The White Garden (25 page)

In this space she also kept her collection of milk white stones. These stones were her children, her toys. They were the stones that led Hansel and Gretel home through the forest; they were pieces of the moon, the eggs of mysterious monsters, the gifts of golden angels. Therese could write messages with her stones, make pictures with them. They were the teeth of a witch. They whispered to her. Consoled her.

Her stones could dry her tears, could tell the future. Therese’s eyes were often filled with sudden tears. Therese was forbidden to write to Violetta, to receive letters. Imagine, Mademoiselle said one day, imagine that Violetta is dead. Mademoiselle looked kindly at Therese across the table in the little library.

Imagine that Violetta is dead. Had Mademoiselle really said that? Perhaps Therese had only imagined it. Perhaps a message was coming through from Violetta. Violetta was dying. Violetta was dead. But a photograph appeared in the
Women’s Weekly
, a picture of Mr and Mrs da Fabriano and their baby son Maximil-ian and daughter Violetta at the wedding of Mrs da Fabriano’s sister in Perth. Violetta was wearing the mantilla Therese had given her.

She loves me.

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Then Therese began to dream that Violetta was dead. A picture of Mr and Mrs da Fabriano grieving at the funeral of their young daughter Violetta. Therese sat up in bed in sickness and horror. She sketched Violetta’s funeral in her diary, and a soft delirium overcame her. She succumbed to fever, was possibly subject to hallucinations, and the doctor suggested she should go to the sea for a holiday. Therese and two of her sisters and a nurse, and, who knows how or why, Mademoiselle, spent three weeks of the summer together at the beach. Swimming and tennis and ice-creams and sunburn and dancing with boys on Friday and Saturday night in the church hall. So time went on, and Therese grew more and more fascinated by the life of the Little Flower.

It was when Mademoiselle returned to France because her mother was dying that Therese, again bereft, began to play a solitary game in which she pretended to
be
the Little Flower.

From Normandy came cards from Mademoiselle, but there was no return address.
Mille Bons Baisers
. Therese could glide in and out of her Little Flower game, while showing no sign of it to other people. Therese is more settled now, they said. She seems to have got over all her childish worries. She’s a different girl.

Sweet. Serene.

She never refers to Violetta any more, thank goodness.

Like a sleepwalker Therese moved through school winning prizes in Literature and French and Music and Art.

When Bridget was preparing to go into the convent, Therese started to show the first signs for years of her old nervous troubles. I think Ambrose Goddard could possibly help her, the doctor said. There seems to be some possible delusion, or at least hallucination. Certainly depression and suicidal tenden-cies. Hysteria. A most unsettling time for a sensitive young woman, with her closest sister entering the convent.

So Therese went to Mandala, and she was given Sodium Amytal with Ritalin, and also electric shocks. She had so many injections of Largactil in her backside she couldn’t walk, but skittered around on all fours, along corridors, up and down the stairs like a monkey. With relief she finally dropped into the life of the Little Flower, and then she became a special patient,

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was given her cell beside the cell of Teresa of Avila, and she had long talks with Dr Goddard. During these talks which were taped, Therese was apparently ecstatic, and Ambrose felt a power within her that fascinated him and drew a deep response from his imagination. Therese was going to be the fullest and most detailed case of religious delusion in
Illumination
.

Ambrose saw this young woman had so imbibed the writing, the life, the personality of the nineteenth-century French saint that when her own fragile world finally collapsed at the betrayal, as she saw it, first of Violetta and then of her sister Bridget, she became, for her own comfort and survival, Therese of Lisieux. Between Bridget’s betrayal and the time when Therese was swallowed up, or transformed by her own intimate knowledge of her namesake, there had been the treatments — some chemical, some electrical — that she received at Mandala. There were also episodes of vigorous love-making by the doctor. Without the intervention of these processes, perhaps Therese Gillis would never have developed her fully deluded condition. Or perhaps she would. In any case, convinced of her own powerlessness, and yet at the same time believing in an immature concept of her own omnipotence, she was a perfect ground for colonisation by the Little Flower.

