‘’dored …’ I heard Milly say.
We stood up. I said a silent goodbye and closed my bedroom door for the very last time. Then I glanced into Mark’s room, next to mine. It was almost empty, the dusty white walls pebbled with Blu-Tack. He’d cleared it before he left for the States. He’d stripped it bare, as though he was never coming back. I remember how hurt my parents had been.
Now we went downstairs and I stood in the doorway of their room.
‘I was born in here, Milly …’
You arrived three weeks early, Anna. But there’d been heavy snow and I couldn’t get to the hospital so I had to have you at home. Daddy delivered you – imagine! He kept joking that he was an engineer, not a midwife, but he told me afterwards that he’d been terrified. It was quite a drama really …
Their mahogany wardrobe – along with other unwanted furniture – was being sold with the house. I opened Mum’s side – there was a light clattering as the hangers collided with each other. I visualised the dresses that had hung on them until only a few months ago – it had been two years before Dad had gone through her clothes. He said the hardest part was looking at her shoes, imagining her stepping into them.
Now Milly and I went downstairs to say goodbye to the garden – the garden my mother had nurtured and loved. It was only just emerging from winter mode, still leafless and dormant and dank. But as we stepped outside I remembered the flowerbeds filled with phlox and peonies in high summer; the lavender billowing over the path; the lilac with its pale underskirt of lilies of the valley in May; the lovely pink Albertine that smothered the arch. Every tree, shrub and plant was as familiar to me as an old friend. The Ceanothus, a foamy mass of blue in late April; the Japanese quince with its scarlet cups. I remembered, every autumn, the speckly green fruit with which my mother made jelly – the muslins heavy with the sweet, stewed pulp.
Chaenomeles. That’s the proper name for quince, Anna – Chaenomeles. Can you say that?
My mother loved telling me the proper names of plants and started doing so when I was very young. As I trailed after her round the garden she’d explain that they weren’t just pink flowers, or yellow shrubs, or red berries. They were Dianthus, or Hypericum, or Mahonia or Cotoneaster.
‘That purple climber there,’ she’d say. ‘That’s a clematis. It’s called Jackmanii, after the person who first grew it. This pale gold one’s a clematis too – it’s called tangutica. They’re like fairies’ lanterns, aren’t they?’ I remembered her pinching open the jaws of snapdragons, and showing me the fuchsias, with their ballerina flowers. ‘Look at their gorgeous tutus!’ she’d say as she’d wiggle the stems and make them ‘dance’. In the autumn, she’d gently rub open the ‘coins’ of silvery Honesty with their mother-of-pearl lining to show me the flat seeds within. Gradually, with repetition, the names sank in and I’d acquired a botanical lexicon – the lingua franca of plants. As I got older she’d explain what they meant.
‘The Latin names are very descriptive,’ she’d say. ‘So this little tree here is a magnolia, but it’s called a Magnolia stellata, because stellata means star-like and the flowers do look like white stars – do you see? This plant here is a Hosta tardiflora – a late-flowering Hosta – it’s “tardy”; and that big buddleia over there’s a Buddleia globosa, because it’s got spherical flowers like little globes. And this thing here is a Berberis evanescens which means …’
‘Disappearing,’ I heard myself now say. ‘Quickly fading from view.’ I thought, bitterly, of Xan.
Then I remembered again the advice my mother had given me, at twenty, when I’d first had my heart broken. ‘Jason seemed very … pleasant,’ she’d said carefully, as I’d sat on my bed, in floods. ‘And yes, he was good-looking, and well dressed – and I suppose he had that lovely car.’ I thought, with a pang, of his Lotus Elise. ‘But he really wasn’t right for you, darling.’
‘How can you say that?’ I’d croaked. ‘You only met him once.’
‘But that was enough for me to see that he was, well, what I’d call – to use a gardening analogy – a flashy annual. They make a great impression, but then they’re gone. What you really want, Anna, is a hardy perennial.’ I’d had a sudden image of myself marrying a Forsythia. ‘A hardy perennial won’t let you down. It will show up year after year, reliable, and trustworthy – and safe. Like your father,’ she’d added. ‘Always there for me. Whatever …’
I picked Milly up. ‘I didn’t do what Granny advised,’ I whispered. ‘But it doesn’t matter, because it means I’ve got you. And you’re just’ – I touched her nose with mine – ‘the sweetest thing. The bees’ knees.’
‘Bizzy nees.’ She giggled.
I hugged her, then put her down. ‘Now look at these little flowers, Milly. They’re called snowdrops. Can you say that? Snowdrops?’
‘Snowtops …’
‘And these purple ones here are called crocuses …’
‘’Kisses.’ Her breath came in tiny pillows on the frosty air.
‘And this, you may be interested to know, is a miniature wild cyclamen.’
‘Sick …’ Milly giggled again.
‘Granny used to say they had windswept little faces, as though they’d stuck their heads out of the car window.’ As we stood up, then walked across the lawn, I imagined myself, as I often did, years hence telling Milly what had happened to my mum.
You had a wonderful granny, I could hear myself say. She was a lovely, vibrant person. She was interested in lots of things and she was especially interested in gardening. She knew a lot about it and was very good at it – she’d taught herself the names of all the plants and flowers. And she would have taught you them, Milly, like she taught me, but sadly she never got the chance, because a year before you were born she died …
I heard a step and looked up. Dad was coming through the french windows, holding a cardboard box. Like the house, he had an air of neglect. He used to look well-preserved for his years, young, even. At nearly seventy, he was still good-looking, but had been aged by grief.
I never thought I’d be without your mother, he’d say for months afterwards. She was twelve years younger than me. I simply never thought it. I don’t know what I’ll do.
Now, after three years, he did. He’d finally felt able to sell up and was moving to London, just a mile away from Milly and me. ‘I’ve loved this house,’ he said as he came and stood next to us. ‘We’ve been here so long. Nearly four decades.’
I imagined what the walls had absorbed in that time. Talking and laughter; weeping and shouting; the cries of childbirth, even. I imagined us all embedded into the very fabric of the house, like fossils.
I heard Dad sigh. ‘But now it’s time to uproot and move on.’
‘It’s for the best,’ I said. ‘London will be distracting. You’ll feel happier there – or, at least, better.’
‘Maybe,’ Dad said. ‘I don’t
