Page 28 of Once Upon a Thyme
‘Yes, Granny brought me up, more or less. I mean, Mum was there, of course, but she often couldn’t go out or help with the herbs because she had to stay in bed.’
‘Hmm,’ Zeb said.
I leaped to the defence of my family. ‘Look, a long-term disability isn’t anyone’s fault. Like… like Ollie. Mum can’t help the fact that she’s often laid up for days, it’s just how it is and it’s all I’ve ever known. Granny was brilliant, she looked after me and taught me all about herbs and their uses and then when I took over I branched out into decorative bouquets and things…’
‘And how did your mother feel about that?’
I recoiled at the question. Zeb was getting very personal all of a sudden with all this deep involvement in my family. It was, after all, none of his business.
‘Look. You’re here to maximise the profits and report back to Mother that the place is doing well, right? Not to prod about in my background – none of which is relevant to turnover.’
My hands had started to sweat and I picked up the crude straw figure that I’d woven from the counter to give me something to do with my fingers. Why did discussing my growing up make me feel so… so…twitchy? It was all very straightforward, I was hardly the first child to be brought up by their grandparent because of parental illness, so why did it make me feel so nervous? Or was it just the way that Zeb kept pushing, like the worst kind of counsellor, trying for a crack in my personality?
‘So, anyway.’ I cleared my throat and twisted the little straw man back into shape. I’d nearly pulled his head off. ‘That’s all you need to know. And thanks to the band filming and paying for the privilege, we’ll be solvent for a bit longer.’
I went behind the counter and began tidying the drawers of my apothecary cabinet, neatening the labels and making sure that none of the plastic envelopes of dried herbs were protruding. It was probably the last job that needed doing, but there was something about Zeb’s continued stillness and bouncing hair that made me feel vulnerable. Outside, the sounds of the band being raucously happy floated from the other side of the garden, like dust.
‘Tallie,’ Zeb said, steadily, ‘what the hell happened to you?’
I slammed the dill drawer shut so fiercely that I caught my finger and yelped. ‘Nothing happened to me.’ The pain filled me with the spurt of anger I could have done with a few minutes ago. ‘There’s nothing. No secrets, nothing hidden. I’m as above board as… as…’ I searched for something visually appropriate. ‘As that dried angelica,’ I finished. It wasn’t ‘above board’ so much as ‘above the counter’, but it would have to do. ‘I’m just someone who owns a business that they are trying to keep afloat,’ I finished, definitively.
‘Can I see the books then?’ Zeb stepped towards me.
He got me by surprise. I was sucking my injured finger – that nail was going to go black, I just knew it – and almost doubling over with my urge to make him see that there were no huge secrets in my background. ‘All right!’ I snapped. ‘If it’s so important, I’ll show you. Tonight, once we’ve got rid of that lot.’ I jerked my head in the direction of the cottage, then had a momentary stab of ‘what if Mika chooses tonight to ask me out to dinner?’
‘Unless anything else comes up,’ I amended.
Zeb jolted into life, as though forty thousand volts had shot through him. ‘Good. Great,’ he said, cheerily. ‘Tell you what, once Mumford and Sons there have finished arsing about, I’ll go and fetch us a takeaway and we can sit and go over the figures, how about that?’
I was taken aback again. ‘Oh. I was just going to have a sandwich.’ I hadn’t even thought about food, or that inviting him over for the evening might involve eating.
‘And now you’re going to have a takeaway. I’ll drive over to Pickering, pick one up. I’m presuming that nobody delivers out here?’
He didn’t even wait for an answer. He was gone, back out into the acid-wash daylight. I heard Big Pig grunt a greeting as the barrow squeaked its way back into the barn, and the guinea pigs set up a rival squeak, ever hopeful of green goodies dropping from above.
I finished tidying the shop. Its interior was so familiar to me that I could do these day-to-day jobs without thinking, the jobs I’d done almost every day since I could walk, since Mum and I had come back to live with Granny. Check everything is put away, remove the till drawer, make sure nothing is left switched on and then lock the door. My body carried out the tasks without the involvement of my brain, which was busy whirling through Zeb’s questioning. Why was he so interested in my past? There was nothing there for him to poke around in, nothing but an age-old tragedy and an impecunious upbringing. So what had he seen, what had he thought, that would make him conclude there was anything else there?
