The Garden Path

by Kitty Burns Florey

  Susannah faced her, beaming. “I’m so grateful to you for bringing me here, Rosie. And not just because I needed to get away. I love England—rain and all.” She laughed again, her angular face becoming softer, her eyes crinkling with glee. Like Edwin when I first met him, Rosie thought, horrified. Memory engulfed her and made her weak. She took Susannah’s arm again with her good right one, and Susannah squeezed it exuberantly. “Let’s walk up to the house,” Susannah said. “I’m dying to see the place.”

  “I’m not so sure I am,” Rosie said. “It’s like seeing a movie made from a book you liked. It’s not the way you imagined.”

  “You were here a long time ago,” Susannah said in her gentle voice. “It’s bound to be different. But the house should be the same, at least.”

  “We’ll see.” She expected nothing. Or worse—the house turned into a Disneyland castle, all purple and pink and plastic, with gnomes. Nothing would surprise her.

  They walked up the drive in their rubber boots, avoiding puddles. No one else seemed to be around; there had been only three other cars in the car park. “Not very good weather for tourists,” Susannah said. “We’ll have the place pretty much to ourselves.”

  The paved path was bordered on one side with trees, on the other with tree-studded lawn stretching out to the hills beyond. “I certainly don’t remember it was so far,” Rosie said. Her left arm pulled heavily against the sling.

  “Well, you probably didn’t come up this way much,” Susannah pointed out. Rosie could see Susannah deliberately not referring to her mother’s fatigue: she’s handling me, Rosie thought; I’ve become someone who needs to be handled. But she was glad Susannah had developed tact—she was like Peter in that way. And she was relieved not to be coddled—not like that damned nurse, Miss Poole, whom she’d been forced to hire her first week home from the hospital and who had treated her like a demented child. At least Susannah helped her hide her weaknesses.

  “I should think you would always have approached the main house from the back somewhere,” Susannah went on. “From wherever your cottage was. Not up the main drive.”

  Of course. That was why it was all so wrong. Something buried deep in her mind turned over and half-revealed itself. Yes: that explained everything. How could she think the farm would be in front? That the main approach would have hops growing alongside it? She was completely turned around. She remembered now, distantly, the long back road in, a road lined with trees: evergreens? did she remember pine needles? or was that someplace else? were there rhododendrons, perhaps? But the road, she was sure, had divided, and one fork had curled around to the cottage.

  “There!” Susannah said as they went around a bend, and Rosie looked up. There it was—Silvergate on its hill suddenly before them, with the mist still on it, the rosy brick glowing in the rain, and the massive chimneys and the little cupola and the steps widening out from the great front door to end in squat pillars topped with urns. The rain had let up a little, and they stopped to look at the house. Yes, this, at least, was right—the sober, tidy shape of it, the color of the brick, the soothing symmetry. It all matched up perfectly with something carved deep in her soul. Tears came to her eyes.

  “It’s lovely,” Susannah said. “Just what you’d expect an English country house to be.” She looked down at Rosie, still clinging to her arm. “Is it the way you remember it? It must be a strange feeling, to see it again.”

  “Very strange,” Rosie said. “But it looks just the way it should look.”

  “Does it look smaller? The places you knew as a kid are supposed to seem smaller when you see them as an adult. I know your house did, at first—the inside, especially. My old room. And the tool shed—the old playhouse. I couldn’t believe how low the roof was—I can’t even stand upright inside it.” She paused, as if uncertain whether to go on, then said, “It’s funny, that you and I have both returned to the scenes of our childhood.”

  Rosie glanced away from the house to her daughter. She hadn’t thought of that—of how disquieting it must have been for her, to return to live in a place she had left with such cold impatience, so many years ago. And yet Susannah had seemed, during all those weeks, placid and content. What had it cost her, Rosie wondered, belatedly.

  The rain started up again, harder. “Oh, hell,” said Susannah. “Shall we dash for it?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Her bad arm bounced painfully under her coat as they ran over the lawn and up the circular gravel drive, and she had to stop, panting, at the top of the steps in the shelter of the overhang.

  “I’ll wager that made the old arm smart a bit,” Susannah said lightly in the exaggerated accent she had begun to affect as a joke. Her face was wet, her hair dripping, and her smile was replaced by an anxious squint Rosie was sure she wasn’t aware of.

  “No, it’s fine,” said Rosie, resisting the temptation to rub her shoulder, refusing even to grimace with the pain. She took off her rain hat and shook it free of the beaded drops. She would have liked to sit down. “It’s been a while since I’ve run,” she said.

  “After we take the grand tour we’ll stop for tea. There must be a nice cozy tea shop on the premises.” Susannah’s smile returned. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my three days in England, it’s that you’re never far from a tea shop. There must be almost as many tea shops in England as there are McDonald’s in Connecticut. Almost.”

