Chapter 9
For the first time since Cape had started at Morton Hall, there was another gardener working alongside him. Not only that, but Mac had arrived that Saturday morning before Cape, his digger already positioned at the entrance to the walled garden.
‘You don’t hang around, do you?’ Cape said, waving a hand as he approached. He was pleased to see him there, but he couldn’t help feeling a little bit threatened by this other man’s presence. The garden had been his domain, his responsibility, and now he was expected to share it – not just with Mac but with a whole group of strangers. He definitely had mixed feelings about the whole thing but it was for the greater good, as he kept reminding himself, and he couldn’t help but be excited by the thought of restoring the garden to its former glory.
‘I thought I’d make an early start and pace the garden out,’ Mac said, removing his woolly cap and running a hand through his thick, dark hair.
‘Anyone else here yet?’ Cape asked.
‘Nope. You’re the first. Well, second,’ Mac said. ‘Not got your daughter with you?’
‘Dance class,’ Cape explained. He’d been looking forward to Poppy’s company, hoping he could have her with him for the whole day, but Renee had reminded him that a new dance class was beginning. ‘Another time.’
‘Good to get them into gardening early,’ Mac said.
‘Absolutely. I’m all for that.’
‘So, are you happy if I make a start?’
‘Please,’ Cape said. ‘There’s a lot to do.’
Mac nodded and Cape watched as he hopped onto the digger and drove it into the walled garden.
From previous wanderings around this space, Cape knew that there was a lot of rubbish to clear. Mrs Beatty had said that a skip would be arriving at some point, but Cape wanted to make a start piling it all together. He’d brought all the pairs of tough gardening gloves he could round up at his place, and he put a pair on now and walked across the overgrown expanse towards the long lean-to greenhouse. It was a magnificent structure with its huge lead-weights pulley system which opened the windows. But many of them were damaged now and broken glass lay around in great shards. He’d make a start clearing those up, not wanting to leave that unpleasant job for anybody else.
His booted feet trod carefully over the ground as he began to clear this first patch of land. What an enormous task it all seemed, he thought. But with the seven of them, plus various children coming and going, the job was definitely achievable. Cape had spent the previous night trying to visualise how the garden would have looked one hundred and fifty years ago. How he wished he could get a glimpse of the garden when it was first being designed and laid out, when the yew hedges of the maze were being planted and the great topiary shapes had first been dreamt up. The walled garden must have been a paradise of produce, with a whole team of gardeners employed to keep it all running. Had they loved it as much as he did now, he wondered? Did they stride around that little bit of earth with the same sense of pride and enjoyment? He felt quite sure that they had, for gardeners were almost always people with a passion for what they did.
It was a rare gardener who was just going through the motions, working the nine till five. Gardening was a vocation. It was what got you out of bed on the cold, dark winter mornings when you knew that the sun would never show itself and a day of numb fingers and frozen toes lay ahead of you. It was what kept you going when a crop failed or a pest struck. It gave you a resilience against rain, frost and snow, because a gardener knows that those days will pass and all of your hard work will pay off when the first green shoots force their way up through the soil, their leaves and blooms unfurling. Yes, he thought: gardening was the only job for him.
He turned to see how Mac was getting on. He’d made good progress digging up some of the nettles and brambles and was just turning the machine around when he stopped and hopped out to examine the ground. Cape watched.
‘Hey!’ Mac shouted over a moment later, waving to him.
‘What is it?’ Cape asked, crossing the space quickly. Was there a hoard of Saxon treasure? A Viking longboat?
‘Is that what I think it is?’ Cape asked, peering into the half-opened black case. A moment later, he let out a laugh. ‘It’s a violin.’
Mac shook his head in bemusement. ‘What on earth is that doing here?’
‘I have absolutely no idea.’
Mac took off his cap and scratched his head. ‘It’s amazing what you find in gardens,’ he said. ‘You know, I once found an engagement ring.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘Big fat ruby. Lovely thing once I’d washed all the muck off it. Been in the ground a good old while, I reckon.’
‘What did you do with it?’
‘I took it to the owner. A Mr Phillips, I think it was. He’d lived in that place all his life and looked puzzled when I presented him with the ring. But then he recognised it and his eyes went all misty like.’ Mac smiled at the memory. ‘Told me he’d proposed to a sweet slip of a girl there several decades before, but she’d turned him down and he’d flung the ring in the herbaceous border in frustration and had forgotten about it. Well, he snatched it out of my hand after telling me that just as Mrs Phillips showed up, asking what we were talking about. My theory is that she had no idea about that sweet slip of a girl her husband had proposed to before her.’
