Page 19 of The Allotment on Willow Tree Lane

‘No, it doesn’t,’ Betsan agreed. ‘It used to, but the old lady who ran it died, and it fell into disuse.’

‘Could it be reinstated?’ Ceri asked, wondering where it used to be. The meadow down by the river perhaps? Although she suspected the area might be prone to flooding after heavy rain.

‘Maybe. I’ll have to have a chat to Terry.’

‘Why? Where—?’ The penny dropped. ‘It was on the field behind the church, wasn’t it? The one we’ve just been talking about?’

‘It was.’ Betsan nodded. ‘Since Hyacinth Rogers passed away it’s not been used – except for Rowena’s wedding and a circus which set up there a couple of years ago but hasn’t been back since. The church doesn’t use it for anything and neither does the village so, if you want, I can have a word with Terry. Better still, why don’t you pop over tomorrow and speak to him yourself? I suggest you go take a proper look at it first though, as I suspect you’ve only seen it when it had a great big tent plonked in it. No one ever goes down that lane anymore: it’s a dead end, you see. The only thing down there is the entrance to the field itself, and Willow Tree House, where Hyacinth used to live.’

‘I’ll take a look now,’ Ceri declared, her heart pounding.

With any luck the former allotment on Willow Tree Lane might be just the place to make her dream of owning a nursery come true.

Damon would have thought that all the time he had spent working in the garden recently would have yielded better results. OK, he hadn’t worked on it all day every day – he had done other stuff in between – but he had dedicated enough hours to it that he should have been able to seesomedifference by now. But the garden looked almost as bad as when he’d started, and by Friday evening he’d had enough. He wished he could just wave a wand and the garden would be magically transformed.

He could always employ the services of a local grounds maintenance team to come in and sort it out… but there were two issues with that idea. The first was his reluctance to have strangers on his property in case someone realised who he was. The second was that he believed employing someone to do the hard graft would be disloyal to his gran’s memory. She had never felt the need to have anyone do her garden for her, so he shouldn’t either. Right up until the end, when a devastating stroke had taken her, Gran had managed on her own, and if he, a six-foot, thirty-year-old, relatively fit guy wasn’t able to cut back a few bushes and subdue some weeds, what did that say about him?

But enough was enough, and he didn’t want to risk damaging his hands. He could already feel callouses developing on his palms, and the fingers on his left hand were stiffer than they should be, so he decided to knock the manual labour on the head for the weekend. He would give his shoulders, back and hands a rest, then start again on Monday.

As soon as he returned to the house, he had a quick shower, cracked open a beer, and, after opening the French doors in his grandmother’s high-ceilinged sitting room which she used to call the parlour, to let the evening air blow through, he reached for his Gibson.

Resting the guitar on his knee, he tuned the strings, his mind drifting.

The itch of a new song was just out of scratching distance, the notes tripping through his mind in elusive bursts, the lyrics hovering on the edge of his consciousness. He knew better than to force it; it would come to him when it was ready.

For now, he would simply play.

He began with familiar tunes, to warm up both his voice and his fingers, and also because it didn’t require any effort on his part. He played without thinking and sang without having to search for the words, but after a while he felt the urge to create, to pluck a song out of the air and make it real. It was strange how a melody would come to him without any conscious thought; it was as though it had already been sung by the gods and was floating in the ether, waiting for him to claim it and make it his own.

The lyrics would follow later, and they too often seemed to sneak into his head as though the melody and the words belonged together, and no others could possibly fit. It was those, or none.

And while he made music out of nothing, the image in his mind was that of the woman he had met in the field beyond the orchard. Her face had hijacked his thoughts so thoroughly that he didn’t realise he had woven her into his song until the last few notes faded into the calm evening air.

Feeling more at peace than he had since the accident, his fingers strummed the chords of the band’s signature track, “Dark Dimension”, and as he allowed the music to fill his soul, he wished with all his heart that Aiden was playing it with him.

Without a ‘great big tent plonked in it’ (to quote the vicar’s wife), the field on Willow Tree Lane looked bigger somehow.

As she walked through the metal gate, Ceri’s eyes automatically went to where the hedgerow grew thickest, where she knew a small wooden gate was hidden, and near to it was the place where she had lain in the grass and gazed up at the stars with a handsome stranger. The place where he had kissed her so very thoroughly.

She wondered where he was now.

Maybe she would ask Rowena about him when she and Huw were back from their honeymoon, which should be tomorrow if their flight landed on time.

She’d give it a couple of days before she mentioned Damon though, see if she could work him into the conversation without it looking as though she was digging for information.

Then again, maybe she shouldn’t ask at all. What good would knowing more about him do? She was hardly likely to go haring off to London. Sleeping dogs were best left unpoked. Or was that a wasp’s nest? Whatever. The sentiment was the same. The encounter had been lovely, and the mystery of the man she’d kissed had undoubtedly added to it. If she met him again, he might be totally underwhelming, so why spoil the most romantic night of her life with disappointing reality? Although, she had to admit that she had been saddened not to have seen him at The Jolly Fox when she’d had lunch with her parents on the Sunday after the wedding. She had spent most of the meal surreptitiously watching the door, hoping he might walk through it, and she had been disappointed when there hadn’t been any sign of him.

Ceri closed the gate with a clang, determined not to waste any more time thinking about him, but even so, her eyes were drawn to the place where they had lain in the grass and gazed up at the stars.

There was no trace of the encounter, and she hadn’t expected there to be. If the grass that the marquee had been resting on had sprung back, then the small indentation their bodies had left would certainly have faded almost immediately.

Talking about indentations, now that she was looking for them she could just make out the signs that the field had once been cultivated. If she squinted, she was able to see the faint outlines of beds, crisscrossed by paths that had most likely been grassed rather than paved. It was possible to see the tumps where the soil of the vegetable beds had been higher than the paths, and if she looked closely she could see some familiar plants, ones she wouldn’t have expected to find in a normal meadow. Rhubarb was one. Its leaves might have been decimated by Terry’s sit-on mower, but the reddish-coloured stalks were still recognisable. As were the clumps of celery. And she was sure she had spotted the delicate fronds of carrot leaves, too.

Making her way to the centre of the meadow, Ceri was delighted with the number of bees and butterflies flitting around, and she vowed that if she was able to rent the field from the church, they would still have a home here. As would the wildflowers that had sprung up in the grass.

Coming to a standstill, Ceri slowly pivoted on the spot, her focus on the direction of the sun and the daily arc it took from rising to setting. Once she had established that, she turned her attention back to the land itself, and studied it again.

It would be a massive job for her to turn the meadow back into cultivated land and one she wasn’t sure she could handle on her own – not with having to work as well. It would be years before it would pay its way, but she was determined not to be disheartened. Hard work had never bothered her, she would just have to work twice as hard to make her dream a reality.

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