The Memory Garden (47 page)

The lounge was empty except for an elderly gentleman sitting in a corner reading a book and Carrie on a leather armchair, feet up, by a crackling wood fire. She tried to get up, but Mel stopped her, bending to kiss her instead.

‘Come and put yourself here,’ Carrie said, patting the arm of the fireside chair next to her, and Irina set about fetching them all tea.

‘Look at you all,’ said Mel, beaming at them. She noticed instantly that Matt stood close to Irina, the unconscious little looks and gestures that could mean only one thing.

‘You and Matt . . .?’ she whispered when Irina took Mel up to her room. A double bedroom with Edwardian-style furniture, it looked out over the valley, now dark except for points of light that meant other buildings.

‘You noticed,’ said Irina, smiling broadly.

‘How could I not? That’s simply marvellous.’

‘It happened slowly. We had to spend so much time together here and Matt . . . well, after Carrie became ill, he’s grown up, taken charge. He’s a lovely man, Mel. Strong but gentle.’

Mel nodded. There was a new air about him, that was certainly true. ‘Is he here all the time now? What’s happened to his shop work? And,’ she remembered, hoping he hadn’t abandoned it, ‘the photography?’

‘He gave up the shop. He enjoys the hotel now because Carrie lets him make decisions. He’s been taking photographs of Lamorna, though. I showed them to a gallery in Penzance and they’ve ordered some prints to sell.’

‘Oh, excellent. And what about Lana?’

‘Doing well. She got a distinction in her Grade Five, you know.’

‘That’s brilliant. But, I mean, does she mind about . . . you and Matt?’

‘Not really, no. She knows I can never be with her father again and she likes Matt. He tries to be her friend, not her daddy.’

Perhaps in the end this is what would work for Aimee, Mel thought. If she could just be Callum’s friend.

Something else occurred to her. ‘Does Greg know? About you and Matt, I mean.’

Irina’s expression darkened slightly. ‘I think Lana must have told him. He hasn’t said anything, though.’

‘How’s it going with Greg and Lana?’

‘Better than I even hoped, Mel. She went to him before Christmas for some days, but told him she wanted to be here for Christmas Day, so he brought her down again. He is different now, more gentle, like a wild animal tamed.’

‘I can imagine!’ Mel walked over to the window to pull the curtains across but stood watching for a moment as the headlights of a car swept over the road below, illuminating walls and trees. Up the valley only a short distance away lay Merryn, waiting, as she was, for Patrick to come home.

‘And how has Patrick been?’ she asked Irina, a catch in her voice.

‘He’s missed you,’ said Irina, shaking her head sadly. ‘I don’t know what happened between you, why you left like that, but he’s been through a terrible time. There were weeks when we hardly saw him. He was working, he told us. Or busy with the house. The roof’s finished, you know, but the garden is still a mess.’

‘It wasn’t the right time for us back then,’ said Mel.

‘Perhaps it is now. Just as it was for me and Matt.’

‘Perhaps,’ Mel whispered. ‘I hope so.’

The next morning, she woke to the sound of rain pattering on the window. She lifted the curtain to see that the valley was obscured by rolling fog.

By the time she had had breakfast and helped tidy away – ‘You’ve got to let me earn my keep somehow,’ she told Matt, who had protested at her even lifting a finger in the kitchen – the mist had lifted slightly. She pulled on her coat and walked down the narrow lane to the road and turned up the hill towards Merryn. Patrick wouldn’t be back until the afternoon, but she couldn’t resist going to look.

The air was chilly, but not icy. It would be a warm wet New Year and the lichen-covered trees dripped all around. By the time she reached the drive that led down to the Gardener’s Cottage, the cloud was lifting from the valley, but she hesitated. It felt wrong, somehow, sneaking in the back of the Hall. She couldn’t imagine that Patrick had re-let the cottage, but what happened if he had and she was intruding on a stranger’s privacy? She climbed further up the hill to the old gateposts where the sign
erryn Hal
still hung at exactly the same angle as she had first seen it eight months ago.

She stood looking down the drive and realised with a pang that little else was the same. The front gardens were a desolate wasteland, trees sawn down and cut up where they lay, the stumps ripped from the ground leaving vast rain-filled craters. Everywhere caterpillar tracks scarred the earth as though a battalion of tanks had driven across the land. The shelterbelts around the edge remained, as did a great copper beech to the right of the path, but the self-seeded sycamore and ash, and much of the tangle of vegetation had gone.

