The Garden House Read online

  Thanks. That would be great. I’ll send directions.

  Once she’s sent it she is washed through with relief. This dreaded moment can be postponed. It will be easier to deal with it once Will, calm, pragmatic, is with her. She switches off the music, goes out and closes the door behind her.

  * * *

  Kate is walking Floss in the woods above Burrator Reservoir. How strange but how familiar it is to be here: a glint of water between bare, black branches, the high outcrop of rock that is Sheepstor, the croak of a raven circling above her. As she wanders slowly, crunching through rusty dead bracken, watching Floss skittering ahead, Kate tries to analyse the sensations of happiness, contentment – and an odd feeling of loss. From the very beginning when she moved here as a young naval wife with her twin baby sons, Dartmoor – bleak, mysterious – has been her spiritual home. The colonial bungalow in Dousland, the cottage near Horrabridge, the Victorian semi in Whitchurch: these places were home and the moor was her refuge. It consoled her when her first marriage failed, when her love affair with Alex broke apart, and then again when her second husband, David, died.

  As she picks her way amongst the mossy boulders, checking on Floss, watching a buzzard surfing the thermals, she wonders why it should have been then, when she felt most alone – David gone, both her boys married – that she left Tavistock, selling the house, which was much too big for her, and renting a cottage from one of David’s friends in St Meriadoc on the north Cornish coast. David was an artist, an RA; Bruno Trevannion is a writer. He owns the small estate at St Meriadoc but prefers to live in a stone folly on the cliff rather than in the pretty house, Paradise, set amongst sheltered gardens, or in one of the three terraced cottages set round the long-disused harbour. It was in one of these cottages that Kate lived, though, and taking advice she’d bought a cottage in Chapel Street in Tavistock, which she rented out as a naval hiring. Her son Guy with his wife, Gemma, and their two boys have been living in it since they came home from Canada. Now they’ve moved down to be closer to the little family group that run the sailing school and Kate must find another tenant. Staying with Cass whilst some redecorating is done at the cottage, she’s falling back into old familiar ways: walking on the moor, going to see old friends, coffee with Cass in the Bedford.

  ‘Why don’t you move back?’ asks Cass. ‘This is home really, you know that. I know you’re very fond of dear old Bruno, and it’s beautiful down there on the coast, but this is where you belong.’

  Kate thinks about this as she walks. In a way, Cass is right. She ran away when David died. At that moment it seemed this place she loved so much represented failure: the collapse of her marriage with Mark, the heartbreak of a failed love affair, David’s death. She was looking for a new beginning, something completely different. The move to St Meriadoc gave her a whole new perspective and she is happy in the little cottage, with Bruno out on his rock, writing his novels, and his kindly relatives around her. She remembers another occasion like this when she felt torn between her two loves, and Bruno saying, ‘Home is where the heart is,’ but she is still not sure where that is. She misses Bruno when she is away from him. In some ways he’s like David. They’re both creative artists and so are slightly detached, but they both know how to share, how to love.

  She looks around for Floss, calling her name. She can see her now, following a scent amongst the trees on the slopes below, and Kate calls again until Floss comes dashing back to her.

  ‘Good girl,’ says Kate, fastening Floss’s lead. ‘It’s time for tea.’

  They walk back to the car, Floss tugging at the end of the lead and Kate suddenly wishing that they were going to her cottage in Tavistock rather than back to the Old Rectory. Just at the moment there’s a great deal of stress between Cass and Tom. Tom feels very strongly that the time has come to sell the Rectory and move into a smaller house in Tavistock.

  ‘Things have changed,’ he says. ‘The village shop and post office have closed down. There’s no bus. I’m seventy-five this year and we need to make the move while we still can. We don’t want to leave it too late and be pushed into it.’

