Page 19 of Once Upon a Thyme
He hustled everyone back outside, Mika trailing behind and giving me a cheeky wink as he left, which didn’t help my overheating problem.
I watched him go with my hands up to my betraying face and a state of horrified terror pulling my ‘cute’ pyjamas even tighter around me.
They were an ancient little shorts set that Granny had bought me on a rare trip into town, and pre-dated me owning Drycott by quite a way.
Actually, thinking about it, they may have pre-dated puberty by quite a way.
There was a kitten on the front of my shirt.
Zeb nudged me. ‘You were going to get dressed,’ he said.
I couldn’t make my body work. The dichotomy of talking about my father and Mika being in my house had made all my systems shut down and all I could do was lean rather feebly against the Aga, wondering if my legs were stubbly, if Mika had noticed and if he would care.
‘I’m just a bit…’ I said faintly.
‘I can see that. Come on.’ He gave me a firm push now.
‘Upstairs. Clothes on. I’m working on a way to charge them extra to be in here, and you don’t want to put me off, do you?
’ He gave me another nudge nudge with an elbow, until I stepped forward, found there was enough strength in my legs to walk, and tottered up to the bathroom to compose myself and get rid of the stupid kitten T-shirt.
* * *
I didn’t bother with the make-up in the end.
There didn’t seem much point. I tried to tell myself that I looked better ‘au naturelle’ but the back of my mind echoed with some condemnatory phrases that my mother had used occasionally when I’d tried dressing up to go out, which might have contained words like ‘pointless’ and ‘trying too hard’.
And I didn’t want to be seen as trying at all .
I did put on the little dress though; short and swingy, it gave me confidence.
My legs were good, if stubbly, and brown enough for the hair growth not to show, as I established with my magnifying mirror and a bright light in the bathroom.
So by the time the band returned, laughing and loud, to the kitchen, I was properly covered with my hair brushed and feeling far more able to face Mika’s particular brand of self-confident flirtiness.
Zeb had gone to feed the animals, the film unit had split in two – half to film in my kitchen with Loke, Tessa and Mika, and the other training cameras on Will, Vinnie and Genevra being beautiful among the gillyflowers.
I was the awkward one, the odd one out, even though this was my damn farm.
I didn’t belong inside, where Mika and Loke were trading in jokes and pretending to make tea, or outside, where their bandmates posed against the high brick walls next to the crab apple trees which were full of small birds.
All I could see was my saxifrage being stepped on and quite a lot of parsley getting bent.
I stood under the mallows, half-heartedly tying odd sprigs in and moving the supporting wire frames, trying to look busy and fully employed whilst feeling stupidly exposed in the dress and rather pathetic.
Whoops of laughter came from the house and whenever I looked at Will and Genevra they were happily chatting whilst Vinnie submitted to being posed amid the greenery.
I wasn’t sure what was giving rise to this peculiar feeling of loneliness; after all, I worked on my own.
Ollie did his thing but he wasn’t company, he was a colleague.
Everything I did, I did alone and it didn’t bother me. Except that now it did.
Fed up with feeling as though absolutely everyone else had a role apart from me, I sought out Zeb in the barn.
He was heaving a hay bale between the pens, preparing to fill the rabbits’ rack and bed up the guinea pigs.
I was pleased to note that he also looked out of place; his long frame and slender limbs were incongruous wrestling the bales, like a spider attacking a house brick.
He noticed me standing in the entrance. ‘What?’
Big Pig, seeing me and hoping for more food, snorted up from her trough.
‘Nothing.’ I glanced back over my shoulder.
Genevra and Will were heading to the cottage arm in arm while Vinnie trailed behind, snatching at stems and plucking leaves.
The entire band was going to be all over my scrubbed pine and oiled oak.
I hoped they weren’t going to be laughing at the memory of me in my PJs or criticising my taste in mugs.
Or, even worse, pulling leaves off the basil that I was bringing on in pots on the window ledge. ‘Just feeling at a bit of a loose end.’
‘Nothing to cut? No customers?’ Zeb wrangled the bale down and cut the twine.
The guinea pigs set up a squeaking that went from front to back in a tuneless chorus, seeing the hay about to descend, and he stepped over their fencing to shake it into their house, while they ran around his feet like animated toupees.
