‘Yes,’ Sandy had said, allowing himself to be lifted gently off the bed, as Janine supported his back and Juliet took his good hand. The endless, boundless kindness of people: Janine’s patience, Ali, the nurse who looked after him at night-time when he woke crying for Juliet and she sometimes wasn’t there, of his doctor, Dr Mulligan, who brought in a special video of her children and their puppy to show Sandy because he had told her he liked dogs.
‘We’ll go in and see him tomorrow, Grandma Elvie and I,’ said her father, turning back to his hoeing. ‘She’s inside now, making an omelette for tea.’
‘Oh,’ said Juliet. ‘Great.’
When she opened the door she could hear singing, and the smell of cooking. She took a deep breath, and went through the dining room into the kitchen. ‘Hello, darlings!’ she called, aware her voice was slightly higher than usual. ‘Hi, Fin, great to see you! Hi, Bea, my love, hello, darling Isla, how was school?’
‘Hi, Mum,’ said Bea, looking up from her phone.
‘Hi, Juliet,’ said Fin. She put down the T-shirt, on to which she was sewing an embroidered patch emblazoned with ‘Mother of Dragons’. ‘How was Sandy today?’
Isla crossed her arms and stared at her mother, mutinously. ‘It’s got green stuff in it,’ she said, glaring at the plate in front of her.
‘Mum! What a lovely smell!’ she called.
Her mother was standing at the Aga, spatula in hand, wiping her forehead, hair sticking up at the front into a tuft. ‘Omelette aux fines herbes,’ she said, shortly, taking a large swig from a mug.
‘It. Has. Got green stuff in it!’ Isla called again from the dining room. ‘LOADS OF GREEN STUFF, MUM.’
‘Isla,’ Juliet hissed. ‘Don’t be rude, please. Thank you. Eat your omelette.’
‘But the green stuff IS GREEN—’
‘I don’t care, don’t be rude.’
‘Your children have an extraordinary attitude to anything that might be good for them, darling!’ her mother called out semi-hysterically.
‘Yes, well. I brought them up on chicken nuggets washed down with Fruit Shoots so no wonder.’ Juliet put her bag on the table and took a mug from the cupboard.
‘What?’
‘Nothing. Thanks for looking after them today.’
‘It’s my pleasure! We’ve had so much fun . . .’ Elvie trailed off. ‘I wanted to walk along the river into the village but the tow path is all overgrown. That awful messy old tree that’s half come away in the winter – can’t you cut it down?’
‘The mulberry? You can’t just hack away at it, alas. It needs a tree surgeon, it’s three hundred years old. It was here when they built the house.’
‘Well it’s such a shame. If you trimmed it it’d open the path up. Back in Dinard, they dock the trees every other year. It’s really very efficient. Keeps everything nice and neat—’
Her father had come into the kitchen. ‘Tea?’ he exclaimed, in wonder. ‘Oh Elvie, you are amazing. A cup of tea is exactly what I was in the mood for. How did you know!’
Her mother smiled and handed him Juliet’s cup of tea. ‘Sixth sense, my darling.’
‘You angel! What a treat.’
Juliet watched them, in wonderment that they could still, after all these years, derive so much pleasure from setting up and then rewarding themselves for the simplest tasks. I am a bad person, and that is why my marriage failed, she thought. I’d no more congratulate Matt on making a cup of tea beyond thanking him than he would. She gave a small smile at the thought of her almost-ex husband clapping his hands together in joy at a pot of tea. He used to find this aspect of her parents infuriating, she knew, though he never said so. He just got on with it. She remembered, when they’d first met that New Year’s Eve, being so impressed at the way the following day he’d asked for her phone number, and then called her. No messing around. No mind games, like her university boyfriends, no ethereal vagueness, like Ev.
Back soon now Ju, just wanted to say you need to keep weeding this time of year, it’s mad. I’ll come and help you. Can’t wait to look round it, some great trails round there too, must bring my bike. Hope your kid is doing OK. Ev x
Cups poured, she and her parents retreated into the dining room to join the children. Juliet slid a plate of biscuits towards her parents. ‘Here.’
‘Thanks, darling,’ said her mum. ‘Ooh, Juliet, ginger nuts! Aren’t you clever. My favourites.’
Juliet smiled, to herself, looking down, as Isla appeared in the doorway.
