Garden of Stars: A gripping novel of hope, family and love across the ages. Rose Alexander

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      As the meal drew to a close and they made moves to leave, Hugo got a message on his phone.

      “Some of the boys are having a drink at the Gate,” he said to Sarah. “You don’t mind if I join them for a nightcap do you?”

      Sarah instinctively looked at her watch. It was 10pm.

      “You’ll be wanting to get to bed,” Hugo added, seeing her check the time. “I won’t be late – just a quick half and I’ll be back.”

      “Fine.” Didn’t he want to come back with her, bid her an intimate farewell? Obviously not.

      Kisses and hugs exchanged, the four parted company. It was only a few minutes’ walk home for Sarah. As she rounded the last corner, the streetlamp threw her shadow upon the wall of the end house, huge and distorted, a giant woman with oversized head and tiny feet looming large over the neighbourhood.

      The phone on the hall table was flashing with a message when she got in. Pressing play, there was a long pause and Sarah was about to walk away, thinking it a drop-down from some irritating robot caller. And then a voice wavered out of the speaker, a voice so well known and loved that Sarah stopped immediately and bent close to listen, as it was very faint.

      “It’s just me, dear, Inês. Before you go… I wanted to remind you to take the journal I gave you. It might… I think… I’d like you to have it there, and read it there. In Portugal.”

      There was another pause.

      “That’s all. Night night, dear Sarah.”

      In her bedroom, having paid the babysitter and made a cup of camomile tea, she checked her bag once more for essentials ready for her early start the next day – passport, boarding pass and euros. Her notebook was safely stashed away, plus her laptop and the inordinate number of chargers – computer, phone, kindle, camera – that seemed to accompany any journey. At the very top of the suitcase, balancing on the rolled up clothes, lay the journal. Something was troubling Inês and it seemed that somewhere in its pages might lie the secret.

       Portugal, 2010

      It was hot, intensely so, despite the protective cover of the branches. Sitting on a grassy tussock, Sarah leant back against the tree’s broad trunk and took a slug of water from the bottle in her bag. Around her, the harvest was in full flow, cloth-capped men of all ages working methodically from tree to tree, everything happening exactly the same way now as it would have done in Inês’s childhood, apart from the use of tractors to haul away the crop rather than mules or horses. One by one the oaks were stripped of their outer skin, leaving skinny orange trunks that appeared strangely vulnerable in their nakedness. The air was redolent with the earthy smell of freshly cut cork bark.

      Sarah looked down at the notebook on her lap, poised to capture the story of cork. On the cover was a picture of a princess, top-heavy in an oversized crown, that Honor had drawn for her by way of decoration. She thought of the children, where they would be and what they would be doing. At school right now, their identical tumbling chestnut hair most likely un-brushed without Sarah there to supervise. They would come home at three-thirty, cardigans lopsided with wrongly done up buttons, fingers stained with paint or glue, demanding snacks and cuddles and CBeebies, and for a whole week she would not be there. It was the first time she had left them for so much as a night.

      Perched on her clump of grass in the shade of the cork oak tree, Sarah shivered as a cloud passed over. Weariness threatened to overwhelm her; she had been up since 4.30am and driven straight here from the airport. She opened the accusing notebook and scrawled some hasty notes, all the while preoccupied by the decision – to contact Scott or not – that awaited her when she got to her hotel in Lisbon. When next she looked up, she saw that João Pinheiro, proud possessor of an enormous black handlebar moustache that bounced up and down as he spoke, and also owner of the montado and her host for the day, was waiting by the jeep to take her back to the farmhouse for a late lunch.

      Gathering her things together, she stood up, picking up a discarded chunk of bark that lay by her side as she did so. She walked out from under the sheltering branches, just as the sun broke through in all its full force once more. For a few seconds she felt giddy, from the brightness of the light or from the thoughts and recollections that were bombarding her, she wasn’t sure. Coloured specks danced inside her lids as she squeezed her eyes tight to quell her light-headedness and breathed in deeply, inhaling the musky, sultry scents that surrounded her.

      João laughed his agreement when Sarah asked permission to take the piece of bark with her; the girls might like to take it to show and tell at school.

      “It is a maravilha, a marvel,” he agreed, as Sarah gently flicked an ant off the cork’s grainy surface. “We humans may be clever but we can’t make any material that is compressible, impermeable, insoluble, elastic, renewable…” he paused, caught his breath and carried on, “–and which doesn’t burn. The cork forests hold at bay the fires which ravage Portugal in the summer months, and also prevent desertification. Our lives and livelihoods depend on it.”

      Just as Inês had written so eloquently in her journal, thought Sarah, as she observed how João gazed as tenderly at the nugget of bark in her hands as at a newborn baby. And then he shook his head and held the passenger door open with a flourish.

      “Almoço!” he cried. Sarah clamboured aboard, wondering why she hadn’t asked Inês what she should do about Scott when they had been on Kite Hill and she had the chance. She wished she had Inês’s wisdom on the subject of love to draw on right now, as well as her insights about cork. João slammed the jeep into gear and they set off, Sarah clinging desperately to the door handle as he negotiated the bends and turns of the potholed, rutted track, the vestiges of her past twisting and tumbling through her mind like the tangled weeds and grass past which they drove.

      The sun was lower in the sky but no less intense when Sarah arrived in Lisbon a few hours later. In the foyer of her hotel, a former nineteenth-century palace built on a fortune gleaned from cocoa, she saw signs indicating that a large international conference was underway. She could hear the mumbled tones of the delegates attending a drinks party in one of the ornate reception rooms above the double-height entrance hall. A woman flitted past her, chic and slender in a business suit and the kind of high heels that no mother-of-two such as Sarah could contemplate for daily wear. She was talking on a mobile phone in beautiful, lightly accented English, playing hardball with her interlocutor about some deal they were doing. From the satisfied smile that curled across her face, she appeared to have the upper hand.

      Sarah glanced down at herself, her flat pumps covered in Alentejan dust, her faded ditsy floral skirt which, if it ever had been fashionable, certainly wasn’t any more. The temperature was blissful inside this old part of the building that had been so cleverly designed to combat the heat of summer, cool chequered tiles underfoot and a circulating breeze from open doors on all sides. But still a hot flush swept over her, combined with a jolt of realisation that she wasn’t sure who she was any more, or who she wanted to be. Marriage and kids had crept up on her, with their relentless, never-ending demands, and seemed to have stolen her identity, to have stripped her of any sense of self.

      She looked at the pencil-skirted businesswoman again, mesmerised by the rhythmic click-clack of her heels on the hard floor, and felt the green tinge of envy descend upon her. What did it take to be like that? To be certain?

      The reception desk was busy and whilst she waited to check in, Sarah’s gaze wandered around, taking in the ornate wood panelling and the oil paintings that adorned the walls. Beside her was an easel on which stood a large display board. She glanced up at it and saw that its purpose was to give the conference СКАЧАТЬ