The Rose Garden Read online

  Besides the main door to the corridor, my room had one more door further along the same wall, that connected with the bedroom just behind here on this east side of the house, a room that Claire had used for sewing, almost never giving it to guests because Uncle George’s cigar smoke had often seeped in from his study beyond.

  And the third door was set in the wall by the head of the bed, and led to a smaller front bedroom that had, I recalled, been used mostly for storage.

  I didn’t bother looking in there now. There’d be plenty of time for exploring tomorrow. Instead I sat down on the bed, making the bedsprings creak lightly as I looked around at the room from my childhood vantage point. The room looked much the same to me as it had twenty years ago. The walls were still a soft sea-green, the bedspread hobnailed, white and fringed, the curtains lace and insubstantial, lifting with the cool May breezes blowing through the partly open window. The wide-planked floor was bare, save for an old worn rug between the wardrobe on the two-doored wall and the small rocking chair set in the fireplace corner, and the same old white-framed mirror hung above the chest of drawers between the windows at the front.

  In the mornings this was one of the first rooms to catch the light, but it was late now and the afternoon was fading into evening, and the room was full of shadows. I could have put a light on, but I didn’t. I lay back instead, my hands behind my head.

  I only meant to rest a moment, then wash up and go downstairs. But lying there, my face brushed by the soft sea breezes blowing in the window, feeling comfortably nostalgic in the dim, high-ceilinged room, my weariness began to weight my limbs until I couldn’t move, and didn’t really want to.

  By the time the sound of Mark’s sure footsteps had gone all the way downstairs and crossed the hall below, I was no longer listening.

  I realised my mistake a few hours later when a restless dream brought me back wide-eyed to wakefulness, into the dark of a house that had fallen asleep. Rolling, I turned on the bedside lamp and checked my watch and found that it was nearly midnight.

  ‘Damn.’ I’d had just enough sleep that I knew I would never drift off again, no matter how much I needed the rest. And I needed it badly. The time change and long hours of travel were taking their toll and if I didn’t get back to sleep now I’d pay a steep price in the morning.

  I tried to resettle myself. Getting up, I changed out of my clothes into proper pyjamas, and snuggled in under the blankets and switched off the light. It was no use. The minutes ticked by.

  ‘Damn,’ I said again, and giving up I rose to rummage in my handbag.

  I’d had sleeping pills prescribed for nights like these, because my doctor had assured me it was normal to do battle with insomnia from time to time while grieving. I had never had to use them, but I’d brought the pills to Cornwall just in case.

  I took one pill and climbed back into bed, taking care not to pull all the covers to my side, from force of long habit, and mumbling ‘Good night’ to the place where my sister should be.

  The first thing I thought when I woke was, I wasn’t alone.

  I knew where I was. My mind had already made sense of the signals and sorted them into awareness – the sound of the gulls and the scent of the air and the way that the sunlight speared into the room through the unshuttered windows. I heard voices talking quietly somewhere close by, not much above a whisper, the way that people talk when they don’t want to wake someone who’s sleeping. Mark and Susan, I assumed, but then I wasn’t sure because both voices sounded male. I couldn’t catch more than an odd word, fleeting, here and there: ‘away’ was one, and then, quite clear, ‘impossible’.

  The voices stopped. Began again, much closer to my head this time, and then I realised that they must be coming through the wall from the next room, the small front bedroom.

  Workmen, probably. Old houses like Trelowarth always needed something done, and Mark had mentioned something when we’d been at Claire’s about some sort of trouble with the wiring. My mind was alert enough now to be wary of having strange men in the next room, and rolling I reached with my one hand to lock the connecting door set in the wall by the head of my bed.

  The door handles here were the old-fashioned kind with a thumb latch, without any keyholes, but small sliding bolts had been set just above them, and this bolt shot home with a satisfyingly sturdy click that made me feel a little more secure while I got dressed.

  In the corridor outside my room I met Mark, who was coming upstairs. ‘Good, you’re up,’ he said. ‘Susan just sent me to see if you were. She’s got breakfast on. How did you sleep?’

