Chapter Ten
TEN
The next few weeks passed in a kind of beautiful blur.
Will disappeared for hours at a time into the woods, where he was renovating Jamie’s abandoned forts.
Matt, making the most of the warm weather, used his weekends to clear fallen trees from the little stream that Paul last cleared when he and Rosemary arrived, almost half a century ago.
Robert the gardener – who turned out to be a strikingly well-muscled young man of few words – came, showed Matt how to work the ride-on mower, hit it off with him and was kept on, ‘just while we get on top of things’; watching him zip around the lawn, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and some trainers, was Kate’s guilty pleasure.
Tilly was introduced to riding at a nearby livery yard, and within days could talk of nothing else.
It turned out Rosemary had kept all Tessa’s old riding gear, although Kate did insist on buying a new hat.
Kate and Rosemary, meanwhile, spent hours making jam.
Kate could never have imagined how enjoyable it would be.
Jam-making, she’d assumed, was like knitting, or darning, or making stock from leftovers: something her grandparents’ generation did, and even then, only out of a sense of duty.
But with Rosemary, it was fun. There was picking the fruit, to begin with.
They filled the wooden trugs with gooseberries warmed by the sun, each berry translucent, glowing like a pale green marble that had somehow been lit from within.
Their plump tautness reminded Kate of her belly when she was pregnant – those striated veins, the tiny navel-like calyx.
One bush had berries that were hairy, almost spiny, like tiny blown-up puffer fish.
Another’s were soft and almost overripe, popping in her fingers with a slimy squirt of seeds – those, she ate straight away, sucking up the burst fruit and pulp from her palm.
The ones that split were always the sweetest.
‘My father used to say, “Never trust fruit that doesn’t have a bruise”,’ Rosemary told her as they picked.
‘Because a bruise means the tree knows it’s ripe and has let it go.
Whereas no bruises means it’s been pulled off by someone.
’ She slid her eyes at Kate. ‘It’s a bit like children, isn’t it? No bruises means no adventures.’
They talked as they picked, and in the kitchen too, while they stirred Rosemary’s enormous jam-making pan on the Aga.
Rosemary, somewhat surprisingly, was a keen karaoke singer, and could perform a word-perfect rendition of Bob Marley’s ‘Jamming’, using a wooden spoon as a microphone.
‘I had such a crush on him in the seventies,’ she confessed.
‘There’s something about beautiful black men, isn’t there?
’ Kate winced inwardly, but said nothing.
For her part, she started talking to Rosemary about her family – about Tilly, who in London had been bullied by some other girls and had started dreading school, while Will, who had dyslexia and ADHD, seemed only to make friends online, and then only when he played video games.
She and Matt had set a limit of no more than ninety minutes’ screen time a day, but enforcing it was a constant battle – even here, with the woods to distract him.
Gradually, she also talked more about herself – about the miscarriages she’d suffered between Will and Tilly, and how she’d been convinced they’d never have another child.
And, finally, about her mother. She didn’t know why she found it so hard to tell people about her, but she did – there was still the shame, somehow, and the years of ingrained secrecy.
‘She was an alcoholic,’ she said simply.
‘Not a mummy-likes-an-extra-glass-of-wine-at-supper alcoholic: a proper, full-blown, vodka-for-breakfast alcoholic. I used to take the bottles from the bottom of the laundry basket where she’d hidden them and empty some down the sink, to try to limit her.
But she’d just stagger out while I was at school and get more. ’
Rosemary was a good listener, never passing judgement or offering advice, just quietly empathising.
Emboldened, Kate told her more: how the alcoholism, and her mother’s consequent inability to hold down a job, had meant they were endlessly uprooted – moving almost every year, the houses ever smaller, the walls shrinking in on Kate as if she were growing at five times the normal rate.
The housing estates in which they were situated became progressively rougher, too, although her mother tried to pretend the opposite, clinging to middle-class gentility even as she increasingly came to resemble the local crackheads herself.
If it hadn’t been for a few pivotal teachers, Kate would never have escaped.
And then, at uni, she’d met Matt, confident and caring, and her life had changed almost overnight.
Not that she’d known back then they were going to be well off, of course; when, a few years later, he’d first mooted leaving his relatively well-paid tech job and setting up his own company, she’d been the one counselling caution.
‘I guess that’s one reason I love this place so much,’ she said, looking around. ‘Having been rootless . . . It’s not just that Trade Cottage is our forever home – though it definitely is. It’s the fact you were here for so long, too. That sense of permanence.’
‘And the Linwoods – the people before us – were here thirty years, I think.’ Rosemary also looked around wistfully. ‘You’re right – Tray’s a hard place to leave.’
