This small horticultural triumph got me thinking. Even the hardiest species can be susceptible to trauma, whether from a cold winter, long drought or an attack of greenfly. Plants suffer, just like people. But if you give a living thing the conditions it needs – in this case, water, light and nutrient-rich soil – it has the best chance not merely to survive, but thrive. With love, attention and perseverance, even a hopeless case can have a bright future ahead. #gardenersofinstagram #Englishcountrygarden #japanesemaple #femalegardener #thisgirldigs #Englishgardenstyle #gardendesign #growyourown #gardeninspiration #instagarden #gardenlove
Morning light casts shadows on the sleepy hills and fields that stretch out before us. The countryside is serene and almost still, with only a whispering breeze rustling in the trees. Jamie lifts Mum’s bag into the boot of his car and places it next to mine.
‘Is this all you’ve got, Harriet?’ he asks.
‘I always travel light,’ she tells him, opening the rear door while I climb into the passenger seat. ‘It’s very good of you to give us a lift, Jamie. Ordinarily Colin would but it’s his friend’s seventieth and he’s on a golfing holiday.’
‘Oh, I didn’t realise Colin was a golfer,’ Jamie says.
‘Oh God, he’s not. It’ll be a miracle if he returns without decapitating someone.’
Jamie laughs. ‘Well, it’s really no trouble to give you a lift. I wasn’t doing anything more interesting, believe me.’
Mum’s gaze slides towards him briefly, suggesting that she doesn’t believe him.
He slots his key into the ignition and turns to me. ‘How are you feeling, Ellie?’
‘Bit nervous,’ I reply. ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve been on a plane for one thing.’
‘Oh, they haven’t changed. Food is still rubbish.’
‘I don’t think I’ll be very hungry anyway,’ I say, forcing a smile.
We chat for most of the journey about the last time Mum and I were abroad together, on a family holiday to France when I was sixteen. We recall long, hot days of swimming in the sea off the Île de Ré, eating fresh moules for dinner and Lucy burying me in the sand.
My thoughts drift to the three days ahead of us. The trip isn’t a holiday – not by my definition. It’s more of a journey of rediscovery – or perhaps closure. It might, of course, be nothing more than an ordeal. But that possibility makes me no less sure that I’m doing the right thing. That this is the final step in my recovery and that I simply have to do it. We find a space in the short-term car park and Jamie insists on coming into the terminal, waiting with me on the concourse while Mum goes to the bathroom.
‘Oh, I nearly forgot,’ he says. ‘I made you a mixtape for the trip. I’ll send you a link for your phone.’
‘You made me a mixtape?’ I say automatically, but the laugh we both start fizzles out before it really begins.
He looks suddenly shy, unable to meet my gaze. Strangely, though, I can’t take my eyes off him. The way the bristles on his jaw fall in crazy directions. The curve of his shoulders. Those gentle brown eyes.
‘Will you share it with me before I fly?’ I ask.
He looks up. ‘Sure.’
Then I hear myself saying: ‘You know, I would really like it if this was a mixtape, Jamie.’
A slow smile creeps to his lips. ‘Then that’s what it is. A mixtape. Just for you.’
I feel something brush against my fingers and realise it’s him, reaching for my hand. He clasps it tight. I hold my breath. I’m about to tell him that I have the strangest feeling of déjà vu, when the words dissolve on my tongue. He lifts up my arm to press his lips against my knuckles. Something surges through me and that something is unmistakable. A rush of euphoria, an explosion of lust, an indefinable, dynamic thing that’s as pure and clear as—
‘All set?’
But now Mum is by our side and our hands are released. I find myself nodding and saying thank you and I’ll see you on Monday, then we’ve parted and I’m drifting towards Passport Control with an overwhelming and urgent sense of having failed at something. We reach the entrance and, as Mum begins piling toiletries into a square plastic bag, she looks up and lets out a long sigh.
‘What’s the matter?’ I ask.
‘Have you really not worked out what you feel about him yet?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m wrong then? You wouldn’t mind if Jamie walked out of here and this weekend met somebody else?’
I feel my expression drop.
‘You’re probably right,’ she continues breezily. ‘No point rushing into these things. I mean, I married your dad after knowing him for twelve months and look how that turned out.’
When I don’t answer, she fixes her eyes on me, deciding to spell it out. ‘Twenty-eight years and counting, Ellie. That’s how that turned out. Don’t believe anyone who says patience is a virtue. A whole wide world has opened up to you. Good things are waiting, but you’ve got to go and get them. Nobody is going to do it for you.’
I turn and scan the terminal building but Jamie is no longer there.
‘He’s by the lift,’ Mum says, then looks at her watch. ‘You’ve got four minutes.’
I thrust my own toiletries into her arms and start to run.
I push through a long line of package holiday-makers and dodge several luggage trolleys. I reach the lift moments before Jamie is about to step in and tap him on the shoulder. He turns and blinks in surprise. Before I can change my mind, I decide to say something that now feels as immense and unavoidable as the sea.
‘I love you.’ I hear the words, but am unsure whether it was me who said them, so I decide to repeat them. ‘I love you, Jamie.’
