Ed had approved of the name as well as the concept.
As she sat in the sunlight that streamed through her front window on Saturday afternoon, Rowan burned as she thought of how she had told him all about it, trusting him to keep it a secret from everyone else at work, when all the time he had been keeping his own secrets, and now she didn’t know if that trust could be reciprocated.
She knew nothing about him, she realised. He had sisters but she didn’t know their names; he was from London – hadn’t he said somewhere like Fulham? – but she wasn’t entirely sure where; he had a child, but she had only just been made aware of this having known him for weeks. A child that was five years old, a child that he hadn’t described so Rowan couldn’t form a picture of her in her mind – and if there was anything that was guaranteed to rankle with her, it was that. She was visual. And at all times she needed to be able to visualise, and that was the problem with Ed Mycroft. She couldn’t visualise anything about him other than what she could see before her.
He, on the other hand, she realised, knew everything about her. About Corkscrew. About the Quantocks – about Judith’s Acre. He knew where she lived, who her friends were. He knew her route to Paddington Station every fourth Friday evening, and the train she took back from Somerset on a Sunday evening. He knew that she liked to visit Camden Market on a Saturday afternoon, that she secretly loved folk music and that her grandmother took her to the Glastonbury festival every year and had done since she was a child.
He didn’t seem to know, however, how much more she wanted to know about him. And how much she was bothered – yes, bothered – by the idea of his dead wife.
Rowan rested her chin in her hands as she tackled the subject in her head.
His wife. Rowan didn’t know her name, didn’t even know how long Ed had been married, or how she had died. Did she even exist? Was it just something that he had said when he was drunk on New Year’s Eve out of the blue? Some tasteless and unfunny joke? Did he have some sort of dark side to him that she wasn’t aware of? And if this wife existed, was she the mother of the child? Of Bee? Had Ed shared a life with someone to the extent that he had started a family with them? Had he wanted more children? Did he want more? Could she trust him at all or what else was he keeping from her? And why did it matter so much?
Rowan suddenly flung the pencil she was holding down on her sketchpad.
She needed to get a grip, she realised. She was verging on becoming obsessed with Ed and experience had served to teach her that that was not a good idea.
There was only one thing for her do, she decided. To just forget about Ed Mycroft. For the time being anyway. Because he confused her. He made her head ache at the same time as making her heart sing. But without the facts, and the honesty, she had to admit to herself that she was really better off without him. For now, anyway.
She had a week to fulfil her promise to herself.
* * *
As Rowan entered the Grafix building on the following Monday morning, she remembered that he was on a week’s leave. For a second her heart sank but as she climbed the stairs she resolved that she would block him from her mind and see what the week brought.
It was difficult at first but, on Monday, the clock had struck ten past one before she realised that it was lunchtime. For a millisecond, her hand hovered over Ed’s phone extension to see if he was coming for lunch, before remembering that he wasn’t there. She took a deep breath to banish the instinctive feeling of disappointment.
Maybe this was how it should be from now on, she thought. Did she really need a lunch buddy after all? Didn’t it just encourage the other staff to talk about her behind her back? And she didn’t need that. Being whispered about, having no control over what others were saying – behaving in a way that made her visible to them in the first place – that was all stuff that Rowan most definitely didn’t need. It was the exact opposite of what she needed, in fact. The exact reason that she had left Somerset behind her.
Which was why, when Friday evening eventually rolled around, she dragged her heels as she made her way into the ladies’ to freshen up on the dot of five. She never went to the pub after work but today, however, all staff were to attend – company policy. There was an announcement to be made, they had been told in an internal email. Grafix had ‘Great News’, it said, the fact emphasised by capital letters and at least ten exclamation marks. And there was to be a celebration attended by all staff (capital letters, 18 point size, bold red font) at 6 p.m. on the dot in the Choirmaster’s Inn.
