by Hilary Boyd
Giovanna gave Jack the contact details of the landlord of the village pub – a man who knew the how, when and where of every leaf that fell in the area, she said – who might be able to tell Jack how to get in touch with the current occupants of the barn. Jack had emailed him immediately. But his plan wouldn’t work unless Stella was on board.
‘Hi, sweetheart. How’s it going?’
‘Hi, Dad.’
‘You having fun with your friend?’
‘Yeah, great.’ Eve sounded relaxed and he could hear music playing loudly in the background.
‘Right, well, if you’re OK to talk, I’ll get to the point,’ Jack said.
He heard Eve say something to her friend, then the sound of a chair scraping on the terrace. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I’ve got this plan, Evie, to scatter Jonny’s ashes in the garden where he died.’ Jack wondered, suddenly, if his daughter even knew about the box in Stella’s drawer. But he hurried on before he lost his nerve. ‘On what would have been his thirtieth birthday … Saturday week.’
‘Great idea, Dad.’ Eve sounded immediately encouraging.
‘Yeah, well, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. But here’s the tricky bit. Ideally, I would have liked you to be there, Evie. I’ve taken on board how rubbish your mum and I have been about Jonny. And I can’t apologize enough for the way we’ve dealt with it … Or not dealt with it, more like.’ He paused. ‘But I think the only way to get your Mum on board is to keep it simple at this stage. Make it just me and Stella.’
‘OK …’ Eve sounded as if she were considering what he’d said, so he started speaking again before she had time to voice an objection.
‘I don’t know if you’d even want to be included. But please don’t take offence, sweetheart. I’m just trying my best to get this sorted, without frightening your mother off.’
‘You think having me there would frighten her off?’ Eve asked. Jack thought she sounded confused rather than hostile.
He took a deep breath, praying he could get across to his daughter that this was such a delicate situation, he wasn’t even sure if he could make it happen, let alone include the rest of the family.
‘To be honest, I don’t know if your mum will agree to letting Jonny’s ashes go.’
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
‘So maybe we could have a proper ceremony another time. Get over this hurdle first?’
He heard her give a small sigh. ‘I think you’re doing a brave thing, Dad. And yes, I would have liked to be there. But I know what you’re saying about Mum.’
Jack realized he’d been holding his breath. ‘Thanks, Evie. Thanks for being so understanding. I’m determined to make things right this time.’
There was another silence.
‘So you’re scattering Jonny’s ashes in someone else’s garden? Won’t the people who live there be a bit weirded out, Dad?’ Eve asked. ‘They probably don’t even know what happened back then.’
‘I checked it out. The owner’s away in South America till September, and it’s only his weekend place. I got his email from the landlord of the village pub and wrote to him. I said I wanted to take photos of his garden for a French magazine – apparently it’s won awards – and he said it would have to wait till the autumn.’
‘Dad! Isn’t that fraud or something?’
‘Trespass, more like. But there are mitigating circumstances.’
‘Good luck with that.’ Eve gave a soft laugh. ‘But hey, I’m really impressed you’re trying.’
He hesitated before he spoke again. ‘Your mum has the ashes in London. If we’re going to do this, she’ll need to bring them down with her, and I don’t know how to ask.’
‘Just be straight with her. That’s always the best way with Mum.’
‘Yeah, OK, you’re right, of course.’ He paused. ‘I want what you want, Evie – to bring Jonny back into the family.’
‘I know you do, Dad. I hope it works out.’
Stella didn’t immediately respond to the calls Jack made. He left a message both times, asking her to ring him, but it wasn’t until the Thursday morning, when he was sitting at his computer in the Queen’s Park house, trying to summon up enthusiasm for work, that he saw her name come up on his phone display.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘thanks for getting back to me.’
‘What’s up?’ Stella asked, sounding in no mood for chit-chat.
The previous twenty-four hours, as he waited for her to call back, had been a struggle for Jack. He found he was desperate, really desperate, to finally put his son to rest. Pushing himself all the way, forcing himself out of his comfort zone because he knew he had to, it had gradually become an obsession.
