The Garden of Memories

Chapter 4

Rose hurries up the sandy incline from the beach, utterly energised and raring to go. It never fails to amaze her how a breezy walk on the beach next to a noisy, wild ocean, immersed in nature’s elements, can send the spirits soaring up with the seagulls. Often people say it’s because when they stare at the ocean, it makes them realise how insignificant they are. The ocean is so vast and ancient their lives seem irrelevant. Well, Rose doesn’t really understand that. If you feel insignificant, why is it so uplifting? For her, it’s the feeling that she’s part of something bigger and she belongs to it. The ocean has always been here. It’s timeless, ageless, and magnificent. All humanity – our lives, our spirits – are intertwined with nature, the elements. We are all part of the whole. Connected.

As she walks, Rose thinks about how the planets and the ocean were first formed, and her mind boggles. She remembers years ago asking a schoolteacher if he thought God made everything. He said, if God made everything, who made God? This kind of question sends her mind scurrying for cover. She’d asked her dad what he thought. He said that if she thought too much about all that kind of thing, she’d go mad. If she accepted things as they were and didn’t ask too many questions, she’d be much happier. Her dad believed in God and said that there was a bigger plan that we knew nothing about – we just had to have faith. One day we’d go to a ‘better place’. Rose is still not sure what she thinks, but she has a sneaking suspicion that not asking too many questions isn’t the way forward.

Rose is still pondering as she goes past the little cottage with the red door that used to belong to old Mr Jenkins. Mr Jenkins passed away last year aged ninety-nine – bet he was fuming he’d not reached the ton. He might know the answers to some of her questions by now, assuming he’s arrived safely at the ‘better place’. A shame Rose can’t ask him. Through the window of the cottage, she glimpses a quick movement and a flash of colour, as though someone’s doing a twirl or dancing. Rose looks away before she’s seen gawping. It’s probably Hippy Lady, as she calls her, in the absence of a name. She’s been here a few weeks or so, but Rose hasn’t had the time to introduce herself. She will, very soon.

As she reaches her gate, she sees a familiar figure in a yellow puffer jacket and black jeans walking down the hill towards her. ‘Daisy!’ Rose waves as her old school pal gets nearer. She had no idea she was coming today. Surely, she hasn’t forgotten?

‘Rose! I’m glad you’re home. I thought about ringing before I came, but it was a spur-of-the-moment thing.’ Daisy’s amber eyes hold a shadow of uncertainty, but Rose’s big smile banishes it.

‘So pleased to see you, matey.’ Rose gives her a hug and leads the way up the path and inside. ‘It must be about three months or so since we had lunch?’

‘Yeah. That’s one of the reasons I just had to come and see you today. I was walking past a gift shop in Port Isaac and there was a painting of a cottage near the sea which reminded me of this one,’ Daisy flaps a hand at the kitchen wall, fluffs her auburn curls and pulls her spotty red-and-black polka-dot scarf off, all in one elegant movement, ‘and I knew I had to see you. You’ve been on my mind for weeks, and I wanted to have a chat with you – you know, what with you leaving work and all? I knew you’d be having mixed feelings about everything. But then life takes over, and I’m so busy with the grandchildren, now Millie’s working full-time…’

Daisy’s machine-gun-fire words register with Rose and land in her consciousness, but they’re in another room – an echo of now. Because she’s far away in a schoolyard, on a hot summer’s day, playing catch with a freckle-faced kid with unruly flame-red hair dragged into bunches, laughter bursting from her chest along with a stream of chatter delivered at a hundred miles an hour. She’s not changed, thank God. Daisy always made her smile, raised her up if she fell, was there to lend an ear and a heart.

‘You actually listening to me?’ Daisy folds her arms, drops a hip and narrows her eyes. Now she’s Daisy the savvy teenager. The one nobody ever got the better of.

Rose laughs. ‘I am indeed. Just thinking of our schooldays and that you haven’t changed at all. Where have all those years gone, eh?’

‘God knows. I was only thinking the same thing the other day. And put the kettle on, for goodness’ sake. I’m parched with all that walking.’ Daisy fans her face, scrapes a kitchen chair from the table along the stone flags, and emits an ‘oomph’ as she sits down. ‘My attitude might not have changed since school, but my poor knees tell a different story.’

Rose smiles in sympathy and sticks the kettle on.

Daisy jabs a finger at her. ‘And thinking about school, do you remember old Mr Hawkins? How he used to call us “little flowers” because of our names?’

A picture of a smiley-faced man with thick curly grey hair comes to Rose. ‘I do. And I’m not sure kids of today would take kindly to being called “little flowers”. Different times then, of course, and he meant it kindly.’

‘Yeah, and I called him “old man Hawkins”. I bet he was our age, or younger!’

