Lessons in Heartbreak. Cathy Kelly

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       THREE

      Anneliese Kennedy sat down in the big armchair that faced the sea and picked up one of her old flower catalogues. There were always a pile of dog-eared catalogues on the white cane table beside the chair, ready to flick through when she hadn’t the energy for the newspaper.

      Normally, her fingers had only to graze the pages for a feeling of contentment to flood through her. Pages of seeds illustrated with full-bodied blossoms made her think of hours spent in her garden, hands buried in the soil, nurturing and thinking about nothing more than nature.

      Today, the magic wasn’t there. They were just a bunch of well-thumbed catalogues, and the hand that lay on them was veined with alligator skin and ragged cuticles.

      ‘You’ve such pretty hands, you should look after them,’ her mother had sighed some thirty-seven years before when Anneliese was a young bride and prone to plunging her hands into dishwater without the time or the inclination to think about wearing rubber gloves.

      Anneliese was a high-speed sort of person. Not reckless, never. Quick, practical and deft. Gloves and hand creams were for her mother’s generation, not for a twenty-year-old with vast energy and a life to be lived.

      ‘Artist’s hands and green fingers,’ Edward said proudly as they stood in the front of the church the day their daughter, Beth, got married and Anneliese had spent hours tying barely unfurled blush pink roses into tiny posies for the pews.

      Anneliese preferred growing roses in the comfort of the Tamarin Garden Centre to making them into bouquets, but she’d have tied the roses together with her teeth in joy at seeing Beth walk up the aisle.

      Four years ago now, it had been the best day of her life, seeing Beth finally settled. Beth was like a rose herself: one of the rare antique tea roses that Anneliese and Neil, who owned the garden centre, liked to grow in the shelter of the giant greenhouse.

      Madame Alfred Carrière, very beautiful to look at with a glorious scent, but also prickly, high maintenance and needing hours of tender care. The day Beth married Marcus – gentle, strong of heart and crazy about her – Anneliese knew someone else was going to be providing that tender care, or at least, sharing it with her.

      If Beth was a rose, Edward was a tree, a rare oak, standing tall and strong against the sea wind. And Anneliese? When she’d met Edward, she was like a poplar: tall, slim and vibrant from the top of her fair head to the tips of her ever-moving toes.

      But she didn’t know what she was any more. Time and life had changed her.

      Once, when she’d started working in horticulture, she’d thought that the art of growing things was the answer to all questions. The earth taught you to be calm, to wait, that the cycles changed but it would all come round again: spring would follow a harsh winter, eventually. Nothing, not problems nor solutions, could be rushed – any more than you could rush the questing head of a snowdrop. The snowdrop would emerge sleepily into the air when it was good and ready.

      That became Anneliese’s motto. Things happened when they were good and ready.

      And now, it seemed, she was wrong. Totally wrong.

      She got up, went into the kitchen and put on the kettle. It was a reflex action. When she had nothing to do, she flicked that switch and busied herself with the ritual of tea-making. Most of the time, she barely drank more than half the tea.

      Edward wasn’t a tea person: he preferred coffee. There was still a jar of his favourite and wildly expensive Blue Mountain from Fortnum & Mason in the cupboard.

      Anneliese hated coffee but liked the smell of it. There would be no one to make coffee now, no rich aroma lifting into the air to tell her that Edward was in the kitchen, idly listening to the radio as he brewed up.

      There would be no other person to move a tea towel, reposition a cushion, unfold a newspaper. After three decades of living with another person, would she now get used to this aloneness? Perhaps aloneness was the true human state, and not the Platonic vision of two together. She hoped so.

      She flicked off the kettle switch, grabbed her keys and went to the back door. Swapping her flat shoes for boots, she put on the old padded jacket that hung with a selection of others on a peg in the tiny back hallway. The back door faced the beach and when Anneliese pulled it open, the fresh hit of sea breeze caught her breath.

      The scent of sand and the tang of the sea filled her lungs and she gasped for a moment before recovering.

      Her cottage was half a mile from the beach, half a mile where tenacious scrub grass and hardy sea orchids clung to the land before СКАЧАТЬ