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‘It’s certainly a good setting.’
    ‘Begin as you mean to go on.’ She smiled at him.
    He did not return the smile but took her gloved hand, and patted it.
    A house came into view
.
    The taxi turned into a drive and sped towards it. A grey sky bore down on them as they passed trees whose bare branches permitted the sunlight to freckle the frozen earth at their roots. Lurking around them were clumps of
Helleborus orientalis
and, flaunting pale green flowers against lingering snow,
Helleborus argutifolius.
    Winter’s sleep.
    Deep and cold.
    She gazed. Beginning in her feet, a shudder went through her. Fragments of the old dream nagged at her. The ragged memories of a childhood spent in a garden rushed to the surface. It was as if the swaddling in which she had bound the remnants of her early self had loosened.
    Why? What?
    Enfolded over this garden – indefinable, but there – was the suggestion of many lives, the whisper of now-vanished presences who had walked its boundaries, loved it, and had been intimate with its corners and the long lie of the land. Lara closed her eyes. She, the city spirit, found herself, to her astonishment, envying those presences. They had known
the smell of its wet earth after rain, the dry meadow scents of summer, and the rot of frost-nipped fruit in the autumn garden.
    Will I ever be whole?
    The question was posed by her inner voice. She and it were old acquaintances. Sensible, matter-of-fact, quiet, it had, over the years, asked many questions of Lara.
    They drew up in front of the house.
    Wrapped in a headscarf and a sheepskin coat, Sarah was waiting in her car parked in the drive. She had driven down the night before and had put herself up in the local B-and-B as the legal niceties were still in train. ‘Terrible,’ she said. ‘Why don’t people spend their money on proper beds instead of tassels on the curtains and knick-knacks in the bathroom?’ She turned to Andrew. ‘I know your parents would probably love the wedding at your home but Bill is so keen for his daughters to marry from … well, hopefully from Membury. Providing …’
    There. The unvoiced ifs and buts.
    Eve looked bewildered. ‘Didn’t Dad come with you?’
    ‘He’ll be here later.’ Sarah tucked her hand under Eve’s elbow. ‘Shall we go and have a look? We can’t go further into the house than the hall as the lawyers are being bossy, but I’ve got permission for us to go round the grounds. And I’ve discovered the perfect position for a marquee …’
    I must pull my thoughts together, Lara told herself.
    Ten seconds, and it was apparent to her that this house was the place where Eve would be married. It was beautiful and crumbling. Much of its charm lay in its decay – and in the fact that it had survived.
    Ten seconds, and she
wanted
Eve to be married from here.
    Clods of frozen earth clung to her shoes as she paced in Sarah’s wake and breathed in the smell of a garden suspended and its woody undertone of leaf decay.
    ‘Wonderful,
wonderful
,’ Eve said. ‘Mum … Look over here.’
    Fretted and patchworked by old browns and new greens, with occasional splashes of winter colour – a clump of crocuses under a tree, the pale hopeful stars of the viburnum – the garden was patiently enduring its months of suffering in order to begin again.
    She observed Eve’s deepening commitment to the idea, could almost see the plans taking shape in her head while Sarah paraded this way and that and flirted with Andrew.
    ‘And here,’ said Sarah, padding ahead, in boots with thick rubber soles, ‘is where I think the marquee should be.’ They filed around a hedge and emerged in an area containing a sunken lawn edged by neglected flowerbeds. A myrtle tree stood in one corner and, flanked by statuary, a flight of steps led to a second expanse of lawn below and a small wild area in the distance.
    Eve emitted a small sound of joy. Even as a tiny girl, she had loved flowers. (And her cardboard