Paradise by Ruth Rendell
 
IT was a map of the Garden of Eden.  The monk, who was also their guide, pointed it out to them under its protective glass and said something in Greek.   The interpreter interpreted.   Made in the eighth century AD by one Alexander of Philae, the map had been in this monastery for a thousand years, had been stolen, retrieved, threatened by fire and flood, defaced, patched up, and finally restored to its present near-perfect condition.
The tour party crowded around to look at it. Rosemary Meacher, standing in front of her much taller husband, saw a sheet of yellowish parchment that looked as if coffee had been spilt over it, spindly-legged insects had died on it, and a child had experimented on its mottled surface with a new paint box. The monk made another short speech in Greek. The interpreter said that, if they were interested, on their way out they could buy postcards of the map at the shop.
"Or tea towels perhaps," whispered Rosemary to her husband, "or tablecloths with matching napkins."
David Meacher made no reply. He had moved to a position beside her and was peering closely at the map. For the first time since their holiday began, for the first time, really, since he had been made redundant, his face wore an expression that was neither bitter nor indifferent. He was looking at the map as if it interested him.
The monk and the interpreter moved on—through the library, through the refectory, out into cloisters. The party followed. Flaking frescoes and faded murals were pointed out, their provenance explained. The hot sun was white and trembling on the stone flags, the shadows black. The party surged thankfully into the shop.
There were no tea towels or tablecloths or aprons or even calendars of the map of the Garden of Eden, but there were the postcards and life-size facsimiles. Framed or unframed.
"You don't really want one, do you?" Rosemary said.
"Yes, of course I do." David had taken to barking at her lately, especially if, as now, she seemed to even mildly oppose his wishes. "I think it's very beautiful, a marvellous piece of history."
"As you wish."
He bought a framed map and then, on second thought, an unframed map as well and four postcards. Back at the hotel he got her to pack the framed map, parcelled in bubble-wrap, and their clothes into their carry-on bag. The unframed map he spread out on the desktop, weighting down its corners with the ashtray, two glasses, and the stand that held the room service menu. He sat down with his elbows on the desk and studied the map. After dinner, instead of going to the bar, he went back to their room and she found him there later, hunched over the desk. From somewhere or other he had procured a magnifying glass.
She was pleased. He had found something to take him out of himself. These were probably early days to think of a hobby developing from it—that he might begin collecting old maps, antiquarian books, something like that. But surely this was how such things began. She vaguely remembered hearing that an uncle of hers had started collecting stamps because a friend had sent him a letter from Outer Mongolia. If only David would find an interest!
Since the loss of his job, he had become a changed man— sullen, bad-tempered, sometimes savage in his manner towards her. And he had been very unhappy. The large sum of money he received in compensation, the golden handshake, had done nothing to mitigate his misery. He still spoke daily of the chief executive, a young woman, walking into his office and telling him to clear his desk and go.
"I'll never forget it," he said. "Her face, that red mouth like a slice of raw beef, and that tight bright blue suit showing her fat knees. And her voice—not a word of excuse or apology, not a hint of shame."
Rosemary saw to her horror that he had tears in his eyes. She thought it would help when the cheque mat came was twice what he had expected. She thought he might put those humiliating events behind him once she found the beautiful house in Wiltshire and had driven him there and shown him. But apathy had succeeded rage, and then rage had come back, alternating with periods of deep depression. He sat about all day or he paced. In the evenings he watched television indiscriminately. His doctor suggested this holiday, two weeks in the Aegean, before the move.
"I don't care," he said. "If you like. It's all one to me. I'll never get her voice out of my head. Not a word of apology, no shame."
He rolled up the map of the Garden of Eden and she packed it in his suitcase. What became of the postcards she didn't know until she saw him studying one of them on the plane.
They moved house two weeks after their return. It was only his second visit to the house, only the second time he had walked through those spacious rooms and down the steps from the terrace onto the lawn to look across at the seven acres which were now his. Wasn't this better than living in a north London terrace, taking the Northern Line daily to a Docklands office? She wasn't so tactless as to ask him directly. It put heart into her to see him explore the place and pronounce later that evening that it wasn't so bad, that it was a relief to breathe fresh air.
She busied herself getting the place straight, unpacking the boxes, deciding where this piece of furniture and that should go. Two men arrived to hang the new curtains. Another brought the chandelier, holland-wrapped, tied up with string. He hung it in the drawing room and he hung the pictures. David hung up his framed map of the Garden of Eden in the room that was going to be his study. Then he asked the man to hang a much bigger picture he had, which he wanted in the dining room. Rosemary saw, to her surprise, that it was the map again, but blown up to three times its size (and therefore rather vague and blurred) in an ornate gilt frame.
"I had it done last week," David said. "I found a place where they photocopy things to any size you want."
She was overjoyed. If she felt a tremor of unease it was a tiny thing, brought about surely by her heightened nervousness and sensitivity to his moods. If she was ever so slightly disturbed by the spectacle of a man of fifty engrossed in a cheap copy of a map of some mythical place .... But no, it was wonderful to see him returning to his old self, to interest and occupation. He even arranged the furniture in his study, put his books out on the shelves. By nine next morning he was out in the garden and later in the day off in the car to a nursery where there was a chance of finding some particular shrub he wanted.
