The Secrets of Ivy Garden

by Catherine Ferguson

  My thought processes whir into action. I’m having dinner with Sylvian on Saturday night. And anyway, Sunday would be better. So much better …

  ‘What about Sunday?’ I wince inwardly, hoping against hope it’s fine.

  She shrugs. ‘Sunday? Yes, perfect. In fact, Sunday’s probably better for me now I think about it.’

  A feeling of blissful relief floods through me. ‘Fantastic!’

  Connie nods, completely unaware of the torrent of emotion that has just rushed through me like water from a leaky gutter. ‘How about we take a drive out into the country? We can take a picnic if the weather’s good or call in for a pub lunch somewhere.’ She winks. ‘And I can fill you in on Pascal.’

  ‘Sounds great. Do you mind if we take your car, though? Ivy’s ancient Fiesta can just about manage a trip to the DIY store but only if the wind’s in the right direction.’

  Connie laughs. ‘Suits me fine. I’m not too good at being a passenger in someone else’s car. Far too fidgety.’

  ‘Applying the invisible brake and clinging to the sides of the seat with clenched teeth? Gotcha!’

  I walk back to Moonbeam Cottage, lighter in spirit and more optimistic than I’ve felt for a long time.

  Some families aren’t so bothered about celebrating their big days. But for Ivy and me, birthdays were a highlight of the year; dates to be circled on the calendar and planned weeks in advance. It was probably because our little family was Ivy and me, that we were intent on ensuring we each had a brilliant day.

  I’ve a feeling Sunday will be fine now with Connie to keep me entertained.

  Then I remember what we’ll be doing – a drive out into the country – and I feel a stab of anxiety. What if Connie’s car breaks down, miles from anywhere?

  I give myself a little shake. Of course nothing bad will happen. The countryside is not my enemy.

  Everything will be absolutely fine …

  EIGHT

  The next day is Wednesday and I’m feeling full of get up and go. This feeling is increased ten-fold when I arrive at Ivy Garden to tackle the nettles and find a surprise waiting for me.

  A carpet of bluebells has transformed the little woodland clearing.

  The ground is dotted with little clumps of the tiny lilac-blue flowers. They peep out from between the trees, like tiny precious jewels, and the scent of them brings back so many memories.

  I thought I’d never see the bluebells again – but here they are!

  Feeling inspired, I don Ivy’s old gardening gloves and set to work pulling up nettles.

  As I work, it occurs to me that once all the nettles and weeds have gone, there will be a large expanse of earth available for planting, all along the hedge. An idea takes shape in my head. Before she died, Ivy kept talking about wanting to plant a wildflower meadow. Perhaps I could have a go myself? It can’t be that difficult. I seem to remember reading in one of her gardening books that wildflowers actually prefer soil that isn’t very fertile. In other words, they’ll probably grow anywhere. Sounds like my kind of plant …

  By tea-time, I’ve cleared a large patch of nettles, and I head back to the cottage feeling tired and very grubby. As I sink gratefully into a hot bubble bath, I think about my life back in Manchester. Apart from watering my fairly indestructible umbrella plant, I’ve never gardened in my life. But I’ve just spent a whole day in the open air, getting all hot and sweaty, and aching everywhere, but actually rather enjoying it. Or at least enjoying the sense of accomplishment after a job well done.

  Later, feeling ravenous, I’m hunting around in the fridge when the phone rings. I rush to answer it, chewing rapidly, having just popped a large piece of quiche into my mouth.

  ‘Hi, only me,’ says Connie. ‘Listen, I’m really, really sorry but I’m afraid we’re going to have to postpone our day out. It’s Dad’s birthday on Sunday.’

  I actually stop breathing for a second.

  ‘Mum’s cooking a special meal and she’ll absolutely kill me if I’m not there for it. She’s always been big on family birthdays. Holly? Are you still there?’

  ‘Yes.’ I draw in a gulp of air and a piece of quiche lodges itself in the back of my throat. I cough and splutter, trying desperately to swallow down the remains of the pastry, but my mouth feels dry as dust.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I gasp. ‘Bit of quiche went down the wrong way, that’s all. I just need to get some water.’

