Garden of Stars

by Rose Alexander

  One headstone had fallen backwards, the end caught on a plinth at the bottom of the large tomb behind it, so that it seemed to be forming a bridge into the next world. Further along the same path was a simple cross fashioned out of tree trunks; next to it a salmon-pink geranium held its own alongside the weeds and shrubs. Almost hidden amongst a clump of nettles was a macabre row of three stone cherubs, one headless, holding an iron chain. Sarah had to stoop to clear the weeds away before she could read the inscription on the grave they guarded, and was glad to discover that this was not where Isabel lay.

  As the search continued, she began to feel that the task was hopeless and that they should give up, had to remonstrate with herself to carry on. She was weary as well as desperately thirsty, and assumed Scott was too, although he didn’t mention it. And she was weary, willing an end to this odyssey. The sun was broiling now, and the many towering pines and cypresses seemed not to provide shade but to hold in the heat like a sylvan furnace. It was many hours since she had last eaten as she had not been able to manage any breakfast and her legs began to feel shaky and weak. She ran her hand over her stomach, concave with hunger, and down to her belly, the hip bones prominent. She had lost too much weight, she could feel it now. She swallowed, trying to make her saliva slake her thirst, and carried on along the stony pathway where Scott was scrabbling around under a particularly rampant clump of brambles.

  A gap in the trees ahead suddenly allowed unfiltered sunlight to stream downwards in a blinding shaft, and Sarah’s pupils contracted painfully. She blinked, rubbed her eyes with her hand and when she opened them again saw right in front of her a simple headstone fronting a small, narrow, stone-edged grave. She crouched down to read the inscription. And there it was.

  Isabel Rosa Morton

  B: 27th February 1938

  D: 24th April 1938

  Eterna saudade de seus pais

  We will miss you forever

  Sarah felt a rushing in her ears and a lightness in her head. She thought for a moment that she might faint, reached out her hand to the headstone to steady herself in her half-squatting, half-kneeling position. The stone’s surface was crumbly and covered with moss and lichen, the grave dotted with tiny white flowers that must have been borne in on the wind, mixed with the reddish-brown seed pods from a nearby Judas-tree. She found herself taking long, slow breaths, trying to restore her lungs to normal action and her heartbeat to a steady pace. Scott, realising what had happened, arrived next to her and crouched down beside her, silently.

  So Isabel was here, in the most obvious place of all, the English cemetery in Lisbon. John must have arranged for her to be buried here, whilst Inês was ill. Maybe it felt right to him, that his half-English baby should stay forever in this half-English place.

  Star Garden. It should be the name of this graveyard, rather than the park opposite. Or Garden of Stars, more appropriately, for all of the children, infants and babies who had been laid to rest here over the years. Sarah sat back on her heels amidst the hushed tombstones, listening to the distant traffic and the tumultuous fighting of some birds in the tree branches above. She had been to a burial of a baby, once. It was the most disturbing thing she had ever seen, the tiny white coffin disappearing into a hole in the ground, being covered by clods of sodden, claggy soil, while the greasy rain smudged the ink on the service sheets and black clouds rumbled overhead.

  She had wondered how the parents could bear to leave their child there, alone for all eternity in that cold, damp earth. Eventually, she turned to Scott.

  “I’d like to go to that market we saw in the park, and buy some flowers for her.”

  “Of course. Whatever you want.” Scott squeezed her hand. “I can go and get them, if you like.”

  “No.” Sarah smiled weakly at him. “Thank you, but no. I’d like to choose.”

  She looked back at the headstone, making no move to go and fulfil this mission.

  “What’s up?” asked Scott, gently. “Other than the obvious.”

  “It makes me think of our baby. The baby we made that didn’t make it.”

  It was a while before Scott replied.

  “But it wasn’t a baby, was it? Not really.”

  Sarah rubbed her hand across her eyes as she struggled to absorb this statement. Her hands were filthy and she could imagine the streaks of grey she’d left on her face. She shrugged.

