The Sick Rose (6 page)

‘Don’t worry, about this, it’s just in case there’s an emergency. And it’s kept under lock and key,’ she said. He relaxed a little. ‘And like I said, I don’t care about what you look like on paper. No, I want to know
who you really are
.’

Who I really am, thought Paul. That’s a loaded question. The dutiless son? The false boyfriend? The faithless friend? The man who let someone die? Demetra picked up on his reticence.

‘Well. I suppose that’s something we’ll find out organically as we get to know each other,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll tell you a bit about us first, shall I? As you know, this is Kelstice Lodge. Ingram – that’s my husband, you’ll meet him later – and I bought the estate a couple of years ago with a view to restoring the garden to its Elizabethan glory. So, we set up our charity, Veriditas. Last year, our fabulous plantswoman, Louisa, unearthed a tapestry that shows the grounds exactly as they were in 1563. I suppose you read about it? It was in all the broadsheets, although she let us take the credit, bless her.’ The phenomenon of the enthusiast who assumes that all laypersons are at least basically versed in their personal passion was new to Paul and he didn’t know how to react. ‘Anyway. We all muck in with each other’s jobs here but officially Louisa’s head gardener, does all the botanical research, Nathaniel’s our other gardener, Ingram’s the fundraiser, and I’m the, the . . . philanthropist, if you like. Essentially, we want the project to be more than just another restoration site, we want to really give something back to the wider community. At the moment, because it’s autumn, there are only four young people working with us, including you. You have all, you’ve all overcome
challenges
and all of you have been referred to me personally. Um, what else? So far we’ve funded most of the work ourselves but we’re in the process of applying for a major grant that will absolutely revolutionise the way we work here. At the moment we’re doing it all on calling in favours and volunteers.’ Basically, thought Paul, she wants cheap labour to do her dirty work. ‘But you mustn’t for a minute think that you’re just cheap labour doing our dirty work,’ said Demetra, disconcertingly. ‘The young people who stay the course say that working at Kelstice has had an absolutely transformative effect on their lives. I believe –
we
believe,’ she was leaning forward now, elbows on her knees, making Paul shrink back into his chair, ‘that working in a garden offers a quite unique and very successful form of rehabilitation. There’s real
redemption
to be found simply through hard physical toil and the observation of the seasons.’

Paul wanted to shout at Demetra that he wasn’t the kind of person who needed rehabilitating, that removing him from Daniel was the only redemption he had ever needed and that he would be out of here as soon as the trial was over, but he settled for, ‘Great.’

‘Marvellous!’ said Demetra. ‘And how do you find your digs?’

Paul panicked. No one had said anything about getting any special kit. ‘I haven’t got any,’ he said. ‘Just what I’m wearing, I’m sorry.’

‘Your rooms. Your lodgings. Are they OK?’

‘Oh,’ said Paul, feeling extremely foolish. ‘Yes. Thank you. Fine.’

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t get you in with the others, but it was so last minute. There’s always a chance a space in the Coventry house will become available. Not everyone is up to the challenge.’ She looked crestfallen, as if she had taken every failure personally. She had a naive, martyrish quality that reminded him of his mother and brought to the fore a strange desire to please her. ‘I’m sure you won’t let me down, though, Paul. I have a good feeling about you.’ She rinsed her cup under the tap and Paul followed suit. ‘Do you know much about gardens?’

Paul recalled his own back garden in Grays Reach, ten square feet of planks and panels. Troy, his mother’s boyfriend, would have covered the whole estate – the whole of Essex – in decking, given half the chance. He had helped put down a membrane and to lay the boards.

‘I’ve done a bit of landscaping,’ he ventured.

‘Fabulous!’ said Demetra, as though he had disclosed a year’s experience at Kew. ‘To be honest, we need you to destroy before we teach you to cultivate. At the moment it’s only ground clearance. We’ve got about twenty acres that are thick with brambles, we haven’t even scratched the surface. And don’t
talk
to me about Japanese knotweed. We’re months off even beginning to plant. Stick around until springtime though: that’s when things get really exciting.’

