The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
‘I don’t know that I’ve told you much about that time, have I? During the war, the Second World War.’ She cupped her hands around the steaming rim of her mug and stared down at it. ‘It was a terrible time, such confusion, so many things were broken. It seemed …’ She sighed. ‘Well, it seemed as if the world would never return to normal. As if it had been tipped off its axis and nothing would ever set it to right.
‘My family, my mother and father, my brother and sister and I, we all lived in a flat together in Barlow Street, over in Elephant and Castle, and the day after war broke out we were rounded up in school classes, marched over to the railway station and put into train carriages. I’ll never forget it, all of us with our tags on and our masks and our packs, and the mothers, who must’ve had second thoughts about sending us, because they came running down the road towards the school, shouting at the driver to let their kids off, shouting at older siblings to look after the little ones, not to let them out of their sight.’
She sat for a moment nibbling her bottom lip as the scene played out in her memory.
‘You must’ve been frightened,’ I said. We’re not really handholders in our family or else I’d have reached out and taken hers.
‘I was, at first.’ She looked up and met my gaze, then removed her glasses and rubbed her eyes. Her face had a vulnerable, unfinished look without her frames, like a small nocturnal animal confused by the daylight. I was glad when she put them on again and continued. ‘I’d never been away from home before, never spent a night apart from my mother. But I had my older brother and sister with me, and as the trip went on and one of the teachers handed around bars of chocolate, everybody started to cheer up and look upon the experience almost like an adventure. Can you imagine? War had been declared but we were all singing songs and eating tinned pears and looking out the window playing I Spy. Children are very resilient, you know, callous in some cases.
‘We arrived eventually in a town called Cranbrook, only to be split into groups and loaded onto various coaches. The one I was on with my brother and sister took us to the village of Milderhurst where we were walked in procession to a hall. A group of local women were waiting for us there, smiles fixed on their faces, lists in hand, and we were made to stand in rows as people milled about, making their selection.
‘The little ones went fast, especially the pretty ones. People supposed they’d be less work, I expect, that they’d have less of the whiff of London about them.’ She smiled crookedly. ‘They soon learned.
‘My brother was picked early. He was a strong boy, tall for his age, and the farmers were desperate for help after their labourers had signed up. My sister went soon after with her friend from school.’
Well, that was it. I reached out and laid my hand on hers. ‘Oh, Mum.’
‘Never mind.’ She pulled free and gave my fingers a tap. ‘I wasn’t the last to go. There were a few others, a little boy with a terrible skin condition. I don’t know what happened to him, but he was still standing there in that hall when I left.
‘You know, for a long time afterwards, years and years, I forced myself to buy bruised fruit if that’s what I picked up first at the grocer’s. None of this checking it over and putting it back on the shelf if it didn’t measure up.’
‘But you were chosen eventually.’
‘Yes, I was chosen eventually.’ She lowered her voice, fiddling with something in her lap, and I had to lean close. ‘She came in late. The room was almost clear, most of the children had gone and the WVS ladies were putting away the tea things. I’d started to weep a little, though I did so very discreetly. Then all of a sudden, she swept in and the room, the very air, seemed to change.’
‘Change?’ I wrinkled my nose, thinking of that scene in Carrie when the light explodes.
‘It’s hard to explain. Have you ever met someone who seems to bring their own atmosphere with them when they arrive somewhere?’
Maybe. I lifted my shoulders, uncertain. My friend Sarah has a habit of turning heads wherever she goes, not exactly an atmospheric phenomenon, but still …
‘No, of course you haven’t. It sounds so silly to say it like that. What I mean is that she was different from other people, more … Oh, I don’t know. Just more. Beautiful in an odd, slightly wild way, but it wasn’t that alone that set her apart. She was only seventeen at the time, in September 1939, but the other women, even those who’d been most stern during the afternoon, all seemed to fold into themselves when she arrived.’
‘They were deferential?’
‘Yes, that’s the word, deferential. Surprised to see her and uncertain how to behave. One of the other women spoke up eventually and asked if she could help, but the girl merely waved her long fingers and announced that she’d come for her evacuee. That’s what she said, not an evacuee; her evacuee. And then she came straight over to where I was sitting on the floor. “What’s your name?” she said in the strangest, airiest voice, and when I told her she smiled and said that I must be tired, having come such a long way. “Would you like to come and stay with me?” she said and I nodded, I must have, for she turned then to the bossiest woman, the one with the list, and said that she would take me home with her.’
‘What was her name?’
‘Blythe,’ said my mother, suppressing the faintest of shivers. ‘Juniper Blythe.’
‘And it was she who sent you the letter?’
Mum nodded. ‘She led me to the fanciest car I’d ever seen and drove me back to the place where she and her older twin sisters lived, through a set of iron gates, along a winding driveway, until we reached an enormous stone house surrounded by thick woods. Milderhurst Castle.’
