The Art of Preserving Love

sinks; there were shelves, neat and evenly spaced like railway tracks that went all the way up to the ceiling. Normally the shelves held the glass preserving bottles. If the preserving had just been done, the jars would sit on the shelves like autumn, filled with the shades of burnt orange and lime green of peaches, pears, figs, grapes and apricots. Over winter these would slowly disappear and be replaced with clean empty bottles waiting for the next year’s fruit. The laundry door was usually jammed ajar with a wedge of firewood. That way Beth could easily carry the laundry or the bottles of preserves in and out without having to bother with the door latch. Now the door was not only shut and latched, it was bolted and locked. Beth wouldn’t let anyone in the laundry, and what was even more concerning to Edie was that she was doing all the laundry in the kitchen, by hand, without the wringer or the copper, and wouldn’t explain why. Even more mysteriously she wouldn’t let anyone inside the laundry, they couldn’t even peek in. Beth was immovable. No one was allowed to look inside the laundry.

‘Oh, come on, Beth, you can tell me. Why you won’t let us in the laundry?’ pleaded Edie.

‘I don’t understand why you are doing the laundry in the kitchen,’ said Paul. ‘We have a perfectly good laundry and there is nothing wrong with it. I think I should demand that you use the laundry properly and whatever you have locked up in there needs to see the light of day.’

But Beth turned on her heel and said, ‘Well, Mister Cottingham, the day you feel I am not doing a good enough job is the day you can give me the sack but the laundry stays locked.’

Beth remembered the exact date that Theo told her about the roses. It was Sunday the fifth of January 1908.

Beth had said to him, ‘You and your roses. It’s all very well to leave a rose on the porch each week Mister Hooley but who do you think it is that has to clean up the mess it makes on the porch?’ And as soon as she said the words she wished she hadn’t. She had been too mean. Her words had cut his heart. She could see the grey wash over his face, his eyes became dull and his skin paled as if she had brushed away his life with no care at all. He was devastated that Edie left his roses on the porch to wither, and Beth had to clean them up.

‘I had hoped Edie would have collected the rose after I’d gone,’ he muttered.

‘She’s not the sort of girl that would do something romantic with them, Mister Hooley,’ Beth said softly, trying to close up the wound. ‘Her mind is filled with caring for Gracie, and besides she’s a practical girl.’ Not like me, she thought. If they were her roses she would put them under her pillow so their magic would make her dream of love.

Beth watched as he gathered himself together, stiffened and put his pain away somewhere she couldn’t see. He said lightheartedly, ‘Well, that’s a wicked waste, you could at least use the petals for tea,’ and he had told her how to dry roses by hanging them upside down.

‘Of course they lose their colour, shape and perfume,’ he’d explained. ‘If you want them to stay whole you have to get glue. You must carefully, with a toothpick, put glue at the base of each petal. Then you must smear the glue down the stalk to where you want to cut it. About, say, two inches. Then snip the stalk where the glue ends, fast but carefully so as not to disturb the bloom, and seal the end of the stalk with the glue. Then when the glue has dried get a container, like a tin, and fill it with two inches of sand, then place the bloom upright in the sand and put it somewhere safe to dry out for four weeks. It will dry as a complete bloom that you can carefully lift out of the sand when you want to.’

‘Who would want to bother with all that nonsense?’ she’d said.

At first she collected the roses because she thought that one day Edie might change her mind and want them, and then she began to collect them for herself. To her, the roses Theo left on the porch were the seeds of undying love. She had even thought that maybe she could feed Colin rose tea from the petals and make him love her with the same passion that Theo loved Edie; but she never did. Maybe because somewhere deep inside, somewhere she wasn’t yet willing to acknowledge, she was dissatisfied with Colin. But she didn’t know why, and when that feeling eked into her consciousness she would push it away and remind herself that of course she loved Colin. If she had spoken about it to her sister, Dottie would have laughed and told her that if she had to remind herself she loved Colin, then she obviously didn’t. ‘We’ll marry one day, Beth,’ Colin would say after he had taken her up the laneway and frantically plunged himself into her and her heart would sink, because marrying wasn’t necessarily the same as undying love.

Each Sunday after Theo’s visit, Beth carefully gathered up the rose and carried it, hidden in her apron, to her bedroom. There she jammed the door shut with her bedside chair. From her drawer, she got the glue she had cooked on the stove and sealed in a jar and the toothpicks she had purchased and very carefully followed the instructions Theo had given her. When the glue had dried she placed the rose into a clean preserving jar already filled with sand from Gracie’s sandpit.

She used a different glass jar each week. If it was a half-pint jar she cut the stem