‘What does it say?’
‘The truth,’ he said, staring down at her. ‘It – it changes everything.’
‘How?’
He broke their grasp and reached into his breast pocket and pressed into her hands a thin paper envelope, covered in technical drawings and scrawled little towers of sums.
She took it, and he said:
‘Not now – now you need to read it. But, later, I want you to know. That I will always, always be here for you. I will always look out for you. You don’t need looking after. You don’t!’ he said, and the sweetest smile crossed his lips. ‘Just know that people change.’
She thought of Ev, the ethereal sprite turned mile-high off-roading real-ale drinker. ‘The Chaos Crew’. ‘Course they do.’ She looked down and saw his head, weaving in and out of the Wilderness.
‘I’ll be waiting, here,’ he said. ‘When you finish reading them. But you should go inside and sit down, I reckon.’
Just then, Isla appeared on the terrace, twisting the hem of her dress around her thumb. ‘Hi, Mum. Hi, Mister . . .’
‘Sam.’
‘Well, hi, Mister Sam.’
He crouched down. ‘Hi, Miss Isla. It’s very nice to meet you. I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Isla nodded, complacently. ‘Great. Mum, can I have a Hatchimal?’
‘No. Isla, listen, darling, Mum’s got to do something.’
‘But, Mum, Sandy got one, from Nonna Luisa.’
‘Still no. He has been ill.’
‘It’s not fair.’ Isla turned to a stricken-looking Sam who was muttering ‘Hatchimal . . .’ ‘We came here a year ago and apart from Christmas I haven’t had a single present, AND I have to play in this big stupid garden all day. And do you know it’s all because Mum had an old, old, old man who was her old, old, old relative and he left her this old, old, old house and she wanted to let Dad live with Tess? And make a baby with her, which is not like an egg which is how Hatchimals do it and you have to hatch it yourself only she has two other children already and I don’t. Like. Elise. So I have to go and stay with them, but really I’d rather be here. And,’ she finished triumphantly, twisting the hem of her skirt around her finger and lifting it up so everyone could see her knickers. ‘We are actually getting a puppy.’
‘No we’re actually not.’
‘Yes we actually are.’
Sam glanced at Juliet. ‘I have a spare Hatchimal,’ he said. ‘I bought one for your brother, but it’s not right for him. She’s looking for a new home. Would you be able to take her, next time I come to visit?’
‘What? Yes! Yes, please!’ said Isla, her slouching crossness transformed to ecstasy in a second. She stood up straight. ‘Can I have him now?’
‘Her. No – she’s at home, she’s not ready to – to hatch yet.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because, she hasn’t incubated long enough,’ said Sam, wildly.
‘But it’s a plastic toy,’ said Isla, confused, and Sam laughed.
‘I like you, Miss Isla.’
‘I like you – can you bring the toy tomorrow?’
‘Go away,’ said Juliet, grasping her daughter’s shoulders. ‘I will come and see you later.’
She shoved her daughter gently towards the door. Sam turned towards her. ‘Well, she is a card.’
‘Yes, she is. A whole stationery shop of cards.’ Juliet glanced towards the door and the house. Sam pointed at the envelope in her hands.
‘Can’t you just tell me what’s in it?’ said Juliet, her palms moist.
‘Just read it.’ He leaned forward then, and very gently, put his hand on her cheek, so the palm cupped her chin. His skin was warm, his touch firm. She knew he did it naturally. She caught his hand, holding it to her face. They stayed like that for a moment then he said, ‘Wow. I’ll go.’
Her cheek was warm where his fingers had pressed against her skin. She touched her hand to her face, slightly out of breath. He watched her, steadily.
‘Juliet—’
‘Why don’t you walk in the garden? And you can stay for some food. A glass of something. Unless what’s in it is so horrific I’ll need to lie down. Unless you’re telling me I don’t own the house, and the painting isn’t mine.’
