The Garden of Lost and Found

by Harriet Evans

  ‘I came to Nightingale House once, you know.’

  ‘Really? When?’

  ‘At Oxford. My mom and dad had come over to see me and they were so excited. You know, my dad hadn’t ever left Canada before.’ His face split into a smile at the memory. ‘Yeah. A very cross lady opened the door and when I asked if it was Dalbeattie’s house she said yes it was and then slammed it in my face.’

  Juliet laughed, despite feeling embarrassed. ‘Oh, no. I’m so sorry. She didn’t like Dalbeattie, for some reason.’

  ‘My dad was quite impressed. He kept saying afterwards, “Well, she was a real old broad, wasn’t she?”’

  ‘That’d be my grandmother. Stella Horner.’

  ‘Of course. The daughter who’s not in the painting. I always forget her.’ He nodded his head slightly.

  ‘Well, she was born after my great-grandfather died,’ said Juliet, inexplicably nettled by this. She thought of Stella’s exercise book filled with instructions which Juliet kept by her bed, the large handwriting, the careful notes. ‘Almost nine months to the day. They were very old – my great-grandmother would have been forty-four. She’s not the lost daughter, she’s just the – the surprise.’

  ‘OK. Well. The archive arrived just after New Year. Kate Nadin, our archivist, hasn’t got to it yet, she broke her ankle over Christmas and she’s been off. I can’t resist though, I keep going in and opening up boxes. She’ll be furious with me.’

  ‘Wow. How exciting.’ Despite herself Juliet’s eyes lit up. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to come look. There are wonderful letters between Dalbeattie and Ned Horner. The hours he slaved over it, transforming the place for his friend, and Ned – well, he was quite a worrier, that guy. And Dalbeattie died pretty young, really. He just seemed like a wonderful man.’

  His enthusiasm was infectious. ‘He was. I think our house taught him a lot. And Ned, as well. He always said that the house inspired him as much as anything else.’

  A swift half-smile crossed Sam’s face. ‘Oh. Of course. I’d forgotten.’

  ‘Forgotten what?’

  ‘You and your Horner thing.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  His eyes danced again. ‘How do I put this, Juliet? You rather tended to namedrop Ned Horner.’

  ‘No I didn’t!’

  ‘Oh, you did. Like he was more famous than Elvis, and no one cared, no one but me, and you ignored me for, like, the whole year!’

  ‘We – we were talking about Horner, it’s entirely relevant!’ She looked at him, not sure if he was joking. ‘Me ignore you? You – wow! You dumped my best friend.’

  ‘She was a tightwad. And she snored.’

  ‘You told her she was stupid.’

  A shadow crossed his face; he put his hand swiftly to his forehead, then down on the desk again. He looked quite shaken. ‘I’m sorry. That’s not cool. Poor – what was her name?’

  ‘Ginny. You can’t even remember her name.’

  ‘It was almost twenty years ago. Wow. Well, I’m sorry. What’s she – what’s she up to now?’

  ‘Oh, you know,’ said Juliet, vaguely. ‘This. And . . .’

  ‘That?’

  ‘Yes, that.’

  ‘You don’t know where she is, and she’s supposedly a great friend of yours. Well OK.’

  ‘I do,’ said Juliet, her subconscious suddenly snapping into action. ‘Pickering.’ She had no idea where this had come from, and knew it was right, but no idea why. ‘She’s – she lives in Pickering. She’s a vicar.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Sam, after a moment. ‘This isn’t a very professional way to conduct an interview. I apologise. I guess I was nervous, seeing you again.’

  ‘No, no, I’m sorry,’ said Juliet. ‘Really, I’m being so rude. You’re supposed to be interviewing me.’

  ‘I just didn’t really get that you’d moved here, that’s all. Much less that you’d want a job with us.’

  ‘I have three children and I’m getting divorced. I have to work. And besides’ – she shook her head, and she could hear her voice breaking a little – ‘I want to work.’

  Sam Hamilton looked at her. ‘Let me try and conduct an actual interview for a few minutes, shall I? I do actually have questions from the board that I’m supposed to ask potential employees.’ He spoke in a monotone. ‘What are you most proud of in your professional life?’

