Luke looked up from his phone, where he was trying to find a footpath on an Ordnance Survey map. Helen was holding her camera out towards him.
‘I can’t really see it,’ he said, squinting at the screen on the back.
‘Move into the shade and shield your eyes,’ she told him, and he did.
‘Ah, nice!’ he said, looking at the fern Helen had captured, half in sun, half in shadow, its unfurled form like an ammonite fossil he’d once found on a beach in Dorset on a family holiday.
‘Do you think so?’ she asked with all the uncertainty of a naturally talented artist.
‘It’s beautiful.’
Helen smiled, obviously relieved. ‘I’ve been learning about chiaroscuro.’
‘Bless you!’
She laughed. ‘It’s Italian! It’s the effect of light and dark working together.’
‘So you didn’t completely waste your time on that course, then?’
‘No, I didn’t learn it there. You can’t learn everything in a single day and we focused mainly on composition. Basic stuff, really.’
‘But it was good?’
‘I enjoyed it, yes.’
He watched as she bent down, her camera poised in front of her as she took some more pictures. Luke went back to examining his phone.
‘I can’t tell where the footpath goes.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does if we don’t want to get shot by a gamekeeper.’
‘Let’s just wander around here for a while,’ she suggested. ‘We don’t have to rush off anywhere, do we?’
‘Well, I’d quite like to get to this pub for lunch.’
‘You and your stomach!’
‘What?’ he protested. ‘It’s only demanding its rights. One square meal a day!’
‘Well, all right, then.’ She got up and put her camera away. ‘Let’s find this pub.’
Shortly after that day, Helen had printed out the fern photograph and placed it on the dresser. She’d spend hours looking at it, her eye always critical.
‘How could I have made it better?’ she asked Luke.
‘I’m not sure you could have,’ he told her.
‘Should I have moved an inch to the right perhaps?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘What if I’d knelt down lower? Would the composition have been better then?’
‘Probably not,’ he said. ‘You might just have ended up with damp knees.’
He smiled sadly now as he remembered. She was always so harsh on herself.
Nicola, Helen’s sister, had said it would be nice to get a few of her photos enlarged and framed for the funeral. Luke had agreed; he’d left Nicola to it, but he’d never forget the sight of them all lined up together at the reception afterwards. Words like ‘gifted’ and ‘talented’ had floated through the air to distress him even more than he already was.
And one of the photos had been of that unfurled fern, half in sun, half in shadow. Perfectly captured.
Nicola had brought the photographs round a couple of days later and Luke had put them in the spare room. He looked at them now, marvelling at their beauty, the words ‘gifted’ and ‘waste’ circling tauntingly in his mind again. He’d never really encouraged her, had he? Not really. Not seriously. If only he could go back to that walk in the woods and really listen to her instead of making silly jokes and going on about his stomach. What would he have done differently, he wondered, if he could go back? He’d have put his phone away for a start. What on earth was he doing staring at that when his beautiful wife was in his company? He’d watch her instead, bending and stretching, squinting and smiling as she captured the beauty around her. And he’d listen instead of talking. He’d wait for her to make suggestions and take the lead and, if that meant they got lost in the woods or chased by an angry gamekeeper, then so be it. She would have been happy to spend all day there with her camera and that, in turn, would have made Luke happy too.
Luke couldn’t help feeling that he’d failed Helen in so many ways, but perhaps he could do something really special now in taking her gift to her friend, BB.
It didn’t take long for Luke to make his mind up. It was as if he instinctively knew that this was the right thing to do.
The first thing was to ring Chippy.
‘Listen,’ Luke said, ‘this is going to sound strange, but I’m going to meet a friend of Helen’s.’
‘That doesn’t sound strange,’ Chippy told him.
Luke paused before continuing, wondering how his friend would react and if he’d think he’d gone completely mad. ‘They never met. Actually, they never even knew each other’s names.’
‘Okay,’ Chippy said, ‘that does sound a little strange.’
‘It just feels right, though,’ Luke tried to explain. ‘I think it’s what Helen would have wanted me to do.’
Luke told Chippy about the gift and how strongly he felt about delivering it in person and how he also didn’t want to tell the friend the news about Helen’s death via a cold and impersonal email.
‘Well, don’t worry about anything here,’ Chippy told him.
‘I was hoping you might keep an eye on this place while I’m away. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone for.’
‘No worries.’
‘Make sure there aren’t any stacks of sympathy cards sticking out of the letter box,’ Luke said. ‘I’ll drop a key round to yours before I go. Thanks, mate. I appreciate this.’
The next thing Luke did was to shave. It felt odd seeing the old Luke after so long a disappearance, but there he was, staring right back at him from the bathroom mirror, with his slightly too long dark hair and his brown eyes which still had that haunted look about them.
Then, after packing a few things in an overnight bag, and with only a vague idea about where he might stay, Luke went through to the spare bedroom and carefully wrapped the Victorian vase in its protective bubble wrap and box, together with the blue ribbon and Helen’s card.
‘I’m taking it to BB for you,’ he whispered into the room, hoping, somehow, that Helen knew what he was doing.
It was almost a
