The Seeds of Poppies

A free story - part two

The Seeds of Poppies (part two)

A year on and it had been an unusual winter in terms of the weather. Still not totally cleansed of the monotony of the desert, Josh has rediscovered his seasonal routine is dependant on the timely appearance of sun, rain and snow - though, thanks to the pandemic turmoil, at least the general absence of visitors has provided him with a little flexibility. Not that were ever that many visitors anyway. As part of his responsibilities for the various swathes of forest for which he has oversight, he keeps the signs promoting the entries into their car parks in excellent condition, everything distinct and legible; yet it seems to make little difference. Whilst the repeated lockdowns have not helped numbers, he also believes that many ‘natural’ tourist sights such as his fall into the ‘nice idea’ category; the kinds of place where, when people drive past, they say “we must go there!” but never do. Only the regular few turn up; the committed and the passionate. The fact that he has not been feeling particularly well for a few days now he also attributes to the weather. After the heat and sun of the desert, he relishes the cold, and embraces brilliantly crisp and clear mornings: hard frost on the ground; the trees dusted in white ice crystals; a last glorious winter statement as they yearn for Spring. But there have been too few such days for his liking and he suddenly feels weighed down by the greyness of it all.

Although he pays little attention to the news, he cannot but be aware of the situation. He feels blessed that he cannot work from home and that nature refuses to put itself on hold while humankind tries to sort itself out. On those occasions when he has bumped into people - colleagues and visitors alike - they seem universally preoccupied with ‘The Virus’, their sole topic of conversation endowed with capital letters. They seem genuinely envious of his situation. He believes it is not the solitude they covet but the fact that he can find isolation so rewarding. They see nothing natural in their situation and, unlike their own versions of lockdown, recognise no hardship in his. And they may be correct, of course, but what they cannot understand is the path taken prior to him landing there; the price he has already paid. It is not as voluntary a posting as they assume. But he does nothing to disabuse them, preferring instead to acquiesce, nod knowingly, perhaps unlock a portable loo, hold a gate or two open to let them through, or indulge in the ritual of a conversation over coffee sipped from shared thermos flasks. Where’s the harm in that?

*

Three years since she left and alone once again, Jonathan still struggles to establish where cooking should sit in the pecking order of his life; whether it needs to be elevated beyond a necessity. It is an idea - taking his culinary endeavours more seriously - which has always appealed to some part of him, and one which Greta certainly encouraged (though for selfish reasons). However, given the not insignificant duration since he once again began to cook meals for one, it is a question which is getting harder and harder to answer positively, layers of uninspiring routine applying matt varnish to the task and becoming increasingly difficult to shift. He is pleased that in the main he has avoided the trap of the ‘ready meal’ and the coincident over-reliance on the chiller section of the supermarket. At least twice a week he endeavours to cook dishes of double proportions - or normal proportions when there had been two of them - so that he can retain half for the following day or, by using old takeaway cartons, create a modest stock of back-up options in the garage chest freezer, just in case. He is not entirely sure the circumstances to which ‘just in case’ might apply, though recent periods of lockdown would have provided an ideal opportunity to draw on such a stock had he been compelled to totally absent himself from the world for a week or two. Were he to be paid an unexpected visit by Josh or Bernie - or even his mother come to that - there is comfort in knowing he would have no issue in feeding them, given a little judicious dipping into his reserves. Of course, what he wants more than anything else - even if he remains largely ignorant of such a desire - is to be cooking for more than just himself again, and for there to be someone else cooking for him too. Given the kitchen has been an unrewarding battleground in the past - never mind the more fundamental impact such a new arrangement would have on his life as a whole - this is a notion sprinkled with more than a little rose-tinted thinking.

As he stirs some korma sauce into a pan of part-cooked belly pork he remembers how long it had taken him to persuade Pamela as to the merits of a good curry. Not an uncommon experience, his was a pleasure discovered at University where, during his three years there, he and his friends had gradually increased the level of fire and spice to which they were prepared to subject themselves - largely in a show of bravado. Curry and beer had been natural bedfellows. In order to appeal to Pamela however he had needed to tone down his creations. Korma was as far as she would go, and although in the short-term what he came up with (she never cooked curries herself) seemed more like mild soup than anything else, its subtle flavour - with some minor tweaks - was something he came to enjoy. Looking down at the gently simmering pale yellow concoction before him, he doubts he could go back to the vindaloos of his heyday. But then there are many things to which he cannot go back, Pamela being one of them.

