by Cathy Bussey
‘Your father told him we’d be delighted to welcome him into our family,’ Judith said.
‘That’s very sweet of you,’ Faith said, thinking what Judith had really meant was ‘hand her over’. ‘I’m not sure I feel the same way.’
‘I was hoping you’d come home so we could start planning,’ Judith admitted and Faith felt another stab of guilt and annoyance.
She wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to get married at all, but definitely not to Rob. She’d always thought if she did get married, it would be kind of cool to just take off and do it on a whim someday, admittedly with the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. She was probably too old for Gretna Green now, but once upon a time she might have considered eloping romantic and a bit crazy.
The problem was, there was only really one person she’d ever met who would have thought that way of tying the knot was fitting and she hadn’t seen him since they were Gretna Green age.
‘Not this time,’ Faith said to Judith ruefully.
‘Are you going to move back here?’
The ultimate insult, bouncing back home to Mummy and Daddy with all her worldy goods, which didn’t amount to much, crammed into the open back of the Land Rover. She’d have to pay her share of the rent until the lease on the flat was up and she couldn’t afford two sets on her salary on top of the monstrous price of a train ticket.
And if she used her savings, which Rob had been hoping would eventually become a deposit, that would be the end of any prospect of her retraining. She still remembered Rob’s outrage when he’d found some of her prospectuses for horticultural colleges and waved them at her as accusingly as if he’d walked in on her shagging somebody else on the IKEA Caffeinegulpen coffee table. He had not supported her increasing desire for a career change, and made it clear living with a penniless, permanently exhausted garden design student didn’t sound like an enticing prospect.
‘Maybe just for a bit,’ Faith said, hoping she didn’t sound too ungrateful, ‘if you don’t mind. We can talk about it later. I’m going to meet Minel at Hollyhock House.’ She wondered what Minel wanted to ask her. She had texted suggesting she come to Hollyhocks for lunch and although Faith had been surprised not to be invited to Paul and Minel’s own house instead, she wasn’t going to turn down the opportunity to nosy round Hollyhocks again. She hadn’t been back there often.
Not often, since one sunlit, enchanted morning.
‘Will you be back for dinner?’
‘I’ll let you know. But Mum, please don’t worry. I can sort myself out. You don’t have to change any of your plans for me.’
‘It’s not a problem, Faith,’ Judith smiled kindly. ‘This is your home.’
No it isn’t, Faith thought, but she managed not to say it.
Chapter 2
Hollyhock House sat in a slight valley, well away from the quiet, pothole-laden country lane that saw, at most, eight vehicles per day during ‘rush hour’. Just before the most concealed of entrances was a hump-backed bridge that presided loftily over an impetuously babbling stream making its excitable way across the border between Hollyhocks and its immediate neighbours.
It was proof, Faith thought as she steered the wheezing Land Rover around the familiar curves and bends, swerving to avoid the worst of the potholes and failing to notice several new ones, that the richer a person was, the harder their house was to find. The first time she had come to Hollyhocks she had spent what felt like hours cycling along this tree-lined lane, bouncing backwards and forwards over the bridge, disturbing its resident and very irate heron. Up and down she’d ridden, squinting for a sign amongst the lush green verges which had been liberally scattered with frothy heads of cow parsley, crowding together like parties of fairies in their milky white dresses.
The tiny sign itself was now almost invisible behind a rambunctious clematis Montana tangling seductively with a wisteria which had in turn long obliterated the delicate white arch once erected to support its rapacious tendrils. The lettering, ornate and all but impossible to read, was more sun-bleached than ever, in fact it seemed to have faded into nothingness.
The gravel drive was even more cratered than the lane she, Minel and Rik had fatuously entitled ‘the big road’. She crawled past the familiar copse to the right and the lowering cherry laurel hedge to the left, wincing as she saw how out of control the toxic plant had become. It wasn’t as if one needed additional privacy out here, she mused. Hollyhocks was so set back you’d need a helicopter and binoculars if you wanted to peep inside.
