Page 1 of Once Upon a Thyme

There was a pig in the kitchen, with its trotters on the table and its snout in the fruit bowl. But this was fine – well, maybe not fine , I wasn’t happy about it, but at least the pig was a known quantity. The man, on the other hand, standing watching the pig eat a satsuma, was not.

‘There’s a pig in here,’ he said, as though observing a strange scientific phenomenon. ‘Eating an orange.’

‘It’s a satsuma,’ I said, helpfully pedantic.

‘Oh.’ He eyed the pig again. ‘Is that a rare breed?’

‘I meant the orange, not the pig. She’s a Tamworth.’ Then I regained my sensibilities, like suddenly putting on a pair of glasses and being able to focus. ‘But who are you and why are you in my kitchen?’

He blinked a couple of times, while the pig honked happily around the remains of the fruit bowl, making the kind of slurpy chomping noises that sounded like a toddler eating porridge.

‘Er,’ he said finally. ‘Do you not think that having a pig in your kitchen is a slightly more pressing problem right now?’

‘Probably.’ I stared at the pig again. She was happily snaffling down the last of the fruit with one eye rolled towards me to check whether I was about to eject her with a broom handle. ‘But I can handle the pig. It’s you I’m questioning. Who are you?’

The man, who now looked a little uncertain himself about who he was and why he was here, blinked again. ‘I came about the job, but I seem to be caught up in a cartoon. Why is there a pig in the kitchen?’

‘Someone left the gate open, I expect. What job?’

I put my hands on my hips in an inquisitorial stance and ignored the issue of the pig.

It wasn’t unheard of for various animals to infiltrate the house; the kitchen door was always open because the kitchen was also my office and I needed to be alert to customers driving into the gardens.

It had never been the pig before though; I was more used to a rabbit or guinea pig intrusion, but the oddness of this situation being pointed out by a strange man was not welcome.

The man in question, who had tousled dark hair and a half-beard, as though he’d leaped out of bed to come here, just kept staring at the porcine incursion.

‘But… it’s a pig !’ he eventually expostulated, as though somehow he was insulted by the presence of said creature.

Okay, it’s not every day you find one in a kitchen, least of all with its head amid the fruit, but, even so, hardly a velociraptor in the bath.

‘Yes, but who are you, and what job?’ I repeated with as much patience as I could summon.

Two pairs of eyes rested on me. One pair was brown and looked worried. The other pair was blue, fringed with ginger lashes and wore an expression of hopeful bliss. ‘And you can bugger off,’ I addressed the sow. ‘You’re not getting anything else.’

I got a wet nose-blow of a noise in reply and she rotated on her haunches, dropped from her snuffle-examination of the table and trotted out, delicate as a duchess in stilettos, over the flagstones back to the yard, where noises of incipient pig-recapture were going on.

‘Er,’ said the man again. ‘I’m not entirely certain I’m in the right place. I’ve come for the herb farm job? Drycott Herbs? I was sure the sign said…’

‘This is Drycott Herbs.’ I began putting the table back together again. Four hundred pounds of pig had disarranged the surface somewhat. ‘I’m Tallie Fisher, I run the herb farm. But I don’t know which job you mean, I’ve not advertised for any… Oh.’

Mother had been at it again, clearly. I was going to take to her internet connection with a pair of secateurs.

I had bought her out of the business four years ago and she was supposed to be taking life easy.

Instead, she’d found a new hobby: gross interference.

‘You’re always so busy, Natalie,’ she’d said.

‘You should be able to relax more. Get yourself an assistant. Apart from that Ollie, he’s as much use as Bournemouth.

He’s not an assistant, he’s an impediment. ’

She’d presented it as concern, but the subtext had been ‘and then you’d have more time to come by and keep me company’.

Which, experience had told me, meant ‘do all my housework while I lounge around on the sofa telling you how fragile I feel and watching daytime TV, then hint heavily that I’d like a roast dinner that I then won’t eat.

’ My mother was complicated and our relationship was a cat’s cradle of obligations, guilt, affection and duty.

And Ollie wasn’t useless, he was excellent with the plants, even if he did have a tendency to hide from customers.

Plus, she didn’t even seem to enjoy my company, she just liked having someone there in the house.