‘Riiiight,’ said Paul, wondering what sort of person could get turned on by the idea of digging out weeds and watching plants grow. It was going to be a long autumn.

Chapter 6

The fewer and farther between her hangovers were, the longer they lasted. It had been Friday night when she had performed her ritual and the after-effects had written off Saturday entirely; Sunday had not been much better, and now here was Monday morning and she still felt weak. The physical hangover was debilitating but the mental one was unusually enduring, too. The mortification when she remembered that debasing journey from the first sip of vodka to hugging the television, crying, on her knees, was almost intolerable. But it had
worked
, that was the thing. As she made her way to the office she felt light, and not just because she hadn’t eaten properly all weekend. She usually felt clean and purged afterwards, but this time there was a sense of finality, a tentative confidence that the demon had been driven out at last. More than that, she felt protected from it, as though the layers of cover she had built up over the years had grown deeper and more impenetrable.

She was on time for work, which by her standards was unusually late. Everyone else was on site by the time she arrived. A light drizzle was falling; the sky was a veil of unbroken grey that didn’t suggest respite any time soon. Fine by her: today would be spent on the telephone and at her desk. Ross came out of the cabin they called the boot room as she ascended the two steps to the office.

‘Morning, Ross,’ she said, realising that he was the last person she had spoken to before the weekend as well as the first one she had seen after it.

‘Morning. Oh man, my hair,’ he said, turning his face to the fine rain and smoothing his thick fringe down. Louisa was puzzled. She had always supposed Ross’s hair was a kind of trichological handicap. He wore his parting at one ear, like a balding man’s combover, even though he was young and his hair was thick. That anyone would deliberately wear their hair like that baffled her, and the bafflement dismayed her. It was the same instinct that made her want to reach out to Dilan and pull up his trousers to cover his underwear. She had become one of those middle-aged women who were mystified by youth fashion. It happens to us all, she thought; but at
thirty-nine
?

One look at Ingram, who was already barricaded behind his desk, cheered her. He was two years her senior but he made her feel like a girl of twenty-one. He wore his thick hair in a bluntly fringed, almost mediaeval bob. Matching eyebrows above square glasses made him look like a walking enchanted cottage from a story book. He wasn’t helping himself today, wearing a hand-knitted sweater with woollen trees across the breast. Louisa half-expected a talking rabbit or a unicorn to jump out of his armpit and start running around his collar.

‘There was an article about you in the paper this weekend,’ he said to Louisa. The sedative of release was replaced by the old terror. She felt winded, as though an invisible assailant had delivered a blow to her belly, and bent at the waist.

‘What’s the matter
now
?’ said Ingram.

‘Indigestion,’ she replied, as her empty stomach was sluiced with acid. Because genuine fear came so rarely now, when it did she was stunned by how quickly it could surface and she suddenly understood that her sense of calm was based on nothing more than a superstition that she thought she had –
ought
to have – outgrown. He gestured with a nod to a sheet of newsprint on her desk. She dragged leaden legs across the room to find that he had clipped and cut an article called ‘The Neo-Luddite’, about a generation of people who were rejecting technology in favour of traditional, organic methods of living and working. She trembled with relief.

‘Ha bloody ha,’ she said. ‘I know, I’m wasting my life, a gardener who works in the garden instead of staring at a computer screen all day. It’s weird, isn’t it? Anyone would think I actually enjoyed my job.’

‘It’s not my job to print out your emails.’ Ingram would have this debate daily if she let him.

‘Then don’t,’ she said. ‘Let them call me. Let them write to me. Let me go to them.’

An electronic quack from his computer told Louisa that another message had winked its way onto his screen. He winced as he read it.

‘We’ve got another one of Demetra’s no-hopers starting today. I suppose you knew about this?’ he accused. She remembered now: Demetra had told her towards the end of last week when her discomfort about Adam had been all-consuming, and it had been temporarily forgotten.

‘Young People, Ingram.’ They had tried a million times to come up with a snappy, PC phrase that better encapsulated the complex reasons the kids ended up at Kelstice. Ex-offenders, vulnerable people, addicts, rehabilitees, youths . . . in the end, it always came back to Young People.

