The Memory Tree

by Linda Gillard

  PHOEBE

  Phoebe was thoughtful as she heated the tomato soup. She wondered if it was too late to go through the contents of the shed to see what Sylvester might have left behind. She was curious, but also fearful. It wouldn’t do to go stirring things up again after all these years. It was surely best to let sleeping dogs lie. Connor had already roused the sleeping garden. He might wake Ann too . . .

  Phoebe heard laughter outside, then the scraping of boots. She ladled soup into three bowls, spilling some as her clumsy hands shook. Matters were beyond her control now. She could only hope for the best, prepare for the worst.

  Connor’s smiling ruddy face appeared at the door and as soon as he entered, the kitchen felt smaller. Phoebe noted he was a whole head taller than Ann – so like her handsome father, especially when she smiled and she was smiling now. Ann was happy. There was colour in her cheeks and she looked alive. Being outdoors had that effect on her. Or perhaps it was Connor. The man’s energy and good humour were infectious.

  ‘Lunch is served,’ Phoebe announced. ‘Tomato soup. Campbell’s best. Campbell is my cook,’ she added with a wink to Connor. ‘Help yourselves to cheese and ham. I’ve cut plenty of bread, but it’s doorsteps, I’m afraid. That’s all my gammy hands can manage these days.’

  ‘The only way to eat bread,’ Connor replied, removing his boots and leaving them on the doormat. He went over to the sink and began to wash his hands. ‘After this I’ll be ready to go another ten rounds with Sleeping Beauty out there. I do believe she’s beginning to stir . . .’

  On an impulse, Ann put an arm round her mother’s waist and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Thanks for doing all this, Mum. I’m looking forward to it!’

  Thrown by the show of affection, Phoebe bent and grasped her stick. Moving cautiously through the kitchen, she called out over her shoulder, her voice slightly querulous, ‘Would one of you be kind enough to bring my soup through? Oh, and there’s beer and cider in the pantry. Just help yourselves. You’ve earned it.’

  ANN

  When Connor had finished for the day, cleaned up and gone home, Phoebe and I collapsed for the evening in front of the stove. The wind had freshened and was whining now in the chimney. I must have been dozing when Phoebe suddenly announced, ‘Nice boy, Connor.’

  ‘Mmm . . . ? Oh, yes, he’s very kind, isn’t he? I hope he manages to make a go of his garden business.’

  ‘I’m sure he will. All that energy, plus a capacity for hard work. He seems to know what he’s about.’

  ‘Yes, he trained at horticultural college.’

  ‘Is he married?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s never mentioned a wife.’

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. He’s got a flatmate. Male. Maybe he’s gay.’

  Phoebe shook her head. ‘Don’t think so. My antennae – which have never failed me yet, I’ll have you know – indicate he’s straight. There’s probably a girlfriend somewhere.’

  ‘Maybe. But when you’re setting up your own business, there’s not a lot of time left for socialising. And the older you get, the pickier you get.’

  ‘That sounds like the voice of bitter experience.’

  ‘Well, it’s not easy to find someone who’ll put up with you being married to a business. Jack and I worked really hard at separate careers and we were both very successful, but the marriage went to the wall. Isn’t that what happened with you and Dad?’

  Phoebe shrugged. ‘It just wasn’t in my nature to be domestic. Or faithful, I’m afraid. But you mustn’t give up looking, Ann. You’re too young and far too attractive.’

  ‘I haven’t given up,’ I replied, without much conviction.

  ‘After all, you’re only forty-three.’

  ‘Forty-four, actually.’

  ‘Really?’ Phoebe looked confused as she calculated. ‘Damn. You’ve had another birthday, haven’t you? Sorry, I lose track of time. I suppose I should get a calendar, but really, what for? One day is much like another for me.’

  ‘Mum, you’ve remembered my birthday once in the last ten years,’ I said, laughing. ‘It’s really not an issue. I’ve got to the age where I prefer to forget about birthdays.’

  ‘Me too. Shall we have a birthday amnesty? No more until further notice?’

  ‘What a good idea.’

  ‘But we’ll have to find other reasons to drink champagne.’

  ‘We need a reason?’