She could have got a Labradoodle, and not needed me at all.

‘So, who are you?’ I continued my questioning. My mother’s controlling nature and desire to have me permanently within calling distance wasn’t his problem.

He glanced very quickly away from the window, where he was watching the pig’s progress.

He seemed afraid that taking his eye off her might result in her coming back inside and attacking him.

‘My name is Zeb. Short for Zebedee, and I’ve heard all the Magic Roundabout jokes already, thank you.

Zebedee McAuley-Wilson. I’ve just moved to Yorkshire and I’m looking for a creative kind of job that I can do part time alongside my online work. ’

Zebedee McAuley-Wilson. Flippin’ heck, as Mother would say, because she’d had any kind of swearing knocked out of her by Granny.

His parents must have gone right through the baby naming book before they’d found one they liked.

I could never employ someone whose name used up all the boxes on those stupid forms that we had to fill in.

He was watching me hopefully now, presumably hoping I’d ask what his online job was so he could mutter about being a content creator or an influencer or something.

Although, from his appearance, I had no idea who he could influence, apart from maybe some gullible teenagers.

He looked a little bit like David Tennant’s Dr Who , if the Doctor had had a sudden bout of low self-esteem and a quick trot through ASOS.

‘Well, you’re thinking about it, that’s a good start.’

I wanted to say that I wasn’t ‘thinking about it’, that there was nothing to think about; I was busy but there wasn’t a job for Mr ‘Part time alongside my real work’ and that my mother should butt out of my life, but I realised that the moment had passed. I’d spent too long thinking.

And there actually was a lot to do. I hated to admit it, but on this point my mother was spot on.

I’d been stretched to the limits lately and, in the depths of the night, had even wondered about recruiting someone to mind the shop.

But I knew I wouldn’t, because that would mean someone else having input, someone else’s ideas sliding under the door.

Drycott Herbs was mine , and I’d rather be overworked and in control than having to think of tactful ways not to implement someone else’s ‘brainwaves’. Least of all an agent of my mother’s.

‘Do you know anything about herbs?’ I asked, my eyes following the pig’s retreat and ending up gazing out across the carefully laid gravel paths and two acres of hand-planting. Ollie was running around with a brush, as though sweeping the sow back into her enclosure was a possibility.

‘A bit. But mostly on the culinary side, and you seem to deal more with the aesthetics.’ Zebedee nodded towards the bunches of herbs which hung from the ceiling rafters, heads down, drying in the gentle breeze.

‘Customers cut their own herbs, and we sell arrangements and pre-packaged…’ I tailed off. Why was I going into the sales spiel for a man I didn’t want here anyway?

‘Great idea,’ he said robustly. ‘When can I start?’

I gave in. I always gave in. ‘I’ll give you a trial shift. Just now I think Ollie – that’s Ollie, the blond bloke out there with the broom handle – could do with a hand getting the pig back in.’

‘Ah.’ He didn’t move. ‘Herbs I can do. Pigs, less so.’

Here was my get-out. ‘To work here you have to multi-task. We’ve got a little animal corner for children; it’s mostly the pig, a few rabbits and guinea pigs, that sort of thing.

They need looking after just as much as the herbs, so…

’ I trailed off because he was nodding. I’d hoped he’d go more for the polite refusal and head home, but apparently he was prepared to overcome his swinophobia in the interests of having a job.

Bugger. That probably meant that his ‘influencing’ wasn’t going well and he’d want all the hours I could give him to work, rather than the odd half hour here and there doing some pruning that I’d been grudgingly preparing to offer – just to satisfy Mother that I did take her advice, sometimes.

‘Catch the pig. Yes. I rather thought that was going to be my induction.’ He straightened his back. ‘Right. I suppose we can deal with all the paperwork and everything later?’

Again I looked out on my sunlit acres. The pig was calmly snuffling her way across a path, having heavily trampled the variegated sage, on her way towards the far more fragile fennel bed.

The air was filled with the scent of crushed stuffing and the cries of foiled recapture.

Thankfully, the main gate to the road was closed, and the stone walls which surrounded the gardens were ten feet high and enough to withstand even a pig that had watched The Great Escape.

‘Yes,’ I said weakly. ‘I suppose so.’