The Memory Garden

by Rachel Hore

  Since receiving Patrick’s letter she had found herself looking at London with new eyes, the eyes of someone who might soon be parted from it. This wasn’t the result of conscious decision-making, rather the sense that something inside her was working away by itself, processing pros and cons, muttering to itself, like a computer program into which she’d fed a long list of complicated data before pressing Go and leaving the room.

  If she were to be with Patrick again, what should she do? Live in London and go down to Cornwall at weekends? Give up her job and live in Cornwall? She had enjoyed writing her book. Perhaps there could be more? Or maybe Patrick would move back up to the city? She was annoyed at her inner self for taking liberties. After all, she didn’t even know what it would be like if and when she saw him again, how she would feel, how he would feel, whether they really had the chance of a future together. But this didn’t seem to stop her inner self from hoping.

  Mel negotiated a huge roundabout and eventually came to a narrow street heading south away from the river. She checked the name of the road against the scribbled address in her diary and started down it.

  As she waited for someone to answer the bell of number 64, she felt with alarm the ground beneath her feet vibrate, then the door opened and the gravelly contralto she recognised from the phone sang out, ‘Come in, come in.’

  Ann Boase was a short, stocky woman, dressed in a beige safari-style top and trousers. Her hair was dyed brown and held back by a multi-coloured scarf twisted into a hairband, her black eyeliner applied with more enthusiasm than judgement. Mel followed her down a narrow white-painted hall, through a cheerful modern kitchen and out into a huge studio room with a high glass roof. Warm light poured down, reflecting off the pure white walls. The effect was exhilarating, if slightly spoiled by a strong smell of turpentine.

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ she gasped, looking round at the large bright canvases on the walls, the str"; font-weight: bold; d s c for heripped hardwood floor, stained with paint and glue and blobs of Plaster of Paris.

  ‘Not always as tidy as this,’ said Ann, straightening one of the pictures – a furious swirl of midnight-blue paint on which was superimposed strips of white tape forming jagged shapes. Like a thunderstorm, it occurred to Mel, and she wondered if that was what it was meant to be. ‘I swept up before I went to Chicago, but I’ll be knee-deep in dustsheets and rubbish again by the end of next week.’

  Once again, the floor began to vibrate slightly and this time Mel heard the rushing sound of a fastline train.

  ‘The railway line’s down in the cutting there,’ said Ann, moving to the French window. Mel joined her. The studio took up most of what used to be garden, and only a few yards of scrub and a line of fir trees separated the studio from a stout link fence and the hidden trains.

  ‘Never much interested in gardening, as you can see,’ Ann said, as Mel surveyed the yard outside. ‘And you get used to the trains.’

  ‘I was brought up with them,’ said Mel. ‘The way they sounded back then was comforting.’ When had the old gentle trundling sound become this horrible startling modern roar? ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Since . . . seventy-eight, I think. My daughters are always trying to talk me into moving, the darlings, but I like it here. Come.’

  They walked through another door into Ann’s living room. More stripped wood floors and comfortable old sofas, the bookcases studded with photographs. Ann crossed the room to an alcove by the fireplace and stood beneath a painting about three feet square in a wide plain gold frame. It was a watercolour of a small boy on a beach, the child fully dressed but with bare feet, digging the sand with a wooden-handled spade.

  ‘It’s Pearl’s, isn’t it?’ Mel whispered after a moment.

  Ann nodded, her eyes soft with pleasure. ‘Isn’t it just adorable?’

  ‘And . . . is that . . . Peter, your father?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. He gave it to me shortly before he died – because I was the artist in the family, you see. There are two more over here.’ On the wall behind the door hung a pair of small oils. One was the portrait of a middle-aged man, with a kindly face weathered by the sun. ‘That’s my grandfather. I always think of him as my grandfather, you know. My brother’s told you Pearl was a naughty girl?’

  Mel, conscious of Charles’s journal lying like a dark secret in her handbag in the kitchen, nodded.

