Authors: Carmel Bird
— she says how parts of the garden in winter are ‘a fragile note
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The White Garden
touched from the brittle violin of frost’ — I know exactly what she means.
It’s special and lovely at Sissinghurst in the winter.
Christmas 1961 was very, very cold in Kent. Vita dreamt again a dream of many years before. She was setting plants in the garden in the winter dusk as the snow fell all around her. And as she worked on and on into the darkness and the snow fell deeper and deeper she saw that she was surrounded by the light of hundreds of burning candles in the snow. Gradually the snow buried the candles but didn’t put them out. She looked up and saw that all about her were silent deer with flames on the tips of their antlers.
The next summer Vita died, and the room where she wrote in the tower at Sissinghurst stopped in time — the apricot velvet curtains, the old embroideries, the silks, velvets, bowls of flowers, books, rugs and blue beads from Persia, crystal rabbits from China, poems framed and hung on the walls — all stayed as she left them. Above the world, mysterious, the tower room of a princess. Snow fell again on the garden where roses hung from the apple trees, and the barn owl swooped through the grey-green shadows of the beloved White Garden.
On the bookshelves were Vita’s books. There was a copy of
The Eagle and the Dove
, the book that Vickie borrowed from the library, the book about St Teresa of Avila and St Therese of Lisieux.
When Vita went to Normandy in 1937 she saw the house and shrine of St Therese of Lisieux. She found Lisieux a strange place, and was intrigued by the story of the saint. Back home in her tower she wrote: ‘Think of writing a book on St Teresa of Avila and St ditto of Lisieux’. It was six years before she started the book, at a time when bombs were falling on Kent. Vita’s precious purple glass plates were shattered, and she was filled with fears — afraid for all her loved ones, and afraid the army would steal the onions. Her imagination moved to Spain in the sixteenth century, France in the nineteenth. For six months she
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43
dwelt with the women she called the two Theresas. She started the book with the words of the Spaniard: ‘I look down on the world as from a great height and care very little what people say or know about me. Our Lord has made my life to me now a kind of sleep, for almost always what I see seems to me to be seen as in a dream, nor have I any great sense either of pleasure or of pain.’
SAINT DITTO OF LISIEUX
It was 1965. Therese Gillis was twenty, suffering from fear and depression. She was lying in a cubicle at the Mandala Clinic, having been injected with a mixture of Sodium Amytal and Ritalin. A tape-recorder by her bed was playing, recording anything Therese might say. Nothing could record her unspoken thoughts. She tried to think of good things. She thought of the water of the lake, and the lake was a looking glass where water birds flew and the clouds drifted upside down and the lilies opened pink and gold and white. Beautiful pink and gold and white. She decided she would say some of this into the tape-recorder. ‘When I was little,’ she said in a small voice that was almost a whisper, ‘I used to go to the Looking-Glass Lake.
Sometimes with my sisters and sometimes with my aunt, and sometimes by myself. I loved going there.’
Then her mind was so filled with memories that it became impossible for her to say anything at all. The doctor had said:
‘Just say whatever comes into your head, and Sister will come and turn the tape over when it’s finished on this side.’ But so much came into her head there was nothing she could say.
She lay in the half-dark room with her head on a small pink pillow, her body covered by a pink blanket, the tape running.
She ran her fingers over the blanket and she thought of the wide pink blanket with the satin edge that was on the bed where her mother and father slept. When Therese and her sisters were children they would get into the bed with their parents and lie like peas in a pod, their heads poking out of the blanket in a row.
The cubicle was hushed; there was a faint sound of move-ment from the tape-recorder. But no speech. Therese drifted into her parents’ bed, and thought of the immediate past, of the tourniquet on her arm, and the sight of the doctor as he found the vein and then pricked it with the needle and pushed in the plunger. Therese looked gravely at him; he looked past her. As he pushed the plunger in he said, so that the sound dropped
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45
into Therese’s ear: ‘Ch-ch’. Then he flicked the needle out and patted Therese on the arm and went out the door, followed by the nurse. ‘Ch-ch’ repeated in Therese’s head. ‘Ch-ch’. The image of her sisters under the blanket faded and so many thoughts rushed in that Therese had to clench her teeth and suck in her breath. Her thoughts concocted a kind of mental white noise so that her tongue was silent and she felt a choking sensation behind her eyes and a blankness in her heart. ‘Ch-ch’ she said a few times and this was recorded on the tape.
