Full Circle

by Connie Monk

  The rough area around The Retreat soon began to resemble a garden. The turf was well laid, the fruit trees giving shape to the ribbon of land to one side of the house. Right from first moving into the house Louisa had surprised herself with how enthusiastic she had felt about bringing life and colour to it, but with the lawn as a backdrop there was no stopping her.

  ‘Here’s our best customer,’ Margaret called to Hamish. ‘I wonder she has a patch of earth with nothing growing in it, the boxes of plants she collects.’

  ‘Och, but there’s space and to spare there. It’s taking shape though, Mags, and she works like a Trojan.’

  ‘Well, she’s just parking. Best you come and serve her.’ Then, with a saucy wink, ‘Reckon it’s you she’s after more than the plants. Come on, she’ll be in in a minute.’

  ‘Chump! Tell her I’m out in the potting shed. If she needs a bit of advice with her choice she’ll know where to find me.’

  Margaret was disappointed. She and her twin could almost read each other’s thoughts and she was sure he was sweet on Louisa Harding. And what could be better? It was time he was thinking of something outside the nursery. By this time next year she and Dennis would have enough saved to put down a deposit on their first home, and once they were married she wouldn’t find it so easy to spend all her days working. But, of course, Louisa was a professional woman – she might not want to be tied to serving in a shop or helping outside.

  ‘The sunshine’s brought you out early, Louisa. I’ve only just got the place set up. Did you want plants or have you come to see Hamish?’

  ‘Both. Or maybe hanging baskets are more in your line than his?’

  ‘Sometimes I make them up for folk, but it’s best if you have a word with Hamish if you’re choosing what to put in them. You don’t want to mix things that like a lot of water with others that are averse to it.’

  ‘I don’t know about that sort of thing. I just go for colour,’ Louisa answered. ‘Petunias are always a bright splash, don’t you think?’

  ‘They last well, too, as long as you dead head them every day. But they do tend to get a bit leggy and can make the basket look untidy as the season goes on. Have a word with Hamish – he’s out in the potting shed.’

  As Louisa made her way between the tables of plants, Margaret stood back from the open doorway but made sure she still had a view of the potting shed. Come on now, brother Hamish, she’s a strong-minded woman if ever I saw one, and if you want to make an impression don’t pussyfoot about.

  Maybe he pussyfooted and maybe he didn’t, she had no way of knowing, but they were a long time in the shed and then both came out to make the choice. By the time they came back into the shop, each pushing a barrow filled with colourful plants, nearly half an hour had gone by.

  ‘How soon can you get them ready, Mags? By this evening?’

  ‘If I don’t get too many interruptions, but on a day like this we may be busy.’

  ‘Don’t rush for this evening. Suppose I come and get them tomorrow afternoon? I have to go to the ironmonger in town to buy brackets to put on the walls. I may not have them up as soon as this evening.’ Louisa meant to keep the evening free. Sometimes she was disappointed but often Leo came out on the pretext of having a drink at the Pig and Whistle. Occasionally that’s what he did too, taking Louisa with him and enjoying the passing glances and raised eyebrows. Those were the times when, back at the farm, he would casually say he had ‘dug Louisa out’ to come with him to the pub. Her favourite evenings were those when he made no mention of her at home, and neither did he go to the Pig and Whistle.

  On that particular evening Louisa had given up hope of his coming and was in her workroom when he arrived.

  ‘I’d just decided you’d stood me up this evening.’

  ‘Um? Stood you up? No, nothing of the sort.’ Clearly his mind was somewhere else.

  ‘What’s the matter? Trouble?’ In her mind trouble meant had Bella realized how they spent their time.

  ‘It’s Dad. Something is different about him. I know his memory lets him down, but it’s more than that. It sounds uncaring to say he looks cunning – anyway, of course he isn’t cunning. He’s lost and frightened, poor old boy.’ For a moment he seemed deep in his worried thoughts before he visibly brightened. Even his voice sounded normal again. ‘One thing is certain: he absolutely dotes on Ali. Well, of course he does; as soon as he comes near her she beams at him and holds up her arms.’

  ‘I know. Bella told me.’ She hoped he wasn’t going to spend the evening with his mind on what was going on at the farm. ‘Shall I get you a drink?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’m not staying this evening. Bella was putting Ali to bed and Dad was gazing at a very flickering picture on the television. I must get the chap from Sewards to come and look at it. That set has been nothing but trouble. Is yours all right? Can it be the weather? I know nothing at all about the wretched things and neither do I want to.’

  ‘I watched the news and that was OK. Anyway, I mustn’t keep you; I can see you’re anxious to get home.’

  He looked surprised by her tone, and then his expression changed as he held his hand out to her. ‘Anxious, yes; but wanting to get home, no. I want to stay with you, that’s all I want. But the old man worries me. Lou, I wish I could help him. I can feel his sadness, his fear at what’s happening to him.’

  ‘Sorry, I sounded snappy. I hate the way we have to live – the pretence, the cheating.’

