‘Right,’ he said, making a note. ‘Seth Greenwood’s coming later this week to design and make my knot garden. I told him I wanted one just like yours, that I could fill it with herbs – “
hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram: the marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun and with him rises weeping
” and I suppose he might have some suggestions about what I should put in the rest of the garden.’
‘Knowing Seth, he’ll probably try and persuade you to turn it
all
into a knot garden or parterre!’ I said. ‘But he’s a lovely man, even if he does have a bee in his bonnet about knots, and he was really kind to Aunt Nan in her last years, making sure her garden was always neat and tidy. He wouldn’t take any money for it, either. She used to grow most of her own fruit and vegetables right up to her mid-eighties, but then it all started to get a bit much for her.’
‘What are you going to do with the garden now?’ he asked.
‘Slowly turn it back to an easier-to-manage version of how it used to be. She liked to mix flowers, fruit and vegetables together in a hotchpotch, which always looked amazing. My tree at the bottom near the hens is a plum, by the way.’
‘I think it looks dead,’ he said critically, looking up at it.
‘Oh, old plum trees just like to fool you, but if you look closer, you’ll see signs of life and soon it’ll take off and produce loads of fruit, you’ll see. Some of the lower branches get so heavy they have to be propped up.’
‘What will you do with all the plums, then?’
‘Jam, wine, plum crumbles and pies, dried or candied plums – there’s no end to what you can do with them! Aunt Nan often bartered baskets of them for other things, like honey for the Meddyg, though of course she would give the hive-keeper a couple of bottles of it too.’
‘I’ve been drinking the Meddyg, one small glass in the evenings,’ he told me, to my surprise. The way he’d been looking at the bottle when I gave it to him, I’d imagined it had gone straight down the sink. ‘It tasted weird at first but now I quite like it.’
‘It’s an acquired taste, but it’ll do you the power of good. I’ll give you another bottle,’ I promised.
‘You don’t need to – or all the food.’
‘Call it payment for the dog walking,’ I suggested, and he let that go, so I’m sort of assuming he likes the home cooking really and doesn’t want me to stop!
It was only after I was back in the cottage that it struck me that for a man on a six-month sabbatical, he was making some expensive and long-term plans for his garden! But I supposed he’d use it as a holiday cottage, and meanwhile all the gardening was keeping him amused and occupied. He certainly looked healthier now, if still just as haunted, which must show how much he had adored his late wife …
I made myself a lavish but very late high tea, just as if it was a Sunday, and then donned the Day of the Dead pinafore that Bella had once brought me back from a trip to Mexico (black background covered in very jolly little skeletons dressed in brightly coloured fiesta gear) and embarked on a frenzy of baking: peanut biscuits, Welshcakes, a plum jam tart (from last year’s bottled fruit) and a big batch of Cornish pasties, all frilled along the top like the backs of dinosaurs in children’s picture books, most of them destined for the freezer.
While I worked I was listening to Aunt Nan, who had once again determinedly sheered off into stories about her childhood.
‘
Oh, we did look forward to Whit Walking Day! We’d all get dressed up and march through the village with a band and banners!
’ she told Cheryl. ‘
Then there’d be a picnic and games with prizes on what they call the Lido field, down by the river. We had a grand time. Proper champion, it was!
’
I was just about to take the tart from the oven when Ivo collected Flash for his walk, so I just pushed the dog out, handed him the lead and dashed back in before the edges caught.
I listened to a lot more of Aunt Nan than my daily ration while they were out. She’d been wandering all over her childhood and teenage years, and by the time I opened the door to let Ivo and Flash back in again, she was describing skating on the lake up at Winter’s End one very hard winter with her friends and Ottie and Hebe, and how the cook had sent down a warming pan full of hot roast chestnuts.
‘
A warming pan?
’ queried Cheryl faintly. She sounded as if she was losing the will to live.
‘
That’s right, lovey
,’ agreed Aunt Nan.
‘Something smells good,’ Ivo observed, as Flash shot past my legs into the kitchen in the direction of his food bowl, which seemed to be having a non-scary day.
