Fandom: Secret Garden
Written for: Diantiquarian in the New Year Resolutions Challenge 2004
by penknife
There's a familiar cough outside the tent flap. It's the closest anyone can do
to a knock, just in case Colin is--actually, he can't imagine what. Privacy is
as silly a luxury under the circumstances as a jeweled throne would be in place
of the camp chair he's sitting in, answering his mail.
"Come in," he calls.
"I've got the tea," Dickon says. "Or what they're calling
tea."
"It wouldn't be so bad if they wouldn't boil it," Colin says, and
drinks it greedily anyway; it's hot and sweet, if chalky with powdered milk.
The chill of the rain goes straight to the bone.
"Busy, are you?" Dickon looks at the letters with mild amusement. He
doesn't understand Colin's passion for writing. Colin's not sure he understands
it himself. It's as though he can hand some part of himself onto the page to be
borne away as on a lifeboat from a burning ship.
"Just the mails. Anything from home?"
"My mother." Dickon hands over the carefully folded envelope, the
name on it printed in large square letters, and Colin reads it aloud. It's not
that Dickon can't manage it, especially the simple words his mother uses--news
of babies and neighbors, hopes that he'll stay safe, always the same frank
words of love--but it's a habit they've gotten into. He thinks it might be that
Dickon likes to hear the sound of his voice, which pleases him secretly. It's
good to have a secret.
Dickon moves about straightening things while Colin reads. He tries not to make
work for Dickon, but he's never quite gotten the knack of picking up things
instead of simply letting them fall. There's the gentlest of scolds in the way
Dickon folds his jacket over neatly and rescues his cigarette case from where
he's likely to step on it getting into bed.
"Always the same," Dickon says after Colin's finished. "I'll answer
that one myself. I can say well enough all she needs to hear."
"Stay a while," Colin says. "We can play cards."
"You always win," Dickon says, but he sits down anyway, taking a
drink from Colin's mug.
"You could have brought your own," Colin says.
He shrugs.
"I'll have my tea with the rest of the men."
"Then what are you doing now?" Colin asks, raising an eyebrow.
"Having your tea," Dickon says, and Colin laughs. "You should
drink up, if you don't want to share."
Colin pulls out a pack of cards and deals. They play seriously for matchsticks,
saying little beyond what's necessary to the game. It's the only change he's
seen the war make in Dickon. He's quiet, now, with a way of watching things for
a long time with his hands still, as if storing up tales he'll never tell.
"Who were you writing to?" Dickon asks after a while, showing his
hand and gathering matchsticks neatly into a stack.
"My father," Colin says. . . . it's really quite pretty here, when
there's no fighting going on. There's a little stream that might have had fish
in it, though I'm sure they're all scared away. I wish I had my microscope to
look at samples from the water. I'll have to be sure and get it when I get
leave. Just as soon as we're doing a bit better, any day . . .
"Ah," Dickon says.
"She can't be writing every minute," Colin says. "I'm sure she
has things to do."
"Don't let it vex thee that's she's happy," Dickon said. "Happy
and far from here."
It's more of an admission that all's far from well than he's used to from
Dickon. It shakes him a bit. He needs his source of comfort, his reminder that
there's still a great deal of good that can come from hope.
"She didn't write you either?"
Dickon smiles a bit.
"She wrote us both Monday last," he says. "A week's nowt."
"I'm spoiled," Colin says. "I want a letter every day."
"You'll have to invent a better way of getting them here, then,"
Dickon says. "A letter a day for every man, and we'd never sort out the
post."
Dickon had given him the letter, last week, and he'd read it out loud,
imagining her voice and the way she had of wrapping you up in it so you seemed
to hear nothing else. . . . It's rained all week, and the birds huddle under
the eaves and in the barns. I went out to walk in the rain, once, because it
was so hard being cooped inside like a bird myself. From the top of the gardens
you could see the rain in grey sheets across the moors, like someone drawing
curtains closed to hide the back of the sky . . .
Colin wrote the letter back, too, Dickon telling it to him as if he were
talking quietly so as not to scare a wild thing, his eyes thoughtful and far
away, his hands busy at polishing the ruin the weather was making of Colin's
tack. That, too, Dickon could have done for himself, and Colin thought to read
the words in Dickon's own uneven handwriting would have pleased Mary better
than in Colin's copperplate, but Colin liked listening to the sound of his
voice, too.
. . . they've brought up new horses, but they're scared still. It takes a
while for beasts to be used to this din. The sound of the guns is like thunder,
and any sensible beast wants to run away. But if you're gentle with them, they
learn they've got to stay and do their duty. The best of them do it for love,
for then they're less afraid of the guns then of being parted from their
friends. If only we didn't have to lead them such places, for they'd be safer
turned out into the wild . . .
He'd wanted to lift his pen from the paper, then, and say these were no kinds
of things to say to people back home, to girls. But he can't. He's been brought
into the circle of their letters, the one place where he's got no right to go,
and he knows how wrong it would be to start giving orders even there. He'd
taken it all down and blotted the page carefully before slipping it into the
envelope.
It's not as if his own letters are any better for being more oblique. He tells
her fantastic tales, the canvas walls that seem press in on him at night turned
to the scarlet silk of a rajah's travelling palace or the steel and glass of an
encampment on the moon. They're stories a child would love, innocent to
innocent eyes, but neither of them is that innocent any more.
. . . and they came back in their rocket, then, to show the strange
specimens they'd found to their fellows back at home, but what they didn't know
was that they'd strayed into another dimension, and when they came home at
last, it was years and years after they'd left. No one remembered them, and no
one cared for the discoveries they'd made. So they went away in their rocket,
looking for a way home, or at least for a green place where they could live
untroubled, and they looked a very long time . . .
