7. Freya
Freya
My mother volunteered me for the Plant Sale in her usual fashion. Without asking, and at volume, and to a room that heard her do it.
"Freya will help," she announced to Dilys, over my head, across her own counter. "She's under my feet from dawn till dinner. Maren can have her."
"I'm standing right here."
"I know you are. That's the problem I'm solving."
So that's how I came to be walking up the High Street on a bright sharp morning, two of my mother's traybakes carried as an offering.
The Glasshouse was the one part of town I hadn't braved yet.
It sits at the top behind a high stone wall, the old Victorian thing glittering away up there like the town's one piece of jewellery.
It had been half derelict when I left. Through the gate, I stopped.
The garden was waking.
That's the only way to put it. The beds had been turned and were steaming faintly in the sun.
The polytunnel glowed like something lit from inside.
Seed trays stood ranked along every bench in their hundreds, each one a little promise somebody had made to April.
Half the town was in there. Glenys with a fork.
The Pengelly twins being loudly forbidden from the beehives.
A daft golden dog tearing joyous laps around the orchard corner with somebody's glove in its mouth.
The hall alongside was as shabby as I remembered, paint gone, one gutter held up with wire.
Nobody seemed to mind. The whole place hummed like a held note.
"You'll be Sian's Freya."
Maren came at me the way a tide comes in. Broad, weathered, sleeves rolled, with a voice that had clearly never needed raising in its life. She took the traybakes out of my hands as though we'd arranged it years ago. One look. She saw exactly as much as I'd have preferred she didn't.
"I'm only here to help for the morning," I said.
"Course you are." She was already steering me down the path.
"Everyone's only here for the morning. Some of those mornings have been going twenty years.
There's tea in the big pot and a thousand pots to fill, and you've cook's hands on you, so you'll be quick about it.
Mind Barley. He's a fool but he means it kindly. "
The dog took the corner on two wheels by way of agreement.
And that, more or less, was that. Nobody asked where I'd been for ten years.
Nobody asked what my plans were, which was a mercy, since I didn't have any worth saying out loud.
Somebody put a mug in my hand. Somebody else put a dibber in the other.
I was set down at a long bench between Glenys and a woman I didn't know, in front of compost and seed packets and an ocean of empty pots.
Within twenty minutes I was part of the machine.
There's a rhythm to potting-on, it turns out.
Fill, firm, dib, drop, water. It's prep work.
It's the one language my hands have never forgotten, and the bench ran on gossip the way a kitchen runs on heat.
Glenys gave me the full state of the parish.
Who was courting. Who wasn't speaking. What the new people on Fore Street had done now, which had escalated, apparently, to gravel.
The twins came round selling dropped pegs back to their owners at a halfpenny each, and were bought out twice from sheer admiration of the cheek.
At the tea break, the bench got round to me. I'd been braced for it all morning. It came kindly, the way everything in this town comes, which makes it no easier to duck.
"You'll be doing the food for the Sale, then," Glenys said. Not a question. "Being a chef."
"I'm not. I mean, I was. I'm not doing anything at present."
"Nora's granddaughter," said the woman I didn't know, to the bench at large, as though that settled a debate I hadn't heard. "The teas were always Bevan teas, when the café did them. Best day of the spring, the Sale, when the café did the teas."
"The café's shut," I said. It came out flatter than I meant.
A small silence sat down at the bench. Then Maren's voice arrived over the top of us, mild as milk, from where she stood drowning seed trays two benches up.
"Plenty of time before the Sale," she said, to nobody in particular.
"Plenty of pots wanting filling first. Glenys, you've put three lupins in that one. "
The bench righted itself and sailed on, and I filled pots, grateful and rattled in equal measure. They hadn't pushed. Nobody here pushed. They just left the door of the thing standing open, the way you'd leave a gate open for an animal you hoped might wander in on its own.
I kept catching myself enjoying it anyway.
That was the thing I want to be exact about, because it mattered later.
The garden didn't ask me to be anyone. The city had wanted my hours, my hands, my sleep, my name on its rota.
