The Rose Garden

This was better. Not as preachy, and its author was a more romantic soul who started off with ancient legends and the story of the old well at St Non’s, and wove his facts with bits of poetry that made the book a pleasant read.

I was halfway through by supper, and I took it upstairs afterwards to read in bed, in hopes that it would lull me off to sleep. But once again, I found myself too restless, whether from an overdose of coffee or residual emotion from our scattering the ashes, and when midnight came and went and left me staring at the walls I took another of my sleeping pills and waited for the drowsiness to claim me.

I was in that strange, floating place, well aware I was nearly asleep and past caring, when I thought I heard the same voices I’d heard before breakfast, the barest of whispers that seemed to come straight from the wall by my head.

‘Oh, knock it off,’ I mumbled with my face against the pillow. ‘Let me sleep.’

They didn’t stop. But in the end, I didn’t mind, because the one voice had a very pleasant rhythm to it, and I let it soothe me into letting go my final hold on consciousness.

CHAPTER SIX

Susan had been right. I really liked her friend Felicity.

She was, like Susan, lively and intelligent and quick to laugh, a pretty young woman with dark hair that would have come down in a cascade of curls if she hadn’t kept it bound back with elastics and a clip and tied a scarf around it, gypsy style, presumably to guard against the dust that we were raising.

‘I mean, honestly,’ she asked us as she lifted yet another broken snooker cue, ‘why would somebody keep all these?’

‘You didn’t know my Dad.’ Susan smiled. ‘He probably had plans to make them into something useful.’

‘Yes, well, I’ve got plans for them and all.’ She chucked the cue with all the others on the growing rubbish heap outside the door. The greenhouse was a fairly modern structure. According to Susan it had been built a decade ago, when Uncle George had suddenly decided he wanted to breed roses, to create new varieties instead of only cultivating existing ones, but as with so many things that Uncle George had started with enthusiasm, it had failed to hold his interest long. His passion for hybridising had waned when it proved to be trickier work than he’d thought it would be, and at some point he must have abandoned his efforts because it appeared that the greenhouse had been given over to storage for several years now.

We three had spent the last two hours since breakfast digging through the clutter and attempting to create a bit of order. It was challenging.

‘The thing is,’ said Felicity, ‘your family doesn’t seem to have thrown anything away. What is this, your first shoe?’ She held a tiny trainer up, and Susan looked.

‘More likely Mark’s.’ She’d found a treasure of her own. ‘Come look at this,’ she said, and spread the pages of a heavy album open so that we could see the photographs. The colours of the pictures had begun to change a bit with age, more reddish than they should have been, but still they showed some lovely views around Trelowarth gardens.

‘This shouldn’t be in here, it’s going to get ruined.’ Susan turned the pages reverently. ‘Oh look, there’s Claire.’

‘That’s quite the outfit,’ said Felicity.

‘Have a heart, it was the Eighties. Eva, look at this. Just look.’

I looked, and saw a charming picture of the Lower Garden with the roses all in bloom and beautiful. I said, ‘You ought to have that one enlarged and hang it up in here.’

Susan turned toward Felicity. ‘Could you do that, Fee?’

‘Course I could.’

‘Fee’s brilliant with photography. You ought to see her pictures of the harbour,’ Susan told me.

‘Well, it’s what the tourists want. I had some made up into notecards for the shop last summer. Couldn’t keep enough of them in stock.’

I asked her, curious, ‘Where is your shop?’

‘Beside Penhaligon’s.’

‘Where Mrs Kinneck’s used to be,’ said Susan. ‘You remember Mrs Kinneck, Eva? She had all those jars of sweets behind the counter, and she always gave us liquorice babies.’

I remembered.

‘It’s all changed, now,’ Susan said. ‘The old shops are all gone. Except the fudge shop – that’s still there, thank God – but Mrs Griggs is gone, and Mr Turner’s.’

I asked, ‘What about the little place that sold the seashells in the baskets, near the harbour?’

‘It’s a tea room, now,’ she told me, ‘but the girl that runs it can’t make scones for toffee.’

‘Sue will put her out of business,’ said Felicity.

Susan turned another page of photographs. ‘I don’t want to put anybody out of business, Fee. I’m only interested in keeping us in business.’ She looked down at the photographs, determined. ‘My father would spin in his grave if Trelowarth passed out of the family.’

Felicity held up a long piece of signboard with the name ‘Trelowarth Roses’ stencilled on it in blue paint. ‘What’s this?’

‘Oh. Part of the display we used to take around to flower shows, when Dad was still keen on that sort of thing.’

I vaguely remembered the rhythm of all those shows, spread through the season from springtime to autumn, although as a child I’d been barely aware of the effort that Uncle George put into preparing for them. Looking at the neglected display, I asked, ‘Doesn’t Mark do shows?’