Ingram snorted. ‘What’s this one done, d’you think?’

‘Isn’t the whole point that we don’t
ask
what they’ve done?’ said Louisa. ‘Aren’t we supposed to be giving them a clean slate?’ She was necessarily big on clean slates, second chances and leopards changing their spots. ‘They’re not all muggers and rapists. And look at Ross. We’ve done wonders with him. He’s going to university next year.’

‘Oh, I know. I’ve just had to write his referral letter to a polytechnic masquerading as a university. William Shakespeare University, if you don’t mind. He’s doing a degree in
heritage management
. What does that even
mean
? In my day you started with a Bachelor’s in history and
then
, when you had graduated, you were in a position to think about your vocation . . .’

Louisa tuned him out and turned to her desk. She would pay for last week’s neglect with a new week of late nights and no lunch breaks. The printed-out emails were piled high, and there were dozens of plants she had yet to track down, let alone order. On her notepad was a doodled list of people she needed to blag favours from, with tick boxes she would fill in when she’d made each phone call. They were all empty. The grant application on which so much hinged was due in two weeks; the forms were still in the envelope. The neglect was unforgivable. She turned the page to find that she had, without knowing it, sketched a rough portrait of Adam. She took her pen and cross-hatched over the image until it disappeared, then tore off the sheet and threw it in the recycling bin.

She spun on her chair to look, as she always did when she needed inspiration, at the tapestry. It wasn’t the real thing, of course – you couldn’t leave your phone unguarded on this site, let alone priceless, centuries-old textiles – but the print was life-size and of the highest resolution. It depicted an Elizabethan couple, she in her farthingale and he in his doublet and hose, standing before a vast and elaborate garden of herbs and hedges, knots and paths. A stone fountain stood in the centre; orchards and fields rolled in the background. The flat perspectives of Tudor embroiderers gave the background a two-dimensional feel that was perfect for her purposes of research and design. She focused on the intricate border, with its convoluted writhes of leaf and petal. Using these pictures she would recreate the garden as faithfully as she could. She eyeballed a pinky-white bloom that had been plaguing her for weeks. Was it eglantine or just a dog rose? Anyone else would have settled for eglantine and been done with it. The fact that she would not commit to the plant until she was entirely sure, and would refuse to compromise with another variety when she did, was what Ingram
really
paid her for. She could spend hours gazing at a single petal. Work was the only place she could escape. Whether she was hunting down a plant or cultivating it, she was always chasing the moment when her past and her character ceased to matter and she became only a vessel for her skills. She turned back to the page of names and numbers, each potentially a step closer to the garden’s completion, and to her relief and delight felt the old passion and capability stir within her. The first call was answered almost before it rang.

‘Tim!’ she said. ‘It’s Louisa, Louisa Trevelyan. Now, listen, this is very cheeky of me but I’m going to ask because if I don’t, I won’t get. I’m working on this amazing community programme at the moment, restoring a Tudor garden in Warwickshire, and I’m looking for some sponsorship.’

‘Why don’t I like the sound of this?’ said Tim. ‘Are you on the blag?’

‘You might call it blagging, darling, I couldn’t possibly comment. But if you could lend us a digger or two, gratis, for about six weeks, you’d get the company logo all over the programme, your insignia on the bumf, all that. What do you say?’

Tim put up a pretence of resistance, Louisa put up a pretence of persuasion, and they agreed to talk again tomorrow when he’d had a chance to crunch the numbers. She put a tick in the box next to his name.

She ate lunch – a packet of offensively processed, just-add-water noodles – at her desk and afterwards went for a walk in the garden. As ever, she felt her spirit soar when she emerged from the counterfeit sunshine of the fluorescent strip into the real thing, even weak and white as it was today. The drizzle had stopped now. It had left the ground moist enough for digging over but dry enough for her boots to grip the earth. Mounting the knoll in four strides, she walked the outer wall of the ruin, surveying Kelstice in 360 degrees. Looking at the estate now, you’d never believe that in two years it would be restored to the splendour rendered by the embroiderer’s needle.