The Rose Garden (4 page)

‘
Do you know,’ I said to Mark, ‘I think I’m getting drunk.’

We were still sitting on the cool ground at the summit of the hill with all the old stones of the Beacon tumbled round us, giving us some shelter from the strengthened wind that blew across the waving grass and wildflowers.

I looked down at my paper cup. ‘What do you call this stuff again?’

‘Scrumpy.’

‘Scrumpy.’ I’d have to remember that name and avoid it in future, I thought. It came on at first like common apple cider, and then suddenly you realized you were, ‘Definitely getting drunk,’ I said. ‘You have the rest.’

Without a word he poured the bottle’s dregs into his own cup and sat back and leaned his elbows on the table rock, and looked as I was looking down the hillside to the sea. Like me, he seemed to be in no great hurry to go anywhere.

As if he’d read my thoughts, he asked, ‘How long till you have to go back?’

‘I don’t, actually.’ Far over the water the tiny white speck of a gull wheeled and languidly dipped and I followed its flight with my faintly blurred gaze. ‘I don’t have a job or apartment, I gave them both up. It’s not home for me there anymore, not since…’ Letting the words trail off, I gave a shrug. ‘When Bill gave me those ashes, I had to think hard, really think, about where I should scatter them. Where she belonged. And it got me to thinking where
I
belonged, now that she’s gone. I have friends in L.A., but not real friends, you know? Not the kind you can really depend on. And where I was living… well, it was all right, but it just wasn’t… just wasn’t…’

‘Home?’

‘No.’ It was comforting to know he understood. ‘I thought I might look round here for a property to rent. A little cottage, maybe.’

‘Everything around here will be full up for the summer,’ was his guess. Then when he saw my disappointment he went on, ‘But come the autumn you could have your pick of properties, and meantime you can stay right where you are, with us.’

‘Oh, Mark, I couldn’t. That would be imposing.’

‘Why? We have the room,’ he pointed out. ‘You always used to come and stay the summer.’

His tone had taken on a stubborn edge that I recalled enough to know I wouldn’t win the argument, and so I simply told him, ‘Well, you’d have to let me pay you then.’

‘The hell I would.’

‘I have the money, Mark. I have more money than I need. I can’t just sit here like a sponge and let you feed me and take care of me when…’ Just in time I caught myself, remembering I wasn’t meant to know about Trelowarth being in financial difficulty.

Mark glanced sideways. ‘When what?’

‘Nothing.’

Silence dropped between us like a stone. I felt his gaze grow keener. ‘What has Susan told you?’

‘Nothing.’

I had never been much good at lying and I knew it, but he didn’t press the point, and after studying my face a moment longer he looked back towards the sea again and told me, ‘Friends don’t pay.’

There was no way of getting round that, so I took a different tack. ‘Then let me pay in kind.’ I paused a moment, trying through the growing haze of drink to organize my argument, both because I had only just thought of it and because all of a sudden it struck me as something that truly appealed to me, something I’d even enjoy. ‘I could help Susan with her tearoom project, help her get it off the ground.’

‘Oh, right. That’s all I need.’

‘You’ve seen her plans?’

‘You think I’ve had a choice?’

I said, ‘I like them.’

‘Do you?’ It was more a comment, really, than a question, but I answered.

‘Yes. She seems to have it all in hand, she’s thought it through.’

‘I don’t doubt that.’ His mouth curved, briefly. ‘She gets that from our mother. My dad was the one who had all the ideas, but Mum was the person who saw things got done.’

He’d remember his mother, of course. He’d been eleven when she died, whereas Susan had still been a baby and I’d just started nursery school. My earliest memories went no further back than his stepmother, Claire, and Claire had always been so wonderful I’d never given much thought to the woman who’d preceded her.

‘My dad was rudderless when Mum died. It’s a good thing he met Claire; she really set him on his course again.’ Mark’s eyes crinkled faintly with fondness. ‘She’s a different sort of woman than my mum was, though, is Claire.’

‘Well, she’s an artist.’

