CHAPTER SIX

The bedroom was warm and quiet. Matty remained on the bed where Kit had sat her down. Her Viyella nightdress had been laid out, and there would be a hot-water bottle between the sheets. She looked forward to climbing under the eiderdown and going to sleep. Again, she touched her breast and when it responded with a satisfactory spongy soreness she gave a sigh of relief.

‘There’s no mistake?’ Kit ripped off his tie and draped it round his neck. His hair fell over his forehead and, in his characteristic way, he pushed it back. As always, Matty had no idea what he was feeling but, at least, her news had broken the silence.

‘I don’t think so.’ Being questioned raised doubts in Matty’s mind and she sifted rapidly through the facts. Twenty-eight days late. Nausea. Sore breasts. A dislike of perfume... A conviction planted in the back of her mind.

‘Have you been to the doctor?’

‘No. But I’m almost sure.’

‘That’s very good news, Matty. When?’

She told him and Kit snapped his fingers, one, two; a trick of his. She knew then that he was pleased. Some of the hurt she was feeling relaxed its hold. She smoothed her gloves over her knees and hugged his pleasure to herself. Then she looked up. ‘Do you mind?’

‘Mind!’ Troubled by her question, Kit sat down beside Matty and took one of her hands. ‘You do ask me funny things sometimes, Matty. And you listen to the answer with those big eyes trained on me as if I was an oracle.’

‘I ask because I wish to find out,’ said Matty. ‘You see, I don’t really know you, and you are hard to understand.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ said Kit, propping himself on his elbows. ‘I don’t sound very appealing or approachable. I’ll have to try, Matty, shan’t I?’

She swallowed. ‘Only if you want to.’

Her answer appeared to annoy Kit and he got up from the bed and returned to the fireplace. Matty wished she had been as determined as Daisy was. ‘Yes, you damn well should try,’ Daisy would have said. ‘I demand it.’

She changed the subject and, with her instinct for rubbing salt into her own wounds, asked, ‘How was Daisy?’

Kit looked uncomfortable, miserable and angry all at the same time. ‘Daisy is very well,’ he replied, choosing the most neutral reply he could think of.

You can demand, said Emma Goldman in Matty’s head. Go on, Matty.

Fuelled by an unfamiliar mixture of nausea, elation and fatigue, she said, ‘Kit I must ask you... please... in future not to make your feelings so plain. In public at least. It makes it very difficult for me.’

‘Matty...’

‘Everyone noticed.’ Matty paused and, thinking that as she had got this far she had better continue, added, ‘I minded very much.’

‘Yes,’ said Kit. ‘Of course. I’m sorry.’

Matty pressed on. ‘I know what you feel about Daisy. Of course I do, although we haven’t discussed it. But please. Not in public.’

The effect was curiously dignified.

‘You should get to bed,’ Kit said quickly to cover his feelings. ‘I shouldn’t be keeping you up. Shall I ring for Ivy?’

‘No, please don’t, it’s far too late for her.’

‘Are you sure?’ Kit paused, and then asked, ‘Can I help?’

Matty stood up. ‘Could you undo my buttons, please?’

Kit was no good at buttons and it was a minute or two before the dress slid over Matty’s shoulders. Pleased by the intimacy, she savoured the touch of Kit’s fingers on her back.

‘Tired?’ she asked, feeling the skin under her own eyes stretch with fatigue.

‘Nicely so,’ lied Kit, and brushed his finger over the place where Matty’s skin thinned over her collarbone. He bent over and kissed her cheek. ‘Bed. At once.’

‘Kit.’

‘Yes,’ he said from the doorway.

She turned and with a slight shock he saw that under her silk chemise her breasts looked swollen and her soft, barely pink, nipples were darker and more prominent. Kit swallowed. ‘Yes?’ he repeated.

‘Nothing,’ said Matty. She watched the door close behind him and listened as he walked down the corridor. Presently, she heard him moving around the drawing room, and knew he would be pacing up and down between the windows, hands in his pockets.

Soothed by his goodnight kiss, she pulled up the bedclothes and fell asleep thinking that, perhaps, the things she dreaded were not as bad as she thought.

