The Mill on Magnolia Lane: A gorgeous feel-good romantic comedy

by Tilly Tennant

  ‘Yes he did,’ Jude said, grinning at Charlie, who now grinned back.

  ‘Lizzie had the little fish things,’ he said. ‘I didn’t like them.’

  ‘Sushi?’ Harriet asked. ‘Oh, I know your feelings on sushi well enough.’ She turned to Jude. ‘Remember that time we went to that Japanese restaurant in Norwich and all Charlie would eat was the sweet mochi? We must have spent about twenty pounds on plates and plates of the stuff just to fill him up!’

  Jude laughed. ‘God yeah! That day was such a laugh. Wasn’t that the day you ended up dancing with that busker who then tried to give you his phone number?’

  ‘And as I recall you pretended to get all tough to see him off, but even he wasn’t convinced by the act, and he didn’t know you!’

  Jude chuckled again and gave Harriet such a look of affection that it rattled Lizzie even more than the flirtatious eyes that Harriet had thrown at him only a moment before. ‘I must have “softy” tattooed on my forehead.’

  ‘You do,’ Harriet said. ‘Don’t I always say, Damon, that Jude is the biggest softy I know?’

  Damon didn’t seem to be anywhere near as unsettled by the exchange as Lizzie felt, and she began to wonder whether perhaps she was being a little paranoid about it. He just grinned and nodded. ‘Nicer than me.’

  ‘Not nicer than you, just more gullible,’ Harriet said.

  ‘Oi!’ Jude cried, but he was laughing still. ‘Just wait! I’ll give you gullible!’

  Lizzie cleared her throat. She hadn’t meant it to be such an obvious reminder of her presence but Jude turned to her now and he looked suitably reminded anyway. His laughter faded and he took Lizzie’s hand.

  ‘We were just on our way down to the riverbank,’ he said to Harriet.

  ‘Oh, Irma at the Lion says there’s a white heron hanging around somewhere near this bit,’ Harriet replied. ‘I think it might be an egret actually, but if it’s a white heron that would be amazing. We thought we’d have a look for it – I want to get some photos for a wildlife photography competition I’ve seen.’

  ‘We saw it a few weeks ago so it’s definitely been nearby,’ Jude said.

  ‘Brilliant!’ Harriet said, hitching her backpack up onto her shoulders. ‘Can you show us where?’

  Jude nodded. ‘Yeah, come down with us – the more the merrier!’

  Without so much as looking at Lizzie for her approval, Jude turned and beckoned them all to follow. Lizzie’s hand had slipped from his as they began to walk. So much for their idyllic day together.

  Every word, every sentence, that passed between Lizzie and Harriet seemed to contain some subtext, some guarded meaning. They sat comfortably enough on the riverbank together in the warm afternoon sun, eyes trained on the river, Jude, Charlie and Damon unaware of the storm clouds in Lizzie’s head and of how Harriet seemed to be going out of her way to contribute to her unease. Lizzie tried to keep her misgivings in check and get the measure of Harriet to work out how she fitted into Jude’s life, but she was finding it hard. Harriet and Jude, and even Damon, were saying one thing, but Lizzie couldn’t help sensing something very different.

  But Harriet was giving nothing away. Outwardly, she was perfectly sweet and saintly and it was easy to see why Charlie and Jude loved her so much. She was pretty in an edgy sort of way, with dark cropped hair, heavy brows and mesmerising hazel eyes flecked with tiny shards of brilliant jade. She wore her jeans and red checked shirt well, managing to look sexy in an outfit that Lizzie would have worn to work on the mill and wouldn’t have looked sexy in at all. She was witty and comfortable in her own skin, smart and interesting and funny and all the other things that made Lizzie feel inferior. It grew more and more apparent that she had been a huge part of Jude’s life for years and years and that Charlie adored her more than he adored anyone else in the world.

