Page 4 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
I grinned. ‘There are a couple of job sites online I can look at, too, but I know I’m going to be back at the bottom of the ladder and starting again on a low wage.’
Aunt Em had given me her old laptop the year before and, though temperamental to turn on, was OK once it got going, apart from an anxious whirring noise from time to time. It was nice to be connected to the internet again, even if I was avoiding social media like the plague.
‘Well, at least this time there won’t be any snakes to bar the way back up the ladder,’ Treena pointed out. ‘Right, I’d better go now – email you later if I spot anything that sounds good.’
‘Yes, I’d better go, too,’ I said, as Jean, the elderly and irascible gardener, appeared from the greenhouse and began gesticulating at me in his own imperative manner. He had come with the château I was currently working at and had a bad temper and a face that looked the way Gérard Depardieu’s would if it had been briskly clapped between the two big wooden butter paddles that hung in what had once been the dairy.
That was something I’d have quite liked to have done to him myself …
2
Back to the Future
I leaned over the ferry rail and watched Calais dissolve into the grey early morning gloom, while the cold salt air scoured out my lungs in what I hoped was a healthy way. The last French seagull, hunched on a nearby hatch, ceased to eye me malevolently and, with a Gallic-sounding screech, took off for home.
I wondered if seagulls had foreign accents. Though unless someone learned to speak Seagull, perhaps we’d never know.
I groped in my pocket for my mobile, meaning to call Treena and tell her I was on the way, then remembered that my cheap pay-as-you-go phone had met a watery end in the lily pond at the Château du Monde and even sealing it in a bag of rice hadn’t revived it. I was the kiss of death to phones.
Unsurprisingly, given the chill, I had the deck to myself, but soon I’d have to go in search of warmth and hot coffee. I spared a thought for my poor little Citroën down in the creaking, oily-smelling hold. She was even more battered than she’d been when we’d made the journey in the opposite direction five years previously, so even if she got loose and skated around the hold like a dodgem, you wouldn’t really notice any new bumps and scratches. I’d had a door panel and the bonnet replaced with parts from a scrapped white model, and perhaps when I could afford it I’d have the whole car resprayed in one colour. It might at least help to hold it together a little longer.
As the Runaway Bride, I’d travelled out on Treena’s passport (just aswell her photo had been taken when she was in her Goth phase, with dyed black hair and lots of heavy eye makeup), but I’d long since cancelled my own old passport which, for all I knew, was still locked away in Mike’s safe, and got a new one, so I was returning as Marianne Ellwood.
Marnie: restored to myself again, and even if there were a few hidden scars, they were faded to the merest tracings of silver.
Since Treena’s phone call, I’d applied for any job that sounded even remotely suitable. But unfortunately, it appeared that most of the situations with accommodation thrown in wanted a married couple, usually a gardener/housekeeper combo. I’d only had one positive reply and that was to an ad that Treena had happened to spot in her local paper.
Full-time gardener required to work at two adjoining country properties.
Position includes small flat if required.
There had been a box number, to which I’d replied, and was astonished to discover that, by one of those weird coincidences that life sometimes throws our way, the advertiser lived in Jericho’s End.
The letter offering me the position was stowed in the small, worn patchwork leather rucksack slung over my shoulder. I could feel it glowing brightly in there, like a promise.
The speed of the first response, and then the offer of the job following hard on the heels of my reply, made me suspect they’d had few, if any, applicants. The pay was low considering there were two gardens to look after, but then, the inclusion of the small flat clinched it for me.
I’d had a tussle with my conscience before accepting it for, after all, Mumhadmade me promise never to go to Jericho’s End. Though, as Treena had pointed out when I discussed it with her, that was when she was very ill and probably confused. What danger could there possibly be in a small Lancashire village?
Aunt Em had thought it was because Mum’s family had threatened to do horrible things to her if she ever showed her face in the villageagain, after she told them she was expecting me, but that was such an outdated attitude now and so long ago … I didn’t suppose I’d get a welcome from whatever members of the Vane family still remained there, but there surely couldn’t be anydanger. In any case, I wasn’t Marianne Vane any longer, but Marnie Ellwood, and there was no reason why they should ever know who I was.
I’d accepted the job offer and I was to start on Monday morning, or at least arrive then, which meant I could spend two nights with Treena and have a good catch-up first. Of course, I’d often seen her when she’d been over to visit the family, but the last – and only – time I’d stayed in her cottage in Great Mumming was when I was making my break for freedom.
I’d been a nervous wreck, illogically convinced that Mike would suddenly appear, even though Treena kept reminding me that, with a burst appendix and septic shock, he’d have been incapable of even rising from his hospital bed in Amsterdam, where he’d just arrived for a conference. He’d been complaining about abdominal pain and thought he was getting an ulcer, which just goes to show how good veterinary surgeons are at diagnosing their own ills.
I’d been afraid that he’d cancel the trip, because Treena and I had been counting on his absence for my Great Escape, so it was with huge relief that I saw his car emerge from the car park onto the road and vanish.
He’d been due back on the Monday, so the news of the appendix bursting, which came just as I was about to depart the flat for ever, was an unexpected bonus, though it had taken Treena, later, to make me see it that way without feeling guilty.
But I’d had my emotions twisted and pulled into such a complicated knot by then that it was to take five years of grubbing about in French soil to heal me.
I pushed away the memory of that fleeing and haunted version of myself and thought about the future instead. I was going to live in Jericho’s End, the magical place of all Mum’s childhood stories, including my favourite ones about the fairies, or little angels, as she insisted they were, that she’d seen by the waterfall at the top of the valley.
I smiled, thinking that it was probably the effect of flickering sunlight through leaves that had caused an imaginative child to conjure up something so fantastical, but I would search out the spot when I had time and think of her there.
The cold wind ruffled my short, dark curls – long gone was the Pre-Raphaelite mass of wavy black hair that Mike had so admired, for the moment the real Marnie had emerged from wherever she’d been hiding I’d ruthlessly purged myself of anything that reminded me of him.
One of the ways Mike had tried to exert control over me was by giving me clothes – short-skirted little suits, slinky dresses and ridiculous shoes with pointy toes and stiletto heels. Apart from not having pointy feet, there was no way I was tottering about on spikes, and I’d thrown them out of the window. For a moment it had seemed likely that he would throw me out after them. I did wear the loathsome clothes at home, though –Mike’shome, never mine.