The house itself appeared like a wounded soldier, bandaged and plastered and left in a bathchair to dream away his remaining days. The new slate-tiled roof looked too pristine, one side of the house was still splinted with scaffolding, and the granite walls had been stripped of creeper and showed unseemly blotches of white where damage had been made good.

It wasn’t her Merryn any more. Suddenly she couldn’t stand it, couldn’t bear the thought of investigating further – what might she find? She turned and fled back to the hotel.

Only as the gloomy day started to sink into darkness did she return to see his sparkling blue car parked on the courtyard. He was home. And so, she hoped, was she. Would Cornwall be where she would find herself again?

‘What are you doing here?’

He was running, zig-zagging down the puddled drive towards her.

‘Patrick. I’m sorry, perhaps I should have warned you. Do you mind?’ she called, suddenly nervous.

Then he reached her and his arms were around her, crushing her; his lips pressed against her face, covering her in kisses, made her sure.

‘Mind? You amazing, crazy woman. How could I possibly mind?’

They stumbled together up the drive to the house.

‘I can’t believe you’re here. I simply can’t believe it.’ She had never heard such joy in his voice. ‘What finally made you come?’

She forced him to stop so she could look at him again. He was tanned from skiing, but beneath the happiness that illuminated his whole face she could see strain etched. She traced the lines around his eyes, smoothed the worry from his forehead.

‘It was the flowers,’ she murmured. ‘It was as though they were calling me. They whispered a thousand words.’

‘All of them true,’ he said, pulling her to him again and kissing her very thoroughly. ‘Mel, I love you, I’m sorry I never told you that properly before. I have missed you so much. I’d almost given up hope . . .’

‘You knew I’d come when the moment was right', she said. ‘Surely you didn’t doubt me?’

‘Not really, not underneath. Every time I lost faith I’d pull your letter out of my wallet – look, here it is, it’s practically fallen apart! And then your lovely card came and I knew everything would be all right. So I sent the flowers.’

They were both speaking openly at last, Mel realised joyfully, as neither of them had really done before. They reached the courtyard and stopped to cling together again. When they finally separated, Mel stared back the way they had come.

‘The front garden is, well . . . different.’ They contemplated the morass of mud and fallen trees.

‘It looks awful, I agree,’ he said, ‘Like No Man’s Land. But don’t worry – I’ve got plans, you see. I’ll show you the rest of the place if you like. There’s less changed there.’

Indeed, the other parts of the garden were little altered from the previous August but lay brown, dripping wet and uninviting. Only, here and there, under the trees, behind the Gardener’s Cottage, snowdrops and daffodils were starting to show.

‘Let’s hope there isn’t a frost,’ Mel commented. ‘You talked about plans – what are they?’

‘I’m hoping for a start that they include you,’ Patrick said.

‘Oh, Patrick.’

They had to stop again while they settled that point in another passionate kiss.

‘There’s an awful lot to sort out, of course,’ she said later, as they lay wrapped in blankets on the drawing-room sofa before a blazing fire.

‘There’s plenty of time for all that,’ murmured Patrick into her neck.

‘What were you saying about plans?’

‘Mmm? Oh, for the garden.’

‘The garden? I thought you meant about us.’

‘The garden
and
us. Mel, darling, despite your general perfection, you have one teeny weeny little fault that I’m going to have to correct.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You talk too much at the wrong moment.’

‘Mmm
mmm
.’

That evening they talked together over a frugal supper Patrick had cobbled together.

‘There’s so much here to connect us to the past, isn’t there?’ Mel said dreamily. ‘We’ve found so many clues – to Pearl and her story not least of all.’

‘It is a garden of memories, isn’t it?’ said Patrick.

‘But not a sad one. Not like a garden of remembrance for the dead.’

