Chapter Nineteen
I thought at first that someone had fallen over or collapsed in the heat of the day.
Then it occurred to me that the figure I could see slumped and immobile in the distance was horribly still and might not be conscious.
My heart began to pound as I quickened my pace and broke into a run, already pulling my mobile from my pocket to summon help.
It sounded like the punchline from a very tasteless joke, but I guess, by the law of averages, some people really did pass away in cemeteries.
But thankfully not today.
With the pounding of my Nikes announcing my arrival, I approached the figure and realised with relief that they weren’t actually face-down in the dirt but were hunched over beside my mother’s grave. On hearing me, they straightened up and sat back onto their knees.
A hand, protected by a gardening glove, lifted to the man’s eyes to shield them from the afternoon sunlight. In the other he held a handful of weeds.
‘Henry? What are you doing?’
The older man looked truly thrown at seeing me, as though I was the interloper at my mother’s resting place and not him. He looked so confused, as though he didn’t know who I was, and I took a step to one side so he didn’t have to stare directly into the glare of sunlight to see me.
‘Oh, Ellie, it’s you.’
I’m not exactly sure who else he might have been expecting. The hand that was grasping the weeds let them fall to the ground and he peeled off the glove. His fingers were trembling.
‘Are you alright, Henry? You look a little pasty.’
I hoped he’d forgive the impertinence, but in truth his complexion looked decidedly waxy and was now the colour of rancid butter.
‘No. I’m absolutely fine,’ he said, getting to his feet with an ease that belied his years. ‘You just startled me for a moment.’
‘That seems to happen a lot on this spot,’ I said, remembering this was exactly how I’d met him several weeks earlier.
‘I thought, as you usually visit the cemetery in the mornings, the afternoon would be a good time to have a quick tidy-up of your mum’s plot.’
I did usually visit earlier in the day, and it worried me a little that he sounded so familiar with my movements. Was there an upper age limit to being a stalker? I dismissed the thought as ridiculous.
‘You came here just to tend to my mother’s plants?’
The waxy grey of his cheeks was replaced by a raspberry-coloured flush. Shame on you, my mother chided from somewhere very close by. Embarrassing a nice old man like that.
‘No, no,’ refuted Henry, looking flustered.
‘I was tidying up Bee’s plot today,’ he explained, nodding in the direction of the rows of graves on the other side of the path.
‘And once I was done with that, I thought I’d just have a quick tidy-up over here too.
’ He inclined his head towards a collection of gardening paraphernalia that I now noticed was neatly lined up beside Mum’s headstone.
‘That’s really kind of you,’ I said, looking at the peonies, which seemed to have almost doubled in size since I planted them. They all looked remarkably healthy.
‘They’re looking good, aren’t they?’ Henry said, and there was something about the pride in his voice that told me that wasn’t just a happy accident.
‘You’ve been watering them?’
He seemed to have regained his composure now.
‘Now and then,’ he admitted. ‘And I’ve given them the odd drop of plant food too.
’ He smiled, and for a fleeting moment I caught a glimpse of what a handsome man he must have been in his youth.
Not quite as good-looking as Rhys, admittedly, but even so, I could imagine how easily his wife Bee’s head must have been turned when they met.
‘Well, it’s very nice of you to help keep the flowers I planted alive, but truly, you don’t have to split your time here doing garden maintenance on two plots.’
Henry gave a small shrug and began gathering up his tools and dropping them into a canvas bag. ‘It really is no trouble, Ellie. I like to keep busy, and if I’m being totally honest, I really miss the big garden I used to have at my bungalow.’
With the tools now packed away, Henry moved to the bench, and it felt totally natural to take a seat beside him.
‘Have you moved house recently?’
He gave a nod. ‘Yes. After my wife passed away, I didn’t need such a big place anymore. So, I’ve moved into one of those retirement village places.’ He gave a small regretful expression, his nose wrinkling.
‘You don’t like it?’
