Chapter Three #3
Edie looked up at the dripping canopy of trees.
“Tell that to my family and friends and their helpful unsolicited feedback. ‘If you hate it here so much, why don’t you leave?’ ‘You can’t make cheese out of nuts and mushrooms and vegetables.
’ ‘I don’t get it. It’s not cheese.’ ‘Forty-five dollars a pound! For what, a salad compressed into a cube?’ ‘What do you pair with the cheese, no-booze wine?’” Edie kicked an acorn.
“And yes. I did. I didn’t have a liquor license. ”
“It exists, right? Fauxmage? You found a bank and made the sign. You told me what you sell. So who cares about the critics? Or your so-called friends and family? They can stuff their heckling mouths with Kraft singles.” Cosima was starting to worry Edie would win this game.
“That’s the thing. They were right.” Edie smiled.
It was her first obviously, identifiably not-real smile.
“Four months. That was how long I had my dream. It started coming apart after the first quarter. The amount of money I needed to make in that fourth month to stay open was more than I’d made in the three months prior.
I tried so many different kinds of things—social media ads, newspaper coverage, interviews with the Chamber, bids to serve the lactose intolerant—for it all to end with a sad closing party and an article in the paper headlined ‘No Mo Faux.’” Edie gave Cosima another two-dimensional smile.
“Did the cloud come? Is it weird now between us?”
Cosima pressed her hand against her tight stomach. “No. You don’t win. The pool party wasn’t my worst. I just haven’t said it myself because you already know my worst.”
Edie’s brows furrowed. “I do?”
Cosima looked into Edie’s face and realized she was perfectly serious. How could that be?
Except Edie had just told her how—working hard, trying to revive a failing business, then being here. She hadn’t caught up to the news. Or she didn’t want the news, in the aftermath of what had happened to her, and was avoiding it.
They were both here, after all—strangers on a damp lane, thousands of miles from home—on the promise of seeing a hedgehog.
“My mother died.”
“Fuck me, Phoebe Frank died?” Edie’s eyes were wide with shock.
No one had believed Phoebe was mortal. No one seemed to have contemplated any possibility other than Phoebe on earth forever, taking audiences far beyond it in film after film, appearing in interviews with only the smallest of character creases around her famous eyes and glamorous threads of silver snaking through her curls.
Only Cosima and Duncan weren’t shocked.
But there had been surprises even between the two of them.
Cosima had seen tears in Duncan’s eyes before—at the end of her ballet recitals, at her graduations, when she held her parakeet George in her hands as she rested him on a bed of coneflowers in a grave Duncan had dug—but she’d never seen him weep.
She’d never heard his heart break like crystal.
Not until her mother died, defying everyone.
Taking life’s deal like anyone else, without negotiation.
Cosima had not cried. Her mother had told her not to.
But here, in this no-place far away from shock or broken hearts, confronted with one small woman’s simple shock and watery eyes, Cosima felt for a moment like a daughter, a girl, a very tired woman, who’d always thought Phoebe was in charge of the world, and who was angry that her mother had left her.
“God, Cosima.” Edie had both hands plastered to her cheeks. “I am so, so, so sorry.”
“You didn’t know her.” She shook her head, seized with a vicious impulse to yell, I ran away! From everything! All of it! “You don’t know me.”
Edie frowned, gathering her hair from her shoulders and twisting it like the tar-covered rope of a tall ship over her shoulder. “I don’t. I didn’t. But even if it’s complicated, it’s not anything you want to happen to anyone.”
“It’s not complicated.” Cosima bit the inside of her cheek until it hurt the same amount as her stomach. “It’s private.”
But even as she chose the word, private, the lie gave a twisting pinch to her lungs.
It wasn’t complicated, and it wasn’t private. Secrets weren’t the same as privacy.
Edie’s enormous green eyes contemplated her expression. Cosima let her look. She lifted an eyebrow and imagined a sledgehammer smashing apart the hot lump of grief in her throat.
“Okay, then.” Edie shoved her hand into one of the kangaroo pockets of her gargantuan green raincoat and pulled out a crumpled pink and yellow bag.
“Rhubarb custard?” She unfolded the top of the bag.
“I’ll be honest, they’re not what I expected when I bought them from a shop at Heathrow.
Morag calls them ‘boiled sweets’ like she’s in a three-hundred-year-old play about British people instead of a British person of this century, though I suppose she straddles the centuries.
I think you need sugar.” Edie shook the bag and held it out to Cosima.
“I know what rhubarb custards are.” Cosima took one.
The rough and sour surface of the candy—the way it flooded her mouth with sweetness when she rolled it between her teeth—chased away the sharpness in her throat and made one more survivable moment.
Like her hot baths, how they stung, then surrounded her.
Like the first bite of Morag’s butter-soaked toast after a night of bad dreams.
