by Rosie Thomas
In the little room there was the same darned cover on the bed; the view beyond the shuttered windows was only winter-browned.
Julia unpacked the first of her belongings and hung them on the hooks. In London, getting ready to travel, she had disposed of almost all her clothes. She had given away the necklaces and bracelets and all the clutter of ornaments that had swagged her dressing tables and overflowed from her jewellery boxes for the years of her adult life.
The only thing she had kept was George Tressider’s marquetry box, with her wedding and engagement rings folded inside Valerie Hall’s birth certificate. Being free of possessions made Julia laugh. It was more intoxicating than champagne, the lightness lighter than the bubbles.
After the first refectory dinner, where she sat again amongst the wheelchairs, Julia went out into the garden. It was dark, and she felt her way until her eyes accustomed themselves to the blackness. The air had an unfamiliar rawness. But it was still enough for her to hear the sea, far below, patiently chafing at its invisible yellow and silver fringe.
Stripped of their summer leaves, the bones of the neglected shrubs seemed more intricately tangled and knotted at her ankles and over her head. Julia walked slowly down a wide flight of shallow stone steps. Hedges of clipped box had once descended here, but now they had swelled to undulating humps through which the weeds climbed and sprawled. Julia reached up to push a sinewy branch out of her path, and then pulled back with a cry of pain. Thorns had gouged into her arm. She nursed it in front of her, watching the blood well up into black droplets, and then run in glistening trails over the white skin.
She pushed the pain down within herself, and felt it spring up as silent, swelling elation.
All her detachment had gone, in that instant. She wasn’t standing apart any longer, condemned to watch her own stiff, puppet-like movements. She was inside herself once more, and she felt the warm, intricate fit of moving parts. She put her arm to her mouth and licked off the salty blood.
‘I am alive,’ she told herself. ‘I’m here.’
Happiness buoyed her up, swelling and spreading to take in the rampant gardens and the thick-walled palazzo on the crest of the hill above her. She turned her head and the claw of a twig scraped her cheek. She reached out to grasp at it, pulling it down against her lips and tasting clean raindrops on the cold bark.
Twenty-four
It was the palazzo gardens that took possession of Julia.
At the beginning, she only walked along the terraces when she had finished her day’s work with the children, or sat on a step or balustrade to look down at the point where the sea met the land. Then slowly she explored the four corners, and traced the grand design under the dereliction.
Her favourite place became a little space enclosed against the west wall of the palazzo. It was walled, but roofless, and the walls were pierced with arched windows to frame the view. There were stone seats against the walls, set in twisted arbours of leafless roses and wisteria. Even on a cold day it was safely sheltered, and when the thin, wintry sun shone into it it caught the warmth and generously amplified it.
Sister Agnes told Julia that it was the palazzo’s giardino segreto, the secret garden. It was very old, the nun thought. Much older than the rest of the gardens, and perhaps constructed at the same time as the palazzo itself. It would have been an outdoor room, where the ladies sat with their work or took their exercise by walking between the intricate beds. Julia used to sit on the mossed stone of one of the benches and imagine them, until she could almost hear their murmuring voices and the rustle of their silk skirts over the raked gravel.
When the spring came, Julia watched the green fronds of the wisteria unfurl like feathers, and the bronze leaves of the roses unwrapping themselves in the sunlight. She began to pull up the weeds that sprouted through the gravel paths. At the four corners of the garden there were big stone pots, heavy with stone garlands of flowers and fruit. Julia had never looked closely at the gnarled and shapeless trees that grew in the pots, but now they budded and the buds swelled and burst into white flowers flushed with red. The strengthening sunshine distilled their fragrant scent, and Julia realised that they were lemon trees.
She saw that the secret garden was beginning to divulge its secrets, and she let herself be drawn into it, forgetting her imaginings of the settecento ladies.
