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‘Yes,’ they chorused.
‘I should say so,’ said Lauren, ‘I don’t think they slept a wink all night.’
‘Ouch,’ grimaced Joel. He looked at his watch. ‘Is that the time? I’d really better dash.’
‘Oh, of course.’ Lauren clocked his sober grey suit, and kicked herself for forgetting what day it was. ‘Good luck, today. Hope it’s not too grim.’ She touched him awkwardly on the arm, not quite sure whether the gesture would be appreciated. After Claire had died, their mutual grief had brought them very close. Too close she felt at times. Sometimes it had felt a little too intense, and now she tended to stand back more.
Joel gave her a tight, tense smile, his dark eyes brooding. His face was sombre and sad. ‘It has to be done,’ he said, before kissing Sam on the cheek. ‘Have a great day, girls.’
Poor Joel. Thirty-five was far too young to be widowed. It was tough on him being alone with Sam, she knew that. That was why, in the main, Lauren cut him some slack when he took her for granted, which he invariably did. Lauren felt she owed it to Claire to look out for Joel; he needed support, and she was going to give it, even if he didn’t always make it that easy. She felt a familiar spasm of grief for Claire too. A year on, and part of her still expected to see Claire pitch up at the cottage as she had done every day with Sam before her sudden and shocking death.
Lauren sent the twins up to brush their teeth, while she cleared up the breakfast things. She stacked the girls’ matching Belle plates in the dishwasher, next to her favourite Cath Kidston mugs and bowl set (a present from Mum, Lauren could never have afforded them). She loved her kitchen, which had been extended to make room for a dining table. It was cosy, and full of clutter. The children’s toys – a magnetic easel, a plastic car and a small table and chairs set – competed for space with her pine table, washing machine, dishwasher and fridge freezer. Though Lauren didn’t have quite as much work surface as she’d have liked, and what she had was crammed full of cookery books, this was her favourite room in the house – the real heart of her home.
Lauren lifted Sam out of the high chair, and put him into the buggy she kept here for him. She felt stupidly nervous for the girls, even though they had been going to the nursery part of the village school for nearly a year. But still. Proper school. True, being the youngest in the year, they were only part time to begin with. But before she knew it, they’d be gone all day. No longer would she have them to herself in the afternoon. If she didn’t have Sam still to look after, the days could be long and lonely. Just like her nights …
A sense of melancholy came over her as she walked down the front path, with its familiar white picket fence, and creaky iron gate. The twins were holding on to either side of the buggy, chatting away nineteen to the dozen about what was going to happen in their day. They didn’t seem nervous in the slightest. It was only Lauren who felt a vague sense of loss, with the realization that after today nothing would be quite the same again. She pushed the buggy down her road, waving hello to her neighbour Eileen, who was out walking her dog, and turned right onto the main road that led down the hill to the centre of Heartsease, where the girls were starting at the village school.
The September sun was still warm, and the day was shaping up to be one of those last blasts of summer lazy days, which you had to cherish before autumn took hold. But there were small signs of the approaching autumn. The trees were beginning to turn, the first conkers were beginning to ripen, and a gentle breeze blew a few leaves softly to the ground. It was days like these she remembered most from the period after Troy left her, and this time of year had remained bitter-sweet to her ever since. Just as she was getting used to the shock of motherhood, she’d had the bigger shock that she was going to be doing it alone. And now more then ever, sending her beautiful daughters off to school for the first time, she wished that it wasn’t so.
Joel got in the car with a heavy heart, turned left out of Lauren’s road, and drove back up the hill past his house and out of Heartsease across the Downs, towards the neighbouring town of Chiverton. He drove down a windy country road, arched with trees, their leaves beginning to shimmer with an autumn hue. He loved the countryside here and it was one of the many reasons, when his mum had inherited Lovelace Cottage and suggested he bought it from her, that he had. Even Claire, who’d at first been reluctant to leave London, and ‘live in the sticks’ as she’d put it, had agreed that when you came to the brow of the hill and looked out on the Sussex countryside, the views were stunning.
