‘The garden is no longer open to the public.’
I turned.
SHE WAS STANDING at the top of the steps inside the archway, looking down, staring at me out of a face devoid of expression, and yet she gave off an air of hostility to me, of threat. She was old, though I could not guess, as one often can, exactly how old, but her face was a mesh of fine wrinkles and those do not come at sixty. Her hair was very thin and scraped back into some sort of comb and she seemed to be bundled into layers of old clothes, random skirts and cardigans and an ancient bone-coloured mackintosh, like a bag lady who preyed upon the rubbish sacks at the kerbside.
I stammered an apology, said I had not realised anyone would be there, thought the place was derelict … I stumbled over my words because she had startled me and I felt somehow disorientated, which was perhaps because I was standing on a lower level, almost as if I were at her feet.
‘Won’t you come to the house?’
I stared at her.
‘There is nothing here now. The garden has gone. But if you would like to see it as it was I would be glad to show you the pictures.’
‘As it was?’
But she was turning away, a small, wild figure in her bundled clothing, the wisps of ancient grey hair escaping at the back of her neck like skeins of cloud.
‘Come to the house …’ Her voice faded away as she disappeared back into the tangled grass and clumps of weed that was the garden on the other side.
For a moment I did not move. I could not move. I looked down at my feet, to where I had seen the strange circle in the ground, but it was not there now. It had been some optical illusion, then, a trick of the light. In any case, I had no idea what I had thought it represented — perhaps the foundations of an old building, a summer house, a gazebo? I stepped forward and scraped about with my foot. There was nothing. I tried to remember the stories we had learned as children about fairy rings. Then I turned away. Somewhere beyond the arch, she would be waiting for me. ‘Come to the house.’
Half of me was curious, wanting to know who she was and what I would find in a house I had thought was abandoned and semi-derelict. But I was afraid too. I thought I might dive back through the undergrowth until I reached the gate and the drive, the safety of my car, ignore the old woman. Run away.
It was my choice.
I waded my way through the undergrowth beneath the gathering sky. It was airless and very still. The silence seemed palpable, like the silence that draws in around one before a storm.
It was only as I reached the path that led out of the gardens between overgrown shrubs and trees towards the gate that I realised I was alone. The old woman had vanished and the small hand was no longer grasping mine.
Sixteen
he key was in my trouser pocket. I had only to open the car doors, throw in the tools and get away from that place, but as I went I glanced quickly back over my shoulder at the house. The door was standing wide open where I was certain that it had previously been shut fast. I hesitated. I wanted to turn and head for the car but I was transfixed by sight of the door, sure that the old woman must have opened it because she was expecting me to enter, was waiting for me now somewhere inside.
‘Are you there?’ she called.
So I had no choice after all. I dropped the secateurs and cutters on the ground and went slowly towards the house, looking up as I did so at the windows whose frames were rotten, at the paint that was faded and peeled almost away, at the windowpanes which were filthy and broken here and there, and in a couple of the rooms actually boarded over. Surely no one could possibly live here. Surely this place was, as I had seen it at first, ruined and deserted.
I walked up the steps and hesitated at the open door. I could see nothing inside the house, no light, no movement.
‘Hello?’ My voice echoed down the dark corridor ahead.
There was no reply. No one was here. The wind had blown the door open. Yet the old woman had been in the garden. I had seen her and she had spoken to me. Then I heard a sound, perhaps that of a voice. I took a step inside.
It was several moments before my eyes grew used to the darkness, but then I saw that I was standing in a hall and that a passageway led off to my right. I saw a glimmer of light at the far end. Then the voice again.
The house smelled of rot and mould and must. This could not possibly still be a home. It must not have been inhabited for decades. I put out my hand to touch the wall and then guide myself along the passage, though I was sure that I was being foolish and told myself to go back. I had only just regained my senses and a measure of calm since the awful things that had happened: in Oxford, in the mountains of the Vercors and the garden of the monastery. I was certain that those things were somehow connected with this house, and my first visit here, with the first time I had felt the small hand take hold of mine. Was I mad? I should not have come back and I certainly should not be going any further now.
But I was powerless to stop. I could not go back. I had to know.
Keeping my hand to the wall, which was cold and crumbled to the touch of my fingers here and there, I made my way with great caution down the passage in the direction of what, after a few yards, I thought was the light of candles.
‘Please come in.’
IT TOOK ME a few seconds to orientate myself within one of the weirdest rooms I had ever entered. The wavering tallow light came not from candles after all, but from a couple of ancient paraffin lamps which gave off a strong smell. There was even a little daylight in the room too, filtering in through French windows at the back, but the glass was filthy, the creeper and overhanging greenery outside obscured much of it and it was impossible to tell if the sky was thundery and dark or whether it was simply occluded by the dirt.
It was a large room but whole recesses of it were in shadow and seemed to be full of furniture swathed in sheeting. Otherwise, it was as if I had entered the room in which the boy Pip had encountered Miss Havisham.