He sets the cooker timer to ten minutes and places a lid on the pan. Regular stirring is, he believes, one of the prerequisites of a good curry. Somewhat ironically, he fears it is one of few culinary secrets to which he has been granted access, and can’t help but draw a line to a nagging sense of unfinished business with regard to Pamela, as if there were whole chunks of her life to which he was never exposed and for which he believes she still owes him an explanation. As he switches on the kettle and prepares a cafetière - one of the few refinements to which she introduced him - he wonders whether, had he been able to appreciate that essence of her which remained untapped, things might have been different. Not that there had been anything untoward in their early years together. Having fallen in love, courtship and marriage progressed as he assumed they were supposed to. Life proved itself a modest adventure; he had been happy. Surely they both had been. But at some point Pamela’s shutters had begun to go up, imperceptibly at first. Jonathan now regards the second half of their marriage as death by a thousand cuts. Had the first of these been Pamela’s refusal to try for children? For him, that had been as natural a next step as adding milk to the coffee he has just poured. Even though it had never been discussed - not until it was too late, one might say - it had never crossed his mind that Pamela might have other ideas. She had begged patience, found excuses; and then his own life conspired against him, primarily in the form of his father’s illness. With Josh away fighting a different kind of war, he became the family’s organiser-in-chief, taking on the lion’s share of helping their mother come to terms with the way she would henceforth have to live her own life. Bernie had helped out from time to time, but back then she had begun to seem as if she wasn’t fully committed to the real world, and when she was around her presence only served to distract Pamela further.

As he sips his coffee, he tries to recall whether he had been surprised when she announced she was leaving him. He still remembers it as no more an emotional event than a bulletin being read out on the news; more a statement of fact than anything else. She didn’t want anything from him, just to be allowed to go. There was no request for money nor for a share of the house. He had asked practical questions, his head in charge over his heart; she had provided short answers where she could, evasive ones where she could not. Or where she chose not to do so. He couldn’t tell the difference. It had been a strange parting from his perspective, one devoid of both necessity and emotion; yet perhaps it was also manifestation of the secrets she had kept close. Leaning towards the conventional, Jonathan suspected there was another man, or that she had a stash of money hidden away and about which he knew nothing, a parachute always ready to be called upon. He looked for the mechanisms which engineered the break-up and missed the ripping of his heart - until she had said, in an offhand manner, “it’s a good job we didn’t have children”. Even now he wonders whether, from the very moment he had made the original suggestion of parenthood, she had been plotting her way out.

There had never been any possibility of such confusion with Greta; lack of clarity was something she failed to countenance under any circumstance. From that perspective, Jonathan always knew where he stood with her, the boundaries and potentialities of their relationship, his role within it. Had he been on the rebound when they met? How could he possibly know? From the first day she started at work - the year after Pamela’s departure - Greta had swept into his life like a tornado he was entirely unable to resist. It was not merely the ‘romantic’ that defeated him. It was the trace of a northern European accent; the way her facial features conformed perfectly to the ‘golden ratio’; her penchant for marching bra-less into his meetings, her magnificent breasts and nipples all too evident beneath the tight white shirts she tended to favour. For all that, he was essentially undone by her decisiveness. Although not the only man bowled over by her, he was the one she had chosen. Looking up from his coffee and toward the open window, he still refuses to acknowledge why. Perhaps it had been because he was three years her junior; perhaps because he represented no threat, was a ‘safe bet’; perhaps she could see he was ‘damaged goods’, a status which absolved her of any responsibility for further destruction should things not work out - which of course they didn’t when a better opportunity materialised for her. Jonathan knows he could frame their relationship in a different way, choose to see it in a more critical light, but he has established the folklore of their time together in such a way as to make it immutable: a whirlwind first few months, the sudden marriage, a road-trip honeymoon in the US, then Greta establishing herself - temporarily, as it turned out - in the very same spaces once occupied by Pamela.

Bernie had been openly critical.

“Do you know what you’re doing?” she had asked the week before their wedding. “She’s very - particular.”