He looked around to make sure there was no one about. ‘I’ve taken the liberty of looking into that, and no, you’re in the clear. It’s all still yours, but it does change everything. And yes, I’d like to stay.’
‘Great. That’s really quite great.’ They smiled at each other.
Alone at last, Juliet sat down on the stone settle outside the old house, and opened up the letters, the lichen-flecked stone pressing into her legs through her thin skirt, the warm sun bathing her shoulders, and she began to read. Behind her, the children yelped, and laughed, and called, in every room of the house. In front of her, in the wide garden, Sam walked amongst the last of the roses, waiting for her. And Juliet read.
Chapter Forty-One
29 July 1981
I have no plans now or at any time in the future to sell my father’s sketch of The Garden of Lost and Found. Thank you for your interest.
Yours sincerely
She signed the letter with a flourish: Stella Horner. She had kept her name when she married, yes, even back then in 1943. The opprobrium! Someone had left a white feather on the doorstep of the house while Andrew was away fighting. Her mother had died by then: she knew they’d never have dared had Lydia Horner been alive. Creeping up to the house, at night? To pass judgement on one of the Horners? The very idea made Stella laugh.
Andrew’s name was Yardley. I can’t call myself Yardley with a straight face, it’ll just make me think of toilet water, she’d declared when they became engaged. I make better lavender water than they do.
He hadn’t smiled.
Stella stood up and stretched, the old pain in her hands, her knees, her back. Gardening injuries, her doctor called it. Though she had never met her father, she knew him: her mother had made sure of that. There were three pictures in the house: The Meeting, The Death of a Nursemaid and of course the sketch for The Garden of Lost and Found. Over the years, the first two had been sold, along with Ned’s paint table, his easel, their finer pieces of furniture, the books – Stella grieved particularly for the Dickens editions, black and tooled in buttercup yellow gold. But Mum was there, always explaining: he bought back the painting, because he was driven slowly mad by the death of his other children, he burned it and the cost of it ruined them but they had to stay, because they had to save the house . . . So there were economies, all the time, very few new clothes and no holidays, and Stella went to school with other children who lived in far less grand houses but who had gleaming shoes and went to the seaside every summer.
It was hard to have any distance, living as an adult in the house you grew up in, but Stella Horner understood, even at the age of sixty-two, that her childhood was unusual, but also that it was very nearly perfect, and those two things could exist together. ‘Mum’ was everything to her, and she to Mum.
Liddy made sure her daughter was not cocooned away, either. There were trips to London, to see the Changing of the Guard, the Victoria and Albert Museum, where they would look at fragments of other houses, the Serpentine, the monkeys changing the lightbulbs on the glittering roof of Harrods department store. There was usually tea at an old friend of Mum’s in a grand house in Kensington with other children, most of whom she liked: Stella was eminently capable of marching up to any child and befriending them. She was happy in the company of others, happy at school. She was brought up by Liddy to be strong, and kind, to look at the world with clear eyes and an open heart, to throw herself into things wholeheartedly. She grew like a young tree, strong and supple, striving towards the sun, welcoming the rain. She was Liddy’s pride and joy.
Before the war, during the summer of 1936, her mother sold a couple of her father’s sketches and Stella and Liddy were able to travel through France, into Germany, where they s
aw Hitler at a rally at Nuremberg, down to Austria, where they holidayed on the Grundlsee lake with a family from Vienna, old friends of her parents: the father, Richard Schoenberg, had been a painter and had known Ned. There was a month in Paris, learning French: but she had become too homesick for Nightingale House and her mother, and left after three weeks, weeping all the way back on the boat train towards London at her own foolishness. She was accepted and went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied hard, and made friends, went to dances, joined a choir, and where she stayed up late drinking cocoa and talking about the state of the world in her large room with the oval window that looked out over the formal gardens. Cambridge was where she first understood her love for Nightingale House was not merely homesickness, but something fundamental: she had to return there, it was a part of her.
