14
Winter Bouquet
After she left Kate, Maureen did something she did not understand. She drove into Hexham and asked a stranger where she might find a bookshop. She bought a copy of Anna Dupree’s paperback, and then she found a florist and chose a winter bouquet. She did not understand but she still went and did those things. After all, they were only two more in a whole journey of things she did not understand. She put them on the passenger seat, and drove back to the golf course. She carried them to Queenie’s Garden for her third and final visit.
Her parting with Kate had been affectionate and slow. Maureen had not spoken about her night but she believed Kate might have sensed something, without fully knowing what it was, as she straightened the wing-back chair and paused a moment to smooth a ruck in the upholstery. She helped Maureen pack her suitcase and made one of her pots of coffee, which they drank in their coats on the plastic chairs outside. She gave Maureen a bag of freshly ground beans to take home for Harold, and they promised to keep in touch and see one another again. Then, to Maureen’s surprise and pleasure, Kate had taken Maureen’s face between her palms and kissed it with a completeness that reminded her of putting a stamp on a letter. “I won’t forget you lying in my truck,” she said. “Whatever happens, I will always keep that memory of you here.”
By the time she was walking past the golf course toward the dunes it was already midafternoon, though the sun had broken through and lit the land crosswise, throwing long, spindly shadows, and catching a nearby cloud, so that it glowed like a tangerine above the bay. There was only one other person in the garden—a man sitting in the far corner—dressed in a robe under an anorak and hat, his head bowed, holding prayer beads. There was rain in the air, but only light. It wouldn’t hurt her.
Maureen made her way past Harold’s driftwood sculpture, and David’s, toward the unnamed one with a hole for a heart. She found a good place for the book beside a statue made of bottle tops and corks, with an additional garland of bright pink paper flowers, and she laid it there.
“I hope you write another blockbuster, Anna Dupree,” she said. “I really do. But I hope you don’t mind if I don’t read it.”
She turned now to the holed piece of driftwood that people believed had no name. Because it was Maureen. She knew it. She had known it since that night in the guesthouse. She knelt and placed her hand where the hole was, and for a moment it was full again. The hurt was gone. Her anger too, and her resentment. At last they were not there. She had been wrong: this brittle piece of driftwood was not an act of unkindness on Queenie’s part, or even pity. It was one of forgiveness. Queenie had understood Maureen’s grief that day they’d met beside the washing line, and done the best she could to give it a place, just as Maureen now knew her letter for Harold had been a letting go of love. She was glad she had kept it in a shoebox. Without any exchange of words, they had taken up each other’s loss, and given meaning to what was unbearable.
Maureen remained kneeling, all alone in that garden she did not understand. Once again there was a rip-split in the cloud and the light shone down on the sea, catching flecks of rain, so that the air was filled with specks of snow-white brightness. A kestrel breasted the sea wind and hung, wings hooked. Maureen watched it for so long she suddenly felt able to see as far as the bird saw, and beyond.
All of Northumberland stretched away, swelling and wimpling toward the south—over the patchwork of low hills and plains, flint walls, patterns of fields, the valleys and fells, over the Cheviot Hills, the backbone of the Pennines, the limestone gorges of the Peak District, the western velvet spur of the Forest of Bowland, the Yorkshire Dales, the rolling Cotswolds, the Mendips, the chalk coasts, the mighty rivers, Tyne, Ouse, Trent, Thames, Exe, the wetlands, forests and woods, the trees that were so various they appeared beneath her like moss and algae, the network of roads and railways and canals, the factories and warehouses, the sprawling cities, the sewage works and toxic heaps, the asbestos, the plastic, the landfill—all the way to the heather-purple peaks of Dartmoor, and a blue estuary, and a road of little houses, each with a garden, where Harold gazed up at the sky, watching for birds. She imagined the edges of the world shifting slowly and she stayed in its mysterious motion as her mind made windings deep into the earth through holes and runnels, where closely woven grasses hid the sky. She followed the ancient path of water and saw the curlicues of buried shells, she followed beetles into scrolls of leaves, and on and on, deeper and deeper, through to where larvae were buried, and she was no more than an eyeless globe in the dark, or a mantle of roots creeping out its threads. Then the kestrel dropped out of view, and once more she was in Queenie’s Garden.
“Well,” she said, coming to, “Maureen, Maureen. Now you’ve finally lost your marbles.”
Maureen stared at all the driftwood sculptures and the seed heads like umbrellas. I am the world’s guest, she thought. And suddenly she understood. She understood what David had meant when he was a boy. She had lived her life as if she was owed something extra because he had been taken away, and other women’s sons had not. She thought of Harold watching for birds and how his face lit up when he saw a bluethroat. To have lived a whole life and then find wonder in a tiny creature covered with feathers, weighing no more than a coin. What was it all for, if not for that? She felt the painful shock of joy that floods in, like blood pushing into a limb that has been starved. It was about forgiveness, the whole story. Harold’s pilgrimage and Queenie’s letter, and now Maureen’s winter journey too. The chimes and necklaces of stones moved in the wind and so did the seed heads. Yes, they said. Yes, Maureen! Everything was about that. She thought of all the strangers who had found a resting place for their losses that were too terrible to bear. The padlocks for love, the paper crosses, the photographs, the keys and flowers, homemade relics and hundreds of candles, the poems and messages. Forgive me, forgive me, for continuing to live when you are gone. The essential loneliness of people was there, wherever you cast your eye—it was in a service station, it was in a bookshop, it was in a parked car by the side of the road—so the things they did to try and bear the loss were choices that required respect. Such acts of love were only so many different ways of saying the same thing, because really there were no words to say.
Maureen got to her feet and laid her winter bouquet against the V-shaped monument. Queenie had been right to place David in her garden. He was not Maureen’s lost son, he was himself. He belonged to no one but himself.
“Thank you, Queenie,” she said, and she found, to her surprise, that she was weeping.
From the car park, Maureen rang Harold. She told him she would drive through the evening and be home very late, though she wanted to drop off a card for a night-security man who had been helpful near Exeter. To all this he said yes. Yes, of course, goodness, yes. She must drive carefully and stop whenever she needed. If she wanted to, she must find a place to sleep. He couldn’t wait to see her, but the most important thing was that she was safe. Then she asked, “What have you two eaten today?”
“Oh, we’ve eaten like kings. Rex and I had sandwiches.”
“What did you put inside?”
“The sandwiches?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think we put anything inside them.”
“So they were bread, then? Really they were bread.”
“Yes,” he said, laughing as if this was a happy new word he hadn’t come across before. “Did you hear that, Rex? Our sandwiches were bread!”
Maureen took one last look across the bay toward Queenie’s Garden. Brave things had been happening in the world, even though she hadn’t noticed. Tiny black packages of buds on the branches and the smallest of shoots from the ground, as green as jewelry. The wind felt sharp and there was still a low ache in her neck, but she experienced no pain.
Maureen stayed a while longer, reluctant to give up the last of the day. Reluctant even to give up her solitude. It was so peaceful. In the distance, Queenie’s Garden waved and sparkled. She watched the clouds frill with gold against the bracken-red sky, and the light that tipped upward in floods, even though the sun was no more than a lozenge on the horizon. A flock of tiny brown birds swooped down to a winter bush, chit-chattering away, like gossips on a street corner. What was it they were saying? Whatever it was, she liked it. So busy, so loud! Tchink, tchink, Haw haw haw! Tsee, tsee! Choo choo! She couldn’t say how and, even if she could, she didn’t need to, but she knew she was the happiest she had been in a long time.
“Maureen,” she said quietly. “Maureen. Maureen.”
Then she got into the car to make the journey home.