Two Lives

17

Her flowerbed has always been for him. Being in the house has permitted that, no questions asked, the slow establishment of the chosen plants, the trial and error of their cultivation, buds breaking into colour, the clustering of petals.

‘Oh, I expect it’ll disappear,’ the gardener grumpily replies when she asks about the flowerbed’s fate. He’s not the man whose arm was broken by Sadie swinging a pickaxe. Youngish, unsuited to the place in any case, that one went at once. This man is old; he has been here all her time; no wonder he’s aggrieved. He says the house will become a hotel.

‘My flowerbed is in memory. I hope they’ll keep the garden.’

‘I hear it said they’ll have it up for a car park.’

Slowly she walks about, imagining the cars drawn up in rows, the different colours. Tessa Enright visited her once, Tessa Hospel as she became, mother of four children, wife of an oyster merchant. They strolled these same paths in the heat of an afternoon and suddenly her friend said: ‘I am in love.’ She had not told another soul and never would. ‘No one except for you.’ She wept into a lacy lilac handkerchief. She said she was ashamed that Mary Louise had been in the house for sixteen years before she visited her. She was in love with an Englishman whom she’d met when she and her husband, with all their children, were on holiday by the sea in France. Her husband was rich; there was a girl for the children. The Englishman had said he could not live without her. ‘Imagine that! To say that so soon! He hardly knew me.’ Tessa Enright hadn’t changed. As thin as fuse-wire, high cheekbones, hair like sun-bleached silk. Her eyes had always had a startled look, her lips still lazily pouted. She would never have visited the house if she hadn’t been desperate for a confidante: here, of all places, her secret would be safe.

Alone in the garden fifteen years later, Mary Louise recalls precisely the shade of lilac of the handkerchief. It was lighter than that of the outfit that accompanied it, the blouse that buttoned to the neck, the very short skirt, the chic little shoes. She recalls being told that the oyster merchant had been met at a party. The Englishman was a person who had to do with boats, who delivered them from one harbour to another, acting for other people. Mary Louise imagines this man, as once she imagined Jeanne d’Arc and later her cousin’s father, and later still the people in the novels her cousin read. She sees the children of her friend controlled by a calm nursemaid; she sees the husband. She places the family in a hotel dining-room, among waiters calling out to one another in French and expertly pouring wine. The Englishman approaches, flannels and a blazer with an emblem on it, brown as a nut, a smile lazing through his features. At some later time, when they are private, her friend puts her arms around him, slipping her hands beneath the blazer with the emblem on it, her fingers touching the muscles in his back.

Mary Louise stoops and lifts a rose petal from where it has fallen. Under no circumstances is it permitted to pick the flowers. Bríd Beamish did so once and was not allowed to enter the garden for seven months, seven being the number of flowers she filched. The petal has no scent, but in the palm of Mary Louise’s hand it seems as beautiful as anything she has ever touched, crimson streaked with white. Roses mostly are what she has planted in her flowerbed, with a border of lily of the valley. She’s glad it was not she who married the oyster merchant and had four children. She’s glad she never had to turn with her intimacies to a childhood companion who is safely locked away and would not, anyway, be believed.