Forget Me Not

I didn’t remind him that today was Valentine’s Day. Not that I’d received so much as a petal, I thought ruefully. I was a romance-free zone.

‘She never threw them away,’ I heard Dad say. ‘When I finally went through her desk I found them.’ He shook his head. ‘Every Valentine card I’d ever sent her – thirty-six of them,’ he went on wonderingly. ‘She was very sentimental, your mum. Then I sorted through some old letters that she’d sent me.’

I did up Milly’s top button. ‘But why would Mum write to you when you were married?’

Dad fanned some smoke away. ‘It was when I was in Brazil.’ He looked at me. ‘I don’t suppose you remember that, do you?’

‘Vaguely … I remember waving you off at the airport with Mum and Mark.’

‘It was in 1977, so you were five. I was out there for eight months.’

‘Remind me what you were doing.’

‘Overseeing a big structural repair on a bridge near Rio. The phone lines were terrible, so we could only keep in touch by letter.’

Now I remembered going to the post office every Friday with our flimsy blue aerogrammes. I used to draw flowers on mine, as I couldn’t write.

‘It must have been hard for you, being away for so long.’

‘It was,’ Dad said quietly.

‘So that was before Cassie was born?’

He snapped in half a small, rotten branch. ‘That’s right. Cassie was born the following year.’

I looked at the box again – a repository of so much emotion. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to keep them? It seems a pity.’

‘I will keep them.’ Dad tapped his chest. ‘Here. But I don’t want to sit in my new flat surrounded by things that make me feel …’ His voice had caught. ‘So … I’m going to look at them one last time, then burn them.’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘We’ll be on our way, then. But ring me when you’ve got to London and we’ll pop over.’ Dad nodded. ‘Say bye-bye to Grandpa then, darling.’

Milly tipped up her face to be kissed.

‘Bye-bye, my little sweetheart.’

I hugged him. ‘’Bye, Dad.’ Damn. I’d done it again.

‘Dad-ee!’ Milly cried.

By the time I’d strapped her into her car seat, and we were turning out of the drive, Milly was chanting ‘Dad-dy! Dad-dy!’ with the passion and vigour of a Chelsea supporter.

‘It’s OK, darling,’ I sang. ‘We will be seeing Daddy, but not for a little while, because he’s busy at the moment.’

‘Daddy. Bizzy,’ she echoed. ‘Bizzy. Daddy!’

‘Oh! Look at that horsy,’ I said.

‘’Orsy! Dad-dy!’

‘And those lovely moo cows. Look.’

‘Moo cows. Daddeeeee …’

As we idled at a red light, I glanced in the mirror and Xan’s eyes stared back at me – the colour of sea holly. I often wished that Milly didn’t resemble him so much. And now, as her lids closed with the hum of the engine and the warmth of the car, I recalled meeting Xan for the first time. Not for a moment could I have imagined the shattering effect that he would have on my life.

As I released the clutch and the car eased forward, I remembered how cautious I’d always been until then. I was like Mark in that way – sensible and forward-looking. Unlike Cassie.

‘You need to have a life plan,’ Mark would say. He was two years older and we were close in those days, so I listened to him. ‘I’m going to be a doctor.’

By fourteen, I had my own plan mapped out: I’d work hard, go to a decent university, get a good job and buy a flat. In my late twenties I’d find myself that nice hardy perennial, get married and have three children, going back to work when the youngest was at school. My salary would not be essential, but would pay for a seaside cottage somewhere, or a house in France, which said hardy perennial and I would ultimately retire to, enjoying frequent visits from our devoted children and grandchildren, before dying peacefully, in our sleep, at ninety-nine.

For years I’d followed my plan to the letter. I read History at York, then got a job at a City hedge fund, where I joined the Equity Research department, gathering intelligence on investment ideas – analysing ‘fundamentals across multiple sectors’ as they called it. The work wasn’t always thrilling, but it was very well paid. I bought a small house in Brook Green, paid the mortgage and pension; then, with the rest, I enjoyed myself. I went skiing, diving and trekking; I joined a gym. I went to the opera, where I sat in the stalls. I spent time in my garden, and with family and friends. I was on track to reach my personal goals.

When I turned thirty, I started on the treadmill of engagement parties, hen nights and weddings. Feeling I ought to make more of an effort to meet someone, I joined a tennis club, gave parties and went on dates. With these I kept in mind my mother’s old-fashioned precepts: ‘Wait before returning their calls,’ she’d often say. ‘Make them think you’re too busy to see them. Never, ever throw yourself at them, Anna. Try and retain a little “feminine mystique”.’ I’d groan at all this, but she’d retort that there was a little dance of courtship that needed to be danced and that it was her duty to give me ‘womanly’ advice.