But when she woke next morning Matty was conscious at once that things weren’t fine. Something felt wrong: an acid aftertaste, an unease. Back in place was Matty’s demon, and she remembered how close Kit and Daisy had danced together and the way her husband’s hand had hugged the curve of Daisy’s hip.

The pillow had slipped to one side and Matty turned over and tried to doze. An image of the younger Kit as she had seen him in the old photographs – scrubbed and hair slicked back – drifted across her mind. It was followed by a sulky Polly. One by one, they emerged out of the leather box: Flora, in riding habit and top hat standing in front of her pony... Rupert, in uniform staring into the distance, Sam Browne belt shining in the studio light... Hesther standing beside her brother, posed by the photographer with a rose in her hand, Edwin in uniform. They were smiling at each other, and it was obvious that they were not interested in the business of being photographed. Matty stared at Hesther. Upswept hair and a square jaw that should have indicated strength and yet Matty knew it did not. The slight downturn of the mouth repeated in Polly, its hint of pain and loss not properly assimilated or mourned. The outlines of the face dissolved, Hesther disappeared and Matty was left feeling cold and sick.

Mother, she wanted to say, searching for Jocasta among the debris thrown up by sleep but, safe on the other side of death, Jocasta eluded her. Then Matty woke up properly and knew with absolute certainty that Hesther’s absence was more important than her presence. More important than anything.

She sat up in bed, reached for the telephone, cranked the handle and asked the operator for the Chudleigh residence.

‘Why Gunter’s?’ asked Daisy.

Wearing a pink and white dress from Mainbocher and an Agnes hat, Matty slipped into her chair. ‘Why not?’

‘It’s the sort of place to meet your future mother-in-law.’

‘It’s lovely,’ said Matty, and glanced round. The tables were occupied by bachelor uncles treating their nephews and nieces to the famous ice creams, ladies up for the day from the country and a budding romance or two at corner tables. ‘Very elegant.’

‘If you like that sort of thing.’ Daisy brushed her fringe back under her hat, not a designer creation but worn with chic. Under it her face looked unhappy, tired and, for Daisy, beaten. ‘I ordered China tea, scones and cream cakes,’ she said.

All morning Matty had told herself to remain calm so she was annoyed to see that her hands were clenched on the tablecloth. A change in a woman’s soul, is it not, Emma? she asked her spiritual mentor. And, now, the tiger principle: I have to be the snarling mother tiger who defends her cub with teeth and claws. Matty pictured the dot seeking life in the dark, thudding spaces of her body, and imagined curving her hand around it and protecting it as tenderly as she could.

‘You have got to go away,’ she told Daisy, transferring her tell-tale hands to her lap. ‘Go away somewhere so we don’t run into one another or, rather, you don’t run into Kit.’

Daisy blew out a plume of smoke and tapped her cigarette case. ‘I’ve said this before,’ she said, ‘but I had no idea how hard you were.’

‘Not hard,’ Matty contradicted. ‘Never that.’

Tea arrived and it was a minute or two before the frilled waitress had arranged it to her liking on the table, which gave the two of them time to think. Daisy continued to smoke furiously. ‘If I do go away, Matty? What then?’

‘It gives Kit a chance to get over you.’ She paused. ‘All of us a chance, actually. You, Kit, me and the baby.’ She tried not to let her elation show too much, but failed.

‘Baby!’ Daisy poured some tea. ‘Well, that gives me no choice.’ She took a mouthful and scalded her lips. ‘I hate you, Matty,’ she said, eyes watering, in a light, conversational manner. ‘I hate you.’

‘Why have you always hated me?’

Daisy searched her memory. ‘I haven’t always hated you. But you irritated Marcus and me right from the first.’

‘But why? I don’t think I did anything.’

‘That’s the point. You never did anything. You were plonked like a cuckoo into our nest and everything changed because you were a moulting cuckoo, who was constantly ill. It drove Marcus and me mad having to tiptoe around. Your money was a problem too. Have you ever considered what it’s like to be on the receiving end of charity? Marcus and I were grateful for all the nice things that came our way as a result of the allowance paid by your trustees, but it also stuck in our throats.’ Daisy lit another cigarette. ‘To be fair, Matty, your money wasn’t your fault, I suppose, but you must see that it made it difficult. Perhaps if you had been a different sort of person then none of the generosity would have mattered. But you never showed emotion, except fright, and that egged Marcus and me on. You never stood up to us.’ She paused to tap ash into the cut-glass ashtray, and said, ‘You never showed any sign of affection.’