Cape laughed. ‘I once found a vase. Beautiful. I wiped away a section of dirt on it and read the word Ming.’
‘Ming?’ Mac said. ‘I’ve heard of that. Wouldn’t that be worth a bit?’
‘Absolutely,’ Cape said, ‘only, when I wiped a bit more of the dirt away, I saw that it read Birmingham.’
Mac grinned. ‘Bad luck.’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘So what do we do with this violin?’ Mac asked.
Cape looked thoughtful for a moment. ‘I guess we take it up to the house.’
Anne Marie wasn’t going to make it to Morton Hall until later in the day. First, she had to pay a visit to her mother. She hadn’t been officially invited to visit, but her mother had left a number of messages on Anne Marie’s answer machine while she’d been working. They were the usual passive-aggressive messages like, ‘I hardly ever see you these days, but don’t go worrying. The last thing I want you to do is worry.’
Anne Marie would ignore such a message at her peril. She once had and the accumulated grief that descended upon her the next time she saw her mother had not been worth it.
Janet Lattimore lived in the sort of Thames Valley village that was frequently used as a location in films. With its close proximity to London and its pretty brick-and-flint cottages and rolling countryside, it was a favourite with directors and would pop up as a backdrop in everything from cosy crimes to the latest blockbuster. She’d moved there after losing her husband three years ago. Anne Marie’s father had been a director at a bank in Oxford, and the family home had been in the leafy suburbs. After he’d died, the three-storey house had been sold for a ridiculous sum and Janet had moved into a tiny two-bedroom house in the Chiltern village. It seemed like a horribly quiet existence after the bustle of Oxford and Anne Marie couldn’t help but wonder what her mother did there all day. Janet was sixty-seven now, having retired from teaching five years earlier. She still went into Oxford from time to time and had joined a few local groups. Still, Anne Marie worried about her being on her own.
Parking outside the cottage now, she took a deep breath.
I am not going to let her rile me, she told herself. Grant and his daughters had already done a pretty good job of that this morning.
‘You’re going to Morton Hall again?’ Grant had complained.
‘Yes. I’ll be going there every week from now on.’
She’d surprised herself by her confident tone and had had to hide a smile as Grant had skulked back to his study. Irma and Rebecca had been in their bedrooms on their respective phones and had barely glanced up at her as she’d poked her head around the doors.
‘I’m going to see Grandma Janet,’ she told Rebecca. ‘Do you want to come too?’
‘She’s not my grandma,’ Rebecca told her. She always said it and it wounded Anne Marie every single time.
Banishing all thoughts of her step-daughters, she got out of the car, picking up the bunch of flowers she’d bought for her mother from a florist en route. Her mother knew the difference between flowers from a florist and those bought in a supermarket or petrol station. Anne Marie remembered the scene her mother had once made when she’d been handed a bunch of flowers from the local Co-op.
‘Is this all I’m worth to you? Your sister would never have bought flowers like these.’
It baffled Anne Marie how anybody could complain about being bought flowers, but her mother had a knack for turning anything into a heated battle.
Opening the green-painted gate and walking up the neat brick path, Anne Marie took a moment to compose herself before knocking on the door. Her mother answered a moment later.
‘Hello, Mum. I brought you these,’ Anne Marie said, presenting the bunch of flowers. She watched as her mother examined them, sniffing the sweet perfume and then examining the wrapping as if she might find a clue to just how much her daughter valued her. It was ever the way, Anne Marie thought as she followed her mother into the cottage. She’d lost count of the number of times she’d had to apologise for gifts because they didn’t please her mother or else return them because they were unsatisfactory.
Her mother went through to the kitchen where she made a great fuss about trying to find a vase for the bouquet.
‘No, this one is much too big,’ she said as she pulled a glass vase out from a cupboard under the sink.
Anne Marie bit her lip, determined not to show her pain.
After tea was made, they walked through to the tiny living room that overlooked the village green. It was a pretty room with a beautiful fireplace above which was a mantelpiece full of photographs. Of Anne. The beloved daughter. The magnificent firstborn. The perfect one.