This thought pulls Rose up short. It doesn’t seem possible. I expect Mr Hawkins has gone to the better place too, after all this time. Melancholy finds a home in her chest as she busies herself with the tea. What does she expect? People don’t live forever, do they? And she hasn’t thought of ‘old man’ Hawkins since junior school, so why has gloom pinned itself to his memory?

‘Talking of school, which we were,’ says Daisy, ‘my Steve says he saw on Facebook that there’s a leavers’ reunion in the summer. It’s forty-five years since we left secondary.’

‘Forty-five years? That’s an odd one. Why not wait until fifty?’ Rose puts two mugs of tea on the table and opens a packet of bourbons.

‘Hey, they can’t hang about at our age.’ Daisy dips a bourbon in her tea and stuffs the whole thing in her mouth just as it disintegrates to mush.

‘True.’ Rose wishes she’d stop talking about old age, poor knees and school reunions. Isn’t life miserable enough? That thought comes out of nowhere. Ambushes her. A miserable life. Really? And Rose was the one who brought school into it in the first place, not Daisy. The good mood she’d brought back from the beach seems to have evaporated.

‘So, do you fancy it?’

‘Fancy what?’

‘The reunion. Me and Steve are going – it’s at The Slipway in Port Isaac. No idea what I’m going to wear…’ Rose gets a faraway stare as Daisy’s brain presumably sorts through the items in her wardrobe, then she snaps to attention. ‘So, what do you think?’

‘I won’t be going.’

Daisy looks like her imaginary wardrobe is on fire. ‘What! Why?’

Rose doesn’t know why. Well, she doesn’t know how to put it into words. She does know that she has an aversion to attending the reunion. She sees doors slamming on the whole idea, one after the other, each one bigger and stronger than the last, until she arrives at the biggest and strongest door with a series of iron bolts, each firing into place. Daisy’s still expecting an answer, and luckily, from behind the last door comes:

‘There’ll be lots of sad old people there, trying to make out that they’re having a great life and making stuff up about themselves to impress everyone. Then I’ll have to listen to stories about their grandchildren and how wonderful it is to spend time with them. I’ll have to appear interested and say ohh and aw, and God forbid, bless, in the right places. While all the time I’ll be wishing I was sitting in front of the telly with a glass of wine, right here in my cosy cottage. Reunions. Dear God. It’s all so bloody tragic.’

A piece of biscuit gets stuck in Rose’s throat and she has to cough to dislodge it. Her face is on fire, and she appears to have tears in her eyes. Daisy’s got her what the fuck? face on, and well she might. That was quite the speech and was as much a surprise to Rose as it was to Daisy.

‘Bloody hell, Rose. That was a bit much. You okay, love?’

Rose considers this. She thought she was okay, but that little outburst and the melancholy that’s growing in her chest like a cancer, say otherwise. ‘Yeah, ’course. Just a bit fed up, I suppose.’ She shrugs and hopes there’s enough expression in it to save her from thinking of more words. The ones she has are jumbled and fragmented, like her thoughts.

Daisy looks at Rose, her face a portrait of sympathy, which does nothing to help the melancholy. ‘Aw, Rose. I know what’s wrong. It’s because you don’t see Bella and the grandkids much, now they’ve moved up country, isn’t it? Plus the fact you’ve just retired and must be feeling all at sixes and sevens.’

At sixes and sevens. Another old expression that has no straightforward meaning. Maybe Rose’s mum would have known. Or perhaps not. Is Daisy right? She looks into her mug of tea, as though she’ll find the answer floating on its surface. ‘Maybe I am a bit. But I have lots to be getting on with. Gardening, for one thing, and horse riding for another.’

Rose enjoys the look of incredulity rolling up Daisy’s face like a spring tide. ‘Horse riding? Since when have you ever done horse riding?’

‘Never, that’s the point. I’ll be doing lots of things I’ve never done before.’ Rose laughs and throws a theatrical wide-armed stance. ‘I’m stepping out of my box!’

Daisy laughs too. ‘You sound completely out of your box already! Have you been on the wine?’

‘No.’ Rose laughs along with her, but is irked that she thinks horse riding is something outside her remit. Maybe Daisy’s made her own box for her. She’s not sure she’d like to look inside it. Rose takes the cups to the sink and thinks about the reunion and the kinds of boxes she’d made for some of her old school friends, and if they’d still fit into them.

‘Well anyway,’ Daisy says to Rose’s back. ‘You might like to know that Tristan Carthew is going to be there. He’s a friend of my Steve’s on Facebook and he’s coming down from Wales for the reunion. Thought that might change your mind.’

This is the second time today that Rose has been brought up with a jolt. Tristan Carthew, the boy she thought she’d marry. Through the kitchen window, by the emerging and strangely abundant daffodils, a tall dark-haired youth looks at her across the years. The bright-blue eyes hold a question, the lopsided self-conscious grin encourages an answer.

