‘Look. I’ll come that weekend,’ he said, when she’d finished loading up the van. ‘I – I can’t come before then. But how about, weekend after next, I meet you halfway somewhere, and I take them out for the day. How about that, for the meantime? We can go to Whipsnade, or something.’ He rubbed his face.
‘Fine. Another time we’ll have to work out how you have them to stay, now there are other children living in their bedrooms.’ She gave a despairing laugh. ‘Isla likes most people but she can’t stand Elise. She thinks she’s rude and farts on purpose.’
‘How are they?’ he said, suddenly. ‘How’s Bea?’
‘Bea is doing OK. She actually told me a couple of weeks ago that she liked it there.’
Matt nodded and said, solemnly, ‘You haven’t really talked, though, then.’
She stared at him with irritation. ‘I talk to her all the time.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘I see.’
‘Would you tell me, if you know something about her you think I should know?’
Matt hestitated. His eyes darted from her face to the near-distance, then back. ‘I don’t think that’s for me to tell you, Juliet, actually.’ He patted the side of the van, and stepped back on to the pavement.
As she drove down the narrow street she saw Zeina peering through her front window at her, eyes round as saucers, and it was all Juliet could do not to stop in the middle of the road, pull over and bash down the door, just for a hug, to feel someone who loved her hold her. To smile with someone. ‘Can you believe what he’s done?’
She’d thought bringing back their possessions would help make the place look homelier, but even when their things were scattered throughout the house they looked all wrong, the plastic dolls looked out of place, the Lego and Duplo got lost, the dressing up was too plastic-y. The house needed proper, substantial items, like a wicker laundry basket, not the collapsible IKEA one made of tea bag material. Back home – back in London, everyone had these items, jumbled in their cramped homes. Back in London everyone was the same as her.
‘Isla, eat up please. We’re leaving in five minutes.’
‘But I don’t like my Cheerios. I hate Cheerios. I want some Weetabix.’
‘You used to hate Weetabix. I got the Cheerios as a first day of school treat.’
‘They’re too sweet. They make me want to vomit. I mean literally, yes, Mummy I do know what that means. That’s how too sweet they are.’
‘Ugh. Too sweet. Sit down here.’
‘OK, Sandy. Isla, you need to eat something. It’s a big day. Imagine if you can’t play with any of your new friends because your tummy’s rumbling so loudly!’
‘My . . . t-t-tummy’s not going-going-going t-t-to rumble, Mummy . . .’ Here Isla dissolved loudly into tears. ‘D-d-don’t say that!’
‘Oh sweetheart –’ Juliet hastened down the long table to her daughter. ‘Isla, darling, sorry, I was just being silly – Sandy, don’t put your arm out, you’ll knock over your mu— DON’T, Sandy – oh, darling, Mummy didn’t mean to shout – oh Jesus. Matt!’
There was an awkward silence. ‘Silly Mummy,’ said Isla. ‘You left Daddy behind. He’s not here.’
She wiped her nose on her too-large red school sweatshirt, emblazoned with an oak tree in white. Juliet looked away. Isla was small for her age. She didn’t look old enough to be going into Year two. She should still be in nursery, with Sandy.
‘You’ll see him next week. He’s taking you out for the day.’
‘Why can’t I see him now? Mummy, please, can’t we go back home this weekend?’
Juliet hesitated. ‘I’m sorry, darling.’
‘Is it because you’ve taken all our things back here? I can sleep on my floor, promise,’ said Isla, her eyes huge.
‘Darling, we can’t stay at the house.’ Juliet chewed a loose piece of cuticle, tearing it away from the nail. A pinhead-sized bead of blood popped out, glinting in the sun. She wiped it on her already muddy jeans. ‘It’s – Daddy has some lodgers staying there. So he’s going to meet us halfway between here and London, and you’ll do some fun things for the day.’
‘What?’
‘My play with doll’s house?’
‘No, Sandy. Eat your toast.’
‘My no like toast. My like Cheerios.’
‘Oh good grief. Bea! Darling! Are you ready? We need to leave in five minutes! Isla – more toast, sweetheart?’
