The Memory Garden (5 page)

He shrugged. ‘Everything changed with Helen after having the kids,’ he said. ‘We both got stressed out, never went out by ourselves, hardly had any time together. Freya – she’s the little one – cute as a button, but a real pain – she never slept. And Helen got so wrapped up in them, talked in baby language all the time. It got like she only spoke to me when she wanted me to do something – change a nappy or cook fish fingers. We became strangers.’

‘That’s so sad,’ Mel said, squeezing the hand that held hers.

At the time, Mel only saw his point of view. Looking back later, too late, she realised she should have taken warning from this conversation, but at the time she was too besotted with this gorgeous, charismatic man to worry about anything except the moment. And the moment was delicious.

They quickly became ‘Jake and Mel’, hardly out of one another’s company, and it wasn’t long before Mel’s Spanish neighbour Cara in the flat above became used to bumping into him in the lobby on her way out to work. He kept on his purpose-built apartment in Kennington, though, which he’d bought after he had separated from Helen. Mel tentatively suggested he let it out and move in with her, but he was reluctant.

‘I must have somewhere to write,’ he said. ‘And I need my books to be in one place.’

But as time passed, he set himself up in Mel’s second bedroom, across the hall from the little box room she called her study , and many of his books and a couple of pictures made the trip across South London. In the early days, if it was his turn to have Anna and Freya, he would go back to stay in Kennington, but as their mother came to terms with the idea that Mel was a regular fixture, the little girls would sometimes visit the Clapham flat, regarding camping at Daddy’s girlfriend’s as great fun.

After a year and a half of the rhythms of this peripatetic lifestyle, Mel began to hint more strongly that they sell their respective properties and buy a house together. She and Jake loved one another, they would find a place with enough bedrooms, so that Anna and Freya could stay and for that hazy point in the distant future when, she dreamed, she and Jake would marry and have children themselves.

But Jake didn’t seem so sure. He loved her, he insisted, and he wanted to be with her always, but it was too soon after his divorce to make such a commitment. And it was certainly too early to talk about babies. Maybe when his novel was finished they could start looking at places. He felt he was living in limbo at the moment, unable to make big decisions.

The novel was not going quite as well as Jake hoped. Two years after he met Mel, he completed it and sent it off to Sophie, his literary agent, with high hopes. Sophie said the book wasn’t yet in a state for her to feel confident about sending it to publishers. It was too . . . cerebral, too much about ideas and not enough about people and emotions. Would he consider recasting it? After recovering from this blow, Jake locked himself up at weekends and holidays for six months to wrestle with his masterpiece. It consumed his attention. If he wasn’t actually writing then he was distant, bearish, and Mel felt sidelined. Suffering for your art was one thing. Suffering for someone else’s was another altogether.

Boiling point was reached one Saturday when Helen dropped off Anna and Freya at Mel’s flat, expecting Jake to be there to receive them, and there was only Mel. Helen couldn’t disguise her annoyance.

‘So where is he then?’ she asked, retwisting a pink scrunchy onto her messy blonde ponytail, her pretty urchin’s face looking more than usually harassed.

‘Still wrapped in his creative cocoon in Kennington, I imagine,’ Mel said wearily. ‘He’ll have forgotten about us.’

Helen said nothing, but she nodded slowly and gave Mel such a look of knowing pity, it said more than could a thousand words. That evening, Mel and Jake had their first real row.

‘You’re never here, you take me for granted,’ Mel almost shouted. His answer was to imprison her in his arms and take her to bed.

‘Now am I here?’ he growled into her damp hair an hour later as they lay hot and exhausted.

Mel shook herself out of her reverie. The one thing she had promised she wouldn’t do coming to Cornwall was brood. She would engross herself in her work, learn to be comfortable with her own company again away from the thousand and one interruptions of her teaching job and having to see
him
every day. She got up from the kitchen table, stashed the remaining food in the fridge, in sharp angry movements, and sauntered outside.

The wind had calmed but the sky was still heavy with the threat of rain, tufts of cloud like smoke drifting above the treetops. It was as though the abandoned garden was waiting for something . . .

