Page 6 of Once Upon a Thyme

‘Do you need me to get you any shopping, Mum?’

It was the next morning, time for my scheduled visit although there would often be phone calls summoning me to an emergency – which could range from her tripping over in the kitchen to a moth on the bedroom curtains – in between times.

I’d left Ollie sorting out the bald spot in the parsley bed and Zeb keeping an eye on the shop.

Usually I had to close when I visited my mother, so at least he was coming in handy for something.

‘No, it’s fine, darling, I’m going in later myself. When I feel up to it.’

My mother was currently a duvet-swathed form in the middle of her bed. She’d suffered from poor health since before I was born, something that her doctors didn’t seem to know what to do with or how to treat.

‘All right. Shall I open the curtains and get some air in?’

The duvet shuddered. ‘I need the darkness, Natalie, you know how I get.’

Alongside her, unasked questions also shuddered.

All those things I wanted to say, all those things I wanted to ask.

She was carefully not mentioning Zeb, and I was, equally carefully, not saying that I had even met him.

There was no way I could phrase my disapproval at her actions and no point in my even trying.

She would spin the situation to make everything sound reasonable with a ‘but I’m just interested , darling’.

If it ever came to a passive-aggressive-off, we’d probably tie for first place.

‘Right. Well then. I’d better get back.’

My mother struggled up onto her elbows. ‘Have you still got that weird kid working for you? Oliver Twist, or whatever his name is?’

‘Ollie Boniface, Mum. Yes. Ollie’s still there.’

I didn’t know why she was asking. I’d employed Ollie when I’d fully taken over the business four years ago, he was nothing to do with her.

‘But you don’t really need him, do you? Can’t he get a job somewhere else?’

She looked older today, I thought, seeing her face properly now she’d half sat up against the ridiculous number of pillows she insisted having on her bed.

She was fifty-two but today her cheeks were sunken and her wrinkles were prominent.

She looked far older than her years, but she’d had a traumatic life, and stress aged you dreadfully.

It was when I looked at my mother’s face that I felt the most pity for her, but if she was going to diss Ollie, that pity was in short supply.

‘He’s not good with people,’ I said shortly. ‘But he is great with herbs, so he’s staying.’

‘But you’re paying him, darling, and he doesn’t do much more than dig, does he? You could fire him and save his wages.’

I thought of Ollie, his joy at working with the plants, helping out with the animals. ‘No, Mum. I need another pair of hands around the place.’

‘I’m sure you could manage,’ she muttered from beneath the duvet foothills. ‘It’s only digging and weeding and suchlike, and you could do that in the evenings.’

I sighed, but inwardly. Despite having herself been brought up at Drycott, my mother could be surprisingly obtuse about the sheer amount of work involved.

‘I have to do the paperwork in the evenings, Mum. I wouldn’t have time.

Or the forms and the tax stuff wouldn’t be done properly, and I can’t risk that. ’

Mother sank back, like a tanker going down in the Atlantic. ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Anyway. I need a sleep now, Natalie darling, so I’ll see you later, all right?’

There was nothing I could say to this. I was there because she summoned me, then behaved as though my arrival was all my own idea and she couldn’t possibly think why I kept popping round all the time.

I left the musky, stuffy bedroom with the tightly drawn curtains and drove back to the wonderful reassurance of the herb farm.

Which was in a state of uproar.

‘You have to keep the rabbits off the herb beds!’ I could hear Ollie yelling as I parked outside the stables. ‘Else they eat everything!’

‘I’m more worried about that damn pig!’ Zeb was bellowing back.

The pair of them were communicating as though they had a mountain between them rather than a couple of acres of planting, and when I got out of the car I could see Zeb, armed with the ubiquitous broom, chasing rabbits around the parsley while Ollie poked ineffectually at the bulk of the pig who was snorting her way happily into the earth near the moss garden.

‘What on earth has happened?’ I climbed over the gate, so as not to give the pig any chance to get out into the car park and plopped down in the middle of a small guinea pig family gathering, to much squeaky dismay.

‘Got out,’ Ollie said shortly. ‘All of them.’

Three black rabbits hopped merrily through the thyme. I had brief Mr McGregor thoughts. ‘Get the pig back first,’ I said briskly, trying to stifle the panic that was rising at the state of my herbs. ‘She can do the most damage. We’ll round up the others afterwards.’

