The Rose Garden (3 page)

That sobered the mood. Mark looked down at his plate and went on eating silently, then he said quietly, ‘Do you know where?’

‘I was thinking,’ I started, then paused for a moment, collecting myself. ‘I was thinking of up by the Beacon.’ He didn’t react, but I still felt the need to explain, ‘She would want to be somewhere where she had been happy.’

Mark gave a short nod and said, ‘That’s a good spot then.’ And after a moment, ‘You want me to come with you?’

He offered that as though it didn’t matter either way, but there was something in his tone that made me ask him, ‘Would you like to?’

Pushing his half-empty plate away he told me, ‘Yes, I would.’

I glanced towards the clearing sky. ‘We ought to wait until the sun comes out.’

‘Right.’ He hadn’t finished with his coffee, either, but he set that down as well and stood. ‘You let me know, then, when you’re ready.’ And with that he turned away and went to start his work.

‘
He really did love her, didn’t he?’ Susan, standing at the sink to rinse our breakfast dishes, tipped her head to one side in a movement that was half-familiar. ‘I mean, it’s not as though he’s been pining away all these years or anything, and he’s had girlfriends since who were serious, but your sister was special, I think.’

I pushed at a small bit of egg with my knife. ‘Well, she was his first love,’ I said. ‘At least, that’s what he told her. I know he was hers. And you never forget your first love.’

‘I suppose not.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t honestly remember what they were like as a couple, I was only seven. And you and I played together more, really. Katrina and Mark always seemed so much older.’ She was filling the sink now with water and dish soap, and I would have risen to help her if she hadn’t motioned me down again. ‘Sit. You’re a guest.’

‘Not that kind of a guest. I can help.’

‘No, you can’t,’ she insisted, and from her expression she wouldn’t be budged, so I did as she told me and stayed in my seat at the table while she started washing the cutlery. ‘Who was
your
first love?’ she asked me, and the question broke the subtle air of sadness that had settled on us; brought the light again into the room.

I smiled. ‘A boy at my school in Vancouver. He played junior hockey, I spent all my weekends in freezing cold ice rinks.’ Somehow it didn’t have quite the same level of romance as Mark and Katrina. ‘And you?’

‘I’m still waiting for mine,’ Susan said. ‘I’m too fussy, Mark tells me. I want what my dad and Claire had.’

‘God, you’ll be waiting a long time for that.’ Even my parents, for all their devotion to each other, hadn’t been a patch on Uncle George and Claire. The Halletts had been one of those rare couples who, between them, made a little world that no one else could touch. True soul mates.

Susan ran the dishrag round a coffee mug. ‘I know. Worth waiting for, though, I think. And it doesn’t mean I can’t have some adventures in the meantime.’

She’d been born to have adventures. Although she’d been the youngest and the smallest of the four of us, she’d been the one most likely to explore, to push the boundaries, and she’d often had the skinned knees and the bandages to prove it. From the little I had seen now of the woman she’d grown into I suspected she still had that spirit in her, that her mind still saw beyond the limits others liked to place on things.

Which made me wonder why she had come back here, to this quiet little corner of the country, and Trelowarth.

‘Mark said you’d been living near Bristol,’ I ventured.

She glanced at me. ‘Did he?’ I had the strong impression I had somehow touched a nerve without intending to, but Susan hid it with a shrug. ‘Yes, well, I had my own catering business up there, did he tell you?’

He hadn’t, but I took the opportunity to shift to safer ground. ‘So then you should be able to make a success of your tearoom.’

‘I hope so. I mean, Mark would never complain, but I know that it hasn’t been easy these past few years, since Dad’s investments went—’ She stopped and glanced at me and quickly looked away and would have likely changed the subject if I hadn’t stopped her.

‘Susan.’

‘Yes?’

‘Trelowarth’s in financial trouble?’ I could read reluctance in her eyes. I asked her, ‘How bad is it?’

‘Bad enough. But don’t tell Mark I told you or he’ll plant
me
in the garden with the roses.’

