The Rose Garden

by Susanna Kearsley

  It was going to rain. The air felt unmistakeably heavy and carried the scent of a summer storm underneath clouds that were gathering grey. As I followed Felicity up to the greenhouse I noticed that the thorn tree now wore flutterings of cloth strips left by some of our new tourists, and it made a proper cloutie tree beside the charming tea room.

  As we came inside the smell of scones fresh from the oven overpowered all my other senses for a moment, and my stomach rumbled as I set my plastic tub of dishes down behind the serving counter. Susan straightened from behind the broken dishwasher and dumped a sodden rag into the bucket at her feet. She looked remarkably controlled, I thought, considering the crisis.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, and sent a smile to both of us. ‘The floor’s dry now, at least. Did you get hold of Paul?’

  Felicity nodded. ‘I did. He’ll be here in a minute, he said.’

  ‘Right, then.’ Looking around, Susan noticed my face. ‘God, Eva. That must hurt. Claire said it looked pretty awful.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I repeated. But she’d reminded me I wasn’t in the clear yet, and I glanced around in my turn. ‘Where is Claire?’

  ‘She’s gone up to keep an eye out for the coach, let us know what the numbers are.’

  ‘Let’s get these tables set, then,’ said Felicity.

  We weren’t quite finished when I heard the steps crunching down the curved path from the gardens above, but it wasn’t the tour group just yet. Only Paul, looking as though he’d rolled straight out of bed to answer Felicity’s emergency call, with his blue denim shirt hanging unbuttoned over the close-fitting T-shirt beneath.

  Susan brightened. She was crouched behind the counter with him, showing him the problem, when another set of footsteps sounded briskly on the gravel and Claire came inside. ‘They’re here,’ she said. ‘Just coming down. The guide said forty-one.’

  Susan stood, as did the plumber, who gave Claire a friendly nod and a ‘Good morning’. He was chattier with Claire than with the rest of us. He asked, ‘Where’s this group from, then?’

  Claire wasn’t sure, but Susan told him, ‘Wales. They’re going on to St Non’s after us.’

  He said, ‘Bad day for it,’ and stretched his shoulders. ‘Looks like rain.’

  ‘We only have to give them tea,’ said Susan cheerfully. ‘They didn’t want a garden tour.’ Setting out plates she asked Claire, ‘Forty-one, you said?’

  Claire seemed oddly distracted. ‘What? Oh, yes, that’s right.’ She’d caught sight of me now. ‘Eva, darling, you ought to be resting.’ A motherly kind of reproach, but she said it with patience, the same sort of patience she’d shown when I’d strayed out of bounds as a child, and I felt the same need I’d so often felt then to just curl up at her side and tell her everything, because she’d understand.

  But would she, this time? How could anybody, even Claire, believe my story, much less understand it? She would put it down to stress, or grief, or even mental illness, and she’d worry …

  ‘Here they come,’ said Felicity, as the first tourists came into view on the path, and the next fifteen minutes were blissfully busy, keeping me from thinking about anything but filling and delivering the teapots – my assigned task – while the others served the scones with jam and clotted cream and Paul the plumber tried to keep his focus on the dishwasher, which couldn’t have been easy since the tour group seemed to mostly be young women, not a few of whom were pretty and the bulk of whom appeared to have their focus fixed on Paul.

  Susan and Felicity were both too deeply occupied to take much notice, but I knew Claire heard the comments and the giggling and I saw her smile a few times, then I saw her smile more knowingly in Paul’s direction as it grew apparent he had eyes for one young woman in particular, a lively girl with laughing eyes who seemed to draw our plumber’s gaze each time he straightened from his work, and when she went outside with friends to have them take her picture by the cloutie tree, his frequent glances followed her with interest.

  Passing Claire as I returned from filling yet another teapot, I nodded at the little group of tourists by the cloutie tree and shared a conspiratorial smile. ‘Susan has some competition.’

