Chapter 50
It took over two and a half months for the results to come back from the laboratory for the skeletons they found down the well. Experts ascertained that one set of bones came from a woman, aged between thirty and fifty and were approximately four hundred and seventy years old. The date fitted. Strangely though the second set of bones was not a baby but a cat.
The well also yielded other treasures which had to have been buried at the same date: religious artefacts, stolen from churches. It couldn’t have been far from the truth to assume that Edward Dearman himself had stored these secretly in Margaret’s grave for safe-keeping to be retrieved later, but after his premature death, they were lost.
Marnie sold them to the British Museum and the funds would pay for a new swanky village hall, and repairs to the church roof, the vicarage and the gravedigger’s cottage.
The diverted waters from the spring had caused the ground to become extra fertile, trees had grown quickly and covered the area over with foliage, disguising the site of Edward Dearman’s dreadful deed. Finally, after hundreds of years, the spring had found its way to the surface again and helped them unearth Margaret.
Marnie, for a reason she couldn’t fathom, deferred moving into the manor until Margaret was laid to rest. In truth, leaving Little Raspberries would be a wrench and Marnie knew why it was always given to someone who could appreciate the sanctuary it afforded. She felt inordinately sad packing up to leave it, but she didn’t need it any more and Little Raspberries should be made ready for the next person upon whom it could work its healing magic.
October 31 – the day of Margaret’s funeral – was the first day off that Marnie had had since the big dig. She had thrown herself into the affairs of Wychwell with vigour, in fact she didn’t recognise herself without a hard hat on. If she didn’t have a meeting with an architect, she had one with a builder or a bank or a prospective tenant. The tearoom was almost finished now and a manager had been appointed. Marnie nearly fainted when Una asked her if she could apply for the job. She’d probably eat more of the cheesecakes than she could sell, but sometimes you had to put your faith in people, thought Marnie, and offered it to her on the spot. Lilian had put faith in Marnie, it was time to pay it forward.
Ruby had fallen head over heels in love with a teacher at her school and her mother, no longer on maternal Rottweiler duty, had become a much softer creature.
And Titus was gone. Hilary offered him the deal of a lifetime – a house in Sandbanks, Dorset where Titus could show off a prestigious postcode. She cut him a generous full and final settlement in the divorce on the condition he played nicely, knowing that Titus would have eaten his own backside for cash. She couldn’t avoid giving him a chunk of her fortune, but her divorce – as she disclosed to Marnie in one of their many email exchanges – really was money well spent. Plus she was earning so much from Country Manors that any hole in her finances would soon be closed over. Number five was done – Country Manors – The Witch is Back.
Marnie saw Herv only briefly – here and there, a quick hello, how’s it going between appointments, nothing more than that. It was always Marnie who set the pace. Lovely to see you, take care. Always her feet that started walking away first. It was better that they were cordial, she reasoned. Their moment had come – and gone. He was a lovely man who should have someone straightforward and simple, not someone who had more history than the Romans and more psychological baggage than a Louis Vuitton stockroom.
Lilian had seen to it that a plot was reserved in the churchyard for Margaret, for when she was found: a sunny spot under the giant wych elm. Margaret’s skeleton, and her cat, were put in the coffin together. The village turned out to say goodbye to her. Una had discovered a real talent for flower-arranging and had made a wonderful autumnal wreath from simple coloured leaves and twigs and fruits, and she took great pleasure from the compliments she was given. She and Derek sat together in the church. Though they were better apart, somehow they had rediscovered the friendship that had brought them together many years ago.
Marnie lingered behind in the churchyard to inspect the new stone which had been erected at the head of Lilian and Emelie’s graves. It had just three words on it, apart from the names and dates: ‘Oh Perfect Love’.
Emelie, Marnie had been astounded to know, had been a celebrated Sapphic poet in Europe, writing in Italian and German. Marnie had had some of her work translated into English so she could read it and it was beautiful. She knew that many pieces had been inspired by her darling tortured Lilian with whom, Marnie hoped with all her heart, she lay at peace now.
Marnie and Lionel, when she’d had any time, had been working on an updated history of Wychwell. Emelie had written a chapter about herself and Lilian. It would cause a few eyebrows to be raised in surprise, Marnie knew, but it wouldn’t make any difference to the affection in which people had held them both.
‘Well, ladies, I hope I’m doing okay,’ said Marnie to the ground. Lilies and edelweiss had been planted there and it was too soon to know if the plants would take, but then again Herv had done it, so she bet they would. ‘I miss you both so much. I’m moving into the manor tomorrow but I don’t think anyone is going to be sneaking down a secret passage to see me. Say hello to Margaret for me. Oh, and I’m getting a dog. Greyhound rescue. She’s grey and was called Irish Lady – how could I resist? I’ll look like Rose’s portrait on the staircase.’ She blew a kiss. ‘God bless you, my darlings.’
She was picking the dog up the following week. Poor thing was the worst racer in history, lost every one despite coming from a champion mother and father. As soon as Marnie heard that, she decided that they were a match, because she knew what it was to be the family disappointment. She could imagine herself as a portrait on the staircase one day, black hair, green-eyed with a sleek hound at her feet, but she’d have no ring on her finger. She’d be the lonely lady of the manor, married to the village and all the people in it, the temporal version of a nun married to the church.
