The Memory Garden (4 page)

It really was the most perfect weather to explore. Mel felt almost jittery with excitement as she stepped out half an hour later, dressed in clean jeans, low-heeled ankle boots and a short russet needlecord jacket. Last night’s demented wind spirit was only impish now, shunting puffs of cloud across a sky as blue as a sailor’s trousers. Mel closed her eyes, welcoming the warm sun on her face. When she opened them, she was dazzled for a moment, before her surroundings swam once more into focus. She almost gasped.

The grounds of Merryn Hall on every side were a wilderness. She squinted up through the bright light towards the Hall where, glimpsed through sycamore and ash trees, the stone walls were half-covered with climbing plants – wisteria, ivy and Virginia creeper. Vague shreds of memory teased at her consciousness. Long ago when they were children, she and William and Chrissie had played in a wilderness like this – a wasteland near their home with a tumbledown building and
Danger! Keep Out
signs on the broken-down fence. Their mother would have been furious had she found out.

Mel swung round and surveyed the view downhill from her cottage. High banks of tangled jungle rolled out before her, swathed with creeper, bramble and bracken. Like living dustsheets, she mused, through which pushed up the shapes of trees, shrubs and who knew what, like hulks of furniture in a disused room.

In the wasteground where they’d played as children stood an electric pylon. The current had pulsed and sung around them as they played hide-and-seek or made dens in the undergrowth. Once, she remembered, William started to climb the pylon, merely laughing at Chrissie’s warnings.

‘Get down – you’ll die, you’ll die!’ Chrissie had screamed as the electricity hummed hypnotically all around them, while Mel, at six years old not truly understanding the danger, shared William’s excitement, silently urging him to climb higher and higher. Fortunately, a barrier of barbed wire had stopped him.

Now Mel gazed around with wonder at the windblown gardens of Merryn Hall. Last night’s first impressions returned. There was no fizzing electric energy here but there was something – mystery, desolation, a sense of watchfulness. In daylight this place didn’t feel like the set for Dracula or the Beast’s castle, more like Sleeping Beauty’s palace, cut off from the world by an evil spell, briars grown up everywhere.

She smiled to herself. A Sleeping Beauty she could cope with. Vampires belonged elsewhere. She would just hope that there wasn’t a Beast. And pushing her bag further up her shoulder, she walked up the track to the lane.

Merryn Hall lay nestled in the side of a wooded valley and Mel followed the narrow road as it bucked and twisted downhill through a tunnel of lichen-iced trees. Where the wall bounding the grounds of the house ended came a stone bridge over a stream rushing with water from the recent rain, and then the lane turned sharp left to run above the stream downhill along the spine of the valley towards the sea. This cool green world of tangled trees and water might have been the setting for a painting Mel loved,
Lamorna Birch and his Daughters
by Laura Knight, one of the young girls perched on a branch, the other in the arms of her artist father.

As she walked, Mel tried to view the route as the artists she was studying must have seen it, wondering how much had changed. The valley, she had read in a local history, hadn’t been quite so wooded back then. She passed houses and tracks leading up to other properties on the hillside, then a sign to a hotel and, on the left, a pub – the Wink – where, she remembered, Alfred Munnings had stayed. Some of the houses must have been there a hundred years ago, but here and there were more modern buildings.

Eventually, the trees ended and soon she came to a junction and a long granite house with a Post Office sign on the left, set back slightly from the main road, its frontage lined with postcard racks and buckets of fresh flowers, while toy windmills clattered gently in the breeze.

The food can wait, she told herself, her eyes drawn towards the next bend in the lane. She couldn’t see the sea yet, but she imagined she could hear it. As thrilled as a child, she almost ran.

Today the water was a deep clear green, with fleeting patches of brown shadow from the fast-scudding clouds, the ripples sparkling in the breeze. Scraping back her wind-whipped hair, Mel walked out onto the quay and leaned over the battered parapet to watch the waves dash against the boulders beneath, then looked out across the water to where a fishing trawler crawled across the horizon. The salt wind and the spray on her face filled her senses.

