The Rose Garden

‘Thanks.’

The door had a lock, but we’d never been allowed to lock the door as children and I didn’t feel the need to do it now.

There were, in fact, three doors into this room. Trelowarth House was a proper smuggler’s house, with doors that led from room to room as well as to the corridor, a feature that had made it unsurpassed for games of hide and seek. Just as the smugglers had been able to evade capture by sneaking from one room to another while the customs men were searching for them, so we children had slipped secretly between the upstairs rooms to the frustration of whoever had been ‘it’.

Besides the main door to the corridor, my room had one more door further along the same wall, that connected with the bedroom just behind here on this east side of the house, a room that Claire had used for sewing, almost never giving it to guests because Uncle George’s cigar smoke had often seeped in from his study beyond.

And the third door was set in the wall by the head of the bed, and led to a smaller front bedroom that had, I recalled, been used mostly for storage.

I didn’t bother looking in there now. There’d be plenty of time for exploring tomorrow. Instead I sat down on the bed, making the bedsprings creak lightly as I looked around at the room from my childhood vantage point. The room looked much the same to me as it had twenty years ago. The walls were still a soft sea-green, the bedspread hobnailed, white and fringed, the curtains lace and insubstantial, lifting with the cool May breezes blowing through the partly open window. The wide-planked floor was bare, save for an old worn rug between the wardrobe on the two-doored wall and the small rocking chair set in the fireplace corner, and the same old white-framed mirror hung above the chest of drawers between the windows at the front.

In the mornings this was one of the first rooms to catch the light, but it was late now and the afternoon was fading into evening, and the room was full of shadows. I could have put a light on, but I didn’t. I lay back instead, my hands behind my head.

I only meant to rest a moment, then wash up and go downstairs. But lying there, my face brushed by the soft sea breezes blowing in the window, feeling comfortably nostalgic in the dim, high-ceilinged room, my weariness began to weight my limbs until I couldn’t move, and didn’t really want to.

By the time the sound of Mark’s sure footsteps had gone all the way downstairs and crossed the hall below, I was no longer listening.

I realised my mistake a few hours later when a restless dream brought me back wide-eyed to wakefulness, into the dark of a house that had fallen asleep. Rolling, I turned on the bedside lamp and checked my watch and found that it was nearly midnight.

‘Damn.’ I’d had just enough sleep that I knew I would never drift off again, no matter how much I needed the rest. And I needed it badly. The time change and long hours of travel were taking their toll and if I didn’t get back to sleep now I’d pay a steep price in the morning.

I tried to resettle myself. Getting up, I changed out of my clothes into proper pyjamas, and snuggled in under the blankets and switched off the light. It was no use. The minutes ticked by.

‘Damn,’ I said again, and giving up I rose to rummage in my handbag.

I’d had sleeping pills prescribed for nights like these, because my doctor had assured me it was normal to do battle with insomnia from time to time while grieving. I had never had to use them, but I’d brought the pills to Cornwall just in case.

I took one pill and climbed back into bed, taking care not to pull all the covers to my side, from force of long habit, and mumbling ‘Good night’ to the place where my sister should be.

The first thing I thought when I woke was, I wasn’t alone.

I knew where I was. My mind had already made sense of the signals and sorted them into awareness – the sound of the gulls and the scent of the air and the way that the sunlight speared into the room through the unshuttered windows. I heard voices talking quietly somewhere close by, not much above a whisper, the way that people talk when they don’t want to wake someone who’s sleeping. Mark and Susan, I assumed, but then I wasn’t sure because both voices sounded male. I couldn’t catch more than an odd word, fleeting, here and there: ‘away’ was one, and then, quite clear, ‘impossible’.

The voices stopped. Began again, much closer to my head this time, and then I realised that they must be coming through the wall from the next room, the small front bedroom.

Workmen, probably. Old houses like Trelowarth always needed something done, and Mark had mentioned something when we’d been at Claire’s about some sort of trouble with the wiring. My mind was alert enough now to be wary of having strange men in the next room, and rolling I reached with my one hand to lock the connecting door set in the wall by the head of my bed.

The door handles here were the old-fashioned kind with a thumb latch, without any keyholes, but small sliding bolts had been set just above them, and this bolt shot home with a satisfyingly sturdy click that made me feel a little more secure while I got dressed.

In the corridor outside my room I met Mark, who was coming upstairs. ‘Good, you’re up,’ he said. ‘Susan just sent me to see if you were. She’s got breakfast on. How did you sleep?’

‘Very well, thanks.’ I gave a nod towards the closed door to the spare front room and added, ‘You can tell them they don’t have to be so quiet, now I’m up.’

He looked at me. ‘Tell whom?’

‘The workmen,’ I said, ‘or whoever they are. In there.’