Faith pulled up at the end of the gravel drive. She admired her friends’ childhood home for a moment, as it basked in the late afternoon sunshine. Mournful recognition seemed to be creeping up from the ground, separated from her skin only by a pair of battered Converse. Faith pressed her feet against the rubber soles, hoping they would ward it off. Hollyhocks might be ready to welcome back one of its lost children but she wasn’t sure she could bear to open her heart in return.
It was another hallmark of rich people’s homes, she thought to distract herself, that you couldn’t even tell what they looked like close up. The pale golden walls and low roof poked out enticingly from variegated ivy, fragrant jasmine, showy Virginia creeper and rambling roses, interspersed with the jaunty spikes of hollyhocks and foxgloves.
To the side, behind the jumble of kitchen backing on to the conservatory and steps down to the utility room, the lawns were more formal and sweeping, although now liberally flecked with dandelions. At the end, glimmering azure, lay the swimming pool that had been put in, irritatingly, after Faith had moved away. Paul had parked some of his work vehicles next to it, near to the greenhouse and vegetable patch and the crumbling stone wall in front of the hay barn.
And behind the house, through the low arch in another stone wall, was the cottage Minel and Rik had shared. Rik had told her that when he and Minel’s parents first moved here they had no idea of the existence of the little building, as it was completely obscured by ivy, brambles and climbing weeds. It was only one day when Minel and Rik’s father Ravi had decided to take a pair of secateurs to the mess of green that he had discovered the cottage underneath.
Once upon a time it must have been used by the farm hands, when the land surrounding it had been cultivated, but nobody had farmed here for generations and the copse had run wild. Helena and Ravi had sold off the remaining pasture to the neighbours, who turned it into a tennis court.
‘Faith!’ She looked up at the sound of Minel’s voice and beamed as her friend came spilling out of the door, followed by a wildly barking ball of sandy-coloured fluff.
‘Hello,’ Faith said, bending down to stroke the yapping puppy, feeling a wrench of recognition. ‘No need to question this one’s lineage.’
Minel laughed. ‘Tackle to the core.’
Tackle had been the neighbours’ dog, an ill-mannered wire-haired terrier cross. A creature of instinct, he was feared far and wide for his savage nature and monstrous libido and would attack or hump just about anything that moved.
Ignored by his legal owners, Tackle adopted Rik, spending more time at Hollyhocks than his own home. The rest of the time he wandered far and wide, slowly but surely impregnating every bitch in the village.
Faith and Rik used to rub their hands together with glee whenever a gleaming 4x4 stormed up the long and not-at-all potholed track to next door, knowing it would contain a yelling Westchester resident and a heavily pregnant dog.
As a result, ferocious wire-haired puppies sprang up all over the village and given that Tackle’s wandering genes passed down from generation to generation as a blueprint and he had an equally undesirable habit of siring mainly males, the unstoppable cycle continued.
Was Tackle still around? Faith thought hopefully. It had been nine years, but he had only been young, three or four at the most, when she had known him.
‘I think even the foxes around here are half wire-haired,’ Minel sighed, scooping up the still-yapping puppy. ‘I don’t
know what possessed me, taking this little one on.’
Faith did and she scanned her friend eagerly, desperate for any sign of a swelling in the belly, a fullness in her breasts or some sort of glow. Minel, catching her looking, shook her head.
‘Come on in and have a cup of tea,’ Minel urged, leading Faith into the long, heavily-beamed kitchen. She gestured to her friend to sit at one end of the scrubbed wooden table and shoved a pile of chintzy-looking magazines with titles like House Beautiful and Your Vintage Home out of the way.
‘So, what do you want to ask me?’ Faith said as Minel poured boiling water into two cream-and-blue striped mugs with heavy cracks down the enamel handles. ‘How come you’re living here at the moment? Where are your folks?’
