Flowers of Darkness by Tatiana Rosnay (free ebook reader for iphone TXT) 📗

stop the shadow from overtaking the light; she threw herself into her story, describing their arrival at the quaint village of Rodmell, which had preserved its original features. Her father had parked near a pub, where they each enjoyed a ploughman’s lunch, a plate of cheddar with ham, pickles, and bread. While she evoked their meal, she clearly and precisely recalled the conversation she’d had with her father. Should she repress it? Or, on the contrary, let it out? She dithered, swallowed her tea. Mia White waited, devotedly.

“That’s funny, I’ve just remembered what my dad and I talked about that day. I had forgotten it, and it came back to me.”

“Would you mind sharing it with me?”

Her father had asked her if she felt more French than English, now that she’d been living in France for a long span of years. She had given it a thought. It was a tricky matter. Deep down, she had no idea. And she still hadn’t. She was aware of her distinctive status, a crossbreed one, powerless to choose one country over the other—a discomfort she had perceived her entire life, the sensation of not belonging to a nation, of being unable to claim an origin. She was twofold. She had two mother tongues, two worlds, two homelands. With Brexit, it had become even more intricate. But that afternoon at Rodmell, on that sunny spring day, neither her father nor she could have predicted the calamitous chain of events following Great Britain’s choice.

“Let’s get back to Virginia Woolf, if you will,” said Clarissa.

“With pleasure.” Mia White nodded.

Clarissa had followed her father along a quiet little street dotted with pretty, traditional houses. The Woolf cottage was much smaller than she had anticipated. There was nothing luxurious there. Her father, like her, knew little about the life of the writer who had lived here. He was not an avid reader. Golf, tennis, and tournaments were more his sort of thing. As he grew older, he spent time looking after the garden behind his London home in Hackney. He enjoyed tending to the plants and flowers Clarissa’s mother, Solange, had planted with such care.

Their guide’s name was Margaret, a slender young woman with protruding teeth and milky skin. She welcomed them as if they were entering her own home, and pronounced the name Virginia with hushed adoration. She told them in a whisper, as if not wanting to disturb the owners, who still lived there, that Virginia wrote in a small lodge, where she liked to be alone, while her husband, Leonard, toiled outside; he planted cherry, apple, prune, and fig trees, and garnered his own fruit and vegetables with the help of his faithful gardener, Percy, as well as his own honey.

Their visit began with the garden. It was magnificent. Her father gasped with joy, overcome; he pointed out gladioli, clematises, roses, zinnias, geum, dahlias, agapanthus. Margaret remained silent, smiling, no doubt heartened by the fervor of this old gentleman’s eagerness. Never would Clarissa forget this enchanted orchard, the sensational exuberance of the colors bursting around them. They walked along the thin redbrick path cutting through dazzling blazes of orange, purple, red, pink. Margaret pointed out a fishpond, installed by the Woolfs, where dragonflies skimmed the water, while bees hummed actively, butterflies spun here and there, birds twittered. The glory of a garden in spring.

“I have a few memories of gardens in Nantes,” said Mia White gently. “But I haven’t seen a real one, like the one you are describing, for a long time.”

“I wonder what Leonard Woolf would say if he came back now and saw what his beloved garden has become,” said Clarissa.

“Is it completely dried out?” asked Mia White, horror-struck.

Clarissa said she hadn’t been back there since. But she had seen upsetting photos. Yes, most of it was a parched mess, like the majority of gardens nowadays. The perpetual heat waves, scorching summers, scarcity of water, brutal storms, end of natural pollination, and slow extinction of insects had taken a deathly toll on beautiful gardens.

“That’s so sad,” said Mia White in the same soft voice.

“But the house is still standing,” said Clarissa. “Houses do last. Thank God.”

“Why do you love houses so much?”

Clarissa said she had thought about that often; she supposed her obsession with houses came from her profession, her penchant for measuring spaces, for needing to define them geographically.

“I imagine there are houses you loved?”

“Yes. Several.”

She described her French grandparents’ country home in Burgundy, near Sens, razed in her childhood in order to give way to a highway. A trauma. And a place in Tuscany, up in the hills overlooking Florence, where she had spent a long summer with her husband. She told Mia White about the simplicity of the rustic white house, called colonica in Italian, and how she had felt at home there. She still remembered the sensation of the cool ancient stone tiles under her naked feet, and the particular shape of the doorknob, which had left an emotional imprint in the hollow of her hand.

But there was also what walls whispered to her. What she had experienced in Romain Gary’s apartment, all those years ago, had been extraordinarily powerful. She had wondered how she would feel when she got to Monk’s House. She had listened to Margaret tell them more about how the Woolfs bought and transformed the long and low weather-boarded cottage with a slate roof. It had been rudimentary in the beginning. No hot water, no bath, no indoor toilets; small, damp rooms, but great promise: a wild, generous garden, with the steeple of the nearby church peeking out over the greenery, and beyond, the view of the smooth, rolling stretch of the South Downs.

Clarissa had not yet read anything by Virginia Woolf. Over the years, she had stuck to Romain Gary, Maupassant, Zola, Baudelaire, Modiano. She had not started to write, either. When they visited the premises, she was still working as a property surveyor. The large black boulder of her suffering lingered persistently.