The Voices in the Garden: Ending

 

Esther could never remember her mother’s funeral with any clarity or detail. It was as if that night, while sleeping, the day was erased from her memory like chalk from a blackboard. The dusty images that were left were faint and cloudlike. Years later she would find two photographs of the day, taken in the garden after the service. She would scour the pictures obsessively, looking for clues, trying to remember. 

In the first photograph, family and friends stand in the garden chatting, drinking tea from delicate china cups. In their sombre funeral clothes, they look as stiff and formal as marionettes, controlled by the strings of graciousness and propriety. The focus of the photo though is Esther. Esther is on the garden swing, soaring high, being pushed by Uncle Tommy. The photograph captures joy, freedom, movement. In contrast to the solemnity of the other guests, both Esther and Tommy are smiling delightedly, wildly. Looking at it years later, Esther would remember bumbling Uncle Tommy fondly. He was a shy man, deeply uncomfortable at any social gathering. That day, the swing was a welcome refuge for both he and Esther, she understood. 

The second photo showed just Esther and her father. He looks handsome and uncharacteristically groomed, elegant even, in his dark suit. He holds Esther in his arms, lifting her so she can reach one of the horses in the field at the bottom of the garden. He smiles for the camera. Esther is wearing the much-loathed green tartan dress, but has defiantly personalised it with a huge, garish pink badge, proclaiming ‘I AM 9!’ She is bewitched by the horse, is stretching out to touch its velvet muzzle, staring deeply into its soft, mellifluent eyes. It is a picture full of love and tenderness, as beautiful and heart-breaking as a pinned butterfly. 

The following Monday, Esther returned to school. The earth continued to turn. Night continued to follow day. Soon spring would bloom extravagantly into summer - that mythical summer when walking to the end of the garden felt like wading through hot tea. That endless summer when the air was thick and stagnant, neither refreshed by breeze nor cooled by rain. That barren summer when rivers dried and crops withered. That long, lonely, languid summer when the voices in the garden began.

 One suffocating Saturday afternoon, Esther closed the dusty velvet curtains and sat in the blissfully cool darkness watching a black and white film about Robin Hood. She went to the library and asked Miss Partridge to help her find as many books as she could about the mythical outlaw. After that, her days were spent reading in the speckled shade of the lilac tree. Or she would roam the arid, sun-bleached fields, Bakewell at her heels, imagining herself in a lush, green and shady forest, as one of Robin Hood’s band of merry men. She felt unmoored that summer, as if the ropes tethering her to reality had been loosened and she was slowly drifting away into her own dark and magical world. 

At bedtime, when the lustrous dusk had thickened into deep, quilted night, the voices came. Every night they came, for the whole summer, melodic and blissful. Esther would wait for them, never afraid, only beguiled. The girls sounded so happy, laughing together in the sensuous blackness. Esther opened the window to feel the coolness of the midnight air, to lean closer to hear fragments of conversations, to catch a glimpse of the girls at play. But the girls were always a distant presence, hushed and hidden. 

Eventually, the sweltering air was tinged with wood-smoke and the sharp crispness of Autumn. The summer holidays ended. School started again, with its comforting routines and rituals. The voices simply faded away and never returned. Esther thought about them often. She understood they were a gift. That when she was at her most alone, they came to comfort her, as reassuring and magical as a kept promise.