The first day of school, Marin got up early and attempted to make a full fry-up for breakfast. She had a desire to provide Rebecca with something warm and nourishing; to be motherly in a way she had never been before.
She still hadn’t quite got the hang of the Rayburn, however; the hotplates were different temperatures in different areas, and she managed to burn the bacon and undercook the eggs. At least there was toast.
Rebecca came down in her uniform, a black blazer and trousers with a red tie, all of it with that starchy, shiny, too-new look and feel. Marin smiled and poured her a cup of tea from the new blue teapot. “Everything ready?”
“What’s there to get ready?” Rebecca answered as she sat down at the table. “I’m dressed, I have a school bag. That’s about it.”
“Right.” Marin had flutters in her stomach for Rebecca’s sake, or perhaps for her own. If Rebecca had a hard time at school… if there were mean girls or simply indifferent pupils who streamed past her without so much as a glance… she didn’t know how Rebecca would react, with sullen silence or breezy determination, and she had no idea how she would react to Rebecca’s reaction, either way. It was an endless loop of uncertainty and ignorance.
There wouldn’t, Marin knew, be any tears. There had been no tears for either of them since she’d got the phone call in Boston and had flown the red-eye to London, arriving in Hampshire less than twenty-four hours after her father had died. She’d picked Rebecca up from the friend’s house where she’d been staying, and for a moment they’d simply stared at each other, two strangers brought together only by tragic circumstances. Then Marin had stepped forward and attempted a clumsy hug that Rebecca had ducked out of before walking to the car.
Now Marin served Rebecca the burned bacon and runny eggs, accompanied by several slices of toast. “I’ve got the hang of the toaster, at least,” she joked as she pushed the butter and jam towards her. “Sorry about the rest.”
“I’m not that hungry, anyway.” Rebecca did not so much as pick up her fork, and Marin tried not to feel stung. Perhaps it really was that unappetizing.
“You should eat a good breakfast, Rebecca,” she said after a moment, and her sister shook her head.
“Don’t fuss, Marin, please.”
“I’m not fussing,” Marin answered, trying to keep her tone mild rather than cajoling. “But it’s my duty to take care of you—”
“I don’t want to be your duty,” Rebecca snapped, and Marin stared at her in surprise.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” she said and Rebecca lifted her chin.
“Are you sure about that?”
“Rebecca,” Marin said helplessly, because she had never encountered such unmasked hostility from her before. “Of course you’re not a duty…”
“Be honest, Marin,” Rebecca cut across her. “If my parents hadn’t died, you never would have even come back to England. You wouldn’t even know me.”
“That’s true,” Marin answered after a pause. The “my parents” rang in her ears, echoed through her. He’d been her father too, but Rebecca hardly ever seemed to realize that. “But that doesn’t mean I was reluctant to do it.”
“You didn’t want this,” Rebecca retorted, a challenge in her voice, and Marin spread her hands.
“Of course I didn’t. I’d much rather you were home with – with your parents, everyone safe and well. But I’m trying—”
And then, all at once, Rebecca deflated. “I know you are,” she said and grabbed her coat. “I need to get going. I’m meeting Natalie at the end of the church lane.”
Still at a loss, Marin watched her walk out of the kitchen. Rebecca hadn’t even touched the breakfast she’d so painstakingly, if ineptly, made.
The front door slammed and Marin sighed, feeling the house stretch emptily around her. She cleared the dishes from the table and then poured herself a cup of tea, wondering what she should do now. She supposed she could get her laptop out, send a few emails mentioning her new freelancing ambitions. If she were feeling truly ambitious, she’d design her own website offering IT services, or place some adverts online. As it was, she simply sat there and sipped her tea and tried not to feel miserable and more alone than she had since she’d first taken on the job of raising Rebecca.
It was a chilly, grey day with a wind coming straight from the sea buffeting the house as if it were a ship in a storm. She could see and even feel the glass of the windows flex, the walls shudder. The kitchen was warm, the house empty; Marin was torn between feeling both cosy and lonely. With a sigh she finished her tea and then tidied all the breakfast things, scraping the eggs and bacon into the bin.
Then she bundled up in her coat and wellington boots, a scarf wrapped around the lower half of her face, and with her pair of garden shears in hand, she headed outside.
