Page 55 of Once Upon a Thyme
‘Good.’ He draped himself in my dressing gown, which had been hooked on the back of the door, and, struggling arms into the fluffy sleeves, squeezed his way past me out to the staircase. ‘You need some food. I might scramble some eggs – do we have any eggs? Chickens ought to be the first new addition, I think. We can pen them down by the compost to start with.’
Then he stopped on the landing and turned. ‘Is it all right?’ His face was clouded with anxiety now. ‘If I make plans? I mean, are we still going ahead with… or are you going to sell?’
‘Sell?’ I was momentarily startled from my tape-unsticking.
‘I thought – I don’t know, maybe you’d want a new beginning? I thought you might be out roaming the acres and deciding on a different future. The pig woke me up,’ he added apologetically. ‘So I knew you were out there.’
‘I went to see my mother.’ A satisfyingly long strip of aged newsprint tore away; a story about an entrepreneur who had been orphaned tragically at the age of ten and had gone on to set up his own tech business. ‘To tell her that I knew.’
‘Ah.’ Zeb turned back to the staircase. It creaked under his weight. ‘I might need to bring out the jam then.’
‘She was sitting in her bedroom, drinking. And her wardrobe was full of bottles.’
I followed Zeb out and down the staircase to the minute hallway and into the kitchen. No sun reached it yet and it smelled of long-gone dinners, dust and crushed leaves. I realised that I hadn’t done anything to the cottage since I’d taken over from Mum. She, obviously, hadn’t touched the place since Granny died. I was living in a house that was stuck in a time warp from the sixties, when Grandad had been alive. Nobody had decorated, nobody had painted. No wonder there were mice in the kitchen and a tatty version of Morten Harket on the landing. I’d kept this place as Mum had kept it, because I thought it was in memory of my father, when really it had just been an inability to cope, and an unwillingness to spend money on anything that wasn’t drink.
Zeb moved from kettle to toaster, examining the bread carefully. ‘I think we’ve got mice,’ he said.
‘Might have,’ I conceded.
He spun around. ‘Tallie, this place needs a good scrub, some traps down and a coat of paint, possibly in the well-known shade “fumigation”.’
I sighed. ‘I know. It’s beginning to dawn on me what really needs doing around here. I’ve been so busy concentrating on keeping the gardens going that I’ve not really touched the house. I thought Mum was too deep in grief to touch the place, but I’m beginning to think it was laziness now.’ I scraped a nail along the table, and some varnish lifted and curled under my finger. ‘There’s so much to do.’
Zeb pushed the bread into the toaster, flicked on the kettle and came over to stand at the window. ‘Now you know,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’
‘There’s so much to do,’ I repeated. ‘If we’re providing the arrangements for Mika and Tessa’s wedding…’ I stared past him, out of the window, where a few sunflowers were drooping miserably, leaning against the walls. ‘I have to talk to Tessa about colours. Or rather, I have to talk to whoever is arranging the whole wedding, I doubt she’s been allowed to choose her own décor. I need to get out there and start picking and drying.’
Zeb caught at my hand as I waved it in a feeble gesture at the garden. ‘I can help, though. I’m here, Tallie, I want to help. Not just with the animals, although I’ve got ideas I want you to hear, but maybe we can park that for now and crack on with preparing for the wedding?’
I looked up at him. He looked ridiculous, protruding from my dressing gown, all angular and bony with his hair standing up in tufts and his mobile face wearing an expression of contained excitement. My heart twisted in my chest.
‘We can spend the winter having a big clear out?’ He went on. ‘Decorate, repair, get rid of the mice.’
‘There’s still a fair bit to do in the gardens even in winter you know, Zeb. I don’t lock the gates and put my feet up for six months.’
‘Good, good. But we can get even more done if it’s the two of us.’ The toast popped up and the kettle steamed itself to boiling. ‘Do you want it to be the two of us?’
He wasn’t looking at me now.
I remembered last night. I remembered his caring, his gentleness. And, of course, there was his ability with Big Pig, if we were going to be prosaic about it. ‘We can definitely try,’ I said. ‘But first…’
‘Yes?’ His head came up, as eager as Big Pig sighting the feed bucket.
‘Can you tie up the dressing gown? It’s a bit distracting, and Ollie will be here in a minute. You’re on full view in the window and I don’t want him scared off first thing in the morning.’
‘Oh. Oh!’ Zeb gathered the fluffy pink fabric around himself. ‘That’s embarrassing. Although you’ve seen all I have to offer already, and you haven’t run screaming, so thank you for that.’
‘Nothing to scream about,’ I said. I moved closer, pretending to help him with the tie, but in reality stretching up to give him a kiss.
The sun, finally getting itself going, sloped a few tentative rays in through the top of the window. ‘Are you really all right?’ Zeb asked gently. ‘That was a hell of a day yesterday.’
I thought of Simon’s face, breaking the news, that scared, wary expression. He’d been afraid. Had he thought I’d throw him out and refuse to listen? And why hadn’t my mother worn a similar expression when I’d walked in on her? The thought that maybe she hadn’t cared about being discovered, that perhaps she was relieved that everything was out in the open, crossed my mind, to be dismissed with a inwards sarcastic laugh. She knew she’d raised me to keep the peace. She knew that I would never speak about this again. Not toher, anyway. I was too well-trained.
‘I’m…’ I hesitated. ‘I’ve got a lot of processing to do. I’ve got to come to terms with the fact that everything I thought growing up was a lie. Everything I was told was a lie. Even Granny couldn’t tell me the truth.’
Granny, watching her only child fall through cracks into alcoholism. Did she know why? I spared a few moments of very uncharitable thoughts about Grandad, but then dismissed them. If he’d known anything or been involved in any of this, Granny would have killed him herself with the overweight frying pan she’d wielded for most of my childhood. No. This was something only my mother could get to the bottom of. Granny had done her best to help, but hadn’t known how. So she’d taken us in, kept me safe, given me a purpose. Hoping, I had to suppose, that her granddaughter wouldn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps. She had done what she could.
And I still had Drycott.
