I cant see Justin doing that, Aunt Nan said.
Even if he wont, Bella could manage the shop for me and I could divide my time between London and Sticklepond, I suggested, though suddenly I really, really wanted to do it myself! Anyway, we neednt think about that now, because youre not going to leave me for years yet, and until then, Bella can run things just the way theyve always been.
I keep telling you Im on the way out, and youre not listening, you daft lump, my aunt said crossly. After that rheumatic fever I had at eleven they said I wouldnt make old bones, but they were wrong about that! But now Im wearing out. One day soon, my cogs will stop turning altogether and Ill be ready to meet my Maker. Id hoped to see you married and with a family by then, though.
Yes, me too, and its what Justin seemed to want when we got engaged yet we havent even tied the knot yet!
Thats what comes of living with a man before the rings on your finger, Aunt Nan said severely. Theyve no reason to wed you, then.
Things have changed, Aunt Nan and I do have a ring on my finger. I twiddled my solitaire diamond.
Things havent changed for the better, and if he wants a family he should realise that times passing and youre thirty-six starting to cut it close.
I know, though time has slipped by so quickly that Ive only just woken up to the fact.
I dont know why you didnt marry long since.
Neither do I, though Justin does seem to have a thing about my weight. I thought he was joking when he said hed set the wedding date when I was a size eight, but no, he was entirely serious! Only my diets always seem to fail, and then I put a few more pounds on after each attempt.
He should leave well alone, then, she said tartly. Youre a small, dark Bright, like me, and we plumpen as we get older. And, a womans meant to have a bit of padding, not be a rack of ribs.
Its not just my weight, but everything about me that seems to irritate him now. I think his mother keeps stirring him up and making him so critical. For instance, he used to say the way I dressed was eccentric and cute, but now he seems to want me to look like all his friends wives and girlfriends.
Theres nowt wrong with the way you look, Aunt Nan said loyally, though even my close friends are prone to comment occasionally on the eccentricity of my style. He cant remodel you like an old coat to suit himself, he needs to love you for what you are.
If he does still love me! He says he does, but is that the real me, or some kind of Stepford Wife vision he wants me to turn into? I sighed. No, Ive been drifting with the tide for too long and after Christmas Im going to find out one way or the other!
You do that, Aunt Nan agreed, because there are lots of other fish in the sea if you want to throw him back.
I wasnt too sure about that. Id only ever loved two men in my life (if you count my first brief encounter as one of them) so the stock of my particular kind of fish was obviously already dangerously depleted.
If I want to have children, Ive left it a bit late to start again with someone else, I said sadly, and although Justins earning a good salary hes turned into a total skinflint and says we cant afford to have children yet theyre way too expensive but then, I expect he thinks our children would have a nanny and go to a private school, like he did, and of course I wouldnt want that.
He doesnt seem much of a man to me at all, Aunt Nan said disparagingly. But Im not the one in love with him.
He has his moments, I said, thinking of past surprises, like tickets to see a favourite musical, romantic weekends in Paris, or the trip to Venice he booked on the Orient Express, which gave me full rein to raid the dressing-up box
But all that was in the first heady year or so after we fell in love. Then the romance slowly tailed off How was it that I hadnt noticed when the music stopped playing?
Chapter 2: Frosted Knots
Ive had my share of sorrows, of course, but Ive never been one to dwell on them. Mother always said we should strive to be like the words carved around that old sundial in the courtyard, remembering only the happy hours, though I think being so old it actually says hourf and not hours. The courtyard used to belong to a house that was where the Green Man is now, but lots of houses went to rack and ruin after the Great Plague visited the village, because it wiped out whole families. and theres nothing of it left now bar the sundial. You know about the Lido field turning out to be a plague pit, dont you, dear? It was quite providential in a way, because it stopped those developers building on it.
Middlemoss Living Archive
Recordings: Nancy Bright.
I had my recurring dream that night or nightmare, I was never sure which. It was a Cinderella one, featuring Justin as the handsome prince and with Rae and Marcia, my wicked stepsisters from my mothers second marriage, as the Ugly Sisters, though actually theyre only ugly on the inside.
