Chapter Eight
We head downstairs, through the house to the terrace. The air is fresh and smells of trees. A smell that always makes me feel better.
Osian drags over a couple of garden chairs, the plastic kind you get from B they are wonderful.”
“Bread basket?” Osian asks in a suggestive tone.
“Fresh baked on the premises.” Leonie sounds very proud. “My first month’s takings all went on a large oven and a professional bread mixer. I reckon every café needs a signature and mine will be fresh bread.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have any—”
She understands him instantly. “As I’m still experimenting, you can have a bread basket for one pound. Call it a special Kendric House community perk.”
Osian is all enthusiasm ordering breakfast, but my thoughts linger on what she said.
“You all right?” Osian asks when Leonie’s gone back inside to prepare.
“Sorry. Yes, I’m fine.”
“You suddenly went a bit…” He trails off.
Glancing around, I see that Leonie has already gone back inside. “She’s very successful, isn’t she? I mean, fresh baked bread. That’s a real crowd pleaser.”
Osian is watching me, a little vertical line between his brows. “Why does this upset you?”
“It doesn’t. I’m happy for her.”
The way he keeps watching me, just sitting and waiting. In the end, it makes me explain. “When did she open her café?”
His eyes flick left and right, calculating. “Two weeks ago.”
Yes, that’s what I thought. She said I was her first customer on the day I came for my interview.
“I don’t know much about professional catering equipment, but they can’t be cheap. Yet she can afford to spend that after… what, two weeks of trading? That’s a viable business.”
“And…?” he quizzes.
“My enterprise is unlikely to make that kind of profit, and not until summer.” If – please, God – I manage to clear enough ground to plant something in time.
“Did you want to be a caterer?”
His question takes me so much by surprise, I laugh. “Caterer? Me? Everything I ever cooked came out of a cardboard box with microwave instructions on the back.”
“Me too,” he agrees. “And with cooking, it’s kinda end heavy.
I mean, it starts easy but towards the end there seems to be a lot of seasoning and adding things.
My memories of Christmases at home are my mother dashing about for the last hour and a half trying to get everything done because most of it had to be done last minute.
Gardening is the opposite. It’s slow to start – you dig and plant, and for ages it looks like nothing is happening.
But towards the end you only need minimal maintenance and the plants just do the work for you.
They kind of…” He makes a bursting motion with his hands.
“They explode into life,” I say.
“Exactly!” He leans forward, more animated. “It’s as if they take over and do all the growing themselves. All you have to do is—”
“Watch.” I also lean forward. “As they go on surprising you day after day, more and more.”
“You two seem very happy.” Leonie glances between us as she brings a tray over.
Osian springs up to bring a small plastic table in front of us.
“I wasn’t sure what tea you wanted.” Leonie puts the tray down. There’s an aromatic basket of bread covered with a cloth napkin and a dish with butter. “Considering it’s morning I’ve gone for Assam. What kind of jam do you want?”
Both Osian and I shake our heads. Who wants jam to mess with the pure heaven of crusty bread rolls hot from the oven and a strong cup of tea?
My worries haven’t gone away but they seem smaller. Not only because of the tea – and the way Osian butters a slice of bread and passes it to me – but also because my hope and excitement about planting has come back.
The morning sunshine makes everything seem brighter, even the old and crumbling slates under our feet where weeds have grown.
Osian, following my gaze, says, “I guess Leonie still has a lot to do before her café dream is a reality. She’s been talking about making the terrace into an alfresco eating area for the summer. She wanted me to advise her about potted orange trees.” He shoots me a meaningful look.
His meaning is clear. It’s not only the two of us who have far to go. Everyone here has been working hard to build something.
Osian asks me a question, but something else has snagged my attention. “Sorry, what?”
“I was asking you about the name,” he says, offering me a buttered slice of rye bread with tiny seeds of something like aniseed. “But I can see you’re miles away.”
“Sorry, I was only looking around.”
He starts buttering another slice of bread for himself. “Is this your favourite word?”
“What word?”
“Sorry. You said it ten times this morning.”
“Sorry.”
“Eleven.” He takes a huge bite, chews, then drinks the last of his tea.
“It’s been pointed out to me that I start saying sorry when I’m…”
When I’m nervous or feeling vulnerable. My university boyfriend called it one of my ‘tells’.
If I started replying ‘sorry’ to every question, it meant I was scared or worried.
Even back then when I was not even twenty, when life seemed simple, I had this one big worry.
My lifelong fear of looking like a joke, like the deluded ordinary girl with extraordinary dreams. Remember her?
The sixteen-year-old girl who really believed she could get Prince Charming.
“You’ve disappeared again.” Osian’s voice brings me back to the terrace outside the café. “What’s taken your attention?”
