Then he looked at his watch and said he was hungry and why didn’t we go and have something to eat?
‘There’s a pub up on the edge of the moors, on the Starstone Edge road, where they do a good lunch, the Pike with Two Heads.’
‘OK,’ I agreed. ‘But why on earth is it called the Pike with Two Heads? Is it some sort of heraldic thing?’
‘You’ll see,’ he said mysteriously, and soon we’d left the last straggling cottages behind us and were driving up a single-track lane, to where a large, low old building stood alone, like an escapee from a Daphne du Maurier film, the sign painted with a two-headed fish flapping to and fro in the wind.
The pub took on a more modern and less creepy aspect as we approached, having added a new restaurant extension on one side of the old building, like that of the Devil’s Cauldron.
A row of what were probably once stables had been turned into motel rooms.
The car park was surprisingly full and so was the pub, when we went inside. Ned insisted we detour en route to the restaurant, so he could show me the original of the pub sign: a huge and ancient-looking mutant fish in a glass case, which did indeed have two heads. It was not a thing of beauty.
‘It looks fed up to the gills,’ I observed.
‘So would you if you’d been stuffed and varnished,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can get a table.’
A waitress found us a table for two by the window overlooking a stretch of gloomy moors under hurrying pewter clouds. I’m sure when we got out of the car, the temperature was several degrees lower than it had been even at St Gabriel’s church.
We ordered food. I chose carrot and coriander soup with a tuna melt toastie, while Ned went the whole hog and had an enormous plateful of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, three kinds of vegetables and thick gravy.
‘If I stoke up now, I’ll only need something light tonight,’ he explained, tucking in. ‘I don’t do much cooking, so if I get the opportunity of a decent meal and some fresh veg, I go for it.’
‘Do you mean you can’t cook?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Of course I can cook!’ he said indignantly. ‘I have an extensive repertoire of beans on toast, scrambled egg on toast, cheese on toast …’
‘OK, just admit you can’t cook. Those aren’t meals, they’re snacks.’
‘I’ve never taken a lot of interest in cooking,’ he admitted. ‘There is always something more exciting to do and, anyway, it doesn’t seem worth the effort for one, does it? Elf puts meals in my freezer sometimes, with cooking instructions.’
‘I quite like simple cooking – casseroles and risottos and things like that, and soup. This one is really good – home-made is so much nicer than the stuff you get in tins.’
‘That pasta you cooked the other night was really nice and it didn’t seem to take you long to make.’
‘It didn’t, though I used bottled tomato sauce, which speeded things up.’
He evidently enjoyed his lunch now, anyway. I finished the soup and ate my tuna melt, then gazed absently out of the window at the moorland, feeling suddenly slightly disorientated as you do, sometimes, when you find yourself in a strange place, though at least I was not with a stranger.
Ned had seemed like one when we’d come face to face on the day I’d arrived, but we were soon back on our old terms of friendship.
I turned my head and found that he’d finished eating and was regarding me with a faintly questioning look in his amber-brown eyes.
‘Something’s worrying you, isn’t it? I thought so yesterday, even though you said you just had a headache.’
‘You’re right,’ I admitted ruefully. ‘And I was going to tell you today anyway, I just hadn’t got round to it yet. It really isn’t anything much.’
And I described how I’d been spotted yesterday by Mike’s veterinary nurse, Melinda, and the shock of discovering Mike hadn’t remarried, after all.
‘Apparently his fiancée moved in with him before the wedding, which was bad for him, because she must have started to get some idea of what she was in for. But it was good for her, because she moved out again and called the wedding off.’
Ned was frowning. ‘So … he’s still single?’
‘He doesn’t seem to have found anyone else … and I admit I did somehow feel safer when I thought he was married,’ I confessed. ‘I’m not afraid of him any more, it’s just that … if he found out where I was, he might turn up and try to make trouble.’
