The White Garden (9 page)

If a thread breaks it must be dealt with carefully, and a knot must never be left visible in the lace itself. The length of the pendulum used governs the ratio of the wheels and pinions necessary to show true time.

Zelie and Louis were married in 1858.

If the thread gets loose from the neck, and the bobbin begins to unwind after the work is started, it is only necessary to wind the bobbin to the length required and finish by winding the thread twice round the neck of the bobbin and pulling it taut. The time of vibration of a pendulum depends entirely on its length.

Zelie and Louis had nine children but four of them died when they were very young. The last of the children was a daughter who was born on a snowy night in January 1873. Her name was Therese — Marie Francoise Therese Martin.

Every morning Zelie and Louis went to Mass at 5.30, and the life of the whole family was marked by a devotion to God. It was the aim of Zelie and Louis to see their children enter the convent or the priesthood. The boys died, but all five girls went into the convent. Therese was to die there, very young, and would become a saint known to the world as ‘The Little Flower’.

Therese kept a diary in which she wrote: ‘You can hardly imagine how much I loved my mother and father. I showed my love in a thousand little ways.’ Her father called her his little queen, and her mother called her her little ferret. Zelie died when Therese was four. The child was lifted up to kiss her dead mother’s forehead, and then she was left alone outside the death chamber. She saw for the first time, with great shock, the coffin propped on its end against the wall. At that moment her naturally happy disposition deserted her, the sun in her spirit was blotted out by a terrible darkness which came and went throughout her life. After the funeral Louis took his five

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daughters from Alencon to live in Lisieux where Zelie’s family could help him and could nurture the children.

The house where Louis and his daughters lived in Lisieux was large, handsome and comfortable. It was called ‘Les Buissonnets’ and was furnished with polished mahogany and warm draperies. Therese had her own little garden decorated with shells and stones where she grew periwinkles and ferns. She also made a miniature altar in her garden where she placed flowers and lit candles and prayed. Her toys were a skipping rope, a draughtboard, a sailing boat, a doll, a bird cage, a toy piano and a toy stove. These things were preserved at Les Buissonnets after Therese’s death. And her curls were hung in a glass case in the local church.

THERESE MARTIN

The first word I ever learned to read was ‘heaven’. Earth seems
to be a place of exile and I dream of heaven. Everything on the
altar in my bedroom is so small — tiny candlesticks and flower
vases that hold the smallest posies I can find. It gives me such
joy to scatter flowers beneath the feet of God. The sun shines
so brightly on God’s world and I turn my face to the sun. But
I always remember the shadows and strange terrors that can
appear in the midst of the clearest sunlight.

One afternoon I was standing by the window looking out
into the garden and I was feeling very cheerful. I saw a man in
front of the wash-house. He was dressed exactly like Papa, and
was of the same height and bearing, but he was very bent and
aged. His head was covered with a kind of thick veil. He wore
a hat that resembled Papa’s hat. I was suddenly gripped with
a supernatural fear and I cried out Papa! in a trembling voice.

But the mysterious figure seemed not to hear me, and, without
even turning his head, he walked on towards the fir trees that
divided the main path of the garden. I expected to see him on
the other side of the trees, but this prophetic vision disappeared
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completely. All this lasted only a moment, but the memory of it
is as vivid as the vision itself. This mysterious image has come
into my imagination time and time again, but it was fourteen
years before I realised its significance. It was a prophecy of
the terrible illness that overtook Papa — like a photograph
taken in the future and handed to me fourteen years before
its time. When Papa became ill he would hide his face from
view under a cloth. The man in front of the wash-house — I
never saw the vision again, but it visited my memory and my
imagination with a force more powerful than the reality of
everyday encounters.