But somebody else had joined Anne on the mantelpiece of memories: her father. It was funny, but Anne Marie couldn’t remember seeing any photographs of her father while he was alive: death had given his memory the glow of a saint and he was now worthy of a silver frame.
Anne Marie couldn’t help noticing that there weren’t any photographs of her on the mantelpiece. She would have to die before she was adored and talked well of.
‘So, I take it you’ve been busy,’ her mother began, implying that Anne Marie had been lax in not returning her phone calls.
‘Yes. Work’s as busy as ever and I’m doing voluntary work in a garden.’
‘A garden?’
‘Morton Hall.’
Her mother’s face blanched. ‘What are you doing going there?’
‘There’s a group of us. Seven. For some reason, Miss Morton chose us to restore the gardens. She’s left her estate to the village on the condition that the group restores the garden.’
‘Why on earth would she do that?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anne Marie said honestly. ‘Nobody seems to know.’
Her mother shifted in her chair. ‘I never liked that place.’
‘You’ve been there?’ This was news to Anne Marie.
‘Once. Your father had some business there and I accompanied him.’
‘Really?’
‘Spooky-looking place. All Gothic towers and dark windows.’
‘Yes, it’s not the bonniest of houses, but the garden is very beautiful.’
‘I don’t like you going there, Anne Marie.’
Anne Marie frowned. ‘It’s only for a few hours a week.’
‘It’s unhealthy.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That family. The Morton family. They weren’t right.’
‘What do you know about them?’
‘Only that,’ her mother said curtly. ‘The way they locked themselves away there and had nothing to do with anyone. There were stories about them. Rumours.’
‘What sort of rumours?’
‘That he wasn’t right. That he kept his sister under lock and key.’
‘I didn’t know you knew anything about them.’
‘I don’t. Only that. Only stories I heard. But you shouldn’t get muddled up in it all.’
‘But the family has all gone now,’ Anne Marie said.
‘It’s not a healthy environment.’
Anne Marie thought about the time she’d spent there, sitting on the bench and soaking in the calm of the wild walled garden, and how it had helped to restore a little bit of peace in her life.
‘I think it’s one of the healthiest places I’ve ever been,’ she told her mother. ‘The garden at least. I’ve only seen a bit of the house.’
‘When did you go into the house?’
‘For the meeting with Mrs Beatty, the housekeeper.’ She didn’t divulge the other secret trip made with Cape.
‘You shouldn’t have anything to do with that place.’
‘It’s too late for that. I’m committed now and I’m going there today.’ She watched her mother’s face as it turned even more sour. ‘Anyway, I want to go,’ she added.
Her mother shook her head. ‘You’re so unlike your sister,’ she said. ‘If your sister were alive, she would have listened to me, but you’ve always been headstrong.’
Anne Marie almost gasped at the outright lie. Her – headstrong! It was ridiculous. She’d never been given a chance to be headstrong either in her family or in her marriage. And, once again, the familiar refrain: If your sister were alive. How many times did Anne Marie want to shout, ‘But she isn’t! She’s dead.’ It seemed absurd to assume what Anne would have been like or how she would have responded or what she would have said in any given situation, but that’s what her mother always did.
It had always perplexed Anne Marie that her mother had chosen to use her dead child’s name as part of her second child’s. Wasn’t that a recipe for sorrow? Surely every time she spoke her second child’s name, a little piece of her would tear inside as she remembered that precious first child whom she’d lost.
‘I’ve got to go, Mum,’ she said, standing up.
‘But you only just got here.’ Suddenly, her mother was all contrition.
‘I’m sorry – I’ve got to get to Morton Hall.’
The scowl was instantly back in place. ‘You shouldn’t go there.’
Anne Marie had reached the front door. ‘I’ll call you next week, okay?’ She leaned forward to kiss her cheek.
‘Anne Marie!’
Stopping by the garden gate, she turned around.
‘What is it?’ she asked. Her mother’s mouth dropped open as if she was about to say something. But, just as quickly, it clamped shut again and she shook her head before disappearing inside the cottage and closing the door behind her.
Once in her car, Anne Marie stared out of the windscreen and yet saw nothing. What possible objection could her mother have for her working in the garden? It was absurd and just another example of how she could never hope to please her. No matter what she did, it would always be wrong, and it would always be compared to what her dead sister might have done in the same circumstances.
Anne. Anne Marie. Would she never be free to be herself?