After they had been in the new place a week she realised he hadn't once mentioned the chief executive or her mouth or her blue suit or her voice. So this, apparently, was the solution. Not the holiday or the doctor's drugs or even kindness, but a move to somewhere new and different. His days, which had been empty, gradually became busy and filled. He followed a pattern—gardening in the morning and in the afternoon going out in the car and returning with books. Some came from a library. Some he bought. She paid them very little attention. It was enough to know that he was reading again after not opening a book of any kind for months. Then one day he asked her if they had a Bible in the house.
She was astonished. Neither of them had religious leanings. "Your old school Bible is somewhere. Shall I look for it?"
"I will," he said, and then, "I want to look something up."
He found the Bible and was soon immersed in it. Perhaps he was about to undergo some sort of conversion. Perhaps this house was his road to Damascus. Disquiet returned in a small niggling way and when he was outside mowing the lawn the next day she looked at the library books and the books he had bought. Every one of them was concerned in some respect or other with the Garden of Eden. There was a scholarly examination of the book of Genesis, an American Fundamentalist work, a modern novel called Rib Into Woman, Milton's Paradise Lost, and several others. Well, she had hoped he would take up a hobby, that he would study something or collect something, and what he evidently was studying was paradise.
Presumably he would tell her about it sooner or later. He would say what the purpose of it was, what he meant to do with it, what he expected to accomplish. They had enough to live comfortably on and he had no need of an earned income, but perhaps he intended to write a book for his own pleasure. She watched him. She didn't ask. Her own life was less busy than it had been in London and it took concentration to find enough to do. She must become involved with village life, she thought, find charity work, develop her own interests. He didn't seem to want her to help in the garden. Meanwhile, she cooked more than she ever had, baked their bread, made jam from the soft fruit from the garden. She admitted to herself that she was lonely.
But when, at last, he did tell her, it came as a shock. She said, "I don't understand. I don't know what you mean."
"Just what I say." He had stopped barking at her. He habitually spoke gently now, even dreamily. "It's here. The Garden is here. This is where it is. It took me a few weeks to make sure. That's why I've said nothing till now. But now I am absolutely certain. The Garden of Eden is there, outside our windows."
"David," she said, "the Garden of Eden doesn't exist. It never did exist. You know that as well as I do."
He looked at her with narrowed eyes, as if he suspected her mental equilibrium. "Why do you say that?"
"Believing in it as a real place is like saying Adam and Eve really existed."
"Why not?" he said.
"David, I'm not hearing this. You can't be saying this. Listen, people used to believe in it. Then Darwin came along with his theory of evolution. You know that. You know that God, if there is a God, didn't make a man out of whatever it was . . .."
"Dust."
"Well, dust, all right. He didn't take out one of his ribs and make a woman. I mean, it's laughable." She stopped, thought. "You're joking, aren't you? You're having me on?"
In a rapt, dreamy tone, as if she hadn't spoken, he said, "It's always been believed that the site of the Garden was somewhere in the Middle East because Genesis mentions the river Euphrates and Ethiopia and Assyria. But, seriously, how could a garden be in Syria and Ethiopia and Iraq all at the same time? The truth is that it was far away, in a place they knew nothing of, a distant place beyond the confines of the known world . . .."
"Wiltshire," she said.
"Please don't mock," he said. "Cynicism doesn't suit you. Come outside and I'll show you."
He took the Bible with him and one of the postcards. The area of their land he led her to comprised the old orchard, a lawn, and the water garden, through which two spring-fed streams flowed. She saw that the lawn had been mown and the banks of the streams tidied up. It was very pretty, a lush mature garden in which unusual plants grew and where fruit trees against the old wall bore ripening plums and pears.
"There you see the river called Pison," he said, referring to his Bible. "That is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold." His eyes flashed. There was sweat on his upper lip. "And the name of the second river is Gihon, and the third Hiddekel, and the fourth river is Euphrates."
She could only see two small rivulets, not much more than trickles, flowing over English stones among English water buttercups. He turned and beckoned to her in his old peremptory way but his voice was still measured and gentle, as if he was explaining something obvious to a slow-witted child.
"There," he said. "The Tree of Life. Sometimes we call it the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." He pointed to it and led her up under its branches. A big old apple tree, laden with small green apples. She remembered that it had been in blossom when first she saw the house.
"Mustn't eat those, eh?"
His smile and his short bark of laughter frightened her. She felt entirely at a loss. This was the man she had been married to for twenty years, the practical, clever businessman. How had he known those words? How had he known where to look for this .. . this web of nonsense? She put out her hand and touched the tree. She hung onto it, leaned against it, for she was afraid she might faint.
"I wondered when I first discovered it," he said, "if we were being given a second chance."