‘They’re off on a cruise all summer,’ Minel said. ‘It’s their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary next year and they’re celebrating it in style already.’
‘Good for them,’ Faith said.
‘Anyway that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. We want to give them something really special, something that I know they’ve always wanted.’ Minel’s eyes were shining. ‘So I’ve talked to Paul and he’s agreed to take the summer off to build them a summerhouse.’
‘Why don’t you just buy one from the garden centre?’ Faith asked.
Minel looked horrified. ‘I’m not talking some glorified wooden shed,’ she said. ‘A proper one. Bricks — or rather, stone — and mortar. Wired and plumbed, a little refuge where they can store their swimming gear and have a cup of tea and sit and watch the world go by.’
And an expensive one, Faith thought, although money wasn’t something her friend had ever had to worry about, and she supposed Paul would take care of all the labouring.
‘We’re going to put it at the top of the swimming pool,’ Minel said.
A solitary bumblebee buzzed loftily past and disappeared out of the open front door.
‘Really?’ Faith frowned. ‘But that would mean uprooting the rockery and filling the pond and —’
‘And that’s why I need you,’ Minel interrupted. ‘I need somebody to redo the garden.’
Faith opened her mouth to protest and Minel held up her hand. ‘I know what you’re going to say, but I don’t want to hire any old gardener. I want you. You know this place better than pretty much anyone. In fact, I’m sure you and Rik were responsible for the pond in the first place.’
Faith nodded, hoping she hadn’t flinched.
‘So I want you to be the one to redesign it. My parents love the garden, Faith, they love how much of it came from your ideas and suggestions. They wouldn’t let anybody else loose on it.’
Faith wouldn’t want to let anybody else loose on Hollyhocks either, but the thought of coming here to take on such a mammoth task was as overwhelming as it was enticing.
‘I’m not qualified. I’d have no idea where to start and I’m really out of touch.’
Minel shrugged. ‘You’ll do an amazing job.’
That straightforward confidence, Faith thought wistfully, could have just as easily come from Rik. Minel and her brother had always been so very different, separated in age by just two years but worlds apart in every other sense.
They looked nothing alike, Minel with her olive skin, delicately pretty face and hazel eyes took after their English mother and Rik’s darker colouring and bolder features came straight from their Indian father. Their personalities were just as contrasting, Minel so gentle, sensible and down-to-earth compared to her hyper, reckless younger brother. Once upon a time Faith had thought Rik’s wilder nature the most exciting of his many appealing qualities, until she had found herself shattered to pieces by it.
Faith herself had always occupied something of the middle ground between the two. Over time she had noticed more and more reminders of Rik’s personality in Minel and occasionally even momentary flashes of physical resemblance that made her stomach jump and her heart beat a little faster.
Maybe I’m just projecting, she thought, because she’s all of him I have left and she reminds me of who I thought he was, before he showed his true colours.
She felt a soft nudge at her ankles and reached down then abruptly removed her hand, wincing, as Tackle’s grandson buried his needle-like teeth firmly in the base of her thumb.
‘And I have a job.’
‘Don’t you get holiday?’
Faith wondered why she was still protesting. She already knew there was no way she could say no. The prospect of swapping her stuffy, air-conditioned office for a summer with her oldest friends landscaping Hollyhocks was utterly irresistible, even if it would mean she had to face some all-singing, all-dancing demons.
‘Yeah, I can take holiday. Or unpaid leave. I can have the whole summer if needs be, everything pretty much shuts down.’
‘I’ll pay you,’ Minel said immediately.
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Yes I do, and that’s the end of it.’
Faith thought for a moment. ‘I’ll stay with my parents I guess.’ At least if she was busy here all day she’d be too tired to force herself to spend much time with them.
‘You can stay here with Paul and I. There’s plenty of space.’
‘It’s OK. I don’t want to impose.’
‘Won’t Rob mind you spending the summer here?’ Minel asked.
