The White Garden (2 page)

Mandala

7

wait with the body. The matron told the gatekeeper to open the gates for the authorities.

Ambrose waited on the steps of the clinic until the ambulance and the police came into sight. He took everyone down the gravel path to the White Garden. He hoped and half expected, in a mad, naive way, that the body might have vanished, disappeared into thin air, that he would have to explain his hallucination. He would say, ‘I don’t know what I was thinking of, Inspector. I could have sworn there was a woman lying dead in this part of the grounds. Dead for at least twelve hours. She was an ex-patient of mine, a woman I have not really thought of now for years, and she came to see me yesterday, saying she was depressed, and wearing such bright clothing, gaudy, odd.

It seemed to me that she had died on the steps leading down to this little garden. Because of her depression I had made arrangements for her to come back to the hospital in two days for some treatment. A joke, that would be it. She would be playing a joke on me. I wonder why. The patients do strange things. And yet I swear she was dead. It was a corpse I saw. I realise now I need a holiday, some swimming and golf and lying in the sun.’

But Ambrose led the ambulance men up the gravel path, and for a moment it seemed everybody paused as the splash of red and green and yellow of Vickie’s clothing caught their eye. Then they hurried forward. Local police arrived, and two policemen stood among the stalks of agapanthus while the ambulance officers pronounced the woman dead. The empty ambulance drove away; the police called the coroner’s undertaker and the CIB.

‘Yes,’ Ambrose said to the detective sergeant, ‘I knew the young woman. She’s a patient I haven’t seen for about two years. At least, until yesterday.’

‘What time was that, doctor?’

‘I think it was at lunch time. Yes, she was my last appointment before lunch. She was depressed. I made arrangements for her to come to the clinic for treatment in two days’ time. Her name is Miss Field. Victoria. I called her Vickie. First names are used at the clinic.’

The uniformed policemen stood among the flowers like sen-8

The White Garden

tries, waiting for some signal from the CIB sergeant. They sealed off the area around the White Garden with tapes, and it became the Crime Scene. Forensic officers from the Crime Scene Unit came. Photographs were taken, drawings, diagrams and notes.

Vickie had died, probably from asphyxiation.

‘Was she asthmatic, do you know?’ the police doctor said to Ambrose.

‘I fancy she was. Yes, I think so. I would need to check her records.’

The Homicide Squad arrives and the Body of the Deceased is taken away in the undertaker’s long black hearse, escorted by police cars. Off to the City Morgue. The body is now an Exhibit.

Ambrose rings his solicitor.

‘Hugh,’ he says, ‘I found the blasted body, for Christ’s sake.

And I was more or less the last person to see the bitch alive.’

That night there was a storm. Most houses in the city were filled with vigorous discussions and thoughts of the man who had been executed in the morning. The home of Vickie Field’s parents and sisters and brother was filled with anguish, sorrow and bewilderment at the sudden loss of their brightest star.

Ambrose Goddard had dinner at home with Abigail, his wife.

They didn’t draw the curtains, but sat at the table by the light of the candles and watched the storm as it illuminated and tormented the garden. Ambrose told Abigail about the awful thing that had happened at the clinic. A patient died in the garden, actually in the White Garden. Abigail drew her breath in.

‘In the White Garden, my beautiful White Garden. Somebody died in my garden?’

‘They think she must have had an asthma attack or something. Very odd. She was a rather odd woman really. I treated her about two years ago. Then she came in yesterday morning and said she was depressed. Yet she was dressed up in a big red hat and crazy bright clothes. All I did was get the girl to make an appointment for her to come back for treatment. I feel I should have admitted her there and then. This thing could have been avoided.’

‘But she didn’t take an overdose or anything?’

Mandala

9

‘Didn’t look like it. Anyhow, who takes an overdose and goes and carks it in the grounds of a hospital?’

‘They do funny things sometimes.’

‘Damned funny. But no, it seems she must have had some kind of episode, asthma attack. We’ll know before too long. The
last
thing I need is a body in the garden. What’s this, summer pudding?’

They had the red summer fruits very cold with cream. With each flash of lightning their faces were momentarily blue, and blue flares would be struck from the silver knives on the table.

It was late. The children were asleep. Ambrose was very tired.

‘You need a good holiday. You put so much of yourself into the hospital. We should get away and play some golf, go swimming, lie in the sun on a tropical island.’

