The Memory Garden

by Rachel Hore

  Twelve o’clock and the students swirled around Mel like the tide around a rock. Not that she felt very rocklike at the moment, more like a pebble rolled over and over by the current. Somehow she had taught her first seminar since March, and it had gone well, she had detected their interest. But now the black feeling swelled in her again, and she picked up the rag to wipe the whiteboard as though it weighed pounds.

  Everything had changed, it seemed to Mel, as she had walked into the college last week. David’s friendly face had gone. She had missed his retirement party in the summer. In his place was John O’Hagen, brisk, militant, too ready to exercise his new found power by making unnecessary changes, the more longstanding members of Faculty grumbled. The second change was that a full-time post had been created for Rowena.

  ‘Student numbers are up. The Art History courses are very popular,’ was how John put it to Mel a few days ago.

  ‘Glad to see all the work I’ve put in over the last few years has paid off,’ she pointed out. ‘But you might have consulted me.’

  ‘You weren’t here,’ he retorted.

  ‘I was an email away,’ she snapped, but John’s attention span was short.

  ‘I’m sorry if you feel that,’ he said, getting up to indicate the interview was over, ‘but what’s done is done and I’m sure we’ll all be glad of Rowena’s help. She has many useful suggestions.’

  Mel was thinking over this conversation as she finished wiping the board.

  ‘Got a moment?’ A head poked around the door: a halo of blonde curls held back by an Alice band with a big tartan bow. Rowena.

  ‘Mel, how did the seminar go? You look shattered, dear.’ Rowena’s light voice with its sibilant sounds could only be called simpering. And that bow, Mel loathed it. All right on a ten-year-old girl, but . . . The worst thing was that her innocent looks completely belied her poisonous nature.

  ‘It was fine, thank you, Rowena.’

  ‘Good. I’ve just been to see John. I thought I’d share these with you.’ She passed a couple of printed emails over to Mel. ‘I have some ideas, you see, about how we could improve the ways these seminars are taught.’

  Annoyance lashed tiredly inside Mel. She glanced down at the emails. Student evaluations agree . . . Reshape . . . new technology"; font-weight: bold; oru of . . . could be more inspiring . . . The phrases leaped to her eyes.

  ‘Why didn’t you discuss this with me?’ she said to Rowena coolly.

  ‘Well, that’s what I’m doing now,’ said Rowena, with a stagy act of being stung. ‘John thought you should see them.’

  Suddenly, Mel didn’t care about treading softly.

  ‘Rowena, I’m sure you’re acting for the best, but let me be frank. I have been here teaching these courses for ten years. You have been here for precisely five minutes.’

  ‘As you know, I was covering your classes when you were off a couple of years ago. When your mother—’

  ‘But that hardly gives you the right to go behind my back and try to change everything.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t think you would see it like that. I was only trying to help.’

  ‘Well, don’t.’ She sighed, then said, ‘It’s not that I’m against the idea of change. I suppose we’d better sit down together sometime, but your ideas are not as straightforward as you think. You need to know the background.’

  And the last thing I need is you and John caballing behind my back, she thought fiercely as she grabbed her bags, nodded to Rowena and marched out. She walked down the corridor, seeing no one and nothing, unlocked her office door, slipped inside and shut it behind her. She dropped onto her sofa, glad to have a few moments to herself.

  Almost at once there came a knock on the door. ‘Hello,’ she called wearily and the door opened. It was Jake.

  He seemed to fill the doorway, his electro-magnetic aura as highly charged as ever. He had grown his blond hair and wore it neatly cut, brushed back, but otherwise he was just the same.

  Placing his forearms on each side of the doorway like the chained Samson about to push apart the pillars of the Temple, he said in a mock American accent, ‘Welcome back, Miss Elusive. How’ve you been?’

  Mel stood up and crossed her arms, like oblivion.

  Chapter 34

  ‘There’s a new place opened near the tube station,’ said Jake as he collected her from her office at six o’clock on Thursday. ‘If you don’t mind the walk.’ They glanced out of the window to see grey London drizzle and Mel reached for her ancient umbrella.

