She stood up and re-walked the rest of the lawn’s verge. The grass was growing everywhere she looked. It hadn’t been there yesterday, of that she was certain. But here it was. Not a lawn yet, but the promise of one.
Sam desperately needed to share the good news with somebody. Danny might care but he wouldn’t be home until later and he wouldn’t think it would warrant a phone call at work. Diana might not care quite enough but she would almost certainly listen. Sam looked down at her pyjamas, chided herself for her own inertia and headed with purpose back inside and then, focused again, back to the woods.
When Sam arrived at the caravan, Diana didn’t ask where she had been but welcomed her as though she had barely left. Sam, emboldened by Diana’s warmth, quickly told her with pride of the new life in the garden.
‘I know it’s a simple thing, Diana, but I’m not as confident as I once was. Seeing those little shoots of life made me think I might actually be able to do something again.’
‘You’ve lost confidence already? At your tender age? Well, I suggest you get that under control now because it certainly won’t get any easier as you get older.’
Diana sat down heavily and continued. ‘Aging is a terrible thing. There’s no easy way for a woman. Grow old gracefully they say. Grow old disgracefully they retort. But there’s no such thing. You’re racing along, feeling infallible and one day, quite out of the blue you pick up a packet in the supermarket and you find you can’t read the list of ingredients. No warning at all. You move it away six inches, and there it is, legible again and you carry on like that for a while because you don’t really want to admit that your eyesight has gone. It is an admission that you’ve begun the slow, inevitable, decline towards death.’
‘Gloomy this morning, aren’t you? I came to be cheered up.’ Sam had come clutching her borrowed copy of Rousseau’s The Social Contract. Since she’d last visited she’d read it cover to cover and the book was now swollen with Post-it Notes and scraps of paper; the scribbled questions, thoughts and arguments that the philosopher’s discourse had provoked but Sam now needed Diana’s help to resolve.
‘Oh, but that’s not my role!’ said Diana emphatically. ‘Please don’t ever come to me to be cheered up. You can come to me for many things but don’t expect me to spend my energy making you feel better about yourself.’
Sam laughed. ‘That’s fair enough. Truthful as ever.’ Sam said this pointedly, knowing that Diana claimed to lie habitually. So perhaps what she was saying now was also a lie. She squinted carefully at Diana and took a slow sip from the cup of coffee Diana had handed to her on arrival.
‘Carry on. I believe you were talking about a slow decline to death.’
‘Well, that’s it really. A woman’s life is terribly hard, it’s so much harder for us than it is for men. Take periods for instance.’
‘I don’t get them,’ said Sam straightforwardly.
‘I don’t often get them either.’
‘No, I mean I don’t have them at all.’ Wanting Diana to acknowledge the special position she had earned post-surgery.
‘Well, of course you don’t, you don’t have a uterus. But I do! And they cause me nothing but trouble and here I am now battling the next ten years feeling like absolute death. I don’t know when they’re coming and I don’t know when they’ll end and I have absolutely no idea what havoc they’ll wreak on my mind or my body from one month to the next. But what I do know is that it is much better here, alone in the woods. Here with no one to bother me I can reach out to the feelings – the night sweats, the impending doom, the cramps and the sheer, physical onslaught and I can say, “Bring it on, do your worst,” which is some sort of comfort. Particularly if I yell it at the top of my voice, which I’m prone to do. Poor old Rebecca on the other hand… She must be having a terrible time of it. It’s hard to go through a career pretending you are not at the mercy of a woman’s great burden. You cope once a month, battling through, trying to manage the sheer practicalities of it and then this – the final insult. At work you have to pretend you are not enraged by your colleagues’ knowing glances, the looks that say, “Oh here she goes again, must be the time of the month,” as if they are the ones suffering.’
Sam nodded and took another sip of her coffee. ‘I know what you mean – I’ve been through the same. It’s not easy but of course mine has been associated with part of my treatment, if you like, all part of the same thing. Where yours has come as a bit of last hurrah.’
‘Ha. That’s a better name for it. The last hurrah. Our bodies start letting us down much earlier than you’d think.’
