The Garden of Lost Memories

by Ruby Hummingbird

  ‘Billy,’ she said warmly, a confidence I wasn’t used to as she summoned me over to her, ‘I was telling Mary about the garden. She has an artichoke plant, you know, we must pop out and see it. Billy here,’ she placed a hand on my shoulder, ‘he understands gardening, he’s got a real talent.’

  I bit my lip and felt heat in my cheeks, secretly pleased to hear her say something so nice about me. Elsie beamed at me before they both returned to poring over letters, gardening books and postcards.

  ‘Tell me more about our mother, what did she love to listen to?’ Mary asked.

  Elsie turned back to her sister and spoke. ‘She had LPs of Ella Fitzgerald. She used to dance in the living room to “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered”.’

  ‘Oh,’ Mary brought her hands together. ‘I used to listen to her songs on cassette. I must get Tilly to upload some to my mobile, she seems to understand how to pipe things through to the speakers.’

  They chatted as we ate cold chicken, potatoes and salad, the evening sky streaked with pale pinks and purples, birds chattering in the trees outside. I stared at the shadows lengthening on the lawn as it sloped away from the house, the sun sinking below the tree line. My problems at school seemed to fade with the light, with the laughter around me, Tilly making Rory wail as she stole the last strawberry in his bowl.

  Suddenly, over his shout, the slow notes of some kind of jazzy music grew in volume in the kitchen, Tilly playing around with a mobile. Elsie and Mary’s heads snapped up from their conversation and they both started to smile as the throaty voice of what must have been Ella Fitzgerald grew louder in the room. Then suddenly they were standing pushing back their chairs, Tilly was dragging me by the hand and we were all dancing around the big island in the kitchen to this song I had never heard before but was sort of beautiful and I didn’t even feel embarrassed like I should because everything just seemed right.

  When it had ended Elsie gave me a quick squeeze in close, before her eyes roved to the kitchen clock. ‘Oh!’ she said with a start, ‘we best get you back.’

  Tilly was back at the table pinging a pea at Rory and stuck her tongue out at me.

  ‘Can’t Billy stay for a sleepover?’

  ‘Not on a school night,’ Mary said, ‘but another time certainly,’ she added warmly, turning to Elsie too, ‘You both must come and stay, and your mother of course, Billy. I know Faith will want to meet her.’

  ‘I would love that,’ Elsie replied, looking at the island where the contents of the tin were laid out. ‘And you must keep the tin now… It’s yours,’ she said, making Mary smile.

  They were walked to the front door in a warm huddle of goodbyes, Mary reaching down to ruffle my hair before turning to Elsie. She gripped both her hands. ‘All this time you lived just a few miles away,’ she marvelled, her eyes watery with unshed tears. ‘I am so glad you decided to come, that we have found each other.’

  I watched Elsie blush as her sister held her hands, unable to believe this was the woman who only a few months ago had nobody in her life. As they held each other I felt a glow in my stomach that the tin I had dug up had led us both to this house.

  We walked back up the gravel pathway together waving our goodbyes, knowing we would be back there soon. Barely talking, we returned to the station, the warm feeling not leaving either of us as we sat opposite each other at a table in the carriage, our heads resting back, reliving the past few hours.

  It was only as we were pulling into Pangbourne that I remembered I had switched my phone off when I was in the den and when I turned it back on, I had seven missed calls from Mum: seven calls and one text message.

  Ring me back, it said, and I felt a stone stick in my stomach.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  ELSIE

  Mary had wanted to visit it and Elsie had offered to join her.

  They met just under the archway of the lychgate, the smell of roses strong as she waited, nervously fiddling with the button on her cardigan.

  Mary approached, looking older than Elsie had seen her before, a slight stoop in her shoulders as she clutched a bunch of pale pink tulips, her footsteps shorter, a worried glance before she met Elsie’s eyes, her face softening. She kissed her on the cheek, a wave of expensive perfume tickling her nose, and smiled as she greeted her, a slight shake in her voice as she said, ‘Lead the way!’