‘Grandma Elvie, can I ask you something?’
‘Yes, my love!’ Elvie put on her special bright ‘Grandma’ voice.
‘Why do you say things are interesting all the time when they’re not?’
‘Isla!’
‘Sometimes they are, Isla!’
‘How?’ said Isla. ‘Would you be very kind and give me an e.g.?’
Elvie appeared to consider this for a long time, as Juliet and her father exchanged looks. ‘Well . . . do you know, I did a special job for many years, Isla. Do you know what that job was?’
‘Astronaut,’ breathed Isla.
‘No. I’ll give you a clue. Some say I was a dreamcatcher, of children’s dreams.’
‘Eh?’ said Juliet, involuntarily.
‘Lovely,’ her father breathed.
‘Um . . .’ said Isla, nonplussed. ‘So . . . were you a monster out of Monsters Inc, the ones that try to scare children to make them scream, not the ones who look after the office?’
‘No, Isla. My very special job was that I was . . . a . . . teacher.’
‘I’ve come to ask very kindly can I get down please,’ said Isla immediately, looking at her mother, as Bea and Fin both struggled to keep a straight face. ‘I want to write a new part of my story for Sandy tomorrow. Thank you for the lovely omelette with bits in, Grandma Elvie. It was delicious. I shall take it into the kitchen now. Thank you again.’
‘You can go too,’ said Juliet to Bea and Fin. Fin turned to Juliet, fiddling with her nose-ring.
‘Thank you,’ she said, her round face breaking into a smile which showed the gap in her front teeth. ‘Um, hope it’s alright to say it but I’m glad Sandy’s doing OK.’
Juliet caught her hand, and squeezed it. ‘Oh, thanks, Fin.’
‘See you later, Mum, we’re going upstairs. Oh, and later, can you give us a lift to Godstow? Ben and some other people are hanging out in the café, I said me and Fin would join them.’ She glanced at her grandmother. ‘Fin and I.’
‘Thank you, Bea,’ said Juliet’s mother, smiling.
‘Sure you can go. Fin, remember your epi-pen.’
‘Oh! I will, thank you, Juliet.’ Fin bit off the thread from the needle and held up the T-shirt. ‘Dracarys!’ she said, and Bea laughed. Juliet looked blank.
‘Game of Thrones,’ said Fin, politely. ‘Is it a matriarchy? It’s a real question. Does even George know the answer to that? Who knows?’
‘George? I doubt it.’ Aware she had literally no idea what they meant, but not minding, in fact joyfully happy that Bea’s world was unknown to her now and that was a good thing, Juliet turned back to her parents, who were whispering to each other.
It was lovely to have them here, even if at this time of day she really just wanted to kick off her shoes and curl up in an armchair and stare out of the window instead of making polite conversation. And there were, still, so many things she didn’t understand about them. Did they really have to disinfect their toothbrushes with a special French toothhead cleaning tablet morning and night? And were they really so worried about digestion that they had to drink nettle tea twice a day? And the business with windows having to be closed all the time . . .
‘Fin is nice, isn’t she?’ said Juliet’s mum bracingly, as two pairs of boots disappeared around the bend in the stairs. ‘Very polite.’
Juliet did think Fin was nice. Privately she thought she was slightly too introverted for Bea, who would march for peace when she was older and kick at
the system and get things done, she was that kind of girl. But Bea was fifteen. This was all new territory, like everything else.
‘She’s a very kind person. That’s the most you can ask, isn’t it? Someone kind.’
‘So you spent all day at the hospital,’ said her dad, his kind face turned towards her. ‘I’m glad Sandy was better. A little better every day. Every day—’
‘I wasn’t there all day. I went to see the painting. Sam, my boss, and I were discussing what to do next.’ She had told her parents about the discovery of The Garden of Lost and Found. ‘Dad . . .’ She cleared her throat, not sure of quite how she’d say what she wanted to but knowing now was the best time to talk to her parents. Sam’s voice, reading the letter from Mary to Dalbeattie, seemed to echo in her head. You have been my life.
‘The night of Sandy’s accident, Frederic said something rather strange – I never knew he was from Dinard, too, did you? But you had to, because you knew him from the village, before he came to England.’ Her parents, side by side, exchanged swift glances. ‘And something Sam said today. I was thinking about Grandi.’ She swallowed, her mouth dry. ‘I was thinking how she was the only child here for most of the time. She never knew her family, did she?’