  “It was to me.”

  “I’m sorry, Sarah,” said Scott, slowly. “I don’t mean to sound callous. I suppose I can’t really imagine it. As a baby, that is. It was so long ago, I never knew about it, and even if I had, I couldn’t have made things turn out differently.”

  “I suppose not.”

  Scott was right, of course. It hadn’t really been a child, not like Isabel, had never reached the stage of being fully-formed, of being more than a bunch of cells. But what it represented had been the idea of Scott, of a life with him, of what their life together might have been. For so long, dreams of Scott had been the happy place she could retreat to when things were tough and she was lonely. She had built a life around those dreams but that was all they had ever been; dreams, no more real than the baby.

  They went to the market. Sarah stood for a long time in front of the flower stall, transfixed by the gaudy displays of red, yellow and coral-coloured gerberas, bright sunflowers and ostentatious lilies. There was a bucket of the orange star-shaped blooms that she had seen in the garden of the hotel in Alcântara. They were so beautiful all together that she bought them, took them to the grave and laid them there, carefully and precisely, and contemplated the perfect, waxy orange petals against the lichen-covered white-grey headstone. Perhaps they were the first flowers ever to be put here. Certainly the first for many, many years. For who would have visited, once John had left for the war and then both he and Inês had gone to live in London?

  The flowers were for Inês’s baby and for her own.

  Sarah asked Scott to go and wait for her in the café in the park, so that she could be alone for a while. She sat with Isabel for a long time.

  What would that little girl have done, who would she have become, if she had lived?

  Nothing seemed to make sense, least of all the death of this tiny, beloved child.

  They took a taxi to the airport; Scott had already returned his car to the office.

  “Don’t wait for my flight to leave,” he said, as they stood outside the departures terminal. He was flying to Madrid to attend a meeting, before returning to Vancouver from there.

  “No. No, I won’t.” Sarah attempted a smile but had to stop to concentrate on forcing back the tears. “No, I’ll get on the train, go back to the hotel…” She faltered, took a deep breath, tried to stop her voice from breaking. “I should go shopping, look for some little presents for the girls.”

  It was hot; Portugal was experiencing an unseasonably warm autumn. Sarah looked at Scott, who was fiddling with the handle of her suitcase that hadn’t extended fully. There were still ghosts that needed to be exorcised, things that needed to be understood. There might never be another chance.

  “There’s something that I’ve been meaning to say to you.”

  Scott abandoned the suitcase handle and slowly turned to face her.

  “The disappearing act I pulled on you. It was wrong. I was wrong.”

  An engine revved somewhere near, punctuating Sarah’s wavering confession. Voices suddenly surrounded them, the high-pitched calls of children, the excited chatter of holidaymakers drowning out Sarah’s words. A family had arrived to meet their relatives; they opened doors, flung in carrier bags and suitcases, took them out again, reloaded them, put the kids in the back, got them out again so a little boy could have a pee on the battle-weary grass verge.

  When the car finally drove off, everything seemed different.

  “I was furious with you, Sarah. Absolutely hopping mad. Incandescent.” Scott inhaled deeply, clenching and unclenching his fists.

  Sarah bit her lip, forc
ing herself to keep calm. A fly landed on her leg and she slapped it viciously away. “Bloody flies.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She had an overwhelming urge to laugh. It seemed hysterically funny, suddenly, that taking the sensible course, doing the pragmatic and caring thing of going back to England for her mother and her degree, had altered her whole life.

  “The thing is…I wanted to get back in touch. I was going to. But then – then what happened was…Carrie told me about you and Celina, that you were back together, that she was pregnant and you would soon be married…” Sarah blurted out her words as weariness threatened to engulf her. She didn’t know why it all mattered so much, any more. “So I gave up on you. I thought you had given up on me.”

