16.

The golden pink of the cool early morning had turned into a blisteringly hot day. Belle felt dizzy and a sickly wave of heat passed through her as she stared at the silver and ivory baby’s rattle. The silver ball had tarnished a little but not as much as one might have expected, and the ivory handle, though yellowed, remained intact. She held it to the light.

‘Look, an inscription.’ She traced the tiny letters with her fingertips. ‘Three hearts and the letters, D and D and E. Diana, Douglas and Elvira. My mother, father and sister.’

On one side of the silver ball was a tiny dog with the words Bow-Wow-Wow. The other side was engraved with a bird and the words Who Killed Cock Robin. She suppressed a sob. This lost sister had suddenly become so real.

Oliver touched her hand gently. ‘Let’s go outside. You need air.’

She was glad to leave the damp heat of the house. Outside it was still hot but a little fresher. She regarded the tangled profusion that had no doubt once been a glorious garden.

‘Is this all there is, do you think?’

He shrugged. ‘Hard to say.’

Her eye was drawn to a gap in the bushes that seemed to create a barrier at the back of the long grass.

‘Do you think …’

‘It might lead somewhere?’

The sun was now burning her neck and she could feel it on her back too through her thin cotton dress. As they began to pick their way across the grass, something about being in the garden tugged her into the past. She saw her mother walking in front of her, bathed in sunlight and heading for the same gap between the bushes. Belle longed to lay a hand upon her shoulder and speak her name. Might everything have been different had she been able to?

The moment passed.

Oliver was ahead of her now, pulling back the ivy and overgrown vegetation. ‘There’s a path,’ he called out in an excited voice.

As Belle followed him she hardly felt the pain as sharp thorns in the dank undergrowth scratched her bare arms and legs. Then, as beating wings alerted her to the presence of birds, she could feel herself getting closer to something that mattered.

Beyond the path, as she came out into the light, her gaze wandered over the expanse. They attempted to circumnavigate this part of the garden, but their progress was impeded by a wilderness of tropical plants. Trees too, lots of trees. He pointed out a large, sprawling acacia, its marbled trunk seeming to twist and turn in the air until it finished in a spreading crown that shaded the ground beneath.

‘What’s that one?’ she asked, pointing at a tree thirty feet high at least and about forty feet wide.

‘They call it the Pride of Burma. It’s an orchid tree.’

She nodded and continued to inspect the garden, brushing the buzzing insects from her hair and eyes. Over in one corner a vine with red flower clusters crept upwards through the canopy of another tree in search of the sun. And beyond lay the remains of a building that looked black and broken.

‘Must have been a summer house,’ she said. ‘Destroyed by fire. What a shame.’

A little further on she gasped at the sight of a tree with the largest girth of all.

‘The tamarind,’ Oliver said.

She gaped at the bright-green feathery foliage of the massive tree, at least eighty feet high. Its trunk had divided into three which meant the canopy had grown gigantic. So much shade for a baby lying in its pram.

He noticed she’d gone quiet. ‘You okay?’

She nodded and walked closer to the burnt-out summer house. Oliver followed and began to rip away the creeper.

‘You won’t find anything there,’ she said.

‘Maybe not.’ But he carried on, only stopping to wipe the sweat from his brow.

‘I’ll help,’ she said. He’d rolled up his sleeves and the sight of his tanned, muscled arms as he worked made her smile. It had been so long since she’d enjoyed being with a man as much as this, and she realized his presence was helping her feel grounded – to have been here on her own might have been a little too much. There was more to him than the easy-going man she’d first met, and that pleased her.

As she stood gazing at the secret garden the noises of the city faded and only the sounds of the birds accompanied Oliver as he worked at pulling more of the creeper away. Feeling soporific, and forgetting her previous offer to help, she watched drifts of yellow-winged butterflies hover over the bushes at the back of the garden, where she spotted the remains of a gate, now smothered by climbing plants. Just then she heard Oliver shout her name.

She ran over and he held out a blackened metal box.

‘Wedged in the earth beneath what remained of the floorboards.’ He passed it to her.

She attempted to open the lid, but it wouldn’t give.

‘I’ve got the pocketknife,’ he said. ‘Might do it.’

‘Are you actually prepared for everything?’

‘Depends. I might be.’ And he gave her a wide smile.

He passed the pocketknife to her and gradually she prised the lid open. When she glanced inside, the first thing she saw was a yellowing photograph of her parents with their arms wrapped around each other, broad, happy smiles on their faces.

She felt a hot flash of resentment battling with the longing she’d always tried so hard to hide. She did not love her mother. She had persuaded herself of it. Steeled herself. Nor did she care that her mother did not love her. But she’d been living with a lie.

As she thought of Diana, she stared at the gently drooping branches of the tamarind tree and shaded her eyes from the narrow shafts of piercing sunlight streaming between its leaves too brightly. The intensity of the light, plus the loud buzzing in the air, made her feel strange and she reached out a hand to Oliver.

As he held her hand for a moment, there was one thing she knew without question. Whatever had happened in this garden, whatever had happened beneath this self-same tree, it had changed her mother, and in doing so it must have altered her father too. She had a sudden uneasy sense of how her mother might have once been before the tragedy destroyed her life and her mind. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the ache of it because, however much she might have thought otherwise, however much she’d longed for it to be otherwise, their story was her story too.