Daisy: March 2020

Knowing what follows, I hesitate before turning the page to the next section of Violet’s journal. Her joy and excitement at having reached Delhi mirror mine before getting on the plane to embark on this trip, little knowing how the world would change. And while my setbacks have hit me hard, they are nothing compared with what she faced on her arrival in the Nepalese capital.

The waiter comes over to remove my empty coffee cup and I order another latte. The café is warmer than the teahouse, where the stove won’t be lit until this evening, so I’m in no hurry to leave. I raise my eyes to the window, but the clouds still obscure the view of the high mountains that encircle the town, and then I glance back down at the journal on the table in front of me.

I’ve marked this page with a pressed flower, a faded blue poppy stuck to a piece of ivory card that was tucked among the papers in the bottom of the cedarwood chest in the library at Ardtuath. The thought of home makes me swallow hard as I wonder how Mum and my stepfather, Davy, are doing and how they are all coping with the pandemic. I check my phone again, hoping for a message from my family, but there’s been no signal all day and the screen stays stubbornly blank.

The waiter sets my coffee down with a smile and I thank him, then pick up the journal again. Just before I begin to read, an image flashes into my mind of the gilded gate in the corner of the Garden of Dreams and the devastation that lay on the other side of it. Dreams in ruins.

There could be no more fitting metaphor, I realise, for the next chapter of Violet’s journey.