  Whenever he says this kind of thing, Kate can see Cass shrink a little; her eyes flick around her home as if to reassure herself of all that is dear and familiar to her. Kate feels huge sympathy for both of them. Tom is right: the Rectory is very big and very remote. It’s beginning to look shabby and the garden is becoming a wilderness. Tom has had a knee replacement and can’t do as much as he once could, and they are starting to lose their grip on it all. At the same time, Cass has lived there for forty years and there are too many memories, too much of her life there, to be cast aside easily. Each of them appeals to Kate for support and she’s finding it a very difficult situation. Although she’s never lived for any length of time in Chapel Street, she wonders what it might be like to be going there now: going home. She thinks of El. How she is feeling now that the Pig Pen is truly her home; not simply a place she goes to for holidays or weekends to stay with her father, but the place where she lives?

  As she helps Floss to scramble into the back of the car and settles her on her rug, Kate thinks about Martin, and imagines how proud he would be of El. She remembers the woman she saw with him in the Walled Garden at The Garden House, and again one winter’s morning on a beach in Cornwall, arm in arm, heads bent close together against the wind. On both occasions instinct warned Kate to stay clear. As she gets into the car and drives away, she thinks about how she saw the woman again at Martin’s funeral, slipping out from her seat at the back into the shadows and disappearing on to Church Lane, unwilling to be noticed. It was then that Kate recognized her: the pretty, dark-haired woman was Julia Braithwaite. She’d presented a programme recently on local television called Cakes and Ale, celebrating the pubs and tearooms around the coast of the south-west peninsula, but Kate made no attempt to approach her, nor did she mention Julia to any of her friends. Clearly Martin wanted to keep their affair a private thing, a secret, and Kate has no intention of betraying it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  All is dark on the flight deck. Will leans forward, gazing out at the stars, his preparations complete, absorbing these last few moments of serenity before descent. The moon casts its glittering light across the cloud sheet below him, obscuring the fainter constellations. He cannot see the swan clearly tonight but he knows where it flies. Deneb and Vega, two of the summer triangle stars, glitter to the right of the aircraft nose, marking the position of Cygnus in the night sky. This is what he has worked for, these moments of privilege and peace, and it is with reluctance that he returns to the management of the flight. He reaches down for the microphone on the throttle quadrant.

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is the captain.’

  For a moment Will pauses: he knows he will never get tired of that phrase. He begins to brief his passengers, explaining that it is a clear and cold morning in Bristol but that the wind might make for a bumpy approach to the airport. He thanks them for flying with the company and wishes them safe onward journeys before he reaches up and turns on the seat-belt signs. In the dark of the flight deck his first officer grins at him. ‘Making excuses for your landing?’

  Christian is a good flight deck companion. When he was posted to Bristol, Will’s home base, it seemed logical for him to move into Will’s house in Backwell. For Will this was a steep learning curve, never knowing quite whom he would meet at the breakfast table. But taking Chris home to meet his critical stepmother was a joy that Will cherished for months. Chris is the eccentric counterpart to Will’s conventional nature, hedonist to Will’s ascetic, and gay to Will’s straight. They have been friends since they met in flight training nine years ago. From their earliest days at flight school to the point where they set off separately to build hours, they’ve got on well together despite their obvious differences. In a strange sense they complement each other. Without Will, Christian would not have had the focus to make it through training. Without Christian, Will, sca
red by the loss of his mother, might have been swallowed up by introspection, melancholy and obsession. Will acknowledges that he has had the luck and, critically, the money, where Chris has not. It was Will who got his airline transport pilot licence first, Will who reached an airline first, and Will who helped Chris join that same company after he qualified as an airline pilot. No one in the business was surprised when, at the age of twenty-seven, Will was the youngest first officer at his base to be offered a command course. With his customary diligence he passed with ease.

  And here they are, Will in the left seat and Christian in the right: a disciplined and effective team.

  ‘Descent, please, Chris.’

  Chris activates his microphone and obtains clearance. ‘London Silver Star Two Fifty, request descent.’

