Garden of Stars

by Rose Alexander

It wasn’t as if either of their marriages was awful. They were just unions that were dull and worn out, like so many, that had somewhere and somehow lost their reason for being, that lacked passion and mutual fulfilment. Where each partner did not pay the other enough attention, did not show appreciation in the way we all crave.

  That night she drank wine until she felt sick and numb. Fumbling in her handbag for paracetamol, her hand encountered a hard-edged object. She pulled it out, wondering what it could be, then saw that it was a small set of face paints, something one of the girls had acquired somewhere, and given to her for safe-keeping. She had completely forgotten they were in there.

  She put them on the table in front of the mirror and considered them, her eyes struggling to focus. She could turn herself into a pierrot, a princess or a pirate. A butterfly or a tiger, as Honor and Ruby had done, so little time before. But she’d still be Sarah, underneath.

  She gazed at herself in the mirror as the tears descended, and she could no longer see through the thick, glassy globules of liquid that formed and reformed, over and over again.

  Eventually, a long time later, she lay down on her bed and slept.

  The next morning, she woke to the bleeping of an incoming text message. She sat up abruptly and reached for the phone, the sudden movement setting her head pounding from last night’s alcohol.

  How’s it going? Any luck with the search? I’m missing you so much. x

  It was from Hugo.

  He was so anxious that she should find what she was looking for.

  30

  London, 2010

  Perfect cotton wool clouds drifted lazily over the uneven squares and rectangles of the green, brown and beige fields far below as the plane approached Luton airport. But when Sarah stepped out of the doors and onto the metal stairs, an icy wind hit her full in the face and she shivered violently, her nostrils filling with the reek of aviation fuel and the shrivelling scent of autumn.

  Finding Isabel was a great achievement; she had fulfilled an old lady’s dying wish. It was far more important than anything that was going on in her own life. She was working hard to convince herself of that.

  Scott had sent a text:

  I’m back, everything is good. There are emails waiting for you. I had a fantastic time. XXXXX

  She got back to the house, let herself in the front door. Her mother had already gone home, with Hugo on standby to pick up from school if Sarah’s plane was delayed. The house was cold and empty, and unusually orderly.

  She opened some mail; there was nothing interesting, just bills and bank statements. No envelope of the best quality paper that might indicate an answer from Inês to the card she had sent her from Amarante.

  Sarah made some coffee, went out into the garden to drink it, sitting on the bench against the wall over which the climbing plants scrambled and tumbled. The dreams that had sustained her for so long were gone and right now she had nothing to replace them. She could not see, she did not know, how she could go on. But she must. She must, even though she could hardly bear the pain that she felt. It clenched and tightened around her heart the way the tendrils of the passion vine gripped the trellis it clung to. She had read in a newspaper article, once, that it was indeed possible to die of a broken heart. She wondered if that was what was happening to her.

  She went up to her office even though she knew it was hopeless to try and get any work done. Instead she picked up, one by one, the photos of the children that adorned her desk. The girls on the swings in the playground. A two-year old Ruby blowing a kiss. Hugo holding Honor at two days old, her tiny body exactly fitting the length of his forearm, his hand held flat with fingers outstretched to cradle her delicate head.

  Every moment with her own children was a joy but also a terror, every newspaper full of the banal tragedies that could end happiness forever; the child choking to death on a school dinner or killed by the falling of a badly built wall or fatally wounded by tripping on the open dishwasher door and being stabbed in the heart by an upright knife in the cutlery basket. At night, what horror could come; five daughters burnt to death in a fire caused by a faulty washing machine, the boy who went to bed with flu and woke up dead from meningitis… Every day was a gift and should be treated as such.

  On the computer screen, the bold type of a new email from Scott stood out against the white background.

  Sarah leant forward and rested her forehead on the cool glass of the tabletop.

  I have been mourning a lover, a youth I no longer have, a life I could have lived.

  But Inês – Inês has spent a lifetime mourning a baby, a life never lived.

