The air smelled of hot earth and lavender. It was late afternoon and the mottled yellow light was about to tip over into the gentle violet of dusk, the change in colour seeping through the sky, leaving a litmus trail of pink. Later, the pale moon would bleed through, its circumference becoming gradually sharper until it was hanging above them, a bright coin pressed against the darkness.
The lawn was parched from a long, dry summer. Flakes of creosote hung off the garden fence like the shreds of a discarded reptilian skin. The plants had just been watered and droplets were still glinting from the leaves of an overgrown rhododendron.
At the bottom of the garden, a small child sat contentedly among the clay geranium pots, her chubby legs protruding from under her dress, and her feet bare. She wore a pale pink hat embroidered with daisies and her fair hair was wildly curly. She was picking blades of grass with her fingers and her attention was almost entirely occupied with this task. Occasionally, when she found a particularly long stem, she would giggle to herself and put it carefully into the lap of her dress for safe keeping.
Sitting at the table with a chilled glass of wine, Anne looked at the child, carefully observing each of her movements and smiling at the intent precision with which she carried out her task. The child was oblivious to the rest of the world, absorbed in her own microcosm, fascinated by the smallest things.
Anne took off her sunglasses. She had not noticed it getting dark and her eyes took a moment to adjust to the new, softer light. The child stood up unsteadily, scattering grass as she moved. Anne looked at her. The child turned and caught her eye, smiling, so that Anne could just make out the tiny glimmer of her two bottom teeth, small and precise like a doll’s. The child started to walk shakily towards her, a stumbling sort of movement that seemed to make her legs whir with the effort of keeping upright, her hands clenched into tiny, round fists.
Anne put down her wine glass and crouched forward, arms outstretched in encouragement. ‘Gracie! Are you coming to say hello to me?’
Gracie stopped for a moment, startled by the sudden noise, and then she grinned and tried to walk even faster, her feet stamping noiselessly on the lawn, her pink tongue poked out in concentration. ‘Come here, darling,’ said Anne, scooping her up as she reached the chair.
Gracie installed herself on her grandmother’s lap, turning her head so that it rested against Anne’s chest. She started to suck her thumb and Anne noticed that the back of her hand was stained with grass. Anne took off the child’s bonnet and placed it carefully on the patio table. She felt the warmth of Gracie against her, the sweet burnt-toast and honey smell of her hair, and she brushed down the tight blonde curls at the nape of her neck.
‘She looks so like Charlotte, doesn’t she?’ said Janet, who was sitting at the opposite end of the table grappling with the pages of a Sunday newspaper supplement. Anne wished she would read a magazine instead – the constant sound of crinkling and re-folding was unnecessarily intrusive. And then she checked herself. It was a new technique she had: she was trying to let trivial irritations skim over the surface of her consciousness and, instead of focusing on someone’s negative qualities, she was attempting to remember all the good things about them. It wasn’t as easy as it sounded. She had read about the technique in a book that she was ashamed of having bought. It was one of those self-help-type things with a vividly coloured cover and a rhetorical question as a title. Anne had picked it up without thinking while in a queue at Waterstone’s and found herself oddly comforted by its curious blend of advice and hopefulness.
‘Yes.’ She smiled at Janet. ‘Yes, she does.’
She could feel Gracie’s head get heavier and she knew, without looking, that her eyelids would be stuttering shut. It was almost her bedtime, but Anne did not want to surrender her just yet. She drew Gracie into her more tightly, placing a protective hand gently against the side of her face so that she could feel the extraordinary softness of her granddaughter’s skin.
It had been almost three years since Charles had died. Anne shivered involuntarily at the thought. It felt far longer than that and yet simultaneously seemed so recent. Sometimes, she woke up in the mornings and forgot that he was gone. She could still feel his presence oozing through the house, even though she had finally got around to redecorating the study and then, in unspoken sequence, she had painted all the other rooms as well. She had thrown out the overstuffed sofa and replaced it with a square, beige minimalist affair that Charles would have hated. She had wanted to get rid of the Aga too but Charlotte protested so vociferously that eventually she changed her mind.