The wind hit her straight in the face, nearly propelling her back into the house, but she adopted the now-familiar pose of hunched shoulders and lowered head and walked into it and around to the walled garden, the frost-tipped grass crunching under her boots, and opened the door. Inside the garden it was sheltered a bit from the wind; she lowered her scarf to stare at the brambles for a moment. They still looked as impenetrable as they had yesterday, and the day before that. Forget magic beans or secret gardens; the brambles reminded her of the forest of thorns that grew up around the castle in Sleeping Beauty. Choking and overgrown. Endless and life-threatening.
She stared at it all for a moment more and then, taking a deep breath and pulling on the pair of heavy-duty garden gloves she’d bought, she went to work with the secateurs.
The first snip was immensely satisfying, as was the thorny branch that fell to the ground. It only took a few minutes of snipping away for Marin to realize, however, how ineffectual her little pair of secateurs really was. And yet still she snipped, cutting a tiny swathe through the vast, thorny sea, determined to do something. And, she realized, to work off the unexpected anger that had surged through her when Rebecca had walked out the door. She’d been numb for so long, since her own mother’s death, and then recently so focused on what Rebecca was feeling. For most of her life she’d felt as if she were watching everything from a distance, as if she were always a spectator standing on the sidelines. This was the first time she’d acknowledged and accepted how she felt. How angry she was.
Yes, taking care of Rebecca was a duty. What had she expected? That Marin wanted to abandon her life – what little she’d had, a few friends, a handful of acquaintances – and play parent to a half-sister she barely knew? But she’d done it, willingly, and that, she thought with another savage snip, should count for something. Should mean something, duty or not.
“Whoa.”
Marin stopped, breathing hard, the secateurs still in hand as she turned to see Joss Fowler coming through the garden door.
“You’ve been hard at it,” he remarked as he propped one shoulder against the stone wall. “With a little pair of secateurs.”
Marin let out a hollow laugh, for she could certainly see now how absurd it was, to be tackling a quarter-acre of overgrown garden with a tool meant for a much smaller task. She also realized how dishevelled she must look; her hair had come half out of her ponytail, and her face was flushed from exertion. She’d cleared less than a foot of ground.
“I didn’t have anything else,” she said and Joss glanced round the garden.
“What you really need is a strimmer,” he said. “Or even a scythe.”
She pictured herself swinging a scythe through the bramble like some kind of green-thumbed Grim Reaper, and she shook her head. “The truth is, I don’t really know the first thing about what I’m doing.” And she realized, after she’d said it, that she meant that in all sorts of ways.
“Well, there’s not much to clearing weeds,” Joss said with a little smile. “Just have at it, but preferably with a power tool that will get the job done.” He nodded towards the shears. “Trying to clear this lot with those is like cutting grass with a pair of nail clippers.”
Marin made a face. “I suppose you’re right.”
“I have a strimmer you can borrow, if you like.”
“To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what a strimmer is.”
“An undergrowth cutter. You could clear this whole place in a couple of hours. Of course, then there’s the matter of roots. You’d need to hire a rotovator to till the ground and make it ready for planting.”
Marin sagged at this, once again realizing how overwhelming a job clearing the garden would be. And she wasn’t even sure why she was doing it.
“I can help you,” Joss said unexpectedly. “If you want.”
“You’re busy—” Marin began, and he shrugged.
“When I have a slow period,” Joss allowed. “I don’t mind. It’s interesting, this.” He nodded towards the mossy stones beneath the bramble, and then, frowning a little, he walked towards them and crouched down.
“Do you see something?” Marin asked, excitement mounting inside her even though she had no idea what Joss could possibly see besides what was there – weeds and rocks.
He reached through the bramble and extricated something; Marin stepped closer to see.
“It’s a… pipe?” she said, frowning, and Joss sat back on his heels.
“A bit of rusted piping,” he confirmed. “I imagine it provided heat for the greenhouse, if that’s what this was.”
“What else could it be?”
“I don’t know, but a heated greenhouse would have been quite an expensive endeavour. Still.” He handed her the bit of piping; flakes of rust fell off in her hands. “Worthwhile, I suppose, if they grew exotic things like melons or oranges.”
Marin turned the piping over in her hands; she felt a shiver of something, although she could not name the emotion. Curiosity, or perhaps something deeper.
“Your sister got off to school today?” Joss asked, and Marin looked up.
“Yes… for better or worse.” He raised an eyebrow at that, and she blurted, “I don’t know what I’m doing with her.”
“What do you mean?”