This place wanted my thumbs in a pot of compost and would clearly have been just as pleased with anyone's.
There was a whole crowd of belonging up there going spare, lying about like the watering cans, free to whoever picked it up.
And I wanted it. That was the trouble. I sat there with dirt to my wrists and wanted it so hard my chest hurt.
Wanting is the part I've never been any good at. Wanting is a hook, and I'd spent ten years learning what gets done to the fish.
It was Emrys who saved me from my own head, by being rude to me.
He'd been visible all morning at the centre of the garden, a wiry old man in a flat cap working a strange formal bed of low hedges.
All curves and knots, half of it restored, half still rough grass.
Every time one of the twins strayed near it he produced a sound like a gate hinge and they fled.
Around eleven I was sent over with his tea, which I gathered was a test the bench had decided to run on me.
He looked at the mug. Then at me. "You're the cook," he said, in the tone you'd use for an outbreak of greenfly.
"I'm Freya."
"You're Sian's girl, Nora Bevan's granddaughter, and you've been gone ten years and come back thin." He took the tea. "Stand off the box edging."
I stood off the box edging. We surveyed his strange bed together, the dark little hedges making their pattern, the rough half waiting.
"What is it?" I asked.
"Knot garden." He said it the way other men say cathedral.
"Pendower's. The big house, up top. This whole garden was Pendower's once.
Glasshouse was her ladyship's conservatory.
I worked those gardens as a boy, when there were eleven of us on the staff and the beds ran to the cliff edge.
" He sipped his tea and looked at the pattern, and for a moment he wasn't seeing the rough grass at all.
"Famous, they were. People came on the train to smell them. "
"To smell them?"
"The violets, girl." He said it sharply, as if I'd failed to know my own name.
Then he saw my face and relented an inch, which I'd learn was Emrys at his warmest. "You've grown up in a town called Violet Bay and never asked why.
There was a violet grew here and nowhere else.
All over the estate ground, thick on the cliffs above the cove, a little dark flower with a scent that'd stop you in the road.
Sweetest thing ever raised on this coast. They sold the perfume of it in tins.
The bay's named for it. The town's named for it. "
"What happened to it?"
"What happens." He shrugged, one notch. "Family thinned.
Money went. Gardens went to ruin a piece at a time, and the violet went with them.
Forty years, more, since anyone's seen it growing.
Folk say there's still a root of it somewhere up on the cliff ground, in under the gorse.
" He drained his tea and handed me the mug, done with me. "Folk say plenty."
"You don't think it's there?"
Emrys looked up the hill, toward the chimneys of the big house you could just see over the wall, and his face did something complicated and brief.
"I think a thing can be lost so long the losing gets comfortable," he said. "Now get off my edging."
I carried that back down to the bench with the empty mug, and I couldn't have told you why it had landed so hard.
A flower. An old man's flower, gone before I was born.
But the bench had gone on filling pots without me, hundreds of them, thousands across the spring.
The whole town up here on its knees in the dirt, putting things into the ground on the bare faith they'd come up.
And the town that did that was named for something lost.
I thought about a dark café with the sign gone grey. I filled pots until my hands stopped asking questions.
It was gone two when Maren's voice carried down the garden that the staging in the glasshouse wanted looking at before it dropped a hundred seedlings on the floor. Somebody should fetch the trays off the far end. I was nearest. I went.
The glasshouse was empty of people and full of light.
That's the first thing. Outside was all racket and barrows, and in here the sound fell away into green and glass and the smell of warm earth and tomato leaves, a hush with a roof on it.
The staging ran down both sides, old timber benches grey with age.
At the far end a man lay half under one with a spanner, swearing at it quietly and with great patience.
I knew the boots. I knew the voice. By then I'd have known him with the door shut, because the warm sage of him was all through the glasshouse heat, and it reached me the way it had in the chippy. Like coming in off the wind to a fire already lit.
"Maren sent me for the trays," I said.
Rhys came out from under the bench too fast and fetched his head a crack on the timber that rang the whole staging.
I laughed before I could stop it. He sat there on the bricks, rubbing his head, looking up at me with an expression of such profound, wounded dignity that I laughed harder, and then he was laughing too.
