The Garden of Lost and Found by Harriet Evans

Author:Harriet Evans [Evans, Harriet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472251022
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2019-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-One

Oxfordshire, six years later

Ned Horner’s idea for the most famous painting of the age came suddenly to him, without warning. Walking in the dappled shade of the rambling Wilderness to escape his baking studio late one afternoon he came upon his children, crouched on the lichen-spotted steps that led from the house into the garden.

‘Now, John,’ his daughter was saying. ‘Put on your wings.’

‘No thank ooo.’

‘Put on your wings please.’

‘Dolphin.’

‘No, John, not dolphin today. Let’s be fairies.’

Eliza was wearing a pair of wings Liddy had made from the old box of costumes Ned had kept for sitters in his Blackfriars studio. Gossamer silver gauze they were, purchased by him from Leather Lane market. She had made a pair for John but he refused to wear them, because he said he was afraid he’d turn into something with wings and fly away. He liked to stroke Eliza’s though, watching her as she flitted around the garden. Eliza was a do-er, John an observer.

It was their seventh summer at Nightingale House. Ned had tried to draw both children several times but the results were too arch, something Millais could have produced to great acclaim but which he couldn’t seem to pull off. Spirit of the Age, his vast panorama of the Strand, and Man and Wife, the triptych of a modern wedding painted at St Marylebone Church, had won him further acclaim and riches. He had sketched the children for his and Liddy’s own record, but not painted them: The Artist’s Wife . . . was the last painting he had made of his own family. It was also true that increasingly he wanted to pull up the drawbridge, to keep this world private.

Liddy agreed. She was busy with the house, making, mending, cooking, gardening, for she did much of it herself. Most of all she was with the children, teaching them their abacus, how to tie bootlaces, to recognise birds and flowers, all done with an extraordinary kind of patience. Ned could only marvel at her self-taught aptitude: it was the vogue, in those days, to be a ‘natural’ mother, but in the county drawing rooms of the other families they knew it was clear from the brief, impressive appearances of the inhabitants’ offspring that most of them lived in the nursery ruled over by Nanny. Liddy simply enjoyed the company of young children, preferred it to that of adults, in fact. She adapted herself to their rhythm, she walked at their pace, she saw the world through Eliza and John’s eyes. Ned was, he knew, mercurial, impatient, wanting them to understand how lucky they were to live in these glorious surroundings; they tired of him more quickly. Their mother asked nothing from them, and in her company they flourished.

Liddy could persuade vegetables to grow in rocky, acid soil. She made clothes for the children, intricately smocked and trimmed. She found money from seemingly nothing, managing the household accounts with an eye for finance which Mr Gladstone would have found impressive.

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