At first, she bought specifically for her own garden, but then, after amassing far more than she needed, or had room for, she decided to make a business out of it and rented a small shop in the village that had become available.
She called it All Things Gardenalia and oh, how she had loved that little shop. With the fashion for recycling and anything remotely vintage, she did surprisingly well and was constantly having to source new stock.
It had been a sad day when she’d taken the reluctant decision to close the shop because of the coronavirus crisis that had so devastated the world. She had sold some of the remaining stock online, but a lot of it still remained in the garage. One day she would get around to having a sort out and sell what she had left.
Colin would be appalled to see the state his once tidy garage was in now. It had always been his domain, where he had religiously put away their cars to spare them from the peril of being exposed to the salty air. Naomi was not so particular about such things and regularly left her car out to fend for itself.
‘Standards have been allowed to slip,’ she could imagine Colin saying.
More than two years on since his death and she could still hear his voice as clear as if he were right next to her.
She supposed she always would.
They had been out for dinner with friends in Chichester when he died. They’d been celebrating his sixty-sixth birthday, and when it was over, when they were putting on their coats, Colin had looked at her with a strange puzzled look on his face as though he’d suddenly remembered something important to ask her. Then thumping a hand to his chest, he’d closed his eyes with a grimace and gasped.
A big man – a bear of a man was the way he was often described – there had been no way of catching him, and he’d slammed against the table at which they’d just eaten, tipping it over on top of him as he dropped heavily to the floor.
The memory of Colin lying there amongst the debris of their empty wineglasses and coffee cups haunted her for months afterwards. It was such an undignified end to a man’s life.
He had been warned by their GP, a personal friend of the family, to cut back on the amount of alcohol he consumed. He’d been told to watch his diet too. But he was old-school and refused to moderate what he ate, no matter how much Naomi nagged him. He was the kind of man who believed the usual rules didn’t apply to him; he was untouchable.
‘I’m going to die of something,’ he would say when she tried to make him see sense, ‘and I hope to God it happens before I go gaga!’
The perfect end for him would have been falling asleep in the conservatory after a day of sailing in his beloved boat, theMarlow. The name, at Naomi’s suggestion, had been a combination of Martha and Willow’s names.
The absence of his larger than life presence had taken some getting used to when he’d died, but she had not been what you would call heartbroken. Her life had not ground to a halt as people might have believed it would when they were paying their respects at the funeral. The way they’d offered their sympathy it was as if they thought she couldn’t exist without Colin, that he had been everything for her.
The truth was, once the funeral was behind her, she had felt a gradual transformation of her old self into a new and stronger self. Her genuine self, she liked to think.
While it was true Colin had been the one to make all the financial decisions, which was his area of expertise after all, him being an associate director of an international investment company, she was the one who ran the show behind the scenes at home.
Yes, he was the star performer on stage, the one who held court and entertained their friends and his numerous work colleagues and clients, but she was the one backstage directing, producing and changing the scenery. She had accepted a very long time ago that there could only be one star performer in their marriage, and that was Colin. That was how some partnerships had to be.
She had been widowed for just over two years now and there wasn’t a day when she wasn’t reminded of Colin, but she refused to live in the past. Life changes and acceptance of that fact enabled a person to adapt and change as well. Maybe even for the better.
Her coffee finished, she saw that the curlews in the mudflats had now been joined by a couple of industrious redshanks. Dig, dig, dig, went their beaks.
Redshanks always reminded Naomi of her eldest daughter, Martha. It was the purposefulness of the bird that did it, the way it went about its business with such conviction. That was Martha all over – determined and focused. She set herself a goal and applied herself to it with unwavering intent. She was a doer, just like her father had been. In contrast, Willow was more like a wren – dainty and hopping around without any real direction.
As sisters they really couldn’t be more dissimilar. It never ceased to amaze Naomi that two children from the same parents could be so utterly different.
Whereas Martha was dark-haired and tall with an oval face and hazel eyes, and a nose that she claimed was too long, Willow was smaller with a more petite build and her heart-shaped face was framed by blonde hair. Her eyes were blue, like Naomi’s, and set wide apart. As a child she had always been picked to be an angel in the school nativity play, a role Martha had never been interested in playing. She always wanted to be the innkeeper announcing in a commanding voice that there was no room at the inn.
‘Ahoy there!’
Leaning forwards, Naomi turned her head to the left from where the voice emanated. She knew without actually seeing him that it was Ellis Ashton, the new tenant of Waterside Cottage, her nearest neighbour.
Ellis had moved in at the end of February, just over two months ago. He was sixty-four years of age, widowed with a grown-up stepson living in Los Angeles and had recently retired as a client director for an asset management firm. His work had taken him to Frankfurt, Brussels, New York and latterly London, where he’d been temporarily renting a house in Richmond.He’d then moved here to be nearer his mother, who was being looked after in a local care home.
‘Ahoy to you too,’ she said with a smile.
‘Permission to come aboard?’
‘Permission granted.’
Lifting the latch on the wooden gate, he pushed it open.
Now directly in front of her, Naomi could see that his denim-blue eyes matched the colour of his shirt and the sky above him. Bending at the waist, and in a very courtly manner, he kissed her cheek. Then with a smile – a smile that had not changed from the one she remembered a long time ago – he produced a bunch of pink and cream tulips from behind his back.
