Barbara White - The Unfinished Garden

“But Isaac’s my main squeeze.” Rowena fired off a string of air-kissses. “Aren’t you, poppet?”

“Yes. I. Am.” Isaac thrust out his chest with eight-year-old machismo.

Tilly stretched and yawned.

“Feeling icky?” Rowena asked.

“Bit tatty round the edges.”

“Rats. So you won’t want to join us for lunch. Well I did say—didn’t I, Sebastian—that you’d be too tired. We’ve a table for two booked for noon at The Flying Duck. I could easily make it four. But I can see you’re both pooped.”

Isaac sprang up and down silently as if to contradict her.

Tilly rubbed her temples. A table for two?

“Nope, much better plan!” Rowena thumped the center of the steering wheel, and the horn sounded. Tilly and Isaac jumped. “Come to Sunday lunch at the Hall! Tilly, bring your mother. Sebastian, bring the children. Isaac? It’s time Aunty Ro taught you croquet. Croquet? What am I saying? Ever played cricket?”

“No. But isn’t it the same as baseball? I’m good at that.”

Sebastian doubled over and appeared to be choking.

“Poppet, we need to educate you in the ways of cultural diversity. And it just so happens that this man sitting next to me, the one who’s about ready to pop his clogs—” Rowena smacked Sebastian between the shoulder blades. “Which, by the way, is an excellent reason for never taking up smoking, filthy habit.” Rowena grabbed Sebastian’s cigarette and sucked on it. “This man was the youngest pupil in the history of Rugby School to make the first X1, which is V.I.S.”

“Very Important Stuff!” Rowena and Isaac squealed in unison.

Tilly didn’t join in the laughter. She was chewing on her thumbnail, wondering why she had forgotten about Sebastian and the first X1, and why Rowena had remembered.

Chapter 9

Tilly watched the Discovery tear out of the driveway and tried not to feel like the duped heroine in an episode of The Twilight Zone. Ro and Sebastian were locked in some conspiracy, and her mother? They hugged, and Tilly’s fingers touched bone. Her mother had lost more than weight since Christmas. She had shrunk in on herself; she had aged.

“You look washed out,” her mother said.

“And you look tired. The life of leisure too much for you?”

“You know me. I rarely sit. Having this much time—” Her mother cleared her throat. “Makes me feel old and dependent.”

The shrill cry of magpies accompanied by a throaty cuckoo-cuckoo sneaked up from the paddock. As a child, nothing delighted Tilly more than the first cuckoo of the season. And everything in Tilly’s favorite garden was as it should be. The cherry tree was wrapped in stockings to keep birds from the fruit, the herbaceous border was a mass of pinks, blues and lavender, and clusters of white rambling rector blooms smothered the stone wall. Her father had planted that rose. How he loved his roses! How her mother interfered when he tried to tend them. But today, Woodend was a flat canvas; it didn’t soothe.

In Tilly’s mind, her mother was always forty years old, plowing through the black waves off the coast of Cornwall with her neck rigid and her hair dry. This morning, however, Mrs. Haddington looked less like a woman defying the Atlantic Ocean and more like an old dear who hadn’t noticed that the left side of her silk blouse hung over the waistband of her skirt.

“I was so bored yesterday, I attempted to knit a tea cozy for the church bazaar.” Her mother tucked in her blouse, then puffed up her thick, white bob. “Which is utterly ridiculous, given this.” She waved her bandaged hand. “How was it, seeing Sebastian again?”

“Mum.” Tilly issued a warning.

Her mother nipped a leaf from the Lady Hillingdon rose that snaked around the back door. “Black spot.” She tutted. “You’ll have to spray. Marigold says it’s a nasty separation. Between Sebastian and Fanny.”

“Fiona.” Tilly watched a pair of sparrows frolic in the stone birdbath. “And Marigold knows this how?”

“She heard it from Sylvia, who heard it from Beryl, who has the same woman-that-does as Sebastian—Mabel Dillington. There’s more.”

Tilly had always wanted eyes like her mother’s. Eyes you couldn’t ignore. Eyes that were the bright blue of a Carolina sky. Tilly’s eyes were pale and translucent, the color of porcelain brushed with a robin’s-egg wash. They made her look ethereal, when she yearned to be an Amazon.

“There’s evidence of a relationship.” Her mother had yet to blink.

Tilly scuffed her Doc Martens boot through round, evenly sized pebbles in coordinating sand tones. Unlike Tilly’s gravel, which was made up of lumps of quartz and splinters of gray rock, her mother’s driveway was perfect. “I’d forgotten how rumors fly in this place. Shame on you for listening.”

“Hardly rumor. And there’s no need to be sanctimonious. Mabel saw the Discovery parked outside Manor Farm yesterday at 6:00 a.m. Now. Where did Isaac and Monty disappear to?” Her mother hobbled up the stone step and through the back door.

Tilly raised her face into the damp, morning air. The sun had vanished, replaced by a fine Scotch mist. So they’re having sex. Big whoop. I just need to figure out how to avoid them for six weeks.

An empty truck rattled along the High Street. Empty trucks—when did she stop calling them lorries?—sounded different from heavily loaded ones. It had to do with the way they hit the dip on the corner. She gazed through the gateway, the place where she had met David. And then she stared back at the house, the place she had longed to run to after he died. After he died because of her. She’d grown used to the guilt, but it was always lurking. And when she was tired, as she was now, it thudded inside her skull like a migraine.

“Tilly! Phone!” her mother called from the kitchen. “A James Nealy?”

* * *

“Good flight?” James grabbed the rail on the treadmill, let go and repeated. Six times. Would she shriek? Accuse him of being a two-bit stalker? But despite what the voice had told him yesterday—over and over—he wasn’t a stalker. Although he had memorized the state harassment laws just to make sure.

“Are you an insomniac?” Tilly said. “It can’t be much later than 5:00 a.m. your time.”

He had prepared for incredulity or hostility, nothing else. And yet she’d asked about his sleep habits. What did that mean?

The treadmill whirred beneath him. “I exercise every morning from four-thirty to six-thirty.” That was probably more information than she needed.

“You get up at four-thirty? Are you crackers?”

What the hell did crackers mean? Who knew, but it didn’t sound good. So yes, clearly he had given her too much information. She was probably freaking out at this very moment, dialing 911 on her cell phone to report him for infringing the state harassment law that included: To telephone another repeatedly, whether or not conversation ensues, for the purpose of abusing, annoying, threatening, terrifying, harassing or embarrassing any person at the called number. Was he annoying her?

“Have you made a decision?” He spoke quickly, a preemptive strike in case she was considering hanging up.

“James.” Her voice dragged with exhaustion. He should’ve waited another hour at least, given her a chance to unpack. But it had taken all his restraint to not call her at 4:30 a.m. “I promised you an answer in September.”

“Can’t wait that long.”

“You’re worse than a child. Isaac was never this demanding, even at three.”

His pulse slowed as her accent, soft and warm, soothed him. He actually thought about crawling into bed and going back to sleep. After he’d showered, of course. “Do you talk to all your clients this way, or just me?”