Unable not to notice the somewhat unusual choice of adjective, Jonathan assumed that Bernie would come round in the end and accept the consolation prize of being able to add Greta to her virtual cast of characters to be drawn upon one day.

“There’s still time,” she said.

“Time?”

“To change your mind. To call it off.”

“Why should I call it off?”

As much as he loved Bernie, even today he still can’t escape the sensation that, to some extent, people are lab rats to her - even if she had been unquestionably right back in 2015. And the others’ view of Greta? Josh was not long out of the Army so was too preoccupied with mapping out his own future to overly care about his younger brother’s; and even though she seemed just about over the death of her own husband two years earlier, his mother’s opinion was inevitably disqualified on the grounds that she had adored Pamela and remained unable to reconcile herself to her abandoning them - for which she unquestionably, and quite openly, blamed Jonathan.

“2013 was such a shit year,” she said once, allowing herself a rare excursion into the vernacular.

Not that anyone would disagree with her, perhaps Jonathan least of all. Was it surprising, therefore, that a year or so later he couldn’t help but see Greta as an opportunity for a fresh start, in spite of what his mother and sister might think - and in spite of the ground rules Greta had very firmly laid out. Batting them aside at the time, now he cannot but regard them as conditions which bordered on the contractual: no children; one two-week foreign holiday a year with him, which he would fund; two one week holidays without him, and about which he would ask no questions. Although his role was to be that of the traditional bread-winner, responsible for assuring their general domestic comfort, her career was the more important. She argued that being older - and being a woman - meant that not only was progression harder for her, but that time was pressing too; she argued somewhat dismissively that unlike him she still had goals she wanted to achieve, and that his role was crucial in helping her get to where she needed to be. Of course she wrapped all that up in seductive language and a softer tone, and he simply went along with it. Had there been a choice? Had he heard alarm bells ringing and simply ignored them? To her credit - even after Greta had callously left him for a man who was more certain to be able to facilitate another step up the corporate ladder - Bernie never openly said “I told you so” even if it was clear that was how she felt. When he read Poppies for the second time, Jonathan had searched it for traces of both Pamela and Greta but found neither. “Those ghosts will appear later”, he told himself. It is something he stills believes; an unveiling he dreads.

*

“I’m worried about him.”

“Josh?”

She nods her head into the phone. “I haven’t heard from him.”

“No-one hears from Josh, Bernie,” Jonathan says.

“I do. We’ve been talking. Often.” She chooses not to mention she has also been speaking to Pamela - and that, as soon as the first lockdown ended they created a ‘bubble’ for themselves. It is proving a stimulating experience. Vindicated remarkably quickly, Bernie has already decided that Pat has a future; perhaps a role as a personal consultant or clairvoyant, or even a character in a book (an opportunity about which Pat is somewhat dubious).

“What have you been talking to him about?”

“The war. His war.” She says it as flatly as she can, as if there is nothing remarkable in the statement.

Her brother is unable to mask his surprise. “He doesn’t tell anyone what he went through.”

“Well he’s talking to me. Or has been. I” - she looks for the word - “persuaded him. It’s research. Or therapy. Maybe both. Once or twice a week for a little while now, since before Christmas. Which is why I’m concerned - I haven’t heard from him for about 10 days.”

“You’re going to write about his war?” Jonathan remains stubbornly incredulous.

“I didn’t say that, Dobs. In fact, I’m not writing about Josh at all. I’m thinking of creating a character who’s had similar experiences, that’s all; or about someone close to them who has. Research, like I say.”

Bernie thinks about waiting for the comeback, but disappointed that Jonathan is focussing on the reasons behind her conversations rather than their brother’s welfare, pushes on.

“He might have had an accident,” she suggests, endeavouring to bring Jonathan back to her primary concern.

He laughs. “Josh doesn’t do ‘accidents’. Never has from what I can recall. And if he had - well, he probably wouldn’t be here now.”

She has always maintained that profile of him in her mind too, but now knows - vividly, from what he has told her about Afghanistan - that it only takes one slip, one error of judgement. Everything changes in a fraction of a second.

“He works with such brutal machinery sometimes, doesn’t he? I mean, chainsaws and things. What if there had been an accident, out in the forest somewhere, miles from anywhere. How would we know? How would anyone know?”