‘All mothers should,’ she once said with a vehemence that took me aback. ‘My mother never told me anything,’ she’d added bitterly. ‘She was too embarrassed. But I wish she had done, because it meant I was hopelessly unworldly.’

Which probably explains why she married Dad when she was twenty.

‘It was a whirlwind romance,’ she’d say coyly whenever the subject came up.

I’d discreetly roll my eyes, because I’ve always known the truth.

‘A tornado,’ Dad would add with a wry smile. They’d gone up the aisle two months after meeting at the Lyons Corner House on The Strand.

‘It was raining,’ Mum would say, ‘so the café was full. Suddenly this divine-looking man came up to me and asked if he could share my table – and that was that!’

But it used to amuse me that my mother, whose own romantic life had been so happily uneventful, should seem so anxious to educate me about affairs of the heart.

The men I dated were all attractive, clever and charming, and would have been ‘husband material’, were it not that they all seemed to have major drawbacks of one sort or another. Duncan, for example, was a successful stockbroker – intelligent and likeable – but his enthusiasm for lap-dancing clubs was a problem for me; then there was Gavin who was still getting over his divorce. After that I dated Henry, an advertising copywriter, who avoided traffic jams by driving on the pavement. The second time he was cautioned I called it a day. Then I met Tony, a publisher, at a wedding in Wiltshire. Tony was clever and fun. But when after six months he said that he didn’t want anything long-term I ended it. I couldn’t afford to waste my time.

‘You’ve still got ages, darling,’ my mother had said consolingly afterwards. We were sitting on the garden bench in Oxted, under the pear tree. It was her birthday, the tenth of May. She put her arm round me, wrapping me in the scent of the Shalimar I’d given her that morning. ‘You’re only thirty-two, Anna,’ I heard her say. My eyes strayed to the little blue clouds of forget-me-nots floating in the flowerbeds. ‘Thirty-two’s still young. And women have their children much later now – thank goodness.’

I suddenly asked her something I’d always wanted to know: ‘If you could have your time again, Mum, would you have waited longer before starting a family?’ She’d had Mark when she was just twenty-one.

‘Well …’ she’d said, blushing slightly, ‘I … don’t think having a child is ever a mistake.’ Which wasn’t what I’d meant. ‘But yes, I did start very early,’ she’d gone on, ‘so I never really worked – unlike you. But you’re lucky, Anna, because you’re of the generation that can have a fulfilling career, fun and independence, and then the happiness of family life. And you’re not to worry about finding that,’ she repeated, stroking my hair. ‘Because you’ve still got lots of time.’

Which was something that she herself didn’t have, it seemed, because less than a month later she’d died.

Now, as I turned on to the motorway I remembered – as I often do when I’m driving and my mind can range – that awful, awful time. I was so shocked I could barely breathe. It was as though the Pause button had been pressed on my life. What would I do without my mother? I felt as though I’d been pushed off a cliff.

And what if I only had twenty-three years left, I had then begun to wonder, as I lay staring into the darkness, night after night. What if I only had ten years left, or five, or one? Because I now understood, in a way I could never have grasped before, how our lives all hang by a thread.

I had a fortnight’s compassionate leave, which I needed, as I had to organise the funeral as Dad could barely function. Going back to work after that was a relief in some ways – though I remember it as a very strange time. My colleagues were kind and sympathetic to begin with, but as time went on, naturally, they stopped asking me how I was, as though it was expected that life should now carry on as normal. Except that nothing seemed ‘normal’ any more. And as the weeks went by I felt increasingly dissatisfied with the life I’d been leading – the fact-finding about investment opportunities that were of zero interest to me – the number-crunching and the daily commute. I now ‘analysed the fundamentals’ of my own existence and realised that the goals I’d striven to achieve seemed trivial. So I made a decision to change my life.

I’d often daydreamed about giving up the rat race and becoming a garden designer. I could never go to someone’s house without imagining how their garden would look if it were landscaped differently or planted more imaginatively. I’d already designed a couple of gardens as a favour – a Mediterranean courtyard for my PA, Sue, at her house in Kent; and a cottage garden for an elderly couple over the road. They’d been delighted with its billowing mass of hollyhocks and foxgloves, and doing it had given me a huge buzz.

So I signed up for a year’s diploma course at the London School of Gardening in Chelsea. Then I went to see my boss, Miles.