The dream ran its usual course, with the prince looking up at me just as he was fitting the glass slipper onto my foot, at which point Justins leonine good looks would morph disconcertingly into the darker, somewhat other-worldly features of my first, brief love, Ivo Hawksley.
Weird, and strangely unsettling for an hour or two after I woke up
So I was up early, and when I looked out of the kitchen window, Aunt Nans herbal knot garden was prettily frosted with snow and the spiral-cut box tree in the centre looked like an exotic kind of ice lolly.
Knot gardens have low, interwoven hedges forming the pattern or knot. When I was a little girl Aunt Nan used hyssop and rosemary bushes to make the outline, in the old way, but since this made a rougher effect than box hedging and also had to be renewed from time to time, a few years ago she bought a whole load of little box plants from Seth Greenwood, who is the proprietor of Greenwoods Knots as well as being head gardener at Winters End, and replaced the hedging with that.
Thats when Seth started to take an interest. He helped her to pull out the old hedging and replace it with the new, in a slightly more intricate design, and then afterwards just kept dropping in and doing a bit of garden tidying.
Sometimes he sent one of the three under-gardeners instead, and I expect they were glad of the break, since Seth was so passionate about the garden restoration at Winters End he seemed to have become a bit of a slave-driver. Aunt Nan would be trotting out with hot tea and Welshcakes for her helpers every five minutes, too.
Each segment of knot was filled with fragrant herbs: lovage, fennel, dill, thyme, several types of mint, clumps of chives and tree onions, sage and parsley. She used several of them in the Welsh herbal honey drink, made from an old family recipe passed down from her mother, that she brewed as a general cure-all. The recipe calls it Meddyginiaeth Llysieuol, Welsh for herbal medicine, but we always referred to it just as Meddyg much less of a mouthful!
The gardens behind this and the adjoining cottage were very long, and divided by a wall topped with trellis, while our other boundary was the high wall of the Green Mans car park.
The gardens behind this and the adjoining cottage were very long, and divided by a wall topped with trellis, while our other boundary was the high wall of the Green Mans car park.
The two seventeenth-century cottages formed an L shape fronting onto a little courtyard accessible only by foot from the High Street via the narrow Salubrious Passage. Both had been extended to provide bathrooms and kitchens, and also, in our case, an anachronistic little three-sided shop window pushed out of the cottage front, like a surreal aquarium. I had to park my car right at the further end of the garden, where a lane turned up behind the pub and ended just beyond the cottages.
I finished my coffee, then put on my coat and boots and went out. Aunt Nan had always been a haphazard kind of gardener, mixing fruit, vegetables and flowers together in chaotic abundance, but most of the beds had been turfed over when it all got too much for her, so by then it looked a little too neat and tidy.
I walked to the far end and on through the archway cut into a tall variegated holly hedge, to let out the hens. Cedric the cockerel, whod been emitting abrupt, strangulated crows for at least the last hour, ceased abruptly when I opened the pop-door. He stuck his head out and gave me one suspicious, beady glance, but then when I rattled the food bucket his six wives jostled him out of the way and came running down the ramp.
Bella had been letting them out and feeding them lately, when she came to open the shop, but since she had to take her little girl to school first, that could be quite late.
I looked for eggs, more out of habit than expectation since the hens generally stopped laying in winter, and found a single white freckly one.
When I went back in, Aunt Nan told me shed discovered an early Christmas present left outside the front door when shed gone to get the milk in.
Two of them, in fact!
What, on the doorstep?
No, next to it, one either side. This was attached. She handed me a card threaded with red ribbon.
A Happy Christmas from Seth, Sophy and all the Family at Winters End, I read.
Theyre still out there go and have a look, while I put some eggs on for breakfast, she urged me.
Heres a fresh one. I handed her my booty, then went out to admire two perfect little ball-shaped box trees in wooden tubs on either side of the shop door. Seth must have carried them down Salubrious Passage in the night!
