The Memory Garden (29 page)

‘You’re in my light,’ Charles grunted without turning, and Pearl skipped sideways out of the slatted square of spring daylight that poured down through a flight of open steps from the hole in the ceiling above. There was a ripping noise as his knife sawed through the canvas, then a scuffle and a thud as he put down his tools.

‘Well, that’ll do,’ he said more gently, turning towards her, brushing his hands on his jacket.

It was odd, she thought, not for the first time, how the building absorbed all echo so that his voice sounded intimate, for her alone. Unlike in the corridor of the house, where a dozen other sounds competed, or in the garden where the wind carried his words away.

He moved towards her, his eyes shining in the gloom. She clutched her sketchbook closer to her chest.

‘Let’s see what you’ve done.’ He held out his hand and after a moment she gave him the book. ‘Come,’ he said, and she followed him as he climbed the steps into the brightness.

The old hayloft where Charles painted bore no trace of its previous purpose. Charles had seen to that. He had, he told her when he first brought her there the previous September, asked for the building when he arrived at Merryn.

He flipped up the tails of his jacket to perch on a four-legged stool, where he sat leafing through the drawings Pearl had made in snatched moments since her last lesson, the previous Sunday.

‘I had no time, sir. Only an hour on Wednesday when Cook—’

‘It’s very fine,’ cut in Charles, narrowing his eyes at a portrait and smiling swiftly. ‘You’ve caught her in a few lines.’

‘Jenna sat for me, sir, but she only gave me a moment and she would wriggle like a dying fish.’

A shout of laughter from Charles. ‘Like a fish, eh? A prize one, I’d say!’

He closed the book and returned it to her with a slight flourish, then reached out and touched her shoulder in a tender gesture. For a moment he appeared lost in thought, one arm across his chest, the fingers of his other hand stroking his moustache. Long, strong fingers, the nails scrubbed clean and cut straight across. Pearl longed to hold them, to stroke the fine hairs on the back of his hand.

‘Today we will see what you make of me,’ he said.

‘You’ll sit for me, sir?’

‘I will. And the Knights will be struck by the likeness.’

She looked hard at him. ‘Are you sure they don’t laugh at me, sir?’

‘No, no, girl. I told you – they admire your work. They applaud your ambition.’

‘My ambition?’

‘Yes, and mine. To encourage your talent. Get you started as a painter.’

‘But . . .’ Pearl’s raised shoulders, her upturned hand, communicated hopelessness.

An elderly chaise lounge draped with a faded blue velvet curtain sagged at the back of the room, beneath the window cut in the roof, and it was here that Charles sat himself now, one leg crossed over the other. To one side stood an easel, and as she dragged over the stool Charles had vacated, she glanced at the painting propped there.

