Five

THE DOVE TREE STOOD at the back of Morton House.

It was known by other names. The ghost tree. The handkerchief tree.

Standing underneath it, staring up through its airy branches, David watched the way that the white bracts moved in the wind. On a morning like this, a cool morning, with the sun just beginning to touch the uppermost leaves, the Davidia involucrata had first been discovered in the mountains of western China, in 1869.

The owner of Morton House had planted this particular tree forty years before, because he had heard the story of when the botanist Augustine Henry had first seen it flowering in Hupeh. Henry had told his wife that it was the strangest apparition of his journey, and that the bracts fluttered like a thousand small white birds on a mountain slope.

The dove could grow to sixty-five feet, and this one was already on its way. Light and vigorous, with beautiful heart-shaped leaves whose green tone was startlingly bright, each leaf ending in a pointed tip—a green flourish, a signature, like the tail on calligraphy letters—it seemed young, as if it were just a juvenile, racing upward.

David reached up and touched the leaves of the closest branch.

Davidia involucrata. It had come into flower in the spring, the small rounded heads with their bright purple anthers surrounded by protecting bracts, one always longer than the other. The flowers were partially hidden under the smaller bract, folded over it delicately, like a white fan hiding a face; the longer bract hanging down behind the flower, a palm of silky tissue paper, eight inches long. When the Davidia flowered, and the bracts covered the tree, it was like looking at a wedding dress, falling in loose silk tiers, fold over fold, to the ground.

David released the leaves. He looked down at the lawn underneath the tree, where the first dying bracts littered the grass. In a few weeks’ time there would be nothing extraordinary to distinguish this tree from the others around it. Nevertheless, he envied the owner, Charles Augre, for his possession of it. No other tree had ever been so pursued and lusted after as this one.

Morton House had once been one of the flourishing estates that, a hundred years ago, had taken pride in propagating the first plants from trees like this. Lovely as the house and gardens still were—the Tudor chimneys rising like candy sugar twists above the knot garden, and the fountains, the laburnum galleries, the lawns and the lake—they were a shadow of their former glory. Here, the gardens had once held two great tropical glasshouses. Charles Augre’s great-grandfather had spent his life breeding the finds that plant explorers, such as Ernest Wilson, had brought back from Asia, China, and India.

David stood with his back to the tree now, eyes shut.

Wilson again.

Anna again.

They came hand in hand walking through his mind, easily and softly, as if they had never left. He opened his eyes and looked up through the Davidia’s leaves, with that familiar ache in his heart.

Ernest Wilson was the man who had flooded the West with the prizes he had brought back from China. He had traveled for years—the first ten years of the twentieth century—to find flowers like the regal lily, the honeysuckle, and Meconopsis integrifolia, the astonishing broad-petaled poppy. It had taken him eight years to find the species that would eventually populate the western world with China’s children: the vanilla-scented Clematis armandii with its creamy white flowers; and the gorgeous Clematis montana, blanketed in ice pink blossom every spring. Twenty species of cotoneaster. The evergreen primrose jasmine. The beauty bush. Seven fantastic magnolia, fourteen different flowering cherries, eighteen varieties of climbing roses. The iris that was named after him, Iris wilsonii; the Liriodendron chinense, from the Lu Shan mountains, which the Chinese called the goose-foot. And three Styrax, known as snowbells in America because of their white, bell-shaped hanging flowers.

Wilson had traveled from Shanghai to Yichang, at the mouth of the Yangtze Gorges; across the Chengdu plain; as far as the China-Tibet borders to Tatsienlu, now Kangding, the Gate of Tibet; through the forests of Ta-P’ao and the wilderness of Laolin, and to the sacred mountain of Emei Shan.

It was in his second year at Oxford that David had found Wilson’s book.

