The Garden of Forgotten Wishes - Trisha Ashley Page 0,74
where we’d gone, but he’ll go round the proper way when he wants his dinner.’
‘Did Marnie tell you our rescue cat has fallen in love with her?’ Elf asked Ned. ‘Jacob had to put a cat flap in the landing door, so he could come and go into her flat. We just see him for meals, really.’
‘It’s nice having him for company in the evenings,’ I said, ‘but I feel he’s using you like a hotel, popping back for food and comfort breaks!’
‘We don’t mind, so long as he’s settled and happy. And Myfy says he does spend a lot of time in the studio when she’s painting, watching her. Jacob put a bigger cat flap in the back door, too, so Caspar can now come and go anywhere in Lavender Cottage as he pleases – except in the café, of course.’
‘Caspar seems well on the way to having you all trained,’ Ned said, smiling. ‘Now, what’s this new flavour of ice-cream?’
‘Oh, yes – I kept two little pots aside for you to try when I was putting the rest away in the big freezer,’ Elf said, fetching them and getting out teaspoons. ‘See if you can tell me what it is?’
‘Lime?’ suggested Ned and I said, ‘Lemon?’ at exactly the same moment.
‘Both right. I thought I’d try lemon and lime together. I think I’ve got the sugar content right … not too sweet, so it will be very refreshing in summer.’
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, finishing the rest of mine.
‘I must remember to keep aside small boxes of ice-cream for you to put in your freezer, Marnie,’ she said kindly. ‘And I’ll bring you some more over soon, Ned.’
I thanked her: a free supply of delicious home-made ice-cream is not a usual perk of a gardening job.
Elf said she hoped I wasn’t finding the work of looking after two gardens too hard and I assured her it wasn’t.
‘In fact, I wish the days were longer!’
‘But aren’t you exhausted? I know for a fact that you’ve been up at daybreak for the last two days, working in our garden!’
‘Oh, no, I’m used to hard outdoor work and anyway, in my book, gardening counts as fun.’
‘Mine too,’ Ned said, and then described how we’d cleaned up the folly and pruned back mega amounts of overgrown rose brambles together.
‘Even Gertie’s now enthused to the point where she’s voluntarily offering barrowloads of her best, well-rotted manure to mulch the rose beds.’
‘I want to get the rose garden to a state where I can leave it and go and help Ned with the water feature and wetland area,’ I said.
‘Yes, I could do with another pair of hands to help finish the hard landscaping in that corner. Then we can plant it up. I’ve ordered a lot of plants from a specialist nursery and Gert’s been growing others from seed.’
‘Yes, she said she’d been planting up a few of them,’ I agreed.
‘I ought to get back to the office and tweak the website a bit more,’ Ned said, though leaning back in his chair with a refill of lemonade, as if he was there for the long haul. ‘And I realized earlier that I should already have distributed the leaflets about the garden all over the district … just one more thing to fit in before we open!’
‘When did you say the information boards were coming?’ I asked.
‘First thing Monday, so I’ll have to fix those up.’
‘It’s going to be hectic till opening day, I can see,’ Elf said, ‘but once Easter weekend and all the fuss of the opening is over, things will quieten down until summer and give you a chance to get into the swing of being open.’
‘I hope we’re in the swing of a lot of visitors at four pounds a pop,’ he said. ‘Otherwise, we’re sunk.’
‘You’ll probably have loads of tourists coming over from Starstone Edge when the holiday season gets underway,’ Elf said. ‘Did I say Clara rang to confirm what time you want her on Friday for the opening ceremony? I told her to get here for eleven and I’d give her coffee first: was that OK?’
‘Yes, fine,’ he said, then explained to me: ‘The garden will be officially opened by one of our local celebs, Clara Mayhem Doome. She’s an epigrapher, but you probably know her for her crime novels.’
‘Gosh, yes, I’ve got most of them! Treena used to bring them out for me when I was in France and I bought the latest one on Tuesday.’