She was closer to her daughter now, and although Anne knew she would never quite have the depth of her love reciprocated, this realisation gave her a profound sense of calm and the calmness was edged with tentative joy. Gabriel had helped. He was a relaxing person to be around – chatty, funny and, most surprisingly, utterly sincere – and he was good for Charlotte. The pregnancy had been an accident and Anne had not been sure, at first, whether it was a good idea. She had old-fashioned notions about bringing up children out of wedlock but then Gracie arrived and she fell in love with her so instantly, so overwhelmingly, that she found herself utterly powerless to be anything other than happy.
They had cremated Charles. Both Anne and Charlotte had agreed, without ever explicitly saying so, that neither of them wanted a physical memorial to remember him by. Anne did not like the thought of visiting a grave, of being judged by its silence or reminded of her failures, and so the two of them had scattered his ashes in the river by Kew Bridge. Neither of them had known whether it was the sort of thing you had to get permission for in advance, so there was a slightly hysterical edge to the proceedings as they took turns surreptitiously throwing fistfuls of grey powder into the murky currents of the Thames. They had laughed and then felt guilty for laughing and that had made them laugh even more. After it was done they went for double whiskies at a nearby pub and they hadn’t said anything but they hadn’t needed to either and this was the necessary difference.
For a while after casting him off into the Thames, Anne had felt lost without Charles. It was not so much that she was grieving for him, because she felt that she had done that already in the weeks before he died. It was more that she didn’t know how to act in the midst of this unasked-for emptiness. She wanted to feel relieved, to embrace her new-found freedom, to begin afresh a life that she had put in neutral, but she found that without Charles she had no anchor. She could no longer define herself in opposition to something. At its most basic, she no longer had an excuse.
Part of her, the buried part that lay misshapen underground, still missed him. She despised herself for this weakness, for the abiding strength of her love despite the battering it had taken, and she tried for a long time to ignore it. She would find herself staring into space in the supermarket, bewildered by the amount of choice on the shelves around her and incapable of making the simplest decision about what she wanted for supper.
Then Janet had suggested a holiday and Anne, to her surprise, had said yes. They spent three weeks in a hire car driving around Italy, winding down Tuscan roads bordered by olive groves and walking through hilltop towns with open marketplaces and red-bricked bell-towers that looked as if they would crumble to the touch. They had eaten fresh pasta and they had drunk Chianti and Janet had arranged everything so that Anne did not have to think. By the end of it, Anne was renewed. Nothing had been said, but it felt as though Charles’s shadow had finally lifted. She was grateful to Janet for that. More grateful than she could ever express.
‘Penny for them,’ said Janet, and Anne looked across at her friend. Janet’s nose was pink with sunburn and her bifocals were speckled with dirt. Her lipstick had faded and bled slightly into the puckered lines around her mouth.
‘Do you know, I was just thinking of our Italian jaunt.’
Janet’s face suffused with pleasure. ‘It was lovely, wasn’t it?’ Anne nodded, carefully trying not to wake Gracie. ‘Perhaps,’ said Janet hesitantly, ‘we should do it again this year?’
‘Yes, Janet.’ Anne smiled. ‘Yes, we absolutely should.’ She could hear Charlotte and Gabriel inside; the murmur of their conversation and the clattering of things being washed up and put away. She could feel the weight of her granddaughter against her chest and the saturating warmth of a day’s sunshine on her skin. There was contentment here, in this place, in this garden, in this moment of time. She recognised it and she breathed it in and she felt it trickle down her throat and then she breathed it out and it split into tiny pieces that scattered over her like breeze-blown blades of grass.
‘Bedtime,’ she said, and Gracie stirred quietly at the sound of her voice. She held her granddaughter tightly in her arms and she walked back into the house.