Rowan sighed as she looked at her reflection in the mirror of the ladies’ and rooted in the bottom of her bag for her seldom-used make-up. She frowned as she started to apply a light foundation.
It didn’t take long to apply her make-up. Her lip gloss in place, she reached around the back of her head and released the bobbin which held her hair tightly off her face and swore suddenly as it snapped in her hand. “Well, shit on that anyway,” she whispered to herself, the ferocity of the curse somehow negated by the accent that Ed found so amusing.
Ed, she thought, as she rummaged in her bag for some replacement device with which to hold up the uncontrollable curls that had spiralled around her face. There was a name she hadn’t thought of in, well, it must have been twenty-four hours at least. Rowan withdrew a hairbrush and began to struggle with her hair. That just went to prove that she’d made the right decision to block him out, she reassured herself. Clearly, Ed Mycroft didn’t mean that much to her after all if she had forgotten about him after four days.
But when, less than half an hour later, she spotted him across the pub chatting to Rob, she had to go back on her word. Seeing him out of the context of the office, in a short-sleeved polo shirt and jeans, was completely unexpected. Like a thunderbolt, in fact. Like he was the only other person in the room.
And for Ed, it was weeks later that he finally admitted that he had felt the same when he saw her hesitant entrance through the double doors of the pub. Her hair like a blonde halo around her head, glowing with different colours as the sunlight shone through stained glass, her figure slim in the teal-coloured shift dress that she had worn for casual Friday. And his heart had leaped through the roof at the sight of her. And that for the rest of the night, as they celebrated Grafix’s merger with another design company called Iconic, he realised that he wanted nothing more than to be with her.
And so, by the end of the evening, while Rob lined up shots on the bar and their colleagues danced awkwardly amidst the tables, Ed and Rowan were tucked away into a corner together, heads close to hear above the hubbub of the pub jukebox on which someone repeatedly played ‘Tubthumping’ – talking.
Really talking. About where Ed lived, about his family, about Grimlet, about Bee who had bravely watched her dad retreat from her new classroom on the previous Monday morning, the red waves of her hair skimming her shoulders, her chin wobbling slightly. Everything that Rowan had wanted to know, he told her without prompt or hesitation.
Almost everything. Throughout the course of the night – which didn’t finish until well after closing time – he still didn’t mention his dead wife, except when he described Bee on her first day at school, his eyes distant and misty at the thoughts, and he mentioned how much like her mother she looked.
Like Jenny.
At last, Rowan thought. A name.
There was more that she wanted to know, of course. But that was a start. The name. Jenny. Bee’s mother.
And she felt sure that it was only a matter of time before she knew the rest, but that it wouldn’t come until Ed was ready. And Rowan knew that she would be there when he was. That her gut instinct was correct. That Ed Mycroft was worth the wait.
Chapter 31
December 29th, 2000
Rowan
The old lady’s fingers looked gnarled from years of hard work as she accepted the cup of steaming tea. Adjusting it so that the handle was in her left hand and the base rested in the palm of her right, she nodded in
the direction of a Viburnum bush. “That’ll be your grandad, I’ll swear,” she observed in a voice barely above a whisper to her granddaughter, who took a sip from her own cup and hunched her shoulders against the biting cold of the winter’s morning.
Together, the two women stood and stared at the robin which chirruped from deep in its little throat at regular intervals, its voice clear against the frosty air as it sang out over the farmyard. With a smile, Rowan stole a glance at her grandmother who watched the little bird intently, her eyes momentarily soft and filled with love and delight.
“All right, you silly bugger,” she addressed the bird before turning to her granddaughter. “He’ll be wanting us to trim the hedgerow again. Like bloody always. Impatient, he is. Impatient, you are!” She finished the sentence in a louder tone directed at the robin again, but without frightening him away. “Always so impatient,” she repeated, and sipped noisily from her cup, removing it from where it nestled in her right hand to rummage in her pocket for a single cigarillo that had been plucked from the box she kept on the kitchen dresser to accompany her morning tea. She lit it using a tarnished brass Zippo lighter from the same pocket, keeping it in her bare hand for warmth once the cigar was lit.