Her father was still staring down into the teacup.
‘Dad?’
‘Yes, darling,’ her father said, very quietly. ‘So she always said.’
‘Ev texted me a few weeks ago about the Royal Wedding. It was a funny day, wasn’t it?’
‘Such a boring girl—’ Elvie began eagerly. ‘Oh, that Royal Wedding. The first one. Poor Diana –’ She stopped.
Juliet looked from one to the other of them. ‘Grandi wasn’t the same afterwards, was she? She got so upset. There was a man, wasn’t there? And you two, you’re never here. And there’s this other thing, about brown eyes. Bea has brown eyes.’ She was speaking fast. ‘All of this together – well, it keeps rolling round and round like the coin on the floor.’
‘What coin?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, impatiently. ‘Just that something doesn’t make sense.’ Her voice was shaking.
Her father sank back against the chair, and put his hands over his eyes, shielding himself from her gaze.
‘Juliet—’ He stopped, one hand up.
‘Michael, darling, it’s all right,’ said Juliet’s mum, swiftly. ‘It’s all right. Honestly.’
Juliet reached for a glass of water, suddenly scared. She swallowed, and said, ‘What happened, the day of the Royal Wedding? Who was that man?’
‘My uncle,’ Michael whispered, his head in his hands, and Elvie put her hands up to his, her face a rictus of pain at her husband’s distress. ‘My Uncle John, darling. He was a very dear man.’
The room was deathly silent; no sounds from the garden or the rest of the house. Juliet said: ‘What?’
Her dad’s lip twisted; he rubbed at his eyes. ‘We never told you. We couldn’t tell you. It was a choice – her or him, and – God help me! We chose him. He had no one. All those years. But you were the collateral damage, do you see?’ And he looked up at the sky, blinking. ‘I’m not a religious man, but I pray we did the right thing. You were so happy here. It was what she lived for, really. This house, the idea of it.’ He gave a despairing, small shrug. ‘How could we take that away from you? So we gave her to you.’
‘Darling,’ her mother said, her voice firm.
‘What?’ Juliet’s voice was shaking. ‘Gave who to me?’
‘I’ll tell you. I’ll explain it all,’ her father said.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
July 1918
‘John John, the painter’s son, Stole a cake and away he rund.’
It was easier, sometimes, to steal a cake than to beg. Because you might be questioned, or worse still recognised – less danger in London, than here, coming towards home. But once, on Piccadilly Circus, smelling the scent of fresh bread from some oven close by, the growling pains of hunger had become too much to bear and he had thrust his cap into a man’s abdomen. ‘Pennies for a poor wounded soldier?’ he’d said, and the man – well-dressed, top hat, a smart jacket of soft black wool, a plump mustard-coloured cravat – had looked down at him, in alarm, and with some repulsion – he had not bathed for weeks now, not since the stream in Brittany.
‘No – no, sir, I thank you,’ the man had replied in horror and, firmly grasping his elbows, had moved him out of his path. As though John was nothing to do with him. The bewilderment on his face, that was the note that stuck. This broken young penniless soldier, on the street, asking for money – what had that to do with him? Up and down Regent’s Street there were banners, poems in shop windows, tributes to our glorious dead. ‘Hang high their swords in churches across the land’ – the dead were heroes. The war was still being fought but the living, the shuffling, beaten-down living were as dirt under the feet, to be ignored.
John ducked out of sight, back into the crowds, up Glasshouse Street and into the murky depths of Soho once more.
As spring had come, and the days were longer and lighter, he grew bolder, walking west, out of the city, begging a loaf here and there, stealing when he had to and only when he knew it would not be missed – a tray of Eccles cakes, fresh from the oven, left on the windowsill of a cottage in Bayswater, frosted sugar glinting like diamonds in the morning sunshine. A few slices of ham, from a butcher’s in Middlesex when the back door had been left open. He was adept at spotting water fountains, and drank greedily from them, remembering the old army advice that often thirst felt like hunger. Nor was this the brackish rainwater oily and brown with human waste and dead rats and flies and tobacco such as he had drunk in Northern France for weeks at a time, and it was not leaves, or grass, or raw eggs snatched from underneath the hen, cracked open and slung hastily down the gullet before a furious, emaciated farmer appeared. ‘Get off my land, you English brute!’ He swiped a shirt from a washing line, burying his army shirt in a field. The jacket he had to keep, for warmth.