Therese was pretty. She had large green eyes and chestnut curls, peachy cheeks, slim body, long legs, no freckles, lovely smile. (I could fuck the arse off her, Ambrose thought as he left the cubicle. It was nice to stick needles into the veins of these depressed little beauties, for starters.) Under the blanket, Therese was wearing a white cotton petticoat. She lay in the half dark and intoned ‘ch-ch’ and then she was quiet and tears formed in her eyes, slowly moved across her cheeks and rolled down into her ears. She began to concentrate on the making and the falling of the tears.
After an hour the nurse came back and turned the tape over.
Therese lay in the bed and stared up at the ceiling which was grey and stippled. Light came in under the door and she wondered where it was coming from, who was on the other side of the door, what they were doing. She tried to identify the sounds she could hear, the noises nearby and in the distance. Far, far away was the traffic — cars and trams and trucks. She fancied she could hear the chirp of a bird outside the window, small animals darting in the grass, the breaking of a twig, the rattle of teacups, the sighs of lovers in a garden, the pressure of a kiss, the silky touch of a hand on her shoulder, on her breast. Nipples under the white cotton petticoat. Stipples on the ceiling. Silent weeping with her ears full of tears. Cups of salty teardrops on the side of her head. Her head on the pillow and the white noise of her thoughts choking in her throat.
At the end of another hour the nurse came back and took the tape-recorder away. Then she brought Therese a cup of tea and a biscuit with sugar on it. Therese ran her finger along the bumpy edge of the biscuit. She licked and sucked the sugar and then
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The White Garden
dipped the biscuit in the tea. The nurse smiled. The nurse’s uniform was pink and she had a badge pinned to the collar, and a watch that dangled on a chain. Therese looked closely at the badge and realised it was a gold oval with an image of Mickey Mouse on it. ‘Good girl,’ the nurse said. ‘You can go back to your own bed now.’
There were five other women in beds in Therese’s room on the third floor of the main convent building. This room was called ‘The Sunroom’ because it reached out beyond the walls of the house and caught the sun through its many windows.
Therese put on her slippers and dressing gown and stood up unsteadily. The nurse supported her as they returned to the Sunroom. Therese’s legs were weak, and her head felt strange, as if there was a pool of stagnant water behind her eyes. She felt so feeble, so unreal, so sad, and they often had to stop while she gathered the strength to go on. ‘Sister,’ she whispered, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’ They turned off towards a toilet, but before they reached the door Therese had doubled over and vomited down the wall. The sister pressed a buzzer, and a patient on buzzer duty came skipping up the corridor. It was Shirley Temple.
‘Go and get a bucket and mop and clean up this mess while I get the patient back to bed,’ the nurse said. Shirley stared at the vomit on the wall and peered up at Therese. ‘Don’t stand there staring like an idiot, Shirley. Go and do as I say.’ Shirley dropped a little curtsy and ran off to get the bucket and mop.
She was a woman of about forty, wearing white socks and little girl shoes. She had a white dress with red polka dots and big flounces that reached just above her knees. Her hair was arranged in a flurry of sausage curls that bobbed up and down as she ran. She hummed and sang: ‘On the good ship Lollipop, it’s a short trip to the candy shop, and there you are — happy landings on a chocolate bar.’ Soon she was back with the bucket, water, disinfectant, mop and cloth. She set about cleaning up the mess, humming cheerfully. The sister and Therese, who was by then almost fainting, stumbled towards the Sunroom.