She turned her attention to the beds that formed the heart of the garden. They had been laid out in the intricate, geometric shapes of diamonds, circles and lozenges, the lines marked by low box hedges and narrow, intersecting paths. Julia remembered, although she had no idea how she had first come by the information, that the formal arrangement of beds was called a parterre. But the once crisp outlines were sadly blurred. The lines that should have been dark and straight had become hummocks that grew together into ungainly mounds, and the plants in the beds sprang out of their circles and squares to choke the paths.
Julia remembered from her first visit that the sad gardens had disturbed her. But then she had only been a visitor, and she had only seen October fade into November. Now she saw the sharp spears of narcissi trying to break through the sheaves of smothering ivy, and a single scarlet tulip standing in a nettle patch, where there must once have been a blazing crescent filled with them.
One evening she went to Sister Maria and asked if any of the palazzo’s shadowy storerooms might yield some gardening tools.
‘The garden has always taken care of itself,’ Sister Maria said. ‘The children like to look after the plants in the courtyard, but there is no time to do any more.’
‘I have time,’ Julia said.
The nun looked at her steadily. ‘Even after what you already do?’
Julia smiled at her. ‘Even after that. It isn’t very much. I wish it could be more. If I was a nurse, or a teacher …’
She felt her inadequacy sharply, but Sister Maria cut her short. ‘All hands are valuable. Come with me, and I will see what I can find for you.’
In a windowless room filled with the lumber of decades, they uncovered some ancient implements. There was a hoe and a rake, and a huge, heavy spade. Julia struggled out to her garden with them.
She spent a few moments raking the gravel of one of the paths. The detritus of broken twigs and clods of earth grew into a mound, and the weeds came away with it. The raked lines swirled behind her, and Julias blood sang with the pleasure of it.
But there were dozens of tiny paths, and after a few minutes she picked up the spade instead. She thrust at it with all her strength, but the edge wouldn’t even bite into the baked earth under the matted vegetation. She let it fall with a clatter, and dropped to her knees beside one of the box mounds. She grasped a handful of the coarse grass that smothered the bed, and pulled it up by the roots. At once she smelt a hot, pungent and familiar scent. She leaned forward, groping amongst the grass, and found the source of it. It was a clump of thyme. The hoary green leaves gave up their scent as soon as her fingers brushed them.
Of course some of the beds would have been planted with herbs, Julia remembered. There would have been medicinal and pot herbs here, interplanted with other varieties grown simply for their scent or for their beauty. She explored a little further, frowning with concentration, but she could recognise only feverfew, and the grey branches of lavender. The scent of it brought back the memory of Betty’s tidy cupboards, the shelves lined with folded paper and perfumed with lavender sachets from the old-fashioned chemist’s in the High Street.
Julia sat back on her heels, twisting a lavender sprig in her fingers. The tiny, unlooked-for link between the secret garden and Fairmile Road was oddly pleasing. And the scent of the thyme made her think of Felix’s cooking, long ago, when she had watched him, overawed, in the kitchen over the square.
The forgotten herbs were suddenly important, uniting her with home as well as belonging here, in the walled garden. She bent down again, and worked busily at the weeds.
The thought came to her that she could cult
ivate the plants once more. If they had been useful once, they could be so again. She went on, digging bare-handed, until her back ached and her fingernails were clogged with the reddish earth. The task reminded her of the herbs that she had grown in the corner of the Ladyhill garden.
The strands of recollection spread outwards and then returned again, anchoring her in her place. It was a comforting sensation, to be pinned to the fertile soil. When she straightened up again, pressing her hands into the small of her back to ease the ache, Julia frowned critically at the little patch she had cleared. It was one corner of one of the geometric beds, and even so she wasn’t sure that she had uprooted weeds rather than precious plants.
She would have to get Nicolo’s help.
Julia and Nicolo Galli had resumed their friendship as if there had been no two-year interruption. When she first met him, after her return, she was relieved to see that he was exactly the same. He held himself just as straight, and moved with the same looseness. He had taken her hand, holding it in his own lean, brown one and smiling at her.
‘So, you are back again?’
