Sixteen

EVERYTHING WAS STILL.

The noise of the torrent had gone. The water flowed noiselessly now, soft as a breath in the darkness. Anna was standing on the bank, her naked feet on the grass. Something like snow was falling. The ground was covered with the grainlike seeds of the poplar. The names of the Salicaceae were like incantations: balm of Gilead, lasiocarpa, szechuanica, babylonica, pekinensis, thibetica. Alba and aurora. Aspen, the whispering tree, the messenger of the gods, the crucifixion tree that trembled at its memories; the white poplar, sacred to Persephone; and the black poplar, perpetually weeping on the banks of the Eridanus, mourning the death of Phaëthon.

Under the black Lombardy poplar that she could see close to the gate, the glasshouses rose like ghosts in the night, barely containing the giants that pressed against the roof, the palm fronds spread like hands. Here by the entrance crowded the magnolia, all ashy pink opalescence, a crowd of luxurious heads, like flushed faces gathered together, pressing forward; white faces and pink throats, and the delavayi behind them, with glossier and darker leaves, and their six yellow petals that opened only at night, and faded the next day.

It was so long since she had been here. She looked around herself for something to catch hold of, to remember. She walked toward the magnolia, but her feet passed through the snow-wash of seeds on the midnight grass without leaving any kind of trace.

He had been going to take her from here—from the little Cherwell dividing into two as it raced toward Christ Church Meadow—to other gardens, eight thousand feet high, unseen and unpictured and unpainted before. Wild gardens dominated by the lily, and by the rose and musk rose; wind-torn valleys in the mountains where, on the gravel shores below, were the tamarisk and meadow rue, and barberries with masses of red fruit, and mile upon mile of the silver-gray artemisia.

She had refused him, and now she would never find the way alone.

She wanted to give him all the paintings she had made in her mind. And now, time was short. She had to seek him out, and give him the thoughts that tied them together. She had sketched them over and over again, on margins of other paintings, in the flyleaves of books. All the lily family, spread over her paper, trailing down through his text: the lily of the valley, the snowdrop, the meadow saffron. The May lily, with its heart-shaped face; and the summer snowflake, exquisite, delicate, with the flower almost impossibly suspended on a green stem as thin as a strand of cotton. The fritillaries, the Oriental lantern-flowers that grew in the Magdalen Meadow in the spring, the only place in England where they grew so freely…

All the honeysuckles: the elder, the dog tree, the borewood, whose heartwood and roots were as hard as ebony, whose flowers tasted of muscat; the guelder rose, twelve feet tall, scarlet-leaved in the autumn, with rings of china white blooms.

The Meconopsis, the yellow poppy, so very beautiful, with its six-inch petals, spreading in the wild all the way from Tibet to Burma; the plant that died when it gave up its flower. An ancient, ancient species, the poppy family Papaveraceae, whose seeds were found mixed with grains of barley in twelfth-dynasty tombs; named daughters of the field by the Assyrians, and a sacred plant of the goddess Ceres to the Romans. Gardens of sleep to those who cultivated the opium. Gardens of death on Flanders Field.

And she would draw him all the roses that Wilson had brought home. Eighteen of them, and among them Rosa helenae, named for his wife; Rosa murieliae, named for his daughter; and Rosa sinowilsonii for himself.

Rosa moyesii was her own favorite. Wilson had found it in Tatsienlu, and called it one of the most beautiful of roses, and she had found it once, growing in Boston in a public garden, and she had stopped, her hand to her throat, looking at the open, five-petaled flowers with their immense yellow centers, struck by the colors that ranged from darkest red to a delicate and soft cerise, and she had thought then of David, and wanted him. Wanted him, suddenly and passionately, just because she had seen a flower; a Tatsienlu rose in an American street.

Everywhere she went, he touched her. She couldn’t look into a room with flowers in a vase, or see the lilies that James habitually put in the gallery, or pass a flower shop, without David’s hand restraining her and turning her to look back at him. The rose family, of course, spread far and wide: in meadowsweet, whose frothy white flowers, on roadsides and in fields, smelled of musk and honey, and whose leaves smelled sharper, almost of vinegar. In the cloudberry, and raspberry and blackberry, all the rose’s cousins; in wild strawberries, and agrimony, and in all the wild roses, and wild cherries and wild plums. In rowan and hawthorn, in medlar, and Juneberry, and whitebeam. He was everywhere, everywhere; wherever she turned.

She held out her hands.

The poplar still rained its soft, cotton-wrapped seeds on her. She let herself go, dropping down through time, her fingers fleetingly touching echoes of colors and shapes, faint traces of her own compositions; passing the river, and the trees, and sinking further down still, into the water of the greater river that came now to engulf her.

And, as she fell, she looked down to see that her still-open palms were full of the moyesii rose: blood red, and growing rapidly darker.