Eden's Garden (8 page)

I sat in my little room and eyed them with unexpected glee. This little store of money I had earned with my own hands. I had no one to answer to. I could do with it as I pleased. My instinct was to be careful and to save it. Make a little stash safely hidden away so that I would have a little insurance against wandering the streets all night again. But the other part of me threw caution to the winds.

Poor as I now was, for the first time in my life I could choose. Suddenly, I was impatient for my afternoon off. Before then, I had felt those few hours of freedom each week as a burden. If I could have simply slept the time away, I would have done. But to have stayed in the safety of the little room under the eaves would have caused notice.

So I had done as expected, taking my way through the iron gates, and through the winding little streets to the river. Walking rapidly, with the air of one on an errand of some urgency, just as I had done in the darkness of that first night, I passed by unnoticed, unmolested, and with scarcely a word exchanged with my fellow human beings until the time came for my return.

Now, however, I had a sense of purpose, and I could scarcely hide my excitement. When the day came, I washed and brushed and mopped at full speed, determined nothing would delay me for even a few minutes. In my mind, I had been through every street, every shop and market place, cursing myself for taking no more notice of such places than as markers for my return to the hospital. And the moment the hour came, I shot out of there, as fast as I could.

It took me some time to find, but by the time I returned to my room that night I had a small precious store of paper and pencils. Colours had been beyond my means, but at least I knew where I could find them.

After all my impatience, I did not know where to begin. I tried a few strokes of the pencil that night, before I heard Lily’s voice on the creaking little staircase that made the final journey to the room we shared. It had been a frustrating hour. Something that had once come to me with such ease felt utterly beyond my grasp.

Over the next few days I tried and tried again. Still the pencil would not obey me, and now, for the first time, the

strict regime of my working day began to irk. I had no time, and no private space to get back into the old rhythm again. My Uncle Jolyon used to say that women were unsuited to the artistic life. How could they possibly believe themselves equal to the likes of Lord Leighton or Sir Edwin Landseer? Or even Mr Turner in his early works, before the man clearly lost his mind and took to mere washes of colour.

Women lacked the mental capacity, Uncle Jolyon would say. It shrank their delicate feminine organs, I heard him once add, as my aunt and I withdrew after dinner to leave the men to their cigars and the freedom to talk of politics and other such matters likely to offend female delicacy. And where would Society be without the true flowering of womanhood and the appearance of the precious little ones? That’s what all this talk of female emancipation and women being given the vote utterly failed to recognise, he added, with particular loudness, and which Aunt Beatrice pretended not to hear.

Uncle Jolyon could keep his opinions. Time and opportunity seemed far more likely culprits to me.

In the end, I gave up the attempt to hide my occupation. Lily watched me as she woke of a morning to find me frowning over scraps of paper, and at night, in a few precious minutes of candlelight as she made ready for bed.

‘Is that me?’ she demanded one evening, as I bent over a portrait I was attempting from memory of one of the patients I seen walking through the corridors that afternoon.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Oh.’ Her voice held disappointment.

‘Would you like me to draw you?’

‘Would you?’ I might have offered her gold. She pulled a face, tugging at the hair she had just turned up tightly in rags. ‘But not like this.’

‘No, of course not.’ I smiled at her. Lily would be easily pleased and be an uncritical eye to my attempts. The thought gave me a sense of safety. And I knew from the frequency she gazed into her little piece of mirror of the pleasure such a thing would give her. ‘I can work quickly. I need only a few minutes each night before you tie up your hair, and I can still work on your face.’

‘A real portrait!’ Lily’s eyes glowed with excitement. ‘Like the ladies in the newspapers!’ I’d never thought such a simple thing could give so much pleasure. I found it strangely touching.

‘A real portrait,’ I agreed.

We started the next evening. As I promised, I worked fast. And if I made her lips a little fuller, her eyes a little larger and her hair more luxurious and more curling than in life? What portrait painted for money doesn’t flatter the client just a little? And suddenly it had become important to me not to hurt Lily’s feelings.

