‘Oh?’ I said, interested by this revelation. I certainly never wanted another husband, but if you had to have one, then keeping him in a separate house seemed like a good idea to me.
‘That door in the wall over there is our private entrance to the River Walk. I’ll show you that later because we’d better go straight to the Grace Garden now. I told my nephew I’d bring you over and introduce you after lunch and he’ll be wondering where we’ve got to.’
She strode back up the lavender garden and then opened a gate in the tall brick wall by the greenhouse.
‘This is a short cut through the old rose garden, though I’m afraid it’s now more of a big Brer Rabbit briar patch, with a path through the middle.’
You could say that again. The beautiful old herringbone brick path that ran across it, the mellow colours lit by a stray finger of sunlight, was flanked on either side by a hugely overgrown and impenetrable tangle worthy of Sleeping Beauty’s bower.
‘I hope you’ve got a good pair of secateurs,’ I said.
‘I’m sure Ned has, and luckily, this belongs to Old Grace Hall so it’s his problem. The door into our garden was put in when Wen – my sister Morwenna – married Theo, so we could come and go easily. Wen was much older than me – we three sisters were well spread out in age, as if Mum and Father were trying to have one child for each decade.’
We skirted a small pond in the centre, in which the giant, ghostly shapes of fish glimmered under waterlily pads and she opened another gate in the even higher old brick wall on that side.
‘Here we are – the Grace Garden!’
As I passed her and took in the sheer scale of what I was looking at, I stopped dead on the gravel path and my jaw dropped.
‘Good heavens, it’s huge!’ I exclaimed incredulously, gazing round.
‘These houses were all built on a small plateau, which narrows towards the river, so the Hall has a lot more flat land,’ Myfy said, but I was still dumbstruck.
A path to my right led off along the wall, behind a tall bed of trees and shrubs, while another, wider one ran straight ahead. To my left were lower beds, hedged in lavender and with lawned borders and walkways.
The tops of the high, mellow, old brick walls defined the giant square of the garden, but it was impossible to see the whole of it from where we were – there were too many tall shrubs and trees for that and also, unlike most walled gardens I’d ever seen, it was not flat but seemed to gently rise up towards the middle.
I longed to go and explore it … but I became aware that Myfy was talking again.
‘Wen and Theo weren’t much interested in gardening and it didn’t help that the lower half was given over to vegetable growing during the war, though there was already a vegetable plot on the other side of the wall. Ned says there’s a huge amount of work to do, to restore it to what it once was.’
‘But how exciting, to be part of that!’ I said.
Myfy gave her tilted smile. ‘Well, I’m glad you think so! Ned did say the late seventeenth-century layout of the main paths is still the same – he found a plan.’
I thought he would need a plan, if he was to restore it all to what it once was, after years of neglect, though so far as I could see, the beds closest to us were in fairly good order and, surprisingly, there were even little painted plant name tags on spikes in front of some of the nearby shrubs … quince, elderberry and an Alchemist rose.
That last one seemed very appropriate. I wondered what was in the middle of the garden and, entirely forgetting the purpose I was there for, was about to go and find out, when Myfy summoned my attention back again.
‘Now where is everyone?’ she said. ‘Perhaps we’d better go through into the courtyard and—’
But at that moment there came the scrunch of heavy footsteps on the gravel path along the wall behind us and she exclaimed, ‘Ah, Ned – there you are! I’ve brought our new gardener to meet you, as I promised.’
I tore my attention from the tantalizing prospect before me and turned round, expecting to see the middle-aged, wax-jacketed and corduroy-clad man of my imaginings.
Instead, to my complete astonishment, I found myself staring up at a giant of a man of much my own age, clad in muddy jeans and a disreputable old blue sweater. His mane of tawny hair was rumpled and needed cutting, and framed a leonine face, with a long, wide, blunt nose and fair, bushy eyebrows over amber-brown eyes. They widened as he stared at me and recognition dawned.
‘Ned? Ned Mars!’ I exclaimed, astounded.
