Two for Sorrow (46 page)

Hampstead rested on higher ground than most of the city, and had a clean, country feel to it, even on a grey, November afternoon; the church clock which struck the half hour as she got out of the car had little other noise to compete with, and the spire which nestled among the trees just ahead of her could easily have graced any village in the south of England. When she turned into Holly Place, she found it quieter still; as she rang the bell at number 8, only the poignant song of birds about to roost and the dry rustle of leaves along the pavement disturbed the peace. She waited, but there was no answer, so she rang again, relief mingling with disappointment at the
prospect of finding no one in. Still, the house refused to come to life, and she was just about to leave when a woman ran down the steps of the house next door. ‘She's in the garden,' she called to Josephine over her shoulder. ‘Try round the back.'

She did as she was told, following a narrow path around the side of the house. Her heart sank when she heard Marta's voice—the last thing she needed was to walk uninvited into a crowd of strangers—but she resisted the temptation to turn back. In fact, Marta was alone. She stood next to a pile of earth by the far wall, wrestling with a large ceanothus root which stubbornly refused to budge from the ground. On the lawn next to her, there was a wheelbarrow piled high with dead branches, stones and bits of brick, and a motley collection of spades, trowels and secateurs, none of which seemed to be of much use in the task she had set herself. ‘Come out, you bastard,' she swore loudly, oblivious to the fact she had any company other than the tree.

‘Do you want some help?'

Marta let go of the wood as if it had burnt her. ‘Josephine! What on earth are you doing here?'

‘Is this a bad time?'

‘No, of course not. Well, yes, but only because of my pride. Look at me—I'm such a mess.' She gestured at the mud on her face and the twigs caught in her hair, but, if anything, she looked more striking than ever, and it occurred to Josephine that this was the first time she had ever seen Marta truly at peace with herself. ‘Muck and dirt wasn't exactly what I envisaged wearing when we met. If we met.'

The contentment left her face, and Josephine knew that Marta was trying to work out if her appearance five days ahead of their scheduled meeting was good news or bad. ‘It doesn't
matter,' she said. ‘Muck and dirt suit you. What do you want me to do?'

‘Don't be ridiculous. You're hardly dressed for gardening.'

‘No, I'm not. It was probably short-sighted of me, but I didn't expect to be digging up trees in November in virtual darkness. If you insist on it, though, I might as well join you.' She took off her hat and fur, and threw them down on a wrought-iron table, next to her bag. ‘Anyway, they're only clothes.'

Marta smiled. ‘At least let me get you a coat.' She disappeared into the house for a moment, and returned carrying an old tweed jacket, gloves and a pair of boots. ‘I'll feel better if we both look ridiculous. I can't be seen in rags while you stand there in Chanel.'

Josephine slipped the jacket on, noticing that it smelt faintly of cigarette smoke and Marta's perfume. ‘It's a lovely house,' she said. ‘How long have you been here?'

‘Only a couple of months, and it was the location I chose it for.' She picked up a spade and started digging again. ‘I couldn't be in the city, Josephine—I've had enough of being hemmed in by bricks and mortar day after day. I took a flat in Kensington when I got out, but I soon realised that a place doesn't have to be a prison to feel like one. I couldn't face the loneliness of the country, either, so this is a perfect compromise—solitude in the middle of London. And you're right,' she added, touching the crumbling red brick which enclosed the whole garden, ‘there's something special about these walls. Think how many summers' worth of sun they must hold.'

‘I must try something like this one day,' Josephine said, raising her voice slightly as an aeroplane clattered lazily overhead. ‘I've never made a new home in my life.'

‘You've always lived in the same house?'

‘Not in the same house, no, but always the family home. I've got an encyclopaedic knowledge of digs, boarding houses, hotels and other people's homes, but that's not the same as choosing something for yourself.' She dug a fork deep into the earth and lifted it so that Marta could cut through the sinewy roots that had spread towards the wall. ‘It's pure laziness, I suppose. I could easily have had a flat when I was teaching, but I preferred even the ugliest of rooms to doing anything for myself.'

‘You should try prison,' Marta said drily. ‘It doesn't get much uglier than that, and you never have to cook a thing.' They worked in silence for a while, each preoccupied with their own thoughts. ‘Do you have a garden in Inverness?' Marta asked eventually.

‘Yes, and it's full of every sort of shrub and tree, from hydrangeas to monkey puzzle, all painstakingly cared for and agonised over each year, but if you were to ask me what I love most about it, I'd say the daffodils that fill the drive in the spring without a moment's work from me. I know it's not a very original observation, and if I were a proper gardener, it's probably the last thing I'd single out, but I don't care. I look forward to them every year, and every year they surprise me.'

A thin trail of smoke rose up from a pile of burning leaves in a neighbouring garden and the smell filled the air, at once nostalgic and bitter, the final goodbye to summer. ‘That's the point of a garden, though, isn't it?' Marta said, wiping soil off her face with the back of her hand. ‘Something to look forward to, something permanent. That's what I want to create here—markers of a year. You can keep your flower pots and your
annuals—they're all far too temporary for me. No sooner has something flowered than you're deciding what to replace it with, and I can't cope with that at the moment. I need something that promises to come back, something that convinces me I'm going to be here to see it.' She glanced up, embarrassed at having strayed into the emotional territory which they both seemed to have been avoiding. ‘Something like your daffodils.'

Josephine crouched down and took off her gloves, then gently brushed the mud away and let her hand rest on Marta's cheek. ‘I can't be what you want me to be,' she said.