  ‘And this is the naughty girl herself.’ The final painting was gloomy, an interior setting. The lines of a mirror framed a pale square face, the black hair pulled back. Great dark eyes burned intensely out of the picture, the lips curved in the faintest of Mona Lisa smiles. Pearl, finally, rising out of the past. Mel was mesmerised. She moved back until the painting fell into clearest focus and stared at the eyes that stared back at her. She’d seen that face somewhere before, she knew she had. Mel looked over at Ann. The woman, too, had fine dark eyes, but they twinkled while Pearl’s were solemn, and where Pearl’s face was square, Ann’s, the bone structure sharpened by age, was small and heart-shaped. No, it was somewhere else that she had seen Pearl. Was it in the Gardener’s Cottage, or in a dream?

  She went back to the picture of John Boase, then across the room again to little Peter, eternally digging.

  ‘And I found one of her sketchbooks expression on his facein. is for you.’ Ann picked up a padded landscape notebook lying on the coffee-table next to a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, and offered it to Mel.

  ‘Sit down and have a proper look,’ she said, seeing Mel turning the book over in her hands in astonishment. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’

  The first page of the sketchbook was inscribed: For Pearl Treglown, from Arthur Reagan with true affection, 1910, and it was filled to the last page with drawings and watercolours of plants, faces; studies of hands, the folds of clothes, a flower growing from a drystone wall. There were some that caught Mel’s particular attention – several pencil sketches of a man’s face instantly recognisable as that of Charles and, close to the end of the book, sketches of little Peter from babyhood on, including studies for the beach picture that met her eye when she raised her head to compare.

  ‘We think Arthur Reagan was her father,’ said Ann, returning with a tray of coffee. ‘She told my grandfather – John, I mean – that he was a painter, but we’ve never found out anything much about him. Did you say this was all relevant to something you’re writing?’

  Mel quickly described the scope of Radiant Light. ‘I’m hoping to include more about Pearl,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you feel about that – in particular, whether you would allow me to reproduce some of these pictures. I mentioned the ones we found at Merryn? I’m sure Patrick Winterton, the current owner of the house, would want you to see them at some point.’ She bit her lip, wondering whether there might be some dispute over ownership of those paintings. If they had been accidentally left in the house, could Patrick legally claim them as his? She didn’t know.

  Ann was nodding as she poured the coffee and lit a cigarette, which she inhaled, causinyed her trust

  Chapter 39

  ‘Time costs money even at Christmas,’ quipped Rob as he handed Mel a visitor’s parking permit for her car. ‘The warden will be looking for his last bonus before the great shutdown, mark my words. Here, let me take the case and that box. Can you and Rory manage the rest?’

  It was lunchtime on Christmas Eve, and Mel had arrived to stay three nights at her sister’s with a car boot full of luggage.

  ‘We’ll be fine, thanks, Rob.’

  ‘I’m taking the presents in for you, Aunty Mel,’ Rory said with a solemn air, dragging a box over the lip of the boot.

  ‘Oh, Rory!’ Mel saved the contents from disaster just in time and helped him carry the box the dozen yards to the front door, through which she could see Rob vanishing upstairs with her suitcase.

  ‘Tell Chrissie I’ll be up in the loft,’ he called behind him.

  Chrissie hurried up the stairs from the kitchen, h
er hands covered in stuffing for the turkey, and she and Mel kissed hello, no hands, like shy children.

  ‘These must go under the tree,’ shouted Rory, and started pulling parcels out over the living-room floor.

  ‘’Eddy, too.’ Freddy stumbled up the steps behind Chrissie and ran in to start a tug of war with his brother over a long thin present tied with a large silver bow.

  ‘Boys, stop,’ Chrissie said, helplessly waving her mucky hands. ‘You’re tearing the paper.’

  ‘It’s a kite!’ shrieked Rory. ‘For me from Aunty Mel.’

  ‘No, me,’ echoed Freddy.

  ‘It was for Rob, actually,’ sighed Mel. ‘Your presents aren’t in there, kids. Oh, I’ve left my handbag in the car. And all the doors unlocked.’ Casting a helpless glance at Rory’s activities she rushed out into the street.

  She shouldered her bag and set down a second box of presents on the pavement so she could lock up. It had taken ages yesterday evening, wrapping and decorating them all with ribbons, bows and stickers until they looked too good to open. A silky nightdress for Chrissie, a sports biography for Rob to supplement the jokey present of the kite, a critically acclaimed travel memoir plus a scarf for her father, some pretty china for Stella. Several parcels each for the children, the fruit of a happy morning in Hamley’s toy shop with Aimee, who had chosen the latest computer game for Callum.