‘You know it isn’t possible, Abby.’

‘I know. Just dreaming.’

FACSIMILE

The autopsy report on Vickie Field said the deceased suffered from an allergy to bee-sting. Death by asphyxiation resulted from acute laryngeal oedema arising from anaphylactic shock, which had occurred following the stings of two bees to the throat.

The police report gave a description of Vickie’s clothing: Red hat, green jacket, yellow skirt. The deceased was wearing boots and stockings. She was not wearing underwear, was naked beneath her skirt and jacket, save for a lace garter belt and silk stockings. The stockings and the garter belt were scarlet. The deceased had been sitting on the step, enjoying the sunshine of the summer afternoon, when two bees crawled or flew into the folds of her collar and proceeded to sting her on the throat. The body of one bee was found, the other must have fallen into the garden. The death was accidental, caused by suffocation as a result of laryngeal oedema, which was in turn the result of the action of bee venom, introduced locally into the bloodstream by two bee-stings on the throat. The condition was exacerbated by the presence in the deceased of an allergy to bee-venom. Death probably ensued within ten minutes of the initial sting.

When Vickie was a schoolgirl they used to call her Miss Adventure. She was always in trouble of one kind or another.

Her old schoolmates remembered that she was never ordinary, and could always get attention whenever she wanted it. They knew she would become an actress, never thought this awful thing would happen, talked about how scary it was because it seemed it could happen to anyone. Allergies could come on so suddenly. One woman said she knew a man who had been eating shellfish all his life, and then one night at dinner everyone had prawns, and this man just swelled up suddenly and was dead at the table in two minutes.

They wondered if she knew she was allergic to bees.

‘Yes,’ one of them said, ‘I think she told me once she was.

Allergic to bees. I
think
it was her.’

Facsimile

11

‘She was wearing red stockings.’

‘Oh, you know Vickie. And she wasn’t even wearing underpants, I heard.’

‘She hardly ever did. When she was at school she used to do cartwheels in the train in front of the boys. So everybody knew she didn’t wear underpants.’

Vickie’s yellow Toyota was parked in the street outside her flat and from time to time her phone would ring. The floor of her bedroom was littered with clothes and shoes when her older sister Eleanor came to collect everything and clean the flat. Eleanor packed the hats, scarves, velvet jackets and the jewellery, as well as photographs and letters and a jumble of personal papers. She found abook with Ambrose Goddard’s name written in it and took it to Mandala. Ambrose met her in the foyer and took her into his office where he expressed his sadness at her sister’s death, and told her that he felt a kind of personal responsibility because the tragedy had happened in the grounds of the clinic.

‘Nobody ever thought the beehives on the property would cause a thing like this,’ he said to Eleanor, and gave her a pot of honey. ‘The patients design and paint the labels on the pots by hand, and the pots themselves are made in occupational therapy.’ By this time he was looking past Eleanor, gazing out the window at the sky as he went on with a familiar speech.

‘Some of the patients have gone on to become potters, gone out into the world with a fine new skill. They are well regarded in the art world. There’s Sybil Cavallini for example. Did you see the special they did on her on television? Her things are now collectors’ items and yet before she came here as a patient she had never worked with clay. In fact, she had a phobia, wouldn’t touch dirt of any kind. Washed her hands all the time.’

His gaze came back to Eleanor and he saw that her eyes resembled the eyes of her dead sister.

‘It is a very sad time for you,’ he said, and showed her out.

She was not nearly as pretty as Vickie, and there was a kind of dullness and seriousness about her that irritated Ambrose.

Respectable young woman wearing a brown floral dress.

News of the death in the garden was kept from the patients at
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The White Garden

the clinic. They saw no newspapers or television, had no radios.

A man was hanged; a woman died in a garden; somewhere there was a war. The patients at Mandala were sealed off from these events. Their visitors were asked to be quiet about the woman’s death. The clinic was its own world, untouched as far as was possible by the world outside. Some visitors who had heard about what happened to Vickie, inquisitive, keen to see where the promising young depressed actress had died, walked down to the White Garden where they shivered and stood on the step and imagined they saw bees.