After a moment she turned to look back at the cove, aware that she would quickly lose the impartial eye of the observer, the outsider. The tide was out, leaving a solitary shabby fishing boat marooned on the great round rocks that edged the sand. Behind, on the harbour wall, lay a pile of nets and lobster pots, which a man in a reflective coat was piling with patient movements into the back of a small van.

A broken arc of grey buildings huddled together below a quarry-scarred cliff. Which was Irina’s house? One of the terrace to the right , she imagined. Mel scanned the buildings for a yellow door, settling for a golden cream on the far side.

Lamorna Cove. Familiar from the oils and watercolours of the artists she had studied, its beauty and character struck Mel with the freshness that lured painters to the area one hundred years ago. The view had changed – that modern house with its picture windows wouldn’t have graced the hillside back then, and the once stony road had been tarmacked, but the rocky curve of the beach, the strip of muddy sand to her right, now beginning to disappear under the turning tide, the rugged headland, boulders protruding through its motheaten blanket of green, could have come straight out of one of Laura Knight’s breathtakingly beautiful landscapes.

After a few minutes she made her way over the rocks to the sand, pulled off her boots and socks, rolled up her jeans and padded across the wet sand. The water was so cold it hurt, the familiar sensation startling.

When they were children, it had been a race between her and Chrissie and William to change into their costumes and run down to the sea first. Usually it was Will who won, but when Chrissie learned to sneak her bikini on instead of her underwear in the morning, she just had to throw off her shorts and T-shirt and rush for the waves. Mel, the youngest, was always last, shouting with helpless rage as she struggled with her clothes, their mother soothing, uselessly begging her elder children to wait for the youngest.

Now, Mel thought as she rescued a little starfish that was lying upside down on the sand, curling its arms in the air, William was still winning, the typical high-achieving eldest child, as a consultant surgeon in the same hospital where their father had worked. Chrissie, however, had never been the confused sibling-in-the-middle. Lucky Chrissie was always unfazed by life and never yearned for the moon. Instead it was baby Mel, who still felt left behind.

Hearing voices close by, she looked up. Two youngish men, wearing wetsuits and clutching oxygen cylinders and flippers, were clambering over the rocks towards her. One was burly, with the well-developed muscles of a weightlifter; the other, lean, more athletic, with cropped black hair like the pelt of a water mammal. As they stopped at the water’s edge to put on their equipment, looking for all the world like a couple of otters on hind legs, the slender man lifted his mask, smiled and said hello.

‘What are you going to see out there?’ Mel called against the wind.

‘Mostly fish, I expect. A wreck if we’re lucky,’ he called back, adjusting the straps of his oxygen cylinder. ‘No treasure though, I’m afraid.’

She watched as they waded into the waves, their groans at the cold carrying clearly across the water. Then they sank below the surface leaving only a trail of bubbles.

It was a warm walk back up the hill and a relief to duck under the low doorway into the shop. Inside was small, gloomy, crowded with people buying newspapers, groceries and postcards. A wiry woman in her sixties held court from a stool behind the till. Another, who though well-rounded, could only be her sister, sat behind the glass of the Post Office counter.

Mel picked up a plastic shopping basket and pottered, amused by the sisters’ shouted exchanges.

‘Mary, my dear,’ called the woman on the till. ‘Ginger. Have we got any ginger? Mary. GIN-GER.’

Mary, counting coins in the Post Office, shook her head vigorously without looking up from her task.

‘No, we don’t have any, my duck,’ said the wiry woman looked at his watch. TU to her customer. ‘Mary,’ she shouted again, ‘put GIN-GER on the list, will you?’

Mel selected a white bloomer loaf, ham, salad, a cauliflower, some carrots, fruit and a bottle of wine. The thought of cooking for herself, as ever, failed to excite. Here with plenty of fresh local food, she should make more of an effort to eat properly, but she only liked cooking if it was for other people.

A teenage boy, with the same round face and wide-set eyes as the two sisters, put down his price gun in response to Mel’s enquiry and silently led her to a freezer where rows of home-cooked meals in foil dishes were stacked up – Beef Stroganoff, lasagne, fish pie . . . not cheap, but far healthier and more enticing than some of the branded versions. She chose a couple, pulled a newspaper from the rack and joined the queue to pay. As she waited she added a couple of postcards to the basket. David Bell would be wondering how she was getting on, and Chrissie’s kids would love the card with the donkey.

