The Memory Garden (44 page)

When I looked once more, they had gone inside, but as I staggered to my feet I became aware of someone else nearby. I looked back towards the Flower Garden to where a man stood under the arch, frozen stock still, one hand clutching some long-handled tool. I knew him at once. The gardener, Boase. We stared at one another for a long moment and his expression turned from shock to pain and anger.

Suddenly, I could endure the fellow’s surliness no longer. I looked away, busying myself with lighting a cigarette to steady my nerves.

A movement. I glanced up and saw him stride towards me, noticing his white-knuckled grip on the hoe, which I eyed warily.

‘What are you doing here?’ Every word spat out. The insolence.

I told him, ‘I’ve come home.’

‘Home, is it? Well, they’re gone.’

‘Where?’

Boase sighed then changed tack. ‘Did you not hear, then?’ His eyes raked my face and body, narrowing as he registered my workman’s clothing.

‘Hear what? I’ve heard little news where I’ve been.’ I stared at him hard then, challenging him, the young soldier’s contempt for the old man stuck useless at home. He caught my meaning well enough.

‘No, I suppose not,’ he said, with a sharp intake of breath. Then, ‘Your uncle. Sick, very sick. In the hospital at Plymouth. They’re all with him. Been away months.’

Aunt Margaret had said no word of this in her letter.

‘So there’s nothing for you here.’ His words ended in a sort of barking sound. The sinews stood out in his neck.

‘No,’ I said, but he must have seen my glance back to the cottage.

‘Leave her,’ he said in a strained whisper. ‘She’s suffered enough. Leave her alone. Go.’

‘The boy . . .’ I started.

‘Go.’ His great hand tightened around the hoe. ‘Get out of here.’

I went.

I never returned to Cornwall again, and now I never shall. But I often think of him, little Peter. He will be a man now, of course, and I imagine how he must live. Perhaps he’s a gardener like his stepfather or works on Uncle’s farm, though Uncle died the following year and the land came to be broken up and sold. My son has probably never heard of me, or if he has, I wonder what he’s heard, how he’s imagined his real father to be? A cad? Or a romantic dream. I fear the former. I’ve been a failure, I face that bitter fact daily. No use toanyone, a burden. And now I’m dying, though they won’t admit that to me, these doctors with their talk of research and new miracle treatments. Peter is all I have. The memory of that beautiful child, the hope of him. When I think of Pearl and how I betrayed her trust I am weighed down with remorse. But when I remember Peter I’m not sorry. Not sorry at all.

For a long while after she had finished, Mel sat at the kitchen table, staring out at the desolate November garden, tears drying on her cheeks. She hadn’t been able to read Charles’s account straight through, as part of her mind kept wandering back to Patrick, but somehow she had stumbled through to the end. So Charles had tried to help Pearl – but failed – and had nearly destroyed her instead. What would have happened to her if Boase hadn’t been there to help? Dismissal, probably. Then where would she have gone if she had no family? But Boase had been there. A strong man. A good, kind man, if his grandson’s account of him was accurate. Pearl’s defender. Did she ever find out that Charles had come looking for her? Boase should have told her, Mel decided. She wasn’t a child to be protected from real life . But what would she have done? Gone away with Charles? Who knows? She had a young child. Her options were few and she must have learned not to trust Charles . Would she have chosen safety, stability, the dull solid virtues of Boase?
Her mind drifted to Patrick and once again, relief and thankfulness flooded through her like a beam of golden light. What should she do? Nothing, she decided . Absolutely nothing. Not today, anyway. She had to think.
Aimee, Stuart and three other friends were due to come for supper that night. All afternoon, as she chopped vegetables and mixed desserts, she remembered cooking with Patrick, he in his butcher’s apron, humming to Miles Davis in the large dingy kitchen. What was the garden like in November ? Sodden, his letter had said, and she mourned those spring and summer days, life burgeoning rudely all around them. Now, in the dying weeks of autumn, it would be dark , isolated, lonely. But Patrick didn’t mind that, being alone. He had told her. After all, his family were nearby, so were old friends. And it sounded as though he saw something of Matt and Irina. Would Mel find it lonely, cut off? Probably. But would it matter if she were with Patrick? Something else she didn’t know.

