The White Garden (30 page)

Shirley Temple put her head round the corner and said, ‘You are both sick.
Very, very
sick. I will call the doctor and have you

Patience Obtains Everything

205

both put to bed, put to bye-byes, and
I’ll
go and meet the duch-ess. Then you’ll be sorry. Sick as dogs. And sorry as a rainbow trout.’

In the end Shirley stayed behind on the side veranda and the two nuns set off together towards the White Garden. The walked slowly in the still, brutal heat of the early afternoon, slowly as if in prayer or meditation, their eyes cast down, their hands out of sight beneath their habits. They walked past Ambrose’s window and the doctor glanced out as they went by. He was rocking back in his chair, his feet on the desk, a cigar smouldering in the ash-tray. On the desk a jumble of papers and two empty champagne glasses. Round the rim of one glass was the imprint of Vickie’s dark red lips. The room was cooled by fans. He poured himself another glass, the moisture from the bottle dripping onto his desk blotter.

The nuns moved through the grounds, beneath the tall trees, past lawns and flowerbeds, muttering and arguing. The strong will of each clashing darkly with the other. (Go back. I won’t.

You’ll be sorry. We’ll see who’s sorry.) Until they came in sight of the White Garden where Vita sat, still and vivid and bright, on the pale golden steps.

Therese stopped walking and said, ‘
Now
go back Teresa.’

But Teresa kept going. Therese took her roughly by the arm, jerking the bottle of bees from her pocket. Now Teresa stopped, staring in surprise at the bottle of angry bees. Then it happened so fast. Vita stood up at the sight of the tussle between the two nuns; Therese took the lid off the bottle; the bees flew in all directions; Teresa fled; Vickie was stung on the neck and sat down on the step in pain.

Therese scarcely knew what had happened. She stood blinking at the woman in the green jacket. The red hat and the red book had fallen to the earth. She put her jar back in her pocket and knelt beside the woman on the step. Vickie’s eyes were wide with fear and pain, and her hands were at her throat.

‘Run, run fast and get the doctor,’ she said. ‘I’ve been stung. I must stay here very still.
Run
.’

For a moment Therese stared into Vickie’s eyes. Then she picked up the red book and ran in the direction of the hospital.

206

The White Garden

She ran until she reached the last stand of cypresses next to the main building. Then she stood for a time beneath the trees.

She turned round and took the path to the left, the path that led away from the hospital and up to the convent where Teresa was sitting in her cell weeping with rage and disappointment, and where Shirley was on the veranda step, pushing the mounds of sand left by the ants back into the cracks between the paving stones.

Therese went straight to her cell, ignoring Shirley, and hid the book among her treasures. If Vita came after her and demanded it back she would deny any knowledge of it. Her bees, intended only to frighten Teresa, had stung Vita. Therese sensed she was already in serious trouble. She would be punished with electricity, with LSD, and Deep Sleep. At least she would keep the book, a talisman, a gift to herself, something from the outside world. And it was the story Vita wrote about the two saints, it was the same as the book the nuns sent to Teresa. It had flown into her hands; she would guard it, read it, love it. Flown like a red angel into her hands at last.

Shirley knew that Therese had been up to mischief. She glimpsed the red cover of the book, and could tell when the little one carried on her heart a burden of guilt.

Vickie died on the steps of the garden.

It was weeks before Shirley, mad, canny, was able, almost, to work it out. Whispers among the staff. The book that suddenly appeared out of nowhere among Therese’s things. The hatred Therese had suddenly developed for Teresa. But only in a mind like Shirley’s would these things add up. And hers was a voice that was never really listened to.

It was years and years before the significance of the bees and the book and Therese and the death of Vickie Field were brought together, to a point, as Laura talked to Rosamund on the balcony, looking out over the sea of tulips.