The familiar scent of the rich, sweet smoke entered Rowan’s nostrils immediately. She didn’t smoke – had never so much as tried it, despite the constant urging from her grandma’s friends to at least try a drag from one of their joints. The smell of the thin cigar, however, mixed with the pure air of the new day, edged with the tang of frost – to Rowan, at that moment, was heaven. It was home.
Yet for once, for the first time since she had come to live there, Rowan had spent Christmas longing to be somewhere else. With someone else. Over the past few days she had come to the realisation that yes, it was serious with Ed. Very serious indeed.
“Maybe I should go and get him some Christmas cake?” mused Judith aloud, taking a deep drag of the cigarillo and staring still at the robin. “You’d like that, Emerson, wouldn’t you?” she called to the bird, which cocked its head in her direction as if listening.
“Judith,” Rowan chastised softly. What would anyone think if they heard her, for heaven’s sake? Talking to birds.
She was rewarded with a sideways glance, a raised eyebrow and the long, gentle exhalation of fragrant smoke.
“Who on earth is round here to hear me talk to a bird?” Judith asked drily, indicating the valley that spread out below them, picture-perfect white with rare hoarfrost and completely still. “Besides which, even if there were someone round to hear, they wouldn’t expect any different from me,” she sniffed, turning her attention back to the robin. “That right, my love?” she called out, smiling as she did so.
Rowan had never known Emerson Garvey, her grandfather. He had died from a brain haemorrhage the year before she was born, his body found on the ground outside the dairy by one of the farmhands. Dying as he did, he left his wife bereft. “I was a widow and a grandmother before I was even forty,” Rowan remembered her saying once. It had stuck with her, had seemed so ancient when she was a child. It was only now, as she entered her thirties, that Rowan realised just how young she had been. And how long her grandmother had been alone.
Alone, Judith had inherited the farm, which Emerson had called Judith’s Acre in her honour, and had worked at tirelessly to make into a substantial dairy holding. Alone, she had rented out some of it and sold the rest, in order to leave herself with a manageable smallholding. Alone, she had dealt with the sudden death of her only daughter and son-in-law some eight years or so after losing her husband. And alone, she had opened her arms and taken her grandchild in to live with her in the untidy farmhouse, along with the chickens and the goats and the remaining ponies in the stables, the vegetables in the adjoining garden and the tomatoes and marrows in the greenhouse. Looking at the old lady in the morning sunshine, it suddenly dawned on Rowan that she had been alone for longer than she had been married. And she had done it, had managed. And Rowan had never wanted for anything from her in their entire time together.
“What are we doing out here, child?” grumbled Judith suddenly, turning abruptly to look back at the farmhouse which was badly in need of a coat of whitewash. She placed the half-smoked cigar between her lips at the corner of her mouth and slung the last of her tea into the grass of the ditch that bordered the farmyard where they had stood, overlooking the valley. “I know I like a bit of fresh air in the morning but that’s enough for now. Can’t feel my bloody toes.”
Rowan glanced down at her grandmother’s feet and smiled, rolling her eyes affectionately. “Judith, you’ve got your slippers on,” she scolded. “And there’s not much point in wearing a rug over a waxed jacket on top when you’ve got silk pyjama bottoms on below.”
Judith shrugged. “Perhaps,” she sniffed, throwing a grin over her shoulder at her granddaughter who still gazed out at the fields below, the odd curl of smoke rising here and there from a distant farmhouse.
Rowan could never tire of looking at this view. Whether it was rich with lush summer greens, or white as it was now, it restored and revived her every time she took it in.
She turned and fell into a slow step beside her grandmother as they crossed the short distance to the back door of the house which had been left ajar.
