Eden's Garden (17 page)

It was only as the Polo made its way up the twisting little road from Beddgelert and past Snowdon – Carys having taken the scenic route in the hope it might calm her down and give herself time to think before facing Joe – that it finally sank in she had no responsibilities for Mam for at least twenty-four hours. In a spirit of rebellion, she stopped at the viewing point at the side of the road. She bought an ice cream from the van waiting patiently for passing tourists and sat on a rock for a few minutes looking out over the curve of Snowdon rising high above her.

Despite her dread of what the next few hours might bring, it was nice just to be herself, with no demands made on her at all. A precious luxury, in fact. ‘I’ll never, ever take this for granted, ever again,’ she promised herself, as she crunched the end of the cone, and, with a heavy heart, set off once more.

 

She had promised herself that she would be calm and reasonable. Well, that didn’t last long. She hadn’t been back in the flat for an hour before the arguments began.

‘Of course I’m pleased for you,’ she found herself saying, in uninhibited exasperation. ‘And it’s a brilliant opportunity, and of course you have to take it. I just wished you’d discussed it with me first.’

Joe was frowning at her. ‘So it’s okay for you to swan off to spend a couple of months with your mother, but not for me to have a career.’

‘No, of course not! I’ve never said that. And anyhow, we discussed me going to look after Mam.’

‘Not that it would have made any difference.’

Ouch.

‘But she’s my mother,’ said Carys, feeling her temper rise. ‘She was in trouble. It’s what human beings do for each other. And anyhow, she’s much better already: it’s only for a few more weeks.’

‘But you were quite happy to put her first.’

Carys stared at him. Was that what this was all about? Was this some kind of punishment for her perceived disloyalty? ‘For a few weeks. Not for the rest of my life, Joe.’

There was a moment’s silence. At last Joe looked up, the warmth back in his eyes. ‘It’ll be brilliant, Cari. A new start.’

‘But I thought the idea was to move out of the city, into the countryside. Set up our own business.’

‘Oh, we can still do that.’ Joe was pleased. He’d obviously thought this through. ‘Look, on what I’ll be getting, we’ll be able to afford a flat in London and a holiday home in the countryside. Sorted.’

‘A
holiday
home?’ Not a smallholding. Not a business. A playground. A Marie Antoinette playfarm to keep the little woman happy while he got on with his brilliant career in the real world. He’d got it worked out, all right. ‘I’m not sure I want to live in London,’ she added slowly.

‘Oh, you’ll be fine once we’re there. Just you see.’

Carys watched him, feeling a huge gulf open up in front of her. This wasn’t about her at all. This was what Joe wanted. And what Joe wanted, she must want too. He was listening to her words, but he no longer heard. It was like coming up against a brick wall. The wall of Joe’s vision for their future. The world according to Joe.

Panic shot through her, catching her unawares. An old, strangely familiar panic. A feeling of standing on a precipice, about to be absorbed into someone else’s life, someone else’s passion. And knowing that if she did so, however much she struggled, she would have no existence at all.

‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ she muttered, making her way into the kitchen. Her hands were shaking.

Maybe this moment would always have come. And better now, than when they had children between them. She’d known this in her heart for months – maybe years. Why had she never fully faced it before? She’d heard some of her married friends complain that it was always they who made the compromises, and been impatient at their lack of backbone. So she could hardly complain now she was faced with her own choice.

This time she was a woman in her thirties, not an
eighteen-year-old
girl whose life was about to begin, with a university to go to, who could just pack her rucksack and run.

‘So you’ll give it a try?’ Joe said, making his way over to the fridge to get milk.

‘I thought you liked the idea of living in the country and setting up our own business.’

‘It was a nice idea.’

‘Was?’

‘Things change, Cari.’

She glanced at him. When she’d first met Joe, they’d been fresh out of college, raring and ready to go with their new careers. They’d both escaped backgrounds of few prospects and few choices. A good life had been their mutual ambition. A nice home, along with money for theatres and concerts and the ability to jet off on a whim to see places their parents had never even dreamed of.

They’d worked hard and played hard, and it had worked so well for all the time they had been together. Of course, during the past couple of years there had been less money, with a
last-minute
booking for a few days in Tuscany and Morocco, rather than weeks spent scaling the heights of Machu Picchu or the jungle temples of Angkor Wat. But that was only a stage and an investment in a more personally rewarding future, so temporary and worth it.

Now she could see that forty had begun to loom over Joe’s horizon. The skinny youth she’d first known had gone, settling down towards a more solid middle age. Why had she never noticed before the way the flexibility had eased from his face, defining itself into more permanent lines?

