The Lost Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

her cigarette. The oily canvas of the rain hat is sticking to my chin. I am suddenly very tired. This war has gone on for so long, I think, that this endless waiting is life now. There is nothing else. “Sometimes, I think that everything we always wanted comes to us in the disguise of this war. What are we waiting for? We’re waiting to recover. We’re waiting to go home. We’re waiting for someone to return to us. Solace and love. What else is there?” I realize, too late, that I’ve said this out loud.
    Jane looks at me intently. “Are those our choices?” she says.
    “Yes, I think so.”
    “What are you waiting for, Gwen?”
    I am embarrassed by having said so much to this stranger, but I am too weary to stop now. “Love,” I say. It is the truth, and I have never said it out loud. “And you?”
    Jane’s voice is soft, quiet, as though the wisps of smoke she breathes out are the words gone from her body. “I’m waiting for love too,” she says. “I’m waiting for the love I had to come back to me.”
    I remember the room in the west wing I’d walked into earlier, the one with the photograph of the airman by the bed. How he looked both edgy and at ease. How I had touched his face. That must be Andrew. “Love,” I say again, because now that I have admitted it, I cannot stop confessing.

7
     
    Of all my books that I have dragged down to Devon from London, the grandest is The Genus Rosa . Miss Willmott’s encyclopedia of roses is in two volumes, each huge and heavy, weighted down with her botanical earnestness. I haul them from my luggage, lie on the floor, and pull one volume onto my chest, one onto my stomach. I did this in London when the German bombing became more frenzied this past winter. Actually I started the ritual of comfort a few months before that, when my mother was dying in hospital.
    I lie under The Genus Rosa on the floor of this, my temporary home. I can see all the dust under the bed next to me. The room still smells strongly of fire. The books press down on me. Surely no one could weigh as much as The Genus Rosa ? But this is what I imagine—someone. This is what I think about—love.
    The Genus Rosa was the only gift my mother ever gave me. The only gift I truly appreciated. The size and heft of it would have suited her fondness for theatricality. As a gesture, it was superb. She gave it to me when I graduated from gardening college. The books were so heavy she couldn’t carry them into the hall, had to pull me from the reception to come and fetch them from her car. But I didn’t mind, not when I saw The Genus Rosa sitting on the back seat of the Austin. “There,” she said, flinging open the door. “Isn’t that the most fabulous present?” And it was. It was. Perhaps I have never been as happy as I was that day. I remember the sharp smell of the leather seats, my hand on the smooth side of the car as I leaned in. And there it was, The Genus Rosa , propped up against the seat back, each volume as sturdy as the wall of a small house.
    I am only a few years older than the first volume of The Genus Rosa . I like thinking that when I was born, Miss Willmott was deep in the writing of it. Was there a particular rose she was working on the exact moment of my birth? The Arvensis perhaps, or the Phoenicea ? Maybe even the Rosa rugosa itself. I like to think that the moment I first breathed in the air of this world was the moment Ellen Willmott wrote Rosa rugosa at the top of a blank piece of paper.

8
     
    Dear Mrs. Woolf.
    Of your books, I must say that I like To the Lighthouse best of all. It is a perfect garden. The right mix of order and chaos. I admire (No) I love how the lighthouse, always in the background of the story, is to some extent Mrs. Ramsay herself. How the strokes of light are part of the emotional rhythm of Mrs. Ramsay.
    I would say (No) Is it true, perhaps, that this book is really about the haunting of memory? This is also what makes it a perfect garden because