‘That she is. So was your sister,’ he informed me. ‘Even back when we were young, before she ever started acting, she still had that spirit in her, same as Claire. They need the space to spread their wings. Like butterflies.’ He squinted at the brightness of the sea as he looked westward, where the restless wind had blown Katrina’s ashes. ‘Ever try to hold a butterfly? It can’t be done. You damage them,’ he said. ‘As gentle as you try to be, you take the powder from their wings and they won’t ever fly the same. It’s kinder just to let them go.’

I looked at him, and asked, because I’d always wondered, ‘Is that why you stopped writing to Katrina?’

‘She had bigger wings than most,’ he said. ‘She needed room to use them, and she couldn’t do that here, now, could she? Anyway, it worked out for the best. She found her husband. They seemed happy.’

‘Yes, they were.’

‘Then that’s all right.’

We fell to silence once again and might have gone on sitting there all afternoon if overhead the clouds had not begun to thicken and to threaten rain.

Mark stood first, more steady on his feet than me, and reached a hand to help me up. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’d best head back.’

He carried the now empty box for me, walking a few steps ahead down the field. Getting over the stile in the pasture fence took a bit more concentration this time, I couldn’t get my legs and hands to coordinate in quite the same way as before and I nearly flipped headfirst down into the dirt, but luckily Mark didn’t see that. Recovering my balance, I followed him carefully into the woods.

It was cool in here, quiet with ferns and the thick press of trees, and all the little flowers that I hadn’t noticed coming up, but that I noticed now since I was keeping such a close watch on my feet and where they landed. There were little white wildflowers close by the edge of the path, and I wanted to ask Mark their name, but I suspected that he’d just come back with something long and Latin, like he always used to do. Show Mark something as lovely as a tiny star of Bethlehem, and he would take one look at it and without blinking say it was an
Ornithogalum umbellatum
. No, it had been my mother who had given me the names of all the grasses and the flowers I had brought back from my afternoon adventures in the woods and fields. I still remembered some of the old names she’d taught me—tailor’s needles, feather-bow, penny-cake, and ladies’ smock.

Ladies’ smock used to be easy to find at this time of the year. I was looking for some when we came to the clearing where Claire’s cottage sat with its windows wide open and welcoming. We hadn’t bothered stopping in to see her when we’d come through here the first time, on our way up to the Beacon, because what we had gone up there to do had been a private sort of pilgrimage for both of us. But it would never do to pass Claire’s cottage twice and not stop long enough to say hello.

Mark went to knock but got no answer.

‘She’s gone out,’ I guessed.

‘Most likely.’ Still, he took his own keys out and stepped inside and called out from the entryway, then had a quick look round to reassure himself she wasn’t lying ill or injured somewhere. ‘Gone off sketching something, probably,’ he gave his final verdict as he reappeared. ‘She does it all the time.’ Glancing up at the sky he said, ‘I ought to get her windows shut before this rain starts. You go on, I’ll catch you up. No need for us both to get soaked.’

The first splat of a raindrop on my shoulder helped convince me.

I moved quickly through the trees—a little too quickly, perhaps, because before I’d made it halfway through I started feeling dizzy so I stopped and briefly closed my eyes, recovering my balance. When I opened them again the woods became a blur of green and brown and quiet shadows. Damn the Scrumpy, I thought. It was muddling my thoughts and confusing my vision.

A tree a short distance in front of me went all unfocused, dividing in two. And there suddenly seemed to be two paths as well, one I didn’t remember that angled away to the cliffs. I heard footsteps coming up behind me and I turned, expecting Mark, but there was no one there.

It must have been an echo, I decided, because here was Mark just coming into view now on the path, and looking slightly blurred as well until I focused with an effort. Seeing me standing there seemed to surprise him. He turned his collar up against the damp wind shaking through the leaves and asked me, ‘Something wrong?’

‘No, not at all.’ I stood as steadily as I was able, not wanting to let on how much the Scrumpy had affected me. ‘It’s just that I couldn’t remember which path to take.’

He laughed at that—the first time I had heard him laugh since I’d been back, and turned me round so I could see with my own eyes the way through the trees. ‘There is only the one path, you know.’

There seemed little point in arguing. I simply let him take my hand as he had done when I was small, and as we came out of the woods the rain came on in earnest and we made a breathless run for it across the rising field towards the house.