‘I’ll sort him out for you if he does,’ Ned assured me. ‘But you said this Melinda promised not to tell him she’d seen you?’
‘Yes, and I don’t think she will, because she doesn’t seem to like him much, but she’s bound to tell other people and then it might get back to him.’
‘What does he look like, in case he turns up?’ he asked.
‘It’s been a few years, so he might have changed, and he must be in his late forties now. He’s medium height and has that deceptively slight, skinny build most runners have – that was his hobby. And short, spiky dark hair with some grey. He can be very charming and seems genuinely nice, so you’d probably like him.’
‘He certainly doesn’t sound very scary – but then, when Lois used to fly into a jealous rage she was pretty terrifying,’ he admitted.
‘It’s hard to describe the effect he used to have on me once we’d been married a little while. Have you read the Harry Potter books, or seen the films?’
He nodded. ‘Both.’
‘Well, the effect Mike had on me was like a Dementor, sucking all the happiness and willpower out of me and leaving me feeling empty and helpless. But I think he found me a tougher nut to crack than he’d expected – unlike his first wife, who killed herself.’
‘I’m glad you got away – and you needn’t worry. If he tries to contact you, come straight to me.’
‘I will,’ I agreed gratefully. I thought Ned would be more than a match for Mike, however persuasive and convincing he might be. ‘Treena knows about Melinda, of course. She said Mike couldn’t do anything to harm me now, too.’
‘It’ll be fine,’ he reassured me, smiling so that all the little sun wrinkles round his eyes spread out like rays, which I found rather endearing.
‘Have a nice, comforting dessert: the chocolate fudge cake with whipped cream works especially well.’
It did, too, and his suggestion that we go back to the office and put in some orders for the old roses we’d been sourcing on the internet was a distractingly pleasant prospect: the icing on the cake.
Lizzie
A great change came upon my life only a few days later, for it seemed that my father had been summoned by Mr Lordly-Grace, whose tenant he was, and the upshot was that I was to go and live at Risings, there to be a maid and companion to Miss Susanna! On Sundays, though, I must return to the farm early in the morning, to spend the day at Thorstane with the Brethren.
I could see my father did not like the idea of my going, but he had had little choice but to accede, and soon I was installed at Risings in greater comfort than I had ever known. I had a small room off the nursery, where the nanny once slept, so that I could always be on call should my young mistress want me. She was inclined to be spoilt and pettish but, if sometimes thoughtless, not unkind to me. I think she liked having me at her beck and call, and I accompanied her to her lessons with her governess, which I found vastly more interesting than she did, and on walks, which usually tended to take us to Old Grace Hall across the bridge. There we might wander the paths of the walled garden, while the governess drank tea with the housekeeper.
Susanna had two much older brothers, George, who was already a young man-about-town and not seen much at Risings, and Neville, who was still at school and only came home in the holidays. He was a good-natured, merry young man and he won my childish heart immediately. He was destined for a career in the army.
29
Well Rotted
Thankfully, we drove back the long way,
which might have been several miles longer than the back road, but infinitely safer.
Call me a coward, but unless I grew a pair of wings like Gabriel, I was never going to let myself be driven back to Jericho’s End by that route.
We stopped off at the dig to see what was happening, if anything, and found the grass and soil had been neatly stripped back in several places, behind rope barriers held by metal stanchions.
The turf had been rolled and stacked nearby and now the volunteers were scraping soil away from the exposed areas with trowels. Charlie was among them and gave us a cheerful wave.
Luke and a thin young man with dark hair were standing in one of the shallow rectangles, laying down white measuring rods and taking pictures, while Treena, hands in coat pockets, looked a little bored. She must be a lot keener on Luke than she was letting on to spend her time off here, instead of walking the dogs or riding Zeph.
Ned, interested, went to see what they were doing but Treena came over to talk to me.
‘So far, this is even more boring than gardening,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t even sound as if there’s going to be very much to show for it, either, as far as I can see.’