  ‘Silver Star Two Fifty descend flight level two four zero, further shortly.’

  As Chris reads back the clearance, Will reaches up to the altitude dial on the flight control unit, turns it till the numbers read two four zero and pulls. On the screen in front of him the selected altitude changes to read FL two four zero and turns blue.

  ‘Two four zero blue,’ he reports.

  ‘Check,’ comes the response.

  Gently the nose of the aircraft dips below the horizon and the altimeter begins to wind down, marking their descent.

  Not far below them is a faintly visible layer of cloud, like a rumpled bed sheet, glowing faintly in the starlight. It does not take long for the aircraft to descend the few thousand feet needed to meet the cloud layer, and Will experiences the familiar rush, the sudden and rare awareness of the speed at which he is travelling. Cloud streamers race pass the flight deck windows as they drop into the mist.

  In his left ear he can hear the incessant measured communication between the controller in London and the many aircraft he is managing tonight. On the central navigation screen in front of him he can see the symbols that mark the aircraft in his vicinity. Yet it is rare actually to see those aircraft: they are invisible performers in a stately dance in the skies.

  Will adjusts the scale on the moving map and makes a quick mental calculation, miles to go versus altitude passing. If anyone had told him at school to learn the three times table up to 150 he would have laughed. The pilot’s mantra, one mile three hundred feet, ten miles three thousand feet, one hundred miles thirty thousand feet, plays in his mind. The aircraft is on profile.

  Momentarily, Will catches a glow below him to his left, then another: a hazy view of light across the nose as the aircraft descends out of the cloud layer. And then … London.

  Red stars upon gold, silver and diamond. A confused cascade of sparkling light strewn upon a black field that is, at first, merely glimpsed through the haze as the airliner breaks out of the high cloud. For a moment the lights blur again, a deep glow penetrating the cloud cover and illuminating the dark flight deck, and then, quite suddenly, sharp focus again. In the darkness below there are no discernible features, just lights revealing patterns of black. There, the dark ribbon of the Thames; there, the absence of light in Regent’s Park; there, the encompassing ribbon of light that circles the whole, the M25. Here is Heathrow, a patchwork buried in the expanded metropolis. To his left a cluster of lights out in the country shows the presence of Gatwick. In front of the aircraft’s nose he can see the M4 stretched out to the west. In places near London it is illuminated by the diamond white of the new motorway lights. Further west it is a thin ribbon of white headlights and red taillights, the motorway traffic sparse at this time of the morning. Far out to his left he can see the south coast, Portsmouth and Southampton. Far to his right, through Chris’s windows, he can see to the north the faint light of Birmingham and Coventry, whilst in front, Bristol – home – and beyond that the south coast of Wales. He allows his eyes to be drawn south, looking for the as-yet-invisible ribbon of the M5. On the far horizon he can see the faint lights of Exeter, and the dense darkness that is Dartmoor. It is a singularly privileged view which, of the 229 people on this Airbus A321, only he and Christian can share.

  As they are approaching their designated level the London controller calls them again.

  ‘Silver Star Two Fifty. What’s your heading, please?’

  ‘Two seven five degrees, Silver Star Two Fifty.’

  ‘Roger. Maintain two seven five degrees, descend flight level one eight zero. Call London one three two decimal four. Good night.’

  Releasing the microphone switch, Chris leans forward to dial up the new frequency and checks in, whilst Will sets the new flight level and pulls the heading control knob to disable the navigation following mode. When Chris has checked in with the new controller, Will reads out the new settings.

  ‘Flight level one eight zero, heading two seven five, blue.’

  ‘Checked.’

  For the next twenty minutes the pilots are kept busy as they are routed around traffic inbound to London from the west. Will can see other aircraft of interest as they appear on the navigation screen in front of him, but he knows these are only a fraction of the traffic that is in the sky over the south of Britain this morning. This is the start of the rush hour, as aircraft inbound from the Americas are making their approaches to London or routeing far overhead to a myriad of European destinations.

