Page 28 of Happily Ever After
No. Surely not.
I only live over there, in the estate village.
Please God, no.
He’s a designer.
Could that design be –gardendesign?
Gay.
A little harder to be exact about, but that tattoo on the inside of his wrist? That tiny bunch of flowers with the rainbow coiled around it that sprang from the cuff of his dreadful gardening clothes? His reticence, his maintaining that life wasn’t like the books, that it was heartbreak and no happy ending?
Oh God.
I mentally audited all my conversations with Jay, just in case I’d said something horribly incriminating about Hugo or Lady Tanith but couldn’t remember him recoiling in shock at anything. In fact, hadn’thebeen the one to be dismissive of them both as bonkers?
But then, if Lady Tanith had reacted badly to his renouncing the estate – and Lady Tanith’s normal behaviour left me in no doubt that her ‘reacting badly’ wasn’t going to mean that she simply took to her bed with a headache – then Jasper probably was under no illusions about her bonkersness.
I groaned, dropping my forehead to rest on the desk. Right. Of course.Of course.
Then I straightened up. It didn’t matter. Jay had been nothing but pleasant and friendly to me; his being Hugo’s brother shouldn’t matter at all. It wasn’t my fault that I hadn’t picked up on it – there was no strong family resemblance although both were dark haired and eyed. Hugo had the fine build and slender frame of their mother whilst Jay was rangier and more muscly – I hit my head against the desk again. Ofcoursehe was! He dug flowerbeds and cut bits off trees all day! And single – well, he was hardly going to flaunt a partner who may well have to contend with Lady Tanith, was he? She was rude enough to me, and I wasn’t stuck here for any reason other than financial; any poor bloke unfortunate enough to be here for love would probably be put through the metaphorical mincer on a weekly basis.
Damn it, I’dlikedhim!
OK, so the only sensible course of action was to catalogue the books. Make increasingly feeble and doomed attempts to find Oswald’s seemingly non-existent diaries. Try to scrape together enough money and a decent-enough reference, and perhaps I could – what? Find myself a job that didn’t ask for qualifications, in a town small and cheap enough to rent a room in a shared house? Well, it wasn’ttotallyimpossible. People did it. They survived.
Ihadto realise that life wasn’t like the books, that there was no gorgeous man, heir to a ready-made way of life, willing to sweep me off my feet and take me away. There were no ghosts walking the corridors of a down-at-heel mansion, waiting for me to discover their secret, avenge their murder and banish their spirit.
That, as Jay had said, sometimes life was just heartbreak, getting up, going to work and going to bed. No narrative, no fabulous adventures. Just life.
At this rate, I wouldn’t even get a go at the heartbreak bit.
13
THE SECRET GARDEN – THE SECRET GARDEN, FRANCES H BURNETT
A few days later I met Jay again.
I had wandered down to the village for something to do, yet again, with my day off. Templewood had begun to feel static and cut-off, as though anything could be happening in the world outside and we would still be here, bent double under the weight of good manners and expectation. Lady Tanith didn’t seem to take a newspaper or read online news stories and I wondered if it was because she wanted to inhabit a world where Oswald was still alive. Cock-ups by the current government or scandals of the rich and famous didn’t seem to mean anything to her, stuck as she seemed to be in her own grieving.
It was bloody claustrophobic. Even the only-marginally-less closed off scenery of the little estate village was better than the house, where hours felt endlessly recycled, I thought, resting on the little gate in the yew hedge to watch two birds of unknown species fighting over berries. The sun leaned its weight against the hedge which left me in shadow, trying to appreciate the great outdoors while really hoping to flag down a passer-by just to have someone to talk to. Even a dog would do, I thought moodily, picking flakes of paint off the gate, aware that the heroines of novels very rarely had to make do with staring into space and monologuing while watching birds squaring up to one another. Fiction didn’t seem to have much to say on the subject of boredom. Ennui was more picturesque but conjured images of wan tubercular heroines in muslin and I had too large a chest and too much nylon to ever be mistaken for a consumptive Miss.
‘Hello.’ The voice made me jump and I turned around so quickly that I panicked the birds into a metallic chinking as they flew off.
‘Oh, Jay! You startled me,’ I said, aware as I said it that I sounded like the heroine of a badly written romance. I stopped myself short of clasping my hand to my bosom. ‘I didn’t hear you coming.’
‘Welcome to my world.’ He was wearing shorts again, his knees were muddy and covered in grass stains and his socks were rolled down to the tops of his work boots. It made him look like a slightly wicked schoolboy. ‘What are you up to?’
I didn’t want to blurt out that I knew who he was now. He’d not used his full name when he’d introduced himself to me, so he didn’t want me to know, for reasons of his own. Well, that was fine, I didn’t care. But I hugged the secret knowledge to me, as though it gave me a measure of power.He’s Jasper. He’s renounced his birthright and his brother resents him.But, of course, now I knew, I couldn’t say anything about Lady Tanith and her demands and I’d already let slip Hugo’s resentment about his situation. I went a bit clammy round the neck when I remembered how much I’d blurted to Jay when we’d last met, and hoped he’d forgotten most of it.
‘I’m out for a walk,’ I said quickly to distract myself from the flush of embarrassment, despite all evidence to the contrary.
‘Fed up with the Great and Good back at the house?’
I didn’t dare acknowledge that. Partly because I wasn’t sure who was the great and who the good, and partly because I was terrified I might let some more information slip that Jasper wasn’t supposed to know. ‘Mmmm,’ was all I said, and he could take that however he wanted.
‘Would you like a tour of the gardens?’
