.

  “Why not?” I say. “We prefer to do for ourselves.”

  “But everything must go through me,” says Mrs. Beetle.

  “Everything probably does go through her,” says Jane unkindly, sotto voce.

  “There are rules,” continues the rep. “You don’t own this place. You don’t live here.”

  “But we do live here,” says the Lumper. She has one hand on the plough, her face all grimy with sweat. She looks as though she has been working a plough for years.

  Is it really possible to think in abstract terms when we are using our bodies so completely? Is it possible to do something “for the war” and not attach it to one’s personal life? We are here together at Mosel because of the war. We are doing this work because of the war. But we are doing this work with our selves and so, in a large measure, it cannot help but be about us. The Lumper is right. It is very simple. We do live here.

  “Let me show you what we’ve done,” I say, and I lead Mrs. Billings away from the North Garden, towards the newly restored kitchen garden. She follows me rather reluctantly, making small gasps as she walks on her little beetle legs down behind the stables. As I wait for her to catch up, I look back at the girls. They have turned the plough around. Everyone has claimed a position at the machine. Jane guides the horse. They all move forward over the new ground.

  That night Victualette Noir cooks us fish with a mustard sauce that is truly delicious. She makes a rice pudding for dessert. We eat and talk with more appetite than usual and later we all go down to the room with the wireless.

  London bombing continues unabated. The port of Plymouth is also being heavily hit. The battle of the Atlantic is on and Britain has already lost well over a hundred ships. For some reason the Admiralty has decided to name all the corvettes in the fleet after delicate flowers. It is odd to hear of the Campanula under escort from the Hyacinth and the Bluebell. One of the ships is even called the Convolvulus, which, besides being an excellent flower for a rock garden, is a very tricky word. I imagine the radio-man on that corvette trying to get the name of the ship out in a hurry when they are under attack. As a flower, the convolvulus is pretty. As a weapon of war, I fear it might be doomed.

  The other news is even more depressing. It is conjectured that Hitler’s advance into the Mediterranean is inevitable and perhaps even unstoppable. I look over at Jane, sitting in a chair by the window, her knees drawn up to her chin, arms wrapped tightly around her legs. How does she survive the uncertainty of her fiancé’s disappearance?

  “I hate those curtains,” says Salad Blue suddenly. “They make me feel as though I’m inside a tomb.”

  “Maybe it’s curtains for us,” says Jane. But no one laughs.

  “Wait,” says May Queen. “I’ve got an idea.” She rushes from the room with what, for her, is unusual speed. We can hear her clatter up the stairs to her room and then clatter back down again. She returns, looking much the same as when she left, just a little flushed from the exertion.

  “What?” says British Queen.

  May Queen stands in the centre of the room. She holds out her hand. There, in the palm, are several pieces of chalk. “I was a dressmaker’s assistant,” she says. “Before. In London.” She walks over to the curtains and draws a huge white square with the dressmaker’s chalk onto the black material. Her strokes are deft and sure. “This is the shop where I worked,” she says. “In Kensington.” She writes a word at the top of the square. “Durbin’s. Durbin’s Dress Shop.” She draws a door in the shop, and then starts to draw mannequins and dresses in the shop window. “This one,” she says, tapping the outline of an evening dress with her piece of chalk, “was the most gorgeous red. Velvet that was soft as fur. It was for the daughter of a magistrate. She used to arrive for her fittings in a chauffeur-driven Daimler. And this one—” She points to the chalk sketch next to the magistrate’s daughter’s dress. “This one was designed by Mrs. Durbin, but I chose the material for it. Jaconet. That’s what I chose. Because I wanted to make a dress that felt as light as smoke, so that when you moved in it there was that lightness to you.”

  We watch May Queen draw the shop where she worked onto the blackout curtains. It is transfixing. How odd it is to think of our lives before we left them. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever go back to London. If there’ll be a London to go back to. And sometimes I feel the weariness of being away from home for such an indefinite stretch of time, and all I want, all I long for, is to go home. And is it a place, I think, or just a feeling? And will I ever have that feeling of home again?

  “Was it bombed?” I ask. “Durbin’s Dress Shop.”

  “Not for a long time,” says May Queen. “But the shops on either side of it disappeared. Big craters in the road. One had been a stationer’s, and I was always finding envelopes in the strangest places, as if someone had mysteriously left a letter between the drainpipe and the wall. Or propped up against the front window.” She draws a small chalk rectangle in the bottom right corner of her shop to indicate an errant envelope. “We didn’t know what to do, so we just kept coming to work. And then one day we had disappeared as well.” She stands back from her sketch on the curtain. “That’s what it looked like,” she says. “How I remember it.” She turns to face us, the chalk held between her fingers like a pen, or the stem of a rose. On her face is an expression of bewilderment, as though she can’t quite believe what has happened to her life. And I realize that we haven’t left our lives. They have left us. The known things in them. The structure of our days. All the bones of who we are have been removed
from us. We have been abandoned by the very facts of ourselves, by the soft weight of the old world.

  May Queen’s real name is Alice. She stands in front of the outline of Durbin’s Dress Shop, holding on to her stick of chalk. “I remember,” she says, “that dress I made of jaconet. The dress that was like smoke. It was bought by a tall, thin woman. I did her fitting a few days before the shop disappeared. She was fidgety, I remember that. And she wore the dress home.”

  18

  Mrs. Woolf is dead. It is broadcast with the war news on the evening of April 21. She has drowned in that Sussex river after all. Her body was found by children.

  I cannot believe it. I don’t want to believe it. I am unexpectedly angry at her for dying. And I keep confusing her death with the war dead. She died during the war, I think, pushing my head against the stiff chair back when I hear the news—not from the war. But what can be separated out any more? It’s all the war.

  I leave the wireless room, go out into the night, where the sky, weighted down with stars, sags black over the courtyard.

  Dear Mrs. Woolf.

  You weren’t perfect. You got some things wrong in your books. I never believed the point of view from the flowers in Kew Gardens. Flowers would not think like that. They’re not about thought at all. And I know To the Lighthouse was meant to be set in the Hebrides, but it couldn’t have been. You got the flora wrong. There are no elms or dahlias in the Hebrides. And no carnations.

  I walk over the grass of the quadrangle. It is starting to get long and should be mowed soon. I can feel it brush against the sides of my boots as I walk past the stables and through the opening out to the gardens.

  Dear Mrs. Woolf.

  Some of your books I didn’t even like very much. I found Night and Day a bit dull, and The Voyage Out not that interesting, although I liked the part about the Thames.