“Because I’m sure he has to check-in somehow. Or maybe his boss or his colleagues regularly go to see him.” Jonathan tries to be consoling. “He may be our family’s incarnation of Captain America, but he can’t do everything on his own.”

It is a joke, but she chooses not to laugh.

“Will you call him?”

“Me? What difference would that make? I mean, if he’s not answering your calls…”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ve upset him somehow, asked too many questions. Maybe he thinks he’s told me too much - or told me something he wishes he hadn’t. Perhaps he doesn’t trust me any more.”

“And have you?”

“Have I what?”

“Gone too far, Bernie.” Jonathan recalls a few incidents with Greta just before she walked out on him. “You know how direct you can be sometimes…”

She knows what he means, yet feels inclined to defend herself.

“I prefer ‘honest’, Dobs. Being straight with people, that’s all. There’s only one truth, when all’s said and done.” She pauses just a moment. “So will you call him?”

“As soon as you hang up.”

“Thanks. And you’ll text me to let me know what happens, what he says?”

“Of course.”

As she waits, staring at her phone, she wonders if she actually believes what she had said to Jonathan about there only being one truth. At one level she feels the statement is logically true, but people are essentially illogical; they have feelings, opinions and perspectives. Take Pamela. Isn’t she proof of the existence of a different truth, one completely at odds with that which family folklore had come to believe? Certainly different from her ex-husband’s version of reality. Bernie now knows things about Jonathan that had been hidden from her, and she has an alternative take on why his relationship with Pamela failed. Only one truth? In part because of the ripples truth creates, she doesn’t think so.

Her phone pings and she looks down at the newly arrived text message: ‘no answer’.

*

The cabin is well insulated. Without any heating other than a wood burning stove in the lounge-cum-kitchen and a small portable radiator in the bedroom, it has to be. Winter nights can be brutal. On odd occasions when snow is piled high against the walls you can almost hear the temperature fall.

It is more than a cabin, of course. There are later incarnations of such structures - updated, expanded, located in more clement spots and glued together with the pride of a mini housing estate - which have been sold to people to use as holiday homes. A few hardier souls are permanent residents. The brochures in which they are showcased refer to them as ‘luxury lodges’, with exotic names and artistic photographs designed to conjure up both romantic and adventurous living experiences. Their practical aspects - triple insulation, central heating, the choice of a sauna or an external hot tub - were also emphasised, endorsed by high-quality images of internal minutiae. Shots of the surrounding forest were softened by showing the trees silhouetted against a sunrise or a sunset, and there was always at least one photograph of a semi-hidden deer or a ‘resident’ sitting by the large lake fishing. The snow and the biting winters were never mentioned, neither was the almost constant background music of the wind in the trees - sometimes soothing, more often than not worrying - nor the purr from a motorway close enough to the little estate to be audible on rare days when the wind chose to be still. Not that Josh’s cabin is anywhere near the residential park.

Even though fishing wasn’t something in which he was particularly interested, he had posed for more than one of those lake-side photographs; sitting there playing the part for an hour or so was no hardship, especially as it allowed him time to look out over the water and think - not that he remembers his thoughts from those experiences just at the moment. Communicating with a telephone mast situated on a not too-distant edge of the forest, his mobile has been ringing. Unable to precisely locate the sound, he assumes the device is somewhere in the kitchen, left lying around on the work surface. Or it could be buried in one of the pockets of his heavy coat. He hasn’t the inclination to try and remember when he saw it last - nor the strength to go and find it. His wits - having not yet entirely deserted him - tell him the battery must be nearly spent. Soon it will be unable to do anything.

Had he made a mistake? That is the one question which haunts him as he drifts in and out of consciousness, memory replayed with subtitles beneath, a dream where he sees himself struggling into the snow - was it two days ago? - convinced he had succumbed to no more than a head cold, one of the perennial perils of his isolated existence. Such minor ailments had been brushed aside before. Fresh air, a couple of hours’ work - even in a foot or more of snow - would surely do the trick, prove that he was above such things, that Joshua Wells didn’t suffer. And he has seen real suffering. He knows what that looks like. But this? This was nothing.