  ‘Very well, thanks.’ I gave a nod towards the closed door to the spare front room and added, ‘You can tell them they don’t have to be so quiet, now I’m up.’

  He looked at me. ‘Tell whom?’

  ‘The workmen,’ I said, ‘or whoever they are. In there.’

  Still looking at me strangely, he opened his mouth to reply and then shut it again, as though wanting to make very sure he was right before speaking. He turned the handle of the room beside my own and pushed the door wide enough to put his head round, then said to me, certain, ‘There’s nobody in here.’

  I looked for myself. ‘But I heard them. Two men. They were talking.’

  ‘Then they must have been outside.’

  ‘They didn’t sound like they were outside.’

  ‘Sound plays tricks, sometimes,’ he told me, ‘in old houses.’

  Unconvinced, I made a final study of the empty room, then let him close the door.

  He said, ‘Come down for breakfast.’

  Downstairs, Susan had a full cooked breakfast on the go, with sausage spitting in the pan and floured tomatoes sizzling beside them, eggs and toast and juice and coffee that smelt sharp and rich and heavenly and brought my eyes more fully open.

  Susan, turning, waved a spatula towards the table. ‘Have a seat, it’s hardly ready.’

  The kitchen had had a remodel since I’d last been here, and the table was a larger one than I remembered, but it occupied the same spot by the window that looked out across what used to be the stable yard, now greenly ringed with overhanging trees and with the former stable building now converted to a garage at its farther edge. I sat where I had always sat, my shoulder to the window wall, and looked across the yard towards the terraced gardens, sheltered by their high brick walls.

  The gardens were all separately enclosed and named: the Lower Garden, closest to the house; the Middle Garden; then the largest one, the Upper Garden, and my favourite of them all, the Quiet Garden, which I’d loved best for its name.

  These were the legacy of Mark and Susan’s great-great-grandfather, who’d returned from the Boer War with only one leg and a mind in sore need of tranquillity. Nostalgia for a simpler time had driven him to cultivate traditional varieties of roses that were falling out of fashion with the rise of the more modern hybrids gaining popularity because they could bloom more than once a season.

  Disdainful of these new hybrid perpetuals, he’d cared for his old-fashioned roses with a passion that he’d passed to his descendants, and through the hard work and investment of subsequent Halletts the business had grown into one of the country’s most highly regarded producers of older historic varieties. In fact, thanks to the family’s obsessive caretaking, these gardens now sheltered some roses that might have been lost altogether to time were it not for Trelowarth.

  The sizzling from the cooker brought my gaze back from the window and I watched while Susan turned the sausage.

  ‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘you didn’t have to go to all this trouble. Cereal and milk would be enough.’

  Mark, who’d been pouring the coffee, came over to hand me my mug and sat down in the place just across from me. ‘It’s not for you,’ he assured me. ‘She’s trying to soften me up.’

  ‘I am not,’ was Susan’s protest.

  Mark said, ‘So I guess it’s coincidence, then, that you’ve set your big file of plans for the tea room out here
on the table?’

  ‘I wanted to look at them.’

  ‘Wanted to show them to Eva, more like.’

  ‘I did not.’ Susan scraped the sausages out of the pan and crossing to the table set Mark’s plate down, hard, in front of him.

  Oblivious, he pointed at the folder with his fork. ‘You’ve got the legends of Trelowarth and that sort of rubbish in there, don’t you?’

  Susan passed my plate across for me and, with her own in hand, sat down herself. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Good. So then you can reassure Eva we don’t have a ghost.’

  It was my turn to protest. ‘I never said―’

  ‘Why would she think there’s a ghost?’ Susan asked.

  ‘She’s been hearing men’s voices upstairs.’

  Susan told him, with feeling, ‘I wish.’

  Mark grinned. ‘What, that we had men upstairs?’

  ‘No, stupid. That we had a ghost. Now that would bring the tourists in.’

  Mark told her that depended on the ghost.

  Ignoring him, she asked me what the voices had been saying, and I shrugged.

