The Rose Gardener

by Charlotte Link

  “Tomorrow it’s the same thing. I’m sorry. We’ll go out to dinner tonight, okay?”

  He carefully brushed her cheek with his finger. “We’ll go out to dinner every night. But unfortunately I can’t during the day.”

  “Why can’t I come along?”

  “Because these people have things to discuss that are meant for only me to hear. They’d never talk with another person there. I can’t do it, it’s not an option.”

  She’d taken off and had been frightfully bored for all the rest of that day, and as expected, that evening Alan had begun asking what she was thinking her life here might look like, what she wanted to do, what occupation she planned to look for.

  “After all, you can’t be satisfied with sitting around the apartment or bumming around town all day,” he’d added.

  She’d been afraid of this of course — that at some point he’d start in with the questions — but she’d hoped it wouldn’t come to that till later.

  She’d tried to give him her most innocent and upstanding look. “Of course. You’re right, Alan,” she said, “but give me a bit more time, okay? It’s all so new to me here, so strange. I have to get acclimated … get somehow … familiar with the city.”

  “If you had a job you’d get to know new people,” Alan offered. “That helps with getting acclimated as well.”

  “Give me time,” she asked again. “It’s all so unusual and disorienting. But soon I’ll feel at home here.”

  He didn’t come back to the subject for the time being, just as she’d hoped. He’d pick it back up eventually, of course, but she knew him well enough to know that she’d have peace for a good long while. Alan was too sensitive to pressure anyone.

  And when he does start again, then I’ll just have to see, she thought.

  Mae had called twice to ask if she’d gone to visit great-grandmother Wyatt yet. She’d gotten very angry when she’d heard that Maya still hadn’t put in an appearance there.

  “Really, Maya, I’m disappointed! You made me such a firm promise. Why can’t you do me this one favor? I told Mum that you were in London, and she is really sad that you haven’t even called her.”

  As if I had any desire to waste a whole day at an old folks’ home, Maya thought, ill-tempered.

  Now, ten days after her arrival, her thinking on the subject had changed a bit. She could hardly speak of “waste” anymore, since she didn’t do anything anyway, other than kill time with meaningless activities — activities not even really being the word for them. Instead of drifting from store to store where she couldn’t afford anything, and becoming more and more frustrated about the fact, she could go ahead and visit great-grandmother Wyatt and knock out a day among the old geezers. She signaled the waiter of the bistro where she sat eating buttered toast, paid, and crossed the street to the phone booth she’d found on the other side. She stepped inside and dialed her great-grandmother’s number.

  Edith Wyatt, like many elderly people, now lived only in the past, and what she most liked to do was to dredge up old stories about the war. She could speak for hours about the occupation of Guernsey. It had always been that way, as Maya remembered it. It was yesterday’s bad news, and it didn’t interest Maya in the least.

  The nursing home lay outside London in an idyllic village not far from Henley. There was a large, ornate Victorian house, with a wide porch that went around all four sides, and an old, somewhat overgrown garden full of fruit trees, with whitewashed benches and chairs set beneath them. But the old people didn’t sit out there, in deep seclusion between tall grass and blackberry bushes; rather they had lined themselves up on the porch, like a row of hungry crows lying in wait for something edible to happen their way. Conversations went silent when Maya approached, and all heads turned towards her. What Maya most wanted was to stick her tongue out at them.

  She hated old people. She hated gray hair and nodding heads and spit-flecked mouths. She hated the appearance of decline. It reminded her of how close they all stood to a border: past that border there was only one road, and it led towards death.

  Live, she thought, as she went past the crows and tried not to breathe in the smell of age and disease, I must live, I must live much more and much more intensely, and I mustn’t waste so much time.

  The thought that it was possibly a pure waste of time, what she was doing with Alan, had preoccupied her for a few days now already, but now, breathing this smell, it nearly overcame her, and she knew that from now on it wouldn’t loosen its grip on her for a single second.

  Edith Wyatt was the only one not sitting on the porch; rather she sat far back in the garden, in a white wicker chair. On a little table in front of her were a teapot, two place settings, and a tray of pastries. She was beside herself with joy at seeing her great-granddaughter.

  “Have some tea,” she said. “Have some pastries! You’re too thin, child. Just look at you! One wouldn’t think you came from our family. Not one of us was ever as pretty as you.”

  Luckily she doesn’t smell like the others, Maya thought, or else I wouldn’t be able to stomach her either.

  She refused both tea and pastries — the dishes that old people regularly ate off of were too revolting. Who knows how much care they take with the dishwashing, she thought, and she felt herself getting goose bumps again.

  Naturally, Edith Wyatt wanted to know everything about Guernsey, the latest gossip. But most of the people she had known were no longer alive, and the names Maya brought up meant nothing to her.

  “I’ve lost my ties to Guernsey,” she said after awhile, sadly. “Oh, I wish we’d never gone away from there. The island was my world.”

