The White Garden (23 page)

Two days before the twentieth anniversary of my sister’s death, Ambrose Goddard drove his grey Mercedes to a lonely place on a dirt road not far from his seaside retreat, formerly the home of his wife’s family. He drank half a bottle of cheap Scotch, put his Ruger Blackhawk in his mouth and pulled the

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trigger. A girl out riding early in the morning found him, the remains of him. The windows misted with a coating of brain tissue and blood, sharp fragments of skull and clumps of bloody hair blasted about the inside of the car. The girl was the same age as I had been when Vickie died, and by coincidence or whatever you call it her name was Vickie too. I realise those small coincidences mean absolutely nothing, but I can’t help thinking about them.

I read it in the paper. Then later I read a longer account in a magazine. How he went to the house by the sea for a few days of rest, how the house was afterwards found to be filthy, a shambles, full of empty whisky bottles and vomit and thousands of scattered pills of all kinds and colours — confetti, it said in the paper, a confetti of sleeping pills and antidepressants. On a gold velvet sofa there were
millions
of white capsules like the eggs of some terrible spider, and somebody had attempted to set fire to the sofa. In a large basement room where there was a billiard table and a bar, the doctor’s dogs, two beautiful wolfhounds, lay dead. They had been chained, each to a separate table leg, and shot. With a pistol, at close range.

Going back to the time when Vickie died — I went into a kind of trance for a long time, and I was not really in touch with reality. And yet I threw myself into my school work and I got good results in my exams. I had always talked about following Vickie and going on the stage, but now I became timid and I retreated, too shy to be an actress, often too shy to speak to anybody. I went instead to university and studied to be a librarian and really became the opposite of Vickie. My body seemed to obey my wish to become almost invisible. I look into my eyes and I think that they are dull. And I remember the spark and fire in my dead sister’s eyes. My clothes are the conservative clothes of an old-fashioned librarian. Whatever became of Vickie’s midnight blue velvet evening gown? Vickie would be shocked if she could see me. What a dreary creature, she would have thought.

She
was going to be the best actress in the country, in the whole world. That’s what we used to say. I always wear Vickie’s watch.

Sometimes I wear the moonstones.

I have a sense of purpose now — unravelling the story of
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Vickie’s death, a story that must include the stories of so many other people. I can imagine Vickie saying, can hear her saying: It’s weird, how all these stories came together in a bee-sting, really weird. Perhaps I have been invisible for so long, just long enough for the truth to begin to come to the surface. When the truth is out, maybe I will burst forth too, like a fabulous fresh butterfly, showing my wings to the sun.

Actually I was wearing the moonstones when I met Ivan Quinn. It was 1989 and we were both at an in-service weekend for municipal librarians. We played a game of croquet and then we were smoking outside in the sunlight and having a drink.

Ivan said, ‘Laura Field. Field. That’s the name of one of my nuisance files.’ When I asked him what he meant he said that one of his jobs at the library was to go through the lost and unreturned books. But apart from the day-to-day job of it, he was also doing a PhD on returns, overdue books, and lost books.

When the library went onto computer in the mid-seventies, all the old files were stored in a cupboard, waiting to be thrown out. They never were thrown out, and Ivan took them home instead. He said they were like gold to him, these old card files of books and people. Just last week, he said, he was going through E and F, and there was a woman called Victoria Field who had had a book out for over twenty years.

I told him then that Vickie was my sister, and that she must have had the book out when she died. He was terribly embarrassed. But suddenly, for me, it was as if a light had gone on somewhere. I asked if he remembered what book it was, and he said he was sure it was
The Eagle and the Dove
by Vita Sackville-West. It was the book Vickie showed me the night before she died, and I began to realise Ivan might have just said the most important words I had ever heard. The red book went missing after Vickie died. What did that mean? Then I realised that he was saying the words many years too late. But perhaps not. For years I had searched my life and mind for a reason for Vickie’s death. If the book had been among her things, Eleanor or someone would have sent it back to the library. Or perhaps not. There were so many unknown bits, after all this time. But something told me the lost library book mattered somehow. I

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seemed to remember the green jacket coming home, and Vickie’s red boots — and the skirt and hat that Mum had to return to the costume department at the theatre. But what had happened to
The Eagle and the Dove
by Vita Sackville-West?

