Page 26 of Once Upon a Thyme

Cool dark filled my lungs. The rosemary was flowering and scenting the air with a subtle tang.

During the day, feet had crushed some of the chamomile and its medicinal aroma rose and fell with the breeze.

Warm brick, cooling wood and a top note from the pig barn completed the olfactory bouquet of a summer night in the herb garden.

It smelled peaceful and I felt my shoulders start to drop, the tension evaporating into the warm air.

Mine. I knew every plant – I could identify them in the dark, just by the feel of their leaves.

I’d raised most of them myself, from seed, from cuttings; grown them on in home-made compost, planted them out, watered them, brought them on.

They were, in effect, my children. So I supposed my standing here, breathing in those unique scents, was almost the same as standing in my children’s bedroom watching them sleep.

I sighed and wandered further along the main central path towards the pond, which was alive with the plops of froglets.

I wondered if my mother had ever come into my room to watch me sleep when I’d been small.

Granny had, I knew, because I’d sometimes woken up to see her standing by my bed or sitting in the little reading chair in the corner, or smoothing my cover.

She’d whisper me back to sleep with her hushing and occasional mutters of ‘poor child’.

It suddenly struck me that Granny must have found it hard, having Mum come back home with a toddler in tow, just when she’d got used to having the place to herself.

After all, the cottage was tiny, two sensible bedrooms and the weeny box room where my cot had just fitted, and Mum could take up an incredible amount of space when she wasn’t confined to her bed.

How had Granny really felt, taking back her widowed and traumatised daughter and her doted-upon but lively granddaughter?

She’d never even hinted at any emotion other than gratitude that we were safe and well mixed with that undercurrent of irritation peculiar to the elderly, but…

I looked around the peaceful quiet acres, straining to increase by stretching feathery arms through the fences.

Surely she must have felt – what, cheated?

Or perhaps she had relished having our company.

After all, she must have been lonely after Grandad died, and perhaps I was putting my feelings of being intruded upon and disturbed in my solitude onto her.

I knew little else, other than the duty calls to my mother and quietly running this place, whilst Granny had known what it was like to have a husband and a child – noise and bustle and conversation.

I was lonely.

The knowledge came over me so suddenly that I took half a step back in astonishment, my feet rattling on the gravel until I felt the cushioning of damp moss beneath me.

Lonely . It had never occurred to me before, but then I’d never had an irritating man washing up in my kitchen before.

I’d never had that chatting over the kitchen table, a figure moving in the light of the swinging bulb indoors while I checked the watering system.

It had always been just me. Except for Granny’s last few years, after Mum had moved back to the village, when it had been just me and Granny here, rattling around Drycott.

By then she’d been arthritic and mostly confined to the cottage and her chair.

I’d worked out here alone and come indoors to a still-warm teapot and Granny upstairs in the room that was now mine, trying to get comfortable and watching eternal repeats of All Creatures Great and Small on the little TV at the end of her bed.

Now my life consisted of just me and my mother. My mother to whom duty tied me as tightly as this bindweed clung to the mallow. Whom I loved and resented and my heart ached with the duality of feelings.

To distract myself – after all, how could I resent a woman who was so ill that she’d had to leave most of the raising of her daughter to her own mother? – I wandered over to the animal barn, creeping quietly through the dark so as not to disturb sleeping rabbits.

Big Pig was on her feet. She’d got her nose under the gate opening and was lifting and dropping the entire gate very gently.

I stood in the shadow and watched as she shook the fastening loose, then leaned against the metal of the gate until it swung open.

With a quick glance over her shoulder, Big Pig stepped delicately out of her pen and across the barn to the small, fenced area of guinea pig and rabbit.

While I watched, she carefully nosed open their gate in the same way and trod down the mesh fencing until it was ground level, allowing a couple of the guinea pigs and an alert rabbit to scamper over, whereupon she briskly opened the main barn gate and led her little band out into the garden.

‘What do you think you are doing?’

My voice made her stop, with a sudden, surprised snort that made her ears flap.

I could almost see her thinking, wondering whether she could turn around and head back to her pen and pretend never to have left, to have no piggy idea how to jolt the gates open or how to push down the fencing to let the other animals out.

For a moment we stood opposite one another on the path, Big Pig and I, and I restrained the urge to laugh.

It wasn’t Zeb letting them out for reasons of his own.

It wasn’t Ollie, being unimaginably careless.

It wasn’t the band or any of their associated film crew.

No human was involved and I couldn’t believe the overwhelming sensation of relief.

‘Get back in that pen,’ I tried. Big Pig remained on the path, eyeing me up, her ears stiffly erect and her tail outstretched, as though she were trying to make herself look bigger which, as she outweighed me about five times, was ridiculous.

She didn’t move, despite the two guinea pigs who sprinted between her legs and made a dash for the parsley.

‘Zeb!’ Calling him was all I could think of to do.

I daren’t move for fear that Big Pig would take this as licence to run amok around the garden again.

We’d only just got the fennel bed straight after last time, and the chewing power of the guinea pigs and the rabbits could do almost as much damage as a rampant sow. ‘Zeb!’