She writes back and tells him about the people at Misselthwaite, his father's
winter fever that's better now, the few girls she's kept touch with from school
who come to visit sometimes in a flurry of unpacking and forced gaity, the much
fewer young men who come to call, long Sunday afternoons.
. . . I wish I were more like my mother--oh, not really, not careless and
thoughtless and a bit unkind, but I wish I knew how to make people forget their
troubles. We talk about the war until I want to scream and go running out the
door out into the clean open air. It will be better in spring, when everything
is in bloom. The robins and the lilies will know nothing about the war. They
will build their nests all the same. I envy them . . .
She's waiting. She's never said it in so many words, but he knows. She would
tell him if she meant not to. They're honest with each other, often more honest
than they can easily bear. It's only sometimes, when he's out of sorts with the
world, that Colin wonders about one of the men she's talked of more than once,
an invalid wounded at the Somme; he knows all too well Mary's need to mend things
that are broken.
It's one way she's like Dickon. Colin looks at him from behind his cards. They
couldn't be more different in their faces or bodies; Dickon's freckled square
hands are nothing like Mary's fine ones, for all that they touch things with
the same care. Colin and Mary could be brother and sister, everything from
their hair to their hands the same. He can see what their children would look
like, only the color of their eyes in question.
He and Dickon play cards every chance they can, one of the few pleasures of
long summer afternoons that's within their grasp here, only for matchsticks so
that they can start with the stakes even. They don't talk about the other bet
they're making, although Colin thinks they both hope the best man wins.
He's thought it through at night, staring at the canvas overhead. Dickon would
tell him he thinks too much, but he's never gotten the knack of stopping
himself. If it's only Colin who comes back, well, he knows how that'll be.
They'll be married in the garden. They'll name the first boy Richard. He'll
pretend he doesn't hear her crying, sometimes, late at night, when she thinks
he's asleep besider her, and maybe if he's careful she'll never hear him crying
at all.
If it's only Dickon--well, not all princes have castles and fine clothes. Mary
knows that. She won't be warned off from doors people tell her she shouldn't
open. He hopes he'd wish them well; surely being dead must give one a
philosophical approach to these things.
There are other endings, he knows. Once he wouldn't have imagined them, but now
it's hard not to think about them, now that he's seen the wreckage mortar
shells and mines can make of horses and men. If it comes to that, Colin hopes
it's him. He's used to being a cripple. He knows all the tricks to make it
bearable, books and music and long afternoons in the sun.
For Dickon--of course he'd never want for anything, Colin would see to that,
but he shudders at the thought of Dickon legless, or limping on a crutch, only
able to struggle out to the garden and see the moors from behind walls. It
would be like keeping a broken-winged hawk in a cage. It wouldn't care how much
you loved it, only that it couldn't fly.
He wonders, too, how long it would be before he woke to find that Mary had slipped
out of their bed at night. He wonders if he'd lie awake imagining what they
were doing, telling it to himself like a story to soothe himself into sleep. He
wonders if he'd look down at one of their children playing in the sun and see a
spray of freckles across her cheeks, familiar small square hands. He wonders if
he'd mind.
He tells himself, every night at the end of tossing and turning, that they'll
both come back. He'll have Mary, and Dickon will have his own girl, although
that part's a little hard for him to see. Dickon would have his pick of the
village girls, surely, coming home a hero with medals (in his mind's eye there
are medals) and a smart uniform. Dickon will be his gardener, and maybe
sometimes when their eyes meet they'll know they share a secret still. There
will be a golden-haired child to teach to pull out weeds with her slender
hands.
That's the happy ending. He hopes hoping is enough to make it come true.
"You're not paying attention," Dickon says, tossing his cards down.
"I'm thinking," Colin says.
"There's your problem," Dickon says. He puts his tanned hand over
Colin's next to the cards. "I can stop that for you."
"Don't be stupid," Colin says, because while all privacy here is
precarious, privacy at four o'clock in the afternoon is impossible.
"I never meant that," Dickon says. He stacks the cards neatly and
comes to stand behind Colin's chair, an uncomfortably familiar position. His
hand brushes at the hair at the back of Colin's neck, smoothing it like the
mane of a nervous horse. Colin leans back and closes his eyes.
"Is that going to keep me from thinking?" Colin asks.
"Yes," Dickon says, and kisses the back of his neck. "Even tha'
can't go on thinking on death now, surely."
"What makes you think that's what I was thinking about?" he says,
reaching back to take Dickon's hand. The strong fingers are warm in his. He
turns when he gets no answer. Dickon's face is shadowed.
"What does any of us think about?" he asks.
Colin thinks it's as close as he'll come to asking for a shoulder to lean on.
He squeezes Dickon's hand.
"What would your mother say?" he says. "'Look at tha' mopin'
about on account o' a lass.' If you can't do better than that, I'll write Mary
and tell her how you're pining over her."
"Is that what tha' calls it?" Dickon asks, with a rather dark smile,
and Colin feels a flicker of fear. He's sure he could do without tea and his
clothes being folded and hot meals just when he wants them, but not without
their unspoken agreement that this is necessity and not betrayal.
"She'd want to see you happy," Colin says, and knows it's true.
"She worries about us, in this godforsaken place."
"They say God's everywhere," Dickon says. "But I haven't seen
him lately."
Colin stands, and kisses him, a quick dangerous pleasure.
"I'll help you look," he says.
Dickon laughs.
"Not now," he says. "And I couldn't tell you when."
Colin shrugs. That's not so important.
"I'll finish my letter," he says.
When Dickon's gone out with the mug and tray and his laundry to take to be
washed, he goes on with writing, trying not to be distracted by the drumming of
the rain outside and the sound of distant thunder.
. . . any day now, we're bound to get leave. Perhaps by then it will be
spring, and the garden will be blooming.