Marta smiled sadly at her, and covered Josephine's hand with her own. ‘But you already are—that's the problem. None of this is about changing you.' The encroaching dusk brought a melancholy aspect to the garden, and the lights from the house combined with the smoke and the evening mist to create an atmosphere of pale ochre. Marta stood up. ‘It always gets depressing at this time of night,' she said. ‘Let's go inside.'

Josephine followed her into the house, and waited alone in the sitting room while Marta went to change. Inside, the house was very much what she would have expected—elegant, although not particularly tidy, and furnished according to individual taste rather than fashion or expectation. In two months, Marta had managed to create the illusion of a much longer occupancy, and Josephine could imagine how much time she had invested in the house, seeking the safety that Mary Size had talked about in a home rather than another human being.

The weather had taken a turn for the worse, and she walked over to the French windows, looking out into the darkness and enjoying the sound of the rain against the glass. ‘It's a
lovely view when you can see it,' Marta said, putting an armful of logs down in the hearth. ‘Just trees beyond the wall, with the odd roof or gable, and the spires of the city in the distance.' She waved dismissively at the garden. ‘Shame about the no-man's-land in between.'

‘It won't look like that forever. You'll have it beaten into shape by the spring.'

‘Damn right I will. Beverley Nichols is moving in round the corner, apparently, so the challenge is on.'

She took longer than was absolutely necessary to lay the fire, and Josephine noticed that she was much less relaxed than she had been in the garden, as if coming inside had forced her to focus on the awkwardness between them. Being here with her was a different experience entirely from reading the diary, where the strength of Marta's emotions and her ability to analyse them had left Josephine feeling like a gauche, inexperienced schoolgirl. Shy and reticent when it came to anything other than her work, Josephine so very rarely made someone else uneasy; now, she seemed to be more in control than Marta, and she was ashamed to acknowledge that she found it gratifying.

Marta poured them each a large gin and sat down by the fire. ‘So what did you dress for, if it wasn't gardening?'

‘A day by the sea. Archie had to go to Suffolk for something to do with a case he's investigating, and he asked me to go with him.'

‘Doesn't he have sergeants any more?' Marta asked, and her expression was so like Archie's whenever her own name was mentioned that Josephine would have laughed had she not found the inevitable triangle so tiresome. Right now, she would gladly have absented herself from the whole situation
and let the two of them fight it out between themselves. ‘Does he know you're here?'

‘Yes.'

‘I bet that made his day.' Josephine said nothing; she refused to be drawn into a conversation which would reflect badly on Archie, and to defend him felt like protesting too much. ‘Is there anyone else?' Marta asked, and Josephine shook her head. ‘You know, I often wondered if you and Lydia would get together after I left. She's always admired you.'

‘We're friends, that's all,' Josephine said impatiently, wondering if she would be asked to justify every relationship she had. ‘It will never be anything more than that.'

‘And where do you draw the line? Spending time together? Enjoying things more together?' She finished her drink and got up to fetch another. ‘Having sex?'

She was being deliberately provocative, and Josephine realised that she was simply adopting the best form of defence, but her question was less straightforward than it sounded. Even as it stood, her relationship with Marta was unlike anything else in her life: she and Lydia shared a creative bond and a mutual admiration, but she increasingly felt obliged to be somebody else whenever they were together and, if you removed the theatre, they had very little in common; Ronnie and Lettice's friendship was an uncomplicated joy, which was picked up and put down again with no damage to its significance; and Archie—well, there was no question that she loved Archie and would choose his company over any other; if he pushed her like Marta was pushing her, she had no idea what she would do—but she knew that he never would. None of those relationships risked anything, none of them made the slightest difference to the world she returned to in Inverness—to her real life, she
supposed. But Marta was different: she threatened to blur all the boundaries that Josephine had so carefully drawn. Although they had spent very little time together, most of it had been on their own without the safety of numbers, and they had been thrown together in circumstances which demanded an intense emotional honesty; she knew that Marta was capable of awakening something in her which her life would be happier—or at least more content—without. Complacent, Gerry had called it, but frightened would have been more accurate.

She took the diary out of her bag and put it down on the table. Marta said nothing, wanting her to speak first. ‘This is all so foreign to me that I don't even know how to begin to respond to it,' Josephine said quietly.

‘Because it comes from another woman?'

‘What? No, don't be silly. Why should that make a difference? No, it's not that.' She hesitated, realising that any attempt at an explanation would expose flaws in her own character which Marta might scorn, but she owed it to her to be honest. ‘It's the intensity of it, Marta—the strength of how you feel. I'm not hard-hearted, I don't lack imagination, but I've never felt like that about anyone. This love that you have for me—look how unhappy it's made you. I haven't often made people unhappy in my life.'

‘Perhaps they just didn't tell you. But I didn't hand it over for you to beat yourself up with—making you feel sorry for me was the last thing I wanted.'

‘I know, and that's not what I meant.' She left the sofa and sat down by the fire next to Marta. ‘I'm being much more selfish than that. You're writing about emotions that terrify me—because of what they might do to both of us.'

Marta took her hand. ‘You really didn't know, did you? I
thought at first that you were just trying to brush it aside, but you had no idea how I felt until I told you.'

‘No, I didn't. And I suppose, in hindsight, that makes me very stupid.' She laughed. ‘Even Lettice had spotted it, for God's sake.'

‘You've spoken to her about us?'

‘No, not really, but she saw I was upset the other night at dinner and I told her you'd been in touch. Lydia was there as well, much to my surprise. As you can imagine, it wasn't the easiest of evenings.'

‘Surely you didn't say anything to Lydia?'

‘Of course not, but I felt vile about it and we can't go on like this.' She took her hand away and stared resolutely into the fire. ‘Go back to Lydia, Marta. She loves you, and she'll accept all the love you can give her in a way that I don't think I ever could.'