The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,24
and handrails,’ Myfy said instructively. ‘On the way back, you empty the two rubbish bins into the sack and collect any litter thoughtless visitors have dropped.’
My spirits rose slightly: it wasn’t exactly sounding as if I’d been fired before I started … or not by Myfy, at any rate. I feared that convincing Ned might be altogether a harder task.
‘The first stretch of the River Walk, about half a mile, is quite easy going, as you see. There are one or two little bridges across more difficult stretches further on, put in by the Victorian owners before the Verdis took over, when they turned it into a daytripper’s beauty spot.’
It would not exactly be an onerous task to walk up the little valley every afternoon … though possibly it wouldn’t be so pleasant in bad weather.
Myfy might have read my mind because she said, ‘If it’s bucketing down with rain or blowing a gale then no one in their right mind would climb the waterfall path up to the top, so you can just do a visual check from the viewing platform at the bottom.’
There had been no sign of any visitors, within earshot or otherwise, to prevent Myfy explaining what had happened to Ned, and I was just wondering if she had forgotten, when she said, with a sigh: ‘I’d better put you in the picture about what happened at the beginning of last year, so you can understand Ned’s attitude earlier. Poor boy,’ she added, though Ned was most definitely not a boy, but a large, angry and seemingly troubled man.
‘When I went to France five years ago he was still a TV celebrity and This Small Plot must have been on about its millionth series,’ I said. ‘I … I’d lost touch with most of my old friends by then, though.’
‘It was a dreadful scandal, in all the papers over here, but I don’t suppose those in France even covered it,’ Myfy said. ‘And really, it wasn’t much more than a seven-day wonder, even if it did have a long-term effect on Ned.’
Now I was really intrigued to know what on earth Ned had got himself into, but when she began by saying that it was all caused by the unreasonable jealousy of his girlfriend at the time, it all began to sound horribly familiar …
‘She began constantly accusing him of seeing other women, which he wasn’t. Finally he felt he couldn’t take any more and ended the relationship.’
‘I’m not surprised, because an unreasonably jealous partner is hell,’ I said with complete empathy. ‘But if he was innocent of any affair, then I don’t see where the scandal comes in and—’
‘Why it should affect him so much that he threw in his career and came up here to hide away?’ she finished for me. ‘It’s because it was all so public. His ex-girlfriend, Lois, sold a story to one of the tabloids – all made up, of course, there wasn’t a word of truth in it. They called him a Love Rat.’
She mouthed the words as if they tasted rancid.
‘It appeared that she’d not only been checking his phone but she’d actually hired a private eye to spy on him. A paper published a picture of Ned and Penny Sinclair, his director, embracing outside the hotel they were all staying at, under the caption “Love Rat TV Gardening Guru and his Director”.’
‘People do hug each other all the time, and I don’t suppose if they’d been having an affair, they’d had done it in front of a hotel, presumably with the rest of the team around?’
‘No, and the real explanation was that Penny and her husband couldn’t have children, so had been trying to adopt for ages, and she’d just had a call telling her they’d been approved to adopt a baby boy. They’d almost given up hope, it’s such a long process. Ned knew about it and was just delighted for them.’
‘How horrible that that wonderful moment should have been misinterpreted like that,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they check the story first, before they printed it?’
‘It appears not – and of course, Penny and her husband immediately refuted it, because they were afraid it might affect the adoption … though luckily not, in the end. The paper had to print an apology, of course, but by then another piece about Ned had appeared in a gossip column. The source was by that student he mentioned.’
‘Who, Sammie Nelson?’
‘That’s the one, and it was a ridiculous story, short on