It was a chance discovery: he had been looking for something else, and stumbled upon the modest green cloth binding on the library shelves. He had taken the book down, and it had opened at a series of photographs: China in the first decade of the twentieth century. A picture of the Great Salt Road—a path only, passing through a fissure in a mountain wall. And someplace called Song-pan, a cluster of poor tile roofs grouped around a stone fort. And, on the subsequent page, a scene of desolate beauty: A view of the countryside above Songpan, read the caption. Mountain ranges filled the horizon, the Kunlun Shan to the northwest, the Himalaya to the southwest. In their heart lay Lhasa; in their foothills, Kathmandu; at their feet, Lucknow and Dhaka, thousands of miles to the south.

David had weighed the book in his hand. He had looked along the library shelf. Nothing else by Wilson. He looked in the first few pages again, at the chapter headings: South and Southwest China, Indochina, Western China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, ran the list of journeys. He glanced at the facing page. The Zhedou Pass at fourteen thousand feet, began an introductory sentence.

He thought he recognized some of the discovery names from his father’s garden. Viburnum, for instance. Rosa moyesii. He turned to the index at the back, and saw page after page of discoveries. Photographs of maples, and sorbus, and primula. Seductive and unreal magnolia. A fantastic plant he had never heard of, with a light green spine running through each leaf, and the tips of the leaves turning copper. An orchid, with a great bell-shaped pouch like a fleshy mouth, almost with a tongue; candy-striped petals, green leaves like tulips. Cypripedium tibeticum. Brought from Tibet.

That lunchtime, David had showed the book to Anna. He still remembered her that day, coming out of Magdalen, carrying the thick drawing pad and her cotton roll of watercolors. They had sat down on the curb while he opened Wilson’s book and folded out the maps, and she had drawn Wilson’s Lilium regale, the fairy-tale white lily with its long yellow stamens and satinlike petals. She had held up the finished sketch at shoulder level.

“And this Wilson,” she had said. “He found this where?”

“Near a place called Songpan.”

“Where’s that?”

“Western China.”

“Romantic,” she said.

He had leaned forward, pulled down the sketchpad, and smiled at her over the top of it. “Romantic?” he had repeated.

“Yes,” she answered. “Why not?”

He opened the book. “…Barring absolute desert, no more barren and repelling country could be imagined,” he read out. “A fierce upriver wind blows regularly and it is difficult to make headway against it…the leaves on the maize plants are torn to shreds by the wind’s violence…”

She was listening to him. “Right up your alley,” she commented. “I can see you doing that.”

“What?” he had asked.

“Searching the world for a new daffodil,” she teased. “Canoeing the Amazon for a chrysanthemum.”

“That’s Japan, chrysanthemums.”

“Trekking Antarctica for a rare cabbage.”

“Never have I looked upon a more savage and less inviting region…”

“I can see you now in a white hat, carrying a big net.” She had laughed, throwing back her head. She had thick reddish hair that fell to just below her shoulders. He liked to listen to her, to hear the burr of her American accent. And she was forever in his head, now, like this…in faded jeans and T-shirt, and the turquoise-and-silver bangle on her wrist that she never took off, and her head rested on one hand, and turned toward him…

“Let’s see what he looked like, this great explorer,” she had said.

They found Wilson’s photograph in the first chapter. A family man, at home in Boston, Wilson was the very epitome of Edwardian respectability, with a high starched collar and a dark cloth suit and a watch chain glimpsed at the waist. Below him sat his wife and daughter, in equally starched masses of white broderie anglaise. But, further on in the book, as they searched through it, they found another Wilson: sitting at the side of a mud track, with two dogs at his feet, a hat pushed back on his head, and a crowd of Chinese around him. Rain had splattered the camera lens. More mountains—endless, endless mountains—rose up in the background.

“Do you see where he comes from?” David had asked Anna.

“England,” she said. “Gloucestershire. It said so, at the beginning.”

“After that,” he said. “Look—see? Hired in 1899 by the Arnold Arboretum in Boston.”

She had smiled at him. “My mother lives just north of there.”

“I know,” he said, and he looked again at her quick, accomplished drawing of the lily.