  The wine bar was already filling up with groups of young people from local offices but Jake effortlessly staked a table and signalled to a waitress who came over at once. Mel had noticed the girl’s eyes fall on Jake from the moment they walked in.

  Had he always fussed so much over the wine list, she wondered, sitting back and letting him argue the relative merits of the St Remy over the house Cabernet Sauvignon. Patrick had always studied the list quickly and made a snap decision. In the end she broke in, saying, ‘I should really be getting this as it’s a celebration,’ and ended the discussion by ordering champagne.

  ‘It’s really brilliant about your book deal,’ she said, after the waitress brought over the bottle in an ice-bucket, with two flutes. ‘Here’s to you,’ and they clinked glasses.

  ‘And to you, too,’ said Jake quietly, engaging her eye. ‘Your return to the real world. I’ve missed you, you know.’

  Mel swallowed a great gulp of champagne and the bubbles went up her nose. Coughing and spluttering, it was a while before she recovered.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, taking the wad of rough paper serviettes he offered her. She remembered Patrick’s soft handkerchief, which he lent her the first time they met, and a shaft of misery pierced her heart.

  ‘Well, I have missed you,’ Jake said, amused and just slightly petulant. ‘At least I still have a dramatic effect on you.’ He made a theatrical gesture.

  ‘Good,’ she said vaguely, feeling some answer was called for, then hastily added, ‘Tell me about the book. When did you get the idea?’

  ‘It was down to Sophie, actually,’ he said, sitting back in the chair. ‘She’s a smart girl. She’d been having lunch with a publisher who had bemoaned the fact that publishing had been taken over by the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, and saying what a pity it was that there wasn’t a British author capable of that kind of thriller-writing. Anyway, this bloke had turned down Painting for Pleasure but wanted to see more of my work and Sophie suddenly had an idea. She suggested I try out a synopsis. I had to concentrate on storytelling, she said, and just write the thing. I was a bit unsure about it to start with, I have to say, but then I picked up a copy of the Dan Brown on the way home and decided I could do better. So I bit the bullet and had a go. Et voilà!’

  ‘Well, I hope you achieve even half of Dan Brown’s sales,’ Mel said jokingly, and he laughed, too, but there was a look in his eyes that made her think she had expression on his facereQ in fronttouched a nerve. Once ambitious for literary fame, he was now after the bestseller lists.

  ‘There have been one or two bitchy comments at the college, but, hell. If this first book works out, I won’t be hanging around there, I can tell you.’

  ‘Mmm, that was going to be my next question,’ Mel said.

  ‘How’s your own writing going?’ For once Jake sounded genuinely interested in her successes and breathed, ‘Oh, well done,’ when she told him she had only one chapter left to write.

  Chapter 35

  On Friday, her father rang to say that he had booked a table at a French restaurant in Covent Garden for their dinner the following Tuesday.

  It was exactly the sort of place he would choose, Mel observed as she put down the phone. Authentic French food cooked by an authentic French chef and served by authentic French staff. No doubt, during the evening, there would be heated discussion with the authentic French patron – in her father’s atrocious French, of course – about some aspect of the menu. She cringed i
nwardly.

  How rare it was ever to be able to see her father on her own ground and to talk to him honestly about things that mattered to her. But what she wanted to say were deep concerns of the heart, and the irony was that while her father was an expert at all aspects of the physical organ, he steered clear of its emotional associations.

  Emerging from Leicester Square tube at 7.30 p.m. on Tuesday evening, she made her way slowly up to the restaurant, wandering into bookshops on the way. Her mind was not on books, however. She was going over the lines she plan towards the rhododendrons.atisDJ5ned to say.

  ‘Dad, why did you leave Mum on her own with three small children all those years ago?’ That was one she had tried asking in various ways from time to time. And the answer had always been? A cold one. As though the end of their marriage was like a company demerger.

