Chapter Nineteen
At half-past six in the morning, I’m just out of the shower and still in my underwear when there’s a knock on my balcony door.
Snatching up a pashmina, I clamp and wrap it under my arms to cover my upper body, then go to the glass doors.
Osian instantly retreats and turns his head away. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to… erm… Sorry.” He folds his arms, and even from behind his body looks tense.
“What is it?” I ask, using the bottom of the floaty white curtain to cover my legs.
“Erm… take your time? We’ll have coffee whenever you’re ready.”
“Sure. I’ll come out in a sec.”
Still averting his eyes, Osian moves sideways and disappears past my windows.
Is Nora still asleep or did she sneak back to her own bed? Hers and Llewellyn’s.
The thought makes me angry. Llewellyn doesn’t deserve this. Even if his girlfriend is Nymphet Nora, Osian should have had better sense.
Of course, my logical mind tells me it’s Nora who is the cheater, hurting her boyfriend, but my anger is all for Osian. I have to give myself a very serious pep talk while drying my hair.
Stop dwelling on this, Evie. Get dressed.
Lemon-yellow dungarees, this morning, and a navy-blue tee and…
And this is none of my business. No matter how he chooses to behave, it’s not for me to judge. He’s not mine; we only met a couple of weeks ago.
By the time I’m dressed and ready, my feelings are back in their proper place. I decide to make the coffee myself on my snazzy machine and walk out on the balcony with two steaming mugs.
Osian is leaning over the balustrade, looking at the garden, but straightens up when he sees me. “I didn’t mean for you to bring the coffee.”
There’s a happy expression on his face. Not from seeing me. It was there before.
“You haven’t tried this new blend.” I hand him a mug.
When he takes a sniff, his eyes close and he groans; a deep chesty groan that feels too private for me to hear.
“This is very good.” He opens his eyes. “What is it?”
“Jamaican Blue Mountain.”
Is it bad that the look of bliss on his face makes me happy?
And also sad. I’m trying really, really hard not to think about him having a similar look, closed eyes and deep groan, last night in bed with Nora.
God, how could he spend the night with someone like her? Besides, this kind of high school drama can’t be good for the community spirit in Kendric House that Evan and Haneen are trying to create.
He’s in faded jeans this morning; they hug his hips and look as good on him as the black trousers last night. I wonder how quickly those came off last night, with her.
“Evie?” Osian is suddenly standing much closer to me.
“Sorry.” I step back, almost unbalancing so he has to grab my arm to steady me.
“Where did you go?” he asks, releasing me.
“Me?”
“I repeated my question twice, but you were miles away.”
“Sorry.”
“Am I making you uncomfortable?”
The question is too perceptive, too near the mark. “No, of course not. Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re saying sorry a lot, which you do when uneasy.”
“Just a bit embarrassed you saw me with my hair dripping wet this morning.” My autopilot comes to my rescue like a champion.
His eyes flick around my face.
“Sorry— er, sorry?” I stammer. What is wrong with my head this morning?
He studies me for a moment longer, then gives a tiny head shake as if dismissing a thought. “Come with me, I want to show you something.”
He sets off down the balcony, and I follow him past the windows and doors of several other apartments which are still unoccupied, until we reach the far end of the wing.
He finally stops by the balustrade there and looks out over North Park.
“There.” He points with his chin. “Tell me what you can see.”
The gardens spread below us. There are the exposed parts we’ve been working on.
The tractor has cleared the land between the terrace and the first of the slate lines where we worked by hand.
Weeds and dead bushes have been cut all the way down to just about ground level.
From this height, the exposed slate lines are clear to see.
Just as I had tried to explain last night, some radiate from a quarter circle and expand in one direction, others point another way, in groups of six or seven.
My gaze follows the lines. There is something about the shapes, something almost familiar, but what?
“I was standing here yesterday, before dinner,” Osian says, bringing me back to earth with thump. “From this point you get a good perspective. I stood here for ages trying to make it out.”
“Before dinner. Not after, obviously,” I say, then wish I could bite the words back.
This time, he stops and gives me a sharp questioning look. “Why ‘obviously’?”
I lean over the balustrade to hide my face which always shows my thoughts. What was it he said he was trying to see? All my knowledge of historical garden design tells me there should be a pattern. Squares? Circles?
“Evie? Can you please talk to me about whatever is on your mind?”
My autopilot takes over; unfortunately it uses the wrong words. “Only that you were with Nora after dinner—”
“With who?” he almost hisses. “Where the hell did that come from?”
It’s too late to retreat now. And I don’t want a return to suspecting me of being a snooping journalist. “I just didn’t want to… I mean, I saw you together last night.”
“You saw us what?” he challenges, but quietly. “In the dining hall, talking. Nothing else.”
“I’m sorry. And this is not my… Nervous, sorry. It’s a genuine apology. It’s just that I wanted to call you to join a discussion about the gardens and mosaics but you were sitting close and… And I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“There was nothing to interrupt.”