THERESE GILLIS

The girl beside the wash-house, the girl at the wash-house door, she came back, over and over again. We all saw her, Mona Lisa of the wash-house. Golden skin and sliding eyes and a smile, the smile of a quiet, quiet mouse, quick as a flick of a mouse’s tail in the green and misty twilight. She gets inside my dreaming head, that Mona Lisa Girl, and she slowly swells inside my head, inside me, filling all the spaces, inhabiting my body until my skin is stretched across her skin and all within me is that Mona Lisa Girl, moaning and laughing and humming inside my face and neck and hands. But not my legs. The Mona Lisa Girl has no legs, and that’s the worst thing about her. She goes around in a floating way, existing only from just above the waist, just above her folded hands, her soft and golded golden god-crossed hands. She is looking out towards the stretching sea, looking for her mother in the sea.

Mona Lisa, Mona Lisa, men have named me. I contain the lady with the mystic smile. Am I warm, am I real, by the wash-house, or just a cold and lonely, lovely work of art? Whatever happened to my feet? I had shoes, red shoes like a princess, and now my feet have gone, my legs have gone, I have no feeling below the waist. Paralysed from the waist down (or from the toes up) she is just what the doctor ordered. Just what a man needs to meet his needs. She doesn’t feel a thing. Fuck out her brains. Toss her into the sea, doctor, back into the sea when you

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have finished with her. Plenty more pebbles on the beach. Have you
seen
her pebbles? This girl has a bag full of snow-white pebbles, stones to mark the way. All along the seashore you will find white pebbles, and the sea rolls in and the waves wash over the stones and the sea sucks back and the secrets of the sea are safe. And the mermaid, seductive siren, will sing a sailor to his death. Sailor, beware. Beware the dumb mermaid, she is the most dangerous. They call her sometimes ‘Daphne the deaf and dumb mermaid’. Watch out for her. She can bring the waves crashing, overwhelming the ship with her deaf, dumb, dead and boiling waves.

The reality of the sea. That was overwhelming. I remember the
first time I ever saw the ocean. I could not take my eyes from
it; it drew me like a giant magnet, and the majestic roaring of
the waves filled me with a sense of the power and majesty of
God.

I swam in the sea with my sisters; there was Bridie and Frankie and Loulou and Margaret and Rosie-Posie and they took me by the hands, by the legs, by the love and by the waves that broke on the edge of the shining sand. Like a ribbon of waters, a ribbon of daughters — all foaming and gleaming and bursting with bubbles and breaking with laughter, peals of laughter, pearls of wisdom, pale pink pearls of watery wisdom on the edge of the green-gold sand. I swam in the sea with my sisters, and God rode in on the tide; God rode in a boat on the tide. Rock-a-bye Godboat on the treetop. God trod on the sand with me and my sisters and sunlight and ribbons of watery love. I swam in the sea with my sisters.

When I was very young I had an illness that was caused by the
devil. He was enraged that my sister Pauline had become a
Carmelite and he wished to punish me for the harm our family
was doing. But what the devil did not realise at that time was
that the Queen of Heaven watched over me. I was her frail little
flower that bloomed in the snow.

It was a time in my life when I always had a headache. One
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night my uncle began speaking to me about my mother, and
about the past, and he spoke so kindly and gently that I became
very troubled and I began to sob, softly at first, and then loudly
and deeply. Suddenly my uncle spoke less kindly. He said I was
sentimental and melancholic and needed taking out of myself.

He decided I must be kept thoroughly entertained, and given
constant company. I must not creep away, he said, and dwell on
the sadness of the past, but I must spend my time with my cousins and with girls of my own age. I found such girls so difficult
and shallow, and they laughed at me and teased me. My head
began to ache and throb as he spoke, and my whole being was
as if gripped by hot irons. That night I became ill and it seemed
that I would go insane. Or die. Pauline was about to take the
veil, and I was desolated by my loss of her, and overcome with
pain at my uncle’s words.

I was delirious, yet I was sharply conscious of what I was
saying and doing. It was as if there were two parts of me, one
watching the thoughts and actions and feelings of the other,
a sufferer and a helpless observer. I became so exhausted I
would have let anyone do anything at all to me, even kill me.