Claire. His heart contracted painfully. A year ago today. Could it only really be a year? A year and a day ago he had been so happy. So rich and fulfilled. With everything in life he needed. But he didn’t know it then, didn’t appreciate it at times, maybe didn’t even want it. It was only after he lost Claire, and his world came crashing down around him, that he belatedly realized how truly lucky he had been.
Today was going to be a painful and difficult day. Joel had promised to go with Claire’s parents to her grave, in the cemetery on the other side of Chiverton, and then for lunch. He wasn’t sure he was going to be able to get through another heartbreaking day with them. It wasn’t that Marion and Colin were unkind or unsupportive, far from it. Although they lived over an hour away, they would help out with Sam at the drop of a hat, and they had been an immense source of strength to him. They had shown him compassion even though they were grieving too. No, it wasn’t Marion and Colin who would make this day hard. It was Joel’s guilt about what he’d done, and how he’d let Claire down.
Every day for the last year he had said sorry to her. Every day. And today, at the graveside, he would lay freesias, her favourite flowers (which he’d bought at great expense) and say sorry again. But it was never ever going to be enough.
Joel blinked back tears as he arrived at the graveyard. It was a bright, warm September day, unlike the day of Claire’s funeral, which had been the bleakest, rainiest autumn day he could remember in his life. The church had been packed, and so many people had been so kind and thoughtful. But Joel had barely been able to acknowledge their kindness, responding like an automaton, feeling only a numbness that he now realized must have been deep jolt. The suddenness of Claire’s death still shocked him, even now, a year later. How could someone as beautiful and alive and vibrant as Claire be there one day, and not the next? He’d be trying to make sense of that till the day he died.
Joel was pleased to see he had arrived earlier than Claire’s parents. Selfishly, he wanted a bit of time on his own, for his own private grief. He walked up to her grave and felt again the sudden shock of seeing her name there:
Claire Harriet Lyle
1975–2010
Loving wife, mother and daughter
Taken from us too soon
He never got over the unreality of it. Nor, did he imagine, he would ever get used to it. Claire should be with him now, watching Sam learning to walk and talk, helping Joel restore the house and gardens as they had planned. She shouldn’t be here, on this Sussex hillside, buried six feet under. He felt a sudden sharp bolt of anguish, the pain of it almost taking his breath away. Claire was lost to him, and there was no saying sorry now.
Kezzie sat in the middle of half-packed boxes, in her tiny lounge crying. She felt like she’d been sitting in the middle of boxes crying forever, ever since she’d made the decision that she had to leave. Only weeks ago, at the height of summer, she’d been excitedly packing up to move out of her small flat in Finsbury Park and move in with Richard. The gardening course she’d completed finished, the redundancy from her much hated job in web design accepted. A whole new life lay before them. She would design the gardens, Richard, the architecture. Together they would take Chelsea and Hampton Court by storm. And now that would never happen. The last month of her life had been the most painful, confusing and ridiculous time she’d ever known.
Should she ring Richard again? Kezzie sat on her heels in the chaos of her lounge and thought about it. She was sorely tempted. It had been nearly a week since their last painfully awkward conversation. Somehow she clung to the hope that maybe he could find it in himself to forgive her for what she’d done. She flinched as she saw the cold contempt in his eyes at their last meeting, heard him say over and over: ‘You’ve let me down, Kezzie. I can’t trust you.’ That scene kept playing like it was on a hideous time loop, over and over in her brain. However much she tried to shut it out, there it was every time she closed her eyes. A reminder of what she had done, and what she had lost.
But all that ringing and texting Richard in vain were making her feel slightly unhinged, and even Flick, the kindest and most supportive of best friends, had gently pointed out she was losing dignity in trying to win him back.
‘You have to give him time, Kez,’ she said. ‘You’re going to lose him for sure this way.’
Kezzie knew she was right, but the temptation late at night to email him after a glass of red, or ring him, just to hear his voice, had proved too much for her time and time again. The last occasion had been so mortifiyingly cringe-making – Richard had answered saying, ‘Kezzie, I have my parents here, please don’t make a scene’ – that she’d hung up straight away. At that moment she decided she was losing the plot big time, and needed to escape, somewhere, anywhere, so she wouldn’t chance running into Richard, and where she wouldn’t be reminded of him, on every corner.
