Standing at the top of the hill, by the bench, Grace claps her hands. ‘It’s time! Come along!’ and her three grandchildren wheel around in the long autumn grass, the dog at their heels, and bound back up the hill towards her, laughing. Her own daughter, now in her late thirties, takes her arm and gives a supportive squeeze.
As she waits for them to gather around, Grace glances at the view, thinking how different it would have looked to Cat and Sam back then. Today the skyline bristles with shining towers. But she supposes the Heath itself has remained almost exactly as it has been for hundreds of years. She and her husband inherited the white gothic house after Leo retired. They’d lived abroad for a long time; it felt good to come home to this place.
She looks around at the expectant faces of her daughter and grandchildren and smiles. ‘We all know how much Sam and Cat loved this place,’ she tells her audience, ‘and the inscription meant something to them. So when the chance came to take this bench over, I thought really carefully about what it should say.’ She blinks away the blurring of tears. ‘They had thirty years. They travelled and lived and loved. They wrote music and books, and spent time with us, and grew old together. We miss them.’ Her voice breaks. She glances at her youngest grandchild, who’s beginning to fidget, and makes an effort to smile. ‘Okay, who wants to see what’s under here?’
‘Me!’ they all shout.
She stoops to take hold of the scarf draped across the bench. It’s a large square of multicoloured silk that once belonged to Cat, soft and worn from use.
‘Ta da!’ She whisks it away, revealing the seat underneath, with its fresh inscription picked out in the wood.
Her daughter lets out a sigh. ‘It’s beautiful, Mum. They would have loved it.’
The children clap. The littlest one clambers up onto the slats, where she pokes her fingers into the pale lettering, tracing the words.
Grace looks at the bench, her breath held in her lungs, because she sees them there as if they are flesh and blood, their heads together, murmuring to each other, fingers interlinked. Then they are gone, and her granddaughter is there instead, smiling up at her. She scoops the little girl into her arms, kissing her plump cheek before placing her on the ground. She wonders if the invisible ghosts of all the people who talked and walked and loved in this place are here too, whispering around them, their laughter rustling the leaves.
The two older children are playing with Cat’s silk scarf, waving it in the air, setting the colours dancing. Grace smiles. ‘Come on, you lot,’ she calls. ‘Let’s go home.’ She gestures in the direction of the valley. ‘There’s cake for tea.’
The two women walk slowly down the hill, arms linked, with the children and the dog racing ahead before them through the rough yellow grass.