The large, light living room had a kitchen/diner area at one end. The floor was dark, varnished wood, scattered with brightly patterned rugs.
‘We used it as a guest suite originally, then had it done over like this when Mum needed a full-time nurse towards the end. It’s quite basic, I know, but I hope you’ll find it comfortable.’
‘Oh, I think it’s lovely,’ I said. There was a long, low squishy sofa in a faded linen cover, a sheepskin rug before a fake electric log-burner and a wicker basket chair with buttoned cushions. The bedroom just had room for a white-painted high metal bed, a small bamboo table next to it, a chest of drawers and a narrow wardrobe. A tiny shower room opened off it.
‘I love it,’ I said warmly.
‘I’m so glad, though I’m afraid we only have electric night-storage heaters in the cottage, which aren’t terribly efficient, but you have the little electric stove too, and we have open fires and log-burners in the cottage, so the whole building keeps very cosy.’
‘I’ve been living in a series of more or less ruined French châteaux for the last few years, so to me it’s positively luxurious,’ I assured her.
‘Sounds fascinating and you must tell us all about it,’ she said, with one of her bright-eyed looks. ‘Now, I’ll mind the café while Charlie helps you to bring your things in and then we’ll leave you to settle in. You can come down for lunch in the cottage at about twelve thirty – come through from the café – and I’ll introduce you to my sister then. She can tell you all about the gardens.’
‘I’m afraid my car is very full of boxes,’ I said. ‘My sister in Great Mumming, who I stayed with over the weekend, has been storing a lot of things for me while I was away and I thought I’d bring some of them with me to sort out, if you don’t mind.’
‘Not at all – that seems very sensible.’
She took over the counter and Charlie soon had the contents of my car transferred to the flat and everything stacked in a corner of the living room. Then he hurtled precipitously back down the stairs to take over again from Elf and I was alone.
Faintly, through the floorboards, came the silvery celestial chime of the café doorbell – not noisy or disturbing at all but just gently welcoming.
5
Men Are from Mars
When I’d closed the door to the stairs behind Charlie I explored my little domain, which was simple, but just right. I thought there must originally have been two or three small rooms, which had been knocked into one to create the large living and kitchen area, and I’d certainly have plenty of space to bring over the rest of the things I’d stored at Treena’s and sort them out at my leisure. Assuming I had any leisure, that is, for I had no idea so far what my hours and days might be.
But Mum’s velvet-covered chair would look perfect by the hearth, and the small white bookshelf with my childhood favourites in it would fit against the wall next to it.
Someone – probably Elf – had thoughtfully stocked the fridge with milk, eggs, butter and cheese, and there was a fresh loaf of bread, a jar of honey and canisters of teabags and coffee. I loved good coffee and had a cafetière and a couple of bags of my favourite ground coffee in my luggage, but I made a cup of instant while I began to unpack my bags: my working clothes first, which was most of my wardrobe, my coats on the rack on the landing, with my boots and wellingtons underneath.
Then the box of favourite kitchen utensils, including my cafetière and a tea strainer in the shape of a slightly squat Eiffel Tower.
That would do for now: I’d enjoy arranging everything else later, putting my collection of French cookery and gardening books on the empty shelves and making a little display of the bits of old Quimper pottery I’d picked up at markets.
Already the flat looked like home, not just a temporary resting place. In fact, the moment I’d set foot in Jericho’s End, it had felt strangely welcoming, soft wings of familiarity folding around me.
Mum had said it was a special place and she was right – I knew already that I could bloom again here and reconnect, quite literally, with my native soil.
Perhaps I’d also be able to reconnect with Mum on some level? There were special places she’d mentioned in her stories, especially up by the Fairy Falls, even if there did seem to be some difference of opinion about the nature of their winged and elusive inhabitants. But they had been angels to Mum … and, I suspected, going by the paintings downstairs and the name of the café-gallery, to the as-yet unknown Myfanwy Price-Jones, too.
The sisters must be older than Mum would have been by now, but they surely had known her – and she had known the ice-cream parlour. It was an odd thought, a ripple in the fabric of time.
