I walk down to the South Garden. From there I can see the dark tilt of the fields below. I stand under a tree already delirious with blossom. The chestnut trees are out. Dear Mrs. Woolf, I think, but there is nothing really to say. The connection I felt to her words can never now be told to her. She will never know I followed her one summer evening in London through the square. She will never know how I felt when I read her books. I remember the delicious fall into Mrs. Dalloway, how I kept expecting the story to drop me, but it held me up, kept me buoyant.
Dear Mrs. Woolf.
There’s the sound of a nightingale, rising from down near the fields. Each note as melodious as water. And then, above that sound is another sound, one I can’t at first place. A thin, droning whine, growing in intensity and frequency. It’s a sound I am familiar with from London. Bombers. A raid of bombers on their way to, or back from, patrolling the Devon coast. The nightingale keeps singing. I wait for it to stop, as the planes roar towards us and are then directly overhead. But the nightingale keeps up her song. Perhaps even nature has become inured to this war. Or perhaps the nightingale needs to sing so desperately that nothing will silence her. The planes pass over, high above us, and the bird keeps singing, is still singing, as I walk back up towards the buildings.
As I’m passing by the kitchen garden I see something out of the corner of my eye. A flash of white against the bricks. It’s gone so fast I don’t really know what to think. Only the next day, when Golden Wonder tells of having seen a figure in white moving among the trees, and the first chicken disappears, will I remember this nocturnal flicker of white and name it as a ghost.
19
There are three things left in the Garden of Longing. One is dead, and one is not yet in bloom. The last plant has grown rampant, making a great cloud of bluish pink bloom over the flower bed. Like a thousand butterflies. This is the Rosa eglanteria—the Sweet Briar Rose, with its small single flowers and its thick branches with hooked thorns. The thing about the Sweet Briar Rose is that while the fragrance of most roses comes from the flowers themselves, this rose stores its fragrance in its leaves. The scent is strongest after a rainfall, but if you crush a leaf between your fingers, you will release the scent of apples.
Whatever questions I answer by naming the characteristics of the plants in this garden, by attaching them to longing, other questions emerge. Did the person who planted this garden plant the Sweet Briar Rose because they wanted to remember the scent of apples, because apples figured in their story? Or was it simply a metaphor for longing—that the Rosa eglanteria released an unexpected fragrance, had a secret that surprised with its poignancy? I don’t know what to think. And the more I find out in this garden, the less I know.
The plant not yet in bloom is lavender. I love lavender. What is more potent than to have that scent on your fingers as you leave the garden? To rub your hands over the leaves, so that all day, as you do your duties, the dying smell will remind you, will make you feel longing all over again. Dead flowers keep their fragrance. And with lavender on them, it is as though your hands become dead flowers themselves, losing the living scent little by little, spending it into the air, so it disappears and disappears.
The thing about longing is this: It is easy to feel equal to wanting. It is rare to feel equal to having.
The final plant in the Garden of Longing is dead, and has been for many years. I find evidence of it only by accident, as I’m pawing through the earth trying to free the roots of the rose from a rush of choking weeds. There, in the earth, I find a withered husk, an old corm of Crocus sativus—Saffron crocus.
I do not know why it is there. I cannot guess. The Saffron crocus is hard to grow, does not live very long. The spice is delicate and valuable. These things are akin to longing, I suppose, but I do not feel confident with these explanations.
On the afternoon I discover the Crocus sativus I stay in the garden for a long time. I have salvaged dead wood from the grove of trees behind the flower bed, have made a crude bench from this. I sit there and I look at the cascade of Sweet Briar Rose, at the brush of lavender, and I try to imagine the Saffron crocus growing between them.
I have cleared the tangle of trees above the flower bed so that now the sun moves over the garden. I can see where it falls, what it touches. There are blackbirds calling from the woods.
Later, I lie under the weight of The Genus Rosa, wrap my arms around the volume on my chest, and crush it against me. Ellen Willmott reminded me, when I looked through her book earlier that evening, of how the Sweet Briar was a rose used extensively by classical authors. For Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Spenser, it was the eglantine. Milton tried to use it also, but he got it confused with the woodbine. I try to remember some Milton, but can’t. And then I do remember something—a line from Virgil’s Georgics, and I know that I’ve found my answer to the Saffron crocus. It might not be the right answer, what was originally intended, but it satisfies me, and this, I realize, under the heavy assurance of The Genus Rosa, is what should matter.
“Let there be gardens to tempt them, breathing saffron flowers.”
20
I ask the Lumper the question I need to ask her, and then I go and find Jane in the stables. She is grooming the young horse and seems so absorbed in her task that I don’t want to break this moment with my demands.
“Jane,” I finally say, and she looks up.
“Hello, Gwen,” she says, and smiles.
“In the absence of a motor car, I need a horse and cart,” I say. “Would you drive me to town?”
“What for?”
“I’ll tell you on the way.” I put my hand into my trouser pocket where I have stashed the pay for being a Land Girl that Mrs. Billings gave me last week. I hope it is enough to buy what I need.
“Tell me now,” says Jane. She puts down the brush. “Why do I have to wait?”
