Deep down, she was far from it. She had cried in her room – Rowan’s old bedroom – as for the first week of their new life she had pleaded to be sent home to London. And for a time, Rowan had been sure that Ed would give in to Bee’s wishes, that he would softly give in to his daughter’s demands and head for the city again. For one thing, Rowan knew that there would be no redemption for Bee if they did that. For another, she couldn’t be sure that this time she’d have it in her to go back with them.
She had prayed to Judith’s spirit that Ed would stay firm. And was pleasantly surprised – and eternally relieved – when he did.
Within that first month of their new life, Bee had made a friend – Josie, who liked horses and sketching wild flowers.
Within six weeks, Ed felt brave enough to allow her to take the bus from the end of their road direct to school instead of driving her himself to counter her oft-repeated threat to run away back to London on the first train that she could get. At half past four each day, he busied himself in the garden, weeding, pruning and digging – keeping an eye keenly peeled, his heart in his mouth, until he saw her lurch in through the front gate, her rucksack slung over her shoulder, her headphones buried in her ears playing Florence and the Machine as loudly as she could tolerate it.
By the Christmas of the year that they left London, Bee was part of the stage crew for the school variety show and Ed’s heart sang as he watched her take her bow at the end of the revue. She was dressed in the black jeans and T-shirt uniform that she had been at pains to select, anxious that it should be just the right black to remain unseenso that she could be really professional, so that she could be guaranteed to remain inconspicuous during scene changes. Ed watched his daughter as she smiled, the stage lights glinting off her auburn hair. He saw her mother in her, yet felt only a small longing for Jenny, just a tiny tingle of nostalgia and wistfulness. He was instead distracted by Rowan squeezing his hand hard, and beaming at him in the darkness of the school auditorium and he was immediately overwhelmed by her beauty, and by the joy and pride that she so clearly shared with him as they watched Bee take her deserved bow. Ed squeezed her hand back, feeling in that moment that he had made the absolute right choice for his family in moving to this place, which made him feel so complete.
And so inspired. He was drawing again – not just menu designs, or brochures or posters – proper, actual drawing. He had converted a place – an old shed – for himself into a rudimentary studio where he spent long hours absorbed in his sketches, and in the computer animation package he had bought on a nostalgic whim. And somehow he had designed a character. A small, red-haired tomboy character called Lila – a precocious six-year-old who lived on a farm with her pet fox, Vulpo, who had an inquisitive mind and went on magical adventures.
By that Christmas, as Bee worked hard with hammer and nails and paint on creating the sets for her school show, her father had finished a five-minute cartoon short – the first new character that he had created and brought to life since Grimlet, during those hazy days when he was the next big thing in animation. It wasn’t as good as Grimlet, he knew, but then again, he hadn’t animated anything for at least thirteen years, so he couldn’t fail to be rusty and awkward with these new techniques. But still, it was better than he thought he was still capable of. Good enough to make him feel confident.
As for Rowan, she had to concede that she had never been happier in her entire life than she was in those first months when they settled into life at their new home – at her old one. At Judith’s Acre.
At first – when they had first come here – she hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what their new life might actually be like – she had simply wanted to run away from London.
But life at the Acre had proved to be so much better than she had thought life could actually be. It was the simplest things that gave her most comfort – lying awake early in the morning and hearing the chirrup of birds outside their bedroom window as Ed lay snoring gently beside her.
Their days were full – as well as Ed’s experimentation with his little character, and Rowan’s Corkscrew Cards orders, the house itself needed work and repair and most of all cheering, as did the garden, all of it neglected throughout Judith’s illness and since her death. Rowan liked to think that somehow she was still with her there. And that her spirit approved of their taking the Acre as their home, and of the work that they tirelessly undertook to bring it back to life.
Claudia and Robert and their children came for Christmas, laden with expensive gifts which were placed under the tree that Rowan had decorated with popcorn strings and dried orange slices and hand-baked ginger cookies, topped with a star woven from straw. Together they toasted in the New Year, Rowan delighting in the company of her godson Hal – almost two now – and his infant sister, Clemency – acutely aware of the passage of time, of the unpredictability of change, of missing those who had gone.
But she didn’t greet 2012 with the dread that had filled her in the past. As the bells of the churches scattered across the valley struck midnight, and they stood in their habitual spot, overlooking the lights below the Acre, exhaling clouds of steam as they made a whispered toast to the New Year, Rowan and Ed exchanged the kiss that they never failed to share at this moment, the kiss that remembered the first time they had met, different people, in a different place.
They were happy, the three of them. Bee took drawing classes and spent hours swimming and walking the lanes with a boy called Seb who lived nearby, who was tall and in need of a haircut and who played fiddle in his brother’s folk band.
Ed spent long and happy hours in his shed studio – gradually building up the stock of equipment he needed to bring Lila to life in better ways – but spent more time outdoors once spring arrived and brought long evenings with it. He was suddenly filled with a newfound passion there that he had never felt before: a passion for bringing things to life, for returning Judith’s garden to its former glory. By Easter, much to Rowan’s amusement and delight, he was seriously talking about chickens and bees and a couple of pigs.