  ‘Your mother and I found we didn’t suit each other, it’s as simple as that. We had grown up together, but we both changed, came to have different aims in life.’

  Which in her father’s case had not included the burden of day-to-day responsibility for three children. It was interesting that he and Stella had never had children – and not, Mel was sure, since Stella had in genteel fashion hinted to her once, because they had not been able to. It was the intimacy, the constant barrage on his emotional equilibrium, the messiness of children from which, in the end, he had probably fled.

  If she and William and Chrissie were with him and any of them started bickering, pinching one another or calling each other names, their father would simply walk away. It was so different from the way their mother would deal with their squabbles, by jollying them along, joining in the argument, helping them work their way through their differences.

  Five to eight. She put down the book of Egon Schiele nudes she had been flicking through without really taking in the extraordinary power of the drawings, and hurried out of the shop. It was raining again, and she had to dodge into the road to elude the umbrellas of the early-evening crowds around the theatres. She walked quickly up Upper St Martin’s Lane, reaching the restaurant exactly at eight.

  As she pushed open the door she could see that her father, predictably punctual, was already seated in one of the best tables near the window. There was something rather grand, patrician, about him, she thought, with an unexpected rush of admiration. His long body gave him the false effect of height when he was sitting, an effect exaggerated by his large face with its high forehead and the wing of thick grey hair that belied his seventy years.

  He was wearing a formal evening suit and Mel was relieved that she had chosen her black jersey dress to wear with a soft silver scarf and had taken the trouble to pin up her hair.

  ‘Hello, Dad.’ He looked up quickly over the top of his glasses, then unhooked the spectacles from his ears and stood up in an awkward movement that caused the magazine he was reading – it was The Economist, she could see – to shoot to the floor.

  ‘Mel, dear, you look beautiful.’

  It was his vulnerability that stabbed her. She hadn’t seen him for – what – eight or nine months, and he seemed less steady somehow. He kissed her quickly on the cheek, patting her shoulder, then sat down carefully. Yet by the way he nodded curtly at the waitress who rescued his magazine and ordered Mel a gin-and-tonic, she saw that none of his presence, his authority, was gone.

  ‘I will have les escargots,’ he said to the waitress imperiously when she came again later to take their order. ‘Soupe à l’oignon for my daughter here, and then Suprème de Poulette, and I’ll have the Bar Cuit à la Vapeur Tartare d’Huitre, if you please.’

  He frowned over the wine list, deciding on a Bordeaux, and sat back in his chair to answer Mel’s question about his business in London. It turned out to be a conference at which he was merely an observer, since he had now been retired from surgery for several years.

  ‘And what_hais ces have you been up to? he asked in turn. ‘Gather you’ve been in Cornwall. Didn’t look up Gillian in Bodmin, did you?’

  ‘No, I suppose I ought to have done.’ Gillian was her father’s elderly cousin, and Mel felt a rush of remorse, having completely forgotten the woman’s existence, though Bodmin was the other side of the county from Lamorna. ‘I was writing, in fact. And gardening. Helping restore an old garden.’ She wondered what it looked like now. Had Patrick continued the work without her? Would the leaves be turning now, the beech trees scattering nuts across the grass and the blackberries ripe? And how was Carrie, and Matt and Irina and Lana? She felt sad that she had forgotten them so easily, so wrapped up had she been in her own problems.

  ‘So I heard from Chrissie yesterday,’ her father went on. ‘She said you hadn’t been at all well lately. I’m most sorry to hear that – though you look all right to me. Between you and me, your sister does over-dramatise.’

  ‘What else did she say?’ asked Mel, narrowing her eyes.

  Their first courses arrived at this point and her father became taken up with fussing with the snail scoops and summoning the bread-basket.

  ‘So, how are you now?’ he said, peering at her before sticking his special fork into the largest snail and bathing his rubbery prize in garlic butter. ‘Come to think of it, you do look a little, well, peaky. Mmm, this is really very good. How is the soup?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, Dad,’ Mel said shortly, and allowed him to think that she had answered both questions with the word. But this time, to her surprise, he didn’t let the matter slip by.