I don’t want to tell her yet. “Just drive me,” I say, rather irritably.
“Chickens,” says Jane. “You must be after some more chickens.”
Two chickens have disappeared from the coop now, and the others seem very distressed and aren’t laying as much as usual. “No, it’s not chickens. Nothing to do with chickens, in fact. I’ll tell you when we get there,” I say, because by then I’ll have to. It will be obvious.
“Oh, all right.” Jane opens the door of the stall and steps out towards me. She seems so small and known. I know her, I think, as she walks out from behind the wooden stall door. Just a little, but I do know something about her. We know something of each other. And the thing is that I like her; what I know of her I like. Before arriving at Mosel, I’m not sure I ever liked anyone. Roy Peake very briefly, but that seems so long ago now, and he quickly became hugely disappointing.
“What’s the matter with you?” says Jane. “You’ve gone all moody looking. Do you want to go to town or stand there and cry?”
“Go to town,” I say. And we do.
I feel nervous on our return, as we drive up the hill to the big house. What if my bright idea wasn’t such a good one after all? But it’s too late for nervous speculation. We are driving up the hill with the cart creaking under the weight of its newly purchased cargo.
No one answers my cautious knock at the front door, so Jane and I go on into the house. There’s a soldier writing letters in the dining room. “Captain Raley?” I ask, and he points upstairs.
“Listen,” says Jane, when we’re back in the hall and I’m making a beeline for the staircase. “I’ll meet you outside. I want to have a look round for David.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I remember how upset she was the night we came up to the house for the dance.
Jane tries to smile at me but can’t quite manage it. “It’s not an idea,” she says. “That’s the trouble.” She touches me lightly on the arm, as though I’m the one who needs the reassurance. “I’ll see you outside.”
Raley is in the upstairs study. He’s sitting by the fire, reading a book.
/> “I thought you gave up on poetry,” I say.
“I did.” Raley flashes the book cover at me. Concise British Flora. “I thought that, since I’m here, I should learn something about the place.”
“Come outside. I’ve got something for you.”
“Ah, Gwen. Bossy as usual.” Raley lays his book aside and follows me downstairs and out to the horse and cart, waiting on the driveway. Sitting on the bare boards of the cart, its roots wrapped in burlap, is the magnolia tree I have bought from the nursery just outside of town.
“It will keep pace with your loss,” I say. “You need something to cast a shadow and lose its fragrance to the earth.”
Raley says nothing, just stands beside me, looking at the tree in the cart.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s already bloomed for this year.” It would have flared up a week or two ago, dropped its waxy cache of petals to the ground in glorious failure.
Raley is still silent. I had thought about this so carefully, and yet I must have been wrong. It has been the wrong thing to do. I think of that night in the house when he and I stood in the doorway of the kitchen, watching Jane cut David’s hair. How I had felt the solid wall of him behind me and how all I wanted to do was to lean back against him. “I’m sorry,” I say again, for I feel now I should apologize for ever having thought this up.
“Gwen.” He puts his hand on my arm, and when I turn to face him I see that he is near to crying. “Don’t apologize. Please don’t do that. I love magnolias. And they won’t have come into bloom yet in Toronto, where I’m from.” He squeezes my arm gently. “I like how sad they are,” he says. “Sad candles, that’s what they look like. A magnolia is a tree lit with sad candles.”
Raley wants to plant the magnolia so that he can see it from his room at Mosel. We dig the hole at the front of the house, right under his window. Raley does most of the work of digging, leaning hard into the shovel with the full weight of his body. I have never seen such a beautiful man. His muscles move like water under his skin.
“That’s deep enough,” I say finally, even though I would like to continue the pleasure of watching him work.
Raley rests on his shovel. There’s sweat on his face. He has his shirt sleeves rolled up and the veins on his forearms and the backs of his hands stand out from the effort of digging. He wipes his forehead on his arm.
“I was meant to work in a bank,” he says. “Doesn’t that seem strange now?” He doesn’t wait or even look at me for an answer. “But my friends were going to war and convinced me that because of my university education I’d get a better deal as an officer.” Raley turns and looks at me now. “There was a magnolia tree outside that bank I was meant to work at. A magnificent tree. I would have passed by it twice a day.” Raley brushes his hands together to clean them of earth. “Perhaps I could have been happy doing that. Do you think so, Gwen?” He seems like an anxious little boy when he asks this. I want to jump down into the hole and put my arms around him, but instead, alarmed at the thought, I back up and hit my head on the magnolia tree.
“I don’t think a tree can give meaning to your life,” I say, rubbing the back of my head.
But I am wrong about this. I will be proven wrong by this very magnolia tree that we are planting.
“What happened to your friend?” I ask.
Raley looks at the earth at his feet, jabs at it with the blade of the shovel. “Shot by accident,” he says. “Before he even got to the war. We joined up together and he was killed in a training accident.”
“And you were sent here.” I look up at the house, how grand it is, how it belongs to another way of life entirely. “How long ago?”
“A week before that day I saw you at the station,” he says. “What does that make it? A month? Yesterday? A hundred years ago?” Raley stabs his shovel into the pile of earth at the edge of the hole, and then he slowly raises his arms into branches above his head.
