The Memory Garden Read online

  Tuesday was the day Mel had arranged to visit the Cornwall Records Office outside Truro. As she was locking up the cottage, she heard a vehicle bumping down the track, its gears screaming. A small open truck rounded the corner and stuttered to a halt. The man who climbed out of the cab looked as ancient and weatherbeaten as his rusted transport, his square face so brown and wrinkled he might have been the spirit of an old gnarled tree.

  ‘Lovely morning,’ he said, nodding at her. He walked stiffly to the back of the van, where he lowered the tailgate and hauled out a large battered petrol lawnmower. Mel recognised him suddenly – he had been working in the front garden of one of the houses near the beginning of the village on her first morning.

  ‘Are you Jim?’ she asked,_elis ces remembering what Patrick had said.

  The man nodded and touched his cap, but he was looking past Mel to the flowerbed she had cleared. A look of concern crossed his face.

  ‘You’re the one doing that thur?’ he said, suddenly fixing her with watery blue eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘No, not wrong,’ he said uncertainly, ‘but thur’s a powerful pile of work you set yourself thur.’ His accent was very thick and Mel had to ask him to repeat himself.

  She remembered Patrick saying Jim had worked here previously. ‘Did you know this place when it was a proper garden?’

  The man was silent for a moment. ‘Before the soldiers come,’ he said. ‘Parking thur tents on the lawns, trampling everything down. My dad, he wur a gardener hur awhile. Sometimes I do help him.’

  ‘Was that the last war? What was the garden like before?’ Mel asked eagerly. ‘What do you remember about it?’

  ‘Well now,’ the old man said, straightening up from his task. He looked out down the garden, lost for a moment in thought. Then he turned and gestured up towards the house. ‘Up thur, see, that wur grass with a sundial. Here, whur you been digging, well that wur flowerbeds, but thur wur a big hedge to hide yur cottage. The soldiers ploughed that up to get their trucks and whatnot past.’

  ‘It’s all rhododendrons over there, isn’t it?’ Mel pointed over to the far side of the garden where she had buried the mouse.

  ‘Yus, and further down, laurels.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘There wur a rockery, too, and a kind of cave. But that had been all grown about. The gardener, he wur an old man then and thur wur just the old lady, Missus Carey, and her daughter. When the soldiers took the place they do go to live with the other daughter up Fowey way.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a pond, with a statue?’

  ‘Ay, its head fallen off – down thur, see, where thur’s all the trees. Thur was what the old lady called the ravine. Wild as Bedlam. Good place for hiding, though, if you’re a young tacker like I are then. And the gardens at the front, too. A ruddy jungle.’

  He sighed and be mower once more as if the memory weighed heavy. Then, one hand on the ripcord, he looked up and said, ‘If you want my advice, you don’t go digging and disturbing. She’s still hereabouts, see. She watches you.’ He shook his head and muttered. A twist of a lever and a tug of the ripcord and the mower leaped into noisy life. ‘Better get on now, my dear,’ he shouted.

  ‘What did you say?’ shouted Mel. ‘Seen who? What?’

  But he was engrossed in his task. Mel looked round the garden again, trying to picture it as the old man had described. It was frustrating. She would have to speak to him again. Then she and Patrick could perhaps draw up a plan of how the garden used to be. But what did he mean by, ‘She’s still hereabouts’? Another mystery to join the others.

  ‘The Careys,’ said the young woman in the Records Office, once she had checked Mel’s registration credentials. ‘Yes, we do have a collection from Merryn Hall. If you’d like to look through the catalogue here . . .’

  Over a hundred documents were listed, relating to the history of the Hall since it was built in the early nineteenth century. A large number, it seemed, were property agreements and accounts related to the far"; font-weight: bold; er. ism estates. What sounded more relevant was a selection of photographs of the house and gardens and of the occupants. Mel made a note of these, together with the references for the tithe map of 1891 and an Ordnance Survey map of the estate dated 1909. There were also listed several ledgers of household accounts covering the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. After a moment’s hesitation, she added the ones that covered 1900 to 1910 to the request for material for her own research, the diaries of a female Newlyn artist from the period.

  While she was waiting for the first batch of material to arrive, she had a sudden thought. Perhaps the information she was looking for about P.T. might be found in the 1901 Census. She found a computer station free and called up the site.