And why did his questions make me so anxious?
10
The garden felt quiet after the band had gone. To my disappointment Mika hadn’t sought me out for any more tête-à-têtes. He’d been seemingly absorbed in the extended photography session, which had seen Tessa and Genevra change into dungarees and loiter attractively around Big Pig while the men pretended to pick apples from the crab apple tree in the hedge. I pointed out that the apples were in no way ripe and wouldn’t be ready for harvest for at least another couple of months, but apparently this didn’t matter. Which did not make me think kindly about the sort of people who bought their albums – I mean, surely anyone with half a brain could see that those apples were blatantly unripe and that the girls didn’t have a pig board and weren’t equipped to deal with a recalcitrant sow? But watching the band being photographed, constant poses interspersed with laughing and occasional bouts of singing or holding an instrument in a photogenic way, had led me to believe that visual veracity was a little thin on the ground in The Goshawk Traderslife.
Zeb had finished the mucking out, fed the animals and disappeared, presumably in search of the fabled takeaway. I sat in the cottage and relished the new silence. Apart from the whirr of the computer fan and a blackbird singing high in one of the birches, there was no sound.
I knew I should switch on the irrigation system and give the damp-loving plants a good drench now that the sun had gone from their corner, but I couldn’t bring myself to move. Sitting here, in Granny’s old chair, surrounded by the smell of aniseed and grass cuttings and feeling the residual heat that the sun had left behind I could relax. This wasmygarden.Mybusiness. It didn’t really matter what Zeb might say or do, or even what he might tell my mother, this was me. Staying afloat, doing what I did best.
Sitting alone in a room.
I tapped at the keyboard once or twice. The accounts were all safe, all backed up and everything delineated and carefully tabulated. The tax office could have used me as an illustration of how to keep financial affairs clearly separated and accessible. Everything had headings, there were spreadsheets for everything. I was so squeaky clean that the screen almost smelled of detergent.
I tapped again. Then curiosity made me type in my father’s name. Jonathon Fisher. I periodically searched for mentions of him, although thirty-year-old local car accidents were apparently not priority for digitisation and there had been nothing, up to now, about his death, online. That state of affairs continued and I felt a momentary prick of disappointment. It would have been nice to show Zeb an article, a death notice, anything that related to my father. Some proof that I was still trying to work on how I felt about his accident, and that all those articles on my bedroom wall were a part of something bigger, an actual investigation rather than the obsessions of an orphaned child.
Sometimes… sometimes it felt almost as though Dad had never existed. My mother, crippled with grief, couldn’t utter his name. I only knew he’d been called Jonathon because Granny had occasionally slipped up and mentioned that I’d got his eyes or, more usually, some prejudicial element of my personality. He’d been expunged from our house as though he’d never been, and only I and a surname remained as a reminder that my mother and Jonathon Fisher had ever been joined in holy matrimony.
I scuffed the chair back a few centimetres, hearing the scrape of the old wooden legs against the brick floor, a sound so familiar that it was almost like my heartbeat. Granny had always dragged the legs when she’d moved her chair. I remembered my mother wincing at the noise, hand held dramatically to her forehead, more indications that she was having another of her ‘unwell’ days. Most of my childhood memories of my mother were of a swaddled figure in a bed, a darkened room, me carefully carrying a glass of water or a cup of tea up the steep narrow staircase to hear a faint ‘thank you, darling’ as I put it on the bedside table and crept away again.
I leaned my head against the dented padding of the chair back. Remembering those days gave me a little burst of heat in my heart, a tiny shot of fondness for my mother. I loved her utterly, of course I did. She’d kept me safe, kept me housed and fed and cared for in those dreadful dark days after the death of my father, and that couldn’t have been easy for her. She loved me back, I knew it. My near-snatching by a stranger with who only knew what in mind in one of the places she should have been able to feel safe, a supermarket, must have hit hard too. No wonder she tried to keep me contained and herself isolated. Her illness, undefined so she couldn’t even say ‘I have…’ whatever it was – and get practical help, support, the medication that might deal with symptoms, pulled her inwards. It made it hard for her to cope with me, so no wonder she’d moved back in with her mother. It also occasionally made her unable to see outside herself and her situation, to imagine how life might have been, mightstillbe, for me.
