The Rose Garden

‘I do that now. They email me their orders and I fill them.’

‘Mr Sociable.’

‘And what exactly am I meant to blog about?’

I gave a shrug. ‘Whatever you get up to in the garden. Or the history of the roses. Or whatever strikes your fancy. It’s your blog.’

‘All right then, mastermind.’ He hitched a chair close to my own and sat. ‘You win.’ He scanned the templates. ‘That one’s not too bad.’

‘Good. That’s the one that Susan liked, as well. Now, let’s talk colours …’

Mark had always been a good sport. He endured another half an hour of website-planning torture with me before he began to fidget.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I’ve got enough to start with. I can have this up and running for you in a week.’

‘A week.’ From the way he looked around I could tell that the prospect of having me taking up half his home office for that length of time gave him pause.

I reassured him, ‘I don’t have to work in here, if it’s a problem. I can use your extra printer and the laptop, on the kitchen table.’

‘No need for that. I tell you what,’ he said, ‘why don’t you use my dad’s old study? Set the printer and the laptop up in there, and you can work in peace. You won’t be tripping over all my mess.’

A good solution, really. Uncle George’s study was conveniently close to my own bedroom, and well across the landing from both Mark and Susan’s rooms, so I could work late if I wanted without worrying I’d keep them up. And working late was how I got myself through those first nights without the sleeping pills, which I had safely buried at the bottom of a drawer.

I was, if nothing else, productive in my work. I had the website done within a week, as promised, and when Wednesday rolled around again I’d finished with the final bits of testing, and was drifting off to sleep at night without the aid of anything, and feeling more myself.

And very ready for a change of scene. It had been raining off and on for the past week, and so I hadn’t really minded being cloistered in the study, but stepping out the back door now I found the morning bright and fresh and sunny, with a clean wind off the sea that swept the calling gulls along with it and cleared my cobwebbed mind.

The dogs came bounding up to greet me and raced off again to be with Mark, wherever he was working in the gardens. I considered going after them, but knew I wouldn’t be much help to Mark, I’d only slow him down. Besides, now that I had the website done, I needed to discuss the next steps in our new promotion plan, and that meant finding Susan.

She was in the greenhouse with Felicity, standing just inside the door and staring at the plumber who’d arrived a few minutes before, sent by Andrews & Son from St Non’s to inspect the old plumbing and give her a quote for the work to be done. I couldn’t help but stare a bit myself – he was a decidedly well-built young man, so much so that Felicity, watching him study the pipes, nudged her friend and said, ‘Well done you. Recreating the past with precision, aren’t you?’

Susan asked, ‘What?’

‘Recreating Claire’s Cloutie Tree Tea Room, right down to the good-looking plumber. I’d like to see him take his shirt off.’

‘Fee!’

‘What? He can’t hear us. God, will you just look at that.’

I looked too, and smiled a little as the plumber, seemingly completely unaware he had an audience, reached up to test the soundness of an overhead joint in the piping, a movement that showed off his broad muscled chest.

‘What’s his name?’ asked Felicity.

Susan, equally awed, shook her head. ‘I don’t know. They just sent him.’

‘Well, they’ve got my business.’

I smiled even more at Felicity’s tone, but it didn’t convince me. She’d been up to Trelowarth a few times this past week, enough for me to come to the conclusion that Felicity, for all her talk, was already quite hopelessly infatuated.

Mark, of course, had no idea. I could see how Felicity looked at him when he came into a room, and the way that she constantly watched him, the light in her smile when he spoke to her. But men could be so impossibly blind, I thought, just as the plumber was blind to the fact we were all of us watching him now.

‘Perhaps I ought to see if he has any questions,’ Susan said, all innocence, then spoilt it with a wink and crossed the greenhouse with a more purposely feminine walk than her usual breezy stride.

Felicity watched her friend go with approval. To me, she said, ‘It’s good to see her taking an interest in men again, after the last one.’

After Susan’s sharp reaction to my mention of her time in Bristol, I hadn’t pried further, but I felt safe in asking Felicity now, ‘Was he awful?’

‘Not at all. But he was older. Much older than Sue, and that made things quite difficult, sometimes. She didn’t really fit in with his friends, and he didn’t fit in with hers, and … well, they came from different generations, different worlds, and sometimes that’s a gap that can’t be bridged. I know she tried. It was your sister’s death,’ she told me, ‘that decided things, I think. Sue said it made her realise life was just too short, so she came home.’ She glanced at me confidingly. ‘Your sister’s death affected everyone round here. It was a blow.’

‘To me as well.’

I liked the way Felicity accepted that, not leaping in with platitudes. ‘Was she your only sister?’