The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,23
replied, feeling a sick hollowness inside. Ned must know – or think he knew – how I came to leave my last HHT job. Word of that unhinged email of resignation sent by Mike, pretending to be me, with its many and varied accusations against my former boss and colleagues, must have leaked out. And once Ned had told Myfy about it, I supposed that would be the end of this job, too, before it had even begun.
There was a curved marble bench next to the pool and I sat on it, heedless of moss and damp. Under the waterlilies and shifting reflections of scudding white clouds, the gold and red koi circled like strange dreams in the darkness.
Myfy, looking troubled, walked slowly through the gate from the Grace Garden, closing it behind her, before coming to sit next to me.
I looked at her numbly, waiting for the axe to fall, but instead she gave me one of her tilted smiles and said, ‘Ned had to go back to his office in the courtyard – he moved his garden design business, Little Edens, here last year.’
‘But he didn’t want to talk to me anyway, did he? He wasn’t pleased to see me, let alone employ me.’
‘The trouble is, he’d heard some odd rumours about how you came to leave your last job,’ she said. ‘But you can’t depend on gossip, as he should know very well by now. Anyway, Elf is the fey one in the family and never misjudges a character, and she told me you were a good person who has had a difficult past and needs the healing powers of the valley as much as poor Ned does, but in a different way.’
‘She did? And … Ned does, too?’ I said, tentatively.
She nodded. ‘I’d no idea you’d known Ned as students, of course, and then, living abroad, you probably entirely missed all the scandal.’
This all sounded very mysterious.
‘But you see, poor old Ned has had a hard time, which is why he’s so prickly. I’ll tell you all about it on the way up the River Walk.’
She got up, dusting off the seat of her billowing black coat and I followed her into the Lavender Cottage garden and under the overgrown thorny rose arch past the beehives.
As we reached a kind of wooden sentry hut by the back gate, she said, ‘We did tell you that one of your duties would be to go right up the River Walk to the falls at closing time every day, to pick up any litter and check for damage and stray visitors, didn’t we?’
‘Not that I recall,’ I said, still wondering if it was all academic anyway, and I’d still actually have a job by the end of this little talk. And what on earth was this scandal involving Ned that had so changed him and made him need healing? It sounded very unlike the Ned I remembered.
Myfy opened the hut and took out a stick with a pointed metal end, which she handed to me, and a large brown paper rubbish sack from a folded pile on a shelf.
‘The shutter over the entrance turnstile is always pulled down and locked at four, when Elf or one of the staff has emptied the box of tokens,’ she explained. ‘Then someone has to walk all the way up to the top of the falls, which we started doing regularly after the time we found a poor Swedish tourist with a broken ankle near the waterfall, who’d been there the whole night and was quite demented, poor thing.’
I felt a little demented myself by this point, with so many unanswered questions whirling about like dark bats in my belfry.
‘Of course, you don’t need to do it on Tuesdays, when we are all closed, or Sundays – someone else will do it that day.’
We passed through the gate, which she locked carefully behind us, and picked our way down a narrow path that wound through gorse and rocks, until we came out on a wide gravelled path by the riverbank.
We turned upstream, away from the turnstile, and began to walk up the valley. The river burbled, rushed and babbled over its stony bed and I could hear a blackbird singing and the distant plaintive bleat of a sheep.
The path was quite wide and easy here, skirting boulders, rocky outcrops and large, gnarled tree roots.
‘As well as checking for injured visitors, you need to keep an eye out for any damage to the path