Page 38 of Once Upon a Thyme

The room was warm, even though the window was open to let the moonlight in to cover the bed.

Eventually Zeb spoke. ‘I feel as though I’ve taken advantage of your trauma.’

I rolled further into his embrace. ‘You didn’t. Honestly.’

‘But it…’

‘Was something I wanted to do. Okay, maybe it took a bit of shock to get me over the hump, so to speak, but I wanted it, Zeb. Never doubt that.’

His long arms were around me, his legs entwined with mine. We were sticky and breathless and it had been surprisingly good for an unplanned event. Zeb had turned out to be an intuitive lover with a great line in improvisation.

‘But you’re not in your right mind, are you? After a revelation like that?’

‘If I weren’t in my right mind, do you think I could have come up with the idea of doing the decorations for Mika’s wedding?

’ I wriggled against him. Even his smell was familiar.

I wondered for a moment if I were searching for something with Zeb, a constant who didn’t lie to me, but pushed the thought away.

It was too soon to be examining ideas like that.

‘True. True.’ He stroked my hair, a gentle movement which disturbed the still air in my bedroom. ‘It’s a great idea and a fabulous move for Drycott. You have surprising depths, Tallie.’

‘Which I feel have been well plumbed now.’

He laughed. ‘Thank you for that.’

We lay and breathed for a moment. It hadn’t just been my depths that he’d found surprising, my tattoo had astonished him too.

His unexpected tenderness and ability in bed had made me see him in a new light.

Zeb wasn’t just the rather sweet, floundering in life lanky-limbed pig carer, he had a capability and a certainty that I was quite sure would come through more in real life now he’d found his ‘place’.

‘Did you know? About my mother?’ I whispered the words drowsily.

‘I had my suspicions. That’s why I asked if you ever checked her cupboards.

There was an empty vodka bottle under the sink, when we were round there yesterday.

I’d already thought by then – an illness that she hasn’t had investigated, that makes her take to her bed with such regularity, sounded like something she didn’t want investigated. ’

‘And Granny knew. They both kept it from me. My mother, the drunk. Oh!’ I half sat up against his shoulder. ‘No wonder I went to a fee-paying school out of area. They wouldn’t have wanted the chance of me hearing any rumours about her.’

‘And Simon sent the money for your education. She couldn’t really get away with spending that on drink. Or, maybe she could have done, but she didn’t. She wanted the best for you. Tallie.’

‘She kept that fact well hidden too,’ I muttered. I was too riled up to sleep. ‘Everyone has been lying to me, Zeb. All my life.’

‘Which is why they taught you not to ask questions.’

‘It’s obvious why, now isn’t it. “Your father is dead,” it’s quite hard to think of many questions about that, other than ‘how?’ And “rushing to your birthday party”? It’s almost as though they wanted me to feel guilty from day one.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t like that.’ I could feel Zeb’s fringe tickling the skin along my spine.

‘ How sure?’ I turned suddenly to face him.

‘Okay, not that sure.’

I lay back down again, but still couldn’t sleep.

Beside me, Zeb’s breathing slowed into a drowsy rhythm, but that relaxation eluded me.

Everyone had lied . Mum and Granny, and I suspected that most of the village who asked after Mum’s health with such solicitude, knew too.

They had known Amanda Fisher all her life.

But they’d known me all my life too! Didn’t anyone owe me the truth?

Careful not to disturb Zeb, I got out of bed and went downstairs.

There was only one way this ended, and that was up to me.

It wouldn’t be an end, of course, more like the beginning of a whole new chapter, but I had to be the one to turn the page.

Otherwise we’d all just carry on in this weird, stunted life.

‘Granny, you could have said something,’ I muttered to the rumpled old arm chair as I pulled my gardening coat off the hook on the back door. ‘You could have explained, I would have understood.’

But really, how could she? She’d had to side with her daughter; had to watch her only child drinking herself into incapability and leaving her own child to fend for herself.

No wonder Granny had taken me under her wing.

She’d understood that if she hadn’t, I would have had nothing.

After all, she’d agreed to have Mum come to live with her so she could help raise me, as an alternative to my father having custody.

My father . I tiptoed out of the front door.

I had a father. Alive, well and a very successful manager to a famous band.

I wondered whether he’d really changed his name because it was more rock and roll or whether it had been to prevent my family from hounding him.

Then I remembered that Simon had been sending Mum money.

She’d spent the money he’d been sending for me, on herself.

A house. Alcohol. The money I could have used to find what I really wanted to do with my life.

I got into my car and started it up. I couldn’t sleep, so I might as well hunt for my answers now.

I drove the few miles to the village, this time without my usual wondering, ‘Was this the place? Or this?’, as I searched for the location of my father’s ‘death’.

All those years that I’d imagined his last moments somewhere along this road.

All those years that I’d studied women whose fathers had died young, searching for an identity, a commonality, and all of those years it had all been a lie.

There was a light on in the house, despite the late hour.

A pink glow from the living room, which meant that the lamp was on in there.

Mum might be watching television, she often couldn’t sleep and sat up with dubious programmes on late night TV.

I’d sat through more of them than I cared to remember, staying with her to keep her company.

Had she just been waiting for me to go, so that she could drink? Or was her bedroom rammed with empties from years of ‘early nights’ and ‘just popping up to freshen myself up’? Why had I never noticed?

