The Rose Garden

‘He hasn’t in years. He’s a true Hallett male,’ Susan said. ‘You can’t blast the man out of his garden unless he sees a need for it, and now he’s got the Internet he rarely sees the need for being sociable. He’s going to die a bachelor,’ she predicted.

‘Oh, I doubt it. Mark’s a handsome man,’ I said.

‘Well, not with this hairstyle, he isn’t.’ Still flipping through the pages of the photograph album, she turned it so Felicity and I could see the photo of a teenaged Mark with denims and fluorescent lime-green T-shirt, with his hair blow-dried and feathered like a 1980s pop star.

Felicity laughed out loud. ‘And who on earth is that, behind him?’

‘That,’ said Susan, ‘would be Claire, again. We really should take these to show her, she’ll have probably forgotten they were here.’

Felicity thought it more likely that Claire had been storing the album out here in the greenhouse on purpose, to bury the evidence. ‘Who would want to be reminded of those clothes?’

But it was getting near to lunchtime and my stomach was aware of it, and Claire had made it clear she was expecting us for sandwiches and tea, which at the moment seemed a very good idea.

The same thought must have struck the dogs, for all of them fell in behind us as we walked downhill towards the coast path, bouncing playfully on one another until Susan with a whistle sent them racing on ahead. The larger three dogs vanished in the woods, but scruffy Samson circled back and snuffled happily along close by my heels as Susan and Felicity forged on ahead of us.

I’d always liked the company of dogs. I’d never had one of my own. When I was younger in Vancouver we’d had two cats that my father had said firmly were the only pets we needed, and none of my apartments in LA would have allowed a pet, but walking now with Samson I reflected on how comforting the bond could be between a person and a dog.

Apparently he liked me, too. He wagged his stumpy tail at the least word from me, and seemed content himself to let the others go ahead while he stayed close beside me on the path, so when he paused to let his nose explore a patch of undergrowth, I stopped as well and waited for him. ‘What’s so interesting?’

Samson couldn’t tell me what he smelt, of course. He cocked his ears to catch my voice but kept his nose down, focused on the scent around the leaves. A rabbit, likely. Maybe even Susan’s badger. I was going to suggest we move along when something rustled not far off, and Samson’s head shot up. One sniff and he was after it, his little body plunging through the trees, and even as I drew in breath to call him back the trees themselves began to shift and move.

At least, it looked as though that’s what the trees were doing. Startled by the strangeness of it, I stopped short.

The path, for some reason, appeared to have narrowed. The wind had grown suddenly warmer and sunlight was filtering down through the leaves at a new angle, dappling everything round me with shadows. And there, just in front of me, where I knew full well it hadn’t been moments before, was a fork in the path.

The surprise held me motionless. That, and the uneasy knowledge that what I was looking at couldn’t be real. It was only a trick of the mind. Had to be. There was only one path through the woods. Mark had shown me that yesterday – and anyway I’d just been looking right there, at that very spot, not half a minute earlier, and I’d seen nothing. Only trees.

The second path lay quietly in shadow, unconcerned with my refusal to believe that it was there. It curved away towards the cliffs, towards the sea, and all the ragged growth along its edges showed it hadn’t just been newly made, as did the deeply sliding marks that looked like footprints left by someone walking there just after rain.

Confused, I looked along the path I knew, the only path that should have been there, but Felicity and Susan had gone on so far ahead I couldn’t see them anymore. I called out to them anyway. ‘Susan?’

But nobody answered.

The wind shook the branches and leaves overhead and the scenery shifted again, faintly dizzying. I closed my eyes.

Something crashed through the ferns at my side and my heart jumped straight into my throat, beating hard. Then a snuffling nose nudged my leg. Very slowly, I opened my eyes and looked down, to see Samson returned from his chasing whatever it was, with a bit of twig stuck in the fur of his fast-wagging tail.

I breathed carefully. Lifted my gaze to the trees. All was just as it should be – one path through the woods, every tree in its place, and Felicity walking with Susan ahead of me.

And when my own legs stopped trembling, I followed them.

Lunch was a blur. I remembered to eat, and to follow along with the table talk so I could nod when I needed to. I even joined in a couple of times. But I wasn’t entirely there, and Claire noticed.

She wasn’t the kind of a person to pry. Still, she took me in hand after lunch, when we’d moved with our biscuits and tea to the patio in the back garden. Claire’s garden had a fairy-tale look to it, bordered as it was by the tall trees of the Wild Wood. Whatever grew here grew in shade. A trailing vine heaped tiny buds of honeysuckle all along the waist-high wall of stone built in the tight-fitted herringbone pattern so common in this part of Cornwall, and the back of the garden was lush with soft ferns and tall spikes of something that looked darkly tropical. Yet in defiance of the shadows, Claire had set a sundial squarely at the centre of her garden in the one place where the sunlight always reached, and with a ring of upturned earth around it, ready to be planted.