9

Garden of Relics

The morning sky was torn and tattered by the wind, and golden light shone through, flashing, then vanishing, yet she saw everything, the land and the light and the cloud—even wink snatches of the sea ahead—through another kind of fog, because the only thing she could think of was David. Thirty years. Thirty years of waiting and searching. And now she was finally going to see him. He was her one thought.

Maureen had driven straight from Kate’s to Embleton. She’d rung Harold to check he was awake but she said nothing about what had happened. She didn’t even mention the truck. She took care to talk only about the driving and the weather, and when he asked her what she had made of Kate, she told him that she had gone to bed as soon as she arrived. There hadn’t been any time to get to know her.

“Oh, what a shame,” he’d said, and she could hear the regret in his voice. “I always liked Kate.”

“I’d better get going now,” she’d said.

At Embleton, Maureen located the Palm Trees guesthouse, and stopped to check in. The receptionist was a friendly young woman sitting in a little booth with a toy plastic palm tree on the desk. She said Maureen’s room was ready for her if she wanted, but Maureen explained she was just dropping off her suitcase before she went to visit a garden. “Queenie’s Garden? The Garden of Relics?” said the girl, with her singing Northumberland accent. “Just past the golf club! You can’t miss it! When my mother died, we scattered her ashes there! It’s a lovely walk!”

The walk could be as lovely as it liked but Maureen had no intention of doing it. She took the car to the golf club and when the road became a dead end, she parked as close as she could and made the very last stretch on foot, never looking back, not once, but always forward. She tied on a headscarf but the wind still flapped her slacks and got at her ankles. Beyond the dunes lay a horizontal blade of sea, and a vast expanse of sky.

She followed a track that crossed alongside the golf course toward the shore: a number of wooden chalets stood on the dunes ahead, looking tiny beside the sea, and it was toward these that she made her way. At the end of the golf course, the path swung to the left with a hand-painted plywood sign for Queenie’s Garden, shortly followed by another sign pointing the way over a small bridge. The signs irritated Maureen. She knew the purpose of them was to be helpful, but she felt she should instinctively know where to go without the help of plywood, and the fact that she didn’t—the fact that she actually needed these signs—made them all the more irksome.

Once she got to the sand, she had to take care in her driving shoes because it gave way abruptly to soft, sludgy patches that might wet her feet. The tide was a long way out. Gangs of gulls and oystercatchers scattered through the sky, and the wind threw up balls of foam from the sea that skittered and tumbled across the land and finally broke into nothing. In the distance to her left, Dunstanburgh Castle was a jagged ruin on the horizon, shaped like the tricky piece of a jigsaw puzzle. And all the time she was thinking, David, David, David, where are you?

The signs pointed along the foot of the dunes, offering a welcome, each one decorated with seaweed banners and plastic flowers and shell necklaces. Bienvenue! Willkommen! ¡Bienvenido! Välkommen! Hoş geldin! Witaj! She didn’t see why they needed all those foreign languages. It was just showing off.

From the beach, the signs directed Maureen up a flight of wooden steps set into the edge of the dunes, leading to a cluster of chalets. The steps were so steep they were more of a ladder, and scattered with sand; even though there was a blue rope to hold onto, it wasn’t enough and she had to reach out to the thick grass for support. There were already tributes. A plastic wreath decorated with bright red baubles. A bunch of fake lilies. The wind was getting stronger and made a gushing sound all round her. Maureen approached the first of the chalets, a wooden house with rickety steps and a veranda, its door and windows boarded up with shutters and a padlock. The next chalet was painted green, with matching curtains at the windows, while another was more like a bungalow with slate roof tiles. The signs to Queenie’s Garden kept pointing ahead. She could make out the outline of some of the shapes she had seen on her computer, like totem poles, and she slowed. Suddenly she had no idea what she was going to do. All this time she had been thinking about seeing David and never once had it dawned on her to question what that actually meant. What would happen when she was finally standing in front of Queenie’s Garden.

Nothing Maureen had seen online had prepared her for seeing it in real life. Nothing she’d imagined either. The garden was even more of a mystery now that she was here. She had no idea where to look for David.

Beneath her feet there was rough grass, but ahead the ground became intricate patterns of shingle, flint and stones of different colors, set in squares and circles, and interplanted with skeletons of plants that had died back over winter, as well as gorse bushes shaped like candle flames. Between these stood pieces of driftwood, dominated by one tall piece at the center, while other monuments surrounding it were no bigger than spoons. They were made of all kinds of things. Spiraled pieces of iron, twisted links, rusted chains, with chimes of keys and holey stones, and scraps of plastic and wood. There were also banners that flapped between poles, and many, many glass jars containing candles. But the thing that astounded her most was the number of people.