Matty had not seen it in that light before, and she was silent while she digested the implications along with Gunter’s scones. Inside she cried: You never showed me affection either.

‘Then,’ said Daisy, and her expression hardened, ‘you went and sold yourself to Kit. At first I wasn’t sure if it was to spite me, or a genuine desire to get him out of a rocky patch.’ She gazed down at her plate. ‘I still haven’t decided...’

‘Have a scone,’ said Matty.

Daisy peered at her cousin and, to Matty’s surprise, gave a snort of laughter. ‘I may hate you, Matty, but you are priceless sometimes. I have to hand it to you.’

Matty passed the plate. ‘You must go away for as long as possible,’ she reiterated while Daisy crumbled the scone on her plate. ‘Otherwise you won’t give yourself, or Kit, time to recover, and since we are bound to meet quite often, it would be the best thing.’

‘Goodness,’ said Daisy. ‘I think you’re developing a bite at last.’

‘Of course, Kit could divorce me and then it would be different.’

‘No, he wouldn’t do that,’ said Daisy, pushing away her plate. ‘Dysarts don’t get divorced. Anyway, he needs your money.’

‘Daisy. Please listen to me.’

‘The price?’ asked Daisy curiously. ‘Are you going to buy me off? You’re always buying things, Matty.’

‘There is no price,’ said Matty. ‘You just have to go.’

The clear eyes assessed Matty, and Daisy’s reddened lips closed tight against feelings that were out of place in Gunter’s. Not for anything would she show Matty how much she was hurting.

Light-headed at her daring, Matty drank her tea and waited. Daisy was seldom malicious and Matty was certain that, for all her passions, Daisy would arrive at the right conclusion. Opposite her, Daisy cupped her chin in her hands and gazed at her cigarette case, her hat brim dipping over her face. For the thousandth time, Matty was suborned by Daisy’s mysterious beauty and understood why Kit loved her.

‘I give you marks for trying, Matty,’ Daisy shovelled her things into her handbag and drew on her gloves, ‘and I’ll think about it.’

‘I’ll pay for tea,’ Matty said.

Daisy frowned and for a second her guard slipped. ‘How predictable,’ she said, wearily. ‘How very bloody like you. Nevertheless, just this once I’m going to pay.’ She signalled to the waitress and waited until she was presented with the bill in its leather folder. Matty pulled her gloves over the Dysart engagement ring – pigeon’s blood ruby, Burma, of the first water: she had mentally catalogued it when Kit presented it to her – and shrugged her jacket around her shoulders. Daisy retrieved her parcels.

‘I shall arrange to go away after Ascot because you have had the courage to ask, and because of the baby,’ she said. ‘Providing I can handle Mother.’

‘Thank you, Daisy.’

Daisy paused before rising from the plush banquette. ‘Don’t think it will solve anything though, Matty. I am sorry to be blunt and I’ve said it before. Two thousand miles, three thousand miles, whatever, won’t stop me loving Kit nor, necessarily, will it stop Kit loving me.’

She left Matty staring at crumbs, crumpled napkins, lipstick-stained cigarette stubs, not at all sure how the balance now sat.

The afternoon paper reported several items. One: the likelihood that two point six million were now unemployed in Great Britain. Two: following on from its trade and friendship alliance with Poland, the USSR was planning to sign a treaty of neutrality with Afghanistan. Other, less disturbing, items covered the possibilities of the Socialists winning the general election in Spain, and whether or not a new electric tote would be used at Ascot.

The articles on Russia required careful reading, and Matty, fascinated as always by Russia and the East, wondered, as the chauffeur piloted the car into Knightsbridge, whether Russia was aiming to dominate the world and make them all Communists.

The first warning – a ripple of discomfort in her groin, light, but determined — came when Matty was being fitted for a skirt with the new longer hemline. She closed her eyes and knew she had tempted fate by allowing herself to browse through the baby department.

She stepped out of the skirt, and a second warning flashed between her legs and up to her stomach. Matty looked up at the assistant and fought an urge to dig her nails into the plump forearms.