It was then that Aunt Jo had stepped in. Arriving on an unexpected flying visit to London, and seeing the state of her beloved niece, Jo had declared that Kezzie needed a bolt hole. ‘And as luck would have it, hon, I can offer you my place.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kezzie had asked.
‘I’m off round the world for a year with Mickey,’ said Jo, referring to her latest toy boy. ‘You remember him, don’t you? We’re going to find ourselves, and maybe get married in Thailand.’ She giggled excitedly. ‘You can stay at my cottage for as long as you want – stay all year if you need to, babe.’
‘Really?’ Kezzie gulped through her tears. It sounded like the best solution she could think of. She had to get away from London, from the car crash that had been the end of her relationship, and the mess she’d made of everything. She needed time and space to regroup, and sort herself out. Staying here moping after Richard was doing her no good whatsoever. He was never coming back to her, and all she was doing was prolonging the agony.
So here she was shoving things in boxes. Every little thing reminded her of the last two brilliant years with Richard, from the framed certificate stating she’d passed the Landscape Gardening Course she’d taken at his suggestion, to the picture of the two of them walking in the Lakes earlier in the year, when he’d asked her to move in with him. And then there were the gardening gloves he’d given her at Christmas, and the silver earrings, which had been a birthday present. In London, all she could think about was Richard. Escaping was the only chance she stood of getting over him.
She picked up her phone and rang Richard’s number. This was the last time she’d do this. The very very last time.
His answer phone kicked in. ‘Hi there, Richard isn’t here right now, but leave a message and I’ll get back to you later.’ She kept doing this, just to hear his voice. She couldn’t help it, even though she knew it didn’t do any good. It was time she stopped and moved on.
Taking a deep breath, and trying to ignore the telltale wobble in her voice, she said, ‘Hi, Richard. This is Kezzie. I’m leaving town. You won’t hear from me again.’
She put the phone down, trembling, tears spilling over her cheeks. But it was done. Kezzie surveyed the mess of the room she was in, and slowly started to rationalize the boxes. There wasn’t any other option. The summer was over, and autumn had begun.
Chapter Two
Different sounds. That was the most unusual thing about living in the country, Kezzie decided. It wasn’t dead silent, as she’d always imagined. The previous evening, the birds had been making a right racket in the hedgerow at dusk, and she’d heard bats squeaking in the dark. This morning she’d been woken by a very early morning dawn chorus. It was still relatively light in the mornings, though approaching mid September, and having left London’s gloomy weather, it had cheered her up no end to get up and watch a very pink sunrise give way to a bright and sunny September morning.
It had taken her all day to pack up her stuff in the van she’d hired, drive down to Jo’s house in the pretty village of Heartsease on the Surrey/Sussex border which she’d fallen in love with on previous visits, and unpack it all. Kezzie knew she could have asked Flick and the others to help but she was too proud. She’d told Flick about the split, of course she had, but she still felt sore and embarrassed about the reasons for it. She couldn’t face actually telling anyone, let alone her best friend, what had really happened. And part of her need for escape was a need to re-evaluate every aspect of her life: her drinking and drug taking, and slight feeling of always living on the edge. Until she had met Richard that had been all she’d wanted, and she’d revelled in shocking him, and teasing him about being so straight-laced. But since their break-up, she’d become uncertain about her lifestyle and wondered whether she was right to always be so frenetic and spontaneous. It used to feel fun. Now she wasn’t sure. And sadly, Flick and her friends were part of all that. Maybe if she was away she could unpick what and who she was, and work out where her life went from here. Maybe.
First things first though. Kezzie realized last night, before she fell into bed, that she’d forgotten to buy milk and teabags. Jo, a caring and thoughtful individual in many ways, hadn’t thought to leave any groceries in the fridge. Mind you, as Jo appeared to have taken off on her voyage of self-discovery with one very small backpack, a few necessities, and had yet to email, perhaps that wasn’t all that surprising.