‘I’m sure it’ll all be infinitely exciting to Luke, though,’ I said. ‘By the way, I’ve just told Ned what Melinda said to me yesterday, about Mike not being married after all. He said much the same you did: that there was no reason to worry about Mike turning up and he’d see him off the premises if he did.’
‘There you are, then – you’ve got your very own hero, though there’s no reason to think Mike would turn up, is there? By the way, I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve told Luke a little bit about you and Mike.’
‘No, I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘He seems a very nice … friend.’
She went slightly pink. ‘Actually, we’ve sort of drifted into going out together. Or perhaps he steered me into it, because that vague manner hides a brilliant and devious mind.’
She raised her voice on the last part, so that Luke, walking back with the other two, could hear it.
Luke grinned at her and then introduced me to his assistant. ‘This is Ken Lim – he was my postgrad student last year, so this is good experience for him. I can only afford to pay one extra person, so I wanted a good all-rounder.’
‘You wanted someone who’d do the work of three people for a pittance,’ said Ken.
‘Ken’s local,’ Ned said. ‘His family have the Lucky Dragon takeaway in Thorstane.’
‘Yeah, Ned, and they think you’ve gone off their food, because you haven’t ordered a take-out for ages,’ Ken said.
‘I think I’ll be ordering one tomorrow night, though – Marnie’s going to help me sort out a huge heap of old papers and photographs. Will you be on delivery duty?’
‘Have to. I can’t survive on what Luke’s paying me,’ he said cheerfully.
He went back to the hole and started taking more photographs and Luke said, hopefully, that if we were at a loose end, we could borrow trowels and help remove the surface layer in the hole of our choice.
Ned said, ‘Since this is our only day off of the week, we’d like a break from digging things up.’
But Treena thought she might as well, so we left them to it, though we agreed we’d all see each other later in the pub after the Friends of Jericho’s End meeting.
We found Caspar sitting on the steps of the office, as if he’d known we were coming and was waiting for us. He followed us in, settling on one arm of the angular sofa.
As he made coffee, Ned said that he’d spoken on the phone a couple of times to Cress’s friend Roddy, and he was happy to come in in the afternoons and help with the garden tours and also in the office, or wherever he was needed.
‘I’m going to move an old desktop and monitor down here, solely for the Grace Garden business,’ he said. ‘The landline phone number’s just on the website; I’ve only ever used my mobile for Little Edens, so that’s already separate.’
‘Good thinking,’ I said. ‘You can leave any messages on the landline for Roddy to answer, as well as enquiries through the website.’
When we’d drunk our coffee, we had a fun session disagreeing over which roses were meant by the obscure Regency names on the metal tags. In earlier times, roses could be called by several different names and many of these changed during the Victorian era, so this was far from easy.
‘But there must have been some kind of planting list originally, because the metal tags are so much later than the Regency, yet have the old names on them,’ I said.
‘If there was, perhaps we’ll find it among those papers when we sort them,’ Ned suggested, and we continued pleasantly bickering about what should go into the empty spots where the original roses had died, but there had been no tag at all.
I returned to my flat feeling much more relaxed and certain there was nothing to worry about and everything would turn out fine.
By now, past experience should really have taught me to mistrust these moments of unfounded optimism …
The vicar was at the FOJE meeting that evening. She was a member, but hadn’t been able to make it the previous week. And tonight’s was short, because she had to dash back to Thorstane by eight to talk to a young couple about calling their marriage banns.
‘Late, I know, but they both work in Liverpool and it’s such a long commute,’ she explained.
The business of the evening mostly consisted of reporting how well the Easter egg hunt had gone, and how much had been raised for the St Gabriel’s church tower restoration fund, followed by the arrangements for the Great Mumming Morris Dancers to come and perform on the Green on Mayday.
‘Though since Mayday is a Monday this year, we’re having it on the Sunday before, instead,’ said Myfy.