That evening, though she had felt like being alone, she enjoyed herself. The food was nicely cooked, the balance of her guest-list was perfect. Even Stuart demonstrated a previously hidden gift as a raconteur and it was well after midnight before they all departed, to the sound of late fireworks exploding all around. She loaded the dishwasher and scrubbed saucepans – jobs she had denied her guests , peaceful in her own company, enjoying the fact that everything was in its place because she had put it there, appreciating that rare sense of total control. Then she went to bed and slept dreamlessly until nine the next morning.

When she woke up she knew what she should do. She had to start it three times, but finally she read her letter through and was satisfied.
Dear Patrick It was lovely to hear from you, more than lovely. We have both been through so much since we last saw one another. You’ve had to find out about Bella. I had to see if Jake still meant anything to me, and he doesn’t. He just doesn’t. Meeting you changed everything. I’m feeling so bruised though, so lacking in confidence, though I’m better than I was, and I can’t just rush into something else. It seems strange in a world where we no longer have to wait for anything, where computers and mobile phones put us instantly in touch, to say that I would like to see you, but not yet. I need more time, Patrick. We both need more time. I know something that will last, something that is worth waiting for. I don’t know if it will take weeks or months but hope that you will wait.
Charles’s journal is an extraordinary find and provides many missing details. I hope it’s all right with you if I show it to Ann Boase, Pearl’s granddaughter, whom I will see in a few days. I’ll return it as soon as I can. This book has been hanging over me for so long, I’m determined to finish it very shortly.
Send lots of love to Carrie and Matt, to Irina and little Lana. I miss them all and Merryn and, most of all, I miss you.
All my love,
Mel

.

Walking south over Westminster Bridge, Mel paused to watch a pleasure launch emerge from one of the arches beneath, the swell smacking against its bows as it ploughed its way downstream. There was something cheering about all the boats coasting the little waves, something fine about the mêlée of buildings thrusting their clean lines up into a skyline dominated by the giant wheel.

A shame the view upriver was blocked by builders’ screens, she noted, before carrying on towards the frowning black glass and steel monstrosities of Waterloo. Somewhere in the midst of which, if Mel could find it, lived Pearl’s granddaughter, Ann.

Since receiving Patrick’s letter she had found herself looking at London with new eyes, the eyes of someone who might soon be parted from it. This wasn’t the result of conscious decision-making, rather the sense that something inside her was working away by itself, processing pros and cons, muttering to itself, like a computer program into which she’d fed a long list of complicated data before pressing Go and leaving the room.

If she were to be with Patrick again, what should she do? Live in London and go down to Cornwall at weekends? Give up her job and live in Cornwall? She had enjoyed writing her book. Perhaps there could be more? Or maybe Patrick would move back up to the city? She was annoyed at her inner self for taking liberties. After all, she didn’t even know what it would be like if and when she saw him again, how she would feel, how he would feel, whether they really had the chance of a future together. But this didn’t seem to stop her inner self from hoping.

Mel negotiated a huge roundabout and eventually came to a narrow street heading south away from the river. She checked the name of the road against the scribbled address in her diary and started down it.

As she waited for someone to answer the bell of number 64, she felt with alarm the ground beneath her feet vibrate, then the door opened and the gravelly contralto she recognised from the phone sang out, ‘Come in, come in.’

Ann Boase was a short, stocky woman, dressed in a beige safari-style top and trousers. Her hair was dyed brown and held back by a multi-coloured scarf twisted into a hairband, her black eyeliner applied with more enthusiasm than judgement. Mel followed her down a narrow white-painted hall, through a cheerful modern kitchen and out into a huge studio room with a high glass roof. Warm light poured down, reflecting off the pure white walls. The effect was exhilarating, if slightly spoiled by a strong smell of turpentine.

‘It’s wonderful,’ she gasped, looking round at the large bright canvases on the walls, the stripped hardwood floor, stained with paint and glue and blobs of Plaster of Paris.

‘Not always as tidy as this,’ said Ann, straightening one of the pictures – a furious swirl of midnight-blue paint on which was superimposed strips of white tape forming jagged shapes. Like a thunderstorm, it occurred to Mel, and she wondered if that was what it was meant to be. ‘I swept up before I went to Chicago, but I’ll be knee-deep in dustsheets and rubbish again by the end of next week.’

