The Memory Garden (42 page)

To her surprise, Judith instantly nodded. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of her, seen her work, too. Big abstract canvases with paint and collage. A great feeling of light and air and the sea. I believe she’s particularly popular in America. All those big corporations with huge boardrooms to decorate, I imagine. Why?’

‘She’s Pearl’s grand-daughter, and I think she might have succeeded where Pearl couldn’t.’

The next day, she looked up the number Richard Boase had given her, and dialled. This time a crackling phone message invited her to leave her name and number so she did.

Later that evening, she answered the phone and a woman’s gravelly voice said, ‘Melanie Pentreath? My brother said you might call, dear, but that was back in August.’

‘I know,’ Mel said, ‘I’m sorry. Things . . . got in the way. May I come and see you?’

‘I was so hoping you would,’ said Ann Boase, ‘but I’m off to the States again tomorrow for six days. How about meeting the second week in November?’

Now, as she traipsed back to# . is Chrissie’s from the fireworks, Mel remembered. Next Thursday morning – she wasn’t teaching until mid-afternoon – she was due to visit Ann’s home and studio near Waterloo. And then she would finish her book and send it in to Grosvenor Press – Mel caught little Freddy’s sock as it fell from his foot – and after that, well, who knew what she would do after that.

‘Has Patrick really never tried to call you again?’ asked Chrissie, after everybody had wolfed down thick vegetable soup and home-made hot-dogs. Rob had wearily offered to put Rory to bed – Freddy had pegged out on the sofa in front of
Pingu
– and Chrissie was brewing coffee. Mel had just told her what had happened with Jake and added grumpily, ‘Don’t say anything, Chrissie, I know what you think already.’

‘I wasn’t going to,’ said Chrissie, petulant. ‘I could have told you . . . But I’m surprised that Patrick has never been in touch. I thought he would have been.’

Chrissie had long ago told Mel about the phone calls he had made during what they now jokingly referred to as Mel’s Dark Period, as though she were a painter whose emotional life was reflected in her art.

‘Well, he hasn’t,’ said Mel in a toneless voice, as she stirred a forbidden spoonful of sugar into her coffee.

They were silent for a moment, then Chrissie said, ‘Oh, I quite forgot. I was on the phone to Dad earlier in the week. He rang to ask what Rory wanted for his birthday. We were discussing whether he and Stella would come down and see us, and, do you know, in a moment of madness I asked them if they’d like to stay at Christmas, and he said they would.’

‘That’s a turn-up for the books,’ said Mel. ‘I don’t remember when we last saw them at Christmas. Actually on Christmas Day, I mean. Won’t it be a bit weird?’ Chrissie was watching her closely and Mel guessed she, too, was thinking about their last, grim Christmas Day, the first without their mother.

‘You will come to stay as usual, won’t you, Mel? Apart from anything else, Rob would be grateful to have you.’

‘Will you have enough space for us all?’

‘Of course, if you don’t mind having the Z-Bed up in the nursery. Then Freddy can go in with Rory.’

Mel smiled. ‘Only if I can have the Spiderman duvet cover,’ she said.

It was a shock to return to her flat the following day to find Cara had taken receipt of a small, tightly-packed Jiffy bag addressed to Mel in Patrick’s flowing handwriting.

Mel opened her front door, propped it back with her overnight bag and returned to pick up the packet from the shelf in the communal hall. In the kitchen she opened it carefully with a pair of scissors and drew out a small battered hardcover notebook. She turned the yellowing lined pages, studying the large, scrawled italic hand, rather like Patrick’s own. Still jammed in the bag was a white envelope addressed to her, from which she pulled a single folded sheet. It was a letter from Patrick. She stood for a moment staring, unfocused, mustering the courage to read.

Dearest Mel,

At last an excuse to write. I’ve been wanting to so much, but haven’t known whether it would be welcome and I wasn’t brave enough to find out. Forgive me.

The enclosed arrived a few days ago. Read the letter inside and everything will be explained. I’m sure it clears up some of the mystery about Pearl.

