Chapter 7 — Her Own Address
TAMSIN
The award weighed less than the secateurs in Tamsin’s bag.
It was a flat piece of local slate with her name engraved beneath the words CONSERVATION LANDSCAPE CONTRIBUTION. The ceremony took place in the assembly room above the city library, where the radiators had been painted too many times and every chair rocked on the parquet.
Tamsin stood beside the lectern while the chair of the heritage forum described the restoration of St Anne’s physic garden.
He credited her patient planting research, her refusal to replace the old soil wholesale and her method of training volunteers to recognise seedlings before weeding.
Fifty-two people applauded. None of them needed to be corrected.
Graham’s chair in the second row remained empty.
He had accepted the calendar invitation in May. At four that afternoon, his assistant had sent a message saying the investor dinner could not be moved and Graham would call before Tamsin went onstage.
Her phone stayed silent in her bag.
The forum chair asked whether she wanted to say a few words.
“Thank you to the gardeners who kept the place alive long enough for us to stop interfering with it,” Tamsin said.
The volunteers laughed. She stepped away before the moment could grow ceremonial.
Afterwards, she drank half a glass of warm white wine and answered practical questions about overwintering angelica.
A retired architect asked whether she would consult on a private knot garden.
Tamsin took his card and told him her practice was accepting work again.
Saying it aloud made the dormant company feel less like a filing decision and more like a structure that would need to bear weight.
At seven fifteen she left the slate award with Lorna in the library cloakroom and walked three streets downhill to a closed flower shop.
Farah waited under the striped awning with a ring of borrowed keys. “You look excessively honoured.”
“The slate is in my friend’s tote bag.”
“Wise. Nothing says professional seriousness like making your lawyer carry masonry.”
Lorna arrived behind Tamsin and lifted the tote in demonstration. “It has already injured one pear.”
The old shop occupied the corner of a narrow brick terrace between a cobbler and a café that closed after lunch.
Dust filmed the front glass. Inside, the refrigeration cabinet had been removed, leaving a tiled recess and an exposed water line.
A long counter divided the sales floor from a back room with a deep sink.
Tamsin switched on the lights. Two tubes flickered; one did not.
“The landlord says he will replace those,” Farah said.
“The landlord says many things,” Lorna replied. “Most of them have been removed from the lease.”
Tamsin walked the floor with her tape. Forty-three square metres at street level. The back door opened into an enclosed yard broad enough for propagation benches if she used the north wall for shade. Water pooled below the outside tap, though there had been no rain since morning.
She crouched and pressed the cracked paving. “The supply pipe leaks.”
“Expensively?” Farah asked.
“Slowly. Which can be more expensive.”
Above the shop, a one-bedroom flat had a separate entrance from the lane. The carpet smelled of old perfume, and the bedroom window looked onto slate roofs and a strip of river beyond the warehouse chimneys. The kitchen tap juddered before producing brown water, then clear.
Tamsin counted sockets, checked the window catches and opened the cupboard under the sink. No active leak. Damp staining behind the waste pipe, old and dry.
“You said studio,” Lorna said from the doorway.
“It is a studio.”
“With a bed.”
“Many studios have beds. Artists are unreliable about boundaries.”
Farah leaned against the counter. “Do landscape designers sleep more responsibly?”
“Only when the drainage is correct.”
They left the flat and returned to the shop. Tamsin put her notebook on the counter and wrote the numbers again.
Six months’ rent in advance because Leith Groundworks had no current turnover.
Deposit. Business rates after the short relief period.
Public liability insurance. Used drawing table.
Two propagation racks. Soil-testing consumables.
A part-time horticultural technician if the riverbank trial became the full commission.
Her savings could cover nine months without income, or five if she hired help.
The riverbank trial paid enough for the soil report and concept work, not the installation.
The private knot-garden lead might become nothing.
The shop pipe and lights belonged to the landlord if Lorna’s amended clauses held.
She added a line for wages before she added one for herself. Lorna tapped the empty director-pay column.
“That is how dormant businesses become charitable organisations.”
“I can defer drawings from the nursery auction and use the counter for three months.”
“That addresses furniture.”
“I know.”
