‘They will get used to it. It takes time.’
‘Yes. But I wish there were some way of making them understand. That I did it for them, as well as for me.’
‘Did you?’
She thought for a moment. ‘I hope so. I thought I was doing it for them. When you’re a mother you gradually lose any sense of what is best for them and what is best for you. They become the same thing.’
‘Not all mothers, Juliet.’
‘Well, I felt by coming back here I would . . . make everything better. You understand.’ She looked at him frankly. ‘It’s the house. You know? I stand out in the morning with my coffee and look out over the garden and I hear the birds in the trees in the evening and I see eight peacock butterflies on the white buddleia and there’s room to breathe, and I feel this little certainty inside. That it was the right thing to do. And the children have found all my old dress-up clothes and books, and when it’s sunny they do actually disappear for hours in the garden. They’ve taken over the Dovecote.’ She was nodding to herself; Frederic watched her. ‘I assumed this was purely a selfish, self-indulgent move. I was so scared, Frederic.’ She paused. ‘Everything’s unravelled since I took the decision to come. But you know what? I feel at home.’
‘It is your home,’ he said, very quietly. ‘For whatever reason, it is.’
Juliet hesitated, trying to read his expression. ‘Yes . . .’
‘And you? You have told me about them, but not you.’
‘I’m OK. I’m sad. They’re all sad. But it comes in waves. You know, listening to a love song. Or staring round at the wiring. I feel overwhelmed, somehow. It’s all linked up.’ She laced her fingers together. ‘I don’t miss Matt, I don’t think. I am just sad. Sad it didn’t work out. I hear about how greatly other people love or are loved, on the radio, on TV, even on Facebook or something and I want to weep for myself, is that self-indulgent? And then I am angry with myself, for not standing up to him. For all of it, all those years.’ She looked up at him, pulling a piece of hair between her fingers. ‘I don’t have any identity, at the moment. That’s what makes me sad.’
Frederic put his hand on hers. Bea was telling the stranger at the back of the shop something, her voice rising in excitement. ‘No!’ Juliet could hear her saying. ‘He never said that.’
‘Forgive my rudeness,’ Frederic said. ‘Can you afford to stay there? Your parents were concerned –’
‘I think so. I have six months’ pay, thank goodness, but I’ll need to start looking for a job as soon as possible.’
‘That house needs attention.’
‘Attention! When Grandi left Nightingale House to me it was obviously in better condition than it is now. It absolutely eats money.’
The quarterly gas bill had come in, and the invoice for fixing the kitchen lights and the oddly wired electrics. She had bought new garden furniture, because the old set had rotted away. She was sure Liddy and Ned would have had some fine, carved oak table and chairs for the terrace but she’d got a plastic table and four chairs from Argos in a murky sage mysteriously called Barbados Green.
‘I mended some guttering the other day with gaffer tape. Special dark green gaffer tape.’
‘This is very impressive.’
‘It is. But I want to do things properly,’ Juliet said. ‘I don’t want everything to be plastic furniture and gaffer tape. And then I tell myself it’s my house and I shouldn’t worry about that stuff, that I’ll be there for years and years.’
‘Well, exactly. So, to other matters: I have a chest of drawers, very fine, and a bedframe, if you have need of a new bed. Some chairs: two armchairs and dining chairs, also a sofa, which I wondered if you would do me the very great favour of taking off my hands and removing to Nightingale House.’ He tore the page from the book and handed it to her. ‘Here it all is. Can George drop it round tomorrow?’
‘George?’
‘My boyfriend. As I said.’
Juliet rubbed her eyes. ‘Sorry – yes.’
He glanced up. ‘My hearing is terrible. Look, he’s been here all along. George! Ah, I see he’s found Bea. George,’ he called. ‘Come and meet Juliet. Stella’s granddaughter, as you know.’
Out of the shadows stepped an angular man, only a few years older than Juliet. His salt and pepper hair was close-cropped, his eyes were a flinty grey, fringed with thick black lashes. He and Juliet stared at each other.
‘Hi,’ said Juliet. ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’
George said tersely, with the faint Scottish accent she’d heard before, ‘Yes. I met you the day you moved into the house. I was driving past and offered to help you turn into the driveway.’