It came out at the inquiry that Vickie was dressed up to resemble a portrait of Vita, and this was seen to be odd, but people reasoned it was because she was visiting the White Garden at the hospital, and had such a wild, dramatic streak.

‘That,’ people said, ‘is just the sort of thing Vickie Field would do, dress up like Vita Sackville-West and pay a visit to a White Garden.’ But I always wondered how that piece of play-acting tied in with what Ambrose Goddard said about Vickie coming to see him because she was depressed. If she was so depressed, why was she dressing up in all that stuff? She didn’t seem to be depressed the night before she died. The taxi driver even described her as cheerful. But I was only sixteen, and I couldn’t express my thoughts and feelings on all this at the time.

I had to keep telling myself that the clothes and the visit to the doctor were things I could never explain, and that the bee-stings were just fate, coincidence. They could happen to anyone

— and anyone who was allergic could die in a few minutes. I had even forgotten the book Vickie said was part of the costume.

Until Ivan said at the conference that it had never been returned to the library.

THE BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE

There was once a girl whose hair was as radiant as sunbeams and whose eyes were as bright as stars. She was studious and good, reading her Latin in the classroom and helping in her father’s garden. On summer afternoons she would put down her rake and her shovel and sit among the purple flags beside the fishpond, reading her books. The fish which were jewelled like the walls of a robber’s cave would break the surface of the water and talk to her.

One day, when the girl’s head was bent over the pages of the book, her eyes downcast, she failed to see the evil one who chanced upon her. In the guise of a noble lord in suede and velvet with dark locks and glittering eyes, he quietly observed the girl at her task. Emerging from the bushes, he spoke to her in smooth and silken tones.

Before very long he said to her: ‘Put down your little red book, my dear, and trust me, for I will tell you all you need to know. See here.’ And he plucked the book from her gentle grasp, coaxed her until she lay back among the flags, and took her there and then, swift as the sting of a deadly insect, for his seed was poison and his heart was black.

The dead girl lay by the fishpond and the lord rose to his feet and made his way out of the garden and across the fields to his home. The red book slipped from the water’s edge and slid beneath the surface of the pond where the fish swam round it in wonder and amazement. Realising that the girl was dead, they decided that the only thing to do was to swallow the book. And so the largest fish opened wide its shining jaws and with one great gulp it ate the little red book with all its knowledge.

The years passed, and the girl with hair like sunbeams and eyes like stars was almost forgotten. Almost, but not quite. For her little sister forever wondered what had happened to the girl, and what had become of the little red book. She travelled the world in search of an answer. She went along the highways and the oceans, and everywhere she went she asked the question:

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‘Have you seen my sister’s little red book?’ until people thought she must be simple, and, for the fun of it, sent her on wild goose chases and introduced her to red herrings. And time went on and time went on and the little sister met kings and prime ministers and emperors and doctors and simple folk. Some were good and some were bad, but none could tell her where she could find her sister’s book.

Until one evening she chanced to sit down to supper in the hall of a wise man in the mountains. She could hear the music of dulcimers and fancied also she could catch from time to time the songs of angels.

‘I am seeking my dead sister’s red book of knowledge. Have you seen it anywhere?’ she said.

‘I have seen nothing, for I am blind,’ the wise man said. ‘For this I am sorry. But you may have the honour of cutting into portions this great fish I caught this morning in the river.’ And so she took the silver knife and fork and she began to cut the fish. And as she sliced into the sweet white flesh she heard the angels singing louder, and the dulcimers playing more insistently, and she saw a pale unearthly light hovering around the fish that lay on the plate staring up at her. ‘I think this is a most unusual fish,’ she said. And the wise man said, ‘So it is.’

