The White Garden (6 page)

As he wrote he heard the phone ringing. The sound brought his thoughts back to Marjorie and the children. He pushed back his chair and went into the hall to answer the phone. It was his sister. He answered her questions about Marjorie, and as he did so he could feel himself telling a story, sorting out the characters, the plot, the action as he went along. There was no place in this story for visions of the burning building, the seething pit of savage lunatics. Instead he said that Marjorie was resting, and was going to be OK. There was nothing to worry about, and the doctor was very reassuring. He had extremely modern ideas, and the grounds of the clinic were delightful, like a park. The staff very bright and efficient. The type of treatment depended on how things went. They would have to wait and see. There was a range of treatment available, and a program of occupational therapy. But surely, his sister said, a note of alarm in her voice, surely Marjorie wouldn’t be staying there having occupational therapy. Wasn’t that for long-term people? Michael

A Small Samurai in Lacquered Velvet
35

said they had to wait and see about everything. How were the children, he said. They were well and happy. Rebecca was such a lovely baby. Michael spoke to the children. ‘We had green jelly. Rebecca nearly crawled into the swimming pool.’ Michael said to his sister that he would make arrangements as soon as possible for someone to live in and look after the children at home.

Back at his desk he wrote that the Pentangle is a symbol conceived by Solomon to betoken holy truth. His mind was far, far away from what he was writing, and he felt a dreadful heaviness in his heart.

Vickie Field was drying her nails and flicking through a small red library book,
The Eagle and the Dove
by Vita Sackville-West. This book was part of the costume she was devising for her part as Vita. Not in a play, but as some effect Ambrose wanted at Mandala. She had to act the part of Vita in the White Garden. A publicity stunt of some kind.

The book was just a prop — it told her nothing about Vita.

It was all about French and Spanish saints. Her knowledge of what to wear came from a coloured portrait in a book of pictures from a museum in Scotland — a picture of Vita as a young woman wearing a red hat, green jacket, gold skirt. Vickie added her own red boots.

BLACK MIRROR OF QUIET WATER

It was 1930 when Vita Sackville-West first saw Sissinghurst Castle in Kent and decided to buy it. She and Harold her husband wanted to make a new garden. Sissinghurst was like Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and Vita said that she fell flat in love with it.

Love at first sight as the bricks glowed pink in the late afternoon sun. The old moat was a black mirror in the twilight.

Vickie Field read a book about the garden Vita and Harold made. She imagined she was at Sissinghurst, imagined what the White Garden must be like, imagined she was at Knole, the great fortress where Vita grew up. Vickie read Vita’s book about Knole. She imagined she was Vita sitting for her portrait in the scarlet hat and the emerald jacket and the golden skirt, holding the small red book in her left hand between slender thumb and long thin fingers. She sat on a straight brown chair with a stiff high back and gazed steadily and quietly at the portrait painter William Strang, and she stared out at the world with large cool dark eyes, mirrors of black water, shining.

Knole was the largest private house in England, and Vita, the only child of Lionel and Victoria, Lord and Lady Sackville, grew up there, climbing its fifty-two staircases and roaming its three hundred and sixty-five rooms. The buildings occupied four acres, and the land went on for a thousand. There were sixty servants. Furniture and paintings left behind by centuries filled the endless corridors, the secret stairways, the vast and gloomy attics.

The house and gardens were open to the public. Vita would put on a silk dress and show the visitors around. It was like a theatre in which she could perform and tell stories. By night it was an empty stage that she filled with the fruits of her imagina-

Black Mirror of Quiet Water

37

tion. Then she wore velvet cloaks and plumed hats and wielded a wonderful silver sword.

