Garden of Stars (6 page)

“What's all this about?” Rich failed to endorse Lorna's assertions about their everlasting love but instead turned to Hugo to question him. “You're letting the wife go off cavorting unchaperoned in a city full of Lotharios?”

Rich made the trip sound outrageous and Sarah feckless and irresponsible.
Why was everyone suddenly so interested in what she was doing?

“I guess so.” Hugo looked doubtful, as if he wasn't quite sure where he had gone wrong, what he was supposed to have done or said.
Everyone except Hugo, that was.

Sarah contemplated the irony of the fact that she would have been furious if Hugo had dared to try to stop her going for anything other than purely practical, childcare-related issues. But on the other hand –
should
he care more, should he be more protective of her, more concerned about the possibility that temptation might cross her path? It seemed that this did not even cross his mind. If it had, would she feel differently? Would it show her that she still had the care and devotion of the man she had married, rather than the rather impatient near-disregard that was usually directed her way?

Order pad rustling, the waiter came to the table and the distraction of choosing the dishes, selecting sides to share and making last-minute changes proved useful in moving the conversation on to other subjects.

As the meal drew to a close and they made moves to leave, Hugo got a message on his phone.

“Some of the boys are having a drink at the Gate,” he said to Sarah. “You don't mind if I join them for a nightcap do you?”

Sarah instinctively looked at her watch. It was 10pm.

“You'll be wanting to get to bed,” Hugo added, seeing her check the time. “I won't be late – just a quick half and I'll be back.”

“Fine.” Didn't he want to come back with her, bid her an intimate farewell? Obviously not.

Kisses and hugs exchanged, the four parted company. It was only a few minutes' walk home for Sarah. As she rounded the last corner, the streetlamp threw her shadow upon the wall of the end house, huge and distorted, a giant woman with oversized head and tiny feet looming large over the neighbourhood.

The phone on the hall table was flashing with a message when she got in. Pressing play, there was a long pause and Sarah was about to walk away, thinking it a drop-down from some irritating robot caller. And then a voice wavered out of the speaker, a voice so well known and loved that Sarah stopped immediately and bent close to listen, as it was very faint.

“It's just me, dear, Inês. Before you go… I wanted to remind you to take the journal I gave you. It might… I think… I'd like you to have it there, and read it there. In Portugal.”

There was another pause.

“That's all. Night night, dear Sarah.”

In her bedroom, having paid the babysitter and made a cup of camomile tea, she checked her bag once more for essentials ready for her early start the next day – passport, boarding pass and euros. Her notebook was safely stashed away, plus her laptop and the inordinate number of chargers – computer, phone, kindle, camera – that seemed to accompany any journey. At the very top of the suitcase, balancing on the rolled up clothes, lay the journal. Something was troubling Inês and it seemed that somewhere in its pages might lie the secret.

Portugal, 2010

It was hot, intensely so, despite the protective cover of the branches. Sitting on a grassy tussock, Sarah leant back against the tree's broad trunk and took a slug of water from the bottle in her bag. Around her, the harvest was in full flow, cloth-capped men of all ages working methodically from tree to tree, everything happening exactly the same way now as it would have done in Inês's childhood, apart the use of tractors to haul away the crop rather than mules or horses. One by one the oaks were stripped of their outer skin, leaving skinny orange trunks that appeared strangely vulnerable in their nakedness. The air was redolent with the earthy smell of freshly cut cork bark.

Sarah looked down at the notebook on her lap, poised to capture the story of cork. On the cover was a picture of a princess, top-heavy in an oversized crown, that Honor had drawn for her by way of decoration. She thought of the children, where they would be and what they would be doing. At school right now, their identical tumbling chestnut hair most likely un-brushed without Sarah there to supervise. They would come home at three-thirty, cardigans lopsided with wrongly done up buttons, fingers stained with paint or glue, demanding snacks and cuddles and CBeebies, and for a whole week she would not be there. It was the first time she had left them for so much as a night.