It was half-finished, but the very young woman in a wide hat, standing in a garden, the ground a riot of spring flowers, her raised hands full of primroses, was already clearly recognisable as Elizabeth. Pearl’s gaze dropped to the pile of sketches on the floor of Elizabeth’s face and hands. She looked up again at the painting and a stab of jealousy passed through her like a physical pain, seeing the light play across the girl’s lovely face, her countenance of pure joy, innocent of pain or real suffering. What did Elizabeth know of life? What had
she
ever lacked or lost? Then Pearl remembered what had happened to the girl at Charles’s party and the look of jealous dislike Elizabeth had sent her, and her bitterness shrivelled and died. She turned back to her task, selecting a pencil from the pot on Charles’s desk.
‘Will this do?’ asked Charles, settling into the couch. Pearl began to sketch, but in two minutes, his eyelids began to flutter and soon his even breathing told her that he slept . And finally she could concentrate on her task.
First she outlined the long oval of his face, as he had shown her how to do. She imagined her fingers tracing the graceful lines of his high cheekbones, stroking the fair waves of hair. How would it feel? Mrs Carey’s hair was dry and thinning. Jenna’s curls, which she had often brushed for her, were springy, wiry. Charles’s hair would not be thick and smooth like her own – it looked too fine for that. Perhaps it would feel as soft and silky as the mistress’s little dog.
Her pencil caressed the paper, as she glanced back and forth between Charles and her work. His blond lashes were long like a girl’s beneath the thick brows, his nose, a straight sweep – like this – but narrow, unlike the typical Carey snub. It was when she came to draw his mouth that the longing intensified. Beneath the lush moustache, his lips bloomed full and red and well-defined.
Half an hour passed. Pigeons squabbled in the roof, whirring wings scraping against wood. She was finished but he slept on, so she quietly turned a page and started again. His head had slipped onto one shoulder now and his body shifted into a more comfortable position, so she rotated the book and her fingers soared across the page, capturing the long lines of his body, the legs curved diagonally in a graceful S to the floor – Charles never did anything untidily.
She drew the contrasting lines of the chaise lounge and waited, watching him sleep as the afternoon sun edged across the floor and a horse in the next stable began to whicker and stamp. Wood creaked in the rising heat and Charles awoke. Immediately he arose, groaning and stretching, and limped over to see her work.
‘This is excellent!’ he exclaimed, staring at the drawings. ‘Your shading is sure and I can almost see myself breathe. Is my nose really that shape?’ He ran his fingers down his face and laughed.
She laughed, too, and nodded.
‘We must get you proper training,’ he said, beginning to pace the floor, her book in his hand. ‘How can it be done?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’ Confusion whirled in her, passion, anger. She half-stood and the stool spun away across the floor. He turned and stared.
‘How can I be anything else?’ she cried. ‘Look at me!’
His gaze took in her worn dress, the plain white collar, the cracked leather boots. Only a servant. The words were unsaid but the voice in her head was Mrs Carey’s. The gulf lay open between them.
His eyes, concerned, met hers, which brimmed with tears.
‘Oh, my dear girl ,’ he whispered, and in two paces he had crossed the gulf, standing before her. Their eyes locked. Her lips quivered but no words came. He lifted a blunt forefinger and caught a welling tear, studying it, fascinated, before it dripped from his finger to the floor. In a sudden savage movement he grabbed her shoulders and pulled her towards him, hugging her tightly as she sobbed.
It was a matter of seconds before her hands finally felt his soft corn-coloured hair and her lips met his full warm ones. The sketchbook tumbled to the floor, but neither of them cared.

‘I can’t think why we haven’t been along here before.’

Mel refastened the gate and slipped her hand into Patrick’s outstretched one as they set off up the earthen path. They were deep in the valley bottom, under the trees where the millstream flowed – or used to flow. The millpond had almost dried up now, in mid-July, and was home to gunnera plants, like giant rhubarb. The disused mill itself was now a craft shop.

‘We didn’t know for definite what to look for before. Now, at least we have a name, there’s some sense in searching for it in the church.’

‘Is Paul graveyard where Uncle Val is buried?’ wondered Mel.

‘No, there’s a family plot in my parents’ local church.’

They plodded uphill in silence, enjoying the ancient lane, the stone walls rising on either side, the electric hum of invisible insects intensifying the heavy thundery feeling in the air. They loosed hands after a while, their fingers warm and slippery with perspiration.

A mile of walking, zig-zagging through a patchwork of fields of cattle, brought them to the edge of the village, then on to the church with its high tower. They hesitated in the porch, listening to the ghostly sounds of the organ, then, deciding it was a practice not a service, Patrick turned the door handle firmly and they passed inside.

‘Hope we’re not disturbing you,’ Mel said to the man at the organ, who was now riffling through a pile of music.

‘Oh no, that’s fine,’ he said absently, ‘you go ahead,’ and began to play a sombre hymn, so they walked around the lightfilled church through a sunny haze of dustmotes, reading the memorials and stroking the wooden carvings made smooth by centuries of other hands.

‘Here,’ whispered Patrick. He was flicking through pages in a ring-binder. ‘Look, we won’t even have to go round reading all the gravestones.’

She glanced down the lists of burials but quickly saw to her disappointment that there was no Treglown. She ran her finger down the names again, looking for a Pearl. Her finger stayed at one name:
Pearl Boase, 1925
. It was bracketed with another name:
John Boase
, who had died in 1952. The name seemed familiar.

‘Boase. Wasn’t that the Head Gardener’s name in the diary?’ The lugubrious hymn had finished and Mel heard her voice too loud in the sudden silence. The organist flipped some pages and started on a rousing processional hymn.