  ‘Off you go, then. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  She sounds as if she feels really guilty for cancelling, so I force myself to say in an upbeat tone, ‘Actually, I’m planning a wildflower meadow at Ivy Garden. So now I’ll be able to do it on Sunday.’

  ‘Oh, good.’ Connie sounds relieved. ‘Because I felt terrible.’

  She hangs up, and feeling oddly light-headed, I walk through to the kitchen and mechanically gulp down some water. Then, remembering what Sylvian told me, I sit down, close my eyes, draw in a deep breath and blow my worry away like a dandelion clock.

  Perhaps it’s fate that Connie cancelled. Maybe I was meant to plant a wildflower meadow on Ivy’s birthday. It would certainly be a lovely tribute to her. And at least I’m busy on Saturday night, at Sylvian’s, which will mean I won’t have much chance to brood.

  Later, I’m poring over Ivy’s gardening books, researching which wildflowers flourish best in a shady, woodland setting, when the doorbell rings.

  It’s Sylvian in his yoga gear.

  ‘Hi, hope I’m not disturbing you,’ he says with that lovely, tranquil smile of his. ‘I just wanted to give you this.’

  He dangles a delicate pendant necklace and I cradle it in my hands.

  ‘Rose quartz,’ he says. ‘It’s the stone of universal love. It opens the heart and promotes deep inner healing and feelings of peace.’

  ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous.’ I hold up the tiny, pale pink sliver of crystal, admiring its beautiful luminosity.

  ‘And don’t say you can’t take it.’ He smiles. ‘It’s a gift.’

  I flush with a combination of awkwardness and pleasure.

  I’m a little perturbed that he thinks I’m in need of ‘deep inner healing’. Is it really so obvious that my life is a wreck? Still, I very much like the idea of ‘feelings of peace’.

  I’ve never met anyone like Sylvian; he’s so calm and giving and … spiritual. He has this mysterious aura of being at one with the universe which is really very attractive. I can’t imagine anything fazing him. Anything at all. If the roof were to suddenly slide off the cottage, Sylvian would probably step nimbly aside in a bendy yoga sort of way then prescribe a calming ‘downward dog’ pose, followed by a cup of herbal tea.

  ‘Do you want to come in?’ I ask, hoping I haven’t left any underwear drying on the radiators.

  ‘Tempting. But no.’ He looks genuinely regretful. ‘I need to be up early.’

  I nod. ‘Let me guess. You’re going out at dawn to commune with nature?’ I say, thinking how wonderful to be so at peace with everything.

  ‘No, the gas man’s coming round.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Here, let me …’ He takes the rose quartz pendant and slips it around my neck. His fingers are cool against my neck and I give a little involuntary shiver of pleasure.

  He fumbles with the catch, clearly having trouble fastening it, and at one point, I turn and catch his eye. We smile at each other and it feels suddenly very intimate. His face is so close to mine, I wonder if he’s going to kiss me again.

  Then he says, ‘Listen, I’m really sorry, Holly, but I think I might have to take a rain check on our dinner date.’

  My heart drops like a stone. ‘Oh. Why?’

  ‘I’m booked to do poetry workshops at the weekend apparently. They got the dates wrong, so I’ve only just found out. I’ve asked them to try and rearrange but I doubt they’ll be able to. I’m really sorry. ’

  I fix on a smile and give my head a little shake. ‘Hey, no problem. W
e can do it some other time, right?’

  He nods. ‘It might still be okay for Saturday. I’ll let you know when I hear from the organisers, okay?’

  Chain fastened, he turns me round to face him, slipping his hands behind my neck and lightly massaging the tops of my shoulders. ‘If we can’t do Saturday, I’ll make it up to you some other time,’ he says, looking deep into my eyes. ‘And that’s a promise.’

  A noise distracts me and I glance along the road. A tall figure is running towards us. It’s Jack on his nightly jog.

  He sees me and slows to a standstill at the gate. Then, observing that I’m otherwise occupied, with Sylvian’s arms draped around my neck, he raises a hand and walks on, with that same slightly puzzled expression, probably imagining far more than is actually happening.

