Page 45 of Once Upon a Thyme
I deflated. ‘I suppose not. I’m not convinced that Mum is serious. She’s just throwing ideas about, she does that sometimes.’
‘Hm, I’m not so sure.’ Zeb looked back over the river towards the house. ‘She sounded pretty determined to me. Maybe she’s got financial worries? I mean, howisshe affording to keep that place?’
‘Like I said, I assume Dad had insurance policies that paid out on his death.’
‘Hmm,’ Zeb said again. ‘But that was, what, nearly thirty years ago? And she owns the house, so that will have taken a lump sum. She must have bills; where is the money for those coming from? Unless your dad was a billionaire.’
I found I was looking too now, at the mossy-roofed old house beyond the grassed-in gateway with the thorns preventing entry as though my mother was some kind of latter-day Sleeping Beauty. ‘He was a guitarist in a local band,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they are noted for being rich.’
‘The Goshawk Tradersaren’t doing too badly,’ Zeb observed, managing to sound only slightly sarcastic. ‘The lovely Mika is hardly scratching round for a fiver to buy lunch.’ He sighed now. ‘There’s justsomething.I can feel it. Too many things not said. Notallowedto be said.’
I thought about the band, milling around the garden. About their decision to film in the garden because Mika… hang on. Hang on a second…
‘Simon said that Mika wanted to film because he liked the look of the place as they were driving past,’ I said slowly.
‘Yep. Bit odd, but why not, it’s pretty and off the beaten?—’
‘But Mika said it was Simon’s idea.’ I still spoke carefully. All those years of being told not to ask questions, all those years of upset and silence and the unspoken censure if I dared to voice any of my concerns, hung heavy in the back of my head. It was as if the fear of repercussions made it too much trouble to even start to prod any doubts into life.
‘Maybe they got muddled. Maybe it was one of those group decisions, where everyone has a say.’ Zeb was looking at me with a concerned crease between his eyes.
‘You said I should ask questions.’ I rounded on him and he was forced to take a step back, brushing against the stone of the bridge wall and raising a little cloud of lichen and moss dust. Behind him, the sun slunk lower, dodging down between the hills as though it wanted no part of my sudden desire for knowledge. ‘So don’t shoot them down when I do.’
‘I meant questions about things that matter. Like how come your mother, with no visible means of support, owns a fabulous semi-detached cottage with a stream at the end of the garden and yet does nothing in the way of upkeep? Why you have no pictures of your father? That sort of question. Not “who decided the band should film here?” That wasn’t the sort of thing I had in mind.’
I eyed him sternly. ‘Look. I have to start being assertive somewhere.’ I probed around the thought of asking Mum about my father; about her decision to move home to live with her mother when Dad had clearly left her enough money to live on. Other questions loomed too in the background – what had my father been like? Kind, musical, tall was all I knew. Why would it have hurt Mum so badly to have told me more about him? I understood there’d been grief, but it all happened twenty-eight years ago, surely feelings must have been down to a quiet sadness and nostalgia by now.
But that was all too much. For now I could only deal with the small questions. How come the band decided to film with us?
‘You’ve got a point though. We never did get a proper answer from them, did we?’ Zeb had moved away from me now, as though satisfied that we’d come to a conclusion about us and were now onto other things. ‘Driving past, like the area – but whyDrycott? Why a herb garden? We need to know why they chose us so we can capitalise on that.’
‘Let’s go back.’ I started walking, gravity accelerating my footsteps as we sloped down from the high point of the bridge. Behind us the water rushed on and a duck quacked into the otherwise silent air. ‘If the band have finished filming then I need to tidy everything up and get ready to open again tomorrow.’
‘Plus, I need to look into building regulations, if Simon is serious about paying for a new barn.’
Zeb strode along beside me, our lengthening shadows thrown into the hedge by the slowly setting sun, which was creeping down behind the hills as though reluctant to leave us. I flicked the occasional glance at him as we walked. He was still something of an unknown quantity, but he wasnice.He was here and he wanted to see if we could have anything more in the way of a relationship other than grouchy boss and unwanted employee.
I didn’t know yet. Maybe we could, it was too early to tell, but the sight of him sloping along, pulling stems from the verge to put between his teeth and keeping up an inconsequential chatter, made me think that we just might.
14
It took a week or two for the business to get back to normal. I struggled the A frames back out onto the roadside, turned the sign to OPEN and threw wide the gate from the car park to the garden, then waited. Ollie came back, pedalling his bike furiously through the gate and propping it carefully against the fence to return to weeding and cutting and turning the compost as though he’d never had an unexpected few days off.
The weather continued fine and bright. I put the irrigation system back through the garden and made some more herb bouquets while manning the shop. We had customers. Zeb made telephone calls, hovering at a distance as though almost afraid that our conversation of declared interest in one another had never taken place.
Questions. It all came down to questions. Why hadn’t I pushed to find out more about my father? Why had Mum and Granny never talked about him? Why had they squashed the urge to ask anything out of me? It had become almost pathological now, I thought, tying up the yarrow, now beginning to break down into plate-like flowers as the season drew towards its close.
Granny would snap and avoid me if I asked too much. Mum would take to her bed, becoming immobile and unapproachable. Butwhy? ‘Seriously, why?’ I asked a patch of dying chive flowers. ‘Why couldn’t they have just told me what Dad was like? Why did they have to treat it as a national secret?’
I also missed having the band around. Watching their glamorous posing around my little garden had given my life a borrowed shine, which had vanished with their departure. I didn’t miss Mika at all, although I did look forward to seeing his and Tessa’s wedding as a multi-page spread in whatever gossip magazine had bought the rights. I could experience a little frisson of second-hand acquaintance – ‘I know these people’, and enjoy her choice of designer wedding dress and their, no doubt, off the wall venue. I missed the background chat and laughter though, and the energy that had come from all the people running around and I missed the music bursting from speakers at random moments.
It had been fun. It had also taught me how much I appreciated peace and quiet.
Late one afternoon, as I was walking the OPEN signs back into the shop and watching a flock of yellowhammers forming and re-forming in the hedgerow, like small mobile flowers opening and vanishing, Simon swept into the car park in his smart convertible.
I leaned against the top of my board and watched him park carefully, flip down a mirror and check his appearance, then get out of the car.
‘Hello,’ I said, making him jump.