She took a first-class degree, to her mother’s joy. ‘How proud Mother would be of you, dearest, girl,’ she kept saying, over and over again. But Stella went straight back to Nightingale House afterwards, for war had broken out the previous year and she was needed there. She worked as a Land Girl, and she and Mum welcomed evacuees, six nice girls from Hornsey, and all thought of moving to London to train to be an architect went out of her head, and she was secretly glad, though she couldn’t ever say it. She was glad to stay at Nightingale House and work the land during the day and provide for these girls in the evening. Glad to be useful. The Schoenbergs from Vienna were killed, every single one.
Then, in 1942, at a dance over in Walbrook, she met Andrew Yardley, who was handsome and teased her, and Stella liked being teased, being laughed at – she was often prone to savage introspection, and he was good at chivvying her out of it. But when he came to tea and she enthusiastically showed him around, she failed to notice his thin lips, tongue darting out between them now and then, as he took in the paintings, the garden her mother spent most of her time tending, the house, Dalbeattie’s greatest achievement.
‘No one’s touched the place for years, have they?’
‘No, silly, of course not. Why would you?’
‘The windows are cracked – the casement’s damp, there’s rats, the front door sticks – don’t you care?’
‘The casement dries out every summer, so does the door. The rats are only cos our cat’s had kittens, they’ll be gone soon. And yes, we should replace some of the panes of glass. Don’t frown, Andrew. You’ll love it.’
Then came that awful time in his car, the time she didn’t think about. She had said no, and he had hit her, and told her it was what he deserved, after putting up with all that nonsense, and besides, who else was there? Who else would she get? It never occurred to her no one else was an option.
She had put arnica on the dark-purple bruises between her thighs, and the green-yellow ones on her stomach. And so though she was brave, she was not brave enough to have him on her own, and so she had married him because she had to, but kept her name, her own name, as the last piece of defiance she had left in her. That is how it happened.
And when she told her mother, because she had thought they kept no secrets from each other, her mother had nodded, and said something she didn’t understand.
‘She was right, and I wish I could tell her she was right.’
‘She? Who?’
Liddy was writing at her desk, the same desk that Stella used now, forty years later. She stopped, and folded the paper over. ‘My sister. I loved her very much. Now, my bird, run along to the larder, and fetch some of that fruitcake from Mrs Beadle, and we’ll have some for tea, and make some plans. You’ll see, it’ll all settle down.’
Stella had grown up thinking Liddy was magical, had powers she didn’t really understand. The clearest example of this was that, a week after Mum’s death, Stella lost her husband, shot by the strafing German guns during D-Day, before he’d even landed on French soil, his body sucked back into the sea. Bringing up Michael, who was merely one baby, after six malnourished, terrified, bedwetting evacuees, was a walk in the garden. After all, her mother had raised her entirely alone. She could easily do the same. And she did. Death had toughened her up. She knew how lucky she was. No point in complaining while the world was falling down around them all. So she got on with it.
Early one morning in late July 1981, Stella stood at her mother’s grave, with a few of the last roses – Albertine, blowsy, watered pink-and-violet, delicious – in her hand. All was quiet, save for the odd sound of handbells, coming from the church tower – the bell-ringers practising for a celebratory peal after the Royal Wedding. Stella thought she was immune to weddings, but for some reason – the extreme youth, the curious passion and passivity of the bride, the Establishment’s last gasp, its death throes? Perhaps her little granddaughter Juliet’s extreme obsession with the whole day itself – Stella wasn’t sure what, something fascinated her and she was caught up in the happy patriotism of it all. She bowed at her dead siblings and her dead father, whom she had never met, placing the roses gently at the foot of her mother’s headstone. ‘They’re lovely this year.’ She often talked to Liddy’s grave. ‘Delicious scent. I don’t know why. The rain, perhaps.’
Lydia Dysart Horner 1874–1944
May is the fairest month for it is when the nightingales sing
She had had to fight to have that on the gravestone, too! Too secular, the vicar had said. But it was what she had wanted for her darling mother, who loved the garden best in May, when she said its greatest glories were yet to come.
