The Memory Garden Read online

  ‘Oh? In what way?’

  ‘The loose brushwork, the idyllic treatment of the subject. I’d need to see this in better light. It is definitely by P.T., isn’t it? Yes, look, here are the initials. Do you know who P.T. was?’

  ‘Absolutely no idea.’

  ‘Was there anyone in the Carey family with those initials?’

  Patrick shook his head. ‘No one I’ve come across. Perhaps he was one of the artists passing through, or a drawing master here.’

  ‘Might have been a she,’ Mel said absently. ‘The garden is this one, isn’t it? Look at the shape of the arch here. We must be looking at the old Flower Garden.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Patrick. ‘In its glory days.’

  Mel moved over to the window and looked out. The sun was sinking behind the valley, throwing the garden into shadow. After a moment’s hesitation, Patrick came to stand beside her. There was a new easiness between them now. Together they surveyed the wilderness.

  ‘Are you a gardener?’ he asked, glancing at her. ‘I’m afraid I know more about crops and vegetables than flowers. Though we used to grow bulbs on the farm.’

  ‘Mum was the gardener. She was a botanist, in fact, so a brilliant person to learn from. I’m the only one who inherited her green fingers.’

  ‘I was sorry to learn about your mother ’s death,’ said Patrick. ‘I only met her once. She came down to Exeter to see Chrissie. Chrissie was going out with Nick then, and your mother invited me along to lunch as well so Nick wouldn’t feel outnumbered.’ He smiled. ‘I was very shy and awkward, didn’t say much but I remember being impressed because she supported Watford F.C. and they were doing pretty well then. She could remember the result of every game in the division that season!’

  Mel laughed. ‘She would.’ Her voice was a little shaky. ‘She supported them for the rest of her life, you know. One of the last big outings she had was when my brother took her to a home game last spring.’

  She was silent for a moment, remembering their large garden in Hertfordshire. It backed onto a railway embankment, the sound of the trains only slightly muffled by a belt of trees. The end of the garden was a deliberate wilderness where she and her brother and sister played hide and seek unable to stop herself. TUor squabbled over whose gang should take a turn in the rough wooden treehouse they had cobbled together in a huge old apple tree. The lawn had been a muddy patch for ball games – only after her children left home did Maureen succeed in coaxing it into a smooth green sward – and the rest of the quarter-acre plot was their mother ’s. A rockery, a shrubbery through which their mother would vanish for hours on end into the vegetable garden beyond.

  ‘We all had our own little flowerbeds when we were kids,’ remembered Mel. ‘But I was the only one who was really interested. Now, I’ve only got a long thin strip of garden in Clapham but at least it’s south-facing and gets the sun.’

  ‘I’m not sure where to start with this jungle, to be honest,’ said Patrick.

  ‘What about taking some professional advice?’ Mel suggested. ‘Getting in one of those landscape architects, perhaps.’

  ‘I’ve thought about that. Maybe I will.’

  Back downstairs again, she picked up her bag with a sense of reluctance. Going back to heat up the contents of a foil dish for supper in her lonely cottage suddenly had no appeal.

  Patrick watched her and said, with effort, ‘You know, I feel I started off on the wrong foot this morning. You’re nothing like Chrissie really, are you? You are yourself.’

  Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Surprised, Mel almost opened her mouth to ask this question, but Patrick said, ‘Wait,’ and disappeared into the kitchen. ‘You’ll need this, city girl.’ He handed her a small torch. ‘I’ll walk you round now, if you like.’

  ‘Very gallant.’ She smiled. ‘But no, keep it – it’s not even properly dark yet. I’ll try not to fall down any rabbit-holes on the way. I’m used to the dangerous city streets, remember.’

  He laughed, but as he said goodbye he seemed a little distracted, sad. He held the door open for her, then a phone started to ring deep in the house and he closed the door with an apology before she reached the bottom step.

  As she made her way back round the great brooding bulk of Merryn Hall she passed the ruins of the walled garden, the ragged contours silhouetted in the misty dusk. The brick half-arch rose above like a giant question mark. A light breath of wind passed, so the coat of vegetation shivered like the fur of a sleeping animal and the leaves sighed in the trees.

