The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,33

there, and I knocked firmly on the door. And of course, the moment I’d done it, the short, carefully prepared and entirely reasonable explanation of how I’d come to leave my Heritage Homes Trust job flew straight out of my head like a flock of startled starlings and scattered to the four winds.

That was a pity, because it had to be admitted that my naturally slightly acerbic tongue had sharpened somewhat over the last few years, so that I wasn’t always able to stop the slings and arrows of outrageous comment from shooting forth at entirely the wrong moment.

Without the script to stick to, I’d have to try to curb that a bit, so I came across as sensible, quiet, totally non-neurotic and unthreatening.

Added to that, I needed to keep a lid on the bubble of resentment that I felt that he’d accepted the gossip he’d heard about me at face value, while he, as much as anyone, should know not to believe everything he heard.

I mean, it might have been a long time ago since we’d been students at Honeywood Horticultural College, but I hadn’t forgotten what he was like: that we’d laughed together, exchanged heated opinions on gardening matters in the pub over pints of Gillyflower’s Best Bitter and both been in the same team at the end-of-term quiz, winning the coveted Honeywood Cup and a set of chocolate gardening tools. I’d got the trowel.

These things ought to have lingered in his memory, as they had in mine. He should have known me better.

I remembered now how amused he’d been when, after offering him the chance to front his own TV series, having spotted him in that documentary, the company had approached me to be one of the team, and I’d turned it down flat.

Ned had known how much I’d hated being in that documentary and, naturally, I’d got snappy when the director kept insisting I turn round and face the cameras … and even gave me lines to say.

But evidently the viewers had liked that and the clincher had been the bit where they’d asked Ned to call me over while I was trying to finish weeding the rockery and I told him to get lost in no uncertain terms, not realizing it was caught on camera. They kept it in, and it went down a storm.

Sammie Nelson had been furious when they offered the job to me and not her, after all her efforts with the presenter, though, of course, he wasn’t with the company making the new series, so she was out of luck there.

Yes, I thought bitterly as I stood on the doorstep, Ned should have known me better than to believe the rumours – and at that moment, the door swung open.

The old, gangling, good-natured student Ned I’d been remembering morphed into the current version: nearly six and a half feet of ruggedly attractive, broad-shouldered and well-muscled masculinity, wearing slightly muddy jeans, a blue checked lumberjack shirt and a deeply distrustful expression.

He didn’t look as if he’d spent the intervening years just drawing up garden designs and fronting a TV series, but from what I remembered of the programmes, he’d mucked right in with the heavy work alongside his team.

His light amber-brown eyes widened and grew wary when he saw me and he took an involuntary step backwards, which I have to say I found irritating. Presumably he’d forgotten his crucifix and bulbs of garlic.

However, I managed to smile and say in a voice of sweet reason, ‘Good morning, Ned. I thought we’d better have a chat. Do you want to come out, or shall I come in?’

But when he hesitated, my resolutions crumbled and I snapped impatiently, ‘You can leave the door open so you can scream for help, if you want to.’

‘I’d forgotten that sharp tongue of yours,’ Ned said, reluctantly drawing back to let me pass.

‘You seem to have forgotten pretty much everything about me, though I haven’t forgotten what you were like,’ I said, finding myself in a light space with a drawing desk and tables at one end, with tall baskets of rolled plans and a whole back wall of white-painted corkboard. It appeared to be covered in photographs of projects, plants and what looked like a blown-up photo of an old plan of the apothecary garden … And there was a wide circular path around the central beds, as I’d suspected, with narrower straight ones radiating out from it to the four corners. There seemed to be