The Lost Garden

The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys Page A

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Authors: Helen Humphreys
Tags: Fiction, General, Romance, Historical
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her chin, arms wrapped tightly around her legs. How does she survive the uncertainty of her fiancé’s disappearance?
    “I hate those curtains,” says Salad Blue suddenly. “They make me feel as though I’m inside a tomb.”
    “Maybe it’s curtains for us,” says Jane. But no one laughs.
    “Wait,” says May Queen. “I’ve got an idea.” She rushes from the room with what, for her, is unusual speed. We can hear her clatter up the stairs to her room and then clatter back down again. She returns, looking much the same as when she left, just a little flushed from the exertion.
    “What?” says British Queen.
    May Queen stands in the centre of the room. She holds out her hand. There, in the palm, are several pieces of chalk. “I was a dressmaker’s assistant,” she says. “Before. In London.” She walks over to the curtains and draws a huge white square with the dressmaker’s chalk onto the black material. Her strokes are deft and sure. “This is the shop where I worked,” she says. “In Kensington.” She writes a word at the top of the square. “Durbin’s. Durbin’s Dress Shop.” She draws a door in the shop, and then starts to draw mannequins and dresses in the shop window. “This one,” she says, tapping the outline of an evening dress with her piece of chalk, “was the most gorgeous red. Velvet that was soft as fur. It was for the daughter of a magistrate. She used to arrive for her fittings in a chauffeur-driven Daimler. And this one—” She points to the chalk sketch next to the magistrate’s daughter’s dress. “This one was designed by Mrs. Durbin, but I chose the material for it. Jaconet. That’s what I chose. Because I wanted to make a dress that felt as light as smoke, so that when you moved in it there was that lightness to you.”
    We watch May Queen draw the shop where she worked onto the blackout curtains. It is transfixing. How odd it is to think of our lives before we left them. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever go back to London. If there’ll be a London to go back to. And sometimes I feel the weariness of being away from home for such an indefinite stretch of time, and all I want, all I long for, is to go home. And is it a place, I think, or just a feeling? And will I ever have that feeling of home again?
    “Was it bombed?” I ask. “Durbin’s Dress Shop.”
    “Not for a long time,” says May Queen. “But the shops on either side of it disappeared. Big craters in the road. One had been a stationer’s, and I was always finding envelopes in the strangest places, as if someone had mysteriously left a letter between the drainpipe and the wall. Or propped up against the front window.” She draws a small chalk rectangle in the bottom right corner of her shop to indicate an errant envelope. “We didn’t know what to do, so we just kept coming to work. And then one day we had disappeared as well.” She stands back from her sketch on the curtain. “That’s what it looked like,” she says. “How I remember it.” She turns to face us, the chalk held between her fingers like a pen, or the stem of a rose. On her face is an expression of bewilderment, as though she can’t quite believe what has happened to her life. And I realize that we haven’t left our lives. They have left us. The known things in them. The structure of our days. All the bones of who we are have been removed from us. We have been abandoned by the very facts of ourselves, by the soft weight of the old world.
    May Queen’s real name is Alice. She stands in front of the outline of Durbin’s Dress Shop, holding on to her stick of chalk. “I remember,” she says, “that dress I made of jaconet. The dress that was like smoke. It was bought by a tall, thin woman. I did her fitting a few days before the shop disappeared. She was fidgety, I remember that. And she wore the dress home.”

18
     
    Mrs. Woolf is dead. It is broadcast with the war news on the evening of April 21. She has drowned in that

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