  There were people around again, too close to them, their noisy, irritating voices preventing Sarah from thinking straight. A plane came in to land and the air shuddered with the sound of the engines and she thought she might go mad, might scream and scream, until…and then Scott’s gentle voice cut through the cacophony.

  “Celina was a casual thing, a stupid attempt to console my broken heart, to pretend I’d already forgotten all about you. It was never meant to be permanent. I went to her for comfort. To make me feel better about losing you. For sex, if I’m honest. And I got…” Scott’s shoulders were slumped, his head bowed. “…and I got more than I had bargained for.”

  Sarah looked down at the ground, at the dirty tarmac over which an ebony-black beetle was making laborious progress. “I see that now,” she began, her voice fracturing, her throat tight. “But at the time – I convinced myself that it was proof that I’d done the right thing by leaving. That you weren’t bothered. That I wasn’t that important to you.” She had an urge to step on the beetle’s shiny, sinister carapace, to crush it, destroy it. “But mainly I realised that there was nothing I could do about it. Absolutely nothing. I couldn’t magic the pregnancy or the marriage away. They were both here to stay. I’d found out too late what a mistake I’d made.”

  She stopped, shut her eyes, saw the blackness behind them. What might have been and what has been. It was almost too much to bear.

  She forced her eyes open and saw, with a stab of shock, that Scott was trying not to cry. Fury, pure and unadulterated, momentarily engulfed her, directed towards anyone and everyone, at Scott for falling into accidental fatherhood, at her mother for getting cancer and needing her, at Celina for existing. But most of all, the anger was against herself.

  “We should have talked about this properly, not here, in a bloody airport car park, with litter blowing around our ankles.” Scott had fought back the tears to speak, at the same time kicking angrily at drinks can that was rolling around on the paving slabs. Then he seemed to collapse from the inside, his limbs caving in on themselves, his whole being diminished by the flood of revelations. “Sarah. It was you I loved. Always you.”

  A long silence followed. Then Sarah moved towards him, put her arms around him, and felt his anger melt away as they held each other. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

  “Don’t be. There’s no need, any more.”

  “One more thing.” Sarah lifted her hand to shield her eyes from the sun that was directly behind Scott’s head.

  “Those months after I left – despite Celina’s pregnancy, the wedding – if I had got back in touch, if I had told you where I was – would you have come?”

  The sun beat down into the silence that followed. Scott looked into her eyes with a steady, calm gaze.

  “Yes, I would have come.”

  They said goodbye at the security gate.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to get away again between now and the end of the year?” asked Scott.

  “I should think so. I hope so.” Sarah watched travellers discard water bottles and fumble with plastic bags full of cosmetics and toiletries. “Perhaps just before the end of term. Inês might… I could see if…”

  What could she do? This was crazy, impossible. Inês was far too frail to travel anywhere, let alone to the edge of Europe on an aeroplane to visit a never-known grave.

  Scott was waiting for her to finish.

  “I’ll work something out. For sure. We’ll do it together.”

  “You could leave, Sarah. Come to live in Canada with me, you and the girls.”

  And then the last call for his flight came through, calling his name, urgent and definite.

  “Think about it,” he shouted back to her as he passed through the barriers. “Please think about it.”

  Sarah made her way to the station to travel into the city. When the train came she got on it, and sat there, biting her lip and bending her ticket backwards and forwards until the fold was white, wrinkled and ready to fall apart.

  The enormity of the situation was too great to comprehend.

  The city centre was hot and fumy, cars three deep trying to circumnavigate the Praça dos Restauradores, a confusing mess of horns and scorched rubber, whirling and swirling around her. She went to the room, the modern box in the chain hotel, with its lingering smell of stale cigarette smoke and carpet cleaner. Lying flat on her back on the bed, she felt the ceiling close in on her. She had taken Inês’s experiences, her confession that she regretted not pursuing Edmund, her advocation that we all only have the one life and that the future is ours to shape, as…what? What had she taken it as? Permission. Endorsement. Encouragement. But it was none of those things. It was Inês sharing her experience, for better or for worse.

