Novels

The Scent of Water

The Scent of Water (1963) is, as the back cover promises, an enchanting book. How have I lived this long without ever even hearing of Elizabeth Goudge? Now that I have an acquaintance with her, I want to read more right away.

But I’m getting ahead of myself… First, in a nutshell, the story:

Mary Lindsay, around 50, inherits a country house after World War II from an aunt she barely knew. She feels compelled not to sell it, but to leave her comfortable London flat and live at The Laurels in the hamlet of Appleshaw, where she visited only once, for a few hours, as a child with her father. She uncovers the history of the place, gets acquainted with her neighbors in the close-knit little community, and pieces together the fuller picture of her aunt from journals she left behind.

I loved it, for several reasons. First, it’s deeply satisfying and comforting because it tackles some serious subjects: mental illness, marital struggle, blindness and suffering, encroaching urbanization and the loss of country life, compulsion, and plain complicated human relationships. These are potentially “modern” subjects, but they are not handled in the agonizingly introspective, slow-paced manner of many modern novels. The pace moves quickly, and we are given the decisions and events without having to endure the stream of minutia in the interior lives of the characters.

Second, it’s hopeful. Part of Mary’s journey into the country is spiritual; part is relational; part is anthropological. (She wants to experience rural England before it disappears entirely.) She, and the other characters in the novel, are mostly successful on all counts. The novel takes its title from a passage in the book of Job:

For there is hope of a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that the tender branch thereof will not cease. Though the root thereof wax old in the earth, and the stock thereof die in the ground; yet through the scent of water it will bud, and bring forth boughs like a plant.

Appleshaw, as blind veteran Paul Randall points out, has more of the scent of water than most places. It bodes well for the characters, and for the story.

Finally, this is a book about the past. Anyone who loves old houses, or old places, and the “secret garden-ish” magic that clings to them, will love getting lost in these pages. The house and gardens Mary inherits have a most interesting history, and the description invokes all the best of my own beloved old places: There’s my grandmother’s house with its two staircases and numerous nooks and crannies. There’s the library in the town where I grew up — a mansion complete with an ornate banister, creaking staircases, oodles of rooms, and a park surrounding it. And there’s the playhouse a cousin of my grandmother’s built for his daughter, who grew to adulthood and died of cancer before I ever met her. I still remember standing inside the tiny cottage as a child, staring at the orderly rows of beautiful dishes, the little table spread with its cloth, the child-sized hutch painted white, the latticed windows.

The Laurels is reached through a green door in a stone wall bordering the Appleshaw village green. The pathway to the house is shaded by a giant wisteria growing over a lattice. It has a conservatory. Its furniture and other treasures have stories. We are treated to the view from its windows, tours of its gardens, and tales of its history that made me want desperately to live there myself.

Alexander Pope spoke of “the genius of the place.” This novel explores the idea that a place can take on the spirit of its inhabitants in ways that outlast them. It’s a marvelous book, poetic and mystical in spots, and highly evocative of an era long past.