  There were eleven names for Merryn Hall. The family consisted of Stephen Carey, the head of the household, aged thirty-nine, his wife Emily, thirty-one, and their two daughters Elizabeth, five, and Cecily, three. The staff included a cook, Dorothy Roberts, an unmarried governess by the name of Susanna James, a housemaid, a kitchenmaid, a butler, the Head Gardener, John Boase, and a coachman-cum-groom. There was no one with the initials P.T., no Jenna and no sign of Master Charles, whom the Head Gardener had mentioned in his logbook, or of Jago, come to think of that, whoever Jago was. Mel sighed with frustration. The next census date was 1911 and she knew the information from that wouldn’t be in the public domain until 2011, an arrangement designed to protect respondents’ privacy.

  Her documents arrived and she carried them over to her desk. The best part of an hour later, she reluctantly arrived at the conclusion that the artist’s diaries were mundane, all too often merely recording trivia of her daily routine. Mel closed the notebooks and sat for a moment in contemplation. Then she turned to the batch of photographs from Merryn.

  There were about thirty in the packet, each wrapped in acid-free paper and labelled. A family group on the lawn was dated ‘around 1880’, as was a photograph of the house from about that period. Mel was surprised by how bare it looked, no sign of the creeper that smothered it now. The forecourt was neat, without a weed.

  Soon after came a photograph confidently marked ‘June 1900’ that made her heart leap. It was taken from the back of the house looking over a portion of garden, the central section. A small blurred terrier dog sprawled out by a sundial on the lawn, a lawn that swept down past a rosebed to a long thin pool with a summerhouse at the far end. In the pond was the statue of a boy or a very young man. To each side of the pond was a high hedge that hid the garden beyond. In the left-hand corner Mel wondered if she could make out the lines of her cottage. It was out of focus, difficult to tell.

  Most of the remaining pictures were more recent. Studio portraits of different Careys, a group of Army officers milling about smoking, a jeep on the forecourt, the house behind patterned in red and green by Virginia creeper.

  She stopped as she came upon a snap of a young man and two girls, lolling on a lawn. The girls were almost women; one wore her hair up. Both were dressed in white. The younger girl was playing with a dog, this time a small greyhound or a whippet. She turned the photograph over. Mr Charles Carey, Miss Carey and Miss Cecily Carey, 1912 it said, in faded italic handwriting. So this nt down to his

  Chapter 10

  August 1912

  ‘Pearl? Get out there quick, girl. The wind’s up.’ Aunt Dolly stood at the window, her dough-caked arms raised as though in horror.

  Pearl, polishing the last of the silver knives, glanced out to see a white nightdress coiling itself around a tree like a ghost in agony. She dropped her rag, threw off her dirty apron, rinsed her fingers and ran out through the scullery, snatching up the linen basket as she went. A rush of wind took her breath away and the back door banged to behind her.

  The sunny August day, as still as the millpond earlier this morning, had lured the maids into draping the whites from yesterday’s wash over shrubs and bushes behind the kitchen to air and bleach in t
he sun. Now, whirling dervishes from who knew where had ripped up the pillowcases, chemises, slips and collars and cast them about the garden under the darkening sky.

  Pearl ran hither and thither, disentangling a lace handkerchief from a rosebush, lifting an embroidered tea cloth carefully from a flowerbed lest it soil, stowing everything in the basket she carried.

  One of Cecily’s hair ribbons had flown up into a tree and got caught around a branch, just out of Pearl’s reach. She leaped up several times, her outstretched fingers only brushing it. Then, gathering up her skir of Newlyn and LamornaHi, she decidedts, she placed a boot on a nubbly foothold on the trunk to swing herself up.

  A man’s laugh. She removed her foot.

  ‘Well, you get it then if you’re so clever,’ she snapped, turning and expecting to see Jago, but the young man watching her, arms folded, appreciation in his eyes, was Master Charles. Her mouth formed a wordless ‘O’.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, mock saluting, stepping forward and, reaching up easily, unwrapping the ribbon with one deft movement. ‘Here,’ he said, then laughed as she put out her hand and he jerked it up out of her range again.