“Her parents – my father and her mother – died in a car accident four months ago. I was appointed her guardian. But I don’t have the first clue about raising a teenager, or—” She stopped suddenly, for to finish that sentence, to admit how little relationship experience she had at all, felt too revealing. Too pathetic.
Joss nodded slowly. “I think raising teenagers is hard for anyone, but you’ve got the deck stacked against you. She’ll be dealing with grief as well.”
“Yes,” Marin said with a nod. “And I don’t know how to handle that either. Some days she’s cheerful and bright, and other times she falls into these sullen silences that I don’t know how to handle. And she’s never cried, as far as I know. I feel like she should, somehow.” Part of Marin couldn’t believe she was confessing to all this, but she needed to talk to somebody, and while someone like Jane Hatton – capable, experienced, understanding – seemed to be the obvious choice, Marin didn’t feel like admitting all her inadequacies to someone who, at least on the surface, seemed to have it all together.
Joss gazed at her steadily with those thoughtful brown eyes and didn’t judge, didn’t suggest some seemingly easy solution. He just listened.
“It’ll come,” he said after a moment. “Four months isn’t a long time to learn to grieve.”
“I never thought of that,” Marin said slowly. “Learning to grieve. It’s not natural, is it?”
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Death is both the least and most natural thing in the world.”
She sensed, from the way he spoke, that he’d some experience with death and grief, but he didn’t volunteer any information and she didn’t know how to ask. “Thank you,” she said instead, and he surprised her by answering: “And you need to grieve as well.”
Marin stared at him, felt a lump form in her throat. No one had mentioned her loss in the four months since her father and Diana had died. It had all been about Rebecca, which she understood and accepted, because Rebecca was young and she’d lost both her parents instead of just one. It was a far greater tragedy for a fifteen-year-old girl to become an orphan than for a thirty-seven-year-old woman to lose a father she’d already been estranged from. Marin understood that, of course she did, and yet…
“I’m not sure I know how,” she told Joss, her voice little more than a whisper. The lump was growing bigger in her throat, making it hard to talk. She didn’t want to cry. Not here, not in front of Joss who, as kind as he was, was still a virtual stranger.
“You’ll learn, same as your sister.” He gave her a rueful smile. “It’s not easy.”
“No.” She blinked quickly, swallowed past the lump. “At least I have a project,” she half joked, gesturing to the garden.
“It is that.” He frowned again, nodding towards the crumbling foundation of stones. “Seems a strange place for a greenhouse.”
“Does it?”
“I would have thought it would have been up there” – he nodded towards the far end of the garden – “where it would catch more sunlight.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t a greenhouse after all.”
He nodded towards the pipe in her hand. “With heating, though?”
“It does seem a bit strange,” Marin allowed, although the truth was, she didn’t know the first thing about where you would put a greenhouse. “I was thinking of asking someone from the village’s historical society about it. Someone might know something. There’s a photo of the garden in the village hall.”
“Is there?”
Briefly she told him about the picture of the girl, although she couldn’t articulate how it fascinated her. “People have said it’s most likely one of the vicar’s daughters, Katherine or Eleanor Sanderson. I don’t know which. Of course, it could be someone else entirely.”
“Yes, well, it’s a good idea to try someone at the historical society.”
“I’ll let you know if I find something out.” She shifted awkwardly, aware just how much she’d revealed to him. “Thanks for the use of your undergrowth cutter or strimmer, or whatever it is.”
“I’ll bring it over tomorrow, if you like. I don’t have need of it at the moment, and the weather’s meant to be dry.”
Marin nodded. She knew she should really be spending the time organizing her own life, setting up her freelance business, but the garden called to her more than her laptop did.
Still, after Joss had left, she went back into the house and dutifully powered up her laptop. She sat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea at her elbow and began drafting an email to all her work contacts, informing them of where she’d moved and that she was planning to work on a freelance basis.
Within a few minutes she became absorbed in what she was doing; she hadn’t even thought about work in months, and she realized, as she considered possibilities, that she’d missed it. She’d missed something that she could call her own.
She made herself a sandwich around lunchtime and kept working, and it wasn’t until she noticed the shadows lengthening across the floor that she realized it was nearly four o’clock, and time for Rebecca to come home.
Guiltily Marin cleared away her laptop and papers and put her dishes in the sink. She’d wanted the house to be tidy and welcoming when Rebecca came home; she’d even thought about making cookies. But everything was as Rebecca had left it; a smell of grease from the bacon frying this morning still hung in the air.
