Flowers in the Morning Page 5

  Hamish approached the house, and for the second time that morning found himself stuffing his gloves into his coat pockets, before enthusiastically setting about hauling back the vines with their colourful papery leaves in an attempt to see through the grimy glass of the one downstairs window that was visible. The creeper seemed to fight his attempts at removal and he only managed to clear a small area of glass. Even then, he found that with the creeper growing so thickly over every other surface the interior was so poorly lit that he could see little in the dimness inside. Giving up on the window he moved back a little to stand still, taking stock of his surroundings in the hope of finding a way in. Outside, there was a central portico over the front door. The hanging tendrils of the creeper had formed a living curtain over the entrance, so he pushed this aside to try the door, finding, unsurprisingly, that it was firmly barred. He retreated back through the dusty carpet of dried leaves and windblown garden debris that had collected around the doorway, brushing cobwebs that he had caught over his face and hair as he went around to the side of the house. Fighting his way through more tangled greenery to reach the rear he hoped that he might find ... he wasn’t sure what ... maybe another door, preferably with a key conveniently left under the mat ...or, possibly, a broken window that he could put his hand through to unlatch, he thought optimistically. Something ... or anything, he wasn’t feeling too picky, that would give him a justifiable excuse to venture inside without causing damage. In his experience, unoccupied houses like this didn’t usually survive long without someone breaking in to check out if anything of value had been left behind, or to inflict gratuitous damage just for the sick pleasure of it. For now, all he wanted to do was to satisfy his curiosity, but instead he found his way blocked by a high stone wall. True, there was a gateway, but the heavy wooden gate was both solidly built and in much better condition than that he’d encountered in the garden and like the portico door it was locked, this time with a stout padlock. The wall was sufficiently sheer, with a steeply pointed stone coping overhanging the top edge that it deterred any aspirations he might have had of attempting to climb over. Just his luck, he thought, to find a house that was, remarkably, apparently unscathed by vandalism. By this time, he had had enough of struggling his way through cold shrubberies, so he laboured instead pulling more creeper away from what he thought could be another window, hoping to see something, however murky, of the interior on this side of the house, only to find solid stone under his scratched, and now freezing fingers. What he did discover was that the walls were built of that same lovely creamy-white stone as the little bridge over which he’d crossed earlier.

  Finally, thwarted in all his attempts to see inside, he stopped ...blowing warm air on his aching fingers to bring them back to life, before replacing his gloves. Without suitable tools it was simply senseless to try and uncover any more ...the creeper had grown with such luxuriance that Hamish couldn’t tell, with any certainty, where any other doors or windows might be. He went back to where he had started, standing on the terrace before the front portico, surveying as much of the house as he could see. It would be two stories high at least, he mused, if the steep angle of the roof and the vine-covered protrusions that could be dormer windows were any indication. The central portion of the roof rose even higher, with tall chimneys to either side of what might be a sort of tower room, ...or possibly a widows’ walk, ...he couldn’t be sure. It certainly wasn’t a large house ...he imagined that there would be two or three rooms on the ground floor at most, but that would be quite enough for one person. The dense thickets of trees and tall shrubs growing close to the left-hand end of the house rendered it practically impossible to see anything to that side and he didn’t fancy fighting his way through more holly and brambles. His thoughts drifted beyond the present, already planning possible alterations to make the house suit his lifestyle ...well, if there was insufficient light in the house for him to work, he might need to build a separate studio ...but that wouldn’t be impossible, the garden was certainly large enough to accommodate another small building. He stayed for several minutes, lost in his musings about what the house might look like when it was cleaned up, before the cold and reality penetrated his bones and subconscious sufficiently for him to realise that he didn’t even know if the house was available for sale. Until he found the current owner it was, perhaps, somewhat premature for him to be planning renovations.

  Galvanised into action by that thought, Hamish turned from the house and began to look for an alternative route to return to his car. Surely, he thought, the woodland path could not be the only access to the house ...so there had to be another way out ...perhaps something wide enough for a vehicle. He’d had more than enough of fighting his way through greenery for one morning. Then, he remembered, just before he had spotted the house he’d briefly glimpsed another, less significant building, barely noticeable among the trees at the top of the slope, opposite from where he had come down from the orchard. It was roughly in the direction that Sara had taken after they’d met so hopefully she’d known something about a way out that he didn’t. Searching, he saw a narrow path leading off from the top terrace through the trees to his left. As it was heading in the bearing that the building lay, he decided to follow it. Within a few yards, he had been led to a gap in the most amazing hedge he had ever seen. Close-up, he found that someone must have been maintaining these plants, as well as the yews. Although in need of a trim, the new growth giving the shrubs a ragged appearance and blurring outlines, they had the look of having been clipped within the past year or so. A wider gravelled path was edged to either side with a double line of dwarf Buxus, trimmed square …and enclosed by the low hedges was a display of true Buxus sempervirens, mature boxwood and growing taller than his head in places. The plants had been encouraged to form a densely-matted, rounded, freeform structure that flowed in either direction from where he stood ...one part of the double row snaking out of sight towards the house, and the other to the woods beyond the building he was trying to find his way to. It was apparent that whoever had developed this part of the garden must have shared nature’s abhorrence to straight lines, no angles here ...the shapes were generously Rubenesque, their curvaceous forms abounding to create a spectacle like none other he had seen. With a thick coating of white frost covering the sculpted serpentine forms, it made a stunning display.