  As a loyal, old-fashioned wife, she had followed without argument when her husband had moved to London in the mid-’50s on account of an offer to take over the practice of a deceased friend from his school days — a terrific opportunity, which no reasonable person would have turned down. But Edith Wyatt never came to feel at home in England, and when her husband died she’d long deliberated over whether she should go back to her children and grandchildren on Guernsey. Nevertheless, when he was still alive, her husband had reserved the places for them both in the nursing home, and it would have seemed a betrayal of him somehow to circumvent his plan and arrange the rest of her life after her own wishes. She had been raised to follow her husband wherever he led her, and as she understood it, his death didn’t mean an end to this principle.

  “Oh, I’d like so much, so much to see St. Peter Port again,” she sighed. “Another two weeks and then it will be ‘Liberation Day.’ The island will be covered in flowers. Will you be part of the parade, darling?”

  “I’ll still be in London then,” Maya reminded her. She was incredibly thirsty but couldn’t bring herself to touch the tea. “I won’t be going back to Guernsey anytime soon!”

  Edith gazed at her with intelligent eyes. “Mae told me you were living together in London with Alan Shaye, Beatrice Shaye’s son.”

  “Yes. For years he’s wanted me to move in with him, and now I’ve actually done it.”

  “Do you love him? Do you want to stay with him?”

  Maya shifted around uncomfortably in her chair. “We’ve still got to get used to each other first.”

  “But you’ve been on quite familiar terms with one another for years. You must have come to know how you felt at some point.” Edith sighed. The way she saw it, young people today had far too great an opportunity to try things out with one another without forming any ties. They had completely lost the ability to actually commit themselves. “Alan Shaye is a very sensitive man,” she continued. “A person with whom one should be considerate in one’s dealings.”

  “You barely know him!”

  “He visited your great-grandfather and me occasionally. And he was here a few times as well. He is very loyal, he doesn’t forget people just beca
use they’re old and sick and don’t have anything to offer him anymore.”

  Maya was surprised. Alan hadn’t told her that he visited great-grandmother Wyatt now and again.

  Typical Alan, she thought, and she herself didn’t know why she was angry at him. He’s just so worthy.

  “Well then,” said Edith, “I hope it all works out between you two. Tell me about Beatrice. And Helene. How are the two of them?”

  Maya was interested in neither Beatrice nor Helene, and she had basically nothing to report about either of them.

  “I don’t know,” she said without enthusiasm. “I think they’re the same as always.”

  “My god, I can still see them as they were when they were young,” said Edith. Her eyes were shining and full of life, and Maya thought, Oh no, now here it comes, the old times and the war!

  “Back then, in May 1945, right around this time over fifty years ago … do you know that every year in May I have to think of the days of liberation? The images come before my mind’s eye again and again.”

  That’s exactly what’s pathetic about you old people, thought Maya, annoyed.

  “Beatrice was sixteen, so young and delicate,” Edith went on. “Undernourished, hungry like we all were, all worked up about what would happen … and Helene was just a shadow of her former self, she was afraid. The Third Reich was falling apart, and she didn’t know what would become of her and her husband. The Germans still held the islands, but time was running out, and everyone was asking themselves what the end would look like. We were still hiding the French war prisoner, Julien, and we were nervous like never before. It was a kind of superstitious dread that took hold of us, the fear that something just had to happen in the home stretch, only because until then we had gotten off with only a black eye.”

  Maya sighed. She’d heard this so many times already!

  “So much was happening in those last few days,” Edith went on. “There were still people being tried and sentenced to death by the Germans, did you know that? Oh, how we were trembling! And rumors spread so quickly in times like those. Some claimed the Germans would blow the islands to smithereens or shoot all the inhabitants … it was all nonsense, of course.”

  “Of course,” Maya agreed, bored.

  “But the occupation forces were getting nervous,” Edith continued, “and people are especially dangerous when they’re nervous. Erich Feldmann was worst of all. Later, of course, we found out that he’d been pumping himself full of psychopharmaceuticals for years, and in those days he needed them more than ever. But he couldn’t get any. The supply situation was catastrophic. If there was any medication to be had at all still, it was just a basic provision for the injured and a bit of penicillin and things like that … But there were of course no psych drugs, and Erich was beginning to fall deeper and deeper into a panicked state. He was addicted to the stuff.”

  Maya sighed again, this time a bit louder. Erich Feldmann and his problems didn’t interest her in the least.

  “He threatened Thomas,” Edith was saying. “Your great-grandfather. Have I ever told you this before? The morning of the day he died, Erich, I mean. He turned up at the practice at some ungodly hour, it must have been around dawn. He looked dreadful. Gray in the face, bloodshot eyes. He wanted stimulants, went around screaming, saying that as a doctor Thomas must have something left, there had to be some secret stockpile … Tommy really didn’t have anything, but Erich didn’t believe him. He had a gun in his hand, and Thomas had to open every cabinet, every drawer, not just in the practice but also in the house. Erich acted like a deranged man. We were half-crazy with fear because Julien was sitting up in the attic, and there was the hatch that led up there, it was in plain sight. At any moment, Erich, driven by his despair and determined to obtain medication at all costs, could have ordered us to let down the ladder and take him up to this room as well. It was like a nightmare.” Edith shuddered at the memory of that moment. “I thought I’d have to scream, my nerves were so terribly wound up. But that would have made it all even worse. I had to appear somewhat normal, somewhat natural.”

