Walking Back to Happiness

  Meanwhile, Diane was making more noises about ‘hopping into the car’, and in desperation, Juliet headed her off at the pass.

  ‘Mum, we’ll talk later,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to get behind on Coco’s schedule.’

  It was a while since Juliet had taken Minton on a formal walk around the delights of Longhampton. Running around Ben’s clients’ gardens all day had worn him out so much that by the time he got home he was happy to snore between them on the sofa, chasing rabbits in his sleep.

  Diane had included a helpful sketch map of the route she normally took with Coco, and Juliet set off on it. It involved a short drive into town for her, then went along the canal path towards the middle of town and then round the formal gardens of the municipal park, now dazzling with splashy crimson geraniums and purple wallflowers circling the old bandstand. From there, it headed up into Coneygreen Woods, the Forestry Commission copse where Ben liked to test Juliet on her trees and Minton liked to chase squirrels.

  Coco ambled along by Juliet’s side, and Minton scampered back and forwards on his extending lead, sniffing and cocking his leg every now and again like a teenager tagging a wall. There were more people around than Juliet had expected to see on a Tuesday mid-morning, some elderly, some mothers pushing buggies in twos and threes, most of them walking a dog, like her. And whereas the mothers and the shoppers were happy to leave her alone, all the people with dogs seemed determined to chat. Not about normal human things, though – just about the dogs.

  ‘Oh, she’s a nice old girl. How old?’

  ‘Don’t tell me – Patch, is it?’

  ‘Ah, I bet you get through some food, don’t you?’

  Each friendly attempt at conversation made Juliet more and more tense. The June sun was warm, and a peaceful English-morning calm hung over the park, but her heart was pounding. There was a reason she walked Minton at night: she didn’t want to talk to people. With everyone who approached her, she felt herself shrink back into her shell, fists clenched with the effort of not running away.

  The worst thing was, they all seemed to know Minton and Coco.

  ‘Minton!’ she protested as he barrelled up to one old dear with a fluffy white West Highland terrier sporting a tartan jacket despite the warm sunshine. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘he’s very—’

  ‘Oh, we’re old friends with Minton.’ The old lady bent down to ruffle his ears. ‘Clever boy, you never forget a face, do you?’ She straightened up, and beamed at Juliet. ‘It’s Mrs Hinchley. I’ve been meaning to get in touch with Ben – he did such a lovely job of my patio. I was wondering if he’s got time to take a look at my daughter’s garden?’

  Juliet’s head pounded, and the self-defence explanation mechanism kicked in.

  ‘I’m afraid he’s dead,’ she said. The story rattled out of her in one go, with no gaps for questions. ‘He had a heart attack, last October. They don’t know why – he was very fit. It’s not as uncommon as you’d think. Yes, it was a horrible shock. I miss him horribly. Minton was with him when it happened, so at least he wasn’t on his own at the end. That’s a small comfort, but I worry about Minton sometimes.’

  The old lady’s smile froze as the pieces fell into place. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry, my dear . . .’

  ‘No, it’s fine,’ said Juliet, automatically. For a second, she thought Mrs Hinchley was going to hug her and she moved a step back. She hated to seem rude, but the helpful things people said had the power to undo everything. She wasn’t ‘brave’, she wasn’t ‘still very young’, and she honestly didn’t think ‘time was a great healer’. After eight months without Ben she felt numb, which was an improvement on flayed alive, but still barely felt like living.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Mrs Hinchley. ‘It’s not fine. But it will be one day.’

  Juliet forced a smile through her watery eyes, and privately doubted it.

  The self-help bereavement books that had arrived from people who didn’t send her flowers suggested that it took a year to start getting over the death of your loved one. Juliet had a wall calendar in the kitchen, and each night, after she’d filled up the day with television, she crossed off another box. There were still four pages until 13 October, but the date loomed ahead of her like a finishing tape, a day she simultaneously dreaded and looked forward to.

  Hopefully, on 13 October, this heavy coat of sadness would lift off her shoulders and she’d start to feel like she could breathe again. It didn’t feel possible now, but Juliet wanted to believe the books.

