Page 39 of Once Upon a Thyme

I drove around the dark lanes for hours, thinking.

When I got back to the cottage it was so late that it was almost dawn.

A faint slice of lemon-coloured light lay on the far horizon behind the hills and I could see the outline of the planting scheme as I parked my car and came in through the garden.

I could have parked in my usual spot and come in the way I went, but I wanted to see the herbs.

I needed to see them, in all their rustling, dancing glory, nodding in the early breeze as though agreeing with what I’d done.

They swayed, each in their appointed place, grouped like-with-like, planted for height, for use, for appeal; neat, orderly.

I remembered the garden as it had been when I had taken it over.

Lovely, yes, but wild. I had thought that was my mother’s idea of planning, a Sleeping Beauty of a garden, letting people wander to choose their herbs by discovery among the riot of scent and flower.

Now I knew it was just that she hadn’t been able to keep up a planting method.

She’d let the garden go to ruin, basically, with only me keeping on top of the pruning and weeding, but pretending it was still a viable business.

Buoyed up by my father’s – by Simon’s – financial input, she’d not needed to rely on the herb garden for income.

I’d bought her out, so keen to take over and make Drycott mine that I hadn’t questioned our low turnover.

The bank had only loaned me the barest minimum, based on my business plan for the future, and still I hadn’t questioned how she’d been keeping everything together on our woeful profits.

All because I hadn’t dare ask.

I felt myself droop. Now that the adrenaline of sex with Zeb and the meeting with Simon had ebbed, I was back to being the usual Tallie.

Back to worrying about causing offence, worrying about upsetting Mother.

I thought of what I’d said to her and felt the horrible heat of shame creep over me.

I shouldn’t have rocked the boat. Let her carry on thinking that I knew nothing and let life continue as it always had, set in the aspic of lies and deceit.

Big Pig heard me arrive and snorted herself to standing. I went to lean over her gate.

‘I don’t know what I’ve done,’ I said softly to her, and scratched her enormous bristly head as she snuffled around the base of her gate. The guinea pigs heard me then too, and set up a squeaky call for breakfast, so I thought I might as well get the day started and opened the feed bin.

As I tipped buckets of feed into feeders and tried to tamp down the deep cringe that had been set off by the knowledge that I had upset my mother – something I had been spending my entire life trying not to do – the thought struck me that the little hyperactive mop heads and the huge sow would have been the first to go if I’d had to sell Drycott.

There would be no more mornings being greeted as though I were a captain being whistled aboard my ship.

No more additions to the muck heap that teetered down by the compost bins, now all neat edges and careful structure thanks to Ollie and Zeb.

She’d wanted me to sell, to keep her in drink.

I might be able to forgive the drinking – who knew what reasons she had for that, I guessed she’d convinced herself it was necessary.

I might even be able to forgive the lying – no, scratch that, I’d never be able to forgive the lies but I could come to understand why I’d been turned into a compliant, scared, non-confrontational person, to let her life continue as it was.

But I would not forgive her wanting me to sell up.

This place was in me, in my bones and my teeth and my hair, just as much as the herbal cordials Granny used to give me as a child, to help me grow ‘big and strong’.

Drycott was my home. I knew, suddenly and with the clarity of dawn, that it wouldn’t have mattered if Mum had given me all the money that Simon had been sending.

I would never have left. Other lives might have beckoned, doors might have been held open for me, but I would have stayed at my home.

Drycott and I were as entwined as the bindweed with the mallow.

In the cottage I crept up the stairs. Zeb was still asleep on his back and puffing so that his fringe rose and fell with each breath.

I looked at him lying there, his feet sticking out at the bottom of the bed like a cartoon, one long arm flopped along the covers like a pale snake, and I felt a rush of affection.

Not love, not yet. But a heat that was attraction and physical compatibility, soft-edged with fondness and caring that could turn into love, if I let it. He understood me. Zeb, with his searching through life for a – well, for a life. Perhaps, just perhaps, he could find one here, with me.