As if needing to end the talk, he leans over the balcony railings. “So this design thing—” He straightens up and turns to face me. This time he looks angry. “Is that what everyone thinks? That I slept with Nora?”
I stand there feeling cornered, wishing I could be anywhere rather than here now.
“For Christ’s sake, Evie. She’s Llewellyn’s girlfriend. What do you take me for?”
How did I become the accused here?
A minute passes in silence, him breathing in and out. He seemed so happy earlier and I ruined his mood. We should have stuck to gardening talk.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s talk about something else. What was it you wanted to show me?”
He sighs. “Of course.” He turns back to the garden. “Something I noticed last night. After dinner.” He stresses the word after. “When I passed your door,” he adds, with a half-teasing smile.
My door? What does he mean?
“Look.” He nods to the garden. “Take your time. I think you will be able to see it.”
So I look. And keep on looking. There’s no sign of formal hedges, pathways, and flowerbeds laid out in symmetrical patterns. None of the usual templates seem to fit. But after a few minutes, I calm down and settle into the usual peace that gardens always inspire in me.
Hmm. There’s a shape there. Something I’ve seen before. The feeling is so strong it nags and nags at me. It’s like when you’re searching for something that you know is right in front of you but can’t see it.
I try another tactic. Relaxing my eyes until they lose focus. Blurry vision forces the logical part of my brain to the back and gives room for my imagination to step forward.
I can almost see a lady lying down.
It makes zero sense but it rings a bell. Something I’ve seen here, in this house. Actually, in my room.
“Osian.” I turn to him. “It’s the stained-glass panel above my door, isn’t it? What you saw last night.”
His lips stretch in the beginning of a smile. “Y-e-s…?” he encourages me.
Then we’re both hurrying back to my apartment, pushing the French windows open; inside, the stained glass looks dim because the sun is behind us.
I open my front door, and we walk out to stand in the hallway and look up.
Now with the sun shining through it, the image is clear.
A lady in a blue dress lies on grass. The gown is far too long and spreads in a curve, like the letter S.
The lady holds a fan, one of those old-fashioned ones that fold and open.
Except this one has only five segments – the Victorians called them leaves – and at the top, flowers sprout out of each of the leaves.
Pink flowers, graduating in colour through various shades from cherry blossom, orchid pink, raspberry, fuchsia and finally deep magenta.
“That’s the shape, a fan,” I breathe. “The slates are… they’re the dividing ribs of a fan.”
Osian’s eyes are shining. “With flowers inside.”
“Graduating in colour. Five shades…”
“Wait.” He puts a hand on my arm. “How many fans are there?”
I think I know the answer. It has to be. We both hurry back through my sitting room, out onto the balcony, and to the end where the perspective is just right to see the whole thing.
“Look.” Osian points. “There’s one fan. And up there, another.”
Not all the bushes have been cut, but enough to see at least part of the design. We count them. My heart wants fly up and out.
“Five fans,” I say. “I thought it might be the lady in blue, but it’s fans.”
“No. I think the lady in blue is a red herring. A blue herring,” he says, studying the garden below us.
No. No, no. Wait a minute. The Blue Lady fits too. “Look at the shape of the ground between the fans. Doesn’t it look like a sort of S?”
He squints trying to see it, but I can’t wait. “It’s a pond. Water.”
He keeps looking, then shakes his head. “This is something only you can see with your psychic vision.” He cocks an eyebrow at me. “But, seriously… pond water would not look blue. It’s not big enough to reflect the sky?”
True, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of this and can hear what the garden has been trying to tell me, finally.
“It’s all dried up and has filled with soil and debris over the years.
There are weeds growing there but I bet if we get rid of all that, we’ll find blue tiling.
You know?” I swallow the lump in my throat. “Like the tiles in the blue wall.”
He lets out a long, low whistle. “Blue pond and five pink fan-shaped flowerbeds.”
“No, no. Each fan a different colour but within each fan, see, there are five sections. So each fan has flowers in that colour graduating from pale to dark.”
“What would the other colours have been, aside from pink?”
I’m laughing, but my eyes fill with tears. “Five colours. I don’t know yet, but the way this is going, the garden will tell me soon. There will be clues down there.”
As we start walking back, he says, “I don’t pretend to communicate with gardens but I may have a few days to give you.”
“Give me?”
“You’ll need a bit of help with the clearing, won’t you? The tractor can’t go near the fan flowerbeds; they need clearing by hand.”
“What about your own work?”
“While you’ve been busy discovering things and listening to the soil, I’ve had my ‘orchard’”—he mimes inverted commas around the word orchard—“all cleared up. Nothing more to do until my first group arrive for the planting course next week.”
Is he serious? A week of working together? My heart dances a little, even as a warning voice speaks in the back of my mind, telling me working too closely with Osian isn’t a good idea.
It now makes sense: there is bound to be more to discover but I’ve got the key to this garden. Now the renovations will fall into place.