‘Oh great,’ said Sam, with a roll of her eyes.
‘It’s true. Your eyesight goes first…’
‘Mine’s gone already,’ said Sam taking her spectacles off and waving them at Diana.’
‘Your ovaries go haywire…’
‘I haven’t got any,’ said Sam, adopting a bored, repetitive tone.
‘Obviously not. But still, the vast majority of us have to cope with that, and it’s no wonder we feel a bit vulnerable.’ Diana shook her head before continuing. ‘And our digestion changes. The very foods we used to enjoy suddenly turn on us and attack us,’ she sighed and despaired.
Sam watched her quietly, knowing better than to interrupt.
‘But the worst thing of all is that finally we lose our bravery. You have it, you’ve earned it and then – whoosh – you’re this timid thing that doesn’t really know where to put a train ticket or how to navigate simple machinery. Suddenly, everything is terrifying.’
Sam thought of her own mother and that maddening dithering she did when it was time to leave anywhere. The sheer panic on her face as she tipped her handbag out looking for keys or her card. And they were always there, every single time. And she found herself talking to her mum like a child, ‘They’ll be there, just take a deep breath, take your time, let’s go through your bag slowly. There they are! Clever you!’ when inside she was thinking, ‘God, you decrepit old fool.’ Sam felt bad.
‘And the more we dither, the more we’re treated like fools,’ said Sam, helpfully.
‘Exactly, and the more we’re treated like fools the more we behave like idiots.’
‘And so the decline begins,’ finished Sam, looking at Diana’s wrinkled, drawn face.
‘Yes. That’s what you’ve got to look forward to.’
‘Thanks,’ said Sam, nonchalantly. ‘Well, like you said. Your job isn’t to cheer me up.’
Diana actually looked very cheerful and her eyes twinkled as she said, ‘I’ve dodged the bullet of old age by being here.’
Sam looked at Diana, at her greying hair, her glasses perched on the end of her nose.
‘No really, I have. It’s only now, with you looking at me like an old mad thing that I feel remotely old. Day to day, I’m a warrior. I’m learning new things every day. I don’t really lose anything, I write it all down, everything, and every time I write something down I lock into my memory. And if my memory does fail me one day, then it doesn’t matter, does it? It’s all there in black and white. Diana nodded at the books, at her memories.
‘But you’re not actually old, Diana,’ said Sam, remembering that Diana was only fifty-four.
‘But I will be soon and I fully intend to do it well. I won’t be surprised by it. I’ll be prepared because there’s no shame here in the woods. I’m young compared to these trees. I’m a baby compared to the land. Feeling old and useless is something imposed upon us by younger, more useful things. Us older folk should feel brave not timid. We’ve got a lifetime of experience and all that coping behind us, so nothing should give us any fear. And what have we got to lose by being courageous? So what if we mess up? Does it really matter if we occasionally lose our keys, or get on the wrong train, or drive off a cliff?’
‘Well,’ hesitated Sam, wondering if driving off a cliff perhaps was a very real problem.
‘Here on my own I am strong. I am powerful. I feel very alive. And if I scr
ew up, if I go foraging for mushrooms and end up eating a panther’s cap instead of a blusher then that’s fine too. That certainly wouldn’t be the preserve of the elderly, you could make that mistake when you’re young, too, it’s a very easy one to get wrong.’
Sam looked alarmed. She’d often arrived at the fireside for her morning coffee with the smell of freshly cooked mushrooms still hanging in the air. ‘But you won’t mess up, will you? You forage daily, you’re unlikely to make a mistake.’
‘I know what I’m doing and I’m certainly more knowledgeable now but, the truth is that my eyes were good once. My hair was chestnut once. Things change. My mind could go. But you’ll never know, will you, you wouldn’t know if you find me dead tomorrow, the stem of an Amanita phalloides clutched in my lifeless hand, whether I ate it deliberately or not.’
‘You’re scaring me.’
‘Well, don’t be scared. That’s the whole point. And in reality, if I should choose to top myself, I’d be very unlikely to deliberately poison myself with mushrooms. Terrible way to go. Your vital organs go into failure long before your heart stops pumping. No, that would be no good at all.’