And Rowan too felt her happiness grow as her business flourished and what she finally thought of as her own family grew in contentment. She felt reborn. As if somehow being here simply blew away everything that had gone before, throughout her entire life. Rowan finally felt free.
It was in May – an afternoon that glowed golden with sunlight and heat – when she walked through the ancient headstones of the churchyard where they had celebrated her grandmother’s life when it came to an end, flanked by her best friend and her stepdaughter, her veil pulled over her face, to finally marry the man who had been her friend, her companion, her lover for the past twelve years. Rowan and Ed were joined in the church ceremony that they both wanted, attended by his family who remained subdued and respectful throughout, by their old friends from London and their new friends from their new, blissful life in Somerset. And by Judith’s old friends – the Glastonbury gang who gathered annually at the stone circle in her memory – the pensioners who would introduce Bee to her first joint and send her home sick, and reeling, vowing never to touch the stuff again. All of them, gathered under one roof, singing ‘Give Me Joy in My Heart’ and ‘Jerusalem’, Ed’s favourite.
And then that perfect summer’s night in the marquee that they had set up at the Acre for a feast catered by Claudia’s old friend Jon and the team from his restaurant. Where they ate spit roast, and danced along to Seb’s brother’s band. Where Bee got drunk on fruit punch and Ed and Rowan didn’t notice because they were giddy on champagne and happiness.
At midnight, they watched the fireworks that they had arranged and when Ed and Rowan had waved the last of their guests off to bed and down the road, they retired to their own room to spend their first night as man and wife in the place that had made them happier than they ever could have imagined. Where possibility had become their friend again, where there were only fresh starts and memories to be made.
Where there were no ghost
s from the past.
Chapter 44
May 2012
Jenny
It’s so very quiet here these days.
And dark.
I keep thinking that they’ll come back – I mean, they have to come back – they’ve left all the stuff. The tables and chairs, the washing machine, the beds – everything. So they can’t be gone for good. They’ve just gone for a holiday, haven’t they? It’s just temporary, and soon the house will be filled with voices again. Soon, my family will come back and take the dust sheets off the furniture and begin life again. They’ll just do the normal stuff like go to work and eat their meals and watch TV and sit out in the garden. They have to.
I have to see Bee go to school, you see. I’m her mum, after all – it’s my responsibility. I have to keep an eye on her while she does her exams to make sure that she works hard but still doesn’t overdo it. That she doesn’t binge on junk food or play on the computer when she’s supposed to be doing essays, that kind of thing.
Because I can’t be apart from her for long – she might be a teenager now, but she’s still my baby – every mother says that, but it’s only when you watch your own grow that you understand that no matter how old they get, they are still always your baby – the infant that you held in your arms is always somewhere, in a parallel place maybe but always just within reach.
She can’t actually have kept her promise, can she? Old Roberta Plant. She just can’t have done that to me – actually taken them away to be somewhere else? To live somewhere else? To have lives somewhere else? Away from me? Away from here? Away from where I can watch over them like I’ve promised to do.
She can’t.
But there are days – like today – where I am cold and weak. And where the loneliness seems endless, like some night that will never have a dawn.
This can’t be how it is now, can it? Because if it was hell on earth to watch them every day without being able to touch them, to let them know I was here, then what could this be? This silence? This longing, this feeling of desertion and sorrow and grief and worry – all of these feelings razor sharp, cutting my very soul to pieces?
I am not sure how I am still here – why I am still here if they are gone. But what I do know is that I don’t want to be here any more if I cannot be with the people I love. I can’t bear it – can’t bear this limbo, this punishment. This death.
Has the time not come yet when I have finally done my punishment? Have I not served my time? Yet not only is there no end in sight, it’s getting worse. And I cannot bear it any longer.
For the first time since I died I feel that I no longer deserve this.
And I want them back because I am terrified of being alone.
Part Three
Bee
September 2019
Rowan and Bee
Rowan found the key was stiff in the lock. It was a long time since the door to 17 Pilton Gardens had been opened regularly, since entry and exit were daily occurrences. Ed and Rowan had taken tenants at the beginning, shortly after they had moved to Somerset – a middle-aged couple had stayed for a year while their own house was renovated and then a young American couple in London on a three-year secondment. They were long gone now, and the house hadn’t been regularly occupied since they had left.
Ed had stayed overnight there occasionally, just to keep things ticking over and to visit his family when he really had to. He had managed to evade pressure from his mother to allow Vicky and Matilda to set up home there, conscious that Vicky’s lack of regard for anything other than herself grew with the years, aware that he wanted Pilton Gardens left in a habitable state. He had no desire for his sister to use it to entertain and house her constant stream of boyfriends, had no appetite for dealing daily with her inevitable constant demands and her destructive tendencies. He was content in his new life in Somerset and felt that there was no reason to bring stress on himself.
When Rowan finally got the key to turn and shoved the door open, disturbing the piles of junk mail on the mat as she did so – a smell of must greeted her, but nothing worse. There was no hint of damp in the air, just disuse and stale heat from the warm summer that had just passed. Nothing that a few open windows wouldn’t sort, nothing that smells of fresh habitation wouldn’t solve before long.