  There was no comparison. Simply none at all.

  She went to Inês’s house. Her shoes clattered cacophonously on the wooden stairs. Pausing on the half-landing, she glanced out of the window to the garden, which looked tired now that summer was over. She saw Billy clearing fallen leaves from the lawn, hat pulled down so far over his eyes that she wondered how he could possibly see what he was doing.

  When she entered the drawing room, for a moment she thought that Inês was not there. But then she saw that instead of occupying her usual high-backed chair, she was sitting by the window in a wheelchair. She looked tiny, fragile and impossibly old. Sarah rushed over to her and kissed her on the top of her head.

  “Inês! How are you? What’s with the chair?”

  “Sarah!” answered Inês, weakly. She opened her mouth to speak, then shut it again.

  “She’s very tired. It’s best not to disturb her.” The carer came out of the kitchen, frowning. “We had to get her the wheelchair – she could hardly get about and I can’t carry her around the place.”

  Sarah felt irritation rise up in her. Don’t patronise her, she wanted to say, but held back. It wouldn’t do Inês any good to set the carer against her. She looked at her great-aunt, whose head was slightly bowed. With a sudden certainty, she knew that this was it. Inês had been right. There wasn’t much time left.

  “I have something very important to tell my aunt. I would appreciate it if I could talk to her alone for a moment.”

  “I hope it’s nothing that’s likely to upset her.”

  “No. It’s fine. I think I know what will upset her and what will not.”

  Better than you do, she felt like adding.

  She knelt down on the floor by Inês’s chair, and took her hands. “Inês, listen carefully. I’ve got good news. I found her grave, your little girl’s grave. She’s fine, the place is beautiful. She’s in the English cemetery in Lisbon. I put some flowers there – I don’t know what they’re called, but they were orange, like the sun. I told her you love her, that you always have and always will.”

  Inês’s eyes flickered towards Sarah and then back again, to the window and the faint stream of sunlight that had fought its way through the oppressive clouds.

  “Obrigada. Obrigada, menina.”

  Her voice was faint. Her hand, cold. Her skin paper-thin and delicate like the seed heads of the Honesty plant after a long winter. She tightened her grip on Sarah’s fingers and said again, “Obrigada. Thank you.”

  Sarah sat with Inês for a long while, mesmerised by the ticking clock on the mantelpiece and the rise and fall of Inês’s shallow breaths. She had expected questions, a conversation about how she had found Isabel, a desire for a description of the grave or its position, a request to see the photos. But Inês said nothing more and seemed to be only half present.

  Now Sarah understood why Inês had not written a reply to her postcard. She simply wasn’t up to it any more.

  She wandered around the room and out onto the landing from where she could see into the garden once more. Billy was by the flowerbed now, cutting back the shrubs ready for winter. Everything had an autumnal tinge of sludgy brown, of death and decay. As she watched him, he pulled a tall, brittle stalk of dead foxglove out of the heavy soil and threw it onto his pile of debris. Then she saw him fumble in his pocket and take out the iPod that he sometime
s used to make his recordings. It had started to rain and he seemed to be capturing the sound of the spattering drops as they plunked onto his pile of heaped up leaves. Sarah could imagine exactly how the noise would be; the dull, flat splash partially absorbed by the rotting vegetation, the whole sodden mess steadily decomposing into damp sludge.

  She went back to sit by her great-aunt’s side. There might not be many more opportunities to do so. She thought through Inês’s story, that had gradually unpeeled over the last few weeks like the multiple layers of an onion skin. Inês had faced the worst tragedy possible and survived and gone on to live a good life in which she had given so much to others, not least Sarah. How had she done it? The scrapbook was still there, where Sarah had left it what seemed an age ago but was only a few days, on the table beside Inês’s chair, underneath the tortoiseshell lamp. The thick board cover groaned with age as she opened it.