Now that he was on the verge of being able to do so, he was almost faint with apprehension. Stella was so stubborn. If she refused this one thing that mattered so much to him, Jack didn’t know what he would do. He could hardly force her, even though his son’s ashes were just as much his as hers.
‘I wanted to discuss the twenty-second,’ he said, as if a plan were already in place. ‘It’s Saturday week.’
‘I know,’ Stella said. Her voice was quiet, but Jack could detect none of the usual hostility. ‘What do you want to do?’
Breathing out gently, and with a cautious optimism, he replied, ‘I thought we could scatter his ashes where he died. Just you and me.’
The silence that followed was thick. He could hear his heart thumping.
‘The pool,’ was all she said. Jack didn’t know if it were a question about the place they would scatter his ashes, or a statement of fact about the past.
‘In the garden,’ he said.
‘Will they let you?’
Jack told her about the owner, about his lie.
‘Can we do that, just walk into someone else’s garden?’ Stella asked.
‘There’ll be no one to stop us.’
Silence.
‘I … You … Tell me how it will work, Jack.’
Her voice was barely above a whisper, and he felt as if she were right on the edge. He didn’t know quite what she was asking, but he began to talk anyway, the words dragged up from so long ago – where they’d been waiting, waiting – he was barely conscious of what he was saying.
‘You and I, Stella. Just the two of us. We’ll go in the evening to the garden as the sun is setting. We’ll take Jonny’s ashes, find the perfect spot, then stand together and remember our son. We’ll remember all the life that was in our boy and the love we shared, the three magical years we were lucky enough to have with him. And we will lay him to rest in a beautiful place, where he will be free.’
Tears sprang to his eyes.
Stella didn’t speak. He swallowed, waiting for her to react. He felt absolutely drained from the weight of his pent-up sorrow. If Stella objects now, he thought, I might just give up and walk away. I don’t know if I have the strength any more to keep bashing against her pain. Her pain, and, of course, his own. He always told himself he had coped better than Stella, been more open about his son’s death. But now, as he thought about it, he realized that wasn’t the case. Yes, he had spoken to various people over the years. But his words were merely a chronicle of the accident itself: the same story he’d recently related to Eve. They never came close to the point where he might reveal his true feelings.
‘All right,’ he heard Stella say after what seemed like a lifetime. Then she said nothing more.
Jack felt as if he’d just broken the tape at the end of a marathon.
‘Good,’ he said, keeping as much of the relief out of his voice as possible. He didn’t want her to know how important this was to him, didn’t want to frighten her off. Neither was he going to remind her to bring the ashes with her when she went back to Eve’s the following day. Stella, he was certain, would not forget. ‘Right, well, that’s good, Stella. Thank you,’ he added politely.
When she said goodbye, he was sure he detected a faint note of relief
in her voice, too.
Lisa was in a good mood when she came home. The early mornings usually made his wife short-tempered when she returned in the afternoon, but today she was grinning broadly and seemed to be on a high as she dropped down on the sofa, hurling her mobile on to the cushion beside her.
‘We had Marty English in today. God, he is soooo cute, Jack. He’s got one of those faces you just have to stare at. And he was such a gentleman. Guys like him are usually so up themselves. I didn’t have to do much work on him, obviously, but we chatted long after I’d finished. Everyone was jealous.’
Jack had no idea who Marty English was. A tennis player? A singer in a boy band? Maybe someone off Love Island – Lisa’s current secret pleasure. It’s an age-gap thing, he told himself: Lisa hadn’t a clue who Michael Foot was, while he’d never heard of this Marty character.
‘Should I be jealous?’ he joked, to cover up his ignorance.
‘Hardly. He and Cheryl’s ex are supposed to be an item.’
Jack thought he knew which Cheryl she was talking about – the one with the roses tattooed on her bottom. Lisa had shown him a photo on her phone a while back – and nodded sagely. ‘Good luck with that,’ he said, which made his wife laugh.
