The Garden Path by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

day’s feline power struggle, maybe reading a little but not in any sustained way, opening books at random, mostly poetry or the long Victorian novels she was partial to; and after a couple of weeks of this she would rise one morning and hatch four sentences, a paragraph, and spend the rest of the day reading and sitting and thinking. And the next morning her paragraph would lead to another, by some lovely and unfailing principle of incubation and growth that always astonished her, so that she might end that day with a page, even two. And by these tiny increments, like sand blowing against the base of a mountain, something in the end got built, and she gave it to her friend Carla to type, and then to Ivan to mail, and it always, now, was sold. The stories didn’t interest her once they left her keeping. The checks, of course, were nice; they went for luxuries, things she couldn’t afford because she and Ivan were hoarding every bit of spare cash—books, dinners out, little presents for Ivan and Edwin and Carla and Carla’s little son. But the real reason she wrote stories was for the odd white, or yellow, or greenish light that filled her room, and the visions that came with it. And because she didn’t want to work in an office.
    One place she liked to imagine, but which had nothing to do with her stories—for some days, while she sat there with the cats in the pleasant gloom, she pondered not her visions but her life—was Silvergate, the estate in England where Rosie was born, and where Rosie’s father and grandfather had been gardeners. Susannah remembered, with effort, concentrating so hard she got headaches, what she had learned about the place when she was little. There wasn’t much to recall—mainly conversations she had overheard between Rosie and Peter, cozy chats about Rosie’s childhood that used to infuriate Susannah with their intimacy, their exclusiveness.
    Not that she ever so much as hinted at her desire to be part of them, or let on that she was listening. She would be deep in a book in one room while Peter and her mother chattered in another, but she had picked up certain things, and over the years she retrieved them from the back of her mind: Silvergate, in Kent, which was in the south of England, and her brother Peter was named after her grandfather who was named after the old man—the earl? baronet?—who inherited the place in the 1890s; and the gardens were beautiful, and vast, and designed by her grandfather’s father Massimo Liliano—what a wonderful name!—who was cheated of the credit for it; and there was a famous hedge clipped into fancy shapes, and a lily pond, and every kind of flower, and a huge patterned rose bed; and there were sheep whose wool used to catch in the wooden fence supports they scratched their backs against, and little Rosie used to collect it into soft, oily, dirty balls, and she had her own strawberry bed, where the berries tasted better than anything— anything —even the ones she grew out behind the house; and Nonna Anna (who died when Susannah was eight) wasn’t blind then, and she used to make yellow pasta, hanging it in strands to dry all over the kitchen, on ropes strung across the room and on broom handles propped between two chairbacks; and this was in the gardener’s cottage where Rosie was born in the back bedroom, delivered by Nonna Anna because it happened so suddenly, on the birthday of Rosie’s mother, whose name was May after the month, and who said to her husband when he came rushing in from the garden to find his baby girl already born, safely flannel-wrapped in a wicker cradle, asleep, before he or the doctor or the midwife could get there, and his wife and his mother beaming and laughing, proud of what they’d accomplished all on their own, “Thank you for my birthday present, Peter!” and they named her Rose.
    That was all—not much, though for a long time