I began pulling things off the walls. All those articles, all that therapy-speak that I had thought was showing me who I was, all had been irrelevant.

I wasn’t the daughter of a grieving widow who’d worked hard to give me the advantages she’d lacked.

I was the daughter of a woman who drank so much she’d driven away a loving husband and who’d spent most of the money sent to help keep her daughter.

The noise of ripping paper, where some of the edges had been stuck to the wallpaper for ten years or more, woke Zeb. He half sat, scrubbing a hand through his hair and staring down at his bare chest.

‘Oh, I must have fallen asleep again,’ he said, and then, with memory obviously returning, ‘ Oh. ’

‘These,’ I said, peeling a three-page article on childhood bereavement away from the 1960s florals, ‘are all lies , Zeb.’

‘Er.’ He sat further up the bed. ‘Tallie, they’re not. They’re just not you.’

‘But I thought they were!’ I wailed, pulling Kate Beckinsale down to lie on top of the crumpled pile.

Her face stared upwards, reminding me of my teenage self, although I hadn’t been nearly so good looking or composed.

Away at school, I’d searched for an identity and found that it lay here, that Drycott was who I was.

‘Does it make a difference?’ Zeb pushed skinny legs out from under my solar system patterned duvet. ‘You’re still Tallie. I’m going to put the kettle on, this is all way too deep a conversation to be having without a good sturdy cup of tea inside me. Possibly some toast, would you like some toast?’

His normality was grounding. Zeb was still the same as he’d been before all this dramatic revelation nonsense. So perhaps he was right and I was also still the same, even though I felt changed from the inside.

‘Toast sounds nice, thank you,’ I said cautiously, as though New Tallie might not yet want to eat.

‘Good.’ He draped himself in my dressing gown, which had been hooked on the back of the door, and, struggling arms into the fluffy sleeves, squeezed his way past me out to the staircase.

‘You need some food. I might scramble some eggs – do we have any eggs? Chickens ought to be the first new addition, I think. We can pen them down by the compost to start with.’

Then he stopped on the landing and turned. ‘Is it all right?’ His face was clouded with anxiety now. ‘If I make plans? I mean, are we still going ahead with… or are you going to sell?’

‘Sell?’ I was momentarily startled from my tape-unsticking.

‘I thought – I don’t know, maybe you’d want a new beginning? I thought you might be out roaming the acres and deciding on a different future. The pig woke me up,’ he added apologetically. ‘So I knew you were out there.’

‘I went to see my mother.’ A satisfyingly long strip of aged newsprint tore away; a story about an entrepreneur who had been orphaned tragically at the age of ten and had gone on to set up his own tech business. ‘To tell her that I knew.’

‘Ah.’ Zeb turned back to the staircase. It creaked under his weight. ‘I might need to bring out the jam then.’

‘She was sitting in her bedroom, drinking. And her wardrobe was full of bottles.’

I followed Zeb out and down the staircase to the minute hallway and into the kitchen.

No sun reached it yet and it smelled of long-gone dinners, dust and crushed leaves.

I realised that I hadn’t done anything to the cottage since I’d taken over from Mum.

She, obviously, hadn’t touched the place since Granny died.

I was living in a house that was stuck in a time warp from the sixties, when Grandad had been alive.

Nobody had decorated, nobody had painted.

No wonder there were mice in the kitchen and a tatty version of Morten Harket on the landing.

I’d kept this place as Mum had kept it, because I thought it was in memory of my father, when really it had just been an inability to cope, and an unwillingness to spend money on anything that wasn’t drink.

Zeb moved from kettle to toaster, examining the bread carefully. ‘I think we’ve got mice,’ he said.

‘Might have,’ I conceded.

He spun around. ‘Tallie, this place needs a good scrub, some traps down and a coat of paint, possibly in the well-known shade “fumigation”.’

I sighed. ‘I know. It’s beginning to dawn on me what really needs doing around here.

I’ve been so busy concentrating on keeping the gardens going that I’ve not really touched the house.