6
Thorny Paths
My immediate reaction, after that of astonishment, was one of pleased surprise, because Ned had been part of my happiest years, spent at Honeywood Horticultural College.
Ned, however, didn’t seem to feel the same way, because his open face assumed a strangely shuttered and wary expression.
‘It’s me – Marnie Ellwood,’ I said brightly, in case he’d got sudden-onset mid-thirties amnesia. ‘I was in the year below you at Honeywood.’
He’d been specializing in garden design for his final year, but when he was talent-spotted after taking part in a TV documentary, Gardeners of the Future, his life had taken a different turn – right into TV stardom.
I’d made a brief and unwilling appearance in that documentary too, trenching for asparagus, but I’d done my best to keep my back turned to the camera as I shovelled.
While these memories galloped through my head, Ned’s oddly wary look didn’t lift, but he said, finally, ‘Yes, of course I remember you. You were a friend of Sammie Nelson, weren’t you?’
This was obviously not a recommendation and I recalled that he’d briefly gone out with Sammie, before she’d suddenly dumped him in favour of a fling with the documentary presenter, a well-known gardening personality about twice her age.
‘We weren’t really friends, she was just in my year,’ I said. ‘We all tended to hang out in the pub together anyway, didn’t we, because it was the only one for miles? I haven’t seen or heard from her since she left without doing her degree year.’
In fact, she’d left very suddenly, the minute she’d finished her exams at the end of the second year and rumour had it that she’d shacked up with that presenter.
Ned made a non-committal grunt and said, ‘You look … different.’
‘Well, I’m older, thinner and my hair is short,’ I said, slightly tartly, though I didn’t think I’d changed that much. And neither had he physically, except that his broad-shouldered frame had filled out with a lot more muscle. No, the difference lay in his expression.
Everyone at college had liked tall, gangling, good-natured, easy-going Ned Mars … and so had the TV viewers, right from the first airing of his series, This Small Plot. When I left for France it had still been running and was as popular as ever, though I hadn’t watched it for ages, since Mike had been jealous when he found out I’d known Ned.
But that was an entirely different Ned, for this one very evidently wasn’t pleased to see me. And now I began to wish he had been the middle-aged, balding and rather stolid stranger I’d expected. I’d so wanted a whole fresh new start, leaving the past behind me, and now I suspected I wasn’t going to get it.
Myfy appeared to have missed the uneasy undercurrents, for she exclaimed delightedly, ‘You were students together? What a coincidence! And now you’ll be working together on the Grace Garden, too!’
‘Well, as to that—’ he began and then broke off, bushy fair eyebrows twitched together in a frown as he stared at me.
Something in his voice and the lack of enthusiasm finally got through to Myfy and she gave him a sharp look.
‘I heard on the gardening grapevine that you’d been doing well with the Heritage Homes Trust … until you left suddenly, a few years back,’ Ned said to me, meaningfully.
My heart sank. Just what, exactly, had he heard?
‘I resigned from the Heritage Homes Trust over five years ago and went abroad,’ I said shortly.
‘M
arnie’s been living in France for the last few years, Ned,’ Myfy told him, puzzled.
‘Yes, my adoptive family bought an old château. I’ve been based with them, but helping other ex-pat château owners restore their gardens. I moved around a lot … but then I found I wanted to come home again. This job presented the perfect chance to move back to England.’
‘Right … And you had no idea I was here?’ He was eyeing me narrowly now.
‘No, why on earth should I know you had any connection with the place? The last I heard of you, you were living near London and doing endless series of This Small Plot.’
I frowned, thinking about that. ‘I wouldn’t have thought you could still do that, if you’re based all the way up here, now, but—’
I broke off abruptly, because I’d obviously said something very wrong. His face darkened like a threatening thunderstorm and for a moment I wished I had those butter paddles handy.
‘That’s not a problem any longer,’ he snapped, and then, turning to Myfy, said ominously, ‘Could I have a private word?’
