Page 22 of Once Upon a Thyme
‘Yes. Tomorrow,’ I said again, firmly. ‘That will be fine.’
Simon lingered, one hand on the top of the door frame. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s good. I’ll go and tell the band.’ He didn’t though. He stayed with the sun running along his back and his expression in the shadow of the shop. ‘It’s nice in here,’ he said eventually.
‘Yes, I think so.’ I looked up at the beams where dried foliage hung, and around at the stone walls, dotted with bunches, bouquets and posies. ‘I like it,’ I said again, more quietly.
‘Very organised. Tidy.’
‘I try.’ I wondered why he was still here. Then I had the awful feeling that he was going to warn me about Mika again, that he’d seen us hand in hand in the garden and taken things the wrong way. I didn’twantto be warned off Mika. I wanted to be encouraged, and if not, then just left to admire him hopelessly from the sidelines, not given chapter and verse on whether he left his dirty socks on the sofa or slurped his soup. I wanted Mika to remain the impossible pinnacle of perfection. ‘Right. I’d better get on. If you’re filming round the pond, I can sort out that fennel.’
I advanced on Simon, who eventually had to move to one side and let me pass, and I kept on walking, giving him no chance to start another dark cautionary tale. Out in the sunshine I could see the band being filmed; a waft of distant music from speakers hit me with the scent of warm chamomile and I thought that from now on I’d always think of this moment when I brewed chamomile tea. That smell of hay meadows would forever bring me the image of Mika sitting on the edge of the pond looking soulful, with his viola pouring sweet notes into the air and a girl’s voice raised in plaintive song, a tune like an old folktale snagging on modernity.
8
I hadn’t got to bed until the early hours of the morning. After all, the curtains had needed a good wash anyway, and the windows needed cleaning; there were the wooden work surfaces to sand and oil – I couldn’t get away with covering them in herb pots again. Fortunately for my sleep schedule I managed to stop myself short of painting the walls and cleaning out all the cupboards, but I fell into bed exhausted just before the sun began to tickle the tops of the far hills.
All of which meant I was woken by Zeb yelling up the stairs. ‘Tallie? Are you here? Your curtains are closed, are you ill?’
He’d gone straight home after meeting my mother, so I hadn’t been able to tell him about the arrangements for today; if I had, I would have been able to put him to work sweeping and polishing the floor tiles. Going home for a nice quiet lie down was the natural reaction to being in my mother’s company for any length of time, so I couldn’t even blame him for dipping out on an afternoon’s hard work. He’d probably had a killer migraine and low-grade earache to sleep off. And at least he’d had the decency to text me and tell me he was ‘working from home’ rather than vanishing. But the result was I’d not told him that I’d be up late cleaning the cottage and preparing the kitchen for its starring role. It hadn’t seemed the sort of thing I could text –by the way, while you’re not here I’m going to be martyring myself to the cause of housework in an attempt to undo six months of neglect so that Mika thinks I’m a domestic goddess.
So when Zeb shouted me awake, I jerked upright with a confused ‘blurgh?’ to hear him coming cautiously up the stairs.
‘Tallie? You sound…’
Before I knew it, Zeb was in my bedroom, looking startled at my bed hair in the morning light that filtered through the curtains at the tiny window.
‘I’m fine.’ I was performing a weird sitcom mime of clutching the covers to my chest as though I’d been caught naked, when, in fact, I was wearing T-shirt-and-shorts pyjamas. ‘I had a late night, that’s all.’
Zeb stood and stared into the room. ‘Wow. Some of the things your mum said are beginning to make sense now.’
The urge to explain myself was so strong that I couldn’t squash it down, even though this was Zeb not my mother. ‘It’s just – I spent some time doing research and studying.’
‘I can see that.’
I wondered what he reallycouldsee. Obviously the absolutely factual, that my bedroom walls were covered in books and bookshelves, and where they were naked of shelving there were magazine articles and printouts stuck to the walls. Garden designs, yes, herbs and their uses, but also articles about people whose parents – one or both – had died or been killed when they were very young. Psychological works on ‘Blame and the Child’, pages of work on self-forgiveness; it all made my bedroom a bit like the office of a therapist with poor short-term memory.
‘Did… err… did you learn anything?’ Zeb swept out an arm. ‘From all this?’
I looked at the walls. ‘Mostly that Blu Tack isn’t good enough to keep printer paper vertical and that nobody knows what they are talking about,’ I said, trying to slide out of bed without him noticing. If I could get him out of the room and away from this shrine to self-improvement, then he may forget about it.
‘Did you have therapy?’ He walked over to where a corner of a newspaper article had come loose and was flopping and curling across its print. ‘Because I think you may have needed it.’
I started to bridle at this unwanted and unwarranted observation, but then relaxed. Zeb was only saying what he saw, and even I had to admit that my wall coverings made me look as though I had issues. ‘There was no point. I was a year old when my father died. I didn’t really start to understand what was going on until I found out about the accident.’
‘Which was when?’ Zeb started squinting, reading the print. It was a bio piece about the actress Kate Beckinsale, describing how it felt to lose her father as a young child. I had identified in a probably rather over-the-top way, given that my similarities to Kate Beckinsale began and ended with ‘female, lost male parent’.
‘I was about ten. Until then I only knew that he’d died.’
‘Oh, Tallie,’ Zeb said softly. The words were swallowed by the half-light, weighted to the carpet under the dust motes that sank in the sun’s rays.
‘Oh, no, it’s fine, honestly.’ I hustled him out of the room, hoping he hadn’t noticed the scatter of clothes on the floor on the other side of the bed, or the hedgehog nightlight. ‘I’m interested, that’s all.’
‘Do you know what happened?’ We’d only got as far as the tiny landing and Zeb stopped walking, so I ricocheted off his shoulder and against the banister. ‘To your dad?’
‘He…’ I held the wooden rail firmly in one hand. The smell reminded me so much of Granny; old wood and lavender water had been her signature scent. ‘He was coming home for my birthday party. He was driving too fast and he crashed into a tractor on one of the lanes near here.’
Zeb had gone very still. ‘And that’s why you think it was your fault?’
‘No! I was one! I couldn’t even feed myself, let alone ask him to make sure he was home in time for my party. Of course it wasn’t my fault.’