We look at each other, and I retrieve the shovel from the side of the hole, gently push a bit of earth down into the cavity. Enough to cover his shoes.
After the magnolia has been planted, Raley and I sit in the sun on the front step of the house, watching the new tree. It feels as though we are waiting for it to grow before our eyes, sprout up like a tree in a fairy tale. Up and up, into the clouds, piercing the underside of heaven itself.
“There were magnolias in the London squares I used to walk through,” I say, thinking of how there was a magnolia in almost every one of the squares in Bloomsbury, threading them together in my mind. Each green page illuminated by the light of a magnolia tree. Where were they now? Blown to pieces, I expect.
“Do you miss London?” asks Raley.
“More than anything.”
“Tell me something.”
I close my eyes and think of the river. I think of walking across Waterloo Bridge and seeing the distant lamps of Westminster, the close lights of Hungerford Bridge. The river is grey at night, a shiver of grey under the bridge. “Sometimes,” I say, “I used to go down to the Thames at low tide and collect the bits of old clay pipes that would wash up against the pilings. There were so many of these tiny hollow tubes. They were like bird bones. I liked to think of all those people, those men of a hundred years ago, dropping those pipes into the river. I liked that in the modern city, with all its bustle and clatter, I could be engaged in a private work of archaeological excavation.” I open my eyes and look at the magnolia tree. It does seem to have grown. I have left all those bits of pilfered pipe in my office at the Royal Horticultural Society. Until this moment I had forgotten that, but now I can clearly see them on the little shelf just inside the door, neatly arranged according to size, looking like a miniature clay xylophone. “I’m afraid that when I go back, when the war ends—if the war ends—everything I’ve loved will have disappeared.”
“I have the opposite problem,” says Raley, looping his arms around his knees. “I’m fairly certain Toronto will have remained intact. It’s more likely that I will disappear.”
I look at Captain Raley, sitting next to me on the step in the April sun. He has the kind of blond hair that will bleach white in summer. I look at the fine hairs on the back of his wrist, his neatly cut nails now all grubby with dirt from planting the tree. His hands look like my hands now. I like that. “Tell me something,” I say.
“The best view of Toronto,” says Raley, “is from the islands that lie the other side of the harbour. There’s a ferry that runs between the islands and the mainland. That was where I first met Peter, my friend who died. We were eight years old. We had both wandered away from our respective parents and met on the upper deck, near the front of the ferry. We stood against the railing. I will always remember this. The top of the railing was smooth, dark wood, and big around as my leg. There were gulls above the waves. We stood side by side, no small talk, and then Peter said, quite solemnly, ‘Let’s take our coats off and throw them in the sea.’ And of course it wasn’t really the sea, but the lake is so big that it feels like the sea. And so we did this. By the time my mother caught up to us, we were struggling out of our shirts.” Raley turns to me then and smiles. I can see his perfect teeth. The lines around his eyes crinkle up with his smile. He has no wrinkles on his forehead. All the lines on his face are from smiling, from laughter, from being happy.
21
I lie under The Genus Rosa and imagine it’s Captain Raley on top of me, squashing the life out of me. I have a bath before dinner, look at my body critically through the bathwater. It’s milky white as a slug. No one’s ever really seen it. I might as well have lived underground all this time, wriggling around, sucking mouthfuls of dirt. I dry myself roughly with the stiff, nubby towel, and suddenly my feet seem horrifically ugly. Why have I never noticed this before?
At dinner, my knee presses against the table and I feel an incredible wave of desire. When I pull my chair in closer to the table, the edge of the tabletop pushes against my stomach and I almost can’t breathe.
“Nothing.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Of course not.” I look at her in alarm. Surely I’m not as bad as all that. “Step on my foot,” I say.
“Why?”
“Just do it.”
Jane regards me with bemused confusion, but she does as I ask, stamps down hard on my foot that’s closest to hers. I cry out, and the other girls stop talking.
“Thank you,” I say to Jane. “It’s fine now.” And it is. I have replaced one kind of pain with another and my equilibrium has returned. I eat my dinner with renewed appetite, and then, since Jane’s not hungry, I eat most of hers as well.
After dinner we go and listen to the war broadcast. London is burning again. Masses of incendiary bombs fell during the night and the fires raged against all effort to control them. Westminster Hall was hit, and the Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament themselves. I am very grateful not to have been there to witness the destruction of these familiar landmarks. At least I can remember them as they were.
The other item of news tonight is not nearly so distressing. It seems that on the night of the worst bombing of London so far, Rudolph Hess, the deputy fuehrer of Germany, flew a fighter plane to Scotland on a mission to broker peace between his nation and ours. He was guided on the nine-hundred-mile journey by two compasses strapped to the legs of his trousers, and by the dance music from a Danish radio station. He was looking for the home of the Duke of Hamilton, whom he’d met once years before, and who he was convinced would understand his mission of peace. Unable to land the plane, he flew it upside down so he would drop out of the cockpit, opened his parachute and landed in a field, where he was apprehended by a farmer in his underwear who had been awakened by the noise of the crashing plane.
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