The Rose Garden

But then, she’d been happy wherever she went. She had danced through her life with an air of adventure and carried that happiness with her, so trying to imagine where she might have felt it the most was a difficult task, far beyond my abilities. Finally I gave up and turned my focus to the last thing Bill had said: Where she belongs.

That should be easier, I knew. There should be one place that would rise above the others in my memory, so I closed my eyes and waited.

It was coming on to evening when I thought of it, and once I’d had the thought it seemed so obvious to me where that place was, where I should take her.

Where both of us, once, had belonged.

CHAPTER TWO

Crossing the Tamar for some reason made me feel different inside. It was only a river, yet each time I crossed it I felt I had stepped through some mystical veil that divided the world that I only existed in from the one where I was meant to be living. It was, my mother always used to say, a kind of homecoming that only those with Cornish blood could feel, and since my blood was Cornish on both sides for several generations back, I felt it strongly.

I’d been born in Cornwall, in the north beyond the sweep of Bodmin Moor, where my film-directing father had been working on a darkly Gothic thriller, but both my parents themselves had been raised on this gentler south coast – du Maurier country – and after my father had settled into lecturing in Screen Studies at the University of Bristol, his more regulated schedule made it possible for us to cross the Tamar every summer and come back to spend our holidays with his old childhood friend George Hallett, who lived with his young and lively family in a marvellously draughty manor house set on a hill above the sea.

We’d come back every year, in fact, until I’d turned ten and my father’s work had taken us away from England altogether, setting us down on a different shoreline in Vancouver on the western coast of Canada, where he’d become a fixture at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Cinema Studies.

I had loved it in Canada, too. And of course it had been in Vancouver that my sister, newly turned eighteen, had first begun to get her acting roles – small parts at first, then larger ones that brought enough attention from the Hollywood directors who came up to film their movies in Vancouver that they’d wanted her to come down to LA, and so she had.

I’d followed her in my own turn years later, more by accident than anything. My own career path took me into marketing, and sideways through an unexpected string of opportunities to corporate public relations, and from there, again by chance, to a PR firm that worked mainly in the entertainment industry, and so I found myself at twenty-five being transferred down from Vancouver to the office in Los Angeles.

It never was my favourite place, LA, but shortly after I’d moved down, my parents had crossed paths with a drunk driver on a rain-drenched road back home, so after that Katrina was the only family I had left, and I was loathe to leave her.

We were close. When she was shooting somewhere, I would always find the time to visit. I was there when Bill proposed to her, and there when they were married in a private ceremony to avoid the paparazzi. And she’d hired me, of course, to represent her. Just to keep it in the family, she had said. These past two years, with her success, she had become my main account.

But I had never really settled in LA, not with apartments – I had gone through four – nor with the men I’d met and dated. I had gone through even more of those, and none had stuck, the last one fading from the picture with convenience when Katrina had grown ill.

I’d barely noticed his departure, then. I didn’t miss him now. I had been all but dead myself these past six months, a walking shadow, but this morning as my First Great Western train ran rattling on its rails across the Tamar I felt something deep inside me stir to life.

I was in Cornwall. And it was a kind of homecoming – the swiftly passing landscape with its old stone farms and hills and hedges held a warm familiarity, and when I’d changed the big train for a smaller one that ran along the wooded valley branch line leading down towards the coast, I felt an echo of the childish sense of thrilled anticipation that had signalled each beginning of those long-lost summer holidays.

The station at the line’s end was a small one, plain with whitewashed walls, a blue bench set beside it, a narrow platform with a white stripe painted at its edge, and a handful of houses stacked up the green hillside behind.

Three people waited on the platform, but I only noticed one of them. I would have known him anywhere.

The last time I had seen Mark Hallett he’d just turned eighteen and I’d been ten, too young to catch his eye but not too young to be completely smitten with his dark good looks and laughing eyes. I’d followed him round like a puppy, never giving him peace, and he’d taken it in the same good-natured way he took everything else, neither making me feel like a bother, nor letting it go to his head. I’d adored him.

Katrina had, too, though for her it had gone a bit deeper than that. He had been her first boyfriend, her first great romance, and when we had left at the end of the summer I’d watched both their hearts break. Hers had healed. I assumed his had, too. After all, we were twenty years on and our childhoods were over, although when I stepped from the train to the platform and Mark Hallett turned from the place he’d been standing, his eyes finding mine with that shared sense of sure recognition, his smile the same as it ever was, I couldn’t help feeling ten again.

‘Eva.’ His hug was familiar yet different. He wasn’t a tall man, despite his strong West Country build, and my chin reached his shoulder, whereas in my memories I’d barely come up to his chest. But the comfort I felt in his arms hadn’t changed.