Chapter Six
He leads me down the stairs, not the side ones but the main curving staircase that takes us into the heart of the house to the big ballroom with the murals.
From there, we cut into the east wing, past the kitchen and a few other rooms, down the corridor to a door that opens out on to another garden.
This roughly triangular one fills the space between two wings, the east and the south, and is a quarter the size of my North Park. Otherwise it’s the same tangle of overgrown hedges and weeds. Except this one has more trees. Lots of trees. I can just see the tops of them above everything.
None of it has been cleared.
“When did you start here?” I ask as we both walk the footpath that runs along the walls of the house.
“Eight weeks ago. I moved in just before Christmas.” A moment later he looks over his shoulder at me. “You’re wondering what I’ve been doing all this time if I haven’t even made a start.”
“No, just… I mean…” Hoping not to sound rude, I start again. “It’s just that winter would have been the perfect time to get the land ready for planting.”
“It would have been perfect if I had the time. I’ve been very busy.”
With what?
We slow down then stop to look at the neglected grounds.
“There.” He points. “Those are good fruit trees, but you can hardly see them for all the privet.” He pulls at a frond of green leaves that must be ten feet tall.
“I’m surprised at the sheer variety of what was planted here.
” He pushes between the overgrown privet to create a gap so we can see.
“Victoria plum and Marjorie plums, damsons, three types of apples, peaches, cherries, walnuts and pears.” He lists fruit like an enthusiastic shopper.
“And over by the wall”—he points to the south wing—“berries – so many kinds. It’s as if someone wanted to make this an idyllic Arcadian orchard. ”
“You feel it too?” I ask. “That illusive sense of the past owners?”
“Not that, but yeah, a sense this must have been really something.”
When I look around, what I see isn’t only the wilderness, but the ghost of what used to be. We continue walking along the narrow crazy paving that skirts the garden towards the south wing of Kendric House. Right at the end there’s another entrance. Osian produces a key and unlocks it.
The heavy wooden door opens with a long creak worthy of a horror movie. Osian grimaces. “I’ve oiled these hinges but they’re beyond repair; they’ll need to be changed. Come on.”
We climb up some back stairs. Very dirty although not with old encrusted dirt but debris left by recent building works.
Osian leads me up past the first two floors to the third. “This wing is higher than the rest. Most of Kendric House only goes up to the first or second floors.”
“I think Evan mentioned the wings were designed by different people.” I pant the last words. Climbing all those stairs at Osian’s pace leaves me out of breath. Whether he still plays tennis or not, he’s very fit.
“This would have been the servants’ quarters.” He finally stops at the third-floor landing.
The corridor here is much narrower, the ceilings lower. And unlike our wing, the doors into the bedrooms are much closer together. Smaller rooms, I guess.
Unlike the other floors, this is clean and smells of fresh paint.
Osian opens the first door to show me a bedroom with a small double bed, a desk, an armchair and coffee table and a wardrobe.
This is the only room that’s fully furnished; the others – some a little smaller or a little bigger – are still bare.
All in all, there are eleven rooms, all with their own tiny ensuite shower rooms.
“We still need to complete the wiring. I also want a small service kitchen at the end of the corridor, so someone staying here doesn’t need to go all the way down to the main kitchen every time they want a cup of tea.”
“Is this going to be a hotel?”
“No…” Again the small hesitation I heard back on our balcony. “It’s accommodation for my – erm – residents.”
I stare at him and wait for an explanation.
“I’m going to be running what you might call courses.”
Of all the things I thought he might say, this is the last. “You’re running gardening courses?”
He shakes his head. “You’ll have heard of things like yoga retreats and residential meditation courses. You know, the kind of thing where people spend a month, sometimes longer, in some ashram in India or Thailand.”
I nod.
“I am doing the same. But with planting instead of chanting.” His previous hesitation fades; instead, I hear a note of real pride in his voice as he glances around the bedrooms.
“Go on,” I say.
