Chapter Eighteen
Not many people managed to get time off during the Boxing Day sales.
Priority was given to those with children and families, so Rosie had to wait until the following Saturday to visit her garden.
Luckily, the weather stayed dry but there was a cold breeze, so she had pulled on her padded gilet underneath her fleece and tied her hair back.
She opened the back seat of the car and carefully lifted out her latest additions to the garden – a glazed terracotta planter, a wind spinner with hypnotic copper colour rotating blades, and a family of life-size stone hedgehogs.
They were all Christmas presents from her mother who always liked suggestions of what to buy.
The previous Christmas Rosie hadn’t wanted anything and her mother had given her a voucher for a spa day that was still lying in a drawer unused.
This year, Rosie had no problem whatsoever of thinking up ideas.
She smiled as she swapped over the key ring for the tool store to the one Connor had given her.
It was another small token of her new life (as well as that sizzling Christmas kiss!).
She took out her weeding equipment and then pulled on her beautiful leather gloves, that were almost too good to use.
The hedgehog family were placed in a group, peeping out from underneath the choisya bush that had now been cut back hard.
At the moment it looked horribly bare and leafless, but Dorothy had assured her it would put out lots of new leaves in the spring along with some gloriously scented white flowers in the summer.
She pushed the spikes of the wind spinner into the ground on the opposite side to the gate.
Once she had planted up the border, she would still be able to see it above the flowers, and already she could picture a whole row of beautiful colours.
Not neat ordered rows of plants like James had mapped out, but a vibrant blaze of shapes and colours.
She stepped back a few paces to check the positioning, and once more found herself falling backwards into Connor.
A pair of arms slipped around her waist.
‘Oops! And that’s the second time I’ve had to rescue you from falling backwards and injuring yourself. You really must take more care!’
Rosie giggled. ‘I wouldn’t have lost my balance if you hadn’t crept up and stood right behind me,’ she responded as she wriggled free. ‘So, how’ve you been? I think you said you were going to your brother’s for Christmas?’
‘Yeah, I did.’
Rosie recalled his refusal to contact his brother when he was ill. She didn’t know anything about his family, but she understood how, at times of the year when jollity was the expected default, tensions could arise.
‘Well, at least it’s all over for another year,’ she said with a smile.
‘Christmas might be, but I doubt I’ve heard the last of the brotherly advice.’
‘On what?’
‘Oh, just’—Connor waved his arm in an exasperated gesture—‘life, me, am I looking for work, that sort of thing.’
‘And you don’t want to look for work at the moment?’ asked Rosie carefully.
‘I do. I am. But it’s not as simple as people think.’
Rosie wandered over to the bucket that held her weeding tools and pulled out her two-pronged weeder, which had proved invaluable in winkling dandelions out of the lawn. ‘I don’t live in your world so I don’t pretend to understand how it works.’
‘The problem is that people make judgements about who you are and what you’re like based on a stupid photo in a magazine.’
‘And that matters?’
‘Yes, because once you’ve lost credibility, you’re not going to get any work from these people, are you?’
Rosie nodded thoughtfully. ‘Can’t you get work somewhere else?’
Her seemingly innocuous question caused an instant change in atmosphere.
‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ he said, irritably. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ Connor turned and marched back indoors.
‘Prima donna!’ Rosie shouted after him. She grabbed her kneeler and continued with her work.
She was not going to give Connor the satisfaction of running after him.
This was why it was safer not to get involved, even though the memory of that passionate kiss still lingered.
But was the kiss for real or was he merely putting on a show?
He had seemed to enjoy himself at the school concert, but then he also didn’t seem to mind when his dinner was interrupted by hordes of young women demanding selfies with him.
She wondered which version was the real Connor Forbes.
She jabbed her weeder hard into the turf several times and made an irritated growling noise. ‘What the hell is wrong with people?’ she said loudly.
‘Sod the lot of them,’ replied a voice on the other side of the fence.
Rosie paused in her ruthless extermination of the lawn weeds. She hadn’t realised someone was listening, although she conceded it wouldn’t be difficult to overhear as the gardens weren’t that big, plus they had both been shouting.
‘Sorry!’ she called out. ‘Just airing a difference of opinion. Sorry to disturb the peace.’
