The Rose Garden (35 page)

I saw the misting of her eyes, the strange emotion of her smile, the way she watched Paul watch the Welsh girl slide his shirt around her shoulders, and it all made sudden sense.

But still, it seemed so unbelievable that I could only clear my throat and say to Claire, ‘That’s just the way it happened with your grandparents.’

She turned her head and turned her smile on me, and then I knew beyond all doubt.

‘My dear.’ Her voice was quiet, meant for me alone, a confidence she must have felt quite sure I’d understand. ‘They
are
my grandparents.’

The rain had stopped. From time to time the wind chased through the taller trees that edged the wood around Claire’s small back garden, shaking leaves and letting loose a scattered showering of water droplets, sparkling as they fell like little diamonds in the spears of sunlight breaking through the branches and the ever-shifting clouds.

Claire came out with two mugs of tea and handed one to me and edged her chair around so that, like mine, it faced the little sundial with its butterfly’s bronze wings forever poised for flight.

We sat there for a moment saying nothing while a bird sang somewhere, steadily, within the cooler shadows of the wood.

Then I said, ‘So you knew who he was.’

‘Paul? Oh yes. From the moment I saw him. And my grandmother too. Of course I wasn’t
sure
I’d get to see the moment when they met, I wasn’t certain of the date, but I did hope…’ She glanced at me. ‘I’m sorry, darling, that I haven’t been more help to you this summer, but I thought it best to let you find your own way through, without my interference.’

‘But you did know what was happening.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It happened much the same for me, although you travel from this time into the past, while this time
is
the past, to me.’ Her gaze had settled calmly on the sundial, and she spoke as though we were discussing something very commonplace. ‘The first time that I traveled back to this time, I was young, like you. Alone, like you. My parents had divorced, you see, and both of them had taken up with new people and suddenly there I was, with stepbrothers and stepsisters and our family home sold, and no place that was really my own anymore, and I began to feel a great nostalgia for the days when I’d come down here as a child, when both my grandparents were still alive and living at St Non’s. When life was simpler.’ Stretching out her legs, she took a sip of tea before continuing, ‘I was struggling along on my own as an artist by then, no real ties or commitments to bind me to anywhere, so I came down into this part of Cornwall on holiday and spent a lovely fortnight rediscovering the place, and that of course,’ she finished off, ‘meant coming to Trelowarth, for a cream tea at the Cloutie Tree.’

She’d always loved to hear the story of the day her grandparents had met, and over the course of her own visits to them they’d formed a tradition of making a pilgrimage out to Trelowarth to share a cream tea.

‘It wasn’t the same,’ she said, ‘with them not there, but nonetheless it was a brilliant summer day and all the roses were in bloom and I stayed afterwards and wandered through the gardens as we’d always done. My grandmother had loved the Quiet Garden best of all, so I went up and had a little moment there, communing with her spirit. But when I was done and ready to come out again, I couldn’t find the path.’

She had been more perplexed than panicked. It felt strange to lose her bearings in a place she’d known so well. Eventually, she’d found the path—not where she’d thought it ought to be, but she did find it, and began to make her way back down towards the Cloutie Tree, a bit disoriented, only to discover that the tearoom wasn’t there.

‘There wasn’t even a greenhouse. I thought I was losing my mind,’ she confessed, ‘as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.’

I managed a small smile. ‘Yes. What did you do?’

‘Well, I
did
panic then. I turned tail like a coward and ran to the house and I banged at the door until somebody answered. That was when I met your Uncle George.’ Recalling that meeting, she said, ‘I was lucky he didn’t call in the authorities right there and then, and have them drag me off to Broadmoor. I know I must have sounded like a madwoman. But George… well, he was always kind to strays.’ He’d brought Claire in and listened to her tale and made her tea.

‘I’m not sure where the children were,’ she said. ‘Mark must have been at school, and Susan was most likely upstairs napping.’

He’d been widowed for a year by then, though at the time she hadn’t known that. She’d been too caught up in her own strange predicament to notice much of anything.

I knew just how she’d felt.

