The Kissing Garden Read online

  ‘No, that isn’t so. That simply isn’t right.’

  ‘It is, and you know it.’ Ralph insisted, his eyes locked on hers. ‘He’s becoming one of those crypto-Fascists sitting round the table.’

  ‘Not George. He couldn’t be.’

  ‘You saw for yourself, Amelia! You heard! You heard what that lot believe! They want to cosy up to Mr Hitler!’

  And Amelia knew that it was true. George had left her. George had been leaving her for weeks, maybe months. George had left her and become another person. He had become one of the people he had once so despised.

  ‘Dearest darling beautiful Mrs Rafferty. Let me make love to you?’

  She let him kiss her because she did not know what else to do, but they heard the car just in time. So that by the time the headlights were on them they were either side of the road, walking on but now innocently turning and putting hands up to shield their eyes against the glare of the fast oncoming beams.

  The car pulled to a sharp halt just past them and George leaned out of the driver’s seat.

  ‘Get in. Not that either of you deserve it.’

  Conversation in the rag-topped Bentley was difficult at the best of times but tonight at the speed George drove it was utterly impossible. Amelia sat up front with her husband, burying herself in her coat and keeping as low as she could to keep warm, while Ralph sat in the back with his long legs stretched out sideways across the seat.

  Once home, George parked the car and went straight inside the house, and, to judge from the lights which went on above Amelia and Ralph, straight to bed. Ralph looked at Amelia as she let herself into the house but neither said a word, Ralph planting one kiss on the end of one of his fingers to signal his feelings before disappearing across the lawns to the guest cottage.

  ‘George?’ Amelia called as she closed the bedroom door behind her. ‘George – what was all that about, please?’

  George appeared at the bathroom door in just his trousers, with a white towel draped around his neck.

  ‘I think it’s me who should be asking you that, Amelia – and your lipstick’s smudged.’

  ‘I must have done that in the car,’ Amelia said, hurriedly removing what was left of her make-up. ‘I was so cold I had my coat collar up round my face.’

  George merely looked at her before disappearing back into the bathroom.

  ‘George,’ Amelia called after him, going to the open door. ‘George – what is going on? Please tell me?’

  He looked at her via the mirror above him and she saw his eyes were full of sadness and regret, yet still he made no reply, carrying on cleaning his teeth before dousing his face with cold water and drying off on the thick white towel.

  ‘George,’ Amelia insisted as he walked past her back into the bedroom. ‘George – something is going on and I really want to know what it is.’

  ‘I’d quite like to know what’s going on as well,’ George replied, sitting on the bed and undoing his shoes. ‘Between you and Ralph.’

  ‘Why should something be going on between me and Ralph?’ Amelia protested, a little too much to judge from the shake of George’s head. ‘George – there is nothing going on between me and Ralph!’

  ‘You left with him after dinner, Amelia. How do you think that looked?’

  ‘I don’t actually care how it looked, George! What I didn’t care for was how you sounded! That’s why I left! Anyway – why should you worry about how things appear? You were the one who was perfectly ready to take a stand against not only your background but the whole establishment, remember? You’re in bed with extremists, George, you’re in bed with the people who don’t want freedom of speech, who believe that might is right, that power is everything – you’re in bed with people who like to burn books, George! Even yours!’

  George stopped unlacing his shoes and sat there, staring at the ground as if at a total loss for words. After a moment he looked up at his wife. ‘You don’t understand, Amelia. I’m sorry, but you don’t.’

  ‘Then help me, George,’ she pleaded, coming to sit down beside him on the bed. ‘Help me to understand. That’s all I want. To understand what is happening to us.’

  She could see that George wanted to tell her, and yet he finally just took her hand and shook his head sadly.

  ‘I can’t explain. I’m sorry, Amelia, but I can’t explain.’

  ‘If you can’t tell me, then how can I trust you?’ She stood up and walked away from him. ‘I never thought it was possible to love somebody as much as I loved you.’