The name was straight out of a gothic novel and I tingled a little remembering Mum’s sob when she’d read the woman’s name and address on the envelope. I’d heard stories about the evacuees, about some of the things that went on, and I said in a breath, ‘Was it ghastly?’
‘Oh no, nothing like that. Not ghastly at all. Quite the opposite.’
‘But the letter— It made you—’
‘The letter was a surprise, that’s all. A memory from a long time ago, a time I’d quite forgotten.’
She fell silent then and I thought about the enormity of evacuation, how frightening, how odd it must have been for her as a child, to be sent to a strange place where everyone and everything was vastly different. I could still touch my own childhood experiences, the horror of being thrust into new, unnerving situations, the furious bonds that were necessarily forged—to buildings, to sympathetic adults, to special friends— in order to survive. Remembering those urgent friendships, something struck me: ‘Did you ever go back, Mum, after the war? To Milderhurst?’
She looked up sharply. ‘Of course not. Why would I?’
‘I don’t know. To catch up, to say hello. To see your friend.’
‘No.’ She said it firmly. ‘Real life went on. I had my own family in London, my mother couldn’t spare me, and besides, there was work to be done, cleaning up after the war. There wasn’t time to be skipping off to the country.’ And with that, the familiar veil came down between us and I knew the conversation had ended.
We didn’t have the roast in the end. Mum said she didn’t feel like it and asked whether I minded terribly giving it a miss this weekend. It seemed unkind to remind her that I don’t eat roast anyway and that my attendance was more in the order of daughterly service, so I told her it was fine and suggested that she have a lie-down. She agreed, and as I gathered my things into my bag she was already swallowing two aspirin in preparation, reminding me to keep my ears covered in the wind.
My dad, as it turns out, slept through the whole thing. He’s older than my mum and retired from his work a few years ago. Retirement hasn’t been good for him; he roams the house during the week, looking for things to fix, driving Mum mad (though she never says as much, and perhaps I’m just imagining that she feels the same way I would), then on Sunday he rests in his armchair. The God-given right of
I gave him a kiss on the cheek and left the house, braving the chill air as I made my way to the Tube, tired and unsettled and somewhat subdued to be heading back to the chill darkness of the fiendishly expensive flat I’d shared until recently with Jamie. It wasn’t until somewhere between High Street Ken and Notting Hill Gate that I realised Mum hadn’t told me what the letter said.
2
In a film or a made-up story, in one of the gothic novels I used to devour, this is the part where the plucky heroine would sniff a mystery and head off to investigate. She’d probably have a mysterious aristocratic uncle to stay with, who’d produce a diary solving the riddles of her mother’s secret past, and there’d almost certainly be an odd but alluring gentleman with whom she might become entangled. I’m not a gothic heroine, however, neither am I particularly plucky, so perhaps it won’t surprise you to hear that it didn’t happen that way.
Writing it down now, I’m a little disappointed in myself. But everyone’s an expert with the virtue of hindsight and it’s easy to wonder why I didn’t go looking, now that I know what there was to find. And I’m not a complete dolt. Mum and I met for tea a few days later and even though I failed again to mention my changed circumstances, I did ask her about the contents of the letter. She waved the question away and said it wasn’t important, little more than a greeting; that her reaction had been brought about by surprise and nothing more. I didn’t know then that my mum is a good liar or else I might have had reason to doubt her, to question further or to take special note of her body language. You don’t though, do you? Your instinct is usually to believe what people tell you, particularly people you know well, those you trust; at least mine is. Or was.
And so I forgot for a time about Milderhurst Castle and Mum’s evacuation and even the odd fact that I’d never heard her speak a word about it before. It was easy enough to explain away, most things are if you try hard enough: Mum and I got on all right, but we’d never been especially close, and we certainly didn’t go in for long chummy discussions about the past. Or the present, for that matter. Certainly not the future. By all accounts her evacuation had been a pleasant but forgettable experience; there was no reason she should’ve shared it with me. Lord knew, there was enough I didn’t tell her.
Harder to rationalise was the strong, strange sense that had come upon me when I witnessed her reaction to the letter, the inexplicable certainty of an important memory I couldn’t pin down. Something I’d seen, or heard, and since forgotten, had been dislodged, fluttering now around the shadowy rim of my memory, refusing to stand still and let me name it. It fluttered and I wondered, trying very hard to remember whether perhaps another letter had arrived, years before—when I was still a kid; a letter that had also made her cry. But it was no use, the hazy, granular feeling refused to clarify into actual memory and I decided it was more than likely my overactive imagination at work, the one my parents had always warned would get me into trouble one day if I wasn’t careful. Thus, over the following weeks, I let it go and the strange sense stopped its fluttering.
