The telephone call was brief, brittle and bright. Mr Dryne was free on Wednesday and would like to arrive at one p.m. Rachel thought of the French term: arrive—the sexual connotation. But she said, quietly, “Yes, I see.”
“Please don’t trouble about lunch. Mr Dryne will bring something.”
“Yes. How nice.”
The assistant thanked her and rang off. Her fate was now sealed. She would have to let Julian Dryne and all his works into her flat, complete with the lunch he had promised her, when she said she preferred not to visit the local bistros at lunchtime.
Rachel sighed, and looked about her. The shabby, comfortable flat, with its old garden, that was in summer almost tropical in abundance, crimson roses in the trees, plumes of fern, waterfalls of laburnum, everything kept just at bay from the house by the short terrace. But which in winter, as today, and as it would be on Wednesday, was sere and spare, the bare branches revealing the ugly block of flats, a puddle caught for ever in the cracked terrace flags.
Julian Dryne was impossible to resist. He had written her seven letters, finally somehow found her ex-directory number, had his assistant call her, called her himself nine, ten, eleven times.
Jokingly he had said to her, “I’m never going to give up, you know. This means a lot to me. Please don’t think of it as an intrusion. I’m such a wild fan of hers. I’m sure you can understand. You met her. Can you guess what that does to me?”
“Haven’t you discovered anyone else who met her?” Rachel had asked, irritated, as if by a series of stabs from a pin, into talking.
“Well, yes. But she became such a recluse. You, your family, were almost the last people. And he’s dead, of course.”
Rachel thought, and if he wasn’t, he would never let you near him. That house in the suburbs of Cairo, with its mastiffs, and armed Scandinavian guards in dull black suits.
But Rachel had no protection except her anonymity, which Julian Dryne had pierced and did not now believe in.
She had given in, to have it end. As one said to the school bully, do it then, punch me and make me bleed. Then it will be over.
He arrived, of course, twenty-five minutes late. When she had opened the street door for him, she heard him come into the hall with a male assistant. Then he sent the assistant away and rang her bell.
She opened the door to her flat, and looked up and up at him. He was about six foot three, and thin, and leatherily tanned. Maybe forty-nine, fifty-one, about seven years her junior. But with that not-always male thing of vigorously imposed youthful fitness, so harsh, as if to be a Lesson to Us All. She was almost relieved to see his teeth had a faint tin burnish from smoking.
“Julian,” he said, holding out his thin brown hand with its expensive nails and gold signet. “And may I call you Rachel?”
“Why not?” said Rachel.
He had brought a lunch hamper from Fortnums, divine absurd things that should be for young lovers, who had no time to cook, between explosions of lust—truffles, salmon, clotted cream, walnuts—and two bottles of Dom Perignon, in two coolers.
“I hope you like it?”
“Oh, I like champagne.”
She had set the table, and now he opened the wine expertly—one prayed he would make a hash of it, but obviously not—and filled the two glasses.
“Let’s drink to her, shall we? To Avrilenne?”
“Yes,” said Rachel.
He said the champagne wasn’t cold enough. You couldn’t beat old-fashioned ice, could you. Trying to make her a co-conspirator?—in their young day—trying to get her to do something hospitable.
She filled a large saucepan with ice and cold water, and let him stand both bottles in it.
The bare garden was outside this room. It stood at her back as she faced him along the ancient table, polished, and scattered with what looked like bullet-holes.
He said, almost at once, “That explains all those singing birds, the scent—roses? How do you start them so early?”
“I don’t,” she said. Then, “It must be air freshener.”
“How disappointing. It smells wonderful.”
He began to tell her about the books he had written, and about the book he wanted to write on Avrilenne Kissei. “She’s so much more fascinating than the other women who worked with gardens. I mean, the European and Eastern elements she combined in her designs. She lived in Cairo. I think she did? Is that right?”
“For some years, with her husband.”
“But you didn’t meet her there.”
Rachel took a breath. Although they were still eating, or he was still eating, she took out her cigarettes. She did not care if he minded. In fact he did not. He came at once to light her up with a platinum lozenge, then went back to his place and drew a long, grey cigarette for himself from a case. He did not ask for an ashtray, used the plate. She suspected him of threatening her with this, an intentional boorishness. But again, she did not care.
“I met her once there, when I was a child. I’m afraid I don’t remember anything about it. I was told I had, that’s all. The meeting I recall was when I was about twenty.”
“In the fifties,” he said, “fifty-seven, fifty-eight—”
“Yes.”
“That was at your father’s house in Suffolk.”
“One of the houses. It must have been Suffolk, I suppose.”
“Was that when—” he hesitated. She knew what he had been about to say, but did not respond. He said, “But I want you to tell me.”