  She was relieved that she had accidentally left on her kitchen light, for it gave her the comforting feeling of going home.

  Chapter 7

  Rain fell all the next morning and a curtain of mist hung over the garden. Mel sat at her computer, trying to shape the introduction to her book, but the sentences seemed clumsy, the ideas too banal. After an hour of this she sighed impatiently and looked at her emails instead. There was an automatic message from the St Ives art historian, saying he was away on holiday for a couple of weeks. That was a nuisance. One from Aimee, sighing that school was starting again next Tuesday and complaining about a dinner-party last night where she had been sat next to the spare man who had not asked her one single thing about herself all evening.

  Mel stared at the screen for a moment. Already, London seemed another world. But rather than have to return to her writing, she called up her college webmail and typed in her password, dreading the list of round robins that she would have to scroll through, but concerned not to miss any real messages.

  True to form, she deleted message after message about guest lecturers, computer network problems and the squash ladder, catching some information she had wanted from an American college librarian, an email about David’s planned retirement in June, before the name Jake Friedland popped into the box. INVITATION, the message was headed. Heart in mouth, she clicked on it, knowing even before it opened that she would be disappointed. And she was. It wasn’t even a message purely for her but a group email inviting Faculty members to attend a talk by a visiting writer. Stabbing the Delete button, she closed the webmail site.

  And sat, with her face buried into her hands. Why did Jake’s name still have the power to disturb her so deeply?

  After a while she slipped outside into the rain and relieved her feelings with half an hour ’s angry weeding, ripping ivy and bindweed as though she were scratching her ex-lover ’s flesh.

  She was making a sandwich for lunch when a piteous mewing started up outside the kitchen door. She opened it to find the ginger cat padding up and down in the drizzle. An offering of a dead mouse lay upon the mat.

  ‘Thanks for that, cat.’ She picked the little corpse up by the tail, whilst the cat watched her curiously. What should she do – drop it in a dustbin or throw it into the undergrowth? No, it would have to be properly buried. She found a trowel and, using last night’s foil dish lid as a bier, walked up a path she had not tried before, searching for a patch of bare earth.

  A tangle of high trees that might mark the boundary of the garden were as far , I’m afraid.’Q it allas she could go. Below these, a belt of rampaging rhododendrons began. She stooped under one huge bush, cleared the dead leaves and dug a shallow grave in the damp earth, then, still crouching, found herself looking through a new world of gnarled trunks and roots spreading out all around. It was like a playground for children – or for Cornish piskies, she thought – low boughs for sitting on or swinging, secret dells for dens and hide and seek where the rain didn’t reach, all bathed in a magical greenish dusk.

  Wobbling suddenly, she shot out one hand behind to balance herself, and hit something sharp. She snatched her hand back and examined the cut on her palm, already welling with blood. With her other hand she brushed away the dead leaves until she found what had hurt her – a thin shard of metal sticking out of the soil. She pulled it out and examined it, sucking her cut. The stick was T-shaped, blackened, with patches of green. Turning it over, she considered
its flatness, its pointed tip. A plant stick, she guessed. Copper probably, judging by the green, and topped with some lumpy design that formed the rough cross of the T.

  Back in the cottage, she calculated the date of her last anti-tetanus injection as she dressed the cut and cleaned up the plant stick as best she could under the kitchen tap. The cat, as though remembering her annoyance at the mouse, was still reluctant to come in, and sat on the doorstep licking its haunches with long rasping strokes.

  ‘Look, cat,’ she said, holding the plant stick up. ‘A mermaid.’ There was no doubt. The handle of the stick that formed the cross of the T was a swirly-haired woman with a fish’s tail.

  The cat stopped washing and sat, one hind leg in mid-air. It stared at the stick without interest, its eyes today as mysterious a blue-green as the sea.

  It’s the first time he’s given me a present. Apart from paint and canvas, of course. I will cherish it for ever.

  ‘A friend in Newlyn made it for me,’ he said, ‘as a joke, I think, because I love gardening. But it’s not much use in the garden – it’ll spoil. You have it, I’d like you to have it.’