Was that what was happening to her, too? Was she just being inflexible and settled in her ways? The comfort of a long weekend in the hotel in Florence last September had seemed so much more appealing than a trek through yet another
heat-steaming
jungle, or balancing on overcrowded trains with a basket of chickens at her feet and her rucksack on her back, for all Joe had complained of a weekend in a 4-star hotel being ‘tame’. Was that her getting old? More tied to her creature comforts? Less adventurous? Or maybe she was just a woman who always ran when faced with difficult decisions.

She took a deep breath. ‘And if I don’t like the idea of living in London?’

‘You haven’t tried it.’ His logic was immoveable. ‘How can you reject something you haven’t even tried?’

‘Do you think I don’t know my own mind?’

‘Well, how can you tell unless you’ve tried it?’

‘But I do know. I know I don’t want a city life. That’s why I changed career and went back to college. We discussed it, remember? Living without all the backbiting of the management structure. Being our own boss, so we don’t have to work our guts out just so someone else can get rich beyond our wildest dreams. We discussed it. We thought it through. We were prepared to make sacrifices. I thought that’s what you wanted, too.’

‘It was a nice idea,’ he repeated. ‘But this is the real world, Cari.’

The real world. Power lunches and bonuses. A guided tour of the Taj Mahal each summer and a new Porsche every year. Was that the real world?

And her world? Her world at this moment? The world with Mam, working out the intricacies of relationships; the looking back at your own childhood and the things that made you. Finding a way to face the future, the future of old age that lies ahead for all of us, one day, with courage and dignity. The things that make you human. Was that truly nothing to do with the real world at all?

Not for Joe. Finally, she understood. That was the world Joe’s sisters would always take care of. The world that Joe would never have to face at all. The world he would never acknowledge even existed.

A desperate sense of loneliness filled her.

‘It can be more lonely being with someone than being on your own,’ Poppy had once declared, one drunken night, long before Stuart, when yet another disastrous relationship had crashed and burned, in Poppy’s usual spectacular fashion.

The choice was hers, Cari knew. She could try, yet again, to make him see her point of view, and attempt another compromise. But they’d been through that before, and she’d sworn to herself that if it failed she would not do it again: there was no point. That left her with only two choices: to go with Joe’s world, or walk away.

Logic said there was only one choice. Her sense of
self-preservation
said there was only one choice.

But her heart said it didn’t want to make a choice at all.

 Willow Cottage was out-and-out spotless by the time Carys made her dispirited return from Chester in time for Mam’s birthday.

‘Go okay?’ asked Gwenan, as Carys let herself in.

‘Fine,’ replied Carys, trying to sound cheerful.

‘Nice trip?’ said Mam, eying her with unusual sharpness.

‘Lovely,’ replied Carys mechanically. ‘Happy Birthday,
Penblwydd Hapus
, Mam.’

‘Well, I don’t see what the fuss is about,’ said Mam, who had always made a virtue of never putting herself first. ‘When you get to my age, every birthday is much like the rest.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Gwenan, who had a habit of taking things literally. ‘This is
your
day, and we’re all going to spoil you. Nia phoned as they were leaving Oswestry, so they should be here any minute. The table at the Llewellyn isn’t booked until half past one. We’ve plenty of time. Presents first.’

‘I’ll just go and change,’ said Carys, escaping upstairs as quickly as she could.

Nia and her family arrived shortly afterwards, bearing an oversized card and a large parcel wrapped in glossy pink paper. The parcel contained a fluffy dressing gown, with matching slippers, along with a large box of Mam’s favourite chocolates.

‘Lovely, thank you, darling,’ said Mam, stroking the softness of the dressing gown as she placed them on top of the sets of towels and duvet covers given to her by Gwenan, along with several bottles of her favourite sherry.

Carys handed over her own offering with a slight feeling of trepidation. The two large black folders, under a box of chocolates, sat for a moment in their mother’s lap.

‘Photograph albums,’ said Mam, slowly riffling through the pages.

‘They’re empty,’ said Gwenan, frowning slightly.

‘They’re for Mam to fill up herself,’ explained Carys.

‘Ah, how sweet,’ sighed Nia. ‘I keep on telling Sam we shouldn’t just keep ours on the computer. We hardly ever look at them. A proper photograph album is much better.’

Mam looked up. Her eyes were twinkling with more life than Cari had seen in ages. ‘I meant to sort out our pictures ages ago, but somehow I never had time. And I never did like going up into the attic, even when your dad was alive.’