He had first seen Anna three weeks before, in Roxburgh’s on The High, sitting under the Matisse prints, making pocket money by drawing cartoons of customers in the style of famous artists. She was at a front table, pad propped on her lap, and a pastiche of Lautrec flowed from the pencil, and he had stopped. He had stopped and stared at her. And, miraculously, she had looked up, and smiled back.

“And this—this savage region—” she was saying, “that’s where this lily comes from?” She, too, had looked again at her drawing, and then down again at the picture in Wilson’s book.

“Lilium regale luxuriates in rocky crevices…” David continued. “It grows three to five feet tall, ivory white suffused with canary yellow within, and is deliciously fragrant…the regal lily occurs here in abundance on the well-nigh stark slate and mudstone cliffs.”

“How weird,” she mused. “They look so fragile. Overblown, almost. As if they couldn’t stand a breeze, let alone a desert.” She frowned. “They look like a floral version of someone’s mistress.”

“A what?” he echoed.

“You know. All satin sheets and shaded rooms.”

He grinned at her. “How did we get to satin sheets?” he asked. “And,” he added, drawing her close to him, while the traffic rolled past just inches from their feet, and the crowds stepped around them, and the drawing of the lily fell between them, “what do you know about mistresses?”

“As much as you.”

“I don’t know a thing.”

She’d smiled, kissing him. “You’d better not.”

They had gotten up, eventually, and walked on down to Brasenose. “I could do my dissertation on someone like this,” David had said, as they had stopped to cross the road.

“You could write a book,” she’d replied. “A book would be better. You could do the text, and I could do the illustration. What would you call it?”

“The Light of the World.”

“No,” she said, pulling a critical face. “That’s already a painting. Don’t you know that, you ignoramus?”

“The World in Color, then.”

She’d started to laugh. “Oh, my God,” she’d said. “That is so much worse. I can’t tell you how much worse that is. That is awful.”

They’d dashed across through a break in the traffic. “Well, I don’t know,” he’d said. “You choose.”

She’d considered, mock serious. “A Road Through the Mountains,” she’d offered, finally. “Something to do with mountains, anyway.”

He had kept the sketch of the Lilium regale for a long time.

Eleven years.

Long after she had gone.

“Mortimer!” called a voice.

He turned around. Charles Augre was walking across the grass. As he watched, the owner of Morton stopped, and beckoned him.

David started in his direction. “Yes?” he asked, when he was closer.

“Your sister’s here for you,” Augre replied. “Something urgent.”

Sara was in the restaurant.

It was in the building where the horses had been kept, when Morton had had carriages. The Stables Bistro, said the sign over the door. The renovation had been one of the changes forced upon Augre to find income to run the house. Just one of the many changes that he hated. David often thought that Augre felt he had sold his soul to the devil, just to be enabled to keep Morton viable. If he had his own way, Augre would shut the gates and close the parking lot, and slam the shutters down on The Stables, just so he could have the luxury of being left alone in peace with his gardens.

“What are you doing here?” David asked his sister, as he came in.

Sara stood in the center of the room, watching the tables being set. It was still only half past nine; the grounds didn’t open to the public until ten.

“They found you,” she said.

Hannah was hitched up on Sara’s hip, looking flushed and fretful.

“Is she all right?” David asked, nodding at the baby. “Is she ill?”

“She’s got a temperature,” Sara told him. “I’m on my way to the doctor’s.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” he asked.

“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s nothing serious. It’s not Hannah. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Who’s in the shop?” he asked.

“Matt,” she replied. “Never mind that.” She frowned at him, bit her lip. She stepped out of the way of one of the women, a stout lady in a checked apron, carrying a fistful of coasters and cutlery. The woman glanced from David to Sara, her gaze lingering a second on Sara’s face. She could read the apprehension there. “When you’d gone,” Sara continued to David, “just after you’d gone this morning…I got a phone call.”

David was still distracted by Hannah, and the waitress, who was now making a hell of a noise filling the cutlery trays by the till. “Who from?” he asked, frowning.