“Couldn’t let a morning like this pass all the same though, could we?” Judith asked softly.
It had been their habit since Rowan was a child, since she had first arrived here and Judith would take her outside for her morning milk to try to take her mind off the fact that she was starting another day without her parents. Eventually it had become a happy event, undertaken religiously, even if it were a brief scamper across the yard in torrential rain just to peer over the hedge down to the murky scene below and then run back to the house again, screaming with laughter, and dodging puddles.
“It’s a lovely one all right,” Rowan agreed, linking Judith’s arm and feeling the warmth of the thin body underneath the tartan blanket and the muddy jacket that had been slung on over her night attire. Judith had always been slender, as was Rowan. Rowan’s unruly hair was the product of her father’s branch of the family, however. The Ilkley Mop, Judith called it. Her own hair had been straw blonde and straight to her shoulders until the day that she had chopped it into a short crop following Emerson’s death. And that was how it had stayed over the years, turning first to salt and pepper and then eventually to the platinum white that it had stayed.
The kitchen felt cosy as the two women stepped back through the door and shut it behind them. Rowan busied herself removing her grandmother’s wellingtons that she had slid her feet into when carrying out the tea and Judith crossed to the porcelain enamelled sink, lowering her empty cup in, and running the tap over the still-burning end of the cigarillo, hearing it give a satisfying hiss as it was extinguished. She turned then and crossed to the door of the wood-fired stove which she had lit earlier, casting the butt inside and closing it again. All these movements, thought Rowan. All so familiar, yet nowadays so alien. Her heart was suddenly gripped with sadness and a hint of panic at the clear realisation that she really didn’t live here any more. She took a deep breath, urging herself to get it together.
“You haven’t said as much,” said Judith suddenly, crossing to the fridge and peering in at the groaning shelves of Christmas leftovers, “but I’m guessing that you’re not going to stick around for New Year again, am I right?”
Rowan’s heart sank as she thrust her feet into the pair of slippers that she had discarded at the back door. Of course Judith was right, but she had put off telling her all over Christmas so that it wouldn’t hang over them like a shadow, like it had done the previous year. There would be no big millennium celebration to avoid this time, of course, so there was no real reason for her not to welcome in 2001 at the Acre. But she couldn’t, she knew. There was a special anniversary to be celebrated elsewhere. In a country house hotel in Berkshire, in fact, where she and Ed were to spen
d their first proper weekend away together. Rowan suddenly looked at her plans – the spa, the five-star restaurant, the four-poster bed – through Judith’s eyes and at once felt disloyal and profligate. She wouldn’t tell her that bit, she decided. Not if she wanted to be told firmly that it was far from spas that she was brought up, a fact she was only too well aware of.
Rowan cleared her throat. “I’m going to go back to London tomorrow,” she replied, her voice small and timid.
She fully expected to hear the fridge door slam and its contents jiggle loudly as Judith’s legendary temper blew into force. Instead, there was calm and the normal kitchen sounds as Judith removed the milk and shut the door gently behind her.
“Good,” she replied.
Rowan looked at her in amazement.
“Not good that you’re going, of course,” continued Judith, filling the kettle, “but good that I’ll have your room. The gang are coming up here to ring in the New Year, you see, and I’ll imagine that there will be a few that won’t make it back so I’ll need all beds free for their old bones.”
Rowan grinned in surprise. “Their old, stoned bones, you mean,” she smirked.
Judith’s friends were themselves the stuff of legend. Two couples – Ron and Jean, and Dave and Peggy – a widow called Susan and a widower by the name of Gunther – all folk who had settled in the area over the course of the 1960s and 70s and befriended each other over a love of red wine and knowledge of where to obtain the best marijuana. Rowan was suddenly very grateful indeed that she wouldn’t be around on New Year’s Eve. The Glastobuddies, as she liked to call them, were notorious for getting out of hand at parties – even though all of them were a long way past the first flush of youth.
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