SPRING ALWAYS COMES
Lara has gone to the park every Saturday morning, rain or shine, since she moved to the north east last November. She’s now on first-name terms with several dogs, and the man at the coffee cart knows that she likes a cappuccino with no chocolate on top. The walk takes the sharpest edge of loneliness off her weekend.
She needs it today. It’s the anniversary of her father’s death, and the call from her mother before breakfast, to check that she was OK, ended with them both sobbing as they remembered how suddenly he was gone, crumpling on the spot, a ‘but I’ve hardly touched this tea’ expression on his face.
She takes the quieter route through the park, then follows the dusty path up the hill. Grief, which is mostly just a thrum now, rises up in vicious ambush.
At the top of the slope, Lara crosses the road and goes into the churchyard. She hasn’t walked this far before; her little terraced house is at the lower edge of the town. A curved path wanders through the graves. She walks slowly, reading the names on the old headstones. Elijah, Agatha, Silas, Dorcas. Oh, she’s tired. Grieving is tiring, yes, but so is living somewhere new: the endless effort of finding everything out from scratch; of trying to make friends with people who are kind, but have enough friends of their own.
A movement snags at Lara’s gaze; it’s a ribbon, attached to the railings around a monument, moving in the April breeze. Oh, but she is tired of the cold, and the wind.
She moves closer. There must be a dozen ribbons on these railings, all purple, white, or green. Some hold the remains of flowers; some are tied tightly in bows.
This place is important. The reason taps at Lara’s memory.
Before she can read the words on the gravestone, a voice says, quietly, behind her, “It’s Emily Wilding Davison. Her family lived here. She was killed by the King’s horse.”
“Of course,” Lara nods. The colours make sense now; they were used by the suffragette movement in their campaign for votes for women.
“I’m sorry,” the woman looks at Lara, “I saw you earlier in the park and you looked upset. We were coming this way anyway, so we followed you up.”
There’s a snuffling from below, and Lara sees Morgan the dachshund, making an assault on her shoelaces. She bends and rubs him behind the ear. When she stands up again, she finds, to her surprise, that she’s smiling a real smile.
“It’s a sad day, that’s all. I’m Lara.”
“Clare,” replies the friendly face. She is holding a bunch of purple-and-white freesias, their stems wrapped in foil.
She starts to tie the posy to the railings with a piece of yellow ribbon. “I do this every year, when the freesias in my greenhouse start to come out,” she says.
“Here, let me take something,” Lara offers. She assumes that Clare will hand over her basket, but instead it’s Morgan’s lead that she finds herself holding. She smiles down at him, and he looks back up at her, cocking his head to one side, before going back to her shoelaces.
Clare steps back. She and Lara stand side by side and look at the railings and the monument, the name carved into the stone.
After a moment they turn and walk back towards the gate. Lara is still holding Morgan’s lead. Crocuses are blooming, green, purple and white, from the shelter at the base of an old oak. Clare nods towards them. “Spring always comes,” she says.