The table was in the hallway near the stairs. It was the wrong place for it. She’d known that since Fergus carried it in, wrapped in a dusty drop sheet, surprising her. She’d sat down on the steps and closed her eyes as he’d directed, then opened them. The tiny kitchen table was no longer pocked and burned, its turned legs scuffed and chipped. It had been restored, she thought, in exactly the right way. Not back to the original: it could never again be new. Fergus had not tried to erase all the knife and heat marks. Had not stripped the table of its past. Somehow, she realised, admiring the deep honey of the newly oiled pine, the simple lines, he had made it more itself. It was, she thought, the most beautiful thing in the house.
That was why she hadn’t moved it. It had become a place to put things, items for perusal, and she would sit on the stairs, chin on knees, looking, thinking.
In the past few days there had been seeds, the broken candlestick, a covered button from some old dress or blouse of Angela’s, the shard of glass. Her airline ticket home. Just days before she’d added the shattered cup, the three pieces curled together like leaves.
She went to the table now and picked up the pieces of china and glass, laying them carefully in her palm. She walked carefully so that nothing fell. Outside the sun was withdrawing, leaving this side of the hill to its own colours, unbleached greens and browns and blues that might never have been boiled in the noon heat.
As she walked around to the side of the house she automatically checked for new growth on the roses. She’d been doing that every day, though she knew it was too early. She was waiting for the candy stripe, sure it would be Kieran’s favourite when it bloomed. She imagined him taking some to Abby, a fistful of pink and white. He would beam as he shoved them in a jam jar. Pink! she heard him say, pink for girls.
At the edge of the herb garden she knelt and picked each chipped and broken piece from her palm and laid them on the grass. She looked around for the spade. It was where she had left it, shoved into the soil near the pots of rosemary and thyme she hadn’t bothered to plant. Francesca’s mother’s saying went round in her head: Rosemary in the front garden, she’d told Laura, her battered English further obscured by a missing tooth, means woman in charge of house. She’d nodded sagely, handing her a pot, her chin almost touching her chest. Is true. Laura hadn’t thought of that in years.
The sun had dipped behind the trees. Over her shoulder a catbird whined, a mewling baby in the bush. Behind it another bird, unrecognisable, and another, a low twilight lament. Laura breathed the damp rich air of trees and grass and salt breeze settling into night all round her. Arched her back and filled her lungs with it, then breathed out and picked up the spade. The soil gave easily, brown-black and perfect, she thought, for grafting. She pressed the first piece of china into its place.