Page 10 of Once Upon a Thyme

I’d already palmed my car keys and drawn on a jacket against the chill that inevitably resulted once the day had vanished below the far line of hills. ‘I won’t be long.’

Zeb and Simon looked at me, then at each other. Zeb looked aghast. ‘But…’

‘Won’t be long.’ I hesitated. I wanted to say something along the lines of ‘don’t come to any arrangements until I get back’, or ‘I know this is stupid but she needs her pills’, but instead, I galloped over to my car, parked outside the cottage in the miniscule driveway, and hurtled off to the village, where I caught the chemist just about to lock the door and pleaded my way in for a packet of Mother’s pills.

‘We do a delivery service.’ The pharmacist gave my dishevelled jacket and obviously rushed air a sympathetic smile. ‘She could ring us direct and we’d take them over.’

‘You know what she’s like.’

Of course they did. This pharmacy had been dealing with Amanda Fisher since she was tiny.

The little village, in this scoop of moorland which contained the houses, the few shops and Drycott Herbs, hadn’t changed much since William I had blasted it into bleakness during the Harrying of the North.

Drycott hadn’t just been Harried, it had been Petered too, and now it was as though the population had made a collective decision never to move again.

The chemist had been a chemist since 1932.

‘Yes, but you can try telling her.’ Again, another sympathetic look. ‘You shouldn’t have to dash out.’ A wave of a hand as she ushered me from the premises, indicating the lateness of the hour and the fluster of my arrival.

I tried to imagine telling my mother that she ‘ought’ to do anything, and couldn’t.

When not struggling under the weight of her illness, Mother had the personality force of a heavy goods vehicle.

You attempted to deflect it at your peril and the resultant injury, although never physical, was the type of scar that throbbed whenever it rained.

I drove ferociously to her house with my car tyres making impressive screeching sounds as I cornered, drew up in a fume of brakes, and hurled myself in through the front door, surprising my mother in the kitchen.

‘Hello, darling. That was quick.’

She was making herself tea. She was also dressed, and evidently functional.

‘I’m in the middle of a meeting.’ I dropped the pills on the table. ‘And I have to get back.’

‘Oh.’ Her face fell. She was still pale, I noticed, and hadn’t done her make-up.

Well, that would explain why she hadn’t gone to the chemist’s herself; she hated to be seen outside without her ‘face’ on, as though she imagined people wouldn’t recognise her without her features being carefully outlined in whatever the latest range being advertised on TikTok was. ‘I thought you’d stay for tea.’

Again that tug of guilt that bound me to her.

I was her daughter, her only child, was it really too much to ask that I sat and ate with her, as though I were still that seven-year-old home from school, asking when I could go out into the garden to help Granny?

But then I remembered that I’d left Zeb in charge of a meeting that could make or break my finances this year.

‘Sorry, no, I have to go and negotiate. It’s work, Mum, honestly.’

A sigh and her hand closed around the two packs of her pills. ‘All right then. But I was going to make us something nice.’

‘I’ll come by tomorrow.’ I dropped a quick kiss on her cheek. ‘To make sure you’re feeling better.’

Then I swept out to breathe deeply as the last of the day crept away beyond the hills.

I’d had a narrow escape. She often cried if I said I couldn’t stay, but this time she’d seemed almost resigned.

Perhaps she was learning that I really did have to work?

Ahaha – the laughter was hollow. Despite her having grown up on the herb farm, despite her having taken it over when her own mother died, my mother seemed to regard my job as just a cosmetic thing I did to fill in time.

Specifically, to fill in time between doing bits and pieces for her.

I threw the car down the lanes in a way that would have been counted extremely unsafe somewhere more populous, and arrived back at the gardens just in time to pass Simon driving away.

He gave me a toot of the horn and a blithe little wave as we inched past one another in the gateway, and then a blast of engine noise as he sped off, leaving me with Zeb in the car park.

‘You let him go! Without talking to me!’ I launched myself out of the car and Zeb put a galvanised bucket of valerian stems between himself and my ire.

‘You weren’t here,’ he countered in a reasonable tone.

‘You should have waited. I wasn’t going to be long, and this is my business. I hope nothing legal got signed without me.’

‘You weren’t here,’ Zeb repeated, his tone still smooth enough to level concrete. ‘And Simon’s coming back tomorrow to sort the paperwork – if you can manage to stick around for long enough.’

Now that was barbed. Although he hadn’t dropped his gaze from my face, he’d picked up the bucket and was fussing the flower heads into a more orderly arrangement, as though he were worried that he might have to use the container as a shield.

‘My mother needed me to fetch her prescription,’ I snapped.

I carefully didn’t mention that the pills were over-the-counter ones and that she had been up and about and perfectly capable of fetching them herself.

She would have had her reasons for not going, and I hadn’t had time to have them listed out for me.