Two men stood at the back of the garden, pointing out its various features, and nodding as if they agreed it was beautiful. A young couple were hand in hand, speechlessly absorbed in a pyramid of stones. Another woman sat on her coat with a notebook and pencil, sketching what she saw, while a man in a biker’s jacket was fixing a padlock to a chain. Maureen could see now that there was a kind of path through the garden that she had not noticed before, leading to the painted hut at the back. It was like looking at something you have never seen, such as the bottom of the ocean, where nature is a vast and infinitely more exotic version of what you imagined, and you feel very small for having given it such a poor expectation.

There was movement from a corner of the garden, and Maureen realized with a jolt that another woman was very close by, bent over, wearing a hat with two pompoms, one on each side of her head. She was probably in her early sixties and she seemed to be digging at the stones with a trowel.

Maureen stayed on the periphery, unwilling to go any further but not yet able to leave, hoping the garden would make sense to her if she just kept staring, while other people continued to enjoy it. At last the woman put down her trowel. “Can I help?” she called.

“No, thank you,” said Maureen.

So the woman stayed where she was and Maureen stayed where she was. She tried looking for David among the sculptures but she still had no idea what she was searching for—there was nothing that looked like David here—and just when she really needed them, there were no signs either. Besides, with all those other visitors in the garden, Maureen felt awkward and self-conscious. She tried walking a few feet to the left but it still made no sense to her so she went back to where she’d been before. The woman in the hat with two pompoms put down her trowel again and stood. “Excuse me? Are you lost?” she called.

“No. I’m fine.”

“Is there something you’re trying to find?”

“It’s okay. I can manage.”

The woman looked at Maureen a moment. Her hat seemed to accentuate the wrinkles in her face, like slashes in her cheeks. “Why don’t you come in?” she said. “Take a proper look round?”

A strange thing to say since there was no fence to separate what was inside from what was out. And yet instinctively Maureen understood what the woman meant. That there was a hallowed space, which was the garden, while everywhere else was not—everywhere else was ordinary dunes and marram grass. Maureen stayed pinned in the same spot, her hands tight-knit, until the woman came right up close, then took a step to one side, making a gesture with her hand as if inviting Maureen through an unseen gate.

“This way,” she said. She turned and made her passage through the garden.

Maureen dipped her head as she followed. Yet another thing she did not understand. Like crossing yourself when you enter a church, except that she was not a churchgoer. She did not even know where the woman was taking her.

The path was not a straight one, but went in curves around the boulders and pieces of driftwood and stone circles. Things flicked in the wind, like tiny pieces of washing, but as she passed, she saw they were photographs of many different faces and that there were written messages too and other strange mementos, like shoes and crosses, and keys and padlocks tucked between the stones. Candles were everywhere, as well as further sculptures made of bottle tops and pieces of colored plastic and foam. A gust of wind took up from the sea so that the ribbons and pieces of seaweed flew out and there was a clinking sound of bells and many chimes.

Maureen went slowly, as if she did not trust the stones beneath her feet—as if they might give way without warning. All she could think of was the day Queenie had come to visit with her flowers and waited while Maureen hung out her dead son’s washing. The other people in the garden looked up as she passed and some smiled. Once again, she experienced that old feeling of being the wrong shape for the situation in which she found herself. Of being an intruder. She wished that—all those years ago—she had been kinder to Queenie.

The woman said, “I’m Karen. I’m a volunteer. I work here twice a week. It’s your first time, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I thought as much. I remember my first time. I cried and cried. It has that effect.”

Karen smiled sympathetically at Maureen as if she were expecting her to weep, and Maureen turned away. The sun had broken through the cloud again and flared over the garden, catching the pieces of driftwood so that they appeared especially bright, their sides gold and purple. The chimes flashed silver.

“Are you a gardener?”

Maureen said she was, but just vegetables.

“Queenie grew vegetables too. She especially liked ornamental gourds.”

“Oh, I never tried those. I’m more—ordinary. Beans and, you know, potatoes and things.” She tightened the knot of her scarf.

“Most people come to visit in the summer, when the weather’s good. But Queenie loved it best in the winter. I feel the same. Of course, when you work in a garden all year, you get to know it like a person. Every part has a story. Did you meet her?”

“No.” She said it quickly.

“She was a very special woman. She left the garden to the people of Embleton Bay. At first no one was sure what to do with it. But it’s become a tourist attraction. Visitors come from all over the world. Even China.”

Maureen had no idea people might come that far. And no one would describe her as special, apart from her father when she was a child, and look where that had got her. She tried to smile but it didn’t happen.

“Then people began leaving things of their own here. Padlocks at first. We had so many padlocks. After that they brought more personal things, like photographs and poems in bottles and even their own sculptures. We took them all away. But we began to think that Queenie would have wanted those things to stay. She was a curator, after all.”

