Page 12 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
What?
‘I was so pleased when Bella said you were a gardener.’
What?
He smiled broadly. ‘Nobody here is interested at all.’
‘That’s not true,’ Bella objected. ‘I’m very interested once you’ve cleaned the mud off things and I can get cooking with them.’
‘Sure. But it’ll be nice having someone else around who knows their way around a greenhouse.’
Jodie had been picturing a desk and a computer and probably quite a lot of time spent scrolling Insta while nobody was looking. She’d imagined she’d have a suit and an office and be called Ms Simpson… Ms Bryant by eager-to-please young underlings. ‘Events manager’ didn’t make Jodie think of weeding or… she struggled to come up with a second gardening term. ‘I don’t want to get in your way,’ she ventured.
‘Not at all. You’re welcome out there any time.’
‘But that’s not Gemma’s job.’
She tried her best not to look too delighted.
Bella turned to her. ‘So don’t feel you have to. Once he’s got you out in the garden you’ll be stuck there all day.’
‘Not at all. I’m just saying she’s very welcome to chip in because we know she loves gardening.’
Jodie’s terror at the risk of getting caught out as a garden novice was slowly being replaced by something else. Gemma had told them she loved gardening. They’d never had so much as a window box. Did Gemma love gardening? Another tick on the list of ways Jodie had been a terrible girlfriend. Failure to show interest in your partner’s hobbies and interests.
Bella and Adam were still cheerfully bickering about how much of Jodie’s life was going to be spent up to her elbows in soil.
‘Stop crowding the poor girl,’ Darcy interrupted them both. ‘Why don’t you settle in and you can come over to the main house for dinner when you’re ready?’
Adam nodded. ‘Good idea. Take some time. And I promise no work talk tonight.’
‘What?’ Bella sounded anguished. ‘But I want to talk about Hogmanay!’
‘Tomorrow,’ Adam insisted. ‘Let her settle in a bit first.’
Time on her own sounded wonderful. A few hours to get her head around what on earth she was supposed to be doing here. Another thought snuck in. A few hours would also be long enough to get herself several miles away from this place.
Chapter Four
Jodie closed the door behind her hosts and leaned back against it. Of course she wasn’t going to run. That was ridiculous. The situation she was in was, perhaps, a little unusual, but she was here now and she was going to see it through. She just needed to get her bearings and settle in.
She looked down the hallway of the Dower House. The walls were lined with paintings. Small portraits. There was a name for them, Jodie thought. Minis. Miniatures. That was it. There were miniatures all along the walls. Men with impressive beards. Women with large brooches and tartan sashes. The great and good of Lowbridge in years gone by, she guessed. All looking down at her. All wondering what on earth Jodie imagined she was doing here. The faces morphed slightly in her imagination. You should go, they seemed to be saying to her. Even the décor knew she didn’t belong.
The thought had taken hold now. That happened – something would intrude into her consciousness and rather than just fade away it would sit there calling to her. Sometimes it was innocuous enough – the urge to have another chocolate, that turned into the urge to finish the box – but once that thought was in her head the chances of Jodie ignoring or overriding it were always slight.
You could run, the thought reminded her. You could go right now, before Bella or Adam or Darcy suspect anything is amiss. If she left right now it would be as if she’d never come here at all. She could simply disappear.
Pavel walked Jill back to her car outside his place, and waved her off. As she rounded the bend he took a deep breath in. Sunday afternoon. He didn’t think he had anyone coming to use the gym, although it was open so people from the village often wandered in. He didn’t have any work booked. He didn’t have to walk Mrs Timberley’s dog or take over from his mum at the pub until evening. He checked his phone. No messages. Nothing from his mum asking him to run someone to somewhere. Nothing from Anna at the shop asking him if he could pop over and fix whatever DIY disaster Hugh had caused. Nothing at all. Pavel shuddered slightly. Having nothing to do was novel for him. He tried to remember the last time he was awake and unoccupied. Almost certainly before… he didn’t want to settle on that thought, but there was no point shying away from things. His grandfather had always taught him to look problems straight in the eye and get on with doing what was needed to solve them. He probably hadn’t had a hunk of free time since before his grandfather got sick. Before then he’d helped out a bit on the boat and done a bit of labouring alongside college, but after that he’d stepped up and filled the gap in Lowbridge life his grandfather had left. It had been the right thing to do. His granddad’s failing health had created a problem – jobs that needed finishing, people who were going to be let down – and Pavel could solve that problem. And so he had.
None of which helped fill Pavel’s afternoon. What did other people do? His mum baked, or planned village events with the precision and cut-throat attitude of a reigning Mafia don. Jill watched trash TV. She’d attempted to convert him on many occasions, explaining the ins and outs of the relationships onVanderpump Rules, but Pavel never saw the attraction. He could do a workout, but his workouts were tightly scheduled on a four-day upper-lower-body/push-pull split. And today was a rest day.
He could – and Pavel slightly balked at the thought – he could try cardio. Mostly Pavel told himself that having a job where he was moving and carrying all day ticked off his basic cardio needs so there was no requirement to Lycra up and go running about the village. Today though it felt like a choice between doing that or doing nothing. And the thought of doing nothing made him itch to do anything.
He jogged back up the stairs to the flat, pulled on shorts and an old T-shirt, grabbed a water bottle and set out. The thing with running, he figured, was to distract oneself as much as possible from the actual running. It was like eating leeks or taking particularly odious medicine. Clearly nobody enjoyed it but you did it because you knew it was somehow good for you.
With that in mind he pulled up a playlist that claimed to be motivating and energising, popped his earbuds in and set out at what he hoped was a gentle warm-up jog. The received wisdom about running was that you shouldn’t set out too fast, so you didn’t hit a horrendous wall of pain ten minutes in and stop dead.
Ten minutes later Pavel reached the Low Bridge that linked the village to the castle estate over the river and stopped dead. Biologically he was sure it wasn’t physically possible to puke up a lung, but all the sensations in his body were telling him otherwise. He leaned on the railing and tried to gulp in as much air as he could. He was still standing there, wholly occupied with the business of remembering how to breathe, when a noise coming from the castle side of the bridge made him look up.
