A Year in the World (28 page)

And:

Don’t ask me where I shall plant the white rose disheveled by a single gust of wind, the yellow rose which has a scent of fine cigars, the pink rose which has a scent of roses, the red rose which dies unceasingly from the pouring out of its odors and whose dry and weightless corpse still lavishes its balm upon the air. I shall not crucify my red rose against a wall; I shall not bind it to the edge of the water tank. It shall grow, if my good destiny allows it so, just beside the open bedroom, the room that will have only three walls instead of four, and stand open to the rising sun.

Even roses she didn’t like can bloom vividly on a sign:

Roses the color of nasturtiums, with a scent of peaches; starved-looking roses tinged with dirty mauve that smelled of crushed ants; orange roses that smelled of nothing at all; and finally a little horror of a rosebush with tiny yellowish flowers covered in hairs, badly set on their stalks, bushing out all over the place, and giving off an odor like a musk-filled menagerie, like a gymnasium frequented exclusively by young red-headed women, like artificial vanilla extract . . .

Back at our musty house on the greeny banks of the Yonne, we reconsider the hapless neglect in the light of Colette’s loved and radiant ambiance. No one lavishes care on this lovely house at the end of the village. “Can we just go now? It’s only three. We could be in a sweet little inn somewhere by dark. Is the map in the car?”

“I can be ready in fifteen minutes.”

We
drive to Dijon, feast well, and leave the next day for a country
relais
near Avignon. The heat becomes serious.

Today I buy the herbs I want at a nursery, and some yellow lilies for our room. When we visit the antique market town of Île-sur-la-Sorgue, we are so hot I don’t care about looking at fine monogrammed napkins and silver serving pieces. We walk through, drinking bottle after bottle of water, buy nothing, and return to our golden stone
mas
under a massive oak for lunch and a swim.

The room has a fine escritoire, waxed for generations. Ed falls into a late siesta, and I shift the desk closer to the window for the pleasure of opening my notebook, writing a few words that have been floating in my brain,
nidify, pith, efflorescence, tesserae
. I keep glancing outside into the oak’s spreading branches. A perfect tree for green-eyed Colette to climb. On the trunk, patches of silvery gray lichen look like squiggly maps. A young waiter on break tips his chair back and raises his face to the sun. His smooth arms the color of butterscotch dapple with shadow. My lilies in a water pitcher look freshly gilded against the soft blue messaline draperies. Colette so loved the shades, contrasts, colors, and sensations of the world. A wasp hovers over two crescents of honeydew melon on a yellow plate.

From Garden to Garden

The British
Isles

Lower Swell—we are at home in a stone schoolhouse that has undergone conversion into a comfortable Cotswold home and enclosed garden. The tiny cluster of surrounding houses looks equally mellow and natural in green, green radiant fields where sheep look as if they are posing for “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” and the word
chlorophyll
comes to mind.

Our schoolhouse seems especially welcoming—three sofas to sink into, long windows where pink mallow branches sway, a table to seat twelve, if we knew so many to invite, and a fireplace. I could settle in for months. I imagine slanting rain on winter evenings, imagine reading the local writers, from Laurie Lee to Shakespeare. Right now in July we open all the windows, page through garden books, and spread our area maps on the coffee table for the pleasure of saying names aloud: Stow-on-the-Wold, Bourton-on-the-Water, Upper Slaughter, Chipping Campden—all places we will see—and names of places farther afield—Hextable, Wootten-under-Edge, Chorleywood, Plumpton Green, Leigh-on-Sea, Frogmore, Midsomer Norton, Flackwell Heath. These could be settings for novels in which an intended note under the door slides under the rug instead and lies undetected until too late, far too late. The cheerful kitchen makes me want to whip up a batch of buttermilk biscuits. Maybe it’s the sunlight pouring through the door, maybe it’s the blue-checked curtains at the window and under the sink, maybe it’s the yellow bowl of plums on the counter, or that the four burners on the stove are called
hobs
here. I like
hobs
.