  ‘Loved,’ George said quietly, watching her slender silhouette outlined against the curtains and the light from the windows. ‘What do you mean – loved?’

  ‘You’re not that man any more, George. Whatever you were like when you came back from war – that wouldn’t matter now. Not in light of what’s happening in Europe. The old George – the George I loved – he’d have buckled on his sword belt and put on his armour and gone after the Fascists instead of allying himself to those toads we dined with this evening.’

  She moved closer to the window, overcome with the nightmare of it all.

  After a few seconds George joined her at the window, and they both stood looking out, but whereas normally he would put his arm round her, or their arms would touch, quite naturally, now they just stood side by side. And Amelia, with a sinking heart, realized that for the first time in truth she might be looking to a future without George.

  While outside they watched from the yew tree, high in its branches, the Noble One standing with his hand rested against the trunk of the huge tree, and Longbeard seated on a branch and slowly swinging his legs to and fro. ‘This must be painful, sir,’ Longbeard sighed, winding the end of his whiskers round a fìnger. ‘Knowing what is to come.’

  ‘Be careful, wizard, lest I put my foot in your back. . .’

  ‘. . . and I float into the night. Like the dust, we immortals have become. But where is he, sir? Where is he?’

  ‘There, you old goat,’ the Noble One said, pointing a finger which became a light, showing the tall figure seated on the little cottage roof. ‘There, here – and everywhere!’ The ray of light from the Noble One’s finger traced lines in the darkness as the figure they were watching moved from place to place, filling the deepening night with his silent laughter.

  ‘What is it?’ Amelia asked him, screwing up her courage and taking his hand suddenly. ‘What’s come between us?’ As he said nothing she persisted. ‘I’m asking you. I have a right to know. There’s something wrong and I want to know what that is.’

  ‘Everything’s wrong,’ George said quietly. ‘Everything’s going wrong.’ ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, George – and you’re frightening me. Are you afraid of another war like the last one, is that it? Is that why you’ve joined the appeasers? Because you’re afraid of losing Peter? Because of the dream I had – because of that – that vision? If it is, George – if that’s the reason for all this – then I can understand. Is that what it is? Is that what all this is about?’

  To her dismay Amelia saw George close his eyes.

  ‘I came to the conclusion long ago that in a world like this if one has a son, one risks losing that son. That is just the way it is.’

  ‘In that case,’ Amelia heard herself saying calmly, ‘it must be that woman who has seduced you into thinking as she does. Deanna Astley. It is all her fault.’

  ‘You’re being ridiculous, Amelia, and you know it.’

  ‘I am not being ridiculous, George!’

  ‘And will you keep your voice down!’

  ‘George – you are seen everywhere with her! The gossip columns have been full of it for weeks! Months! Everywhere she goes, you’re there! There or thereabouts! Whenever you’re in London you see her. And you have the nerve to say I’m being ridiculous!’

  ‘Because you are.’

  ‘Fine,’ Amelia said, dropping her voice and looking at him steadily. ‘In that case – convince me.’


  ‘I thought we’d never have the need to explain things to each other.’

  ‘Me too, George. But it seems times have changed.’

  George sighed deeply. ‘All I can say is that I have no choice.’

  ‘Now it’s you who’s being ridiculous, George. We all of us have a choice in what we do!’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant.’

  ‘Then say what you do mean! For God’s sake!’

  ‘I mean that for some reason I have no choice in this matter. And because I have no choice, I can’t tell you. I can’t explain.’

  ‘Now you’re talking in riddles.’

  Amelia turned on her heel and walked away from the window, going to the bed and pulling her nightdress out from under her pillows.

  ‘I’m going to sleep in the spare room.’

  ‘Amelia,’ George pleaded, getting between her and the door. ‘Amelia, please. . .’

  ‘George, I cannot go on like this!’ Amelia insisted. ‘I can’t go on living with a man who won’t tell me what’s going on because he says he can’t, then asks me to understand. And to trust him. A man who’s changed beyond all recognition.’