  She pushed open the heavy door—oak, Rosie knew, weathered a silvery gray like the massive gate, centuries ago demolished, that had stood between the pillars at the foot of the drive and given the place its name. Inside, a woman in a blue National Trust blazer sat at a desk. Behind her, through a doorway, loomed the vast hall and the split staircase winding up on either side to a gallery. A discreet sign said: Admission £2. Susannah paid, and bought a brochure (50p). “It’s a self-guided tour,” the woman said. “You’ll find everything you need to know in the brochure. Please remember that we keep the rooms rather dark to prevent further fading.”

  “It will probably be really dark in here on a day like this,” Susannah chatted to her as she dug a five-pound note out of her pocket. “Though we keep being surprised by how quickly the weather changes. I mean, one minute it’s pouring and the next the rain almost stops and the sun almost comes out.” She grinned at the woman. “I’m sure that before we leave England we’ll get some beautiful days.”

  “Feel free to ask any of the guides to illuminate the dark corners with a torch,” said the woman imperturbably, “should there be anything you particularly wish to see,” and she dropped the change into Susannah’s hand.

  Susannah thanked her, still cheerful, and said to Rosie as they passed through the antechamber and into the high, arched hall, “There’s my first complaint against the old country. In America we replace our snooty ticket-takers with slot machines and computers.” She began flipping through the pages of the brochure. Rosie was continually astonished by Susannah. She seemed to have lost not only the querulousness of childhood, but, now that they were abroad, her natural shyness and her air of detachment from the real world. Rosie surveyed her with affection as Susannah pulled her reading glasses out of her pocket—she never carried a purse—and set them on the end of her long nose. She squinted over the brochure in the gloom.

  “I don’t know how they expect you to read this thing in this light,” she said. “This is a different one from the one you showed me at home.” Her voice echoed in the huge room. At home, Rosie thought. She wished, impulsively, that she could hug Susannah there and then, in thanks for moving in and taking care of her, for not bringing up Ivan’s name, for her willingness to let bygones be bygones. She hadn’t, she realized, thanked her properly for anything; it was Susannah who was always thanking her. “Let’s see—they haven’t revised the bit about the gardens,” said Susannah, peering. “Still no mention of the family.” She flipped through the pages. “Nope—not a word.” She looked with indignation at Rosie. “I’m going to write a let
ter to the Times.”

  Rosie smiled at her fondly, a look that seemed to surprise Susannah and disconcert her slightly. She dropped the brochure to the floor, and when she had retrieved it, she said, “Let’s see the place, then—if we can in this gloom,” and took Rosie’s arm again to ascend the massive staircase.

  They looked at the marble busts of the Elliott-Casson family in the Great Parlour, and the linenfold paneling and the glossy parquet floor, and they saw the Dining Chamber filled with the absurd glitter of its immense cut glass chandelier (“Installed in the eighteenth century,” Susannah read from the brochure, and added, “Vulgar, if you ask me”), and they went into the bedchambers where the high, carved beds were hung with meticulously restored embroidered material—impossible to imagine anyone actually sleeping there. “Think of the dust!” Susannah said. “And how completely quiet and pitch dark it must have been at night, under all those hangings.”

  Rosie turned away. She couldn’t, some days, see a bed without a grievous, vivid memory not so much of Ivan but of other days, another Rosie.

  They moved on to the Long Gallery with its famous Reynolds portrait of the first Peter Elliott-Casson with his dog and his mistress. None of this was familiar; the only portion of the house that she knew was the servants’ quarters in the basement, and these were closed to the public, used for storage.

  “The really interesting parts,” Susannah said, disappointed. “I’d love to see the kitchens, especially.” Rosie thought of Duke, and of the thriving little restaurant back in Connecticut. Duke, she knew, had asked Susannah to live with him, and Susannah had refused. A cohabitation de convenance, she called it—a joke she didn’t explain. Yet, Rosie knew, she had already written him a long letter. “I’d like to see a real butler’s pantry,” said Susannah. “The underside of all this magnificent overkill.”

  “You betray your lower-class origins,” Rosie said, smiling.

  “I adore my lower-class origins!” She fingered, gingerly, the metallic gold trim on a heavy velvet drape. “Did you used to envy all this as a kid? Wish you lived in the big house?”

  “I must have been too young. I remember being completely pleased with our cottage.”

  “Your ’umble cottage,” Susannah corrected. “Where you ate porridge and was ’appy. Pardon my accent. I’ll get it right after a couple of more days.”

  “You’re doing fine,” said Rosie. She tried to remember the Elliotts, vaguely recalled a jolly, overweight family who lived for their horses. She hadn’t thought of them in years; Silvergate had always meant the Liliano family. Now she remembered the stables, and the whole bunch of them, children too, in red jackets for the hunt, and, once, a party—was it here, in the Gallery?—with a huge Christmas tree and a ribbon-tied package—paper dolls? “I wonder what happened to the family,” she said. “I seem to recall they were down on their luck after the war. Something must have happened, anyway, for them to give all this up. They loved the place—that I remember.”

  “Just as well you left when you did,” said Susannah. “They might have taken you down to ruin and perdition with them.”

  “Ruin and perdition—I doubt it. They probably just sold off a couple of their horses and got rid of this place and moved into their town house.” A thought struck her. “I wonder if the weather vane is still on top of the house. A stork, standing on one leg. I used to love looking up at it from the gardens. I didn’t notice it as we came in, though.”