  ‘That’s my girl!’ Phoebe said, slapping the arm of her chair. ‘Let’s have some the next time Connor’s here. I need him to be in a good mood.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m thinking of asking him to sit for me. Just a few sketches. I have an idea for a portrait, if I ever feel up to tackling it. Do you think he’d do it?’

  ‘I’m sure he’d feel very flattered to be asked.’

  ‘Good! We’ll ply him with champagne first though, then catch him off-guard.’

  ‘You really like him, don’t you?’

  ‘I do, and for some unknown reason, he likes me, so I think he might do it. He has an interesting face, I think. A lot of conflict there. And he’s still grieving for poor old Ivy, isn’t he?’

  ‘I suppose so. I haven’t really given it much thought.’

  ‘You don’t have to think about it, Ann,’ Phoebe said, sounding tetchy. ‘You can see it in his face.’

  ‘Well, you can.’

  ‘So could you if you looked properly. But I don’t suppose you’ve seen past the pleasing exterior. Can’t say I blame you. Six foot, broad shoulders and a nice arse. He’s very easy on the eye.’

  Shocked that my mother’s assessment of Connor so closely resembled my own, I squirmed with guilty embarrassment. ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about men as if they were specimens. Connor is our friend.’

  ‘It’s my job. I study faces and bodies, but I see past the surface of things. Connor’s a nice-looking chap. Regular features, apart from that long nose. And he smiles a lot, doesn’t he? Makes an effort to be pleasant. There’s almost something angelic about him – all that unruly fair hair and those high cheekbones. Like a Burne-Jones angel. But a fallen angel . . . If you ask me, Connor’s angry. He’s suffered loss. And rejection. I can see it in his face.’

  ‘You can really see all that?’

  ‘Oh yes, plain as a pikestaff. Anyone who smiles that much has to be pretty miserable, don’t you think? Perhaps some champagne will cheer him up.’

  Large amounts of fresh air and exercise ensured I was sleeping better than I’d done for years, but that night I was woken by the sound of screaming. I lay in bed, struggling to make sense of the eerie sound that had woken me.

  It was the wind. A gale was tearing round the house, ripping off slates, flinging flowerpots from one side of the garden to the other. I recalled the so-called hurricane of 1987. A teenager then, I’d slept through it all and got up the next morning to find trees lying on the ground, like fallen soldiers on a battlefield.

  This storm sounded bad. I got up and went to the window, drawing back a curtain to look outside. I didn’t recognise the moonlit landscape. Trees were leaning at a crazy angle but when the wind relented, they sprang back, swaying until the impact of the next powerful gust sent them keeling over again. As I watched, there was a cracking sound like a gun shot and a branch sailed past the window, its smaller twigs scraping the glass. Startled, I stepped back, then leaned forward again to rearrange the curtains, so that if the window broke, the glass couldn’t travel far into the room.

  As I drew the curtain, I took a last look at the garden, casting an anxious eye towards the studio. If one of the closer beeches came down, the studio could receive a direct hit. The thought of Phoebe’s unfinished canvases buried under brick dust and rubble made me consider going out to rescue them, but I dismissed the idea as too dangerous. With my eye I measured the distance between the nearest beech and the studio and was estimating its length when, to my horror, I saw the studio door open and a large canvas appe
ar. It appeared to be wrapped in a blanket and was moving very slowly on carpet-slippered feet.

  I threw open the window, whereupon the wind tried to wrench it from my hand, almost dragging me over the sill. I yelled ‘Mum!’, even though I knew Phoebe wouldn’t hear me above the din which had now reached a frenzied crescendo. Unable to shut the window, I had to let it go and winced as the draught slammed the bedroom door behind me. Grabbing my dressing gown, I pushed my feet into some shoes and ran downstairs, tearing through the hall and into the kitchen where I found the back door open and swinging. I hurled myself into the wind and headed for the studio.

  When I reached Phoebe, I put an arm round her in an attempt to keep her upright and yelled, ‘Mum, what on earth are you doing? Get indoors! A tree could fall any minute.’

  ‘I needed to move the canvases,’ she wailed. ‘Just in case.’

