For a couple of months, as autumn gave way to winter, those three mornings came to define Josh’s weeks. Clearing bamboo, weeds, and rubble at Willow Road, or pruning the apple trees, their branches furred with frost, at Fenton House. He was unskilled but took to the work well. His mind, he realised, had been looking for this: hours outdoors in which it could wander beyond the repetition of his jobs. Nathan, the National Trust gardener, was a quiet man and was content, once he knew Josh could be trusted, to set him going, then leave him alone. The other volunteers tended to come and go frequently. They were actors between jobs, gap-year students, or just people fulfilling the hours demanded by another organisation — the Duke of Edinburgh Award, community service. Once these were completed, Nathan never saw them again. But Josh proved to be constant, a regular. Often, on finishing a shift he’d stay on, especially in Fenton House, sitting on one of the benches in the walled garden, breathing in the iron scent of freshly turned soil, or listening to the birdsong. Which was why, when Josh applied for a vacancy with one of the conservation teams on the Heath, Nathan had supported him so enthusiastically. Because in all his years of gardening, never before had he met a man who so clearly needed to feel the earth again, in whom the exertion of physical work had so plainly brought peace, and with it, pleasure.
“I know, ironic, isn’t it?” Samantha had said when she’d told Michael. They’d been in her garden, weeding and dividing clumps of perennials. “He’s working for the City again. It’s like he can’t bloody escape them.”
“The City?” Michael said. “How do you mean?”
“Well, they own it, don’t they?” Samantha cleared a strand of hair from her face and sat back on her heels. “The Heath,” she’d said, wiping her forehead with the top of her wrist. “Or at least the Corporation of London does, which in my book is pretty much the same thing.” She threw a handful of weeds onto the pile between them. “So, yeah,” she’d said, returning to her work. “He’s on the payroll again.”
For a moment neither of them had spoken. There was just the tearing sound of the weeds being uprooted, the barking of dogs from the Heath.
“But it’s working for him,” Samantha had said after a while. Michael’s mind had drifted and at first he didn’t know what she was talking about. He’d looked over at her, but she was focused on her work, pulling at the weeds with short, steady tugs. “I even think it makes him happy,” she said, throwing another clump onto the pile.
―
As Michael parted the bodies in the gallery before him, gently touching backs and shoulders as he pressed forward, Josh, looking up from his conversation, saw him approaching. Michael managed to free a hand and raise it, nodding over the expansive hair of a blonde woman between them. Josh didn’t acknowledge the greeting, but just looked back at him, a disturbance in his eyes. His expression stopped Michael in the middle of the crowd. Not because it had been so unexpected, but because it was a look of such long-held animosity, not a sudden aversion. A look of knowledge, not question.
Michael was about to continue towards him when a whine of feedback punctuated Emmanuel’s stepping up to a microphone to ask the crowd for quiet. The heads around Michael all turned in the direction of his amplified voice. As Michael did the same, he glanced over at Josh again. He, too, was looking towards the microphone now. He looked calm, smiling at Emmanuel’s opening jokes. So perhaps Michael had been wrong. Perhaps his guilt was making him see things and fear things that weren’t to be seen or to be feared. He took a drink from his glass and, as Samantha stepped up to speak, tried to focus on what she had to say.
The speeches were short. Samantha thanked her course tutors, Sebastian, the owner of the gallery. And she thanked Michael, too, for his help, and Rachel as well, for hers, raising her glass to each of them in the crowd. She spoke briefly about how the photos on these walls had been found as the result of a loss. But she said nothing else about Lucy or the specifics of her own journey towards those early minutes of the day, waiting to discover what its light would deliver. When she finished speaking and backed away from the microphone there was applause, a few whoops from her fellow students, and then Emmanuel stepped up again to encourage everyone to drink and, if they could, buy one of Samantha’s prints.
Over a final smattering of applause, the crowd began to move again, towards the drinks or to view the work. Michael looked for Josh where he’d last seen him. But he wasn’t there. He glanced over the rest of the room, then pushed his way through to the second space. Josh was nowhere to be seen in there, either. Michael was aware of his heart racing. He realised he had to talk to him. He had to know why he’d been keeping his distance. Why he’d looked at him that way across the gallery.
Squeezing himself back through the crowd, he made his way outside into the cool of the night. There were three smokers on the pavement, but none of them was Josh. He looked up the lamp-lit street, a spring mist gathering about the rooftops. It was empty. Josh had gone.
Michael thought about walking up Flask Walk, trying to catch up with him. But it was no good. He could just have easily turned the other way and could already be walking across the Heath, or along any one of the surrounding streets.
Michael turned back to the windows of the gallery, fogged by the crowded bodies inside. Someone wiped a sleeve across a pane, swiping an arc of clear glass. Michael peered through it, just in case he’d missed him in there. But there was only the drinking and talking crowd, and at its centre Samantha, flushed with her success, her images of the pond hung around her, its stilled waters a silent witness to everything Michael had done.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“I SOLD SIX! Can you believe it? Six!”
The private view had rolled on to a nearby pub, and then again for a nightcap at Sebastian’s house. Now Michael and Samantha were back in her kitchen in South Hill Drive. Samantha was drunk. But she was also elated. The exhibition had opened well. There had been praise, attention. She looked years younger.
“Sebastian said that hardly ever happens,” she said, pouring another shot of whisky into her glass. “Not on the first night.”
“It’s great,” Michael said. “But I’m not surprised. Of course people want them. They’re…” He picked up one of the unselected prints, still on the dining table. “Well, they’re calming, aren’t they?” he said. “And they reveal more with each looking.”
“Oh, shut up!” Samantha said, dropping into one of the armchairs in the conservatory. “You’re always so bloody nice to me. Last drop?” She held the whisky bottle towards him.
“You’re right,” Michael said, sitting down opposite and holding out his glass. “They’re pretty ordinary, really, and most people there couldn’t tell the difference between a decent image and crap, anyway.”
“Steady,” Samantha said, mocking a hurt expression as she poured out the last of the whisky. “Don’t go too far.”
Michael raised his glass. “Congratulations,” he said. “You deserve it.”
They both drank, Samantha releasing a deep breath on swallowing. Tipping her head back against the chair, she closed her eyes.
Michael wanted to ask her about Josh. Had she spoken with him? What had he said? Why had he left? But now wasn’t the time. She was infused with her present and her future. She didn’t want to talk of the past. Not now, when this was all so fragile, so passing.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, her eyes still closed. Her speech was slow, liquid. “This house. It’s way too big for just Rachel and me. We rattle around in here. We don’t even ever go up to the top floor.” She opened her eyes and stared at the ceiling for a moment, then brought her head forward to look at him. Her expression was serious, but then a slow smile spread across her lips, followed by a girlish shake of her head. She looked down, away from him.