  Sarah thought she might cry and then decided that there was no point. Crying wouldn’t change anything. Hours passed as she lay there. She kept looking at her phone, thinking, he’ll send a text as soon as he gets to Madrid. Or when he comes out of the meeting. Or before dinner. Or after dinner. Surely he will.

  It was an hour ahead in Spain. At 11pm she texted him.

  I need to speak to you. I can’t bear this. x

  In the morning, the phone rang. She hadn’t slept at all.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She thought she was going to lose it, to throw the phone at the wall and watch as it broke apart, the case detaching, the battery falling out, the internal components shattering irreparably as it crashed to the floor.

  What do you think is wrong?

  “I just wanted to know that you were OK, that’s all. After the last few days, everything we’ve had together… I didn’t think you would just go off without a word.”

  “Sarah, that’s bullshit. I didn’t go off without a word, and I’ve been with my colleagues the whole time since I got here, I couldn’t get away. I didn’t want to phone you at 5am; I thought you’d be asleep.”

  Silence followed. She was weeping.

  “Sarah, don’t do this to me. Don’t fall apart on me now.”

  “I can’t bear it. To think that this is it, we might never see each other again.”

  “I’m not even going there. I’m not even considering that. I’m going to see you again soon, for sure.”

  “You’re the only person I ever wanted to love me. I wanted so desperately much to be with you, but it didn’t work out. I’ve lived all these years knowing it was my fault. And what now?”

  Scott’s phone bleeped and Sarah heard nothing for a moment; she wondered if she had been talking to herself.

  Then she heard him saying, “Sarah, my love. I love you too. There’s no point in blaming yourself for what happened such a long time ago.”

  The line crackled and fizzed and Sarah was sure he was gone for good this time, until his voice came again. “Don’t give up on me now, Sarah. Think about what I said at the airport. Consider it, at least.”

  And then the continuous tone sounded that signified that the call had ended. She sat looking at the phone for a long time. She had thought that he was omniscient and omnipotent, that he would be able to make everything right. But he had only the same suggestion to make as anyone might – that she should leave her husband, break up her marriage and live in Canada. And as soon as h
e had said it, she had known with a searing knife-blade of horror in her heart, that she would never do it. Though the world was so much smaller now than in Inês’s day, transport so much easier, distances, continents and borders could not just be magicked away. The obstacles that Carrie had listed were obvious and real – visas, permissions, finances. But even more than that was the knowledge that she could not rip her family apart in heartbreak and pain for a fantasy.

  She went down to breakfast, not to eat, just to get coffee. She met her own eyes in the mirror in the lift and was appalled by how old and washed out she looked.

  There’s nobody to blame but me. I’ve brought this all on myself. I should have stayed well away. I should have known better.

  The search for Inês’s lost little baby girl was over, and Sarah did not feel inclined to return to the cemetery. She had the whole day to fill. She went instead to Alcântara, wandered the narrow streets trying to find the little pink and blue house but the hunt was in vain. She didn’t recognise any of the neighbourhoods she passed through and could find no trace of her one-time home.

  She took the train to Estoril, and walked through the streets, past the imposing white façade of the Palácio Hotel where Inês had stayed on her short honeymoon, past the Casino, and on along the beach. Everywhere was quiet now and almost deserted long after the summer holiday season was over. There was not even a seagull within sight, just the sporadic glinting of the sun on the cars speeding along the main road in the distance. She was completely alone.

  The ocean was calm, but grey, not blue. It suddenly occurred to her that it stretched all the way to Canada. Not to Vancouver, of course, but the same landmass, at least. And that he was on a plane somewhere above it right now. The repetitive, endless ebb and flow of the tides, the continual crashing of the waves upon the shore seemed to mirror the push and pull of her feelings for Scott, and for Hugo.