The logs collapse inward with a little explosion of flames and sparks. Bertie stirs, raises his head and then drops back into slumber. Julia uncurls her legs and gets to her feet. Taking up the poker, she pushes the embers together, piles more logs on top and goes back to the sofa.
How strange that next meeting was; how hoped for and yet how unexpected. During the next few weeks she thought about Martin often, analysing that odd moment of time, recalling their conversation and her reaction to him. Several times she went back to The Garden House but she didn’t see him. Spring was blossoming all around her, and as she walked Bertie at Cross Furzes and watched the lambs in the field, she heard the cuckoo down in the valley and was caught up in the beauty and the melancholy of the cold, sweet April morning.
Now, as she pulls cushions around her, tucking her legs beneath her again, Julia is remembering the late April morning when she drove again to The Garden House, pulling in through the gateway, parking the car. She paused to gaze in amazement at the yellow magnolia in full, glorious flower at the entrance and then headed towards the Walled Garden. She strolled along, noticing the precision of the mown pathways, enjoying the beautiful stone buildings, and passed under the archway into the Jubilee Arboretum. Martin was sitting on the bench beside the lake. Kingcups were in glorious golden flower and the Nancy Fortescue was moored near by. The old wooden rowing boat rested quietly on the still water whilst Martin sat gazing at nothing in particular, at ease, as if he were waiting for her. She walked calmly round the lake, across the stone bridge, until she was standing beside him. She was planning some light-hearted remark, a jokey comment, but when he raised his head and looked at her, the words remained unspoken.
‘I was so afraid that I would never see you again,’ he said.
His words, his look, totally disarmed her. She sat beside him, half turned towards him.
‘I’ve been here several times,’ she said, ‘wondering if I might see you.’
She paused, not knowing how to continue, and he spoke again as if continuing his train of thought.
‘Even though I had no right to hope for it.’
In the following silence Julia wondered how to voice the things that needed to be said, but Martin was there first.
‘I’m separated from my wife, you see, while our divorce goes through.’ He continued to look at her. ‘When we met last time it was like a gift from the gods. One of those magical moments that happen rarely and are never forgotten. And that was the problem. I couldn’t forget it. It was as if a curtain had been pulled aside showing me a whole new landscape.’ He shook his head as if unable to find words to describe it. ‘And I wanted it more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life.’
He looked away from her, watching the Nancy Fortescue, his face bleak. Julia reached out and lightly touched his hand.
‘I felt like that. It was very odd. As if I’d known you forever.’
He turned quickly to look at her. ‘Did you really feel that?’
Julia nodded. ‘Truly. I wanted it to go on and on but I guessed you were married. I’m a widow. My husband was a navy pilot. He died in an air crash five years ago. I have two sons.’
She saw the quick flash of relief in his eyes quickly replaced by an expression of confusion. Julia waited. She knew that she should get up and walk away, just as she had on that first occasion, but this time her willpower failed her. By waiting she was being complicit in his decision, but still she could not move.
Martin sighed, a long deep breath, and when he spoke his words filled her with a mix of elation and fear.
‘Shall we go and have some coffee?’ he asked.
Abruptly, as if this recollection is too much to bear, Julia sits up and feels about for her shoes with her toes. Bertie struggles into a sitting position and looks at her.
‘Supper-time,’ she says. ‘Please remember that you’ve had yours.’
He gazes at her with a wounded expression, as if she has misjudged him, and she relents.
‘Maybe,’ she says, ‘just maybe, one small treat.’
He follows her down the hall and along the passage to the kitchen, his tail wagging expectantly. The kitchen, thanks to the Aga, is always warm, unlike the passages and bedrooms, and Julia opens the fridge and stares into it, hoping for inspiration. The lunch at the pub was good and she isn’t particularly hungry. Perhaps a mug of soup and a sliver of Sharpham brie will be enough. She sets the soup to warm, slices the cheese and cuts a hunk of bread.
Bertie drinks from his bowl and then goes to the door and Julia takes him out, along the passage, switches on the outside light and opens the door into the garden. Leaning against the door jamb, arms crossed against the chilly evening air, she watches him disappear across the grass into the dark shadows of the rhododendrons. Her mind slips back to those early days with Martin, the impromptu meetings: walking in the watercolour magic of the Wildflower Meadow in spring, the scarlet and orange and yellow glory of the Acer Glade in autumn. His first text was enigmatic:
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Woodstock.
