Page 27 of Once Upon a Thyme
Zeb was early next morning. The dew had barely settled itself on the edges of the ferny yarrow when he was climbing over the gate and arriving in my kitchen.
‘Thought I’d start my employment as I mean to go on,’ he said brightly, watching me make tea and wrinkle my nose at the smell of last night’s curry still lingering in the furnishings.
‘You were already employed here,’ I said. ‘Remember? You’re here in both capacities for the rest of the month, and after that the jury is out.’
‘Well. I’ll just have to make sure I earn my keep then, won’t I? Pig wrangling and looking into the options for more animals, plus giving a bit of advice on the financials.’ He leaned against the door frame, still watching me. ‘Any chance of a cup? I left before I had breakfast.’
I grunted, which he took as assent, claiming the half-empty kettle and the pack of tea bags with alacrity and the kind of smile I’d more normally associate with a primary school teacher introducing the school play.
I flopped down in Granny’s chair and watched him through the steam of my own cup; he was moving with a new deftness as though he had a new routine to establish and was going for it all guns blazing.
‘I looked through your accounts,’ he said finally, lifting his mug to me in a kind of toast. ‘After I’d put Big Pig back, while you were still rounding up the small squeakies. They’re in pretty good shape, I have to say.’
‘You make it sound as though you expected everything to have been written on the back of used envelopes in pencil.’
‘Not at all.’ The infant teacher smile was turned on again. ‘I had every faith in your rigour and attention to detail. And you’re right, your mum isn’t drawing that much money from the herb farming, is she? A couple of hundred pounds a month at most.’
I grunted again. A couple of hundred pounds would be a very good earning month, but I wasn’t about to point that out.
‘So what does she live on?’ Zeb dragged out the chair from the table that was nearest where I sat, and slid himself onto it. ‘She’s too young to be getting any kind of pension, and even if she is getting benefits, they’d never pay for that house of hers.’
I shook my head. ‘I always thought my dad must have left her some kind of insurance policies or something. She’s never worked, so there wouldn’t be any pensions, apart from the state one, and she’s got a good fifteen years before she can get that.
Plus, I think Granny helped her out here and there. ’
‘Hmm.’ Zeb frowned into his mug. ‘She owns the house in the village? Or does she rent?’
‘Owns it, I think.’ I put my tea down on the arm of the chair, the hot ring on the leather adding to the thousands that already decorated it.
‘You aren’t curious about how your mother is managing to keep body and soul together?’ He lifted the frown to my face now.
I sighed and let my head flop back. ‘You don’t understand.
I was brought up not to ask questions. Believe me, I tried.
When I was younger I used to ask about Dad, what he was like, whether he looked like me, whether there were pictures.
Or about how Mum came to meet him, when they fell in love, how he asked her to marry him – I was full of questions. ’
I heard Zeb take an extra-large mouthful of tea and gurgle ‘ow’ at the heat, then gulp it down.
‘But asking Mum anything would send her to bed for a fortnight. She’d get huffy and go to her room and then she’d be ill and Granny would get cross with me for making Mum upset.
There would be an atmosphere .’ I remembered those days, Granny barely speaking to me, Mum not speaking to anyone – existing only as a series of thumps overhead and a blanketed swaddle in her bed. I’d learned early not to rock the boat.
‘So they taught you not to ask questions? That explains how easily you accepted that I’d come for a job that didn’t exist. Although it clearly does, now,’ Zeb added hastily. ‘You were trained.’
I thought about this. The hand not holding my tea tightened on the slippery leather of the chair as I dug my fingers into the fabric, which felt uncomfortably like a human arm.
‘I didn’t want to upset Granny, she was teaching me about the herbs, and it was horrible here when she wouldn’t talk to me.
I had to trail along behind her as if I didn’t exist.’
‘So not upsetting them became more important than you knowing about your own father?’ Zeb sounded angry and I opened my eyes, straightened up to see him blazing a dark look at me across the kitchen. ‘Seriously?’
‘It…’ I tried to think how I’d felt. ‘If I asked about Dad, or about the past in general, it made things… I don’t know, sort of worse . And it didn’t matter, not to me, not really. Dad was just this person who once existed, like Napoleon or Henry the Eighth.’
In my pocket my phone buzzed a text. I didn’t look. I knew who it would be from and most likely what it would say. Zeb refocussed that dark stare which was becoming uncomfortable.
