Lia sat in her small garden with her eyes closed. She could feel the sun on her face and hear the trickle and gurgle of the water in the dyke as it flowed down to the wider ditch. The dyke was very full this spring, as they had had a great deal of snow in the winter. They had been confined to the house during the worst blizzard she could ever recall, when Klara couldn’t get to school and Hans had been unable to travel home from Amsterdam.
She opened her eyes and looked about her. The tulips and hyacinths in their pots were in full bloom in this sheltered sunny garden, but even their bright colours did nothing to cheer her as once they might have done. She could hear Miriam clattering in the kitchen; what a blessing she was, putting order into Lia’s life when there would have been only chaos, making her meals and standing over her whilst she ate them.
She remembered that cold bleak day when she had answered a knock on her door and opened it to an older woman, older than her own mother, and beside her a younger one of about her own age. Although she didn’t know them, she greeted them cordially, feeling an uneasy curiosity.
‘Mevrouw Jansen?’ the older woman asked. ‘Lia?’ the younger said, and as no one but Frederik had ever called her that she had felt a sinking feeling travelling down her body.
‘I am Frederik’s moeder,’ Mevrouw Vandergroene had said. ‘This is his sister Anna. May we come in?’
How had she known that something was wrong, she wondered now. They could have been here only to warn her not to break up Frederik’s marriage, and yet she did know. Perhaps she’d always known that the happiness they’d shared wouldn’t last for ever, that their dream of a mountaintop hideaway was only a figment of their imagination; that such dreams would never, could never come to fruition.
Anna had said that they hadn’t come earlier because it was over a week before they had found out that Frederik’s ship had gone down. The communication between Hull and Amsterdam had been poor because of the atrocious weather, and the manager of the Hull office had come over himself to tell the Dutch employees before taking the news to her mother. ‘We came as soon as we could,’ she finished.
‘I am grateful that you came at all,’ Lia said huskily. ‘I hadn’t heard. I am … so …’
‘You don’t need to say anything,’ Gerda Vandergroene said softly. ‘We understand how you must feel, how we all feel when someone we love has been taken from us.’
Lia had looked at her. ‘You know that I loved your son?’ she whispered. ‘Did Frederik tell you about me?’
Gerda nodded and her voice had broken. ‘Just before he took that last voyage he told me that he loved you – that you loved each other – and he wanted to be with you.’
Miriam came in then with a tray of coffee and cakes, and when she had put them down on the table Lia caught her by the hand and told her who her visitors were and whispered that Freddy was no more, that his ship had gone down in the sea. Miriam pressed a hand to her mouth and closed her eyes. ‘He brought such happiness with him, mevrouw,’ she said to Gerda. ‘How will we ever recover?’
‘You see?’ Lia said, when Miriam had gone, weeping, back to the kitchen. ‘How everyone loved him. I don’t know how I will break the news to my children – they will be devastated for the second time in their young lives. And dear little Margriet, how she adored her father.’
Anna had told Lia about the memorial service, and that they intended to call on Margriet and her mother. ‘We would be pleased if you would come to the service with us,’ she said. ‘You could be part of our family; no one would know who you were.’
Lia had shaken her head; she had no place there.
‘We don’t think that Rosamund will attend,’ Gerda had explained. ‘It won’t be expected of her, so if you should wish …?’
‘No. Thank you, but no,’ Lia had said. ‘If I came it would be too final a parting. I will say my goodbye to him here. Here in the place where I know he was happy.’
Gerda had given a wistful smile. ‘I am so glad that we came, for I see now that he would have been content here with you. Alas, it was not meant to be. But one day, perhaps, we could bring Margriet again to visit you?’
Lia had told Klara when she came home from school and the child had cried, but she was young and resilient and had told her mother she would write to Margriet when she could find some comforting words to say. She was yet to write them. Lia had written to Hans at school and he had asked for leave of absence to be with her, and she was touched by his generosity of spirit that he would think to do so.
Now, as she sat alone in her garden on the day that the memorial service was to be held in Hull, she wondered how she would fill her life. The love that she and Frederik had shared had been brief, unlike the longer love she had known with Nicolaas. The two could not be compared for each was different, but both were so special that she felt she had been singled out for happiness. This morning she had lit two candles on her table, one for each of them. How blessed she had been, she thought, but there would be no other. Only the love of her children would comfort and support her now.