by Kate Hewitt
“All right,” she said after an endless moment. “I guess we could try it.” Which left Will feeling both exultant and extremely apprehensive. But at least they’d got somewhere, even if he didn’t know where exactly that was.
*
By the time Esther climbed out of her car in front of the vicarage, she was feeling the effects of very little sleep. Her eyes were itchy and she felt as if she were viewing the world through a hazy veil, which was why she didn’t even think before replying to her mother’s apprehensive, “Where were you?” with “At Will’s.”
“At Will’s?” Ruth’s concern immediately transformed into cautious delight. “All night?”
“Yes—Toby died.” The memory was like a heavy fist ploughing into her stomach. “He was old, I know, but…”
“Oh, Esther. Darling. I’m so sorry.” Ruth enveloped her in a warm, floury hug, and Esther breathed in the sugary-sweet scent of her mother, grateful for the comfort and the contact.
“Thanks, Mum.”
“That’s so hard.”
“You know as well as anyone.” Before Charlie, there had been first Max and then Molly, the black labs of her childhood. Each one had been a friend.
“Yes.” Ruth eased back and smiled at Charlie, who had not moved a muscle from his well-worn position by the Aga. “You try to prepare yourself, but it always comes as a shock.”
“What will you do with Charlie, when you move to China?” The enormity of her parents’ move hit her all over again, as it always did. “You can’t take him, surely.”
“No, and I don’t think he’d want to go, even if we could. He’s too old to change his ways, poor lad.” She smiled again at Charlie, whose only sign of understanding any of the conversation was the twitch of his doggy eyebrows.
“So…?”
“I was hoping you and Will or Dan and Rachel might take him,” Ruth admitted with a wry smile. “But I haven’t asked anyone yet, obviously. I’m sure someone in the parish will take him, but I’m sure he’d rather be with family.”
“What about Simon? So Charlie could stay here?”
“Yes, Simon too, of course.” Ruth rubbed her forehead. “For some reason I keep forgetting that Simon will be living here. It’s so silly of me.”
Except it wasn’t silly at all, and Esther understood it perfectly. She couldn’t imagine Simon living here. She couldn’t imagine anyone other than her parents living here, filling up these rooms. But, despite her mother’s wry smile, Esther could see a warning in her eyes not to push the subject, so she didn’t. She was too tired anyway, and she had a lot of work to catch up on before she finished with Natural England next week, and then of course there was all the community garden stuff… She needed to arrange a work party for the next weekend, and send out emails, and rent a tiller or even two…
“You look shattered,” Ruth remarked. “Maybe you should get some sleep.”
It was ten o’clock in the morning and the day stretched ahead of her, seeming somewhat endless. “Maybe,” Esther agreed, because she couldn’t really imagine keeping her eyes open for another twelve hours. “What are you doing today, Mum?”
“Oh, I thought I’d sort through some things for the move,” she said in a tone that, to Esther, sounded overly bright. “There’s so much to do—I really should have started before now.”
“Sort out some things? What kind of things?”
“Well, you know, furniture and such. We have far too much of it. Far too much of everything, really.” Ruth turned away and began to wipe the top of the Aga’s silver lids.
“Yes, but…” Along with Charlie, was everything to go? Why did the thought bother her so much? She felt like a little girl. “You’re not going to give away everything, are you?”
“Not everything, no. Some of it Simon might want to keep. I don’t think he has more than a sofa and a bed to his name. And I thought Rachel and Dan might want a few things, setting up home together, although who knows, perhaps our things are too shabby.” Ruth let out a high laugh that subsided on a sigh. “Anyway, it certainly needs sorting out. We’ve just shoved things in boxes upstairs for the last thirty years. Most of it, I suspect, will go in the tip.”
Which brought a lump to Esther’s throat. “Do you want me to help?”
“I thought you were tired…”
She was, but this felt more important. She didn’t want her mother to do this all alone. “I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep, actually. Let me make a pot of coffee and then I’ll help. What are you going to tackle first?”
“I don’t know if I have the stamina for the attics,” Ruth admitted with a grimace. “Perhaps we could just go through the pantries.”
“Is there much to go through in there?” Esther asked in surprise. Ruth just laughed and shook her head.
Twenty minutes later, armed with a large mug of coffee, Esther began to see why her mother had laughed. At first glance, the kitchen’s two walk-in pantries had seemed like fairly innocuous propositions—everyday dishes, the fine china, food. Simple. Or not.
As Ruth went deeper into the pantry, out came the crystal serving dishes they’d picked up at a car boot sale and never used; the flower pots the children had sloppily painted over the years; the five-kilo bag of lentils Miriam had bought during a short-lived health kick. The pile of dusty, unused tat grew at both their feet, and despite the utter uselessness of much of it, Esther couldn’t help but feel nostalgic.
“You really want me to keep that?” Ruth demanded with an arched eyebrow when Esther hesitated over a pair of silver-plated salt and pepper shakers in the shape of a pair of elephants. “They’re completely impractical, we never used them, and they were a gift from someone whose name I’ve forgotten, who left the parish fifteen years ago. They were probably just getting rid of some of their old rubbish when they moved.”
