Page 6 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
Most of my belongings stayed at Treena’s cottage. I took my working clothes and some jeans and jumpers, a pre-Mike long washed-denim skirt and old, comfortable ballet flats and a good, warm, loose wool jacket in a cheery bright red that Aunt Em had once bought me. That was pretty well it, apart from my leather rucksack.
I certainly wasn’t taking my laptop and phone. Mike had given me those and I’d eventually realized he was using them to snoop on me. Or so he thought. He never knew about the mobile phone I kept sealed in a waterproof bag in one of the plant pots on the flat’s balcony,orthat I had an emergency set of car keys hidden under the bumper – for ofcourse my car keys had been on the ring with the door key he’d taken with him.
There were a lot of things he hadn’t known about me, but he’d been so sure when he went away that weekend that he finally had me exactly where he wanted me.
It all felt a bit like a bad nightmare now, the kind that gave me flashbacks I could have done without.
I got up and showered and then went down to the warm kitchen to forage for breakfast. The two Border collies had gone with Treena, but two of the sedately middle-aged cats kept me company while the other, a three-legged and slightly cross-eyed Siamese, was quite shy.
After I’d washed down toast and marmalade with two more mugs of coffee, I thought I might as well make a start on sorting out the stack of belongings in my bedroom and seeing what I could fit in my car around the stuff I’d brought from France.
I’d been surprised at how much I’d accumulated. There weren’t a lot more clothes, but I’d filled two stacking boxes with old French cookery and gardening books and several old gardening tools I’d picked up along the way. There was also the last-minute find at a junk market of a pair of enormous old butter paddles … I was armed and dangerous.
I’d left most of this stuff in the car last night, just bringing in the rucksack and a slightly moth-eaten carpet bag I’d found in the Château du Monde attic. Just to be sure there weren’t any ravenous inhabitants remaining, we’d wrapped it in plastic and left it in one of the big freezers for twenty-four hours, which Aunt Em reckoned would finish off any lingering moth grubs, so I had the most chilled luggage ever.
I was filling what space there was in the car with the nearest boxes and bundles – some mine, some things of Mum’s that Aunt Em had packed up for me after her death – when Treena returned. She put the dogs in the house and then came back to watch me. Her cheeks were glowing and she smelled pleasantly of horses.
‘It looks like one of those 3-D jigsaw puzzles,’ she said, as I attempted to slide the wooden butter paddles between the back of the passenger seat and a battered tin trunk. ‘Whatarethose things?’
‘Butter paddles, but much bigger than usual. Em reckons the dairymaid who swung these must have been Amazonian.’
‘I expect you’ll find a hundred and one uses for them,’ she said, as I closed the door cautiously. The car didn’t explode, scattering belongings in all directions, as I’d half feared.
‘I’ve made a small hole in the stuff you’ve been storing for me, but I’ll try and do something about the rest as soon as I can. It’s been taking up space in your cottage for way too long.’
‘Oh, no problem,’ she said, looking slightly surprised. She was very laid-back, as were all the Ellwoods. ‘I’d forgotten about them – I mean, they’re just there, in nobody’s way.’
She went to change and then we walked into Great Mumming and had a pub lunch with her old college friend and partner at Happy Pets, Sam, and his wife, Karen, who was a doctor. They were fascinated by my nomadic life in France, moving from one crumbling château to the next, nominally gardening, but in reality also picking up other skills, from French cookery of the more hearty peasant type, to plumbing, plastering and wallpapering.
As I described the funnier episodes and recalled how, on warm summer evenings, the château owners and the volunteer helpers would all gather together at trestle table in the garden to eat after a hard day’s work, I could already see how these years would soon become fond memories, to look back on with pleasure.
During that time, I’d slowly unwound until the old Marnie blossomed forth once again, though with a few additional thorns, as I’d restored walled gardens, semi-wild kitchen plots, neglected formal parterres and even a maze. Reconnection to the earth had been what I’d needed and I’d made many new friends, though never anything more, because I was entirely done with love.
From time to time I’d gone back to the Château du Monde for a little holiday with the family, but the time there never turned out to be that, because I couldn’t resist working in the World Map garden, which gave the château its name. The family had thrown themselves into upgrading and extending the campsite and the lake facilities, then opening a gardencentre, before they’d sorted out the accommodation for themselves, and they were still working on making the place a comfortable home.
‘I sometimes wish I’d moved to France with them,’ Treena said. ‘But then, like you, Marnie, living in France was nevermydream and my roots are forever dug into west Lancashire.’
We gave the dogs a quick walk when we got back and then a tidal wave of tiredness washed over me and I zonked out on my bed before dinner under a coverlet of cats.
The remains of a pot of spaghetti Bolognese lay on the table along with an open bottle of prosecco, a scene almost exactly like the last evening I’d spent here before I’d set off for France.
Treena had obviously been thinking along the same lines, for she said now, ‘You were still terrified Mike might somehow appear and drag you home, that last night before you left for France, do you remember? I had to put through a call to his hospital in Amsterdam before you were convinced he was still there.’
‘I know, and in retrospect it still seems incredible that I let him get such a hold on me … but I think you have to be in that kind of relationship to understand it fully: how slowly it sucks you in before it even dawns on you what’s happening.’
‘Yes, it took me a long time to work out what he was doing and he had most people fooled into thinking he adored you and was so worried about your mental health, especially after you lost the baby.’
I shivered. I’d got pregnant after my pills had mysteriously ‘vanished’ and before I could replace them, but I’d hardly realized I was expecting before I’d lost the baby.
‘I think the worst thing he ever said to me was that I couldn’t even carry out the one function most women managed without any problem – have a baby.’
‘He truly deserved a burst appendix and septicaemia,’ Treena said. ‘God moves in mysterious ways – and it was certainly a godsend for us that he was ill the exact same weekend we’d arranged everything for your escape.’
I smiled through a blur of sudden tears. ‘Yes. It was ages before he got home and could start trying to find me.’
‘He rang me when he got back to the flat and found you gone,’ Treena said, to my surprise. ‘I didn’t tell you at the time in case it worried you. At first he tried to charm me into telling him where you were, and then, when I wasn’t having any of his fake concern about you, he moved on to the threats. But I told him I was recording the conversation and if he tried to blackmail me I’d hand it to the police. That stopped him in his tracks and he rang off.’
‘I should think it did,’ I agreed. ‘Wereyou recording it?’