In one corner was a couch which seemed to be made up as a bed with a pile of cushions and an ancient quilt thrown over it. There was a wicker chair facing the French windows and a dresser with what must once have been a fine set of candelabra and rows of rather beautiful china, but the silver was tarnished and stained, the china and the dresser surface covered in layers of dust.
She was sitting at a large round table in the centre of the room, on which one of the lamps stood, the old mackintosh hanging on her chair-back but the rest of her still huddled in the mess of ragged old clothes. Her scalp looked yellow in the oily light, which shone through the frail little pile of hair on top of her head.
‘I must apologise,’ she said. ‘There are so few visitors now. People still remember the garden, you know, and occasionally they come here, but not many. It is all a long time ago. Look out there.’
I followed her gaze, beyond the dirty windows to where I could make out a veranda, with swags of wisteria hanging down in uneven curtains, and another wicker chair.
‘I can see the garden better from there. Won’t you sit down?’
I hesitated. She leaned over and swept a pile of all manner of rubbish, including old newspapers, cardboard and bits of cloth, off a chair beside her.
‘I will show you the pictures first,’ she said. ‘Then we can go round the garden.’
I had had no idea that anyone could possibly be living here and now I had found her I could not imagine how she did indeed ‘live’, how she ate and if she ever left the place. She was clearly half mad, an ancient woman living in some realm of the past. I wondered if she belonged here, if she had been a housekeeper, or had just come upon it and broken in, a squatter among the debris and decay.
She looked up at me. Her eyes were watery and pale, like the eyes of most very old people, but there was something about the look in them that unnerved me. Her skin was powdery and paper-thin, her nose a bony hook. It was impossible to guess her age. And yet there was a strange beauty about her, a decaying, desiccated beauty, but it held
my gaze for all that. She seemed to belong with those dried and faded flowers people used to press between pages, or with a bowl of old potpourri that exudes a faint, sweet, ghostly scent when it is disturbed. Yet when she spoke again her voice was clear and sharp, with an elegant pronunciation. Nothing about her added up.
‘I think you’ve visited the garden before Mr …’
‘No. I got lost down the lane leading to the house one evening a few months ago. I’d never heard of the garden. And my name is Snow.’
She was looking at me with an odd, quizzical half-smile.
‘Do please sit down. I said I would show you the albums. People sometimes come for that, you know, as well as those who expect the garden still to be open and everything just as it was.’ She looked up at me. ‘But nothing is ever just as it was, is it, Mr Snow?’
‘I don’t think I caught your name.’
‘I presumed you knew.’ She went on looking at me for a second or two, before pulling a large leather-bound album towards her from several on the table. The light in the room was eerie, a strange mixture of the flickering oil lamp and the grey evening seeping in from outside, filtered through the overhanging creeper.
‘You really cannot look at these standing up. But perhaps I can get you something? It is rather too late for tea. I could offer you sherry.’
‘Thank you. No. I really have to leave, I’m afraid. I’m on my way to stay with friends — I still have some miles to drive. I should have left …’
I heard myself babbling on. She sat quite still, her hand on the album, as if waiting patiently for my voice to splutter and die before continuing.
For a second the room was absolutely silent and we two frozen in it, neither of us speaking, neither moving, and as if something odd had happened to time.
I knew that I could not leave. Something was keeping me here, partly but not entirely against my will, and I was calmly sure that if I tried to go I would be detained, either by the old woman’s voice or by the small hand, which for the moment at least was not resting in mine. But if I tried to escape, it would be there, gripping tightly, holding me back.
I pulled out a chair and sat down, a little apart from her, at the dark oak table, whose surface was smeared with layers of dirt and dust.
She glanced at me and I saw it again, the strange beauty shining through age and decay, yellowing teeth and desiccated skin and dry wisps of old hair.
‘This was the house when I first found it. And the garden. Not very good photographs. Little box cameras.’
She shook her head and turned the page.
‘The wilderness,’ she said, looking down. ‘That’s what the children said when we first came here. I remember so well — Margaret rushing round the side of the house and looking at it — the huge trees, weeds taller than she was, rhododendrons …’ She lifted her hand above her head. ‘She stopped there. Look, just there. Michael came racing after her and they stood together and she shouted, “It’s our wilderness!”’
She rested her hand on the photograph and was silent for a moment. I could see the pictures, tanned with age and rather small. But it was all familiar, because it was all the same as today. The wilderness had grown back, the house was as dilapidated as it had been all those years ago. All those years? How many? How old was she?
‘You!’ I said suddenly. ‘You are Denisa Parsons. It was your garden.’
‘Of course,’ she said dismissively. ‘Who did you think I was?’
My head swam suddenly and the table seemed to pitch forward in front of me. I reached out my hand to grab hold of it.
She was smiling vaguely down at the album and now she began to turn the pages one after the other, making an occasional remark. ‘The builders … look … digging out the ground … trees coming down … light … so much light suddenly.’
The flicking of the pages confused me. I felt nauseated. The smell of the paraffin was sickening, the room fetid. There was another smell. I supposed it was accumulated dirt and decay.