  Frost ...Brrr ...that brought Hamish back to earth. True, it was a lovely sight, but it was also perishingly cold down here in the shade. Later, the weak autumn sun might pierce the tree cover to touch the frozen ground, but for now, no warmth reached this part of the garden. So, stunning display aside, he felt it was high time he found his way home. Moving quickly along the clear path, he reached the building that had been his goal. It appeared to be an old carriage house of sorts, two-storied and solidly stone-built, but Hamish was, by now, in no mood to explore further. He had seen enough to know that this was the place for him, and now, all he wanted was a hot meal and a fire to warm his extremities in front of. He set off at a fast clip along a driveway ...little-used, judging by the luxuriance of weeds and mosses growing among the gravelled surface ...but still quite passable. He followed where it led, away from the building and up a gentle rise then back into the woods beyond. As he was negotiating the potholed track a robin flew close over his head and winged up ahead between the trees along the driveway. Hamish wondered if it was his feathered guide from earlier in the garden.

  As he had surmised, the drive led him back to the paved lane. The driveway exit was blocked by a five-bar timber gate set between solid stone piers. The robin sat atop the uppermost timber crossbar singing at the top of its voice. Hamish stopped for a moment surveying the little creature. It halted its song and cocked its head to one side to stare back at him with dark beady eyes that gave the impression to Hamish of more intelligence than a simple robin should possess. Hamish shook his head to dispel the thought –bad enough that he found it difficult to talk to people any more …if he started to conver
se with birds and animals on a regular basis he would find himself in no short order inhabiting a small padded room in a modern day equivalent of Bedlam. He’d put it down to whimsy …since this place seemed rather full of it, but he couldn’t resist one last one-sided conversation with the bird.

  “Well, this is goodbye for now. Thanks for the tour,” he said amiably before continuing, “but if I have my way, in the immortal words of Arnie Schwarzenegger …I’ll be back.”

  The robin gave a short sharp chirp, fluffed its feathers and flew off its perch back along the lane into the green shadows of the garden.

  Hamish smiled to himself, feeling lighter in his soul than he had for months as he nimbly hopped over a cantilevered stone stile set in the head-high stone wall beside the padlocked gate He alternately walked and slid down the sloping lane, which sported sheet ice in patches where leaves had blocked the natural drainage, and was back at the road bridge and his car within minutes. It was sheer bliss to warm his frosted toes in front of the car’s heater, which he soon had blasting at maximum output. He wrapped his chilled hands around a mug of coffee ...poured from the flask that he’d only remembered as he’d replaced the backpack in the car, while running back over the morning’s proceedings in his mind . Now that he was ensconced in the warmth of his car, he regretted that he hadn’t taken time to snap more photographs. But meeting Sara in less than ideal circumstances, then the delightful surprise of discovering the house had driven all thoughts of photography out of his mind. Coffee cup drained, Hamish manoeuvred the car onto the road, and headed back to his B & B and a well-earned cooked breakfast.

  Before sitting down to breakfast, he called Andrew, arranging a meeting for later that morning, determined to find who owned the house of his dreams.

  And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,

  And she forgot the blue above the trees,

  And she forgot the dells where waters run,

  And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;

  She had no knowledge when the day was done,

  And the new morn she saw not:

  John Keats

  Liana

  She was cold, so deeply bone-marrow cold that even her dreams were now filled with images of ice and snow. Winter had come early to the garden, with a chill so intense that it pierced the thickening layers of her lassitude. Never before, awake or asleep, had the natural changes in temperature affected her like this: …Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter ... the ever-revolving facets of, and the interplay between each of the seasons had always been part of the very fabric of her existence. Liana had revelled in the distinctive differences of each with equal pleasure. It was men, and their mortality that had been the problem ... to her they had seemed more ephemeral than any of the seasons, and so tragically vulnerable to the passing of time.

  She, in her turn, had alternately raged and cried to the powers that be about the unfairness of this inequality, but to no avail ... until eventually, her energy spent and patience lost, she could no longer bear the pain and sought to retreat from it.

  And now, in her dream-sleep, she cried ... the tears turning to glittering fragments of ice the instant they touched her lashes.

