5

Sea Garden

Queenie made a sea garden at her home in Embleton Bay. Locals now call it the Garden of Relics because of the things people leave there. But I only heard recently that she created a monument to your son. I thought you might like to know that. Much love, Kate x

To begin with, it had been a postcard that arrived in the summer. Harold had read it out loud and they’d got on with their morning. Maureen weeded the strawberries while he sat in the sun. But her mind kept going back to it. “I didn’t know Queenie had a garden,” she would say to Harold, trying to keep the snag out of her voice, and he would smile and say he didn’t either. The fact was it was just a garden. A garden that was four hundred and fifty miles away. If there was a monument to David, so what? Queenie had worked with Harold for all those years. They must have talked about David sometimes. But from there the garden grew in its awkwardness, like a splinter you don’t attend to. Why had Queenie made a monument to David? What right had she to do that? And what was it like, this monument? Had Queenie known David? The questions came back to Maureen as she put out the washing or forked the vegetable beds. They returned to her in the lulls when she brushed her teeth or made Harold’s breakfast or even as she lay beside him at night, wide awake while he slept. Time went by. The days shortened. The leaves changed. But her head didn’t. She couldn’t forget about the garden; it only became more insistent. It was out there and yet it was stuck inside her too.

“Are you sure you didn’t know about Queenie’s Garden?” she asked Harold, one evening over supper. “The one Kate wrote to you about?” It was autumn by this time. She tried to put the question in a casual way as if it was something that had just occurred to her.

“Queenie’s Garden? I’m not sure. I don’t think so.”

“But she was a gardener, was she?”

“I don’t remember that she was a gardener. We never spoke about gardening. At least, I don’t think we did.”

“Then why is David in her garden? Did Queenie know David? Why didn’t I know she knew him?”

The impatience in her voice betrayed her. She was asking too much too quickly and now he was looking pained, as if he suspected he had done something terrible that he should remember without knowing what it was. “Oh dear,” he said. “Oh dear.” He touched his head with the heel of his hand and tapped it, trying to wake things up. “It will come back, it will come back, give me a moment.” But it didn’t. She picked up the dinner plates. Scraped his leftovers on top of hers. Took them to the sink and rinsed the plates with hot water.

“Can I help you, Maureen?”

“It’s fine. You just sit there.” She hadn’t intended it to come out like that. The blow was cheap. He came up behind her. Snaked his arms around her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder. He was tired and she felt it, then. What she’d done to him, bringing all this back about David.

He said softly, “It was a long time ago, you see.”

“I know it was.”

“The garden is nothing to worry about.”

“I know.”

“We’re happy.”

“We are.”

“So let’s not worry.”

“No, Harold. We won’t.”

He kissed her and the subject was closed. But even though she’d agreed not to, she did. She did worry. And the fact that he didn’t want to made her double-worry—as if she had to take it on for both of them. It had been the same after Queenie died and the director of the hospice sent on Queenie’s letter. Harold hadn’t wanted to worry about that either. It was Maureen who had pored over the pages, trying to understand from the packed script that held no words, only dashes and squiggles, what Queenie had been so desperate to tell him. Trying to understand what he didn’t wish to know. In the end she had tucked the letter into a shoebox and stowed it in the loft, along with David’s things. But she was too old for this now. They were both too old. She didn’t want it all welling up again. Only it had already begun. The ghosts had entered the room.

Alone, Maureen searched for images of the garden on the computer. She was shocked. There were all these people who had visited it, people she didn’t know. Taking selfies and family portraits, or artistic wide shots. So they must have seen Queenie’s monument to David. They had seen it, and Maureen had not. Where was it, then? What did it look like? Was it an exact image of him? Or something more contemporary? She looked and looked, and she tried to make the images larger, but she couldn’t find him anywhere. She couldn’t find anything that looked remotely like her son.

The truth was it wasn’t just David she couldn’t find. She couldn’t make sense of the garden, full stop. It didn’t even appear to have a fence. It simply came out of the dunes. There were stretches of shingle, interspersed with circles of stones and flowers and metal sculptures that were all kinds of shapes—funnels, tubes, spirals, spindles and whorls—alongside pieces of driftwood, some the size of wooden spoons but others as tall as posts, and dominated by one huge balk of timber at the center. There were strange sculptures too, made out of plastic bottles, guttering, tin cans, old furniture, rope and brushes—the kind of things, in fact, that she wouldn’t think twice about throwing away. There were even poles with weather-bleached animal skulls on top. She looked at all this as if she was staring at life from the other side of a steamed-up window that she couldn’t rub clean. Banners of seaweed and cork floats were strung between sticks, or hung like necklaces over single pieces. Ribbons were tied to branches. There were seed heads as bold as pieces of ironwork and grasses the size of sprouting fountains. In summer, all this was thrown into relief by the bright splashes of yellow and orange and red from gorse, marigolds and poppies. (You could tell it was summer because the sky was blue and the people visiting the garden wore sunglasses and T-shirts.) On other occasions, it appeared to be lit by hundreds of tiny candles. At the back stood an old painted wooden chalet with a falling-down roof.

