The Watcher in the Garden (15 page)

Terry soon saw the stick, knew at once why she carried it, and the infrequent smile crossed his face.

When it eventually happened, when the violence latent in both of them finally boiled over, they were on a crossroads on one corner of which was a deep concrete ditch. There was nothing secret about the accident. It happened for everyone to see. An accident and nothing more. It was hard for a motorbike rider to see a girl crossing a busy street when the sun was in his eyes and she was not using a pedestrian crossing. He could not have been blamed if he had hit her. Nobody could think he deliberately aimed for the girl, who was in the middle of the road and should have been safe enough from anything coming from behind. It could only have been pure chance that sent the bike skidding sideways in front of a passing car. And it was chance again that the car, trying to avoid the bike, had sideswiped the girl so that she was flung across the road right into the concrete ditch. It was inevitable that when the bike hit the curb as hard as it did, the rider should have dived into the ditch too. Both had landed head first and both were unconscious when they were picked up. Except for bruises, the girl did not appear to be badly injured. Her concussion, the doctor said, was not serious. A few days would see her out of hospital. As for the bike rider, an injury to the throat, as if in his charge across the road he had somewhere run into a rail or an iron bar, would keep him in bed a good deal longer. The rail beside the ditch had been broken as one of them fell and no one noticed the walking stick deep in the hedge of someone's front garden, where it had been flung from Catherine's hand by the impact. There was no one to say if the impact had been with the car, or Terry's throat.

At first Catherine noticed nothing wrong. She was stiff and sore and her head ached. That was what she expected, and when the doctor let her go home soreness and headache were much improved. She was to spend a few days in bed at home and then, according to the doctor, she would be right back on form. No one mentioned Terry to her and she did not ask. She was not supposed to know who it was that hit her and they thought she might feel quite unnecessarily guilty if they told her the bike rider had been a good deal worse injured than she was.

They did not need to tell her because she knew it was Terry. She knew, too, without their telling her, that he was in pain, that his thoughts were confused and angry, and that there was a mark on his throat. She lay in bed, calm, contented and feeling better as the days went by. For the first time she could remember she was the centre of her family's attention. One by one, for they had been told not to excite or tire her, they came into her bedroom, always on tiptoe, often with cups or glasses, fruit or flowers. One day her mother came in with a strange, small bouquet. It was composed mainly of leaves and small green twigs with here and there an insignificant pale mauve flower. It could have been a bunch of fairly unattractive everlastings except that as she took it the smell of fresh garden herbs came strongly, bringing with it the sudden memory of Mr. Lovett's garden. She did not need the typewritten note to know who it came from. Indeed, the note only said, “Bob read about accident in the paper. We look forward to seeing you again very soon. Press the leaves between your hands.” There was no signature, and Mrs. Hartley, noting the look on her face as she took the bouquet, was satisfied with a secret she thought she could understand very well.

“But it was a curious little note,” she told Mr. Hartley afterwards.

When she was alone Catherine took the bouquet and pressed it, and the leaves gave off their aroma and filled the room with the mingled scents of lavender, lemon balm, verbena, thyme, rosemary and many other herbs she could not name. And Diana, coming in shortly afterwards, stopped in the doorway, closed her eyes and sniffed, and then said, “Heaven. It's like walking into one of the pavilions of paradise. Where did you get it?”

 

Terry continued to lie in hospital. Sometimes he knew where he was and more or less why he was there. Sometimes it seemed to him he was in quite a different place, where there were no white-capped figures hovering over him and no rows of beds on either side. On these occasions he would feel himself relax and a strange peace creep over him. Peace was something he was unaccustomed to and he found it as comfortable as a warm fire in winter. Although he could not explain them, and his head ached too much to try, he looked forward to these periods and learned to enjoy them without needing an explanation. During one of them when he breathed he found the air was full of the fragrance of herbs, and this was pleasant, too. He was in pain a good deal but the pain never encroached on the times he allowed his mind to take him elsewhere. But as his aches and pains grew less, the periods when he was elsewhere ceased. He found he missed them, but no effort that he made could get them back.