Kezzie stretched and slowly got out of her aunt’s big, cosy bed. Jo had modelled it on a Bedouin tent and built a frame above it to hang curtains from. Kezzie felt like she was emerging from a cocoon; it was the perfect bed to hide herself away in. She threw on a dressing gown and padded downstairs to the bathroom, which led off from the kitchen. Even on a warm day like today it felt chilly and slightly uninviting, with its flagstone floor and wooden door, which didn’t quite reach the floor. That was going to be draughty in winter. The bathroom was the one room Jo hadn’t got round to modernizing, and the shower was erratic to say the least, spewing out boiling water one second and icy cold the next. Kezzie spent the shortest time possible in there, got dressed quickly and left the cottage. On the way down the little lane she passed a middle-aged woman walking a Border Collie.
‘Would you mind telling me where I could buy some teabags?’ Kezzie asked.
‘Turn right out of the Lane, go down the hill, and there’s a little shop on the corner of Madans Avenue and the High Street. It’s less than five minutes. Or if you have time, walk right to the end of the High Street, and you’ll find a small local supermarket, Macey’s, which has most things you need.’
‘Thanks very much,’ said Kezzie.
‘You must be Jo’s niece,’ said the woman. ‘Eileen Jones. I live across the road.’
‘Oh, hi. Kezzie Andrews,’ said Kezzie. ‘Nice to meet you.’
She set off down to the shop, taking in the wide sweep of the road lined with broad oaks and beeches as it wound its way down to the picturesque little village at the bottom of the hill. It was indeed as Eileen said, only five minutes away. Ali’s Emporium declared the sign above the door, though in truth it was more of a minimart than an emporium. Still, it sold tea and milk, though not the herbal variety.
‘You must be Jo’s niece,’ smiled the man behind the counter, who was presumably Ali. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘Yes, I am,’ said Kezzie. ‘Er, nice to meet you.’
She made her way home, shaking her head with amusement. She’d been here less than twenty-four hours and already said hello to more people than she did on her street in London.
After a reviving cup of tea, Kezzie decided to go for a walk up to the Downs. She’d only been here a few times before, and remembered going for a lovely walk with Jo ages ago. She fancied a quick blow away of the cobwebs, before she got down to doing stuff she needed to, like getting on with unpacking, and sorting out her entire life. It was all very well living on her redundancy, but Kezzie knew she’d go mad with boredom if she didn’t find something constructive to do soon. Much as she hated it, at least she still had enough contacts to get her some freelance web design work, if the gardening didn’t take off straight away.
She turned right out of the house and made her way up the Lane, till she came to a fork in the road. Ahead of her was a farm, and to the left was a path which presumably led back down to the village. She struck off up to the right, figuring that would keep her walking in the right direction. She’d been walking for about five minutes up a tree-lined path, the trees laden with orange and yellow leaves, through which the sun shimmered and shone, when she came across an attractive, high, redbrick wall. Kezzie wondered idly what lay on the other side, and coming to where the wall turned a corner at the main road, she saw there was an old oak tree, with roots that were breaking up the bottom of the wall. It had a bough low enough to tempt her to swing up to see what was hidden behind the wall.
‘Wow.’ Kezzie was stunned. She had assumed it was going to be someone’s back garden, but was taken aback by what she saw. It was a sunken garden, with steps and a metal gate at one end, a square in the middle, surrounded by gravel paths and a rusty old bench near to where she was. At one time it had clearly been well maintained; the ivy, rosemary and box that now straggled over the paths, still resembled some kind of pattern, but they were now so choked with weeds it was hard to make out what it was. She swung herself slowly down. What an amazing place. A proper secret garden. She walked a little further up the hill and followed the wall round a corner, to where she saw a large, derelict-looking redbrick house. Its high windows looked soulless and empty, the paint peeling off them, and the curtains faded and old. The front door was painted a dark green, and had a charming stained-glass pattern at the top, but several of the glass panes were cracked, and the privet bushes and wisteria planted in front of the two bay windows were crowding over the cracked garden path and obscuring the doorway. The house looked unlived in and neglected, much like the garden.
‘What a shame,’ said Kezzie out loud. ‘Someone should do something about it.’ Someone? Kezzie thought back to her early guerrilla gardening days, when she, Flick and Flick’s boyfriend, Gavin had called themselves the Three Musketeers and taken it upon themselves to restore gardens that were uncared for. She’d been looking for something to do. She might just have found it.