  ‘See you, Holly,’ murmurs Sylvian, brushing my forehead with his lips. At the gate, he turns, touches his lips and sends me an imaginary kiss. ‘Love and light.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you.’ I pat the crystal. ‘Er … love and light!’

  I watch him as he walks off along the road. He’s staring up at the moon, and I can’t help having a look myself. It’s probably an ancient source of spiritual inspiration – or something …

  I could certainly do with my spirits lifting tonight. My weekend is once again looking as empty as a fairground in a force nine gale.

  Listlessly, I watch as Jack sprints along the road then turns down the next street. I glance at my watch. He’s early tonight. Perhaps the woman whose husband works in Dubai, and who Jack visits under cover of darkness because they don’t want the neighbours to catch on, got home from work early today? This is my latest theory on why he flashes past the cottage most evenings. (These long nights in the country play havoc with your imagination.)

  Retreating slowly inside, I pick up the phone to call Vicki, and amazingly, I get a signal first time. She’s getting ready to go out with Beth and some other friends.

  ‘Why not come and stay for the weekend, Vick?’ I say it nonchalantly, as if I’ve only just thought of it, when what I really want to do is throw myself to the floor, weep copiously and plead with her to please, please, please come and rescue me.

  ‘A whole weekend? In the country?’ She laughs. ‘Love, you know me. I’d totally die of boredom. Come back to Manchester. We miss you so much. Please, Holly!’

  ‘You miss me?’ Tears well up.

  ‘Of course we do. When are you coming back?’

  I can hear her rushing around getting ready as she talks into her phone, excited about her forthcoming night out with the girls.

  ‘I can’t yet. I’m doing up the cottage, and Ivy Garden’s in a hell of a state.’

  I pause then try again. ‘Why don’t you just come down for the day?’

  She sighs. ‘But you know I absolutely hate sheep, right? It’s definitely a phobia.’

  ‘So I’ll give Shaun his marching orders. I promise, you’ll have the bedroom all to yourself.’

  ‘Shaun?’ She perks up. ‘Have you got yourself a new man already?’

  ‘No. I mean Shaun the sheep …’

  ‘Oh … Tell you what, Hols, I’ll get myself some wellies then we’ll see …’

  My heart dives into my slippers.

  Message understood.

  No-one wants to visit me in the back of beyond. And seriously, who can blame them?

  ‘But listen,’ she says, ‘I was talking to Beth yesterday and we decided that when you get back, we’re going to have this amazing—’

  The phone goes dead.

  The stupid phone has actually cut me off!

  I slam around crossly in the kitchen, making tea. Honestly, I’d probably get better reception if I moved to Mars! I carry my tea upstairs along with one of Ivy’s weightier gardening encyclopaedias, deciding to bury myself in wildflowers to take my mind off everything.

  I snuggle under the duvet for a minute, giving in to gloomy thoughts, then I glance at my phone which I’ve thrown onto the pillow on the other side of the bed. I grab it and find Ivy’s number in my contacts. Then I click and wait, with a lump in my throat ,for her familiar message to begin.

  I know I probably shouldn’t do it, but it makes me smile every time.

  I toss the phone back on the pillow and start flicking through the huge hardback encyclopaedia. It has a musty smell and the pages are stuck together in places.

  Something slips out.

  It’s an old blue exercise book, like the sort we used at school. There’s nothing on the cover, but when I open it at the first page, I see the familiar handwriting and my heart lurches. Ivy must have written it a long time ago because the ink has faded. With hands that are trembling slightly, I flick through the pages. About a dozen have been written on and the rest is blank.

  It looks as if it might be a diary of some sort.

  Heart pounding, I begin to read.

  NINE

  21st September 1965

  I escaped to Ivy Garden again today.

  Peter’s foul mood was casting a black shadow over the house, making me so on edge, I couldn’t settle to anything. I had to get out, otherwise in trying my best to placate him, I might have unwittingly said something wrong and made him even angrier. And his temper is starting to really scare me. It used to happen only when he’d had too much to drink, but since he lost his most important client, the moods have become darker and more prolonged. I try to say the right thing, so as not to upset him, but when he’s in that mood, nothing I say is right.