  ‘Very funny,’ she muttered, glaring at him and reddening up at the thought of the figure she had cut, leaping like a deer, her skirts flying up. She turned her back on him with a stamp of her foot and picked up the basket.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, close behind her, as he pushed the ribbon into the pile of clothes. ‘Here, I’ll help you.’

  His sharp hazel eyes sought out several more items flung by the wind and she watched him negotiate prickly shrubs and eye-poking branches to collect them. He waved a pair of female drawers suggestively at her and she rolled her eyes in embarrassment, one arm crooked on her hip. Fat drops of rain began to fall as she snatched the drawers from him with a barely audible, ‘Thank you, sir,’ and flounced inside without a backward look. As she slammed the scullery door, did she hear laughter, or was it the wind?

  ‘You’d better finish up there and get them irons hot.’ Aunt Dolly nodded at the abandoned silver, still kneading her dough. Pearl placed a pair of irons onto a hotplate and set about tidying away the silver. They were shorthanded for an hour or two as Jenna had been sent off to fetch more eggs from the farm.

  ‘Was that Master Charles you were talking to?’ Pearl was still for a second. She knew Aunt Dolly missed nothing and so she nodded and went to take out the ironing board. Dolly didn’t usually like to gossip, but the peace of the house without Jenna and the mistress, who had taken the girls to stay with friends at Fowey, must have lowered her guard.

  ‘Reckon there’ll be a wedding in the family before too long,’ Dolly said.

  Pearl looked up, surprised.

  ‘Watch that Miss Elizabeth,’ said Dolly, looking satisfied at the effect she had caused. ‘And that young man come to dinner again last night, Sir Francis whassername’s lad.’

  ‘Oh, but I thought . . .’ started Pearl, then stopped, knowing her aunt didn’t like being contradicted. Pearl had waited at table last night and had noticed the youth in question. Julian Styles was little more than a boy, with his long lanky figure, his moustache still a shy blond shadow on his short upper lip, giving him a slightly rabbity look. He had certainly seemed entranced by sixteen-year-old Elizabeth, who sparkled with the zest of being treated as grown up, and self-consciously walked around the garden with him after dinner when the others were playing cards. But Pearl had thought that during the meal, Elizabeth’s glances rested more often on Charles than on awkward Julian Styles.

  As for Charles, he remained deep in conversation much of the evening with the squat dark stranger Jago had introduced to the company as Mr Robert Kernow. She heard their talk as she collected up the plates. Kernow uttered phrases in a language strange yet oddly familiar to her – Old Cornish, he told Mr Carey.

  ‘How do you know that’s how it’s pronounced,’ growled Carey, motioning to Jago to pour more wine. ‘It"; font-weight: bold; t. is’s dead and gone. We’re all English now.’

  It was obviously the wrong thing to say. Kernow replied irascibly, ‘If a people loses its language, they’re dead. We must revive it. There’s enough still speak some words to determine the accent. And if we’re to look after our interests well, we must rediscover our identity as Cornishmen.’

  Charles leaned forward, listening intently, one finger stroking the side of his moustache, a habit Pearl had previously noted. His eyes were dreamy. ‘We mustn’t lose the old stories, our history,’ he said, ‘that’s for sure. This is one of the beautiful places of the world and we must fight to keep it ours.’

  ‘Times are bad here,’ argued Mr Carey, ‘for farmers like ourselves. The mines are failing, too, and the fishing. We need strong representation in London, not old words.’

  ‘Only if we band together as a people, a nation, will we see a rise in our fortunes,’ said Kernow, playing with his unused cutlery. When Pearl took away his plate she saw he had arranged the pieces of silver in the shape of a cross – or was it a dagger?

  She glanced at Kernow’s face as she moved round the table. She’d seen that expression before, on the face of a travelling Methodist minister in Newlyn. This was a man with a mission, the sort who wouldn’t let anything or anyone get in his way.

  ‘It’ll be good for the farm, marriage with the Styles,’ continued Dolly now, cutting her dough into small loaves. ‘That young master will inherit his father’s farm and marry it with this. It’ll be a weight off Mr Carey’s mind.’

  ‘But what about Master Charles? Isn’t he supposed to have this farm?’ Yet she had seen Charles listen to his uncle declaim on the drop in the milk yield or the falling price of vegetables, always polite, but with a glazed look on his face.

  ‘That’s what they say. But what they do will be another matter,’ Dolly said enigmatically. ‘He ought to look to where his bread and butter’s coming from, did Master Charles.’