To cover my thoughts, I get up and walk towards the five or six steps that lead down to the gardens. “See this low wall?” I ask him, pointing. The steps down to the garden curve around a low wall which seems to have blue stones. Why would anyone build a wall with blue stones?
“The one behind the ivy?” he asks, following me. When he reaches the curtain of ivy, he drops into a crouch and grabs one of the branches to push it away. The wall behind is indeed blue.
“Wait,” I say, moving for a closer look.
Of course, he’s in my way and unless I want to drape myself over him to peer at the tiles, I have to step around him into the flowerbed.
Lifting my leg high over some dead bushes, I walk right up to the screen of ivy and rub dirt and decades of mud and gunk from one tile.
“This is ceramic tiling. Fired in a small kiln.” I scan around. “It’s unusual in this kind of outdoor usage. Victorians never used tiling like this; it’s more Art Nouveau.”
“Which means…?”
“There has to be a reason for putting them here. The question is, what?”
He glances up at me. “If you had to guess?”
“Then, I’d say there’s bound to be a more decorative detail somewhere further along.”
“You think there might be something else hidden under the ivy?” He’s curious but also doubtful.
“This place has a…” I try to explain. “I don’t know how to say it, but you felt it in your orchard of wellbeing. A purpose that can’t be ignored. It wants to be discovered. And it’s the same here. As if the original design of this park wants to come back to life.”
“Here, take my hand.”
Osian’s words startle me. He’s moved out of the flowerbed and is offering a hand to help me climb back out. His attention is on the land, not on the tiled wall.
“So?” he asks when we’re both back on the terrace and have poured more tea. “What do you think about a tractor?”
I pause with the cup halfway to my mouth. “Tractor?”
“I mentioned earlier.”
He did? I must have been miles away.
“To clear all the privet and pull up any dead trees in my patch, I’ll need a tractor. So if you like, the tractor can clear everything for you in three days.”
A tractor. Yes, that might work. “Once I have a map for them so they know what to dig up and where to stay clear. Yes, that would work.”
“We’ll need trucks too, for all the waste,” he says.
“Why trucks? Can’t we just build a bonfire?”
“Sure. If you want to burn down Kendric House. We’re going to have mountains of the stuff.”
Every now and then, he says something that sounds oddly American, like his use of the word yeah, and sure. Little reminders of his American wife.
Speaking of which, where is she?
“Evie? Come back from wherever your mind’s gone to.”
Embarrassed, my face heats. But the look in his eyes is kind and slightly amused, as if he finds me interesting, not foolish.
“I was saying, we can go halves on the hire cost.”
“That’s very generous of you. But it’s not fair to you. My land is five times bigger than yours.”
“Not generous at all. You might have more land, but it’s only bushes and grass to clear. A tractor can plough through it like a warm spoon through ice cream. My plot has deeply rooted dead trees that will have to be uprooted one at a time. It’ll take ages. Then there’s all that topiary to clear.”
“All of it?”
“Of course. To give me empty land for my cabbages and carrots with their mental health issues.” He says this so deadpan, I might have thought him serious.
Then I see the half-teasing expression and have to laugh.
He himself doesn’t even smile, yet he’s made me laugh twice in the space of half an hour.
He’s actually a much better partner than any of my past colleagues.
Not only funny and easy going, but also kind and supportive.
And he has good ideas. In the same way that I pour the tea while he cuts and butters the bread.
I might have the creative ideas – me and my blue wall, spotting his geometric design – but he has the practical ones. Ploughs, trucks, splitting costs.
Later my common sense is going to come back and tell me what a bad idea it is to go into a partnership with Osian James, even on a limited land-clearing job. But for now, I’m so happy with his solution that I could hug him.
“And I must thank you.”
“For…?” I would cock an eyebrow because that’s such a cool move, but I’ve never been able to move only one. So I raise both.
“You may not have noticed but when you were talking earlier, you said, ‘orchard of wellbeing,’ which gave me an idea. A name for my project. What do you think of this?” He holds his hands up to shape a square, like a shop sign.
The Orchard Centre for Wellbeing. Or perhaps give it the Welsh for Orchard. The Perllan Centre for Wellbeing.”
He looks at me for my opinion.
“It’s good. But wouldn’t The Osian James Orchard, or The Osian James Centre work better? I mean, take advantage of your reputation?”
He looks uncertain. “My rep—?” Then his face stills. There’s the smallest flicker in his eyes, no more. Yet, everything changes. The warm expression, the humour and lively interest are replaced by a wary, guarded expression.
Deliberately, he returns his teacup to the table and gets up. “Not many people recognise me. But I suppose working in television, you would.”
The words are friendly, but his voice has cooled. His entire body temperature has dropped several degrees. He walks back to the terrace doors.
What the hell happened here?
I can’t even ask him. He’s already through the doors and into the house. The last time I saw someone extract himself so fast was sixteen years ago at school, when Osian used to escape fans by hurrying into the school library.