She strolled across the grass, wondering idly who mowed this lawn. Surely not Patrick? She bent and plucked at a long trail of ivy that was clawing its way across the cropped grass. Several great lengths of it uncoiled from the jungle and she was astonished in a moment to find her arms full of wet weed. She stepped back, yanking at it impatiently and a whole wadge came away, a few strands snapping loudly and a musty stink of sap filling the air. The rest stuck fast, tangled up with the brambles and bindweed. She tossed the leaves back into the ocean of greenery. What was the point? Her feeble efforts seemed to make no difference.

Glancing down, she saw that she had in fact ripped a tear in the shroud of weed. There was a flash of purple in the undergrowth, like blood welling in a new wound. She bent down to look. Violets! And a glimpse of creamy yellow proved to be a clump of primroses. Excitement coursed through her.

She crouched down and pulled impatiently at the ivy, trying to see what other treasures its smothering blanket might hide. It came away in long hanks revealing more patches of purple and cream struggling to breathe. What she really needed, of course, was some gardening tools. Perhaps there would be something in one of the outbuildings up near the main house?

Behind the cottage she found a narrow gritty path forging its way up the terraces in just that direction. She zig-zagged through the brambles round the back of the house, past the ruined arch of a crumbling brick wall, until she came to the stable block, set parallel to the front of the house on a small cobbled courtyard. Two of the doors were padlocked, but the third had only a rusty latch that yielded unwillingly, viciously pinching her fingers. Nursing her bruised hand, she heaved open the door with the other and found herself inside a large shed smelling of dust and creosote. Piles of junk lay everywhere on the cobbled floor. Some seemed welded to the ground by cobwebs, looked as though it had not moved for decades – an old ground roller, a rusted mowing machine of unknown vintage, several spades and hoes and a small weeding fork that was not too badly corroded. This she seized, coughing, batting at the skeins of dust, together with a stout pair of gloves that looked as though they had recently been dropped down on the elderly trestle table, moulded as though invisible hands were still inside. Her final trophy was a little billhook. Despite flecks of rust, the scythe gleamed keenly. Then, leaning against the door to shut it, Mel returned with her swag to the scene of her excavations and knelt down to work again, slashing at the long grass, digging up the weeds around the flowers, wishing all the while that she had a good pair of secateurs to take to the thick thorny stems of the brambles.

Before long she had cleared a small patch of flowerbed where violets, narcissi and primroses at last had light and air. How long ago had they been planted – or could they have seeded themselves?

It was good to be absorbed in physical work. The scent of flowers, the pungent sap, the smell of the earth were exhilarating. Out here, with new life thrusting through everywhere she looked, it was impossible to dwell on gloomy thoughts. Instead, Mel found herself making plans.

She must take herself in hand or she would waste her precious time here. She would give herself the rest of the day off, enjoy the garden, finish unpacking, eat one of the frozen home-made meals for supper with a glass of wine – but only one – and go to bed early. Tomorrow she would start work on her book.

An hour passed and another. She stood up, stiffly, and stretched her aching limbs, noticing to her astonishment that she had cleared a six-foot width of flowerbed. I’ve made a difference, she told herself, filled with pleasure as she surveyed the flowers, seeing pale new shoots thrusting their way out of the chestnut-coloured earth. She looked up as a pair of wood pigeons flapped their wings lustily, crashing through the foliage above. Huge and plump, these were entirely different creatures to their scraggy London cousins. High in the sky against the clouds, a bird of prey was coasting on the wind currents and it was as though Mel’s heart soared with it, yearning for something she didn’t yet know.

As the afternoon grew cooler, she trudged back and forth with forkfuls of weeds, adding them to a heap on a patch of wasteground some way behind the cottage. She was about to pick up the tools when a small ginger cat cautiously made its way round the side of the house. It stopped dead when it saw Mel, crouched tense, not sure whether to run.

Mel stood perfectly still and the cat, encouraged, tiptoed over to the flowerbed, delicately touching a narcissus flower with the tip of its pink nose, then batting it gently with a velvet paw.

Mel made cajoling noises, holding out her hand. The cat sat down and stared at her for a moment, then started to lick its white bib with long languorous movements, its peridot green eyes hardly leaving her face. After a while it desisted and, ignoring Mel, sashayed off down the track towards the road, its tail high. Mel wondered who it belonged to or whether, like herself, it was a stray.