  Mrs Hinchley patted her arm. ‘He was a wonderful gardener, your Ben. If he looked after you as carefully as he looked after my roses, you must have felt like the most important girl in the world.’

  Juliet bit her lip. That was exactly how Ben had made her feel: tended, and special, grown from a seedling of a girl into the woman she was now. And now she was nobody, and nobody’s. Spinning, like one of those satellites that gets blown off course in space.

  Come on, she thought. You should be past this by now.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, wiping her nose. ‘I’m walking my mother’s dog. We need to get home.’

  ‘Good for you, getting out and about,’ said the old lady. ‘Fresh air’s a great healer.’

  That was a new one, thought Juliet. Made a change from time.

  She tugged Coco’s lead and dragged a quick smile on her face. They set off walking faster than Coco was used to and she panted to keep up.

  ‘You’re more sociable than me, Minton,’ said Juliet, once they were out of earshot. ‘Did Daddy make a nice patio? Did Mrs Hinchley have anything she wanted to bury underneath it? Should we be asking questions about the bell-ringing group?’

  Talking to Minton kept Juliet from going mad. He let her witter on endlessly about Ben without making the sad face everyone else pulled – the one that always seemed to turn the conversation to how wonderful he’d been, what a perfect marriage they’d had. But there were times when that made her feel even worse. Only Minton let her whimper about how selfish he’d been to die and leave her all on her own, with an unfinished house and a wrecked future.

  Coco started to pull to one side with more enthusiasm and Juliet looked to see where she was going.

  A round figure in a red fleece gilet and practical navy slacks was heading past the ornate bandstand towards them, pushing a buggy containing a small, fuzzy-headed boy in dungarees. She waved enthusiastically.

  ‘It’s Granny Di,’ said Juliet. ‘I don’t believe it. She’s checking up on us.’

  Minton said nothing.

  Louise had known a whole new world of weariness in the first year of Toby’s life, but the weariness she felt, now she’d been back at work for a while, when she collected him from her mother’s and finally collapsed on her huge squashy sofa at home was like nothing else.

  Her brain hurt. Her eyes were ready to shut. Her feet were killing her in the new heels she’d bought online the previous week, thinking that at least her feet wouldn’t have put on weight. Wrong! In the old days, she’d have worn them in, or rubbed the heels with Vaseline, but there’d been no time. There never was.

  Everything was done in a rush these days. Peter got back in from work at six and rushed to bath Toby, while she got some supper together and dealt with the laundry, the post, the hoovering. She didn’t stop rushing from the moment she got up to the moment she rushed to get into bed before Peter. There were no pauses in her day any more.

  Her favourite part of the day had always been that first crisp, cool sip of white wine as she eased off her shoes. Now it was the first delighted, baby-powdered cuddle from Toby when she picked him up from her mother’s house, or from the nursery. The feeling of his hot starfish hands on her face made her heart explode with love, as if the day had just gone into colour from black and white.

  She sat hypnotised with love now, as Toby babbled away at her, pressing parts of her face with his hands. I wish I could just pause this moment, thought Louise, drunk on infatuation and exhaustion.

&
nbsp; Chores, said a voice in her head, and somehow she dragged herself off the sofa, put Toby on her hip and took them both upstairs to get changed.

  ‘Did you have a lovely time with Granny?’ she asked, as she changed out of her work suit and into her forgiving yoga trousers. He gazed into her eyes, tugging at the invisible thread that bound them together. ‘Did you? Did you miss Mummy? Mummy missed you.’

  She picked him up again and padded downstairs in her bare feet, setting up a to-do list in her head for the next hour, before Peter got in. Food, play, bath, food for adults . . .

  ‘Shall we do our chores first?’ she asked Toby. ‘Good idea. Let’s start with the thing we mustn’t forget. Can you pick up your watering can? You can? Good boy!’

  They went through the conservatory and down the garden path towards the greenhouse the previous owners had put in. Louise’s garden was huge, big enough for a proper lawn and a rose garden and a vegetable plot, and space for a trampoline and/or cricket square when the need arose.

