Nothing Here Dies

Chapter One: The Paper Garden

The wind came off the North Sea all night, and by morning the garden had lost three roses.

Vivienne Lacey found them on the gravel path: two of the cream ones she had made in August and a red she had finished only last week, its petals now pulped and darkened, the wire stem bent double. She crouched down slowly, in stages, the way you lower a heavy thing you do not trust yourself to hold, and gathered them into her apron.

Rain was the enemy. Wind she could plan for. She had learned in forty years of textile work how a material behaved when you pushed it, and heavy watercolour stock, sized and sealed with three coats of matte varnish, would take a Norfolk gale better than most living stems. But rain got underneath. Rain found the seams where she had glued petal to calyx and it swelled the fibres and the whole architecture went soft and gave up.

"You're not meant to be out here."

Anwen Pryce stood in the doorway of the wall with her bag over her shoulder and her car keys still in her hand, forty-one years old and unimpressed by anybody.

"I heard the wind," Vivienne said.

"You heard the wind. And you thought, best go and stand in it." Anwen came down the path in her sensible shoes, taking care, as she always did, not to brush the beds. Along both sides of the gravel the garden stood as Vivienne had built it: hellebores with their heads bowed, tissue-thin and grey-green; a drift of cow parsley made from a hundred and twelve separate paper umbels; snake's-head fritillaries on wires so fine they shivered; foxgloves as tall as a child, each spotted throat painted with a brush of three hairs. Nothing here had ever grown. Nothing here had ever needed water. Nothing here, in seventeen years, had died in the way things die — not properly, not once and for all. When one went, Vivienne made it again.

"Kitchen," Anwen said. "Hands."

They sat at the table under the window where the light was best and Anwen unwound the dressings. The right hand was the bad one. Sixty years ago the skin across the back of it had burned and healed and burned again in the sense that all such skin keeps burning, thin as onion paper, tightening a little more each decade, and now the knuckles stood up like a row of pebbles under cloth and there was an ulcer at the base of the thumb that had been open since June.

"You've been folding," Anwen said.

"I've been writing."

"Writing's worse." Anwen cleaned the wound with a gentleness that never matched her voice. "Did you take the tablets?"

"Some of them."

"Which some?"

"The ones that don't make the words go stupid."

Anwen looked up. She had been coming three times a week for two years and she knew the shape of what was inside this woman better than Vivienne's own family did, because she had read the letters from the haematology department that Vivienne left face down on the dresser and never mentioned. Myeloma. Slow. Advanced past the point where anybody talked about treatment; they talked instead about comfort, and about how much time, and the answer they gave in July had been *months, probably, rather than a year.*

"You're allowed to be in pain and still be clever," Anwen said.

"I'm not clever enough to spare any."

When the dressings were done and the tea drunk, Anwen washed the cups and said, at the door, in a different voice, "Is anybody coming? At Christmas. Anybody at all."

"There's a son," Vivienne said.

"There's a son," Anwen repeated, and left it there, because it was not the first time.

After the car had gone, Vivienne went into the back room and sat down at the table where the manuscript was.
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It was four hundred and eleven pages of longhand in six school exercise books and a stack of loose foolscap, held down against draughts by a smoothing iron she had inherited from her mother. She had begun it in February, when the consultant had used the word *indolent* about the disease as though it were a lazy lodger. She wrote in the mornings, an hour, sometimes two, until the pen made her hand shake. Some days she wrote nothing and read what was already there and changed a word.

On the first page, in capitals she had gone over twice: THE WEAVER'S CONFESSION.

She had three chapters left. She knew exactly what was in them. She had known for fifty-seven years.

What she did not know — what she had turned over every night like a stone she could not get comfortable on — was who was supposed to read it. Frederick was dead. Henry did not speak to her. There was a granddaughter somewhere in Manchester who sent a card at Christmas signed *love Robin* in handwriting Vivienne had never learned to recognise.

She uncapped the pen. She wrote four words. She crossed out two.

At half past three, a car she did not know pulled up in the lane.

It sat there for a long while with the engine off. Vivienne watched from the window. A woman got out at last — tall, dark coat, hair pulled back, a bag over one shoulder — and stood looking at the cottage the way people look at buildings they have decided in advance to dislike. Then she came up the path and knocked, three knocks, hard.

Vivienne opened the door.

The woman on the step had Frederick's jaw and Sheila's eyes, and for a moment the ground moved.

"Hello," the woman said. "I'm Robin. I'm — Henry's daughter. Your granddaughter."

"I know who you are."

"Do you?" Robin gave a short laugh, embarrassed. "We've met twice. I was eleven the second time."

"You were nine," Vivienne said. "It was Frederick's sixtieth. You had a plaster on your knee and you asked me why my hand was like that and your father took you outside."

Robin's mouth opened slightly and closed.

"You'd better come in," said Vivienne. "It's coming on to rain and I've things in the garden I need to bring under cover."

Robin followed her in. The cottage smelled of paraffin and paper and something medical. In the front room every surface was covered: half-built stems in jam jars, coils of florist's wire, tin palettes with the paint dried in cakes, a guillotine, three pairs of scissors, a scalpel. On the windowsill, a completed spray of something small and white with five petals, so exact that Robin leaned in before she understood it wasn't real.

"Meadow saxifrage," Vivienne said, from the kitchen. "Take your coat off. There's a hook."

They brought in the flowers together. Robin carried them awkwardly, two at a time, terrified of crushing them, while the old woman moved along the beds and lifted each pot free of its collar of gravel with the assurance of a woman handling her own inventory. The walled garden was maybe fifteen yards by thirty, high brick, a door at the far end that had rusted shut. In the rain the whole place had a strange sound — not the wet slap of leaves but a dry, high rustle, like a crowd whispering.

"There's no grass," Robin said.

"Gravel. Grass needs mowing and mowing needs a man."

"And nothing's — nothing's alive."

"No," said Vivienne, with something like satisfaction. "Nothing here dies, either."

They got the last of them into the shed. Vivienne stood in the doorway breathing carefully, one hand on the frame, and Robin saw for the first time, in the flat grey light, how thin she was under the layers; how the cardigan hung; how the skin at her temple was the colour of the paper on her table.

"Right," Vivienne said. "You've not driven four hours to help me with the pots. What do you want?"

Robin had rehearsed it in the car, twice, out loud, on the long straight stretch past the wind farms. All of it went out of her head.

"I want to ask you about Lacey Brothers Woolens," she said. "And about your sister."

The rain came harder against the windows. Somewhere in the shed a paper foxglove, disturbed, tipped against another with a small papery knock.

Vivienne Lacey looked at her granddaughter for a long moment, and what crossed her face was not shock. Robin, who had interviewed liars for a living for nine years, would think about it for weeks afterwards and only be able to describe it one way.

It was the face of a woman hearing a knock she had left the door unlocked for.

"Well," said Vivienne. "You'd better put the kettle on."