“Have you heard the expression Dod yn ?l at fy nghoed?” His accent takes on that Welsh lilt and the un-English stress on the ending of words.
“Dodnoy…” I try to mimic and fail.
“Dod yn ?l at fy nghoed,” he repeats, as if he has another voice, deeper and more melodic. “Translated literally, it says return to my trees. It means to find mental balance and unwind, to find peace.”
We stand in the middle of the cold corridor, and his eyes shine with warmth.
“You see, there’s been considerable research into the effects of gardening or farming on psychological wellbeing.
Take, for example, someone who feels they’ve hit a brick wall.
” He starts ripping newspapers from the windows, letting in early morning sunlight.
“For people who feel as if they have nowhere to go, planting something and waiting for it to grow can give them a sense of purpose. When you watch a plant sending up leaves and flowers, or fruit, even a potato, a spring onion… it feels like success. It can bring back hope.”
I agree. Oh God, how I agree.
My own life proves it.
How often have I thought that when the rest of my world is a disaster zone, only gardening brought me peace and satisfaction? I don’t tell him all this; my autopilot comes to my aid.
“How many of these workshops do you plan to run?”
“I’ll run as many as I can. Each course is six weeks long, so you do the math.”
Do the math. It’s an American expression. A reminder of his marriage to the American Kirsten Sheringham.
I shake the thought away. “Will you run all year?”
“Theoretically. Not when the ground is frozen, which is a shame. Winter is hardest on people when they’re depressed.”
“Have you thought about building a greenhouse? You could do the planting inside during the colder months,” I say, infected with his enthusiasm. “You know, potting, propagation.”
“Or experiment with different vegetables, crossing different varieties…” He trails off and stares into the distance, thinking, trying out the idea in his head.
I give him time and go to look out of one of the windows at the back of one room. It overlooks the patch of land he’s going to be working in his project.
Even this project is a trace of the old Osian.
Like when I looked at the garden and saw traces and clues.
The boy who once refused to believe gossip about our teacher; his courtesy, even when students chased him for selfies; the kindness and care when he handled my broken plant then searched for a nursery that sold that rare hybrid – they were all clues to the caring thirty-three-year-old man, now, who wants to help others.
“It hadn’t occurred to me.” Osian joins me at the window. “But indoor planting could work. I’ll need to wait until I’ve made enough money. Greenhouses aren’t cheap to build and I don’t want to take out a loan. I hate debt.”
“A mortgage is a kind of debt,” I point out.
“Yeah, I don’t have one of those either.”
Surprised, I twist around to look at him. “You don’t—” Then I stop myself. My curiosity has overcome my manners. “Sorry, none of my business.”
“It’s all right,” he says lightly. “I bought my own house outright. It’s not difficult in a small village like Solva. In the last few years, the area has become more popular and more expensive, so I made a profit when I sold it.”
“You sold it?” Again I ask before I can stop myself.
“What do you think is paying for all this?” He waves at the newly decorated rooms. “My investment into a new—” He stops himself in time but I saw the way his mouth began to shape the letter L.
Life?
“A new enterprise,” he says. “Once the accommodation is ready, I can start on my garden, get the grounds ready for planting. Hopefully, my first residential course will start middle of March.”
“So this will be your garden of wellbeing?”
His eyebrows quirk up. “Garden of Wellbeing. That’s a good name. Maybe a little on the nose, but certainly in the right direction.”
“The ornamental orchard?”
“I like the word orchard. But it’s not ornamental. It’ll be vegetables and maybe fruit trees if enough of them are still viable.”
“No, I meant what it was before.” I nod at the view beneath the window
He no longer thinks me an idiot, so I’m not getting the polite pitying expression. Just a little frown.
“Sorry,” I laugh. “I tend to go a hundred miles a minute sometimes and not explain properly. I think I know what your garden used to be a hundred, even two hundred years ago.”
“How?”
“Want to see?” I ask, in an echo of his question to me earlier.