The Garden of the Villa Mollini Read online

  ‘No, they are not, Millicent,’ snaps Alison. ‘Why do you always have to get names wrong?’

  ‘What are they called, then?’

  ‘The Hammond-Clarks.’

  ‘Oh well, the builder is called Silverstone.’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘You always doubted a great deal that was true, dear. He is called Silverstone, and I shall from now on refer to these people as the Haydock-Parks because it suits them extremely well.’

  Alison goes angrily up the stairs and into her room. The door closes. Her anger, Millicent notices, has made the house throb. She wonders how many times and in what degree the timbers and the lathes have shifted, over all the years, to the violent commotions of their friendship. She ponders the origin of the phrase ‘brought the house down’ and wonders if it was originally applied to anger and not to laughter. How splendid if, as their removal van drove away, the house gave one final shudder of release and collapsed in a pile of sticks at The New People’s feet.

  She waits for a while for Alison to come down. She’s hungry, but she refuses to eat supper alone.

  She goes out into the garden and folds up the two deck chairs. ‘Order before night’ was a favourite saying of her father’s, and before he started imposing a more or less perpetual state of disorder on their previously calm and prospering household, he would, each evening, observe his own strict ritual of collecting every toy scattered round the house and garden and returning it to its place in the nursery, before checking that all the downstairs windows were shut, the curtains drawn, the silver cupboard locked, the backgammon board closed, the lights extinguished and the eiderdowns in place over the bodies of his sleeping daughters. Millicent remembers that Christina once admitted to her that she would often let her eiderdown slip onto the floor on purpose and lie awake waiting for this infinitely comforting moment when it would be lifted gently from the floor and placed over her. When the strangers kept arriving, there was no time in her father’s life for ‘order before night’; there was, as Millicent remembers it, simply night. It descended swiftly. Patiently, the family waited for dawn, but it never came. Christina died. Millicent retreated from death by starting to write poetry.

  She hadn’t expected fame. It had come as suddenly and as unexpectedly as the arrival of the strangers. And it had changed her, made her bold, excited and free. Other people complained about it; Millicent Graves always found it an absorbing companion. Now, she misses it. Her frail hope is that in Italy she will miss it less. It still astonishes her that work once so highly valued can now be so utterly forgotten.

  She props up the deckchairs in the porch. In the distance, she hears the church clock chime the three-quarter hour. The evening is warm. She wonders how often and for how long the convent tolls its massive bells and whether these summonses will help to structure a future which she knows she hasn’t imagined fully enough. Alison has expressed anxiety about the bells, complaining that the days will seem long enough without being woken at dawn.

  Resigned to an evening alone, Millicent makes a salad and eats it. She supposes that Alison is sleeping, but then when the telephone rings, it’s answered upstairs. Tiptoeing to the sitting room, Millicent can hear Alison talking in halting sentences, as if she’s trying not to cry. Millicent sniffs. ‘I’m much too old for all this!’ she says aloud.

  In the night, the ghosts of The New People come into Millicent’s room and tear off her wallpaper and replace her old velvet curtains with something called a festoon blind, that draws upwards into big bunches of fabric, like pairs of knickers.

  ‘I see,’ says Millicent.

  They don’t say anything. They’re standing back and admiring the window.

  ‘We used to wear cotton knickers like that,’ Millicent tells them. ‘I never saw my own, not from any provocative angle, but I used to see Elizabeth’s and Christina’s when we were invited to parties and they would bend down to do up their shoes, and I used to think that the backs of girls’ legs looked very strong and lovely.’

  The New People are utterly silent and satisfied and fulfilled by the curtains and have drifted off into a contented sleep with the festoons falling caressingly about their heads.

  ‘Night in this cottage,’ Millicent whispers, knowing that nothing she says will wake them, ‘is usually kind because it’s quiet. I’ve found that in this quiet, I’ve often started to understand things which may not have been plain to me during the day.