‘I –’
‘You shouted at me. I think you might even have given me the finger.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Juliet, her eyes still searching his face. ‘You’re quite right. I’m so sorry about that.’
George gave a shout of laughter. ‘It’s lovely to meet you properly,’ he said, and he shook her hand. ‘Very nice to have some new blood in the village, too. And this one.’ He put his arm round Bea. ‘This one is a very lovely girl. Even if she does have some crazy ideas about Bowie.’
‘Mum loves ABBA,’ said Bea, in disgust. ‘I discovered Bowie on my own.’
‘Nothing wrong with ABBA,’ said George. ‘“The Day Before You Came” is one of the best songs of the last thirty years.’
‘That’s what I say!’ said Juliet, staring at him. ‘God. Well done, George. At last.’
Bea glowed, smiling at them both. ‘Thanks for letting me look at these,’ she said, handing the box back to Frederic.
‘It’s my pleasure. I hope that you will pick some yourself, to put in the doll’s house.’
‘I’d love to.’
Juliet said, ‘We need to get you to school, Bea. I have to do a bit of shopping beforehand.’
‘So soon? Will you come back?’
‘You won’t be able to get rid of us,’ said Juliet.
‘I am sure there’s still a lot you have to catch up on,’ said George, slowly, looking at Frederic. ‘Isn’t there, F?’
‘It can wait for another time.’ Frederic raised himself up slowly, and stepped out from behind the desk. He put his arm through George’s, and did a small heel-toe shoe shuffle, then slid his hands outwards. George applauded, enthusiastically.
‘He’ll win Strictly yet, you wait and see. Listen, come again soon.’
‘Thank you.’ Juliet hesitated, and turned to Frederic. ‘It is so wonderful to see you again. Thank you for listening to me go on.’
‘It is my pleasure,’ Frederic said, walking her through the shop. ‘Ev’s mum is looking for you, by the way. She’s back from Jamaica. She wants to come for tea.’
‘I must call her. She can be the second person I know here. Third,’ she said, to George.
‘You’re determined not to remember me, aren’t you? Who’s Ev?’
Juliet laughed. ‘My best friend. Well, he was my best friend. He’s – gosh, I haven’t seen him for twenty years now.’
‘Honor’s son,’ Frederic interjected. ‘You know Honor Adair, George, we went to their house for dinner. Barn, rather. Bryan is her husband. Lawyer. He’s Jamaican, she grew up here –’
‘Those Moroccan tiles,’ said George, clicking his fingers. ‘The amazing garden.’
‘That’s her. Ev is her son. He and Juliet used to play together as children. You met him last Christmas, I think, when he was back.’
‘Oh . . . yes,’ said George, in a hard-to-read tone. ‘I remember him.’ Juliet could feel George’s eyes on her, and thought he could see her blushing.
They were standing on the pavement. One of the parents from Isla’s class, a nice-looking woman in a potentially Boden skirt, whom Juliet had noticed earlier that morning at the school, nodded at her.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi,’ Juliet said, smiling at her.
‘I had to drop Emily’s inhaler back at the class just
now,’ she said, in a rush. ‘Your daughter was playing very happily with her. Just thought you’d like to know.’
Juliet could have clasped this stranger to her bosom and kissed her. ‘That’s so kind of you. Thank you! Thank you so much.’
‘No problem.’
‘Well thanks again. See you – see you later.’ The others watched as Juliet waved frantically after her as she disappeared into the Co-op.
‘The fourth person I know,’ Juliet said, turning back to Frederic and George. ‘She was nice. Wasn’t she nice?’
George looked at her, with a raised eyebrow. ‘That was a bit desperate,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Bea. ‘Calm down, Mum.’ As George and Frederic turned back into the shop, Juliet heard George say:
‘You should have told her.’
Frederic was turning to go inside but she saw him shrug his shoulders, his face hidden from view. Juliet stood for a moment and then, becoming aware of her surroundings, she checked her watch.
‘We’ll be in loads of time to get to your school.’ Bea nodded; Juliet was pleased to see the colour in her face. ‘Well, well,’ she said, fumbling in her bag, to hide the emotion she felt. ‘Old Frederic. I never knew he was gay. Silly me.’