Late on the night after Vickie’s death Ambrose drove to her flat and let himself in, searching for anything that might link

Patience Obtains Everything

207

him too closely with the dead woman. As usual things were all over the place. He found some books he had lent her, but there should have been more. In any case, they seemed harmless enough. He found it strangely moving to be in her house, knowing she was dead. He recalled the last time he had been there, the conversation about the dressmaker’s dummy. In a foolish gesture of regret, in a moment of desire to preserve something of the lovely young actress, he took the dummy, draped in Vickie’s scarves, in an awkward embrace and hustled it into his car. He felt a wave of sadness about to engulf him as he pushed the clumsy body with its wooden peg of a head across the back seat.

It lay beneath its single unscrewed leg, completely forlorn and dismembered. For months it stayed behind a roll of carpet in the garage until he eventually took it to the house at the beach.

There he stood the dummy in a corner of his billiard room.

A pale brown linen woman-shape without arms, marked by a vertical split, in the middle of which could be seen some sort of wheel. A dumb, silent, eerie memory of Vickie Field. An even darker memory of the dummy his mother used to have in his childhood home.

Therese’s mental state got swiftly worse. She returned to a kind of ecstasy of muteness in which nobody could reach her.

Her copy of
The Imitation
was always with her, as was the red copy of
The Eagle and the Dove
. Therese would leaf slowly through Vita’s book, tracing the picture of the mermaid above the publisher’s name — I swam in the sea with my sisters

— turning entranced to the photograph of the Little Flower’s childhood home in Lisieux — snow was falling. I rode on the horse with the golden mane. She was, as she had imagined she would be, subjected to many strange, cruel and different treatments. For weeks at a time she lay in the Deep Sleep ward, naked, part of the stew of filthy, naked bodies, writhing, groaning, screaming bodies strapped to narrow beds. Some of them died. Therese did not die. Her tough little body refused, in spite of everything, including lack of nourishment, to give up.

There came a time when Therese could do no more. ‘I am not taking anything in. I am shutting down, closing up, and time is running out. Slowly my soul is seeping away, bleeding
208

The White Garden

sadly, quietly, relentless. I have a tearful hole in my soul. I see a bright unearthly light. It bathes me and draws me on. Is it the moon, mother-moon? I will be the death of a beautiful woman, the beautiful death of a beautiful flower, so small, so white, by the light of the moon. I must clear my head. Clear and clean and scrape out my brains. How Violetta will approve. Violetta will sit on the floor in her red silk jacket and laugh with approval.

My sisters will be sorry, their little baby Daphne going from them. Deaf and dumb Daphne curled up and died. My father is a very old man, as old as time, Father Time. My mother has brought me stones.’ In the clarity of blind confusion, suffocating in waves of self-love, breathless with gusts of a desire for power, Therese lost sight of herself.

She lay for days in her cell weeping silently. She easily stole the key to the playground where she and Violetta had pushed up into the clouds on the swing, had dangled and leapt from the horizontal ladder of the monkey bars.

It was said the bars at Immaculate Heart were higher than in any other school, risky and dangerous.

Starvation, chemicals, electricity — these things had failed to serve her. She searched her mind, her heart, her soul for help to come from Violetta. Where could she drown? There was nowhere to drown. The doctor had a gun in the drawer of his desk.

How do you shoot yourself? What poisonous plants can you find in the garden — is there a laburnum here? If there is one thing, for sure, you can’t do at Mandala, it’s slash your wrists.

They are very strict about that. She rolled some of her stones round in her pocket, between her fingers; six of the smallest stones she swallowed.

In her cell in the old convent at Mandala Therese placed all her poor little belongings in a row on the bed. Her hairbrush, towel, soap, deodorant, cold cream, toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, books, rosary, folded clothing, an old card from Violetta

— a wreath of violets on a pale green ground with ‘All My Love, Violetta’ in a round childish hand. Stones, white stones. She left behind most of her stones, although there were some in the pocket of her habit when she died. Why did she take nothing with her? Suicides can be so puzzling, their thought so far from

Patience Obtains Everything

209

any rational sense. Her cell was bleak, spotless. Beside her rosary she put the red book tied up with a red ribbon, and what remained of
The Imitation of Christ
.