‘Are you quite well, madam?’ enquired a voice.

Deep inside Matty, a seed was pulled up by its bloody roots.

‘No,’ said Matty. ‘No, I don’t think I want this skirt.’ She handed it back.

‘This one, madam?’ The girl held out a shorter, cleverly cut skirt on a padded hanger. Her scent was strong, cheap and made Matty nauseous. Because she could not think of anything better to do, she tried on the second skirt. Pat, pat, went the assistant’s hands over her bottom and hips. Rip, answered something inside Matty’s body, and a cold, hard clod dropped into her groin. She swayed and put out a hand for support.

‘Excuse me, madam,’ the assistant peered at her white-faced client, ‘are you sure you are quite well?’

But Matty was far away, concentrating on the demon that was now ripping the flesh from the walls of her womb. No! She screamed.

No.

After that, Matty could not distinguish much. She heard the terrified assistant say, ‘In Harrods! This is awful. Get a doctor.’ There was a blur of light, a prick of a needle in her arm, and the impression of a large hand examining her stomach. The clod grew heavier and more punishing, then nothing.

Some time later, it was night. Matty worked that out because of the electric lamp shining in the corner. Someone sat beside it, and each time they moved, a square of linen danced above a blue uniform. A pad of soft cotton was wadded between Matty’s legs, and her arm ached where the needle had gone in. She was thirsty and made an effort to reach for the glass of water by the bed. The nurse, wearing an artificially concerned expression, came over and helped Matty to drink it before tucking her up and telling her to go to sleep.

She awoke properly into daylight. The bedroom at Bryanston Court was filled with late morning sunshine. Matty lay and watched it filter between her eyelashes and observed the colour change as she moved her eyes this way and that. It meant she did not have to think.

‘Poor old girl.’ Flora stood beside the bed. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Matty looked up at her sister-in-law. Flora’s nimbus of hair made her seem stronger than usual and she was too weak to fight envy. ‘So am I.’

‘Kit is beside himself.’ Flora dragged up a chair and sank into it. ‘Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘Kit knew.’

‘Oh.’ Still not accustomed to the fact that husbands and wives had secrets, Flora looked put out. ‘He feels very guilty.’

‘He shouldn’t. It’s not his fault.’

Flora examined the face on the pillow and considered privately that it was Kit’s fault. If he had behaved better or, at least, less obviously at Lady Londonderry’s ball, then Matty would not have been so upset. Love, Flora concluded after analysis, was complicated and involved odd factors such as timing and luck.

Matty made an effort. ‘How was the nightclub?’

‘Fun.’

‘And Marcus?’

Flora made a face. ‘Well,’ she confessed uncertainly. ‘He wanted to kiss me again.’

The face on the pillow tried to smile. ‘Is this becoming a habit, Flora? You know what happens to fast women?’

The remark made Flora laugh, albeit uncertainly, because she was not sure where the dividing line was between fast and acceptable. ‘I’ll take care, Matty,’ she promised. Even so a faint red crept into her cheeks. ‘But you don’t want to talk about nightclubs,’ she said to Matty. ‘What can I do to help?’

Matty moved restlessly. ‘Will you ask Kit to do something for me?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘I want to go home. Will you ask him to take me?’

Four days later, Matty woke to a different sunlight and the sound of birdsong. She listened for a moment: the birdsong had sounded different when spring came and now it was changing again for the summer.

Matty pulled herself upright and felt the hammer of headache in her left temple. The clock on the bedside table registered only five thirty. It also ticked comfortlessly at her. Look at you. Tick. Anxious. Tick. Tearful. Tick. Full of dread.

Yes, she told herself, I am all these things. She directed her willpower against the greyness that seeped through her defences.

‘Well, Mrs Dysart,’ said Dr Hurley, who had descended yesterday from the magnificence of his Harley Street consulting rooms to Bryanston Court before they set off home. ‘What have we been doing to ourself?’

‘Nothing,’ Matty almost snapped.

Dr Hurley stared at his normally timid patient and took out his notebook. ‘It’s quite natural to be angry, Mrs Dysart.’ He took Matty’s pulse. ‘Now, tell me what happened.’