He looks, above all, shocked. The kind of shocked that makes your knees give way, or possibly your hair turn grey. But it’s momentary. He smiles and that smile expands into a laugh that is full of disbelief and joy, but stops almost as abruptly as it came on. Then he reaches out to cup my face in his big hands and I stand on the balls of my feet to allow the tingling warmth of his kiss to spread all the way down to my toes.
Chapter 69
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
12 December
My Dear Elena,
I can hardly believe I am writing to you. I have thought about you many times over the years, but truly never imagined the day would come when we would be in touch. I pinch myself that you will be reading these words in your home in England.
Now I am sitting down to write, I do not even know where to begin. I should ask straight away that you forgive my mistakes in English. My conversation is better than my writing, at least I like to think so! So what can I tell you? You already know that I am married to Cristian. We have a six-year-old daughter, my beautiful Daniela (I know a mother is not supposed to say this but it is true – she really is so beautiful, on the inside too!). We live on the outskirts of Bucharest and, although the house is rather small, it is cosy and the village pretty – a nice place to bring up children.
Cristian I know has told you that I am unwell. I am writing this letter in hospital and must say that being in touch with you is one of the few wonderful things to happen at this difficult time. But I will have the operation on my heart next month and I am hopeful that I will be like a spring chicken afterwards!
It was Cristian’s sister who first saw the picture of us in the orphanage on your Instagram. We looked at your new photographs and although you look so different, I knew it was really you the moment I saw you.
I have just read back what I have written and fear I have already jumped ahead. The past is a terrible place for you and me, dear Elena. I never talk about my childhood to anyone except my Cristian. I believe that it is better to concentrate on being positive and the future – my own and that of Romania. There is a true determination here that what happened to us could never happen again. But, for you, dear Elena, I will go back to the start – otherwise you will wonder what on earth ha
ppened in that large gap in time.
I look up from my phone as we sit at the gate in Heathrow, waiting for our plane to start boarding. It’s the umpteenth time that I’ve read Tabitha’s email, sent months ago and in circumstances that were different from those today. So much has changed since December. Yet those first words she wrote to me, as she lay in hospital feeling nervous but very clearly confident about the operation, still bring a lump to my throat, every time.
When I first read her story, what had happened to her in the intervening years, I was frantic, racing through her sentences and each new revelation. Now, although it involves so much horror, it is also the source of comfort. Without even speaking to her, I can hear her voice. Her letter is a hand stretched across continents, holding mine – one that I’ll always have, no matter what.
The email describes her life under the Gara de Nord station, in that year after she ran away. It documents the unbearable heat and freezing cold, the tiny space in which she ate and slept and how at the time there were many other adults and children too – all generations, in fact. She had always been a good fighter and said this became essential. She also learnt to beg and steal, quickly discovering that it was the only way to survive.
I don’t know why, but of everything she describes, it is her casual reference to how she and the other children would get high on cans of paint that I find most upsetting. Everyone did it, she explained, and she wanted to fit in. A universal human desire and one I know so well.
I have not asked my doctor if that is what caused me to be so unwell. I cannot dwell on what I inflicted on my poor baby heart back then. There is no point as in so many other ways I am lucky.
She explains that the police started to regularly come along and try to return the children to the orphanages, so she made the decision to leave the tunnels. Now alone, she found shelter in various places that were, in her words, ‘very unsuitable’. She eventually ended up under the stairs of an apartment building and it was there that her life finally took a turn for the better.
Ana and Sorin were a young, professional couple, both born and raised in Bucharest and now living together on the sixth floor of the building. They were kind, the first people since the Italians who seemed to consider Tabitha worthy of empathy. Their decision to take her in would change the course of her whole life.
There was no official adoption, but they did everything they could to give her a normal childhood, and Tabitha decided to adopt Sorin’s surname – Dascalu. Despite this, she confesses that she didn’t make life easy for them; she didn’t do well at school at first and was always fighting and in trouble.
It was as if I could not help myself…
But Ana and Sorin refused to give up on her and over time she began to knuckle down. She discovered which studies interested her, and above all, developed an appreciation of the opportunity that these wonderful people had handed her.
By the time she was sixteen, Ana would tell anyone who listened that Tabitha had overtaken her peers academically.
There is no point in fake modesty – I was proud of myself!
She describes one of the best moments of her life as winning a scholarship at the University of Bucharest to study computer science. Her first job was as a junior developer at Microsoft, where she met Cristian. They were married in 2009.
Do you have someone, dear Elena? I really hope so. You and I experienced some terrible things and we more than most need somebody to wrap their arms around us and make us feel safe.
She goes on to say Ana and Sorin now live in Timis¸oara, where the latter has family. She says that it’s a truly beautiful city and urges me to visit, adding that she planned to spend a family Christmas at their house, ‘assuming I am well enough to travel’. She ends the email by asking one thing of me.
I know it is a long way, but if you would ever come to Romania again, my greatest wish would be for you to meet Daniela and Cristian. Please do write to me again and tell me more about your life. I have looked at you on Instagram and it was wonderful to hear in your letter that the people who adopted you were as good to you as Ana and Sorin were to me. We are lucky, dear Elena. So many of those with us in the orphanage were not. Though we hold dreadful memories, I always tell Daniela: even when the world is against you, there are still good people. You just have to go and find them.
