The White Garden (29 page)

‘The worst thing, of course, was working in the Deep Sleep ward. There were people with bedsores so bad their legs would be stuck together. I remember one boy like that, and his mother was down at the front office crying and hysterical saying she had to take him home. I saw my mother hustle that woman out the door and into a taxi. Then that night they had to call the woman and say her son had died of pneumonia.

‘The very worst was when I went in and found a woman called Molly lying dead in her bed. She was blue. She used to go about the place in a white lace nightie, flinging her head back and saying, “Yes, yes,” all the time. I was a bit frightened of Molly. Then this day I found her dead. I
thought
she was dead, and I went to the sister on duty and said would she go and look at Molly. She didn’t, you know. That woman was dead for two days before anyone would listen to me. Hard to believe, isn’t it? Bloom, Bloom — she was called Molly Bloom, like a flower.

Then there was the one called the Little Flower.

‘I was fascinated by that one. Mind you, she was even more frightening than Molly. Shirley used to warn me about the Little Flower. “Don’t you go anywhere near that girl,” Shirley would say. “She’s not quite right in the head. And very naughty. Real
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naughty. Kill you as soon as look at you.” This only made the Little Flower more interesting to me. She thought she was a French saint, and she was allowed to dress up as a nun. That was one of Ambrose’s theories — if you imagined you were Napoleon, you were supposed to go the whole hog and more or less
be
Napoleon. It was one of the great revolutionary breakthroughs at Mandala. Ambrose’s book
Illumination
had all the case histories of these nuts in it. They could be anyone they liked, the more the merrier. Of course there was only one God

— that was Ambrose. He really liked it when they called him Doctor God.

‘The Little Flower lived out in the old convent, out where I had cleaned the cells and the honeycomb pavement. There was her and another saint, Teresa. Teresa became my friend. She was a very kind, sweet woman. I still see her to this day.

‘She got better, by some miracle. Not many people recovered from being at Mandala you know. Rosamund is her name; she lives in a really lovely house with her husband Ron. He’s a psychologist, of all things, but completely harmless. You probably ought to talk to Rosamund as well. It was when the Little Flower went crackers and killed herself that Rosamund started to see the light, actually. No wonder, I suppose, because Rosamund was one of the people that found Therese hanging from the monkey bars. That’s a thing about suicide, isn’t it.

Who’s going to find you? Rosamund had enough common sense left to pack her things and get the hell out of Mandala, and after that she snapped out of her idea she was a saint. Mind you, she really
is
a saint, a modern saint, if ever there was one.’

I became afraid Jane was going to leave out completely the story of the White Garden that the two nuns had made.

So I couldn’t resist prompting her. ‘Didn’t they make a special garden, the two nuns?’ I said.

‘Oh yes, that was a thing. Very famous. The White Garden.

‘Mrs Goddard came and supervised the planting and so on, and Doyle the gardener considered it to be his big achievement.

‘I used to see him kissing Mrs Goddard down there behind the bushes. She was a real tart, Mrs Goddard, you know. It was a lovely garden. It’s probably still there.’

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199

I wanted so much to say: ‘Yes, yes, it’s still there. And my sister died in that garden.’ I wanted to scream: ‘Tell me what happened in the White Garden, the day they hanged Ronald Ryan. Remember that day? Do you remember? Do you remember Vickie Field, the girl in the red hat, the corpse in the White Garden?’ But instead I said: ‘And weren’t there some beehives?’

‘Beehives, yes. That was another one of Ambrose’s special schemes. They got rid of them though because somebody got stung, one of Ambrose’s girlfriends. She died, actually. The same day they hung Ronald Ryan. It was a spooky day.’

‘How was that — she died?’

‘I think she was allergic to the sting.’

Then I couldn’t stand the charade any longer, and I said, ‘I have to tell you, Jane, that woman was my sister Vickie.’