His mother came to see him, full of anger and indignation that he should be lying there through no fault of his own. Until that moment he had not thought of how he came to be there, and he asked her. But as she began to tell him he found that, after all, he knew already. A dark shade peeled off a memory that had been there all the time, and he knew it was Catherine who had crossed the street in front of him. He knew that this time he had had her just where he wanted her, and he knew that as he reached her she had stepped towards him, raised her stick and hit him. He knew more than this. He knew the rage that possessed her when she did it. This surprised him, for it was a rage like his own—murderous and implacable. He also knew that she was not in hospital, and he knew the day she got out of bed for the first time and walked out on to the veranda. He could feel his head swim and a momentary cloud come down over his eyes. Was it his mental effort, or hers, that drove it away?

 

It was not long before Catherine was quite well again. Her mood was now so amiable that she did not even snap back when Mrs. Hartley told her to be very careful when she crossed the street on the first occasion she went out by herself. Naturally she went to the garden. She found Mr. Lovett sitting at the look-out with Conrad beside him. It was a cold morning with a sharp breeze and he was well muffled-up. Jackson never let him out in the winter wind without his coat and scarf. But he refused to wear a hat and the white hair was blowing about like some wild winter bloom, sprouting from the folds of the woollen scarf. He did not hear her come. It was Conrad who came towards her, ears flat, tail waving. Mr. Lovett must have been deep in thought, for she had to say his name before he knew she was there.

When he did, the surprise and joy in his face silenced her, and for a moment she could not speak. But it was not necessary. He got up at once, saying, “Catherine! We never expected to see you so soon.” He put his hand out and she put hers into it and was led towards the seat. “Sit down. I'm sure you shouldn't be standing.”

“I'm quite all right again now,” she said. “I was never very ill.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” he said quite sharply. “No one gets knocked off the road by a motorbike without feeling ill.”

“Not very ill, I said. I was lucky, and now I'm quite well again.” She wanted to dispose of the subject before he asked if she knew who had been riding the motorbike. Terry's name had not been in the paper when the accident was first reported, and it was better that he should not know. “Thank you for the herbs. They were lovely. Just what I needed.”

He smiled. “I knew you'd like them. Sometimes a pleasant smell is more healing than a pleasant sight.”

“Yes.” There were times she forgot he was blind and when it hit her, as it did again now, the shock was always painful.

Unexpectedly he got up. “We must go into the house. Come along. I can't have you sitting here in this cold wind. I should have thought sooner.”

She could not persuade him that she was again in robust health, but just as they were leaving the look-out he stopped and said, “Just before we go—take a glance at the new look-out. Tell me what you see.”

She turned round again, facing the wind. Surprise made her hesitate, but he waited quietly until she was prepared to speak. At last she said, “They've done a lot of work on it. That piece of ground is quite level now and there's a sort of stone parapet round the outside, over the drop into the gorge. It's a long drop, Mr. Lovett, longer than the one from here. You can hardly see the bottom of the gorge over there. It gets very narrow and the trees go down right to the bottom on both sides. You can't even see the water.”

“You can hear it though, when there's no wind. Jackson took me over there the other day. You could hear it quite clearly.”

“I expect so. And the cliff that goes down from the look-out is higher than this one. At the bottom the trees start. They've begun to make the seat for you to sit on. It looks rather like this one. But the back part of it isn't finished yet. Will it take much longer?”

“Next week, Jackson thinks. Tom can get on with work like that in the winter when there's not much else to do. You see, they've been pretty quick about it.”

“Is—does—” She started again. “Does that boy still work for him?”

“I believe so. Apparently he turns out to be quite an intelligent boy and he works reasonably well.”

“They haven't started the bridge yet?”

“I think not. Can you see any sign of it?”