  ‘And you think I don’t? Listen, I came so that I could tell you this – just between ourselves, mind. Not a word to the others. An old friend – we go back to school and then college together – lives in London and writes for an engineering monthly magazine, but he has a cottage near Leominster where he often spends his weekends. He says we can use it any time we like except weekends. See, I have the key here,’ he added with the smile of a triumphant schoolboy.

  She knew she should resist him but was powerless, and found herself moving to perch on the arm of his chair, bending to kiss his brow.

  ‘A very useful friend to have.’ She said it to please him, as what he said had only added to her sense of shame. Shame that she wanted to be at the cottage, somewhere cut off from everyone who knew them, shame that she was stealing temporary happiness to which she had no right, and shame that of the two sentiments it was the first, the eagerness to cut themselves off from everything but each other that was predominant.

  ‘I told them at home that I’d had a long talk on the phone to Gerald Sinclair – that’s his name – and he’d invited me over to see the place. I said I’m going tomorrow and shall stay the night. They accepted it without question. It’ll mean driving separately, of course, but we can meet up for lunch. There’s a really good café I know called The Copper Kettle – their steak and kidney pie is out of this world and always on the menu. I’ll draw you a map of how to get to an arranged spot and from there you can follow me in.’

  ‘Not tomorrow, Leo. I’ve arranged with Hamish McLaren that he’s going to town to get the brackets on his way here and then he’s hanging three baskets of flowers his sister has promised to get done. I thought one near the front door and one either side of the front window. What do you think?’

  ‘I think you’ll just have to phone this gardener chap and tell him something has cropped up. Tell him where you want him to hang them and when you get home you’ll find them waiting. Agree?’

  ‘Most certainly not. They are putting a lot of work into these hanging baskets and I’m not clearing off without even seeing them put in place. You can use the cottage any weekday, so let’s go the next one.’

  ‘If that’s your answer I shall have to go without you. I’ve already told Gerald we shall be there tomorrow. I’m sorry you think it more important not to hurt this gardener fellow’s feelings than mine.’ With that he stood up, ready to leave. Her immediate reaction was panic but it didn’t last. One look at the sulky expression on his face and she started to laugh.

  ‘Oh
, Leo, darling Leo, you’re being a prima donna. Hamish won’t be here above an hour, I shouldn’t think. Have your steak and kidney pie and I’ll meet you later.’

  Just for a couple of seconds the expression hung on, then it was gone and she found herself pulled into his arms. Shame had no place in her mind, nor did hanging baskets; she wanted just to be with him, whether it was right or wrong mattered not at all.

  Five minutes later she was alone, a piece of paper in her hand telling her where to find The Copper Kettle, which was the rendezvous where he would wait for her.

  A few days later it was Bella who told her that Leo had given up the flat where they’d lived before Ali was born.

  ‘I persuaded him it was greedy to keep it. I heard the other day that the council has a list a mile long of people waiting to be housed, so to hang on to a place he only used if he didn’t want to drive home seemed immoral. That’s what I told him, expecting him to argue that the flat we’d rented wouldn’t help anyone on the council list. But he took it like a lamb and even agreed.’

  ‘Perhaps if he doesn’t want to drive home he could stay with David occasionally,’ Louisa suggested, her mind journeying in an entirely different direction. Sometimes, through the months she had suggested they should find a way to spend the night in his flat when they had found a plausible excuse to both be away at the same time, but he had always preferred to find somewhere new to both of them. Booking in as Mr and Mrs Harding they had managed a few escapes, always setting off at different times and in different directions, and returning an hour or two apart. The cottage near Leominster put a new complexion on their situation. It may not alter the lies they had to tell, or the care they had to take to set off in different directions, but it was a little home waiting for them, somewhere they could return to knowing they could shut the door on the outside world and have nothing but each other for a whole night. Compared with couples who lived together permanently, that was so little to ask. It would be no more than an hour’s drive to the cottage, and there would be occasions when they could meet there even for a couple of daytime hours. No more booking in as Mr and Mrs Harding and having to familiarize themselves with unknown surroundings.

  So a new era began. More often than not they were only in the cottage together for two or three hours, but for Louisa those brief periods were like a drug she couldn’t live without. Their relationship was changing; the hours of intellectual discussion grew less frequent. Their time together was driven by physical need. It wasn’t a case of one leading and the other following. Louisa knew nothing of his past, and neither did she want to know. For her, until he came into her life she had been aware of the biological facts but for all her half-understood yearning and lonely self-indulgence, she had found nothing compared with the wonder Leo brought to her. It was as if she had been but half alive until he made her a whole person. Now that part of her life belonged to him and only to him but, even so, it wasn’t in her nature to wait idly for the hours they could be together.

  It sometimes seemed to her that her life was divided into sections, each of them separate. By far the most important was Leo but the others all played their part. By word of mouth and recommendation her business was growing so that she had sufficient work to fill as much of her time as she needed; then there was Bella who came to see her most days, sometimes just with Alicia but occasionally, if there was no one around who could ‘keep an eye’ on Harold, bringing him with her; and then, increasingly as that year of 1958 drew to a close, there was Hamish.