Monday morning, and Joel was running late. It had been over a week since the painful graveside meeting with Claire’s parents. As usual, their kindness to him made him feel more fraudulent then ever, and he’d felt too guilty to take Marion up on her kind offer of babysitting at the weekend. Instead, he’d asked Eileen Jones to do it, and then felt guilty that he was depriving Marion of seeing her grandson. His evening out at the local pub, the Labourer’s Legs, had gone a bit awry. In a moment of madness he’d agreed to go out for a drink with Suzanne Cawston, a cashier at Macey’s, who clearly fancied him, as well as feeling sorry for him. Why he’d said yes he didn’t know, but he found himself sitting in the pub with her, under Lauren’s scornful eyes, as she poured him a pint. Though she had never said anything, Lauren seemed to him to be the only person who disapproved of him dating other women – or was it that looking at her reminded him of Claire?
Joel quickly established he and Suzanne had nothing in common – at twenty-two she was far too young for him – and not wanting to be rude, had drunk far more than was good for him. After that he ended up having an embarrassing fumble in the dark, outside the pub – Suzanne’s comment ‘We can’t go home, my mum and dad are in,’ reminding him how little he should be doing this – before he made his excuses and fled back home. He ignored her plaintive cry of, ‘We will see each other again won’t we?’ as he made his way up the hill.
Sunday had been spent visiting his mum. He never mentioned these women to Mum. He suspected she guessed something of his private life but she never asked him, unless he brought it up first. He’d taken her and Sam out for lunch in a cosy restaurant in nearby Chiverton, where she lived in a warden-assisted flat, and as usual, she’d cooed over her grandson. It was only towards the end of the meal, she’d tentatively asked, ‘Joel, are you OK? Only you’re very quiet. I know last week must have been so hard for you.’
‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. ‘More than fine. It’s been hard, but we’re getting through it, aren’t we, Sammy?’ And he tickled Sam’s chin, and ignored the hand Mum held out in front of him. He didn’t refer to it again, till he dropped his mum home, gave her a kiss, and told her she worried too much.
But later when he got home, and put Sam to bed, he’d had a whole evening to brood. As he sat alone sipping a whisky, idly flicking through the TV channels in the lounge he’d started decorating just before Claire died, and had still not finished, he knew that his mum was right to worry about him.
The house weighed heavily on him – what had once seemed an exciting lifetime’s project now felt like a burden. Without Claire to share the work with him, without her to give him something to aim for, restoring this old, falling down wreck of a house seemed a pointless exercise. His enthusiasm for restoring it had died with Claire. And as for the secret garden, which had excited him so much when he and Claire had first got here, he hadn’t been in it for months. Even his great great grandfather’s old writing desk (left to him with the house), which he’d started to strip down and lovingly planned to restore, sat abandoned and unfinished. He felt in limbo. Unable to go back, unable to move on. He was very very far from all right.
Matters didn’t get any better the following morning. Sam wasn’t being cooperative and he’d got porridge all down the top that Joel had just put him in. Joel had ended up shouting, and of course Sam burst into tears, which made him feel terrible. What kind of monstrous dad shouted at their seventeen-month-old? As ever the thought – what would Claire do? – floated in his head. He sighed, got Sam changed, and then himself when he realized that he was smeared with baby porridge. Seeing the time he raced to the car, strapped Sam in, and drove like the clappers down the hill to Lauren’s house.
He got on well with Lauren, and she’d been a fantastic source of strength to him after Claire died. She had been one of the few people he could face being around in those early weeks. She didn’t ask anything of him, or besiege him with questions about how he was doing, but was quietly supportive, and they had grieved for Claire together.
Their childcare arrangement (fortunately already in place before Claire died) was a good one, but he often felt wrongfooted when he was with Lauren. It was one thing to constantly be home late for an uncomplaining wife, quite another to face Lauren’s wrath for the hundredth time, when he’d got stuck working late. He did his best, and for the most part the small charity where he worked accommodated him, but his life was now full of tense compromises between work and home. He was always joking that he was like the wife of the office, always the one rushing home early for the children. And only now was he beginning to realize quite how tough things had been for Claire when she first went back to work.