‘You should have said,’ exclaimed Gwenan. ‘Charles would have gone up for you, or one of the boys, if only you’d asked.’

Mam smiled. ‘There’s really no need, dear. Carys has been marvellous. She’s been looking out the old photographs up in the spare room. You found a whole lot more the other day, didn’t you,
cariad
? It’s so nice to see them all again. Lots of them I’d totally forgotten about. They’re in the boxes next to the sofa. We’re still sorting them out. Bring that top one over, Carys, I’m sure your sisters would like to see.’

‘Yes, Mam.’

‘Some of those look really old,’ said Gwenan at the appearance of an ancient shoebox. She turned back from the window that opened out into the garden, where the men-folk had been left entertaining four slightly grumpy teenagers for whom terminal boredom had already – and loudly – set in. ‘Half of them are falling to bits.’

‘I’m going to scan the really fragile ones into my laptop,’ explained Carys. ‘And I’ll be able to touch up the worst ones.’

‘Well, if you’ve got the time. Sounds like a big job to me,’ said Gwenan, dubiously. ‘No you can’t go to the shops,’ she snapped to her offspring through the open window. ‘I told you; we’re going to take Grandma out for a birthday lunch in a few minutes.’

‘I think it’s a really sweet idea,’ said Nia. ‘Are there lots of us when we were little?’

‘Quite a few. We’re sorting them out at the moment, aren’t we, Mam? The three of us when we were small will go into one book, and then we’re going to put any really old ones, before we were born, in another.’

‘Oh,’ said Nia. ‘Where are the ones with the three of us, then?’

‘Here, in these.’ Carys handed her a box that had once held reams of paper, now stuffed to the brim with curling prints.

‘I bet we look funny,’ said Nia, sheafing through. ‘Oh look! Mam, how could you wear a coat like that?’

‘They were all the rage,’ said Mam mildly.

‘Here we are.’ Nia pulled out a small selection in triumph. ‘Oh my goodness, wasn’t I just so fat!’

‘Nonsense, dear. You were a lovely looking little girl. Everyone said so.’

Nia smiled and turned to the rest of the photographs. ‘I remember those picnics on Talarn beach, Mam. My goodness, don’t we look wrapped up! Dad used to love taking photographs, didn’t he?’

‘Your grandfather had a photographic studio, you know,’ said Mam, smiling down fondly at the dog-eared prints. ‘The Merediths set him up with it, when he retired from being head gardener.’

Carys looked up in surprise. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Oh, yes. On Pont-ar-Eden High Street, it was. There used to be so many shops there. You could do all your shopping without leaving the village, and everyone was so friendly. Not like going to the supermarket today. Your dad used to work there when he was young, when he wasn’t working at Plas Eden. Of course, I didn’t know him then. He was so much older than me, you see. He still did weddings and portraits, on and off, when you were all small, when he wasn’t driving the taxi.’ Her eyes took on a faraway gaze. ‘I think he’d have liked to have been a famous photographer, like David Bailey, or Lord Snowdon. But he had us to support, and times were hard in those days.’

‘There aren’t any really old ones here,’ said Nia, who had reached the bottom of the box. ‘I’m sure there used to be some ancient ones Dad used to show us. People in really old clothing. And there was a carriage, a proper one, with horses, right in front of Plas Eden.’

‘Yes, that’s right,
cariad
,’ said Mam. ‘I’d forgotten about those. They must still be up in the attic. There are lots of things up there of your dad’s. I always meant to sort them out,’ she added, a little sadly. ‘I expect your grandfather’s photographs are still there. Photographs were really special things, in those days. Your grandfather took up photography when it was out of the reach of the pockets of most people.’

‘Exactly,’ said Gwenan, nodding. ‘Being head gardener would have been a really good job in those days. The butler and the head gardener were the most important members of staff in places like Plas Eden. The equivalent of senior managers in a large firm today.’

‘Would they really have been that important?’ Carys, who hadn’t given the matter any thought, was dubious.

‘Oh, yes.’ Gwenan was firm. ‘The head gardener would have had dozens of men under him. They didn’t just grow flowers in those days, you know. He’d have been responsible for making sure Plas Eden had enough food grown throughout the year. And things like pineapples and grapes that were really exotic and hard to grow. Dad used to tell me about it.’ Her face had softened with memory. ‘He was really proud of the connection, you know?’

‘Oh,’ said Carys. Silence had fallen in the little room.

Gwenan cleared her throat. ‘Time to think about moving, don’t you think? Or we’re going to be late for that booking.’