‘Then someone telephoned—the telephone was in the hall, I think, and George went off to answer it, and then…’ She paused, as though unable to describe exactly what had happened next, before it seemed to strike her that with me, the process didn’t need describing, so she simply said, ‘And there I was again, back where I’d started, in the Quiet Garden.’

Everything was back where it was meant to be. The tearoom was in its place again, and she had gone inside to settle her bewildered nerves with one more pot of tea. After an hour in the Cloutie Tree amid the normal ebb and flow of patrons and inconsequential chatter, she’d convinced herself that what had happened must have been a daydream, an imagining.

But still, she’d packed her car up hastily that afternoon and cancelled her hotel and driven north across the moors to switch the subject of her paintings to the wilder-looking coastline on the other side of Cornwall, up near Boscastle.

Three months had passed before she’d found the nerve to venture back.

‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it,’ she told me. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking of
him
. I’d begun to have dreams…’

It was autumn, by that time. The tourists had mostly departed, the streets of Polgelly were quiet, and up at Trelowarth the roses were reaching the end of their season, the gardens being readied for the winter.

She’d gone right up and knocked at the door of the house. ‘I’d decided, you see, that the only way to get the whole episode out of my head would be to prove to myself that it couldn’t have happened.’ And as she’d expected, the door of Trelowarth was opened by somebody else—a man not unlike George in appearance, but with reddish hair and a leaner build. ‘He was quite pleasant. I asked after George and he told me the only George Hallett he knew was his grandfather, and he’d been dead a long time.’

I felt my eyes widen. ‘His grandfather? Then he was—’

‘Mark’s eldest,’ Claire supplied. ‘Stephen. A charming man. Very artistic he was, with these gardens, though all of Mark’s children were artists in their own way. Something they got from their mother.’

‘Felicity.’

‘Yes.’

I was pleased by that.

Unseen, the wind stirred the trees at the edge of the garden and shook loose a new spray of lingering raindrops that fell near our feet and chased over the face of the sundial. The butterfly, frozen in bronze, stayed unmoving, still counting its moments.

Claire settled deeper in her chair and took another sip of tea. ‘After talking to Stephen, I didn’t know what to believe. What I’d seen. I only knew that there was something… something pulling me… no, pulling is perhaps too strong a word. Something inviting me to stay here. I went down into Polgelly to the pub to have some lunch. To think. And there, two tables over, was a man, a very old man, and he watched me for a little while, and then he just came over with his pint and sat right down and introduced himself.’

He’d thoroughly disarmed her with his easygoing attitude and they’d begun to talk, about her painting and her grandparents and all that she remembered of St Non’s.

‘And then our talk turned to Trelowarth and the gardens and he told me that his wife had been a Hallett, and through her he had inherited a cottage on the grounds and if I wanted I could have it for the winter, do my work there. So—’

She spread her hands, and at the gesture I looked round.

‘
This
cottage?’

‘Yes.’

‘So this was home for you in your own time, as well.’

Claire gave a nod. ‘It still is, come to that. I still go back and forth, my dear. Not quite as often, anymore. The process seems to slow with age, but even so it’s really not a thing one can control.’

Of course
, I thought, and with a dawning sense of understanding I recalled what Mark had told me on the day we’d argued in the field: ‘When I was young,’ he’d said, ‘Claire used to go away for days, for weeks, sometimes, to do her work… She still does, every now and then…’

I said, ‘It can’t be easy, though, with Uncle George gone.’

‘It was never easy.’

When all this had begun back in her own time, for the first few weeks after she’d moved her things into the cottage nothing untoward had happened. And then one day while walking in the gardens she’d heard voices, and passing the half-open door in the high wall she’d found Mark and George pruning roses.

George had smiled at her. ‘Hello,’ he’d said. ‘You came back.’

She’d been lost after that.

But it hadn’t been easy.

‘It was,’ she said, ‘a very different life than I was used to. You think women have achieved things now, you want to wait and see what’s yet to come. And then of course there were the children and their feelings to consider, and the more I fell in love with George the more it all became so very complicated.’

In the woods the bird had stopped its song. Some little creature rustled briefly in the undergrowth and then was gone, and all I heard then was the whisper of the wind among the leaves and further off the plaintive crying of a gull above the shore.