‘Well … of course,’ she said, looking taken aback. ‘Now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right …’ she said, then smiled at me, reassuringly. ‘You will excuse us for a moment, Marnie, won’t you? Perhaps you’d like to wait for me in the old rose garden.’
‘Of course,’ I replied, feeling a sick hollowness inside. Ned must know – or think he knew – how I came to leave my last HHT job. Word of that unhinged email of resignation sent by Mike, pretending to be me, with its many and varied accusations against my former boss and colleagues, must have leaked out. And once Ned had told Myfy about it, I supposed that would be the end of this job, too, before it had even begun.
There was a curved marble bench next to the pool and I sat on it, heedless of moss and damp. Under the waterlilies and shifting reflections of scudding white clouds, the gold and red koi circled like strange dreams in the darkness.
Myfy, looking troubled, walked slowly through the gate from the Grace Garden, closing it behind her, before coming to sit next to me.
I looked at her numbly, waiting for the axe to fall, but instead she gave me one of her tilted smiles and said, ‘Ned had to go back to his office in the courtyard – he moved his garden design business, Little Edens, here last year.’
‘But he didn’t want to talk to me anyway, did he? He wasn’t pleased to see me, let alone employ me.’
‘The trouble is, he’d heard some odd rumours about how you came to leave your last job,’ she said. ‘But you can’t depend on gossip, as he should know very well by now. Anyway, Elf is the fey one in the family and never misjudges a character, and she told me you were a good person who has had a difficult past and needs the healing powers of the valley as much as poor Ned does, but in a different way.’
‘She did? And … Ned does, too?’ I said, tentatively.
She nodded. ‘I’d no idea you’d known Ned as students, of course, and then, living abroad, you probably entirely missed all the scandal.’
This all sounded very mysterious.
‘But you see, poor old Ned has had a hard time, which is why he’s so prickly. I’ll tell you all about it on the way up the River Walk.’
She got up, dusting off the seat of her billowing black coat and I followed her into the Lavender Cottage garden and under the overgrown thorny rose arch past the beehives.
As we reached a kind of wooden sentry hut by the back gate, she said, ‘We did tell you that one of your duties would be to go right up the River Walk to the falls at closing time every day, to pick up any litter and check for damage and stray visitors, didn’t we?’
‘Not that I recall,’ I said, still wondering if it was all academic anyway, and I’d still actually have a job by the end of this little talk. And what on earth was this scandal involving Ned that had so changed him and made him need healing? It sounded very unlike the Ned I remembered.
Myfy opened the hut and took out a stick with a pointed metal end, which she handed to me, and a large brown paper rubbish sack from a folded pile on a shelf.
‘The shutter over the entrance turnstile is always pulled down and locked at four, when Elf or one of the staff has emptied the box of tokens,’ she explained. ‘Then someone has to walk all the way up to the top of the falls, which we started doing regularly after the time we found a poor Swedish tourist with a broken ankle near the waterfall, who’d been there the whole night and was quite demented, poor thing.’
I felt a little demented myself by this point, with so many unanswered questions whirling about like dark bats in my belfry.
‘Of course, you don’t need to do it on Tuesdays, when we are all closed, or Sundays – someone else will do it that day.’
We passed through the gate, which she locked carefully behind us, and picked our way down a narrow path that wound through gorse and rocks, until we came out on a wide gravelled path by the riverbank.
We turned upstream, away from the turnstile, and began to walk up the valley. The river burbled, rushed and babbled over its stony bed and I could hear a blackbird singing and the distant plaintive bleat of a sheep.
The path was quite wide and easy here, skirting boulders, rocky outcrops and large, gnarled tree roots.
‘As well as checking for injured visitors, you need to keep an eye out for any damage to the path and handrails,’ Myfy said instructively. ‘On the way back, you empty the two rubbish bins into the sack and collect any litter thoughtless visitors have dropped.’
My spirits rose slightly: it wasn’t exactly sounding as if I’d been fired before I started … or not by Myfy, at any rate. I feared that convincing Ned might be altogether a harder task.
