It wound its way up a blind-ended valley that looked more like a ravine towards the top, where the road petered out and was replaced by a zigzag of dotted lines. There appeared to be only the one decent road in and out, which made it quite off the beaten track.
Only visitors looking for scenery or, possibly, fairies would have any reason to go there and neither of those had ever been interests of Mike’s. To him, a village was something you ran through and I assumed he was still running – did runners go on forever? He must be the wrong side of forty-six now.
I shivered. I might be free and in what passed for my right mind, but I still never wanted to hear his voice, or come suddenly face to face with him again … though now I was also so filled with anger at what he’d tried to make me become that I only hoped those butter paddles were handy if he ever turned up.
I grinned to myself, picturing that, but I didn’t suppose I’d have the paddles to hand even if he did appear, because people would think I was a little strange if I took to carrying them about with me.
I looked at the clock and decided it was time to make a move.
As a concession to this first meeting with my new employers, I’d applied eyeliner and a smudge of ruby lip gloss, brushed my hair so that it curled neatly behind my ears, and I was wearing what now served as my special occasion outfit: a dungaree-style denim dress (made by Aunt Em, of course, so with a decently wide top), worn over a long-sleeved black T-shirt and with black and white striped leggings and clumpy Doc Marten boots patterned with bright butterflies. I slung my carpet bag and rucksack into the car, along with the cherry-red wool jacket, said goodbye to the cats and set off.
I found the right road out of town – it was past a place making huge terracotta garden pots that Treena had told me about – and soon the houses petered out, ending in a glimpse through trees of a large Victorian house that seemed to be some kind of private school. Then the road began a slow climb upwards through farmland.
It was a changeable early April morning and a brisk, chill breeze tried to insinuate its chilly fingers through the edges of the car’s fabric roof. Small white bunny-tail clouds were rolling across a baby-blue sky and all looked clean, well scoured and fresh – entirely suitable for the new start I was about to make. I felt nervous, of course, but also excited, both at the prospect of helping restore the old lavender, rose and apothecary gardens, and of having a place, however small, to call my own. The last few years I’d felt akin to something between tumbleweed and one of those plants with aerial roots that seemingly suck nutrients from thin air.
Then, too, I hoped I might in some way find and reconnect with my mother here in the valley she’d loved … though not, perhaps, with the family who’d inspired her with such fear she had warned me never to go there.
I assumed I still had Vane relatives at the farm, maybe even grandparents, though perhaps not, since they’d be in their nineties by now. But Mum had had an elder brother who might have family of his own, and I’d probably be able to take a sneaky look at them without their ever suspecting who I was.
The car wheezed slightly as the road grew steeper and the cows in the fields on either side gave way to sheep.
I began to keep a sharp lookout for the turn, and there, round the next bend, it suddenly appeared.
A tall signpost was planted in the long grass of the right-hand verge, with one arm pointing in the direction of a gap in the hedge.
Three other signs of differing sizes, shapes and colours had been nailed to the post, so that it looked like a strange totem pole. I paused next to it as I turned in, to read them. They advertised, from top to bottom:
The Devil’s Cauldron Inn
Risings B&B
Fairy Falls
Nearby, in a niche clipped into the hawthorn hedge, was one of those brown Ancient Monument signs, looking as if it was trying to disassociate itself from the rest.
If it hadn’t been for the signs I’d have thought the road was a farm track, but it immediately opened up into a passing place, which evidently also did service for a bus stop, improbable as that idea seemed. The thought of coming windscreen-to-windscreen with a bus round one of the bends in the narrow road was scary and I wasn’t the kind of driver able to whizz backwards nonchalantly for miles.
Thankfully, I met no other vehicles at all, and the tall hedges soon gave way to drystone walls, lichen-patched in sulphur yellow and a slightly snotty green, over which I could see fields descending to a lazy, meandering river a long way below.
The hillside rose steeply up to my left, the hardy-looking sheep wrenching tufts of grass with determined jerks of their heads.