Or that had been his assumption. What was unusual about a little cough when you were feeling below par? Or a shortness of breath? He had told himself to suck it up, to pull himself together; after all, he has seen men with their arms and legs blown off. And he has told Bernie about some of them.

For a while he worried that telling Bernie about Afghanistan was a kind of betrayal - of both himself and the colleagues he had lost or seen maimed. He was nervous about what she would do with what he told her, what she would write; he thought of stopping but all too soon found the experience soothing, as if it were medication of some kind, regular doses twice a week. Keep taking the tablets.

The phone. It was probably Bernie. How often had it rung? He’d lost count.

He had intended to lay down for a short while, just long enough to get the cold out of his system, but had awoken some thirteen hours later, disorientated, wheezing, his head feeling as if it was about to explode. There was a pressure in his ears that reminded him of an explosion in Kandahar, the one that tore Scottie to pieces. He hadn’t yet told Bernie about Scottie. He felt as if something had been drained from him while he slept; tried to move but could not, so resolved to rest a little longer. Then the phone had rung for the first time - or was it the second, the third? He remembers being laid low by German measles when he was a child. It had been a similar experience he thinks; a vague kind of paralysis, the desire for it to be tomorrow already and the sickness over. He finds himself wishing such things once more, and before he slips back to sleep tries to imagine himself in his coat and boots, out through the door and into the snow, clearing paths, chopping wood, lighting the log burner again to warm up the cabin.

And answering the phone.

*

When Jonathan’s phone rings a few days later, his immediate assumption is that it will be Bernie once again, calling to provide him with some sort of update. In the time between the third peal and when he lifts the phone from its cradle he has already constructed a scenario where Josh and Bernie have re-connected once again and Bernie has persuaded their brother to call him. “Jonathan’s worried,” she might have said, a white lie partly to dilute her own fears and partly to distribute familial concern more evenly. But second thoughts, arriving in the instant during which he opens his mouth and says his name, forces Jonathan to remind himself that he has never known Bernie to lie. He is still vaguely unsettled when his mother’s voice surprisingly intrudes into his consciousness. “She was in pieces,” he tells Bernie later that day.

Josh had been found by one of his colleagues during a routine visit. Unable to rouse him by knocking on his front door, they had tried calling him. Hearing the mobile responding inside, they then walked round the outside of the cabin, peering through windows and into the various shades of gloom beyond. Catching a glimpse of Josh static on the bed, they had resorted to brute force and charged at the back door, ripping the lock from the frame and sending splinters into the kitchen.

“They were too late, of course. It took the medics a little while to get there, but they soon confirmed he’d been gone about ten to twelve hours. There was some confusion I think, and it took a while for Josh’s colleague to speak to whoever he needed to. Then they called mum. She rang me pretty much straight away.”

“Poor mum.”

“I know. She was on her own, of course, and as there was no way either of us could get down to her quickly I made her give me Audrey’s phone number - you know, her friend from two doors down - and I got her to go and be with her. After that I had to get the doctor to her, then get in touch with Josh’s work, the police, all sorts. I’m sorry I didn’t call you straight away but I needed to know mum was being looked after and that whatever needed to be gone through was at least started.” Jonathan pauses, conscious he has rattled through his overview. He had chosen to do so in order to forestall any questions Bernie might have had. There is a short silence. “Bernie?”

“And how are you?”

“Me?” He is thrown. Her question seems entirely inappropriate. Surely he is the least important of them all. “Okay, I suppose. I spoke to Audrey again just before I called you. The doctor’s given mum something to calm her down, sedate her. I don’t know. Audrey says she’s bearing-up. Apparently mum said she was in some way prepared; something about having lived with the threat of such news every single day Josh was in Afghanistan.”

“And we probably didn’t think like that at all,” Bernie observes.

Jonathan is shocked.

“Didn’t you worry about him?”

“Of course! I’m not saying that. All I’m saying is that it must have been different for mum, Josh being her son and everything. There’s no way we could have felt or understood that.” She waits for acknowledgement but gets none. “What was it?”

“What was what?”

“What killed him, Dobs. There are” - here she hesitates - “several possibilities…”

She leaves a gap, inviting Jonathan to fill it in, to come up with his own list of possibilities. He responds quickly.

