The Real Katie Lavender (7 page)

The woman behind the bar took Katie’s order of a smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich, poured her a glass of wine and pointed her in the direction of the beer garden, saying that her sandwich would be brought out to her shortly.

Outside it was a very different matter: the garden was thrumming with customers. With only a few tables free, Katie picked the smallest one and repositioned the umbrella so that she wasn’t in the full glare of the sun. She could see why everyone was sitting outside in preference to the gloomy bar: the attractive lawned garden sloped gently down towards the river, where a variety of boats were neatly moored along the towpath. In the shade of a willow tree, its branches dipping into the water, a man and two small children were surrounded by a mob of persistent ducks. The children were flinging bits of bread at the ducks with nervous excitement, their arms moving with sudden jerky movements, their laughter shrill. The setting was as perfect as the weather, and despite the reason she was here, Katie felt herself relax. It really was a perfectly sublime summer afternoon with a hot sun shimmering in a hazy blue sky.

Her sandwich duly arrived, and as she hungrily tucked in, Katie scanned the other tables. It wouldn’t be beyond the realms of possibility for Stirling Nightingale to be here. For all she knew, this could be his local pub. But as far as she could see, there was no one at any of the tables who resembled the man she’d seen on her computer.

The man who was her father . . .

Her
biological
father, she corrected herself. No matter what transpired, Dad would always be her real father.

As a child, you never really think about how much your parents love each other, but Dad must have loved Fay to an extraordinary extent to forgive her for what she’d done, and then to pretend to the world that the child she’d conceived with another man was his own.

How difficult had it been for him? Had there been a time when he’d struggled to like Katie, never mind bond with her? She would never know. And that saddened her, because now that the seed had been sown, she didn’t know if she would ever be able to rid herself of the doubt. All she could do was rely on the memories she had of her father. A patient and quiet undemonstrative man, he had always been someone to whom she could turn. If she’d been upset over something that had happened at school, he would be the one to calm her and make her realize that it was nothing more than a storm in a teacup. He was always able to get things in perspective for her.

Mum, on the other hand, was the sparky one of the two. When the mood took her, she was her very own localized storm in a teacup, who could whip up a commotion in seconds flat and out of nothing. Dad had joked that she ran on high-energy fuel and didn’t have a brake pedal. They were opposites in just about every way, but as everyone said of them, they made a great team. Not just as husband and wife, but as business partners. For more than twenty-five years they had jointly run an antiquarian bookshop, and for a couple who lived and worked together, Katie couldn’t recall a single heavy-duty argument between them. Maybe that was because Dad wasn’t the argumentative type. He never let things get to him.

After Dad’s death, Mum had carried on running the bookshop, but as she later admitted to Katie, her heart was no longer in it without Dad. What had once been a great source of pleasure, a real labour of love, became a millstone around her neck, and within a year she had sold up. That was when she moved to Brighton, to start a new life. Albeit a tragically short new life.

Behind the wheel of her car again – it was a yellow Mini Cooper that had once belonged to her mother, and which Katie had nicknamed the Custard Cream – she switched the satnav back on. She wondered whether by tracking down her biological father, she was also about to start a new life.

Was this what her mother had wanted for her?

The white-painted gate to The Meadows was open, and practising aloud what she was going to say, Katie turned into the drive and followed the pretty tree-lined sweep of it to the front of the white house. It was gracefully proportioned and perfectly symmetrical, with two columns either side of a front door that was painted a very dark shade of blue. A Volvo estate was parked in front of the double garage, which gave her hope that somebody was at home.

She rang the doorbell and tried to contain her nerves.

When nobody responded, she rang the bell again, this time for longer.

But still nobody came.

She had come this far; she had no intention of giving up so easily. She walked round to the side of the house on the gravel path and called out, ‘Hello, anyone at home?’

Still no response.

She pressed on through a dappled tunnel of laburnum whilst continuing to call out. She stepped into a courtyard where the walls were covered in variegated ivy and water gently played from a fountain in the farthest corner, its base surrounded by a bed of lush hosta plants. It was very tranquil, a cool and restful oasis.