‘I DON’T WANT ANY TOAST MUM!’ Isla screamed, so loudly her voice sounded hoarse. There was silence as the words rang around the dining room and Isla got up and stomped out, trying to make her feet stamp on the solid wood floor. Juliet glanced out over the garden. She could actually see the difference her efforts that morning had made. Later, she would buy some cheap bulbs. Sort out the shed. See if there were any potatoes in the old potato bed. Go to the library and get them all cards. Buy: gaffer tape, a new rake, batteries. Bulbs – this time for the lights. Look at the fusebox, as four different switches didn’t seem to work; she remembered her grandmother, bent over the wooden casement in the scullery for hours. Call Honor. Call Matt’s mother. Buy more socks.
Sandy was still at the table, swirling pieces of muesli around on the table-top.
‘All right, little one?’ she said, gently stroking his flaxen hair, which curled and bobbed around his head. He nodded, not really understanding. ‘My get down,’ he said, and slid off his chair, pottering out of the room, calling after her. ‘Isla! Isla?’
Of all of them only Sandy had adapted with any equanimity. He didn’t seem to have noticed Matt wasn’t there. Juliet had bought him some new red wellies and he’d liked helping her on the few previous times she’d tried to tackle the garden, watching her cut things down, sow new seeds, tie branches to walls. He loved getting lost in the Wilderness. He didn’t mind the mice in the sitting room, or the constant rain, or the loneliness of the echoing house which Juliet felt was peopled with ghosts, watching them, every day.
We should all be more like Sandy, Juliet thought. She glanced at her watch.
‘It’s eight-twenty!’ she yelled. ‘Everyone! In the car! Now!’
Somewhat to her surprise there was a thundering noise on the stairs and Isla appeared, flushed and cross, followed by Bea, glowering, barefoot, dressed in her new school uniform. Her slender neck and small dark face with its bobbed black hair rose from a navy sweatshirt that swamped her thin frame, her new navy nylon trousers far too long. She stood at the bottom of the steps next to Isla, who clutched her bookbag.
Juliet felt her heart clench. She said, ‘Darlings, you both look very smart. I’m – I’m so proud of you both.’
Bea twitched her nose and then rubbed her face, a sign she was trying not to cry. She pulled on her black trainers. ‘Shut up, Mum. I look like a bloody Passport Control guard.’
Isla peered forward to stare at her sister then clapped her hands. ‘You do, you look like that man from the Arr Ess Pee Pee Pee who rescues sweet guinea pigs on Pet Rescue, oh the darlings with their fluffy fluff, remember chinchillas have two hundred thousand hairs per square inch, do you remember?’
‘Shut up.’
‘Annie says none of the girls wear trousers at Bea’s school.’ Annie was Mrs Beadle’s granddaughter and Isla set great store by her opinion. ‘They all wear skirts. I told Bea this. She didn’t listen.’
‘Literally no one wears skirts, it’s gendered bollocks. So shut up, Isla, OK?’
‘Isla, darling, get in the car. You’re the one who’ll be late, Bea doesn’t start till this afternoon.’
‘I don’t understand why I can’t bloody stay at home anyway.’
‘Because I want you to come into Godstow with me. There’s someone special I want to say hello to.’
‘Who?’
‘An old friend of mine.’
‘Well I don’t see—’
‘Get in the car! All of you! Or else I will get really cross! Really soon!’ Juliet bellowed. They stared at her, her two girls in their new
uniforms, Sandy in his red wellies, and then Isla smiled.
‘It’s funny when Mum shouts, isn’t it?’ she said to Bea, as if Juliet wasn’t there. ‘She’s so terrible at it.’
Bea nodded. ‘Mum has no clue. At all.’ She looked at her phone.
Chapter Fifteen
‘I’ll stay in the car.’ Bea slumped down over her phone as Juliet eased into a parking space on Godstow High Street.
‘No,’ said Juliet, pushing her sunglasses up on her head and grabbing Grandi’s old green string shopping bag which she’d found at the back of a cupboard. ‘You’re coming with me.’ She rubbed her eyes. Sandy had screamed inconsolably for ten minutes at his new nursery before she had brutally cut him loose and left him in the arms of an apparently nice woman named Janet whom Juliet had never met but had to trust wasn’t a child murderer. And Isla, perhaps more heartbreakingly, had gone into class without a murmur. She had hugged Bea tightly, clinging to her as a drowning man to a liferaft. But Juliet she had dodged a kiss from, brushing her lips against her arm instead.