  ‘It was during one particular night, very, very cold, with that bitter feeling of snow to come, that I decided I couldn’t endure it, the unloveliness of England, I just couldn’t stand it any more, its comatose people, its ravaged landscape. Because we’re in a dark age, that’s what I think. But no one listens to what I think any more. Millicent Graves is out of fashion, passé, past, part of what once was, a voice we no longer hear.

  ‘So I decided I would go. It seemed, from that night, inevitable. And you see where I’ve put myself? Slap up against a convent wall! But do you know why I’m able to do that? Because the wall itself, which I believed was so strong, so much more substantial than anything we have left in this brutal-minded country, the wall itself is crumbling! The money I’ve paid for my little house will prop it up for a bit, but I don’t think it will rebuild it, and the best I can hope for is that it doesn’t collapse on my head – not till I’m buried, at least.’

  At this mention of burial, Millicent sees The New People open their eyes and listen and she thinks she knows why they look so startled: the thought has popped into their minds that despite all the extensive re-planning and re-decorating they’re going to do, traces of Millicent’s habitation may still remain in the house to disturb them. They imagine how they might be made aware of her. They’re giving a dinner party, say. Friends of Simon’s from the City will have driven down with their wives, and suddenly Prue or Simon will remember that even the walls of the dining-room used to be lined with books, and the flow of their conversation, which is as easy for them as the flow of money, will be halted – just for a moment – because one of them, searching for a word or phrase, understands for a second that there are thousands of words they will never use or even know and remembers that access to these words was once here, in the very room, and is now lost. The moment passes. It’s all right. But Simon and Prue both separately wonder, why is it not possible never to think of her?

  ‘Good!’ says Millicent aloud. ‘That’s something, at least, their little discomfort.’

  She has gone to sleep and is dreaming of Italy when she’s woken by Alison’s gentle tap on her door. This knocking on each other’s doors is a courtesy neither would want to break; it allows them to share their life without any fear of trespass.

  Millicent puts on her light and Alison comes in and sits down on the end of her bed. ‘I couldn’t sleep, Millie,’ she says, ‘I think we have to talk.’

  ‘Yes, dear,’ says Millicent.

  Millicent decides to put on her glasses, so that she can see Alison clearly. Dishonesty must not be allowed to slip past her because dishonesty she can never forgive. She watches Alison’s breasts rise as she takes a big breath and says with great sadness: ‘I’m not certain that I can go to Italy with you. I think that, for the moment, it’s not possible for me to go.’

  Millicent blinks. Her eyes were always like a bird’s eyes, hooded above and beneath.

  ‘Diana, I suppose.’

  ‘Partly so.’

  ‘And the other part?’

  Alison’s eyes have been turned away from Millicent until now, but as she speaks, she looks up into her face.

  ‘I can’t,’ she says, ‘feel all the pessimism you feel. Don’t think I’m being harsh, Millie, when I say that I feel that some of it comes not from the way our world has changed, but from the way you’ve changed – from being so very beautiful and praised, to being . . .’

  ‘Old and despised.’

  ‘That’s how you choose to see it. I don’t think anyone despises you. Th
ey’ve just learned, over the years, to disagree with you sometimes and not praise everything you write.’

  ‘They don’t praise any of it, Alison. They want me to be quiet.’

  ‘Well, again, that’s how you’ve decided to see it.’

  ‘No. They do. But that’s not what you’ve come to discuss. I suppose it’s Diana’s beauty, is it? You’re infatuated.’

  ‘I may be. What I find I can’t believe when I’m with her is that this country has lost all the good things it had. I know it’s lost some of them, but I don’t believe it’s “finished”, as you say it is. I just can’t believe that, Millie. I can’t. And I know that if I go to Italy, I’m going to miss it. I’m going to be homesick for England.’