I could hear the sound of running feet on the gravel and Zeb arrived at my elbow. ‘Are you all… oh. I see.’

He’d got his sleeves rolled up and for some reason this made something inside me which had previously been solid, go melty at the edges.

‘We have to get them back. The band need the place to look consistent for filming and if she tramples half the beds they won’t be able to finish the video.’ I kept my voice level and my eyes locked with the little blue orbs of the pig. The tufts on her ears trembled, but otherwise she didn’t move.

‘What do you need me to do?’

‘I don’t want to move. I’m keeping my eye on her and tracking where all the small squeaky beasts are heading, so we can bring them all in. If I go and get the bucket she can rampage around half the garden before I’m back. And she likes you, she’ll follow you back inside.’

Like a hypnosis practitioner and subject, Big Pig and I stood, eyes fixed on one another. I didn’t even turn to look at Zeb.

He took a deep breath. ‘If I get her back in, can I come and work here?’

I broke the porcine-human stare-off. ‘That’s blackmail! She could destroy my business!’

‘But I’m good with her and she’ll follow me. Isn’t that worth it?’

‘Zeb!’

In front of me, Big Pig took a careful, and almost calculated to insult, step forward. I didn’t move but I did quickly work out how much damage I would sustain if she just charged me. She could flatten me on the path and trample over me without even noticing.

‘Zeb!’

Big Pig snorted.

‘Can I come and work here?’

He’d come up beside me now and the pig was looking from me to him and back again. I threw him a desperate look. ‘You’d rather wrangle pigs and muck out barns than carry on working in the clean and indoor world of promotion and finance?’

‘Yes.’ Zeb’s voice was very level. ‘And help plant herbs and learn to make up bouquets and sell things in the shop. To be honest, I’d rather personally hose Big Pig clean every day and polish her little trotters than carry on doing what I have been.’

‘This is still blackmail.’ I chanced a look at him now and Big Pig took advantage of my distracted attention to advance another step.

Somewhere behind me, two guinea pigs and a rabbit were playing hide and seek among some caraway in the culinary section.

They’d already caused some damage, I could smell the rich, aniseedy scent from crushed stems.

‘I know. But you really could do with another pair of hands.’

‘I’ve got Ollie. Zeb!’ I added his name urgently, as Big Pig, clearly fed up with the ongoing impasse, began to advance slowly towards us, as though playing the world’s worst game of Grandmother’s Footsteps.

‘Ollie’s brilliant at the herbs but he can’t deal with customers. I can. And I’m pretty sure I can look at the figures and work out a way to increase your takings by more than the salary you’d pay me.’

Big Pig had almost reached my knees now and I’d either have to jump aside or risk being ploughed into my own garden.

‘All right, all right! On a trial basis, six months, and if you can pay for yourself over that time, you can stay. Now, work your pig magic, please .’

‘Thank you.’ Zeb sounded cheerfully perky. ‘Right, Pig, come on, let’s have you back in the barn.’ He strolled casually around and slapped her on her mighty rump whereupon, to my surprise, she turned a neat circle and followed him happily back to her pen.

I watched them go, shaking my head with astonishment.

How did he do that? Maybe he and the pig shared some fellow feeling at being oppressed by me?

I could hear him pouring pig feed into her trough, but surely she wasn’t sufficiently certain that he would feed her, when she could have had the freedom of the garden.

If I hadn’t spotted her letting herself out just now, she’d have been out there all night and I dreaded to think what The Goshawk Traders would have turned up to see in the morning if the pig and the small rodents had been scoffing and rooting for hours.

My heart rose into my throat at the thought.

A few minutes ago my biggest worry had been feeling a bit lonely and hard done by, now I was realising that my inattention to the detail of gate closing mechanisms could have cost me my business – or, at least, the large chunk of money that the band were paying to use the premises, plus most of the summer’s earnings.

I felt my blood sting with the what-might-have-beens.

I’d been lucky. Lucky that the pig had only just worked out how to let herself out, and lucky that she’d been recaptured before too much damage had been done.

Perhaps Zeb, damn him, was right and I did need another pair of hands.

Someone else to check things, someone else to man the shop, someone to talk over planting plans and layout details, so it wasn’t all my responsibility.

All those things I could have talked to Mum about, but didn’t dare, because I didn’t want her advice shaping my business and my life. Not any more.

But did it have to be Zeb? With his lanky limbs that looked as though they might snap if he lifted heavy weights and his strange fringe, his big dark eyes and his sudden switches of conversation from the practical to the emotional. Was he really the best person to take some of the pressure off me?

I tried to avoid the mental image of Mika working here.

That was fantasy. I knew of course that there was no way that a famous musician would give up a life on the road to plant parsley and stir compost. Zeb was offering and he was right about me needing help.

‘Tie her gate up with string!’ I called across to the barn. ‘She’s opening the gates herself.’

Zeb called back something I couldn’t hear and faded off to become a shadow in the distance and rattling metal.

I set off after the elusive guinea pigs, combing through the taller growing herbs in search of the whistling bundles, swearing under my breath about how I’d been backed into a corner by a long-limbed farmer-wannabe and a Big Pig.