Rosemary talked about her family, too: Jamie the golden boy, good at everything, with an extraordinarily well-paid job in Washington, one that made a real difference to the world; his beautiful wife Courtney, who, Rosemary confessed, she was rather scared of, so frighteningly competent was she; Tessa, who had been ‘troubled’ in her twenties – Kate got the impression drugs and toxic boyfriends had been involved – and had never quite got over an eating disorder she’d had at school.
But Rosemary didn’t talk, Kate noticed, about Paul, or her feelings about becoming the carer of someone with a terminal illness.
There was just the occasional crumb of information – that they were selling Paul’s beloved old Land Rover, for example, and getting a car that could accommodate a powered wheelchair.
‘Paul calls it the Popemobile. I think he secretly rather likes the idea of me having to drive him around. Says he’s going to get me a chauffeur’s hat. ’
For a brief time in mid-August there was a glut of peaches, too, but those were too precious to make jam from.
When Paul and Rosemary first came to Trade Cottage, they’d deliberately planted two varieties you couldn’t get in the shops: white peaches and pêche de vigne.
The white peaches were coarse-skinned, hairy as velvet, but the pale flesh inside was slippery with juice, almost oily, coating Kate’s fingers and tongue with floral, muscaty flavours.
And the pêche de vigne were misshapen and smooth-skinned, but revealed, when you opened them – Rosemary showed Kate how to do that without using a knife, just a sharp twist of the hands – yolk-coloured flesh streaked with red, like a sunset.
‘Blood peaches,’ she said proudly. ‘Even today, you don’t see them often.’
Kate took a picture of the blood peach for her Instagram. She was trying not to post too many shots of Trade Cottage – she didn’t want to be an Instabragger – but the fruit-picking and jam-making was another matter: she felt she was earning those.
After the peaches came the raspberries, the long green tunnel of canes now dotted with crimson everywhere she looked, little bobble-hats of pulp that trembled between her fingers as they slid off their white cones.
She had to pick carefully to avoid crushing them, but she noticed that, even so, she was starting to catch Rosemary up, her trug no longer still half-empty when Rosemary’s was full.
One evening, she had to go up to London to join Matt at a work dinner, and it was no surprise when Rosemary and Paul offered to mind the children.
Kate suggested pizzas from the pub and a bedtime of nine p.m. When she and Matt got back, sometime after midnight, she was startled to discover Tilly and Will both still up, finishing off an epic game of Risk, and an empty lasagne dish soaking in the sink.
It had been, the children told her, the funnest evening ever.
Privately, Kate – whose own evening had been long and exhausting; Matt’s techy co-founders were not the easiest conversationalists – wished she could have been with them.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ Rosemary said to her quietly as they left, Paul navigating his way out with some difficulty.
‘But it’s the hollibobs, and they were all three of them having such a lovely time.
’ She glanced at Paul’s departing back. ‘He adores them, you know. And it’s so good for his morale .
. . If we can do any more sitting, you will say, won’t you? ’
Kate did try to protest when Will came back from The Old Tennis Court a few days later with a knife – a fearsome-looking dagger in a leather sheath that Paul had given him.
But Jamie had had one just like it when he was a full year younger, Rosemary said, and, anyway, part of the gift was that Paul would teach Will how to use it safely.
So Will started going round to The Old Tennis Court every afternoon for whittling lessons, his knife proudly strapped to his belt. After a few sessions, he brought back an animal he’d carved. ‘It’s Biddy,’ he told Kate, and it did indeed look very like the Labrador.
‘It’s for you,’ he added. ‘A present.’ Touched, she kept it in pride of place beside her bed, so he could see how much it meant to her.
It was while she and Rosemary were making raspberry gin that the older woman had the idea of a party.
‘A sort of joint housewarming,’ she exclaimed.
‘You could get a few friends down from London, and I’ll get some people up from the village.
There are so many you really must meet. Gordon, of course, and Jake who runs the pub, and Liv who does the book club, and Mary Snow who I happen to know has a pony that nobody’s riding. ’
‘We’ve met Jason from the pub, actually,’ Kate said. Rosemary did this occasionally, she’d noticed – mixed up names, or couldn’t remember if they’d added sugar to the gin. It was one of the few reminders she was almost twice Kate’s age. ‘But being introduced to those others would be great.’
‘There’s a woman in the village who helps with catering, so it needn’t be too much of a chore.
How about the last bank holiday of August, when everyone’s back from their hols and needs cheering up?
We always used to have a do then. And if it starts early enough, we can invite some people with children the same age as Will and Tilly, so they’ll make friends before school starts. ’
‘That sounds perfect,’ Kate said. And so the party went in the calendar.