I noted that my body was afraid; my blood had quickened and brought about a pulsing in my ears, and my cheek stung. In my thinking, I was as yet too startled to be frightened even though I sensed a frisson of malice that transcended the ordinary. I was instead, indignant and very repulsed. I backed away slowly and then turning, took the steps too quickly, twisting my ankle as I went.
“Some small cuts on my cheek, Beth,” I said later. “It must have been one of the village children, they’re quite rough nowadays, their fathers, you know, so many of them died in the war.”
The following morning I found Beth standing in the gap between the yew trees at the edge of the Quiet Garden. I do believe she was searching the flag-stones, looking for a scattering of small sharp objects to give credence to my story. “What are you doing out here?” I asked.
“I was concerned about the attack on you, Annie,” she said, “and you do look very wan.”
“Life has been a great strain hereabouts. Goodness, it is only two years since the end of the war, and there cannot be a soul in England who has not been dreadfully upset by the whole thing,” I told her.
For a while, the Quiet Garden reclaimed its tranquillity and June passed by pleasantly enough, although there was a faint chill in the air. I sensed nothing immediately harmful, although I had become nervous enough to be startled even by the movement of birds in the bushes beyond. Beth and I had agreed to stay within calling distance of each other and come together again as dusk distorted the shadows of the trees on the lawn.
They did not return again until late in October, and this time I confronted them boldly by calling out their names. I have wondered if it was my insolence that gave them vigour, for they were upon me suddenly with brutal energy. Sometimes I fancied my neck was kissed or my hair brushed, and if I resisted I was beaten. On one occasion, I was obliged to slip back into the house quietly and dispose of my frock that had been badly torn such that mending it would have been pointless. They would pull at me so and pester me, and it was as if I was mesmerised as their administrations became more intimate in nature.
I tried, at first, to keep a record of the particulars, as if by doing so I could assert the authority of all my forty-five years, but when later I read my jottings I found that my writing was always the nonsensical scribbling of a child, and I could make no sense of it.
I have failed to keep the dark business away from Beth, she has become so nervous and brooding that the slightest matter upsets her terribly; she has but to drop a spoon on the floor and she will be in tears. She has set about once again, finding ways to stop the vicious draughts moving freely in the house and banging shut the doors as they always have done. She insists that we keep an electrical light on during the night. “Where do you go for such long stretches of time?” she whispers at me repeatedly. She has become so persistent in her questioning that I am obliged to reveal a little of what is unfolding. “But why must you go to the Quiet Garden? It is winter now, and I know you go there even at night.”
“I go because I must. Concern yourself only with inside matters. I alone am responsible for things outside, and for finding ways to keep them there.”
“But what is out there that pulls at you so, Annie dear?”
“It is just a habit.”
“It is very eccentric, and I’ve become dreadfully fearful for you.”
“Some small eccentricities are unavoidable in those who have lived lonely for so long.” I did feel a great tenderness for Beth in her bewilderment, but I could not tell her then that I had no will in the matter. I could not say that the compulsion to keep tryst in the Quiet Garden was outside my own making; that the meetings were as unavoidable as when I was a child mute with obedience, bolstered only by the belief that eventually adulthood would free me from further misery. Sometimes I could see them clearly, before ever I reached the garden; they paced up and down along the yew hedges, impatient with my slowness.
In the middle of November, an occasion arose when Beth looked at me very levelly; she had led me to the kitchen, and stood with her back against the door. “Be truthful with me, it is to do with them, is it not? You think they are out there in the Quiet Garden.”
“I cannot deny it. Of course it is them. The spitting and stones—who else would engage in such puerile activities?” I did not describe how once my head was pulled sharply backwards so that I struggled for breath, or how on one occasion they would have my clothes from me and leave me to stand naked, and I witnessed my garments hanging in the air unsupported.
“I did not realise you thought about them so much anymore. I do not,” Beth said.
“Why should you? You have been gone all this long time, and I have been here with them.” She came towards me and I moved away, she could not change things that had already been done. “They are here, and they are very eager to make acquaintance with you again,” I shouted.
“Annie, hush, I cannot bear to see you so tormented. They are merely memories.” I saw her shudder.
“You do not believe me, do you, Beth?”
“How has this all come to be, do you suppose? Ever since I came home you have been fitful and really quite strange, Annie.”
“It is because of what we did.”
“But it was you who first suggested it, if I recall.”
“Perhaps, but you agreed. They have been about since then, sometimes together and sometimes separate. I have seen them by the water’s edge, or up by the stable. Never have they ventured into the Quiet Garden until your return. And they come back ferocious, more so than they were in life.”
I felt quite broken up and I did not resist her when she took my hand in hers and looked down upon it as if it were her very own. “Annie, perhaps if it really is us who have caused it, stopping it would also be possible, do you not think?” There was a curious tone to her voice that made a child of me.
“How, how could we stop it?”
“Perhaps you alone can stop it. Where is the fine spirit I so envied you when we were little? You were not afraid to move away from them and find your childish sanctuaries.”
“I think you should leave, Beth. That is the only way this business can be halted.”
“I do not regret what we did, it was not malicious. Besides, I do not wish to leave you again.”
“You did so without hesitation the first time.”
“Poor Annie. I did not know you suffered because of that, truly I did not.”
I let her take me in her arms and pull my head down onto her shoulder, for I was all done in with my torment. “It was monstrous and pagan, the thing we did,” I whispered.
I felt her tremble against me. “Can one be guilty of a thing if one does not understand the implications of it, do you imagine, Annie?”
“Of course!” I pulled away from her, “if those you have harmed think otherwise. That was exactly what our parents did think, as you very well know. We were guilty of things we had no knowledge of at the time.”
The relationship between our parents was debauched, and my sister and I lived in the murkiness of it, we crept between the intensity of the hatred they felt for each other and the extravagant ways they menaced each other’s bodies and thoughts. We spent time in the kitchen with our silent cook when we felt the need for the company of an adult through days in which our parents did not leave their bedroom, or days in which they grappled together through the rooms of the house, shouting. There were times of quietude, but these were brief and their length unpredictable.
We did not think they would damage us when they were alive. They seemed hardly to notice we were there, and when they did, they looked at us as if surprised. Father spoke to us with a hesitating formality that seemed to suggest that had things been otherwise, his enthusiasm for our company would have been boundless. Our mother had a myriad of different ways to show us that her life before our births had been thrilling.