I imagined a place this big must take a good deal of money to run. Apart from the house, there was all the land—not just the gardens themselves, but the fields where the roses were actually grown. Most of the regular work could be done by two men, but with Uncle George gone that meant Mark would have had to hire someone to help. They’d be busiest during the winter months, digging the bare-rooted roses and shipping them off to fill all of the orders that would have come in through the year, after which all the rest of the harvest still had to be potted and delivered to the garden centres that had always sold Trelowarth roses. But even at this time of year there was much to be done. Taking care of Trelowarth, I knew, was a full-time concern.

‘Anyway,’ Susan said, ‘that’s really why I came back. To help out where I could.’

‘Hence the tearoom.’

‘Exactly. My dad used to talk about having one someday. I thought if we put in a tearoom and opened the gardens for tours, it might bring in some revenue and make more people aware of our product.’ She heard her own words and smiled wryly. ‘I’ve been swotting up on marketing, can you tell?’

‘Good for you, though. That’s just what you should do.’ My gaze found the folder of plans she had left on the table. ‘You mind if I look at these?’

‘No, go ahead. Only—’

‘—don’t tell Mark. I know.’ I reached for the folder. ‘Why is he so set against your tearoom?’

Susan set the final teacup on the draining board and pulled the plug to let the water out. ‘I wouldn’t say he’s set against it, more that he’s resistant, and that’s just because it doesn’t fit his vision of Trelowarth. Mark’s a purist, like my grandfather. Change doesn’t interest him.’ She grinned. ‘If you ask me, Mark’s simply not sure about sharing our roses with strangers.’

Reading her notes while I finished my coffee, I rotated one drawing slightly to help get my bearings. ‘So you’d put the tearoom over there, then,’ I said, pointing at an angle out the window, past the stretch of level turf that once had been the stable yard and to the tangled greenery beyond it.

‘That’s right, in Dad’s old greenhouse. No one uses it anymore, but it’s still got all the plumbing in place and the glass is all good. I’ve been told that it wouldn’t be hard to convert.’ She came round beside me to study the plans. ‘Claire’s grandparents met in a tearoom, apparently. She told us the story, it’s very romantic. I’ll have to ask if she remembers the name of the place. We could call ours the same, put a bit of her history here too.’

This was the sort of project that my mother, with her passion for historical research, would have loved. If she’d been living still, she would have wasted little time in digging through the records to unearth the finer details of Trelowarth’s past.

But when I said as much to Susan, she said only, ‘She’d have bored herself to tears then. They’re all deadly dull, my family, and they’ve been here for two hundred years, at least. I keep hoping that I’ll come across a smuggler or a pirate, someone infamous, to help bring in the tourists.’

‘Someone famous might work just as well.’ I kept my focus on the drawings and the notes as I reminded her, ‘You have a famous movie star who used to spend her summers here, remember.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t feel right, trading on Katrina’s name. And Mark would never go for it. You know my brother.’

Yes, I did. The years might change our outer selves, but underneath it all we stayed the same, we kept our patterns, and I knew where I should look for him when I went out a short while later with the box of ashes. In the mornings, he had always started in the highest terrace and worked down from there. I found him in the Quiet Garden, pulling weeds. His boots were caked and muddy and the wind had blown his hair and he was wearing an old denim jacket not unlike the one I held a memory of him wearing when he worked among the roses.

He stopped as I came in through the old wooden door in the high stone wall, into the roofless, still space where the wind couldn’t reach with its fine salty spray from the sea that could burn through the delicate petals and leaves. When Mark saw what I’d brought with me, what I was carrying, he asked me, ‘Ready, then?’

‘Whenever you are.’

He tugged off his gloves, set his tools away tidily into the small corner shed, and picked up a small battered rucksack he slung on his shoulder before leading me out of the garden.

The walk to the Beacon was one of the prettier walks at Trelowarth. We went down the hill to the coast path again, through the Wild Wood as if we were going to Claire’s, but we passed by the cottage and right through the clearing and into the woods again, still on the coast path. We came out the other side close to the top of the cliffs, close enough to be able to hear the harsh rush of the waves as they broke on the black rocks and shingle beneath. Here we left the path, turning our backs to the sea as we came to the fence of a broad sloping pasture where several cows lazily stood with their heads to the grass, paying no heed to either of us as we climbed up and over the stile.