Ollie and Zeb, armed with the broom, began rather ineffectually to try to sweep the pig back towards the barn, with vague ‘shoo shoo’ cries.

I picked up a bucket, one of the rubberised ones we used to carry stuff up and down the garden, put a handful of gravel from the path in it, and shook it. ‘Come on, pig, dinner!’

The sow raised her head hopefully and began to trot towards me, surprisingly dainty on her spreading trotters, but with increasing pace.

I ran towards the barn and into the penned half where she had her quarters, with the pig behind me, and as soon as she got between the gates that contained her I slammed the pen shut and whipped myself and the bucket out of reach.

Disappointed snorting resulted, and she stuck her head into her feed trough as though she firmly believed there must be something there, even if she couldn’t see it.

I fetched a scoop of pig feed from the locked bin and tipped it into the feeder. I got a damp cough of acknowledgement and a piggy snout instantly started to hoover up the feed, one small eye rotating upwards to watch me, presumably in case of more miracle dinner.

‘I’m only feeding you because otherwise you won’t come back to the bucket,’ I muttered.

Snort. This time it sounded derisory and I deserved it. I couldn’t even stand porcine disappointment. I was not only a people-pleaser, I was a pig-pleaser too. I sighed. My mother had trained me well.

Ollie came into the barn with an armful of rabbits gathered to his chest. Our rabbits were pretty tame.

They had to be when they were petted on a daily basis by children, and they tended not to run too far and were easy to handle, so they were flopped in a relaxed way between Ollie’s arms. One was chewing lightly at his collar.

‘Got ’em,’ he announced cheerfully.

‘How did they get out?’ I looked at the catches on the doors. The rabbits shared a pen with the guinea pigs in the opposite corner to the Big Pig, which meant that not only their pen gates but the big barn gate had to be left open in order for everything to escape.

Ollie looked puzzled as though it had only just occurred to him. ‘Dunno.’ He plopped the rabbity bundle over the wire wall into their enclosure. ‘I fed them all when I got here and I haven’t done the mucking out yet.’

‘You shut the gates after feeding?’ I don’t know why I asked. Ollie was assiduous to the point of obsession about checking things like that.

‘Yes,’ was all he said. There was no point in saying ‘are you sure?’ because Ollie was always sure. It was how his mind worked.

Behind us, Zeb came into the barn. He’d got a bucket of guinea pigs making squeakily disgruntled noises from the bottom of the container.

‘How many should there be?’ he asked. He looked rather ruffled and his knees were muddy.

‘Because they’re sneaky little buggers. I caught one trying to blend in to the rosemary back there, and it’s not as if they’re green or anything. ’

‘Nine,’ Ollie said definitively. ‘There’s nine of them.’

‘I’ve got seven.’ Zeb peered into the bucket. ‘I think. They move about a lot. There might be nine, if the big ones are sitting on some little ones.’

I found that I was looking at him sideways. Someone was opening gates. Someone was letting the animals out, and whilst the rabbits and guinea pigs were annoying, unless they were out for hours they couldn’t do that much damage to the herbs. The pig, on the other hand…

‘Have you got any idea how they escaped?’ I asked quickly, watching his face.

‘Not a scooby.’ He shrugged and the movement made his bucket start squeaking again. ‘Just heard Ollie shout, ran up from the kitchen and then you arrived. I’m not really used to animals, except in oven-ready pieces.’

He looked and sounded innocent. Thin, dark and intense, but innocent.

I looked around the barn. Pig was snuffling her way through her straw bedding now in search of any dropped food.

Her gate was firmly fastened, the sliding bolt fully in place.

The rabbits’ pen had the same gate arrangement, but inside their actual accommodation was a metal fenced run which sat on the concrete floor to stop them from digging out, with a cosy house at one end.

The rabbits were bouncing around their perimeter, like prisoners of war checking out the guards’ timetable.

‘Can we all make sure we double-check the gates?’ I tried to sound firm. ‘Someone must be… not quite fastening them properly.’

I couldn’t accuse Ollie, because whilst I could possibly consider him leaving one gate open accidentally once, which would have accounted for the pig’s kitchen adventure yesterday, I absolutely would not believe that he could do it twice in a row.

Ollie was detail-orientated. Leaving two gates open was just beyond him.