‘Diana,’ he said.
She stared at him. She was thirty-eight now. Her father nearly eighty-eight. She hadn’t married, she hadn’t had another child and she hadn’t ever heard from Douglas again.
Instead she stayed every day in her parents’ home, reminding them it all stopped with her.
They took away her future so she took away their legacy.
Her father was pale, gaunt, his eyes briefly open and his head lying on the pillow in a way that looked uncomfortable, a nurse by his side.
‘I want to tell you,’ he said, his voice thin with age and sickness.
She had waited for his apology for twenty years, but now that it was close she felt nothing anymore. She was tired of everything; she was tired of punishing him and herself.
She turned to leave the room and she heard him say: ‘In the safe. Her birthday.’
She paused, her back towards him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and finally she turned to him.
‘Father, whatever you’re feeling at the end of your life, whatever forgiveness you’re looking for, you won’t get it from me. You could have had it all: the loving daughter, the loving granddaughter, maybe I would have married again, had more children, but you will never know. You took away my life and now everything you built – your legacy – is in my hands. I will sell off this house – every piece of furniture, every painting. I will salt the earth, and then I will leave the house open to be taken over by animals and tourists and anyone else who wants to partake in the misery of these walls and the pain of this family.’
Her father was unmoving in the bed. The nurse was looking at her hands, probably wishing she wasn’t there, thought Diana, but she didn’t care.
She saw a single tear fall down his weathered face.
‘Goodbye, Father, go well.’
*
Her father slipped into unconsciousness and died four days later. Diana spent most of that time outside. She walked around the garden, picking off rosehips, pulling off the deadheads of the daisies. She could see Helen’s father in the distance, now in his sixties, trimming the whips of the wisteria from the walls of the garden.
She walked over to him. ‘Pete,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Helen had another boy,’ he said.
‘Oh wonderful, I will send her a little present,’ Diana said.
Helen had married a mechanic from Newcastle and had three boys and now she’d had her fourth. She was busy but happy. Diana had gone into herself when her baby was taken and had stopped going out. Idle gossip with Helen about boys and parties wasn’t something Diana could partake in anymore. And how could Diana watch Helen raise a family when she had lost everything she had ever wanted? She didn’t begrudge Helen’s happiness but she also knew her own personal limit to what she could bear.
‘Do you like gardening, Pete? I mean, I know you do it through the week here, but do you like it?’
Pete looked at her for what felt like a long time. His face was lined and brown from the sun, his bucket hat sitting on top of grey curls that needed a cut.
‘I can’t rightly think of anything else I’d rather do. There’s something special about growing things. These plants are like my children. You have to water them, feed them, prune them when they’re being too wild, and you can get generations from a single plant if you know what you’re doing.’
Diana was silent. The symbolism of his words wasn’t lost on her.
‘I would like to learn to garden,’ she said. ‘If you would teach me?’
Pete smiled. ‘Gardening can’t be taught; it has to be a trust between the gardener and the garden. Plants will grow if they trust you.’
She looked closely at him and realised he knew everything. Of course he would know. He would have seen her coming and going as the baby grew.
‘You knew? Why didn’t you say something?’ she asked.
‘Not my business,’ he said.
‘Did you notice me or did Helen tell you?’ she asked.