Mark helped me over, then went back to walking just in front of me, head down, his thoughts turned inward. I knew why.

He’d often brought Katrina up here, that last summer. This had been their special place, a place to get away from all the adults and us younger children, to be on their own together. I’d been too young then to be my sister’s confidante, too young for her to tell me what they’d talked about up here. I’d only known that when she’d been with Mark up at the Beacon, she had come back shining like a lamp had been switched on inside her, stepping lightly as the butterflies that danced around my feet now as my shoes brushed through the bluebells in the windblown grass.

And Mark, I knew, was walking with the memories.

I had memories of my own to keep me company. My mother, loving history as she did, had loved the romance of the Beacon, ancient relic of the days when there had been a chain of signal fires on hilltops all along the coast of Britain, standing ready to be lit in times of trouble. They had served a double purpose, calling everyone who saw them to come out and take up arms against the enemy, while at the same time swiftly sending warning word to London of approaching danger. In Elizabethan times, this beacon at Trelowarth had been used to pass the signal when the sails of the Armada were first spotted from the shore.

In those days, the Beacon would have been a sight to see—a high stone table, higher than a man, much like the Neolithic cromlechs that one still saw perched on hillsides in this area, but with a pile of kindling wood, perhaps, stacked on top of it in readiness. My mother’s words had painted such a clear and vivid picture of it in my mind that when we’d come up here on picnics I had always felt the urge to keep a sharper watch on the horizon for a stealthy Spanish sail, and sometimes glanced from left to right along the coast to see if I could spot another beacon fire flaring in the distance.

I still felt a small tug of that same feeling now as we came to the top of the field, to the level place scattered with old weathered stones that had tumbled into a rough circle and gave little hint of their earlier purpose, except for the stone at the centre that lay like a low table, cracked at one end.

The view from here was wide and unobstructed—I could see the whole unbroken line of coast, headland to headland, the waves beating white on the black cliffs and dark shingle beaches, and the sea deep blue today beneath a warmly glinting sun.

I set the box that held Katrina’s ashes on the table stone and looked at Mark, who looked at me.

And then he reached into the rucksack he had carried up with him and brought out three small paper cups, the kind you find near water coolers, and a dark green bottle. ‘We should do this right,’ he said.

‘What is that?’

‘Scrumpy. When Katrina and I came up here, we always brought a bottle with us.’

‘Scrumpy?’

‘Cider. With a kick.’ He filled a cup and set it on the wooden box, then poured two more and handed one to me, and raised his up as though to make a toast. ‘Here’s to…’ he said, then faltered. ‘Well, to hell with it,’ he finished off, and drained the cup.

I drank mine too, and Mark poured out the third cup on the box itself before he stepped aside and gave a nod to me. ‘Go on, then.’

With uncertain hands I flipped the latch that held the box shut. ‘There was something I was going to read.’

Mark looked at me and waited.

‘From
The Prophet
,’ I explained. ‘Kahlil Gibran’s
The Prophet
. There’s a passage about death that Katrina always liked. She read it at our parents’ funeral.’

I had crammed the folded paper in a pocket, and I had to tug it out and spread it smooth against the blowing breeze.

‘“For what is it to die,”’ I read, ‘“but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? And what is it to cease breathing, but to… but to…”’ And there my voice trailed off and would not carry on, and Mark reached over for the page and gently took it from my hand, and went on with the reading in his steady voice. I turned my face towards the sea and let my eyes be dazzled by the brightness of the water while Mark finished off the passage and came down to the last lines:

‘“And when you have reached the mountaintop, then you shall begin to climb.

And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.”’

It seemed the perfect time then, so I tipped the box and let the ashes spill.

Beside me, very quietly, Mark told them, ‘Go and dance now.’

And they caught the wind and did just that, and for that fleeting instant there were three of us again upon the wide and sunlit hill, before the ashes gathered on an upward swirl of breeze that blew them westward, out across the blue and endless sparkle of the sea.