  In the scullery, away from the smuts, Pearl pulled a blouse out of the basket, tested the heat of the plate on a corner and began to iron. They all seemed to disapprove of Charles, she mused as she worked, and yet he was so charming, so interesting, so . . . passionate about his Cornish roots.

  Today’s incident hadn’t been her first encounter with him alone. A few weeks ago, Mrs Carey had announced in the middle of the day, when Jenna and Pearl were up to their elbows with the laundry, that Bijou, the nervous little whippet, had fleas and should be bathed and powdered at once.

  With some grumbling from Jenna, who needed the hot water for the copper, Pearl drew off several buckets and heaved them upstairs, one by one, to the bathroom where the mistress insisted the deed should be done. She didn’t notice Charles passing the top of the servants’ staircase until she had to swing the bucket to avoid him and splashed water over his shoes.

  ‘Sorry,’ she gasped, looking up into his surprised face. She put down the bucket and delved into her apron pocket for a cloth.

  ‘No.’ He stayed her with a gesture and pulled a handkerchief out of his jacket, crouching down quickly to repair the damage. ‘No harm done,’ he said, smiling. ‘Now where’s this going?’ Then, ‘This I must see,’ laughing, when she explained about Bijou.

  He picked up the pail and lugged it to the bathroom where Mrs Carey, all togged up in a housewife’s overa extraordinary coincidence!carll, waited with the wretched beast.

  In the end, the bathing of Bijou brought pity rather than amusement to all observers – the sight of the skinny creature, bowed and shivering in the cooling rose-scented water brought to Pearl’s mind the half-starved cats of Newlyn that challenged her with eyes that were pools of anguish before turning tail and vanishing into shadow.

  Then, last Sunday, the family had taken luncheon at a neighbour’s house. Pearl had spent the afternoon in the Flower Garden, sketching roses, and he had crept up on her unseen and cajoled her into showing him her work. Was it an accident today that he had come across her alone?

  ‘M
istress wants a party for Master Charles’s birthday next month,’ Dolly called through the scullery door as she shut the oven on her loaves.

  ‘A party?’ echoed Pearl, dragged roughly from her daydreams.

  ‘He’ll be five-and-twenty,’ Dolly went on, bringing out the dirty utensils and dumping them in a sink. ‘A parcel of work for us, I tell you. Seventy guests or more, she says. With dancing and supper. We’ll be needing some extra help then, I says, and she says all right we’ll have it.’

  ‘I’ve never seen a party here,’ said Pearl, looking up from her ironing, eyes shining. She was imagining the women in their beautiful clothes, the men polished in dinner-jackets and white cuffs, the sounds of music, the scents of the garden and the ladies’ perfumes. And the dancing. Dolly gone back into the kitchen, she swayed gently behind the ironing board, humming, eyes half-closed. Imagined herself dancing with Charles, one warm hand with the long artist’s fingers resting at her waist, pulling her close, the other imprisoning hers.

  She was aware that she watched him – did he realise? She hoped not. Sometimes she saw him in the garden, when Aunt Dolly sent her to pick herbs or to ask Mr Boase for more lettuce for a picnic.

  Once she passed him sitting on a low wall, frowning as he sketched a group of girls, Elizabeth and Cecily among them, lounging on the lawn in pretty summer dresses, Elizabeth twirling a parasol.

  Pearl stood back in the shadows of some trees, watching him draw with his strong quick movements, the cigarette caught between the first two fingers of his left hand serving dual use as he squinted along its stub to measure the lines of the garden. Until she heard a gentle cough and glanced over to see Mr Boase watching her and she stumbled away towards the rosemary she’d been sent to cut.

  Overhead, against the sun, she glimpsed the dark shape of a bird of prey, floating on the wind, then poised, ready to drop. This was a garden of watchers. Pearl turned back to the kitchen with the herb. There was Cecily, for instance. A pretty girl of fourteen, but awkward beside her bolder elder sister. Sometimes, when she wasn’t with her tutor at the Askews’ house up the hill she would follow Pearl and Jenna around the house, stalking them, always at a distance, never saying a word. It gave Pearl the willies, to be cleaning a room and hear a creak in the corridor outside, seeing the door shiver when there was no draught.