Page 17 of Once Upon a Thyme
‘What?’
‘You said nobody ever asks, so I’m asking.’ He swung himself up to sit on the reclaimed wood counter that I’d made out of some of the old beams from the stable. ‘Go on. We’ve got time to kill.’
I was taken aback. Did Zeb think that, now I’d been nice to him once or twice, he could dig into my background? My perplexity must have shown on my face, because he gave me a small grin and dangled his legs. ‘After all, you know about me. Ex-chef, broken marriage, new career, blah-di-blah. Your turn.’
So, for the second time in ten minutes, I found myself reciting my life story. It had sounded matter-of-fact when I’d told Simon but suddenly here, in the shop which smelled almost antiseptically of dried thyme and mint, it sounded thin. As though life had dropped into my lap with a private education, fortuitous cottage and acres of land, and I was playing at running a business because I didn’t know what else to do.
Which, when I thought about it critically, was close to the truth.
When I stopped talking, Zeb was still sitting swinging his legs, his head up so that he could see out of the window. I wondered what he was looking at. The view was almost entirely of the car park, and lorries were filling most of that.
‘What about your dad?’ he asked. ‘You haven’t mentioned him.’
This was the bit I always tried to avoid. ‘He died,’ I said shortly. ‘When I was tiny. I never knew him.’
Now Zeb looked away from the bright square set high in the wall of the dark little shop. His gaze roamed the packets and jars of herbs for a second and then came to rest on my face. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
I shook my head and went to the apothecary cupboard which stored samples of the culinary herbs, each in its own little drawer, carefully labelled. ‘It’s fine,’ I said, fiddling with the marjoram. ‘Like I said, I never missed him because I don’t remember him being about at all. It was hard on Mum though. She had to come back here to live with Granny.’
‘Do you know what happened?’
I could feel Zeb watching me, over my shoulder. This was all wrong. It was too dark in here, too musty and old. All the furniture was old, either reclaimed from when the shop had been the stable belonging to the cottage, which had been the local coal yard years ago, or bought from flea markets. Too old, too dark, and the smell of herbs was no longer the reassuring background perfume I’d known all my life – now it was ancient and dry, the smell of the graveyard.
‘I don’t like talking about it,’ I said, sliding the marjoram drawer shut and adjusting the label.
‘Does it feel a bit like it all happened to someone else?’ Zeb asked, surprising me enough that I turned around. ‘That’s how I feel. About my life before all – this.’ He waved a hand, hit a bunch of meadowsweet hanging head down above the counter, and caused a rain of dried flowers, which caught in his hair. ‘I sometimes feel that I had a dream about getting married and being a chef, and I’m only now starting to wake up to real life.’
‘No, I’m sorry, that’s weird.’ I saw him dust himself down, the white fronded petals trailing down like scented dandruff. ‘Life changes. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’
‘What do youdowith this stuff?’ He knocked the last of the meadowsweet onto the counter and stared at it.
‘Meadowsweet? Lots. You can make dye from it, use it for scent; it contains the active ingredient of aspirin too, so you can make a mild painkiller from the flower buds.’ I ran my hand over one of the hanging bunches so that the trailing mare’s tail tickled my palm.
‘You could probably kill someone with herbs, if you wanted to,’ he observed.
‘I could, but I wouldn’t. I don’t grow any of the really dangerous plants, the nightshades and the hemlocks and all that, even though they can be useful medicinally.’ I glanced up and caught his eye. ‘Too easy for accidents to happen when you’ve got a pick-your-own farm and I’d never forgive myself.’
‘No, you wouldn’t, would you?’
It sounded personal, not like a general observation. His whole attitude was making me uncomfortable now, as though the questions had a point to them that he was trying to obfuscate behind a pretended interest.
‘If you’re trying to find out whether my dad died of poisoning, no, he didn’t. It was a car crash, and, no, I didn’t cause it, I was only a year old.’
Now there was a darkness to his expression, almost as though it had absorbed some of the astringency from the air. Not quite bitter, but curled around at the edges, dry and hard, like leaves that had been put away damp. ‘I wasn’t thinking any such thing, Tallie,’ he said quietly.
‘Well, good.’
‘So you never knew him? That must have been difficult for your mother.’
I thought of my mother. Rattling around her cottage in the village, huddled up in the dark of her oppressively warm bedroom, sending me out for her pills. ‘Yes. Her life has been hard. Bringing me up on her own, losing her husband so young and being ill.’
‘And that’s why you do so much for her?’ Zeb had his head tilted so he could see my face. There was too much shadow in here.
‘Yes,’ I said slowly. I hoped he was going to change the subject soon. Talking about my mother and how and why we behaved the way we did around one another always made me feel – disloyal. As though I was prying into a relationship that was none of my business, which was downright peculiar, because as far as I was aware you can’t pry into yourownrelationships. ‘I like to try to make life easier for her, if I can.’
‘Hence putting up with me, I suppose.’ Zeb slithered down off the counter, a mixture of movement and limbs that made him look suddenly like an accident in action. But the change of subject was reassuring, now we were moving away from the topic of my mother. ‘Maybe we should see how things are going outside?’
He flung open the door and instantly the cool darkness of the shop, with its sombre wood and rows of jars and drawers and hanging herbs, was flooded with light and noise and warmth. The incoming breeze made everything oscillate, filling the air with loose petals and the smell of summer.