  London, late 1970s

  It was twenty-five years before I went back to Coram’s Fields. The nineteen-fifties came and went, and the sixties, and then a new decade began, and brought with it, on New Year’s Day, something truly special. That something was the baby, Sarah.

  When I held my great-niece tight, the very first time I saw her, I prayed that tragedy would not strike the same family twice. And also that I would be allowed a share of this infant, to love and to care for as I would have done my own daughter. I knew that I must not expect too much; Sarah is not even my grandchild, after all. That privilege belongs to John’s brother Rupert and his wife Diana - but they live in Derbyshire now, where Diana is from, not fifteen minutes away as I do.

  I waited until the spring after Sarah’s birth, when she was four months old, and then I took a big spade, and the special parcel with the Portuguese postmark that had recently arrived, into the rambling garden of my draughty house in Grove Terrace. I planted the cork tree in the centre of the lawn; for Sarah and for Sarah’s children, whenever they might be born. But the cork oak grows and thrives on the poor, baked soil of the Iberian peninsula, not on North London’s wet, cold, heavy clay. The tree didn’t take and neither did any of my later attempts.

  And as it turned out, growing a tree became of much lesser importance than growing a child, which soon preoccupied the majority of my free time. Sarah’s mother Natalie was only too glad of my assistance, as babysitter, childminder and anything else that was on offer. Sarah had come along unexpectedly, just as Natalie’s business, which she had invested so much of her time, energy and money in, had begun to take off. She ran – still runs - an employment agency specialising in accounting and bookkeeping jobs and had made sure her business plan took account of every possible eventuality, except for the sudden arrival of a baby. Sarah’s father had always worked long hours in the construction industry, and was often abroad making tax-free dollars in countries such as Saudi Arabia.

  I cut down my hours at the young mothers’ charity so that I could be available whenever I was needed. I cannot put into words the pleasure and joy I felt whenever I put the little platinum blonde Sarah, with her unusual china-blue eyes, into her pram. It had a blue and white polka dot sunshade, and a plastic cover for when it rained. I took her up to Hampstead Heath, wheeling her along the paths and tracks I knew so well from all my years of solitary rambling. I showed her the kite flyers on Parliament Hill, how their kites swoop and soar on the wind that always seems to blow up there.

  Sarah always loved me to point out the London landmarks of St Paul’s, Battersea Power Station and the Post Office Tower; she learnt them all and would recite them back to me. When the weather was too cold or wet to go out, I took her to the library and read books to her, sometimes the same one over and over again if that was what she demanded. I taught her nursery rhymes in Portuguese, because I don’t know any English ones.

  And then one day, when Sarah was two or three years old, and surely all danger of her dying suddenly in the night had passed, we went to Coram’s Fields. The brass plaque to all the abandoned children had gained an extra patina of age since I first laid eyes on it. The playground had been augmented by a petting zoo; goats and sheep, rabbits and guinea pigs of various dispositions kept in wooden pens and forced to undergo daily loving from London’s animal-deprived children.

  I marvelled to see the way Sarah’s reaction to the animals changed and developed as she grew up – from puzzled and anxious at first, to curious but too scared to touch, right through to her first tentative pats. By the time she was four she was so bold that she marched straight up to the pens and demanded to be let in, and happily wandered around amongst goats twice her size, not even minding when one snatched her woolly hat off her head and ate it, pom-pom first.

  A trip to Coram’s Fields became one of our special treats, and I would load up the buggy, and then, when Sarah could walk all the way from the bus stop by herself, various plastic bags full of sand toys, balls and snacks. We would build enormous constructions, much more elaborate than a mere castle, in the sandpit before trying out every piece of playground equipment. Sarah always sought out other children to play with and I suspected that she was sometimes lonely, with two busy parents and no siblings. I did my best to make up for it.

