The Summer Season

Joel quickly established he and Suzanne had nothing in common – at twenty-two she was far too young for him – and not wanting to be rude, had drunk far more than was good for him. After that he ended up having an embarrassing fumble in the dark, outside the pub – Suzanne’s comment ‘We can’t go home, my mum and dad are in,’ reminding him how little he should be doing this – before he made his excuses and fled back home. He ignored her plaintive cry of, ‘We will see each other again won’t we?’ as he made his way up the hill.

Sunday had been spent visiting his mum. He never mentioned these women to Mum. He suspected she guessed something of his private life but she never asked him, unless he brought it up first. He’d taken her and Sam out for lunch in a cosy restaurant in nearby Chiverton, where she lived in a warden-assisted flat, and as usual, she’d cooed over her grandson. It was only towards the end of the meal, she’d tentatively asked, ‘Joel, are you OK? Only you’re very quiet. I know last week must have been so hard for you.’

‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. ‘More than fine. It’s been hard, but we’re getting through it, aren’t we, Sammy?’ And he tickled Sam’s chin, and ignored the hand Mum held out in front of him. He didn’t refer to it again, till he dropped his mum home, gave her a kiss, and told her she worried too much.

But later when he got home, and put Sam to bed, he’d had a whole evening to brood. As he sat alone sipping a whisky, idly flicking through the TV channels in the lounge he’d started decorating just before Claire died, and had still not finished, he knew that his mum was right to worry about him.

The house weighed heavily on him – what had once seemed an exciting lifetime’s project now felt like a burden. Without Claire to share the work with him, without her to give him something to aim for, restoring this old, falling down wreck of a house seemed a pointless exercise. His enthusiasm for restoring it had died with Claire. And as for the secret garden, which had excited him so much when he and Claire had first got here, he hadn’t been in it for months. Even his great great grandfather’s old writing desk (left to him with the house), which he’d started to strip down and lovingly planned to restore, sat abandoned and unfinished. He felt in limbo. Unable to go back, unable to move on. He was very very far from all right.

Matters didn’t get any better the following morning. Sam wasn’t being cooperative and he’d got porridge all down the top that Joel had just put him in. Joel had ended up shouting, and of course Sam burst into tears, which made him feel terrible. What kind of monstrous dad shouted at their seventeen-month-old? As ever the thought – what would Claire do? – floated in his head. He sighed, got Sam changed, and then himself when he realized that he was smeared with baby porridge. Seeing the time he raced to the car, strapped Sam in, and drove like the clappers down the hill to Lauren’s house.

He got on well with Lauren, and she’d been a fantastic source of strength to him after Claire died. She had been one of the few people he could face being around in those early weeks. She didn’t ask anything of him, or besiege him with questions about how he was doing, but was quietly supportive, and they had grieved for Claire together.

Their childcare arrangement (fortunately already in place before Claire died) was a good one, but he often felt wrongfooted when he was with Lauren. It was one thing to constantly be home late for an uncomplaining wife, quite another to face Lauren’s wrath for the hundredth time, when he’d got stuck working late. He did his best, and for the most part the small charity where he worked accommodated him, but his life was now full of tense compromises between work and home. He was always joking that he was like the wife of the office, always the one rushing home early for the children. And only now was he beginning to realize quite how tough things had been for Claire when she first went back to work.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, as he thrust Sam into Lauren’s waiting arms. The twins peeped mischievously from behind her, already in their school uniforms. How did she do that? Joel wondered. She had two of them, it wasn’t yet 8 a.m., and they were both spick and span and ready. Even after a year he still felt inadequate when it came to the domestic side of his life.

‘No worries,’ said Lauren lightly, but he knew her well enough to tell she was irritated. Though she generally showed him nothing but sympathy and kindness, Lauren wasn’t above putting him in his place from time to time. She had pointed out on more than one occasion that she wasn’t his slave, and he really needed to take more responsibility for things. She’d never quite said, ‘Just because Claire put up with you, there’s no reason why I should,’ but Joel sometimes felt sure it must be on the tip of her tongue, and he knew he deserved it. He knew he should make more effort for Lauren. She was great with Sam, and filled the gap Claire left behind as well as she could. Joel never meant to take her for granted, but life was so overwhelming sometimes he leant on her a bit too heavily. Lauren loved Sam almost as much as he did. He was immensely lucky to have her.

Lauren sighed as she shut the door behind Joel. He could be so frustrating at times, it nearly drove her demented. He appeared to have no concept of time at all, or appreciate that her life didn’t just revolve around him and Sam. For the most part, Lauren felt really sorry for him – it was hard for him having to bring up a child alone, and she was sympathetic. But lately, she had also begun to feel resentful. She’d been left literally holding the babies and had had no choice but to get on with it. Everyone in Heartsease thought that Joel was an amazing dad and he was, but Lauren also knew from things Claire had let slip that he had been quite unhelpful when Sam was born. So while she was sympathetic to his situation, somehow she couldn’t quite shift her feelings of irritation.