‘But neither Napoleon nor Henry make up half your DNA,’ he said quietly. ‘You have a right to be curious.’
‘But it doesn’t matter .’ I slithered out of Granny’s chair. ‘I’m me and I live and work here. I know who I am, Zeb, and that’s the only thing that’s important.’
I hoped he wouldn’t point out all that research and all those printouts that decorated my bedroom walls.
My knowing of myself had so obviously been made up from a lot of piecemeal reading and other people’s experiences that I knew more about than I knew about my own.
Now, to distract myself from the way his eyes were flickering over my face, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. As I’d thought, Mum.
Natalie, darling, could you pop over? I’ve nothing in the cupboard and I can’t go out today, I’m feeling too ill. I went shopping yesterday but I seem to have forgotten bread and potatoes and I’d like some of that lovely soup they do in the shop.
She didn’t sign it or leave a kiss, but that was typical. When Mum was ill she could barely summon the energy to type, other than to list what she wanted.
‘Your mother?’ Zeb raised an eyebrow.
‘Yes. I’d better get over there. Well, I’ll go via the shop, she needs a few things.’
‘Finish your tea first.’ Zeb moved out of his chair and lifted my mug into my hand.
‘Oh, but…’
‘She’s not going to get worse if you stop and drink your tea.’ His voice was firm. ‘You should take better care of yourself, Tallie. What’s the saying, “put on your own oxygen mask before you help others with theirs”?’
In the crowded shadow of my little kitchen, still smelling of last night’s food, Zeb sounded more serious than I’d ever known him.
‘I do take care of myself,’ I muttered.
‘You ate last night as though you hadn’t seen solid food for weeks.
I’ve only ever seen you make yourself toast, and you’re out in the garden from dawn ’til dusk.
You’re too thin, your clothes are hanging off you and – forgive me for this – you don’t look as though you’ve had a proper haircut for years,’ Zeb said, then added, ‘Sorry,’ as though he realised how much his words would sting.
‘I…’ I began, then realised I couldn’t refute any of this.
To launch into an explanation of how hard it was to eat when the shop was busy and I was the only one available to man the till, how my hands were usually too full of planting or weeding to make it worthwhile making a sandwich, how I hadn’t had a chance to do any clothes shopping for ages or to get to the hairdresser and anyway I couldn’t really afford it would take too long and I needed to get some shopping over to Mum.
‘I’m going out,’ was all I said, putting my half-drunk tea on the table now. ‘To get Mum her food.’
‘I’ll come with you.’ Zeb put his tea down, equally as definitely.
‘What? No! You stay here, the band will be arriving soon.’
The thought of Zeb following me around the shop and then over to Mum’s house and wandering around her kitchen while I checked she had everything she needed, filled me with horror.
‘The band will do their thing, they don’t need anyone here. And I’ve been to your mother’s before, remember? She likes me. I might perk her up a bit.’
‘You might drive her into a relapse.’
‘Ah, come on, if I’m going to work for you I’m going to have to help out with chores for your mother.’ Zeb patted my shoulder. It reminded me, uncomfortably, of the way he’d slapped Big Pig’s rump last night. More gentle, obviously, but still.
‘You’re coming to work with the animals.
’ I sounded mutinous, as though I was thrown back to my questioning teenage self, trying to ask why I wasn’t allowed to go into town, why I couldn’t go to the local school, why I had to go all the way to the private school two towns over. Why I was so isolated .
Questions I’d only dared to mutter in the silence of my bedroom.
Asking them out loud would have been to invite Mum’s illness to take over our lives again, and for Granny to alternate worrying with censure.
Zeb was company. He was annoying and pushy and he pried into areas of my life that even I didn’t look at, but he was there .
‘All right.’
‘I’ll drop Simon a message so they don’t worry when we’re not here.
I think they’re doing some pick-up shots today, joining bits together and maybe filming a couple of tracks.
’ Zeb seemed to take my acquiescence as a given and trotted alongside me as I closed up the cottage, went through to the front and got in my car.
‘She’s not well,’ I said, steering us out into the narrow lane.
‘I know, you’ve said. Do you know where your dad died? Where the crash was, I mean?’ Zeb turned his head from side to side as though the narrow innocence of the flower-crowded hedge banks were about to close in on us and squeeze us to death, like a horror film, and replay those tragic events.
‘No. Somewhere near the village.’
‘And his car hit a tractor?’
I concentrated on driving.
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