Leaving the roses, and touching the grave with one slightly arthritic hand, Stella clambered down the churchyard to the worn iron gate and the darkness of the yew trees. She could hear birds singing. Little Ju and her friend Ev were in the garden, she singing something, he wandering off to examine things, peering down at beds, into tree stumps. Occasionally they would say something to each other, then go back to what they were doing. She could see his black head disappearing into bushes, her red-gold one spinning around, stopping, staring up at her surroundings. Stella stood watching. Warmth stole across her, the sun arching up into the sky. It had rained earlier, but it was going to be a lovely day.
She walked down towards the terrace, feet crunching on the gravel. Michael and Elvie were in the dining room, clearing up after breakfast and Stella hesitated before going in. She watched them too, saw her daughter-in-law methodically tidying and wiping the table, and her dear son, ambling around the room, picking up things at random, putting them away, obeying orders, in his own world.
He was so very different from her! It caught at her throat now as it did periodically: she’d pull him on to her knee, as a boy, to tell him the stories. Of how her parents came to the house – growing up in Highgate, the cemetery, dissolute Uncle Pertwee, awful Nurse Bryant, their hopeless father – of beloved Mary, Mum’s sister, and Dalbeattie, her father’s best friend, who had rebuilt the house with Ned. Of Liddy’s mother, Helena, who’d grown up at Nightingale House before she had to marry their father. Of Liddy’s children, and how they died, of Zipporah and Darling and all the other characters who made up her mother and father’s rich story. ‘Then they ran away and lived happily ever after, and her father couldn’t catch her,’ she’d tell Michael, but the child would slide off his chair and say, politely:
‘Can I go and play, Mummy?’
‘Of course.’
So when he and Elvie had produced a child Stella had made a rare journey into London to meet her, without much enthusiasm, it must be said, but then they had given her to Stella to hold and she had stared into her dark eyes.
My sun, my moon, my darling girl.
On her first visit to Nightingale House, when she was three months old, Juliet had opened her eyes again and stared at the nightingales on the pargeting in the sitting room, looked around her, taking everything in. Stella had never forgotten that look. As if she knew the place already. Juliet’s eyes remained deep, dark blue, her nose small and round, but the thick, golden hair she was born with slowly became tinged with red. Ther
e was nothing of Elvie’s suburban North London via Norfolk stock in her. She was a Pre-Raphaelite.
‘Ev!’ she called now. ‘Ju? It’s starting soon, do you want to come through to watch?’
‘No, thanks,’ Ev called back, just as Juliet said, ‘Oh, yes please.’
Stella pulled at the stiff back door, which then swung open with a loud bang, and entered the kitchen.
‘Shall I switch the TV on? Mrs B left some iced buns yesterday.’
‘That’s nice of her, isn’t it? Very nice. I’ll put the kettle on. Do turn on the TV.’ Elvie gave a little sigh, and Stella found herself gazing at her curiously. ‘It’s going to be lovely, isn’t it? They were saying on the radio thousands of people camped out in Hyde Park last night. They were given a jolly good time, by all accounts.’
Like her mother, though Stella was virulently allergic to patriotism in any form, her love for England and what she believed to be English values ran deep within her, deeper than anything else perhaps. ‘Of course they were,’ she said, swallowing a rude remark down and swinging a tray out from underneath the counter. ‘I’ll get the tea things. And, dare I say it, some crisps and peanuts. I think, for once, we could treat ourselves to some snacks in the sitting room.’
‘Wonderful!’ said Elvie and disappeared across to the sitting room. Stella heard her, calling to her son. ‘Mike! Mike, love, come quickly! Not long now! Juliet! Everett! Let’s gather, shall we?’
‘Gather,’ Stella muttered to herself, as she hunted in the terracotta bread bin for the buns. ‘Gather.’ Juliet raced in, slamming the kitchen door shut.
‘Grandi! Ev’s chasing me!’ she screamed with total delight. ‘Argh!’
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