Perched on her clump of grass in the shade of the cork oak tree, Sarah shivered as a cloud passed over. Weariness threatened to overwhelm her; she had been up since 4.30am and driven straight here from the airport. She opened the accusing notebook and scrawled some hasty notes, all the while preoccupied by the decision – to contact Scott or not – that awaited her when she got to her hotel in Lisbon. When next she looked up, she saw that João Pinheiro, proud possessor of an enormous black handlebar moustache that bounced up and down as he spoke, and also owner of the montado and her host for the day, was waiting by the jeep to take her back to the farmhouse for a late lunch.

Gathering her things together, she stood up, picking up a discarded chunk of bark that lay by her side as she did so. She walked out from under the sheltering branches, just as the sun broke through in all its full force once more. For a few seconds she felt giddy, from the brightness of the light or from the thoughts and recollections that were bombarding her, she wasn't sure. Coloured specks danced inside her lids as she squeezed her eyes tight to quell her light-headedness and breathed in deeply, inhaling the musky, sultry scents that surrounded her.

João laughed his agreement when Sarah asked permission to take the piece of bark with her; the girls might like to take it to show and tell at school.

“It is a maravilha, a marvel,” he agreed, as Sarah gently flicked an ant off the cork's grainy surface. “We humans may be clever but we can't make any material that is compressible, impermeable, insoluble, elastic, renewable…” he paused, caught his breath and carried on, “–and which doesn't burn. The cork forests hold at bay the fires which ravage Portugal in the summer months, and also prevent desertification. Our lives and livelihoods depend on it.”

Just as Inês had written so eloquently in her journal, thought Sarah, as she observed how João gazed as tenderly at the nugget of bark in her hands as at a newborn baby. And then he shook his head and held the passenger door open with a flourish.

“Almoço!” he cried. Sarah clamboured aboard, wondering why she hadn't asked Inês what she should do about Scott when they had been on Kite Hill and she had the chance. She wished she had Inês's wisdom about love to draw on right now, as well as her insights about cork. João slammed the jeep into gear and they set off, Sarah clinging desperately to the door handle as he negotiated the bends and turns of the potholed, rutted track, the vestiges of her past twisting and tumbling through her mind like the tangled weeds and grass past which they drove.

The sun was lower in the sky but no less intense when Sarah arrived in Lisbon a few hours later. In the foyer of her hotel, a former nineteenth-century palace built on a fortune gleaned from cocoa, she saw signs indicating that a large international conference was underway. She could hear the mumbled tones of the delegates attending a drinks party in one of the ornate reception rooms above the double-height entrance hall. A woman flitted past her, chic and slender in a business suit and the kind of high heels that no mother-of-two such as Sarah could contemplate for daily wear. She was talking on a mobile phone in beautiful, lightly accented English, playing hardball with her interlocutor about some deal they were doing. From the satisfied smile that curled across her face, she appeared to have the upper hand.

Sarah glanced down at herself, her flat pumps covered in Alentejan dust, her faded ditsy floral skirt which, if it ever had been fashionable, certainly wasn't any more. The temperature was blissful inside this old part of the building that had been so cleverly designed to combat the heat of summer, cool chequered tiles underfoot and a circulating breeze from open doors on all sides. But still a hot flush swept over her, combined with a jolt of realisation that she wasn't sure who she was any more, or who she wanted to be. Marriage and kids had crept up on her, with their never-ending demands and relentlessness, and seemed to have stolen her identity, to have stripped her of any sense of self.

She looked at the pencil-skirted businesswoman again, mesmerised by the rhythmic click-clack of her heels on the hard floor, and felt the green tinge of envy descend upon her. What did it take to be like that? To be certain?

