Goswell, West Cumberland, October 1919
The rain lashes against the windows and the sky is dark with lowering clouds as she gazes out at the lawn now awash in puddles and steeped in mud. It makes her ache to remember how only a few months ago Jack was out there, toiling in the hot sun – it had been such an unusually warm summer for West Cumberland – and the lawn had been verdant, the garden so full of beauty and life. It had all looked so lovely, and her father had been so pleased.
She presses a hand to her thudding heart and turns away from the window, and the view of mud and gloom. As she walks through the house she can hear Tilly, their housemaid, humming under her breath as she moves around to stoke the fires burning in every fireplace on this grey November day. In the kitchen Mrs Stanton is starting on supper, and she can hear the busy clang of copper pots. She passes her father’s study, and hears him clear his throat, and then the rustle of papers.
All is well. Or as well as it could be, in the year since Walter’s death.
She walks towards the kitchen where the hall narrows. She thinks about going upstairs to change into her walking boots, but there seems little point and she does not want to have her mother call to her from the bedroom and ask her to come in and read a few verses of the Bible, a bit of poetry, something to while away the afternoon.
She won’t take a coat either, or even a wrap. She stands by the kitchen door, waits until Mrs Stanton has gone into the larder and then slips like a ghost – already, she feels like a ghost, and she wonders if Walter must have felt this way, if he had known – into the kitchen, out the back door, into the little courtyard where the coal is kept. Through the gates and around past the old stables, along the path that leads to Bower House where Grandmama lives, on the other side of the church.
All around her the churchyard is wet and dark, the bare branches dripping with rain, heaps of soggy leaves clumped by the headstones. Jack should clear those, she thinks, before she remembers. Jack is gone.
She walks down the path and around to Grandmama’s garden, the gate to the walled garden in front of her. She knows if Grandmama looked out the window of her dining room she would see her there, standing in front of the wooden door, ivy curling around its arched top. Five hundred years ago it had been the herb garden for the monks, or so her father said, before the Reformation. Now it is her garden, hers and Jack’s, and it deserves her farewell.
Already she is soaked and her feet are numb. The rain is relentless, the wind from the sea cold and unforgiving. So unforgiving. Yet after a few moments she forgets the wind, the rain; she feels strangely serene and suddenly surprisingly buoyant because she knows that there is no going back now, and that knowledge brings only relief.
She struggles with the latch to the walled garden, a few rooks wheeling and screeching above her, as if they sense her unnatural purpose. She knows that if anyone came along now they would see her soaked and shivering in the middle of a garden, wrestling with a latch. Yet even as part of her acknowledges this, another deeper part knows she will not be seen. She is becoming a ghost; she imagines if she looked down she would see her body waver, like a reflection in water. She cannot live in this world, not with the knowledge inside her, the intolerable heaviness of her own reckless cruelty.
The latch finally lifts, and she enters the garden. Her garden, the garden her father gave her and that Jack made. Even in the beginning of winter it is beautiful to her, the damson trees thrusting their stark branches to the sky, the borders now full of straggling weeds, although in summer they were rampant and wild, heavy with flower and fruit, which is what she had wanted. Life – pulsing, vibrant life – in all of its glory.
Now she stands in the middle of the garden and looks towards the little house, her house. Once it was warm inside enough for its fragile occupants, but now it is cold and dark and empty. There is nothing left for her here now, nothing but memories.
She leaves the walled garden and walks back through the churchyard to the vicarage, and then through the rose garden, the bushes’ stark branches black with rain, and down the stone steps to the muddy acre of sheep pasture that leads to the beach road. She knows her father could see her if he just turned his head, but she feels he won’t. He has most likely drawn the heavy curtains against the cold and dark.
She continues walking, the rain running down her in icy rivulets, her dress soaked completely through, and no one sees her. No one stops her.
If only it would all be this easy, she thinks. If only it was a matter of walking, one step at a time, into eternity. Walter was pushed – so suddenly, so unfairly – but she will go willingly. She will choose it. And yet she knows the entrance to eternity is not such a simple thing, although as she nears the beach she thinks perhaps it is after all. Perhaps this step is as simple as any other, if you just close your eyes.
And so she closes her eyes, and lets the rain beat over her, and everything in her demands she take that small, final step into forever.