  The only person close to her Mel hadn’t bought a present for this year was Patrick. Try as hard as she might, she hadn’t been able to think of anything suitable, anything that felt right given the circumstances. Men were difficult to buy presents for at the best of times, she told herself"; font-weight: bold; class="Q in front, so what did you get for somebody you thought about all the time but with whom you didn’t, at the moment, actually have a relationship? Aftershave? Too clichéd. Books? She wasn’t sure which. Music? Ditto. A tie? Socks? Too boring.

  Worst of all, she hadn’t even heard from him since the arrival of the teapot back in mid-November. At first it hadn’t seemed to matter, she passed her days with the thought of him tucked away in her mind like a special secret. But as the weeks crept on and there was no communication from him, her brave confidence began to flag. Had he forgotten her? Or had, maybe, his view of her altered? Perhaps, it occurred to her, lying awake in the darkest hours of the night, he had even found somebody else. But surely he would have said, if that was the case. Wouldn’t he? Surely by now they had built some modicum of trust between them.

  I should have written to him again since thanking him for the teapot, she decided as she reached into the boot to rescue a bottle of Rob’s favourite whisky that had rolled to the back. Shouldn’t have left things so long, unresolved. And yet space, silence, is what they had agreed to grant one another, wasn’t it?

  She leaned against the open boot, suddenly devoid of energy. In the end, she had made him a beautiful card with folding cut-outs of gold and silver angels, and had inscribed it, Darling Patrick. Wishing you a most wonderful Christmas and New Year. PS: I’m at Chrissie’s with the children as usual. How about you?

  She had dropped the card in the postbox two weeks ago and gone to the door hopefully every day since, looking for something from him amongst the scattering of cards from friends, old colleagues and rarely-glimpsed aunts. But nothing came. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Where did this leave her? Nowhere. Worse than nowhere. In a black hole.

  ‘Any sign of Dad and Stella?’ asked Mel as, presents tucked safely under the huge Christmas tree, she joined Chrissie in the kitchen.

  ‘They got here an hour ago and went straight out to the off-licence,’ said Chrissie, her arm halfway up a huge turkey carcass, Freddy meanwhile was clamped to her leg, whining.

  ‘Anything I can do?’ Mel said faintly, staring round the chaos of the kitchen. Something in a preserving pan was bubbling furiously on the stove, there was flour spilled on the floor. On every surface lay food in various states of preparation.

  ‘Can you turn down the ham? Then there’s that Yule log over there to decorate – chocolate icing’s in the fridge – and the spuds to peel. I should have done some of it earlier but there were the refreshments for Rory’s Christmas show and they gave me an extra shift at work this week, which made me furious. I still haven’t made up the beds, can you believe it – never mind wrapping presents. Oh Freddy, darling, don’t dig your nails in, that hurts.’

  Freddy gave another wail at his mother’s sharp tone, and Mel, after turning the gas to ‘simmer’, reached down to scoop him up. ‘Come on, monster,’ she whispered into his ear and he turned to snuggle into her.

  ‘Actually, Mel, can you go and ask Rob to come downstairs. He’s been looking for the star for the top of the tree half the morning, and we really can live without it. Maybe he’ll occupy the boys for a bit, hang up the stockings and make paperchains or something.’

  The doorbell rang.

  ‘Oh, that’ll be Dad and Stella.’

  ‘We’ll get it, won’t we, Freddy?’ sang Mel and"; font-weight: bold; rter of started up the stairs to the hall, nuzzling the little boy’s head. He smelled deliciously of chocolate, babywipes and sleep. Last Christmas, she remembered, he could only crawl and had been more interested in wrapping paper than presents. How quickly everything changed. Had it really been a year ago that they had all sat mournfully around the dinner-table as William, in his somewhat pompous manner, toasted ‘absent friends’. William and his family were spending the day with his in-laws, this year. It would be strange having Dad instead . . . she hoped he wouldn’t be irritable.

  The doorbell rang again. ‘Coming,’ she called and, with her free hand, helped Rory open the door. It wasn’t her father on the doorstep but a young man with a motorcycle helmet at his feet, juggling a long rectangular box and a clipboard.

