The Last Garden in England(41)

“What do you know of the garden?” she’d ask him once.

“Only what I’ve found in the papers in the study.”

She flipped over onto her stomach, looping her hand around his neck to bring his lips to hers. “Tell me,” she murmured against his lips.

He kissed her. She could have lost herself in his kisses. Now she spent her days wishing she had.

When he pulled back, he let his hand linger to the top of her stocking. “Once upon a time—”

She laughed. “Is this a fairy tale?”

“Who is telling this story?” he asked, playfully snapping the ribbon of her garter.

“You are. I apologize.”

“Once upon a time,” he started again, “there was a woman named Venetia who was a very talented gardener. She was hired by my grandfather…”

The story went on, and Diana’s attention waned as her husband stroked her hair once again until she was asleep with her head in his lap.

When Murray died, she put away the two keys to the winter garden—their garden—in a dish on the mantel in the library. She couldn’t bring herself to enter it. John Hillock, the gardener, or later one of the boys from the village, would ask Mrs. Dibble to retrieve one of the keys so they could tidy it. Then they would lock it up tightly and return the key, and she would once again turn her back.

“Grief can be a powerful thing,” Father Devlin said, interrupting her memories.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You are allowed to mourn your husband, Mrs. Symonds,” he said.

She looked out over the lawn, to where the land girls’ tractors were gouging into the earth. “Do you know how many people told me ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted?’?”

“Matthew 5:4,” he said.

“So many of those well-meaning people walked up to me at the funeral and said that. The one who didn’t was Father Bilson.”

“Which, I take it, is why the good vicar is still invited to dinner,” said Father Devlin.

She inclined her head.

“What do you remember of your husband’s funeral?” asked Father Devlin.

The feeling of being squeezed by her mother and father on one side and Cynthia on the other. Trapped in the pew with everyone watching her, she’d wanted to race out of the church because if she did, maybe she could run fast enough to escape it all.

“We all rose at the end, and I had to walk out first. My father put his hand under my elbow to help me stand. I could barely feel my legs, but somehow I put one foot in front of the other. Then, halfway down the aisle, I couldn’t move.”

“You were in shock,” Father Devlin said softly.

She shook her head. “It happened to me at my wedding as well. I was walking on my father’s arm, and suddenly I froze. All of those people were looking at me.”

“At your wedding, they were happy for a young bride. At your husband’s funeral, they were sad for the pain they thought you must be feeling,” he said.

“Those people didn’t know anything of how I was feeling.” The words came out fierce and bitter. “They wanted to see me break. To see the widow sobbing in her parents’ arms, so helpless because her husband is dead.”

“I’m sure that no one thought that,” said the chaplain.

Her laugh stuck dry in her throat. “Then you have more faith in people than I do, Father. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing me lose control, but I froze until I felt my mother’s fingers dig into my waist. She’d wrapped an arm around me so that it looked as though she was helping, but I could feel the pinch of her grip. ‘You’re a mother now,’ she whispered in my ear. I hated her for it, but she was right. I had Robin to look after. I couldn’t fall to bits, because I had my son.

“I’ve done everything I can to give him a normal life. He attends school with the other boys. He hardly wants, even with rationing. Nothing in this house has changed if I could help it. This will be his home one day.”

Even when she’d wanted him during those miserable dinners after the funeral with only Cynthia for company, she didn’t send to Nanny for him. She hadn’t wanted to place the burden of her grief on her son, so she’d stuck out her chin, blinking back her tears and trying to close the yawning sadness that threatened to split her open.

“We all have to get along with it,” she said, somehow unable to stop talking now that she’d begun. “I’m no different from my school friend Marcella, who lost her husband in a U-boat attack, or the wife of my cousin, whose plane was reported missing over France.”

“You may well be right about that, Mrs. Symonds, but remember that you do not have to carry the burden of all of Highbury on your shoulders.”

She stood abruptly. “I do not need you to tell me what I should or should not do. Good day, Father Devlin.”

He didn’t protest as she disappeared through the door.





? VENETIA ?


WEDNESDAY, 3 APRIL 1907

Highbury House

Overcast

Matthew Goddard is proving to be a man of his word. Today he drove to Highbury House to take me to visit Mr. Johnston’s Hidcote Manor.

My delight at an outing to meet another gardener was dampened by Mrs. Melcourt, who stood at the front door, watching her brother hand me into his old but serviceable gig. Mrs. Melcourt’s mouth pinched as Mr. Goddard climbed up and flicked the reins, and off we went.