  ‘I haven’t, Amelia. You don’t understand.’

  ‘Stop saying that!’ Amelia glared at him and saw the genuine surprise and hurt in his eyes as he looked back. ‘I don’t know what I mean exactly – but for God’s sake stop telling me that I don’t understand. I want to understand. It’s you that’s stopping me.’

  ‘I will prove to you what I mean.’

  ‘When? When you grow bored of Deanna Astley?’

  ‘There is nothing going on between me and Deanna Astley.’

  ‘So for one last time what the hell is going on.’

  For one moment George hesitated.

  ‘He is about to tell her, sir,’ Longbeard groaned.

  ‘And let him!’ the Noble One replied, descending swiftly through the branches until he stood on the ground. ‘Let him speak! Let him tell her! If he does not – then she is lost to him!’

  ‘Sir,’ Longbeard protested as the two men stood on the dark lawns below the window in the house. ‘Sir, we cannot weaken now or this jewel set in a silver sea will be drowned, this sceptred isle lost.’

  The Noble One sighed, for he could feel the sadness in their souls. Yet he knew his sorcerer was right. He could not repair a harm done fourteen hundred years before. So he took himself away to a part of the gardens where flowers of late autumn still flourished, there to hide his face among the blooms while the tears he wept washed all the colour from them.

  ‘You were going to tell me something, George.’

  ‘I was?’ George stood back from her, frowning deeply. ‘Are you sure? Well, whatever it was has quite gone now, I’m afraid.’

  ‘There was something.’

  ‘No, nothing,’ George replied, with a vague, tired smile. ‘It’s very late now, Amelia, and I really must get to bed. I have a million and one things to do in the morning and have to get up at the crack of dawn, so I’ll sleep in my dressing room.’

  George left her still wearing that same vague smile. As to Amelia, she went to bed and dreamed of how she had once felt, when she was loved.

  Twenty-Three

  ‘He must have left first thing,’ Amelia told Ralph over breakfast. ‘It was hardly dawn when I woke, but he’d already packed his things and gone. All he said was that he was getting up early. He said nothing about leaving.’

  ‘He’d only just come home,’ Ralph remarked, pouring dark strong coffee. ‘Now you see him, now you don’t.’

  ‘Something to do with all those phone calls, maybe. I mean Captain Dashwood is a much wanted man.’

  ‘But Mrs Rafferty – to go off without a word. You didn’t quarrel, did you?’

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘I thought I heard raised voices.’

  ‘We did not have a quarrel.’

  ‘I must say I never thought that George would change for the worse.’

  ‘He hasn’t. Has he?’

  ‘You know as well as I do. This is not the George who came home from the war. It certainly ain’t the old George Dashwood I used to know.’

  Amelia drank her coffee slowly, watching Ralph over the top of her cup while she decided whether or not to confide in him.

  ‘No, he’s not the same,’ she agreed, having finally decided in favour of disclosure. ‘He seems to think – he carries on as if he’s got some form of – well, destiny.’

  ‘Destiny?’ Ralph frowned at her in apparent disbelief. ‘Next thing you know he’ll be hearing voices.’

  ‘Perhaps this is a recurrence of all that business after the war.’

  ‘He really did say nothing about going?’ Ralph wondered, putting the coffee pot back down on the table. ‘It seems so odd for him to come all the way home – and then take off into the blue the very next morning.’

  ‘Maybe something came up? Among all those telephone calls there were two from Jack Cornwall. His publisher.’

  ‘Surely if he was just going to see his publisher. . .’ Ralph began, only to stop to give the situation some more thought.

  ‘I think he’s left me, Ralph.’ She looked across at him. ‘I don’t know why, but I suddenly have this feeling.’

  ‘Not possible,’ Ralph assured her immediately. ‘He loves you far too much.’

  ‘Loved me far too much,’ Amelia said quietly, getting up from the table. ‘But not any more.’