‘It must be difficult for him, I guess,’ Claire would say, to Lauren’s annoyance. Much as Lauren had loved Claire, it drove her mad the way she constantly forgave Joel, when Lauren felt he was being so unsupportive. Claire. Lauren felt the loss of her friend keenly. The grief could still come suddenly like a deep punch to the stomach. Claire had put up with Joel’s vagaries because she loved him, Lauren should probably try and do the same.

But Lauren had found it difficult to cope with the scandalously short time it had taken Joel to start dating other women. Claire had barely been in her grave, or so it seemed, when Lauren had spotted him with the first one in the Labourer’s Legs, where she worked some evenings. True, on that occasion, Joel had been pounced on by Jenny Hunter, the village slapper, who’d been known to fell lesser men at five paces, so he didn’t have much chance. But Jenny had been swiftly followed by Mary Stevens, the Year One teacher at the village school, and Kerry Adams, who ran the chemist’s.

If she hadn’t known better – Joel had cried on her shoulder more than once in the early weeks after Claire’s death – Lauren might have thought he didn’t care about Claire at all. Only the other Saturday – a few days after Claire’s anniversary – Lauren had spotted him all over Suzanne Cawston. His behaviour exhausted her patience with him. If the boot had been on the other foot, Claire would never have done that, and Lauren felt indignant on her friend’s behalf that Joel should apparently have replaced her so lightly. But she didn’t want to fall out with him about it. Not only did she love looking after Sam, the bottom line was she needed the money.

And Joel was good to work for in many ways. He always compensated Lauren financially when he was late, but she resented the time taken away from her own girls, and hated the stress-inducing moments when the clock was ticking and she was going to be late (again) for the pub. It was like having all the disadvantages of marriage without the sex.

‘Come on, Sammy, let’s have a cuddle before we take the girls to school,’ she said. Sam, she’d noticed, loved to be tickled and played with in the mornings. She wondered if it was because Joel didn’t quite know how to – although for all her carping, Joel was clearly devoted to Sam, he just hadn’t had much practice looking after him, and it showed.

‘Maybe we should teach him, eh?’ said Lauren, and she was rewarded with a great big smile as she tickled Sam’s chin. ‘Get that silly daddy to see what he’s been missing.’

Chapter Three

It was dark, just the way she liked it. Kezzie had forgotten the sheer dizzying excitement of guerrilla gardening. She felt the familiar frisson of being out on a moonlit night, in the middle of nowhere. Ever since she’d stumbled across the decaying garden a couple of weeks earlier, she’d been determined to make a statement to whoever the owner of the garden was. Presumably someone must own it. Shocking, how such a beautiful place could be left so neglected. Whoever it belonged to, clearly didn’t value it as they should.

She found the oak tree, from the which vantage point she had peered into the garden last time she was here. She hooked herself up, heart pounding, before swinging her legs from the tree to the wall, and jumping down into the garden. She rummaged round in her bag for her torch, then decided she didn’t need it. The moon was so bright she could clearly make out the contours of what had once been an orderly and well-managed garden. Overgrown with weeds it might be now, but it was obvious that once upon a time someone had lavished a lot of care and attention here.

On the far side was an ornate iron gate, with steps leading down into the garden. There were borders running round the edges, which were full of weeds creeping over the paths, and in the square in the centre was a tangled mass of ivy and rosemary and box. She spotted the rusting iron bench near where she had landed, so she put her rucksack down on it while surveying the scene. An owl hooted nearby, startling her, and she could hear the sound of foxes fighting, not far away. It gave an added thrill to what she was doing. She felt like Rapunzel’s dad, stealing lettuces in the dark. Any minute now an ugly witch would appear.

She opened her rucksack and pulled out the garden clippers, fork and trowel she’d brought with her. The garden was hideously overgrown, but she could make out an ancient hedge – box? Probably, it looked like it had been a border once – beneath the weeds. Taking her clippers, she started to hack back at the brambles and convolvulus threatening to strangle it. As she worked, she tried not to think about the night she’d done this in London – the night she’d met Richard, the night her life had changed forever. If she hadn’t broken into the rough patch of ground by the posh gated community, where he lived in Clapham, and planted daffodils, she’d never have met him at all. He was on his way home and he’d accused her of vandalism, until she pointed out that you couldn’t vandalize something you were trying to improve.

A couple of months later, when the daffodils were blooming and he’d found her admiring her handiwork, he’d grudgingly admitted that she was right and her efforts had transformed a scrubby patch of ground into a little haven of green in the city.

‘You should do that for a living,’ he said. ‘You seem to have a way with plants.’