Opposite her was a small arched wooden door; it was only about four feet high, and there was a sign on it that read: ‘Open Me’. Feeling a bit like Alice in Wonderland, she self-consciously turned the metal handle, bent down and went through.

And again like Alice, she found that she’d stepped into another world, a beautiful and enchanting world. After the shade of the courtyard, she blinked at the brightness of the sun and teased out the impact of what she was seeing. In front of her was an immaculate stretch of perfectly striped, luxuriant green lawn that was flanked by two deep borders and enclosed by soft-hued brick walls covered in a scrambling rose the colour of clotted cream. The borders were stunning, planted with delphiniums, lupins, hesperis, alliums, aquilegia and poppies – all the flowers that Katie’s mother had adored, and which in turn had become favourites for Katie. She walked to the middle of the lawn and slowly turned round, looking back at the small wooden door through which she’d entered, as if not really believing it would still be there. It was truly spellbinding.

‘Can I help you?’

She spun round at the sound of a woman’s voice, fully aware that if this was the owner of the house – Mrs Penelope Nightingale – she had every right to be angry, to accuse Katie of trespass. But pushing a wheelbarrow and dressed in a loose-fitting top and jeans that were rolled to just above her ankles, with off-white canvas shoes on her feet and a large-brimmed hat on her head, the woman didn’t look angry, just enquiring. She actually looked quite a nice woman, down-to-earth, with an open and friendly expression. On the shortish and dumpy side, she wasn’t at all what Katie had expected. She had dreaded a gentrified gorgon of a woman, one of those tall, haughty horse-faced types prone to wearing headscarves. Although, of course, Katie had yet to establish whether this was the owner. Maybe she was a gardener who worked here.

‘The garden isn’t open to the public yet,’ the woman said in a pleasantly low and rich husky voice, when Katie still hadn’t replied.

‘Um . . .’ Oh hell, she’d forgotten what she was supposed to say. She’d been so blown away by her surroundings, her mind had gone blank, every carefully chosen word of her ruse gone from her head.

‘That’s all right,’ the woman said, letting go of the wheelbarrow. ‘People are always turning up at the wrong time. I’m quite used to it. You need to come back a week today, next Saturday.’

Katie tried to pull herself together. ‘I did ring the bell,’ she began. ‘I rang it several times.’

The woman laughed. ‘Sorry. Once I get stuck in, there’s no chance of me hearing it. But as I said, you’ll have to come back next weekend.’

‘Um . . . it’s not the garden I’ve come about,’ Katie said. ‘It’s . . . I’m looking for Mr Stirling Nightingale. I have a delivery for him. This is his address, isn’t it?’

The woman tipped the brim of her hat back and wiped her face with her forearm. ‘I’m glad I’m not the only one who gets things muddled up,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong Nightingale house; Stirling, my brother-in-law, lives less than a mile away at Willow Bank. You can’t miss it; just follow the river in the Marlow direction and take the turning after the church.’

So she
was
the owner. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m sorry to have troubled you.’

‘Think nothing of it. Glad to be of help. Can you find your way out on your own?’

‘Oh yes, don’t worry about me.’ Katie reluctantly turned to go, but didn’t quite manage it. It was the strangest thing, but she suddenly felt intoxicated by the magical beauty of the garden, overcome with the feeling that she had fallen under some kind of spell here. It made her want to stay, to wander round some more and lose herself in this beguiling paradise. ‘You have an amazing garden,’ she said, somehow finding her voice. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It has a very special feel to it. My . . . my mother would have loved it.’

The woman smiled. A real smile of genuine warmth. ‘Then come back next Saturday and have a proper look. This is only a fraction of what there is to see. You’ll have to pay an admission charge, but it’s all in a good cause, for the local hospice.’

‘Thank you,’ Katie said again. ‘I’d love to come back and see it properly.’

‘The gate opens at ten thirty.’

Katie smiled. ‘I look forward to it.’

Nice girl, Pen thought to herself as she went to fetch a spade. Not the usual kind of delivery person, though. Usually it was a man, and if they couldn’t get an answer, they just shoved a card through the letter box. Good of her to go to so much trouble. One thing was certain: Pen had to do something about having a new doorbell installed. For ages now Neil had been on about getting one of those special devices that could make itself heard for miles around.