***

The dogs had been out in the garden as well. They sat lined up like penitents in the back corridor while Claire, with mop in hand, dealt with the crisscrossing paw tracks that muddied the floor. The corridor smelt of stone and plaster, and the rubber of old boots left drying underneath the rows of hooks that held a heaped array of well-used coats and cardigans. As Mark and I came diving in the door, wet through and stamping mud from our own feet, Claire gave us both a look.

‘Not one more step,’ she warned us, ‘till you’ve taken off those boots. I’m nearly finished, I don’t want to have to do this over.’

As Mark bent to his laces the dogs swarmed him happily, pleased he’d come down to their level. He fended them off as he told Claire, ‘You don’t need to do it at all. I’ll take care of it.’

But there was no breaking the long years of habit. She twisted the mop in its bucket of hot water, wringing it out and then slapping it onto the flagstones in front of the dogs. ‘And you lot,’ she said, as she swished past them, ‘can stay where you are, till your feet dry.’

I could have sworn the dogs snickered, the way men will nudge one another and wink when their wives tell them off. Claire had noticed it too, and she gave them a withering look that made the setter and the Labrador lie down, pretending submission. The cocker spaniel and the little mongrel, Samson, stayed near Mark and would have followed him in defiance of Claire’s orders if he hadn’t told them both to stay. They whined a token protest, but they did as they’d been told.

Mark said, good-naturedly, ‘
My
feet wouldn’t be wet at all, if I hadn’t had to stop and close your windows.’

‘Did I leave them open? Sorry.’ Thanking him, she glanced towards the windows just behind him as he straightened, but they both were tightly shut.

This was the part of the house that we children had passed through most often—the workaday, less showy side of Trelowarth. The section we were in now jutted farthest back into the yard—on one side of the corridor two windows and the door faced out across the yard itself, while on the other side the laundry room and office nestled side by side, their doorways all but hidden in among the hanging coats.

I left my own boots with their heels lined up against the wall, the way Claire liked them, and led the way round past the narrow back staircase that dropped like a chute from the old servants’ quarters above, and then up the one uneven step to the kitchen.

Mark brought the box with him and asked where I wanted it.

‘Anywhere’s fine.’ It was only a box now, with nothing inside.

Claire, who’d followed behind us, asked, ‘How did it go?’ in a tone that, to anyone else, might have sounded as though she were asking an everyday question.

I said, ‘It was perfect, thanks.’

Mark put in, ‘Eva got drunk.’

‘I did not.’

‘Get over it, you said yourself you were.’ His grin was, like his stepmother’s tone of voice, designed to even out the day’s emotions. ‘You still are. You ought to see your eyes.’

‘Well, if they’re anything like yours,’ I said, ‘I guess I’ll need some coffee.’

‘Guess you will. I’ll make some, shall I?’ And he headed for the kettle with an amiable purpose.

I was moving much more slowly, and Claire came to take my elbow. ‘What on earth were you two drinking?’

‘Scrumpy.’

‘Ah. Then you’ll be needing to sit down, darling.’

She took me through into the big front room that we had always called the library, because of all the bookshelves, and she saw me seated next to the piano, and then Mark came, with coffee for us all, and slouched into the sofa at my side. His hair was curling as it dried, and he looked so much like the boy he’d been once that it seemed incredible to me so many years had passed since I’d last sat in here, like this. With them.

Claire’s mind had been traveling on the same line. ‘I feel I ought to send you straight upstairs to have a bath,’ she told me.

‘I don’t think I’d manage the stairs, at the moment.’ I leaned my head back on the cushions, then brought it back upright to stop it from spinning as Claire asked where we’d taken the ashes.

Mark answered. ‘The Beacon.’

If Claire understood the full meaning of that, she gave no indication. She only said, ‘Oh yes, it’s lovely up there.’

‘It was, today,’ he said. ‘Where’s Sue?’

‘I’m here,’ said Susan, coming in. She stopped inside the doorway, looked from Mark to me. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ Mark said, ‘but Eva’s had too much to drink.’

I sighed. ‘I have not. Anyway, you can talk. Look at the state of you.’

‘I’m not the one seeing double, now am I?’

Claire’s voice was calm. ‘Children.’

Susan came all the way into the room and sat down on my other side, curious. ‘Who’s seeing double?’