Page 51 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
‘No, Audrey’s always been snobby,’ Myfy agreed, then explained to me, ‘Her late father-in-law left the property to Cress, but Audrey carries on as if she owns it.’
‘The old man left the lodge to Steve just to spite her,’ Elf said. ‘The only reason he let her carry on living there after his son died was because he loved Cress.’
‘There wasn’t much money, though, so that’s why they’re having to run Risings as a B&B,’ Ned explained.
‘Or Cress is. Audrey still has her pretensions,’ Elf said. ‘Cress and some daily help run the B&B, but her main passion is horses and she does some teaching at a riding school over near Great Mumming, when she can get away.’
‘She keeps two horses at Brow Farm, too,’ Jacob said. ‘I like the piebald with the wall eye best.’
‘Only because he looks so odd,’ Myfy said. ‘He has a pink floppy lower lip, too, and grins a lot.’
‘Can horses grin?’ asked Gerald.
‘Rags does,’ she said.
‘Cress would get on well with my sister, Treena,’ I said. ‘Her horse is at livery near Great Mumming and she spends all the time she can spare with her.’
‘They might already have met, because it could be the same stables.’
‘Maybe,’ I said, as Cress returned with four packets of crisps and a bag of peanuts. Her horses would probably be able to use her as a salt lick by the end of the evening.
‘Gerald teaches music at Gobelins, a small private school,’ Elf said.
‘I’m sort of semi-retired, so a few hours here and there suit me very well,’ he told me.
Charlie and a young girl so like him she must be his sister, Daisy, brought round pads of paper and pens for each table and there was a bit of moving chairs about and regrouping in the room, which was now crowded. Through a gap at the far end of the bar I could glimpse the new lounge and the restaurant, and that looked busy, too. For a pub up a dead-end lane off a minor road, it was surprising how popular the place was!
But on this side, everyone seemed to be local and when we’d sorted ourselves out a bit, the quiz began.
The questions were read out by an elderly man, who I was told was Frank Toller, Charlie’s grandfather, and were very wide-ranging.
I’d only done gardening quizzes before, and that was when I was a student, but we seemed to have a wide range of general knowledge on our table, apart from TV soaps. Between them, Gerald and Jacob answered the music questions, from pop and rock to classical, and Ned proved to be hot on history and general knowledge. My input was confined to nature and an obscure question on Agatha Christie.
Ned looked at me with a raised eyebrow and I whispered: ‘Cosy crime fan.’
In any small intervals of silence, thetock, tockof darts hitting a board came from the out-of-sight area at the back and occasionally the playerswould emerge to order in another round of drinks. One of them was Wayne Vane, I saw. He didn’t look around, though, just shambled up to the bar and then straight back again.
We came second in the quiz, narrowly beaten by the next table. Apparently Stacy Toller was an ace at quizzes and had appeared onMastermind.
The prizes were not extravagant – the winning table got a free round of drinks and the booby prize winners a bag of pork scratchings apiece.
‘We just do it for the fun, really,’ Ned said. He looked much more relaxed this evening than I’d seen him since I’d arrived, as if he might actually remember what fun was, if he gave it a bit more thought.
After the quiz the room began slowly to thin out and the talk at our table became more general. Ned told the others about the marble folly I’d uncovered, and how there were Victorian metal rose-name tags, some of which seemed to have the old Regency names on them, and then Ned and I fell into a discussion about whether it was better to try to find and replace the old varieties where they’d died, or put in newer ones, a topic that we, at least, found engrossing.
‘I think we should restock with what was there originally, if we can,’ I said. ‘But you could put lots more roses into the Grace Garden, because apothecary gardens always had them, didn’t they?’
Cress, who I rather liked for her gentle air of melancholy, like a human Eeyore, listened to our talk about roses and then said she’d like to pop in and see the little temple we’d found.
‘Gertie asked me to bring her some more manure, anyway,’ she added.
‘Gertie has a huge hoard of well-rotted manure round the back of the vegetable garden,’ Ned told me. ‘But she’ll have to part with some for the roses.’
‘I do like gardens, even if we’ve had to turf most of ours over to make it easier to keep up,’ Cress said. ‘We don’t have very extensive grounds now anyway, Marnie. We used to own most of the valley, but we had a gambling Lordly-Grace back in the nineteenth century and that’s when most of it was sold off.’
‘Wayne still does your gardening, doesn’t he?’ asked Elf, and Cress’s face clouded.
‘After a fashion, but Mummy has to constantly keep an eye on him and all he does, really, is drive the mower over the lawns and run a brush cutter across the shrubs. We do have a few tubs and pots about, to brighten the place up, and Steve kindly looks after those, when Mummy’s out playing bridge.’