‘Like you know who I’m talking about,’ she said.
‘I do vaguely,’ he insisted.
‘So what have you been doing?’ Lisa asked, yawning widely and sighing with what Jack presumed to be ongoing pleasure at her brush with stardom. He hadn’t seen her so chilled for a long time.
‘Researching,’ he lied.
Lisa raised her eyebrows.
‘Well, mostly sitting here pretending to.’ He gave a sheepish laugh.
Lisa kicked off her sandals and curled her feet underneath her, rubbing the shiny orange polish on her big toenail with her thumb. ‘Let’s not go to the country this weekend, Jack. It’s such a long way and there’s nothing to do if the weather’s crap, which it’s going to be on Saturday.’ She paused. ‘Storms, they said.’
Jack felt a lurching stab of disappointment. He’d been counting on seeing Stella. But then he thought it was probably better not to until the twenty-second – a week away now – as he didn’t want to give her a chance to change her mind.
‘OK,’ he said, bringing a surprised look to his wife’s face.
‘Really?’ She frowned. ‘You agreed quickly.’
Jack tried to look nonchalant, but it was hard. There was so much going on in his head, which he had no desire for Lisa to intuit.
‘I’ve been feeling kind of tired this week, I don’t know why,’ he said, sounding lame even to himself.
She groaned. ‘You’re tired!’
‘No, I know. You’re amazing, Lisi. I couldn’t do what you do. Those people would drive me mad.’ Jack knew he was pandering to his wife because he was feeling guilty about Stella. Although the TV celebrities whose egos she so often had to bolster would have driven him mad.
I’ve done nothing wrong, he told himself. But his recent need to spend time with Stella, to think about her, even occasionally to remember the times when they had loved each other so much, was betraying Lisa, whichever way you looked at it. But it was all about Jonny, not Stella. Once we’ve done the ceremony, he thought, everything will go back to the way it was.
27
‘Arthur, what are you doing? Don’t pee in the flowerbed!’ Eve shouted from the terrace, where she and her mum were sitting with a cup of tea on the afternoon Stella returned to the Kent house.
Arthur turned, still peeing in an arc, and giggled gleefully, his shorts around his ankles. ‘Teo says it’s good for the ’drangers,’ he said, although the hydrangeas were way at the back of the bed.
Stella was chuckling. ‘Don’t encourage him, Mum,’ Eve said. But she couldn’t help smiling at Arthur’s obvious pride in mimicking his new hero, who had stolen the little boy’s heart from the moment Marzia and her son began their stay.
‘Anything Teo did, Arthur had to do, too,’ Eve told her mother. ‘Including refusing to eat broccoli, go to bed or come when I called.’
‘You used to do that,’ her mum said.
‘Pee in the flowerbed? Really?’
Stella laughed. ‘No, although you weren’t averse to the odd “grass wee-wee”, as you called them. I meant hero-worship an older kid. You probably don’t remember – you were little, about Arthur’s age – but there was this girl, Poppy?’
Eve thought for a moment and shook her head.
‘She must have been seven, or thereabouts, and I was friends with her mother, Pam. They invited us to their house in Greece the summer after your dad and I split up – feeling sorry for me, maybe – and you literally never left Poppy’s side the entire week.’ She was smiling at the memory. ‘The child was a little minx and taught you to say “fuck”, although you had no idea what it meant – she probably didn’t either. You would potter around the villa saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck … fuck, fuck, fuck.” I had to tell you off, obviously – Pam and David were horrified, and no doubt thought it was me who had corrupted you, not their precious Poppy – but you were so innocent, so cute with your bright-red hair and those huge blue eyes of yours. You had no idea what it meant, obviously. I think you just liked the way it sounded.’
Eve grinned. It was so rare for her mother to reminisce about her childhood – so rare for her to hear anything positive about that time. ‘What was I like as a child, Mum?’
