Page 33 of Once Upon a Thyme
‘All right, all right! On a trial basis, six months, and if you can pay for yourself over that time, you can stay. Now, work your pig magic,please.’
‘Thank you.’ Zeb sounded cheerfully perky. ‘Right, Pig, come on, let’s have you back in the barn.’ He strolled casually around and slapped her on her mighty rump whereupon, to my surprise, she turned a neat circle and followed him happily back to her pen.
I watched them go, shaking my head with astonishment. How did hedothat? Maybe he and the pig shared some fellow feeling at being oppressed by me? I could hear him pouring pig feed into her trough, but surely she wasn’t sufficiently certain that he would feed her, when she could have had the freedom of the garden. If I hadn’t spotted her letting herself out just now, she’d have been out there all night and I dreaded to think what The Goshawk Traderswould have turned up to see in the morning if the pig and the small rodents had been scoffing and rooting for hours.
My heart rose into my throat at the thought. A few minutes ago my biggest worry had been feeling a bit lonely and hard done by, now I was realising that my inattention to the detail of gate closing mechanisms could have cost me my business – or, at least, the large chunk of money that the band were paying to use the premises, plus most of the summer’s earnings.
I felt my blood sting with the what-might-have-beens. I’d been lucky. Lucky that the pig had only just worked out how to let herself out, and lucky that she’d been recaptured before too much damage had been done. Perhaps Zeb, damn him, was right and I did need another pair of hands. Someone else to check things, someone else to man the shop, someone to talk over planting plans and layout details, so it wasn’t all my responsibility. All those things I could have talked to Mum about, but didn’t dare, because I didn’t want her advice shaping my business and my life. Not any more.
But did it have to be Zeb? With his lanky limbs that looked as though they might snap if he lifted heavy weights and his strange fringe, his big dark eyes and his sudden switches of conversation from the practical to the emotional. Was he really the best person to take some of the pressure off me?
I tried to avoid the mental image of Mika working here. That was fantasy. I knew of course that there was no way that a famous musician would give up a life on the road to plant parsley and stir compost. Zeb was offering and he was right about me needing help. ‘Tie her gate up with string!’ I called across to the barn. ‘She’s opening the gates herself.’
Zeb called back something I couldn’t hear and faded off to become a shadow in the distance and rattling metal. I set off after the elusive guinea pigs, combing through the taller growing herbs in search of the whistling bundles, swearing under my breath about how I’d been backed into a corner by a long-limbed farmer-wannabe and a Big Pig.
11
Zeb was early next morning. The dew had barely settled itself on the edges of the ferny yarrow when he was climbing over the gate and arriving in my kitchen.
‘Thought I’d start my employment as I mean to go on,’ he said brightly, watching me make tea and wrinkle my nose at the smell of last night’s curry still lingering in the furnishings.
‘You were already employed here,’ I said. ‘Remember? You’re here in both capacities for the rest of the month, and after that the jury is out.’
‘Well. I’ll just have to make sure I earn my keep then, won’t I? Pig wrangling and looking into the options for more animals, plus giving a bit of advice on the financials.’ He leaned against the door frame, still watching me. ‘Any chance of a cup? I left before I had breakfast.’
I grunted, which he took as assent, claiming the half-empty kettle and the pack of tea bags with alacrity and the kind of smile I’d more normally associate with a primary school teacher introducing the school play. I flopped down in Granny’s chair and watched him through the steam of my own cup; he was moving with a new deftness as though he had a new routine to establish and was going for it all guns blazing.
‘I looked through your accounts,’ he said finally, lifting his mug to me in a kind of toast. ‘After I’d put Big Pig back, while you were still rounding up the small squeakies. They’re in pretty good shape, I have to say.’
‘You make it sound as though you expected everything to have been written on the back of used envelopes in pencil.’
‘Not at all.’ The infant teacher smile was turned on again. ‘I had every faith in your rigour and attention to detail. And you’re right, your mum isn’t drawing that much money from the herb farming, is she? A couple of hundred pounds a month at most.’
I grunted again. A couple of hundred pounds would be averygood earning month, but I wasn’t about to point that out.
‘So what does she live on?’ Zeb dragged out the chair from the table that was nearest where I sat, and slid himself onto it. ‘She’s too young to be getting any kind of pension, and even if sheisgetting benefits, they’d never pay for that house of hers.’
I shook my head. ‘I always thought my dad must have left her some kind of insurance policies or something. She’s never worked, so there wouldn’t be any pensions, apart from the state one, and she’s got a good fifteen years before she can get that. Plus, I think Granny helped her out here and there.’
‘Hmm.’ Zeb frowned into his mug. ‘She owns the house in the village? Or does she rent?’
‘Owns it, I think.’ I put my tea down on the arm of the chair, the hot ring on the leather adding to the thousands that already decorated it.
‘You aren’t curious about how your mother is managing to keep body and soul together?’ He lifted the frown to my face now.
I sighed and let my head flop back. ‘You don’t understand. I was brought up not to ask questions. Believe me, I tried. When I was younger I used to ask about Dad, what he was like, whether he looked like me, whether there were pictures. Or about how Mum came to meet him, when they fell in love, how he asked her to marry him – I was full of questions.’
I heard Zeb take an extra-large mouthful of tea and gurgle ‘ow’ at the heat, then gulp it down.
‘But asking Mum anything would send her to bed for a fortnight. She’d get huffy and go to her room and then she’d be ill and Granny would get cross with me for making Mum upset. There would bean atmosphere.’ I remembered those days, Granny barely speaking to me, Mum not speaking to anyone – existing only as a series of thumps overhead and a blanketed swaddle in her bed. I’d learned early not to rock the boat.
‘So they taught you not to ask questions? That explains how easily you accepted that I’d come for a job that didn’t exist. Although it clearly does, now,’ Zeb added hastily. ‘You were trained.’
I thought about this. The hand not holding my tea tightened on the slippery leather of the chair as I dug my fingers into the fabric, which felt uncomfortably like a human arm. ‘I didn’t want to upset Granny, she was teaching me about the herbs, and it was horrible here when she wouldn’t talk to me. I had to trail along behind her as if I didn’t exist.’
‘So not upsetting them became more important than you knowing about your own father?’ Zeb sounded angry and I opened my eyes, straightened up to see him blazing a dark look at me across the kitchen. ‘Seriously?’
‘It…’ I tried to think how I’d felt. ‘If I asked about Dad, or about the past in general, it made things… I don’t know, sort ofworse. And it didn’t matter, not to me, not really. Dad was just this person who once existed, like Napoleon or Henry the Eighth.’