Statues of grand leopards decorated the wide front staircase, and other mythological beasts were painted or carved on the wooden surfaces throughout the house. Mermaids stood up boldly on their tails; birds, monkeys, winged horses, garlands of fruits swung and spilled across walls and mantels. Masks, tapestries and portraits hung on every wall — pictures of ancestors, princes and kings. Lady Sackville saw to it that bowls and urns of roses, lilies, gardenias, jasmine filled the house. There were flowers painted on the wooden furniture and woven into the velvets and brocades. In the King’s Room the furniture was made from silver, hung with cherry-coloured satin, decorated with crimson and white ostrich plumes. The bed in the Spangle Bedroom was draped in scarlet satin into which were sewn millions of metal sequins so that the whole bed glittered as the breeze from the open windows ruffled the hangings. Vita played alone all over the house, talking to her dolls — Boysy, Dorothy, Clown Archie and Mary of New York.

Under the apple trees that grew in small square orchards there were irises and snapdragons. In spring the paths were edged with bluebells and daffodils, and when she was a child Vita would go into the summer house in the Sunk Garden to write novels inspired by the romance and history around her.

She wrote in immense ledgers. She sometimes tied other girls to the trees and thrashed their legs with nettles. She stuffed putty up their nostrils and gagged their mouths with handkerchiefs. She danced in and out of strawberry beds, cherry trees, on wet gravel, among honeysuckle and lavender. She played draughts with her silent grandfather who resembled a goblin; he kept plates of fruit for her in a drawer in the dining room. She fell in love with a girl called Violet and they dressed up in silks and velvets and chased each other up and down the stairs, in and out of fabled rooms hung with dark brocades and glinting with mirrors and silver swords.

William Strang painted Vita’s portrait in the red hat when Vita was twenty-six, and married, and just beginning her adult
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The White Garden

affair with her childhood sweetheart Violet. The portrait hangs in the Glasgow Museum.

Vickie Field stared hard at the print of this portrait, and tried to imagine herself as Vita.

Vita and Violet ran away to France, Vita dressing up as

‘Julian’ and booking into hotels with Violet as his mistress. The trouble it caused; the tears and storms and dramas with husbands and families; the fun and the pleasure and excitement; and the letters tied up with red ribbon and later burnt.

Vita fell in love with Sissinghurst Castle and it was there that she and Harold Nicolson designed and made the White Garden.

Vickie longed to go to Kent, to see Sissinghurst, to walk along the paths where Vita walked. She wished somebody would write a play about all this, and she could star in it. She would be Vita. She would be brilliant, a brilliant Vita. It seemed that all Ambrose wanted her to do was dress up and put in appearances in the White Garden at Mandala. It was fun and easy, but Vita’s story had started to inspire her. She tried on her costume and paraded in front of the mirror in her flat, imagining the mirror was edged with silver, the walls hung with tapestries, the bed draped in scarlet satin and sprinkled with stars and spangles. She read Vita’s story in
Orlando
by Virginia Woolf.

‘There’s no need to get carried away with all this,’ Ambrose told her. ‘All I want you to do is dress up.’ But into Vickie’s imaginings there came a man called Paul. He worked at Sissinghurst as a gardener’s boy, helping with the clearing of the cluttered heaps of rubbish that lay about the grounds — old bedsteads, sardine tins, ploughshares and cabbage stalks.

RIVULETS OF VIOLETS AND

MATTRESSES OF ROSES

PAUL

I was there from the beginning. Mrs Nicolson would go out in the moonlight, planting until midnight sometimes. I’d go home of an evening and then when I came back the next day there would be things done, new things, all according to the plans they had. Later on she would give me apples and cherries to take home to my brothers and sisters. And was I pleased when she wrote up about the garden in the newspaper.

We were working on the new idea of a garden with white flowers — and grey and green and silver — and she wrote it up in the paper and I just swelled with pride to think that the thing I was doing all day was so new and important it was in the paper. She said about the yew hedge and the box edging of the White Garden (as it came to be known) and I thought — well, I keep all those yews and boxes in trim; that’s me she’s talking about, really. And who carried the grey flag stones then? Me, that’s who. I was always so proud when I read those things in the paper. Like a secret knowledge. I knew she was meaning me, but for the other readers I was invisible.