Inside the house she made some tea and ran a bath – whatever else was Victorian about the cottage, thankfully the central-heating boiler and the plumbing were modern. Climbing into the hot water was ecstasy.

The only trouble with baths, she thought shivering, as she yanked at the plug chain with her toes twenty minutes later, was that they tempted you to daydream. All her plans for being positive had trickled away. For once again, her mind had turned to Jake, going over and over the end of their affair.

It was while she was living in a limbo with Jake, hoping desperately that once he finished the second draft of his book he would return to his usual charming self, that tragedy struck. Her mother was discovered to have a rampant form of cancer that had spread to her pancreas.

Whilst Mel, Chrissie and sometimes William between them accompanied their mother on a depressing round of hospital appointments and debilitating treatments, finally finding a place for her in a hospice near home, it was a time of enormous closeness for the family. But it was as though Jake were outside looking in.

He was supportive, yes, in the sense that he comforted Mel, showing her immense kindness, but Mel felt he never truly entered her distress. She could see the terror in his eyes on the rare occasions he came to visit the ravaged figure of her mother in the hospice. With Chrissie’s husband, Rob, on the other hand, Chrissie’s grief was his also. Once, after a particularly harrowing visit when her mother was clearly in a lot of pain, Mel caught Rob weeping in the hospice reception area. She was deeply touched by his sorrow.

‘Have we offended Jake in some way?’ Chrissie remarked another time when Jake dropped Mel off at the hospice and drove off with a wave. ‘Why doesn’t he come in?’

‘He wants to visit a bookshop,’ said Mel, glancing at her sister as they walked down the hospice corridor, wary of her sharp tone. Today, she saw, Chrissie’s eyes were red-rimmed and she hadn’t bothered with her usual meticulous make-up.

‘I mean,’ Chrissie said, ‘surely he should be here, supporting you.’
Like Rob does
, being the unspoken implication. ‘He’s quite, well, self-sufficient, isn’t he?’

‘You don’t understand.’ Mel snapped back. Chrissie had struck a tender spot. ‘He feels awkward coming, that’s all. He doesn’t know Mum very well, not like Rob. And he doesn’t like hospitals – ever since his little sister nearly died of meningitis when he was ten.’

They had reached their mother’s ward, so Chrissie merely raised her irritatingly knowing eyebrows in reply.

Maureen Pentreath drifted away in drug-induced sleep on a beautiful day in early May. On the way to the crematorium the hearse passed along an avenue of cherry trees. The blossom fell soft as snow.

In the months after her mother’s death, Mel observed Jake and felt in her heart of hearts that Chrissie had a point. Jake didn’t need to rely on anybody else. He loved her, of that she was sure. He had loved his wife, but had allowed her to grow away from him. He loved his children – but sometimes it seemed he could live without them, so absorbed was he in his writing.

‘I wonder whether our children would look like Anna and Freya,’ she said tentatively one Sunday evening.

He had laughed, uncertainly. ‘Not if they were boys. Anyway, Mel, that’s the last thing we need at the moment. A baby really would push us over the edge.’

‘What do you mean?’ she said.

‘The disruption. When would I work? When would you work, come to that. I couldn’t face all that again for a while.’

‘But not never?’

‘Not at the moment, is all I’m saying.’

She had felt slightly mollified, but feelings of distress began to build inside her. She was already vulnerable, grieving as she was for her mother, and one of the focuses of her grief, as she confessed to Aimee, was that her mother wouldn’t be there when Mel had children of her own. Maureen had not lived to see her younger daughter’s children and they would never know their grandmother. The thought was painful to bear.

Early in November, Jake announced that he had finished his book. This time, his agent, whilst still encouraging, sounded impatient. ‘It’s much better than it was,’ she told him on the phone. ‘A really fascinating story. But there’s something about the tone that still isn’t right. And your characters need to be more emotionally engaging.’

‘What the hell does that mean?’ shouted Jake, after he had finished the call. ‘Emotionally engaging? It’s a literary novel we’re talking about, not some Mills and Boon romance. What does she know anyway, silly cow.’