It felt odd to enter it again. This house where she had lived under a shadow for so long. She paused on entry, took in the familiar hallway around her, glanced up the stairs. It was just as they had left it eight summers before, the last time that Rowan had set foot inside.
She stepped forward to allow her companion to follow, to enter as she had done, to sniff the air in the same way, to cast her eyes around – at the heavy mirror where it had always hung, at the bare hall table, to peer through the living-room door which was slightly ajar.
Bee hadn’t thought that the house would make her feel strange but, with that single step over the threshold, she was suddenly overwhelmed, as the sights – the familiarity – of her childhood came rushing over her. She glanced up the stairs – where she knew her old bedroom lay, where she would sleep from now on – those stairs that she had trodden up and down thousands of times – and suddenly had to bite down hard on the inside of her cheek as a completely unexpected wave of emotion washed over her. She kept her head turned well away from her stepmother, not wanting her to see.
Bee wondered if Rowan felt anything. When she had composed herself a little, she glanced at her stepmother, curious to see any sign of emotion on her face. She was suddenly struck by the fact that Rowan had aged. That there were defined lines radiating from her eyes, at the corners of her mouth, evident with the half-smile that she gave her before taking a tentative step toward the door of the living room, which she pushed gently to open it further. Her hair was still blonde, but an ashy blonde now, the curls a little dry and tired. Somehow, seeing her in the city made her look out of place – her tanned skin, the scruffy jeans and sandals, the habitual smock in bright colours. It was exactly as Rowan looked at home – her home, of course – in Somerset, but it was somehow wrong in Pilton Gardens.
Bee didn’t hate her any more. All that rubbish she’d spouted when she was a kid, the disrespect she’d shown her, the hard time she’d given her – Bee blushed at the thought of it now. It didn’t mean, however, that she was even yet entirely happy to be alone in her stepmother’s company, even after all this time.
On the surface, Bee could be completely logical about her relationship with Rowan yet could never take it that little step further, could never fully feel what she thought she might be supposed to feel – companionship, kinship even. They were friendly, yet somehow still formal with each other – polite, courteous, careful – Bee couldn’t quite put her finger on it. There was plenty about Rowan that still grated on her after all these years, too. Ridiculous things like her vegetarianism, the meditation which Rowan practised for hours on end. Bee tried her best not to be spiteful, to think well of Rowan, but there was always a part of her that held back.
It was all about control, of course, wasn’t it? And Bee, deep down, felt that she just couldn’t trust someone who on the outside seemed to be so relaxed – laid-back, at one with nature, all organic, and teetotal and free-range and so on . . . but underneath . . . Bee was sure all of this had to be a veneer. Rowan, after all, had always got exactly what she wanted, hadn’t she? Ed, Pilton Gardens and then Judith’s Acre. The successful husband, the life in the country – you had to have a strong character to successfully run your own business for years, too, after all – to keep it successful, to grow it in recessionary times. There was no amount of meditation could do that for you, Bee reckoned.
She had puzzled long and hard over her father’s wife. It had to have been part of her plan all along – to eventually end up living exactly where she longed to live the most, where she fit in – while keeping her business going – and in the process managing to get Ed to go along with it all, despite the fact that it meant he’d had to up sticks f
rom his home city and turn to building a whole new life for himself. Glancing again at Rowan – make-up-free skin, the amethyst that she wore as an engagement ring instead of a diamond, the slightly down-at-heel look she sported – when Bee knew for a fact that these days she was anything but – all of these things intended to show that Rowan didn’t bow to convention, that she followed her own free path. Yet all of it was fake, Bee had concluded. It had to be. A careful façade put on by an inscrutable woman. For the millionth time in her life, Bee looked at her stepmother out of the corner of her eye and wondered just what really lay underneath.
Trying to free herself from the suspicious train of thought that she had a habit of falling into involuntarily, Bee inhaled sharply and focused on her surroundings, following Rowan along the hallway and down the steps that led to the kitchen and through to the dining room ahead. It felt like walking through a dream of her childhood suddenly, familiar things hidden under dust sheets as she passed, just waiting to be uncovered, to take her back. Bee knew that underneath everything would be as it was eight years ago when they had left. A charge of unease ran through her at the thought that to remove them might just transport her back to being fifteen years old and all of the feelings that went along with that – the resentment, the feeling that she didn’t belong. She shuddered and then blocked them from her mind.
She watched as Rowan strode with what looked like no emotion across to the windows of the sunroom and began to pull the Roman blinds up, one by one. The room was flooded with light, suddenly, like a stage being set and Rowan was immediately transported back in time. There it was, the dining-room table, so ordinary, yet suddenly so evocative – the scene of so many Christmas dinners and family celebrations – of books spread out for study, sketchpads and charcoal – laid as a buffet for summer feasts, the double doors behind propped open with pots of lavender, curious bees and insects flitting in and out, carried on sunbeams. A hundred flashbacks washed over Bee suddenly, years of memory. She felt woozy for a second and thought that she might have to sit down.
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