‘I’ve been baking and I’ve wrapped some biscuits up for you, but I thought you might like a hot Cornish pasty now. I’ve just taken the last batch out of the oven. Come in.’
He looked uncertain, a bit like Flash when he’s convinced there’s a big scary monster hiding in the garden, or behind his food bowl, but then followed me in.
Aunt Nan was still talking: ‘
You can still buy cough candy, but it’s not the same. I’ve a good recipe, though
…’
I flicked the switch and her voice vanished. Ivo was looking around curiously.
‘You know, this is the first time I’ve been over your threshold – apart from the shop, of course.’
‘Is it? I suppose it is. Did you know that your cottage and mine started out as one building originally, the sort with the living accommodation at one end and the cattle byre at the other? Then after the Black Death had passed by it became two cottages and they’ve both been added to and changed over the years.’
‘I’d no idea, but I suppose that’s why the dividing wall between the two cottages isn’t as substantial as you might expect.’
‘You can’t really still hear the doorbell playing “The Bridal March”, can you?’
‘Yes, if I’m in the sitting room next door.’
‘Well,
I
can hear this really gloomy classical music from your side in the evenings,’ I countered, ‘and that’s not
my
cup of tea at all.’
‘“I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs”,’ he said gloomily. ‘Sorry if it disturbs you, though.’
‘It isn’t loud enough to bother me, so I don’t really mind, except that I wish it was something cheerier,’ I told him. ‘Look, sit down a minute while I wrap your pasty up. There’s some tea in the pot too, if you’d like a cup?’
He didn’t say one way or the other, but he did sit down, so I poured him some and shoved the milk jug towards him, before taking my pinny off and hanging it behind the door. I noticed in the little mirror that also hung there that my hair was half-down and there was a smudge of flour across one cheek, but I wasn’t about to start primping under Ivo’s gaze.
‘Have you heard any more about this retail park?’ he asked.
‘No, not yet, but Hebe Winter will get to the bottom of it, and if anything is to be done, she’ll organise it. I’m
really
worried about the new bridal shop, because I’ve gambled everything on Cinderella’s Slippers and I’d feel I’d let Aunt Nan down if the shop folded when I was running it.’
‘Wasn’t that your aunt’s voice I could hear when I came in, or was I just imagining it?’ he asked curiously. ‘I mean, I only heard her voice once, but it was very distinctive.’
‘Yes, it was. She recorded her memories for the Middlemoss Living Voices Archive and they gave me a copy. It’s fascinating stuff,’ I told him. Then something came over me and I found myself confiding, ‘She said she had a guilty secret, which she’d tell me about in the last recording, a private one, but she wanted me to listen to the rest of it first.’
‘Sometimes it’s better not to know the secrets at all,’ he said very seriously, and that haunted look came into his grey eyes.
‘Perhaps, but she wanted me to know – and actually, I’m sure I’ve already guessed what it is. She had a little fling with an American airman and … well, I think she got into trouble. But I’m just guessing really.’
‘Don’t you want to skip ahead and see if you’re right?’
‘Bella asked me that too, but I want Aunt Nan to tell me in her own time, so mostly I’m rationing myself to a session of half an hour or so in the evenings. Only she keeps rambling off the subject and meandering on about all kinds of things, so it’s been really hard not to skip forward and find out for sure. It might be nothing to worry about these days, but that kind of thing was a big deal then, a catastrophe.’
‘My wife wrote a diary every day of her life,’ he confessed abruptly. ‘She was no Pepys, so mostly it’s just short entries about meeting friends, appointments, that kind of thing. She often left it lying around the house, but of course I never even opened it …’
He looked up suddenly, but he wasn’t seeing me, he was looking back down the past. ‘Now I wonder if perhaps she wanted me to open it, to read it.’
‘So, did you read it after the accident?’ I asked cautiously, and into my head popped the image of the old leather diary I had seen lying open and face down on his desk the day I had taken him the Meddyg. It had been a very girly pink …
‘Not immediately. I just put them all in the small wooden chest she kept her papers in and put it into storage with everything else, and it ended up here. I thought I’d better see what papers she kept in there and saw the diaries again … and that’s when I started reading them.’