  ‘So it seems.’ She raised a hand to brush the hair back lightly from my swollen cheekbone. ‘That looks rather better than I feared it would. I’m glad.’

  I drew a breath. ‘You didn’t hit me with the door.’

  ‘I know I didn’t. But I had to tell them something, darling, didn’t I?’

  A laughing shriek from outside interrupted us. The rain had come at last, in a great sudden lashing downpour that was pelting on the glass roof of the tea room like a drum roll and cascading down the windows as the small group of young women by the tree, caught unawares, made an impressive dash towards the door and tumbled through it, out of breath and dripping on the floor. Two of them had been wearing hooded anoraks and so escaped the worst of it, but the dark-haired girl Paul had been watching was soaked to the skin in her light cotton blouse.

  And then Paul stood and shrugged his denim shirt off and stepped forwards, drawing all the female eyes now with his T-shirt closely sculpted to his muscled chest and shoulders and his lean flat stomach. ‘Here.’ He gallantly offered his shirt to the wide-eyed young woman, who took it and gave him a suddenly self-aware smile in return.

  At the far edge of my vision I could see Felicity nudge Susan, and they stared together for a moment before Susan shook her head and made some comment to Felicity. No doubt she was remarking on how weird it was that history was repeating; that our plumber had done just what Claire’s own grandfather had done, such a coincidence.

  And then a kettle whistled to the boil and she turned back again to give it her attention, and the moment passed.

  But not for me.

  For me the moment stretched as though it were a string and I’d just figured out the pattern of the beads to thread upon it. Because I was watching Claire.

  I saw the misting of her eyes, the strange emotion of her smile, the way she watched Paul watch the Welsh girl slide his shirt around her shoulders, and it all made sudden sense.

  But still, it seemed so unbelievable that I could only clear my throat and say to Claire, ‘That’s just the way it happened with your grandparents.’

  She turned her head and turned her smile on me, and then I knew beyond all doubt.

  ‘My dear.’ Her voice was quiet, meant for me alone, a confidence she must have felt quite sure I’d understand. ‘They are my grandparents.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The rain had stopped. From time to time the wind chased through the taller trees that edged the wood around Claire’s small back garden, shaking leaves and letting loose a scattered showering of water droplets, sparkling as they fell like little diamonds in the spears of sunlight breaking through the branches and the ever-shifting clouds.

  Claire came out with two mugs of tea and handed one to me and edged her chair around so that, like mine, it faced the little sundial with its butterfly’s bronze wings forever poised for flight.

  We sat there for a moment saying nothing while a bird sang somewhere, steadily, within the cooler shadows of the wood.

  Then I said, ‘So you knew who he was.’

  ‘Paul? Oh, yes. From the moment I saw him. And my grandmother, too. Of course I wasn’t sure I’d get to see the moment when they met, I wasn’t certain of the date, but I did hope …’ She glanced at me. ‘I’m sorry, darling, that I haven’t been more help to you this summer, but I thought it best to let you find your own way through, without my interference.’

  ‘But you did know what was happening.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It happened much the same for me, although you travel from this time into the past, while this time is the past, to me.’ Her gaze had settled calmly on the sundial, and she spoke as though we were discussing something very commonplace. ‘The first time that I travelled back to this time, I was young, like you. Alone, like you. My parents had divorced, you
see, and both of them had taken up with new people and suddenly there I was, with stepbrothers and stepsisters and our family home sold, and no place that was really my own any more, and I began to feel a great nostalgia for the days when I’d come down here as a child, when both my grandparents were still alive and living at St Non’s. When life was simpler.’ Stretching out her legs, she took a sip of tea before continuing, ‘I was struggling along on my own as an artist by then, no real ties or commitments to bind me to anywhere, so I came down into this part of Cornwall on holiday and spent a lovely fortnight rediscovering the place, and that of course,’ she finished off, ‘meant coming to Trelowarth, for a cream tea at the Cloutie Tree.’