Quickly Marin put the kettle on and opened the window to let in some fresh air. She saw some daffodils in the garden, struggling through the weeds, and she went outside and picked a few, arranging them in a water glass at the centre of the table. There. The kitchen was a little more homely, a little more welcoming now.
The front door opened and then slammed shut, and Marin heard Rebecca’s footsteps coming down the hall. She pinned a bright smile on her face as her sister came into the kitchen.
“How was school?” It was, Marin thought, the question of every parent upon their child’s re-entry into the home, and Rebecca’s answer was probably the same as every other teenager’s.
“Fine.” She dumped her bag of books by the table as the kettle began to shrill. Marin whisked it off the Rayburn.
“Tea?”
“No thanks.”
She’d already had several cups of tea, and so with nothing to busy herself, she simply stood there and tried to smile. “So tell me about it. How are your teachers? Did you meet any nice kids?” She cringed at her over-bright tone, her ignorant questions.
“Teachers are teachers,” Rebecca answered with a shrug. “Kids are kids.”
Which told her precisely nothing. “Do you think you’re going to like it there?” Marin tried again, and Rebecca just shrugged and picked at her nails. “Rebecca…” Marin began, and her sister must have heard something in her tone, for she glanced up warily, waiting. “If you don’t like it here, you must tell me. We don’t have to stay. I don’t want you to be unhappy.”
Rebecca sighed. “It’s not being here,” she said, and Marin waited for more. “I just thought it would be different, you know?” Rebecca continued after a moment. “I thought I’d be able to start again properly. But I can’t.”
Marin nodded her understanding. You could change houses or towns or even countries, but you couldn’t change the fact that your parents were dead. That your life wasn’t turning out the way you’d expected.
“That’s understandable,” she said. “But you know, it’s only been four months since – since your parents died.” She never knew how to refer to her father and Rebecca’s mother; saying “your parents” made Marin feel removed from their deaths, as if he hadn’t been her father too, just like Rebecca had said: “I forget he was your father too.” I don’t, Marin thought. I never forget.
“I know,” Rebecca said. “Sometimes I wish I could just fast forward a couple of years, when things – when things will feel different.”
And the process of grieving would be finished – except Marin didn’t think it ever finished. She still missed her mother every day of her life, more than she could say. Certainly more than she’d tell Rebecca, but then Rebecca had never asked about Marin’s mother. It was as if she’d never existed.
“I was in the garden this morning,” she said instead. “I cleared a bit of the bramble away. And Joss found this.”
“Joss?” Rebecca raised her eyebrows.
“You remember Joss Fowler, the man we met in the churchyard? He opened the garden door?”
“Of course I remember Joss. I just didn’t realize he was stopping by now, helping you with the garden.” Rebecca gave her a teasing smile, and Marin started to blush.
“He isn’t – I mean, not like – oh Rebecca.” She shook her head and Rebecca laughed.
“He’s handsome, isn’t he? In a rugged way. And he looks about your age.”
“I have no idea how old he is.”
“Well, why shouldn’t you fancy him?”
She shook her head again. “Because I’m not a teenager looking for someone to have a crush on.”
“But you’re single, aren’t you? You haven’t mentioned a boyfriend before.”
“Of course I’m single.” And had been for a very long time. Her list of boyfriends was comprised of only two unremarkable relationships – one during university, and one in Boston. Neither had left her with anything close to a broken heart.
“Well, then?” Rebecca raised her eyebrows again. “He must fancy you, to stop by.”
“He’s not a teenager either, Rebecca. He was just helping me out.” And listening to her, more than anyone else had in a long time. Why shouldn’t you fancy him? To Rebecca it was simple, but for Marin it felt incredibly fraught and complex. Because she didn’t really do relationships, didn’t know how. She’d cut herself off from true intimacy ever since her mother had died, when her father had cut himself off from her. And she didn’t know how to reconnect, not in a real way. A scattering of friends, whose updates she sporadically checked on Facebook or who sent the occasional, cheerfully curious email, didn’t count. In any case, her fumbling attempts with Rebecca were hard enough.
“I barely know him,” she said, her tone final, but Rebecca just smiled and leaned back in her chair, as mercurial as ever.
“Uh-huh, sure,” she said.
Marin did not reply.