The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (21 page)

‘The idiot could have killed us,’ complained one of the night staff. She looked cross and tired, on the verge of tears.

‘Yes, but he didn’t,’ said Sister Philomena, smiling. ‘It’s all right, Barbara. No need to get up. Sit still now. Hold my hand.’

The patients’ faces glimmered against the lights from the dayroom. Nothing had substance in the dark. The people, the trees, the pagoda, the stones of the rockery, the silvery stars of astrantia and the cascades of laburnum. They were pale in the stillness.

‘It’s like Watership Down out there,’ said Sister Lucy. ‘All peaceful.’

‘Are you joking?’ barked Mr Henderson.

Sister Lucy said she wasn’t. It didn’t matter she had skipped the beginning; she thought it was a lovely story. She had just finished reading it to Barbara.

‘All those rabbits? Being run over and traumatized?’

Sister Lucy covered her mouth with her hands. ‘Rabbits?’ she repeated. ‘Where are the rabbits?’

‘They’re all rabbits,’ said Mr Henderson. ‘That’s the whole point.’

‘What? All of them?’ Sister Lucy looked devastated. ‘But they
talk
. I
had no idea they were rabbits. Oh no.’ She sat in silence, taking this in, and sometimes her face buckled and she said, ‘Oh no,’ again. ‘That’s terribly upsetting,’ she murmured.

Why did you have to go and tell her they were fucking rabbits? hissed Finty. And Mr Henderson said he was sorry. He thought everyone knew they were rabbits; there was even a picture of them on the front cover. He wished he’d never mentioned the rabbits. ‘Oh no,’ sobbed Sister Lucy. Sister Philomena wrapped the young nun in another blanket. I reached for her hand.

A little later someone said, ‘Look, Reverend Mother. Look at the moon.’ When Sister Philomena saw it, she asked for the staff to wheel us to a place in the garden where we might enjoy it too.

The moon hung low in the sky, the colour of a clementine. All around, the stars flickered and pulsed. Mr Henderson pointed to the Plough and my father’s favourite constellation, the little batch of stars called the Seven Sisters. ‘Do you see, Sister Lucy?’ he asked. ‘Miss Hennessy, do you see too?’

I thought of my sea garden. The figures glowing in the moonlight. The chimes calling in the wind. I pictured Embleton Bay in snow and wind and sun; all the different ways I have come to know it. I saw the winter waves rising in slate-black walls, and I saw the sea on a July morning, like a stretch of pink silk. In reality Embleton is not so far away, only thirty miles, but the space between me and my garden feels a light-year.

After all the emotion of the oxygen tank and the rabbits, I didn’t want to cry and make a fool of myself. So I said in my head, Think of something else. Think of Harold Fry. He is under the orange moon and these stars too.

Ways of loving

‘P
EOPLE CAN
love in different ways,’ I told David. ‘You can love full on, with a lot of noise, or you can do it quietly, over the washing-up. You can even love a person without them knowing.’ I was careful to turn away.

It was the Christmas of David’s third year at Cambridge, and things had got worse. Whenever he came to visit, he sat in my chair by the electric heater, hunched in his black coat, smoking a joint. If I questioned this, he said it helped him to relax. Apparently he was still writing poetry, but he didn’t want to show me any more. When I asked about the coursework, his eyes glazed over. It was the same when I enquired about friends. He often complained about the cold, and I was forever fetching him blankets. I asked if he would see a doctor, but David only scoffed. It was the same when I suggested that he should talk to you.

I had promised myself that I would be a bridge between you and your son, and I was out of my depth.

Perhaps in order to distract me, he took me back to the debate we’d been having about love. It was the idea of loving over the washing-up that appalled him. How could I be so trivial?

‘Sometimes you have to think in an ordinary way, David,’ I said. ‘Sometimes life is not what you expect.’

‘I’d rather die than be ordinary, Q,’ he said. He lifted his head and fixed my eye, and there was so much trouble in his face, I had no reply.

I understood what David meant, though, when he said he wanted to
be more than ordinary. When I was a student, I’d felt the same. I fell in love, over and over, with tall, dark, handsome boys. The tall boys took me on dates in order to ask about my tall friends. I wrote love letters, beautiful things, on their behalf. Afterwards the dark, handsome boys and my golden, beautiful friends called me a good sport or a rock but that is the same as saying You are kind, or You have nice feet. It is being supportive. I didn’t want support. I had hosiery for that. I wanted love.