‘Yes, but we were in a meeting.’ He shuffled the bucket again, then bent to sniff the valerian which, as it smelled, as many of the decorative herbs did, of elderly cat, was clearly a ruse to avoid looking at me. ‘It was business, and you walked out.’

‘I did not walk out, I told you where I was going. And it’s nothing to do with you where, when and why I do things,’ I said, becoming more aware with each word I uttered that, in his position of self-appointed PR guru, it actually was his concern where, when and why I did things.

Although it did give me a tiny inner smile that, should he report my inadequacies as the head of the business back to my mother, he was going to have to put a spin on ‘having to attend to my mother’ that would be worthy of a first-class bowler before she agreed it to be a black mark against me.

‘Does this happen often?’ Zeb’s tone was different now, less accusatory and a little softer. ‘Do you have to care for your mother?’

‘Define “care”,’ I said and sighed. ‘No. No, of course it doesn’t.

Today was an emergency.’ I tried not to think of Mother, up and about in the kitchen and just not bothered about going to pick up her own pills.

‘But I do like to help her out when I can. She’s ill.

Didn’t she mention any of this when she recruited you for this job? ’

‘Er no, we didn’t meet, not in person. Everything was done via Zoom and email.’ Zeb looked slightly ashamed. ‘I didn’t think that our not meeting might be due to her being ill, I just thought it was a privacy thing.’

I nodded. If he hadn’t met her in the flesh, then he wouldn’t know.

How could he? And without the rest of the story, without knowing what lay behind the complicated relationship I shared with my parent, I had to admit that it all looked dodgy – as though I were some kind of Girl Friday at my mother’s disposal. ‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

‘That’s what people say online when they mean they’re in a relationship they aren’t sure about.’ He smiled at me now and I had to admit, his was a nice smile. ‘Or when they don’t think the other person is committed.’

‘Oh, no, not like that,’ I hastened in. ‘It’s more…

’ I tailed off. The story of my background wasn’t anything to do with him and yet I felt an odd kind of urge to explain myself.

It must have been the way he was looking at me; his expression mixed curiosity with unwarranted pity, which didn’t sit well on his kind of face.

‘I think,’ he said after we’d been standing mired in our lack of conversation for a while, ‘that we ought to have a chat.’

I panicked and snatched the bucket of valerian from him, the heads swinging from side to side as though they were trying to keep track of who was speaking.

‘No, it’s all good. I’ll tell Mother that she can’t interrupt meetings and I won’t go over when we’re busy anyway.

’ I spoke very fast, heading off his questions at the pass.

‘She just likes to feel she’s still involved, I think, I mean, she doesn’t have much else in her life apart from me and Drycott and she wasn’t really keen to hand it over to me but… ’

His expression had switched to a raised-eyebrow impatience for me to stop talking which stifled my justifications.

‘I meant, we need to talk about what Simon wants to do next week and how we’re going to manage things,’ he said, rather too evenly for my liking.

‘Oh.’

‘He’s had some good ideas, but we really should discuss them tomorrow morning, before he arrives.’

‘Oh.’

‘Your mother…’ He stopped and turned away, seemingly to watch the feather of birch branches that traced their way across the far fence, swept in a passing breeze. ‘Your mother is your problem.’

Great. As if I didn’t know that. ‘I see,’ I said, meaninglessly.

‘I’m off now. I sent Ollie home early too, so you might want to close up and get the place tidy for tomorrow. I think Simon is bringing the band over to plan out the video?’

He made it a question. Why had he made it a question?

Presumably he wasn’t questioning the absent Simon as to why it was necessary for The Goshawk Traders to personally be on site, when they’d have a team of professionals who would script, set up equipment and work out shooting angles.

Unless – I felt my collar tighten and become hot as a wash of embarrassment crept up the back of my neck – unless he’d seen my reaction to Mika and knew how much I’d anticipated his return.

My mouth flapped.

‘Er,’ I said, a feature of a lot of my conversations with Zeb.

He raised an eyebrow, turned smartly and walked over to his car.

‘Tomorrow, then,’ he said, getting in with a cheery, and to me dismissive, wave of his hand.

He folded himself into the driver’s seat and drove off with no further acknowledgement of my presence and I threw the bucket of valerian onto the gravel.

‘Bastard,’ I said. ‘The utter turd.’

Swifts shrieked through the air above me and the pig snorted a reminder that it was feeding time in the barn.

Everything else was silent. Even the herbs were still now, the breeze blown off to somewhere where its gentle passing would be remarked on with words like zephyr and caress, rather than followed by someone with string who muttered about having to stake the mallow.

I sighed and began picking up the sprawled valerian, whose pale stems now feathered across the gravel like exhausted brides.

‘This is my business,’ I muttered, vindictively ramming the flower stems into the bucket so hard that they buckled. ‘Zebedee can just boing off and do one.’

The bitter tinge of mint gave my words an extra edge and, pleased with myself for managing to get angry, I set about my garden work.