Otherwise, what to say? I miss you, Mel, I really do. Our time together was so short, but now I look back I know it was wonderful and I think about it constantly. I can’t believe how I messed up and I’m sorry. I have to tell you about Bella.

First, the most important thing is that Bella and I are not together and never will be. I realised that, very soon after you left. I began to see her differently. There was a time when she was precious to me, and I must have been grieving for the loss of her all the weeks that I spent with you. I felt so muddled, I’m sorry. I suppose the bottom line is that it was the wrong time for you and me. When you left, I was devastated, but took it as a sign that I had to find out the truth about me and Bella. Whether it would work. And we tried, but it became clear fairly soon to both of us that we were chasing after a phantom. I realised that what I felt for her was a pale shadow of what I felt for you. I’ve told her I can’t be in contact any more, that what she and I had is firmly in the past now and must be left there.

Mel, I don’t know whether you ever want to see me again. I couldn’t blame you if that is the case, I have so let you down. But I do hope that it is otherwise, that, given time, you might offer me another chance.

The garden is shutting down for winter now. You have missed the leaves turning russet, the sweet wild apples, the scent of smoke from the eternal bonfires – Jim makes some damn fine bonfires. It is dark and foggy here, sodden and lonely. I rather like it.

There’s little news. Carrie’s condition is stable, but they’re waiting for her blood pressure to come down before they operate. She’s also on a diet, which makes her irritable. Matt is running the hotel with Irina helping him, though fortunately, it’s low season. Greg is sometimes a guest. He has come several times to spend time with Lana. But this week, half-term, after much wringing of hands and asking everybody’s advice until we were sick of it, Irina took her up to London on the train and left her there with him. All week she’s been like a cat on hot bricks. He will bring Lana back this weekend, please God promptly, for the sanity of us all.

Write to me, please.

All my love,

Patrick

Mel read the letter again, stopping and mulling over
I miss you, Mel, I really do. Our time together was so short, but now I look back I know it was wonderful and I think about it constantly
. A feeling of such relief flooded through her that she leaned against the work surface for support. She read the words again and, for the first time for many months, knew the gift of joy, that soaring certainty that the world is a wonderful place in which we are special and infinitely precious. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she whispered, though whom she couldn’t tell.

It occurred to her, and she was shocked, that seeing Jake again had never given her this joy, and now she knew for certain that with him again those few weeks she had been going through the motions. But Patrick . . . suddenly all she wanted to do was speak to him, see him, be with him. She turned to pick up the phone and dial his number, but something stayed her.

She read the rest of the letter once more and caught its warning.
Given time
. Patrick sounded fragile, she thought, sad, and she knew he must have been treading a similar path to hers these last months. And as she reread what he said about Bella, the firework sparks of elation died and fell to earth. All that time he was with Mel, part of his mind had been with Bella. What did this mean? Could she ever trust him? Would he, if he knew she had tried again with Jake, trust
her
?

Given time.
Time heals all wounds. She had never quite believed that one. There were some injuries, surely, that were too deep – the loss of a child, for instance, or a partner after many years of marriage. The skin might grow over, the pain might dull, but the scars remained, occasionally to be prodded into agonising pain. Both she and Patrick were battered, wounded. Perhaps they should wait for the scars to form and harden. Time gave other things. Perspective. ‘All in good time,’ her mother used to say when Mel whined for a toy she’d seen, fashion shoes she was too young for, permission to go to a late disco. What was ‘good time’? Perhaps she was about to find out. She wouldn’t ring him yet. She had to think.

Mel pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat down. For a moment she was deep frozen in thought, but then she put the letter to one side and drew the notebook towards her. She opened the front cover, picked up the folded piece of cream writing paper tucked into a worn-out piece of elastic inside and glanced at the handwritten inscription at the top of the first right-hand page of the book –
Charles Carey
. Charles Carey! This was extraordinary.

She pinched open the letter.

It was close-typed, without margins, on a manual typewriter with a jumpy ‘e’.