“There isn’t much to tell. My father decided to meet Kissei on business. He came to the house with his wife.”
“Did you know she was so important?”
“I knew about her. But she wasn’t, you see, so famous or important then. Professional women were still dismissed. It was a pretty hobby for her, designing gardens.”
“No one realized she was a genius,” he said. “That’s so typical. Only after her death—how old were you when she died?”
“I was in my thirties. I’m afraid I didn’t know. I’m still not sure of the date.”
“1969.” Julian Dryne crushed out his cigarette, and lit another. “Please do drink your champagne, Rachel.”
He sounded like a strict nanny from her childhood. She laughed. He said defensively, misunderstanding, “I’m afraid I’m a hundred-a-day man, left to myself.”
Rachel made no comment. She smoked four or five cigarettes a day. She drank her champagne, and let him refill the glass. It was a fine old glass, embroidered by design, but with a little chip out of it. He knew she had no money. The fortune, if there had ever really been one, had vanished with her father. Dryne had gauged the flat, of course, damp patches, dark areas. A sitting room with a dining table, a bedroom, a small study, a bathroom and a kitchenette. But then he meant to offer her a large sum. It must be reassuring to him, all this.
“Well, Rachel. Tell me something about Avrilenne Kissei. What did you think of her?”
“I thought she was unusual.”
“Yes, yes. That’s right. What a perfect description. She looks beautiful in some of her photographs. Plain, almost dumpy, in others.”
He waited, his eyes stretched wide, mouth devouring another cigarette, a biscuit with Stilton lying untouched, because he needed the drug so much more than the food.
“She was beautiful,” said Rachel. “She had beautiful eyes. Dark green, with a slight cast in the right one. She wore glasses for drawing.” As she had known, she did not want to speak to him about Avrilenne. But the bully had forced her to the bushes. The beating must begin and go on.
“Did you talk a lot, she and you, Rachel?”
“No. Not really. She spent most of her time in her room. She’d had a horrible journey, and then ’flu. Kissei was always running away from things that had gone wrong for him. He sorted out some deal with my father. She came downstairs for the last three days. She sat with the other women. She didn’t say much.”
“But you must have spent some time alone with her.”
Rachel looked at him. “Are you asking if she was my lover?”
Julian Dryne smiled, magnanimous, oily, “You must tell me that, Rachel.”
“Must I? Then no.”
“She was in her forties and you were only twenty.”
“That wasn’t the reason.”
“But I’ve seen your own photo, Rachel. You were a lovely young woman. And Avrilenne—liked women.”
“The only time we spent alone was one afternoon after lunch. We walked in the garden. It was a very big garden. It had the usual things, topiary, a little maze, a rose arbour, sunken garden, pool, water-steps.” He was reacting like some awful sort of word-eating plant, expanding greedily to every phrase. Rachel said, “We just talked about the garden. There were things she said she would have liked to suggest.”
“Was that when she—” he could hardly contain himself now, “when she told you about the château at Narbelle?”
“No, she never told me about the château.”
“But the drawing—” he cried. It was out.
Rachel lowered her eyes. “What drawing, Mr Dryne?”
Her clothes smelled of Egypt, that was what Rachel had thought, a yellow—sandy—pink—ochre smell of dust and the river and the invoked spices of mummy. There had been a yearning to question her about the city. And then an aversion. Avrilenne was plump, her skin carefully preserved, her sable hair perhaps artificially free of any grey. She wore no make-up except for the red lipstick and eyebrow pencil that women affected then. Her eyes were sleepy, droopy, the colour of the Nile in stories and not in fact.
That afternoon Rachel had met her on the terrace, the long, wide, white terrace with a statue of Apollo, turning his harp towards the descending Steppes of the vast garden.
“Will you walk with me, Rachel?” asked Avrilenne Kissei in her weary husky voice, that had lost all accent of anywhere and sounded only utterly foreign, presumably to every race. It was by the lily pond that Avrilenne stopped. She said abruptly, “Do you ever think about death?”
Rachel said, truthfully, “Yes.”
“Does it frighten you?”
“Yes.”
“But isn’t life more terrifying?”
Between the flat sallow lilies, their reflections gradually appeared, some vagary of the hot still afternoon sky. They had a look of each other, and gazing down, Avrilenne had laughed.
“There we are. But in a moment, gone.”
Rachel had not minded this strange conversation. The people in her father’s house spoke of Cricket and cars, social functions, taxes, investments, politics (the Suez crisis in honour of Kissei), clothes and food.
Avrilenne and Rachel sat in the rose arbour. “I would pull this dreadful garden apart,” Avrilenne said. “It is all things. I would make it whole. Like an operation. Everything would be healed, and better afterwards.”
