1
Robert strode purposefully through the orchard to his mother’s house, accompanied by his loyal golden Labrador, Tarquin. The evening light had softened to a warm honey tone as the sun sank behind the fields, turning the sky pink. The air was thick with the sweet scents of mown grass and ripening wheat and the ground was already dampening with dew. Pigeons billed and cooed in the lime trees as they settled down to roost and a pair of fluffy blue tits squabbled playfully about the bird feeder his wife, Celeste, had hung from a pear tree in the no-man’s-land between their modest farmhouse and his parents’ much grander home farther down the valley. From there he could see the tiled rooftops of their seventeenth-century manor, mottled with moss and algae and weathered to a muted reddish brown. The rows of ornate-shafted chimneys seemed to balance precariously above the triangular gables like unsteady sentinels, weary of keeping watch. One, which was no longer in use, was now the nest of an uncommonly large pigeon who had settled in for the summer. The manor had the tousled charm of a much-beloved toy whose fur has worn away in places because of so much affection, and Robert felt a surge of fondness for the house that would always be home.
Robert had grown up at Chawton Grange with his three sisters, but he was the only child to remain, as the girls had since married and moved away. He loved the farm and had fond memories of driving tractors in his youth and helping out at harvesttime during the long summer holidays. Growing up had been easy in such a beautiful place. Now, as life grew more complicated, he reflected on those long, lazy days in the fields, when grief had not yet sought him out and the future had stretched ahead like a pure summer sky, clear and full of promise. He could never have foreseen how things would change.
Robert had lost his eight-year-old son, Jack, to leukemia sixteen months before. He would never get over it, but he had learned to live with it, like the dull, throbbing pain of a chronic condition that never goes away. He often wondered whether his loss was in some perverse way life’s balancing of the books, payment for thirty years of unadulterated pleasure. Had he been asked, he would happily have chosen thirty years of misery in exchange for his son’s good health. Celeste had not yet learned to live with her grief. It had gushed and flowed around her like a terrible flood of pain, forming an impassable moat, hemming her in and forcing him out. She had shrunk into herself like a tortoise resentful of the light. Her laughter no longer bubbled and her smile had ceased altogether, so that her face had set into a taut, unhappy scowl. He had not only lost his child, but he had lost his wife, too. Jack had taken her heart with him, leaving his father with nothing but the shell.
He thrust his hands into his pockets and walked out of the orchard into his parents’ garden. The sight of home momentarily uplifted him, like ascending out of shade into sunshine. Every corner of that serene oasis echoed with the laughter of his childhood games. Now that laughter reached him in waves of nostalgia and his heart ached for that innocence, now gone, and that ignorance, so sweet, because back then he hadn’t known the bitter taste of bereavement. Back then he hadn’t known the ferocity of love either.
His father, Huxley, was busy up a ladder, deadheading the roses in a panama hat and pale linen jacket, while his mother sat on the terrace in regal splendor, a cigarette in one hand, a pen in the other, her large dogs at her feet and a half-eaten box of chocolate truffles on the table in front of her, doing the crossword.
She sensed his approach and popped a truffle into her mouth. “I thought it wouldn’t be long before you trotted down to reproach me,” she said, putting the newspaper aside with a sigh. Robert descended the stone steps onto the terrace.
“Help yourself to a glass of wine,” suggested his father from the ladder. “It’s that Chilean sauvignon blanc you gave me to try. I think it’s rather good. Has a fruity taste.”
“Listen, Mum, why can’t you have him?” Robert poured himself a glass and sat on the bench opposite his mother. “You are his grandmother.”
Marigold took off her glasses and fixed him with pale, turquoise eyes. At seventy-three, those eyes still had the power to mesmerize, even though her body, which had expanded over the years like a sponge in water, retained none of its once infamous allure. Wrapped in layers of loose cottons and fine pashmina wraps, Marigold had given in to the chocolates and cakes she had spent her youth avoiding, and her long blond hair was pinned loosely on top of her head so that it resembled the pigeon’s nest on the chimney. “Because I’m very busy,” she said briskly, lifting her chin.