  It is so pretty, the little copper mermaid. Her hair flows all around her serene face like seaweed, her bare breasts are masked by the mirror she holds ... I must hide her, though. It wouldn’t do for anyone to know. And I mustn’t think about the heat that spread through me when our fingers touched or wonder whether he guessed.

  ‘Where did you say you found it?’ Patrick had appeared early that afternoon.

  Mel, fed up with her own company, spotted him from out of the side window of the kitchen and leaped up to open the door.

  ‘Well, if you’re making yourself some,’ he said in answer to her offer of tea, ‘then yes, please, though I haven’t found you a teapot yet. Even mine’s broken. I came to fix that kitchen light if now is a good time.’ He stepped out of his wellingtons and stood them next to her ankle-boots by the back door. His feet were bigger than Jake’s, Mel noticed, and his boots dwarfed hers – menacingly or protectively, she couldn’t decide.

  As she poured boiling water onto teabags he threw his thick gardening gloves on the table and climbed up on a chair. She watched him twist the fluoresc a packet of cigarettessGoent bulb, and obediently pressed the light switch when he told her to.

  ‘That seems all right now,’ he said, stepping down.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said as he turned the chair round to sit down. She passed him the mermaid plant stick. ‘I found it in the rhododendrons.’ She explained about the mouse. ‘Whose cat is it, anyway?’ she asked. The animal didn’t seem to mind Patrick’s presence and was lazing on the mat, inside the open door.

  ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s a witch’s familiar.’ He poured milk into the tea she passed him.

  ‘Does that make me the witch? Ha ha, thanks very much.’ With a mock scowl she plumped the sugar packet down on the table. ‘Perhaps it knows I can’t resist cats.’

  ‘It looks well fed, doesn’t it? Must belong to someone round here.’ He took a sip of tea. ‘Are you busy? Only I thought it might be fun to look for the Flower Garden. Try to work out where that painting is set.’ He patted the pocket of his jacket. ‘I found some secateurs in a drawer and we can use some of the tools you found.’

  The rain had dwindled to a light drizzle as, armed with the billhook, a large fork and the secateurs, they marched up the path. Ripping and trampling their way through brambles and bracken, they clambered over piles of fallen bricks to where the half-arch hung – today sparkling with raindrops like a broken rainbow.

  ‘If this is indeed the arch in the painting, we must be at the entrance to the Flower Garden,’ said Patrick, testing with a practised hand a rusty hinge that hung from the brickwork. ‘And over there,’ he indicated a fallen wall further down the garden, ‘might be where they grew vegetables. It would make sense. Convenient for the kitchen.’ He bent down and fossicked in the undergrowth below until he dragged up part of a rotted door, across which woodlice scuttled in all directions. He threw it to one side and rubbed his forearm. ‘Ouch, these are killer nettles.’

  A couple of minutes later he had hacked a way under the arch and they found themselves standing at the edge of an overgrown path gazing across the remains of a large enclosed garden. Here and there, sections of the wall still stood, peeping through trees and creeper. In one or two places, especially in the long walls at right angles to the arch, whole lengths had cracked away and keeled over like a child’s Lego, to become engulfed by the greedy greenery. In the rain, everything looked lank, swimming in a dark green sea.

  ‘It’s difficult to believe it was once full of flowers,’ Mel said mournfully. She walked further down the path then turned, mentally measuring her distance from the arch. ‘I think P.T.’s young man must have been standing about here. Which means over there was a flowerbed, and there would have been fruit trees trained against that wall. I suppose there must be a greenhouse somewhere under all that mess.’ She nodded towards the wall on one side of the arch where a flowering plant like a huge furry blanket hung down. It shrouded the skeleton of a crouching building like an ill-fitting hide. Through it poked a tangle of trees.

  ‘Difficult to tell, isn’t it?’ Patrick parted some of the vegetation. Underneath, the remains of a wooden frame could be glimpsed. They ducked inside the doorway to see. One of the window frames, its glass long gone, hung down shivering in the breeze. On the side against the wall, bunches of shrivelled black beads were embalmed by dense cobweb.