We must feel at home because we taught for so many years. I wonder which way the desks faced and where the chalkboard hung. Two staircases branch off, going up to dormer bedrooms. Perhaps two teachers lived here, retiring to their separate quarters at night. From upstairs, the small windows look out at the golden village on one side and onto a walled garden on the other. Beyond, the open countryside lures me to walk in every direction. A road sign cautions to watch for badgers. Travelling in the Cotswolds is the polar opposite to adventure travel. The sheep will part to let us cross their bucolic meadows. Downstairs the garden awaits with drowsy charms. An intimate, informal space about twice the size of the house, the garden blooms haphazardly; the scraggly beds could stand a visit from those patron saints of English gardens, Vita Sackville-West or Gertrude Jekyl, to tidy up and add some flowers and bushes with rhythm and texture. I have planted thyme and basil near the kitchen door. A primitive urge, I think, that instinct to put something with roots into the ground, even though I am transient here. “The garden could be so heavenly—and we could transform it in a week.”

“Resist. Just enjoy the spontaneous qualities.”

“Actually, it’s pretty this way, a jumble, a blur of color.”

We have come to visit the great English gardens—to feel, as Edith Wharton said, “the secret vibrations of their beauty”—and my list is long.

We
started a week ago in Bath.
Bah-th,
we said, walking down streets where Jane Austen’s skirts once grazed the stones. Our hotel outside town was a former priory with a formal but livable garden of small ponds and boxwood knots, and a good kitchen garden, too, that supplied their restaurant. Immediately, I liked living there. This is jolly England, I thought, the English major’s England. The England of my great-great-grandfather’s people, although I don’t know if they lived like serfs or lords. The drawing room, just so, was lined with portraits and paintings and crowded with the classic English-style mix of striped and flowered and velvet furniture and Oriental rugs. We felt like guests at a country house where someone is perhaps poisoned, the inspector droll, and all the weekend guests suspects. The large room opened onto the garden terrace. The staff settled us on a sofa and brought champagne while we ordered dinner. When we were shown to the table, course after course appeared, ending with a trolley of Cheshire and Stilton cheeses. Our bedroom was serene and large, furnished in sage and coral with duvets and down and a view of the knot garden and fountain. I realized that the formal terrace gardens were designed not only for strolling but for the pleasure of viewing them from the house.

That first night after dinner we drove into Bath late and saw it empty except for jammed pubs and a few doorways where not-so-innocent teenagers lurked. We’d thought we were tired after the flight from Italy and after the rental car’s flat tire in the rain on a lane where we were turning around, having taken a wrong turn. But the curves of Bath’s streets, lighted shop windows, and the looming church kept us walking until midnight.

In the morning we walked to the Royal Crescent, then through dignified streets lined with town houses. What noble spaces for living. In the park I stopped to photograph the small raised circular beds of double pink begonias edged with thyme. Among the begonias a few lavender and dusty millers had been plunked down here and there to good effect—they undid the studied look of a park bed. Wallace Stevens liked to insert one “ugly” word, a rough-textured word, into each poem, seamless beauty being boring. The silk-textured petals and the jaunty little pale-leafed thyme—such a simple and inspired choice.

We shopped with the matrons for those delectable local cheeses we’d been served the night before. If I had a kitchen in Bath, I would try the cockles and samfire, a seaweed offered in bins outside the fishmonger’s. We loaded our shopping bag with scones, buns and fresh breads, and bottles of elder flower juice. Walking back to the car, we fell into step with a brisk lady, upswept hair and linen suit, who hoped we liked Bath and pointed out her black varnished door in a circle of gracious houses around a park with one vast tree. “Don’t come in town at night. It’s shameful what has happened. Hippies and drugs, the girls are devils, tough as boys. They’ll take your teeth if they’re false.”