And little wonder. At the time, I had more pressing concerns. Namely, where I was going to live when the period of pre-paid rent on the flat was up. The rental advance had been Jamie’s parting gift, an apology of sorts, compensation for his regrettable behaviour, but it would end in June. I’d been combing the papers and estate agent windows for studio flats, but on my salary it was proving rather difficult to find anywhere even remotely close to work.
I’m an editor at Billing & Brown Superior Book Publishers. They’re a small family-run publisher, here in Notting Hill, set up in the late forties by Herbert Billing and Michael Brown, as a means, initially, to publish their own poetry. When they started I believe they were quite respected, but over the decades, as bigger publishers took a greater share of the market and public taste for niche titles declined, we’ve been reduced to printing genres we refer to kindly as ‘specialty’ and those we refer to less kindly as ‘vanity’. We survive as a company because of the loyalty of our two largest clients and the mercifully insatiable demand these days for self-publishing. By doing a good job cheaply and by keeping our overheads down, we’ve managed to stay solvent. Just.
Mr Billing (that’s him in the title) is my boss, he’s also my mentor, champion and closest friend. I don’t have many, not the living, breathing sort at any rate. And I don’t mean that in a sad, lonely sort of way; I’m just not the type of person who accumulates or enjoys crowds. I’m good with words, but not the spoken kind; I’ve often thought what a marvellous thing it would be if I could only conduct relationships on paper. And I suppose, in a sense, that’s what I do, for I’ve hundreds of the other sort, the friends contained between bindings, page after glorious page of ink, stories that unfold the same way every time but never lose their joy, that take me by the hand and lead me through doorways into worlds of great terror and rapturous delight. Exciting, reliable, worthy companions—full of wise counsel, some of them—but sadly ill-equipped to offer the use of a spare bedroom for a month or two.
For although I was rather inexperienced at breaking up—Jamie was my first real boyfriend, the sort with whom I’d envisaged a future—I suspected this was the time to call in favours from friends. Which is why I turned first to Sarah, my oldest chum, and most determinedly of the flesh and blood variety. The two of us grew up in neighbouring houses and our place became her second home whenever her four younger siblings turned into wild things and she needed to escape. I was flattered that someone like Sarah thought of my parents’ rather staid suburban home as a refuge, and we remained tight through high school until Sarah was caught smoking behind the toilets one too many times and traded in maths class for beauty school. She works freelance now, for magazines and film shoots—she did the make-up on that movie that was nominated for an Oscar last year, the one set in outer space. Her success is a brilliant thing, but unfortunately it meant that in my hour of need she was away in Hollywood turning actors into zombies, her flat and its spare room sublet to an Austrian architect.
I fretted for a time, envisaging in piquant detail the sort of life I might be forced to eke out sans roof, before, in a fine act of chivalry, Mr Billing—Herbert—offered me the sofa in his little flat above our office.
‘After all you did for me?’ he’d said, when I asked if he was sure. ‘Picked me up off the floor, you did. Rescued me.’
He was exaggerating; I’d never actually picked him up off the floor, but I knew what he meant. I’d only been with them a couple of years when Mr Brown passed away, and I’d just started to look around for something a little more challenging. Mr Billing took the death of his partner so hard, though, that there was no way I could leave him, not then. He didn’t appear to have anyone else and, although he never said as much, it became clear to me by the type and the intensity of his grief that he and Mr Brown had been more than business partners. He stopped eating, stopped washing, and drank himself silly on gin one morning even though he’s a teetotaller.
There didn’t seem to be much choice about the matter: I started making him meals, confiscated the gin, and when the figures were very bad and I couldn’t raise his interest, I took it upon myself to door-knock and find us some new work. That’s when we moved into printing flyers for local businesses. Mr Billing was so grateful when he found out that he quite overestimated my motivation. He started referring to me as his protégée and cheered considerably when he talked about the future of Billing & Brown; how he and I were going to rebuild the company in honour of Mr Brown. The glimmer was back in his eyes and I put off my job search a little longer.
And here I am now. Twelve years later. Much to Sarah’s bemusement. It’s hard to explain to someone like her, a creative, clever person who refuses to do anything on terms that aren’t her own, that the rest of us have different criteria for satisfaction in life. I work with people I ado
I accepted gratefully his offer of a place to bunk; it was really a very touching gesture, particularly in light of his flat’s tiny proportions. It was also my only option.
Herbert was extremely pleased. ‘Marvellous! Jess will be beside herself, she does love guests.’
Jess is Herbert’s dog, a rotund, piggy little thing with short bristly hair, greying these days about the face in a somehow charming and sad-seeming manner. She’s a darling, but a smelly one with rather an odd taste for feet, a tendency to sit very close, luring one into a false sense of security, before beginning to lap gently and warmly, a look of mild shame on her face. Poor thing. It’s not her fault. And if we were to be sofa-mates, I knew I’d just have to be considerate. Wearing socks while I slept was a small matter and the least I could do given that Jess and Herbert had come so gallantly to my rescue.