“The virus they think. No sign of anything else. They’ll check of course, but they suspect he hadn’t been well for a while; stuck all the way out there on his own, well, how could anyone know?”

“Which explains why he didn’t answer his phone.”

“Because he was too ill.” Jonathan completes the thought.

“Do they know how he got it? I mean, he was hardly ever in close contact with people.”

“They haven’t said - and I’m not sure how they can know. Maybe it was when he went into town shopping, or he caught it from someone who came to visit the forest.”

“Just bad luck then. An accident.”

Jonathan remembers what he had said about Josh not ‘doing’ accidents. It had been a joke that was no longer funny - and no longer true.

*

“How do you think he’ll handle it?”

It is a day later. Bernie sits across from Pamela in the small sofa she has come to make her own, feet tucked beneath her, book in her lap. She has studied Pamela for a few moments before speaking, rousing the latter from her own novel.

“Jonathan?”

Bernie nods.

“Why ask me? He’s your brother.”

“Obviously; but I didn’t live with him for seven years - not as an adult, anyway. I could guess, but even if I tried not to, part of my assessment would inevitably be informed by the little boy I did live with, the one who used to try and build dams in rivers with sticks and stones.”

Pamela lays her book on the arm of her chair.

“I doubt I’ll surprise you,” she says, then pauses as if to organise her thoughts. “He’ll be very organised and logical about things, of course; take on responsibility for the practical.”

“Who else would?” Bernie interrupts.

“Indeed. But that would be his way in any event. He’ll see it as his job. So he’ll sort things out, partly - he’ll say - to take the burden of your mother, but mainly because he won’t be able to help himself. It’s a kind of defence mechanism, I suppose; bury yourself in the nuts and bolts of things so that you don’t have to worry about your emotions.”

“Was he always like that?”

Pamela smiles.

“No, of course not. And I bet your little boy in shorts wasn’t either!”

“Dobs?” Bernie laughs, a jumble of memories cascade at light speed through her mind. “He used to be many of the things he isn’t now: frantic, enthusiastic, ambitious, optimistic. I remember him being quick to things too. Perhaps it was because he was always trying to compete with Josh, whether he realised it or not. He wanted to be first, faster, stronger; he needed his pictures to be the best, his Lego models the tallest…though they rarely were. That kind of thing.”

“Hardly the Jonathan of today.”

“Hardly.”

They look away from each other, Bernie down to the book lying open across her knee, Pamela up towards the window as if she has caught sight of something outside.

“Why is that, do you think?”

It is a question either one of them could have asked - though inevitably it is Bernie who does.

“I don’t know. I guess he lost something along the way. Gradually. All those emotional things.” Pamela frowns. “I need to be careful.”

“Careful?”

“Because you might think I had a role to play. And perhaps I did. How can I not have, I suppose.”

“He used to hate coming second.” Bernie is astute enough to let Pamela’s comment fall between them. From what both Pamela and Jonathan himself have told her, she knows enough about those seven years to have constructed a timeline for the changes in her brother during his relationship with the woman who now sits across from her. There has always been sufficient evidence to map out the cracks and fissures, the inflexion points along the way. And now, with her presence in Pamela’s house - and most often in her bed - that evidence has become both more concrete and more personal. “Josh used to beat him at just about everything. He was quicker, tougher. Almost certainly brighter too. By the time they were out of shorts I suspect Dobs was already just a little tired of - something.”

“That’s hardly a ringing endorsement of me!” Pamela’s objection is immediate and accompanied by a change of tone. “You make it sound as if I was someone - I don’t know - he ‘settled for’. Or that I chose him because he was - what? - a loser.”

Bernie shakes her head gently.

“You, my dear, were his saviour. I don’t think he was ever happier than when he was with you. You gave him the chance to be the man he had the potential to be - just as you have given me something similar.” She waits to see if there is any response. The younger woman glances down at her book and Bernie feels the tension dissipate. Bordering on forty, she wonders if her extra five years have given her a kind of wisdom. Or is it something else, an amalgamation of unlocked experience and the inevitable bequest of everything that led to Poppies, plus an appreciation of the future? “The fact that he eventually resigned himself to being the person he is today is not down to you. How could it be?”