  ‘Chrissie said it was to do with a man,’ he went on, glaring at her sharply over his spectacles before returning his attention to his dinner. He trapped the second shell and worried at its occupant with his fork. ‘That’s a pity. You haven’t had much luck on that front recently, I think.’

  He chewed slowly, looking straight at her for a moment, and she felt like the snail, prodded, trapped and chewed up. She froze, wondering what to say next. Did he really expect her to confide in him?

  ‘Don’t let them all go by.’ What was he mumbling? She watched as he caught the next shell, then he put down his fork and, taking off his spectacles, rubbed the lenses furiously with his napkin. ‘Mustn’t let my example ruin things for you,’ he said, gazing at the results, his eyes small andime had laid a

  Chapter 36

  ‘Mmm, you smell gorgeous.’ Jake’s kiss hello lingered and she felt the shock of an invasion as his hand brushed lightly over her hip. She thrust the bottle she had brought firmly into his hands and stepped away, busying herself removing her jacket. He got the hint, standing back for her to enter the living room.

  Jake’s flat, a two-bedroomed, first-floor apartment in a gated development in Kennington, looked exactly how Mel remembered it, but tidier. As he went to check the progress of his lasagne, she sipped white wine so cold the glass misted over, and surveyed the books and ornaments on the white shelves that covered two of the walls of the living area. The large black and white studio poster of Anna and Freya leaping in the air, now hanging over the fireplace, was new, so was the pile of hardback thrillers under the window.

  She was touched to see the two photographs of herself still on display, albeit in new places – had he left them there since February, or had he whipped them out of the store cupboard for her visit? She was horrified at her cynicism, but soothed herself that it was natural to feel wary.

  These last few weeks it had been as though he was courting her all over again. They had revisited the wine bar where, this time, they had eaten. Then she had accompanied him to a book launch at Kensington Roof Garden, where he had tactfully introduced her to people as his ‘friend’.

  If nothing else, the party had proved useful because she had been introduced to a literary agent who had been most interested to hear about her book and had given her his card. ‘In case I can be of use with future projects,’ he said.

  On this, as at all their meetings, Jake had been charming, attentive, but not overly so, his kisses of greeting tender rather than passionate. Until tonig
ht. Friday-night dinner at his flat. Already the atmosphere felt charged with seduction.

  The latest Kate Bush album, which he could only have bought because he knew she liked it, was playing in the background. The magazines and mounds of paper usually piled up around the room had mysteriously vanished as had, she noticed when she used the unusually pristine bathroom, any evidence of dirty washing or shaving scum round the basin, both matters that had caused bickering in the past. A brand new cake of soap lay in the dish and the hand towel – a hand towel? When had he acquired a hand towel? – hung lopsidedly in the metal loop by the shower.

  A peep through Jake’s bedroom door on the way back from the bathroom revealed a newly-made bed instead of the usual jumble of duvet and pillows . . .

  ‘It’s ready to eat now!’ he called through from the kitchen.

  She took her wine and walked through. And stopped to stare. The small table was set with a cloth, napkins, candles, a small jam jar of freesias. She smiled, eyebrows raised, and met his eyes, where he stood holding a chair back for her. For a moment he glanced away, sheepish, but then he stepped over to her and took her into his arms.

  His kiss was like the unleashing of a floodgate of passion in her. She was startled by the intensity of her response. His hands were everywhere, stroking, rubbing, squeezing, until her whole body was on fire and tears leaked from her eyes.

  ‘Oh God, Mel,’ he growled in her ear, and his lips were on her hair, her face, her neck, and his body pressed against her.

  It was all as she remembered – the way he raked his fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp, and she waited for the butterfly kisses on her eyelids that she loved, but he didn’t do that and then she realised with a little shock that that was Patrick, not Jake. Patrick. She thrust the thought from her and kissed him back intensely.