  She’d always loved to hear the story of the day her grandparents had met, and over the course of her own visits to them they’d formed a tradition of making a pilgrimage out to Trelowarth to share a cream tea.

  ‘It wasn’t the same,’ she said, ‘with them not there, but nonetheless it was a brilliant summer day and all the roses were in bloom and I stayed afterwards and wandered through the gardens as we’d always done. My grandmother had loved the Quiet Garden best of all, so I went up and had a little moment there, communing with her spirit. But when I was done and ready to come out again, I couldn’t find the path.’

  She had been more perplexed than panicked. It felt strange to lose her bearings in a place she’d known so well. Eventually, she’d found the path – not where she’d thought it ought to be, but she did find it, and began to make her way back down towards the Cloutie Tree, a bit disoriented, only to discover that the tearoom wasn’t there.

  ‘There wasn’t even a greenhouse. I thought I was losing my mind,’ she confessed, ‘as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.’

  I managed a small smile. ‘Yes. What did you do?’

  ‘Well, I did panic then. I turned tail like a coward and ran to the house and I banged at the door until somebody answered. That was when I met your Uncle George.’ Recalling that meeting, she said, ‘I was lucky he didn’t call in the authorities right there and then, and have them drag me off to Broadmoor. I know I must have sounded like a madwoman. But George … well, he was always kind to strays.’ He’d brought Claire in and listened to her tale and made her tea.

  ‘I’m not sure where the children were,’ she said. ‘Mark must have been at school, and Susan was most likely upstairs napping.’

  He’d been widowed for a year by then, though at the time she hadn’t known that. She’d been too caught up in her own strange predicament to notice much of anything.

  I knew just how she’d felt.

  ‘Then someone telephoned – the telephone was in the hall, I think, and George went off to answer it, and then …’ She paused, as though unable to describe exactly what had happened next, before it seemed to strike her that with me, the process didn’t need describing, so she simply said, ‘And there I was again, back where I’d started, in the Quiet Garden.’

  Everything was back where it was meant to be. The tearoom was in its place again, and she had gone inside to settle her bewildered nerves with one more pot of tea. After an hour in the Cloutie Tree amid the normal ebb and flow of patrons and inconsequential chatter, she’d convinced herself that what had happened must have been a daydream, an imagining.

  But still, she’d packed her car up hastily that afternoon and cancelled her hotel and driven north across the moors to switch the subject of her paintings to the wilder-looking coastline on the other side of Cornwall, up near Boscastle.

  Three months had passed before she’d found the nerve to venture back.

  ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it,’ she told me. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking of him. I’d begun to have dreams …’

  It was autumn, by this time. The tourists had mostly departed, the streets of Polgelly were quiet, and up at Trelowarth the roses were reaching the end of their season, the gardens being readied for the winter.

  She’d gone right up and knocked at the door of the house. ‘I’d decided, you see, that the only way to get the whole episode out of my head would be to prove to myself that it couldn’t have happened.’ And as she’d expected, the door of Trelowarth was opened by somebody else – a man not unlike George in appearance, but with reddish hair and a leaner build. ‘He was quite pleasant. I asked after George and he told me the only George Hallett he knew was his grandfather, and he’d been dead a long time.’

  I felt my eyes widen. ‘His grandfather? Then he was—’

  ‘Mark’s eldest,’ Claire supplied. ‘Stephen. A charming man. Very artistic he was, with these gardens, though all of Mark’s children were artists in their own way. Something they got from their mother.’

  ‘Felicity.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I was pleased by that.

  Unseen, the wind stirred the trees at the edge of the garden and shook loose a new spray of lingering raindrops that fell near our feet and chased over the face of the sundial. The butterfly, frozen in bronze, stayed unmoving, still counting its moments.

  Claire settled deeper in her chair and took another sip of tea. ‘After talking to Stephen, I didn’t know what to believe. What I’d seen. I only knew that there was something … something pulling me … no, pulling is perhaps too strong a word. Something inviting me to stay here. I went down into Polgelly to the pub to have some lunch. To think. And there, two tables over, was a man, a very old man, and he watched me for a little while, and then he just came over with his pint and sat right down and introduced himself.’