Quietly, the way he does everything, but properly, eyes creased shut.
I'd forgotten his laugh. Ten years, and I'd forgotten it, and there it was filling up the glass like the light.
"You could announce yourself," he said.
"I did announce myself. You attacked a bench with your skull."
"It started it." He got up, unfolding all that new height, and put his hand flat on the staging and rocked it.
The whole run swayed. "Rotten at the post. She'd have come down by Friday with the lot on her.
" He'd brought timber, a saw, the spanner.
Of course he had. Somewhere in the years I'd been gone, the boy who mended what broke had become the man a whole town sent for.
"The trays are down your end," he said. "I'll pass them up."
So that's what we did. He lifted, I stacked, the pair of us moving down the staging in the green hush.
And it was easy. That was the dangerous part.
Not the scent of him, though the scent of him was everywhere in the warm air and I was breathing it like a fool at a bakery door.
The easiness. We fell into step the way you fall into an old chair.
My hands knew where his would be. No need to speak.
The light came down through the glass roof in long gold bars between us.
"You did all this," I said, somewhere in the middle of it. I nodded down the garden, at the staging, the cold frames, the polytunnel ribs. His work was everywhere once you knew his hand. The same neat joints. The same refusal to do a thing halfway.
"Some." He passed a tray up. "Maren feeds me. It comes out about even."
"It does not come out even. I've seen what you eat."
"Then I'm robbing her, and I'll thank you not to tell her." A pause, two trays long. Then, not looking at me, in the tone of a man asking nothing at all, "You're up here for the morning, then."
"Apparently some of these mornings have been going twenty years."
"That's what she tells everyone." He almost smiled. "It's true, mind. Ask Emrys."
"Emrys told me to get off his edging."
"Then you're in. He doesn't waste it on people who aren't staying."
It went through me quicker than I could get a guard up, the easy certainty of it. People who aren't staying. I opened my mouth to put him right. To say the sensible things, passing through, plans to make. The glasshouse had gone very quiet and warm around the words. None of them would come.
Then we reached for the same tray.
We didn't touch. I want to be clear about that, because of what it did to me anyway.
His hand came down a breath from mine on the tray's edge and stopped, and mine stopped, and neither of us moved.
Warm sage and sweet pea, close enough now that it was less a scent than a place, somewhere I'd lived once, somewhere with my name on it.
I looked up. It was a mistake. He was already looking at me.
The careful had gone out of his face entirely, and what was left was ten years old and brand new at the same time.
"Freya," he said. Just that. Low. The whole glasshouse leaned in to hear what came next.
My heart was going like a kicked drum. Every instinct I'd kept on a short rope for ten years had slipped it at once, all pulling one direction.
Toward the warmth of him. Toward the place with my name on it.
I stood on the edge of it the way you stand on a harbour wall in a high wind.
One lean. That's all it would have taken. One lean, and…
"FREYA!" The glasshouse door went off like a gun. "Freya, Maren says, Maren says you're to come, because Barley's been in the traybakes and Mrs Glenys said a word we're not allowed to say and you have to come NOW."
The Pengelly twins, in stereo, vibrating with the importance of the errand.
Rhys took his hand off the tray. I took my heart down off the wall. Whatever the glasshouse had been holding, it let go of, gently, the way a wave sets a boat back down.
"Go on," he said. The corner of his mouth had gone up. "Sounds urgent."
"Sounds like a crime scene."
"In this town, same thing."
I went up the path with a twin towing each hand, and I did not look back at the glasshouse, in the same deliberate way I had once not looked at a dark shopfront.
Behind me, faintly, I heard the saw start.
Steady strokes. A man fixing what was rotten so that nothing would fall, asking nothing for it, taking his time.
The traybake situation was resolved with less bloodshed than advertised. The afternoon wound down golden. And I walked home at dusk with compost under my nails and two things lodged in me side by side, snagged in the same soft place and equally impossible.
A flower nobody had seen in forty years.
And how close one lean is, when a thing is exactly the right distance away.