  Quickly taking herself off into the garden, Amelia tried to calm herself. It was as if something had been randomly planted in her head, all of a sudden, out of the blue. One minute she had been talking to Ralph, albeit about the events of the previous evening and night, then the next thing she knew she heard a voice saying, George has left you – George has left you, just seconds after Ralph had remarked that George would be hearing voices next. George has left you, my darling love, my own, the voice had said – and laughed.

  ‘Maybe I’m the one who’s going crazy,’ Amelia muttered to herself as she walked towards the herbaceous garden.

  Try as she might, she could not believe George would leave her simply because of the argument that had taken place the night before. Besides, as she recalled, it had been a very one-sided affair. George had seemed not to take particular offence. It was she who had been upset. Furthermore, George was many things, but one thing he was most certainly not was impetuous. When George decided to do something drastic, it was only after the most careful consideration.

  Yet he is gone, Amelia realized. So there are only two conclusions which can be drawn. Either he has fallen in love with someone else, or else he quite simply does not love me any more. I accused him of having an affair with Deanna Astley and for one moment he looked as if his last hour had come.

  Which was when she saw the flowers.

  She had reached the herbaceous garden, entering it from the top gate so that the bed had been hidden from her until she stood on the grass pathway. The beds were full of summer colour, as well as the first flowering of plants chosen for their autumn life; deep red pompon dahlias set among the last flourishes of pink and pale blue. Amelia was glad to see how perfectly glorious the beds still appeared – all except for one patch under the south wall, which she suddenly noticed was completely colourless.

  ‘Jethro?’ Amelia called as she stood staring in bewilderment. ‘Jethro – have you seen what has happened here?’

  Her gardener hurried through from the Wild Garden.

  ‘Well, I’ll be . . .’ he muttered, pushing his cap to the back of his head. ‘I never saw that before. They was as good as new last evening. I cut some for the house if you remember, and they was all as fresh as paint.’

  It was a momentary interlude, almost welcome, but as soon as she left Jethro reality began once more to kick home as she wandered back towards the house. She seemed not to have spared a thought for her children over the previous days, yet she now realized Peter was due home for his summer holidays at the end of the
week and Gwendolyn at the beginning of the week after. If George was still absent she had absolutely no idea what she would say to them.

  She could hardly say their father had gone away without any rhyme or reason, and although as far as she knew he was in London he could actually be in Timbuctoo with no intention of ever returning home again. What, she wondered as she trod across the velvet lawns, could George have possibly meant by going off without a word? How was she supposed to find him? Who or where should she call? Or did he simply expect her to sit and wait for him to call her in order to let her know what was going on? He must have done this quite purposely, she decided as she re-entered the house. It had to be part of George’s present scheme of things. Whatever that particular scheme of things might be. She telephoned his flat but there was no answer.

  As she stood in the telephone room waiting to be put through to Jack Cornwall this time, she wondered whether the man she had left finishing his breakfast on the terrace had played any part in the situation in which she now found herself?

  It was strange, but ever since Ralph Grace had come into their lives everything had begun to change. And had Ralph not reappeared so dramatically on this last occasion, Amelia wondered, would she ever have confronted George the way she had the night before? Would she have allowed the situation to develop the way it had, with George going off to sleep alone in his dressing room with an argument unresolved, before leaving in the morning without a word?

  The slow realization came to her that Ralph Grace was a libertine who had turned her head.

  ‘Jack?’ she asked when she heard his voice at last. ‘Have you seen George? Do you know where he’s staying? He’s not at the flat.’

  ‘Not a clue. Sorry, Amelia.’

  ‘You must have some idea of where he is!’

  ‘None. Stop worrying. Husbands always turn up, in the end. Bad luck.’ He laughed and replaced the telephone.

  In her desperation Amelia found that she had the courage to call both known Astley households, Riverdean and the Mayfair number. The Astleys were at home at neither address. Then she tried everyone she knew in London but drew only blank after blank until, in its turn, her telephone rang.