Then, weighed down by two heavy carrier bags, she climbed back up the hill.

At the last small stone cottage before the bridge, a grizzled old man weeding in the front garden straightened to rest his back and scrutinised her with faded blue eyes. She smiled nervously and he nodded once in acknowledgement but his face communicated nothing. She walked on, aware of his gaze burning into her back until she reached the bridge, yet when she looked back it was to see him absorbed once more in his task.

After lunch, lassitude set in. She glanced out of the window. The sky was clouding over once more. Perhaps she should explore the grounds before the rain came. Or should she stay in to unpack her clothes. Or try out her laptop connection on the telephone line, organise a work space, or even begin writing . . . but somehow she couldn’t summon the energy for anything.

Maybe I’m just tired after the journey, she told herself. Tired and fed up. In her London flat, after Jake neatly packed his possessions in boxes and left, pulling himself up roots and all like a plant ready for a bigger pot, laundry piled up, dirty crockery soaked in the sink . . . she had no energy for looking after herself.

Three weeks after he left, her friend Aimee, who had split up with her man, Mark, a few months before, dropped round unexpectedly. She surveyed the mess and gave Mel a sympathetic hug. ‘Never mind, I’ll give you a hand. It took me ages to feel like doing anything ever again.’ She tossed her small cropped head, ‘Now I appreciate having the place to myself. Mark was
so
untidy. I still miss him, though . . .’ she ended sadly.

As Mel sat in the kitchen of the Gardener’s Cottage, she worked out that it would be two months next Thursday since Jake left. When had it all started to go wrong? It was all too recent to view clearly.

She had met Jake when he had joined the college staff four years before. He had switched careers after years as a journalist, he told her at a drinks party. With two published collections of poetry behind him he was now working on a novel. Mel knew the college regarded it as something of a coup to have persuaded him to enter academia.

‘I’m hoping this job will give me more time and focus to write,’ he said in his gravelly voice, frowning. He was a tallish man who held himself well; although he was muscular, there was a sense of lightness about him. But Mel wasn’t fooled by his laid-back pose. His black eyes flared with intensity as he spoke about his work and he had a nervous habit of ruffling his cropped blond hair and beard that betrayed a coiled-up energy.

‘You’ll have to learn to say no then,’ Mel said, laughing, relaxed and flirtatious after her second glass of red wine. ‘It’s all too easy to find yourself bogged down with meetings and extra tasks. Never mind all the marking and the forms. But let me know if I can help at all. With how things work in this place, I mean.’ Their eyes met and Mel recognised the spark of his interest even then.

And so Jake took to tapping on her door whenever he needed advice – whether with completing one of the endless forms or dealing with a problem student. Both of them tended to work late, long after colleagues with marriages and families had left for the day. He often found her reading or marking essays, curled up on the tiny sofa she’d bought in a junk shop, its worn leather artfully disguised by an Indian throw, and would drop elegantly into the easy chair opposite or pace the little office and chatter amusingly about their colleagues, or challenge her, deliberately provocative, about her scathing views on conceptual art or tease her for getting too worked up in argument (‘You’re too serious,’ he goaded her). Sometimes she made a pot of tea, sometimes he opened a bottle of wine. She learned that he was recently divorced and had two young daughters whom he saw only at weekends.

And so came the day, soon after Christmas, when Jake slid beside Mel on the little sofa, and Mel’s heart raced and her voice faltered as he mesmerised her with his caressing flow of words, staring into her eyes, his arm moving across the back of the seat, almost accidentally brushing her shoulder, coiling her hair with his fingers. Eventually she felt herself falling towards him to be kissed deeply, passionately, until she was molten. Only when the cleaner marched in without knocking to empty the bin did they draw back from one another, breathless, giggling.

Dinner at a Thai restaurant later that evening was merely a prelude to a night together. Mel hardly noticed what she was eating.

At one point she couldn’t help asking, half not wanting to know, ‘Your marriage. What . . . went wrong?’