“I know you’re right.” Esther relegated the shakers to the pile. “It’s just… it feels so… unsettling. Like you’re pulling up anchor and suddenly we’re all adrift.” She pictured the house like a ship on the sea, bobbing amidst the foreign waves.
“I know this has been the only home you’ve really known,” Ruth said, softening. “Sometimes it feels like the only home I’ve ever known.”
“There’s something weirdly reassuring about knowing all this stuff is here,” Esther tried to explain. “That you’ve never got rid of anything. That we can find whatever we need.” That it hadn’t changed.
“Somehow I don’t think you’re going to need ninety percent of what we kept, including all your GCSE textbooks and notes.” Ruth rolled her eyes. “It was just that we had the space, so we kept it. But letting go of it all can be strangely liberating. At the end of the day, it’s just stuff. You can’t take it with you.”
“Not to China, anyway,” Esther quipped, and then braced herself when her mother gave her one of her serious looks.
“And not into eternity,” she said quietly, and Esther resisted an eye roll. She felt badly, in a way, for not sharing her parents’ faith, but there it was. She didn’t.
Ruth sighed and reached for the next dusty item. It seemed Esther wasn’t going to have to listen to a well-meaning lecture, after all.
By lunchtime they’d cleared out both pantries, and boxed up what could go to charity shops and taken the rest to the tip. Esther had offered to drive it all over, and it felt both sad and strangely liberating to toss the bags of rubbish into the skip.
Back at the vicarage, Ruth and Roger had both gone out and Esther realized she needed to make a start on preparations for the garden clear-out on Saturday. She brewed herself a cup of tea and then set about making lists and phone calls, arranging for a tiller to be delivered on the morning. She also spent a fair amount of time looking into getting not-for-profit status, and realized she could spend hours, if not days, snarled up in all the bureaucracy—making a charter, registering it, setting up accounts. But it would have to be done if this community garden was actually going to be something, and so
she made notes and a few telephone calls about getting registered and also opening a bank account, and by evening she felt both invigorated and exhausted.
“You’ve been busy,” Roger remarked as he came into the kitchen after having finished a pastoral meeting. “At least, you look as if you have.”
“Busy but I’m not sure how productive,” Esther answered as she gathered up sheets of paper with bits scribbled on them. “Research, mainly, but at least we’ll be able to have a work day on Saturday.”
“Have your mother bake for them,” Roger advised. “Then they’ll come out in droves.”
“Dad…” Esther began impulsively, and then stopped. Roger turned to her, one eyebrow raised.
“Yes?”
“Do you… do you think Mum will bake in China?”
Roger cocked his head, his knowing gaze sweeping over Esther, making her feel like she had as a child, when she’d done something wrong and been called into his study. “Why do I think that’s not really the question you care about?”
“I think you know what I mean.”
“Yes, I think I do. What are you worried about, Esther? That your mother won’t be happy in China?” As usual, her father nailed it square on the head, and so Esther decided to answer in kind.
“Yes,” she said. “That’s exactly what I’m worried about.”
“Have you talked to her about it?”
“Yes.”
“And what has she said?” Roger sounded remarkably unperturbed, so much so that Esther suspected he was quite certain of the answer.
“She said happiness was a choice—”
“Ah.”
“But that still sounds rather bleak to me,” Esther persisted. “Like you’ve got to work at it—”
“You have to work at just about anything worthwhile.”
Esther was fast remembering she could not win a philosophical argument with her father. She’d tried, when she’d taken philosophy for an A level, but she’d been beaten before she’d barely managed a syllable.
“Don’t you think anything in life should be easy?” she grumbled, and Roger shot a quick smile, full of humour and love.
“Yes, the decision to work at something. That’s easy.”
Esther rolled her eyes and Roger laughed. “Why don’t you tell me about your plans for the garden while I attempt to make us a cup of tea?”
Esther smiled as her father filled the kettle. He liked to pretend he was utterly useless in the kitchen, but in fact he knew his way around fairly well. Esther remembered how he’d made a full fry-up every morning when Miriam had been born, and delivered breakfast in bed, complete with flowers and the newspaper, to her mother upstairs.
She was so lucky, she realized with a sudden pang. So, so lucky to have two parents who loved her absolutely—she’d never doubted that, not for a second—and were devoted to each other, as well. She’d had such a good model for marriage. Why did she seem to keep making missteps with her own?
Chapter Fourteen
The next Saturday, the day of the community garden clearing, dawned sunny and warm, like a promise from Providence, although why Esther was thinking about Providence, she had no idea. Her parents must be slyly rubbing off on her.
Still, whatever the reason, she was grateful for the sunshine and warm breeze as she pushed the tiller back to the garden, wrangling it through the gate.
“Small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life,” Roger intoned, a sparkle in his eye, as he came up behind her and helped to shove it through.
“I’m not sure how much life there is in this garden yet,” Esther quipped back. “It’s looking pretty dead.”
In fact, in the few weeks since she’d come at it with a pair of secateurs and a lot of determination, the brambles and nettles had started growing back, and everything looked wilder than ever. Her spirits, which had only just been beginning to lift, started to flag once more. How on earth was she really going to do this?