  ‘Give it to me, I’ll bring it in. Get indoors now. Go on! It’s not worth getting killed for a painting – even one of yours. Get inside, please.’

  She staggered towards the back door, mounted the step with difficulty, then turned to watch as I struggled across the garden. The canvas resisted the wind like a sail and a sudden vicious gust wrapped my dressing gown round my legs, almost lifting me off my feet. I stumbled, but got as far as the step where Phoebe was waiting, arms outstretched to take the canvas from me.

  ‘Oh, well done!’ she gasped as we both fell into the kitchen. ‘I couldn’t sleep for worrying about it and I had such a bad feeling.’ She sank down on to a chair. ‘Thank you, Ann.’

  I turned away, intending to shut the back door, but froze as I heard a long, loud groan, punctuated with cracking sounds, like a volley of shots being fired. Alarmed, Phoebe got to her feet. We stood side by side in the open doorway, clutching each other, speechless with terror as we watched the descent of a beech as it described an impossibly slow arc across our field of vision. It just missed the studio but flattened the shed as if it had been a Wendy house. The tree’s crown, a massive tangle of branches, filled the garden where, moments ago, Phoebe and I had been arguing.

  We stood gaping at the fallen tree, which looked twice as big now it was horizontal. Stunned, tearful, I reached for my mother’s hand and squeezed it, unable to speak. She managed a wheezy little chuckle and said, ‘Well, that was lucky, wasn’t it?’

  The clear-up took days. When they found the rusty tin in a hollow in the trunk, I set it aside for Connor who I thought might like to see the seed packets. When he came back at the weekend to work in the walled garden, the fallen beech was gone apart from its massive stump, as big as a dining table. Delighted by the hundreds of concentric rings revealed on the cut surface, Phoebe had decided to keep it.

  ‘It reminds me of Op Art from the sixties. The circles are dazzling, aren’t they? You feel drawn into the very centre.’ She touched the cut wood with reverence. ‘If my hands were any good, I’d have a go at carving something on that surface. A face, perhaps . . . A Green Man, something like that.’ She looked up at me. ‘Don’t you think so? That’s what it should become. A piece of sculpture. A monument to . . . something. Don’t know what exactly. But something that old shouldn’t just cease to be, should it, like a mere human being?’

  Connor said the beech would continue to live on as a piece of living sculpture because it still had roots in the ground, enough to ensure it would cling on to life. He took a commemorative photo of Phoebe and me, posing in front of the stump, then we all went indoors for tea.

  Connor offered to help in the kitchen, so I asked him to set out crockery on a tray. As I reached for the tea caddy, I remembered the old tin and its seed packets. I opened a cupboard, took out the tin and handed it to him.

  ‘What do you make of this? It was found in a hollow in the tree. Someone must have climbed up to put it there.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘The men found it when they were disposing of the trunk. There are old seed packets inside.’

  ‘Really? Well, the seeds could still be viable,’ he said, prising open the lid.

  ‘Don’t get too excited,’ I said, filling the kettle. ‘The packets are all empty.’

  He’d taken several out and was turning them over. ‘How do you know they’re empty? They’re all sealed.’

  ‘You can feel. And if you hold them up to the light, you can see there’s nothing in them.’

  ‘Yet they’ve all been glued shut.’

  ‘Yes. I suppose someone wanted to preserve them as art work. A collector of some kind, perhaps.’

  ‘But why put them outdoors – and in a tree – if you wanted to preserve them?’

  ‘Yes, it’s odd, isn’t it? It seems more likely they were trying to hide them.’

  ‘Why would anyone want to hide seed packets?’

  ‘Search me. I thought you might have some ideas.’

  He turned a packet over and examined the printed text closely, then looking up, he said, ‘Do you mind if I open one? I’ll do it carefully with a knife, so I don’t tear it.’

  ‘Go ahead. But I think you’ll find it’s empty.’

  As I made the tea, Connor took a knife from the kitchen drawer and slid it under the glued paper flap. He ran the knife gently back and forth until the glue cracked, then he upended the packet over a plate and tapped. Nothing came out. Still refusing to believe it was empty, he looked inside.

  ‘My God . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look!’

