The White Garden (31 page)

All was empty. Yet his rage was constant, his self-destructive gesture had become automatic, inevitable.

It was a Saturday; Abigail was gone for several days, off in the country somewhere lecturing on gardens. That was how it had been for some time, Ambrose alone, Abigail absent. They had loud and violent arguments whenever they were in the same room — arguments about everything, about money, the children, the houses, the hospital, the cars, the dogs. About Abigail’s love affairs; about Ambrose’s appetites. They would argue about the colours of the towels in the bathroom, the number of dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

The impending public exposure of Mandala was never discussed, although in his heart, Ambrose thought of little else.

On this Saturday morning he finally selected his weapons, the Browning and the Ruger Blackhawk .44 Magnum, and drove to the beach. He drove calmly and steadily, relentlessly, planning how he would send the caretaker of the beach house off on a wild goose chase; how he would chain the dogs, his beloved wolfhounds, descendants of his dear old Silas, to the billiard table and shoot them. Then he would drive to a lonely place on one of the cliff tracks and end it all. A couple of drinks to get up his courage — if that’s what it takes — and then a quick hot suck on the Ruger. His will was a mess. Let people sort things out themselves afterwards. He didn’t care. Everything was a mess. Sophie and Sebastian — the thought of his children came to him as a thought of figures in a dream. He loved them. He
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used to love them. He still loved them. They would soon know of the things he was supposed to have done. He was ashamed, unable to face the thought of Sophie and Sebastian. In his imagination he blew Abigail a kiss, a bitter, ugly goodbye kiss.

He should have gotten hold of Abigail and shot her too, lined her up with the dogs and filled her with bullets. Or lined her up with the dummy in the corner of the billiard room and shot them both — Abigail and the dummy. But Ambrose was tired, very, very tired of the whole intricate shambles of his life. Better just to exit stage-left, with a good big bang. Shoot the dogs and blow your head off. Good shot, Ambrose.

His bitterness, his shame, stirred his blood, arrested his tears.

His heart was beating hard, and he felt a kind of inspiration, a sharp, dark glory in the anticipation of his own annihilation.

Nobody was going to have the satisfaction of getting Ambrose Goddard into court to justify his life, his theories, his glorious, daring, wonderful theories. It was the world’s loss. An empty, yawning loss. For him there would be peace at last, at least oblivion. Rest in peace. Peace of mind. Give them first a piece of his mind. Lots of bits and pieces — like porridge all over the car.

His cold exaltation lasted until the moment the second dog lay dead on the floor of the billiard room. The lights hung low over the green cloth of the table, and Ambrose knelt, burying his face in the warm belly of the animal, his sobs inhuman rasps of dreadful, desolate sound.

Ambrose steadied himself and backed away. He left the pistol on the table, took a bottle of whisky from the bar and turned his back on the dressmaker’s dummy in the gloomy corner of the room. He drank from the bottle, staring at the bodies of the two wolfhounds as they lay in a grotesque shape of peace. He took up the Ruger and tempted himself to use it, running the smooth tip of it around his gums, the roof of his mouth, tapping it against his teeth. He took the gun from his mouth and tapped his cheek-bone with the handle, listening to the muffled knocking in his ear, imagining the sudden crack and whip and spray of bone and mush and blood as he blew his head apart.

Every respectable suicide must leave a note. On the back of

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a scrap of cereal packet, Ambrose wrote in pencil: ‘Goodbye cruel world, I’m off to join a circus.’ He left the message on the kitchen sink and, without looking at the dogs again, he went with his whisky and his Ruger to the car.

THE WHITE GARDEN

LAURA

White flowers are for virgins and brides and corpses, a mingling of innocence, purity, sex and death. I remember this when the image of the garden at Mandala comes into my mind. The hospital at Mandala has gone, but the White Garden is still there, a showpiece in the grounds of a modern conference centre. Groups of visitors from all over the country, all over the world, come for conferences, and I suppose millions of photographs have been taken of the garden, a charming, odd little counterfeit of the garden in Kent. I went to the garden at the conference centre when the almond tree, Abigail’s almond tree, was blooming — a lace bouquet of creamy blossoms frothing out from thin dark boughs.