‘Seriously?’ said Bea.
‘Well – I just thought he was asexual.’ Juliet fiddled in her pocket for her keys. ‘Some people are, you know.’
‘That’s rubbish, they’re not. Everyone wants someone.’ Bea was biting her nails.
‘That can’t be true.’
‘It is true. You’re born with desire. It’s, like, a biological thing.’
‘Is it?’ said Juliet, uncertainly. ‘Really?’ She literally couldn’t remember the last time she felt desire. She desired many things, not another person. A watertight house, a garden free of brambles, and a good night’s sleep, both for her and for her children.
Chapter Sixteen
October
When you used to come to me for half-term in October, do you remember what we’d do? We’d rank all the apples in order of usability and attractiveness. But Ev used to just eat them no matter what. A child out of time, your Everett, wild and elemental. He never slept, as a baby. Honor would bring him over at seven in the mornings during the holidays. Whereas you – you were like an enchanted princess in a bower. You slept all the time.
Pick the apples. Store them in the wooden trays in the cool and the dark of the Dovecote. Make sure each fruit is not touching another or they will bruise. Pick the quinces from the tree by the stream. Quince, when boiled up with sugar, makes delicious jam which you can eat with cheese. Your child – WHAT IS HER NAME – can live on apples for months – ours are Russets, and Blenheim Orange – my favourites.
I don’t know her name, I’m old and sometimes can’t remember myself. Sorry.
What else? Lift the dahlias after the first frost, cut them and plunge them in sand or ash in the greenhouse for winter.
Sow the sweet peas in little pots in the greenhouse.
You must tackle the garden with pruning shears, ready for winter. Cut back, always cut back. You will be rewarded come summer.
The weather changed when October arrived. Having rained for most of August suddenly it became achingly warm, an Indian summer where the light was that peculiar rich gold of autumn. The days were noticeably shorter. On 2 October the thermometer on the wall by the kitchen door said twenty-five degrees, and they sat outside amongst the last of the listing sunflowers and had home-made pizza which Juliet did on the old barbecue. Isla and Sandy rushed around the Wilderness playing hide and seek and Juliet watched them, and the darting birds, and the heart-shaped Small Copper butterflies basking on the lawn below her. Lacy, pink-fringed daisies crept along the borders and the steps along with the final wild strawberries, prinking the luminous lichen-green and the soft grey flagstones with coral and red. The apples were gloriously ripe now, reddening to blush on one side.
Bea set herself up in the Dovecote, where she’d put the doll’s house, much to Sandy’s disgust, for he wanted it in his bedroom. She did her homework in there. The north-facing windows still gave light; Ned had lined the opposite wall with wooden shelves himself – in fact everything in the Dovecote had been made by his hand, not Dalbeattie’s. An old easel, rarely used by Ned, stood in the shadows; mostly he had painted his larger canvases on an old wooden child’s cradle, still propped up against the wall and spattered with paint. The whole room was covered in paint – smears and blobs of colours hardened over time into a nobbled texture.
Juliet had not yet paid attention to her grandmother’s advice about the sunflowers, because the weather had been so terrible they hadn’t flowered until very late on. But she had remembered about the figs. Bea loved figs and could eat five in a row. All three children grew adept at picking the ripe ones, and Bea kept a bowl of them in the studio, resting on the table Ned had made for his paints and brushes, a semi-circle whose side was lathed precisely to run flush with the gentle curve of the wall.
One such warm afternoon, when you could hear the bees still buzzing lazily in the purple salvia, Honor came for tea, and was press-ganged into droping off one of Frederic’s latest offerings into the Dovecote.
‘I don’t understand why George couldn’t have helped you with this,’ said Honor, pulling at the eighties office swivel chair, which was caught on a small rock. ‘This path is in a terrible state. Ah, I see the dahlias and asters are still out in force. Look at that yellow. And that bright red. She’d be delighted the Walkers kept it up.’
‘Yes,’ said Juliet, herself wheeling a small cabinet on a trundle George had left behind. ‘I have no idea what to do about dahlias, do you?’