‘I’ve got a job,’ Kezzie had replied defiantly, not wanting to admit that designing logos for a company that advertised on the web wasn’t really fulfilling her. It turned out that Richard was an architect specializing in garden design, and he encouraged her to train up in her spare time. One thing led to another, and before long she’d found herself agreeing to move in with him, and giving up her job, once she’d finished her course in landscape gardening. Of course, none of it had worked to plan, her job giving up on her, before she had a chance to resign, and then losing Richard before she’d moved in. Something she had simply never thought would happen …

Richard had been a revelation to her. He was completely unlike any of the boyfriends she’d had before. Kezzie had had the unfortunate habit of spending most of her teens and her early twenties attracted to the wrong kind of guy, and after a disastrous liaison with a small-time drugs dealer had forsworn men, until just before her thirtieth birthday when she’d met Richard.

For starters it was unusual for Kezzie to be dating someone with a job – let alone someone like Richard in his late thirties, with such a high-powered job. Not only that, with a failed marriage behind him (‘She left me, sadly,’ he’d explained to Kezzie that he’d have done anything to make the marriage work, but his ex had been equally determined to move on), Richard also had a fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily. Kezzie didn’t even know anyone who had a baby, let alone a full grown teen. That aspect of things hadn’t been ideal, Emily being as unkeen on Kezzie as Kezzie was on her, but Kezzie had been overawed by the trendy, open-plan loft living apartment Richard had owned near Clapham Junction and ashamed to take him back to her small rented flat in Finsbury Park. But Richard was totally unfazed by the differences between their lifestyles – or some of them at any rate, later on it would be all too clear that he disapproved of the drug taking and late night partying – but to begin with he’d said, ‘We’re not that different, you and I.’

‘Really?’ Kezzie was incredulous. She stared at his fair hair, public school boy good looks and his smart shirt and Armani suit. ‘We inhabit different planets.’

‘Maybe we do now,’ said Richard, ‘but I didn’t always earn good money. And I might have gone to public school but my parents worked hard to get me there. My dad ran a pub you know. I spent most of my time at school pretending he owned a chain of hotels.’

Kezzie laughed, ‘And I used to lie to people about which estate I grew up on.’

‘See,’ said Richard, with his crooked grin, which made her fold up and melt inside, ‘not so different after all. I don’t pay any attention to trappings. They don’t mean anything. It’s the person inside who counts.’

And of course, that was how it had all gone so wrong. She had turned out to be different from the person he thought she was.

‘That was then, this is now,’ growled Kezzie to herself and continued with her work, while trying to put painful thoughts of Richard and what might have been behind her.

As she worked, she cleared away the brambles and began to see the box was really out of shape and ragged. Once upon a time, though, it had clearly formed a pattern, woven into which was rosemary and a kind of ivy she couldn’t identify.

What was hidden in this wonderful place? Ever since the day she’d climbed up the oak tree and peeked over the wall, she’d fallen in love with this secret garden, and it looked like it was about to surrender some of its secrets to her.

The more she uncovered, the more excited she grew – the box, ivy and rosemary definitely formed an interconnecting pattern. Eventually she uncovered enough to see it was in the shape of a heart.

Suddenly, she realized what she was looking at; she’d studied this kind of design. ‘It’s a knot garden,’ she said out loud. ‘That’s amazing.’

A security light flooded through the iron gate. She looked up and saw to her surprise there were lights on in the derelict house she’d seen the other week. A torch was bobbing its way down the garden. Shit. Although she’d imagined someone must own the house, it had looked so ramshackle, she’d assumed no one was living in it. She must have made a mistake. Gathering up her things, she ran to the corner of the wall and slung her bag over the top. She was scrambling up the wall, trying to grab for the branches of the oak tree, when—

‘What the hell are you doing in my garden?’ said a distinctly male and very attractive voice.

‘Um—’ Suddenly Kezzie felt very foolish. She had a feeling that guerrilla gardening might not quite have made it to this quiet corner of Sussex …

Joel shone his torch into the eyes of a petite woman – a very pretty woman he had to grudgingly admit. She had short, dark hair, and an elfin look and was dressed in oversized combat gear, which made her look like a little doll. She’d dropped back to the ground when he’d accosted her.

‘I didn’t realize it was your garden,’ she said. ‘I saw the high wall and was curious, so I climbed up the oak tree and discovered your garden. I thought it looked uncared for.’

‘So you thought you’d care for it did you?’ said Joel. ‘Perhaps I prefer it this way.’

‘How can you possibly like it like this? All your beautiful plants being strangled to death by convolvulus. It’s criminal neglect. It deserves being brought back to life. If it were mine that’s what I’d do.’

‘Well it’s not yours, is it?’ said Joel, resenting this stranger telling him what he should or shouldn’t do in his garden. ‘So quite frankly it’s none of your business, and I should ask you to leave.’

‘No, it’s not,’ the stranger looked a bit sheepish. ‘Sorry, I get carried away sometimes. I saw your garden and didn’t think anyone lived in the house. It looked a bit neglected. I just wanted to help.’

Neglected. You could say that.

‘Well, it’s a work in progress,’ said Joel.

‘Doesn’t look like there’s much progress happening,’ said the stranger.

‘I’m a busy man,’ Joel said defensively. ‘I work full time, and I’ve got a young son I’m bringing up alone. There are only so many hours in the day. Not that that’s any of your business either.’