‘Pagan, but fun,’ agreed the Reverend Jojo. ‘I can pop over after lunch and catch the second session. I doubt I’ll make the earlier one.’
‘They dance twice,’ Elf explained to me. ‘The Possets give them lunch at the pub in between. They’re quite lively.’
‘They’re even more lively after they’ve been to the pub,’ said Myfy.
‘I often take my violin down and join in with their fiddle player,’ Gerald put in.
‘There’s nothing much to arrange for that, except to make sure they have the right day and Steve opens the Village Hut for them to rest in, or put their bells on, or whatever,’ said Gertie.
‘And then there’s only the jumble sale before the Annual Fête in July,’ said the vicar, who hadn’t taken her coat off so she could make a quick getaway. ‘I do like that.’
‘Yes, well, all these events are good for business, I suppose,’ Myfy said, ‘but when there are crowds about, I’d rather just go up to Jacob’s place and hide out till it’s all over.’
She and Jacob exchanged one of their intimate smiles, but I knew what she meant: I much preferred quiet and peace to crowds, too, but at least in the garden I was long acclimatized to letting the visitors pass me by, like a film whose sound had been turned down to a murmur.
In the pub we found Treena and Luke, who said some of the dig volunteers had only just left.
‘Quite late, really, because most of them have quite a way to travel to get home and you can’t drink if you have to drive,’ he said. ‘That’s why I’m staying at Risings – to be on the spot – and I’ve let a friend have my flat while I’m here, so it’s worked out well.’
Ned said he was going to order sausage and chips and I stared at him. ‘You can’t possibly want more food after all you ate at lunchtime!’
‘But that was hours ago, and all I’ve had since is a sandwich!’
‘It’s just as well you work so hard in the garden,’ I told him, ‘or you’d be a tub of lard.’
‘That’s it, Marnie, don’t pull your punches,’ he said, grinning, and when his food had arrived and I tried to steal a couple of his chips, he wouldn’t let me.
‘Buy your own, Ellwood,’ he said, covering his plastic basket protec
tively with both large hands.
Treena and Luke didn’t stay long because although she had left the dogs at Happy Pets, where one of the staff would have walked and fed them, she wanted to pick them up and get home.
‘The cats will give me hell,’ she said gloomily. ‘That new Siamese is ten times more trouble than any of the others, now he’s settled in.’
‘I know the feeling,’ I sympathized. ‘And Caspar has taken to coming to find me when I’m working.’
Once they’d gone, Ned and I reverted to our favourite topic – the garden – and there was no sign of Wayne that night to jolt my uneasy conscience … Not that it needed jolting, and when Ned suddenly asked me out of the blue if anything was still worrying me that I’d like to tell him about, it would have been the perfect opportunity to Confess All.
But call it cowardice, or simply a reluctance to spoil what had been a lovely day – maybe both – but I smiled at him and lied through my teeth.
‘No, not a thing! I love living here and working in the gardens.’
At least that last bit was true.
I was early for work next day, but Ned had beaten me to it and had already tipped several barrow-loads of Gertie’s best rotted compost on the rose beds, and there were three more full ones lined up.
We began spreading it out around the roots, but after an hour or so he left me to it, and went off to Risings to speak to Wayne about those holes in the lawn, and I carried on alone, feeling a bit uneasy. I hoped he wouldn’t lose his temper. Although he was very easy-going, he could be pushed too far …
I finished spreading the mulch and then awarded some to the Rambling Rector in the Lavender Cottage garden, though, goodness knew, it didn’t really need encouraging. I spread the last bit on the Alchemist rose in the tall bed by the path leading to the arch, on my way to put the last of the barrows away. Then I replaced the ropes across the paths in the rose garden, ready for opening, though actually James was probably right about the pong and none of the visitors would want to venture down them.
The Garden of Forgotten Wishes: The heartwarming and uplifting new rom-com from the Sunday Times bestseller Page 30