‘You listening, woman?’ Daisy asks.

‘Yes.’ Rose turns around and answers her smile. ‘It doesn’t change my mind. The Tristan I knew left here when he was sixteen. I want him to stay the boy he was. The boy in my memory. We’ll have nothing in common now.’

‘You might do. It would be nice to meet just as friends, obviously, catch up on old times.’

‘No thanks. It’s all too much of a cliché, Daisy … and faintly ridiculous. Older woman goes to school reunion and magically falls back in love with her first love.’

‘That’s not what I’m saying at all. It’s just that you’re not too old to start again. I don’t mean with Tris, necessarily. As far as I know, he’s still married, so it…’

‘Daisy. Can we change the record? This one is old and scratched.’

Concern draws a few lines across Daisy’s brow and she scrunches her nose up. Right now, she looks like a disgruntled fairy and very daisy-like. A tall willowy elegant daisy, trying to avoid Rose’s scratchy thorns. ‘I reckon this leaving work malarkey has hit you quite hard. I knew it would, it’s only natural. I was saying to Steve the other day that you…’

A picking over the bones of Rose’s lost career is not what she wants to hear, so she pats Daisy’s hand, hoping a physical interruption will speak volumes. ‘Hey, enough about me. Let’s talk about you. What have you been up to?’

Another few worry lines sketch around Daisy’s eyes, then a half-smile erases them, and Rose listens as Daisy holds forth about her family and the part-time job she has at the library. It never fails to amaze Rose how she keeps quiet enough to do a job like that. Daisy is the type of person that can’t help herself peering over shoulders and asking about the story. She’s done that with Rose’s story today. Trouble is, Rose isn’t exactly sure what’s happening in it. She keeps re-reading the same sentence but it’s not registering.

‘Anyway, I’d best get gone.’ Daisy scrapes the chair over the flags as she stands. ‘Need to get lunch and then I promised our Millie I’d get some shoes for Lottie before collecting her from school.’

Lunchtime already? The clock confirms it – where has the time gone? This is the second time Rose has wondered that today. Must stop it. Remembering her manners, she says, ‘You can stay and have a sandwich if you like? Ham, cheese and pickle suit you?’

After a moment’s hesitation Daisy says, ‘Thanks, but I ought to go, or it will be time to pick up Lottie before I’ve got the shoes. You know what we’re like for gabbing on.’

Daisy has switched on her twinkly smile, but her eyes don’t get the message. Rose realises she’s been a proper old grump and Daisy can’t wait to get away. Who can blame her? ‘I’ve not done much gabbing today, have I? I’m sorry…’ Rose’s words dry up as she wonders exactly what she’s sorry for. There seems to be a bit of a list.

‘Don’t apologise, you dafty. Look, you’ll be your old self in no time. It will just take a bit of time.’ Daisy pulls her jacket on and wraps her scarf twice around her neck. As Rose is searching for an appropriate response, Daisy pulls her in for a hug and says in her ear, ‘You know where I am, Rose. Just give me a call anytime, okay?’

Suddenly thrust at arm’s length, Rose notices tears in Daisy’s eyes, but she turns away, pulls on her boots and scoops up her handbag. When she looks back her eyes are dry, and as she makes her way to the front door, she’s trailing a stream of chatter over her shoulder about the scandalous price of children’s shoes and what she’s cooking for dinner later. Rose is left in no doubt that this is an act. One of Daisy’s tools she keeps in her bag of tricks for awkward situations. One that Rose made for her. The situation, not the bag. She opens the door for her and says, ‘It’s been wonderful to see you, Daze. We should have lunch in town soon – my treat.’

Rose is gratified to see a genuine smile on her friend’s face as she gently pats her cheek. ‘I’ll hold you to that, Rose. See you!’

Rose waves her off and follows her progress until the yellow of her coat and the red of her hair blend to form an early sunset as she grows ever more distant. Dear Daisy, what would she do without her? She needs to have a long hard look at herself because it’s not Daisy’s fault that she’s feeling at sixes and sevens. And if Rose has a non-horse-riding box, maybe she’s to blame for furnishing it. As she’s already decided, she’ll be stepping out of it very soon. This thought brings with it a smile and dilutes the melancholy. Adjustment needn’t be a trauma. Yet more yellow daffodils nod at her in agreement. Hmm. Maybe she’ll do a bit more than strim the grass in the garden and water the pots. Maybe she’ll buy a few new plants from the garden centre too. Attending a reunion will be one step too far, however. Once Daisy’s disappeared over the brow of the hill, the wind whips Rose back inside and she’s left with a bit of a hole. She needs to fill it with something uplifting before the melancholy sneaks back in.