Julia walks in the lanes above Buckfast, glimpsing the pale stone of the abbey walls, surrounded by bleached wintry fields and bare-twigged hedgerows. She watches the squirrels, those high-wire acrobats, launching themselves from branch to branch, leaping, climbing, racing each other, as they swing high up in the beech trees. The low November sunshine burnishes the holly berries into fiery crimson and their prickly leaves into shining emerald. A cock pheasant breaks cover, running stiff-legged across the lane, scrambling awkwardly between the bars of a gate and launching suddenly into clumsy flight, whilst Bertie stands disconsolate, his head thrust through the lower bars, watching its escape.
‘You wouldn’t have liked it, anyway,’ Julia tells him. ‘Think of all those feathers.’
She walks on, hands in her pockets, thinking of her visit to The Garden House with Davy. How strange it was to be there with him and not with Martin. How odd to be showing him the places where she and Martin met, having coffee in the café again. At least the spell was broken: that sense of being unable to return. She knows now that she can go back to wander the familiar groves, and no longer feel that in some way she’s been barred from Paradise.
‘We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.’
She remembers that was Martin’s very first text clue: Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. He loved crosswords, puzzles, Sudoku, and she’d had to sharpen her wits to keep up with him. How she misses that. Deliberately she turns her mind to more positive thoughts, glad that she’s told Davy, who is encouraging her, keeping in touch. And soon the boys will be home for Christmas: her heart lifts at the prospect. She’s got a little plan at the back of her mind that she might invite Davy now that he’s on his own. Of course, she’ll need to check with Laurence and Ollie, but she knows that they’re very fond of Davy. It’s something to think about, to plan for … However, as she turns for home, calling to Bertie, Julia is thinking about El. She wonders if she’s sold the Pig Pen, the cottage Julia has never seen, and where El’s living and working. How proud Martin was of her; how he loved her.
‘I wonder how they’d get on,’ he mused once. ‘Your boys and my girl and Freddie.’
She had no answer for him. It seemed impossible that they could merge into one family, yet other people did it. Why should it seem so impossible for her and Martin? They both knew he would find it difficult moving into her house, and he wasn’t prepared to present El and Freddie with a second family of stepbrothers, and there certainly wasn’t room in the Pig Pen. But the prospect of selling everything, finding some new place for them all, with Julia’s boys in the middle of exams, was too daunting to contemplate. Now Julia is glad that they didn’t attempt it. At least she is still in her own home, her boys’ home, and if they were to leave it, then they will all three decide together what might happen after that. As she strides home, Julia wonders why it should be her luck to lose both the men she’d loved. Then, once again, she deliberately turns her mind away from grief to an article she’s researching for Devon Life about wedding venues on the south-west peninsula. It’s an interesting prospect and she’s glad of the distraction. Work is a good antidote to sadness. And then there’s Davy’s new project, which might just be worth considering after all.
It’s odd that the visit with Davy across the moor to The Garden House seems to have unlocked some kind of paralysis in her mind. Ever since she read of Martin’s death she’s been in a strange sort of limbo, only just able to hold herself together. Now she is able to think more clearly, to begin to allow the past its place in her life. Sometimes she’s felt like a fly in amber, stuck, unable to move, but since that trip back to the garden she’s begun to free herself up.
Is it possible that one day she might be able to make some overture towards El? Instinctively she shakes her head. The question comes to mind: what do you hope to achieve? She can’t see the answer to that. No one can bring Martin back and what advantage could it possibly be to her or to El to attempt some kind of conversation? Yet she longs to know that El is recovering, even happy. She would give much to know that El is moving forward. Julia remembers her at the funeral, surrounded by her friends, and she knows that they will be supporting her.
Julia turns into the driveway, Bertie just ahead, his tail waving as he anticipates a treat. She opens the back door, lets him into the passage and they go together into the warm kitchen.
As she makes some tea, gives Bertie a biscuit, checks his water, Julia thinks again about her Christmas plan, determined to make it a good one for the boys but knowing, too, that the inclusion of someone who isn’t very close family can keep arguments at bay, add a different and interesting dimension. Her own parents are spending Christmas with her brother in Scotland and her mother-in-law is going to Hong Kong to her daughter’s family, so Julia is able to make up her own guest list without fear of upsetting anyone.
