The journey to Rathmore Drive was mercifully brief and so precipitous, conversation was quite impossible. I was so grateful to arrive in one piece that I set aside all my worries and headed for the sitting room with a smile on my face, leaving Harvey to stride down the hall to the kitchen to give his report.
‘Hello, Daddy. How’s things?’ I said and bent over to kiss his cheek.
His skin was rough against my lips and had a yellowish hue beneath his weather-worn complexion. I thought back to Friday night. I could have missed a change in his colour in the dim gloom of the dining room or later in the firelight.
‘So far so good. Mavis has been summoned to the inner sanctum,’ he said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Janet looks set to join the second oldest profession. George Best has scored two direct hits on the azaleas.’
The light, bantering tone reassured me. It was always a sign that he felt well in himself and was in good spirits.
‘And Susie,’ he went on, pausing for breath and looking up at me with a twinkle in his eye, ‘Susie, with her usual seriousness of purpose, has extracted a solemn promise from her grandad that he will tell her the moment her Aunty Jenny arrives. Cross his heart and hope to die.’
He folded his newspaper and turned towards the French windows with a broad grin. I followed his gaze and saw a small figure in a red dress and white lacy tights walking backwards along the path looking up at the huge blooms of his prize chrysanthemums which arched high above her blonde head.
‘In that case, I’d better go straight out, hadn’t I?’
‘You had indeed,’ he agreed warmly. ‘I’m given to understand the children will lunch in the kitchen before we have our meal.’
We exchanged glances that said all we needed to say. I opened the doors and stepped into the garden. Before I had time to close them behind me, the small red figure spotted me. She raced back up the path and tripped on the edge of the terrace just as I managed to get there.
‘Hello, Susie,’ I said as she fell into my arms. ‘Were you waiting for me?’ As I picked her up and felt her small arms close round me in an energetic hug, Janet marched down the path to stand squarely in front of us.
‘Hello, Janet,’ I said pleasantly. ‘No favouritism’ was my rule, both in school and with my nephew and nieces.
Janet, at eight, had no such rule and had other things on her mind. She stared at us coldly. ‘Mummy says you’re not to run like that, Susie, and you’re not to climb up on people either. Look what you’ve done to Aunty Jenny’s hair. Mummy’ll be so cross when I tell her.’
Susie’s large brown eyes filled with tears.
‘It’s all right, Susie. It’s all right,’ I whispered to her as I returned her hug and made no move to put her down.
‘Susie didn’t climb up, Janet. I picked her up. Didn’t you notice that?’ I said easily. ‘And my hair’s always falling down. Long hair often does, especially when it’s freshly washed. I’m sure you’ll notice that when you grow up.’
‘I shall have short hair when I grow up,’ was her immediate reply. ‘Like Mummy’s. She says it’s much more practical.’ She turned her back on us and walked primly down the garden to where she had arranged two dolls and a teddy bear on a garden seat and set up a blackboard and easel in front of them.
Peter was kicking his football disconsolately round the rose beds and pretended he hadn’t seen us. Like his father at the same age, he sulked when he had no admiring audience, and he had worked out long ago that I wasn’t in the admiring audience business.
‘Will you tell me the flowers again, Aunty Jenny?’ Susie’s eyelashes were still wet with tears but she was smiling now, her eyes bright with excitement. They looked at me steadily, so confident I wouldn’t refuse her.
I carried her round the garden, intensely aware of the warmth and softness of her small body. No, I did not have Val’s problem. I was not revolted by the thought of a small creature growing in my body, then clinging to me, needing my love for its growth and wellbeing. Since the first moment of holding Susie, still red and wizened like a very old lady, I had been entranced by her personality, her sheer passion for life, even when life involved only feeding and sleeping.
I remembered standing by Mavis’s bed in the private nursing home, with Colin watching me, as I took her gingerly from Mavis’s hands. One day, I thought. One day, I shall hold Colin’s and my child. As I looked down at those shining eyes, I wondered if I would ever have any child to love other than Susie. What was certain was that it would never now be Colin’s.
‘Chrifanthemum,’ repeated Susie, solemnly.
‘Very nearly. Try again. Chrysanthemum.’
‘Chrifanthemum.’
