She’d always loved to hear the story of the day her grandparents had met, and over the course of her own visits to them they’d formed a tradition of making a pilgrimage out to Trelowarth to share a cream tea.
‘It wasn’t the same,’ she said, ‘with them not there, but nonetheless it was a brilliant summer day and all the roses were in bloom and I stayed afterwards and wandered through the gardens as we’d always done. My grandmother had loved the Quiet Garden best of all, so I went up and had a little moment there, communing with her spirit. But when I was done and ready to come out again, I couldn’t find the path.’
She had been more perplexed than panicked. It felt strange to lose her bearings in a place she’d known so well. Eventually, she’d found the path – not where she’d thought it ought to be, but she did find it, and began to make her way back down towards the Cloutie Tree, a bit disoriented, only to discover that the tearoom wasn’t there.
‘There wasn’t even a greenhouse. I thought I was losing my mind,’ she confessed, ‘as I’m sure you’ll appreciate.’
I managed a small smile. ‘Yes. What did you do?’
‘Well, I did panic then. I turned tail like a coward and ran to the house and I banged at the door until somebody answered. That was when I met your Uncle George.’ Recalling that meeting, she said, ‘I was lucky he didn’t call in the authorities right there and then, and have them drag me off to Broadmoor. I know I must have sounded like a madwoman. But George … well, he was always kind to strays.’ He’d brought Claire in and listened to her tale and made her tea.
‘I’m not sure where the children were,’ she said. ‘Mark must have been at school, and Susan was most likely upstairs napping.’
He’d been widowed for a year by then, though at the time she hadn’t known that. She’d been too caught up in her own strange predicament to notice much of anything.
I knew just how she’d felt.
‘Then someone telephoned – the telephone was in the hall, I think, and George went off to answer it, and then …’ She paused, as though unable to describe exactly what had happened next, before it seemed to strike her that with me, the process didn’t need describing, so she simply said, ‘And there I was again, back where I’d started, in the Quiet Garden.’
Everything was back where it was meant to be. The tearoom was in its place again, and she had gone inside to settle her bewildered nerves with one more pot of tea. After an hour in the Cloutie Tree amid the normal ebb and flow of patrons and inconsequential chatter, she’d convinced herself that what had happened must have been a daydream, an imagining.
But still, she’d packed her car up hastily that afternoon and cancelled her hotel and driven north across the moors to switch the subject of her paintings to the wilder-looking coastline on the other side of Cornwall, up near Boscastle.
Three months had passed before she’d found the nerve to venture back.
‘I couldn’t stop thinking about it,’ she told me. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking of him. I’d begun to have dreams …’
It was autumn, by this time. The tourists had mostly departed, the streets of Polgelly were quiet, and up at Trelowarth the roses were reaching the end of their season, the gardens being readied for the winter.
She’d gone right up and knocked at the door of the house. ‘I’d decided, you see, that the only way to get the whole episode out of my head would be to prove to myself that it couldn’t have happened.’ And as she’d expected, the door of Trelowarth was opened by somebody else – a man not unlike George in appearance, but with reddish hair and a leaner build. ‘He was quite pleasant. I asked after George and he told me the only George Hallett he knew was his grandfather, and he’d been dead a long time.’
I felt my eyes widen. ‘His grandfather? Then he was—’
‘Mark’s eldest,’ Claire supplied. ‘Stephen. A charming man. Very artistic he was, with these gardens, though all of Mark’s children were artists in their own way. Something they got from their mother.’
‘Felicity.’
‘Yes.’
I was pleased by that.
Unseen, the wind stirred the trees at the edge of the garden and shook loose a new spray of lingering raindrops that fell near our feet and chased over the face of the sundial. The butterfly, frozen in bronze, stayed unmoving, still counting its moments.
Claire settled deeper in her chair and took another sip of tea. ‘After talking to Stephen, I didn’t know what to believe. What I’d seen. I only knew that there was something … something pulling me … no, pulling is perhaps too strong a word. Something inviting me to stay here. I went down into Polgelly to the pub to have some lunch. To think. And there, two tables over, was a man, a very old man, and he watched me for a little while, and then he just came over with his pint and sat right down and introduced himself.’
He’d thoroughly disarmed her with his easygoing attitude and they’d begun to talk, about her painting and her grandparents and all that she remembered of St Non’s.
‘And then our talk turned to Trelowarth and the gardens and he told me that his wife had been a Hallett, and through her he had inherited a cottage on the grounds and if I wanted I could have it for the winter, do my work there. So—’
She spread her hands, and at the gesture I looked round.
‘This cottage?’