  He’d thoroughly disarmed her with his easygoing attitude and they’d begun to talk, about her painting and her grandparents and all that she remembered of St Non’s.

  ‘And then our talk turned to Trelowarth and the gardens and he told me that his wife had been a Hallett, and through her he had inherited a cottage on the grounds and if I wanted I could have it for the winter, do my work there. So—’

  She spread her hands, and at the gesture I looked round.

  ‘This cottage?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So this was home for you in your own time, as well.’

  Claire gave a nod. ‘It still is, come to that. I still go back and forth, my dear. Not quite as often, any more. The process seems to slow with age, but even so it’s really not a thing one can control.’

  Of course, I thought; and with a dawning sense of understanding I recalled what Mark had told me on the day we’d argued in the field: ‘When I was young,’ he’d said, ‘Claire used to go away for days, for weeks, sometimes, to do her work … She still does, every now and then …’

  I said, ‘It can’t be easy, though, with Uncle George gone.’

  ‘It was never easy.’

  When all this had begun back in her own time, for the first few weeks after she’d moved her things into the cottage nothing untoward had happened. And then one day while walking in the gardens she’d heard voices, and passing the half-open door in the high wall she’d found Mark and George pruning roses.

  George had smiled at her. ‘Hello,’ he’d said. ‘You came back.’

  She’d been lost after that.

  But it hadn’t been easy.

  ‘It was,’ she said, ‘a very different life than I was used to. You think women have achieved things now, you want to wait and see what’s yet to come. And then of course there were the children and their feelings to consider, and the more I fell in love with George the more it all became so very complicated.’

  In the woods the bird had stopped its song. Some little creature rustled briefly in the undergrowth and then was gone, and all I heard then was the whisper of the wind among the leaves and further off the plaintive crying of a gull above the shore.

  ‘I went away,’ she told me quietly. ‘I found it all too much, you see, and once I had returned to my own time I left my cottage and I went away to London.’

  She had stayed away for nearly a full year.

  ‘What brought you back?’ I asked.

  Her answer was a
simple one. ‘I loved him.’

  We sat quietly together in the garden for a moment while I turned this over in my mind, and then she shook the memories off and looked at me.

  ‘Do you feel that you can talk about it yet, my dear? I rather think your story might be more exciting than my own.’

  ‘Oh? Why is that?’

  ‘Because.’ She reached across and lightly touched my hand. My left hand. ‘Your ring is on a different finger now, and knowing you that is no accident,’ she said. ‘You’ve taken a rare interest in the smugglers of Polgelly. And the coat you wore when you came back last night was stained with blood.’ Her hand moved up to smooth the hair back from my swollen cheekbone. ‘Then there’s this. He didn’t do that, did he?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The man you’ve married.’

  I had always marvelled how Claire could just accept things, never doubting, taking everything in her stride, and now I finally knew the reason for it. Nothing would surprise her, I thought, after what she’d lived, herself.

  I shook my head and told her, ‘No. He would never hit me.’

  And I settled back, and told her all of it, beginning where we’d started once before here in this garden, with the voices in the next room and the path that wasn’t there.

  It took some time to tell it properly. Enough time that we’d gone through one more pot of tea and half a plate of sandwiches before with difficulty, haltingly, I reached the point where I had stabbed the constable.

  ‘And good for you,’ was Claire’s pronouncement. ‘What a bastard.’

  ‘Yes, well let’s just hope he wasn’t meant to father somebody important later on.’

  Claire didn’t think it very likely. ‘Anyway, your actions can’t change history, as you said.’

  ‘That’s Daniel’s theory,’ I corrected her. ‘He thinks that what has happened is already cast in stone, and can’t be changed. That’s why I couldn’t stop Jack being shot and killed, no matter what I did.’ That knowledge didn’t make it easier to say the words. ‘It was his time to die.’