On the subject of Neil, she thought how odd it was that she hadn’t heard from him since he’d gone sailing. It was very unlike him. He always phoned home at least once when he was away. She had mentioned it to Lloyd yesterday when he’d called from New Zealand, and he’d agreed that it was odd but had reached the same conclusion as she had: that it was probably something simple, such as being out of mobile range. Still, so long as Neil was enjoying himself, that was all that counted. He worked so hard; he deserved some fun.

But he was cutting it fine for Cecily’s party. Perhaps his flight home had been delayed. She looked at her watch. Gracious! How did it get so late? She would have to get her skates on. Abandoning the idea of doing any more gardening, she hurried back up to the house.

Katie drove out of The Meadows. What was she thinking? What madness had she just experienced? Imagining herself falling under the spell of a garden; how had that happened? And why had she mentioned her mother?

Gina was frequently told that no one could organize a party better than she could. Naturally she brushed the compliment aside with an appropriately modest shrug, but secretly she believed it to be true. She put the success of anything she organized down to being highly meticulous and with a keen eye for detail. She was an inveterate list-maker and never approached anything without painstaking preparation. Rosco and Scarlet liked to tease her about it. ‘Oh, there goes Mum with one of her lists,’ they’d laugh. ‘We could wallpaper the whole house twice over with the lists she’s written over the years.’

It was just as well that she was as thorough as she was, because no one else in the family was capable of doing what she did. Whilst it couldn’t be disputed that Pen had cornered the market when it came to green fingers, nobody in their right mind would count on her to arrange a picnic with shop-bought sandwiches, much less coordinate a party. Thankfully Pen was good-natured enough to admit her failings and was invariably the first to congratulate Gina on a job well done and to apologize for not doing more to help; without fail she would promise to do more next time. Always quick to quash these offers of assistance, Gina would reassure her sister-in-law that she wasn’t to give it a moment’s thought, that Pen had enough on her plate as it was.

Armed now with her A4-sized Filofax, she put a tick against Floral Arrangements. The florist had left no more than a few minutes ago and the house was already fragrant with the heady perfume of old English roses, freesias and early sweet peas – Cecily’s favourite flowers. The arrangements had been placed in the hallway, the sitting room and the conservatory. Later, when it was dark, candles and flaming torches would be lit on the terrace.

This surprise party for Cecily was to be held in the garden, but once the temperature dropped, the older guests would very likely be drawn inside the house. Sadly for Cecily, many of her contemporaries were long since dead, but – and behind her back – her newly made friends from South Lodge had been invited. Taxis would be fetching them thirty minutes after Stirling had collected his mother, the plan being that she would think she was coming here for a quiet family dinner to celebrate her birthday. Gina hoped that the South Lodge crowd, with their memories and faculties not quite as sharp as they had once been, wouldn’t give the game away.

It was hard to imagine there ever being a time when Cecily wouldn’t be around; she was very much a key member of the family, and still most assuredly had plenty to say on what went on. In the early years of her marriage, Gina had been convinced that her mother-in-law didn’t approve of her. When she had voiced this concern to Stirling, he had laughed and said she was being ridiculous. All these years on, Gina still got the feeling that Cecily had to force herself to like her. Their conversations were superficial and stiffly polite, as if they’d only just met and couldn’t get beyond making small talk. In contrast, Cecily and Pen were completely natural around each other. Gina had repeatedly told herself that the effortlessness of their relationship was down to their shared love of gardening. But she wasn’t so sure. She was convinced it went deeper.

She wasn’t so bothered about being treated differently herself, but she did object to partiality when it came to the grandchildren. It irked her that Lloyd was so clearly his grandmother’s favourite. But then Lloyd, as they all knew, was a special case. Not that anyone was supposed to talk about that. Heaven forbid. Like Pen, he had the same laid-back and affable temperament, but beneath it there was a core of steel. If he didn’t want to do something, you couldn’t make him do it, not for anything. Gina frequently wondered if Neil wasn’t just a little disappointed in him. He must have expected more of his only son and occasionally he surely must have wondered why Lloyd hadn’t turned out more like Rosco; after all, as cousins, they’d had the exact same advantages and opportunities.