There is a silence brought about by Bernie’s rhetorical question which suddenly wraps itself about them, enveloping the room and all it contains. It is as if cotton wool has materialised to cocoon and protect them. They look around, avoiding each other’s glance even though they know the moment of danger has passed.

“Isn’t it odd?” says Pamela.

“What?”

“That Josh has just died and here we are talking about Jonathan.”

“Odd? I don’t think so, not really. In my experience you can’t talk about any one of us without including the others. In the same way, in whatever I write, Jonathan and Josh - and now you - will always be there, somewhere, like invisible hands guiding me.”

“Or ghosts,” suggests Pamela.

“Or ghosts.”

*

So what were they now, those who were left?

Spring arrived hesitantly, as if Josh’s passing had given it permission to emerge from its own isolation, tentatively projecting fingers of light onto the earth with promises of warmth, an optimism suggesting things would start to get better. Jonathan wondered how you might measure those; know; be certain.

He had been surprised how stoical their mother had been. By the day of the funeral it was as if she had already indulged her grief, worked it through before she needed to see them, as if overt sadness was an embarrassing blemish which required surgical removal. Unaware of her resolve, he had tiptoed around her at first, wary of indulging in too much reminiscence, busying himself with practicalities and organisation. He kept telling himself that it was important things went smoothly. Three of Josh’s old comrades had presented themselves at the church; in full uniform they leant proceedings a gravitas and solemnity that seemed to fit with the post-Army Josh he had come to know, the one who had lived on after his war. They endowed events with a seriousness which conferred importance and respect upon the man who was not there. The only time his mother had shown any signs of breaking down was when she had first seen them, resplendent as if newly minted, slowly walking up the path towards the narthex. Perhaps in slow step like that they had reminded her of how she had lived through those years fully expecting to one day find herself following Josh’s coffin shrouded in the Union flag and borne aloft by six from his regiment perfectly attired and perfectly in unison. If so, seeing them out of step, almost at their ease, might have offered her some comfort, the reward of knowing that earlier catastrophe - and the formal pageant it would have inevitably spawned - had been avoided. It might just have been enough to see her through the day.

“He was lucky really,” she says to Jonathan out of nowhere as they walk slowly away from the crematorium, the formal car waiting to take them back to her house where Audrey was busy putting the finishing touches to the small tea on which they had settled.

He lets it go, partly because he is unsure how to respond, and partly because his eye is draw once again to Bernie and Pamela walking slightly ahead of them; Pamela’s arm is round Bernie’s waist, his sister’s head slightly inclined toward his ex-wife’s shoulder. He had been taken aback when the two of them had emerged from the same car, accepting a kiss on the cheek from Pamela as if they were old friends brought together by sad circumstance. His mother had embraced her as if there had been no passage of time since they had last seen each other, and as the four of them congregated outside the church waiting for the hearse, he was struck how an outsider could easily have taken them for siblings - he, Bernie and Pamela - his mother behaving as if they all belonged to her. He wanted to ask his mother when she had last seen Pamela, but chooses not to do so; it seems inappropriate.

“You don’t mind, Dobs?” Bernie had asked him once she had released him from her initial hug.

“Mind?”

“That Pammy’s here. I needed some moral support.”

It was a statement that seemed to short-circuit all the questions and answers that should have preceded it, and as such left Jonathan attempting to draw conclusions, build his own narrative. All of which was Bernie’s territory of course, and he found himself adrift as a result. Striving for some kind of resolution had forced his detachment from proceedings a little, and seeing them walking just ahead of him simply confirms he is yet to successfully conclude his study.

“Will you miss him?”

Jonathan is standing in the back garden examining the naked borders, knowing that beneath their dull brown surface his mother’s perennials are stirring. In a month it will be greener; in three or four, a riot of colour. He feels Bernie’s hand slip through his arm before he hears her voice.

“Of course,” he replies. “Even though we didn’t see that much of each other, it was comforting to know he was there if we ever needed him.”

“I suppose so,” she says, evidently unconvinced, “though I do wonder if he would ever have changed.”

“Changed? How?”

“Oh, got over his war. Reconciled himself to it and what he experienced; put it behind him. Phrase it however you like.”

“You don’t think he had?” Jonathan makes to walk down the garden but she holds him in place.

“Do you?”