I smiled and moved a little further on. In the summer, while the Antrim house was being extended to provide more bedrooms and a new suite of consulting rooms, Susie had come to stay with me. Her vocabulary had expanded by leaps and bounds. Each day she demanded new words, rehearsed them and tried them out on me till she got them right. Susie never let a word defeat her.
‘Begonia,’ she said firmly.
‘That’s right. I thought you’d have forgotten begonias.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s a nother chrysanthemum.’
‘Say again, Susie.’
‘Nother chrysanthemum.’
‘Good girl, well done. You’ve got it. Say it again for Grandad.’
‘Chrysanthemum. Chrysanthemum. Chrysanthemum.’
She beamed with delight when I hugged her, but I had to turn my head away as we walked on. Tears had jumped into my eyes at the sight of that small, vulnerable face. So easily hurt. A pretty child. Along with the Jaguar, the new extension and the flourishing practice, I wondered if Susie was really only a delightful object to her father, just one more marker of his success. What was going to happen when she grew old enough to use her sharp little mind for herself and was no longer Daddy’s little baby was a very nice question. I wasn’t sure at all how Mavis would react to a Susie with a mind of her own, and there certainly wouldn’t be much support for her from either of her grandmothers. Mavis’s father had died some years ago. That left only Daddy and me.
‘I like your stroky dress, Aunty Jenny. When I grow up, can I have a stroky dress just like yours?’
‘Of course you can. But you might like a different colour because your hair is blonde and mine is dark.’
‘I’ll have blue, or red, or yellow, or green,’ she began, counting on her fingers the colours she knew. ‘Or perhaps crushed raspberry,’ she added triumphantly.
‘Come along, children, lunchtime.’
The saccharine tone reached us from the kitchen door where my mother stood with Mavis. Resplendent in a new wool dress with very high heels, she wore a minute frilly apron, the product of some long-forgotten bring-and-buy sale, as a gesture towards the cares of office. I walked Susie to the door and delivered her up for handwashing. I expected no greeting from her, nor was there one, and Mavis would not speak if my mother remained silent.
I turned back into the garden and walked the whole way round it, looking at my father’s autumn planting and the new piece of crazy paving he’d laid in the summer. The air was mild for so late in the month and where the sun spilled onto the path through the trees and shrubs on the south side of the garden I could feel it warm on my shoulders.
I stood looking around me, the garden still bright with summer bloom, the flowers whose names Susie had finally mastered through her sheer persistence. With some things persistence really did pay off. I remembered the first cuttings I had made after I’d watched Daddy making trays full of them in the greenhouse. It looked so easy. Indeed, he assured me, it was easy. You just pulled off a new shoot with a little heel of old wood, trimmed it, and stuck it in some compost, or some soil. I’d tried it, produced a boxful that looked just like his and they’d all died. I’d firmed them in so energetically, I’d knocked all the air and moisture out of the soil. The next lot did better, but it was a while before I developed that knack of picking the right piece of new growth, at the right time, and sticking it in the right mixture of what would best encourage it to put roots down.
But sometimes persistence was not such a good idea. Like the way I had persisted in trying to make something of my marriage. I had certainly tried, I had gone on trying, as if, with practice, I could get the knack of it. But making relationships work was not at all the same thing as getting cuttings to grow. There were times when one just had to walk away. Admit defeat. Start over again.
I looked up at the bright sky, the sun glancing off the slate roofs across the Drive, the small clouds beginning to form on the crest of the hills to the north. I wondered what Alan was doing at this moment. Clearing up the mess after the party, or having lunch with Val and Bob. Or perhaps he’d gone down to the cottage.
I imagined him there, taking the key from behind the drainpipe, unloading stuff from his car. And as I thought of him, I knew I would have to be very strong, and very steady, because at this moment all I really wanted was to be with him, in his cottage, in his arms and in his bed. After all this time it just seemed so simple and so obvious.
I walked round the whole garden once again, gently putting Alan out of my thoughts. As I came back up the path, a wisp of grey cloud from the west blotted out the sun. The warmth was cut off for a few moments only, before the sun beamed out again, but I found myself shivering. A thought had shaped in my mind and repeated itself, over and over again. Never again in this garden. Never again in this garden.