‘Well, that seems a very natural thing to do, to me. Have you finished reading them all now?’
‘No. Oddly enough,
I’ve
been rationing them each evening, much as you have been doing with your aunt’s recordings … and I too have been reading things that have made me want to cut to the last one, the unfinished diary.’
He didn’t elaborate on what that might be, but since his face took on that shuttered look again and he left abruptly, as if sorry he’d said even that much, it can’t have been anything good.
I wondered what his wife had been up to: was his grief mixed with anger? Is that why he was so edgy and tense?
And what a strange coincidence it was that we should both be discovering the secret lives of those we loved at the same time, bit by bit, both more than half afraid of what we might find at the end!
I went back in the recording to the bit I’d missed while I was letting Ivo and Flash back in, and it was a real effort of will to turn it off after that, for Cheryl had finally managed to prod Aunt Nan back to her narrative thread and my suspicions began to crystallise into conviction.
Chapter 26: The Birds and the Bees
Yes, of course, my parents did hear the rumours eventually, dear, but they didn’t ask me any questions either. I suppose they were afraid to. Despite all Vi’s scheming I expect they guessed the truth, but it was a case of least said, soonest mended. My poor mother had another stroke soon after I came home, though, and that was that. Then it was just Father and me.
Middlemoss Living Archive
Recordings: Nancy Bright.
Bella arrived at the shop, after first pushing through Ivo’s door the wad of typescript that she’d typed up some time over the long weekend.
‘He’s speeding up now,’ she said.
‘I expect he’s got a deadline looming. There’s nothing like them for making you get a move on. I’ve read all three of those novels of his that I got from Marked Pages and they’re very good.’
‘So is this new one, and I’m dying to know who did the dastardly deed. I haven’t the faintest idea.’
‘It’s very clever the way he has the two stories going, the Elizabethan one and the contemporary one,’ I said. ‘And then to be able to tie it all together with a theme from one of Shakespeare’s plays really is an amazing feat.’
‘He’s really done his research too, but of course he is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company and knows the Stratford area, where they’re all set,’ Bella said.
‘I expect that’s why he wants to keep his identity secret, because although he’s created a second, smaller Shakespearian company in the books and called it the King’s Players, everyone in the RSC would assume
they
were the characters.’
‘Perhaps some of them are?’ Bella suggested.
‘All the more reason to hide behind a pen name!’ I said. ‘Ivo actually came into the kitchen and had a cup of tea last night, and we talked a bit, then I gave him a Cornish pasty to take home with him.’
‘He could do with fattening up. He’s obviously lost weight because his clothes are loose on him. What did he say?’
‘Well, I had the archive recording running and he asked me if that was Aunt Nan’s voice, so I told him about it. In fact, I’d just got to a bit that made me think I’d guessed her secret right and I expect that’s why I ended up telling him about it. But the amazing thing is that it turns out that he is reading his late wife’s diaries, and spinning them out each evening to make them last longer, just like me with Aunt Nan’s memoirs! Isn’t that a weird coincidence?’
‘Truth always does seem stranger than fiction. Except for Stephen King’s novels,’ she added, being a big fan of his. ‘His fiction is always far weirder than the truth. But what did you find out about your aunt?’
‘You remember I told you I thought she might have had a bit of a fling with that American airman she was seeing towards the end of the war?’
Bella nodded. ‘The one she went jitterbugging with.’
‘I think they may have done more than jitterbugging, and she might have found herself pregnant just after he’d gone back.’
‘Oh, poor Nan, if so!’
‘She hasn’t come out and actually said so, but there was some kind of trouble, and she went to stay with her sister for long enough for rumours to get out. I suppose she’ll tell me all the details in the final recording.’
‘I still don’t know how you’re managing to keep your hands off that one! I’d have given in and listened to it long before now.’
‘It’s really tempting, but I’m going to do it the way she wanted.’
‘Did Ivo say anything about his wife’s diaries?’