Page 8 of Once Upon a Thyme
It was just a shame that Granny wasn’t still here to affirm my decision.
But then, if she had still been here, Drycott would still belong to her, I’d probably be living now with my mother in her suffocating little house in the village and I’d be…
what would I be? What would I ever have become if Granny hadn’t taken me under her wing and taught me about herbs.
Growing them, planting them. The right times to harvest. How to make arrangements that looked better than conventional flower bouquets, how to use them in cooking.
Without Granny, would I just have been a carer for my mother?
Ollie gave me a beaming smile, heading towards the mint beds wielding his best secateurs, and I bit my lip.
No . I had to stop thinking that way. Some people just needed a bit more looking after than others.
It wasn’t Ollie’s fault that he couldn’t cope with strangers and that he was detail-orientated.
And it wasn’t my Mother’s fault that she was so ill and needed help.
It wasn’t her fault that her life had gone so wrong after I was born, that it had caused her such trauma she now found it hard to function.
Nobody’s fault. But it did mean that the end result was pieces that needed to be picked up, and I’d learned how to do that without asking why from an early age.
I stretched myself under the sun’s warmth again and let myself relax.
A bee, heading for the lavender bushes, bounced off my forehead, adjusted its flight path and lurched downwards to join its hive mates poking around the pale flowers at knee level.
I bent to pick a bee-free stem and let the scent soothe me.
Good old lavender. Reliable, perpetual, attractive – if occasionally tending to scruffiness, it didn’t need much looking after and would do its thing year after year with the minimum of care.
I pulled the flower head between my fingers and wondered whether I’d been thinking of lavender or myself when that description had come to mind.
There were an extraordinary number of similarities, although I was marginally less attractive to bees and probably – I looked down at my worn jeans and untucked shirt – less fragrant.
The pale purple petals fluttered from my hands, torn and spoiled, to decorate the gravel as though fairy confetti had been liberally thrown at a fae wedding.
I had to stop this. Introspection was all very well, but it wouldn’t get the fennel bed patched or the mallows tied in to their decorative supports.
Self-analysis was self-indulgent. I was me, Natalie, Tallie to my friends, Fisher.
Owner of Drycott Herbs and… well, all right, not very much else, but I had my own business and that was enough.
The total lack of social life and any appreciable kind of romance was a side effect of having to work so hard, that was all.
I tried really hard not to add to myself that having a mother who needed me on call 24/7 didn’t help either of these things much, because hadn’t I already agreed with myself that none of this could be helped?
She hadn’t chosen to be physically frail and mentally non-resilient, had she?
What she had done, though, was land me with Zeb McAuley-Whatsit, who was currently drifting around outside the shop, rearranging buckets and ignoring the fact that a car had pulled in and there were people who actively needed to be sold things wandering around the stable yard.
I watched him tweak a few buckets into place and then straighten up to greet the potential customers.
He looked a lot more personable at a distance; he had that tall, long-limbed thing going on that made every gesture into something big, and his hair wasn’t so objectionably floppy from back here.
He looked like just another worker, the irritating questions and intrusive behaviour being too far off to bother me.
I tried to ignore the tiny tug that I felt somewhere deep inside when I thought of his offer of help; the way he looked as though life had hit him very hard around the head and then expected him to get up and carry on.
There was just something about Zeb, and I wasn’t sure if that tug was fellow feeling or a desire to bury him under the mint bed.
While I was looking at him, Zeb looked up and across the acres and met my eye.
It was too late to switch focus and pretend I’d really been checking the line of the fencing or assessing the distant marigolds; he’d clearly caught me staring at him because he raised his eyebrows.
I didn’t know whether he was questioning my stare, expressing surprise that I was even looking his way or raising a problem with a customer, but to cover my confusion at being caught out, I set off towards him.
I had to work on a reason for going over, so I focused on the customers, a young couple, who might have questions.
After all, it wasn’t unreasonable for me to want to be there, selling things.
I ought to be there and actively selling, in fact.
Just so that he was in absolutely no doubt that this was my place.
I didn’t let myself think about my suspicions regarding letting the animals out. There was no time now to wonder whether Zeb, whatever his reasons, was trying to sabotage my business.