  Sometimes at the weekends, if John had the time, the three of us would drive down to Chalk Farm in his Rover car with the wide leather seats and enormous steering wheel that Sarah liked to turn back and forth, pretending to drive, making engine and hooting noises as she did so. We went to Marine Ices, one of North London’s original Italian ice-cream parlours, and ate wildly foreign foods such as spaghetti vongole or lasagne al forno, all served with chips so as not to put off the British clientele.

  “You spoil that child,” John said to me one day, watching Sarah tuck into a huge ice cream sundae in a tall glass that came up higher than the top of her head as she sat in her formica chair.

  “But she’s worth spoiling, isn’t she?” I replied. “And I haven’t got anyone else to dote on.”

  John nodded in agreement but said nothing.

  As Sarah grew older, I took it upon myself to teach her to do something I have always loved; to swim. We went to the swimming baths at Kentish Town and I showed Sarah how to doggy paddle and then front crawl, and how to float on her back with her arms and legs spread out like a star. As well as three swimming pools, the building incorporated an immense public laundry. It hummed to the roll and thud of gigantic washing machines that tumbled and turned and then let out an enormous whoosh as the water emptied away. The smell was of washing powder and starch, of steam and hot linen, delicious, homely and comforting. There were huge ironing presses, and rows of ironing boards where the women pressed and folded, their snippets of gossip wafting over the two of us imposters like lines from a soap opera. “They was drunk as, all three of them, and when they get back, they’ve been robbed blind”; “The barmaid from the Peels, that’s right, six months gone already and who the father is, she won’t say”; “Don’t get a moment’s peace from them all, except when I’m here…”

  I could never help but notice that the majority of the stories told in that laundry seemed to centre around sex - who was having it with someone (sometimes more than one) they shouldn’t be having it with; the general uselessness of men, who were usually rendered incapable due to excess alcohol intake; and babies, the impending arrival of which could be roughly divided into cause for celebration or scandal, occasionally both.

  London, 1988

  I put this book away one day, and didn’t think of it for a while. Every so often I would remind myself to find it again and add to it, but then I would forget. And now here we are, with Sarah eighteen years old and about to finish secondary school. We are still very close but of course she spends less time with me these days; she has her own life, her friends, her hobbies. Her mother Natalie has been rather ill with breast cancer. Sadly this coincided with a bitter and acrimonious break-up from Sarah’s father in which neither party seemed to spare a thought for Sarah, and Natalie has severed all contact wit
h our side of the family. The negotiations and legal proceedings are on-going and seem that they will take some time to be resolved.

  I suppose the piece of information that I have not included, that perhaps should have been foremost in my mind, is that John died, quite a few years ago now. A massive heart attack. He led a full life and died doing what he loved, playing golf. Not a bad way to go. I miss him terribly but I am learning to live with it. Billy still does the garden; it was what John wanted. I must say that he is extremely competent and green-fingered, coaxing everything into life and encouraging the kind of repeat flowering in my roses that I never thought possible. I have so much to enjoy, and be grateful for.

  Now for the real reason for this entry after so long. Sarah has given me the news that she is taking a year out – a gap year, I believe they call it – before taking up her place at Bristol. Young people have so many opportunities these days. And next year, once she’s saved some money, she’s going to Lisbon! She will be teaching English there, but she’ll have time to travel around and see a bit of the country; it’s not a big place, after all. I do so hope that after all my stories my country lives up to her expectations.

  I want nothing but the best for her; she is, and always has been, everything to me.

  London, 2010

  In the school playground, Honor and Ruby greeted Sarah with beaming smiles, hugs and kisses, jumping up and down with excitement, chattering endlessly about everything that had happened while she had been away. She couldn’t believe how long she had been without them, wanted to scoop them up and take their love, innocence and beauty deep inside herself. Reading about herself in Inês’s book had had a strangely discombobulating effect; to realise how much she had been loved, nurtured and cherished by her, exactly the same way she herself loved, nurtured and cherished her girls. As for Inês’s hopes for her experience in Portugal – little could she have imagined how the consequences of that visit would ripple on for years afterwards.