When I began to find it, it was only in ways that came to nothing. I chose people who would let me down. And when I didn’t choose people who would let me down, I was chosen by people whom I would let down instead. There is no need to say very much about those affairs. It is a hard thing, this learning to love. I knew, for example, that the Shit in Corby was the wrong choice, and so I had to do a lot to distract myself from the truth. When you know a thing is wrong, you have to work very hard to stick with it. And really, I should stop calling him the Shit now. He is probably a good husband. A good father and grandfather. A good neighbour. All that.

Then I met you and I fell in love with you, and for once I would have stayed. I had saved enough money in my bank account to buy a small house. But there followed the terrible tragedy of David, and so it was the same old story. I delivered my message to your wife and the next day I fled. I went north, off to the east, until I met the sea (damn this small island), and once again I had to stop.

What I discovered when I stopped was that it was not so easy to do the same with love. It doesn’t finish just because you have run away. It doesn’t even stop when you decide to start again. You can look at the North Sea and you see only the English Channel. You can look at the
Northumberland sand dunes and you recall those in South Devon. There is no getting away from the fact that your love is still alive and you must do something with it.

I had no plan when I began my garden. No experience of plants. It evolved slowly. Just as love does. Every day I walked alongside the dunes and the shore and observed what grew among the rocks and paths. I took notes. In Craster, I watched how other people dug and planted. I studied the gardens that front the fishing harbour and are made with stones. When I returned to my beach house, I dug and planted my own garden. Every year it grew bigger. Every season it established itself a little more.

Over time, my garden was tested in many ways. There were my own mistakes, plenty of those. There was the weather. There were gulls. People too. Sometimes they offered help and inadvertently their help got in the way. Sometimes they challenged me. How could I give my life to a garden? How could I stay in one place and not travel? I answered them all. It gave me pleasure to talk about my garden. One summer, I was interrupted by three young women on a hen party. I remember because one of them was wearing a BRIDE-TO-BE sash and carrying a giant inflatable plastic penis. It’s not the sort of detail you forget.

The women were wearing shorts, bikini tops and silver tiaras. Their skin was plump, their shoulders and chests bitten with sun and salt.

Nice garden, said one.

Nice suntrap, said the second.

But too near the cliff edge, said the bride-to-be.

So I put down my gardening fork and told the usual story. My garden was a tribute to a man I could not have. It was my atonement for a terrible
mistake. I showed the young women the rock pools with the anemones and the tiny blue fishes I had carved from mussel shells. I showed them the driftwood figures and the seaweed banners and the garlands of coloured pebbles, each with a hole bored by the sea. I showed them the spires of agapanthus and angelica (I always favoured the taller flowers), the white foxgloves, and my favourites, the blue poppies and irises. The seasons came and went; the plants died back and reappeared. Every part of my garden had a story, I said. It reminded me of what I’d learned or left behind.

But how could a garden make up for a man? asked the bride-to-be.

‘Trisha’s getting married next week,’ said her friend.

‘Tonight we’re going clubbing in Newcastle,’ said the other. ‘To celebrate her last days of freedom.’ The three young women laughed.

Couldn’t she be free and married as well? I asked.

‘Not if you know my fiancé,’ said the bride-to-be.

I told the young women that in my garden I’d had to learn there were times to intervene, and there were also times when, however much I loved it, I should leave a plant alone. My garden was not about possession, and neither was it about my sublimation.

‘I’d still rather have a wedding,’ said the bride-to-be.

‘You should see her frock and her veil,’ said her friend. And the other one said, ‘A woman has to have her special day. She has to be a princess.’

I considered my life. There had been no party, no speech about my kindness, no special dress, no confetti. Nobody had sat with me every evening or woken every morning at my side. And even though I told myself it was my choice, that instead I had a garden and my solitude, I felt cold even in the sun and could not eat.

A year or so later, the bride-to-be returned. She’d lost weight. She told me the marriage had not worked. She asked if I knew any plants that would be nice in her window box, and I gave her cuttings. She’d met someone new, but she was taking it slow this time. ‘No wedding,’ she said. We watched the sea, and I think we both smiled.