She looked at the steep, narrow little gully that divided the two look-outs. So far there was nothing to connect them at all. Just air that flowed out into the wider, deeper gorge below, flowed up, caressing the falling water, stroking the clinging trees and the cliffs, rising, invisible, into the empty sky and streaming silently south, racing lightly over the hills and valleys, cool and fresh, and carrying the smells of winter fires and the nip of frost. Soft, silent, invisible air, capable, too, of using its great power for destruction, of picking up one of those mighty trees and flinging it, roots and all, into the gorge below, of swirling tons of soil from the ground and putting it somewhere else.

“The bridge hasn't been started yet.” She stopped, and then said, “It's a pretty morning.”

“Tell me—just before we go.”

She began slowly, carefully. “The sky is quite clear. I can't see any clouds. This morning it's a lovely, lovely sort of blue—not dark like sometimes, or washy, like in summer, but bright—clear and bright as if it was holding the sunlight everywhere. You seem to be able to see a long, long way into it. The hills are all patchy with shadows because the sun isn't very high up yet. In places the trees are very dark, but in others they're a kind of olive green, and where the shadows are, they're blue as blue. Towards the south where the gorge goes the last of the mist is rising out of it and being blown among the trees in little wisps. The sunshine has turned some of it to a sort of whitey silver. And I can see a hawk floating about. I expect he's brown, but he looks quite black against the blue sky. Behind us, at the head of the gorge, where the sound of traffic comes from there are little flashes of sunlight where it's catching windows and bits of metal.”

It had taken her a long time to say it because she had spoken slowly and carefully, with quite long pauses. When she had finished there was a silence that lasted several minutes. Then Mr. Lovett said in a voice she had never heard before, “Thank you, my dear.”

They walked up the path, Conrad leading with his tail streaming like a banner in the breeze, then Mr. Lovett, who liked to go at his own pace, and then Catherine. Before she followed him round the corner where the path took a twist towards the lower terrace she stopped and turned to look once more at the two look-outs and the sheer gap that divided them. There was no sign yet that even the first preparations for the communicating bridge had been started. One could throw a stone from one look-out to the other, but they were as remote from one another as two stars in the night. She found herself hoping the bridge would never be started.

Her eyes blurred and she thought it was the nip in the breeze that had brought tears to them, but when she tried to blink them away it made no difference. She seemed to be looking through a slowly moving mist, not white and gleaming like the one that was rising from the valleys far away to the south, but a grey mist, and the grey was streaked through with black. She saw now that it was rolling up from the gully that divided the look-outs, rising between them, and the black streaks licked up through it like tongues of flame from some monstrous satanic fire. A sudden terror paralysed her and for a moment she felt colder than she had ever felt before. Then she blinked again and her eyes cleared and there was nothing between the look-outs but space and sunshine and the sound of birds. Her heart was thumping as she started up the path, telling herself she was not as fully recovered as she had thought, and glad that Mr. Lovett, who was very quick at picking up her changes of mood and behaviour, would put her quickened breathing down to the steepness of the path. And perhaps, she told herself, that was all it was—some sudden need of oxygen in her brain.

 

At the same time Terry, still lying in his bed in the hospital, experienced in his hazy mind a sudden clear picture of the two look-outs, and he knew them and he remembered that his mate was helping to make the second one. And a sudden idea came to him, tailor-made, complete and beautifully simple. Then the images he was constantly seeing became confused again and no clear thoughts attached themselves to any of them as they had to the one brief vision of the look-outs. It was the only one that, much later on, came back to him and the idea with it.

The period that Terry was in hospital was one of the most tranquil that Catherine could remember. Nothing at all happened at home to disturb it. Her mother and Diana were still looking after her as if she might disintegrate at any moment and for once she found nothing to irritate her in their solicitude. In fact—and this was something new—she was grateful. With nothing to ruffle the domestic harmony her father became less critical. Diana was rash enough to say one day, “It's lovely being able to stay at home without wondering when the next crash of crockery is coming.” Catherine only smiled at her.