The Rose Garden

But would she, this time? How could anybody, even Claire, believe my story, much less understand it? She would put it down to stress, or grief, or even mental illness, and she’d worry …

‘Here they come,’ said Felicity, as the first tourists came into view on the path, and the next fifteen minutes were blissfully busy, keeping me from thinking about anything but filling and delivering the teapots – my assigned task – while the others served the scones with jam and clotted cream and Paul the plumber tried to keep his focus on the dishwasher, which couldn’t have been easy since the tour group seemed to mostly be young women, not a few of whom were pretty and the bulk of whom appeared to have their focus fixed on Paul.

Susan and Felicity were both too deeply occupied to take much notice, but I knew Claire heard the comments and the giggling and I saw her smile a few times, then I saw her smile more knowingly in Paul’s direction as it grew apparent he had eyes for one young woman in particular, a lively girl with laughing eyes who seemed to draw our plumber’s gaze each time he straightened from his work, and when she went outside with friends to have them take her picture by the cloutie tree, his frequent glances followed her with interest.

Passing Claire as I returned from filling yet another teapot, I nodded at the little group of tourists by the cloutie tree and shared a conspiratorial smile. ‘Susan has some competition.’

‘So it seems.’ She raised a hand to brush the hair back lightly from my swollen cheekbone. ‘That looks rather better than I feared it would. I’m glad.’

I drew a breath. ‘You didn’t hit me with the door.’

‘I know I didn’t. But I had to tell them something, darling, didn’t I?’

A laughing shriek from outside interrupted us. The rain had come at last, in a great sudden lashing downpour that was pelting on the glass roof of the tea room like a drum roll and cascading down the windows as the small group of young women by the tree, caught unawares, made an impressive dash towards the door and tumbled through it, out of breath and dripping on the floor. Two of them had been wearing hooded anoraks and so escaped the worst of it, but the dark-haired girl Paul had been watching was soaked to the skin in her light cotton blouse.

And then Paul stood and shrugged his denim shirt off and stepped forwards, drawing all the female eyes now with his T-shirt closely sculpted to his muscled chest and shoulders and his lean flat stomach. ‘Here.’ He gallantly offered his shirt to the wide-eyed young woman, who took it and gave him a suddenly self-aware smile in return.

At the far edge of my vision I could see Felicity nudge Susan, and they stared together for a moment before Susan shook her head and made some comment to Felicity. No doubt she was remarking on how weird it was that history was repeating; that our plumber had done just what Claire’s own grandfather had done, such a coincidence.

And then a kettle whistled to the boil and she turned back again to give it her attention, and the moment passed.

But not for me.

For me the moment stretched as though it were a string and I’d just figured out the pattern of the beads to thread upon it. Because I was watching Claire.

I saw the misting of her eyes, the strange emotion of her smile, the way she watched Paul watch the Welsh girl slide his shirt around her shoulders, and it all made sudden sense.

But still, it seemed so unbelievable that I could only clear my throat and say to Claire, ‘That’s just the way it happened with your grandparents.’

She turned her head and turned her smile on me, and then I knew beyond all doubt.

‘My dear.’ Her voice was quiet, meant for me alone, a confidence she must have felt quite sure I’d understand. ‘They are my grandparents.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

The rain had stopped. From time to time the wind chased through the taller trees that edged the wood around Claire’s small back garden, shaking leaves and letting loose a scattered showering of water droplets, sparkling as they fell like little diamonds in the spears of sunlight breaking through the branches and the ever-shifting clouds.

Claire came out with two mugs of tea and handed one to me and edged her chair around so that, like mine, it faced the little sundial with its butterfly’s bronze wings forever poised for flight.

We sat there for a moment saying nothing while a bird sang somewhere, steadily, within the cooler shadows of the wood.

Then I said, ‘So you knew who he was.’

‘Paul? Oh, yes. From the moment I saw him. And my grandmother, too. Of course I wasn’t sure I’d get to see the moment when they met, I wasn’t certain of the date, but I did hope …’ She glanced at me. ‘I’m sorry, darling, that I haven’t been more help to you this summer, but I thought it best to let you find your own way through, without my interference.’

‘But you did know what was happening.’

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘It happened much the same for me, although you travel from this time into the past, while this time is the past, to me.’ Her gaze had settled calmly on the sundial, and she spoke as though we were discussing something very commonplace. ‘The first time that I travelled back to this time, I was young, like you. Alone, like you. My parents had divorced, you see, and both of them had taken up with new people and suddenly there I was, with stepbrothers and stepsisters and our family home sold, and no place that was really my own any more, and I began to feel a great nostalgia for the days when I’d come down here as a child, when both my grandparents were still alive and living at St Non’s. When life was simpler.’ Stretching out her legs, she took a sip of tea before continuing, ‘I was struggling along on my own as an artist by then, no real ties or commitments to bind me to anywhere, so I came down into this part of Cornwall on holiday and spent a lovely fortnight rediscovering the place, and that of course,’ she finished off, ‘meant coming to Trelowarth, for a cream tea at the Cloutie Tree.’