‘Probably,’ Faith admitted, ‘but I’m fairly certain he minds the fact that he proposed to me and I said no, broke up with him and came here the next day a lot more.’
‘What?!’
Faith sighed. ‘You’d better make some more tea.’
‘Sounds like you could do with some time away,’ Minel said after Faith had poured out her tale of woe. ‘Or rather, some time here. I know you’re usually too busy to come and visit, but I do know how much you love it here.’
Faith looked out of the window. She could see the pool, glinting in the mid-morning sun. Paul was wandering around checking on a cement mixer.
‘I did love it here,’ she said slowly.
Her eyes drifted to the cork notice-board Helena and Ravi had covered with photographs; of themselves, of Minel and Paul, of Rik and Minel, most of them as children, a few as teenagers and a few more as adults. Rik was looking away from the camera in all but one of the photos. Typical Rik, she thought, refusing to co-operate just to irritate his parents. But in one of the photographs, which must have been taken a few years after she’d left, his eyes were fixed straight on the camera and he was smiling that radiant smile that lit up and transformed his face. Faith felt her heart contract and she forced her eyes away.
‘What made your parents buy this place?’ she asked Minel, not wanting to dwell on Rik any more. She’d never actually had that conversation with Helena and Ravi. It had been overgrown back then and probably in quite a lot of disrepair. There are project houses, she thought, and then there’s this place.
‘They must have thought it had a lot of potential,’ Minel said. ‘But you know my mum. She told me that they hadn’t so much chosen this place, as it chose them. She said from the moment they set foot on the drive she could just feel it, like the place was telling them they had to come here.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘My dad and I used to laugh at her for it, but she was absolutely adamant. I think she had a lot more of an audience for all that rubbish in Rik.’
She would have done, Faith thought. Rik wasn’t anywhere near as fanciful as her but he had spent enough time on this land, getting to know it and later shape it, to have cultivated a far stronger sense of place than his sister. Minel was never really one for immersing herself in the world around her the way she and Rik did. Her friend preferred to establish and abide by the rules than test and experiment with them. She’s a born teacher, Faith thought, she found her vocation — and her husband — early on, and she’s never had to question either of them.
‘It surprises all of us that he hardly ever comes back here,’ Minel added absently.
It surprised Faith too. She hadn’t been ab
le to bear coming back, not for many years, but Rik had no reason to stay away.
She supposed she would have to get used to Hollyhocks without him, even if she wasn’t entirely sure how one could exist without the other. And she knew there would be memories waiting around every corner to assault her, emotions swirling just below the surface that she hadn’t ever allowed to see the light of day. She still had no idea how she was meant to deal with them.
‘Why doesn’t he?’
‘Too busy chasing adventures elsewhere, I suppose.’ Minel shrugged. ‘He travels a lot, and he’s got himself some super-hot girlfriend up in London, although how she puts up with him constantly flitting about I don’t know.’
Faith flinched again. ‘What does he do?’
‘He’s a graphic artist,’ Minel said. ‘You can ask him yourself,’ she carried on, still watching the puppy who was now gambolling at the end of the lawn, chasing an invisible quarry. ‘He’ll be here next Monday.’
Faith’s stomach lurched, and she felt the hairs on her arms beginning to stand on end. ‘Huh?’
‘He’s coming to help Paul,’ Minel said. ‘I wasn’t sure I’d be able to talk him into it actually, but I didn’t have to work too hard to persuade him in the end. He works freelance so he can stay here and help Paul with the labouring. We can’t manage this alone and we couldn’t afford to pay anybody other than a few local teenagers. At least I’ve saved him the trouble of having to think of a present for Mum and Dad himself.’
Faith gripped the table, watching her knuckles whiten.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Minel asked. ‘I just assumed — you guys were so close once, I thought it would be nice to have us all together again. I’m sure he’s looking forward to catching up with you.’
I’m sure he isn’t, Faith thought darkly. ‘He knows I’m coming?’
‘Of course,’ Minel said. ‘Why would that be an issue?’