  Harriet snapped photos on a bulky digital SLR camera that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the hands of a professional, and it seemed to Lizzie that most of them were of Jude. It did nothing to alleviate her sense of unease at the way Harriet and Jude were with each other. They laughed together like a couple of teenagers, like people who knew each other’s souls intimately from years of friendship, and it was Harriet who constantly reminded him of shared anecdotes, encouraging him to recount them and finishing them for him with punchlines that often became private in-jokes. Lizzie would steal a look at Damon every so often, but he didn’t seem bothered at all by it. Then again, Damon looked as if he wouldn’t know an emotional crisis if it slapped him across the face and Lizzie couldn’t work out what Harriet saw in him anyway. He was so different from Jude in so many ways that it didn’t make sense.

  Perhaps an hour had passed in this way when Charlie suddenly leapt to his feet and pointed at the trees overhanging the far bank of the river.

  ‘I saw it!’ he cried.

  ‘Shhh!’ Harriet hissed, pulling him down to the grass again. ‘You’ll frighten it away!’

  Charlie blushed and crossed his legs on the ground again.

  ‘Harrie didn’t mean to shout, Charlie,’ Jude said, giving her a pointed look as he spoke.

  Harriet pouted. ‘He was loud enough to scare away every bird for miles.’

  ‘And he didn’t mean it,’ Jude said firmly.

  Harriet ignored him and got to her feet, camera poised, keeping low to the ground as she moved closer to the riverbank. When she was right at the water’s edge, she began to snap. Lizzie fought the urge to run over and push her in. They’d only just met, but even though she couldn’t really have said why, already Harriet was winding her up.

  Jude touched her hand, and instantly she calmed.

  ‘See it?’ he whispered.

  Lizzie followed the line of his outstretched finger as he pointed to the trees at the far riverbank. It took a moment, but then she saw it, and all her ire melted away.

  ‘It’s gorgeous!’ she breathed. ‘Beautiful!’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ Jude smiled at her and she met his eyes. He leaned forward as if to kiss her, but then Harriet’s voice cut into the moment and he jerked back.

  ‘It does look like an albino heron,’ she said, and Lizzie looked around to see her flop down on the grass next to Jude. ‘I’ll be so pissed off if it’s an egret because that won’t win anything. I’ll show Grandpappy later and see what he says.’ She stretched to kiss Jude on the cheek and grinned. ‘Thanks for letting us crash your party.’

  ‘We don’t mind, do we, Lizzie?’ Jude said blithely.

  ‘Of course not,’ Lizzie said. How could she say anything else?

  FIVE

  ‘I’ve never been so excited to see scaffolding!’

  Lizzie pulled the old cardigan tight around her. The sun had barely risen but, as promised, the builder and his subcontractors had arrived Monday morning, bright and early, to start work. There was little Lizzie would be able to do herself now without getting in their way so she was planning a day locked in the caravan catching up on the work that actually paid her bills.

  But she stood now in her garden with Tim Lundy, the builder, while he explained what the immediate plan of work was and then waited for her approval. She didn’t really care which way round they did things as long as they did it and as long as they didn’t take too many months – the thought of winter in her creaky little caravan wasn’t an appealing one.

  Tim grunted, which interrupted her train of thoughts. She’d found him rather stony-faced, but he seemed honest and straightforward, and he said things plainly, which was all she could ask for.

  ‘So you want us to work on the extension first?’ he asked.

  ‘The house bit? Yes.’

  ‘Right.’ He nodded curtly.

  ‘So I can move into that bit while the mill is being restored.’

  ‘Have you found your specialist for the workings yet?’

  ‘No. I was sort of hoping you might know someone?’ Lizzie said hopefully. She’d already posed the question to Jude, but he didn’t have anyone i
n his architectural contacts who knew about windmills. If Tim didn’t know anyone then it was going to take a bit of research.

  ‘No, but I can put the word out if you like. I’m not promising anything, though, mind.’

  ‘That would be brilliant,’ Lizzie said.

  ‘It’ll likely take most of the day to get this lot up,’ he added, angling his head at a growing stack of scaffolding at the base of the gable wall. ‘But you can’t do anything without it, not on a place as unsafe as this.’ He turned a flinty stare on her. ‘You’ve not been playing about inside, have you? Not the safest place to be.’