  Once he and Chris are handed over to Bristol Approach the radio traffic becomes much quieter. They cross the M5, heading out into the Bristol Channel before they are turned inbound to Runway 09 at Bristol.

  As Will reduces their speed for the approach he begins to reconfigure the aircraft for landing, concentrating hard. Bristol has an unusual runway that slopes downhill from the west to the east. Landing on Runway 09 requires the pilots to fly manually as the approach is too tricky for autoland systems. Will knows he needs to land accurately in the touchdown zone so that he isn’t left in the air, floating down the hill. But this is his home base and this is his moment; this is what he lives for. As they pass through three hundred feet the wind catches them, throwing the aircraft off balance, but Will is ready for the disturbance and corrects the flight path almost before it is deflected.

  ‘Decide.’ The order is from Chris.

  ‘Land,’ responds Will.

  He has timed it perfectly. The main wheels touch the runway firmly, preventing any side-slip. He feels the ground spoilers deploy as he holds the right wing down with the stick, lowering the nose to the runway as the automatic braking system kicks in. At the same time he selects full reverse thrust. It may be early in the morning for loud noise but Will is making sure the aircraft will stop on the runway as it rolls downhill. As soon as he is confident of his landing he moves the thrust levers back to idle and the engine noise dies away from a roar to a murmur. His heart is beating fast, he exhales fully and feels the familiar exhilaration of a job well done.

  Chris says, ‘Nice one, Will.’

  Will doesn’t respond, he doesn’t need to.

  Bristol is a small airport and it is not long before Will is braking the aircraft to a halt and they are shutting down the engines and turning off the anti-collision lights. As the passengers disembark, Will and Chris work fast to secure the aircraft, complete the electronic paperwork and flight reports and brief the ground engineers on the minor faults that this flight has revealed. Then they are out of their seats, packing their flight bags and putting on caps and jackets before they leave the flight deck to join the cabin crew, who are waiting on the crew bus. They dump their bags on the floor and sprawl on to the seats. Soon they will be on their way home.

  * * *

  El sleeps fitfully. It’s not the first time she’s been alone at night in the cottage since Pa died, but it’s the first night of this whole new life ahead of her. Restlessly she turns on to her back, trying to keep sadness under control; trying to recreate the sense of adventure that she experienced as she drove down, planning what she might do and how she might live. Now, her hopefulness is diminished and she fears that her mother might be right: that it’s a crazy plan. S
he’s never told her mother about her secret dream that she might start to write, to attempt a novel. For some time now she’s been wondering what form it might take, how she would begin, and she makes notes continually about her feelings, things she sees, how people behave. Pa encouraged her simply by allowing her to escape into other worlds, to read voraciously. It worries her that, even in her grief and loneliness, a part of her stands detached observing these emotions, wondering how they might be described, used. It makes her feel callous, but at the same time she thinks that it might be necessary if she is to write with any depth about people and how they think and feel and have their being.

  ‘Cardboard cutouts,’ Pa would sometimes say, tossing a novel aside. ‘Two-dimensional characters.’

  She is determined that she will never be snared in this trap and as she lies there in the darkness, in the deep rural silence, El wonders how she would describe her mother if she were to write about her; how she would try to show the need to dominate, to control, so as to maintain her grasp on events and the people around her. She needed order, rules, familiarity, to hold at bay her own insecurity. El could see now how much Pa’s faithlessness had undermined all these things, stripping away her mother’s fragile structure and support, leaving her exposed. Explanations and forgiveness were not an option. She took everything and left, expecting those closest to her to be absolutely on her side. Her motto was, ‘Those who are not for me are against me.’

  Just occasionally in this last year Pa came close to talking about his private life; the separation before the divorce.

  ‘Why?’ El asked him once, tentative and nervous, after a companionable supper.