  Juliet thought for a moment, and then smiled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She’d been about to say: potty-training Sandy. ‘I suppose it’s finding a Millais sketch in an antiques shop in Banbury.’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Yes way. It paid for our first car.’

  He was watching her with that curious intensity of his, but now he leaned forward. ‘I don’t mean to be rude,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t it be relatively easy for someone like you to spot one of his sketches? You’re Juliet Horner. I was reading yesterday how you paid for the cleaning of that murky landscape at the Tate out of your own pocket and it turned out to be a William Dyce.’

  ‘I did. And you’re right. But this—’ She shook her head. ‘We’d gone into the shop because my husband saw an old enamel Bialetti sign for sale in the window. We woke the kids up from the car, so they were truly horrifically grumpy. They were screaming in the background and – sorry. Do you have kids?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. I got divorced last year. I’d . . .’ He trailed off. ‘It didn’t work out that way.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Juliet, wishing she’d never asked. ‘It’s just . . .’ She cleared her throat.

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, awkwardly. ‘With kids, it’s like Whack-a-Mole, you know? Keeping one down before the other one pops up again. And there were only two of them then. We were driving back in a hire car from Matt’s old colleague’s wedding and we’d had a huge row about –’ her hands stole to her burning red cheeks – ‘something else, so there’s then a third tension about who’s looking out for them, and I can tell you the husband never, ever looks out for them. Sorry,’ she said, raising her hands at Sam.

  ‘Don’t apologise. The patriarchy hurts us all,’ he said, nodding, half joking, half serious.

  ‘Well thank you. So you’re in an antiques shop piled high with crystal punch bowls and china shepherdesses with two tired hungry children and your husband thinks he can haggle with an antiques dealer who doesn’t believe in haggling. And you keep seeing these sketches, on rough paper, in the corner of the shop stacked on top of a bureau, and there’s just something about the top one – it’s like a high-pitched buzz in your ear . . . Something special. So you spot an old girls’ school annual and give it to the nine-year-old, and a wicker basket, and a teddy bear, and you tell the two-year-old she can put the teddy to bed with your scarf. You give them the scarf. That gives you about forty seconds, max, to flick through the drawings before they kick off again. And the first few sketches, they’re lovely, but it’s the fourth one you see, there’s just something, something about the shading, the expression in the girl’s eyes, the way the hands are treated . . . you get that prickling feeling, on the neck, and you’re there, right there – and now your youngest child is yelling about Frozen and clinging to your leg and it’s over.’ She glanced at him. ‘Honestly, you’d have been proud of discovering it, if it was you.’ She shrugged.

  Sam was nodding. ‘Wow. Yep, I would.’

  ‘It’s not rocket science. Like you say, I should have known.’

  ‘Well, you tell it well then,’ he said. He stood up, and went to look out of the window, his arms folded. He didn’t say anything for a moment. ‘Can I say something? I said you look the same, but you’re really quite different than you were at Oxford.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He shrugged. ‘We all got each other wrong, perhaps. I wasn’t very happy there actually. I was pretty lonely.’

  ‘You seemed to know
everything. You didn’t seem like you wanted friends.’

  ‘That’s funny. I did. Desperately. I didn’t fit in.’

  ‘It’s not a finishing school. I wasn’t anyone interesting. I was from a North London comp and I went there.’

  ‘You’d be surprised, though,’ he said, and she nodded at the same time.

  ‘You’re right.’ She curled back against the chair. ‘I am sorry. If you didn’t have a good time. I should have been more friendly. Especially like you say because we did actually have interests in common, as they say. I don’t suppose I was that happy, either. I was convinced I was ugly and stupid and my parents moved to France literally the day after I went to university like they couldn’t wait to be shot of parenting. I didn’t have a home any more, so I’d stay with my grandmother in the holidays. And everyone else was so incredibly clever and posh, and I was sure I wouldn’t get a job afterwards.’

  ‘Wow. It doesn’t matter. Hey, everyone’s going through stuff, right?’

  ‘They are. Always.’

