The White Garden (26 page)

He’s not allowed to bat an eye, bat a wing, bat a belfry. Has to sit there in his chair with his socks up on the desk and listen while I open up the dream bank for him. Lies, all lies. Nearly.

Sometimes I tell him what I truly dream. I don’t dream much, myself. Monday sessions are one of my best times. It feels so good, making up the dingbat dreams for Goddy. I have the recurring underwater-mermaid-sex-and-violence dream. And the recurring me-turning-into-the-daffodil dream. And these things
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are all going into his great book, you know. His great big, fat pig book. And I have toothless-old-men-trying-to-eat-lettuce. And girls with glass bellies with lighted candles in them — these girls all sit on a banquet table and play with monkeys and my grandmother hangs from the rafters, dead as a sack of maggots, singing
Ave Maria
till the cows come home.

‘I tell him all this with a straight gate face, and I show no fear, no laughter, no emotion whatsoever. That’s what he finds most interesting, I’ve heard. I am so dead, he says. Of course he doesn’t know. Best be dead here. Sparkling dead. That’s me, Shirley Temple, the sparkling dead.’

Teresa said: ‘This is a very small room, Shirley. And you are making too much noise. I will have to ask you to leave now.’

‘So sorry, I’m sure, your saintlyship. No skin off my nose, by the skin of my teeth, the pricking of my thumbs. Thumbs up bums. Mind the step and steady as you go.’ She turned to Therese. ‘Putting you straight, I want you to know, I see you are a cutie-pie little killer girl. There’s murder in your eye-pie and ants in your pants. You smile your china doll smile and close your tin saint’s eyes and wear nun’s underwear and at night you tear out children’s eyes with your black fingernails.

‘I will have to explain to you that I hate you, and I know you through and through. I have seen through your eyes into the blood vessels of your brain, and I see murder-stew. All this I tell to Dr God in dreambank time. I see through it all. I see through everything. I laugh. Listen while I laugh in the bath. Cackle crackle tickle wickle. Bye-bye baby.’

Shirley was gone.

Teresa sat stiffly and sadly on the bed, the book in her hands.

It was a small green book with a brown paper cover. Therese followed Shirley with her gaze, then drew in her breath and stared out at the sky.

‘She is a poor mad woman. We must pray for her,’ Teresa said.

But Therese said: ‘She frightens me.’

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‘Oh never mind her. Look, look at the letter from Sister Michael. Think of the garden filled with the white flowers. A white garden. We could make a little paradise here outside the window; we could make a garden of white roses, a garden of snow and moonlight.’

When Therese went to Ambrose with their thoughts of the white garden, he began to see her in a new light. Here was this deluded little nun, starving herself half to death — depressed, demented, deluded, drugged, sex-crazed — and she comes up with a bright idea. Who is this Vita Sackville-West?

THE GREAT GHOSTLY BARN OWL

Ambrose took the story home to Abigail, garden enthusiast, and she knew some things about Sissinghurst and its white garden.

On her bookshelves in the morning room, a room of blue and gold and white that opened onto the sloping lawn, were Vita’s gardening articles from
The Observer
, collected into books called
In Your Garden
.

As they drank their coffee after dinner, Abigail read aloud to Ambrose from Vita’s article, 22 January 1950: In my grey, green and white garden you will survey a low sea of grey clumps of foliage, pierced here and there with tall white flowers. I visualize the white trumpets of dozens of Regale lilies coming up through the grey of southernwood and artemisia and cotton-lavender, with grey-and-white edging plants such as Dianthus Mrs Sinkins and the silvery mats of Stachy’s Lantana, more familiar and so much nicer under its English names of Rabbits’ Ears or Saviour’s Flannel. There will be white pansies, and white peonies, and white irises with their grey leaves. The great ghostly barn owl will sweep silently across a pale garden in the twilight.

‘Your lunatics will have to be supervised if they are going to do this properly.’

‘Doyle will be the man for that. He’s virtually the head gardener at the place. He’s in charge of the apiary, what’s more.

You know Doyle.’

‘Maybe I could help too, in a way.’

‘Just the thing. Can they really do it? Well, even if they fall by the wayside, Doyle can carry the thing on, if he agrees. And you.