‘And what is Amanita…’
‘The Death Cap. The clue’s in the name. That’s not one you want to confuse with something else, but it’s easily the most deadly mushroom in this country so plenty of people do get it wrong. The symptoms start a few hours after eating. It begins with severe vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pains. Then you get completely better, you think you’re fine and then within a few days later you’ll die of kidney or liver failure. Very cruel but in reality, getting to the hospital in between time wouldn’t do you any good. There’s no known antidote.’
‘Perhaps you could take me foraging one day, show me the basics,’ said Sam, whilst silently vowing never to eat a wild mushroom again in her life.
‘Happily. There won’t be anything much until the autumn now and then I’ll take you to all the best hunting grounds and show you which ones to avoid.’
‘Thanks,’ said Sam. After all of this talk of old age and death, she rather liked the idea of an appointment in Diana’s diary for the autumn.
Chapter 37
‘Do you fear old age, champ?’ Sam asked Danny, her words landing heavily amongst the silence. They were sitting on either end of the sofa, facing each other, their toes touching.
Danny looked startled. This wasn’t a conventional topic of conversation. He scanned Sam’s features for signs of illness, as though new traces of disease might be found right there on her face.
Sam saw his discomfort but pressed on. ‘I know you don’t like to talk about it, but we should, shouldn’t we? I mean, just sometimes, we should broach the big stuff? We’re in this together, after all.’
Danny blinked a couple of times to help him order his thoughts. ‘Are you OK, sweet pea, you’re not feeling poorly, are you?’
‘No, no. I feel good. Great. I just realised that we’ve got out of the habit of talking or we never really got into it. You’re such a closed book, Danny, and I respect that, but I’d like to take a peek inside from time to time. You know, just scan the chapter headings if nothing else.’
‘And so, you’re starting with death?’
‘It feels like a good place to start. We’ll work backwards from there.’ Sam shrugged glibly.
‘Rationally, I do not fear death,’ he said, carefully.
‘But? There’s a but in your voice…’ Sam said, applying pressure on his toes with her own, urging him on.
‘I have no cause to fear death. I can only assume I will return to the same state I occupied before I was born, whatever that might have been, and I have no reason to believe I was either afraid or in pain then.’
‘But?’
‘My father faced his death stoically, he prepared everything so practically in order to give me as little inconvenience as possible. He knew he was dying and he used his time to sort out his affairs and to leave nothing to chance. I’m grateful to him for that. But I think he would have approached it very differently if my mother had still been alive. He wouldn’t have wanted to leave her.’
‘Were they very much in love?’
‘It’s hard to say, they were just my parents, I didn’t really have any point of reference. But I think her death must have broken him. She took all capacity for him to love or be loved with her, I think.’
Sam blinked back the tears that formed, not wanting to startle him.
‘I don’t think I really understood any of this until I met you, sweet pea. My father was a practical man, he gave me everything I needed. But he never put up a fight when he was diagnosed. I think he must have been looking forward to joining my mum. And I might have resented that if I hadn’t met you but I’m beginning to understand, now, what he must have felt without her. His own death might have been a relief.’
‘But he had you.’
Danny didn’t respond. Instead, he carried on speaking without looking Sam in the eye. ‘Love can complicate things, sweet pea. It can make life harder to live and harder to leave. But in answer to your question, I fear living without you far more than I fear death.’
Sam thought hard about his words, surprised by the passion in his voice that had been impossible for him to disguise. ‘You should take great comfort from those feelings, Danny. You’d never really know, from the way you act, quite how much you love me. I mean, I do, you give me no real cause for doubt. But nobody else would know. You’re not exactly one for grand gestures, are you?’ Sam smiled, remembering how quietly strong he’d been when she’d been ill, he’d been her champion when she’d been at her lowest, with more than enough strength for the two of them. ‘Your dad probably loved you very much too, and he showed you by making sure you were safe without him.’
Danny nodded quietly and thought about his dad. He felt a pang of recognition and hoped his dad had never feared the pain of loss as keenly as he did. He would rather tell himself his own version of that story, that his dad went peacefully towards his mum, than imagining him facing the double wrench of separation from his wife and then his child.