When I went downstairs to the café, Charlie was patiently explaining to a young family that no, they didn’t sell Coca-Cola or Dr Pepper, or anything like that, just home-made soft drinks. They seemed to be finding this concept difficult to grasp. He winked at me as I went past, then turned a serious, helpful expression back on his customers and said, ‘No, we don’t sell anything in bottles or cans that you can take away, just in glasses, to drink here …’
I tapped at the stable door, which was now closed, turned the handle and went in, finding myself on the threshold of a warm, large kitchen of the old-fashioned country variety, with an Aga, a long pine table with bunches of herbs and lavender hanging from a rack over it, shelves of jars and bottles … and an extremely large and hairy marmalade cat, staring at me from narrowed green eyes.
‘Do come in, Marnie,’ invited Elf, who was assembling what looked like Welsh rarebit at one end of the table. I hoped it was, because I’m very partial to it and it’s one of those things that doesn’t work properly with French cheese.
The cat also seemed keen on the idea, going by the way it switched its bright green glare back to the table.
‘This is my sister Myfanwy.’ Elf gestured with the butter knife at a tall woman, who was standing by a glowing electric grill, watching cheese melt. ‘Myfy, Marnie Ellwood.’
Myfanwy Price-Jones was a slender woman, perhaps in her mid-sixties, but it was hard to tell, because her face was unlined, even though her hair was purest shining silver and hung straight and loose to her waist. She had a long, dreamy face, a little like Virginia Woolf, but the same bright dark eyes as her sister. She was dressed in a bohemian fashion I rather liked, in a knee-length pink kurta tunic embroidered in a rainbow of colours, worn over black harem trousers. Round her neck hung two pairs of glasses on pearl chains and a long string of chunky oval amber beads. Her feet were bare.
‘Pleased,’ she said, a smile lifting one corner of her mouth attractively and taking away the slightly melancholy cast of countenance. ‘Marnie? Such a nice name – from the Hitchcock film, perhaps?’
‘It’s Marianne really, but Marnie was as close as I could get to it when I was a little girl.’
‘Well, Marnie, God knows we’re glad to see you, because we certainly need some extra help with the gardening,’ she said frankly. ‘Especially our nephew, Edward, who’s hoping to restore enough of the Grace Garden to open it to the paying public at Easter, and he can’t do that single-handedly.’
‘Edward – we call him Ned – is sort of our nephew, because his great-uncle Theo married our elder sister, Morwenna,’ explained Elf helpfully. ‘But he and Wen have both gone now and Ned’s inherited Old Grace Hall and the very overgrown gardens.’
Myfy deftly removed two slices of toast from the grill onto a plate and replaced them with the ones passed to her by Elf.
‘Do sit down and start your lunch,’ urged Elf, sliding the plate in front of an empty chair. ‘Welsh rarebit is one of those things you have to cook in relays, like omelettes. Mine’s next and then these last two are for Myfy, so dig in while it’s hot.’
I sat down and did, feeling slightly self-conscious. The cat, who was sitting bolt upright on the next chair, switched its attention to me and said something imperative.
‘Ignore Caspar: he’s on a special diet and isn�
�t allowed any,’ Myfy said. ‘We got him from a cat rescue place a couple of weeks ago, so we’re only just getting used to his little ways, and vice versa.’
‘I don’t think he’s really taken to us yet,’ Elf said. ‘We took pity on him when we saw him there, because he seemed such a quiet, elderly cat, who just wanted somewhere warm and quiet to spend his last few years in.’
‘Early days yet,’ Myfy said, ‘but it looks like he might wear us down and see us out.’
Caspar said something that sounded like, ‘Too right!’ and then laid a large furry paw on my knee for a moment, to remind me he was there and hungry.
‘He’s very big,’ I commented.
‘He’s supposed to be half Maine Coon, and they can be enormous,’ said Myfy. ‘Funny, he didn’t look that big in the cat place.’
Elf took the next slices of toast when they were ready and sat down opposite to me.
‘Myfy wasn’t quite right about Ned having to restore the garden single-handedly, because he has Jekyll and Hyde to help him, though they aren’t really up to the heavier work any more, especially James, with his rheumatism.’