  ‘I couldn’t hear.’

  Mark said, ‘Perhaps they came to give a warning.’ Imitating a stern, ghostly voice, he went on, ‘Do not build a tea room at Trelowarth.’

  ‘Do you see?’ asked Susan, looking to me for support. ‘You see the sort of thing I have to deal with.’

  ‘And you love me anyway.’ Her brother’s smile was sure.

  ‘Yes, well, lucky for you that I do. That’s the only thing keeps me from planting you in the back garden alongside your roses.’

  Mark took the threat lightly, and turned his attention to me. ‘So then, what are your plans for the day?’

  I said, ‘I don’t know. I suppose I should take care of … what I came for.’

  That sobered the mood. Mark looked down at his plate and went on eating silently, then he said quietly, ‘Do you know where?’

  ‘I was thinking,’ I started, then paused for a moment, collecting myself. ‘I was thinking of up by the Beacon.’ He didn’t react, but I still felt the need to explain, ‘She would want to be somewhere where she had been happy.’

  Mark gave a short nod and said, ‘That’s a good spot, then.’ And after a moment, ‘You want me to come with you?’

  He offered that as though it didn’t matter either way, but there was something in his tone that made me ask him, ‘Would you like to?’

  Pushing his half-empty plate away he told me, ‘Yes, I would.’

  I glanced towards the clearing sky. ‘We ought to wait until the sun comes out.’

  ‘Right.’ He hadn’t finished with his coffee, either, but he set that down as well, and stood. ‘You let me know, then, when you’re ready.’ And with that he turned away and went to start his work.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘He really did love her, didn’t he?’ Susan, standing at the sink to rinse our breakfast dishes, tipped her head to one side in a movement that was half-familiar. ‘I mean, it’s not as though he’s been pining away all these years, or anything, and he’s had girlfriends since who were serious, but your sister was special, I think.’

  I pushed at a small bit of egg with my knife. ‘Well, she was his first love,’ I said. ‘At least, that’s what he told her. I know he was hers. And you never forget your first love.’

  ‘I suppose not.’ She frowned. ‘I don’t honestly remember what they were like as a couple, I was only seven. And you and I played together more, really. Katrina and Mark always seemed so much older.’ She was filling the sink now with water and dish soap, and I would have risen to help her if she hadn’t motioned me down again. ‘Sit. You’re a guest.’

  ‘Not that kind of a guest. I can help.’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ she insisted, and from her expression she wouldn’t be budged, so I did as she told me and stayed in my seat at the table while she started washing the cutlery. ‘Who was your first love?’ she asked me, and the question broke the subtle air of sadness that had settled on us; brought the light again into the room.

  I smiled. ‘A boy at my school in Vancouver. He played junior hockey, I spent all my weekends in freezing cold ice rinks.’ Somehow it didn’t have quite the same level of romance as Mark and Katrina. ‘And you?’

  ‘I’m still waiting for mine,’ Susan said. ‘I’m too fussy, Mark tells me. I want what my dad and Claire had.’

  ‘God, you’ll be waiting a long time for that.’ Even my parents, for all their devotion to each other, hadn’t been a patch on Uncle George and Claire. The Halletts had been one of those rare couples who, between them, made a little world that no one else could touch. True soulmates.

  Susan ran the dishrag round a coffee mug. ‘I know. Worth waiting for, though, I think. And it doesn’t mean I can’t have some adventures in the meantime.’

  She’d been born to have adventures. Although she’d been the youngest and the smallest of the four of us, she’d been the one most likely to explore, to push the boundaries, and she’d often had the skinned knees and the bandages to prove it. From the little I had seen now of the woman she’d grown into I suspected she still had that spirit in her, that her mind still saw beyond the limits others liked to place on things.

  Which made me wonder why she had come back here, to this quiet little corner of the country, and Trelowarth.

  ‘Mark said you’d been living near Bristol,’ I ventured.

  She glanced at me. ‘Did he?’ I had the strong impression I had somehow touched a nerve without intending to, but Susan hid it with a shrug. ‘Yes, well, I had my own catering business up there, did he tell you?’