  Lizzie shook her head forcefully, and she decided very quickly that she wouldn’t mention going in to clear the place out. Or the tour she’d given Derek the caravan vendor. Or the time she’d taken Jude and Charlie in. Or the half-dozen times she’d stood in the ruins dreaming of what they might look like when all the work was done.

  ‘I’ll have to put notices up,’ Tim continued. ‘In case you get any daft kids snooping around. Don’t want to get sued if one of the little buggers breaks a leg or something.’

  ‘There was nothing up all the years it was empty before,’ Lizzie said tentatively.

  ‘Then somebody was a bloody fool.’ He dug his hands in his pockets and strode away to speak to the scaffolders before Lizzie had a chance to reply.

  ‘So, I’ll be in the caravan if you need me for anything,’ she called. Whether he heard her or not there was no reply. Feeling strangely redundant after her previous few days of intense activity, she hesitated for a moment before finally heading inside, out of the way.

  * * *

  It was hard to concentrate knowing what was going on outside. Sitting still didn’t come naturally to Lizzie and what she really wanted to do was get stuck in herself. Instead, she had to be content with going to the window every so often to see how things were progressing. There was a team of men out there now, radio blasting, the sounds of metal poles clanging together, whistles for attention and good-natured banter crossing back and forth across the site. The sun was shining and there was nothing to hamper the work, and Lizzie had to be grateful for that. She’d gone out with a couple of trays of teas that had been gratefully received, but even that wasn’t making her feel very useful. Maybe she’d drive out later and fill her car boot with biscuits – her dad always said there was nothing like a steady supply of tea and biscuits to get a workman on side.

  For now, to take her mind off things, she’d clicked into a search engine and typed in ‘antique furniture’, narrowing the search to the local area. She hadn’t really made any solid plans for the interior décor once the shell of the building was done, but she’d daydreamed of what it might look like: a vague sense of a light-filled space sympathetically furnished in a style that suited the solid stone build and the period of the mill. There were large windows to consider, high ceilings and circular rooms in the main body of the mill, while the extension where the mill owner and his family would once have lived was smaller and the ceilings much lower, and it would take a lot more imagination to bring light and space to these rooms. Jude had already said he could help there, though his expertise was more architectural than interior design. It was easy to get fired up anyway – help or no help – because the possibilities were endless, and every time she looked through a house magazine she saw another style or theme that she loved. She couldn’t have them all, and she guessed that in the end she’d wind up with something quite eclectic, a mishmash of the best bits that she hoped would still look beautiful and put-together enough to work.

  According to the search engine there was a salvage/antique yard less than five miles from where she was now, tucked away down a secluded lane. Lizzie clicked on the link and went onto their website, scrolling through photos of household detritus in various states of repair. Some items were rough, like the stone bird tables with chunks missing and bits of rusting Victorian fencing, and some were more delicate, like the pair of exquisitely carved wooden benches and a bed frame fashioned from scrolled ironwork. On the home page of the site there was a photo of the yard as a whole, row upon row of treasure – or trash, depending on how you felt about old furniture. It looked like a fairyland to Lizzie, though she knew plenty of others who would probably disagree. But this was going to be her home and only she got to decide what went in it.

  Her gaze went to the caravan windows again, where the scaffolding that would hug the outside walls of the mill was going up apace. Suddenly it all looked more real than ever – this was actually happening. Maybe it wouldn’t be too premature to go on a little shopping trip and if she only bought smallish things she could store them with her mum for a while.

  Putting the postcode of the yard into the map function on her phone, she checked the location to find that it was pretty much where she’d thought it would be and it wasn’t really much of a drive. Then she dialled her mum, who picked up on the third ring.

  ‘Are you doing anything for the next couple of hours?’ she asked.

  ‘Hello to you too.’

  ‘I just wondered if you fancied a shopping trip?’

  ‘I thought you had the builders starting work today?’

  ‘They have, which means I’m pretty much redundant. So do you fancy it? I’m going to look at a reclamation yard.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t know. Bits of stuff.’

  ‘Bits of what?’

  ‘I’m not sure yet. I think I’ll know what I want when I see it and fall in love with it.’

  Lizzie’s mum chuckled. ‘That’s no way to shop.’