The flowering tree holds its breath above the golden steps where Vickie died, in the centre of the little stage of the garden. Low box hedges enclose the flowerbeds; silvery plants make a carpet from which rise green and white lilies. No longer a facsimile of Vita’s garden, the White Garden in the grounds of the conference centre has grown its own shape and character.

I go alone to the garden with the red book in my hand. I sit on the step, holding the book, and I feel a deep sad peace. Ivan, Michael, Jane and Eleanor — I told them all that I have found the red book. I told them what it means, and as I did so I felt a lightness beginning to dawn in my heart. Tears come to my eyes and the snowstorm of the almond tree is a haze of iridescence.

This is the location of the central problem of my whole life. A strange, false place. I wonder how it feels when people go to old battlefields where their brothers, fathers, lovers died; how it is when you pass every day the spot on the road where the accident happened. All Vickie’s vitality gone in a moment, in the time it takes for a bee to sting. Ever since Rosamund gave me the library copy of
The Eagle and the Dove
I have been unable to bear to open it, have not untied its ribbon. I just have it with me all the time, in my shoulder bag, beside my bed, on the café

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table, anywhere. It’s a talisman, a token that I have kept faith with my sister in an odd and simple way.

Something evil happened here in this garden — many evil things happened at Mandala — I think of Marjorie Bartlett, Jane Wilson and Shirley Temple, Molly Bloom and Therese Gillis, and there were many others. In her own case, Vickie was not entirely blameless and she paid for her own dangerous mischief with her life. Her accidental death. When there is an accident we search for who or what to blame: if only
this
had not happened, or if only
that
had been the case, we say. If I had sent my child to a different school, she would not have been knocked down on the crossing; if the city fathers had seen fit to mend the railing on the bridge, the horse would not have shied, the family in the wagon would never have ended up in the river. Perhaps.

Fate, fate, fate. What power determines the designs by which we live and die? If the sun did not shine, if the rain did not fall, if everything was different, nothing would have happened.

If Vickie had never met Ambrose Goddard, she might be alive today. Yet I can see how she came to be mixed up with him, how he came to be with her. People like Vickie and Ambrose are attracted to each other. I faced that fact a long time ago.

She was so bright, so funny. I suppose he needed her; perhaps (and it goes against the grain to say it) she needed him. I often wonder about retribution — if Ambrose hadn’t shot himself, would he today be in prison in atonement for the lives he took at Mandala? Would his clever lawyers have saved his skin? In any case he would not have been executed by the state because executions ended the day that Vickie died. The last man hanged was hanged that day; the first woman to die in the White Garden died then too. I wonder, when Ambrose ran off and killed his dogs and put the gun to his head, if he ever gave poor lovely, silly Vickie a passing thought. His suicide, so long after Vickie’s death, resonates with the deaths of all the Deep Sleep victims, and with the death of Vickie. I wonder as well if he ever knew what really happened in the White Garden, how it came to be that Vickie was stung by that crazy little woman’s bees. Did Therese confess to him what she had done? I imagine that she
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would have, in her own peculiar way, and he would then have known exactly what had happened.

This place doesn’t feel sinister, but neither is it ordinary. For me the White Garden is a monument to my sister, enclosing a scrap of beauty, capturing a sliver of time. And besides that, time has flattened out, bringing me to a point where all the play-ers in the drama exist in my mind at once, woven and twisted together in my memory and imagination. Fixed. Blossoms drift onto the steps, the light of the sun shines through the petals on the tree and there are bees among the flowers. Sometimes a ray of light splits as it passes through a drop of water on an almond flower, and for a second there is a sparkle that winks a minute rainbow and then is gone.

I have kept faith with my sister; and I think of the sisters of poor crazed Therese. I don’t know them, but there is a curious bond between me and them, for their sister murdered mine.

People would say I overstate the case, that Therese was innocent, mischievous but innocent. She was, I daresay, insane.