Winter came. Harold and Maureen got on with life. They ate together and slept together but they were in separate circles all over again. He was happy watching for birds, and playing drafts with Rex, while she was cooped up by herself with the computer, searching for Queenie’s Garden online and getting more and more agitated. Besides, as far as Maureen was concerned, a garden was a garden. It was for growing things to eat. Swede and onions and potatoes and spinach and fruits to freeze or bottle and take you through winter. It wasn’t for bits of junk and wood and metal. So it wasn’t simply that David was there, but more that he had been made a part of something from which Maureen was excluded. It was like looking at those cards of condolence all over again. And then she’d had a nightmare that disturbed her so much she’d had to go downstairs and turn on every single light in the house until day came and Harold woke.

“What happened, Maw sweetheart?” He put his arms around her and she rested her head on his shoulder as she began to tell him her dream.

It was about digging in a vegetable bed and finding David all alone beneath the earth, though she stopped short of talking about the worms that poured out of his mouth and ears, or the side of his face that was so decomposed it was a black layer of rotting leaves. She couldn’t bear to say those things about their only son, even after all this time. Best to keep those dark thoughts to herself.

“I’m sorry. I’m not like you, Harold. I can’t stop dwelling on Queenie’s Garden.” She described all the images she’d seen online that she couldn’t make sense of.

It was then that he gave one of his smiles that still unbuttoned her slightly and told her he’d been wrong. She needed to go and see it.

“Oh, no,” she said quickly. She got up. Straightened a few things. Wiped her hand on a chair, checking for dust that was not there. “No, no. There’s no need to do that. No, no. It’s much too far. Who would look after you? No, no. I’m just talking about it. That’s all.”

“You’re right, of course. It’s a very long way. But why don’t you think about going? You could do it over a few days. Kate’s a kind woman. She lives about twenty miles away. You could stay at least one night with her.”

“Oh, no. No, I wouldn’t want to do that. I wouldn’t want to stay with Kate. I don’t know Kate. She’s your friend. Not mine.”

There were so many reasons she couldn’t go, she said. It wasn’t just the distance. There was the house and the washing and everything else: she was even thinking of replacing the old pink bathroom suite with something more neutral. The truth was she was slightly scared of Kate, though she had never met her, just as she was scared of Queenie’s Garden. Kate was in her late fifties, and some kind of activist. She had decided to give her marriage another try after walking with Harold but it hadn’t worked and now she lived alone. That was all Maureen knew. Of the many people he had met, Kate was the one he cared for most, which was another reason Maureen felt insecure when she thought about her. Maureen wasn’t sure she would even know what to say to an activist.

But she had got herself cornered. And, true to form, she’d achieved it all by herself. In the end she had to agree. Harold was right. Yes, she would go to see the garden, but she would get the drive over and done with in one day. Rex agreed to look after him while she was gone, though privately she suspected that, with Harold’s forgetfulness and Rex’s heart, it would be more like two small boys holding hands.

“I won’t visit Kate. I’d rather keep this to myself. I’ll order a shop for you and Rex online. And I’ll show you how to use the dishwasher. It isn’t difficult. It’s just some buttons. I’ll leave a Post-it note…”

This time he laughed. “Even we can work out how to wash a few pots and pans.”

She wrote instructions anyway and found a nice guesthouse called Palm Trees near Embleton serving early-evening meals, and booked it for two nights. She would drive there on the first day, see the garden the following morning, and set off for home early the next. She made so many meals for Harold and Rex, there was barely room for them all in the freezer. If she kept herself busy, she felt more in control. The evening before, she packed a few necessary things, then pressed her best blue blouse to the thinness of a paper cut-out, while Harold found a wire brush and cleaned her driving shoes. Like preparing armor, she thought briefly, except no one was going to war. It was just a garden with some driftwood in it, and that was all.

He smiled at her and maybe he caught hold of what she was thinking, because he said, “It’s okay. There’s nothing to be frightened of.”

“I know.”

But she watched him later as he slept, his hand loosened from hers and now neat on his chest, his breath going pop, pop, pop, and she envied the peace it brought him. He is the brave one, she thought. The complete one. Not me.