Then she had gone to sleep, snoring a little, very softly, as if she were unable to rest when alone or with her husband. Rachel sat by her side, smelling her Egyptian smell and some tindery French perfume that she wore, and half closing her eyes, watched the dragonflies dance on the water of the pond.
Avrilenne woke about four, in time for the ritual English tea no one, save the most voracious, ever wanted.
She made no apology, seemed unruffled by her lapse. She put out her fine, veined hand, and stroked Rachel’s cheek. It was not a lover’s caress, only very proper, the touch of a familiar aunt.
“I was once your age, Rachel. One day you will be mine. The horrible wars are all over. I shall send you something, one day. A drawing. May I do that?”
Rachel had, at that time, never seen the drawings of Avrilenne Kissei. Did not think they would matter much, that is, not in pecuniary terms, or in the way of fame, but simply in the scheme of life. But the drowsy eyes of the fictional Nile made her say, “I’d like that. Thank you. But you won’t remember.”
“Yes. I should have liked to know you better. If you’d been older. Somewhere else.”
“I might go back to Egypt,” Rachel had said, boldly.
“Don’t. Your heart will be broken.”
“I might break it anyway,” said Rachel. “I sometimes drop things.”
Avrilenne laughed loudly now, her green eyes turned up to the Sun, flashing gold.
Then some servant came, and called them in like naughty children to tea.
The next day Kissei and his wife left for London.
“Those birds,” said Julian Dryne, “they sing so loudly. I didn’t think that happened at this time of the year.”
“A few fine days deceive them,” Rachel said. “The weather’s odd now, isn’t it.”
“That’s true. My God. I’ve fallen into that thing where childhood summers are always hot. Does that happen to you?”
“They were,” she said.
“But they can’t have been.”
Rachel smiled. “I was in Egypt, remember. And then in France.”
“Of course. France—I’m almost hearing cicadas now…”
“The central heating does that.”
“Yes… But you say she never spoke to you about the château and the garden she planned there.”
“She didn’t, no.”
“I’ll swear that’s a nightingale,” he said suddenly, craning from his chair, scanning Rachel’s garden. “But not here, not in England. Not on a winter’s day.”
Rachel said, calmly, because she could hear the nightingale too, “one of my neighbours thinks he hears it. It’s strange. Perhaps it’s escaped from somewhere.”
“You do hear them in France, of course,” he said, “in summer. All day long. And they mimic the other birds. There—is that a lark—my God, what a chorus—and now it’s stopped.”
Rachel said, “My neighbour suspects someone has a CD of birdsong, and is playing it, with the window ajar.” This was true. The neighbour suspected Rachel of the crime.
“Well, the rain’s stopped them. Or stopped the CD.”
“Yes, it has.”
How effective were his matt little eyes? Could he see, although it was just audible, there was no rain falling on her garden of bare branches, no rain needling at the stagnant puddle on the terrace?
He was refilling their glasses from the second bottle.
“Tell me about the drawing,” he said, throwing caution to the winds. “Please.”
“I asked you before, which drawing?”
“The drawing for the garden at the château of Narbelle. Which was never finished—neither drawing nor garden. And of course, we know what the Germans did to the garden when they occupied the château.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“The drawing Avrilenne gave you, Rachel.”
Rachel looked up. She met his eyes. “I think you’ve been misled, Mr Dryne.”
“Sorry, Rachel, no. I have an impeccable—let me say, source. And my source assures me that some time before her death, Avrilenne Kissei sent you the signed but unfinished drawing which she made for the garden at Narbelle in 1936.”
Rachel found it simple now to look right through him. She said steadily, “This is really why you wanted to see me, isn’t it, Mr Dryne. Because you think I have a priceless signed work by an architectural floral artist who’s come into sudden fashion.”
“I’m—interested, yes, Rachel. Of course I am.”
“You’d like to buy it from me.”
“That’s blunt. Yes. I would like to.”
“You brought your chequebook. Do you have that much in your account?”
Julian Dryne blinked, then grinned his fouled teeth at her. “You’re a deceiver, Rachel. I have certain documents that will show you I can pay you very handsomely. Will that do?”
“Don’t you want to see the drawing?”
“Oh Rachel, I’m faint with wanting to see the drawing.”
“Pen and ink, with colour wash, actually,” she said. “Quite small. Twenty inches by sixteen, without frame.”
“Oh God, Rachel—” He was like a man longing to fuck her, desperate, pleading, grinning, almost dribbling, and on her white plate the cigarette smearing to its black death in a pond of weeping Stilton.
“This is very embarrassing,” said Rachel. “Worse for me, in fact. I could have done with the money.”
“What—” His face, acid pallor, dim teeth and eyes. “What do you mean?”
“You see, Mr Dryne, had I appreciated what you wanted, I could have told you before. Yes, I did have the drawing, of the garden—Narbelle, you say?—but I’ve been short of cash for years. I’m afraid I sold it long ago.”
