Chapter Thirty-Three
It was later than I usually visited, so I wasn’t particularly concerned when I didn’t run into Henry at the cemetery that afternoon.
I’d been playing catch-up for most of the day, trying to recoup the time I’d lost at the dress fitting that morning.
And it wasn’t as if I saw Henry every time I came, although he was there frequently enough for it to feel strange when our paths didn’t cross.
I was probably one of the last visitors of the day and could have had my pick of spaces in the car park, but I swung into the one I’d come to think of as mine.
I followed the familiar pathway to my mother’s section of the burial grounds, feeling a little disappointed when I didn’t see a tall silver-haired septuagenarian somewhere nearby.
Although in fairness, I couldn’t see anyone else around either.
That didn’t bother me in the way it might once have done.
If you’d told teenage me, who’d been an avid fan of horror films and Buffy episodes, that one day I’d find a graveyard a comforting and peaceful place, I’d never have believed you.
But there was something special about this one.
Perhaps because this was where I was learning to look back on so many memories from my past and see them from a different perspective.
The shift in my viewpoint started small.
You would have thought hearing snippets of my childhood recollections would have been boring to Henry, but he was far too polite for that.
The story of when I’d told Mum, the night before a school play, that I needed a fairy costume for the next day was hardly riveting, but Henry listened with rapt attention.
He grinned broadly when I revealed there’d been a gorgeous sparkly dress on the foot of my bed the following morning, in a fabric very much like my mother’s one and only good dress .
. . a dress I’d actually never seen again after that day.
It was strange how even the things that had once made me cringe now made me smile.
‘She embarrassed the hell out of me by running in both the mothers’ and the fathers’ race on my last junior school sports day.’
Henry chuckled softly at that. ‘Oh, I do like the sound of your mother. What a character she must have been. Tell me, did she win either of them?’
‘Came first in the mums’ race and second in the dads’,’ I said, feeling suddenly guilty, twenty-five years too late, that I’d been so mortified by her actions I hadn’t spoken to her for days.
She’d never been like the other mothers and all I’d ever wanted was to have a normal family like everyone else seemed to, and to fit in.
I was only now starting to realise that I’d spent so much of my youth focusing on every time she hadn’t shown up at a school event or parents’ evening that I hadn’t appreciated how she’d shown up for me in a myriad of other ways.
Of course, there were incidents that still stung, but with the benefit of age, hindsight, and some guiding prompts from a kindly stranger, who’d now become a friend, I realised that neither Mum nor I had been totally right, or totally wrong.
I’d been stubborn and unwilling to listen to any viewpoint other than mine .
. . but so had she. I gave a sad smile. I’d always thought our similarities were only physical, but as I unlocked the doors to the past, I realised they ran deeper than that.
Sometimes I wondered if I’d ever have made those discoveries alone, without Henry’s quiet influence.
Maybe, but he’d undoubtedly made it easier.
Which was why it was disappointing to have missed him today, because I wanted to let him know that I was no longer hiding from the truth of losing her.
Now that Rhys had been told, everyone important to me knew what had happened.
‘Hi, Mum,’ I said, crouching down beside her plot. A cool breeze rustled through the surrounding trees and I looked up into their branches, fancifully imagining that she was greeting me too.
It was colder today, and I was glad I’d grabbed the thick-knit cardigan from the back seat of my car.
September had slipped into October, and it was inevitable the warm weather we’d enjoyed wouldn’t last much longer.
Would I continue to visit the cemetery this often when the seasons changed?
I didn’t mind the cold, but I still had issues with storms, and a tendency to panic whenever the TV weather map showed dark grey clouds and lightning bolts.
But if I wasn’t going to be trapped indoors every time the weather turned squally, that was something I really needed to address.
‘I finally told Rhys about you,’ I said out loud as I reached for a handful of fallen leaves and twigs that had blown onto Mum’s plot and dropped them into the rubbish bag I’d brought with me.
There seemed to be more foliage and scraps of litter to clear away than usual, and as I plucked them from between the peonies I’d planted, I noticed the soil was bone-dry.
