When Felicity and Susan brought out the photo album once again and started flipping through its pages, Claire said, ‘Eva, come and help me plant my flowers, darling.’
She fetched me a spare pair of gardening gloves and a trowel and took me across to the sundial, beneath which a varied assortment of seedlings were waiting in small plastic pots. ‘Here.’ She tipped out a small spindly flower of some kind, its fragile roots bound in a pressed clump of soil, and I knelt down beside her to take it. At first we said nothing. We planted the flowers together in a rhythm I remembered – scoop, set one down, tamp, tamp, mound up a basin to keep in the rainwater, reach for the next one, then scoop, set one down, tamp, tamp …
The repetition soothed me, and the sunlight caught my moving hand and glinted on the little golden Claddagh ring. ‘Aunt Claire.’
‘Yes?’
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘Certainly.’
‘When Uncle George died …’ No, that wasn’t right. I started over. ‘After Uncle George died, did your mind ever play tricks on you?’
‘What sort of tricks?’
‘Well, make you think you saw things that weren’t really there.’
She stopped digging with her trowel partway in the earth and glanced up again. ‘Are you seeing things?’
‘Sometimes. And hearing them.’
‘You mean the voices you heard in your room. Mark did mention that, yesterday.’
I mounded my basin with careful hands. ‘What, did he think I was losing my mind?
‘No, of course not.’ She gently pinched a dead and wilted bloom from the next plant before she set it in its hole. ‘Our bodies have a lot to deal with, darling, when we’re grieving. And in answer to your question, yes, my mind played tricks when I lost George. It still does, even now. I smell his aftershave, from time to time. It’s been five years this spring,’ she said, ‘and sometimes I still feel as though he’s very near.’ She looked directly at me then, and smiled a small and understanding smile. ‘Be patient, Eva. It will all get easier.’
I’d reached the final flower. ‘Yes, I know.’ Scoop, set it down, tamp, tamp.
‘There,’ said Claire with satisfaction, dusting off her hands against her legs as she stood to inspect our work.
I rose too, and for the first time took a good look at the sundial. The stone base had graceful curved lines and the vane on its top face that marked the sun’s passing was shaped like a butterfly pausing at rest with its wings folded upwards, set to cast its ever-moving shadows round a dial of Roman numerals raised in elegant relief. Around the whole top ran a poignant bit of poetry, in script:
The butterfly counts not months but moments,
And has time enough.
I traced the letters with one finger. Claire said, ‘That’s a lovely poem, don’t you think? By Rabindranath Tagore, I’ve always liked his poetry. Felicity outdid herself, I think.’
‘Felicity made this?’
‘It’s what she does,’ said Claire. ‘She’s quite a brilliant sculptress.’
‘Yes, she is.’
The bronze wing of the butterfly was casting its long shadow at the halfway point between the Roman numerals one and two, and Claire looked at her wristwatch to compare the times. ‘Bang on,’ she said. ‘There’s something to be said for the old ways.’ A breeze swept singing through the branches of the trees that marked the edges of the woods around us, and she raised her face to it. ‘I’ve always rather liked the Celtic view of life, that this world and the next one aren’t so separate from each other. My grandmother believed that. She was Welsh, you know – a true Celt, through and through – and if you’d told her you’d heard whispers in your walls, she would have taken it in her stride,’ she said, with certainty. ‘She would have said you’d heard the voices of the people living at Trelowarth, sharing space with us, but in another time.’
I thought that was a rather lovely concept, and I said as much.
‘I think so, too,’ said Claire. ‘So there, you see? Perhaps the voices you’ve been hearing aren’t imagined ones at all.’
‘You’re only saying that to make me feel less crazy.’
‘Is it working?’
‘Sort of.’ With a rueful smile I leant into the comfort of her one-armed hug, and told her, ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re most welcome.’
Turning, she looked back towards the patio, where Susan and Felicity were sitting with their heads bent close together over the old photos. ‘Haven’t you two finished laughing at my frocks, yet?’
‘Hardly.’ Susan called over. ‘We’re choosing a few to put up in the tea room.’
‘You do, and I’ll take them back down.’
‘Not of you,’ Susan said with a laugh. ‘Of the greenhouse. Like this one.’ She hefted the album, and rose and came over to show us.
‘Oh,’ Claire said. ‘Well yes, that one’s lovely.’
Looking at the picture of the greenhouse, with Claire’s mention of her grandmother still recent in my mind, I said to Susan, ‘Weren’t you going to ask Claire about the tea room where her grandparents met?’
‘So I was.’
Felicity, who’d come across to join us by the sundial, didn’t know the story, and asked Claire, ‘Your grandparents met in a tea room?’