Reliving details and events did not make them better. Matty explained the missed periods, the sore breasts and the nausea and asked, ‘I was pregnant, wasn’t I, Dr Hurley?’

He put his fountain pen down on the pad. ‘To be honest, Mrs Dysart, knowing your history and physiology, I would be surprised.’ Matty stared at him, and Dr Hurley made a smooth change of tack. ‘But,’ he amended, ‘strange things do happen, of course.’

She shivered as she engaged his bland look. ‘What about next time, Dr Hurley?’

Dr Hurley assumed the expression of professional compassion that got him out of most difficult situations. ‘Mrs Dysart, I am almost sure there will not be a next time. Your illnesses, certain irregularities... we have discussed them many times and you know my views.’

‘Never, Dr Hurley?’

He busied himself with the pen. ‘Never is a hard word. But consider, Mrs Dysart, you are luckier than most. You have other things to keep you busy.’

The clock ticked inside its tortoiseshell case. ‘Other things?’ Hats to tilt over one eye and jewellery to wear and indeed, as Mrs Christopher Dysart, summer fetes to open. Yes, there was the house to think about: windows to curtain, china to check, meals to plan. Yes. It was good to see the furniture gleaming, to smell pot-pourri in the rooms and to enjoy fresh paintwork on the shutters.

But it was not enough to provision a life, or to please the spirit, or to fill the hole made by her treacherous body.

‘Goodbye, Dr Hurley,’ she said and he left.

Everything hurt – breathing, talking, dressing, thinking, remembering. Matty examined the rogue crack in the ceiling above the bed, and imagined that it grew wide and enormous, inviting her to climb into the space and lose herself. Below it hung a painting of a woman wearing blue striped trousers by an artist called Suzanne Valadon. (‘Good God,’ exclaimed Kit on seeing it. ‘I can’t get over your taste in paintings.’) Matty concentrated on the cigarette hanging out of the woman’s mouth and felt better.

Inch by inch, she got out of bed. First her feet, second her legs and a great push upright, towards the bathroom. Then her brassiere, next her knickers, and a petticoat edged in Nottingham lace. Try to ignore the ache in her abdomen. Concentrate. Stockings. Cotton skirt and blouse. Concentrate. Lace-up shoes. A glance in the mirror. A dab of rose water, a quick pat of the hairbrush. Out of the room, down the stairs and into the sunlight.

It was already warm. Matty took off her cardigan, left it draped over the stone balustrade and made her way down the steps, releasing a waft of thyme. Under the beech tree emerald moss was sharp and jangling in contrast to the brown tree trunk. Matty stopped to look and then, drawn almost against her will, glided on.

At the thicket she hesitated, stepped forward and beat her way along the covered path towards the garden whose hidden life waited for her. At the top of the slope, she halted. Light filtered through a lacework of leaves, a ring dove sounded from the silver birch and its mate answered. Cradled in the undergrowth, the statue stood out, yellow-green with moss, while the choked plants in the flowerbed were drenched in damp. Her eye caught by a blob of pink in the green, Matty edged her way down the slope and knelt down on the wet earth.

Smothered by weeds, leggy and unpruned, a ‘Queen of Denmark’ rose flowered in a sugary pink with grey-green foliage. To please itself, thought Matty, liking the idea of its independence, and traced the shape of quartered, cupped petals, dotted with a button eye. Lower down the stem, a fat bud waited to bloom. Matty ran a hand down over her own body: flat breasts, empty stomach, slack thighs. Above everything – above everything else — she longed to feel a child’s body against her own, and empty, hungry, grieving, she was to be denied it.

What was she to do with her life?

After a few minutes, she brushed the mud away from her knees, rubbed her hands on her handkerchief and looked up at the clematis scrambling over the brick wall. Broken only by the rustle of leaves and the whirr of birds’ wings, the silence dared her to move, to break the moment, so she remained quite still. Then, with the lightest and most tender of touches, the sun spread over her tired skin and warmed her tired spirit.

And out of Matty’s grief was born a moment of exultation, and the conviction that, at last, she had found her place. She was the garden, the garden was Matty, and they were both living. Somehow, Matty had made her stumbling journey along an unknown road and reached a milestone.

It lasted no more than a few seconds, but it was enough.

