Watching the Roses (Egerton Hall Trilogy) [Paperback]

Alice has withdrawn from the world. Isolated in her bedroom and unwilling to talk even to her parents, her only form of communication is a notebook. In this she describes the family legends surrounding her birth and the events leading up to her 18th birthday party.

Once upon a time, I was a good girl and no trouble to anyone. Now, everyone is worried about me, although I don’t think there’s really anything that dreadful or strange about my behaviour. I do not want to speak, not at all, not to a single soul in the whole world, and therefore, I’m not speaking. I decided not to speak a week ago, and since then not one word has passed my lips. I stay in this room. I do not want to leave it. They bring me food on a tray and when they’ve gone, long after they’ve gone, I eat it. Then at least they don’t have to worry about me starving to death. I truly don’t want to worry anyone by what I’m doing, although already I can see signs that I have.
A week ago today was June 20th, and it was my eighteenth birthday party. It should have been a perfect day and it was spoiled, oh, horribly spoiled. They all try to get me to say something and I won’t. In fact, every time I hear footsteps in the passage outside my door, I get on to the bed and arrange my hands over my body as if I were a medieval stone princess carved on an ancient tomb. I close my eyes. I become as stiff as I can and as still. As far as they’re concerned, I won’t speak and I won’t move. I would like my mother to think that I am sleeping.
The doctor has been and examined me and shaken his head and gone, ‘Tsk! tsk!’ and whispered in a corner of my bedroom to my mother and father. I couldn’t hear what he told them, but my mother (who quite often comes in to talk beside my bed, not really knowing whether I can hear her or not) said:
‘You’re exhausted, Alice. Nervously exhausted, that’s what Dr Benyon says. He says we must let you rest and rest. First the exams, he says, and then . . . well, what happened at the party . . .’ (she blinks very quickly in case I notice the tears in her eyes) ‘you’re simply worn out.’
That’s a very good way of describing how I feel: worn out. As if I were a piece of cloth, or a sock or something that’s been rubbed thinner and thinner until it’s almost transparent. I am writing in an old notebook that must have belonged to my father when he was younger than I am now. I found it under a loose floorboard in my wardrobe. This was my father’s room when he was a child. I’m quite used to the fact that my father is an expert on roses, and writes books about them and articles in magazines and newspapers telling people how best to take care of them, but now I can see the beginnings of this passion. In this notebook, he has copied down names of roses and a brief description of them, perhaps from an old catalogue. I like seeing what he wrote. I like the look of his young handwriting on the page and I feel as though he’s provided a kind of decoration, an ornamental border for my own words. Perhaps, also, I will add something to what he has to say about the roses. I can see so many from this room.
When I was a very small child, my father used to take me for walks through the gardens. They seemed enormous then, laid out in elaborate patterns of flower-beds and terraces and arbours and lawns dotted with trees. The drive seemed to go on for ever, and the gates at the end of it rose up above my head as tall as cliffs. I couldn’t reach the big ring that you had to twist to open them until I was seven years old. Now, although I can reach it easily enough, turning the ring to lift the latch would take all my strength. The gates usually stand open, but my father has closed them now. He closed them after all the guests had left the party.
As we walked about the garden, my father used to explain the roses to me: Damasks, Gallicas, Bourbons, Albas and the rest. I loved their names. So many of them were called after French-sounding ladies that I imagined them sweeping along the gravel paths in crinolines made of brocade and tall, powdered wigs: Honorine de Brabant, Madame Lauriol de Barry, Comtesse de Murinais, . . . there were scores of them, and I knew every one of them personally because my father did. He loved them and cared for them. I loved them and looked at them and inhaled their fragrance every summer, and felt saddened and betrayed when, year after year, having been so beautiful, they faded and grew brown along the edges of their petals and died.
‘There’ll be more roses next year,’ my father used to tell me, and that was supposed to console me for the loss of these flowers, this particular beauty. In the end I grew suspicious of all the coloured glory and began instead to admire the winter skeletons of the plants. I liked the filigree pattern made by the dark stems, and the way the thorns stood out clearly, unhidden by any foliage or blooms.
Every evening, when I finish writing, I lock this notebook in a drawer of my desk, a secret drawer. Sometimes I imagine myself completely gone: dead, vanished, faded away, quite rubbed out, and then no one will think of looking in this hidden place for years and years, and these pages will just lie there, becoming yellow and dry like old petals. Someone will find them long after my death, and they won’t know who I was or who anyone I’ve written about was, and they’ll toss the whole notebook on the rubbish heap or put it on a bonfire. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.