‘I am. I’m going to stay and work at the palazzo, if the sisters will have me.’
‘I’m happy to see you, Julia.’
He had asked her about Lily, and she had told him the story. Nicolo nodded. ‘You are wise to let her do as she wishes. It will be better for you both, at last.’
‘I hope you’re right.’
Julia resumed her evening visits to Nicolo’s house. As the weather grew warmer they took to sitting in the courtyard behind it. Nicolo grew a few kitchen herbs in pots, and a vine scrambled up a trellis and hung its serrated leaves over their heads.
On the next visit after her efforts in the secret garden, Julia asked him if he would teach her to cultivate a plot at the palazzo.
‘It’s different from gardening in England,’ she said. The fierce heat and the summer’s drought contradicted the little she had learned in the lush greenery of Ladyhill.
Nicolo laughed at her. ‘I make buildings, not gardens. I know nothing.’
‘At least come up to the palazzo and look at the garden with me,’ she begged him. Nicolo took his straw hat off its peg and strolled up the hill with her.
The nuns stopped to greet him as they crossed the courtyard, and the visitors in the wheelchairs followed him with their eyes. Nicolo was well loved in the community. In the secret garden he walked for a long time between the ruined beds, and then sat on one of the seats under the purple hanging banners of the wisteria.
‘It is a long time since I came out here,’ he said, at last. ‘I had forgotten it is so beautiful.’
Eagerly, Julia told him, ‘I could clear the parterres, couldn’t I? If I could learn what to plant, I could grow vegetables for the kitchen. That would bring the garden alive again, and it would be useful too.’
‘If you are interested in the history, it would not be quite accurate to grow vegetables here. There would have been some herbs, yes, but mostly flowers for the ladies to enjoy.’
‘I don’t think the families who onced owned the palazzo would mind the nuns being here now. I’m sure they approve of the work they do. Perhaps they won’t mind if I adapt their garden too, just a little?’
‘Perhaps you are right.’
They left the secret garden and walked around the walls to the main part of the gardens. They caught the spicy scent of the cedars that spread on the lowest terrace, and Julia sighed. ‘I wish I could have seen it all. Before the last owners went away and left it.’
‘This part is not so very old,’ Nicolo said. ‘Perhaps only the same age as me, although I do not remember how it was then. But it was made as a copy of the great gardens of our Renaissance. If you are interested in those, I have a book. But it is in Italian.’
‘I can puzzle it out,’ Julia said.
‘Perhaps this garden is lucky to have been left just as it is,’ Nicolo went on. ‘At just the time that it was made, many of the old gardens were being destroyed. To make way for a new fashion. The English style.’
Julia thought of the sweet, damp profusion of an English border wilting under the eye of the Italian sun, and shook her head.
‘And, Julia, if you wish to learn how to grow for food, I will take you to meet Vito.’
‘Vito?’
‘Vito is a gardener, but he will not thank you for pretty flowers.’
Nicolo took her down to the lowest point on the skirt of Montebellate, where the last houses of the hill village clung above sheer rocks. Vito was a very old man with a wrinkled nut for a face. The last few teeth left in his gums were as brown as his skin, and his hand as Julia shook it felt like a paw. He looked as if he had sprung from his own earth. When he led them out to the back of his house, muttering in Italian of which Julia could decipher one word in ten, she gasped in astonishment. Vito’s garden seemed no more than a series of tiny lips chiselled out of the hillside. But above and below the house, in their precarious lines, fat, bursting vegetables sprang and sprouted. There were early tomatoes ripening below the scarlet flowers of bean rows, tiny crisp lettuces, and swelling marrows nested in straw, little knobby cucumbers and strawberry plants and other glossy leaves and urgent shoots that Julia didn’t even recognise. There were espaliered peach trees against a wall of rock, and on a tiny plateau a fig tree and a walnut tree reached upwards, with dusty brown hens scratching at their feet. There were tangles of canes, shelters constructed of flapping polythene, and snaking coils of hosepipe underfoot. It was makeshift, without a single ornamental concession, but it was one of the best gardens Julia had ever seen.
