The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,6
ever showed her face in the village again, after she told them she was expecting me, but that was such an outdated attitude now and so long ago … I didn’t suppose I’d get a welcome from whatever members of the Vane family still remained there, but there surely couldn’t be any danger. In any case, I wasn’t Marianne Vane any longer, but Marnie Ellwood, and there was no reason why they should ever know who I was.
I’d accepted the job offer and I was to start on Monday morning, or at least arrive then, which meant I could spend two nights with Treena and have a good catch-up first. Of course, I’d often seen her when she’d been over to visit the family, but the last – and only – time I’d stayed in her cottage in Great Mumming was when I was making my break for freedom.
I’d been a nervous wreck, illogically convinced that Mike would suddenly appear, even though Treena kept reminding me that, with a burst appendix and septic shock, he’d have been incapable of even rising from his hospital bed in Amsterdam, where he’d just arrived for a conference. He’d been complaining about abdominal pain and thought he was getting an ulcer, which just goes to show how good veterinary surgeons are at diagnosing their own ills.
I’d been afraid that he’d cancel the trip, because Treena and I had been counting on his absence for my Great Escape, so it was with huge relief that I saw his car emerge from the car park onto the road and vanish.
He’d been due back on the Monday, so the news of the appendix bursting, which came just as I was about to depart the flat for ever, was an unexpected bonus, though it had taken Treena, later, to make me see it that way without feeling guilty.
But I’d had my emotions twisted and pulled into such a complicated knot by then that it was to take five years of grubbing about in French soil to heal me.
I pushed away the memory of that fleeing and haunted version of myself and thought about the future instead. I was going to live in Jericho’s End, the magical place of all Mum’s childhood stories, including my favourite ones about the fairies, or little angels, as she insisted they were, that she’d seen by the waterfall at the top of the valley.
I smiled, thinking that it was probably the effect of flickering sunlight through leaves that had caused an imaginative child to conjure up something so fantastical, but I would search out the spot when I had time and think of her there.
The cold wind ruffled my short, dark curls – long gone was the Pre-Raphaelite mass of wavy black hair that Mike had so admired, for the moment the real Marnie had emerged from wherever she’d been hiding I’d ruthlessly purged myself of anything that reminded me of him.
One of the ways Mike had tried to exert control over me was by giving me clothes – short-skirted little suits, slinky dresses and ridiculous shoes with pointy toes and stiletto heels. Apart from not having pointy feet, there was no way I was tottering about on spikes, and I’d thrown them out of the window. For a moment it had seemed likely that he would throw me out after them. I did wear the loathsome clothes at home, though – Mike’s home, never mine.
I’d left every single thing he’d ever bought me behind and now my wardrobe was almost entirely utilitarian: dungarees and jeans, T-shirts and jumpers, anoraks and lace-up leather work boots.
I love dungarees, but ones made especially for me by Aunt Em, with a wide bib front and lots of pockets, because I’ve never found a pair of dungarees in a shop yet where the sides of the bib didn’t hit the middle of my boobs dead centre, which is neither comfortable, nor a good look if you actually have a bosom. It’s the same with most aprons, come to think of it, because they usually have ridiculous little bib tops too … and don’t get me started on women’s shirts with breast pockets. I mean, show me any woman who puts stuff in a breast pocket? Clothes designers should take a sanity check before they’re allowed near a sheet of pattern paper.
There had been no chance of my acquiring even the slightest touch of French chic during the last few years. I was a lost cause.