That night Rebecca and Marin got ready for the ceilidh. The wind had started up again and rain spattered against the rattling windowpanes. Marin peered outside at the darkening gloom and wondered if it was actually worth walking the quarter-mile up the high street to the village hall.
“It’s atrocious out,” she called to Rebecca, who had been trying on different outfits in her bedroom. “It’s almost putting me off.”
“Oh, don’t,” Rebecca answered, flouncing into Marin’s bedroom in a ruffled mini skirt and colourful tights. “It’s just a bit of rain.”
“More than a bit,” Marin answered. She was glad Rebecca was looking forward to the ceilidh, but she didn’t know how to handle her half-sister in her determinedly cheerful moods any better than in her slumps. “Are you going to dance?” she asked, and Rebecca did a little twirl.
“Of course I am, and you are too. That’s why we’re going, isn’t it?”
“To meet people, I thought,” Marin answered. She did not relish the thought of dancing; she thought it quite likely that she would make a fool of herself. But she supposed she would do it if it made Rebecca happy. Anything to distract her from her grief.
“Do you miss him?” Rebecca asked abruptly and Marin turned around, startled.
“Pardon?”
Rebecca nodded towards the photograph Marin had put on top of the chest of drawers, of her and her father when she’d been fourteen. “Do you miss him?” she asked again and then added without waiting for Marin’s reply, “Do you know, sometimes I forget he was your father too.”
Marin blinked, a little stung, although she would never admit it. “Well,” she answered, “I’m a lot older than you. It’s an easy thing to forget.”
“It’s not just that,” Rebecca said after a moment. “It’s that you never were around much, were you?”
It didn’t actually sound like a question, and Marin wasn’t sure if she should answer it. In any case, Rebecca answered it for her. “I suppose you were busy with university and then jobs…”
“Yes,” Marin agreed. It was easier simply to agree, and it was true, up to a point. “Yes, I was.”
“But you were close?” Rebecca pressed, nodding again to the photograph. “When you were younger?”
Marin glanced at the photograph, the only time when she’d actually felt as if her father cared about her since her mother had died; felt as if he remembered that even though her mother had died, she was still alive and craved his love and attention. “We…” she trailed off helplessly. She had happy memories of her father, of her family, before her mother’s death. Blurred now by time and grief, but she still held on to them. Remembered the feel of his arms around her, or him tossing her in the air. But after it was just the two of them, there had been nothing but an awful, frozen silence she had not been able to break. An indifference that had hurt worse than any actual unkindness could have. But she didn’t want to explain all of that to Rebecca; didn’t want to reveal the sorrow she still felt at a loss that was decades rather than months old. “It’s getting late,” she said instead. “We should head over to the ceilidh.”
The rain had downgraded to a steady drizzle, and after bundling up in waterproof jackets and boots, they headed out into the dark night. Other people were walking along the high street towards the village hall, and despite the rain and wind, there was a convivial, expectant feeling in the air.
They ran into the Hattons coming down the vicarage lane, and Jane waved to Marin, who introduced Rebecca to the family. Jane went through her own haphazard introductions; her son Ben was bouncing around and Merrie was tugging insistently on her father’s sleeve. Natalie, the girl around the same age as Rebecca, gave her a guarded hello that Rebecca answered in kind, like opening moves in a game of chess. Marin hoped they would get along.
The hall was crowded with people of all ages as they entered, shedding their coats and exchanging their boots for shoes in the foyer. Inside children raced around as the band warmed up on a makeshift stage; a bar in the corner was doing a brisk business in boxed wine and orange squash.
On the walk over, Marin had noticed, Rebecca and Natalie had begun talking about school; now Natalie led her over to the bar and they got themselves glasses of squash. Marin heard Natalie say something about the biology teacher, and Rebecca laughed.
She turned away, glad for Rebecca’s sake that she had a friend but feeling unsettled and a little lonely on her own. Jane and her husband Andrew had gone off to greet someone else, so she stood alone. Then she saw someone standing by himself on the other side of the room, and it took her a moment to recognize who it was: Joss Fowler, the man who’d been pruning roses in the churchyard. He saw her staring and raised his glass in something of a wave; Marin smiled awkwardly back and then, having nothing else to do, she started over towards him.
“Hello,” she said as she approached; she could feel an awkward, uncertain smile contorting her face and so she stopped. Joss smiled back, easy and slow.
“You all right?”
This was, Marin had learned over the last few days, Cumbrian for “How are you?” It had disconcerted her at first, because it seemed as if people were asking because they knew she wasn’t, that they could see all the uncertainty and sorrow and fear she was trying to hide. Now she was a little more prepared for it and she answered, “Oh, yes. Yes. Fine.”
“Have you sorted your door?” he asked, and after a second she realized he was talking about their garden.
“We haven’t been able to open it, no. But I saw from my bedroom window that it leads to a walled garden. It looks like mostly bramble, but we’re still curious.”
“I could open it for you, if you wanted. Latch is rusted shut, most likely.”
“Yes, it is—”
“I’m working in the churchyard tomorrow. I’ll come round, if you like.”
“That would be brilliant,” Marin said, and this time when she smiled nothing felt awkward about it. She looked forward to telling Rebecca that they’d be able to open the door.
The band had started to play, and with a screech a microphone turned on and a man at the front began to speak.
“Welcome, everyone! Very glad you could join us at Goswell’s annual ceilidh. We’ll start with a basic country dance, if everyone could get into a circle…”
Marin glanced at Joss. “Are you going to…” she began and he shook his head and stepped back.
“Two left feet, I’m afraid.”