Tamsin entered a modest monthly draw, then reduced the equipment allowance instead. It left enough for rent and food if no second client appeared by December. The number was uncomfortable because it placed her own survival inside the business model rather than outside it as an invisible subsidy.
“The courtyard budget is twelve thousand,” Farah said. “That includes resident sessions and the trial beds. I won’t pretend it can carry this place.”
“It can carry its own work.”
“If the committee approves you on Tuesday.”
“If.”
Lorna set the bruised pear beside the notebook. “And if it doesn’t?”
Tamsin looked through the front glass. Across the road, rain from a brief shower had collected in a depression beside the kerb. Bus tyres lifted it in brown fans. The shop’s step stood seventy millimetres above pavement level, enough for ordinary runoff, not enough if the blocked gully backed up.
“Then I have an expensive room and time to find other work.”
“That is an answer,” Lorna said. “It is not a forecast.”
“No.”
Tamsin had spent years making forecasts for Graham. Which sites would flood, which trees would fail, which public promises would create maintenance no one funded. She had made herself useful by finding the hidden cost before he signed.
The habit now turned towards her own risk.
“I can take the flat out of the lease,” Lorna said. “That cuts the advance by a third.”
“Keep it.”
“You have a home.”
“I want the option.”
Lorna did not ask what kind. She opened the amended lease and pointed to the repair schedule. “Then read this paragraph again. The pipe, electrics and external drainage are the landlord’s responsibility. You cannot decide you are being kind and repair them yourself.”
“I am rarely kind to supply pipes.”
“You are catastrophically kind to invoices.”
Farah pretended to examine the old price hooks on the wall.
Tamsin read every clause. The document did not protect her from failure; it identified which failure would be hers. That was useful. She initialled the repair schedule, signed the lease and transferred the deposit and advance from her personal savings.
The banking application required a trading address. She entered the flower shop.
Then she opened Farah’s trial-work order. The residents wanted relief from basement damp, usable seating, planting that could survive children and salt wind, and a maintenance plan that did not depend on annual professional visits. Calder Meridian was not named anywhere.
Tamsin signed as director of Leith Groundworks.
Farah took the duplicate. “Site at eight tomorrow. Two residents will tell you the drain is fine. One of them keeps a broom beside his front door for pushing water away.”
“Does he use it before or after the downstairs toilet backs up?”
Farah smiled. “That is why I called you.”
Lorna held out the keys. Tamsin closed her fingers around them, then opened her hand again.
“These are the shop and flat?”
“Blue for the front, brass for the lane, small one for upstairs. The yard bolt sticks.”
Three keys. They were cold from Lorna’s pocket and edged with somebody else’s years of use. Tamsin put them on a plain steel ring rather than attaching them to the Calder house keys.
Her phone rang.
Graham’s name lit the screen.
The investor dinner would be between courses now. Sabine would be seated where the room photographed best. Graham might have remembered the ceremony when his calendar alert fired, or when his assistant told him the call had not been made.
Tamsin let the phone ring until it stopped.
“Do you need to return that?” Farah asked.
“No.”
The answer did not make the empty chair less empty. It did, however, leave the next ten minutes available.
She walked through the shop again and assigned functions.
Drawing table beneath the north light. Locked cabinet for originals.
Soil work in the tiled recess. Client table near the window, where residents could see the plans without being made to sit across a formal desk.
Propagation in the yard, raised above the leaking pipe until it was repaired.
Upstairs, the flat would remain mostly empty. A bed, a kettle, clean towels and storage for work clothes. Tamsin added smoke alarms and a locksmith to the first-week list. An option only mattered if it could be used without asking anyone else to make it ready.
Lorna opened the front door. “There is no champagne.”
“There is a bruised pear.”
“We have already established what professional recognition does to fruit.”
Farah left for a committee call. Lorna took the award home for safekeeping. Tamsin stayed to measure the back wall for shelving.
At nine twenty, Graham sent a message.
I am sorry. Dinner ran over. Did the ceremony go well?
Tamsin turned the phone face down on the counter. She did not answer the question he could have witnessed.
Outside, the kerbside puddle found the gully at last and emptied. Inside, she wrote LEITH GROUNDWORKS on a sheet of packing paper, taped it to the glass and set her alarm for the riverbank site.