  Maya hadn’t heard this story before, but that didn’t mean she found it in any way exciting. It was all so horribly long ago. It had no significance anymore, not for her or for her life.

  “I assume he didn’t find Julien,” she said, ill-tempered. “Since you’d hardly be sitting here otherwise.”

  “No,” Edith nodded. Carefully she took a sip of tea. “I probably wouldn’t be sitting here. He went away without having seen the attic. But the whole time I had the feeling that some other awful thing would happen, and I was right. Late in the afternoon that same day, Thomas was called over to Beatrice and Helene’s. The other Frenchman who worked for Erich, Pierre was his name, I think, was laid up in the kitchen, gravely injured. Erich had shot him. I no longer know exactly why …” Edith furrowed her brow, “some difference of opinion, I assume. Erich hadn’t had his medication and he just lost it … Thomas said it looked bad.”

  “Was he able to help the Frenchman?” Maya asked. She was terribly thirsty. Maybe I’ll find something to drink in the kitchen, she wondered, a can or an unopened bottle, something guaranteed not to have been touched by any of the old folks.

  “He was able to help him,” Edith answered. “As far as I can remember, he spoke of a clean shot through the leg. Pierre had lost rather a lot of blood, and the heat outside was monstrous …” Her eyes darkened a bit. “Oh, what times those were,” she said vaguely, and there was something like wistfulness in her voice. “They were horrible, they were dangerous, but we were all together, we were alive … sometimes here I have the feeling I’m not here at all anymore.”

  “You should go back to Guernsey,” said Maya. “Grandmother would certainly be very happy to have you with her.”

  “I don’t know …” Edith murmured, leaving it open as to whether her doubt was directed towards Mae’s joy or the suggestion of going back to Guernsey. “Who knows if I even belong there any more …”

  Maya got up. “It’s alright with you if I go to the kitchen real quick, right? I just have to get something to drink …”

  Edith gestured towards the teapot. “The tea …”

  “Something cold,” Maya said quickly. “It’s just too warm today for tea.”

  “A very sunny spring,” Edith agreed. “Maybe that’s why the memories are so active. In 1945 it was also this warm. Too warm for April, too warm for May …”

  They all act like that time was so great, Maya thought while she went off in the direction of the house. But things were actually just horrible. I wouldn’t have liked to live back then. War and hunger and ridiculous clothes …

  She made a face and shuddered. She’d reached the house and was happy to find a back door that was unlocked. It would have bothered her to have to go by the old folks in the front and get stared at again.

  The door led directly into the kitchen, which she concluded upon seeing multiple large refrigerators and a giant stove. It was spotlessly clean; there wasn’t a dirty dish anywhere, not even a speck of a dirt. You couldn’t well call the place disorderly.

  One of the refrigerator doors was open. A young man was crouching down in front and was searching through the compartments. When he heard Maya’s steps, he jumped up, startled, and turned around. In his hand he held a can of soda. It was covered in condensation from the cold; a single bead of moisture trickled slowly down the side. Maya grew weak at the sight of it.

  “Hey,” she said, “they’ve got soda here!”

  “I’d be happy to pay for it,” the young man said, embarrassed. “I just couldn’t find anyone. Do you work here? I’d like …”

  “I’m only hear for a visit,” Maya interrupted. “And I’m about to die I’m so thirsty.” She pushed him aside and fished out a second soda can. “I don’t want to drink any of that tea they give you her
e.”

  “The tea is ghastly,” the young man agreed. “So weak you might as well be drinking water.”

  “I haven’t even tried it,” said Maya. The can let out a soft hiss when she opened it. “I’m afraid of the dishes here. I don’t know if they’re cleaned properly.”

  “There are big dishwashers over there,” said the young man. He opened his can as well. Apparently Maya had given him courage. “That hits the spot,” he murmured.

  In one long gulp, Maya almost emptied her can.

  “That really does hit the spot,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s the heat or the depressing atmosphere, but I just have to have something to straighten me out right now.”

  “Are you visiting your grandmother or grandfather?” inquired the young man. His eyes betrayed that initial captivation that Maya recognized in men. Hardly a man had ever looked at her without this glimmer coming into his expression.

  “I’m visiting my great-grandmother,” she said.

  He was surprised. “Really? That’s rare. I mean, it’s rare for someone to still have a great-grandmother.”

  “Everyone in our family gets to be pretty old,” said Maya.

  They stood across from one another, both somewhat indecisive. Maya noted the man’s soft, dirty blond hair, his topaz-colored eyes, a soft curve along his mouth that she found alluring.

  What a handsome boy, she thought.

  “My name’s Frank,” he said. “Frank Langtry.”

  “Maya Ashworth.”

  “A pleasure, Maya. Where do you live? In London?

  “Yes. You as well?”

  “Yes. Maybe we could go back together. Did you drive here?”

  “No. I took the bus.”

  “I’d be happy to take you back, then. If that’s okay with you.”

  Maya was very pleased. She hated taking the bus, plus the good-looking man would let her forget her impressions of the nursing home.

  “Around five o’clock?” she asked.