‘She always felt bad about the way things ended between you two.’
He falls silent. ‘It issofreaky when you come out with stuff like that.’
‘Oh, God, sorry!’ I exclaim as he laughs, shaking his head.
‘It’s all right, it’s just surreal. It’s like you actually knew her.’
‘Why don’tyouread her diaries?’ I ask.
‘They’re not meant for me,’ he says simply. ‘I’ll never read them.’
‘But you wanted to keep them. Was that just for me? For the sake of the book?’
‘No. There’s no way I could ever bring myself to throw them away. April might want to read them one day. It’s a bit odd, because she wouldn’t be reading about her mother: she’d be reading about the person whobecameher mother. It’s hard for me to know, or even recall, how similar those two people are.’
‘I don’t know, either,’ I reply. ‘But I like the younger Nicki a lot. She makes some bad decisions, sure, but she’s a good person at heart. She’s fun. Funny. I would’ve wanted to be her friend if I’d known her.’
‘I think you would have wanted to be her friend if you knew her in later years, too,’ he says. ‘She definitely would have likedyou.’
His comment means a lot. It bothered me, his admission that Nicki would have hated someone else finishing her book. The knowledge that we could’ve been friends makes me feel more at peace with what I’m doing.
‘Thank you for telling me that,’ I say quietly.
The conversation gives us both pause for thought.
‘Here at last!’ I say when Charlie pulls into the car park. ‘This had better be worth it.’
Right by the entrance is a series of posters with photographs and the story of Heligan. I already know much of it fromWikipedia,but the pictures catch my eye.
The gardens were created between the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century and are typical of the gardenesque style with areas of different character and in different design styles. There are aged rhododendrons and camellias, a series of lakes fed by a ram pump over a hundred years old, productive flower and vegetable gardens, an Italian garden, and a wild area that slopes steeply down into a series of valleys that ultimately drain away into the sea at the old fishing village of Mevagissey. The wilder area is filled with subtropical tree ferns and includes sections referred to as the Jungle and the Lost Valley.
Many of Heligan’s gardeners were killed in World War One, and, in the 1920s, the owner leased out the estate. The gardens fell into a serious state of neglect and were lost to sight until the 1990s, when a huge restoration project was undertaken.
One of the pictures shows a wooden door in a redbrick wall. Light spills through from the other side, and underneath is a quote from archaeologist and Eden Project creator, Tim Smit: ‘Wild horses could not have stopped us pushing that door open.’
I’m even more excited to get going after that.
Charlie brings April’s pram, and although it makes navigating some of the steeper paths virtually impossible, at least she can nap in peace. He keeps encouraging me to go and explore on my own – I do eventually, because I want to climb the rope bridge over the Jungle – but I meet up with him and April for lunch by the house. We get a couple of burgers from the barbecue hut and sit at one of many picnic tables in the shade of the trees.
‘Have you been here before?’ I ask Charlie.
‘Just once,’ he replies. ‘Years ago. It’s nice to come back.’
‘It’s unbelievable,’ I say. ‘I reckon I could stay all week.’
‘You’d probably need that long to see everything.’
I tuck my hair behind my ears so it doesn’t get in the way of my next mouthful.
‘What do you do to your hair to make it wavy?’ Charlie asks, studying me from across the table.
‘It always goes like this when I let it dry naturally,’ I reply. ‘The hairdryer blasts all of the curl out. I’m not even trying to straighten it – it does it without a brush.’
‘It suits you like that,’ he says, jigging April gently on his knee.
‘Um, thanks,’ I reply awkwardly.
‘It looks nice the other way, too, though,’ he obviously feels compelled to add and now he’s the one looking self-conscious.
