The White Garden (27 page)

Have you better in no time, sister.

Shirley Temple liked to water the flowers with a small water-ing-can, and to pat the earth around each plant.

A patient known as Molly Bloom would sit on a stone seat, stretched out in her white lace nightdress, intoning her solilo-quy. Yes, she would say, and yes, yes, yes. Nobody took much notice of her except when she attempted to pick the flowers.

Then Shirley chased her off with the hose and the pair of them were put to bed in disgrace. Molly died of pneumonia one day in the Deep Sleep ward. She had been dead for two days before anybody noticed. Well, a child had noticed, but nobody listened to her. Shirley Temple survived Mandala and was taken to live in a private institution in the hills, her fees paid by her family who wanted only to forget about her. Michael Bartlett gave Laura Shirley’s address, and Ivan and Laura made an appointment to see her.

LAURA

I don’t know what I expected, but it was just an ordinary timber house surrounded by trees and vines. It looked dark and damp and sad from the outside, and there were old armchairs on the veranda, a pile of tattered magazines by the front door. When
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you got in past the trees, you saw that there were bars on all the windows. I was glad Ivan was with me. It was scary. A man with a face as white as wet dough came to the door. He was nodding and smiling and he said he was Mr Brennan, the owner of the place, and they were expecting us. He took us into a kind of waiting room where there was a smell of stale cooking and dust and age and decay and a terrible sadness and despair. I wanted to run.

All around the walls, high up on a plate rail, they had china mugs commemorating things like the coronations of English kings and queens. There were bushes pushing up against the windows from the outside. It was a trap. In a glass case above the fireplace was a large stuffed trout.

‘Sit down, do sit down. Make yourselves at home. Tea?’

Mr Brennan spoke softly but very firmly. We knew we would have to have tea. He rang a buzzer and almost at once a woman in a floral apron appeared, her head cocked on one side. She didn’t speak, but took her orders from Mr Brennan.

‘Tea for four, thank you, Mrs Davenport. Shirley will be join-ing us shortly.’

So the tea came on a bare wooden tray. White cups and saucers with blue rims and the crest of the Mercy Hospital and white plastic spoons. There were spots of tea-stain in the sugar.

Then there appeared in the doorway a tiny woman. She was wearing an ancient dress of pink frills, covered by a navy blue overcoat, a child’s overcoat. Her face was fixed in a sinister, wide, sad smile.

Mr Brennan said to her: ‘Sparkle, Shirley.’

And Shirley, standing in the doorway like a timid child, lowered her head, stretched her coat and dress away from her body, and bobbed a curtsy. As she did so she lifted her face to us and it was suddenly, briefly radiant.

I gave her some flowers we had brought for her, and she took them gracefully, but held them in a greedy grip.

‘Miss Field would like to hear about your life, Shirley,’

Mr Brennan said. Shirley didn’t stir. ‘Tell her about your garden, she wants to know about your garden.’

The Great Ghostly Barn Owl

185

‘Our England is a garden. Beg your pardon Mrs Arden, there’s a chicken in your garden. My Bonny lies over the ocean.’

‘Say something about the people you want to talk about,’

Mr Brennan said.

I could scarcely talk — the woman was so tragic and lost, but I knew I had to try. So I said, ‘I would love to know about you and your friends, Shirley. Do you ever think about the White Garden, and about Teresa or Therese?’

Her face set hard and her eyes seemed to cloud over as I spoke.

There was a long, long silence and I wanted to scream, but eventually Shirley began to speak in a low voice.

‘Death comes in the cradle and in the grave where little flowers and pure white butterflies grow marked by death or marred by blood, married in the best sense in the grey, grey light of twilight when the moths and the mothers and the mummies and dummies carry their big white jugs of milk to the nursery stair where it’s dark at night on the stair, very dark in hot weather and a man will leap from the shadows and rush and rush into your arms with famous discoveries of mortal hopes and buzzing of windswept bees and many, many dressmakers sail away in a sing boat, imagine, a single boat, with silks and satins and buttons and bows and you’re all mine in buttons and bows.’

I became desperate and I said: ‘A little red book. Do you remember a little red book?’

