Page 3 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
‘Well, I expect I’ll have to go there with work at some point. I’ll tell you what it’s like, and then if there aren’t any Vanes running around with axes, we could go and visit it,’ she suggested.
The promise Mum had extracted from me did seem a bit silly now and these future plans comforted me. I told myself that I had lots to look forward to. I had good friends, loved my job and, if the family were moving abroad, at least that gave us somewhere nice to go for holidays. And Mike had his own work, as well as a passion for early morning running that took him for miles and seemed to be almost an addiction.
There were bound to be minor misunderstandings at the start of our married life, when Mike and I had known one another for so short a time, but since we loved each other, I was quite convinced any little difficulties would soon be ironed out.
Only I didn’t realize that it was me who was supposed to be ironed out, and then refolded into a state of submission, fear and obedience … I wasn’t going down without a fight, however.
Sarcasm had always been my weapon of choice. The first time Mike gave me a list of things he wanted me to do while he was at work one Saturday, I looked at him in astonishment and said, in a robotic voice, ‘This android is not programmed to take your orders.’
He didn’t find that funny, and was grouchy for the rest of the weekend. Then he apologized but I knew he was still punishing me when I began to be excluded from social arrangements or he totally overrode household decisions we’d already agreed upon. I began to see a pattern, and again, he wasn’t amused when eventually I said that if he’d wanted a Stepford Wife he should have married one. I really wanted our life together to be everything it had once promised to be but I knew I had to choose between saving the so-called marriage or saving myself in the end. Before he destroyed my love for him, I wasted too much time trying to make things right between us, but when I finally took my courage in my hands and told him I thought we’d been mistaken in each other and should separate, he flew into one of his terrifying cold rages, which by then had much the same effect on me that the Dementors had on the characters in theHarry Potternovels, and threatened that if I ran off to Treena for help, he’d blacken her professional reputation.
That stopped me in my tracks. She’d moved to Merchester by then and taken out a loan to buy into her friend’s family veterinary practice, not to mention a mortgage on a small terraced cottage. I couldn’t risk any action that might harm her.
Mike had already made very sure he’d alienated me from any other friends I might have turned to, and the family were too far away to see what was happening. I had casual friendships with my gardening colleagues but, due to Mike, I no longer even went to the pub with them after work … and his habit of suddenly turning up at the garden where I was working didn’t endear me to my employers, either.
He’d known Treena was the one person I could turn to and so once that was impossible, I felt trapped and hopeless.
Now, of course, I find it hard to understand how I came to be so much under his thrall, but one thing followed another in a spiral of descent, until I began to feel I was losing both the fight and my mind, and there was no way out but one – until Fate and Treena intervened to set me free and I became the Runaway Bride.
Now, five years later, here was Treena telling me that Mike had remarried and moved on.
I realized I was still holding the phone in one hand and Treena’s voice could be heard faintly asking me if I was still there. I felt as if an hour had passed, but the same small white cloud above my head had hardly shifted and I knew it must have been barely minutes. I took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh, then put the phone to my ear again.
‘Yes, I’m still here, but I think I just had a near-death type experience, where the dodgier parts of your life rush past your eyes.’
‘No, that one must have been a new-life experience, because there’s no reason to put off coming back to the UK now, is there?’
‘I expect he lost interest in me long ago anyway and there was no reason why I shouldn’t have come back after the divorce was finalized,’ I said. ‘But now he’s remarried it somehow feels … safer.’
A sudden wave of homesickness swept over me for the rolling farmlands, upland moors and little market towns of west Lancashire, where I had been brought up. I wanted to walk on the flat, pale golden sands at Merchester, with the wind blowing stinging sand against my bare legs and the taste of salt on my lips.
‘He’s got someone new to work on now he’s remarried,’ Treena said. ‘Sylvie, my receptionist friend, said his wife is a vet too, and she’s joined his practice so he’s going to be able to keep tabs on her all the time. She’s only a couple of years older than you were when you got married – he seems to like them much younger than he is.’
I shivered, though that might have been the icy breeze winding around me.
‘So, when are you coming home, Marnie?’
‘As soon as I can find a job, though not with the Heritage HomesTrust, because after Mike managed to convince them I’d had a breakdown, alarm bells and whistles would go off if I sent in an application – or to the National Trust and English Heritage, because rumours do get around in the gardening world. I don’t think I could ask them for a reference, either,’ I added wryly.
‘Maybe not,’ she agreed. ‘But I expect some of the people you’ve been gardening for in France would be happy to write you references.’
I’d spent the last five years moving around the surprisingly large circle of ex-pat château owners, working for little more than pocket money and board and lodging, returning to my family at the Château du Monde from time to time.
Once I’d begun to feel safe, I’d found the life fun, but it meant I had little savings, and the small and decrepit old Citroën 2CV I’d arrived in was my only asset, unless you counted fluent, but Lancashire-inflected, French and a large collection of battered old books on gardening in that language, which I’d picked up along the way.
‘I seem to have lost my ambition to work my way up the gardening hierarchy of any big organization,’ I said, turning it over in my mind. ‘I think a job on a private estate with a cottage thrown in, something like that, would be perfect.’
‘You can stay with me while you look.’
It was a kind offer, but her end-terrace cottage was so tiny and full of animals that staying there wasn’t going to be practical for more than a couple of days.
‘Thanks, Treena, that would be lovely, but I think it would be best if I could have something lined up before I got back,’ I said. ‘I’ve got my BSc Honours in horticulture, so that and a few references from people over here should do it.’
‘There are always copies of theLadymagazine in our waiting room at Happy Pets. They used to carry a lot of adverts for jobs like that with accommodation thrown in, so I’ll scour the recent issues,’ she offered.
‘As long as the work involves gardening, I’m not fussy,’ I assured her. ‘I can even do some handyman stuff, after helping renovate all these old French houses.’
‘Handywoman,’ she corrected. ‘But I know it’s the gardening you love best – never happier than when you’re grubbing about in compost and mulch.’