When she had cut the fish, there in its belly lay the little red book, open at the page her sister had been reading. A chill ran through the dining room, and as the girl and the wise man held their breath, there entered a beautiful woman with hair as gold as sunbeams and with eyes that sparkled like the stars.

So the sisters were reunited and they feasted on the fish.

They ate the book as well. You can be sure the evil lord was punished for his crimes once and for all. And the mouth of the person who last told all this is still warm.

‘Victoria Field never returned her library book,’ Ivan said.

‘Victoria was my sister. She died.’

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Ambrose Goddard was dead. Mandala was only a hideous memory.

It lived on in the hearts of people who had been hurt by it, people whose lives had been altered by the death at Mandala of a wife, a husband, a child; people who had almost died themselves; people whose minds had been shredded by psychedelic drugs or by ECT.

Ivan Quinn was intrigued by Laura’s desire to find the lost library book. Michael Bartlett, he said, was a good place to start because Michael had taught Laura at university and was likely to be sympathetic, and because Michael’s wife had died at Mandala.

Laura went round and round in her mind, chasing the idea that in going to Michael for help she would transgress some rule of decent behaviour. His wife had died in the Deep Sleep ward.

Would he thank Laura for reminding him of that? And yet she had to know, had to begin somewhere.

Ivan suggested she should imagine Michael had the book himself. But how could Michael possibly have it? Who gave it to him; who took it from the dead body of Vickie? What if Vickie hadn’t even
had
the book in the garden. Laura’s mind was spinning with the possibilities. She would wake suddenly in the middle of the night and imagine that Michael Bartlett had died, that her only link with Vickie and the book had died in his sleep, fallen under a bus, been caught in terrorist crossfire at an international airport, suffered the fatal attack of a large dog in a suburban park.

Finally, Laura summoned the courage to write to Michael, asking if she could call on him, telling him she needed information about Mandala, but not saying why. He sent her a small white card saying he was pleased to hear from her, how was

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she, and to call in one evening. He didn’t know how he could help her, but he would if he could.

The hinge on the front gate was rusted and broken, and an air of faint sadness hung over the garden. Or was this Laura’s imagination? Michael had never remarried, and lived in the house with his youngest daughter, Rebecca. Michael and Laura had coffee and biscuits in the study where an orange cat with long hair and a flat face lay curled under Michael’s desk.

‘That’s Twisty,’ Michael said.

Laura began to relax.

‘Let me get this straight now,’ Michael said. ‘Your sister dressed up like a picture of Vita Sackville-West. You’ve recently seen a reproduction of the costume on the cover of a biography of Sackville-West. Complete with red book. Your sister went to visit Goddard. She never left the grounds of the hospital. And was found dead from a bee-sting the next morning. Part of the costume she was wearing was a red book, a copy, you say, of Sackville-West’s
Eagle and Dove
. This book was never returned to the library from which Vickie borrowed it.

‘And now, twenty years on, you are looking for the book.

Why? Because you always felt there was something very odd about Vickie’s death, and you think that if you can locate the book you will be closer to knowing something about the day Vickie died.’

‘Yes, because why would somebody keep the book instead of taking it back to the library?’

‘Carelessness.’

‘Perhaps, but I have to know. I know I have to know.’

‘You’re like a princess with a quest. Looking for the one fish in the ocean that swallowed the ring.’

‘I know. But it’s as if for so many years I had to accept that the official version of what happened was true, and now I have a glimpse of the possibility of a different explanation. For some reason, somebody kept that book. Why?

‘If I find out who, I might know why, and if I know why

— it’s as if I’m haunted by the restless spirit of my sister. She is telling me to do this so that she can be at peace. Something in
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