‘Bye darling – I hope you—’
Isla had turned away. ‘My dad gave me these hairclips,’ she said to Miss Fraser at the classroom door. ‘He lives in London. I’m seeing him next weekend. He’s picking me up from school. My sister says some other children live with him now.’
One of the other parents had stared in horror at Juliet, as if she had three heads.
‘Come on,’ said Juliet now, opening Bea’s car door for her and waiting while she got out of the car. She put her arm around her daughter, so grown-up in her new uniform. ‘It’s time you met someone important.’
‘Hello, Juliet.’ Frederic Pascale looked up at her over his half-moon spectacles and laid his fountain pen gently down on the table. ‘Ah! And this must be Beatrice. Good morning, my dear child. Enchanté.’ He stood up slowly, kissing first Juliet, then Bea’s hand.
‘Hi,’ she said, awkwardly.
‘I’m sorry we haven’t been in to see you yet,’ said Juliet, hugging him. ‘I wasn’t sure when you were back.’
‘We came home four days ago. And I have been feeling most guilty about not paying you a visit. It has been rather hectic since our return: six weeks in France and I have forgotten everything about running a business. George says next year we can only manage three weeks. George is more practical than I, as you can tell.’
‘George? Oh – of course.’
‘My partner. He believes you know each other.’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Juliet. He was watching her closely; something in his direct gaze unnerved her. She smiled at him. ‘How lovely it is to be here again. It hasn’t changed at all.’
Frederic nodded. ‘Dear child. You haven’t, either. No, don’t protest. You are still a Pre-Raphaelite innocent in a big bad world.’ His gaze took in her unbrushed hair, her dirty mud-and-blood streaked jeans which she hadn’t had time to change, her worn plaid shirt, but Juliet felt flattered, for the first time in ever so long. ‘It is true, my dear, you are a greater beauty now than you were at twenty.’ He reached under his desk, a long-forgotten gesture that clutched at Juliet’s heart, and took out a wooden box. ‘Beatrice,’ he said, and she looked up.
‘Yes?’
‘Would you be able to look at these pieces for me?’
Bea said, in a rush, ‘Well, I really don’t know anything about old things—’
‘You do,’ said Juliet, stoutly. ‘You’re brilliant at it.’
‘These are items for a doll’s house, Bea. As your mother knows, over the years, I collected them. Some are not the right shape, or size. But Juliet told me over the phone that you love the doll’s house, too, and have a fine eye. I am so very pleased it is back at the house. Could you see what in this box might be suitable for it?’
There was a light determination to his tone, as he handed the crate to Bea. ‘Sure,’ she said, nominally unenthusiastic, but Juliet saw, with a kind of wonder, the soft glow in her eyes as she peered inside.
‘Thank you so much, my dear. It is much appreciated.’
‘Let me know what we will owe you, Frederic.’
He waved his hand. ‘This is my treat. I am in your grandmother’s debt for many reasons. You must indulge me on this. I will explain why, one day.’
The shop – named Pascale & Co, on Godstow High Street, was narrow and long. The sound of traffic grew faint the further you retreated into the shop. In the first room was jewellery, velvet-covered trays studded with pieces worn in the ears, on the fingers, around the necks of those long dead. Juliet used to wonder about them, who they’d been. The second room was shelves lined with gold-tooled books. There were etchings and prints in upstanding cases for one to sift through and a stand of old umbrellas and walking-sticks. In the back room were large, dark items of (good) Victorian and Georgian furniture: ‘Antiques, not Junk’ read the sign in the shop window.
In fine weather Frederic would place cane chairs, upturned wicker baskets and a dogbowl in front of the shop. He himself sat in the first room behind his desk, ledger book and cash till by his side, and thirty years since he’d first opened, the set-up had not changed. Frederic had taste, was honest, and did not suffer fools, and thus had built a reputation for himself beyond the village and the towns nearby. London dealers dropped in en route for weekends away to see what he might have, or to ask his advice.
Frederic had been in Godstow since the eighties. Originally from a small town in Brittany, he had decamped to this forgotten corner of the countryside almost on a whim because, as he said, he loved the English. He had become one of Grandi’s closest friends – by the end, one of the very few with whom she hadn’t argued at some point.