She joined the others for a drink in the Wych Arms after they had laid Margaret to rest. Lionel had upped his game to apricot brandy and David Parselow had to carry Pammy home. Herv stayed for a couple of drinks and then slipped away. Marnie wondered if he had a date. The thought of him with someone else still tore a hole in her heart.
She couldn’t sleep that night and she blamed it on the brandy. She didn’t know what Lionel had added to it to make her head spark with activity so much, but she suspected those apricots had been grown next to an amphetamine factory. She dressed and did a few laps of the green, as she so often did, and then flopped onto Jessie Plumpton’s bench in the middle of it and stared up at the manor – her new home – and thought how amazing it was. The moon was high above it, a huge pink-tinged round of light as if it was doing its best to impersonate an apple, she thought. A Pink Lady. She laughed and deduced she must still be half-pissed, having stupid notions like that. She should get back to bed, she had a big day ahead of her.
She had only taken a few steps, when she heard a voice behind her. A voice that sent shivers tripping down her nerve endings.
‘You too?’
She turned, tried to sound cool and not as if her heart had started flapping around inside her like a landed trout. ‘Oh hello, Herv.’
‘Sit with me for a moment. Help me find my sleep,’ he said, then immediately corrected himself. ‘Not that I think you’re boring.’
Marnie smiled. She sat beside him, a person-width away.
‘So, here we are again,’ he said, after a ridiculously long silence.
‘We are indeed.’ Well this wasn’t awkward at all.
‘We’ve barely spoken for weeks . . . months.’
‘It’s been a busy time, what with all the building work and stuff.’ The lamest excuse on the planet.
They sat looking in the direction of the manor for a few moments before he sighed heavily.
‘Do you know what I think?’ he said.
‘No.’ And that was true, she had absolutely no idea.
‘I think you’ve been avoiding me.’
‘Don’t be silly. I haven’t . . . at all . . .’ she said; the world’s most unconvincing reply.
‘Know what else I think?’
‘No.’
‘I think I’ve been avoiding you.’
‘Have you? Why?’ She didn’t even ask if he was joking because she knew he wasn’t.
‘You’re the lady of the manor and I’m the gardener.’
‘I’m still the same person.’
She wasn’t though and they were both more than aware of that. She was queen of a small private kingdom and his pride couldn’t take that people might think he wanted to be with her for that reason. At least, until he had come to his senses tonight thanks to Lionel’s apricot brandy. It might have made his walk wobbly but it also caused him think more clearly than he had done for a long time. ‘Til helvete med alle Kay Sweetmans i denne verden.’ To hell with all the Kay Sweetmans of this world. He wasn’t going to let them stop him from saying what he should have on the night of the big dig, when he had thrown the towel in instead.
‘Know what else I think?’
She chuckled. ‘No.’
He twisted to face her. ‘I think I love you,’ he said. ‘No, that’s wrong, I know I do. Because I can’t get you out of here’ and he hit his skull with the heel of his hand, ‘. . . you won’t leave it. And I told my head, “Look, you plant bulbs and dredge leaves out of the lake, Herv Gunnarsen. People will think you’re after her money.” But I watch you and I don’t see any happiness in your eyes and I think, Herv, you can make her happy. You can love her, you can mend her.’
She was aware of his eyes, his lovely blue eyes trained on her, waiting for her to respond. She didn’t because she knew he couldn’t mend her. She was beyond repair.
He reached for her hand and took it between both his own and felt it trembling like an injured bird. ‘I think I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you. I know you can’t say the same because of the brown sticky-out teeth and I don’t really look good in hessian.’
She laughed and she felt her eyes sting and she blinked hard because she didn’t want to cry.
‘I see you and my mood lifts, you walk away from me and it sinks.’
She pulled her hand from his because it felt too good.
‘Tell me what is it that stands between us, Marnie, please.’
‘There’s nothing.’
‘You’re a terrible liar,’ he said. ‘There can be nothing so bad that—’
‘There is,’ she insisted.
‘Marnie, tell me. This is killing me.’
Don’t. A kind voice inside her urged. He is yours. Let him love you. And she felt that voice despair when the words moved up her throat and into her mouth and were then released into the air.
‘We went to the best school in the area, my sister and I. All girls. Not a fee-paying one but really good,’ began Marnie. ‘There was an English teacher there, Mr Trent, married with a young son, all the girls fancied him. Me included. I was thirteen and we were reading Wuthering Heights and he was my own personal Heathcliff in my imagination. He offered to give me extra lessons after school because I was “bright”, he said. I didn’t think I was, really. There was one girl in my class destined for Oxbridge but she didn’t get extra lessons. Still, it was something to tell my mum that I’d been selected. I thought I’d impress her with that.’ She stalled, gauging Herv’s reaction, waiting for his mind to gallop ahead and for that look of revulsion to appear on his face, but found only that he was listening carefully.
