PART 1
My husband passed twelve days before our apples were ready.
I want to be accurate about that sentence, because I said it about forty times in the first week and it was only much later that I understood what it actually meant.
Those trees were his pride.
Four apples and two pears along the back fence, planted the spring we moved in, eleven years ago, when Rory was a baby and the garden was mud.
He pruned every branch himself, in February, with a pair of secateurs his father gave him. He went out and checked the fruit nearly every morning before work, in his dressing gown, with a mug of tea, turning the apples in his hand without picking them.
And he taught our son, very patiently, how to tell when an apple is actually ready.
You cup it. You lift it and give it a quarter turn. If it comes away in your hand, it’s ready. If you have to pull, you leave it.
And he had a rule, which he said every year and which Rory could say along with him by the time he was seven.
Not before, Rory. Never before.
Not long before he died — about three weeks — he put his hand on Rory’s shoulder at the bottom of the garden, in the evening, with the light going, and said:
These trees will keep looking after you. Even when I’m not here.
I told him straight away not to talk like that. I said it quite sharply, from the back door. He laughed and said he only meant they would outlive all of us, which is what trees do.
I had no idea how soon it was going to matter.
Hamish died on a Wednesday, at work, in a meeting. His heart. Forty-one. There had been nothing wrong with him that anybody knew about, and I am not going to write about that week.
The day we came home from the service, I was carrying our three-year-old asleep on my shoulder, heavy as a bag of sand.
Rory was walking next to me, holding his dad’s old cap flat against his chest with both hands. He had taken it off the hook in the hall that morning and he had not put it down all day.
We had barely reached the house when I heard a crack from the back garden.
Then leaves. A great deal of them.