‘I went away,’ she told me quietly. ‘I found it all too much, you see, and once I had returned to my own time I left my cottage and I went away to London.’

She had stayed away for nearly a full year.

‘What brought you back?’ I asked.

Her answer was a simple one. ‘I loved him.’

We sat quietly together in the garden for a moment while I turned this over in my mind, and then she shook the memories off and looked at me.

‘Do you feel that you can talk about it yet, my dear? I rather think your story might be more exciting than my own.’

‘Oh? Why is that?’

‘Because.’ She reached across and lightly touched my hand. My left hand. ‘Your ring is on a different finger now, and knowing you, that is no accident,’ she said. ‘You’ve taken a rare interest in the smugglers of Polgelly. And the coat you wore when you came back last night was stained with blood.’ Her hand moved up to smooth the hair back from my swollen cheekbone. ‘Then there’s this. He didn’t do that, did he?’

‘Who?’

‘The man you’ve married.’

I had always marveled at how Claire could just accept things, never doubting, taking everything in her stride, and now I finally knew the reason for it. Nothing would surprise her, I thought, after what she’d lived herself.

I shook my head and told her, ‘No. He would never hit me.’

And I settled back and told her all of it, beginning where we’d started once before here in this garden, with the voices in the next room and the path that wasn’t there.

It took some time to tell it properly. Enough time that we’d gone through one more pot of tea and half a plate of sandwiches before, with difficulty, haltingly, I reached the point where I had stabbed the constable.

‘And good for you,’ was Claire’s pronouncement. ‘What a bastard.’

‘Yes, well let’s just hope he wasn’t meant to father somebody important later on.’

Claire didn’t think it very likely. ‘Anyway, your actions can’t change history, as you said.’

‘That’s Daniel’s theory,’ I corrected her. ‘He thinks that what has happened is already cast in stone and can’t be changed. That’s why I couldn’t stop Jack being shot and killed, no matter what I did.’ That knowledge didn’t make it easier to say the words. ‘It was his time to die.’

Claire’s quiet glance was comforting. ‘He seems a very clever man, your Daniel.’

‘Yes.’ Which brought to mind another theory Daniel and I shared. ‘Claire?’

‘Yes, darling?’

‘When you went away that time, and stayed away so long,’ I asked, ‘what happened? I mean, did you travel back in time at all?’

She shook her head. ‘No. When I wasn’t at Trelowarth, nothing happened.’

‘And when you
were
here,’ I pressed further, ‘did you ever travel back in time when you were in Polgelly or St Non’s?’

‘No. Only here.’

I felt a twist of hope. ‘So then it
is
tied to Trelowarth.’

Claire agreed that it did seem to be. ‘Perhaps it has something to do with Felicity’s ley lines.’

I frowned. ‘But why us, though? Why are only the two of us affected? Why not Susan or Felicity or—’

‘Darling, it’s a mystery, and it likely will remain one. I don’t know what brought your Uncle George and I together, and I doubt I ever will. He called to me, somehow,’ she said. ‘That’s all I truly know. He called to me, or else I called to him.’ The sun was setting now, the shadows growing longer on the sundial as she looked at it serenely. ‘We were both a little lost, I think, and so we found each other. How does anyone find anyone?’

I didn’t have the answer. I was thinking about Daniel, lonely after losing Ann, and of myself without Katrina, looking desperately for somewhere to belong. Which one of us, I wondered, had first called out to the other across time?

I watched the sundial too, and drew a breath that caught a little in the place above my heart. ‘But it’s so hard,’ I said. ‘I mean, what if I never do go back again? What if the whole thing just stops or…’ My next breath caught more painfully.

I thought of Fergal, telling me he wouldn’t ever want to know his future. ‘Nor should anyone,’ he’d told me, ‘know what lies in store for someone else, for that would be a burden, would it not?’ If he were here, I thought, I could have told him it was just as great a burden, sometimes,
not
to know.

I said as much to Claire. ‘It’s just so hard,’ I said, ‘not knowing what will happen.’

She looked at me, and in the fading light her eyes were filled with understanding and with sympathy. And knowledge.

And she asked me, ‘Shall I tell you?’