The Insistent Garden
Page 29
My father sat at the table. A milk bottle lay in front of him, a single rose balanced within its neck. He adjusted its petals with trembling fingers, laid his hand back down on the table and looked towards me.
But I did not want it. Not yet. I took Alden’s hand as we turned and went back into the hall. A chair scraped on the kitchen tiles behind us but I did not look back. I opened the front door and we paused on the threshold but still I did not look back. I looked for the blue tree on the horizon. My blue tree. I released Alden’s hand and walked down the path towards it.
34 Ethrington Street
Billingsford,
Northamptonshire
October 5th 1969
Dear Gill,
Sorry I didn’t answer your letter. I’ve been trying to get my head round all the goings on round here. I’m not sure where to begin. But, you know what Gill, it’s not a beginning I’m on about, it’s an end. Everyone’s talking about it. The butcher for one, ran up the hill and banged on my door before I’d even got the sign turned round. Turns out Aunt Vivian isn’t just a rotten aunt, she’s a killer, Yes, Gill, that woman killed Edith’s mother with a slug of weedkiller. Accidentally on purpose, of course. Then she went and blamed it on the bloke next door. A Mr. Black. No wonder she kept turning up every other day, making sure she kept her story going. I know we never warmed to her, but I didn’t realize I had a murderer going through my special offers. She’s been taken in by the police for questioning — I can just see her pulling one of those stripy prison shirts over her head, can’t you? Anyway, I know you’re dying to ask, how did all this come out? The woman from the plant nursery, the one who buys all the fags, gave the game away. I’ve only got the tail of the story so far but it seems she sold the poison to Vivian. Suppose it might not be too long before she’s trying on stripy shirts too.
So where’s Edith in all this, I hear you wondering. Edith’s gone. Yes, she walked out after the barny at the house and she’s gone. Can’t blame her, can you? Seems like people are out looking for her. I expect the police are crossing the fields in lines like on the telly. But you know what Gill, I’m no palm reader or anything, but I’m not worried. I think she’s gone to do what any girl her age should have been doing. Gone to live her life.
Can’t interest you in a Saturday job, can I?
Jean
The author gratefully acknowledges use of extracts from the following books and poems:
ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCH-YARD Thomas Gray (1750)
ELYSIUM IS AS FAR AS TO — Emily Dickinson (1860)
SNOWSHILL MANOR — Wall engraving
THE LADY OF SHALOTT — Lord Alfred Tennyson (1833)
THE ENGLISH FLOWER GARDEN — William Robinson (1883)
MENDING WALL — Robert Frost (1914)
ODE ON MELANCHOLY — John Keats (1884)
HAVING IT OUT WITH MELANCHOLY — Jane Kenyon (1993)
SONNET 30 — William Shakespeare (1590)
TITLE UNKNOWN — Ukifune / Gengi Monogatari (12th century)
COME SLOWLY, EDEN — Emily Dickinson (1860)
THE RAVEN — Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
WHO EVER LOVED, THAT LOVED NOT AT FIRST SIGHT — Christopher Marlowe (1593)
SNOWSHILL GARDENS, GLOUCESTERSHIRE — Wall engraving
THE SONG OF THE WRENS — Alfred Tennyson (1867)
ROSE — William Carlos Williams (1923)
ROSIE CHARD grew up on the edge of the North Downs, a range of low hills south of London, UK. After studying Anthropology and Environmental Biology, she went on to qualify as a landscape architect at the University of Greenwich and practiced for several years in England, Denmark and Canada. She and her family emigrated to Winnipeg in 2005 where she qualified as an English Language teacher at the University of Manitoba.
She is now based in Brighton, England, where she currently works as a freelance editor and language teacher. Her first novel, Seal Intestine Raincoat, was published in 2009 by NeWest Press; it went on to win the 2010 Trade Fiction Book Award at the Alberta Book Publishing Awards, and received an honourable mention for the Sunburst Fiction Award. She was also shortlisted in 2010 for the John Hirsch Award for Most Promising Manitoba Writer.