Dear Mr Winterton,

I encountered my second cousin Susan Granger, for the first time for many years, at a family funeral last week. Susan is the daughter of Elizabeth Goodyear, née Carey, who was raised at Merryn Hall where you live, and she told me you had written in quest of family papers. I am wondering whether the enclosed is of interest to you. My father Duncan and Elizabeth, rest their souls, were first cousins to one another and to Charles Carey, who wrote this journal, I believe, in 1934, when he was dying in a TB hospital in Surrey. I don’t remember Charles, being only six when he passed away, but my grandmother, Margaret, whose nephew he was, used to speak of him. He was a painter, not a terribly good one, I’m afraid, and my grandmother helped him when he fell on bad times after the First War. This book I found in my father’s papers when he died. It’s a queer story, but perhaps of interest to you in your inquiries. My children appear to have little interest in the family history, so I’m happy if you want to place it with the Carey archive when you’ve finished with it.

Yours sincerely

Jane Merchant (Mrs)

Charles Carey. The photograph she had seen of him in the archive rose in her mind. A carelessly good-looking young man with a cap of soft blond hair and a moustache, slight but graceful, lounging against the car. And in Pearl’s painting, the same elegant figure, holding a . . . and now she knew. He was holding an artist’s brush. The symbol of his trade, though if Jane Merchant’s opinion was anything to go by, he was not a success at it. Mel wondered idly whether any of his work had survived.

The elderly binding creaked as she opened the notebook at the first page. The ink, faded to sepia, was hard to decipher, the curls and flourishes of Charles’s pen frequently rendering ys and gs, ss and fs indistinguishable from one another. But she was used to puzzling out handwritten sources and slowly she began to pick out the sense.

A month I’ve been in this damn place, and now I understand fully why they call us patients, for to be sure, boredom will kill me before the disease gets me. Aunt Margaret visited today with a fine-looking fruitcake, the first decent food I’ve set eyes on for weeks, not that I have much appetite after all these potions they pump into me. She’s the only one who comes now. How hunched she’s grown. Not one word from Uncle Stephen’s family, all these years.

Charles had clearly felt this was the wrong approach, because a few lines’ space followed and he started again on a different tack.

I have made many mistakes in my life, but there is one wrong that I regret above any other. The chaplain who came again today with his chubby fingers and his air of tired resignation could not make me speak of it and so he advised me to write it down, to consider the matter prayerfully and to ask God’s forgiveness and peace. I have never had much to do with God, but peace – ah well, that is something we all seek and it has eluded me always.

My father died when I was a boy of ten, leaving me and my mother but her small annuity to live on, her own parents having died some years before. She did her best by me with the help of money my father’s brother and sister sent. By the time I was sixteen, she recognised that I was not meant for university, not least because I passed my spare time drawing and painting instead of studying. She begged Uncle Stephen to pay for me to attend art college in London near to where we lived. Unfortunately he would not, his letter pointing out that this training would offer no certain way for a boy in my reduced circumstances to earn a living, but he invited me to make my home with them in Cornwall and learn to farm, for he had no sons to follow him. My poor dear mother did not want to let me go and she saw my reluctance to do so and the strength of my vocation. Eventually she took work as companion to an elderlylady and persuaded Aunt Margaret and her husband to contribute to my education, though they had their own large family to feed.

Two years into my course, disaster struck. My mother was killed in an accident in the street involving a runaway horse and carriage. With her death the annuity my father had left her ceased. Soon, I faced a straight choice between paying the rent and buying food, so I was forced to give up our shabby rooms. At first I stayed with my aunt, but I was made to share a room with her two eldest boys and her crotchety husband resented my feet under his table. There came a time when they could no longer pay my fees, and when my uncle wrote again inviting me to Cornwall, it seemed an answer to please everyone. His wife, Emily, added a charming postscript to offer me my own studio if I wished to pursue my ‘daubings’, and at the time Lamorna, in a county of artists, sounded a land of opportunity for a tyro like myself.