She didn't know what he meant. She closed her eyes, bowed her head. When she felt she could breathe again and that strength was returning she looked for him, but he was gone. She made her way back to the house. Later, after he had gone to bed, she sat downstairs, wondering what to do. It couldn't be right for him to be left to go on like this. But in the morning when she woke and he woke, when they encountered each other on adjoining pillows, then across the breakfast table, he seemed his normal self. He talked about taking on a gardener, the place was too much for him alone. Would she like the dining room redecorated? She had said she disliked the wallpaper. And perhaps it was time to invite the neighbours—if you could call people living half a mile away neighbours. Have a small drinks party, acquaint themselves with the village.
She summoned up all the courage she had. "That was a game you were playing last evening, wasn't it? You weren't serious?"
He laughed. "You evidently didn't think I was." It was hardly an answer. "I dreamt of her again," he said. "She came in wearing that ghastly blue suit that showed her fat knees and told me to clear my desk. She was eating an apple. Did I tell you that?"
"In your dream, do you mean?"
He was instantly angry. "No, I don't mean that. In reality is what I mean. She came into my office with an apple in her hand. She was eating an apple. I told you."
She shook her head. He had never told her that. She would have remembered. Next day the new gardener started. She was afraid David would say something to him about the Garden of Eden. When some neighbours came in for drinks a week later she was afraid David would say something to them. He didn't. It seemed that conversation on this subject was reserved for her alone. With other people he was genial, bland, civilised. In the evenings, alone with her, he spent his time compiling a list of the plants indigenous to Eden—balm and pomegranate, coriander and hyssop. He took her into the fruit garden and showed her the fig tree that grew up against the wall, pointing out its hand-shaped leathery leaves and saying that they could stitch the leaves together and make themselves aprons.
She looked that up in Genesis and found the reference. Then she went to seek advice.
The doctor didn't take her seriously. Or he didn't take David's obsession seriously. He said he would review the tranquilizers he was already prescribing for David. And this he did—with startling effect. David's enthusiasm seemed to wane. He became quiet and preoccupied, busied himself in other areas of the grounds, returned to his old interest of reading biographies. He joined the golf club. He no longer spoke of the chief executive and her blue suit and her apple. The only thing that disquieted Rosemary was the snake.
"I've just seen an adder," he told her when he came in for his lunch. "Curled up under the fig tree."
She said nothing, just looked at him.
"It might have been a grass snake, I'm not sure, but it was certainly a snake."
"Is it still there?"
There came a flash of the bad temper she hadn't seen for weeks. "How do I know if it's still there? Come and see."
Not a snake, but a shed snakeskin.   Nothing could have made Rosemary happier. She was so certain the snake had been part of his delusion, but he had seen a real snake, or a real snake's skin. He was well again. It was over, whatever it had been.
The summer had been long and hot and the fruit crop was spectacular—first the raspberries and gooseberries, then peaches and plums. Rosemary made jam and jelly. She even bottled fruit the way her mother used to. None of it should be wasted. David picked the pears before they were ripe, wrapped each one individually in tissue paper, and stored them in boxes. The days were long and golden, the evenings mild, and the air scented with ripe fruit. David often walked round the grounds at dusk but that was the merest coincidence. It had nothing to do with the Lord God walking in the garden at the cool of the day.
The big tree was a Cox, David thought, a Cox's Orange Pippin, considered by many even today to be the finest English apple. It was laden with fruit. They used an apple picker with a ten-foot handle but they had to put a ladder up to reach the highest branches. Rosemary went up it because she was the lighter of them and the more agile. He held the ladder and she picked.
If her fears hadn't been allayed, if she hadn't put the whole business of the map and the Garden of Eden—and, come to that, the chief executive in her bright blue suit—behind her, she might have been more cautious. She might have been wary. She had forgotten that cryptic remark of his when he had said that they— meaning mankind?—might have been given a second chance. She had come to see his delusion as the temporary madness of a man humiliated and driven beyond endurance.
So she climbed down the ladder with her basket of shiny red and gold fruit and taking one in her hand, a flawless ripe apple, held it out to him and said, "Look at that. Isn't that absolutely perfect? Try it. Have a bite."
His face grew dark red and swollen. He shouted, "You won't do it a second time, woman. You won't bring evil into the world a second time!"
He lashed out at her with the apple picker, struck her on the side of the head, on the shoulder, again on her head. She fell to the ground and the apples spilled out and rolled everywhere. Her screams fetched the gardener who got there just in time, pulled David off, and wrested the bloodstained apple picker out of his hands.
Rosemary was in hospital for a long time, but not as long as David. When she was better she went to see him. He was in the day room, quiet and subdued, watching a game show on television. When he saw her he picked up the first weapon that came to hand, a table lamp, brandished it, and flung himself upon her, cursing her and crying that he would multiply her sorrow. They advised her not to come back and she never did.
She stayed in the house on her own. She liked it. After all, she had chosen it in the first place. But she took the maps of the Garden of Eden out of their frames and gave the frames to the village jumble sale. In the spring she had the apple tree cut down and put in a big fishpond where it had stood. Fed by the streams he had called Pison and Gihon, Hiddekel and Euphrates, it was an ideal home for her koi carp, which became the envy of the county.