What’s “artemisia”?’

‘It has lovely silvery filigree foliage. It’s a kind of wormwood.’

‘The things you know. Do we really want more wormwood and gall about the place though?’

They looked at pictures of white flowers and silver leaves, and Abigail’s mind was racing, inspired by the creation of a little white garden within the grounds of the hospital. Her mind

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and the mind of Therese were racing together — the doctor’s wife and the doctor’s patient both dreamt daydreams of iceberg roses and white owls.

Abigail walked, in her imagination, through the grounds of Mandala, searching for the place to cultivate the White Garden.

Her mind kept returning to a hollow that lay behind a stand of cypress trees where she imagined steps of golden sandstone and a semicircle of box and the white marble statue of a girl. White salvia, white lavender. An almond tree in frothy blossom. Pure white jasmine, snowflake camellia, magnolia. And always she came back to the almond tree in flower. It would take some years to grow the almond tree, but it was the centre of Abigail’s plan. It seemed to be a secret inspiration, a whispered poem, a little piece of knowledge whose meaning would one day be revealed. Like the tantalising creature of a dream that hovers in the waking mind long, long after day has succeeded night and the images of sleep have receded with the coming of the light.

The faint pink blush of almond froth, one drop of blood mixed with snow.

‘We used to have a great big almond tree at home,’ Abigail said to Ambrose at breakfast. ‘We could have an almond tree.’

‘Where?’

‘In the White Garden at the clinic, darling.’

‘Oh, yes. Have whatever goes. Whatever takes your fancy. The saints will want to choose some things too, don’t forget. Come and see Doyle. I’ll get him to ring you to make a time.’

‘Today?’

‘You’re keen. I suppose today.’

‘And have you ever seen lilies, you know, those huge ones like tiger lilies — only white — and you shine a light on them, and they throw a dark shadow, just like you’d expect — but as well as that they throw a luminous white reflection out past the shadow, so there’s a negative and a positive picture of the lilies on the surface of the floor or the table or whatever. Did you ever see that?’

‘No darling, I never saw that. You must show me one time.

Grow some lilies in the White Garden and we’ll have a display, an exhibition of shadows and light. Get Doyle onto it.’

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And Abigail Goddard, her hair pale and smooth, her limbs long and slim, eyes bright, lips full, teeth regular and gleaming, laugh sweet, fingers long and clever, conversation sparkling, breasts inviting, voice sexy — Abigail dresses the way the doctor’s wife would dress to call on the head gardener of the exclusive lunatic asylum, and her satin underwear slithers round her thighs, her Italian shoes caress her dainty feet. Silk and wool, in mysterious earthy shades, create a misty greenness all about her. She drives up to the door of Mandala and swings

— she is so elegant — from her shiny Rover. Hello Joyce, I’ve come to see Doyle. He’s expecting me.

When the gardener looked that day at the eyes of the doctor’s wife, he thought how large they were, how beautiful. A sort of green — or was it amber. Her hair, he saw, was soft, smooth, long and glinting gold. It would ripple just a bit in the sun when Abigail moved her head. Her shoulders — Doyle watched as she gave a little shrug every now and again — there was an arrogant sweetness about the way she moved her shoulders.

‘You could have it here,’ he said, gesturing, his arm describing a broad arc, at the space behind the cypress trees.

‘I would like to plant an almond tree, to have it, you know, as a kind of imaginative focus.’ She gave a little smile.

‘You could have an almond tree.’ He spoke slowly, in a measured way, his eyes on some distant point in the clouds.

She liked the way he spoke, the sound of his voice, the hairs on the back of his neck, the smell of earth and sweat.

Yes, it was run-of-the-mill. Lady Chatterley got away with it, but she was fiction.

They drove up to the hills one day and ordered azaleas and roses.

‘Can we have white poppies?’

‘Yes. Whatever you wish.’

When Sophie was at ballet and Sebastian was at cello and Ambrose was with Vickie Field at her flat, Abigail and Doyle were sitting very close, face to face, knee to knee in the blue room, looking at rose catalogues.