‘Which leads me on to another aspect of my plan. Maybe we could open an art gallery here. Tourists would come to see the garden and the paintings.’
‘What a fantastic idea! We could show Matt’s photographs. And Pearl’s pictures. Although . . .’ Mel explained about meeting Ann and how the paintings might morally at least belong to Pearl’s descendants. ‘But perhaps they’d allow the paintings to be shown,’ she finished. ‘And, Patrick, there’s something else I haven’t told you. My editor phoned the other night.’
‘She likes the book?’
‘She loves it. In fact, they want me to think about writing another, about the St Ives group. You know, Ben and Winifred Nicolson, Barbara Hepworth, that lot.’
‘Mel, that’s fantastic.’ She was silent for a moment, her mind in turmoil. Would all this really be right for her, giving up her job to the awful Rowena, leaving her lovely flat, her life in London, to come down here to write, maybe find a teaching post? She still didn’t know.
Patrick seemed to sense her confusion for he whispered, ‘There’s plenty of time, you know, all the time in the world to sort things out in a way that makes us both happy. The important thing is that we’re together.’
‘Pearl didn’t have time, did she? Dying so young.’
‘No.’ His response was sober. ‘But maybe she found happiness, married to a kind man and with a child.’
‘I wish we knew that, I really wish we did,’ said Mel, and told Patrick about the dream she had had, her last night in the Gardener’s Cottage. ‘I’m sure it was her I sensed. She seemed utterly desolate.’
‘Maybe that passed. Maybe she got through it.’
‘That’s what her grandson, Richard, thinks. Patrick, I want so much to believe it was true.’

***

July 1919

Pearl was sitting on a kitchen chair in the garden shelling peas. It was the late afternoon of a perfect July day and she felt well, for the first time since last year’s illness.

It was peaceful sitting here, listening to the birds and the sound of Peter and the miller’s boy playing soldiers down the garden. The fresh green of the peas against the white bowl pleased her, as did the cool smooth feel of the inside of the pods. A ladybird glowed red against light green as it negotiated its way over the peas in their bowl, like a child across boulders on the shoreline. How would she paint that green? A white wash underneath could make it glow with life, she was thinking, when a slight noise – metal on stone – made her look up.

John was up near the Hall. He had propped his hoe against the wall and now crouched down to pick up something from the ground. Whatever it was, he held it gently cupped in his hands. She watched as he came across the lawn towards her. His hair was silver now, but thick and glossy against skin as brown as an acorn. So tall and broad, yet so tender towards whatever he carried. Something moved in her throat. Desire.

He came near and she was acutely aware of him, the warmth of his body, the thick hair on his arms, the sweat beading on his collarbone where his shirt gaped open. He carried a small white bird, she saw.

‘Is it dead?’

‘There’s a heartbeat, but very faint and fast,’ he said. ‘It’s stunned.'

‘What bird is it, John?’

He shrugged. ‘Looks like a blackbird.’

‘But it’s white.’

‘Aye.’

She put out a finger and stroked the top of its head. Its eyes were slits. After a moment, it made a feeble struggling movement.
John took two strides over to a flowerbed and laid the bird under a shrub. Its struggles became stronger and as they watched , it recovered and after a while took off, high and away into the trees.
‘Well now,’ said John, stealing one of her peas and laughing as she slapped him. He set off back to his work, and she watched his receding figure with overwhelming tenderness.
That night, Pearl lay between the soft sheets, turning over the events of the day in her mind, marvelling at these new feelings. Tenderness, desire. She heard John’s tread on the stairs, soft so as not to wake the boy, then the door of their room opened and he shuffled about in the light of his candle, readying himself for bed.
John, her husband. Peter’s father, in truth, for he loved the boy as his own. She owed John everything, she had recognised that for a long time now. She had come to love him, her love a gentle, frail thing, had submitted quietly to his caresses over the years, had cradled his spent body after he was done.
But this time, as he lifted the sheet and slid in heavily beside her, turned towards her, for the first time it was she who reached out to him, began to awaken his desire. They had never spoken of love, but tonight she would make sure they did. It was time.

Author’s Note

Until the middle of the nineteenth century and the construction of the London to Penzance railway line, Cornwall was effectively detached from the rest of the UK. With the trains came tourism and with tourism came the artists. The nucleus of painters who settled around the fishing village of Newlyn after 1870 worked in a distinct style, eschewing pretty landscapes for the portrayal of ordinary Cornish people at home and work, in tragedy and joy, with a sympathetic realism that impressed critics and public alike. Among them were Stanhope Forbes and his wife Elizabeth, Thomas and Caroline Gotch, Charles Walter Simpson and Norman Garstin. They formed a close but constantly replenished social group whose artists, both male and female, produced work of equal quality.