‘Not really. No customers, anyway. I could cut some angelica heads, but the bucket is still quite full in the shop. I’m going to muck out the pig in a minute.
’ I leaned against the stone wall. The barn was the old-fashioned, open fronted kind, built as stalling for the horses when Drycott had been the coal yard.
Big farm gates kept Big Pig in her half, more gating and low fencing separated the rabbits from the central food preparation area and a final gate kept everything closed off.
It all looked a bit makeshift and cobbled together, but it worked, mostly.
I leaned over and rattled the nearest gate, which seemed secure.
‘What are the band up to?’ Panting, Zeb distributed the hay and started coiling the twine to hang on the handy nail Ollie had driven into the barn wall, when our previous string arrangement had failed.
‘Filming. Being beautiful. Laughing. That sort of thing.’
‘Oooh.’ Zeb straightened up, one hand in the small of his back. ‘You sound jealous.’
‘Do I? I’m not, not really. They just all seem so together, like they’ve got life sorted out.’
‘They’re famous. I think a lot of things are easy when you’re famous. Doesn’t mean they’re any better than you or me though.’
‘Very philosophical.’ I remembered what he’d told me about his ex workmate who now had a TV slot, and his bitterness made sense. I took a slice of hay from the bale and half-heartedly shook it loose to put in the rabbits’ rack.
‘You’ve nothing to feel inferior about, Tallie.
’ Zeb sounded serious, but had hay in his hair.
It was hard to be philosophised at by someone who looked like Wurzel Gummidge.
‘You’ve got your own successful business, your own house, all this.
’ He threw his hands wide and more hay trailed from his grasp.
‘“All this” being squeaky rodents and an enormous pig,’ I said sullenly.
‘Don’t be obtuse. You’ve done okay, admit it. Growing up can’t have been easy from what you’ve told me, but you came through.’
I stopped and thought, staring at the excited bundle of guinea pig circling around Zeb’s feet like hyperactive mop heads.
‘There wasn’t much choice,’ I said. ‘School was tough – Mum sent me to the private school over in town rather than the local comp, so the locals called me “posh” and behaved as though I’d personally chosen not to go to school here, as if I thought I was too good for them, and the girls at school treated me like an oddity.
I was a disappointment to my teachers because I wasn’t interested in much apart from horticulture.
I grew up knowing that I’d probably take over Drycott so I didn’t exactly cover myself in glory on the academic front. ’
My mother had been sharp about that too.
On the one hand telling me that she was ‘looking after’ Drycott for me, once Granny died, and, on the other, telling me that I should study harder, take more exams, get better reports.
My repeated questions as to why, when herbs weren’t that bothered about A levels, as long as you got the soil depth right, were never answered.
‘I hated school,’ Zeb said surprisingly. He stepped over the rabbit’s fence. ‘Everybody was just so… shouty .’
‘I’d have thought cheffing was pretty shouty too.’
‘Different kind of shouty. I knew what to do there. School was everyone shouting at cross purposes, but when you’re in a kitchen you’ve got one job to do and you ignore any shouting that isn’t directed at you.
’ He replaced the remains of the bale on the hay stack and wiped his hands down his thighs. ‘At least this job is quiet.’
‘You’re only here for a month,’ I reminded him, possibly too pointedly. I could hear sounds that indicated that the band had left my kitchen and were milling around in the garden and I didn’t want to turn around in case Mika caught my eye again.
‘I meant my job,’ Zeb said evenly. ‘Targeted marketing. Going in to companies and businesses and finding out how best to increase their market reach within their chosen sphere.’
‘Oh.’ I thought for a second. ‘What’s a “market reach” anyway? Sounds like what the greengrocer does down in the village when he’s trying to get the apples from the back of the stall.’
‘I hoped that nobody would notice that.’ He perched on the gate that led out into the garden, sitting hunched on the top bar like a multicoloured crow. ‘The concept is sound though, go into businesses and help them make a profit.’ He sighed. ‘I just wish it wasn’t so… hard. ’
I leaned on the gate beside him, forced to look out across the herbs which were slowly nodding their fragrant heads as the weight of the day pressed them into somnolence.
Part of my mind was appreciating the loveliness of the plants while another part dwelt on the back-breaking work that was necessary to keep them looking so gorgeous.
The beauty on the surface was only there because of the hours and hours of physical labour that nobody saw.
‘Ants in the parsley bed,’ I said.