Page 1 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
Prologue
Passing Places
1993
‘Tell me about when you were a little girl at Jericho’s End,’ I said. It wasn’t that I needed to hear her stories again, for they were engraved on my memory for ever, it was just that her thin, silvery thread of a voice was all that seemed to keep her connected to life – and to me.
After the last round of chemotherapy, her curling, red-gold hair had returned in the form of an ashy down, and her hand in mine, once so strong and capable, seemed to have turned into a bird’s claw, dry as a bundle of fine twigs and cool to the touch. Painkillers had smoothed out the lines in her hollowed face and clouded her blue-grey eyes with vagueness.
‘It’s me, Marnie. Can you hear me, Mum? Auntie Em’s dropped me off after school, but she’s going to come in and see you later, when she picks me up.’
‘Marianne, not Marnie,’ Mum corrected, with an echo of the old touch of reproof.
The hospice was so quiet that you could hear the bees buzzing among the lavender bushes in the garden, and only the purposeful footsteps of the nurses going briskly and competently about their work broke the drowsy spell.
‘Mum?’ I tried again. ‘Remember when you were a little girl and lived at Jericho’s End, and what you and your friends saw when youwere playing among the stones by the Fairy Falls? Tell me that story,’ I pleaded.
‘Jericho’s End …?’ A light seemed to glimmer in her eyes for a moment and the fleeting ghost of a smile touched her lips.
‘Ice-cream … and angels,’ she sighed ecstatically on an exhaled breath, as if she’d had a glimpse through the doors of Heaven, and spotted the Angel Gabriel driving the celestial version of a Mr Whippy van – and then, in an instant, she was gone.
Even at twelve, you know when the butterfly has flown and the chrysalis is an empty husk, but I sat there holding her hand and wondering if the journey from birth to death wasn’t a straight line at all, but a circle, until Aunt Em came to fetch me.
1
French Leave
Early 2017
When my mobile rang, I was digging up early potatoes in the walled garden of a vast and castellated French château, though not the one belonging to my adoptive family, the Ellwoods, which was an altogether more modest affair about forty miles away, in the Dordogne. I fished the phone out of my pocket with an earthy hand.
‘Marnie? Good news!’ announced Treena Ellwood, who filled the dual role of my almost-twin sister and best friend, sounding as if she was standing next to me, rather than back in the UK. ‘I just heard on the grapevine that Mike got married again early last year. I thought there must have been a good reason why he suddenly agreed to the divorce.’
‘He’s … remarried?’ I repeated, slowly. I spared a fleeting thought for his newest victim, but my overwhelming feeling was that one final shackle holding me to the past had finally fallen away. I found I was staring at the ice-blue sky, wondering if I still remembered how to fly.
And as I stood there, phone in hand, the memory of my brief marriage escaped the dark corner of my mind in which I’d hidden it and slithered out to taunt me for the reckless, loving fool I’d been.
It had been a whirlwind romance and I’d blithely followed a trail of rosy delusions right up to the altar within two months of meeting Mike Draycot. I’d assured everyone that despite the short time we’d knowneach other and the age difference – he was ten years older – we were true soulmates … though, later, I found it hard to think of anything we shared.
But then, I wasn’t the malleable, emotionally damaged person he thought I was; he just caught me at a low ebb. I was strong, prone to be acerbic and fiercely independent, and yet Mum’s death when I was twelve had left me with a deep feeling of insecurity. My adoptive family’s recent decision to sell up their home and garden centre business in the UK, and to relocate to an old château in France, had stirred up that feeling all over again. Somehow it felt like a second betrayal.
Mike had seemed so understanding and sympathetic. I’d told him more about how I felt than I’d ever revealed to anyone, even Treena, and since his first wife had died tragically young, we seemed to have a bond of loss in common.
He was charming, very clever and emotionally manipulative in ways I’d never even thought of. I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.
Mike was a wiry man with the deceptively skinny physique of the runner, and had attractively spiky silver and black hair, bright dark eyes and an engaging smile.
He owned the veterinary practice in Merchester where Treena was providing a year’s maternity cover for one of the staff, which is how I came to meet him. Treena, however, was the only member of the family whodidn’tthink Mike was the perfect man for me, right from the start.
‘He’s a good vet, but the animals don’t like him,’ she’d warned me, before the wedding. ‘And he’s the only vet I know who doesn’t have pets of his own.’
She herself had two dogs and three cats, and for the last year I’d shared a small rented cottage with her and her menagerie on the edge of Merchester, where the Ellwoods ran their garden centre. Just before I met Mike, my adoptive family had fallen in love with the rundown Château du Monde in France, which came with extensive grounds and outbuildings, a lake and campsite. With hard work, it would provide a home and a living. Unlike her married older brother and her sister, Treena herself had decided to stay put in the UK and I’d been in twominds whether to go or stay. There were gardens to restore at the château and the Ellwoods hoped eventually to set up a garden centre there, too. But moving to France had never beenmydream. In any case, I was successfully working my way up the gardening hierarchy of the Heritage Homes Trust, and had just been offered a promotion at a property in the North-East.
Falling for Mike scuppered both those options, though he seemed to understand my ambition to become a head gardener one day, as well as sharing most of my aims in life … and really, I can’timaginehow I got that impression, because it wasn’t long before I realized that he was intent on making me over in an entirely different pattern of his own design.
But of course, the benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing. And at first he was very subtle in his technique: one small thing after the other, each designed to isolate me from family and friends, undermine my self-confidence and independence and lead me further and further under his control.
It didn’t help that in public he showed a different face, so that for a long time he fooled everyone (though never Treena) into thinking he was the perfect husband and I the ungrateful and difficult wife.