But innocence like hers is dangerous; it wields a subtle and a deadly power. I say she killed my sister; I say Ambrose Goddard
conspired
with her to kill my sister. It comes down to a matter of self-absorption and a wild and blissful carelessness of other human beings. And lies. So many lies are woven into the sticky web surrounding Vickie’s death.

There was a time, long ago, when I imagined I could exact some revenge for Vickie’s death, a time when anger and hatred filled me with the scarlet and the blackness of terrible venge-ance. But since I have followed the convolutions of Vickie’s fate, and have visited the lives of some of the people whose fates touched hers, I have come to a place of sorrow and serenity.

Almost thirty years have passed, and now I sit in the White Garden where the almond tree blooms above me, a cloud of small white flowers like a blessing. I see in the distance, above the tops of the cypress trees, the towers of the convent. I hold the small red book in my hand, and I feel the closeness of my dead sister. That is all.

THE VIOLETTA LETTERS

A woman wearing a blue dress walks barefoot along a clifftop high above the sea, which is calm and clear and green as glass.

The full skirt of the dress catches at the woman’s knees and billows out behind her in the breeze. A worn leather satchel containing her shoes and books and cigarettes hangs from her shoulder, bumps against her thigh as she makes her steady way along the cliff. She is deep in thought. It is late afternooon.

The place is lonely and remote; there is nothing between this woman and the sea.

She reaches a place at which the cliff juts far out into the sea, and there, high up on the point, she stands and stares for a long time at the horizon.

Laura Field has come to the clifftop, not very far from the Goddards’ seaside retreat. It is the cliff where Ambrose used to walk his dogs. Laura knows this. She sits down on the grass and from her bag she takes the small red book,
The Eagle and the
Dove
, unties the ribbon, opens the book and studies it page by page. She plans, when she has looked at it, to throw it into the sea. She reads the library stamp — date on or before which this item must be returned. The black and white photograph of the medieval walls of the city of Avila; the mermaid colophon of Michael Joseph Ltd, 26 Bloomsbury Street, London, WC1. The date, 1943. A note from Vita Sackville-West: ‘Owing to the im-possibility of communicating with France, I have been unable to ask permission from the Carmel of Lisieux for the reproductions of illustrations from
L’Histoire d’une âme
, but I trust that some day they may forgive me the unavoidable discourtesy.’ ‘Set and printed in Great Britain by Unwin Brothers Ltd, at the Gresham Press, Woking, in Bembo type, eleven point, leaded, and bound by James Burn.’ A lion sits on top of an image of an open book which bears the words ‘Book Production War Economy Standard’. A black and white photograph of a letter from St Teresa

— an exuberant joy in the handwriting, the marks of ancient folds in the paper.

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The woman comes to the end of the book, reads the poem Therese Martin wrote to Memory, and the prayer she wrote for France to offer to Joan of Arc, the Liberating Angel. Then she turns the page and finds, in very small neat handwriting, a collection of letters written on the blank section at the back. Across the top is written: ‘The street I live is Loneliness / My house has no address / The letters that I write myself begin
Bonjour
Tristesse
.’ And following is a series of strange sad little notes, love letters, addressed to Therese in her own handwriting and signed by ‘Violetta’.

The last letter is an entreaty from Violetta to Therese: Sweetest angel of damage and death, I instruct you to burn all my letters for I fear our plans to be together will be discovered. I will write no more. I further instruct you to meet me by the swings. We will be united as we have never before been united, and together we will don our wings and fly into the bright sun of eternity. My own heart’s darling, come to me, I burn with longing.

Violetta

Laura turns the pages over and over, reading and re-reading the Violetta letters. Then, without thinking, or so it seems to her, she begins to tear the pages of the book from their binding where they had long ago been assembled and fixed by James Burn. In a long, hypnotic ritual, she slowly releases single pages into the air. They flutter seaward in little flurries. Some pages she ignites with her cigarette lighter, and, as the pages burn, she lets them go, and they are taken up by a soft wind, blown, charred paper and ash, out to sea.