Therese crept into the playground, locked herself in, and, using her belt, hanged herself from the monkey bars. Climb the vertical ladder, reach out, loop the strap around a rung on the horizontal ladder, twist the strap into a figure eight. Put your head in the noose. Swing out. Pain, euphoria, light, dark, oblivion.

A scrawny caricature of a small medieval figure hanging by the neck, a sketch in sepia and charcoal, Therese Gillis died swiftly. Her eyes bulged out of their sockets, her bloated face was blue, and her tongue protruded from her mouth. The white gravel beneath the body of Therese was splashed with shit.

When all was said and done, Dorothy came to collect her things. Matron Wilson was with her — she was a mother herself. It was a shocking tragedy. What to do with the white stones? Bury them with the body perhaps. By the time Dorothy came, Teresa had already taken the red library book, this book that Therese had mysteriously acquired, and which she took to turning over and over in her hands.

Ambrose moved Teresa from the convent and put her in the Sunroom. He had had enough of these dangerous dramas and tragedies. Then, as if in response to all that had happened, week by week, in a mysterious striptease, Teresa shed parts of her habit until Rosamund Pryce-Jones finally emerged, peeling back the cocoon of death, choosing the naked skin of life. In a deep part of herself she knew what she was doing, but she was never able to articulate it. The death of Therese delivered to Rosamund a profound and resonating shock, and set her on a new and long slow path to recovery. Jane Wilson befriended her — together they gradually nourished each other, gave each other strength and understanding. They both needed so much, had been long in the strange prison of Mandala, damaged, frightened, small. Rosamund’s family took her home, snatching her from the care of Ambrose Goddard. Too many strange and terrible things seemed to happen at Mandala. Rosamund was
210

The White Garden

still a wreck, and it was years before she led a normal life, free of doctors and medication.

So many strange and terrible things, indeed, took place at Mandala that they could no longer be ignored, and in due course a Royal Commission into the deaths of seven of the patients who had received Deep Sleep was called. Many more than seven had in fact died in Deep Sleep, but seven only could be verified. People were openly describing Ambrose Goddard as a murderer.

Twenty years after Vickie Field and Marjorie Bartlett and Therese Gillis died, Ambrose entered his garden study for the last time. He ran his fingers over the old-fashioned keys of his father’s typewriter, feeling a rage twisting in his heart and rising within him. For a long time he stood in the room which had grown dark and cold, even menacing. He faced the glass wall, his back to the wall of firearms, and stared out into the trees.

The untidy piles of his manuscript lay beside the typewriter on the desk which was otherwise empty. His rage was cold and growing stronger.

He took the typewriter in his arms — it was heavy and cumbersome — and went from his study out into the garden.

He walked down the long lawn until he came to the little jetty that stood out over the river. Again for a long time Ambrose sat on the jetty staring at the water and the trees, the typewriter beside him. Then he stood, picked up the typewriter and swung it back, let it go. It tumbled into the river close to the jetty, and sank immediately. He looked down at the bubbles and the ripples until the surface was almost still again and he became aware that he was very cold.

He walked slowly back to the study where he began to weep.

The manuscript of
Illuminations
, thousands of pages of vast and jumbled thoughts, case histories, knowledge — words, words, words, black jumping spiders of letters and words and evil little scraps of punctuation — lay in dreadful heaps on the desk. Ambrose took it in bundles to the garden incinerator and stood for hours feeding the pages into the flames. He stood there

Patience Obtains Everything

211

in the grip of an icy mood of dreadful compulsion as the Joan of Arcs, the Napoleons, the saints, movie stars, kings and queens, Rosamund and Therese, all caught at the edges, smoked, curled, flared — and were gone. Smoke and flame and ash. No words survived. No ideas.

The black marks on the pages were gone. In those hours, as he destroyed the evidence of his life’s work, Ambrose was filled with hate — he hated the manuscript, hated the events that had brought him to this hatred, hated himself. He was engulfed in a loneliness that had been beyond his imagination. He experienced loneliness, but in an eerie way, he felt nothing. Ambrose gazed into the inferno of his book, his life, and he saw nothing.