Sitting duck, Ambrose thought. Therese Gillis was a sitting duck for Therese Martin. ‘Celine and I are two little white chickens,’ she said to Ambrose.

Therese sat on the floor in Ambrose’s office, playing with her white stones, arranging them in circles, in spirals, in crosses, stars. She talked to them as a baby talks to toys.

She looked up from her game and said: ‘Did I ever tell you about the jelly sandwiches? Well — I went out fishing with Papa, and as he fished I sat in silence by his side. I watched the clouds as they passed by, I watched their reflection in the water.

I listened to the murmur of the wind in the trees, in the reeds, and my thoughts became very deep. I was drowning in my own still, dark, deep-sea thoughts. I roused myself at last from my drifting pleasure, and I unpacked the sandwiches my sisters had prepared for us. Thick white bread with yellow butter and berry jelly, all wrapped up in lettuce leaves and folded in a white
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napkin. Imagine the bitterness of my disappointment when I found that the lovely scarlet jelly had gone a miserable pink and had sunk like blood into the bread. I wept and I knew what a very sad place the earth is. And I longed for heaven.’

‘My mother died when I was nine,’ Therese said to Ambrose.

‘She is in heaven. Is your mother still alive, Doctor Goddard?’

She sat on the floor surrounded by her white stones, a little nun in a magic circle on the blue and red of the Persian rug. ‘Where is she, your mother? Is she dead too? Perhaps she is in heaven with my mother and my little brothers. Where is your mother?’

There were certain words, and ‘mother’ and ‘dead’ were among them, that came to Ambrose’s lips with the greatest difficulty. Before he could frame them he would stop and stutter and stumble over the first sound. He now sat stiffly behind his great carved Italian desk and flattened his palms on the blotting pad, drawing in his breath. His fingers splayed out in front of him, springing tufts of blonde hair sprouting from the backs of his hands where the skin was faintly scaly. He rotated his head a few times was if to suggest there was some odd irritation lodged between his neck and his collar. She was peering up at him, the childish lunatic on the carpet, smiling and waiting politely but insistently for him to answer her question. Ambrose affected to smile, but his eyes were fixed and cold, and a dark blush had crept up his neck and across his cheeks. She was waiting.

‘My m-m-m-m—’ he began, and Therese sat quite still as the sound hummed in the silence of the room. M-m-m-m-m-m-m.

He began again. Over and over he began and the patience and quiet smile of the young woman in front of him became almost intolerable. He had forgotten what she had asked him, intent only on conquering his inability to utter the shocking and pain-filled word. Love and fear and a toothy biting hatred twisted steadily into a knot in his heart so that his blood beat in his ears — and still the hum of the sound he was making droned out into the air. Finally he did succeed in saying the word, but then he had to deal with the next one, because his mother was dead. D-d-d-d-d-d-d hammered into the air between him and Therese, and still she sat among her stones, with her infinitely

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patient face tilted up at him, her pale green eyes wide and kind and deadly.

Your mother is in heaven with my mother and the angels. My little brothers watch over her.

But Ambrose heard none of the twittering platitudes coming from the girl at his feet. He could hear only the rushing of his own blood and feel only the rhythm of an axe as he imagined hacking Therese to pieces.

The moment passed, and Ambrose broke with Therese’s gaze and turned to look out the window. Sunlight shone on the shiny surface of the camellia leaves outside the glass, and as far as the eye could see stretched the green safe grounds of Mandala, a faint lilac haze softening the edges of the trees.

Ambrose ordered ECT for Therese for the next day. After the shock treatment, one of many, Therese lay on her bed in her cell, stunned, bewildered, her temples aching, her memory blurred now, and studded with gaps. The pale haze that hung about the trees in the grounds of the clinic had invaded her mind somehow, and she thought and saw and recalled and imagined as though struggling in a fog. Who was the woman in the cell next door? Who were all these people, and where was she? With each treatment of this kind she lost a little more of her grip on the meaning of the reality of the things around her.

She thought of white stones. What did that mean?