Once again, the floor began to vibrate slightly and this time Mel heard the rushing sound of a fastline train.

‘The railway line’s down in the cutting there,’ said Ann, moving to the French window. Mel joined her. The studio took up most of what used to be garden, and only a few yards of scrub and a line of fir trees separated the studio from a stout link fence and the hidden trains.

‘Never much interested in gardening, as you can see,’ Ann said, as Mel surveyed the yard outside. ‘And you get used to the trains.’

‘I was brought up with them,’ said Mel. ‘The way they sounded back then was comforting.’ When had the old gentle trundling sound become this horrible startling modern roar? ‘How long have you been here?’

‘Since . . . seventy-eight, I think. My daughters are always trying to talk me into moving, the darlings, but I like it here. Come.’

They walked through another door into Ann’s living room. More stripped wood floors and comfortable old sofas, the bookcases studded with photographs. Ann crossed the room to an alcove by the fireplace and stood beneath a painting about three feet square in a wide plain gold frame. It was a watercolour of a small boy on a beach, the child fully dressed but with bare feet, digging the sand with a wooden-handled spade.

‘It’s Pearl’s, isn’t it?’ Mel whispered after a moment.

Ann nodded, her eyes soft with pleasure. ‘Isn’t it just adorable?’

‘And . . . is that . . . Peter, your father?’

‘Yes, that’s right. He gave it to me shortly before he died – because I was the artist in the family, you see. There are two more over here.’ On the wall behind the door hung a pair of small oils. One was the portrait of a middle-aged man, with a kindly face weathered by the sun. ‘That’s my grandfather. I always think of him as my grandfather, you know. My brother’s told you Pearl was a naughty girl?’

Mel, conscious of Charles’s journal lying like a dark secret in her handbag in the kitchen, nodded.

‘And this is the naughty girl herself.’ The final painting was gloomy, an interior setting. The lines of a mirror framed a pale square face, the black hair pulled back. Great dark eyes burned intensely out of the picture, the lips curved in the faintest of Mona Lisa smiles. Pearl, finally, rising out of the past. Mel was mesmerised. She moved back until the painting fell into clearest focus and stared at the eyes that stared back at her. She’d seen that face somewhere before, she knew she had. Mel looked over at Ann. The woman, too, had fine dark eyes, but they twinkled while Pearl’s were solemn, and where Pearl’s face was square, Ann’s, the bone structure sharpened by age, was small and heart-shaped. No, it was somewhere else that she had seen Pearl. Was it in the Gardener’s Cottage, or in a dream?

She went back to the picture of John Boase, then across the room again to little Peter, eternally digging.

‘And I found one of her sketchbooks is for you.’ Ann picked up a padded landscape notebook lying on the coffee-table next to a packet of cigarettes and a lighter, and offered it to Mel.

‘Sit down and have a proper look,’ she said, seeing Mel turning the book over in her hands in astonishment. ‘I’ll make us some coffee.’

The first page of the sketchbook was inscribed:
For Pearl Treglown, from Arthur Reagan with true affection, 1910
, and it was filled to the last page with drawings and watercolours of plants, faces; studies of hands, the folds of clothes, a flower growing from a drystone wall. There were some that caught Mel’s particular attention – several pencil sketches of a man’s face instantly recognisable as that of Charles and, close to the end of the book, sketches of little Peter from babyhood on, including studies for the beach picture that met her eye when she raised her head to compare.

‘We think Arthur Reagan was her father,’ said Ann, returning with a tray of coffee. ‘She told my grandfather – John, I mean – that he was a painter, but we’ve never found out anything much about him. Did you say this was all relevant to something you’re writing?’

Mel quickly described the scope of
Radiant Light
. ‘I’m hoping to include more about Pearl,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you feel about that – in particular, whether you would allow me to reproduce some of these pictures. I mentioned the ones we found at Merryn? I’m sure Patrick Winterton, the current owner of the house, would want you to see them at some point.’ She bit her lip, wondering whether there might be some dispute over ownership of those paintings. If they had been accidentally left in the house, could Patrick legally claim them as his? She didn’t know.