  Elsie pushed open the gate and walked the familiar route, around the side of the church, the grass sliced with shadows, headstones worn, some crooked in the far corners, some marbled, polished and more recently laid. The grass neatly clipped, the place deserted.

  She steered her up the narrow path of flattened grass to the spot she had stood at hundreds of times before, kneeling to talk to her mother, tending to the grave, in the rain, in the sun, season after season for twenty-eight years. Always bringing flowers from their garden. The only visitor.

  And now her sister: Mary. Her mother’s other daughter, the woman she had thought of endlessly over the years, who she had thought had it all.

  Their reunion had been emotional, back in that house, staring at each other in the hallway.

  Mary had stepped forward. ‘You found me,’ she had said.

  Everyone else had melted away as Mary had steered her into a beautiful drawing room, surfaces gleaming and smelling of polish, silver frames containing photos from the ages. Elsie had drawn up with a start as she saw a photo of a young Mary: something in her expression so like their mother.

  The conversation had been stilted at first, both perched on the end of a large cream sofa, a pink lampshade on a table next door. Mary offered her tea but didn’t show any sign of fetching it, just staring at her.

  ‘I’m sorry it’s taken me all this time,’ Elsie began in a rush, realising now she was looking at this woman that she had been so stupid, so stubborn. ‘I was so angry,’ she admitted in the smallest voice, sinking deeper into the cream sofa, too ashamed to look up at her older half-sister.

  When she did meet her eyes they were warm, not reproachful, filled with tears as Mary reached across a hand. ‘I understand, it must have been so hard. You only had each other.’

  The rest had spilled out then. The guilt, the anger, the confusion. ‘She had always made me feel it was just me and her and I had hated the intensity at times, wanting to break out. Then I would feel terrible for wanting to leave her.’

  Mary had been nodding throughout, encouraging her to go on, aware perhaps Elsie needed to talk.

  ‘After she died, I realised she had kept so much from me. I couldn’t handle the idea that she hadn’t shared such a massive part of herself. It was complicated, it was…’ She handed Mary the letter she had discovered originally in the tin. ‘Read it,’ she said as Mary placed it in her lap. ‘She wanted me to find you, she was just too afraid to tell me herself.’

  Mary nodded again, too moved to speak.

  ‘She didn’t want to give you up,’ Elsie said, wanting to ease the pain for her. ‘Her parents made her. She had fallen pregnant by accident, your father was married…’

  ‘I know,’ Mary admitted, filling in her own gaps. ‘I overhead my parents talking one time, a scandal...’

  There was silence and Elsie glanced around the room, the shafts of sunlight through enormous windows, a striped window seat, a book spine up, abandoned, another flash of silver of the photos. ‘What wonderful photos,’ she commented, seeing one of a large family group, an old wedding photo.

  ‘That was Dennis, my husband. He died a couple of years ago sadly: liver cancer.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Elsie said, a stab of pain for Mary’s loss.

  ‘He was wonderful,’ Mary smiled. ‘I was very lucky to have him. Were you ever married?’

  Elsie swallowed. ‘I never married, no. I was…’ Elsie twisted her hands in her lap, picturing Philip, his own head thrown back, the straight white teeth, the feel of his arms around her. ‘I was engaged. He was… he was lovely,’ she added in a small voice, ‘but he died young and we
never did…’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Mary said. ‘How hard for you.’

  ‘It was hard. And it made me harder. Made me shrink away from life.’ And Elsie found herself sharing more, found it easy, as if she had always had a sister, as if she had always shared intimate thoughts with her. ‘I think I used the death of our mother as an excuse to remove myself from it all, to try not to get hurt again. But of course it doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘It doesn’t,’ Mary agreed sadly.

  They had talked for ages, at some points weeping, others laughing. Discovering similarities: ‘I say that!’, ‘I remember that place.’

  Elsie talked about their mother and it was wonderful to concentrate on all the pleasant memories, her idiosyncrasies, all the things that had made her so beloved. The lisp she had been embarrassed by, the passion for flowers she had passed to Elsie, her midnight jam-making sessions when she couldn’t sleep, her skill at embroidery, the tiny snort she sometimes did when she was really laughing. Elsie’s voice grew in strength as she added more details, realising she hadn’t focused on this side of her mother for a while, too wrapped up in her hurt.

