The Kissing Garden Read online

  Having finished his examination, Dr Macleod, a tall, thin elderly man with a profusion of black hair which sprouted from every visible part of his body, shut up his bag and shoot his head sadly.

  ‘Stupefaction,’ he said with another sad shake of his head. ‘I can recognize the malady now the moment I walk into a room. Even in these parts, remote as they may seem, I’ve seen more cases of stupefaction in the last two years than the whole of Scotland has seen in a century.’

  ‘Stupefaction,’ Amelia repeated as she walked him downstairs. ‘I always thought the word meant astonishment. Or amazement.’

  ‘Aye, lass, it does,’ the doctor replied, allowing himself into the drawing room ahead of Amelia and heading straight for the whisky decanter. ‘But our amazement is not always to our pleasure, is it? Amazement can lead to shock and stupor, which I fear is what your husband is suffering from. He has been stupefied by his experiences.’

  ‘Obviously by that you mean the war.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Dr Macleod, having helped himself unasked to a large measure of whisky, sank into a chair by the fireplace and proceeded to fill his pipe. Amelia watched curiously, not at all taken aback by the man’s lack of manners but rather admiring his individuality. As he got his tobacco lit, she sat down opposite him to hear what else he might have to say.

  ‘We’re all of us only just beginning to count the cost, Mrs Dashwood,’ he said between puffs, spinning his exhausted match into the fireplace. ‘In our wee village alone we had a population of eighty-three, and now we are but seventy souls. Eight of those thirteen fell at Loos. Men of the Seventh Cameron Highlanders who had knocked Fritz for six in the fight for Loos but were then shot down like rabbits on the pursuit into a nearby town. Ran into a barricade of wire hidden in the long grasses. The Germans were waiting for them in the town and when the Camerons were but a couple of hundred yards away they mowed ’em down. There was nowhere to hide, no cover, no trees, nothing. Just a bare hillside. It was wholesale slaughter.’

  ‘Thirteen men. That has to be about a third of the village’s male population, I suppose.’

  ‘One third precisely, Mrs Dashwood. Thirteen boys I’d helped bring into this world who I knew like sons. One lad survived the battle and was later sent home, suffering just like your husband from stupefaction.’

  ‘Can anything be done, Dr Macleod? Or must we just hope that time will do the healing?’

  ‘I wish I knew the answer to that, so I do. They lose their senses, do you see? It’s like a form of madness.’

  ‘Madness?’ Amelia leaned forward anxiously. ‘You’re not saying, are you, that my husband is insane?’

  ‘He’s no mad in the accepted sense of the word, no. But imagine if you can what this war must have been like. And what it did to men. Your husband, I understand from Hamish Muir, served through the whole shooting match. That’s a terrible burden on a man, Mrs Dashwood, on any man. That is a terrible burden indeed.’

  Dr Macleod fell silent, so deep in thought he allowed his pipe to go out. Amelia said nothing during the long silence, because all she could do at that moment was try to imagine.

  ‘No, no,’ the doctor said, coming back to life and tapping his pocket for his box of matches. ‘No, your husband isn’t mad as a lunatic is mad, Mrs Dashwood, but he has maybe been driven to a form of insanity by his ordeal. There are all sorts of treatments the medical folk are recommending nowadays, fancy remedies which are meant to deal with this sort of condition – Faradism and the like.’

  ‘What is Faradism?’

  ‘Electric shock treatment. Although how the administration of electric shocks to a man’s brain is meant to bring him back to his senses the good Lord alone knows. I do not go along with that, do you see. Nor anything like it. Personally I simply live in hope that time, above all else, will prove to be the great healer.’

  ‘So what will happen?’ Amelia asked. ‘What should I do now? Should we return home? Is my husband well enough to travel?’

  ‘I do not think so, not at this moment. If he is as deeply shocked as I believe him to be, he must rest here in the hope that he recovers his senses. If and when he does – then you may return home with him, where no doubt you will seek advice from your own doctor.’

  ‘Is our own doctor going to say anything different from you, Dr Macleod? Or is he going to offer some fancy, fashionable advice which might prove either useless or at worst dangerous?’

  Dr Macleod looked up from relighting his pipe.

  ‘Alas – you must be the judge of that, Mrs Dashwood,’ he said. ‘All I can do is to give you my opinion.’