  ‘Listen, it’s great to see you again, Juliet.’ Sam leaned across, holding out his hand. ‘We’re lucky to have someone like you coming into the area. You know it. The board asked me to ask you if you’d take three days a week to start with, moving to five if we get the Arts Council funding we want for the extension.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m offering you a job. Sorry. Was that not clear?’

  ‘Of course it’s not clear,’ said Juliet, laughing. ‘That’s wonderful!’

  ‘You’re Juliet Horner,’ he said, waggling his outstretched hand so she’d take it. ‘We’d be mad not to hire you. It was a slam dunk.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was obvious.’

  ‘I like this board.’

  ‘So you should. They like you. We need your help. Aside from the extension and the Dalbeattie archive, we’re mounting an exhibition of Horner’s sketches in 2019—’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. We’ve asked Julius Irons to loan us The Garden of Lost and Found sketch.’

  ‘My goodness. Do you think he will?’

  ‘After the level of outcry about his taking it out of the country and stuffing it in some vault I think he’ll have to say yes. I heard he’s told people he overpaid for it. Early signs are encouraging, put it that way.’

  ‘Sam!’ Juliet’s smile split her cheeks into apples. ‘I – that’s absolutely wonderful. That’s – that’s great! To have it hanging here . . . I accept. Don’t care what the job is.’ They grinned at each other.

  ‘Reunited over Edwardian art.’

  ‘Victorian. Summer 1900.’

  ‘There you go again, showing off about your relative.’ He stood up.

  Juliet ignored this. ‘Thank you for seeing me. And about the painting. It’s wonderful news. When can I start?’

  ‘February third would be great, actually.’

  ‘Great. Thank you again – and Ham? Sam. Sam Ham? Oh, dear. I’m sorry again. And for making you sound like a Dr Seuss book.’

  ‘It happens all the time back home. It’s mainly why I moved over here. So let’s have a clean slate, shall we?’

  ‘I long for a clean slate. I dream of clean slates. Piles of ’em,’ said Juliet. ‘That sounds great.’

  And for the second time, a little too enthusiastically, she shook his hand, smiling at him.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  February

  Check the guttering in February, Juliet. The leaves have often turned to mulch, they block the old pipes. Do it three times. Once in November, once in January, once now. Three times. Any leaves you clear can be put on the soil, but make sure it’s not too wet or it will freeze and harm your poor plants even more. Enjoy the bulbs you planted, the narcissi and the snowdrops. The evenings are lighter. I do not fear winter. I revel in its quietude, in the feeling the earth is sleeping.

  Spring is coming. It’s not here yet, but it’s coming. There are secrets in the soil. Buried deep, waiting to burst up, out, into the open.

  Juliet had always hated February – the sound of it, like a taunt. Februareeeee. But here, even now, when the branches were bare and the days still so short, she found joy in every day. The stark contrast of the black trees against the pale-blue sky; the small mists on the valley in the mornings, curling and hugging the undulating wold. And, everywhere, the feeling of waiting. Treacle-brown buds, almost ready to open, and the dark earth, rich, thick with dead leaves and worms and a winter’s worth of clean rain.

  She suppressed a yawn as she steered the car round a bend. Winter had sapped some of her energy. She’d been up at five-thirty, clearing the leaves from the guttering – she had done it twice, once in autumn, once before Christmas, and almost hadn’t got up to do it that morning. But Grandi always said it needed to be done three times, and the plumbing at Nightingale House had proved to be so erratic that Juliet was terrified of angering it when it might be avoidable. She’d learned over the winter that if you put off small jobs, they had a habit of swiftly turning into big problems. The previous day she had slipped on the stones on the terrace.

  Hi Ev can I ask you something else? What can I use to clean the terrace stones? They’re slimy and green and disgusting and I slipped on them y’day. I can’t use bleach can I?

  Ju mate hi. Don’t use bleach no way that will kill lichen / get into plant roots when rains. Jeyes fluid is OK.