  ‘A vine, I suppose,’ said Patrick. He unfolded a small penknife and stabbed the blade in">‘I can imagineu of to the wooden frame. It cut through like butter. ‘Completely rotten. We’d better be careful the whole thing doesn’t fall on us.’ He looked troubled.

  ‘How long do you think the garden has been like this?’ she asked, as they ducked back through the doorway.

  ‘Decades,’ he said. ‘I don’t know. It was certainly in this state when Val bought it. He had no interest in gardening. The couple who rented your cottage cleared some of the ground around and grew flowers and vegetables but Val did practically nothing.’

  ‘Who mows the grass down there now?’ she remembered to ask.

  ‘Oh, an old bloke called Jim who came round asking for work. I felt sorry for him. Strapped for cash, I think. Says he used to work here once, but his accent is strong and he mumbled. I couldn’t make out everything he said.’

  Mel nodded. ‘I suppose it might be worth quizzing him sometime though.’ She turned and stared round at the wilderness that seemed to stretch in every direction. ‘It’s sad, it must have been so beautiful once. Have you found any photographs or maps of the place?’

  ‘I looked into all that when we wound up Val’s estate.’ He explained that Cecily Carey’s solicitor had been helpful. When the house had been requisitioned during the war, most of the contents of the estate office had been packed away in one of the attics for safekeeping. Then when Miss Carey had died, the solicitor had sorted through a lot of the material with her great-niece – and sent most of it to the Cornwall Records Office in Truro. ‘So I think that is where I have to look. When I have time, that is.’ His sigh was impatient.

  Mel looked around the devastated Flower Garden, fascinated.

  ‘Come on,’ called Patrick, striding off towards the far end. ‘I’m going to see what’s down here.’

  ‘It is definitely a shed of some sort,’ said Patrick half an hour later. They were surveying an L-shaped wall of brick against a main long wall. ‘The potting shed, I think – look.’ In one corner, a great rack of earthenware pots had once collapsed and sunk to the ground, the pots falling forward, still lying where they had smashed.

  Mel caught her foot on something that clinked. Shuffling the undergrowth she uncovered a rusted half-moon, the blade of a turfcutting tool, perhaps. There were more plant sticks, too, twisted and unreadable, but none of them decorated like her mermaid.

  The previous half-hour h
ad seemed like a dream. To Mel it was as though they had passed through a magic veil – the miasma of the past. Jake, Chrissie, her life in London . . . could all be another universe. It was partly, she decided, being within these walls that shut out the activities of the modern world. Here, she and Patrick were hidden; here, they were part of the plans and visions of other times. What had these walls overheard? The sound of hard industry, metal on stone, secret conversations, tears and laughter. Here, if you knew where to look, under the briars, were arcane signs to be read in the earth – the shapes of flowerbeds, the sketched lines of a busy household.

  A cross of paths had once quartered the Flower Garden – a few minutes ago, walking across the centre, Mel had nearly wrenched her ankle when the vegetation gave way under her.

  ‘I think you’ve found the dipping pool,’ said Patrick, helping her to her feet. ‘Water for the garden. Look, there’s the pipe. I wonder where the water came from.’ But the pipe ran into the ground, preventing further investigation.luggis c f

  ‘There’s the stream running near the bottom of the garden, down the valley to the sea. Perhaps they pumped water up here?’ Mel said, still rubbing her ankle.

  ‘There was a leat,’ he said suddenly. ‘I remember one of the neighbours complaining once to Val.’

  ‘What’s a leat when it’s at home?’

  ‘An artificial stream or channel. It would have come from a reservoir further up the valley, then run down by the side of those trees and fed one of the millponds below.’ The owners of Merryn apparently had a duty to maintain the leat so that one of the mills could operate. Val, of course, wasn’t bothered. The mill was no longer in use by then, but a neighbour had a garden that relied on the leat flowing properly and had threatened to take Val to court over it. Val had grumbled about paying a firm to clear it.

  ‘So the leat would have fed Merryn’s garden, too.’

  ‘Together with the stream, I expect, yes.’