Julia stared at it, baffled, trying to remember any conversation they might have had that related to it. Amused, curious, she was determined to crack this code. She googled the names and then listened to several of the tracks on YouTube. Joni Mitchell. ‘Woodstock’. She was getting it now and began to feel excited. She read the lyrics on the screen as she listened, oddly moved, and suddenly there it was: ‘We are stardust, we are golden … And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden’. She replayed it, laughed aloud, punched the air triumphantly as though she’d passed a test. And then she texted back:
Yes we do. When?
His reply was swift.
Monday afternoon? The Magic Circle?
So it began, this silly, wonderful time of texts and codes, swift meetings: how precious they were.
Bertie comes padding out from the shadows, trots across the grass towards her. Julia is surprised to feel tears on her cheeks. She scrubs them away, lets him pass her, then shuts the door behind them, locks it and switches off the light.
She sits at the old farmhouse table, with its odd assortment of wooden chairs, caught up now in this act of remembrance. Ever since Martin’s funeral she’s been in denial – getting through the holidays with the boys, working on some assignments, writing a few articles – but now the door has swung open to the past and she can’t slam it shut. Martin is with her, sitting at the end of the table, talking, gesticulating, getting up to reach for a book, searching for a reference. He is here with her now, in her kitchen, as he never was in real life, and she is woefully aware of how much she has missed and gloriously alive to what they shared.
‘Have you heard … read … seen?’
Their absences from each other are filled with things to be shared once they are together again. Those snatched moments at The Garden House, in quiet moorland pubs and on deserted coastal paths and beaches, were like sips of champagne.
‘Not champagne,’ he said. ‘Champagne goes flat and loses its savour. No, we shall be like Kubla Khan, “For he on honeydew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise”.’
She laughed at him when he ‘declaimed’, as she called it.
‘Do I hear a declamation coming on?’ she’d ask, and they’d laugh with the sheer craziness of it.
Julia sips her soup, breaks off a crust of bread. From the beginning they both could see how impossible it would be to live together. How would they do it? There was no room in the Pig Pen for Julia and her boys, nor could Martin move in with them. He talked about the difficulties and resentments El and Freddie were experiencing when their mother remarried, and Julia couldn’t begin to imagine explaining the situation to Laurence and Ollie. She couldn’t risk losing her widow’s pension, and the house was to be the boys’ inheritance.
‘Perhaps the right moment will come,’ Martin said tentatively.
There were so many complications and it was too early to take risks. Other people managed it, clearly, but neither of them wanted to rock the boat. And somehow it was working. Martin was in his office all through the week and she had the boys to look after, to ferry to clubs and entertain their friends. At Easter and Christmas, and during the summer holidays, El would be staying with Martin. Time together was rationed.
Crumbling her bread, Julia remembers those shared lunches and walks; a few days snatched when the boys were on school trips or staying with their grandparents. Each kept clear of the other’s territory.
‘It’s crazy,’ Martin said, recently, as they sat together in the Stables café at Killerton House near Exeter. ‘I’m divorced and you’re a widow. Why don’t we just throw caution to the wind and get together?’
Even now she can remember the feeling of panic. How would she tell the boys or explain to Bob’s elderly parents? She couldn’t imagine how the two families could be merged without the same kind of resentment and awkwardness that he’d told her that El and Freddie had experienced.
‘Soon,’ she answered. ‘Now that Laurence is already on his way and El is in her last year at university. Ollie goes next year. That’s the time to make changes, once they’re all moving on.’
Part of her knew that it was irrational but at the same time she simply couldn’t face the upheaval. She’d done it all before when Bob died and she simply couldn’t face it again. And it was working. She and Martin’s relationship was so special, perhaps because it didn’t have to stand the warp and weft of family life. There was something exciting about the secrecy, impromptu meetings, and those magical days at the flat.
Julia gives a little gasp as she thinks about those special moments in Bristol. Martin had a cousin who lived in a remote cottage in North Wales: a man of his own age, a bachelor, a writer. He owned the flat, enjoying regular fixes of city life, but when he wasn’t staying there he was very happy for friends or relatives to use it. Central to the city’s cafés, galleries, docklands, it had all the anonymity that Julia and Martin needed. Perhaps without the flat they might have been more inclined to change the status quo, but the flat gave them that extra dimension for privacy and intimacy.
The flat was their home, the place where they could be a couple, and it was within easy reach for both of them. Julia caught the train from Totnes, Martin drove, meeting her from Temple Meads Station and driving them to the flat. It was clearly a bolt hole: small but functional. Martin’s cousin was a minimalist but there was everything at the flat that enabled him to lift and shift between Wales and Bristol with very little luggage. He always left the bed stripped and visitors brought their own sheets and towels.