  Ben hadn’t been their gardener – they agreed it would have been a bit too awkward, paying your brother-in-law – but he’d advised them a lot on the apple trees and had had some good suggestions for easy vegetables Louise could grow while she’d been on maternity leave. He’d noticed how restless she’d been, her brain spinning without the daily challenge of cases, and without asking, had suggested just what she needed – a project, something she could see growing. Something that wasn’t Toby.

  Louise stopped, Toby on her hip, and surveyed the garden. She missed Ben and his straightforward attitude to life. She’d known him since she was a teenager, and it was hard to see the garden without imagining him in it, showing her something she’d never noticed before. She’d seen him kneeling to smell these flowers, or yank out a weed, so many times; she’d often imagined what Ben and Juliet would look like when they were celebrating their golden wedding. Much the same: Ben with thick grey hair, Juliet with three kids and their mother’s glasses. It still surprised her to think she’d never see him again.

  Louise sighed, pushed open the door to the greenhouse and made her way over to the far end. It was empty – only Ben had used it, as an overflow for his own cuttings – apart from five big pots, containing a single sapling each.

  About a month before Ben died, in September, he’d brought her the five cuttings, which he said he’d taken from the big cherry tree at the top of the hill heading out towards Rosehill.

  ‘They were trimming it back, so I grabbed some cuttings while I could,’ he said, beaming with delight at having snapped up something precious. ‘It’s our favourite tree – thought I’d see if I could grow a little one of our own, to put in the garden so Jools can see the blossom every year when she wakes up. Don’t tell her, though – I want it to be a surprise. An anniversary present, if they take.’

  Louise had been touched that he’d wanted to include her in his secret, and even more touched by the characteristic sweetness of his gesture. That was Ben all over – Peter would take her out for dinner, or give her some money to treat herself to a spa day, but Juliet and Ben lavished their own time on their gifts. Juliet had perfected banana cake for Ben; Ben took seedlings and cuttings for her.

  She hadn’t had the heart to tell Juliet about the saplings after Ben died. All five had taken – he’d planted them meticulously, and given her instructions about feeding and covering them up – and now they were growing into young trees. If things hadn’t been so strained between her and Juliet, Louise might have told her about them now; Juliet seemed on the road to recovery, even if she wasn’t very far down it.

  Toby waved his watering can at the shoots like a conjuror trying to turn them into trees. ‘Tree!’ he said.

  ‘Yes, trees,’ said Louise, checking the notes for how much feed to give them. They looked strong, but she hated the thought of giving them to Juliet only for them to fail. It would seem so horribly symbolic. And Juliet could wipe out the most sturdy houseplant within hours.

  I’ll know when the time’s right, thought Louise, pressing the soil with her fingertips. She liked to think of the moment her sister would discover the little legacy her husband had left, and cry happy tears for his thoughtfulness and love, in among the sad ones. Till then it was comforting to watch the cherry trees keep on growing, sprouting new shoots, driving their roots further and further into the soil. It made her feel better about her sister, about poor lost Ben, to think she was helping them without the words that seemed to get in the way more and more these days.

  Chapter 4

  Juliet’s favourite place in the house was in her big armchair by the back sitting-room window, where she could look out over the long, narrow garden Ben had started to overhaul, and doze off.

  They hadn’t been able to afford a lot of furniture, but this armchair was the first ‘investment’ piece: a squashy velvet antique that they’d bought at the local auction and dragged home in the back of their van. Juliet had bid way over the odds, but she’d fallen in love, not just with the chair, but the room she was going to build around its soft red depths.

  She’d already decided on deep-mulberry walls and a refurbished fireplace for a wood-burning stove that they could drink tea next to in the winter, with a space for Minton’s basket. The front room was light and airy, with a view onto the street and wisteria tickling the window edges, but the back room looked out over the garden, and she’d angled the chair now so it faced the bank of roses and fruit bushes Ben had put in for her.