‘Jekyll … and Hyde?’ I repeated, tentatively.
‘Family joke,’ Myfy explained. ‘James Hyde and his sister, Gertrude, are twins, and when she married a man called Steve Jekyll, it was irresistible, though not entirely accurate as they’re both lovely and neither at all a monster.’
‘And Gertrude Jekyll is a very suitable name for a gardener, too,’ Elf put in. ‘There was that famous one.’
‘Right,’ I said resignedly, because it didn’t look as if I’d escaped the tyranny of an entrenched ancient gardener even here – in fact, there were two of them and they’d probably look on me as someone who could do all the heavy digging. This nephew probably wasn’t so young, either.
‘Until recently, I’ve managed to keep more or less on top of our garden, which isn’t huge, and mostly lavender,’ said Myfy, ‘but there are a few rosemary bushes that have got well out of hand and gone woody, and the Rambling Rector rose at the far end is trying to take over the world.’
‘They can be very aggressive,’ I said. ‘Lovely rose, though.’
‘I don’t expect it will take you long to get the upper hand of it,’ she said optimistically. ‘And then, of course, you can spend most of your time next door. We don’t mind how you arrange your hours.’
‘Ye-es,’ I said, and then added tentatively, ‘What exactly are my hours … and days?’
‘Oh, didn’t I say?’ exclaimed Elf. ‘Silly me! We thought perhaps half past eight till five, with tea breaks, of course, and an hour for lunch. Tuesday will be your day off, since it’s the closing day for the café and the River Walk – we sell the tokens for the turnstile to that in the café. When the Grace Garden opens to the public, it will have the same closing day, to fit in.’
‘And, of course, you get Sundays off,’ said Myfy, ‘unless you arrange with Ned to work extra hours in the Grace Garden from Easter.’
‘We all gather together here at about seven on Sundays for dinner, so we do hope you’ll join us,’ urged Elf, hospitably.
‘How lovely,’ I said non-committally, wondering exactly who this ‘all’ were who gathered for Sunday dinner. Were there more Lavender Cottage residents I hadn’t met yet, or did they just mean the nephew?
‘Myfy, you can tell Marnie about the River Walk when you show her round the gardens after lunch,’ Elf went on.
‘OK,’ her sister said amiably.
I had finished my rarebit by the time Myfy was just sitting down to hers, but once she’d caught up, we all had ginger and honey ice-cream … except Caspar, who had now somehow managed to drape his front half over my knees and was snoring and drooling onto my best denim dress. He must have been at least four feet from nose to tail, the biggest cat outside a zoo I’d ever met. I decided to let him carry on.
‘Ginger ice-cream is a good choice to follow the robust flavour of Welsh rarebit,’ said Elf. ‘Though it’s not as good as the lavender and rose.’
‘And you make all of it yourself?’
‘Yes, though Charlie’s sister, Daisy, who is sixteen, loves to help me. She seems to have inherited the Verdi gene for ice-cream making! Although I make some in the old machines in the café, as you saw earlier, I also use the room next door to this one, where I have a more modern ice-cream maker and huge freezer,’ said Elf. ‘Myfy will show you when she takes you round.’
‘Yes, we’ll go out through the house and my studio at the back,’ Myfy agreed.
Elf made coffee and told Myfy how I’d been moving around various French châteaux for the last few years.
‘It’s been fun and given me lots of varied experience, but I felt I wanted to settle down over here now, and with the accommodation included, this is perfect for me,’ I explained.
‘Well, we hope you’ll be very happy with us,’ said Elf. ‘I had a feeling you were going to fit in the moment I saw you,’ she added. ‘There was something sort of instantly familiar about you.’
‘Yes, I felt that too,’ agreed Myfy. ‘But you’ve never been here before, have you?’
I shook my head, wondering what about me could have given that impression. They must have known Mum, but I didn’t resemble her very much.
Elf went into the café to relieve Charlie so he could have his lunch and I cautiously extricated myself from under the cat and stood up, somewhat hairier than before.
