Page 23 of Once Upon a Thyme
The garden felt quiet after the band had gone.
To my disappointment Mika hadn’t sought me out for any more tête-à-têtes.
He’d been seemingly absorbed in the extended photography session, which had seen Tessa and Genevra change into dungarees and loiter attractively around Big Pig while the men pretended to pick apples from the crab apple tree in the hedge.
I pointed out that the apples were in no way ripe and wouldn’t be ready for harvest for at least another couple of months, but apparently this didn’t matter.
Which did not make me think kindly about the sort of people who bought their albums – I mean, surely anyone with half a brain could see that those apples were blatantly unripe and that the girls didn’t have a pig board and weren’t equipped to deal with a recalcitrant sow?
But watching the band being photographed, constant poses interspersed with laughing and occasional bouts of singing or holding an instrument in a photogenic way, had led me to believe that visual veracity was a little thin on the ground in The Goshawk Traders life .
Zeb had finished the mucking out, fed the animals and disappeared, presumably in search of the fabled takeaway. I sat in the cottage and relished the new silence. Apart from the whirr of the computer fan and a blackbird singing high in one of the birches, there was no sound.
I knew I should switch on the irrigation system and give the damp-loving plants a good drench now that the sun had gone from their corner, but I couldn’t bring myself to move.
Sitting here, in Granny’s old chair, surrounded by the smell of aniseed and grass cuttings and feeling the residual heat that the sun had left behind I could relax.
This was my garden. My business. It didn’t really matter what Zeb might say or do, or even what he might tell my mother, this was me. Staying afloat, doing what I did best.
Sitting alone in a room.
I tapped at the keyboard once or twice. The accounts were all safe, all backed up and everything delineated and carefully tabulated.
The tax office could have used me as an illustration of how to keep financial affairs clearly separated and accessible.
Everything had headings, there were spreadsheets for everything.
I was so squeaky clean that the screen almost smelled of detergent.
I tapped again. Then curiosity made me type in my father’s name.
Jonathon Fisher. I periodically searched for mentions of him, although thirty-year-old local car accidents were apparently not priority for digitisation and there had been nothing, up to now, about his death, online.
That state of affairs continued and I felt a momentary prick of disappointment.
It would have been nice to show Zeb an article, a death notice, anything that related to my father.
Some proof that I was still trying to work on how I felt about his accident, and that all those articles on my bedroom wall were a part of something bigger, an actual investigation rather than the obsessions of an orphaned child.
Sometimes… sometimes it felt almost as though Dad had never existed.
My mother, crippled with grief, couldn’t utter his name.
I only knew he’d been called Jonathon because Granny had occasionally slipped up and mentioned that I’d got his eyes or, more usually, some prejudicial element of my personality.
He’d been expunged from our house as though he’d never been, and only I and a surname remained as a reminder that my mother and Jonathon Fisher had ever been joined in holy matrimony.
I scuffed the chair back a few centimetres, hearing the scrape of the old wooden legs against the brick floor, a sound so familiar that it was almost like my heartbeat.
Granny had always dragged the legs when she’d moved her chair.
I remembered my mother wincing at the noise, hand held dramatically to her forehead, more indications that she was having another of her ‘unwell’ days.
Most of my childhood memories of my mother were of a swaddled figure in a bed, a darkened room, me carefully carrying a glass of water or a cup of tea up the steep narrow staircase to hear a faint ‘thank you, darling’ as I put it on the bedside table and crept away again.
I leaned my head against the dented padding of the chair back.
Remembering those days gave me a little burst of heat in my heart, a tiny shot of fondness for my mother.
I loved her utterly, of course I did. She’d kept me safe, kept me housed and fed and cared for in those dreadful dark days after the death of my father, and that couldn’t have been easy for her.
She loved me back, I knew it. My near-snatching by a stranger with who only knew what in mind in one of the places she should have been able to feel safe, a supermarket, must have hit hard too.
No wonder she tried to keep me contained and herself isolated.
Her illness, undefined so she couldn’t even say ‘I have…’ whatever it was – and get practical help, support, the medication that might deal with symptoms, pulled her inwards.
It made it hard for her to cope with me, so no wonder she’d moved back in with her mother.
It also occasionally made her unable to see outside herself and her situation, to imagine how life might have been, might still be, for me.
It wasn’t her fault.
I sighed and closed my eyes, feeling the worn leather of the chair against the back of my neck, almost like the fingers of a lover kneading my muscles.
I had a brief flash of memory of the touch of Mika’s hand, taking mine to lead me up among the tall flowering foxgloves and the summer-scented mints in the shaded garden.
And then memory stretched to include his laughing with Tessa, his arm reassuring around her after the pig incident, his general easy affection with her.
Mika was not for me. Simon had warned me that Mika was – how had he put it?
‘He can be a bit…’ Simon had never actually finished that sentence.
I remembered the whole of that time with Simon, his surprising questions about my situation and his dark almost-warning about Mika.
How would he have finished? ‘Mika can be a bit…’ What?
Over-excited? Over-affectionate? Over-dressed?
Reckless, careless, casual with his affections?
I didn’t really care. It had been so long since a man, any man had noticed me.
I protected myself against casual incursions by cultivating an aura of obsessive busyness, always dashing around the place cutting or weeding or planting, so any man who came as a customer would have got the impression that I was far too absorbed in the garden to date.
I could have slowed down, flirted lightly with some of the delivery men who brought the animal feed or the hay and straw.
Service engineers who periodically came to poke at the Aga or the hot water system in the cottage or the irrigation unit had been chatty; surely I could have dropped my single status and an assumed availability for nights on the town to them?
But I had been raised on dreadful tales of how falling in love ended.
Granny had, on some late winter nights when my mother had been confined to her bed and we’d sat around this table illuminated only by a single swinging bulb, been condemnatory about her daughter’s choice of husband.
No details had passed her lips, nothing I could winnow out for information about my father.
Just vague, dark hints about meeting and marrying quickly – from her tone, I deduced that I had been ‘on the way’ and marriage had been hastily scrambled in order for my mother to remain respectable, which was ridiculously old fashioned even thirty years ago.
This valley, on the edge of the moors, was still populated by families who had been here longer than most of the trees and before the rivers had settled in their current courses; old-fashioned courtesy and manners caused ridges and rifts out here like fingerprints of behaviour.
Granny would have wanted to save face and not be seen to have a daughter who had succumbed to modern morality.
Maybe she felt a twinge of guilt afterwards at forcing Mum to marry?
Maybe things might have been less intense if I could have been born to an unashamed single mother with a perhaps less-than-present father?
Forcing Mum and Dad into a relationship which might not otherwise have gone the distance with the concomitant awful ending, was really down to Granny.
Now, here I was, with a mother I couldn’t imagine introducing to any potential partner because of her overt mistrust of any utterances of love or devotion – ‘men will say anything, Natalie. Anything. And then they will leave you heartbroken’ – and a herb garden which took so much of my time and energy that I didn’t really have the opportunity to meet anyone anyway.
A mouse scraped along the beam and I allowed myself the briefest fantasy of introducing Mika to my mother.
Surely he, with his sparkling self-confidence, wouldn’t be daunted by her recurrent illness and her dark hints about relationships ending.
He’d be wild and energetic, sweep her out of her long sadness and into glamour.
He’d entice better doctors, specialists, into a proper diagnosis of her energy-sapping headaches, sickness and inability to function.
She’d get the proper medication and re-emerge into the life she’d lost, back into fashion and modern hairstyles and, perhaps, a new man. She was still young, after all.