  Juliet assembled her equipment on the broad arm: mug of tea, CD remote control, CD player loaded with the music that reminded her of him, photograph album of their honeymoon in New York, big white hankies. Her dad always had a proper hanky, and he always gave it to her when she cried, so now she had quite a collection. He never asked for them back.

  This was her designated Grief Hour, as recommended by the counsellor Diane had dragged her to see a few months ago. It was a ‘recovery-stage’ tactic, designed to focus all her flailing emotions into one exhausting torrent of tears, rather than let them spread through her day, tangling her up like a net. Jabbing herself with all the worst reminders of Ben and their lost life was supposed to lessen the impact of each photo and song, old shirt or scribbled postcard, until normal life became more ‘real’ than the dead life she was trying to wish back. Juliet wasn’t sure it really worked like that.

  The prompts she’d collected weren’t slowly losing their capacity to reduce her to tears at all. She’d found one green shirt that still smelled of Ben, but bringing it out to cry over had started to make it smell of her, not him, so she’d hidden it in her wardrobe for safekeeping, like a holy relic. The music especially still tore at her chest like claws, starting at her throat and raking slowly down her chest with each breath, but now she felt as if she was betraying Ben by trying to ration her grief into manageable chunks for her own convenience.

  Juliet pressed play on the CD player and the opening bars of Coldplay’s X&Y album seeped into the room like the processional in a church. Carefully, she opened the album and moved the first sheet of old-fashioned tissue paper back to the photograph of Ben standing outside JFK Airport, with the ‘Just married’ stickers on his battered rucksack. It was the first time in America for both of them. An adventure. They’d promised to go back for their silver wedding, and stay in the posh hotel they’d only been able to afford one drink in.

  A fat tear rolled down her chin and she caught it quickly before it splashed onto the page. Ben had laughed when she’d gone to Boots with the memory stick from his digital camera, but that was exactly what bothered Juliet – something so small and losable couldn’t be responsible for holding her precious memories. She wanted printed-out evidence, in old-fashioned photo corners and tissue leaves, because their love was the old-fashioned for-life sort.

  ‘But it’s all in our heads,’ Ben had insisted. It was. But Ben had gone, and with it, the other half of her honeymoon.

  The counsellor was wrong, anyway, she tho
ught, forcing herself to turn the page. Looking at how happy they’d been was getting harder, because now, after eight months, she finally accepted that he wasn’t coming back. It had come to her one wakeful night, as if her brain had been waiting to spring it on her. As if she was hovering over her own body, Juliet had seen her future stretched out like a flat, grey sea: no land to aim for, no points to navigate round, just the sense that she was being swept further and further away from the happiness and solidity she’d assumed was there forever.

  Juliet closed her eyes and let the music wash through her.

  It’s like I’ve died too, she thought, curling her hand around Minton’s hot ear, as the opening bars of ‘Fix You’ sent shockwaves of longing through her. Nothing new is coming into my life, and all the old stuff is slipping out of my head. No one can fix me.

  X&Y had been ‘their’ summer album. It reminded her of lying on the balcony of their old house, slipping and out of dozy, sun-drenched sleep as the bees buzzed round the flowerpots. They hardly ever went on holiday – summer was the busiest time for Ben’s gardens and the weddings Juliet catered. They’d made a holiday at home instead, sleeping out on the balcony under mosquito nets, going to bed in the afternoon, getting woozily drunk on homemade sangria.

  That was the happiest moment in my life, she thought, as the sudden memory of Ben’s warm body pressed against hers hit her with an unexpected force. She’d woken in the early morning to find his bare arm draped around her, his nose nuzzled into her neck. She’d lain there for ages, just looking at his gently muscular body, almost scared by how much she loved him, amazed that the perfect man for her had been born in her home town, not on the other side of the world.

  Why did he die? she asked for the millionth time, as hot tears leaked between her lashes. Why hadn’t she had any warning, so she could have pinned that last day in her head properly? Not just the last day – the last month, the last year? So she could have said some of the things she’d meant to. And so she could have bitten her tongue on some of the things he really didn’t need to hear her say.