She put her hand out to the earth in one of the beds. It crumbled in her fingers. It was dark, and rich, and seamed with straw. It couldn’t have been less like the unyielding crust of her parterres.
Her nursery Italian was hopelessly inadequate, but she tried to explain what she wanted. Vito listened, and then said something to Nicolo. It sounded to Julia like a series of snorts and whistles.
‘What does he say?’
Nicolo was trying not to laugh. ‘He says, approximately, that he can’t teach you. The only way you’ll learn is by watching. And if you must watch him, you’d better not get in the way.’
Julia beamed at them both. ‘Molto grazie,’ she said, and meant it.
From then on, Julia divided her spare time between the secret garden and Vito’s vertical wonderland. She sat on an upturned bucket beneath the fig tree and watched as he dug and pruned and irrigated. Occasionally, and then more often, he would grunt over his shoulder in her direction. She learned the Italian words for all the vegetables, and began to understand what he was telling her. She sampled the first tomatoes, and tiny sweet strawberries hot with the sun.
One day she went with Nicolo to the market in Agropoli. From a stall clanking with agricultural tools she bought two shiny spades and a pair of shears, and some trowels and hand forks and a big coil of hosepipe. They hurried home again, armed with her trophies.
In the evenings, when it was cool, she clipped the box edgings of one section of the parterre. It was hypnotically fascinating to see the crisp shapes emerge. Julia felt as close to the intricate pattern as if she had drawn it and planted it herself. She worked on and on, promising herself that she would just get to the next corner, but then the curve beyond that enticed her, and the satisfaction of the complete shape that the next angle led to. It was pitch dark when she finally gave in, but the new black lines were sharply etched against the colourless gravel. In the morning she could hardly straighten her back, and there were oozing blisters in the palms of her hands. She was impatient to continue the work, but it would have to wait a little. She opened the history of the gardens that Nicolo had lent her.
She gazed in fascination at the illustrations of the Villa Lente and Isola Bella. The formal magnificence of stone and statuary and massed plants clipped and trained into architectural discipline was unlike anything she had ever seen, only guessed at under the wildernes
s that had engulfed Montebellate. She turned to the descriptions, but with constant references to her dictionary it took her half an hour to read a single paragraph of the scholarly text.
Sadly, she realised that she needed an English book if she was to make any headway. She wondered how far she would have to go to find one – to Naples, or all the way to Rome? It would probably be easier to order one from England.
It was then that Julia thought of China.
China had sold her flat in Cheyne Walk, claiming that she was too old for London, and bought a cottage in Wiltshire. Julia had seen little of her in the last years. It was Alexander who took Lily to visit Granny Bliss now. He had told Julia once that China spent her time in her flower garden, and Julia had pictured her small, straight-backed figure moving between the blue delphinium spires. But it was also China who had revived the Ladyhill gardens years ago, and during Julia’s brief regime the old man who came in to work on the grounds used to talk with uncharacteristic enthusiasm of China’s knowledge and expertise.
Julia sat down in her little room one evening and wrote a long letter to China, describing the secret garden and the rest of the wilderness. To her surprise, almost by return of post, a letter came back. It was followed by a package of books that seemed to offer Julia more information than she could ever hope to absorb. She read everything eagerly, and wrote back to China with a dozen questions that she had been unable to ask Vito. China replied, and they began a correspondence.
They wrote only about gardening, and the problems that Julia faced at Montebellate in undoing the neglect. There were just two lines in one letter, when China asked if Julia remembered a particular corner of the Ladyhill garden, that were painful to read. They touched a memory, as clear as a photograph. Julia remembered Alexander, with Lily as a baby in his arms, sitting in the same corner. He had settled the brim of the baby’s sunhat to keep the sun off her face. There was an expression of mystified pride in his face that made Julia jealous. I was always jealous then, she thought. I’m not, any more. I wish I could show them that. She felt her isolation at Montebellate, thinking of them.