  Mary had asked question after question and the afternoon had been strange and magical and Elsie hadn’t wanted to leave. But they knew they had more time together – and Mary had been adamant she wanted to come to the graveyard.

  Elsie stepped back as Mary knelt in front of the grave, reaching to trace her finger over the letters on the headstone – ‘ROSA MAPLES: BELOVED MOTHER’ – and resting her bunch of white roses at the bottom, the stems tied with a purple satin bow. She stayed there a while, head bowed, and Elsie felt tears creep along the edges of her eyes as she watched her sister’s shoulders tremble with the moment.

  Elsie joined her on the ground, her knees damp from the rainfall the night before, shoulder soon damp with her sister’s tears, as Mary buried her head in Elsie’s shoulder.

  ‘She never forgot you,’ Elsie told her, feeling like the older sister in that moment. ‘Every year she would make the cake for you, light the candle. She loved you,’ she said, certainty in her voice, realising this was the first time that thought hadn’t been accompanied by pain.

  Elsie started to cry softly as she still tried to make sense of the complicated feelings about the mother she had loved so hard, who she had resented at times for keeping her so close. An intense childhood, no real friends, home-schooled, wrapped in cotton wool and kept safe. The daughter who wouldn’t be taken away. And Elsie had almost escaped the life she both loved and resented and then Philip had died and she had stayed home, heartbroken and alone, her mother’s sole companion until she died. The tin had shocked her. The tin had shown her that it wasn’t just love that made her mother love her, smother her, in that way, but other feelings too: guilt and fear.

  ‘She would be so pleased,’ Mary said, one arm around her little sister, ‘so pleased you found me. Hadn’t that been why she had given you that tin?’

  Elsie nodded, pulling a tissue from her sleeve. ‘But I wasted all those years. I came to see you, filled with curiosity, and as I stood staring at you in that house, your husband chasing those children on the lawn, your smile as you’d looked on, I didn’t think you would want your life disturbed, and,’ Elsie took a breath, ‘and I suppose I’d been jealous too. Such a rich life.’

  Mary shook her head slowly. ‘I always wondered. I knew I’d been adopted, and I’d always wondered what happened to my birth parents, always wondered if I’d had any siblings. I was so envious of friends who had them, who used to squabble and berate them, I’d think, you lucky sods…’

  ‘But I was broken then. You seemed to have your Philip – your husband and children, and I was so jealous, expecting someone who needed me and instead finding someone happy and enjoying the life I had hoped for myself. The life that was stolen from me.’

  ‘I did need you,’ Mary said quietly. ‘And I am so grateful that we have each other now, and can make up for all that time.’

  Elsie couldn’t help the smile that lit her up as her sister spoke, realising for the first time how lucky she was to be given this second chance to be a sister.

  ‘You never found out more about your father?’ Elsie asked.

  ‘No, I never did. There was a man, Harold, he sent me a card, he emigrated to Australia… I was only very young… it contained a cheque for fifty pounds, which at the time seemed a small fortune. And later, I wondered, when I overheard my parents, if he’d been the one…’

  Elsie frowned, a distant memory tugging at her. ‘Harold,’ she repeated, recalling something her mother had told her once in a soft, sad voice. A trip to Oxford, punting on a summer’s day. A drive to the countryside, her hair blowing in the wind. A love she had felt for somebody. Elsie had thought she was talking about her own father.

  ‘There was a man,’ Elsie said slowly, ‘I think she had loved someone deeply.’ How had she never realised that her mother had been harbouring a broken heart? They lived in each other’s pockets, side by side, but there was so much distance between them, so much she didn’t know.

  ‘Did you find out more?’ she asked, looking at her older sister, realising together they had the answers.