At an outdoor antique/junk market, Beatles music blared. Humming “Hey, Jude,” I found a starch-and-crochet christening dress some baby wore 150 years ago, four ivory-handled cheese knives (forty pence apiece!), and a pair of tiny horn spectacles, also worn by a child whose eyes are long since shut. Ed found an old level and an unfolding wood and brass measurer. I overheard a Scottish woman say, “Their junk is different from our junk.” By midmorning, the sidewalks were thronged with tourists and local shoppers. Morris dancers performed in a closed street. A homeless man leaned against a doorway reading
Wild Spain
. The street people are known as
crusties
. They are
cuffy
, meaning “down and out.”

We were herded through the Roman baths, then spent an hour in the big parish church, reading the epitaphs on gravestones in the floor and on the walls: Walter Clarke Darby, Mary Henrietta Cotgrave, Marmaduke Peacocke, Cecilia Blake. Maybe Jane Austen perused the stones for her characters’ names. Amid the tourists, one of whom was eating from a box of Cracker Jacks, a priest was conducting a religious ceremony for a group of five ancient ladies. As we passed, we heard him boom out, “Lead us not into temptation.” Four silver heads were bowed; the fifth lady, looking contemplative, examined her manicure, her hand outstretched. Of the five, perhaps she was the one once led into temptation.

We took care of the split tire and headed for Wales.

We
crossed into Wales and drove up to the Isle of Anglesey, Ynys Môn in Welsh, where we had rented a cottage with the beguiling name of Mermaid, right on the water. Taking slow roads through pastureland put us there at nine at night, still the long Welsh summer twilight, with the tide rushing back in to fill the strait, and the slanted rays striking a great castle across the water. We carried our Bath provisions inside, looking forward to a picnic of various meat pies and cheeses on the terrace. On the road in, we’d stopped at an organic vegetable stand and a pick-your-own berries field. The customers chatted in Welsh, oldest of Great Britain’s languages. We paused, fingering the beans, just to listen. The sound was at once musical and hard, like a vase of marbles emptied into the sink. We felt ebullient to be in Wales. Nearby was the first garden on my list, Plas Newydd, designed by my distant ancestor, Humphrey Repton. Our garden-to-garden vacation was beginning. As we unloaded the car, the rising moon looked like a big gooseberry, translucent gold in the milky sky. The whitewashed cottage, a former stable, had been remodeled recently. When we walked inside, we almost dropped our bags. It was hideous. Someone had furnished it like a cheap trailer. “No. This can’t be.” I walked through, peering into two cramped bedrooms. “It has a five-teacup rating from the tourist board.” I’d thought the Welsh teacup system so cozy.

“Must have been based on quantity, not quality. The number of beds and spoons.” Ed pushed the bed, and the mattress sank. The coverlet of pilled polyester was slightly damp, the bath done up like a two-dollar bordello, and the kitchen floor’s low-grade plastic wood gave at each step. Only the unattractive living room redeemed it. French doors opened to the water view, and if I concentrated on that, I didn’t notice the bad leather furniture “suite” or the plastic flowers atop the TV or the itchy-looking wall-to-wall. “Beware of renting on the Internet. Weren’t there photographs?”

“No, they didn’t have them yet, and I took a chance. The photo of the outside looked so wonderful, and the agent said the whole place was just redone . . . Let’s don’t talk about it anymore.” I’m guilty.

The luscious twilight lasted until eleven o’clock. We walked along the shore of the Strait of Menai and decided that things would be better in the morning. But in the blank light of day, the place was still tawdry. As if to confirm my impression, a trailer surrounded by various large metal storage containers was parked outside the kitchen window. “Do you want to go? Even though we’ll lose the money, I’m not sure we can sleep on that squat little bed. My feet hang off and practically touch the floor. Chalk it up,” Ed said. He started looking in the guidebook for a hotel.

