Epilogue
Some gardens hold the dead.
This one holds a climbing clematis that has twisted itself around a fence and a buddleia that was cut back three times and came back each time, but bigger.
There’s a terracotta pot tipped to one side, which nobody has got around to straightening yet, and an old, tall chimney pot covered with a grill, blackened at the edges, that has served as a barbecue for longer than anyone intended.
A cobbled path leads to a stone cottage, lined either side with flower beds, which are wild in parts. There are weeds, partly budding flowers, and twigs that somehow didn’t survive the winter.
A robin sits on the edge of a mossy stone birdbath, fluffing up its feathers, red belly proud.
At the far end there’s a pergola. Woody wisteria, barely budding, winds its way to the top in long, reaching stems. Two mugs sit on a small table under the pergola, surrounded by mismatched garden chairs – three originals, one replacement, and one that arrived from somewhere nobody can remember.
Today there’s a pair of small Wellington boots sitting outside the cottage – mud-splattered, decorated with rainbow stripes – and, next to them, a broom leans up against the stone.
Inside, in the kitchen, Belle wipes her brow with the back of her hand. She hums quietly – some song without a name, more of a habit than a tune – as she stirs a teapot which is loaded with four bags of Yorkshire Tea, plucked from the sun-bleached jar on the windowsill.
She places the teapot on a tray, alongside a jar of milk and a pot of sugar, and walks out into the garden, still humming, but her pace has slowed down after having left the London tempo behind with her fifties.
‘The lavender survived the winter,’ Jake calls out, crouching to a planter, garden gloves on his hands as she places the tray next to the mugs under the shade of the pergola.
Belle joins him, bends forward, and brings her nose to the lavender. Eyes closed, she breathes in before audibly exhaling.
‘How is it that that still manages to take me straight back?’ she asks, cheeks plump.
Jake stands beside her, wraps his arm around her waist and she settles to his side, both staring at the purple stems. She’d had it in her hair once, at the very beginning of things, and he’d spent ten minutes picking it out, strand by strand, in a field, while she complained and he pretended not to enjoy it.
A scream from inside and then sticky hands pressed against the glass. Belle and Jake chuckle at the tiny face, toothy and wide-grinned.
‘Help me, Grandpa! Mum is tickling me,’ the young girl squeals.
Belle watches as Jake pulls his gloves off, one finger at a time.
She gazes longingly at those hands, which are still her favourites.
She’d held these hands on a snowy day outside a church in Whitby.
She’d held them in the dark, in the back of a car, contractions shooting through her body, and on a different Tuesday morning, when the news was bad, and the tea was getting cold.
They are the hands that shook slightly while teaching their daughter to parallel park on a Sunday morning in an empty Sainsbury’s car park, both of them certain she was about to write the car off.
And they are the hands that had helped to build their dream home in the countryside when they left London twenty years ago.
They look mostly the same, just a little more withered and dusted with sunspots.
‘Juliet, Grandpa’s coming to get you!’ Jake sings, before he kisses Belle on the forehead. He walks to the back door, tiny footprints landing as heavy as a stampede of elephants.
Belle shivers, goes to the table, the breeze leaving a stamp of goosebumps on her arms.
His garden jacket, now cold to the touch, hangs on the back of a garden chair.
She pulls it on and pushes her hands into the pockets to warm up.
Left pocket: a receipt, a biro with no lid on, and the rooting powder she’d been looking for for the past year.
The right pocket is deeper and her fingers close around a fold of paper, which she pulls out before she knows what it is.
She almost doesn’t look, almost puts it back, thinking it’s another receipt, but it’s on thicker paper, denser, so she inspects it, turning it over in her palms.
It’s soft at the folds, the creases worn slightly white, as though it has been opened and closed more times than paper is meant to withstand.
She notices then, a crayon drawing. A squiggle, a smudge, an assortment of colours. Their daughter’s first drawing, her first circle. It’d been stuck to their fridge for years until one day it wasn’t, and she’d just assumed the magnet had broken.
Then scribbles, dark ink bleeding through from the other side.
She turns it over.
She recognises his handwriting from the slant of the first letter, the same slant it always had, just a little shakier now and covering every inch of space.
She pauses for a moment, then sits on the garden chair as she pulls her reading glasses from the chain around her neck to the tip of her nose.
Different colours, different pens, a couple faded and old, others freshly written.
Her smile lines. She hates them. I love them.
Her hands still slot in mine like they were made to fit.
She still loves hedgehog mash, but also cooks a mean artichoke.
Caught her telling our granddaughter that ghosts are nothing to be scared of.
Still eats cereal over the sink and now I’ve started doing it with her.
She danced on a bar in Ibiza on our honeymoon. Those pictures are my favourites.
I hope we live forever, to the very end.
She looks after me while I’m losing my memory.
She sniffs, removes her hand which has risen to her chest without her realising. She takes a deep breath, shakes her head, laughing, and places the list back into his pocket, carefully folding it neatly at the seams.
She stands for a moment. The robin is still on the birdbath; the lavender sways gently in the wind.
She picks up the teapot and, with it warming her hands, she looks up at the sky.
Just for a moment, she swears she sees someone watching.
A huge, mighty man with kind eyes, a big beard, and a familiar sadness.
She blinks and, as quickly as he appeared, he’s gone.
‘What is it?’ Jake asks, arriving behind her.
He takes the teapot from her hands without a word and pours two mugs. Hers first, no sugar.
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Just saying thank you.’
He doesn’t ask again. She just finds his hand, fingers threading through his, the way she always has. The way she suspects she always will.