“When—oh when—where—Rachel, where?”
“Fifteen years ago. I took it to a flea-market near Highgate. He gave me—you’ll curse me, Mr Dryne—fifty pounds.”
“Fifty—fifty—Rachel, it’s worth thousands—it’s priceless, Rachel.”
“Oh dear. If only I’d waited. I didn’t know—”
“Tell me the place, Rachel.”
A Filofax, a pen, things pushed aside, the lighter toppling in the Stilton.
“They closed, Mr Dryne. I know because I went back with an old chair I wanted to sell. I can give you the address, but it’s a Chinese restaurant now.”
“Give it me anyway, Rachel.”
She gave him the address of the restaurant that had taken over the flea market where once she had sold a few items. The drawing not being one of them.
She had been told, by her own “source,” that even if he ceased later to believe her, he would not send men to break into the flat, to search. He had his ethics, apparently, and she had clearly seen his eyes go round and round the walls of this room. He had made the guest’s excuse to visit the bathroom. She had sensed he had, during this excursion, looked into the bedroom, into her study, the doors of both of which she had left wide. Even the kitchenette had been over-run by Julian Dryne, helping her with the ice-bucket saucepan.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Its a catastrophe for both of us.”
“Yes,” he said. “Can I make a phone call?”
She told him he could. He went out into the hall, and she heard him telling another assistant to go straight to the restaurant.
The scent of roses, tamarind, orange trees, flooded the room in a deluge, and when he came in again, he reeled at it—“That scent…”
“Yes… I think the Stay Fresh is leaking in the kitchen. Of course, those smells aren’t real, are they, all chemicals.”
His eyes bulged. Like a small boy cheated of Christmas, he said, “Isn’t there anything…?”
“I didn’t know her well. I don’t know why she sent me the drawing. I never appreciated her fame, or the fame she’d come to have. I feel as if I dreamed the lottery numbers and didn’t buy a ticket.”
“Yes, yes.” He brushed her grief aside. He drank the last of the champagne. He looked so ill she suspected she had hastened his death.
Inside twenty minutes more he left her, and when she saw him to the door, the young blond assistant heaving out the hamper, which she had not earned the right to keep, she said to them, “I regret you had a wasted journey.”
The drawing of the garden at the château Narbelle had come through the post one morning when Rachel was in her thirties, just before, it now seems to her, Avrilenne Kissei had died, there in the enormous stuccoed house at Cairo, under the shadow of the spider-like fans, the red carpets bleeding on the walls, the mastiffs baying in the courtyard, Kissei pacing below, unable to go up to her, unable to touch her or hold her hand.
There was a note. It said only,
For you, Rachel. You said I would forget, but I have not. This, perhaps my very best, even though unfinished. And the garden itself now rubble. The German soldiers raped women there, and tortured men. Later the Resistance burned it all. The wisest thing. So, only here, Le jardin. And now I too am stuck in the ground. But you go free.
Allez, ma Chère.
Avrilenne
Rachel took down the picture she had hung that morning where normally Le Jardin de la Narbelle depended on her study wall, a picture of the same size, to hide the mark and give it cause, if checked.
She now leaned this picture on the desk, and held Avrilenne’s Garden in her hands.
The inks, the colours, were just a little damp, after the shower. A mistiness hung over the architectural paths, the grey slenderness of a statue. On the roses, the hints of droplets, drying. The tamarind opened like a fan.
The glorious odour of flowers was faint at last, its wave dying back, and the birds were only the faintest twittering, mingled in the violin-scraping of the cicadas.
The garden had grown, since she had first received it. Initially, Rachel thought she imagined each new bloom, the statue of Pan that appeared beside the wall, the greener leaves on the wall the creepers climbed, and where the jacaranda spread its spicery. But she was not much given to doubt. Rachel lived always in the moment, glancing ahead, behind, aside. She watched as the garden expanded, filling up the paper to its edges. It exuded sounds, warmth, scents, and times of day, and in its dusk, sometimes she had vaguely glimpsed, behind the glorious wreaths of the trees, a passing, girl-shining Moon.
Avrilenne had been afraid of death, and gone to death, as most things fear and must go. But this she left.
Such a thing was not for a Julian Dryne, nor for anyone. Rachel did not consider it hers. One day it would be done, and no new rose would open, no more rain would fall, the cicadas would crumble to silence and the nightingale be dumb. There was no rational reason for its being, there would be no definite reason for its ending. As with all love, as with all life.
She hung the picture, shut the study door. In the sitting-room she cleared the plates and glasses, threw the monstrous, over-assertive bottles in the bin. Then, standing at her long window, looked into her stripped city garden, over the bare branches, to the block of flats, and the winter, and the world.