  ‘My parents told me when I was eleven that I’d been adopted when I was a baby. That my real mother had been very young and was not in a position to keep a baby. And they were so loving and I was so happy that I accepted it, in the way that children do. I wondered, of course, and I can’t believe she lived so close, all this time, that we never met.’

  ‘She would have wanted to, but she wasn’t a selfish person. If she believed you were happy, she wouldn’t have wanted to have changed that.’

  Mary was quiet as Elsie spoke and then without thinking, Elsie dropped her hand by her side and found Mary’s, their fingers entwined as they stared at the grave, as they both forgave the woman who lay beneath.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  BILLY

  Mum had been ringing because we had been summoned into the school the next morning, first thing. I had a sleepless night worrying about all the things they might say. Was I in big trouble? Had they heard about Dad? Would they arrest me like him? Had Daniel told them I’d tried to hit him? Was I going to be suspended? Expelled? If I had to leave the school, where would Mum and me go? I’d just started to like it here and we’d have to move to a new place for a new school because Mum didn’t have a car. I couldn’t rest, eyes flying open every time I wondered what they might say the next day.

  I hadn’t told Mum everything earlier. She hadn’t bothered to change out of her work clothes, her feet resting in a plastic tub of soapy water as she grilled me.

  ‘What’s happened? What did Mrs Maple mean in the restaurant? What’s this Daniel got to do with it?’

  I tried to play it dumb at first but I could see I’d have to tell her something. ‘Daniel doesn’t like me,’ I’d begun, Mum leaning forward and sloshing bubbles on the carpet. ‘And he put something in my bag and he also took a sort of video of me.’

  Mum went mental immediately, which suited me because she stopped asking questions and I didn’t have to tell her about the part where I’d tried to hit Daniel in the face. I didn’t feel too bad about it, not really: he deserved to be punched and I wish I hadn’t missed but still, I was quite pleased Mum didn’t know.

  We were early for the meeting and I thought it would be just us but outside the Headmistress’s office was Rich, Mum’s manager from work, and Daniel sitting right there. Mum and Rich said hello to each other a bit awkwardly and I sat on the edge of one of the shiny wooden chairs that had scratches in the surface: people’s initials and someone saying Mr Williams was a willy, which reminded me that I called Daniel’s dad a dick because he was called Richard and that thought gave me the confidence to sneak a peek at Daniel.

  He was sat on another chair a few feet away, not looking at me, but he didn’t have his usual scowl on and his eyes were all tiny, his face covered in red blotches, like he
was allergic to something. There’d been a kid in my class in London who got like that every time he ate kiwi fruit. Daniel sniffed and I realised the blotches weren’t because of kiwi fruit but because he’d been crying. Daniel had been crying. That thought almost distracted me from Mrs Kendrick, who opened the door to her office and asked us all to step inside, her face serious.

  ‘I’ll dive right in, if that’s alright with you both. It has come to my attention,’ she said, perched on the edge of her desk, a pot of biros and a plant pot inches away, ‘that there exists a video, a video that was created originally by you, Daniel.’

  Daniel didn’t deny anything, sat nodding miserably in the bucket chair as Mrs Kendrick asked him to hand over his phone.

  His dad produced the mobile from his pocket. ‘Daniel showed it to me last night,’ he said, glaring at his son. ‘He has assured me he is very sorry but obviously realises he needs to accept whatever punishment you think he deserves.’ He handed over the mobile, my eyes following every move.

  I bit my lip as Mrs Kendrick took the phone, my whole body stiff that she might actually watch the video. Instead she handed it over to Daniel.

  ‘Daniel, can I rely on you to delete this from your mobile immediately and let me know immediately if it has been posted on any social media sites as that will change things?’

  ‘It’s not Miss,’ Daniel said, his voice cracking as he took the phone. With shaking hands, he tapped in his password and started to press buttons, the video deleted from existence. ‘Done it,’ he whispered, his voice wobbling as he stuffed the mobile in his pocket.

  ‘I don’t need to tell you we take these matters very seriously,’ Mrs Kendrick continued, ‘and it would be remiss of me if Daniel did not receive an appropriate punishment. Daniel, do you have anything to say?’