They stood in the lane, sucking on candy. For as much as Edie talked, she seemed to know when to be quiet. An occasional breeze rattled rain from the leaves of the trees overhead. Everything smelled muddy and green, spiked with the wet mineral scent of weak sun hitting the graveled lane.
Cosima didn’t know how long they had been standing still and silent when she noticed a movement and soft, rustling noises coming from the beautiful garden behind a fence that faced the lane. She looked toward the movement. Water shook off a big, floppy bergenia leaf.
A hedgehog ambled into view.
“Holy shit,” Edie said. “That’s one of Baroness Rachel’s hedgehogs. Morag was not kidding.”
The hedgehog paused in the lane, pointing its sniffing nose into the breeze, no doubt smelling their candy breath.
“My mother said the inn was magic.” The hedgehog’s back leg rose, and it furiously and comically scratched behind its ear.
“Phoebe Frank said that, for real?”
“You can’t say her whole name every time you talk about her. ‘Phoebe’ is fine.” Cosima crunched the candy. “It was in the eighties. She met my dad here.”
“You came here to be close to her?”
Cosima blinked at the unexpected question. Had she?
“What I’m doing here remains to be seen,” she said.
“Same, girl, same.” Edie shifted in her boots, somehow not startling the hedgehog, who only looked at her and adorably yawned, showing off rows of pointy little teeth.
They watched it sniff the ground, then amble away, disappearing behind a fence.
After it had gone, they started to walk back from where they came, saying nothing all down High Street. They were nearly to the inn when Cosima broke the silence, surprising herself. “Have you seen the garden? At Gregory Place?”
“I’ve heard the garden. The foxes are hard to ignore. But I haven’t looked at it yet. I do want to. I want to see where Morag is getting her weird hex bouquets.”
“I can see into it from my windows. It’s a mess.”
“I’m guessing it’s hard for Morag to do that kind of work anymore. She tells me she’s eighty-six, but I think that’s just her human glamour’s age. She dates back to the druids at least.”
“It looks like it was cared for once.”
One night, before Edie arrived, Cosima hadn’t been able to sleep.
She finally gave up around five in the morning.
She’d pulled on clothes and tiptoed down the stairs, leaving out the back door.
It felt like a dream. She followed a path to a gate set into a stone wall.
It took a great heave on the handle to budge the creaking iron.
She made her way around the perimeter first. In some places, she could walk along a path. In others, overgrowth blocked her way. She estimated the fenced area was two acres.
The lot the Castle sat on was considered parklike at eight-tenths of an acre, about thirty-five thousand square feet, but the first-floor footprint of the Castle took up ten thousand square feet of that.
After the pool, cabana, tennis court, and garage were accounted for, the gardens Cosima and Duncan had cultivated weren’t even fifteen thousand square feet.
Two acres was almost ninety thousand square feet of rough and neglected stone walls, follies, ponds, beds, greenhouse, orchard, and copses.
At one time, this was a garden that would have offered tours.
It would have bred new varieties of roses and narcissi in its greenhouse.
Its gardener would have had a display at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Cosima spent the last few hours of that moonlit night roaming around, mentally cataloging what she found, digging emerging perennials from fallen leaves, and guessing at the slope and where the garden was dry, where it was wet.
She came across a hedgehog then, too, in a den under a stone bench, blinking at her while it gobbled a grub.
It was clear no one had gardened at Gregory Place since at least as long ago as the interior of the inn was kept up, but perennials carried on even without tending.
Someday, a gardener would know Gregory Place again.
Cosima’s envy of this unknown, imagined, faceless gardener was breathtakingly sharp and unexpected.
When she had finally gone inside, Morag had made her breakfast tray.
Cosima took it from her wordlessly and floated back into her room, where she ate her breakfast and was finally able to sleep.
She’d had her first good dream since she came here, of herself and Duncan, planning a new flower bed.
Her mother was there, cutting flowers in a big hat.
Phoebe told them to plant a garden in the shape of an elephant, and then Duncan tried to come up with a list of plants that would look gray or silver in the California sun.
“If someone was taking care of that garden,” Edie broke into her musing, “they weren’t doing it by themselves.
Same with the inn. The way Morag is running it, she couldn’t handle much more than the two of us.
For the inn to make real money, it would need a staff around the clock.
It would have to exist on the map, and that takes people. ”
They returned to the inn in silence that should have been more awkward. Cosima climbed the stairs. She took a shower, not a bath—progress—but then got back into her bed, a pile of crisps and candy bars at her elbow and a stack of gardening magazines she’d grabbed off an end table in the lounge.
She wondered who had won their game.
Mentally, she awarded the point to Edie. What Edie had lost was something she had made herself, from her own dreams.
Cosima told herself it was ridiculous to feel sad about the inn’s dark and moldering garden. She had plenty else to feel sad about if that was what she wanted.
Was that what she wanted?