This, I had come to see, was Lily’s time of glory. And a poor glory it was, it seemed to me, snatched as it was between scrubbing floors and holidays spent helping her mother in tenements an hour or so walk away. For now, her youth was noticed and courted. Once married, her life would be an endless round of cooking and cleaning, with children to bear and raise, and she would soon become the unnoticed drudge I passed so often in my wanderings. Not necessarily unhappy, but with no time or income to call her own. I swore to myself I would never again pass by such a woman without noting every line of her face and committing it to memory. After all, to the outside world, was not that just as I seemed too?

Absorbed in my task, I had not noticed how Lily had been watching me closely as I worked.

‘Who’s Judith?’ she asked suddenly.

I looked up, the point of my pencil splintering on the page. ‘Judith?’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was hesitant, as if this were a question she had been building up to for some time, and was half-afraid to ask. ‘It’s a name you call out in your sleep sometimes.’

My pencil was beyond mending, for the moment at least. ‘I’m tired,’ I said, placing the half-finished drawing on the chest of drawers between us. ‘We can begin again tomorrow.’

But I should have known Lily was not to be distracted, not even by the prospect of her emerging eyes and hair on the paper before her. ‘And there’s other names, too,’ she went on, in a kind of rush. ‘Ones I can’t make out. And you always sound so…’ From the corner of my eye I glimpsed her bite her lip. ‘So afraid.’

‘We all have nightmares,’ I replied, pulling the covers tight around me.

‘But not like this. I wondered …’ She paused, but only for a moment. Lily and her curiosity. Sharp-eyed Lily, who was a born story-maker, who always wanted to make the pieces of a pattern fit to a familiar mould. ‘I wondered if maybe Judith might be your daughter?’

I turned my face away from her, toward the hard cold stone of the wall. ‘I have no children,’ I said.

 

Despite my fears, Lily did not pursue her questioning the next day. And, thankfully, as her portrait neared completion, her impatience served to distract her.

When it was finished, I was pleased that Lily delighted with the result of my effort. But I should have known her delight would not be contained. First one, and then another of the maids came up to me, shyly, hesitant. Some with a few coins to offer me. I did not take the coins, but I made their portraits, thankful for their momentary stillness and the necessity to please, which overcame self-doubt.

And I had more reward than any coin could have brought me. Apart, perhaps, than paper and the luxury of watercolours. My hand was soon regaining its old fluency. With each portrait my confidence was returning. And with it, I began to see a distant hope of regaining some inner peace.

I should have known better, of course.

‘Mrs Smith?’ He called to me as I crossed the corridor, with my usual accompaniment of a bucket of dirty water sloshing at my heels. ‘If you wouldn’t mind just stepping this way, for a moment.’

His tone was even, and not harsh. But I knew it meant trouble.

‘Yes, Mr Meredith,’ I murmured, setting down my bucket carefully in a nook under the stairs where it would not be tripped over and dirt mar the hard-won cleanliness of the tiles. I followed him into the little office.

‘Please sit down.’ He was polite. I feared the worst.

‘Thank you, sir.’ But at least the weight off my feet was bliss. I wriggled my toes, wishing I dared kick off my boots. He turned back to the desk, lifting a piece of paper. I swallowed hard.

‘This is yours, I believe, Mrs Smith?’

‘I did it in my own time. And Ruby’s.’ He was watching me. He had an open face. Not handsome, not striking. Pleasant, I think is the word that might be used. Apart from those restless blue eyes of his, that seemed to pierce through to the heart of me. ‘And I didn’t ask for any money,’ I added, for good measure.

‘I’m sure you didn’t.’ He smiled. ‘And have no fear, I’ve promised faithfully to Ruby I shall return this to her before she goes home tonight.’

