The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,101
what I could.
Inside the gate to the lavender garden, Caspar was sitting by the sleeping beehives, waiting for us.
‘Why aren’t you in the kitchen, pestering Myfy or Elf for your dinner?’ I asked him, and he made one of his enigmatic noises and ran off ahead of us up the crazy-paving path, his bushy tail up in the air.
‘It must feel odd having a tail,’ I mused, watching him. ‘I mean, having to remember what to do with four legs must be hard enough, but then you have to think about what to do with your tail, too.’
‘It must be odd to be Marnie Ellwood, even before she puts on her bunny tail,’ he observed, taking the bag from me. ‘You go in – you’ve done enough for the day – and I’ll sort this rubbish out. I want to catch up in the office for a bit and then that’s me for the day, too. Then there’s only one more day before opening.’
‘It’ll all come together tomorrow,’ I said encouragingly.
‘I hope so. And since I seem to have been too preoccupied to buy supplies, I’ve now run out of anything interesting to eat, so I’ll have to do a quick dash up to Toller’s now, before they close. If you want me to fetch you anything, I can drop it off on my way back?’
On impulse, I said, ‘I feel in need of good, solid carbs tonight, so I’m going to cook pasta – nothing fancy, just cheese and bottled tomatoes, a bit of garlic … And dessert will be either ice-cream or jelly babies. Why don’t you join me?’
His lip twitched. ‘The jelly babies make it sound almost irresistible.’
‘I expect Caspar will have had his dinner and be back in the flat by the time it’s cooked,’ I said, as if offering a chaperon – and perhaps that was the clincher, because he agreed that pasta sounded just the thing he needed, too.
On Thursday I awoke filled with that feeling of unfounded optimism that often suddenly strikes me.
The previous night Ned and I had been relaxed and companionable over dinner, like the two old friends we were, despite our recent experiences having temporarily warped the picture.
We’d talked mostly about the garden, of course, our mutual obsession, and he showed me pictures on his phone of the pots he’d ordered from Terrapotter. They were huge and the shape reminded me of Ali Baba’s jars, though there were swirls of applied seaweed fronds and barnacle-like decoration that made them look as if they’d just been dredged up from the Aegean Sea bed.
Four of them would be positioned on the circular path at the points where the diagonal ones met it, while the rest were to provide points of interest in the low beds at the side.
He said Lex Mariner would deliver them next week. ‘I’ll get some more later, when I’ve decided what I need: smaller ones on the path around the sunken herb bed, perhaps.’
‘Good idea, because then you could move the mint into them, stopping it trying to escape from its bed and making room for other herbs,’ I suggested.
‘I think Gertie would like that idea, and I could use pots to hold a few more invasive things I’d like to have in the garden, but don’t want to plant out.’
After we’d eaten Ned admired my collection of old French and English gardening books and also the butter paddles, which I’d arranged in a cross shape on top of one of the shelf units. He knew what they were, too, he’d just never seen any quite that size.
‘And don’t I remember you mentioning them before?’ he asked, brows knitted over his long, blunt nose, so he looked like a very puzzled lion.
‘I might have done,’ I admitted. ‘It’s sort of a running theme in my imagination.’ And I told him about Jean, the irascible old gardener at the last château I’d worked at, with the face like an elderly Gérard Depardieu that had been clapped between two large butter paddles – and how sometimes I’d have quite liked to have done that to him myself.
‘I’ll have to watch my step!’ Ned said, but in a teasing way, not as if he thought I was barking. Though actually, a desire to slap people’s heads between butter paddles might not be entirely a normal one.
I think I’d imagined there had been just a faint trace of hesitation before he’d accepted my invitation to dinner, because we’d put all that behind