She felt a strange mixture of both disappointment and relief at this admission, and was just about to confess to the same, when Rebecca hurried towards her and grabbed her hand.
“Come on, Marin. You’re not getting out of this one!”
“Oh, but…” Marin began, but Rebecca was already pulling her towards the centre of the hall, where people were arranging themselves in a rather lopsided circle.
The man at the microphone guided them through the first dance, which involved walking around the circle one way, and then the other, and then going in and out. “It feels like the Hokey-Cokey,” Marin whispered to Rebecca, who grinned back.
They went through several dances, each one becoming more intricate, until the band took a break, and with relief Marin headed towards the bar. She hadn’t minded dancing, even if she’d felt a little silly, but she’d been conscious of Joss Fowler standing behind her, watching.
Jane joined her at the bar, looking flushed and happy. “Right, that’s my workout for the week!” Marin smiled and took a glass of wine from the bar. She was terrible at making small talk, but Jane seemed determined.
“So Rebecca’s looking forward to starting school next week? It’s a good school, Copeland Academy. Big, but they do seem to care about the pupils. Ben was having trouble with his reading last year and they sorted him out quite quickly. Merrie, my youngest, is at the village school. It’s much smaller, but a lovely place. Cosy.” She let out a self-conscious laugh. “Sorry, I’m rabbiting on, aren’t I?”
“It’s all right,” Marin assured her. “Rebecca and Natalie seem to be getting on, at any rate.”
“Yes, they do.” Jane glanced at the two girls, whispering together as they stood against the wall. “There’s a boy, Will, who lives on the other side of the churchyard, in the old gardener’s cottage. He’s in the same year as Natalie and Rebecca. They can all ride the bus together. It picks up on the Beach Road.”
“Goodness, there are a lot of church buildings, aren’t there?” Marin said with a smile. “It’s so interesting, the history of the place.”
“Oh, I think so,” Jane enthused. “Do you know, when we first moved into the old vicarage, I found a shopping list? Such a small thing, and yet it fascinated me. I did a bit of research and discovered the last woman who lived in the vicarage was Alice James, back in the 1930s. She had quite an interesting life, in the end.”
“Did she?” Marin thought about the walled garden, and wondered if Alice James had tended it. “What was she like?”
Jane started to tell her about Alice, and a war evacuee called Vera, and Marin listened with interest.
“So there are church records?” she asked and Jane nodded.
“Yes, Simon’s been very helpful. And there is a village historical society too – they’ve done a marvellous job of preserving old documents and writing up a little history of Goswell through the years.”
“I’d like to read that—”
“Are you interested in Bower House?” Jane asked. “I read that the incumbent at the time sold it to the diocese in 1929. That would have been the man before David James – Andrew Sanderson, I think his name was.”
“Actually,” Marin said, “I’m more interested in the garden. The walled one, between the church and Bower House.”
“I didn’t even realize there was a walled garden there,” Jane said in surprise. “I suppose I just thought it was the church wall, separating the properties.”
“You can see it from our upstairs window. There’s something there, but it’s all just bramble now.”
“Well, you never know what you might find,” Jane told her, “beneath all the bramble.”
The band was starting up again, and despite Rebecca’s entreaties, Marin didn’t join the dancing and stood against the wall instead. Rebecca partnered with Natalie for a country reel, and as the dance started Marin wandered around the hall, looking at the old photographs of Goswell framed and hanging on the walls, each with a typed explanation underneath. The historical society was indeed alive and well.
She studied a photograph of the high street, recognizing the bed and breakfast she and Rebecca had stayed at on their first night, although in the picture, taken in 1909, it was a farmhouse. The house on the other side of the street, now a private dwelling, had been a poultry dealer’s and greengrocer’s. Fascinated by the glimpse into what Goswell would have been like all those years ago, Marin peered closer at the photograph; she could see in the background there was a sign for a tailor’s and another one for a confectioner’s. She wondered how many shops the village had once boasted, compared to its lone post office and few pubs now.
She moved on to the next photograph, this one of the sweep of beach, minus the café that had been built in the 1930s, and with a single, ramshackle building in the foreground that had apparently been built to house telegraph wires.
The music stopped and everyone clapped before the man with the microphone – Jane had told her his name was Derek Williams – started again with instructions. Marin moved to the next photograph.
It was of a young woman with dark hair and striking eyes, staring straight at the camera, one hand outstretched, a butterfly having alighted onto her fingertips. She was unsmiling, with an almost wild intensity about her expression that both fascinated and unsettled Marin.
Behind the girl a young man with a shock of dark hair underneath a flat cap stood, watching her with a look of such longing on his face that Marin felt as if she’d intruded on a private moment. They were in a garden, and when she read the placard underneath, the breath rushed from her lungs:
Thought to have been taken in the garden of Bower House, circa 1920.
She glanced up again at the photograph, and recognized the stone walls in the background, the open door framing the picture, painted black instead of its current white. This was the walled garden. Her and Rebecca’s garden.
“Marin?” Rebecca came up to her, tugging on her sleeve. “It’s the last dance. You have to join in this time!”
“Rebecca, look.” Marin pointed to the photograph. “It’s the garden, the walled garden behind Bower House.”
“Is it?” Rebecca peered at the photograph before nodding. “Wow. Cool. Now are you coming?”
Marin let herself be led towards the centre of the hall; she joined hands with Andrew Hatton and a man she didn’t know on her left. As the dance started, she felt a surge of excitement at the thought of the photograph, and she reflected that now she was more interested in the garden than Rebecca was. She was looking forward even more to when Joss Fowler came and finally opened the door.