I let myself in through the kitchen. I could hear a laugh track echoing through the house, but the TV was playing its eighties comedy to an empty room. The kitchen was likewise empty, but there were no lights anywhere else. I crept up the stairs.

‘Mum, are you in?’ I pushed her bedroom door open, surprising her sitting on the end of the bed, in the dark.

‘Natalie? Oh, you made me jump! Why are you here? It’s gone midnight.’

She hadn’t quite been quick enough. Not quite. The covers beside her bulged with a recognisable lump, vodka or gin by the look of it. A big bottle.

‘I came to tell you that I know.’ I stayed in the doorway, watching her struggle to adjust to the situation. Usually I didn’t come unannounced, I came when summoned, irritably and looking for things to do, or I called out when I came into the house. Giving her time I hadn’t known she needed.

‘You know?’ Mum was still dressed. She’d been downstairs watching TV and she’d come up here to – what? This was her house, she could have bottles in every room if she wanted, so why did she need to come into her bedroom to drink?

The answer came to me, stark as the expression on her face right now. Because then it’s all hidden away. Everything she needs is in here.

‘What is it you think you know, Natalie, darling?’ I could hear the drawl now I was listening for it.

Before, I would have put it down to her not being well, her inability to speak clearly down to the fatigue she felt constantly.

Well, of course she did, she sat up all night drinking!

The flame of anger lanced through my chest and I stepped into the room.

‘My dad is alive and well. That, for starters.’

I flung open the door to her wardrobe. It was full of dresses and coats, but a momentary fumble behind the shoes piled on the floor turned up two litre bottles of vodka, one half full and the other empty.

‘And this.’ I flourished the bottles.

She blinked at me, astonished at my statement, at my presumption.

‘You and Granny lied to me. And the money to send me to school? That I thought was just because the herbs were doing well? Turns out that Simon… that Dad was sending you the money for me.’

I began pulling things from the wardrobe. Two coats clonked with bottles in the pockets and there were more empties tucked inside a pair of boots.

‘All the while I’ve thought that you had some rare illness’ – I threw the coats down, pulled out a small suitcase which turned out to be rammed with bottles, mostly half full – ‘you were drinking, drunk or hungover!’

She let out a little cry of alarm and tried to stop me, but she was so fragile and weak that I could push her back down onto the bed with one hand. ‘Natalie, darling, you don’t understand…’

‘Then you have the nerve to try to persuade me to sell Drycott! What is it, are you running low on money? Is Dad refusing to send you more cash?’

Another little mew of a cry.

‘So you’d happily see me out of the farm, having to find myself a job somewhere, just so you could sit and drink yourself into insensibility?’

‘You’re my daughter!’ she managed. ‘You are supposed to help me.’

‘He’s been sending you money, every month, more and more as he’s got successful, thinking that you were passing it on to me. Money that could have put in a new irrigation system, or kept us ticking over during winter – you’ve spent it on buying yourself a house and alcohol.’

I could feel the anger draining away now, leaving me with an odd emptiness. My mother turned her worn face towards me, scrunch-eyed as though she was trying not to cry.

‘You don’t know, Natalie,’ she said quietly. ‘You have no idea.’

‘No, because I was never allowed to ask. Never allowed to talk about anything that mattered. Everything was pushed down and stamped out of me so that I wouldn’t dare mention anything that might upset you.

’ I sounded tired now. ‘So the fact that I don’t know why you drink isn’t my fault.

And, right now, I don’t care. I came over to tell you that I know, that Simon has told me nearly everything.

Anything else I need to know I shall ask him.

So if there’s anything you feel you ought to tell me, then you should do it right now, because I’m going to find out anyway. ’

I got a weak headshake for that. A slow, ponderous negative that I wasn’t even sure that she meant. ‘I tried so hard to keep you away from musicians,’ she said weakly. ‘I knew he’d try to find you, one day.’

‘And that’s why you panicked when you heard there was a band filming in the gardens?’

‘I knew he’d try,’ she repeated. I saw her hand reach out and gently slide under the cover that concealed the lump that I was pretty sure was a vodka bottle. Even here, even now, she couldn’t reach for me, only for another drink.

‘I’m off.’ I turned, leaving the detritus of my search all over the floor. ‘I’m going home.’

There was a huge, empty space, unfilled by all the words we knew we should say.

Eventually my mother said, in a small voice, ‘Will you come over tomorrow? I might need some more milk from the shop.’ Her voice was almost childlike, so whispered and broken.

A child who’s had a nightmare, who wants reassurance.

I sighed. ‘Of course I will, Mum,’ I said, and saw her relax.

‘I want some bread too,’ she said, her voice rising back to her normal levels. ‘I fancy sandwiches for lunch. That nice bread, from the farm shop, not the packet stuff they sell in the village.’

The farm shop people were new, I thought, with the clarity of sudden realisation. They hadn’t been here for generations like the family that owned the old-fashioned village grocery. She didn’t want me mixing with anyone who might give her away.

‘Don’t push your luck.’ But the normality was making me smile despite myself.

I was still angry, I still felt that low burn in my stomach at the thought of the lies, and the memory of all that deflection and the stamping out of any questioning, but this damaged woman was still my mother, and she still needed me.

‘No more lies. I’ll help you where I can, but no more lies. ’

With that, I walked out of the room, leaving the fug, the smell of alcohol and the sound of my mother crying.