Danny glanced at his laptop. It looked tangible, reliable, solid. He looked at his wife. She looked ethereal, vulnerable, elemental. Like the sweet peas he’d named her for. ‘I’ve got a bit of work to do this evening, you don’t mind, do you?’ He drew the computer to his lap and opened it up. The bright light on his face blanched out his features.
Sam recognised the look. He had shut down. And when Danny shut down, she had to reach for that other outlet. She stood up and stretched. ‘No problem, champ. I’ve got some writing to do myself.’
Chapter 38
Sam and Diana were sitting on a plank that had been balanced on two upturned logs. In front of them a small fire warmed a kettle and the smallest trace of steam was beginning to rise.
Sam, who now felt more at home in the woods than she did in the fields or lanes of her area wondered of Diana, ‘Do you ever feel oppressed by these trees?’
Diana leant forward and stoked the fire with a heavy stick before looking up to the canopy above her. ‘Oppressed, heavens no. Listen to them. They’re my orchestra, my ballet, my soap opera. They’re my derring-do adventures and my lullabies.’
Sam looked up also and watched the tips of the trees sway harmoniously, as if choreographed by Diana’s words.
Diana continued. ‘And I love their vigour. The way they just grow regardless. A crack in the concrete, a patch of dappled sunlight, an acorn dropped by an absent-minded squirrel. And whoosh, they don’t wait for a second invitation. They’re off.’
Sam recalled her very first visit to the woods. Long before she’d met Diana. ‘That’s funny. That’s the feeling I first had when I got to the woods. But they made me feel so apathetic in comparison. I wonder though, if when they’re swaying above you at night you’re fearful. You know, when the wind picks up.’
Diana inhaled deeply, loving the scent of the conifers and the sound of the kettl
e. ‘Oh I’m not daft, and some of those trees are what, thirty metres tall? And golly, if you saw the size of the root systems it’s a wonder they stay upright at all. But no, I’m not a fool. When it’s really stormy in the autumn and the winter, I occasionally run for the hills, then I’m not too proud to find a more solid roof to sleep under.’
‘You do? I’m really glad to hear that. I rather imagined you holing up in here through thick and thin. Where do you run to, when it’s stormy?’
‘Rebecca’s,’ said Diana, a little curtly, as if it were obvious.
‘Oh goodness. I somehow thought Rebecca and you had fallen out, that you no longer spoke.’
‘Whatever made you think that?’ Diana used her stick to lift the kettle off the fire by its handle. She didn’t look like she wanted to make Sam a cup of tea anymore and Sam wondered if she’d overstepped the mark by making assumptions.
‘You told me you’d needed to reject her entirely. But perhaps I misunderstood.’ Sam said lightly, ‘I’ll fetch the teabags, shall I?’
Sam stepped over the makeshift bench and headed into the caravan to find the tin with the teabags in it. She reached up to the shelf, pulling down the caddy and in doing so knocked over a small pile of unopened post that had been wedged between the tin container and an earthenware pot of sugar. Sam stood the envelopes up again before realising that this was the only clutter she’d ever noticed in the caravan. Guiltily, she grabbed an envelope and studied the address. ‘Ms Rebecca Downing. Willow’s Fortune, Hambledon Hill.’ The address was handwritten in ink. She reached up and looked at the other envelopes. The same name and address, but the typed addresses of bills or statements. Helping herself to two teabags, she put the tea caddy back and the envelopes in place, hoping it didn’t look like she’d disturbed them. A flood of realisation swept over her. Willow’s Fortune. Rebecca. The woman with the gardener and the housekeeper was Diana’s friend, Rebecca. She wondered why Diana would have Rebecca’s post. She’d never yet seen any trace of personal life or interaction with the outside world inside the caravan. And now she knew that Diana made a dash for the big white house on a stormy night. Perhaps, she mused, this was a letter from Diana to Rebecca, though it didn’t look like Diana’s careful script. Sam frowned as the small pieces of information she thought she knew jostled to take shape in her head.
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