“Those synthetic bed linens feel like sandpaper. Let’s just stay until we see what’s around here.” We set off. We found Wales sublime. The saturated-green air looked aquatic, as though someone just pulled the plug, draining away the watery world and leaving swaying meadows, fields, trees, and hills washed and gleaming. “Do we need to
go
to gardens? All Wales seems to be a garden,” Ed said. The roads we took were actually lanes, with hedgerows crowding the edges and the green banks profligate with wild foxglove. For three days we left early and stayed out late, eating in pubs and pushing on toward the next interesting town rather than going “home” and cooking, imagining we lived facing that changeable strait, picking fruit down the road, as we’d like to have done.

We spent hours at the garden of Plas Newydd, which also overlooked the Strait of Menai. My distant relative Humphrey Repton, involved in the original planning, created one of his rare design portfolios called a Red Book for the property in 1798–99. We didn’t go inside the huge house. I have an allergy to hearing anecdotes about ghosts in the hallway. Dead houses depress me. Unless one looks fascinating, I skip it. In the gardens I’m free to wander among the old guards’ legacies that still grow. I can’t tell what’s left of the Repton design, but the garden has an especially expansive feel, partly because water views open a property as nothing else can. Grand trees and islands of hydrangeas punctuate the greenswards. In Wales hydrangeas bloom prolifically and intensely, that blue of the Madonna’s dress in Renaissance painting, and deep pink globes. I’ve only seen such blue in the hydrangeas on the campus where I used to teach. They bloomed under pine trees, a respite in an urban campus. I always thought the blue came from the Pacific sea air, not from acid levels in the soil; perhaps that’s the secret here as well.

Conwy, nearby on the mainland, is an active castle town. I wonder if someday I can take my new grandson Willie to such places in Wales instead of Disneyland. Conwy, like many Welsh towns, centered on a stupendous castle to explore or to climb for the views. We took tea with apple pie on High Street; then while Ed looked for paper supplies, I walked around photographing the window boxes and baskets of flowers that dangled from most shops, the flowers flourishing far above dog level. Riotously blooming, not a dried-up one to be seen, densely planted, these blaring bouquets made the streets gay and cared for. “What kind of fertilizer do you use?” I asked a woman outside a bed and breakfast. I would love to be staying behind her bright blue door.

“Oh, any old thing,” she replied. “Can’t stop them.” Petunias, ivy, impatiens, geraniums, campanula, lobelia, all planted by the armful, even fuchsias mixed with geraniums, shade or sun preference be damned. Breathtaking, a great big yellow and apricot trailing begonia basket hanging against a pale stone wall. This simple addition to the street rescued the whole block from drabness. Mainly for the name, we buy dinky pork pie, along with some Llanboidy cheddar. On the way out of Conwy, we stopped in at the Teapot Museum. After all, we’re in England. The eccentric collection consists of more than a thousand teapots, some classic and pretty, some kitschy, and many outlandish, such as Princess Diana with bright yellow hair, a camel, a majolica fish swallowing another fish, Elvis, and a World War II tank. Crammed into one upstairs room, the collections seemed right at home in the castle wall mews.

At night we headed back to Mermaid House with the same lavish view as the great house at Plas Newydd.

Portmeirion—the entire town—is a
folie de grandeur
of Clough Williams-Ellis, who wanted to build the ideal village. His purpose was didactic—he meant to demonstrate that development could be for the good—but his result is peculiar. The village, constructed from 1925 to 1975, never became a real town with cheese monger and dry cleaners, but it did become a magnified toy town with an amalgamated Mediterranean flavor, quite surreal in the Welsh landscape. Now a hotel, with various tea and gift shops, the pretty village on the water feels like a TV set, which it has been. Only the garden, mostly white and blue, anchors Portmeirion in reality. I sketched the iron urns of bountiful snowy white hydrangeas and imagined having a few of their square wrought-iron structures made for Bramasole’s roses to climb. As in every Welsh garden, banks of hydrangeas, these a lighter blue, drifted around the park at the town’s center. A sublime climbing rose of flat white blooms and pink buds obscured the front of one house. We didn’t linger; pretty as Portmeirion was, we found it artificial. I kept thinking of Asolo in the Veneto, a town even lovelier, with real people living and working there, moving easily through layers of time.