  ‘What for?’ says Millicent indignantly. ‘For riots? For waste? For greed? For turkeyburgers?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Then for what? For this garden, maybe. Or Diana’s garden. But what are English gardens, dear? They’re fragile oases, preserved by one thing and one thing only: money. And when the economy falters, as falter it undoubtedly will, all your peace of mind – that keeps you in the garden and other people outside it, suffering in those concrete estates – will vanish. Then what joy or satisfaction will you get from the garden?’

  ‘I can’t believe it will come to that.’

  ‘It’s coming, Alison. Do you know what the Haydock-Parks are going to put in before anything else? A burglar alarm.’

  ‘I know all that. But there are so very many decent people, Millie, who want the country to survive, who want to make things better . . .’

  ‘Decent people? Who? Name one decent person.’

  ‘The kind of people we’ve always known . . .’

  ‘Our friends? I don’t think they’re “decent”, Alison. I think they’re infinitely corruptible and infinitely weak, and when it comes to saving England, the task simply isn’t going to fall to them, it’s going to fall to people like the Haydock-Parks, The New People, and what kind of ‘salvation’ do you ever imagine that’s going to be?’

  Alison is silent. When she thinks about it, she is perfectly happy to let Millicent win the argument. What she will not let her do is change her mind.

  The silence endures. Alison picks at the fringe of her dressing-gown cord. Millicent takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes.

  ‘I have never,’ says Millicent after a while, ‘been at all good at being quite and utterly alone. How in the world do you think I’m going to get on in that Italian house without you?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Millie,’ says Alison sadly, ‘I expect I shall worry about you a great deal.’

  Refusing to think about Alison after she has gone back to her own room, Millicent snaps out the light and lies on her back and sees the dawn starting to frame the curtains. Just outside her window is a clump of tall hazel bushes. Pigeons have roosted in these trees for as long as Millicent can remember and she thinks now that if she’s going to miss one thing, it will be the murmuring of these birds.

  They lull her to sleep. She dreams her dead sister, Christina, comes and stands by her bed and puts her child’s hand on Millicent’s grey head. ‘I am wearing,’ Christina announces solemnly, ‘the Haydock-Parks’ curtains, just to mess them up, and in a few moments I’m going to drink this little phial of White Arsenic I’ve stolen from father’s lab, and it will make me die.’

  ‘Don’t die, Christina,’ Millicent begs, ‘dear Christina . . .’

  ‘Oh no, I’m definitely going to die,’ says Christina, ‘because I think loss is the saddest thing anyone could possibly imagine. Don’t you, Millie? I think losing something you once had is the most unbearable thing of all. Don’t you?’

  ‘What have you lost, Christina? I’ll find it again for you. I’ll get it back, whatever it was. Just as long as you don’t die . . .’

  ‘No. You can’t get it back. Thank you for offering, Millie, but I know that what we once had in this house went away when the strangers arrived and even if mother pleaded and begged and made father send them away, I know that they damaged us, damaged our love, and however hard we tried to get it for ourselves again, we never ever could.’

  This dream is so sad that Millicent has to wake herself up, even though she knows that her old head which her fifteen-year-old sister was touching is very tired and in need of sleep.

  Thoughts of Christina and of death linger with her. She feels, as she has never felt before, afraid not so much of death, but, in dying, of yielding territory to others who may desecrate and destroy the few things which have seemed precious to her and which, in the absence of any belief in God, have been part of a code by which she’s tried to live.

  In Italy, she promises her new hosts, the nuns, she will alter nothing in their house, nothing fundamental, and to the land around it she will behave kindly. But when she dies, what will happen to it? Who will come next? Which strangers?

  ‘Probably,’ she says aloud to the pigeons, ‘it’s wiser to own no territory at all and just be like that man in my Samuel Palmer print, who lies down alone in the landscape with his book.’

  Next door, she hears Alison get up.

  ‘Daybreak,’ announces Millicent.

  www.vintage-books.co.uk