The Rose Garden

‘No, go ahead. Only—’

‘—don’t tell Mark. I know.’ I reached for the folder. ‘Why is he so set against your tea room?’

Susan set the final teacup on the draining board and pulled the plug to let the water out. ‘I wouldn’t say he’s set against it, more that he’s resistant, and that’s just because it doesn’t fit his vision of Trelowarth. Mark’s a purist, like my grandfather. Change doesn’t interest him.’ She grinned. ‘If you ask me, Mark’s simply not sure about sharing our roses with strangers.’

Reading her notes while I finished my coffee, I rotated one drawing slightly to help get my bearings. ‘So you’d put the tea room over there, then,’ I said, pointing at an angle out the window, past the stretch of level turf that once had been the stable yard and to the tangled greenery beyond it.

‘That’s right, in Dad’s old greenhouse. No one uses it any more, but it’s still got all the plumbing in place and the glass is all good. I’ve been told that it wouldn’t be hard to convert.’ She came round beside me to study the plans. ‘Claire’s grandparents met in a tea room, apparently. She told us the story, it’s very romantic. I’ll have to ask if she remembers the name of the place. We could call ours the same, put a bit of her history here, too.’

This was the sort of project that my mother, with her passion for historical research, would have loved. If she’d been living still, she would have wasted little time in digging through the records to unearth the finer details of Trelowarth’s past.

But when I said as much to Susan, she said only, ‘She’d have bored herself to tears, then. They’re all deadly dull, my family, and they’ve been here for two hundred years, at least. I keep hoping that I’ll come across a smuggler or a pirate, someone infamous, to help bring in the tourists.’

‘Someone famous might work just as well.’ I kept my focus on the drawings and the notes as I reminded her, ‘You have a famous movie star who used to spend her summers here, remember.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It wouldn’t feel right, trading on Katrina’s name. And Mark would never go for it. You know my brother.’

Yes, I did. The years might change our outer selves, but underneath it all we stayed the same, we kept our patterns, and I knew where I should look for him when I went out a short while later with the box of ashes. In the mornings, he had always started in the highest terrace and worked down from there. I found him in the Quiet Garden, pulling weeds. His boots were caked and muddy and the wind had blown his hair and he was wearing an old denim jacket not unlike the one I held a memory of him wearing when he worked among the roses.

He stopped as I came in through the old wooden door in the high stone wall, into the roofless, still space where the wind couldn’t reach with its fine salty spray from the sea that could burn through the delicate petals and leaves. When Mark saw what I’d brought with me, what I was carrying, he asked me, ‘Ready, then?’

‘Whenever you are.’

He tugged off his gloves, set his tools away tidily into the small corner shed, and picked up a small battered rucksack he slung on his shoulder before leading me out of the garden.

The walk to the Beacon was one of the prettier walks at Trelowarth. We went down the hill to the coast path again, through the Wild Wood as if we were going to Claire’s, but we passed by the cottage and right through the clearing and into the woods again, still on the coast path. We came out the other side close to the top of the cliffs, close enough to be able to hear the harsh rush of the waves as they broke on the black rocks and shingle beneath. Here we left the path, turning our backs to the sea as we came to the fence of a broad sloping pasture where several cows lazily stood with their heads to the grass, paying no heed to either of us as we climbed up and over the stile.

Mark helped me over, then went back to walking just in front of me, head down, his thoughts turned inward. I knew why.

He’d often brought Katrina up here, that last summer. This had been their special place, a place to get away from all the adults and us younger children, to be on their own together. I’d been too young then to be my sister’s confidante, too young for her to tell me what they’d talked about up here. I’d only known that when she’d been with Mark up at the Beacon, she had come back shining like a lamp had been switched on inside her, stepping lightly as the butterflies that danced around my feet now as my shoes brushed through the bluebells in the windblown grass.

And Mark, I knew, was walking with the memories.

I had memories of my own to keep me company. My mother, loving history as she did, had loved the romance of the Beacon, ancient relic of the days when there had been a chain of signal fires on hilltops all along the coast of Britain, standing ready to be lit in times of trouble. They had served a double purpose, calling everyone who saw them to come out and take up arms against the enemy, while at the same time swiftly sending warning word to London of approaching danger. In Elizabethan times, this beacon at Trelowarth had been used to pass the signal when the sails of the Armada were first spotted from the shore.

In those days, the Beacon would have been a sight to see – a high stone table, higher than a man, much like the Neolithic cromlechs that one still saw perched on hillsides in this area, but with a pile of kindling wood, perhaps, stacked up on top of it in readiness. My mother’s words had painted such a clear and vivid picture of it in my mind that when we’d come up here on picnics I had always felt the urge to keep a sharper watch on the horizon for a stealthy Spanish sail, and sometimes glanced from left to right along the coast to see if I could spot another beacon fire flaring in the distance.