‘Oh.’ If anything, this was worse. I cursed myself. Well, and that was the last act of kindness I’d be trying. Virtue definitely did not bring its reward. Quite the opposite, in fact. And I didn’t mind standing and saying so in church on Sunday, if I was asked. Or, indeed, ever attended.

‘You have quite an eye.’

‘Thank you,’ I muttered.

‘And you always draw faces?’

Without meaning to, I glanced over towards the watercolour of that house of his, Plas Eden, glimpsed between trees, the lavender haze of mountainside sweeping up behind.

‘Yes,’ I said, firmly. ‘It amuses me.’ I met his gaze, defying him to ask if I’d been tutored. Which I’d flatly deny, of course. And we’d both know I was lying.

Well, at least, I reflected, as his eyes returned to the portrait in his hands, that show of wilfulness would curtail any interest he might have had for me.

I was wrong.

Those blue eyes were watching me as closely as ever. And I could have sworn I glimpsed a flicker of amusement in his smile. I wished I’d tipped my bucket over his polished, and no doubt highly expensive, shoes, and been done with it. Reference, or no reference. I could see another question arriving. I clenched my fists hard under the table.

‘And are you squeamish?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ He’d caught me on the hop with that one, and no mistake.

‘Well, are you?’

‘No,’ I said. Those eyes of his! ‘Well, at least I don’t think

so,’ I muttered. I didn’t like the way his smile was going. ‘What do you mean by squeamish? I don’t faint at the sight of blood.’

‘And the dead?’

I gasped before I could stop myself.

‘I’m sorry. That was uncalled for, Mrs Smith. I’m not interested in the dead, but in the living.’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘But when I say ‘living’, I mean where death is only ever a day or so away, whether it be the very young, or the very old, from accident or pestilence.’

‘Oh,’ I said, blankly. Did he mean me to train as a nurse? For the most part, my work had not yet taken me deep into the wards. This, I was not ready for. My stomach clenched.

‘The charity is undertaking a study of the housing conditions around the hospital. Have you heard of Friedrich Engels?’

‘No,’ I said. Truthfully, this time. Uncle Jolyon could at least be proud of my carefully cultivated ignorance.

‘A translation of his study of the condition of the working class in England was published earlier this year. Much easier reading than my poor attempts at German. It seemed an opportune moment for the Meredith Charitable Foundation to undertake our own study.’

‘Oh,’ I said, warily.

‘It has struck me, in our attempts, that a photographer, although useful, is not always the best way to document living conditions. A camera is such a novelty, it draws attention to itself. But someone with a skill for catching faces…’

‘No!’ I said. Loud enough to make myself jump. ‘My post here,’ I added, feebly.

He turned away, so he was looking out of the window into the little garden. ‘One of the women on the wards – Alice – has nowhere to return to. At least, nowhere she would care to return, or the charity, in all conscience, could wish to force her to go.’

It was like a blow to the stomach, taking my fragile safety away. ‘I work hard,’ I protested, suddenly back to fighting for my life once more.

‘Yes, I know,’ he replied, turning to face me. ‘But I take it you can read and write?’

I opened my mouth to hotly deny it. But of course there it was: Eden. The moment I had stepped inside his office on that first morning, I had read the name beneath the painting. I could, I suppose, have sworn blind I knew my letters enough to read the Bible, and it was the Old Testament that had enabled me to recognise the word. But meeting his eyes I saw he wouldn’t fall for that one.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Then there is other employment here, far more suited to you.’ He grinned, almost a boyish kind of grin I had seen once before, warming the customary seriousness of his face. ‘Cleaners I can find by the dozen: but the Meredith Charity Hospital is not exactly a hotbed of literacy. So you see I cannot really afford to let any possibility pass me by.’

‘I see,’ I said slowly. I could feel the temptation, drawing me in. No more ceaseless activity. Time to sit. Time to think. And to earn my living – at least part of my living – by my sketching. I would be given paper and pencils to work with. Maybe, in the future, even watercolours.