The room was filled with a clear white light, and the air in there was fresh and sweet. It was Shirley Temple who kept the
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air like that — she would open the windows, wipe everything with lavender disinfectant, scatter flowers, lightly spray the bedspreads with eau de Cologne. Like beds in a convent boarding school, six white iron bedsteads were lined up, the windows behind them, their feet pointing towards the door. Beside each bed was a locker and a wooden chair. Iron bars were attached to the outside of the windows. As Therese and the sister came into the room, three pairs of eyes stared at them in silence. Two other pairs of eyes were closed in sleep. The stares were not hostile, but were vacant with a hint of curiosity, like the stares of sleepy children. ‘Better sit here while I give you a wash,’
the sister said to Therese. Obediently Therese sat on the chair beside her bed while the sister fetched warm water from the bathroom that was kept locked at the end of the Sunroom. Soap and a cloth were taken from the locker beside the bed, and as the sister bent down to get out the towel, Therese fell forward in a faint and hit her face on the side of the locker. Three pairs of eyes opened a little wider to register the shock. Then the steady stares resumed.
Through two dulled minds went simple images of a bed, a girl, a cake of pink soap, a nurse in pink bending over, a falling girl, a thud. The other mind dreamt there was a beautiful girl in a thin white gown. She was sitting on a pure white chair, a princess on a princess chair. A servant was kneeling and washing her feet. The princess’s face turned grey and then her face and body were covered with crisscross lines of spider web wrinkles. A crisis of crisscross, a cocoon of silken threads.
Slowly the princess tipped forward, and, without a sound, she hit her head, which was made from cotton wool, on a small marble table. A fountain of blood spurted from her eye. The blood flowed fast and filled the room, and boats bobbed on the dark, sticky surface. The dreamer rocked in her boat in the middle of a lake of blood, her head filled with the sound of a washing machine. She reached from the boat to try to save the princess; she tried to scream, but no sound came. The princess
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The White Garden
was drowning in the lake of blood; the blood was flowing from the windows and down the walls of the castle; the castle was weeping blood.
The sister lifted Therese onto the bed, straightened out her legs and then washed her face, neck, arms and hands. One cheek was grazed by the brush with the locker. The sister dabbed the graze with antiseptic. Therese opened her eyes as the antiseptic stung her face. The sister pulled her nightgown on over her underwear, tucked in the bedclothes, took her pulse and temperature. Normal. Thank goodness for that. She tidied away the soap and cloth and left Therese to sleep off her fatigue after the Amytal and Ritalin. She put the injury on record: ‘Patient grazed side of face when getting into bed. Cleaned graze with Dettol.’
One of the other women in the Sunroom sat up in bed and took her sewing from her locker. It was her task from OT
— a red, white and blue cloth octopus. She didn’t use a needle, these being banned from the Sunroom, but she set about stuff ing the toy with crumpled bits of nylon stocking. As she stuffed the octopus she nodded at Therese and said in a loud voice:
‘War Casualty. Extensive Facial Injuries. Internal Bleeding.
Coma.’
And one of the other women said in a low, tired voice: ‘Shut up, Florence Nightingale, and get on with your octopus.’
A woman who appeared to be asleep, and who didn’t stir or open her eyes, said in the tone of a school mistress’s authority:
‘Quiet now, girls. No talking in the back row. Listen carefully and take notes.’
‘Silly old bitch,’ the second woman said.
Then all was silent again and the room was filled with the bright sunlight of the afternoon which cast the shadows of the bars across the beds.
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It was a curious fact that nobody ever listened to the silent tape that Therese made when she lay in the cubicle. The tape had her name on it, and the next time she came up for Amytal and Ritalin it was used again. Her eyes went black after the fall, and Dr Goddard said: ‘Been in a punch up with the nurses?’ His voice was joking, but his eyes were cold. ‘No point in that, milady. The nurses here are all trained thugs. Kill you as soon as look at you.
I wouldn’t ever get on the wrong side of them myself. You just watch your p’s and q’s and do as you would be done by. How do we feel after our first go at the truth drug? Clears the mind, doesn’t it? Hasn’t done much for your appearance, I must say.
But you’ll mend.’ He laughed loudly and moved on. Therese made no attempt to answer him. It was three days before she saw him again, and he was only a blurred recollection, less defined than the images of her dreams and imaginings.
During those weeks Therese’s mother visited her, bringing flowers, fruit, biscuits, chocolate, nightdresses. ‘You must have something to eat, Therese. You’ll never get better if you don’t eat.’ She took the washing away and came back each time with clean clothes. ‘Sister says you’re not eating, and not talking to anybody. But why is that? If you start to cooperate they’ll let you have visitors. The others are dying to come and see you.