  ‘It’s the only way to shop.’

  ‘In that case I’d better come; there’s no telling what you might buy without a steadying influence.’

  ‘Brilliant! I’ll pick you up in an hour!’

  Lizzie smiled as she ended the call. She was suddenly excited at the thought of spending some time with her mum. Over the past few days, when she’d been sitting in her caravan in the evening watching the sun dip behind the horizon, she’d realised that, although this was everything she’d ever wanted, she missed her mum. She missed her little house in town being close enough to jog around the corner to borrow a cup of milk, just as an excuse to call for a chat with her mum, or to call anyway, not really needing an excuse at all. It was so quiet out here, so removed from everything she’d known all her life, and even though it was glorious, it was going to take some getting used to. The only thing she didn’t miss about her old town was Evan. As far as she was concerned, the town could keep him.

  * * *

  It was almost two hours later by the time Lizzie and her mum were picking their way through the aisles of furniture at Reg Astley’s reclamation centre. Her mum had got distracted by a stray cat in the garden and wasn’t ready when Lizzie arrived to pick her up, and then they’d got lost on the seemingly simple route to the yard. Now they wandered up and down the lot inspecting things that caught their eye. There was that peculiar smell of sun-baked varnish and brass polish layered with a fusty aroma that always came with unheated warehouses full of old junk. Lizzie didn’t mind it – she’d soon get the smell out of anything she purchased once it was brought into a warm, dry interior and renovated.

  ‘Most of this is absolute rubbish,’ Lizzie’s mum said, running her fingers along the top of an old fireguard with a look of bemusement and then inspecting the dust it had left on them. ‘Surely people want to get rid of this stuff, not buy it.’

  ‘You do have to do some rummaging,’ Lizzie agreed.

  ‘Some?’

  ‘OK, a lot,’ Lizzie replied with a laugh. ‘It’s part of the fun. It’s exciting when you find something good because you’ve had to work for it.’

  ‘We’d have been better off spending the afternoon in IKEA. At least they have a nice café. And no dust.’

  ‘I’m sure they have dust; they just have more people to keep it at bay. It’s a different kind of dust too – this is the dust of history. That’s just the dust of
… IKEA.’

  ‘Does that mean your dust has cholera in it?’ Lizzie’s mum raised her eyebrows.

  ‘I hope not! Anyway, if my dust has cholera then yours must have meatballs in it.’

  ‘Meatballs?’ Gwendolyn looked confused.

  ‘Meatballs… because it’s IKEA and they sell those Swedish meatballs?’ Lizzie shook her head with a grin. ‘Never mind.’

  They carried on walking and she pointed to what looked like a church pew. ‘This looks nice and solid. Could work in the kitchen with a big scrubbed pine table.’

  Lizzie’s mum shook her head. ‘Too low. And if someone wanted to leave the table before your other guests they’d have to ask everyone to get up and let them out.’

  ‘So you don’t like it?’

  ‘Not especially. Reminds me of Sunday school as a girl.’ She gave a theatrical shiver. ‘I hated Sunday school.’

  ‘I know, I remember you telling me the stories when I was little. I was terrified of nuns until I was about twenty; didn’t realise they were actually supposed to be nice.’

  ‘I wish I could meet one of them now – I’d give them a piece of my mind.’

  ‘I expect most of them would be dead by now.’

  ‘Then point me to the graves and I’ll dance on them.’ She pointed to a huge mirror leaning against a wall. The intricately designed metal frame of loops and swirls was tarnished and the glass grimy, but nevertheless it was an eye-catching item. ‘That’s quite nice, I suppose. It would reflect a lot of light if you hung it in an entrance hall or somewhere.’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ Lizzie agreed, making a beeline for it. ‘Let’s put it on the maybe list – I expect it would clean up a treat but I can’t just bring to mind where the right wall to hang it would be.’

  ‘Let’s see what they’ve got inside the warehouse. I think we’re done out here, aren’t we?’

  ‘I saw a lovely armchair on the website, actually,’ Lizzie said. ‘I’m hoping that’s inside because I haven’t seen it.’