‘I’m trying to find it.’ Flick. Flick. ‘Margaret never forgave me. Nor Michael, but Michael was more stoical, I suppose. And then of course he went away. But Margaret. It was hate. Bitter hate. You see –’ she rested her hand on the table and stared down, as if reading something there – ‘I sent them away to boarding school. When we first came here, after Arthur died, it never occurred to me that I would want them out of the way. He had left me the money, enough to buy somewhere else, and I had never liked the suburbs. But when we came here something happened. I had to do it, you see, I had to pull it all down and make something magnificent of my own. And they were in the way.’
She turned a page, then another.
‘Here it is, you see. Here it all is. The past is here. Look … the Queen came. Here she is. There were pieces in all the newspapers. Look.’
But I could not look, for she was turning the pages too quickly, and when she had got to the end of the book, she reached for another.
‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘I have to be somewhere else.’
She ignored me.
I stood up and pushed back my chair. The room seemed to be closing in on us, shrinking to the small area round the table, lit by the oily lamplight.
I almost pitched forward. I felt nauseous and dizzy.
And then she let out an odd laugh. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘This one. Look here.’
She turned the album round so that I could see it. There were four photographs on the left and two on the right-hand side, all of them cut from newspapers and somewhat faded.
They seemed to be of various parts of the White House garden as it had been — the yew hedge was visible in one, a series of interlinked rose arches in another. There were groups of visitors strolling across a lawn. The one she pointed to seemed to be of a broad terrace on which benches were placed in front of a stone balustrade. Several large urns were spilling over with flowers. It was just possible to see steps leading down, presumably to a lower level and another part of the garden.
She was not pointing to the book. She was sitting back in her chair and seemed to be looking into some far distance, almost unaware of where she was or of my presence. She was so totally still that I wondered for a second if she was still breathing.
And then, because now it was what I had to do, I could not turn my eyes away, I looked down at the page of photographs, and then, bending my head to see it more closely, to the one on the right at which she had pointed. There was a caption – I do not remember what it read but it was of no consequence, perhaps ‘A sunny afternoon’ or ‘Visitors enjoying the garden’. I saw that the cutting was from a magazine and that it seemed to be part of a longer feature, with several double columns and another smaller picture. But it was not the writing, it was not the headline at which I was staring.
The black-and-white photograph of the terrace showed a couple beside one of the benches and seated on the bench in a row were some children. Three boys. Neat, open-necked white shirts. Grey trousers. White socks. Sandals. One wore a sleeveless pullover knitted in what looked like Fair Isle. I looked at it more closely and, as I did so, I had a strange feeling of familiarity, as if I knew the pullover. And then I realised that it was not only the pullover which was familiar. I knew the boy. I knew him because he was myself, aged perhaps five years old. I remembered the pullover because it had been mine. I could see the colours: fawn, pale blue, brown.
I was the boy in the pullover and the one sitting next to me was my brother, Hugo.
But who the other boy was, the boy who sat at the end of our row and who was younger than either of us, I had no idea. I did not remember him.
‘Come outside,’ she was saying now. ‘Let me show you.’
Yes. I needed to be outside, to be anywhere in the fresh air and away from the house and that room with its smell, and the yellowing light. I followed her, thinking that, whatever happened, I had the key to the car in my pocket, I could get in and go within a few moments. But she was not leaving the room by
the open door into the dark corridor, she had gone across to the French windows and turned the key. Yet surely these glass doors could not have been opened for years. The creeper was twined thick as rope around the joints and hinges.
They opened easily, as such a door would in a dream, and she brushed aside the heavy curtain of greenery as if it were so many overhanging cobwebs and I stepped out after her on to the wide veranda. It was twilight but the sky had cleared of the earlier, heavy cloud.
I remember that she turned her head and that she looked at me as I stood behind her. I remember her expression. I remember her eyes. I remember the way the old clothes she wore bunched up under the ancient mac when we had been inside the house.
I remember those things and I have clung on to the memory because it is — was — real, I saw those things, I was there. I could feel the evening air on my face. This was not a dream.
Yet everything that happened next had a quite different quality. It was real, it was happening, I was there. Yet it was not. I was not.
I despair. I am confused. I do not know how to describe what I felt, though in part the simple word ‘unwell’ would suffice. My legs were unsteady, my heart raced and I had seconds of dizziness followed by a sudden small jolt, like an electric shock, as if I had somehow come back into myself.
AS WE LEFT the shadow of the house and went down the stone steps, the evening seemed to retreat – the sun was still out after all and the air was less cold. I supposed heavy clouds had made it seem later and darker and now those were clearing, giving us a soft and slightly pearlescent end to the day.
Denisa Parsons stayed a few paces ahead of me and, as we walked, I saw that we must have come out on to a different side of the garden, one which I had not seen before and not even guessed about, a part that was still carefully tended – still a garden and not a jungle. The grass was mown, the paths were gravelled and without weeds and a wide border against a high stone wall still flowered with late roses among the green shrubs. I looked around, trying to get my bearings. I still felt unsteady. A squirrel sprang from branch to branch of a huge cedar tree to my right, making me start, but the old woman did not seem to notice, she simply walked on, and her walk was quite steady and purposeful, not faltering or cautious as I would have expected.