The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,18
and it’s one of those things that doesn’t work properly with French cheese.
The cat also seemed keen on the idea, going by the way it switched its bright green glare back to the table.
‘This is my sister Myfanwy.’ Elf gestured with the butter knife at a tall woman, who was standing by a glowing electric grill, watching cheese melt. ‘Myfy, Marnie Ellwood.’
Myfanwy Price-Jones was a slender woman, perhaps in her mid-sixties, but it was hard to tell, because her face was unlined, even though her hair was purest shining silver and hung straight and loose to her waist. She had a long, dreamy face, a little like Virginia Woolf, but the same bright dark eyes as her sister. She was dressed in a bohemian fashion I rather liked, in a knee-length pink kurta tunic embroidered in a rainbow of colours, worn over black harem trousers. Round her neck hung two pairs of glasses on pearl chains and a long string of chunky oval amber beads. Her feet were bare.
‘Pleased,’ she said, a smile lifting one corner of her mouth attractively and taking away the slightly melancholy cast of countenance. ‘Marnie? Such a nice name – from the Hitchcock film, perhaps?’
‘It’s Marianne really, but Marnie was as close as I could get to it when I was a little girl.’
‘Well, Marnie, God knows we’re glad to see you, because we certainly need some extra help with the gardening,’ she said frankly. ‘Especially our nephew, Edward, who’s hoping to restore enough of the Grace Garden to open it to the paying public at Easter, and he can’t do that single-handedly.’
‘Edward – we call him Ned – is sort of our nephew, because his great-uncle Theo married our elder sister, Morwenna,’ explained Elf helpfully. ‘But he and Wen have both gone now and Ned’s inherited Old Grace Hall and the very overgrown gardens.’
Myfy deftly removed two slices of toast from the grill onto a plate and replaced them with the ones passed to her by Elf.
‘Do sit down and start your lunch,’ urged Elf, sliding the plate in front of an empty chair. ‘Welsh rarebit is one of those things you have to cook in relays, like omelettes. Mine’s next and then these last two are for Myfy, so dig in while it’s hot.’
I sat down and did, feeling slightly self-conscious. The cat, who was sitting bolt upright on the next chair, switched its attention to me and said something imperative.
‘Ignore Caspar: he’s on a special diet and isn’t allowed any,’ Myfy said. ‘We got him from a cat rescue place a couple of weeks ago, so we’re only just getting used to his little ways, and vice versa.’
‘I don’t think he’s really taken to us yet,’ Elf said. ‘We took pity on him when we saw him there, because he seemed such a quiet, elderly cat, who just wanted somewhere warm and quiet to spend his last few years in.’
‘Early days yet,’ Myfy said, ‘but it looks like he might wear us down and see us out.’
Caspar said something that sounded like, ‘Too right!’ and then laid a large furry paw on my knee for a moment, to remind me he was there and hungry.
‘He’s very big,’ I commented.
‘He’s supposed to be half Maine Coon, and they can be enormous,’ said Myfy. ‘Funny, he didn’t look that big in the cat place.’
Elf took the next slices of toast when they were ready and sat down opposite to me.
‘Myfy wasn’t quite right about Ned having to restore the garden single-handedly, because he has Jekyll and Hyde to help him, though they aren’t really up to the heavier work any more, especially James, with his rheumatism.’
‘Jekyll … and Hyde?’ I repeated, tentatively.
‘Family joke,’ Myfy explained. ‘James Hyde and his sister, Gertrude, are twins, and when she married a man called Steve Jekyll, it was irresistible, though not entirely accurate as they’re both lovely and neither at all a monster.’
‘And Gertrude Jekyll is a very suitable name for a gardener, too,’ Elf put in. ‘There was that famous one.’
‘Right,’ I said resignedly, because it didn’t look as if I’d escaped the tyranny of an entrenched ancient gardener even here – in fact, there were two of them and they’d probably look on me as someone who could do all the heavy digging. This nephew probably wasn’t so young, either.
‘Until recently, I’ve managed to keep more or less on top of our garden, which isn’t huge, and mostly lavender,’ said Myfy, ‘but there are a few