Page 54 of Once Upon a Thyme
‘Iknewhe’d try,’ she repeated. I saw her hand reach out and gently slide under the cover that concealed the lump that I was pretty sure was a vodka bottle. Even here, even now, she couldn’t reach for me, only for another drink.
‘I’m off.’ I turned, leaving the detritus of my search all over the floor. ‘I’m going home.’
There was a huge, empty space, unfilled by all the words we knew we should say. Eventually my mother said, in a small voice, ‘Will you come over tomorrow? I might need some more milk from the shop.’ Her voice was almost childlike, so whispered and broken. A child who’s had a nightmare, who wants reassurance.
I sighed. ‘Of course I will, Mum,’ I said, and saw her relax.
‘I want some bread too,’ she said, her voice rising back to her normal levels. ‘I fancy sandwiches for lunch. That nice bread, from the farm shop, not the packet stuff they sell in the village.’
The farm shop people were new, I thought, with the clarity of sudden realisation. They hadn’t been here for generations like the family that owned the old-fashioned village grocery. She didn’t want me mixing with anyone who might give her away.
‘Don’t push your luck.’ But the normality was making me smile despite myself. I was still angry, I still felt that low burn in my stomach at the thought of the lies, and the memory of all that deflection and the stamping out of any questioning, but this damaged woman was still my mother, and she still needed me. ‘No more lies. I’ll help you where I can, but no more lies.’
With that, I walked out of the room, leaving the fug, the smell of alcohol and the sound of my mother crying.
17
I drove around the dark lanes for hours, thinking. When I got back to the cottage it was so late that it was almost dawn. A faint slice of lemon-coloured light lay on the far horizon behind the hills and I could see the outline of the planting scheme as I parked my car and came in through the garden. I could have parked in my usual spot and come in the way I went, but I wanted to see the herbs. Ineededto see them, in all their rustling, dancing glory, nodding in the early breeze as though agreeing with what I’d done. They swayed, each in their appointed place, grouped like-with-like, planted for height, for use, for appeal; neat, orderly. I remembered the garden as it had been when I had taken it over. Lovely, yes, but wild. I had thought that was my mother’s idea of planning, a Sleeping Beauty of a garden, letting people wander to choose their herbs by discovery among the riot of scent and flower.
Now I knew it was just that she hadn’t been able to keep up a planting method. She’d let the garden go to ruin, basically, with only me keeping on top of the pruning and weeding, but pretending it was still a viable business. Buoyed up by my father’s – by Simon’s – financial input, she’d not needed to rely on the herb garden for income. I’d bought her out, so keen to take over and make Drycott mine that I hadn’t questioned our low turnover. The bank had only loaned me the barest minimum, based on my business plan for the future, and still I hadn’t questioned how she’d been keeping everything together on our woeful profits.
All because I hadn’t dare ask.
I felt myself droop. Now that the adrenaline of sex with Zeb and the meeting with Simon had ebbed, I was back to being the usual Tallie. Back to worrying about causing offence, worrying about upsetting Mother. I thought of what I’d said to her and felt the horrible heat of shame creep over me. I shouldn’t have rocked the boat. Let her carry on thinking that I knew nothing and let life continue as it always had, set in the aspic of lies and deceit.
Big Pig heard me arrive and snorted herself to standing. I went to lean over her gate.
‘I don’t know what I’ve done,’ I said softly to her, and scratched her enormous bristly head as she snuffled around the base of her gate. The guinea pigs heard me then too, and set up a squeaky call for breakfast, so I thought I might as well get the day started and opened the feed bin.
As I tipped buckets of feed into feeders and tried to tamp down the deep cringe that had been set off by the knowledge that I had upset my mother – something I had been spending my entire life trying not to do – the thought struck me that the little hyperactive mop heads and the huge sow would have been the first to go if I’d had to sell Drycott. There would be no more mornings being greeted as though I were a captain being whistled aboard my ship. No more additions to the muck heap that teetered down by the compost bins, now all neat edges and careful structure thanks to Ollie and Zeb.
She’d wanted me to sell, to keep her in drink. I might be able to forgive the drinking – who knew what reasons she had for that, I guessed she’d convinced herself it was necessary. I might even be able to forgive the lying – no, scratch that, I’dneverbe able to forgive the lies but I could come to understand why I’d been turned into a compliant, scared, non-confrontational person, to let her life continue as it was.
But I would not forgive her wanting me to sell up. This place was in me, in my bones and my teeth and my hair, just as much as the herbal cordials Granny used to give me as a child, to help me grow ‘big and strong’. Drycott was my home. I knew, suddenly and with the clarity of dawn, that it wouldn’t have mattered if Mum had given me all the money that Simon had been sending. I would never have left. Other lives might have beckoned, doors might have been held open for me, but I would have stayed at my home.
Drycott and I were as entwined as the bindweed with the mallow.
In the cottage I crept up the stairs. Zeb was still asleep on his back and puffing so that his fringe rose and fell with each breath. I looked at him lying there, his feet sticking out at the bottom of the bed like a cartoon, one long arm flopped along the covers like a pale snake, and I felt a rush of affection.
Not love, not yet. But a heat that was attraction and physical compatibility, soft-edged with fondness and caring that could turn into love, if I let it. He understood me. Zeb, with his searching through life for a – well, for a life. Perhaps, just perhaps, he could find one here, with me.
I began pulling things off the walls. All those articles, all that therapy-speak that I had thought was showing me who I was, all had been irrelevant. I wasn’t the daughter of a grieving widow who’d worked hard to give me the advantages she’d lacked. I was the daughter of a woman who drank so much she’d driven away a loving husband and who’d spent most of the money sent to help keep her daughter.
The noise of ripping paper, where some of the edges had been stuck to the wallpaper for ten years or more, woke Zeb. He half sat, scrubbing a hand through his hair and staring down at his bare chest.
‘Oh, I must have fallen asleep again,’ he said, and then, with memory obviously returning, ‘Oh.’
‘These,’ I said, peeling a three-page article on childhood bereavement away from the 1960s florals, ‘are alllies, Zeb.’
‘Er.’ He sat further up the bed. ‘Tallie, they’re not. They’re just not you.’
‘But I thought they were!’ I wailed, pulling Kate Beckinsale down to lie on top of the crumpled pile. Her face stared upwards, reminding me of my teenage self, although I hadn’t been nearly so good looking or composed. Away at school, I’d searched for an identity and found that it lay here, that Drycott was who I was.
‘Does it make a difference?’ Zeb pushed skinny legs out from under my solar system patterned duvet. ‘You’re still Tallie. I’m going to put the kettle on, this is all way too deep a conversation to be having without a good sturdy cup of tea inside me. Possibly some toast, would you like some toast?’
His normality was grounding. Zeb was still the same as he’d been before all this dramatic revelation nonsense. So perhaps he was right and I wasalsostill the same, even though I felt changed from the inside.
‘Toast sounds nice, thank you,’ I said cautiously, as though New Tallie might not yet want to eat.