They passed several boulders that had been carved with names and a bright blue bird made of fragments of glass. Karen said, “Someone told me once that the garden was about love. Since then, I’ve heard a few people say that. They even say it makes a noise of its own but people will believe all sorts of things. It’s just the wind.” Her voice was quiet, as if she was talking to herself. “Now this little shoe?”

She pointed at a child’s shoe, so small it must have been a first one. It was weather-beaten to the point where the leather had lost its color and it was woven with ivy into a larger driftwood cross. There were shells too, all threaded with the ivy. “I am glad someone felt they could leave that here.”

Karen showed Maureen another sculpture, a heart shape, made of barbed wire. “I wonder what went on there,” she said.

After that she moved to a line of photographs and touched each face with her finger, marking its presence. There were totems made of driftwood and old garden tools and one with a model of a dog and another with a bird skull. She talked about the people who had brought memorials to the garden, like a man whose husband had died in a car accident and a farmer who had lost her home because of mad-cow disease back in the eighties. People from all walks of life, she said. “I love to hear their stories.”

“You mean they leave things?” Maureen still did not really get why the garden was considered beautiful. But even more she did not understand why people would feel free to leave pieces of themselves there. Things that were so deeply personal and private and could not be replaced.

Karen said there were still the original tributes in the garden that had been Queenie’s. She had found a place for her mother and father—she pointed at a monument that was made of a spade, and another that was a sturdy branch—and also a curtain of feathers. “These were some female artists she once lived with. But they’re flighty things. They’re always blowing away.” She laughed. “We have to keep finding new ones.”

They were in the center of the garden now, standing beside the tallest driftwood piece. Karen glanced up at it and said, “There was a man Queenie cared about, I believe. Yes. I think this might be him.”

Maureen was no longer hearing the words. She felt the shock in her own face. A kind of dropping away behind her eyes and mouth.

She looked at where the woman was pointing. It was a huge balk of timber. Ten feet or more. It was so strong it might have once been part of an old ship. Nevertheless she also knew that what Karen was saying to her was the truth. If Harold was anything, he was that piece of wood. Steadfast and solid. She would have liked to touch the surface, all those wrinkles and twists. To rest against the tall bulk of him and feel his goodness.

“But the only piece she ever gave a name to is the one she called David.”

Maureen was not ready. Her thoughts had slipped over to Harold; the words came to her as a blow, like being hit when you’re not even looking. To hear David’s name from the mouth of a woman she did not know was as shocking as visiting his body at the funeral parlor.

“David?” she said.

“He died young. He took his own life, I think.”

Maureen did not know what to say. She did not know how to arrange her face. She didn’t even know where to look.

“Which one is that, then?” she said. “Which one is David?”

“Well.” Karen smiled. “For a long time I got it wrong. I thought he was the figure over there.” She pointed to a piece of driftwood that was set apart from the others, with a hole worn right through it. It must have been about four feet tall, but so slim it was hard to see how it had not split because of the hole: you could see through it to the other side. “That’s not the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” Karen said quietly. “But it is one of them.”

“But it’s not David?”

“No. I don’t think that’s anyone. It’s just a piece of driftwood Queenie took pity on. David is the one over there.” She pointed to another figure, fastened in the shingle. “You see?”

Maureen was nothing but nerve endings. Oh, it was the most appalling thing. Crueler even than the rings of bruises around his neck that the undertaker had tried to cover with makeup. There were no words. There were no words for the horror she felt on looking at that terrible piece of driftwood. She felt dizzy. Mauled. The monument was a knotty V-shape, in height only about two feet, the wood weathered to dark gray, crooked and complicated, like a broken lyre, and worn away into sharp points at both ends. It was not a tragic structure, like the holed piece Karen had already shown her. This was angry; it was violent; it was separate and undeniable. Maureen thought of his bedroom that she had wrongly painted yellow. She thought of the tablet at the crematorium and the little green stones she was always tidying, and how he was not in either place, no matter how much she tried to find him. But this was David. This was him. Too fragile for the world and yet full of youth and complication and pomp and arrogance. She did not know how such a piece of wood could have survived the wind and rain and yet, secure in Queenie’s Garden, it had held fast. All those years she had been calling for David, all those years of waiting, and he’d been here all along. Queenie had taken him.

“Would you like to see more?” said Karen. “Or have you found what you were looking for?”

Maureen’s heart seemed to shrink inside her chest, trying to defend itself. It was the same sensation she’d had as a child, and during Harold’s walk, and again in Kate’s truck, of being measured against something she didn’t understand and would never get right.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” said Karen.

Maureen couldn’t speak. She nodded.

“Can I get you something? A glass of water?”

She managed one “No.” She managed one “Thank you.”

But she was almost not able to walk in a straight line as she hurried along the dunes and down the steps to the beach. And all the while she could feel Karen’s eyes on her, so that Maureen had the strangest feeling of watching herself from a distance, as if she had become a person alone and apart, even from herself.