Why was she thinking of white stones? She reached out as if to grasp the stones she thought she saw floating in the air just out of reach, but even as she seemed to touch them, they dissolved, slowly faded like a photographic image working backwards in a reverse developing fluid.

Teresa of Avila came to her bedside to comfort her. She brought with her the book that Vita wrote about the two saints.

‘The sisters in Wales sent me this book. I am the eagle and you are the dove. It says we are saints. I am not really a saint.’

‘Oh, but
I
am.’

And as the days went by and Therese’s mind began to clear, she listened to the stories of their lives as written down in the book.

‘You are the eagle and I am the dove. You are the bird of
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bright vision. You fly high above the waters of the ocean, and have eyes that see the fish on the floor of the sea. At other times you fasten your eyes upon the sun and fly to God the father. I am the little white dove that sings of peace and true affection. I am innocent, defenceless. Do you think the sisters would send me also a book?’

‘You may look at mine whenever you wish.’

‘The kiss of the dove is the kiss of the soul. With one kiss the sacred dove brought the baby Jesus to his Mother. I am a dove; you may call me Columbine. You laugh Spanish laughter, but I am a sweet, sweet sweetmeat. A caramel. I melt in the mouth of God. I fly from the mouth of a dying man, and I dance in the light, on the water. My wings glisten with silver, and my feathers with yellow gold. I am the colour of air. I am nothing, nothing in the eye of God; a breath of thought in the palm of his hand. Keep me as the apple of an eye. Hide me in the shadow of a wing. Be ye as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves in gloves. My dove grey gloves are soft and silent, silver on the edge of my mind. If the feet of this fowl be hanged from a tree, that tree shall not bear fruit from thenceforth. I dream the unexpected. Hundreds of people travelling in great silver metal angels that fly above the earth. I dream that God is black. I ride the horse with the golden mane.’

‘I dream only of my own severed arm.’

‘Who is the woman who sought us out and wormed her way and wrote us down, found us out as tawny eagles and white doves?’

‘West.’

‘Test the west for frost is lost. Old mould is grey green and west is the nest.’

‘Vita Sackville-West. She writes a lot of poetry and stories, and it says here she wrote a book about flowers.
Some Flowers
.’

‘I’d be in that one too. The smallest dove, the smallest flower.

I bloom in innocent insignificance under a glass moon.’

‘Sister Michael, the one from my convent in Wales, has sent me a note about the writer’s house. It is actually a castle called Sissinghurst. Perhaps she is dead. Sister Michael doesn’t say.

She says some of the sisters went to Kent for a visit. They were

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staying near the house. It has been given to the National Trust.

The gardens are going to be a public park, and there is a garden all full of white flowers. Only white. A white garden. Imagine a garden where all the flowers were white.’

‘I think of a garden like that. A garden of innocent snow flowers, of the purest petals like white moths in the moonlight.

Garden — danger — garden. You jumble up the letters and get danger. I used to have a garden once, with tiny daisies, blue and white, and roses, and sometimes a red tulip. I had a round garden, completely round, made from a circle of red bricks, and sometimes I think about it. And sometimes I’m happy, and sometimes I’m sad. Tulip happy, tulip sad. Running round the circle ring of roses.’

Therese’s eyes were glazed and her gaze was fixed on a point far off.

‘I see the clouds,
mouton
,
moutonner
. Mutton button glutton.

Here comes Shirley Temple.’

Therese and Teresa sit on the bed in Therese’s cell, the book lies between them, and as Shirley comes skipping in, they look up at her with a chilly composure.

‘I heard you talking, I heard you talking about your dreams,’

Shirley says. ‘You should hear mine. I am an endless mine of information about dreams of mine. A bottomless pit like elephant shit. Laugh. You’ll laugh yourself silly. Dr God can hardly control himself. Every Monday, just about, I go in there to the inner sanctum and I tell him all the dreams I’ve saved up for a week. We call it the dream bank. I make deposits. He does withdrawals. Under my supervision of course. He believes everything I say. I say, Oh, Dr God, I dreamt this and this and this. The shock of it, the murky dirty drainy dreams I have.