When my uncle Uriel died they were going to throw out all his old clothes and Mrs Nicolson said would I bring them to Sissinghurst instead. So I did, and whenever we needed sacking for one thing or another we would use old uncle Uriel’s jacket or trousers. My aunt read in the paper how we put trousers round the trunk of the mimosa in the winter to protect it from the cold, and she said she supposed they were Uriel’s trousers then, and I said yes they would have been, and she was pleased about that.

The first thing we did after the war was get a start on the White Garden. Between the Tower Lawn and the Priest’s House there was a rose garden, very sunny, and that was where we
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The White Garden

put it. Winter 1949 we did the first planting — that was the willow-leaf pear. Roots and cuttings and seeds from all parts of the gardens were brought in. And so, as it happened, the new things they bought only cost three pounds altogether. You can hardly believe that. Gypsophila was new. I suggested the rabbits’ ears myself. Mrs Nicolson always said she hoped a barn owl would come in the summer, at dusk, and haunt the White Garden. It did too. It was like some big silver spook out there in the twilight.

Mrs Nicolson collected cuttings wherever she went, and she carried a sponge bag that she put them in to bring them home for planting. She always had some potatoes with her and she would cut a groove in a potato and put the cutting in there to keep it alive for the journey. She kept track of all garden business in a big green book with gold letters on the front: ‘V Sackville-West, The Garden’. She would move things round in the garden from one place to another, and she’d always make a note of it in the green book. It was like a Bible to her, and to us. She was always going out giving talks to garden societies and it was all written up in
Vogue
. One time the
Picture Post
sent round a photographer without even asking, and Mr Nicolson was furious and he stormed off to do some weeding. Well the woman followed him with the camera and got a picture of his backside under the forsythia. It was fun and games when they printed that one in the paper, but everything always blew over. It was like all Mrs Nicolson’s girlfriends — and Mr Nicolson’s boyfriends for that matter. There would be a bit of a storm and tempest, and then things would go on as usual. It always seemed to me they really loved each other, in a funny sort of way. And they had the garden. That was the important thing. I often think of how they used to walk together in the garden in the moonlight

— of course the White Garden was very good in the moonlight, with the ghostly light of the flowers and leaves. And that owl.

Every Sunday they would pick some flowers for Mr Nicolson to take up to his rooms in London. Glorious they were, those bunches of flowers. I was proud to think they were going up to London.

We had thousands of visitors always looking at the gardens.

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41

The doves and the dovecote came to the orchard in about 1954. People loved the doves. Mrs Nicolson won prizes for the poems she wrote about Sissinghurst — and she never planted anything without knowing what soil it needed and how to get it right. ‘Build up the underground constitution,’ she used to say. She was just a natural gardener. And she talked in poetry some of the time. ‘Rivulets of violets and mattresses of roses,’

she would say. Things like that. Very poetic. And a real gift for colour. She would pick a bunch of something and stick it in the ground where she was thinking of growing it. If it worked in the bunch she knew she could go ahead with the planting. I never ever saw anybody else do that.

Once there was a time she went to visit her mother and there were no flowers out in Lady Sackville’s garden — and her Ladyship was worried that her daughter would probably be scornful about this. So she sent a girl out to Marshall and Snellgrove to buy all kinds of artificial flowers — there were velvet ones with jewels and silk ones and paper ones — and she attached all these flowers to the plants in her garden. She was a funny one. Just imagine that. Mrs Nicolson came home and told everyone, and she laughed like anything and said it was hilarious. When you consider the planning and the time and all the thought and patience and skill that went into the garden at Sissinghurst — and then just think of sticking some velvet roses into a bush as if it was a hat or something. Take the White Garden, for an example — there’s the weaving of the pattern of grey and green leaves and the little maze of box that sets off the white flowers. It’s art — it’s all art and nature all at once. And light. The way the light works and the way the plants work. Summer’s the time for the White Garden, and then in autumn it’s the Moat Walk — so much colour along the Moat Walk in the autumn. I like it here in the winter when there’s no visitors and we do repairs to the buildings as well as the garden. Some of the trees and shrubs come into their own in the winter, and the people from outside never see that. In one of the poems — I know bits of the poems by heart