‘Yes, yes, it was. But Boase must be a common name round here – look, here’s another, and here, right back to the eighteenth century.’

‘Let’s go and look for the grave.’ Mel jotted down the number of the plot with the pencil from the visitors’ book and stared at the plan of the graveyard, trying to commit the location to memory. The part across the road behind the church hall, it said.
They smiled at the organist, who nodded and plunged into Widor’s Toccata in F, the baseline to which Patrick began to hum as they left.
‘I love that one,’ he said in between hums. ‘I’d have it at my wedding.’
‘Would you?’ Mel said, set momentarily off-balance at the turn of the conversation. ‘It is stirring stuff. I like it, too.’ She waited but he said nothing more about weddings. A seagull cried mournfully overhead.
They passed in silence through a wrought-iron gate into a kind of garden. Only at the far end were there rows of graves. The rest of the graveyard was a neatly mown lawn, the memorial stones removed and propped up against the surrounding wall.
They reached the remaining marked graves and Patrick stepped left off the path along a line of lichen-covered stones. ‘Could you start looking over there,’ he called back.
She began studying the stone to the right –
Emily Martin and two infants
– but her mind was still on weddings.
Robert Armstrong . . . beloved
. What should she do? She and Patrick never talked about the future and yet in a very few weeks it really would be time for her to return to London and her job, to pick up the reins of her life there.
Eleanor Godwin, may she rest .
. .
Was their time together real, valuable, lasting – or was it a holiday romance, a midsummer night’s dream? What should they do? She had only known Patrick such a short time and yet in some ways – in their mutual ease, the closeness of their times together, the intensity of their passion – it felt as though she had known him for ever.
Did he feel the same way? Sometimes she felt he did, but at others he seemed so distant, unknowable. Misery descended on her like sea fog.
Then: ‘I’ve found it!’ she heard him shout, and she shook herself out of her mood.
The gravestone of Pearl and John Boase was like all the others in the row, an inverted U-shape, and the words were still clear:
In loving memory
Pearl Boase 1894– 1925
John Boase 1869– 1952

Mel crouched and pulled back the long grass to read the rest. Together again at last. ‘Patrick, she was only thirty -one.’ She stood up slowly, appalled.
‘Very young to die,’ said Patrick . ‘He went on till – what – eighty-three. They can only have been together a short while.’
‘Mmm. Patrick, I’ve just realised something,’ she said, her tone urgent.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘If this was Pearl Treglown and if it was Merryn’s Head Gardener she married . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, wouldn’t she have lived at the Gardener’s Cottage?’
‘I suppose she would.’
Could it be Pearl, then, whose presence she sometimes sensed? Mel shivered. What nonsense! The sooner they left this gloomy churchyard, the better.

***

November 1913

‘Ignorant fools.’ Charles crushed the letter in one hand and threw it into the fireplace. Pearl, fascinated, watched it uncurl, stretch and brown before being consumed by flame.

‘What did it say?’ she whispered, horrified. She had known it was important by the way he took it from her tray, turned it over in his hands, examining the postmark, and hesitated before ripping it open. The envelope had fluttered to the floor.

‘They don’t want the painting,’ was all he would say, staring out of the window, down the garden, to where one of Boase’s men was raking the fallen leaves in long slow sweeps in the pale winter sun.

‘That exhibition, you mean,’ she said, understanding dawning. ‘Oh.’ For months of summer Sunday afternoons she had watched the construction of the painting in question, Elizabeth and Cecily posing for him sitting on the rocks below the cliff, staring out to sea. She had pored over the many sketches of their faces, of Elizabeth’s still-girlish figure and Cecily’s elfin one, the attempts he made to capture the clouds racing across the sky, to find the exact colours of the sea on a fresh sunny day. The result had pleased all of them – but not, it seemed, the grim gentlemen at the Birmingham gallery.

Disappointment followed disappointment. An earlier portrait of Cecily had not been selected for the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, and Charles had failed to find a buyer for it until Mrs Carey had purchased it herself.

Pearl dropped her tray on a chair and moved across the room to touch Charles’s elbow in a gesture of sympathy. As he turned, anger fighting misery in his countenance, there was a light knock on the door and they leaped apart.