‘The first stretch of the River Walk, about half a mile, is quite easy going, as you see. There are one or two little bridges across more difficult stretches further on, put in by the Victorian owners before the Verdis took over, when they turned it into a daytripper’s beauty spot.’
It would not exactly be an onerous task to walk up the little valley every afternoon … though possibly it wouldn’t be so pleasant in bad weather.
Myfy might have read my mind because she said, ‘If it’s bucketing down with rain or blowing a gale then no one in their right mind would climb the waterfall path up to the top, so you can just do a visual check from the viewing platform at the bottom.’
There had been no sign of any visitors, within earshot or otherwise, to prevent Myfy explaining what had happened to Ned, and I was just wondering if she had forgotten, when she said, with a sigh: ‘I’d better put you in the picture about what happened at the beginning of last year, so you can understand Ned’s attitude earlier. Poor boy,’ she added, though Ned was most definitely not a boy, but a large, angry and seemingly troubled man.
‘When I went to France five years ago he was still a TV celebrity and This Small Plot must have been on about its millionth series,’ I said. ‘I … I’d lost touch with most of my old friends by then, though.’
‘It was a dreadful scandal, in all the papers over here, but I don’t suppose those in France even covered it,’ Myfy said. ‘And really, it wasn’t much more than a seven-day wonder, even if it did have a long-term effect on Ned.’
Now I was really intrigued to know what on earth Ned had got himself into, but when she began by saying that it was all caused by the unreasonable jealousy of his girlfriend at the time, it all began to sound horribly familiar …
‘She began constantly accusing him of seeing other women, which he wasn’t. Finally he felt he couldn’t take any more and ended the relationship.’
‘I’m not surprised, because an unreasonably jealous partner is hell,’ I said with complete empathy. ‘But if he was innocent of any affair, then I don’t see where the scandal comes in and—’
‘Why it should affect him so much that he threw in his career and came up here to hide away?’ she finished for me. ‘It’s because it was all so public. His ex-girlfriend, Lois, sold a story
to one of the tabloids – all made up, of course, there wasn’t a word of truth in it. They called him a Love Rat.’
She mouthed the words as if they tasted rancid.
‘It appeared that she’d not only been checking his phone but she’d actually hired a private eye to spy on him. A paper published a picture of Ned and Penny Sinclair, his director, embracing outside the hotel they were all staying at, under the caption “Love Rat TV Gardening Guru and his Director”.’
‘People do hug each other all the time, and I don’t suppose if they’d been having an affair, they’d had done it in front of a hotel, presumably with the rest of the team around?’
‘No, and the real explanation was that Penny and her husband couldn’t have children, so had been trying to adopt for ages, and she’d just had a call telling her they’d been approved to adopt a baby boy. They’d almost given up hope, it’s such a long process. Ned knew about it and was just delighted for them.’
‘How horrible that that wonderful moment should have been misinterpreted like that,’ I said. ‘Didn’t they check the story first, before they printed it?’
‘It appears not – and of course, Penny and her husband immediately refuted it, because they were afraid it might affect the adoption … though luckily not, in the end. The paper had to print an apology, of course, but by then another piece about Ned had appeared in a gossip column. The source was by that student he mentioned.’
‘Who, Sammie Nelson?’
‘That’s the one, and it was a ridiculous story, short on facts but full of unsavoury innuendo about how, when they were students and going out together, he’d callously dumped her when he was offered the chance to present a TV series.’
I stopped and stared at her. ‘I do remember them going out together briefly – and she made all the running. Then when that documentary was being filmed at the college, she dropped him like a hot potato, because she got off with the presenter!’
‘Yes, that’s what Ned said,’ Myfy agreed.
‘Rumour was that she’d moved in with this man at the end of term. Certainly, she never came back for her final year. And then Ned was headhunted by a totally different TV company for his own series,’ I said.
The Garden of Forgotten Wishes: The heartwarming and uplifting new rom-com from the Sunday Times bestseller Page 6