It had been lovely to see Bella again when I came home, but wed postponed our catching-up until that evening, because it was Christmas Eve the next day, and Aunt Nan was fretting about the state of the house. I needed to embark on the sort of major clean she would have already done herself in times past, until everything sparkled, while Bella minded the shop.
When that was done we decorated the sitting room with paper garlands and put up the ancient and somewhat balding fake tree, made from green bristles on twisted wire branches. I left her hanging glass baubles on it while I went to start off the sherry trifle and bake mince pies and other goodies.
This years Meddyg, which Nan made in summer and autumn, was long since bottled and stored away, for it was best at least a year after brewing pale yellowy-green and aromatic. I made it in London too, fermenting it in the airing cupboard, much to Justins disgust, since he couldnt even stand the smell of it.
It must be an acquired taste. Like Aunt Nan, I always had a glass of it before bedtime and whenever I felt in need of a pick-me-up, for, as she said, A glass of the Doctor always does you good! She also insisted she never drank alcohol, so clearly Meddyg, which packs a powerful punch, didnt count.
After supper I left Aunt Nan comfortably established in front of the TV in the parlour and popped next door to the Green Man to meet Bella. Her parents were babysitting, which was not exactly an arduous task, since they only had to leave the door to the annexe open to hear if Tia woke up, but shed rarely had a night out since shed moved back home.
They love Tia, but they dont like it when they have to alter their plans to look after her, Bella said glumly. At least now shes turned five and at school, working is easier, but if I had to pay a childminder in the holidays it wouldnt be worth my while working.
I know, it must be really difficult, I said sympathetically. How is everything going? You look tired. Bella has ash-blond hair and the sort of pale skin that looks blue and bruised under the eyes when she is exhausted.
I must need more blusher, she said with a wry smile, though having been an air hostess, she made sure her makeup and upswept hairdo were immaculate. Old habits die hard!
And I am tired, but at least my office skills evening class has finished for Christmas, and theres only a few weeks more of it next term, she added. Im going to advertise my secretarial services and see if I can get a bit of extra work to do at home.
Its been a godsend having you helping in the shop and keeping an eye on Aunt Nan for me now shes got so frail, but wed both understand if you took up a better-paid full-time job offer.
I couldnt fit in a full-time job around Tia, but Nans let me close the shop just before school finishes so I can pick her up, which has worked very well. Plus I love working in the shoe shop and I love Nan too. The holidays and Saturdays are a bit of a problem, though, because unless I can arrange a playdate, or Roberts mother comes over from Formby to take her out for the day, Mum has to mind her again. Her face clouded.
Not good? How are things going with you and your parents? I asked.
Oh, Tansy, its horrible living in the annexe! she burst out. I know I should be grateful weve got a roof over our heads and no rent to pay, because goodness knows, Mum and Dad tell me that often enough, but when youre used to having your own house and suddenly youre crammed with a small child into a flat the size of a garage, its not that easy!
No, I can imagine, I said sympathetically. It seemed so unfair that you lost everything.
Bellas partner had been an airline pilot, several years older and separated from his wife when they met. Bella was an air hostess on one of his flights and they got to know each other on a stopover in some exotic location. Hed been handsome and charming, and swept her off her feet, but though their life together had seemed idyllic, and hed adored Tia, it had all gone pear-shaped after hed died suddenly from a heart attack and shed discovered his debts.
There was very little left to lose. Hed already gambled us deep into debt, though I didnt know it. And hed never got round to divorcing his wife like he said he would, so she got whatever was left. I even had to sell my car to cover our moving expenses and a lot of our belongings, because we couldnt fit them in and I couldnt afford storage, Bella said bitterly.
But coming back home was the only thing you could do, wasnt it?
Yes, and although Mum and Dad have been very kind, letting me have the annexe, you know what theyre like, especially Mum. Im sure shes getting worse.
I nodded. Bellas mother was super-house-proud, to the point where it was becoming an illness. She swept up every microscopic particle of anything that fell in or outside her house with manic fervour, and polished every surface that would take it to a burnished, mirrored sheen.