Abigail says she loves the scent of old roses. Doyle says they

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ought to have White Butterfly. And the best white tea rose is Madame Cochet. And the trailing Dundee Rambler.

The waxy white bloom and the dark polished leaves of the Cherokee. Doyle smiles and says this is only a little garden, not to get carried away. Abigail thinks about this for a minute and then she says she will also be buying plants for the garden at the beach — she is about to redesign it.

Would Doyle consider helping? Would he have the time? He would. It’s decided. One day soon Doyle will go to the beach house with Abigail to look at the garden and its possibilities.

Meantime, the White Garden at Mandala must be considered.

Concentrate. The patients — suddenly they remember the patients — those two religious women have to be included in the plans. Yes, yes. We’ll more or less plot it all out and then we’ll bring them in. It’s their thing, really, after all. Abigail’s mind is already racing to the wider possibilities of her own garden. She imagines a bank of Blue Moon roses, and walking on the beach with Doyle.

I’m a bit too romantic, she tells him.

He says he is too. They are also both quite practical. He thinks to himself that the doctor’s wife is a cool customer — and she’s a very beautiful woman. She puzzles him.

At the gate that afternoon, she stood on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. He placed his hand on her arm, looked into her eyes which were unfathomable and laughing, and then he drove away.

While Abigail flirted with the gardener, and Ambrose trifled with the actress, and Therese and Teresa hoped and dreamed and said the office, the White Garden was coming into being.

Past and present merge and interweave, giving now a present tense, then a past. The White Garden would be Vickie Field’s last sight on earth, and it was building itself, shaping its golden steps, preparing the soil, the humus, for the seeds and roots of fantasy and delight and death.

A lilac mist collected in the space behind the cypresses,
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and into this mist came flying the idea of the garden, flying on threads of thought, on finest gossamer wires, like filigree, like air and like the materialisation of a wish.

The filaments of a fine blue vapour swirl through the atmos-phere, wisps of smoke, hints of perfume blow and turn and mingle, gathering behind the cypresses, spinning and curling and making ghostly images by day, ghastly images by night. The idea of the White Garden is quivering into being, diaphanous, ectoplasmic, a mist, a sheen. Garden. Looked at another way, the letters spell ‘danger’.

There’s white, creamy white and pearly white. Climbers, trailers, teas, floribundas, damasks, mosses and musks. They choose Ophelia (hybrid tea), Penelope and Moonlight (hybrid musks), Wedding Day (climber), Iceberg (floribunda and climber) and Dr W van Fleet (climber). They order also a Green Rose, the flowers small, double and imperfectly developed.

Flower parts are all really modified leaves.

Abigail and Doyle are in the blue room. Abigail gets up from the little table which is covered with catalogues and order forms. She stretches, smiles down at Doyle, and then she begins to remove her clothes. It is a lovely routine finale to their search for flowers for the White Garden. Afterwards she gives him her lace garter belt; he gives her his pearl-handled pocket knife. For the months of the laying out of the White Garden, they meet at her house, or at his caretaker’s cottage in the grounds of the hospital, right under the doctor’s nose.

They exchange many small gifts as on this first occasion, and when the designs for the White Garden and the beach garden are complete, things are over between Abigail and Doyle, as suddenly and as quietly as they began. Abigail will see the flowers grow and bloom, will marvel one day with Doyle at the sight of the Green Rose. And that is all. He goes his way and she goes hers — hers being much more exciting and complicated than his.

‘I would like white tulips,’ Therese said when Abigail asked for her opinion. And Teresa asked for lilies. The women in their habits helped with the digging of the garden, and they helped

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to sow the narrow lawn, to put in some of the seedlings, to fill holes with water when trees and shrubs were being planted.

‘Sometimes they seem un-mad,’ Abigail said to Ambrose. ‘But then I remember their habits are really theatre, and I remember they spend half their time in Deep Sleep. It’s funny, really, having them in the garden. It looks quite medieval.’

Sometimes only one of the nuns would be working in the garden. The other, most often Therese, would be asleep in the hospital, Sleeping Beauty in the Sleeping Beauty ward where Ambrose, it must not be forgotten, would take his pleasure with her unconscious body. Ch-ch-ch just a little injection, and what every good nun needs is a good fuck.