The Midnight Garden — Chapter 10: The Sea
The Midnight Garden
The Midnight Garden — Chapter 10 of 12. New to the serial? Start with Chapter 1. This is a work of fiction intended for adult readers.
Chapter Ten: The Sea
“Mine,” said Maren. “You have my hands.”
She said it the way you tell someone they have soil on their face — a fact, a small one, none of her doing — and then she let go and looked out of the window at the moor going past, and Elara drove the next mile without once seeing the road.
“That isn’t possible.”
“So did Ismay, about a good many things, and she came round. You have my jaw as well, for that matter; she never mentioned the jaw.” Maren settled her coat around her like a woman settling an argument. “I came to Thornmuir with a daughter on my hip and no husband to explain her. Sixteen hundred and seventy-five, if the year matters to you. It has stopped mattering to me. The hill took the mother. The child went to the smith’s wife in the village, and grew, and married a gardener, which is the only kind of husband that family has ever managed to find. Her daughter had the house in the end. Her daughter’s daughter had it after. The wall has known every one of you by your hands, little gardener. It knew you at nine. It has been waiting for you longer than you have been alive.”
In the back seat Callan said nothing, and the nothing had a shape.
“You knew,” Elara said to the mirror.
“I kept Ismay when she was a girl, and her grandmother before her.” Rule one had followed him over the wall like a dog. “I knew what the hands meant. I did not think it was mine to tell.”
“Everything in that house is a thing nobody thought was theirs to tell,” Elara said, and took the turn for the station harder than she needed to.
The train was two carriages and smelled of wet coats and diesel, and Maren was unimpressed by it for exactly as long as it took to leave the platform. Then the loch came up on the left, grey and enormous and moving past at the speed of a galloping horse, and she put her palm flat against the glass the way she had put it under the electric light, checking for the trick.
“Sixty years your aunt described this to me,” she said, “and she was a truthful woman, and she still undersold it.”
Callan sat opposite with his knees against Elara’s, learning to be carried. He watched the old woman more than the loch. Once, when the line swung out onto a viaduct and the drop opened under them, his hand found hers on the seat and stayed there, cold, and neither of them mentioned it.
The sea, when they reached it, did not care that it was being looked at, and that was the first thing Maren loved about it.
She stood on the shingle with the wind pulling at her coat and did not say oh. She had used up oh on the cold. She only stood, for a long time, a small grey woman at the edge of a very large grey thing, and Elara understood that there was nothing to be done for her here and nothing that needed doing — that this was what three hundred years of a wall had been for, in the end, so that one person could stand at the sea and be nobody’s, briefly, before she died.
Then Maren took off her boots.
“You’ll freeze.”
“I have been frozen. I have been a rose in November. I intend to be cold in the sea, once, on purpose, and you may write it in your book.” She walked in to the ankle and stood there with her skirts gathered and her face turned up and the water dragging the shingle out from under her heels, and she laughed the laugh Elara had first heard from a rose.
The shop on the front sold everything a shop on a front sells: postcards, sun cream nobody would want until May, sweets in jars, tartan tea towels. Maren bought a postcard of the sea — the same sea, flat, framed, the wrong colour — and paid with a note Elara had folded into her hand, and the girl behind the counter, who could not have been eighteen, put it in a paper bag and said, “There you are, madam,” and Maren stood so still that the girl asked whether she was all right.
“I am extremely well,” said Maren. “I have never in my life been anybody’s madam.”
They ate chips on the sea wall in the last of the light. Callan had never had a chip. He approached it as he approached most of the century, as a witness, and then ate eleven.
“Tell me the rest,” Elara said. “You’ve been carrying it up and down the beach all afternoon.”
Maren looked at the sea instead of at either of them.
“He came over the wall on the thirteenth of November,” she said. “Seventeen hundred and fifteen. Two days after Martinmas. There had been a battle up at Sheriffmuir, and the boy had run the wrong way from it with a cut across his ribs you could have put a hand in, and he got as far as my wall and lay down in the snow to finish. I opened the door. I was keeper; nobody had ever told me I couldn’t.” A gull went over, and she watched it as if it were the first, which it was. “The hill offered before I could. It always did. Live, it said to him, and be mine. And he wanted to live so badly that he said yes before I could stop him. That was the bargain. That is all it ever was. A boy who wanted to live, and a hill that wanted a man.”
“And the promise,” Elara said.
“I was dying.” Flatly, the way she said everything true. “Ten years after. He sat with me the way your aunt sat with me, later, and I was frightened, and I said — to comfort him, I thought; to comfort me — that not death itself would part me from him. He said it back. Boys do.” Her mouth moved; not a smile. “He said it to me. I said it to the ground. The ground was listening. It kept me and it kept him, it wrote its rules in what he’d sworn and fed on what I’d meant, and it never let either of us learn which of us had done it, because guilt keeps a man better than roots.”
Callan had stopped eating. He was looking at his hands.
“I did not know you said it first,” he said.
“You were nineteen and half dead. You didn’t know your own name.” Maren reached across Elara and put one old hand on his knee, and it was the first time Elara had seen them touch. “Tomorrow is the thirteenth,” she said. “I should like to go the same day you came. Symmetry is the only thing that hill has ever respected, and I intend to make it watch.”
They drove home in the dark with the postcard on the dashboard. The moor came up black on both sides, and then the house, and then the wall — shorter than the beeches.
Elara laid her hand on the door and it opened, as it had for a wet botanist on the first night and a walking corpse that morning, and inside the garden was June, and waiting, and turned every one of its faces to the sill.
Maren went in. Elara went in.
Callan stepped forward, and the door closed — not a slam; a settling, oak into stone, as though it had been shut all along and they had only imagined otherwise — and the garden’s thousand small lights held very still, and from the far side of the wall there was no sound at all.
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The Midnight Garden
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