His eyes twinkled and I sensed that buried somewhere beneath the passage of the years was a wicked sense of humour.
‘It’s full of old people.’
I’m not sure if it’s considered bad manners to laugh quite so heartily in a graveyard, but I couldn’t help it.
‘I think that’s the general idea, isn’t it?’
He gave a sad smile. ‘Also, there are more elderly couples there than I’d been expecting.’ He gave an old man’s sigh. ‘Perhaps I’d have liked it a whole lot more if my Bee could have been there with me.’
My heart ached a little for him, despite knowing next to nothing about him and his late wife.
‘And I miss gardening,’ he added, taking us back in a circuit to where our conversation had begun. ‘Which is why I like to tidy up the odd weed or two that I might spot on other people’s plots.’ He gave a little chuckle. ‘It’s the first time I’ve been caught red-handed, though.’
I’m not usually a very touchy-feely kind of person, so I totally surprised myself by leaning across the bench and gently patting his age-spotted hand. ‘Well, you can tidy up my mother’s plot anytime you feel like it. I don’t mind at all.’
He smiled as though I’d bestowed a gift on him, and I felt a sudden pang for his loneliness.
‘You’re a very kind young lady, Ellie. Very thoughtful.’
It was my turn to smile, but mine had a wry twist to it. ‘You only say that because you don’t know me very well.’ I looked across at the black granite headstone. ‘I don’t think I was terribly good at being a daughter.’
That seemed to really trouble him for some reason.
‘Did you and your wife have any children?’ I asked.
I was going to have to stop asking him questions, because the ones I was posing seemed to put too much regret on his face.
‘Sadly, we weren’t able to have any,’ he said.
The pain of that fact must have been thirty or forty years old, and yet it still looked fresh in his eyes.
‘There wasn’t so much help available for couples like us who were struggling back in those days.
’ A sudden image of Mel flashed into my thoughts, with her injections, hospital visits, and constant aching grief for something she’d never had and might never get to experience.
It made me wonder why those same yearnings didn’t run through my own veins and I couldn’t help looking towards the plot beside us.
‘Get yourself a career. Become financially stable. You won’t regret the hours you studied harder and worked longer than everyone else when you’re in control of your own destiny and never have to rely on anyone.’
I swallowed several times because the old memory had left a sour taste in my mouth.
That was how it had always been with my mum.
I did well at school, but every achievement had been tainted by her needing to know who’d scored higher than me.
With the benefit of hindsight and the wisdom of age, I eventually came to realise that her drive for me to succeed was tangled up in her own struggle as a single parent after my father had left us.
But however well-intentioned she’d been, the takeaway had always been that however great my achievement, it was never quite enough.
‘Ellie? Ellie?’
I jumped out of the reverie to find Henry looking at me with obvious concern.
‘I’m sorry. Did you say something? I was miles away.’ Years away would have been more accurate, but Mum had always been big on never showing emotional vulnerability. It seemed like that particular apple hadn’t fallen very far from the tree.
‘I was just asking if I could interest you in a glass of chilled lemonade.’ He reached into another compartment of the canvas bag and pulled out an old-fashioned thermos flask. ‘I make it myself. It was my wife’s recipe, and I have to admit, it’s exceedingly good.’
‘Go on then,’ I said, smiling at this kindly elderly gentleman who seemed to be my newest and most surprising friend.
He pulled off the thermos cap, revealing a second beaker beneath it, and poured out two drinks.
‘Cheers,’ he said, holding up his white plastic cup and clinking it against the one he’d just passed to me.
It was incongruous and kind of crazy, but also funny and charming.
I glanced over at the headstone and realised that Mum would actually have found it really amusing.
She might have had high, often unrealistic, expectations of me, and life hadn’t always dealt her the kindest of hands, but her sense of humour had miraculously remained intact.
Henry saw the direction of my gaze and tilted his own cup towards the black granite headstone in a salute. ‘And cheers to you too, Elizabeth.’
That was the moment when I knew that Henry was exactly the friend I needed in my life right then.