‘All the books were red in those days. Red book, red chook, black look, black snake. Oh I remember the black snake all right.

More than one. She had a big black bag of big black snakes and she tried to tell us they were licorice. But I knew the difference between skin and bone, skin and bone and frog and toad and jam and honey. The bees! So many bees and so much honey.

Sweets to the sweet and gather ye rosebuds if that’s what you want. Is that what you want, my dear? We sing for our supper, you know. Sing, sing, sing for our supper. You have to admit, things are not what they were. You just have to admit that.

Roly-poly pudding. Golden syrup. I prefer honey. I really would prefer honey.’

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‘The bees,’ I said, ‘what do you remember about the bees?’

I was whispering, and she was whispering.

‘Everything, my dear. I remember everything about the bees.

And the fleas that tease in the high Pyrenees.’

I was silenced. Shirley began to hum tunelessly. The tea had gone cold. Mr Brennan raised his eyebrows at me. Ivan stood up. Shirley threw her arms around him and began to sob and scream, and Mr Brennan and the woman in the floral apron pulled her back and dragged her from the room, the flowers I had brought for her scattering a path behind her. There was nothing to do but leave.

I cried in the car going home, for the sadness of her life, and for the frustrating knowledge that somewhere in her scrambled brain she probably had the answer to my questions.

Shirley probably knew everything about my sister’s death.

I wrote down what she had said, and I went over and over it, looking for clues until I nearly went mad myself. What did she mean about red books? Probably nothing.

THE HOTEL OF THE STARS

LAURA

After the sad dead end of Shirley Temple, Michael put me on to Jane Wilson, the daughter of the woman who was the matron at Mandala. Jane and her mother used to live on the premises.

I was nervous, but more hopeful. There was always the worry that any of these people were in some way guilty of a part in Vickie’s death. I had to be very careful, and there was a fine line between being careful and finding out nothing. I also had to be credible. The whole thing was full of traps and pitfalls. I decided to pretend I was a journalist doing research into hospitals in the sixties. I had a notebook and a tape-recorder.

When I visited Jane I was alone. As well as the notebook and tape-recorder I took a bunch of violets and a tin of cookies. Ivan and Michael said this was a bizarre touch and a dead give-away.

But I couldn’t help it. For one thing I felt guilty about what I was doing, although I
had
to do it.

I gave the flowers and cookies to Jane at the door. It was a small wooden house, not unlike the place where I had seen Shirley Temple, but it didn’t look so forlorn. There was a damp look about everything, a neat brick porch with pot-plants, floral curtains, so quietly, respectably sad. Jane placed the violets on top of the cookie tin and sat down on the sofa. My gifts were placed on her knees, and her hands were curled round the edge of the tin so that her fingertips met at the front. She had intense blue eyes but she looked old and tired, her body thin, her clothing drab. Her voice was low and she spoke softly, with a faint singsong as if she had rehearsed the things she said.

Besides this, everything she said had a ring of truth about it — I can’t explain any better. For some reason I felt I could believe everything she said. There was a deep urgency about her words, as if she had been waiting to tell a story, waiting for me, for this moment. Perhaps I imagined that; it’s what I wanted to believe. I
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sensed she was going to tell me something vital; I knew I would have to be patient.

Before we sat down she said, ‘Welcome to the Hotel of the Stars.’ She paused and pointed to the door at the end of the room where the words were picked out in gold across the top: Hotel of the Stars.

‘Parker tells fortunes. He’s my husband.’

The door was painted sky-blue and sprinkled with stars.

‘I don’t believe in it; he knows that,’ she said. Her voice was solemn. ‘But it pays the rent.
Parker
believes. And sometimes you have to admit there might be something in it. Things happen. Mainly we run an introduction agency, people meeting up according to their stars and how their transits are and so on.

Parker’s very good at it. Hotel of the Stars is very reliable. People get lucky in love when Parker’s around. He’d have to be the best thing that ever happened to me. You should meet Parker. He’ll be finished in there soon.’

I said I’d like to meet him, and I meant it. I was intrigued, but somehow shocked to find this business going on in the sad little house. I felt out of place, ridiculous on the old yellow sofa, and I started picking at the corner of a black cushion that had an Egyptian scene painted on it. I must have been staring nervously at the door of the Hotel of the Stars because Jane bounced the cookie tin on her knees and said brightly, as if to reassure me,

‘Yes, Parker’s in there with a client, but we don’t have to worry.