With all my love from Romania.
Tabitha
xxx
I click off the email and onto Instagram, where I quickly locate the account that belongs to Tabitha’s husband. Until she became ill, when the family clearly had other things to occupy their time, he was a regular poster of pictures. There’s one from five years ago when her daughter Daniela was small enough to be carried in Tabitha’s arms. It’s summertime and she is holding the giggling little girl just close enough to reach into a fountain and let the water rush over her fingers.
There’s another of the three of them on Cristian’s birthday, in which his wife holds out an elaborately iced cake as he blows out the candles. There are one or two of Tabitha by herself, in her cap and gown on the day she received her degree from the University of Bucharest. Then there are the three of them, at their home in the pretty village she talked about, only a dozen or so miles from where I will be sleeping tonight. There’s just one picture of her while she was in hospital and, every time I look at it, it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. In that image, she looks closer to the girl I knew than in any other. She’s pale, thin and clearly in vulnerable health, but with a strength in those dark eyes that is utterly and wholly hers.
* * *
We are greeted at the airport by a smiling young driver who proudly declares, ‘Welcome to beautiful Bucharest!’ He whisks us to our hotel on the edge of the old town, an elegant pile with all the stylish trimmings beloved of the aristocracy in the 1920s, when its location – Mum tells me – was considered the Broadway of its day.
Checking in is just one surreal fragment of the whole bizarre experience. I can’t reconcile this hotel, its crisp white linen and Relais & Châteaux affiliation, with the very different associations Romania holds for me. Despite the surroundings and impeccable customer service, there’s no denying that I am on edge. This faint state of alert persists while I unpack and is uppermost in my mind until, an hour before dinner, we take a stroll through the streets. It’s then, early on a balmy summer evening, that a curiosity begins to awaken in me.
Bucharest, it seems, is a place of layers and contradiction. Parts of the cityscape would win no beauty contest and are blighted by concrete and peeling communist blocks. But in among those and the shiny new hotels, there are also eighteenth-century Orthodox churches, dazzling belle époque villas and art nouveau buildings. If a city’s history is reflected in its architecture, then Bucharest has known as much extravagance as it has constraint and despair.
We arrive at the old town to find it buzzing, with locals enjoying the gastropubs and teahouses, al fresco bars and beer gardens. It’s full of vitality and laughter. Mum comments on how clean it is, how safe it feels, how, in her many trips abroad, she found most Romanians to be charming, resourceful and streetwise. For all its vigour, though, the pace of life here feels markedly different from London.
‘Nobody looks as though they’re in a rush, do they?’ she asks, trying to elicit a response from me. But I can only nod in vague agreement, still taking it all in.
We dine in a restaurant where Mum ate once before with her friend Andrei. Caru’ cu bere is housed in a gothic building with a stained-glass ceiling, ornate arches and a mosaic floor. Despite the grand surroundings, the atmosphere is fun and informal, with musicians pounding out folk tunes while customers dine on spiced meats, salads and beer.
Mum likes this place, it’s obvious. She likes Romania. She was always at pains to tell me that the orphanages never said something dreadful about the country as a whole and now, for the first time in my life, I can understand why she wanted me to know that.
When our pre
tty waitress arrives to take our order, I can’t help noticing her dark eyes and hair, that her skin has the exact same hint of olive as mine. Nor indeed that this is no rarity around here. The thought prompts a memory to bubble up from nowhere.
‘Do you know what I thought the moment I first saw you?’ I ask Mum.
She pauses mid sip, and lowers her glass of red. ‘No. What?’
‘I couldn’t believe how pale your skin was. I was bewildered by it.’
‘Really?’ she smiles. ‘I thought you couldn’t remember much at all about that first meeting.’
‘I couldn’t until now. But, yes, I was fascinated by it – and worried. I thought you might have been ill.’
She laughs into her wine. It occurs to me that this country has never represented more than a series of fragmented, nightmarish memories to me. I’ve spent almost every day since I left trying to forget it even exists. To wipe clean the slate and restore my factory settings. But as I soak up the energy in this room, I can feel something shifting in me.
I will always feel British. I have a British passport. I sound British. I even act British, as my passionate love of tea and default conversational topic of the weather proves. But within a few short hours of being here, I register something I never thought possible: the first glimmers of connection with where I came from.
Chapter 70
Harriet
Andrei is at the wheel of his very old car, as it heads through the busy streets towards sector 3. He’s making small talk, lightening the mood, though the closer they get to their destination, the more difficult that is. He turns a corner into a wide, tarmacked road and Harriet is hit by a feeling that’s similar to déjà vu, but entirely more visceral. Her gut tightens as a series of images flash into her head in the same way they’re supposed to when you die. The grip of Colin’s young hands on a steering wheel. Two small children at the window, heads shaved, eyes dull. A surge of scrambling boys as the door opened. Dank, concrete stairs leading underground, a lightbulb flickering overhead.
The World at My Feet Page 32
