A Winter’s Tale (41 page)

‘No…actually, I couldn’t.’

‘Or Seth wanting to live anywhere except Winter’s End?’

‘Not really, but it would depend how mad about her he was, wouldn’t it? He might be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice, but we will just have to wait and see.’

‘Mike’s been keeping in touch,’ Anya said casually. ‘He phones me for a chat every now and then. His parents originally came from Antigua in the Caribbean and he’s hoping to go there on holiday next year. It sounds like paradise!’

Although she deserved to be teased after her comments about Seth, I nobly restrained myself. Mike is very nice, and if something comes of their obvious attraction to each
other, it will be another anchor to keep her living near me, which would be lovely.

In fact, everything seemed to be coming together in a very fortuitous way, like a preordained pattern, even if Jack did so far seem incapable of understanding that I was no longer even remotely romantically interested in him.

It’s a pity I was all over him like a rash that time he kissed me, or he might have been easier to convince.

But luckily he was still too preoccupied with business to do more than drop by occasionally, and even his late-night phone calls had a rushed air, as if he was always about to dash off and clinch another deal.

Perhaps, if he ever was really attracted to me, I was losing my charm.

It took all four gardeners to get the heavy statue upstairs, with Jonah supervising the operation, though luckily that didn’t impede them much.

‘What did you say it was?’ Seth asked, panting, when it was finally manoeuvred into place.

‘It’s an Egyptian goddess, Tawaret—she’s often depicted as a pregnant hippo standing upright. But maybe it’s just fat, in which case it could be
you
.’

‘
Me?
’ He looked at me as if I had run mad. ‘You think I look like a hippo? And I’m
not
fat,’ he added with wounded male pride, casting a glance down at his torso, as if he feared his six-pack had suddenly turned into a beer barrel.

‘I never said you were, and you don’t look anything like a hippo. But the evil brother of Osiris was called Seth or Set, so this could have been your namesake.’

He patted Tawaret on the head. ‘I think this one is female, all right.’

‘Careful—she’s a bit of a fertility symbol,’ I warned.

‘I think I’m unlikely to get pregnant, Sophy,’ he said mildly.

Bob and Hal were grinning and nudging each other until he said, ‘Come on, we’ve wasted enough time—back to work. There’s plenty to do.’

‘Mrs Lark’s been making Chelsea buns this morning; they should be out of the oven by now,’ Jonah hinted.

‘Go out by way of the kitchen and ask for some to take with you,’ I said hastily, seeing Seth’s face darkening.

In his own way, he is as driven as Jack. Or me, come to that. I’m pretty single-minded in my determination to make the house beautiful again and paying its way.

Ottie returned from Cornwall via London, where according to Seth she was arranging for a major retrospective exhibition next year and catching up with her friends.

She was preceded a couple of days earlier by a van bearing the unfinished model for
The Spirit of the Garden
sculpture she is making for Winter’s End, wrapped in damp sacking.

It was good to have her back again, though once she had admired the changes I had made to the house and seen the progress of the Shakespeare garden, she retired to her studio to work on the sculpture. I could see her at all hours of the day and night when I was passing through the courtyard, working away in one of her oversized, checked lumberjack shirts.

I think I am starting to feel much as Grandfather did about having all the family around me, and though some of them are more annoying than others, I have grown to love them anyway.

Another strand in the fabric of Winter’s End was strengthened when the cleaned painting of Alys came back, too. It wasn’t a good painting—in fact, it was a very bad one—but without the dark coating of dirt and old varnish I could see that the artist had managed to catch something
sad and secretive about her eyes—though I would love to know what Alys thought of the pursed rosebud lips, which she had never possessed, and the simper. But apart from that bit of artistic licence, it was a fairly faithful, if uninspired, catalogue of her features. Dark curls lay on the young girl’s long white neck, and her neat nose had the hint of a tilt at the end, just like mine. For the first time I could see that I looked very like her—or how she would have looked, had she lived to my age. After being for so long the atypical dark Winter, I suddenly felt a renewed sense of belonging. Alys’s blood ran in my veins and the two opposing strains of Blezzard and Winter were forever united there.

Maybe
I
should wear a pentacle and a cross, like Aunt Hebe, to symbolise this strange union?

One afternoon in December I was sitting contentedly on the bottom step of the flight of stairs down to the lower terrace, watching Derek and Hal lay a herringbone path in Tudor bricks along the new border in front of the rebuilt wall. The weather had taken a slightly milder turn, but it was still chilly. The freshly dug beds were dotted with pots of shrubs ready to plant out and larger, container-grown trees stood about as if simply dropped from the skies. But I knew there was method in this seeming randomness, because I’d seen Seth’s planting scheme.

He’d already marked out the central knot before I got there and was now measuring and laying out the designs for two smaller ones at either end, using some kind of red spray. From where I was sitting it looked a bit like a stencilled, boxy Christmas cracker.

When he’d finished Seth came and sat on the step next to me. ‘You’ll get piles, sitting on cold stone,’ he said mildly.

‘That’s an old wives’ tale, like the one that says eating
too much sugar gives you worms. Yuk! Anyway,
you’re
doing it too.’

We sat there in amicable silence for a moment or two, contemplating the terrace. ‘It’s odd how suddenly it’s all starting to come together,’ I mused. ‘Now I can imagine what it will be like once it has all settled and grown a bit—but I suppose you could see that in your head right from the start?’

‘Yes, though it’s changed a bit as we go along. Using that pile of weathered old bricks from behind the pigsties for the path will give it a settled look instantly and then when we put the gravel down, the pattern of the knots will be more defined until the edging shrubs grow together.’