At times I longed for death to come. The devil had great power
over me and was able to instil in me terrible fears — fears of the
most ordinary things. The door looked like the entrance to a
tomb, and the trees outside the window were great dark fingers
reaching in to claim me. The devil danced in the shadows of the
candlelight.

My head aches. I have received quick deep darts of electricity into the thick of my brain, and my brain is thick and aching with dead thoughts. A pathway has been cut into my thinking tissue, straight is the gate and narrow is the way. A narrow way has been cut through the yellow primroses and down the path runs electricity in the frying trying crying electri-city of the city of my brain. I had a memory, a recollection of companions rolled in sheets, moaning and groaning and tolling the bells of morning and noon and night. Through the brains of my companions ran the electric pathway, through the blooming scarlet primroses of the bright and brazen city of the dying and

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the dead. I was in torment. I cried out in agony and nobody heard me, nobody came. I heard sometimes a murmuring as though a hundred hundred whispering voices hummed within my head and the voices all were saying: ‘The boat, we are in the boat, in the same boat, all in the same boat. Beauty, beauty, Sleeping Beauty, put your feet, one foot after another on the electric pathway that runs between the frozen primroses in the icy fields of sleep.’ And another voice calls out to me: ‘Don’t go.

Don’t go. Come back, don’t sleep. Still waters run deep.’ And the ache in my head booms out loud, loud, and everyone can hear it and they stare at me, stare at me and brush me aside like a cobweb. I drip with drops of silver water, beads of water on a slender single strand of a spider’s web. The droplets shiver in the breeze, shiver and fall to the ground, to the frosty ground.

Everything is hard and cold and stiff and white. White flowers bloom on cold branches of dark sticks. Sharp spines reach out to catch my flowing garment. I am an insect in a web.

I speak now of the month of May when the world is dressed in
flowers, when the snow is but a memory and Mary Queen of
Heaven smiles upon the earth. This Little Flower drooped and
was about to die. My dear father, my own Papa, in anguish at
my state, sent gold coins to the church of Our Lady of Victories
in Paris so that Masses could be said for my recovery. As I lay in
my bed at Les Buissonnets I turned to the statue of the Blessed
Virgin that stood in my room, and I begged her to have pity on
me. My sisters were with me, but I felt I was alone, and saw the
Virgin begin to glow with a beauty beyond anything I had ever
seen and she smiled at me with an infinite tenderness. As she
did so, my pain vanished and a great sweetness entered my
body and my soul. Two great tears crept down my face. My sister
Marie saw me staring at the statue. She said, as with sudden
inspiration, ‘Therese is cured.’

A violet has come back to life. I am the life. I am the resurrec-tion and the life. I am Violetta, she inhabits me, she is my habit, I am her heart. When I smile I smile with Violetta’s lips, I laugh with Violetta’s glossy eyes. I touch her cheeks with my finger-62

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tips and I feel the bloom of peaches, the flutter of the butterflies of her lashes. Into my butterfly, her butterfly, fly her swift sweet fingers. My little soldier fingers march ten thousand men up and up to the top of the hill and then march them down again.

We lie on the marble slab in the graveyard; an angel with folded hands and pointed wings smiles down on us. Our bodies in and out of each other are joined in a long long kiss, a shiver-ing kiss so hot on the cold of the gravestone, a kiss from the twining twins of our toes, this little piggie, from our toes to the blood red blobs of blood of our blood-silk lips. The angel above us blazed with light, light the blue of startled kingfishers. The angel blazed with light.

The nuns insisted on talking to me. Did the statue blaze with
light? What did our Blessed Mother say to me? They were so
disappointed when all I could tell them was that the Blessed
Virgin looked most lovely, and she smiled at me, and I was
cured. They seemed to think that perhaps I had lied, perhaps I
had not really been ill at all.