They come and go through the side door.’ She paused again, and there was a funny little silence. Then she went on, ‘But you said you wanted to talk about Mandala. What do you want to know?

Where d’you want to start? I know the lot. The whole bloody lot. Ask me something.’

It’s strange, I think, the way people will so readily tell their stories to you if you say you’re a reporter. I wonder what would have happened if I had been honest and said I was just a member of the public, like her, just a woman looking for a clue to my sister’s death.

I said I understood her late mother had been the matron, and I thought there were things she could perhaps tell me that would help me with research for my article.

The Hotel of the Stars

189

‘What research? I forget.’

‘Into mental hospitals in the sixties.’

‘I can tell you about Mandala from the beginning. It isn’t pretty, you know.’

‘I don’t expect it to be.’

‘It’s worse than you think. Much worse. Sure you want to hear this?’

‘I want to know.’

‘It’s best to start with myself. My knowledge of all this is related to who I am. Be patient, this is a long story, but it leads to Mandala right enough.’

‘Okay.’

I switched on the tape and flipped back the page of my notebook. But I could feel myself tensing, and sighing inside.

Would any of this ever lead to the red book, to an insight into what happened to Vickie?

Jane told me Joyce Wilson and her husband Felix adopted her when she was a baby. It was a long and at times rambling story, but when she said her view of Mandala was related to who she was, she was right. Her story came pouring out. This small drab woman sat quite still on the sofa clutching the flowers and the tin, and in a strangely confident monotone she told me about her life, the central and most horrifying parts of which happened at Mandala. She was a patient, as well as the matron’s daughter, and was there at the time of Vickie’s death.

Even as a child she used to work alongside Shirley Temple, cleaning wards and caring for other patients. She knew a lot about Therese Gillis who used to fascinate her. This was very important to me.

JANE

‘I was born in 1954 to a lady named Antonia. She wasn’t married and so I was illegitimate and had to be given up for adoption.

Two years ago I tried to find Antonia, but I found out she died
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soon after I was born. She was only eighteen when she died.

Think of that. My own daughter is nearly eighteen — I called her Antonia you know. And I sometimes look at her and try to imagine what it must have been like for my mother, all alone in the world and so young, with a baby and nobody to turn to.

I reckon she died by her own hand. I have no evidence of that, but I can feel it. She drowned, actually. I know nothing about my real father, nothing at all. It’s weird. Sometimes I have a fantasy about meeting him somewhere by some miracle or other.

Once I asked Parker to help me arrange something. A miracle.

Surely you know people, I say to Parker, people like mediums that can get in touch with the spirits of the dead, or the type of fortune-tellers that see into the future. People that could bring me at least news of my real father. But Parker says it’s not so easy, and you have to believe. I suppose I half believe, in a way.

He says they can read my Tarot, read my palm or whatever. But what I really want, you see, is a man ringing up one day and saying — Hello Jane, this is your Dad, and I can prove it. It isn’t going to happen, though. Just wishful thinking, fantasy, eh?

‘So Joyce and Felix adopted me and I don’t remember how old I was when Felix started molesting me. Joyce knew about it; I’m certain Joyce knew, but she did nothing about it. I never said anything. Kids don’t. We lived in the bush just outside the city.

It seemed like the end of the earth to me because we went from living near the beach, right in the city, out into the hills. We had a kind of guest house in the bush. I remember one Christmas when I was seven and Felix took me and a girl from school out into the bush to cut down a pine tree. We were going to put it on the veranda and decorate it. This girl, her name was Jennifer, had brought bags of tinsel, all different colours. Out under the trees we found dozens of those red toadstools and I remember me and this girl hiding from Felix and picking the toadstools, and she said to me — Your father’s rude. I knew then he must have touched her and exposed himself to her. I went completely cold, ice cold, and still. It was like I froze then and there on the spot. I wished I could die. I was totally speechless, like I was dead anyway. Jennifer was just sitting there on the ground with her legs crossed, breaking the toadstools up into bits. She had a