Julia leans back against the Aga, her hands around her favourite Cath Kidston mug, sipping her tea and remembering how much Bob loved Christmas. All the aspects of it – the tree, the decorations, the food and drink – brought out his generosity, his love of hospitality. The little Georgian house was filled with lights and noise and tantalizing smells – and people. After he died it was almost impossible for Julia to recreate the atmosphere. Bob was so much larger than life, and though the three of them did their best, his absence was palpable. They got better at it, adapted, and Julia is determined to do everything she can to make it a special time this year.
She has no memories of Christmases with Martin. They were never together. Julia sips her tea, remembering that strange sense of unity, of intimacy. How to explain that feeling of belonging, of anticipation before each rendezvous? She wonders if it could have survived ordinary day-to-day living, imagining how it might have shrivelled and dwindled under the sceptical gaze of their children. The whole point of it was that it was something apart, something rare and secret. Perhaps each of them, instinctively knowing this, had connived at keeping the status quo, neither asking too much of the other or putting any strain on this special relationship they shared.
As she looks around the kitchen, her glance drifting across the cyclamen in their pots along the windowsill and fixing on the Charlotte Marlow painting Martin gave her, Julia reflects on how little she’d known him. She’d never seen him under stress, with the flu, in a bad mood. He’d never seen her in a panic with a looming deadline, shouting at the boys as she tried to muster them for school in the mornings, grumpy with a cold. They were at their best with each other and now Julia is glad of it. They talked briefly about the people that were the framework of their lives – she told him about Davy and her workmates, and he mentioned names: Angus, who was his senior partner, and other friends, Tom and Cass and Kate – and they talked about their children, but they also discussed books and music and plays. Martin went to the Wharf cinema in Tavistock, whilst she went to the Barn Cinema at Dartington. Each knew what the other was going to see, each kept the other aware of new productions, so that they could discuss them, exchange ideas and laughter. Neither of them ever said: ‘What a pity we can’t go together.’ Even here they kept to their codes: no regrets, no complaining. The secrecy was absolute. And it is this aspect of it that makes it almost inconceivable to imagine describing it to El. What would it be like for her to know about something her father had kept totally hidden from her? Surely she would feel hurt, betrayed? Her own loyalty to him was such a strong, vivid thing, and for it she’d risked her mother’s displeasure.
How lucky we were, thinks Julia, that we never bumped into any of those friends of his while we were at The Garden House.
That was their greatest risk, yet they couldn’t resist the gardens. And they were always careful. Anyone seeing them might have assumed that they were two friends who had met by chance whilst walking in the gardens, having coffee on the terrace. Only in Bristol at the flat were they able to be totally free.
‘It’s odd,’ Martin said one evening as they had supper at The Florist in Park Street, ‘how flowers seem to follow us around.’
It amused them that not long after they’d begun to use the flat, this restaurant, which hitherto looked rather like a gentlemen’s club, should suddenly have a new name and a whole new décor.
Now, a sudden twist of pain to the heart causes Julia to hunch over her mug, eyes tight closed. However can she manage without those moments, without him? But she knows the answer. Work will get her through, as it got her through after Bob died: the discipline of work will keep her focused. And she has her boys to think about, to plan for.
Bertie nudges her leg and she smiles down at him.
‘And you,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not forgetting you.’
It was Davy who looked after Bertie on those rare dashes to Bristol. He and Phil loved Bertie and were happy to manage him between them at their little house in Plymstock. They teased Julia about her secret lover and she laughed back, pretending to go along with the joke, although she told them that she was going to see an elderly godparent. She didn’t care if they believed her or not and Bertie enjoyed his little holidays. It’s sad for Davy that he and Phil have split up and, on an impulse, Julia takes up her phone from the kitchen table and texts Davy.
How about Sunday lunch at the pub? Xx
Perhaps by then she might have had a chance to speak to the boys about inviting him for Christmas. Davy will be the perfect guest, entering into the spirit of it all, ready to have fun.
‘And you’d like it, wouldn’t you?’ she says to Bertie, stroking his head, gently pulling his ears.
The short winter’s day is fading, the wind is rising. Julia pulls down the blinds at the windows and turns on a lamp. A text pings in. It’s from Davy.
Great idea. Thanks xx
Julia feels relief. It’s something to look forward to, a little light shining in the lonely days ahead.