‘That’s what comes of living with a man before the ring’s on your finger,’ Aunt Nan said severely. ‘They’ve 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 haven’t changed for the better, and if he wants a family he should realise that time’s passing and you’re thirty-six – starting to cut it close.’
‘I know, though time has slipped by so quickly that I’ve only just woken up to the fact.’
‘I don’t know why you didn’t 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 he’d 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. ‘You’re a small, dark Bright, like me, and we plumpen as we get older. And, a woman’s meant to have a bit of padding, not be a rack of ribs.’
‘It’s 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.’
‘There’s 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 can’t 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, I’ve been drifting with the tide for too long and after Christmas I’m 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 wasn’t too sure about that. I’d 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, I’ve left it a bit late to start again with someone else,’ I said sadly, ‘and although Justin’s earning a good salary he’s turned into a total skinflint and says we can’t afford to have children yet – they’re 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 wouldn’t want that.’
‘He doesn’t seem much of a man to me at all,’ Aunt Nan said disparagingly. ‘But I’m 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 hadn’t noticed when the music stopped playing?
I’ve had my share of sorrows, of course, but I’ve 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 there’s nothing of it left now bar the sundial. You know about the Lido field turning out to be a plague pit, don’t 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 mother’s second marriage, as the Ugly Sisters, though actually they’re 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 Justin’s 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 Nan’s 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 Greenwood’s Knots as well as being head gardener at Winter’s End, and replaced the hedging with that.
That’s 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 Winter’s 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 Man’s 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, who’d 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 she’d discovered an early Christmas present left outside the front door when she’d 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 Winter’s End,”’ I read.
‘They’re still out there – go and have a look, while I put some eggs on for breakfast,’ she urged me.
‘Here’s 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 we’d 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 year’s 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 Justin’s disgust, since he couldn’t 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, didn’t 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 she’d rarely had a night out since she’d moved back home.
‘They love Tia, but they don’t like it when they have to alter their plans to look after her,’ Bella said glumly. ‘At least now she’s turned five and at school, working is easier, but if I had to pay a childminder in the holidays it wouldn’t 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 there’s only a few weeks more of it next term,’ she added. ‘I’m going to advertise my secretarial services and see if I can get a bit of extra work to do at home.’
‘It’s been a godsend having you helping in the shop and keeping an eye on Aunt Nan for me now she’s got so frail, but we’d both understand if you took up a better-paid full-time job offer.’
‘I couldn’t fit in a full-time job around Tia, but Nan’s 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 Robert’s 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, it’s
horrible
living in the annexe!’ she burst out. ‘I know I should be grateful we’ve got a roof over our heads and no rent to pay, because goodness knows, Mum and Dad tell me that often enough, but when you’re used to having your own house and suddenly you’re crammed with a small child into a flat the size of a garage, it’s not that easy!’
‘No, I can imagine,’ I said sympathetically. ‘It seemed so unfair that you lost everything.’
Bella’s 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. He’d been handsome and charming, and swept her off her feet, but though their life together had seemed idyllic, and he’d adored Tia, it had all gone pear-shaped after he’d died suddenly from a heart attack and she’d discovered his debts.
‘There was very little left to lose. He’d already gambled us deep into debt, though I didn’t know it. And he’d 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 couldn’t fit them in and I couldn’t afford storage,’ Bella said bitterly.
‘But coming back home was the only thing you could do, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, and although Mum and Dad have been very kind, letting me have the annexe, you know what they’re like, especially Mum. I’m sure she’s getting worse.’
I nodded. Bella’s 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.
‘She’s in my flat cleaning all the time too. There’s no privacy! Even Tia’s toys are all clean, disinfected and lined up on shelves by order of size or colour or whatever.’
‘Not an ideal atmosphere to bring up a small child in – it’s surprising you turned out relatively normal,’ I teased.