My destination remained hidden until I rounded another bend and saw the centre of the village laid out below me, like a haphazard Toytown. I spotted a blue Parking sign as I swooped down the steep hill and I turned in, coming to a halt on a stretch of rough gravel.
I needed a breathing space before carrying on … not to mention an attempt to unclench my hands from the steering wheel.
This seemed to be the parking area for the Ancient Monument, a fenced enclosure in which all I could see was mysteriously hummocked grass, with a closed gate and a shuttered entrance hut.
A small stone building nearby proclaimed itself a public convenience, though inconveniently locked up with a huge chain and padlock, and the couple of other cars parked there were empty and haphazardly positioned, as if washed in by the tide and stranded.
On the other side of the road, some way up the hill, was a large house that I thought must be Risings, the place Treena was often called out to, with the overbearing owner and the spoilt Pekes.
A plump, bearded elderly man in a bright red bobble hat now emerged from the small lodge at the large house’s gates and hobbled over the road and past my car, giving me a hard stare as he went. He slowly unpadlocked the toilet block, then did the same for the gate to the ancient monument, before fetching from the hut an armful of those wooden bat things with laminated information sheets stuck to them, which he deposited in a kind of wooden bucket on a post.
That seemed to be the extent of his caretaking duties, for, with another suspicious glare in my direction, he returned to his lodge and shut the door.
I got out, pulling on my red wool jacket against the icy breeze, and looked down at Jericho’s End. There was a straggle of small cottages edging the lane past the lodge, ending in a large building that was unmistakably the pub. The road went past it and vanished upwards round a sharp turn, but opposite the pub was a small, humpbacked bridge that led to my destination. I could see the sparkle of water as it cascaded underneath into a pool far below and on the other side of the river, a group of buildings clustered around a small green, including an improbable black and white Tudor building like an overgrown cottage from a fairy tale, which I guessed to be Old Grace Hall. The long, low stone shape set with a typically large café window near the bridge must be my destination.
It was time to go.
‘You can drive over the bridge and park by the Green. Come into the café, which opens at ten, and you will find me there,’ Ms E. Price-Jones had written.
The bridge was very narrow, but had embrasures on either side into which pedestrians could press themselves to escape any traffic. I came to a halt opposite the café, between a lime-green Beetle and a white van so bashed and battered that it looked as if it was made from a crumpled piece of dirty paper.
As I reached for the door handle, a movement out of the corner of my eye stopped me dead. A thin, wiry man was just turning into a gateway beyond the Tudor house and glanced back with an oddly furtive air as he did so.
My heart thudded to a stop for a moment and then restarted: it wasn’t Mike, unless he’d taken to dyeing his hair bright red. I would have to stop seeing bogeymen around every corner.
Getting out and pulling my jacket around me, I headed across the road, noticing for the first time a large entrance turnstile between the café and the bridge, with wrought ironwork over it, proclaimin
g it to be the entrance to the River Walk and Fairy Falls.
The café window was set into one end of Lavender Cottage and bore a sign over it:
Ice Cream and Angels
Café-Gallery
The scalloped edge of a striped awning showed beneath it, where it had been folded back against the wall in a protective housing. In summer, it must pleasantly shade the small paved area in front of it, where a few white-painted wrought-iron tables and chairs were now stacked together. A grassy bank dividing it from the road was decorated with an ancient ice-cream vendor’s tricycle, the box in front planted up with variegated ivy and spring bulbs.
It had been brightly painted and the gilded lettering on it advertised Verdi’s Ice Cream.
It was all very picturesque, but a sharp cold spatter of rain hit me and I ran for the café door.
There was a heavenly chiming as I went in, appropriate for somewhere called Ice Cream and Angels, and I found myself in a surprisingly large, white-painted room, with a tiled floor like a chessboard and light wooden chairs and tables. Hung along one wall were large oil paintings, their subjects hard to make out at a glance.