  As I was putting on my shoes, I heard the study door open and held my breath. But luckily, he didn’t object to me going. Just demanded to know when dinner would be ready, then retreated into his study and slammed the door. I found myself remembering what it was like between us when we were first married three years ago. If only it could be like that still.

  But I know we can never reclaim that all-too-brief happiness. I’ve spent the past two years walking on eggshells, doing everything I can to make Peter happy, but it doesn’t seem to matter what I do, it’s never enough. Being childless doesn’t help, of course. We never talk about it, but it can’t have been easy for Peter to find out that the problem lay solely with him; that it was highly unlikely he would ever be able to father a child. The news must have been devastating, his pride crushed. It was hard enough for me to accept the fact that I’d never have the child I so longed for. The consequences for our already shaky marriage didn’t bear thinking about …

  Stunned, I put down the notebook.

  Why didn’t I know about all this? It’s as if I’m reading a diary written by a complete stranger. Not the person closest to me for most of my life.

  Granddad’s moods scared Ivy? But she always spoke warmly of him; never in any great detail, but the impression I’d got was of a happy marriage. She never told me they had trouble conceiving …

  It must have seemed like a precious gift when my mum was finally born in September 1967. My granddad had been warned he was never likely to be a father and yet the miracle had happened! Had it made a difference to their marriage? Made things better between them perhaps?

  My granddad died of cancer in 1970, so they’d had just three years together, bringing up the baby they’d longed for.

  That baby was my mum.

  I go back to the diary entry, eager to discover more:

  I was all tensed up as I walked through the village, past the shops, hoping I wouldn’t bump into someone and have to stop and chat. (It’s so hard to keep up the constant pretence among our neighbours that Peter and I are just like any other normal, happily married couple.)

  But I made it safely out the other side and with the hedge and the woods now on my right, across the road, and the pretty little row of Cotswold sandstone cottages on my left, I felt I could breathe properly again.

  I glanced at the windows of Moonbeam Cottage, the way I always do. I just can’t help myself. There’s something really special about it.

  Then I crossed over the road,
found the little gap in the hedge and squeezed through into my little woodland clearing – it lifts me every time! – and straight away, I could feel my whole body relaxing.

  I put down the notebook and stare into space.

  Ivy’s marriage had clearly been anything but blissfully happy, thanks to my granddad, who seemed to have been a bully. I never knew him because he died long before I was born, when my mum was just a toddler.

  But how terrible for Ivy, marrying a man she never realised had such a temper. In those days, you tended to stick with your marriage, no matter what, and that’s obviously what Ivy had done …

  I continued reading:

  Sheila from next door popped her head through the hedge while I was busy pulling weeds, and six-year-old Alice ran into the clearing and asked if she could help me, bless her. I showed her which were the weeds and she set to work with such fierce concentration!

  It’s at times like these that I most long for a child of my own. But maybe the fact that Peter and I can’t make a baby is a sign that we were never meant to be together. And in any case, would I really want to bring a child into such a desperately sad, destructive marriage? Peter loves me in his own way, of that I’m certain, but he’s made no secret of the fact that he’s had affairs while he’s been away on business. He doesn’t even attempt to hide it from me either. He tells me they mean nothing and that it’s me he loves – but if you truly love someone, you don’t cheat on them like that, do you?

  But then, following that logic, I suppose that means I don’t love Peter any more. If I did, my heart wouldn’t beat faster every time I’m in darling Bee’s company, would it? Not that I’d dream of being unfaithful to Peter.

  To be honest, Bee is probably the only reason I haven’t walked out on my marriage already. He keeps me sane. Makes me laugh. Gives me a shoulder to cry on. And he gives me something to look forward to. The highlight of my life these days is sitting talking with Bee in the garden. (I used to call it my secret garden until Bee said no, it should be called Ivy Garden because I’d single-handedly transformed the little clearing into something so special.)