  Thanks hope you’re good. X

  I am. You can plant fruit trees now it’s cold. Make sure the hole is deep & root ball has space. Plant a damson tree always wanted one of them ;) see you in summer

  She was able to look back on winter, now it was on the way out: it had been wild, wet, too warm, not the crisp, glittering affair she had hoped for: she’d kept wrapping up in cosy knits and lighting the smoking, sputtering fire and would find she was hot, uncomfortable, wet. Always wet. The rain created new problems all the time. The french doors from the dining room and the study were swollen shut and wouldn’t open, the stream at the bottom of the Wilderness had burst its banks, and the grass was waterlogged, the plants in the lower borders drowned in mud. Two apple trees had lost large branches which simply cracked clean away and were carried along by the water before jamming further downstream. Only last week a huge branch from an oak tree that shaded the house had torn off and crashed into the Birdsnest on the top floor, smashing one of Bea’s bedroom windows – thankfully, while she was at school.

  ‘I could have had a day off school if it hit me,’ she’d said, grumpily. ‘It’s not fair.’

  Juliet had laughed. ‘Of all the things in life that aren’t fair, you not being seriously injured by a fallen tree and thus having to go to school is not one of them.’

  The tree looked wholly sad now, the custard-and-orange wood revealed beneath the missing bark a strange, unseemly contrast with all that black and green, and the grey graves now visible over the yew trees.

  Every morning, new jobs to do, new crises fomented during the nights. When she thought of how she and Matt used to row over whose turn it was to replace a lightbulb and whether they should put Sellotape on the scart cable to help it stay in the TV she wanted to laugh.

  Should she have made leaf mould? What was leaf mould? What did you do with all the browning apples you’d picked and neatly stored? How did you insulate a bedroom window that rattled so loudly at night it woke your child up? What were you supposed to do if you saw a hedgehog being rolled around the lawn by a fox? Would there ever not be mice?

  You left me plenty of instructions, but it turns out not quite enough.

  Juliet slowed down to let a horsebox pass, crushing her car against the hedgerow. When she’d first got here in those dog days of summer, she had been terrified of the narrow lanes, the heavy farm machinery that lumbered out at you around corners, of the mud-spattered Land Rovers, bashed about and rusting, dogs sitting in the back. She had never really cared about her car: in fact only that very day, walking away
from the Fentiman, absorbed in conversation with Sam Ham about a new painting by Holman Hunt that had suddenly come on the market, she couldn’t remember where she’d parked it.

  ‘It’s been over-restored – a huge pity, as I think the layers underneath would have revealed – what’s wrong, Juliet?’

  Juliet was patting her pockets, as if that would help. ‘My car. I can’t find my car.’

  ‘Oh. I won’t ask if you’re sure you parked it here.’

  ‘I really did. I saw you on the way in, remember?’

  ‘Of course.’ Sam turned to his two-seater sports car, nodded, then turned back, hand clasped to the back of his head, which she had learned was how he thought best. ‘Could it be . . . the next road? They’re very similar.’

  ‘No, I remember this yellow front door. I’m already late for Bea,’ she said, trying not to sound panicked. She had set in stone with her daughter a date every Friday, where they’d make supper and then pick a film for the four of them to watch. Today Bea was making spinach and chickpea casserole and Juliet had promised to bring back some smoked paprika. Cooking together was the only time of the week Bea ever told her anything. Juliet had mastered the art of extracting information: it was all about the long game. If her daughter had given too much away the previous week (anything from the fixable: ‘Miss Wrexham says my long shore drift diagrams are way off and I need to practise them’ to the unknowable from last week: ‘A girl at school said she liked me and she’s bi though I actually think that’s just something she says to sound cool, and anyway when I was at Dad’s last weekend Fin and I had a chat about being exclusive’), sometimes, though it killed her, Juliet wouldn’t ask her anything the following week. So Bea never realised the whole operation was to get her to want to talk. And it was working: she’d got more out of Bea the last month than the previous year. Her daughter amazed her. Juliet chewed her lip, eyes darting up and back along the street. This was why the Friday cooking session was so important.

  She stared up at Sam in dismay. ‘Do you think someone’s stolen it?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Sam got out his phone. ‘It’s rife at the moment. Look, I’ll call the police, then I’ll call you a cab.’