There’d been no rain for weeks, but thanks to Henry and his regular watering regime, everything had been flourishing. Until now.
I cast my mind back, trying to remember how long it had been since my last visit. It had to be at least five days ago, possibly longer, and now that I thought about it, Henry hadn’t been here then, either. In fact, when was the last time I’d seen him?
Concern prickled down my spine like a rash.
Looking more closely at Mum’s headstone, I noticed there were several weeds poking through the soil. It wasn’t Henry’s responsibility to keep things tidy for me; he was here for his wife, after all. But whenever I’d tried to dissuade him from helping, he’d always assured me it was no trouble.
‘Perhaps he’d just run out of time,’ I suggested to Mum, who had no comment to offer.
I filled the watering can from a nearby tap Henry had discovered, but the niggling feeling that something was wrong refused to leave as I watered the peonies.
It was still there when I pulled up the handful of weeds, and I couldn’t help but wonder if Bee’s plot was similarly neglected. Now that would be worrying.
I got to my feet, rubbing the soil and dirt from my hands, and turned my gaze in the direction where Henry always headed when we parted.
Shielding my eyes against the last rays of the day, I scanned a seemingly endless horizon of gravestones.
Thinking with my feet rather than my head, I strode across the pathway towards the other section of the cemetery.
Luckily good sense kicked in before I stepped onto the turf.
I’d never accompanied Henry to his wife’s plot and had no idea which block was Bee’s.
I could literally search the rows for hours and still not find it.
‘Gates will be closing soon, love,’ declared a voice directly behind me, making me jump out of my skin and taking at least ten years off my life expectancy. I spun around to face its owner.
‘We lock ’em at dusk,’ a ruddy-featured groundsman informed me.
‘Oh, okay. Thank you. I’m just going,’ I said hurriedly.
‘Wouldn’t want you to get accidentally locked in.’
‘No. Absolutely,’ I said, turning to scan the tombstones as though expecting Henry to miraculously pop up from behind one. Although if he had, it would probably have lopped another decade off my life.
‘Lost someone, have you?’ the groundsman asked intuitively.
‘Kind of.’
The groundsman smiled, revealing the gaps where several teeth should have been. ‘They’ll turn up. Sooner or later we all turn up here.’
‘It was the creepiest thing ever,’ I told Mel, who happened to call me on the drive home, when the incident was still fresh in my head.
‘I tell you what is even more spooky,’ Mel said. ‘What if this Henry guy of yours isn’t real?’
‘What do you mean, not real? The man carries a bag of Werther’s Originals in his pocket and drinks Starbucks coffee when I bring it in.’
‘Apparitions can do stuff like that,’ said Mel, taking a quantum leap into the twilight zone, her old stomping ground.
‘Apparitions? Do you mean like ghosts? Is that what you’re saying? That Henry is a ghost?’
‘I’m just offering up a perfectly plausible explanation,’ Mel said, settling comfortably into the kind of argument that used to occupy us for hours in our student days.
‘Think about it. He’s always there when you are.
He doesn’t interact with anyone else. He helped you resolve your feelings about your mum and now that you have, he’s mysteriously disappeared.
Maybe he’s not a ghost at all. Maybe he’s an angel. ’
‘Okay. Hanging up now,’ I said, just about managing to stifle my amusement.
‘The truth is out there,’ Mel said, trying very hard not to laugh herself.
‘Sure it is,’ I said, as I severed our connection.
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ Rhys asked me later that evening, shifting slightly on the settee so that I could position my laptop more comfortably on my legs.
‘I’m trying to track someone down.’
‘Intriguing.’ Rhys leant forward to rest his chin on my shoulder, the better to see my screen, where my search bar was still visible.
Retirement homes near me.
‘Mel thinks the person I’m looking for is a ghost.’
‘Okay. I’m officially hooked now. Do you need the internet or a Ouija board?’
I glanced back over my shoulder and gave him a quick kiss.
‘I think the web should do it.’