‘Didn’t you tell me they used several different colours of gravel in the late sixteenth century?’

‘Yes, but I’m sticking to one throughout here, because we’ve already got the contrast between the bricks and the wall, and it all has to blend together. We’ll plant up the compartments inside the knots later with flowering plants popular at the time.’

Now I was starting to see it coming to life and colour too. ‘Where are you putting the big topiary trees?’

‘The pyramid yews are for either end of the terrace and the holly balls for the corners of the central knot. I’ve got a large spiral for the middle that I’ve been nurturing for years—but then, topiary takes time. It’s the wrong time of year to do all this, but to be ready by next year, we have to push on when we can.’

‘It should look pretty good by Valentine’s Day, and absolutely
amazing
by the time we open for the season at Easter,’ I said optimistically.

‘The major work will certainly be finished by February, so when Derek takes over as head gardener he should be able to keep the place up with just Hal and Bob’s help.’

Startled, I turned to look at him, but he was gazing off across the valley. ‘Why, where are
you
going?’

‘Well, you won’t want me once it’s finished, will you?’ he said diffidently. ‘I know you’re just letting me stay on to complete the scheme.’

I stared at him, astonished—until I remembered that that was pretty much what I
had
thought at first…It seemed a long time ago. ‘But Seth, I don’t want you to leave!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re family, for one thing, and you
belong
here.’

‘I’m only family by marriage, not related at all, really.’

‘You
feel
like family.’

‘Do I?’ He gave me one of his more unfathomable looks.

‘Yes, and you have a stake in the garden too. You know you love it.’

‘Yes, of course, but—’

‘Look, Seth, do you
want
to go?’

‘Well, no…but—’

‘If it suits you to stay here as before, then that’s fine by me. I
really
don’t want to lose you.’ I found I was gripping his arm as if I could hold him at Winter’s End by force, and snatched it away, going a bit pink. ‘Free gardeners don’t grow on trees,’ I finished lightly.

‘That’s what Ottie says, and that the arrangement seems to suit both of us. Have you seen that sculpture yet, the one we’re suppose to fit into the garden? I don’t know where she thinks we’re going to put it!’

‘I thought we’d decided on the rose garden. And do you think I should go and look at it? I thought she might not want me to see it until it’s finished.’

‘She won’t mind. In fact, she may not even notice you’re there.’

‘She
does
seem pretty engrossed—Jonah takes her dinner across to the studio to her every night. The lights seem to
be on in the studio day and night, so she must have a very extreme work ethic—or maybe a work addiction.’

‘Yes, you can’t say she isn’t focused.’

‘Every time I pass, there she is working away—wearing one of those enormous lumberjack shirts too. She’s so elegant, they seem an odd choice of overall.’

‘They were my father’s,’ Seth said shortly. ‘I think she’s practically worn them to death.’

‘Really? I think that’s very touching.’

‘I suppose it is. They were pretty wrapped up in each other, though my father’s passion was the garden and Ottie’s her sculpture. I suppose it equalised out.’

‘So where did you fit into the scheme of things?’

‘Around the edges, mostly. Ottie was always kind to me, and my father loved me in his own way, but neither of them was very good with children. Things got better once I was older.’

‘I always longed to be part of a large family,’ I confessed, ‘or at least to get back to the feeling of family I’d had when I lived here. Of course there was the commune in Scotland, but that felt more like belonging to a tribe. And then, when I did come back here, I found Jack had taken over the place I once had and I was
horribly
jealous.’

‘Natural.’

‘I suppose so and now I know Jack I don’t really mind quite so much, because I’m fond of him too.’

He got to his feet and looked inscrutably down at me. ‘Yes, you are, aren’t you?’

‘It was lovely to find I had a relative I didn’t know about,’ I explained. ‘Oh, well, I’d better go and get on. Mr Yatton has drawn up a list of all the children who will be coming to the party on Christmas Eve, so I’m going to go and buy presents for Father Christmas to hand out. I suppose I’d better get some spares, too.’

‘And I’d better get back to work.’

‘Yes…Seth, there aren’t any box trees down here, are there?’ I asked tentatively, because something had been puzzling me.

‘I was moving a couple of container box spirals on the top terrace earlier—do I reek of it?’

‘Yes, you do rather,’ I said with a grin. ‘It’s not the nicest of smells, though you may attract the odd vixen.’

‘You can say that again,’ he said obscurely, then went off to admire Derek’s bricklaying while I took my frozen and numb bottom back to the house.

Later, I did what I had been longing to do and went over to the studio. I could see Ottie standing in her usual contemplative pose in front of the sculpture, back towards me, so I tapped gently on the glass door before opening it.

‘Hi, can I come in? I don’t want to disturb you,’ I said cautiously, though my eyes were irresistibly drawn to the large shape beyond her

‘That’s all right,’ she said, turning and refocusing her bright blue eyes on me with, it seemed, an effort. ‘I was just about to make a cup of tea. Want one?’

‘Yes, please, but really I wanted to see how the garden sculpture was coming on, if you don’t mind?’

‘Look all you like—and there’s the maquette; that will give you more idea of how the finished thing will look.’ She pointed out a small model on the work surface, then plugged in a clay-smeared kettle and got out a battered tin tea caddy decorated with a portrait of Charles and Di on their wedding day.

I looked from the sculpture to the model…and back again. There seemed to be a face, half-animal, half-human, at the heart of it, amid a whirlwind of spiky wings—the Spirit of the Garden, presumably? It was masculine and vaguely familiar…