Two days later, feeling much stronger, dressed in a linen shirt and trousers, Matty returned to the garden carrying a fork and a trowel. She took off her jacket, draped it over the statue, surveyed the space and began to dig in the flowerbed under the wall.

It required effort to drive the fork into the earth and, to her chagrin, Matty did not possess the strength. After five minutes she was panting. After ten, her back ached and her hands were slippery with sweat – but there was a heap of dug earth. Copying Ned’s favourite pose, Matty leant on the fork handle to draw breath. The disturbed earth was alive with worms and indignant insects and she watched them taking cover.

Again she lifted the fork and drove it down, and this time struck a root clump which refused to yield. Matty rocked the fork experimentally, and her foot slipped on the tines. With a thump, the handle whipped back into her stomach.

‘Blast it,’ she said.

Shocked by the blow and feeling childishly let down by her own weakness, she stopped, unaware that she was experiencing the sort of set-back most first-time gardeners encounter. She dragged her forearm across her sweaty face and suppressed an urge to burst into tears. Not this time, my girl, she told herself. You’re only tearful because you’re still weak.

Don’t be beaten.

You’re not going to be beaten.

Beaten, echoed the ring dove.

Matty knelt down on a piece of sacking which she had sensibly brought with her and tackled the mass of roots and grass in the bed. Bothered at first by the feel of earth on her hands, she brushed at them continually, but after a while she gave up, and discovered it did not matter if dirt caked under fingernails. Nor did she mind. Later, Matty grew to like the sensation, as she came to enjoy the smell of wet earth, leaf mould and rotting plants.

Such waste, thought the waste-hating Matty, tossing a slug-ridden bulb onto her refuse pile. Such waste.

Working her way along the bed, she encountered another root which refused to budge. Part of it snapped off, exposing a white circle of inner flesh. Matty pushed her fingers into the earth around it and grasped the fibrous remainder, pulled until her eyes bulged, and fell backwards when it came up. She held it in triumph.

Two hours later, she had managed to clear a patch of three feet square or so and felt like the early colonist in tropical Africa. After its long incarceration, the earth looked lifeless. Not sure if she had been too enthusiastic and unselective in what she had discarded, Matty sorted out suspects from the rubbish to consult Ned as to what they were. He would not approve, but she had an idea she could talk him into co-operating.

That night she slept through until seven o’clock and woke up hungry.

*

The garden was Matty’s secret. Like all secrets, it was the better for hoarding and being turned over in the mind, this way and that. For maturing like all good vintages. Matty’s plan was simple: to bring this garden back to life. Clear it. Plant it. Watch it grow. Then, only then, would she show it to Kit and, after she had proved to him of what she was capable, ask him again to let her manage the whole garden.

Oh, yes. Years of planning, planting, watching, retrenching lay ahead. Busy years, she thought with relief.

Since the miscarriage, Kit had been punctilious about visiting Matty’s bedroom to say goodnight but now he was due to return to London with Flora and to hand over the latter to Lady F. (‘Do you always make living sacrifices?’ Flora asked bitterly. ‘Do you like hearing victims scream?’)

‘We can’t do anything else,’ Matty pointed out to Kit. ‘Robbie has to look after your father, and Flora must not miss the rest of the Season because of me.’

‘No,’ said Kit.

‘I think you should stay up in London as long as possible to give her support.’

‘Well, I will,’ said Kit. ‘It’s nice of you to be so understanding about it.’

Neither of them mentioned Daisy. Kit leant over to give Matty her goodnight kiss on the cheek and on an impulse slid his hand round her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry you’ve been disappointed and miserable, but things will get better.’

After he had gone, Matty did not feel nearly as empty as she often did. Instead she picked up one of Miss Jekyll’s gardening books. ‘The lesson I have thoroughly learnt, and wish to pass on to others, is to know the enduring happiness that the love of a garden gives.’

Good, thought Matty and marked the place. I could do with some.

Next to Miss Jekyll lay two books by Mr Bowles – My Garden in Spring and My Garden in Summer – full of humour and artistic arrangements. Beside them were stacked The English Rock Garden by Mr Farrer and Mr Robinson’s The English Flower Garden, plus an article by the novelist Vita Sackville-West from the Evening Standard, which Matty loved for its mixture of the poetic and the practical.

