His other hand rises, and with the back of his fingers, he brushes my cheek, and then, with both hands, tilts my head to his, and bends and samples my lips, once, twice and then again in a kiss so deep it takes away my breath and leaves me speechless.
“Doc O’Connell! Is that you?”
He breaks away, straightens and steps away from me.
“Mrs Munze,” he says.
“Did I disturb you?”
“Mrs Munze. Ms Beston. Ms Beston is teaching me about roses.”
Mrs Munze is not convinced.
“Haven’t seen you here much, Doc. When you coming back? We miss you. Doc Tappy is good, but he’s not like you.”
“Thank you, Mrs Munze. It’s too soon for me to make any big decisions, you understand.”
“Whatever you need, Doc. How’s the house?”
“House is fine, thank you, Mrs Munze. How’s your family?”
Mrs Munze clearly has a large family. I bite down on my smile and head back to the roses, snip, snip, snip, as Dirk listens to Mrs Munze and nods patiently, beside me.
I love this part of keeping roses. I snip at an angle near the base of a leaf, careful to choose a bud that will open the plant to more light as it grows, never back into the tangled centre.
I’m down on my knees as Mrs Munze moves away. I give her a wave and grab at Dirk’s leg to catch his attention, and it’s there again, acute awareness of the man. I snatch back my hand as if his body scalds me. It does.
“Where do you want the clippings, Dirk?”
The clouds come over again.
“Can we burn them?”
“Some of them, sure. The dry and dead ones.” I show him the oldest ones, shrivelled almost black.
“Want me to sort them? I can make different piles from now on. You’ll need gloves if you’re going to help. The thorns stay savage year round.”
As I keep working, he enters the house and returns with his coat and hat and gloves, and works silently beside me. It’s lovely to have his company. Bart never showed an interest, beyond checking the garden as a backdrop for interviews or footage.
From a back shed, Dirk finds a big old bucket. He ferries the dry wood inside the house, and then heads out somewhere in the car.
“That’s enough,” he says on his return, just as I’m tiring and the last of the roses nears completion.
He grabs the crook of my arm, hauls me up and I lean against his strength, my bones less supple than I remember. I’ve been working away quietly at the garden at Brighton Court, along the edges Professor No can’t see properly from his apartment, and making progress, but that work is varied. Millie’s rose garden is vast. Pruning it has been a joy, but my muscles and joints protest. Dirk leads me inside.
The interior is beautiful, if strangely empty and impersonal.
He takes me into a formal dining room. On the table is a bottle of wine, two tumblers, a loaf of bread on a chopping board with an old knife, and some cheeses and olives on a plate.
He turns two chairs around to face the fireplace, then holds a match beneath a stack of advertising brochures nestled beneath the dry rose clippings.
“I should have taken you into town with me, but we’d never get away. Even buying these few things I ended up in eight long conversations.”
“Must be nice to be so popular, so needed.”
“I hate it.”
He opens the wine and offers me a glass as fire leaps in the grate and the clouds darken again outside. Sitting is heaven. I’m suddenly ravenous. There’s nowhere else I want to be.