He was alive, that much he had. He was back in England, thanks to a friendly passage he had secured in Boulogne, doing things to the captain in the lean-to outbuilding of the harbourmaster’s headquarters facing out across the fields. Things that he didn’t mind doing anyway: he’d seen far worse, been asked much worse. All he understood now was that he must keep moving forward, or else lie down and die.
In late June he caught the flu and was quite unwell, crawling from roadside verges into a disused barn where he lay for the best part of a week unable to scavenge for food or to beg. He had heard whispers, in pubs and on newspaper hoardings, that the Spanish flu that was killing thousands of men back in France had arrived here. For a day or two he thought he might die too, and hoped he would. He wanted it to be over. He wanted to end it, but he’d been too cowardly to do it. But, for whatever reason, he lived. He told himself he was lucky, though he didn’t feel lucky.
He lost even more weight, and being sick made him sicker, of course. By this point he was somewhere on the Bath Road, west of Reading. His progress slowed, though he knew he must find his way home. He must see Liddy, for the last time.
John was well aware how many deserters from the war had been court-martialled, how they were still being rounded up. The 2nd Battalion had been charged with executing five of them, before Cambrai; they did it, he knew, to stiffen resolve. If he was caught he’d be shot. He understood his old life was over, that he could never really go home again – it would put his father and his mother at risk of being accused of harbouring a deserter, to say nothing of the shame it would bring on them. He merely wanted to see his mother once more.
To smell her lily-of-the-valley scent, to touch her hair. To walk in the garden in summer, to spend – perhaps? – one night in the house, in his bedroom with the smooth floorboards, the turreted window. To hear the nightingales sing in the trees, now it was June, to relive, one more time, the perfection of Nightingale House in summer and the love that, once, they had all held for
each other. To have a memory from after the war that wasn’t wholly bad. Something to build a new future upon. His desire to live, he had started to realise, was strong.
So when he was better, though his boots had worn through and flea bites troubled him greatly, though the wound in his side was painful and his skin was easily sunburned and his guts torn to shreds from the mustard gas, and though every step grew harder, John kept on walking.
He had pictured, so many times, the lane along to the house, so that when he reached it finally it seemed unreal. Then he heard the birdsong – first the crows, croaking in the yew trees behind the house, keeping watch over the graves. Pushing aside the worn metal bars cut into the wall, John crept into the churchyard. He could not, now, remember what way was widdershins. Mama’s arm, pinching his to go the right way towards the grave . . . ‘This way little one, she’s over here.’
He picked his way towards the new graves, fifteen or more of them, a village decimated. His heart hammered as he steeled himself to read the name on each fresh headstone. The Hoyle boy, and Lord Alfred Coote. A fine fellow he had been, he’d driven John back to the train that last, awful time he’d come home on leave, not said a word on the journey as beside him John had shuddered and vomited and then sobbed, brokenly. A good man, Major Coote, damn it. ‘Cambrai, 1918’. So he had died only a few weeks after John had deserted . . . John touched the grave, repulsion at himself for his cowardice sluicing him like nausea once again. I am here, and he is gone. A dear boy. The scion of the family, gone.
That hazy summer morning when they’d all set off for Walbrook together . . . The Godstow Pals! And most of them gone now . . . One more name – oh dash it! A sob burst from John’s mouth as he read the name: Jack Burnaby.
He and Jack used to fool about together in the barn over the hill as the pigs snuffled and snouted, wrestling and playfighting and it was there, one hot summer afternoon as the rest of the village celebrated Empire Day, that he had felt himself rising with uncontained excitement for the first time – and it was Jack who had known what to do, who had shown him what was happening. Dear Jack, whose gentle hands made him gasp, as he laid him back on the scratchy hay who had pulled and pressed at him till John exploded with joy. It had taken a while for John to understand what they had done was not merely illegal but reviled by almost everyone in the land. It wasn’t a little bit against the law, like driving a motor car at 21mph. It was a disgusting act . . . and yet the memory of dear Jack, his lock of blond hair falling into his eyes . . . That time, o’ times.
The Garden of Lost and Found Page 42