  ‘Which is to stay away from any so-called fashionable treatments.’

  ‘In cases such as these we should really look for the cause,’ the doctor replied. ‘And if we find it then and only then may we treat the illness.’

  After a long sleep helped by some of Dr Macleod’s powders, George awoke as if nothing at all had happened. From the time of the incident itself he had been insensible for over twenty-one hours, eighteen of which had been spent in actual slumber, so Amelia was more than a little surprised to be awoken herself by the sound of her husband calling.

  She had spent the night in George’s dressing room, allowing him to sleep undisturbed in the large four poster which should by now have been their marriage bed. Hurrying into the bedroom, she found George sitting up and wondering what he was doing there.

  ‘Tell me what you remember of yesterday, first of all,’ she said after she had sat herself down on the chair beside the bed.

  ‘Yesterday,’ George wondered, frowning hard. ‘Yesterday we fished. Eoin caught a splendid salmon. And you made him throw it back.’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Of course not. I remember everything quite vividly. Why shouldn’t I? We had beef for dinner, over which we discussed the matter of whether or not you should come out with us stalking today – and good heavens!’ He checked the time on his wristwatch. ‘If that’s really the time Eoin will be up and waiting!’

  ‘No, George.’ Amelia put her hand on his arm as he made to get out of the bed. ‘George, we went stalking yesterday. Don’t you remember?’

  George sat back in the bed, sensing the seriousness of Amelia’s tone.

  ‘What is this, Amelia? This can’t be one of your teases.’

  ‘Something happened yesterday, George. We were out stalking in the hills and you had – you sort of blacked out. There really is no other way of putting it. We had to bring you back here on the pony. Dr Macleod has been to see you – yesterday . . .’

  ‘I don’t remember a thing of this. Dr Macleod?’

  ‘One of the things he wanted to know was whether or not this sort of thing had ever happened to you before. I couldn’t really answer that.’

  ‘Hardly,’ George said quietly, lying back on his pillows to stare up at the ceiling.

  ‘Has it, George?’

  ‘Yes and no. Tell me what happened – yesterday. Don’t leave anything out.’

  Amelia told him, leaving out no essential detail. George listened, lying on his back staring above him and saying nothing, even after she had finished. Even though she spared no detail Amelia kept her account as undramatic as she could, so as to try not to alarm her husband with her own fears. After a long silence George wanted to know Dr Macleod’s opinion, so Amelia told him everything that the doctor and she had discussed. She was completely frank.

  ‘Did you suspect anything?’ George asked, turning to her with a deep frown. ‘Did you ever think there might be something wrong?’

  ‘I don’t understand the question. Wrong in what way?’

  ‘It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’ He shook his head and turned away again, this time right away so that he was looking out of the window. ‘I have to be honest with you, Amelia. And I should have told you before.’

  But he didn’t tell her now. He just fell again into silence.

  ‘Tell me what, George?’ Amelia prompted him.
‘George?’

  She heard him sigh quietly to himself before answering the question, still staring out of the window.

  ‘What happened yesterday – although it hasn’t happened since I got home, I have to say – I think what happened yesterday happened several times when I was in hospital.’

  ‘Just before you came back, you mean? But that’s perfectly understandable, surely? When someone’s badly wounded—’

  ‘I wasn’t wounded. Not in that sense. Not physically.’

  ‘They said you’d been wounded.’

  ‘Mentally. I collapsed.’

  ‘You collapsed?’

  ‘My nerves went. Had I not been an officer, and decorated, I know they would have shot me. Oh, what do they call it now? Yes, I had a breakdown.’

  Amelia thought about this before replying, having frequently heard the term ‘nervous breakdown’ being bandied about without ever understanding quite what it meant. Now it was being applied to George it seemed too terrible to contemplate.

  ‘I don’t think so, George, really I don’t. You were just tired. I mean, for heaven’s sake – you had fought right through the war. It’s a wonder you didn’t collapse earlier. I mean, you probably had become neurasthenic.’

  ‘It might have been better if I had.’

  ‘You wanted to get out of the war?’

  ‘You’d have to have been truly mad not to want to get out of the war, Amelia.’