I never heard about David’s poems again apart from once at the end of his third year, when he said how hard it was to be told you were something and then dropped as if you had been nothing all along. He was back at home, supposedly preparing for his finals. It would have been better, he said, to live without expectation.

‘But what did you expect?’ I asked. ‘What did people tell you that you were?’

‘A poet. They said I could be famous.’

‘Why do you need someone else to tell you what you are? Why can’t you just write for the sake of writing? You don’t have to be famous to do those things.’

He shook his head angrily. He lit another cigarette. ‘You don’t understand.’

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘But I would like to.’

‘It’s no good being a fucking poet if no one knows that you are one. I’d rather be a nobody, like Father. I’d rather know I was nothing and get on with it.’

‘You’re not a nobody, David,’ I said. ‘And neither is your father.’

With an impatient grunt, he staggered up from my chair, as if I had become unbearable. He left my flat with his coat slung over his shoulder.

Sometimes I remember David wanting to be famous. I remember him saying that he was a failure because the world didn’t sit up and notice. I think of the waste, and, I tell you, Harold: I want to hurl things. It is a hard thing, as I said, this learning to love. But it is an even harder thing, I think, to learn to be ordinary.

Several years after I had begun my garden in Embleton Bay and found the tall piece of driftwood that reminded me of you, I found another. I was down on the beach, hoping to spot oystercatchers on Craggy Reef, when something hard poked my bare foot. I stopped. Cleared the sand away. It was a blackened piece of driftwood, about the length of my arm, but hunched over into a knotty V-shape, and worn into fragile points at both ends. It was so full of sadness it almost knocked my breath away. I could see only David. I carefully carried the driftwood up to my garden and spent the day deciding where to set it. In the end I chose a bed of stones and a creamy burnet rose. I planted cuckoopint around him and when the red berries came I thought of my wool mittens.

I kept working in my garden that night, long after the sun had gone down, long after the moon had come up and cast a silver trail over the waves. I needed to hear the sea and the wind and keep some movement in my hands. I couldn’t bear to go inside.

Concerning the future

L
AST NIGHT
I dreamed I went to my sea garden again.

In my dream, Harold, I was attempting to secure the wood figures and stake the seed heads, but the wind kept whipping the sea into swirls of black and white, and tossing my hair and thrashing my garden. The plants and figures began to lift and blow in the air, like a shipwreck in the wind, and I tried to chase after them but I couldn’t. I saw the storm carry them away.

When Sister Mary Inconnue arrived, I could not think about my letter. All I could write was:

What will happen to my sea garden?

Sister Mary Inconnue sat in front of the window with her red fingers lifted to her mouth, palm to palm. Behind her, the clusters of leaves in the tree were plump hands too, and little spikes of blossom poked from the branches. She was deep in contemplation. ‘Is it the first time you have thought of this?’ she said at last.

It wasn’t. The question has been in me for a while, but it has lurked in the shadows and I have concentrated on other things because I have not wanted to look at it.

As I waited for her answer, I watched Sister Mary Inconnue carefully. I was so afraid of what she would say, and yet so needful of the truth, that I saw nothing but her. The tree disappeared. I even forgot I was me. I saw only Sister Mary Inconnue and her green eyes.

‘Have you made a will?’

No. I felt my throat tighten.

‘You need to make a will, Queenie. You know that, don’t you?’

I began to cry and she held my hand but the emotion was not one of fear any more and neither was it one of sorrow. It was because she was right and I knew she was right. I had only been waiting for someone to say the words.

‘It is not so terrible, dear heart, to make a will. It is like cleaning your house before you go on holiday. It is only making things neat. You need to ask Sister Philomena. You need to say you would like to make your will.’

A little later, Sister Lucy washed my hair. She massaged the conditioner into my scalp, and I felt a melting in my toes and hands. Once again I pictured my sea garden, but this time the chaos had gone and the only movement came from the skittering of orange-tipped butterflies. Down in the bay the sea was an unruffled blue, and the waves were lace frills. There was no wind. Sister Lucy wrapped my head in a warm towel. She blow-dried my hair and painted my nails.