Caspar sat up to watch as Myfy pulled on a pair of wellingtons without bothering with socks, shrugged into a long black woollen coat with brightly coloured tassels hanging from a pointed hood and led the way through Lavender Cottage.
She opened the door onto Elf’s ice-cream-making room a crack and prevented Caspar’s attempt to squeeze through with her foot.
‘No cats allowed in there. Same in the ice-cream parlour, though luckily he doesn’t seem to have thought of jumping up onto the stable door when the top’s open,’ she said, closing the door again. ‘Dogs are allowed on the patio, of course, if their owners are well behaved.’
She gave that tilted smile again and carried on along an inner hall, past the foot of a wide, polished wooden staircase and several closed doors, merely saying, ‘Small parlour … formal dining room – we tend to eat in the kitchen mostly – and here’s the living room.’
She did open the door this time, revealing a huge, airy room obviously created out of several smaller ones. There were wooden floors, over which lay faded, but beautiful, old carpets, and a log-burning stove on a stone slab hearth.
She didn’t pause, but clumped across the floor in her wellies and led the way into a studio that had been built out at the back and had French doors leading to the garden, pausing only to shut a very miffed Caspar in the living room.
‘He has to stay in at the moment, till we feel he knows it’s home and won’t wander off,’ she explained. ‘I do let him in here when I’m working, though.’
‘It’s a great studio space,’ I said, looking round.
‘It was Father’s – and now it’s mine,’ said Myfy, striding past a large, empty easel and stepping out of the French doors onto a small patio.
It was crazy paving, like the path that wandered off in a meandering fashion through huge hummocked beds of lavender and some rampant rosemary.
‘Elf manages the café and does most of the cooking, and I take on the gardening, when I have time from my painting,’ Myfy explained. ‘Mum loved lavender and so do I. I’ve got as many different varieties as I can cram in – Hidcote, Munstead, Miss Katherine …’ she murmured dreamily. ‘And the white varieties, Edelweiss, Nana Alba and Arctic Snow.’
‘I’m not so familiar with the white kinds and, of course, I’ve been looking after mainly French varieties, lately.’
‘Fathead,’ she said, still in the same dreamy tone, and I stared at her.
‘Not perhaps so hardy as the others, but pretty, so I’m trying it,’ she added, to my relief.
‘I see what you mean about the rosemary. It’s got way too big for its boots and gone woody.’
‘It certainly has, and it’ll be a tough job getting it out, I’m afraid. It was Elf’s idea to put some among the lavender, but I don’t think it’s working out.’
‘I’ll soon have it out and then you’ll be able to replace it with more lavender,’ I said cheerfully.
We were well down the garden now and I could see a trellis overburdened with thick, thorny stems. They reached out across the arch dividing the lavender garden from the rest, ready to snare the unwary.
‘The Rambling Rector, I assume?’
‘Got it in one,’ said Myfy. ‘I put it in to cover the trellis, but I hadn’t quite realized how fast growing and thorny it was. I expect I should have radically pruned it back every year.’
‘I’ll tame it,’ I promised. ‘It needs a good cut back now, while it’s still early in the year, then an eye keeping on it.’
Avoiding the grabbing, spiky stems of the Rambling Rector, I ducked through the arch and discovered beyond it a rectangle of paving, surrounded by a border of shrubs including several mahonia bushes. In the centre stood a neat row of three white beehives.
‘Who’s the beekeeper?’
‘Elf. She’s a member of the Thorstane Bee Group, though there’s not a lot to do with them at this time of year. Some die off, including the old queens, and the rest are either asleep or stay near the hive.’
‘I’m afraid I know nothing about beekeeping,’ I confessed.
‘Nor I. I like bees, but I haven’t time to mess about with them. I paint and garden and that’s it. And Jacob says he’s allergic to them, but I think that’s just cowardice.’
‘Jacob?’ I asked at the mention of a new name.
‘My husband. He lives in a converted barn up a track next to the Village Hut at the end of the Green. I mostly stay here in Lavender Cottage. We find it works better like that, with separate studio spaces.’
The Garden of Forgotten Wishes: The heartwarming and uplifting new rom-com from the Sunday Times bestseller Page 5