  Realizing the effect such a remark might have on his impressionable bride George glanced at her, and seeing the look in her eyes took and held her hand in one of his.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he assured her. ‘That doesn’t mean I funked it – or wanted to run away. I simply mean that – well, that if perhaps I had been treated earlier it would never have come to this. You see, what happened was--’

  He was on the verge of telling her everything. And in truth, right up until the very last moment he had fully intended to do so. He had formed the words in his mind. Amelia sensed this, and waited patiently, when he suddenly stopped.

  * * *

  ‘You are quite certain of this?’ the Noble One asked. ‘It does not seem necessary.’

  ‘It is cruel,’ Longbeard replied. ‘I grant that fact. But sir – we must think of the future. Not ours. Not theirs. But of the future. And, more than anything, of what is believed of you.’

  The Noble One nodded once as he slowly stroked his bearded chin. ‘Propel them, therefore,’ he ordained. ‘Advance them. Bring them closer to the time when they will know joy, when they may realize their bliss. Bring them here. Let them be in this place.’

  Longbeard nodded now, selecting a different jewel from his purse, holding the crystal clear stone up to the stars and releasing it so that it flew above them to vanish into the Milky Way. ‘It shines over the place they are now,’ Longbeard assured him. ‘The next die has been cast.’

  ‘Is anything the matter, George?’ Amelia put her hand protectively over his, still not wanting to hurry him.

  He shook his head, suddenly dismal. ‘No, nothing’s the matter. It’s just that I can’t remember what it was exactly that I was about to tell you, not exactly.’

  ‘Perhaps it will come back? In a minute?’

  ‘No.’ To her horror Amelia saw her young husband’s eyes once more fill with tears. ‘No. I don’t think it will ever come back. I think I have lost my mind.’

  Seven

  The fourth night of their stay in Scotland, Dr Macleod having pronounced his patient well enough to be up and about again, George and Amelia went for a long moonlit walk round the loch. It was a cold but windless evening, with a sky which was a blanket of stars.

  ‘That’s not the North Star, is it?’ Amelia wondered as they stopped on the far shore.

  ‘If you know what it isn’t, why ask me?’ George laughed. ‘Anyway, I’m a useless astrologer.’

  ‘That’s the North Star there.’ Amelia pointed. ‘So what’s that, then? That very bright star there – the one which seems to be nearer than most.’

  ‘Probably just larger,’ George replied, putting a hand over his eyes to squint above him. ‘It isn’t any part of the bits I know. Orion, the Great Bear, et cetera.’

  ‘I agree. It’s much too close, for a start – and a lot brighter.’

  ‘Could be a shooter.’

  ‘Except it doesn’t appear to be moving.’

  ‘It’s very bright, you’re right. Twinkle, twinkle, little star.’

  ‘Not so little,’ Amelia observed. ‘It’s probably a thousand times the size of Earth.’

  ‘Or maybe a millionth the size but just very, very bright.’

  Amelia stood silently looking at the star which had so caught her eye.

  ‘Is anything the matter, Amelia?’ George wondered after a while, taking her hand. ‘You’ve gone really awfully quiet for you.’

  ‘I’m fine, George. But – but I think that we ought to go home now.’

  ‘Back to the lodge?’

  ‘No. Back home. In fact I think we should go tomorrow, and at once.’

  Hundreds of miles away in Somerset two shadows moved among the ancient yews of an old priory and a sigh was heard above the sound of an owl’s hunting cry.

  ‘Time to go to work,’ the Noble One urged Longbeard, but he only shook his head at his master’s impatience.

  Eight

  On the train journey south, George and Amelia agreed not to say a word of what had happened to George to either set of parents. Amelia was only too happy not to do so, not only because the thought of their parents all discussing their personal problems was too much to contemplate but also because Amelia hoped that whatever difficulties George might be experiencing at the moment – difficulties which were obviously affecting their marriage – could perhaps be solved more easily with devotion and love than by any of the new-fangled medical remedies so feared by the redoubtable Dr Macleod.

  Once home, however, their good intentions were more difficult to put into practice than they had imagined. Having as yet no place of their own, they were living, as they had known they might have to live, in a wing of the Dashwood family house. Although it was almost entirely self-contained, comprising as it did a living room, a sitting room and two bedrooms, because the newlyweds were living en famille they were forced, out of duty, to take all their meals with General and Lady Dashwood.