I thought Mum was too deep in grief to touch the place, but I’m beginning to think it was laziness now.

’ I scraped a nail along the table, and some varnish lifted and curled under my finger. ‘There’s so much to do.’

Zeb pushed the bread into the toaster, flicked on the kettle and came over to stand at the window. ‘Now you know,’ he said. ‘What’s next?’

‘There’s so much to do,’ I repeated. ‘If we’re providing the arrangements for Mika and Tessa’s wedding…

’ I stared past him, out of the window, where a few sunflowers were drooping miserably, leaning against the walls.

‘I have to talk to Tessa about colours. Or rather, I have to talk to whoever is arranging the whole wedding, I doubt she’s been allowed to choose her own décor.

I need to get out there and start picking and drying. ’

Zeb caught at my hand as I waved it in a feeble gesture at the garden. ‘I can help, though. I’m here, Tallie, I want to help. Not just with the animals, although I’ve got ideas I want you to hear, but maybe we can park that for now and crack on with preparing for the wedding?’

I looked up at him. He looked ridiculous, protruding from my dressing gown, all angular and bony with his hair standing up in tufts and his mobile face wearing an expression of contained excitement. My heart twisted in my chest.

‘We can spend the winter having a big clear out?’ He went on. ‘Decorate, repair, get rid of the mice.’

‘There’s still a fair bit to do in the gardens even in winter you know, Zeb. I don’t lock the gates and put my feet up for six months.’

‘Good, good. But we can get even more done if it’s the two of us.’ The toast popped up and the kettle steamed itself to boiling. ‘Do you want it to be the two of us?’

He wasn’t looking at me now.

I remembered last night. I remembered his caring, his gentleness. And, of course, there was his ability with Big Pig, if we were going to be prosaic about it. ‘We can definitely try,’ I said. ‘But first…’

‘Yes?’ His head came up, as eager as Big Pig sighting the feed bucket.

‘Can you tie up the dressing gown? It’s a bit distracting, and Ollie will be here in a minute. You’re on full view in the window and I don’t want him scared off first thing in the morning.’

‘Oh. Oh!’ Zeb gathered the fluffy pink fabric around himself. ‘That’s embarrassing. Although you’ve seen all I have to offer already, and you haven’t run screaming, so thank you for that.’

‘Nothing to scream about,’ I said. I moved closer, pretending to help him with the tie, but in reality stretching up to give him a kiss.

The sun, finally getting itself going, sloped a few tentative rays in through the top of the window. ‘Are you really all right?’ Zeb asked gently. ‘That was a hell of a day yesterday.’

I thought of Simon’s face, breaking the news, that scared, wary expression.

He’d been afraid. Had he thought I’d throw him out and refuse to listen?

And why hadn’t my mother worn a similar expression when I’d walked in on her?

The thought that maybe she hadn’t cared about being discovered, that perhaps she was relieved that everything was out in the open, crossed my mind, to be dismissed with a inwards sarcastic laugh.

She knew she’d raised me to keep the peace.

She knew that I would never speak about this again.

Not to her , anyway. I was too well-trained.

‘I’m…’ I hesitated. ‘I’ve got a lot of processing to do. I’ve got to come to terms with the fact that everything I thought growing up was a lie. Everything I was told was a lie. Even Granny couldn’t tell me the truth.’

Granny, watching her only child fall through cracks into alcoholism.

Did she know why? I spared a few moments of very uncharitable thoughts about Grandad, but then dismissed them.

If he’d known anything or been involved in any of this, Granny would have killed him herself with the overweight frying pan she’d wielded for most of my childhood.

No. This was something only my mother could get to the bottom of.

Granny had done her best to help, but hadn’t known how.

So she’d taken us in, kept me safe, given me a purpose.

Hoping, I had to suppose, that her granddaughter wouldn’t follow in her mother’s footsteps. She had done what she could.

And I still had Drycott.

Which still contained herbs that needed weeding, cutting back and tying up, and a lot of hard work to prepare for a wedding.