‘You can probably guess what happened. Plain girl full of new sexual hormones, handsome teacher giving her attention she’s never had, knowing all the right things to say, looking into her eyes as he reads poetry. I thought I was being loved, not groomed. It only happened twice. I didn’t like it. I knew it was wrong . . . it hurt, I felt sick. He said that was natural the first time and it would be better after, but it wasn’t. Textbook stuff, I was special, he said. He’d never felt that way about anyone before. I didn’t want to go to any more lessons after that. I told Mum that he’d stopped them, she wasn’t surprised. She put my weight gain down to comfort eating because I’d been dropped. I put my weight gain down to comfort eating because I felt ashamed. I didn’t know I was pregnant until I went into labour. Three months after my fourteenth birthday.’
Herv’s eyes were on the ground now, his hands knitted tightly together.
‘I didn’t know what was happening to me. I thought I was dying. It was the school holidays and I was arguing with Mum about something when the pains came from nowhere. She thought I was putting it on until my waters broke.’
Her voice gave up and she had to cough to clear away the frog that seemed to have taken residence there.
‘I gave birth to a beautiful tiny little girl. She had to go straight into special care because she was so early. Mum said I couldn’t keep her. She said that even if I didn’t sign her over to be adopted, she’d be taken away anyway. She told me all sorts of lies and I was fourteen and confused and believed them all and she wouldn’t let anyone give me any alternative. Mum said what sort of life would she have with a schoolgirl mother and a father who was already married? I’d ruin hers as well as everyone else’s. So I let her go and then I found out that I could have kept her, I could have gone into a home and let social services help us but it was too late by then. One of the nurses took a polaroid of her and Mum found it and tore it up because she said I had to forget her, but I never did, how beautiful she was, how perfect. And on the sixth of August, the day of Emelie’s funeral, she would have had her eighteenth birthday. She would be a woman, a grown-up.’
Marnie sensed Herv getting up from the seat and she thought he would start walking away but then she felt his arms around her, pulling her to her feet, holding her tightly.
He was talking into her hair, words in his native language, words she didn’t understand but she knew that they were tender, loving.
‘I’d ruin a man’s marriage, his career, his family if I told, Mum said, but there had been rumours in the school and the police came to see me and . . . Oh God, I felt so guilty after I said his name. He was sacked, prosecuted. His wife left him. We moved away, to another town and another school and she never forgave me for the mess. Then I found out he’d done it before. In a private school. He’d had to leave but they’d hushed it up to avoid the scandal and sent him on his way with a good reference. The girl wrote to me but I didn’t find the letter until after Mum died. She’d kept it from me.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ said Herv, holding her tighter. ‘Kjære jenta mi.’ Oh my darling.
Her legs were shaking, she sat back down before she fell.
‘I try not to think of her, but I do. What if she was adopted by a woman like Judith and has been unhappy all her life?’
‘More likely a couple who have loved her as if she were the most precious child in the world. Like my parents loved me,’ he smiled. ‘Marnie, you were especially unlucky.’
‘What if she’s turned out like me, Herv?’
He didn’t leave a beat before he answered. ‘Then I think that it’s not such a bad thing. Obviously without all the hang-ups.’ And Marnie couldn’t help the blurt of laughter that escaped her.
Herv sat down beside her, put his arm around her and pulled her close. The moon had sunk into a quilt of clouds; Time for bed, the sky said. Time to sleep for a final time in your old life and waken in a new one.
‘You are the perfect man,’ said Marnie. ‘You really are.’ He was way out of her league, not the other way around.
‘Whaat?’ said Herv, throwing his head back and giving a hoot of incredulity at that. ‘Anyway, Lilian once said to me that perfection was an imperfection in itself.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I have no idea, she was . . . gæren.’ And he rotated his finger near his temple to indicate that Lilian was slightly bonkers, but he was smiling and it made Marnie smile too. Imperfection personified, that’s what Lilian’s father had labelled her. And he was right, because she was the most perfectly imperfect woman Marnie had ever met. The mother she had grown in her heart.
‘My God, Marnie, look at that,’ said Herv. ‘What the . . . ?’
A light in the gallery window of the manor claimed their attention. A pink dot hovering. But it couldn’t be? Because Emelie was the Pink Lady, wasn’t she?
They sat mesmerised, watching the light bounce in gentle arcs from left to right.
‘You’ll be living with a ghost after all,’ chuckled Herv as it halted for a long moment and then melted into the darkness.
‘I don’t mind,’ said Marnie. ‘I can learn to share.’
‘Can you?’ asked Herv. ‘Can you learn to share yourself with me then?’
Marnie turned to him, saw the tenuous smile on his mouth, pinned there by hope. His hand rose to brush against her cheek, such a gentle touch yet she felt the reverberations shoot all the way down to her fingers and toes and beyond as if they were too big and powerful to stay within the confines of her skin. His head bent towards hers, tentatively, expecting her to edge away at any moment, but she didn’t. As he placed his lips softly on hers, she felt a warmth bloom in her heart as if his love was slipping between the many breaks and cracks in it, gluing it back together, mending it like liquid gold.
Kintsugi.
Her lips pressing back against his answered the question perfectly.