And as she said it she knew it wasn’t true, that somewhere in Grandi’s little book of instructions there was something about dahlias.
‘Here we are, the scene of the crime – oh, you have got it looking nice in here.’ Honor swung the chair around, and pushed it into the Dovecote, then fluffed out her blonde cropped hair. ‘Lift them out, cut them, store them. Darling, I must go. Bryan is off tonight and I want to catch him before – Hi, Bea!’
‘Hi, Honor. Nice to see you again. Thanks for bringing it over.’
‘When did you meet Honor?’ said Juliet, as Bea leaped happily into the office chair and started to swing around.
‘Oh, with George.’
‘George?’
Honor was hugging Bea. ‘Listen, Ju. It’s wonderful to see you. I’m giving your number to Ev, you can ask him all your garden questions if I’m not around. He wants to be in touch again.’
‘Really? How is he?’
Honor rolled her eyes. ‘Same old Ev. It’s rather wonderful in a way to be that childish still. But his old mum thinks he should be more futureproof – is that the term? Right then.’ She jangled her keys in her coat. ‘When he’s back in the summer you two can catch up properly – but he’s the one to ask about it all, the professional gardener and all—’
‘Frederic says you’re the one who taught Ev everything he knows.’
‘I am, but it’s the lot of the mother to teach them only to lose them.’ But she was smiling. ‘Toodle-loo, Ju, darling. I’ll come back, if I may. Love to everyone.’
Juliet watched Honor’s car drive away. Funny, it was, how someone like Frederic seemed so much older and Honor seemed exactly the same, if anything slightly younger. Younger than Juliet felt. She had always been like that, bursting with energy, direct, funny. She’d grown up here, like Juliet’s father.
Bea was still spinning round in the chair as Juliet turned back, her feet skimming on the stone counter that ran one side of the studio. She pulled her hoody up over her head.
‘Oh this is great. Thanks, Mum.’
‘George brought it over.’
‘He’s the best.’ She spun around again. ‘I like George. Did you know he saw Bowie live in Glasgow? Have a fig.’
‘Thanks, in a minute.’ Juliet climbed up on the high mezzanine ledge and be
gan hunting for a booklet she’d co-written on Leighton at her first job with the Tate Gallery’s publications team. She thought it’d be useful to look it over again. Darryl, her old friend from Dawnay’s, had emailed her to let her know the Fentiman Museum in Oxford, with its peerless collection of Horner sketches, might be looking for someone. ‘Wouldn’t working there be totally ideal except isn’t the new man there the guy you hate?’ he’d written. Juliet winced as she read it. Hate was too strong a word, she told herself nobly. But, yep, she couldn’t stand Sam Hamilton.
Since the sale of The Garden of Lost and Found sketch he kept cropping up, on the radio, in those ridiculous ‘What I’m Reading on Holiday’ pieces in the papers which never gave any decent recommendations like a Virago Modern Classic you’d missed or a Georgette Heyer you’d forgotten about. And, as expected, Sam Hamilton had said the book he was taking probably somewhere pretentious like Micronesia or Yerevan was a translation of an Italian poet’s new epic in thirty stanzas about the death of Europe as seen through the eyes of a dying bull. He’d even done a short Q&A in The Times. ‘Sam Hamilton, new director of the Fentiman Museum and at 40 one of the youngest gallery directors in the UK. Divorced, lives in Oxford alone.’ In answer to the question ‘What has most disappointed you?’, Sam Hamilton answered: ‘Social media as a means of democratisation but in fact a purveyor of narcissism and entrenchment.’
Pretentious idiot. Twitter had a field day with it, as Juliet could have predicted it would.
Along with many art historians, Juliet was tired of new directors coming into galleries and feeling they had to put their stamp on a decent, well-run museum by doing something ideological like ordering a rehang that displayed everything in alphabetical order or by themes. She couldn’t work out what Sam Ham, as she thought of him, would be like now, but at Oxford he was very much the kind of person who went up to you and explained how clever he was. At Oxford. Still, it was literally the one museum in commuting distance, and she had to email him . . . She wondered if Sam Ham still only wore T-shirts from nineties Britpop bands. There was no photo of him in the Times piece, which was small.
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