“So…” Roger planted his hands on his hips as he surveyed the scene. “What we need is coffee, tea, and plenty of flapjacks.”
“That’s not going to get this garden tilled,” Esther said, feeling more hopeless by the second. What if no one came? What if people did come, and it was all too hard, too impossible?
“No, but it will get people motivated. Now help me set up a table.”
“A table…”
A few minutes later they were dragging one of the old, weathered picnic tables from the garden to a space by the gate, and then Ruth came out bearing a tray of flapjacks, followed by several carafes of coffee and tea, and a platoon of mugs.
She’d just finished when people started arriving—first Sophie West, who smiled cheerfully and added a plate of homemade brownies to the table, and then surveyed the garden with interest, whistling under her breath.
“Wow, what a big space.”
“And lots of weeds,” Esther couldn’t keep from adding, even though she knew she was just being gloomy.
“And lots of possibilities,” Sophie answered. “How are we going to make a start?”
Good question. Esther wished she’d had more of a game plan. She was normally organized to the point of brutality, but somehow she’d lost that along with everything else.
“Only one person can manage the tiller,” she said, thinking out loud, “but we’ll need several people collecting the weeds, and someone coming behind raking out the soil…”
“That sounds about right,” Sophie said. “Good thing there’s quite a few of us.”
In surprise, Esther turned and saw half a dozen people walking across the vicarage garden… including Will. She caught his eye and he gave one of his tiny quirks of a smile, and her heart turned over. She wondered if he still wanted to date her, and how on earth that was going to work. Maybe it had been a spur of the moment suggestion, after the intensity of their night together with Toby, one he now wished he hadn’t made.
Toby… a pressure built in her chest and she took a deep breath to ease it. She needed to focus on the garden right now. On the future. Her future… whether it included Will or not.
The next half hour was a blur of activity as Esther organized everyone, Ruth poured coffee and handed out flapjacks, and Roger relaxed everyone with his easy bonhomie. Soon enough someone was behind the tiller, other people were cutting swathes through the wild, and yet others were gathering the waste into paper garden bags that they piled by the door.
The sun was warm and bright, the sky a deep blue, with fleecy clouds scudding across. It was the kind of spring day that only came once in a very blue moon to the usually wet and rainy lake district, and it lifted Esther’s spirits even further, so she felt as if she were flying inside.
Several hours in, she could see the rich, black earth of the garden, and she began to envision how this blank canvas could become a beautiful picture.
They stopped for lunch after a couple of hours; most people had brought sandwiches and Ruth made more tea, and amazingly, brought out yet another plate of flapjacks. Her mother could magic baking anywhere, anytime, a gift Esther hoped she’d still be able to use… but she was coming to realize her mother’s choices were not her business, and maybe there would be other gifts she could use. Other opportunities. Maybe life wasn’t the single, straight road she kept trying to make it, but a meandering path with lots of bumps and surprises along the way, for everyone.
Now, perched on the crumbling foundation of a cold frame, sipping tea from a flask and tilting her face to the sun, Esther wanted to enjoy the twists and bumps, or at least take them in her stride… whatever they were.
“Hey there.”
She turned to see Will standing next to her, squinting in the sunlight. “Hey.”
He sat down next to her, one long, blue jean-clad leg stretched out in front of him. “It’s going well.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Esther gazed around the half-ploughed stretch of earth. “It’ll be quite a job removing all the rocks and roots and pu
tting compost on, but still.”
“It’s a start, anyway, and people seem keen.”
A round dozen of volunteers had showed up, besides her parents, Sophie, Will, Rachel and Dan, and Simon, and Esther had been both shocked and gratified by the number. “Yes, they do, actually.”
“You sound surprised.”
Esther gave a little, self-conscious laugh. “I suppose I am. This entire idea seemed mad, and it isn’t as if I’ve made a success of much lately, is it?”
Will shook his head slowly. “Why do you say rubbish like that, Esther?”
“Rubbish?” She jerked back, affronted and a little hurt. “I thought I was just stating fact.”
“It’s as if you’re always holding a scorecard,” he continued. “Ticking things off or deleting points, grading yourself when there’s no need.”
She blinked, stung by his observation even as she recognized some truth in it. “Doesn’t everyone do that, at least a little?”
Will shrugged. “Maybe, but it feels as if it’s paralyzed you. Because for once in your life you didn’t get the A star and now you don’t know what to do.”
Esther looked away, unable to answer as she tried to formulate her thoughts. “So what grade did I get?” she finally asked, only half joking, and Will shook his head.
“Seriously, Esther.”
“I am being serious.” Sort of.
“I know you are, that’s the trouble.” He sighed and stood up, holding a hand out to her. “I need to get back to the farm.”
“Okay.” Esther took his hand gingerly, feeling something like relief when his big hand closed over hers and he hauled her up. She’d always liked how strong Will was, how steady. She’d just never let herself depend on it.
“So, do you want to go out to dinner?”
“What?”
“I told you we should start dating.” He stood there, as immovable as a rock, his gaze unblinking as he waited for her answer.