Jane was silent. She stared at me and her lower lip creased and her chin wrinkled and wobbled, and as tears began to flow down her cheeks she stood up and held out her arms to me and held me gently as we both wept. After a while we drew apart and Jane said softly, ‘God, oh my God. What can I tell you. I can’t remember properly. I didn’t even know very much about it at the time. Just gossip among some of the nurses. It would have been hushed up in the hospital. You have to realise so many terrible and weird things happened in that place — this was only one of them. I’m sorry.’

‘Rosamund, should I talk to Rosamund, do you think?’

‘Yes, yes, talk to Rosamund. You should talk to Rosamund.’

There was no need for words, no need for explanations. I could feel an understanding flowing from Jane — and a kind of hope and love.

And so it was that I came to visit Rosamund.

DATE ON OR BEFORE WHICH

ITEM MUST BE RETURNED

It was spring when I first visited Rosamund. I stood at the gate for a long time gazing at the blaze of tulips, a sea of shining cherry-red that lay between me and the house. A blaze, a sea

— it was a carpet of scarlet light that glowed and sang and danced — beckoned, seduced and mesmerised. I felt a faint chill in the air, a shiver of strange expectation. Often I have thought that this feeling is something I have placed there in hindsight, a premonition added after the event. I mentally re-run the scene as if it were a movie where I stand at the gate looking across the field of flowers, up the winding path to the house of warm bricks with gables and windows divided into small diamond panes. The front door solid, dark, inviting. And I feel again the thrill that darted through me. I walk slowly up the path, seem-ing to part the tulips as I am drawn towards the house, unable to feel the ground beneath my feet, moving as in a dream, seeing with hallucinating eyes. This is the memory, the dream of what I saw and how I felt and what I did that day. And in my heart I know that the tulips in Rosamund’s garden were the brightest sight that I have ever seen, and I know that I approached the house in a strange cloud of light and hope.

Rosamund had the red book.

It was on a shelf beside the other copy of
The Eagle and the
Dove
, the old green one in the brown paper cover that came from the nuns in Wales. There would have been perhaps an hour, no more, between when I was standing at the gate looking at the tulips, and when I finally held the red book, tied up with a red ribbon, in my hands. So many books, a lack of order

— Rosamund couldn’t find
The Eagle and the Dove
, and yet she knew she had it somewhere. Even without it, she was able to tell me its true significance, to confirm my feeling that the book was a key to Vickie’s death.

There were bookshelves all along the wall of the upstairs

Date on or Before Which Item Must Be Returned
201

landing. Books from floor to ceiling. Books in Ron’s study; books in Rosamund’s sitting room. Rosamund and I talked in her sitting room for a few minutes only, and then she took me up the stairs to see the view from the balcony. In one direction you could see right across the suburbs to the tall buildings of the city, and the other way you could see the hills. We stood on the balcony looking out, and looking down onto the tulips. A haze seemed to hang over the flowers. It was there, above the world, in that small bright space, that I finally spoke to Rosamund of the book. And when she found it, handed it to me, I saw that its due date was a date in January. It was already overdue when Vickie died.

‘When my sister went to Mandala that day, she was, as you know, all decked out in green and red, and she was carrying a red book, a library book. I’d give anything,’ I said, ‘to know where that book is now.’

PATIENCE OBTAINS EVERYTHING

‘I look down on the world as from a great height and care very little what people say or know about me. Our Lord has made my life to me now a kind of sleep, for almost always what I see seems to me to be seen as in a dream, nor have I any great sense either of pleasure or of pain.’

Teresa of Avila

On a hot February afternoon in 1967 Vickie sat on the steps in the White Garden, pretending to read the story of the two saints. She was like a gaudy statue among the pale foliage and flowers, an elegant woman in a large red hat, her lips dark red and glossy. She waited for the two women she had been told to expect — women dressed in the simple brown garb of Carmelites and wearing the black veils of their imagined order.

It was a stage setting, a nice little farce arranged by Ambrose partly so that he could see what effect it would have on the two deluded patients, partly because it was the kind of little drama that amused him. He would afterwards have an hilarious report from Vickie, and he would have some sort of story from each of the patients.

‘Vita Sackville-West has written a book about you, and she wants to meet you, and to see the White Garden you have made,’ he said to Teresa and Therese. ‘She will be in the White Garden this afternoon, expecting you.’