A woman’s head appeared at the fence. Her shoulder-length greying hair flapped gently in the breeze. ‘Glad you gave him a piece of your mind. He’s a grumpy bugger and no mistake.’
Rosie got to her feet and moved closer to the fence so she didn’t have to shout. ‘Sorry I haven’t introduced myself. I’m—’
‘Rosie, I know. You’re the gardener.’
Rosie inclined her head. ‘In a manner of speaking.’
The woman glanced around. ‘It’s certainly looking a lot better. I got fed up of all the weeds growing into our side, so I asked Bob to put a proper fence up.’
‘How long had it been a problem for?’
‘Oh ages. Dorothy next door tried asking nicely but nothing happened. Eventually all three of us’—she pointed at the flats with her finger—‘signed a letter asking him to do something about it.’
Rosie suppressed a smile. Ah, that’s what prompted Connor’s advert in the newsagent’s window!
‘I’ll try to keep the nuisance at bay in the future.’
‘And what about the weeds?’
Rosie laughed. ‘Yes, them too. Sorry I don’t know your name?’
‘Lilian. But everyone calls me Lil.’
‘It’s nice to meet you. I’ve often admired your garden, and that little playhouse. Someone is very lucky.’
Lilian pursed her lips and made a non-committal noise. ‘Well, they would be if they were here. No one uses it anymore now our son’s moved away with his two kids, but Bob won’t get rid of it. He doesn’t understand how I feel, seeing it there day in, day out.’
‘In my experience, men rarely understand how women feel.’
Lilian gave a hollow laugh. ‘Too bloody right, girl.’
Rosie felt quite flattered at being called a girl.
There were clearly some bits of this story that she didn’t understand, but she tactfully didn’t press further.
Instead she carried on with her weeding, not because she felt like it, but because she wasn’t going to give Connor the satisfaction of thinking she’d stormed off like he had.
What the hell was wrong with that bloke anyway?
He could be really charming, funny, passionate, generous, and then – bam – without any warning he was like a petulant child who didn’t get his own way.
She supposed she shouldn’t be surprised as most of the men in her life had let her down in one way or another.
Even now from beyond the grave, James had shone a light on a different aspect of their relationship that had hitherto gone unnoticed.
Only good old Simon had stayed on course, but he was in the “friends” column, which was why she’d always thought she could tell him anything.
However, on Boxing Day at her mum’s, he’d been distinctly funny about her going out for a meal with Connor.
If Simon had imagined some cosy, intimate tête-à-tête, he couldn’t be more wrong, and Rosie was almost tempted to phone him and put him straight about exactly what did, or more to the point, what did not happen.
It was very sweet of him to be concerned, and the silver necklace with a teardrop pendant was a lovely present, but it didn’t give him or anyone else the right to tell her how to behave or who she could see.
Rosie was still muttering about unreliable people as she pulled off her wellies and drove home. Halfway home her phone pinged with a text, but she waited until she had made herself a cup of tea and sat down at her sewing table before she looked at it. The one-word message was from Connor:
Sorry.
‘Sorry for what?’ she demanded as she threw the phone back in her bag. ‘Sorry for being a shit? Sorry I kissed you? Sorry I rented my garden to you? Or how about sorry your husband preferred to shag someone else but couldn’t be bothered to tell you?’
Her hands shook as she marched into the hall and returned with one of the boxes she’d collected from her mum’s house.
She lifted the lid off the large, white rectangular cardboard box and immediately the faint scent of roses wafted into the room.
Carefully, she removed the layers of tissue paper and the dried roses her mother had saved from her bouquet.
And there it was. Her special dress, worn for one day only; a physical touchstone to a day lying in the past, the memories of which were now tainted with evidence of deceit.
It had taken several shopping trips with her mum before she had settled on her choice of wedding dress but once she’d tried it on, she knew it was the one.
Made of ivory satin, it had a wide scooped neckline, and three-quarter length sleeves.
The bodice was embellished with lace panels covered in fine crystals, and the skirt lay in elegant folds over a layered, tulle petticoat.
She had felt like a princess the moment she’d tried it on, and in the weeks leading up to the wedding, just touching the dress made her feel special and treasured.