Maureen by Rachel Joyce

Author:Rachel Joyce [Joyce, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

9

Garden of Relics

The morning sky was torn and tattered by the wind, and golden light shone through, flashing, then vanishing, yet she saw everything, the land and the light and the cloud—even wink snatches of the sea ahead—through another kind of fog, because the only thing she could think of was David. Thirty years. Thirty years of waiting and searching. And now she was finally going to see him. He was her one thought.

Maureen had driven straight from Kate’s to Embleton. She’d rung Harold to check he was awake but she said nothing about what had happened. She didn’t even mention the truck. She took care to talk only about the driving and the weather, and when he asked her what she had made of Kate, she told him that she had gone to bed as soon as she arrived. There hadn’t been any time to get to know her.

“Oh, what a shame,” he’d said, and she could hear the regret in his voice. “I always liked Kate.”

“I’d better get going now,” she’d said.

At Embleton, Maureen located the Palm Trees guesthouse, and stopped to check in. The receptionist was a friendly young woman sitting in a little booth with a toy plastic palm tree on the desk. She said Maureen’s room was ready for her if she wanted, but Maureen explained she was just dropping off her suitcase before she went to visit a garden. “Queenie’s Garden? The Garden of Relics?” said the girl, with her singing Northumberland accent. “Just past the golf club! You can’t miss it! When my mother died, we scattered her ashes there! It’s a lovely walk!”

The walk could be as lovely as it liked but Maureen had no intention of doing it. She took the car to the golf club and when the road became a dead end, she parked as close as she could and made the very last stretch on foot, never looking back, not once, but always forward. She tied on a headscarf but the wind still flapped her slacks and got at her ankles. Beyond the dunes lay a horizontal blade of sea, and a vast expanse of sky.

She followed a track that crossed alongside the golf course toward the shore: a number of wooden chalets stood on the dunes ahead, looking tiny beside the sea, and it was toward these that she made her way. At the end of the golf course, the path swung to the left with a hand-painted plywood sign for Queenie’s Garden, shortly followed by another sign pointing the way over a small bridge. The signs irritated Maureen. She knew the purpose of them was to be helpful, but she felt she should instinctively know where to go without the help of plywood, and the fact that she didn’t—the fact that she actually needed these signs—made them all the more irksome.

Once she got to the sand, she had to take care in her driving shoes because it gave way abruptly to soft, sludgy patches that might wet her feet.

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