The reception desk was busy and whilst she waited to check in, Sarah's gaze wandered around, taking in the ornate wood panelling and the oil paintings that adorned the walls. Beside her was an easel on which stood a large display board. She glanced up at it and saw that its purpose was to give the conference delegates information about session times, subjects and speakers. Her eyes ran idly up the list of names for no other reason than that it was her habit to notice and read things. She got to the top of the list and half turned her head away, to assess her progress in the queue. Then stopped, abruptly. Took a deep breath and slowly looked back at the board, scarcely believing what she had seen. Read it again and again. And then again, as her stomach turned itself upside down and sweat broke out on her forehead.

The name of the day's principal speaker headed up the list.

The letters whirled and reeled in front of her eyes, unravelling and rejoining, forming and reforming, in the space of seconds.

S-c-o-t-t C-a-l-v-i-n

It couldn't be him.

Dizziness overcame her and she gasped for air as if she had been punched in the diaphragm. She put out her hand to grasp the easel to steady herself.

It must be him.

Eventually, the noise of everyday business, of footsteps and voices and phones ringing brought Sarah back to her senses. She had no idea how long she had been standing there, in the elaborate foyer with the carved wooden staircase curving away on two sides, light from stained-glass windows streaming in above, her eyes fixed on the board but seeing nothing. She became aware of one of the hotel staff, the concierge, looking at her, frowning, then turning to a colleague and saying something she couldn't hear. As if to remind herself that she had to be somewhere, she glanced at her watch and then hurried to the desk, now queue free, feeling dazed and light-headed.

How could it possibly be that he was here, so close to her, close enough to just walk up to and say, “Hello, Scott. Fancy meeting you here. How are you?” When she had been vacillating about whether to contact him in advance of her visit or not, she had at least been in control of the situation. Now she had lost that control because here she was, thrust into his immediate vicinity merely because of the hotel she'd booked. Was it fate? A sign? Or was that kind of reaction superstitious rubbish, not to be given serious consideration?

The receptionist's hair was dyed ash blonde and pinned into an immaculate chignon. It seemed to have an independent life of its own, and Sarah could not stop staring at it as she answered the woman's questions absentmindedly, hardly hearing what she was saying. She was conscious of her own unkempt mane, roughly pulled back into a ponytail, untouched since she had got up that morning. She signed the form in the wrong place and had to re-do it, with much patient smiling from the receptionist and buoyant bobbing up and down from the chignon.

Key finally in hand, mind in turmoil, she headed straight for her room, keeping her head down as she approached the conference centre entrance, praying not to see him now. She needed time, time to absorb the situation, to work out what to do. It was not quite true that they had had no contact since they parted. Ten years ago, he had found out from their mutual friend Carrie that she was getting married and had called her, he said to wish her well. They had had a polite and friendly conversation. He had given
her his email address, which she had written on a piece of paper whilst promising to keep in touch and then, as soon as she had put the phone down, had torn up into a thousand tiny pieces and discarded into the bin.

He had not contacted her again.

In her room, she sat on the edge of the bed and let her head fall into her hands. She could ignore the fact that she had seen Scott Calvin's name on that board, forget she had even considered seeking him out. She could carry on with the trip, do her job, get the article written, and forget it ever happened. Forget he had ever been a part of her life, let alone a part so vital.

She could do all of these things.

Couldn't she?

Thirty minutes later, and having disposed of the contents of a small bottle of wine from the mini bar, Sarah opened up her laptop. Using the tab she had previously hovered over but not opened, she found Scott's email address.

Dear Scott

How are you? It's been so long since we saw each other, but by remarkable coincidence, that might be about to change.

Her fingertips left damp marks on the keys as she typed with trembling hands.

I can hardly believe it's true, but I think that at this very moment we are in the same hotel in Lisbon. I saw your name on the list of speakers at the conference that's going on here.

Is it really you?

If so, it would be great to see you. We have so much to catch up on. All is well with me. I still live in London and I'm still a journalist, but freelance now. My husband Hugo and I have two daughters, age 6 and 4.

What about you? I guess your kids must be all grown-up these days.

I'm sure you're pretty busy, but my mobile number is at the bottom of this email, so give me a call or mail me back if you have time to meet for a drink.