  ‘Sign for this?’ he said, holding the clipboard steady. Mel scribbled her name and took the package, which felt lighter than she somehow expected, wishing him Happy Christmas. Rory shut the door shouting, ‘Goodbye, man.’

  In the gloom of the hall she peered at the label to see whether the parcel was for Rob or Chrissie. Instead she was surprised that it read Ms Melanie Pentreath. Why would someone send her something here? The box was really quite light. Not a bottle, obviously, and the wrong shape for chocolates.

  She and the boys climbed back down to the kitchen. Chrissie, wrapping foil over the turkey with a ghostly rattling, looked up, eyebrows raised. When she saw the box and Mel said, ‘It’s for me, oddly,’ she gave a curiously knowing smile. ‘What?’ Mel said.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Chrissie, dropping the turkey back in its roasting tray and coming over to see.

  Mel slid Freddy into his high chair with the cardboard roll from the foil to play with, then sat down and started to ease out the flaps of the box. It was then she noticed the address on the courier’s label: Cornwall. She lifted the lid, folded it back, then pulled apart the layers of cellophane and tissue to reveal . . . a neatly tied sheaf of daffodil buds – no, not just daffodils, but sol d’oeuil, narcissi, bedded in damp cottonwool. The faint perfume, the dewy green freshness, rose from the box to transport her out of this hot ham- and onion-smelling, steam-filled kitchen back to the garden at Merryn, the only sound the songs of the birds, the salt-tinged breeze on her face. It was too much. The tears pooled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

  Patrick hadn’t forgotten her. He was calling her back. Merryn was calling her. Perhaps it was time.

  ‘Why are you crying, Aunty Mel?’ asked Rory, more interested in adult tears than the flowers.

  ‘Aunty no kie,’ wailed Freddy.

  ‘Because I’m happy,’ whispered Mel.

  There was a card tucked into the cellophane and she pulled it out. Across it in black ink Patrick had scrawled: From the garden, the eternal promise of spring. Happy Christmas, darling, all my love, Patrick.

  When Mel’s father and his wife returned five minutes later, Stella, elegant in navy and white twinset, took on
e look at the chaotic kitchen, at Mel sitting crying over a box of flowers, Chrissie trying to comfort her, the children yelling as they fought over the foil roll and, with tactful authority, she took charge. ‘I can make lunch, if you like, Chrissie,’ she said, whilst you deal with the more important tasks.’ And before long, soup, cold meat and salad, were laid out on the table in the dining room whilst Rob poured sherry and"; font-weight: bold; onu of listened attentively to his father-in-law’s views on the parlous state of the Health Service.

  ‘Dad seems quite at home here,’ Mel whispered to Chrissie as they took the dirty plates down to the kitchen and gathered up the fruit salad and ice cream for pudding.

  ‘He does seem more relaxed than he used to, doesn’t he?’ Chrissie agreed.

  ‘It’s really been since Mum . . .’ Mel didn’t finish. Perhaps he was expanding into the gap that Maureen had left.

  ‘I was thinking the same,’ put in Chrissie quickly. ‘Rory and Freddy have hardly seen him, you know, and there he was before lunch, getting down on the floor with Rory’s train track. I don’t recall him ever doing that with Will.’

  ‘Don’t you?’ Mel said. ‘You can remember him when he was still at home with us. I can’t, you see. I only really remember when we visited him. And he was with Stella instead of Mum. It was dreadfully confusing.’

  ‘And Mum kept crying all the time.’

  ‘I don’t remember that, either. But when I try to, I feel this horrible heavy sense of sadness. All locked away inside, I suppose.’

  ‘I wonder if that’s what it was, back in August,’ Chrissie said suddenly, staring at her sister.

  ‘You mean the thing with Patrick triggering off memory?’

  Chrissie shrugged. ‘Could have been, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Because I thought Patrick was rejecting me, like Dad? Oh, come off it, Chrissie, that’s a bit too neat.’

  But was it? Did her sister have a point? Mel thought back to that last nightmare night at Merryn. There had been her own distress, yes. But also her dreams . . . the atmosphere in the cottage. That was someone else’s memory she had tapped into. Pearl’s. And if that was really what had happened, surely tapping into her own memories would be easy.