The only customers were a middle-aged couple dressed for the ascent of Everest, in parkas, knitted hats, rucksacks, boots and sticks, who got up and left as I went in, bidding me good morning as they passed.
‘Dear me! Perhaps I should have offered to find them a Sherpa for the ascent of the Fairy Falls,’ said a small, elderly lady sardonically as she appeared from behind the counter at the far end of the café. She had turquoise hair cut in a sleek pageboy bob, lively dark eyes and a puckish grin.
‘They’ll probably go out by the turnstile at the top of the falls and hike up to Thorstane,’ suggested a young man who had been half hidden by a huge and ancient stainless-steel coffee machine.
The woman lost interest in the hikers and advanced on me, holding out a thin hand encrusted with huge semi-precious stone rings. ‘I am sure you must be Marianne Ellwood. Welcome, my dear!’
I shook the hand gingerly and it rattled metallically.
‘I’m Elfrida Price-Jones, but do call me Elf – everyone does.’
‘Thank you, and you must call me Marnie,’ I told her.
‘Short and sweet,’ she approved. ‘And this is Charlie Posset, whose family have the pub on the other side of the bridge, the Devil’s Cauldron – they’re distantly related through my mother’s side. Such a lot of it in small villages like this,’ she added, and Charlie grinned.
He was a very engaging-looking youth, with a wide mouth, a mop of indeterminate brown hair and freckles.
‘I’m finishing off my gap year by helping in the café,’ he said. ‘The lure of all the ice-cream I could eat was too much for me.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ I said.
‘Marnie’s the new gardener,’ Elf explained to Charlie. ‘I told you she was coming, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, but not that she was arriving today.’
‘Didn’t I?’ she said vaguely. ‘Never mind, she’s here now. Come along, Marnie, let’s sit in the window with a nice hot cup of coffee and get acquainted. Frothy or espresso?’
‘Er … frothy, please,’ I said, but turned down the offer of ice-cream.
Charlie produced two cups of frothy coffee from the hissing stainless-steel monster, and it must have had plenty of caffeine content, because I felt myself perking up after only a couple of sips.
‘Hear that noise?’ asked Elf.
I nodded; I had become aware of a faint grinding and rumbling somewhere in the background.
‘That’s one of the original electric ice-cream-making machines in the back room – you need to keep using them constantly or they seize up,’ she said, unpeeling a mini biscotti from its wrapper and dunking it into her coffee. ‘I even sometimes use the original patented Victorian devices, where everything is done by hand. You can see some of the photographs and original adverts for Agnes Marshall’s Ice Cave, and Ice-cream and Water-Ice making tubs on the wall.’
I’d noticed the wall opposite the paintings was decorated with posters and photos, as well as being set with a stable door that had the top ajar, which presumably led into the adjoining Lavender Cottage.
‘The Verdis opened a teashop here selling ices in late Victorian times, you know. They were of Italian descent and my mum was the last of the family.’
‘Oh, really?’ I said, interested. It seemed rather exotic for a little village up a dead-end valley and I’d had no idea ice-cream making was flourishing that early.
‘Jericho’s End was in its heyday of popularity with the Victorian daytrippers then, and they say it was the first ice-cream parlour in the north of England, but I don’t know …’
She broke off as the small, battered white van that had been parked in front of my car drove slowly past, emitting a bronchial rattling noise and the pale face of the red-haired man I’d glimpsed earlier scowled at us through the open window.
‘Dear me – I wonder what he wanted? I suppose he’s been up to the Hall, trying to make trouble again.’
Elf, seeing my blank expression, explained, ‘He’s one of the Vanes, a local farming family, but he set himself up as a self-employed gardener/handyman, though he’s a poor hand at both. And almost as dour and unpleasant as his father,’ she added. ‘He helped in the Grace Garden one day a week for my late brother-in-law, but when my nephew inherited, last year, he let him go. Lazy and couldn’t tell a lupin from a foxglove.’
‘Did you say his name was Vane?’ I asked, most of what she’d said washing over me, as I wondered if this was some relative of mine. If so, I can’t say I’d really liked the look of him.