Juliet, having spent many happy summer hours skulking round the shop and in the tiny cobbled garden at the back, knew the place like the back of her hand; every time she came in she found there would be something new to covet. A Tiffany-blue travel set, with tiny crystal bottles to be filled with rose-water, cold-cream and talcum powder. A set of photographic plates of a Victorian fancy-dress ball. The tiny edition of Jane Austen’s The History of England, no bigger than a matchbox, and, of course, the doll’s house furniture.
So it was in that shop, not at Nightingale House, with Frederic telling her about Rococo art, or Whitby jet, or Clarice Cliff, that Juliet first acquired her love of old things. And it was in that shop, as a long-haired, moody teenager in flowing skirts, that she learned from Frederic that to follow the crowd is all very well, but forging your own path serves you best in the end. He, as much as Grandi, had taught her to trust her eye, her instincts. Without him she suspected she would never have found the Millais sketch in the Oxfordshire junk shop, nor bluffed her way into a job at Dawnay’s when she had no auction house experience.
Now Frederic turned, and the light from a passing car mirror bouncing off the late-morning sun caught his face for a second, and Juliet could see for the first time the lines around his eyes, the sag of his skin, how slowly he moved.
‘We had a very pleasant summer. We were in Paris for a fortnight, then to Brittany, to Dinard. We saw your parents.’
‘Yes; they said.’ Juliet jangled her keys in her pocket. ‘Dad told me you were worried I’d made a terrible mistake moving back here.’
A faint glimmer of amusement played around his mouth. ‘That is not how I would put it; either your father exaggerates, or you do.’
‘But you don’t deny it, Monsieur Pascale,’ she said, smiling.
‘I do.’ Frederic put his hand on hers. ‘Ah my dear. It’s so lovely to see you, after all these years. I’ve been wondering so very much how you’re getting on.’
‘Oh. Well, it’s been – a bit strange.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t want to moan—’
‘Please. You may moan to me. I think you have every right to.’
‘Well . . .’ Juliet looked at her hands. ‘We moved back at the start of the summer holidays, not knowing anyone. We’ve hung out a lot. That’s been terrific. Playe
d a lot of board games . . .’ She cleared her throat. ‘And the children have got things out of their system, as it were. They’ve obviously been – ah – affected by the move, and our marriage break-up.’ She thought of Isla one lunchtime two weeks ago, refusing to come in for pasta, head bobbing out from the Wilderness in the pouring rain as she bellowed: ‘I wish you would understand I hate you and I don’t want your horrible pasta!’
‘Anyway, our stuff is here now, and we all know the house inside and out, and the garden. So it was OK. But – well, I had all these dreams of them running wild. And it rained. You know, it never really rained when I was a child.’
‘You remember it like that. I remember it rained an awful lot. It is England. It is the West Country. I remember you and Ev bouncing off the walls, your grandmother quite distracted about what to do with you indoors all day.’
‘Oh.’
‘Memory plays tricks, my dear.’
She nodded, unsettled. ‘Oh, you’re right. I thought I’d sink into some rural idyll and of course it’s not like that. Well it is, but not in the way I thought.’ She gave a self-pitying chuckle. ‘Besides, we don’t have enough furniture and the garden is a jungle. We’re just getting used to it all. And it has been tough on them. Sandy is fine, he’s two. Isla is very, very sad. And Bea – well.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I think it’s the right thing for her. But I know she’s still not telling me everything. It’s a lot for them to take in.’
‘A huge amount. I am very impressed at your bravery in going through with it. I had no idea when I – Well done.’
‘Oh, it was liberating to be honest.’ She smiled into his kind eyes, and put her elbows on the desk. ‘You know, some mornings I’d wake up and hear the rain and realise there’s another day stretching ahead to be filled and wonder what on earth I’d done.’
‘Don’t they play, these children?’
‘A little. They really want WiFi.’ Juliet shrugged, ashamed of her London children, creeping around inside instead of rushing out to find beetles and wild snapdragons and blue speckled eggs. ‘Like I say, if they were used to it, to being here . . .’ Juliet looked around, at the sound of voices: Bea was chatting to a stranger towards the back of the shop. She heard her laughing.
The Garden of Lost and Found Page 18