To Vickie he spoke of the garden as a wonderful facsimile, of Vickie as a delightful imitation, a class act, and of the patients as his best examples of advanced delusion. ‘I want to see what will happen when part of their fantasy, an aspect of their delusion, turns up in the garden and starts talking to them about— what are you going to talk about?’

‘Oh, wild clematis, old man’s beard, traveller’s joy. That sort of thing.’

‘Snail bait? Compost? Blood and bone?’

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203

‘Perhaps. Actually, I feel sorry for them. I’d rather like to just, you know, talk to them.’

‘About the weather?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Remember you’re meant to be this Vita woman.’

‘I won’t forget.’

After the visit in the garden, Vickie would return home and one day soon, when Ambrose had the time, she would tell him all about what happened.

But Therese Gillis did not want to meet Vita in the company of anybody. She wished, she longed, to meet this colourful stranger, this woman who had conjured the lives of the two saints into a narrative with photographs and quotations, to meet her alone. Alone in the White Garden which bore her stamp.

Would Vita be pleased? Surely she would be flattered by the imitation. She would have advice, ideas. It was all like a lovely dream — the glowing garden (danger, danger) and the exotic visitor. A visitor specially for Therese. She could tell her about everything, perhaps, about her stones, about Violetta … Therese would come, in her thoughts, up against the problem of Teresa.

Teresa must
not
be there.

It was simple, really. Teresa was afraid of insects. Therese was not. Therese went down to the beehives on the morning of Vita’s visit and collected some bees in an old glass jar with holes punched in its rusty lid. She made several visits, each time gently releasing the bees that were in the bottle and collecting some fresh ones. The first time she went it was nearly eight o’clock in the morning; the man in the prison was about to be hanged. The whole city was waiting for the clocks to strike eight. Therese kept the the jar full of bees in her pocket, a dark and busy comfort throughout the morning.

‘What are you grinning about?’ Shirley Temple asked her.

‘Saint Cheshire Cat that swallowed the cream, the canary. All grin. Grinning and sinning and licking your lips. Licking your chops. You look like the wolf that swallowed grandma. What’s the time, Mr Wolf? Dinner time. Din-din-dinner time.’

‘Shut up, Shirley. And don’t hang around here. Go and do
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your work down in the wards. Why don’t they ever put you to sleep? You sing too much.’

‘I sing for my supper. I sing, and sing. And the dreams! Do you realise I have the most vivid imagination in the whole world? I am going into Goddy’s book as the best dreamer. Ever.

Beautiful Dreamer
— da-da-da-da. I am
Guinness Book of
Records
stuff, you know. I might go on the stage. Me and Goddy.

He does his thing — Look into my eyes — and I fall asleep, pretend to fall asleep, have a quick dream and wake up and tell him all about it. In front of the whole audience of the Princess Theatre. We’ve talked about it. You wait. You just wait and see. I have had the Mexican Bandit dream — and the Goldfish on the Roof dream. He
liked
that one. Laugh. He nearly wet himself. I do them in catatonic for him, you know. That’s the way he likes it. Nearly
killed
himself laughing when I told him the Sinking of the Titanic. With music and lyrics. He threatened me with a gun. Fun with a gun. Shirley Temple and Doctor God will tickle your fancy with deep dark dreams of great big guns. God be nimble, God be quick.’

‘Shut
up
.’

Therese turned to Teresa who was sitting on the edge of the honeycomb veranda and said, ‘Why don’t you stay here this time? I’ll go and meet Vita by myself, and then next time she comes, you can come too. How would that be?’

‘I’m coming too.’

‘But you could have the afternoon to yourself. You could have some peace and quiet. What say I go and do this by myself, just this first time. You don’t like meeting people.’

‘Yes I do. I’m coming too.’

Therese sighed and ran her fingers over the glass jar in her pocket.

‘You could read or paint.’

‘I’m supposed to come, anyway. She wrote the book about both of us. And we both made the garden, don’t forget. You were sick most of the time.’

‘
You
were sick.’