It would have been all too easy to allow myself to get distracted by Rhys. Lord knows, it never took much for him to take me from nought to sixty. But whatever it was that had ignited the first embers of concern in the cemetery was still quietly smouldering away several hours later.
‘Henry, the man I’ve made friends with at the cemetery, hasn’t been there on the last two or three times I’ve visited.’
‘And that’s worrying you?’ It was a perfectly reasonable question.
I wrinkled my nose. ‘I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because he’s old and doesn’t appear to have any family to worry about him. And after months of seeing him there practically every time I go, it’s strange when suddenly he isn’t.’
‘But he’s only been missing a couple of times?’
Rhys was playing the part of devil’s advocate extremely well.
‘I know. I’m being ridiculous for worrying. I mean, there’s probably a hundred good reasons why I haven’t seen him. He could be on holiday or have gone somewhere else for a while.’
‘Like another astral plane?’ Rhys asked, his eyes twinkling.
I gave his shoulder a gentle shove, but he captured my hand and didn’t release it.
‘You’re really concerned about this old chap, aren’t you?’
I nodded.
‘Okay,’ Rhys said, as though he wasn’t talking to someone who was making absolutely no sense. He gave my hand a reassuring squeeze before releasing it to pull his mobile from his pocket.
‘How can I help? What are we searching for?’
When stripped down like that, I realised how little I knew about Henry or how to find him. I blew out a long breath. ‘Well, I know that his name is Henry, although I don’t know his surname.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I know he’s a retired mathematics teacher; that he used to live in a bungalow before moving to the retirement place – which he doesn’t particularly like. I know he loves gardening and that his wife’s name was Bee and that she was the love of his life.’
‘That’s all we have to go on?’
Rhys would never know how much that ‘we’ meant to me.
‘’Fraid so. I don’t even know when Bee passed away, although I’ve always felt it must be quite recent because he still looks and sounds so sad when he talks about losing her.’
‘I don’t think we can use that as evidence,’ Rhys said, running one finger gently down my cheek. ‘I don’t think I would ever get over losing you.’
For a moment all thoughts of trying to find Henry were set aside as I lost myself in his eyes. We’d grown so much closer over the last few weeks, but we kept dancing around the L word. No one had said it, but there had been times, like now, when it seemed close enough to touch.
Just remember, L is for lightning as well as love, Old Ellie materialised long enough to point out. I did my best to ignore her.
‘That’s a lovely thing to say,’ I whispered.
‘It’s true,’ Rhys said, his eyes turning momentarily sad for something that hadn’t even happened. ‘Some things are too painful to even think about,’ he said softly.
‘Well, I’m not planning on going anywhere anytime soon.’
‘Ditto,’ he said before pulling me in for a kiss, a longer one this time. It was the kind that could easily have spilled over into something more, and I could already feel a very familiar stirring deep inside me. Ironically, it was Rhys who pulled away first.
‘Enough of this. We have some cyberstalking to do.’
We split our searches, with me taking the retirement homes and Rhys looking into the gardening and horticultural connection.
It took over an hour of scrolling and I think I fell a little bit more in love with Rhys with every passing minute as he trawled through his phone, never once complaining or moaning about searching for someone who probably didn’t need to be found anyway.
In the end we located him almost simultaneously.
‘I think this might be him,’ declared Rhys at almost the same moment as I cried out ‘Got him!’
We swapped devices. On Rhys’s was an archived article from a local paper about an amateur gardening competition, where first prize had gone to someone called Henry Thatcher, who’d won with his hybrid rose called Bee’s Delight.
‘I mean, it could be the kind of bee that found its way inside your bra,’ Rhys said with a twinkle in his eye. ‘But equally, it could be his wife’s name. What did you find?’
I’d also found a local newspaper article, but mine concerned the expansion of an exclusive retirement village.
Accompanying the article was a grainy photograph showing a ribbon strung across an archway, about to be cut by an official wielding an impossibly large pair of scissors.
Behind the satin barrier were a handful of the new wing’s occupants, and among them, standing a little to one side and alone, was a familiar silver-haired figure with a smile on his face that looked like it was only going to be there until the camera had flashed.