  Sitting up in bed, Louisa wrote something on those lines to her friend Jess. Some people keep diaries, some drift through life never putting their true feelings on paper. Louisa supposed she fell somewhere between the two for, ever since Jess had set sail for Australia, letters to her had been a safety valve. Had they met face-to-face after so long would she have opened her heart in the same way? She suspected she wouldn’t, for Jess’s years in another country, first single and then married, would have held them apart. But, on paper, life changes didn’t come between them; they’d been kindred spirits for too long for altered circumstances to put up a barrier.

  If Louisa could have read her earlier letters it would have brought alive the memory of how she had contrived to make her life sound more exciting than it was. What was there to tell of a weekly routine that never changed? That was before Violet had lifted her out of the tedium set to continue in the same colourless way. If only she’d had more self-confidence she would have forced herself to join some society, any society; but to do that would have meant trying to find a way into a closed circle of friends, or so she had imagined. So she had hidden behind a façade of austere efficiency. And then she had fallen under the spell of Lexleigh where, on her first afternoon, she had met Bella. No longer had she struggled to fill the pages of her letters to Australia. Indeed, to her they were like a confessional, a place to put into words that she had fallen desperately in love with her friend’s husband, that her life revolved around the hours she spent with him hidden from the prying eyes of a world which would condemn what they did. Then into her letters there crept another character, one about whom she had no guilt: Hamish. As the months went by his name appeared more often as she described a day fossil hunting on the Dorset cliffs, a visit to the glorious gardens of an ancestral home in Cornwall, a Sunday spent helping in the potting shed at the garden centre, all written as the happy memories tumbled back into her mind.

  Jess’s reaction to her friendship with Hamish was to suggest that he was in love with her, something Louisa immediately rejected. From his enthusiasm for the transformation of her garden there had developed a friendship that became increasingly important to her. He was such an easy companion and informative, too. Often at weekends when the garden centre was closed they would drive on some outing or other, her interest developing as she learnt from his greater knowledge. Then with the coming of spring they would walk in the countryside. She was grateful to have her Sundays filled, for it was the one day of the week when work stopped at the farm and in the factory too, a day when Leo had no excuse to have to keep appointments. So his freedom was curtailed. He kept an eye on Harold – and Harold kept an eye on him – while Louisa became ever more involved with the McLarens. Occasionally Margaret and her fiancé Dennis would make a foursome with Louisa and Hamish. Even after what Jess wrote, it didn’t occur to Louisa that Margaret had hopes – even expectations – that they were forming a quartet that would be permanent. Their outings were always happy times and from the McLaren twins she was absorbing a lot of knowledge about plants and gardening technique. Had she read Margaret’s mind and realized the hope that one day she would be included in the McLaren family and even be part of the garden centre, she would have felt less at ease with them.

  It was a Friday in April, the morning of a day that seemed to have forgotten the season and taken them straight into summer. Leo had gone to keep an appointment with one of Carters’ important agents in Shropshire, saying he anticipated being away all day.

  ‘He likes days like that,’ Bella told Louisa when she called on her way to the butcher. ‘I expect they could get through their business in half the time if they wanted, but he’s been asked to stay to lunch and then there will be more chat. He’s so much happier now he has an office at home and doesn’t have to spend his working hours in that dingy office at the factory. I know he always had days out like today, but even they must have been spoilt by the thought that tomorrow he’d be back in the factory. He gets a lot of work done at home too.’

  Louisa nodded. ‘Much better. People must always work better when they are happy in their surroundings, I expect. I know I do as much here, mornings, evenings, any time I want, and yet I always feel a free agent.’

  Bella smiled and nodded. ‘It’s Lexleigh’s magic. I love it here, don’t you?’ It didn’t need an answer. ‘I dragged you out of your workroom and I expect you want to get on. Can I pick up anything for your lunch?’

  ‘No, I’m OK. I’m warming up a
casserole from yesterday. But I must get on. This afternoon I want to take back the papers I’ve been working on.’

  ‘We won’t hinder you. I just wanted you to see Ali in her new jacket. Remember, it’s the one we bought in Gloucester back in the winter and it was much too big for her then.’

  ‘She looks gorgeous. She really is the prettiest baby. Couldn’t fail, I suppose, with you and Leo for parents.’

  Bella chuckled appreciatively, told twenty-one-month-old Alicia to wave goodbye to Auntie Lou, and then they were off. Watching her carefully close the gate after them, Louisa was flooded with shame once more. Sometimes it happened to her; it was a physical feeling of emptiness, hopelessness. Going back into the workroom she put away the papers she had been working on. To lie to Bella was to betray a friend who had never shown anything but kindness to her, and that she could do it filled her with self-disgust. Her mouth felt dry; her hands were shaking. She lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply. Forget Bella, forget the lies, none of it matters. Put it all out of your mind and think of the afternoon that’s ahead. What if Leo had lied about having lunch with Carters’ agent – no one was hurt by it. No wife could be happier or blinder to the truth than Bella and, as for an order, he would use all his charm and knowledge and come back with that safely in his pocket.