  He handed me the packet and I peered inside. The interior was completely covered with tiny words written in pencil in a copperplate hand. I looked up at Connor, who was grinning now and wielding the knife with a determined gleam in his eye.

  ‘May I?’

  ‘Please do.’

  He slit open the seed packet along its glued edges and smoothed it flat on the kitchen worktop. ‘It’s a letter!’ He pointed to the top left-hand corner of the yellowed paper oblong where someone had written My dearest. ‘There’s no date though. And no signature. No name anyway. Just a letter. Is that a W? It’s very ornate.’

  I bent over the packet and examined where he was pointing. ‘Yes, I think that’s a W.’

  Connor was already opening another packet. ‘This one’s the same. Every inch is covered with tiny writing. These are love letters!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Read them,’ Connor said, thrusting one into my hand. He was working his way through the packets now, opening them carefully and spreading them flat. ‘They’re all from W.’

  ‘How maddening that they aren’t signed or dated. I’d love to know who wrote them.’

  ‘Not to mention why they had to be hidden in a tree. Wait a minute . . .’ Connor peered closely at one of the packets. Without looking up he said, ‘You wouldn’t have a magnifying glass by any chance?’

  ‘Phoebe has a magnifying bookmark. She uses it to read newspapers. It’ll be on the table somewhere . . . Here it is,’ I said, handing him the piece of transparent plastic.

  ‘I just want to see this handwriting normal size . . . Yes, I thought so. I recognise this hand.’

  ‘Really?’

  He looked up and nodded. ‘Well, I’ve seen it before, definitely. Somewhere in my grandmother’s archive, but I can’t remember where.’

  ‘Connor, look – that’s an H, isn’t it? “My dearest H”. Isn’t that what it says?’

  ‘Yes, I think so . . . Maybe these were love letters written to Hester Mordaunt. These packets could be a hundred years old. Easily.’

  ‘Hester? The unmarried daughter?’

  ‘The one who inherited Beechgrave. The woman who adopted my grandmother and gave her a name.’

  I poured three mugs of tea, preoccupied, then remembered something. ‘Didn’t you say Hester wrote a diary?’

  ‘Volumes. Some were destroyed in the fire though.’

  ‘But you still have some of them?’

  ‘Yes, and photocopies of some pages which were subsequently destroye
d.’

  ‘So if we read the diaries—’

  ‘We might find out who W was. And why his letters had to be hidden in a tree.’

  ‘And more importantly, why she never married him.’

  Connor lifted the tea tray, shook his shaggy head and grinned. ‘Phoebe’s going to love this.’

  PART TWO

  HESTER

  June 5th, 1914

  Walter has proposed.

  Mother is thrilled. Father seems very pleased too. I was too astonished to respond when Walter finally made his intentions clear. Eventually, I said I needed time to consider. Mother says that was quite proper, but I should accept soon if we are to organise a wedding before Christmas. There is talk of war, though Father says nothing will come of it, it is just the Kaiser sabre-rattling.

  I suppose I should record the details of this momentous event! Walter proposed in the rose garden. No doubt he thought that would be romantic. He was not to know roses irritate me rather. They are very beautiful, but they do not last. Perhaps that is why they are so admired. They enjoy a short season, like asparagus. But you can at least eat asparagus.

  Sitting in the rose garden, I felt as if I were at a summer ball, surrounded by young ladies got up in yards of pale silk and satin, the air heavy with their suffocating scent. I had far rather sit in the kitchen garden than the rose garden. How comical, if Walter had proposed in the kitchen garden! Yet how much more appropriate, since the purpose of marriage is to be fruitful and multiply.

  I suppose if I marry, Mother will have to tell me what multiplying entails. I once asked Arthur and Eddie, but they refused to tell me. They smirked and said I should find out soon enough. Then Arthur winked at Eddie, which was perfectly horrid of him. I have no desire to be fruitful if it means inflicting brothers on a daughter of mine.

  When I was sitting in the rose garden with Walter I noticed something interesting. The bees prefer single roses. The double blooms, though much showier, seem to hold little attraction for them. I sat observing this phenomenon for some minutes and confess I might not have taken in all that Walter had to say about the happy future he intends to offer me.