Page 17 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
‘She did? And … Ned does, too?’ I said, tentatively.
She nodded. ‘I’d no idea you’d known Ned as students, of course, and then, living abroad, you probably entirely missed all the scandal.’
This all sounded very mysterious.
‘But you see, poor old Ned has had a hard time, which is why he’s so prickly. I’ll tell you all about it on the way up the River Walk.’
She got up, dusting off the seat of her billowing black coat and I followed her into the Lavender Cottage garden and under the overgrown thorny rose arch past the beehives.
As we reached a kind of wooden sentry hut by the back gate, she said, ‘We did tell you that one of your duties would be to go right up the River Walk to the falls at closing time every day, to pick up any litter and check for damage and stray visitors, didn’t we?’
‘Not that I recall,’ I said, still wondering if it was all academic anyway, and I’d still actually have a job by the end of this little talk. And what on earth was this scandal involving Ned that had so changed him and made him need healing? It sounded very unlike the Ned I remembered.
Myfy opened the hut and took out a stick with a pointed metal end, which she handed to me, and a large brown paper rubbish sack from a folded pile on a shelf.
‘The shutter over the entrance turnstile is always pulled down and locked at four, when Elf or one of the staff has emptied the box of tokens,’ she explained. ‘Then someone has to walk all the way up to the top of the falls, which we started doing regularly after the time we found a poor Swedish tourist with a broken ankle near the waterfall, who’d been there the whole night and was quite demented, poor thing.’
I felt a little demented myself by this point, with so many unanswered questions whirling about like dark bats in my belfry.
‘Of course, you don’t need to do it on Tuesdays, when we are all closed, or Sundays – someone else will do it that day.’
We passed through the gate, which she locked carefully behind us, and picked our way down a narrow path that wound through gorse and rocks, until we came out on a wide gravelled path by the riverbank.
We turned upstream, away from the turnstile, and began to walk up the valley. The river burbled, rushed and babbled over its stony bed and I could hear a blackbird singing and the distant plaintive bleat of a sheep.
The path was quite wide and easy here, skirting boulders, rocky outcrops and large, gnarled tree roots.
‘As well as checking for injured visitors, you need to keep an eye out for any damage to the path and handrails,’ Myfy said instructively. ‘On the way back, you empty the two rubbish bins into the sack and collect any litter thoughtless visitors have dropped.’
My spirits rose slightly: it wasn’t exactly sounding as if I’d been fired before I started … or not by Myfy, at any rate. I feared that convincing Ned might be altogether a harder task.
‘The first stretch of the River Walk, about half a mile, is quite easy going, as you see. There are one or two little bridges across more difficult stretches further on, put in by the Victorian owners before the Verdis took over, when they turned it into a daytripper’s beauty spot.’
It would not exactly be an onerous task to walk up the little valley every afternoon … though possibly it wouldn’t be so pleasant in bad weather.
Myfy might have read my mind because she said, ‘If it’s bucketingdown with rain or blowing a gale then no one in their right mind would climb the waterfall path up to the top, so you can just do a visual check from the viewing platform at the bottom.’
There had been no sign of any visitors, within earshot or otherwise, to prevent Myfy explaining what had happened to Ned, and I was just wondering if she had forgotten, when she said, with a sigh: ‘I’d better put you in the picture about what happened at the beginning of last year, so you can understand Ned’s attitude earlier. Poor boy,’ she added, though Ned was most definitelynota boy, but a large, angry and seemingly troubled man.
‘When I went to France five years ago he was still a TV celebrity andThis Small Plotmust have been on about its millionth series,’ I said. ‘I … I’d lost touch with most of my old friends by then, though.’
‘It was a dreadful scandal, in all the papers over here, but I don’t suppose those in France even covered it,’ Myfy said. ‘And really, it wasn’t much more than a seven-day wonder, even if it did have a long-term effect on Ned.’
Now I was really intrigued to know what on earth Ned had got himself into, but when she began by saying that it was all caused by the unreasonable jealousy of his girlfriend at the time, it all began to sound horribly familiar …
‘She began constantly accusing him of seeing other women, which he wasn’t. Finally he felt he couldn’t take any more and ended the relationship.’
‘I’m not surprised, because an unreasonably jealous partner is hell,’ I said with complete empathy. ‘But if he was innocent of any affair, then I don’t see where the scandal comes in and—’
‘Why it should affect him so much that he threw in his career and came up here to hide away?’ she finished for me. ‘It’s because it was all so public. His ex-girlfriend, Lois, sold a story to one of the tabloids – all made up, of course, there wasn’t a word of truth in it. They called him a Love Rat.’
She mouthed the words as if they tasted rancid.
‘It appeared that she’d not only been checking his phone but she’dactually hired a private eye to spy on him. A paper published a picture of Ned and Penny Sinclair, his director, embracing outside the hotel they were all staying at, under the caption “Love Rat TV Gardening Guru and his Director”.’
‘People do hug each other all the time, and I don’t suppose if they’d been having an affair, they’d had done it in front of a hotel, presumably with the rest of the team around?’
‘No, and the real explanation was that Penny and her husband couldn’t have children, so had been trying to adopt for ages, and she’d just had a call telling her they’d been approved to adopt a baby boy. They’d almost given up hope, it’s such a long process. Ned knew about it and was just delighted for them.’