Sara didn’t reply. He looked back at her. “Who from?” he repeated.

“Grace Russell,” she said.

The waitress came back. She smiled at Hannah. “Does she want anything?” she asked Sara. “A drink of juice?”

“No,” Sara said. “Thank you…no.”

“Oh, she’s lovely,” the woman said. “Isn’t she a lovely one? Such a pretty little thing, in her pink outfit.”

David watched her walk away. The doors to the kitchen rattled behind her.

“David,” said Sara. “It’s Anna’s mother.”

He lifted his eyes to hers.

“I know who Grace Russell is,” he said.

“She’s been trying to find you all night,” she said. “Since yesterday.” She took a step toward him. “It was just after nine when she got through. It’s four in the morning out there.”

He turned on his heel, went to the door, and pushed his way outside. Over the top of the restaurant, you could see the poplars that Augre had planted by the lake. The wind was plucking at them.

“David…David!”

He turned around. “The only time I heard from Grace Russell,” he said, “she told me she didn’t know where Anna was. And I rang her, then. Four times. The last time, she put the phone down on me.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Sara said. “It was years ago.”

David’s expression darkened. “That’s right,” he said. “It’s years ago.

“You have to ring her,” Sara said. She was taking a piece of paper out of her pocket. “I wrote down the numbers.” She held it out to him.

He didn’t take it from her.

“She had phoned all over looking for you,” she said. “Your old college, London, Kew, VSO, Westonbirt, Bristol…everywhere you’ve worked.” She pushed the piece of paper at him. “If you think I’m standing here for my health,” she warned. “Take it.”

Grudgingly, he did so.

“Ring her,” she told him. “It’s about Anna.”

He looked up. “What about her?”

“She’s been in some sort of accident.”

His hand dropped to his side, paper still in his grasp. “When?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Yesterday, maybe. A road accident. She’s in hospital.” She nodded at the paper. “The first number is the mobile. The second is Massachusetts General.”

In Sara’s arms, Hannah began to cry.

“What happened to her?” David asked.

“David, I don’t know.” Sara looked closely at her daughter.

“Is she injured?”

Sara looked despairingly at him. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “I’m really sorry. I have to go. Ring Grace.”

She turned, and walked to her car, glancing all the while at Hannah.

As she unlocked the door, David called to her.

“Why now?” he said. “After all this time?”

His sister put Hannah into the child seat. She straightened up, and leaned momentarily on the car’s roof.

“Ring her,” she told him. “Just ring.”

Charles Augre showed him into the dining room.

It was the nearest phone. David didn’t own a mobile.

He sat down on a chair, and looked at his watch. Ten-forty in the morning. It would be five-forty in Boston. Grace had rung Sara in the middle of the night.

He wondered if Grace still lived at Ogunquit. He wondered if Anna lived with her. He wondered if Anna had always lived with her, from the first days of going back there and deserting him without a word of explanation. Had Anna been standing close to Grace when he had phoned all those years ago? He wondered most of all what Anna had said to her mother, what reasons she had given her. The reasons denied to him.

He dialed Grace’s number, and sat back and waited, staring ahead of him.

It was picked up after the second ring.

“Grace Russell.”

“Hello,” he said. “This is David.”

There was a gasp on the other end of the line. “Oh! Thank you for calling. Thank you so much.”

“You wanted to tell me something.”

There was a beat of silence. “Yes…yes,” she said. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

He gave a grudging half-smile. Grace’s voice was full of the smoky breathlessness and warmth that he distantly remembered. “About Anna,” he prompted.

“I…” Another silence. “Could you hold on?” she said. “The damned signal on this thing. Let me go into the hall.”

He waited.

“David,” she suddenly whispered. “I’m so grateful.”

He said nothing.

“David, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“Anna is very ill.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

Another silent second. “She just came out of surgery.”

“Surgery?” he repeated. “What happened?”

“Her car crashed in a rainstorm. A truck went into her.”