‘Yes, Wayne Vane.’ She giggled at my expression. ‘His parents christened him Esau, but from a child he insisted on being called Wayne. Personally, I think he’d have been better sticking to the original.’
‘You’re right,’ I agreed. ‘Esau Vane has an unusual ring to it, but Wayne Vane just sounds a bit silly.’
‘Anyway, that’s neither here nor there,’ Elf said a little more briskly, turning back from the window, where the last trace of blue exhaust hung in the air.
‘What were we saying before? Oh yes – ice-cream. I’m making lemon today. Of course, our bestseller is my lavender and rose, but I like to ring the changes. Your wages may not be munificent, Marnie, but you may eat all the ice-cream you want, like Charlie. There is a little fridge-freezer in your flat, so you can keep some to hand, too.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘that sounds lovely.’
‘We call the place a café-gallery now, but basically we’re still an ice-cream parlour and, apart from tea and coffee, only serve ice-cream, sorbets and my home-made lemonade, ginger or nettle beers.’
‘I didn’t know you could make nettle beer,’ I said, surprised.
‘Oh, yes, it’s quite delicious, but you must pick the young tender tips of the nettles. When the time is right and the fancy takes me, I brew up a fresh batch, or a jug of lemonade in what I call my stillroom in the cottage, which is through that door over there.’
So I’d been right about the stable door leading into the cottage itself.
‘Lavender Cottage was originally a row of three and the Verdi family crammed themselves into the upstairs and back of this one. Father bought the other two when he came here to live, between the wars, and knocked them into one. Then when he married Gina Verdi, he had the doors put through into this one, too, and it’s very convenient now that I have taken on the running of the café, because I can keep an eye on things from my own kitchen if I want to.’
My head was starting to spin a bit with all this information, and we hadn’t even got on to the subject of my work yet! But she was twittering blithely on.
‘My sister Myfanwy is a painter, like my father was, so we use the café to hang some of her works, though of course she sells mainly through London galleries – she’s quite well known.’
The name Myfanwy Price-Jones did sound familiar, no
w I came to think about it, though I didn’t know a lot about art. I looked at the dark serried ranks of oil paintings on the whitewashed wall. Now my eyes had adjusted to the interior light, I could see that they were semi-abstract works that seemed to depict cascades of water, fern and rocks and the flickering suggestion of something winged and slightly humanoid …
‘Myfanwy – we always call her Myfy’ – she pronounced it My-fee, not Miffy, like the rabbit – ‘looks after the garden, too, but she doesn’t have a lot of time to spare. We had a much older sister, Morwenna, who married the last owner of Old Grace Hall. The two gardens are linked because our families are.’
I expect I was staring at her blankly by now, because she put down her empty cup and patted one of my hands with a clashing of metal and clinking of pigeon-egg-sized stones.
‘Never mind trying to take it all in now, Marnie, because it’s going to be terribly confusing for a day or two, until you’ve met everyone and got your bearings. I expect you’d like to see your little flat and then bring your things in and settle in before lunch, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes … but we haven’t yet discussed the work and—’
‘Oh, time enough for that over lunch,’ she said. ‘Come on!’
She left Charlie in charge and took me through to a cavernous back room, where the ice-cream chugged away to itself, and on through a kind of scullery to a small hallway.
‘There’s the back door, which you can use to come and go, though there are keys to the café door on the ring I’ll give you, too.’
She opened another door I’d thought was a cupboard and revealed a boxed-in flight of steep steps.
‘These are the original stairs, and private to your flat because we have our own in Lavender Cottage. Up we go!’ she added gaily, and led the way up to a small landing. ‘There’s the connecting door to the cottage – so we’ve put a bolt on your side, so you can make the flat quite separate – and this,’ she announced, throwing open the door on the other side, ‘is your new home!’
The Garden of Forgotten Wishes: The heartwarming and uplifting new rom-com from the Sunday Times bestseller Page 4