  Susannah consulted the brochure. “It’s still there, according to this. ‘Set in place in 1650, when the house was finished, and miraculously preserved on the roof of the octagonal cupola to this day.’ We’ll have to look for it on the way out.” She stopped to listen. “Can you still hear the rain? Or has it stopped? Look how green the light is in here—like the inside of an old bottle. I wonder if we could go out and see the gardens.”

  Rosie approached a guide—male this time, elderly, his chest sunk beneath his blue blazer, his hands shaky and ridged with veins. “How do we get to the gardens?”

  “Oh—the gardens?” He touched her good arm and led her to the window, and pushed back the drape. Dust motes attacked them. Through the old wavy glass, she could see that it was still raining, that clouds like old rags flew low over the hills. “You see?” said the guide. “Out there is the terrace, and down the steps is the rose garden. No roses now, of course, but just beyond is the yew hedge, and the little walled garden. Oh, that’s a little beauty.” His voice, faintly Irish, was proprietary. “There are still plenty of flowers in bloom—the chrysanthemums and the dahlias are especially fine just now, and the little autumn crocuses.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they are,” said Rosie. “I know they are.” She smiled down at the terrace, gray and wet, with its pots of gold chrysanthemums marking the steps. “I knew this garden as a girl—as a child. I used to live here. The gardener was my father, back in the Thirties.”

  The old man stood looking at her, frowning. His face was bright red, deeply wrinkled, with long creases in his cheeks and pendulous jowls above a skinny neck. “What’s that?”

  “I was born here at Silvergate,” Rosie said. She glanced over at Susannah. Did the man even understand?

  “The original gardener was her grandfather,” Susannah put in. “My great-grandfather. The man who restored the gardens—who created all this.” She spoke with restrained pride, and Rosie remembered Susannah at the funeral, claiming her grandmother, and her own anger. She bowed her head, looking out at the blurred greens, listening to Susannah’s voice. “His name was Massimo Liliano; he came here from Italy to do this—that.” She gestured toward the window. “He was responsible for it. He planned it out, he supervised the work, he saw that it was maintained. He was the head gardener here for years, and then his sons took over, my grandfather and my uncles. And my mother was born here, in the gardener’s cottage.”

  The old man let the curtain fall. He seemed disoriented by Susannah’s speech. In the gloom, he mumbled, “I don’t know about that.”

  “Well, it’s true,” Susannah persisted, and Rosie marveled again at the confidence she seemed to have acquired simply by stepping onto English soil. Against the dark ancient wood, in the shadows, she looked regal—as if she belonged not in the cottage but in the manor. “I don’t know how I could convince you,” she said to the guide, “because our family doesn’t even get a mention in this brochure.” She flipped through it to the page on the gardens, and held it up. “Here: all it says is—”

  The old man waved a hand, dismissed it, took a step back. “Get away with you,” he said in his brogue, half bantering.

  “But it’s true,” said Susannah.

  “Well, but it’s all irrelevant, isn’t it? Because the gardens are closed today.”

  “Closed?”

  “It says so in the book,” he said, and his jowls shook as he nodded toward the brochure in Susannah’s hand. “Clear as daylight. Open Tuesdays and Thursdays only after October first. So it doesn’t matter whose daughter you claim to be, does it?” He was grinning, and he cackled; he’d decided to treat it all as a joke.

  “But the gardens!” Rosie looked at Susannah in despair. She could have cried.

  “We’ll come back,” said Susannah, and to the old man she said, “Is there a tea shop on the premises?”

  He had stopped chuckling, and he looked at them kindly, sadly. “It’s not your day, then, is it? Tea shop’s same as the gardens. Tuesdays and Thursdays after October first.”

  They left, through the drawing room, down the grand staircase, past the woman at the desk. Susannah said good-bye to her; Rosie was too miserable to say anything.

  “Come again,” said the woman.

  “As a matter of fact, we intend to,” said Susannah. “We want to see the gardens.”

  “Oh, they’re worth a visit.” The woman smiled stiffly. “They’re really quite lovely. Open Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  “We have rather a special interest in them,” Susannah began, but
Rosie put her hand on her arm to stop her. She couldn’t bear to go through it all again. She thought how the old man would tell the other guides about his crazy Americans.

  “You might come back next week,” the woman said politely. “Perhaps the rain will stop.”

  In the car Rosie gave way to tears. “It’s as if I imagined it all. My whole childhood. None of it seems real any more. I never should have come, Susannah.” She blew her nose awkwardly with one hand. “You can’t go home again. It’s true.”

  “But you have to try,” Susannah said. Her own spirits seemed undampened. “We’ll come back. It’s what you’ve always wanted to do, and we’re going to do it, dammit.” She started the car. The windshield wipers cleared the view of the oast house in the distance. “Right now let’s find a nice warm pub and have a good lunch. This rain’s bound to stop by tomorrow, and we’ll come back then and see the gardens. And the weather vane—the stork! We forgot!”