  Amelia had been utterly against such proximity, and so too, in fairness to George, had he, suggesting from the outset that it might be more salutary to rent somewhere entirely independent of his parents while they decided where they were finally going to live, and even more importantly what exactly George was going to do. But Lady Dashwood would not hear of it.

  ‘Whatever is the point, George? Whatever is the point of finding somewhere else to live which will not possibly be as comfortable as this? After all, this is your home. And until you find a home of your own, one expects you to continue to live here. Besides, you will soon be returning to your regiment, and then to whom will Amelia turn for company, pray?’

  ‘But you said you were no longer thinking of returning to your regiment, didn’t you?’ Amelia asked George when they were discussing the matter privately in their wing after their return from honeymoon. ‘When you were unwell in Scotland, you said—’

  ‘I know what I said,’ George interrupted. ‘I was fully compos mentis at the time. But it’s all a bit different now I’m back home.’

  ‘But you’re not at home, George. Not any more. We’re staying with your parents, but we’re not at home.’

  ‘You’re quite right. I apologize. But even so, as far as rejoining my regiment goes, I want a little time to think.’

  ‘When you do, George, think about your health more than anything. Your health and your happiness, because that’s just as important a part of your health as anything else. You can hardly go back into the army if you’re – if you’re still suffering blackouts.’

  ‘It wasn’t a blackout. Not like that.’


  ‘According to Dr Macleod it was.’

  ‘All right, just give it time, that is all I need – time.’

  But as the months passed it seemed the more George considered his present position and the more the two of them discussed it the more it became apparent that George’s basic attitude to the army had altered radically. Even his commitment to his regiment was no longer as before. It came as yet another shock to Amelia to realize the total and profound change that had come about in the man she loved. As always when shaken to the core, she sought out her father for advice, without of course revealing the true nature of her worry. She knew that he too had been brooding deeply on the war and its aftermath, judging from the amount of anti-war poetry he had been producing.

  ‘But surely it can’t all have been in vain?’ she asked him one afternoon when George was out playing golf with his father and she had called on her parents to have lunch. ‘I keep getting the impression from your latest poems that you think it’s all been the most terrible waste.’

  ‘Why mankind has never been able to resolve his problems without a call to arms I cannot imagine. Perhaps it’s because we men actually enjoy killing each other.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘I tried to enlist.’

  ‘But in retrospect—’

  ‘Would I have done so? Probably not, knowing what I do now. In fact most certainly not.’

  ‘Why? Because it hasn’t made any difference?’

  ‘Because it’s made the greatest difference, more than any of us can ever imagine. We have killed most of our youth. The flower of it, certainly. If only we had thought a little more in advance.’

  Slowly Amelia was beginning to put together some sort of theory as to what precisely might be troubling her husband the most, and after this particular conversation with her father she thought one of the most salient facts was that so many of George’s contemporaries had been killed: friends from school, from the local village, or men he had befriended in his regiment.

  ‘I think that’s a major part of it,’ he agreed, some few days later as he and Amelia walked the Downs, while holding back what he well knew was the major contributing issue. He stopped and pointed to a rolling field before them. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Let’s say that in the middle of that pasture, we planted a copse of say one thousand trees, young oaks, England’s national tree. Say we planted them in 1895, so that by 1914 they were just maturing. In fact let’s say we planted six such copses along the hillside there, each of one thousand young oaks, trees which when they matured would make this landscape one of the finest plantations in the land. We go away then, to return six years later to see how our young trees are doing, only to be appalled. One in every six trees is dead. Instead of the great woodland we hoped to see, there are these decimated copses, four trees here then a gap of two or three, a single oak surrounded by more gaps, half a dozen trees still growing but next to them another four spaces. And so on and so forth. Even the trees which are left are suffering because they are trying to grow alone, without the protection and benefit of their dead friends – and why did they die? They died for a few yards of land. Someone uprooted them and moved them a hundred yards this way, or a hundred yards that way, then they moved them again another fifty yards, then another two hundred back again, another hundred and fifty forward again – and every time they were moved one in every six or seven trees died, so that finally when the powers that be ordained they had moved them far enough, they called an end to it. Only by then a sixth of the forest was dead.’