He balled his fist, knocked it against his leg, taking a moment to reply. “Is it bad?”

This time, the pause was long. “Yes,” she said, and he heard her voice hitch.

“Is she unconscious?”

“Yes,” she told him. “There’s a head injury.”

Immediately, irrationally, he thought of the reddish hair and the blond lily, side by side.

“I’m very sorry,” he said.

“Yes, I…” There was a jumble of voices, evidently of a group passing in the corridor where Grace was standing. “David,” she whispered, “I need to ask you something.”

He waited.

“I don’t know what else to do.”

He waited.

“David,” she said, “will you come over here?”

He paused. Actually, he stopped breathing for a second, in surprise. “I’m sorry?” he said.

“Come over here. To Boston. To the hospital.”

“What?” he said.

“Today. Tomorrow?”

He stared at the phone, then replaced it to his ear. “Is this a joke?”

“Do you think I would joke about this!” she exclaimed.

“You ring me up after eleven years…”

“I know,” she said. “I know how it must seem to you.”

“It’s out of the question,” he told her. “No.”

“Listen…”

“I really am sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry Anna’s not well.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I do understand,” he replied. “But there’s nothing I can do.”

“Yes, there is!”

“No,” he said. “No.”

“Are you married?” she asked, suddenly.

“What?”

“Are you married?”

“What is that to do with anything?” he demanded.

“Your sister said you weren’t.”

“You’ve discussed me?”

“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “It would complicate things. But it wouldn’t change them.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” he said.

“If you were married,” she answered. Her words came in a rush, falling over each other. “If you had a wife…if you had children…but you would have to tell them. Nothing alters the fact…”

“You aren’t making any sense,” he said. “I don’t understand you. I’m not married. I don’t have a family.”

“Then will you come? Please!”

“Is Anna?” he asked.

“Sorry?” Grace said. “Is Anna what?”

“Is Anna married?”

“No,” she replied. “She has a partner. An art dealer called James Garrett.” He heard the coldness in her tone.

“Then it’s certainly not appropriate for me to come there,” he told her. “How would it seem to him?”

“You don’t know him,” she replied. There was a pause. “You don’t want to know him.”

He frowned hard. “I can’t see what earthly good it would be,” he said. “Anna wouldn’t want me there.”

“It’s not for Anna,” Grace said. “Not just Anna…”

The line crackled heavily.

Someone—one of the stewards, the guides for the public in Morton House—opened the dining room door. She had a chair in her hand, and the rope barrier that kept the public away from the table and the furnishings. “Oh, sorry,” she said, seeing David there. “But it’s almost eleven. I have to open this room.”

He put his hand over the receiver. “I’ll be done in just a minute.”

“David…David…!” Grace was saying.

“I’m still here,” he told her. “But I have to go. I’ve borrowed this phone. People need to come in here.” He stood up. “I’ll ring another time,” he said. “I’ll ring in a few days and see how she is. If you want me to.”

“Did you hear me?” Grace asked him, raising her voice.

“I can’t just fly over there,” he repeated. “It’s absurd. I’m sorry. I’m not going to do that.”

“Did you hear what I said?” she insisted. “Just now. Just a second ago?”

“No,” he said. “The line…”

“It’s Rachel,” Grace continued. Now there were tears. He heard her sob, and then, almost in the same breath, curse herself. “Not for Anna, not for me…”

“Rachel?” he repeated, mystified.

He watched the double doors being opened now. There was someone—visitors to the house—already there, guidebooks in hand. They peered into the room curiously. “I have to go in a moment,” he said, turning away, and cupping his hand over the receiver.

“She needs you,” Grace was saying. “I’m afraid for her. I don’t want her with him. It’ll only get worse…”

“Who?” he said. “Don’t want Rachel with who? Who is Rachel?”

Through the silence, across four thousand miles, he heard Anna’s mother begin to weep helplessly.

“Your daughter,” she told him. “Rachel is your daughter.”