Julia finishes her soup, thinking of that first day, driving through the traffic with Martin, parking in the reserved place in the small car park, climbing the stairs to the flat. Once inside she was fascinated by its compactness, the glimpse of the cathedral from the window. Her excitement was suddenly swamped by shyness, by the close proximity of Martin moving around, putting overnight bags in the bedroom and unpacking clean sheets. She was relieved by his pragmatism – he’d remembered to bring milk and bread – and by his suggestion that they should go out to explore and find some lunch.
‘We shall need a name for it,’ he said, as they strolled across College Green and began to climb Park Street, and she laughed and at once felt easy again.
‘For Bristol?’ she asked. ‘Or for the flat?’
She could see he was thinking about it whilst at the same time taking in his surroundings. He looked happy, alert, and she slipped her arm into his and he pressed it closely to his side.
‘Either,’ he said. ‘Both. Give me time and I’ll find it.’
Now, slicing some cheese, Julia’s heart aches with the loss and loneliness of being without him. The Bristol days were the best. At the most they could generally manage two whole days, three nights. Usually it was two nights with one whole day to be free. Maybe its scarcity value was a gift: the relationship never staled. There were no rows or falling out. Nothing challenged their happiness. Martin was relieved when Felicity married her childhood sweetheart.
‘She should have stuck with him,’ he said. ‘Maybe he would have made her happier than I did.’
‘But then,’ Julia pointed out, ‘you wouldn’t have had Freddie and El.’
She knew how guilty he felt about his children, how hard he worked to maintain contact. El responded readily but Freddie, already at medical school, withheld his understanding. He was polite, friendly, but there was no real closeness. Julia felt guilty, too, however many times Martin assured her that his marriage was over in all but name long before they met.
The Bristol days gleamed in her imagination like sunshine after rain.
‘I know what we should call it,’ Martin exclaimed, raising his glass of Shiraz to her in what was to become their favourite wine bar. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? The flat is the Play Pen.’
She laughed with him, still on a high after their first whole night and day together. To wake up next to him, to feel his warm skin under her fingers, to hold him close, was still a marvel to her. She hadn’t realized how lonely she was for a man’s touch, his companionship. At the flat she felt free, happy.
‘To the Play Pen,’ she said, touching her glass to his.
So the name moved into their foolish code along with all the others that would baffle anyone who might pick up their phones. And now the boys are gone, El has inherited the Pig Pen, and Martin is dead.
Five years, thinks Julia sadly. We wasted five years that we might have been together.
Yet even as she thinks it she knows that back in those early days, trying to make it work in one house with El and the boys all together, would have been very different from the five years she and Martin shared. She wonders how El is coping, where she is, and whether it would ever be possible to have some kind of relationship with her. How would it work? Julia tries to imagine the conversation they might have about Martin, but fails. Would El be hurt to know that her father kept such a secret: that he shared so much with another woman? How would a twenty-one-year-old react to such a situation?
Julia wonders what happened to Martin’s phone. Maybe it got mislaid. Davy put his finger on her greatest fear: a call from El asking whose number it is. Yet she can’t bring herself to block the number or to delete Martin’s messages. They are all she has, apart from the Charlotte Marlow painting he bought for her. She turns her head to look at it, hanging on the wall at the end of the table: a pretty, impressionistic watercolour of a flower. They saw it during one of the artist’s exhibitions in the café at The Garden House. A few months later, she bought a similar one for him. It was an astrantia – Moulin Rouge. There was one planted outside a small stone and slate building up above the Bowling Green Terrace where they sometimes met if it was raining.
‘For those times,’ she said, ‘when we can’t get ourselves back to the garden.’
She wonders where it hangs and whether El likes it. A text pings in and Julia reaches for her phone, her heart quickening, half imagining that it might be from El: that by allowing this luxurious indulgence of her memories she has somehow conjured her up. It’s from Davy.
Thanks for a great day. Are you OK? Dx
She stares at the text. Am I OK? she asks herself.
She’s glad now that she’s told Davy about Martin. It has unlocked the memories, and the pain of bereavement, though she’s used to that.
I’m OK. How about you? x
He texts back quickly.
Missing Phil. I’ve got to move out of the flat. Can I come over on Sunday?
Julia heaves a sigh of relief. By sharing his own misery Davy has made them equals and she can allow herself to accept his kindness, his affection and sympathy. She texts back.
Yes please. Whole weekend if you like. x
She holds her breath, hoping he’ll accept. The house feels empty and quiet without the boys and she longs for company. Davy’s text pings in.
Thought you’d never ask! x
Julia lets out her breath. She can get through until Friday night.