Page 8 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
‘To Luke, lumps of mud and random bits of burned bone seem to provide endless excitement.’
Treena had always insisted that she was never going to get married, or live with anyone. She liked her independence and her own way of doing things too much, and had her animals for company. Seeing what happened to me had probably reinforced that determination.
But now I wondered if there was a softening around the edges … though there certainly wasn’t around mine. Once bitten, more than twice shy. Forever shy.
We’d both turn thirty-six this year – we’d been born within a weekof each other, and in fact it was at the antenatal clinic that our mothers met and became such close friends. Treena and I had always had joint birthday parties, twins of a kind.
I tactfully changed the subject. ‘This Ms E. Price-Jones sounds very kind in her letters, and there’s a sister, too. They’re expecting me about ten tomorrow and I’m to go into the café, Ice Cream and Angels, which is at one end of Lavender Cottage. She sent me a little map on the back of the last letter, but it was in pencil so I’ve only just noticed.’
‘Strange name for a café,’ Treena commented.
‘Yes … and oddly enough, “ice-cream and angels” was the last thing Mum ever said.’
I’d never told even Treena that before. Now I’d remembered I felt doubly excited. First Jericho’s End and now the name of the café were connecting my new life with Mum in a way I couldn’t wait to discover. I hadn’t forgotten Mum’s warning, but I felt there were answers waiting for me.
‘Really?’ she said. ‘Then I think that’s a good omen, don’t you?’
4
Going to Jericho
Treena was to set out early for Happy Pets in the morning, since she was taking the first drop-in session. Over breakfast she presented me with a large-scale Ordnance Survey map of the Thorstane and Jericho’s End area.
‘The turn to the village is easy to miss if you haven’t got sat nav.’
‘I sneer in the face of sat nav,’ I said, larding butter onto toast and adding some of last year’s bramble jam. ‘After all, when I went to France I only had an ordinary car atlas and a load of Post-it notes with road numbers written on them stuck along the dashboard – not to mention having to drive on the wrong side of the road – and I found the Château du Monde OK.’
Not that I actually remembered much of that nightmare flight to safety, with the imaginary hounds of hell on my trail in defiance of all common sense and reason.
‘Didn’t you circle Paris twice before you found the right road south?’
‘You know very well that’s just a family joke,’ I said with dignity, though the other one they told – about my having inadvertently bought a supply of high-salt-content mineral water when I stopped for petrol and arriving with a raging thirst – wasn’t.
Treena gave me a spare key to the cottage and left, taking the dogs with her, and saying she couldn’t wait to hear how I got on and I must email her later.
I still felt slightly spaced out and as if this wasn’t all really happening, but I spread out the map on the kitchen table, pushed away the cat that immediately came and sat on it, and studied the lie of the land.
From Great Mumming, which was an attractive small market town, I needed to take the road that ran vaguely eastward towards the large village of Thorstane, which was up on the edge of the moors.
The tiny village of Jericho’s End looked very close to Thorstane on the map, but the turn to it onto a single-track lane came miles before you would expect it to, due to it forming a long, narrow ‘V’ with the main road.
It wound its way up a blind-ended valley that looked more like a ravine towards the top, where the road petered out and was replaced by a zigzag of dotted lines. There appeared to be only the one decent road in and out, which made it quite off the beaten track.
Only visitors looking for scenery or, possibly, fairies would have any reason to go there and neither of those had ever been interests of Mike’s. To him, a village was something you ran through and I assumed he was still running – did runners go on forever? He must be the wrong side of forty-six now.
I shivered. I might be free and in what passed for my right mind, but I still never wanted to hear his voice, or come suddenly face to face with him again … though now I was also so filled with anger at what he’d tried to make me become that I only hoped those butter paddleswerehandy if he ever turned up.
I grinned to myself, picturing that, but I didn’t suppose I’d have the paddles to hand even if he did appear, because people would think I was a little strange if I took to carrying them about with me.
I looked at the clock and decided it was time to make a move.
As a concession to this first meeting with my new employers, I’d applied eyeliner and a smudge of ruby lip gloss, brushed my hair so that it curled neatly behind my ears, and I was wearing what now served as my special occasion outfit: a dungaree-style denim dress (made by Aunt Em, of course, so with a decently wide top), worn over a long-sleevedblack T-shirt and with black and white striped leggings and clumpy Doc Marten boots patterned with bright butterflies. I slung my carpet bag and rucksack into the car, along with the cherry-red wool jacket, said goodbye to the cats and set off.
I found the right road out of town – it was past a place making huge terracotta garden pots that Treena had told me about – and soon the houses petered out, ending in a glimpse through trees of a large Victorian house that seemed to be some kind of private school. Then the road began a slow climb upwards through farmland.
It was a changeable early April morning and a brisk, chill breeze tried to insinuate its chilly fingers through the edges of the car’s fabric roof. Small white bunny-tail clouds were rolling across a baby-blue sky and all looked clean, well scoured and fresh – entirely suitable for the new start I was about to make. I felt nervous, of course, but also excited, both at the prospect of helping restore the old lavender, rose and apothecary gardens, and of having a place, however small, to call my own. The last few years I’d felt akin to something between tumbleweed and one of those plants with aerial roots that seemingly suck nutrients from thin air.
Then, too, I hoped I might in some way find and reconnect with my mother here in the valley she’d loved … though not, perhaps, with the family who’d inspired her with such fear she had warned me never to go there.