“Northumberland; his forests. I got the impression he’d found what he was looking for. He seemed - I don’t know - happy enough.”

Bernie laughs gently, as if she is humouring him.

“When do you last remember Josh really happy?” It is a question she could have asked of any of them. In her mother’s case happiness would surely have accompanied Josh’s leaving the Army, but after that? She wonders about herself too, feeling as if she is close to something, yet fundamentally unsure how relevant being happy is. She returns to her theme. “I mean, really happy, Dobs? Because I can’t.” Her brother inclines his head; a sign he is either agreeing with her or inviting her to go on. “That’s not to say he couldn’t have been. But I don’t buy that notion that he had found himself. He was still running away from his past, joining the dots as to what it had done to him.”

“He told you that?”

“In a way. It was in his voice when he talked about Afghanistan; in the stories, the atrocities, the pain. I heard it most when he talked about other soldiers, people he knew who hadn’t been as lucky as he had, those who hadn’t got out in time. There was a part of him that couldn’t understand why they had been singled out to suffer and he hadn’t; that was the version of Josh who struggled with luck and fate and chance, what happened one day to the next. In the desert, I mean. That’s one of the reasons the forest suited him so well: there was no similar chance or fate for him to worry about. Seasons happened, trees grew. It was predictable. There were never any alternatives to concern him.” She pauses long enough to acquiesce to their moving down the garden. “I think he was beginning to see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, simply because he had taken the brave step of sharing.”

“Your conversations.”

She nods her head, releasing his arm as she does so. What does she see when she looks into the borders? More stories unfolding.

“Was it too little too late? I hope not.”

They walk on in silence until they reach the trellis that partially shields them from their mother’s modest vegetable patch.

“And what about us, Bernie?” Jonathan asks. It is a question that surprises her.

“Us?”

“Is it too late for us, Bernie? Haven’t we been fighting our own wars, our private battles? Don’t we each have wounds to tend? Doesn’t there come a point when we say that we’ve had enough of trying?”

She smiles at him.

“That’s unusually philosophical for you, Dobs.”

“Well if you can’t be philosophical at a funeral, when can you be?”

It is not meant as a joke but Bernie laughs nonetheless. She reattaches herself to his arm, turns him around, and begins to steer him back toward the house.

“And where are your scars, brother mine?”

“They’re obvious aren’t they? Take your pick. You arrived here with one of them.”

“Ah.”

She suddenly finds herself not in the mood to explain or analyse; the former would take too long, and the later be a fruitless exercise. Would Jonathan be able to take it all in, process and understand it? There is nothing she can say that might fill the gap she now senses between the two of them. Having lost one person who acted as a bridge between them, Bernie realises Josh has been replaced by another; but Pamela comes with a different history, in some ways a less innocent one. What had Jonathan said all those months ago about playing in the river when they were children? That was the kind of history which easily morphs into legend. Perhaps Pamela may find herself in the same category at some point in the future, finding an occasion to bring them together, one which permits sharing, honesty, the philosophical. But now is not the time. It is too early; so much of their history has yet to be written. And, if she is honest with herself, she finds it difficult to commit to the off-the-cuff; though she feels she is trying, it is not an environment where she feels able to work things through. She needs quiet, blank sheets of paper, and to be supported by characters she has yet to invent.

“When are you off?” Jonathan chooses not to pursue her evasion.

“We’ve a train booked a little after four.”

He can’t help but remark the confidence in the way she said ‘we’.

“Do you want a lift to the station?”

“There’s a taxi already booked. And anyway, that’s probably for the best, don’t you think?” It is a cryptic comment from which she swerves back to the mundane. “One more cup of tea before we go?”

Jonathan watches Bernie as she leaves his side and walks back into the house. It is, he realises, a house he has never liked. After Devon and his grandmother’s - when they were all still together - his mother’s current house, smaller, unremarkable, stands as a monument to loss. She is here because their grandfather died, then their grandmother, then their father. And then, one by one, the three of them choose to leave her - and now Josh has gone altogether. It is a house into which his mother has been forced, beating a retreat through no fault of her own.

When was Josh happy? That had been Bernie’s question. When were any of them last that way, his mother included? He looks back down the brown garden and to the brown trellis, and he remembers a magical garden with a river beyond it and children building dams in the sunshine.