Page 96 of The Garden of Forgotten Wishes
A row of what were probably once stables had been turned into motel rooms.
The car park was surprisingly full and so was the pub, when we went inside. Ned insisted we detour en route to the restaurant, so he could show me the original of the pub sign: a huge and ancient-looking mutant fish in a glass case, which did indeed have two heads. It was not a thing of beauty.
‘It looks fed up to the gills,’ I observed.
‘So would you if you’d been stuffed and varnished,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s see if we can get a table.’
A waitress found us a table for two by the window overlooking a stretch of gloomy moors under hurrying pewter clouds. I’m sure when we got out of the car, the temperature was several degrees lower than it had been even at St Gabriel’s church.
We ordered food. I chose carrot and coriander soup with a tuna melt toastie, while Ned went the whole hog and had an enormous plateful of roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, three kinds of vegetables and thick gravy.
‘If I stoke up now, I’ll only need something light tonight,’ he explained, tucking in. ‘I don’t do much cooking, so if I get the opportunity of a decent meal and some fresh veg, I go for it.’
‘Do you mean youcan’tcook?’ I asked incredulously.
‘Of course I can cook!’ he said indignantly. ‘I have an extensive repertoire of beans on toast, scrambled egg on toast, cheese on toast …’
‘OK, just admit you can’t cook. Those aren’t meals, they’re snacks.’
‘I’ve never taken a lot of interest in cooking,’ he admitted. ‘There is always something more exciting to do and, anyway, it doesn’t seem worth the effort for one, does it? Elf puts meals in my freezer sometimes, with cooking instructions.’
‘I quite like simple cooking – casseroles and risottos and things like that,andsoup. This one is really good – home-made is so much nicer than the stuff you get in tins.’
‘That pasta you cooked the other night was really nice and it didn’t seem to take you long to make.’
‘It didn’t, though I used bottled tomato sauce, which speeded things up.’
He evidently enjoyed his lunch now, anyway. I finished the soup and ate my tuna melt, then gazed absently out of the window at the moorland, feeling suddenly slightly disorientated as you do, sometimes, when you find yourself in a strange place, though at least I was not with a stranger.
Nedhadseemed like one when we’d come face to face on the day I’d arrived, but we were soon back on our old terms of friendship.
I turned my head and found that he’d finished eating and was regarding me with a faintly questioning look in his amber-brown eyes.
‘Something’s worrying you, isn’t it? I thought so yesterday, even though you said you just had a headache.’
‘You’re right,’ I admitted ruefully. ‘And I was going to tell you today anyway, I just hadn’t got round to it yet. It really isn’t anything much.’
And I described how I’d been spotted yesterday by Mike’s veterinary nurse, Melinda, and the shock of discovering Mike hadn’t remarried, after all.
‘Apparently his fiancée moved in with him before the wedding, which was bad for him, because she must have started to get some idea of what she was in for. But it was good for her, because she moved out again and called the wedding off.’
Ned was frowning. ‘So … he’s still single?’
‘He doesn’t seem to have found anyone else … and I admit I did somehow feel safer when I thought he was married,’ I confessed. ‘I’m notafraidof him any more, it’s just that … if he found out where I was, he might turn up and try to make trouble.’
‘I’ll sort him out for you if he does,’ Ned assured me. ‘But you said this Melinda promised not to tell him she’d seen you?’
‘Yes, and I don’t think she will, because she doesn’t seem to like him much, but she’s bound to tell other people and then it might get back to him.’
‘What does he look like, in case he turns up?’ he asked.
‘It’s been a few years, so he might have changed, and he must be in his late forties now. He’s medium height and has that deceptively slight, skinny build most runners have – that was his hobby. And short, spikydark hair with some grey. He can be very charming and seems genuinely nice, so you’d probably like him.’
‘He certainly doesn’t sound very scary – but then, when Lois used to fly into a jealous rage she was pretty terrifying,’ he admitted.
‘It’s hard to describe the effect he used to have on me once we’d been married a little while. Have you read theHarry Potterbooks, or seen the films?’
He nodded. ‘Both.’