 

By the time Gwenan and Nia left for the hotel in Talarn that evening, families dutifully in tow, Mam was completely worn out and fast asleep in her armchair in front of
Coronation Street
.

Quietly, so as not to disturb her, Carys hooked down the ladder to the loft and clanged her way upwards, the biggest torch she could find in her hands. She was tired herself, after a few fitful hours of sleep on Poppy’s sofa last night, followed by the drive home and then keeping up the appearance of cheerfulness throughout the day. But Mam hadn’t half perked up since the appearance of those first photographs, so probably best not to lose momentum now.

And besides, she’d done enough thinking and feeling for half a lifetime over the past twenty-four hours. Time to keep herself busy. That’s how Mam had dealt with grief when Dad had died. Joe wasn’t dead, of course: but after that last sniping, warts and all row, there was no going back to the way things had been before. Some things can be said that clear the air and make a relationship stronger, Cari had discovered. After some, there is no way back. Last night was definitely the
no-way-back
variety.

Tomorrow, she would pick herself up, dust herself down, agree with Joe that the only thing that could be done was to put the flat on the market as soon as possible, hold her head high and get on with her life. Wherever that might take her. Which was mightily scary, starting off from scratch once more.

‘This time, I’m in charge. And I’m going to do things my way,’ she muttered to herself, placing the torch on a rafter and pulling herself up into the attic.

It hadn’t changed since she was a child. She could swear some of the boxes were the same. Once she located the switch in the darkness, a shadeless bulb illuminated the long, sloping space. Bare rafters rose above her, with equally bare rafters below her feet. Taking care not to put a foot wrong and end up through the ceiling below, Carys made her way to the centre of the light, and looked around her.

Dad had been a hoarder and Mam had never had the heart to throw anything away, instead adding items of her own bit by bit. For a good twenty minutes, Carys was waylaid by cardboard boxes filled to overflowing with school reports and exercise books. A tin trunk opened to reveal games and toys she had almost forgotten, but which now came back to her with memories of sitting round the fire at Christmas, or up in Gwenan’s bedroom on wet afternoons, obeying Gwenan’s ordering of the doll’s house Dad had made from bits of plywood, with the Sindys and the Barbies and the Tiny Tears all marshalled into their respective positions.

She peered through old curtains, a complete tea set that had never seen the light of day (and thank goodness, the psychedelic sixties pattern in brown and orange was enough to make your stomach churn), along with glass ice cream dishes, old pots and pans and broken bits of table, and a truly hideous vase, of the kind that never breaks however hard you try.

She paused for a few minutes over her old rag doll: bald, threadbare and with one arm hanging off. Suzie was placed on a select pile of ‘don’t let Gwenan or Nia get their hands on this’, along with her own school reports and the medal she’d won for swimming.

Grasping the torch and feeling her way gingerly along the rafters, Carys made her way into the deepest, darkest recesses of the loft, where logic told her the oldest of Dad’s hoardings were likely to be found. The first box she came across held magazines, old and yellowing. The next, ancient copies of the
Beano
. Probably worth a small fortune to a collector.

The third was a shoebox stuffed full of old photographs. Carys peered at the first few in the dim light given out by the electric bulb and the beam of her torch. They were black and white, and definitely older than the family ones taken by Dad that she had found in the spare room. These had been taken in the thirties or the forties, judging by the clothes.

Some were of aunts and uncles Carys faintly remembered, with a whiff of egg mayonnaise sandwiches and salad cream on long, crisp sheaves of Cos lettuce, brought in straight from the garden. Others bore a family resemblance to herself that made the hairs on the back of her neck begin to stir. All people who had lived their lives in a time that looked straight out of a history book with its ancient cars and empty roads, and the formal cut of suits and coats of a way of life unimaginable to Carys now.

And yet each one was part of her. Shared blood flowed through their veins. It was a belonging to the world that Carys had never felt before.

Weird. Very weird. It gave her a sudden hunger to know more.

‘So that’s the fascination of family trees,’ she said aloud, the excitement at the Boadicea suddenly falling into place, along with all the books, DVDs, magazines and TV programmes. All that geeky, trainspotting, hunting down of birth certificates and death certificates and middle names that told one John Jones and one Jane Williams from another.

Very Important People have history: that was the history she had been taught at school. From the Bible downwards, come to that. All that begetting that went on for pages and pages to prove a bloodline and who’s dad did what to whom. All politics and battles and poisonings, as far as Carys could see. And – Queen Elizabeth and Boadicea apart – nothing for girls at all.