Stella considered her question. ‘You were absolutely gorgeous,’ she said, and Eve was surprised to see tears in her mother’s eyes. Stella swallowed hard and turned away for a moment. When she turned back, she went on, ‘You were a stubborn little thing. But you never caused any trouble … Not till you were in your teens, that is.’ She raised a wry eyebrow. ‘You seemed to live in your own world, always brilliant at entertaining yourself …’ She gave a sad, self-deprecating shrug. ‘Probably because you had no choice, I was always working.’
Not knowing how to respond to her mother’s obvious regrets, Eve said, ‘Do you remember what I did to my hair?’ She began to laugh. ‘I thought you might actually fall down dead, Mum, you looked so horrified.’
Her mother groaned. ‘Your stunning red waves, reduced to a spiky peroxide bob? Do you blame me?’
‘I thought it looked brilliant at the time. But now I can see I might be a tad disturbed if Arthur ever decides to cut off his curls and bleach the stubble.’
The ridiculous possibility made them both chuckle as they watched Arthur where he sat on his haunches, digging a small stick into the soft earth of the flowerbed. Eve had enjoyed having her friend Marzia to stay, not least because Teo took Arthur off her hands, allowing her and Marzia to natter away and catch up with each other’s lives. But she’d breathed a huge sigh of relief when her mum’s car had pulled into the drive an hour ago.
It had worried Eve, while her mother was away, that Stella might be fed up with looking after them both, that she was secretly dying to get back to her city life. She felt guilty too, remembering some of the scratchy arguments they’d had – about her dad, Eric’s absence, Arthur’s safety. But Stella seemed genuinely pleased to be back.
‘I’ve missed you, Mum,’ Eve said quietly.
Stella smiled at her, reached over and patted her hand. ‘I’ve missed you too, sweetheart. Both of you – and your lovely house. London was hell.’
Eve, now she focused on it, thought Stella looked a bit peaky, a bit tense. ‘So what did you get up to?’ she asked.
Her mother shrugged. ‘Oh, nothing much. I saw Annette for lunch …’
There was silence between them as they sat in the peace of the warm summer afternoon. When her mother didn’t go on, Eve asked, ‘Mum? Is something the matter?’
Stella quickly shook her head and feigned surprise. ‘Matter? No, nothing’s the matter. Why do you ask?’ But she wouldn’t look at Eve; she just sat there chewing her lip with her bottom teeth, twisting her cup round and round on the iron table. When she
finally looked up, she seemed lost, almost bewildered. Blinking at Eve, as if she wasn’t really seeing her, she said, ‘Your father has arranged a … a sort of memorial. For Jonny.’
Eve nodded, ‘I know, he told me.’ She didn’t elaborate on the discussion she’d had with her dad. She had no intention of putting anything in the way of his plan.
Her mother looked relieved. ‘Oh,’ was all she said.
‘That’s good, isn’t it?’
Stella didn’t react.
‘I think you’ll be glad you did it,’ Eve added cautiously.
A flash of irritation crossed her mother’s face. ‘So everyone keeps telling me.’
‘And you don’t believe them?’
Silence, more cup twirling.
‘Well, I’m doing it, aren’t I?’
Eve thought she sounded like a stroppy teenager forced to apologize for some perceived transgression.
‘Sorry,’ Stella muttered after another awkward silence. ‘I just feel a bit bulldozed by your father, that’s all.’ She paused. ‘But I suppose bulldozing was the only way. I wouldn’t have agreed to go there otherwise.’
Eve was on the verge of reminding her mother that she didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to. But she felt passionately that this was something both her parents needed to do, so she bit her tongue and said nothing.
‘How have you been in yourself?’ Her mother, true to form, abruptly changed the subject. ‘I hope your friend didn’t wear you out.’
‘It was fun having them here … But yes, I do feel a bit worn out. Guests are tiring, even if you like them.’
‘Well, I’m here now. You can sleep for a week if you want to.’
28