  He hadn’t, but I took the opportunity to shift to safer ground. ‘So then you should be able to make a success of your tea room.’

  ‘I hope so. I mean, Mark would never complain, but I know that it hasn’t been easy these past few years, since Dad’s investments went—’ She stopped and glanced at me and quickly looked away and would have likely changed the subject if I hadn’t stopped her.

  ‘Susan.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Trelowarth’s in financial trouble?’ I could read reluctance in her eyes. I asked her, ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Bad enough. But don’t tell Mark I told you, or he’ll plant me in the garden with the roses.’

  I imagined a place this big must take a good deal of money to run. Apart from the house, there was all the land – not just the gardens themselves, but the fields where the roses were actually grown. Most of the regular work could be done by two men, but with Uncle George gone that meant Mark would have had to hire someone to help. They’d be busiest during the winter months, digging the bare-rooted roses and shipping them off to fill all of the orders that would have come in through the year, after which all the rest of the harvest still had to be potted and delivered to the garden centres that had always sold Trelowarth roses. But even at this time of year there was much to be done. Taking care of Trelowarth, I knew, was a full-time concern.

  ‘Anyway,’ Susan said, ‘that’s really why I came back. To help out where I could.’

  ‘Hence the tea room.’

  ‘Exactly. My dad used to talk about having one someday. I thought if we put in a tea room and opened the gardens for tours, it might bring in some revenue and make more people aware of our product.’ She heard her own words and smiled wryly. ‘I’ve been swotting up on marketing, can you tell?’

  ‘Good for you, though. That’s just what you should do.’ My gaze found the folder of plans she had left on the table. ‘You mind if I look at these?’

  ‘No, go ahead. Only—’

  ‘—don’t tell Mark. I know.’ I reached for the folder. ‘Why is he so set against your tea room?’

  Susan set the final teacup on the draining board and pulled the plug to let the water out. ‘I wouldn’t say he’s set against it, more that he’s resistant, and that’s just because it doesn’t fit his vision of Trelowarth. Mark’s a purist, like my
grandfather. Change doesn’t interest him.’ She grinned. ‘If you ask me, Mark’s simply not sure about sharing our roses with strangers.’

  Reading her notes while I finished my coffee, I rotated one drawing slightly to help get my bearings. ‘So you’d put the tea room over there, then,’ I said, pointing at an angle out the window, past the stretch of level turf that once had been the stable yard and to the tangled greenery beyond it.

  ‘That’s right, in Dad’s old greenhouse. No one uses it any more, but it’s still got all the plumbing in place and the glass is all good. I’ve been told that it wouldn’t be hard to convert.’ She came round beside me to study the plans. ‘Claire’s grandparents met in a tea room, apparently. She told us the story, it’s very romantic. I’ll have to ask if she remembers the name of the place. We could call ours the same, put a bit of her history here, too.’

  This was the sort of project that my mother, with her passion for historical research, would have loved. If she’d been living still, she would have wasted little time in digging through the records to unearth the finer details of Trelowarth’s past.

  But when I said as much to Susan, she said only, ‘She’d have bored herself to tears, then. They’re all deadly dull, my family, and they’ve been here for two hundred years, at least. I keep hoping that I’ll come across a smuggler or a pirate, someone infamous, to help bring in the tourists.’

  ‘Someone famous might work just as well.’ I kept my focus on the drawings and the notes as I reminded her, ‘You have a famous movie star who used to spend her summers here, remember.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t feel right, trading on Katrina’s name. And Mark would never go for it. You know my brother.’

  Yes, I did. The years might change our outer selves, but underneath it all we stayed the same, we kept our patterns, and I knew where I should look for him when I went out a short while later with the box of ashes. In the mornings, he had always started in the highest terrace and worked down from there. I found him in the Quiet Garden, pulling weeds. His boots were caked and muddy and the wind had blown his hair and he was wearing an old denim jacket not unlike the one I held a memory of him wearing when he worked among the roses.