Stourhead Gardens

A Short Story

In the southwest region of Wiltshire, within a property quite isolated from the city, lay a garden that lingered somewhere between the brink of magic and actuality. It was here where we played hide-and-seek between the bushes that seemed to embrace us, acted out the skits we would write while the morning dew still rested on the grass, and waved farewell on opposite sides of the bridge where we would meet again the next morning. Not long after, it was here where I asked her to meet me.

Looking over the bridge at my reflection in the water, I wonder if Stourhead gardens would have achieved a magical state if my fond memories of it hadn’t been inundated with the ache from one painful one. I thought of the hot summer afternoon we spent laying on the grass talking about nothing. Her head resting on my stomach as she babbled on about something I wish I could remember. At the time, it felt like one of those transitional moments between the past and future elation. Looking back, I realize this moment was the elation itself.

I’m standing in the exact place I was years ago, which seems to be worn by time. The insipid garden is a desolate product of our years spent tending to its flowers. A dulled colour seems to have conquered the vibrant pigments of the tulips. The kinetic waters that once trickled playfully between my toes have become poignantly still. I used to fall asleep to their rhythms, but I can’t imagine drifting away to their now haunting silence. I wonder if the garden’s decrepit state really is a result of time, or a manifestation of neglect.

Looking in the direction of where I came from, I amalgamate into the man I was that July afternoon. I watch her emerge onto the path where the rosemary she was named after grew, and feel her gravity take hold of me. She walks with the step of a ballerina, gracefully gliding over any surface that is lucky enough to touch her feet. The pleats of her red sundress flutter as the gentle wind dances between them. The shimmer of her golden locks exude a familiar warmness, similar to the kind that would embrace you as you walked into an evening garden party with a myriad of good friends.

She approached me with the confidence of a lioness, but looked at me with the shyness of a Persian cat. Her lips still curled into a cordial smile but had a certain tiredness about them that introduced the first feeling of nervousness to my gut that day. They were painted a red lighter than that of her dress, but darker than the crimson of the garden’s peonies. I was seized by her atmosphere, but unsure if I was about to burn up in it.

Taking her soft hand as we sat on the bridge’s brink, I couldn’t help but wonder how many others had done the same between the time I last saw her and today. How much time we had lost to life’s complications and love’s great complexities made me hold her tighter. How wrong it seemed to be written, as if a pretty girl had sat on His desk and distracted Him in the process. As if He rushed the final manuscript to take her out to dinner before the moonlight indicated it was too late.

It was in Stourhead gardens where I begged her to marry me. The brazen words fell from my lips like water droplets from a leaky tap; they couldn’t be stopped. It felt like hours had passed in the moments I held her hands on my knees, retching my heart out onto her navy blue shoes. Her posture in which she sat in a state of oblivion didn’t falter each time I looked up: cross-legged and gazing over my shoulder. It seemed as though her shoe, the one that sat on the foot of her crossed leg, was the only thing in the garden that acknowledged my imploring. It trembled while the grass, the leaves, and the trees remained still: indifferent. So clearly did her answer lie in the shoe I watched eagerly palpitate, as if ready to spring into the still water below. So persistent was my ignorance.

A sharp shriek divorces me from myself on that hot afternoon. My vision comes into focus on her running across the field where we used to enjoy picnics. I watch the wind grasp at her unbridled red hair, as if it desired to hinder her progression from his outstretched hands. They chase each other across the garden in a pattern that reminds me of an ice cream swirl. In dizzying skips and fluent jumps. The games they play are all too familiar to me. When he finds her hiding in the bushes she lets out youthful giggles that sound like how I imagine the sparkling wine of Europe to go down: warm and refreshing. As they take a break to lay in the grass, I notice her babbling is incessant as the bird’s chirping in the early hours and I watch as he tries to catch the words that seemed to dissipate into the sky. All the things I would have never had if her shoe had remained still.

She makes the existence of what came before seem almost made up, but I’m glad it still exists in some form, even if it’s only in my mind. Permanently instilled as a seemingly perfect reminder of what could have been, but was never written to be. As she runs into my arms with a cloud of laughter trailing behind her, I feel the magic that engulfed me so many years before. And in leaving I catch a glimpse of the trees that were still, that would forever remain still, in Stourhead Gardens.

This is my first short story inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens. Immersing myself in literature in hopes of honing my writing, it’s hard not to be envious reading a phrase so eloquent I wish I’d come up with it first. For Kew Gardens, it was:

“All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe”.

I wrote this story in an attempt to extend its impact on me.