  ***

  In the darkest recesses of the woods there was movement …something unpleasant was stirring. Inside a dark musty cave an untidy pile of ancient bones covered in a ragged shroud lay haphazardly strewn where a body had been dragged and discarded behind the sealed entrance. Even woodland creatures such as the tiny field mice that might have entered the cave to pick the bones clean had hesitated to make their way between the closely-packed stones that plugged the cave’s mouth. The corpse had lain for so long that eventually fungi and microbial organisms had done the work of any natural scavengers, eventually completing the cycle of degradation that saw the flesh returned to earth. Over time the dark tendrils of a choking vine had overgrown and hidden the entrance to the former fox-den set among craggy rocks at the rear of a small waterfall that had once been a feature of a pretty light-filled spot favoured by both garden-dwellers and the local villagers for summer dips and the occasional lover’s frolic away from prying eyes… The internment of the cave’s current resident had changed the place so that now no-one came near without feeling a heightened sense of dread that caused them to turn away and head to other more pleasant parts of the woods. Now, after years of specious idleness the malevolent tendrils of the vine sought entry by way of the miniscule gaps and crevices among the rocks …working their way into the fetid air of the cave. As the questing tendrils of deadly poisonous creeper grew more elongated and broad, a tiny shower of rocks was dislodged from the pile at the entrance, soon followed by others until one of the larger rocks fell, leaving a gap of proportions large enough for light to fall on the remains. With the amplification in light the shoots sprouted at an augmented rate that soon saw them reaching the remains and wrapping themselves around the bones in a malignantly tender embrace.

  Nature might abhor a straight line but it abhorred a vacuum even more and Liana’s persistent absence had left a gaping void in the balanced dance of power that controlled the day to day happenings within the Garden’s boundaries, from minutiae to major events …and where there is an empty space to be filled, unwanted weeds are often the opportunists that prove to be the ablest colonisers of an unoccupied niche.

  London, that great sea, whose ebb and flow

  At once is deaf and loud, and on the shore

  Vomits its wrecks, and still howls on for more.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Chapter Two

  Hamish

  It was minutes from midnight when Hamish switched off the car’s engine for the last time on Sunday. Despite departing Kent in the late evening when traffic into the city usually thinned, the drive back into the city had been mind-numbingly slow. To top off the horrible journey home he’d arrived to find that in his absence a deep trench had been excavated into the road immediately outside the studio’s single garage with the added complication that whoever had dug up the road had omitted any provision for vehicle-access across the ditch to the studio’s garage. As garages were something of a rarity in the area, maintaining access was probably something the contractor hadn’t planned for. Cursing roundly, he’d been obliged to cruise around the car-lined streets in the vicinity of the studio for another twenty minutes, searching in ever-widening circles for a large-enough parking space before squeezing the car into what was little more than a fissure among the tightly packed cars half a dozen blocks from where he lived. Not for the first time, he wished he’d invested in a smart car, sourly eyeing several of the tiny vehicles parked in the most miniscule parking spaces imaginable as he drove further and further from the studio. When he spotted one squeezed across the gap at the end of a pedestrian crossing he laughed in sardonic amusement. If the local Kensington and Chelsea parking attendants found it still there in the morning it would undoubtedly gain their ire and end up on the back of a truck bound for internment in the pound and a hefty fine.

  Twisting in the narrow confines of the car, he turned to grab his overnight bag and the steering lock, dumping one on the pavement and securing the other in place over the steering wheel before getting out, locking the door and activating the car alarm. As he picked up the bag and walked away from the car, he knew, despite his precautions, there was a high probability that it would be broken into, stolen or damaged in some way by the time he came back for it. The locks and alarms were there in an effort to keep his insurance company from increasing their already astronomically-high premiums, but in Hamish’s opinion, they acted as little more than minor deterrents to London’s latest breed of organised car criminals. He no longer cared ...to him the car was nothing more than a convenient method of getting out of the city on weekends. Other than that, from Monday to Friday he hardly ever drove it. He strode away in long loose-limbed strides along the dimly-lit near-deserted street, the vehicle already forgotten.

  ***

  Monday’s alarm clock w
as replaced by a heart-attack-inducing, ear-damaging jack hammer starting up on the pavement directly below Hamish’s bedroom. Having purposely set the alarm back a little later to allow an extra hour of dozing Hamish was less than thrilled to be woken in such an abrupt manner. Although high up under the mansard roof several floors above street level, the room had windows facing the road and not for the first time, Hamish wished that the picturesque windows with their decorative Georgian mouldings had been double-glazed to dampen the sounds from the street. Since going back to sleep was out of the question he had rolled out of bed, groaning drowsily, and headed for the shower. Even the pelting noise of the water had not been enough to drown out the repetitively reverberating rat-tat-tat sounds of the pneumatic drill, providing impetus for a brief shower and a frantic scuffling search of his wardrobe for suitable clothes to make a hasty get-away from the neighbourhood. Now, dressed in dark jeans, teamed with short leather boots, a pullover and light wool coat, Hamish was standing looking down from the tall sash windows of the living room overlooking the street, watching during a lull in the drilling with bemused interest as a workman clambered out of a van full of tools and materials and set two heavy short planks over the trench directly below him, allowing belated access to the garage.