These visitors, thinking all the time about the dead woman, inspected the gladioli, which were so white and pure. They admired the oleander blooming white in the background. One visitor told another visitor the story of the Roman army that was wiped out when they ate porridge stirred with the poisonous twig of an oleander. With sharp, knowing fingers the visitors would pinch cuttings from the plants growing in this special and now tragic garden. As if, by taking home a bit of white geranium to grow in their own flowerbeds, they could somehow be close to and yet protected from the strange death of Vickie Field. Friendships sometimes grew up among regular visitors to Mandala, and people would exchange cuttings from their own gardens along with information about the patients’ treatments.

Being able to discuss with knowledge the merits of LSD and ECT and OT and Deep Sleep and Sodium Amytal with Ritalin and Largactil and all the rest gave them a thrill of power over the dangers and mysteries of sickness of the mind. They were above and beyond insanity themselves. Sometimes romance would bloom among the visitors as they exchanged their phar-macological and horticultural chat:

‘The women who keep the bees are doing it as part of OT.’

‘This White Garden’s OT too.’

‘Yes, two of the long-term patients designed it and everything, and they maintain it. They’re both nuns of some kind I think.’

‘Look at the double white petunia.’

‘I’ve got that at home.’

‘I wonder …’

Facsimile

13

‘Of course. I’ll pot some for you.’

And before long they would be visiting each other’s gardens, which would lead to each other’s kitchens, which were not far from each other’s bedrooms. And so on.

The press was not interested in the death of an unknown actress in the grounds of a psychiatric clinic. It was not, after all, murder, not suicide, not the strike of lightning. There was a short report saying that a woman (28) had been found dead in the grounds of Mandala suffering from the effect of insect bites. As if the announcement of her age somehow explained something; or as if she was woman number twenty-eight, the latest in a line of dead women found in the grounds of the clinic. As if the insects were to be expected. As if the clinic was ordinary, its grounds like the grounds of any other hospital.

No hint of the fact that an actress imitating an English novelist had died in an imitation of the novelist’s garden, or even that a real and lovely woman had been stung by a real and angry bee.

There was a funeral at the tiny wooden church near Vickie’s parents’ place. Reports on the death and related matters were taken at the local police station — statements from Ambrose and the ambulance men and the guard on the hospital gate who saw Vickie arrive in a cab. A statement from the cab driver who said she had been very cheerful. Six months after that there was a coroner’s inquiry. Nothing amiss was found. The case was closed. When she died the public was in thrall to the story of the man who was hanged for shooting the prison guard. Later there were other stories. Vickie Field and her fatal allergy to bees was of no interest to the world, a small death in an obscure place — although the White Garden occasionally caught the imagination of the writers of gardening pages.

This garden was a small facsimile, an imitation, a gesture, a tribute to the White Garden that Vita Sackville-West made in Kent. What can have inspired the patients to choose to imitate that garden far away? The patients were particularly interested, it seemed, in the works of the writer. They were cultured and educated patients who were given every opportunity to bring themselves to health of mind and body. The doctor’s wife was
devoted
to the idea of the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in
14

The White Garden

Kent. She and Doyle, the caretaker and gardener at the hospital, collaborated in this instance to assist and support the patients in the creation of the White Garden.

On the one hand Ambrose wanted the outside world to know that he had encouraged two of his patients to design, construct and maintain the White Garden for therapeutic purposes; on the other he wished to avoid the public eye, wanted to proceed privately with the treatments and experiments at the clinic until he was ready to publish his great work. For over ten years Ambrose had been writing
Illumination
, a treatise on the treatment of deluded patients, showing how the long and careful nurture and observation of delusion could lead to remarkable insights into the human mind, and even to the eventual recovery of the patients themselves. Far from simply writing these sufferers off and letting them live and die in their deluded state, or attempting to bring them out of the delusion, Ambrose worked to
use
the delusion itself to bring about the recovery of a normal life. The idea owed something to the practice of R D Laing at Kingsley Hall, but was even more unorthodox and revolutionary. Ambrose intended his book to burst upon an unsuspecting world. No point having a lot of journalists poking about the place getting wind of what was going on, writing up stories giving vent to their own half-baked ideas. A woman from
Vogue
rang wanting to know what was the connection between the White Garden at Mandala and Vita Sackville-West’s White Garden in Kent. The matron who took the call said she knew nothing about a garden in Kent and the doctor was giving no interviews at all.