Matty realized that the scope of her ambition needed to be bigger: clearing the earth was fine, but a plan was needed if the work was to mean something. On a piece of paper she drew in the shape of the garden: the south and west sides bounded by the perimeter wall, the east side by the avenue of birches and the north by the scrub.

‘Clematis’, she wrote and drew an arrow to indicate its position on the west wall. Which clematis? The book said clematises flowered either in early summer or early autumn and were lime-loving. ‘Roses’. Matty was keen to have as many as possible. ‘Queen of Denmark’, of course. The Jacobite rose which she had seen in a painting. ‘Maiden’s Blush’. The ‘Duchess of Montebello’.

Next: ‘Salvia patens’ to underplant the roses. Delphiniums and white foxgloves against the wall. Some silver-leaved plants in front of them? Plus a drift (thank you, Miss Jekyll, for the idea) of pink sedum for the autumn. After that, she scrawled ‘Trillium grandiflorum (shady bits)’, blissfully unaware of how tricky they were to grow, ‘saxifrage?, santolina (must have), Tradescantia (blue or white?)’

Circles and arrows sprouted all over the diagram and the list grew.

‘Mrs Kit,’ said Ned once he had succumbed to a pair of pleading eyes, a request for an extra wheelbarrow, compost, a lesson on planting, an order to buy up stock at the nearest nursery and an injunction for the deepest secrecy. ‘Mrs Kit, what are you asking me to do?’

‘I’d like you to help me. You know the garden, the bit that no one goes into?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Ned’s face wore an expression which she could not place.

‘You don’t want to be bothering with that, Mrs Kit,’ he said after a moment. ‘It’s not the best place. The soil’s tainted.’ He added, ‘It gets like that sometimes.’

‘Please, Mr Sheppey.’

She waited. He appeared to be struggling with the wish to speak out, and then the habit of following orders won.

‘If that’s what you’re telling me to do. But I don’t like it, Mrs Kit.’

Matty produced her plan. Ned stared at the hieroglyphics and then wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. ‘You haven’t measured the garden. Nor have you allowed for the plants to grow. You can’t start until you’ve done that.’

Matty sighed. ‘Nor I have, Mr Sheppey.’

He smiled, enjoying his little triumph. ‘Never mind, Mrs Kit. You can do it again.’

‘Will it take long to get the plants, Mr Sheppey? I’d like to come with you.’

‘Depends,’ said Ned. ‘There’s only one nursery in the area and they don’t keep everything. We’ll have to ask around other gardens for seeds and cuttings.’

Every day Matty visited the garden. When she first began work, she found it almost impossible to lift the wheelbarrow. A couple of weeks later she was wheeling it half loaded without losing her breath.

‘Mark out the area to dig, Mrs Kit,’ said Ned during one of their daily confabulations. So she did.

‘Push the spade straight down. Use the shaft to lever the soil, not your back.’ So she did.

‘Sharpen the blade with a stone. Choose a good day. Dig down one strip to the depth of the spade, Mrs Kit, and make a trench. Jiggle the spade at the bottom to loosen the subsoil.’

The soil peeled back, revealing its secret greys and browns: So shall my life turn over. Matty felt sweat soak into her blouse.

Next, she tackled the second strip, deposited its soil into the first strip and mixed in spadefuls of compost: Go then, and multiply. Scrambled back muscles, jagged fingernails, a smell of turned earth, a gritty feel on her hands: unfamiliar sensations became friendly, part of a repertoire that she hugged to herself.

In the end, because it was a huge task, Ned came to help and they cleared and burnt the debris side by side. Matty was impatient for her garden, badgering him for results, and he told her over and over again that it would take time. That the garden required preparation before she could plant it.

‘What about the lily bulbs that Mrs Pengeally sent over? Can’t we plant those? In a pot, perhaps?’

‘You need to know what you’re doing with lilies, Mrs Kit.’

‘But you know, Mr Sheppey, and you can teach me.’

‘Top dressed and staked.’

‘Top dressed?’ Matty felt much as Echo must have done, dashing about in mythical Greece hearing her words repeated.

‘Equal parts manure, lime rubble and loam.’

Next year, thought Matty, the idea giving her extreme pleasure, I will have more roses, more lilies. Hundreds of them.