The Unfinished Garden (14 page)

“If you’re staying, you can help me run an errand.” She yawned
and stood. “How do you feel about mentally challenged springer spaniels?”

* * *

An impenetrable barrier of dog rose, seeded stinging
nettles and six-foot-high hedgerow shielded the car on either side from fields
strewn with black plastic bales of silage. Once, Tilly counted the species of
shrub along this stretch of road and came up with eleven, which, at the rate of
one species per century, dated the hedgerow back to Anglo-Saxon times, before
the Norman Conquest. Hadn’t James mentioned that he was a farm boy? He might be
interested in some English country knowledge, such as how to determine the age
of a hedge. Or maybe not. He had remained silent since they’d collected Monty,
crammed into the passenger seat with his head grazing the car roof, his knees
pulled up and his arms pinned to his chest. Monty sneezed from the back and a
stench, as pungent as skunk, wafted into the car.

“Fox.” Tilly tucked the car farther into the stinging nettles
as the switchback road narrowed to one lane. “You might want to close the
window.”

But James scratched at his black T-shirt, his fingers
fluttering like a dazed bird that had crashed into her deck door.

“These roads close in on you a bit, don’t they?” Tilly
said.

He didn’t answer.

“Omigod. You’re claustrophobic. How did you manage on the
airplane?”

They reached a passing place carved into the side of the bank,
and James blew out a shallow breath. “Yoga breathing and self-medication.
Bourbon,” he added with a glance at his watch, a plastic object of clashing
colors and sharp-angled design. “It’s 4:02. We’re going to be late to pick up
your mother and Isaac. I’ve noticed you don’t wear a watch. Why?”

Tilly turned her attention back to the road, swerving to avoid
a ragged line of pheasants staggering like Friday-night drunks. “Life is
stressful enough. Why set a timer to it?”

“Because without one—” he inhaled loudly and then exhaled
slowly “—how can you arrive where you’re meant to be when you’re meant to be
there?”

Wasn’t the answer obvious? “You wing it.”

“Wing it,” he said, as if repeating a phrase in an unknown
language.

“Don’t worry. Work with me long enough and you’ll figure it
out. So, what else do I have to contend with, other than claustrophobia and
severe punctuality? I thought you just had OCD.”

“No one has just OCD, Tilly. OCD likes to come with a
buddy—bipolar disorder, ADHD. I told you, it’s all about pairs.”

The car whooshed past a gap in the hedgerow flanked by two
massive oak trees, their trunks bandaged in ivy.

“Terrific. What’s your OCD partnered with?”

“Generalized anxiety disorder. More of the same. Does this mean
you’re taking me on, as a client?”

They approached the cluster of two-up, two-down cottages that
denoted the edge of Bramwell Chase.

“Nope. Better idea.” Tilly braked and they crawled under the
fluorescent speed camera. “I’m going to teach you how to do it yourself.”

“I’m sorry,” James said. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m going to give you a crash course in gardening 101. By the
time you fly home, the gardening bug will have bitten hard and you won’t need to
hire anyone. What better way to spend early retirement? You can sniff around
local gardens, see what thrives and—” she grinned “—wing it. Oh, and start a
compost pile.”

“Compost?” His voice rose sharply. “As in rotting food?”

“Absolutely. With broken-down horse manure mixed in. We have
crap soil in our area of the Piedmont. You want to garden? You compost. Of
course, some people will tell you to bring in truckloads of topsoil, but that
merely masks the problem. Eventually the roots break through into what’s
beneath. Gardening’s like life, you have to work with what nature gave you. Hey,
don’t look so worried. I’m good at this. And I happen to know a garden that’s
screaming out for help. I’m going to teach you how to get dirt under your
fingernails, James Nealy. And once I do, you’ll wonder how you ever managed
without it.”

Tilly flashed James a smile, but he shot forward and grabbed
the dashboard. Apprehension wormed through her stomach. Oh crap, was it too late
to renege? Why was he gripping the car like that? And what was he doing now?
Dear God, he couldn’t be serious. She reached across and grabbed his wrist,
preventing him from releasing the door lever.

Okey-dokey, this guy wasn’t a sandwich short of a picnic; he
was missing the whole ruddy picnic basket. But he wasn’t a crank, and she
wouldn’t treat him as one. His spurts of energy weren’t firecrackers of anger.
It was fear that kept him fiddling, twisting, tapping; fear that isolated him in
a private cell. What was the description she had read of OCD, the one that had
stayed with her? A crippling allergy to life. Although that was a pretty
accurate description of grief.

“Bad idea,” she said, “leaping out of a moving vehicle. Land in
those stinging nettles and I’ll have to rub calamine lotion into all your nooks
and crannies. I might enjoy the experience, but I doubt you will.”

James slumped back and combed his fingers into his hair. “Thank
you.”

“For what?”

“For this,” he said, and laughed.

Chapter 14

Always barefoot, Tilly moved with a grace James found
calming and sexual at the same time. Had she trained as a classical dancer? Back
ramrod straight, knees bent, she balanced on the balls of her feet as she
retrieved an oven mitt from the floor.

He could watch her for hours.

Tilly straightened up and smiled over her shoulder. James
smiled back, the silence between them a balm for his exhausted mind, which, even
as it accepted the completion of the trip without catastrophe, spat out darts of
anxiety about the plane ride home.

The plane’s going to crash; you’re going
to die.

James tried to shake the thoughts loose, but they kept
recycling. Over and over. The never-ending repetition of OCD. And he was so
friggin’ tired.

At least Tilly wasn’t a chatterer. He couldn’t deal with other
people’s voices right now. Women who yakked nonstop grated on his patience, not
that he had much to begin with, but every word Tilly spoke mattered. She was an
extraordinary woman, but God Almighty—she slapped the salmon on the broiler pan,
no olive oil, no chives—she couldn’t cook.

James picked up the magazines scattered across the kitchen
table and sorted them into a pile. A pile that created order, that gave his
hands purpose and stopped him from interfering. Please, God, she wasn’t going to
boil the carrots into baby food, was she? He turned over a Mini Boden catalog,
so much smaller than the other catalogs, and placed it, front cover up, on top
of the pile. He nudged it to the right, back a bit, no, a little more to the
right. Perfect.

Muttering something about the heat, Tilly stripped off her
denim shirt and tossed it toward the nearest chair. James told himself not to
stare, but the red bra strap peeking out from under the skimpy tank top was a
lure no man could possibly resist. And yet why did her right shoulder blade
stick out more than the left one?

Instinctively, he stepped toward her and traced her S-shaped
spine.

Tilly turned, her eyes, the color of frosted sea glass,
watching for his next move. “No one’s ever noticed my scoliosis before,” she
said quietly. “How did you know?”

“Your right shoulder blade juts out.” His eyes moved down. “And
your waist’s lopsided.” How had he not noticed that her torso was asymmetrical?
Asymmetrical! The daydream from the plane, in which he’d imagined making love to
this perfectly imperfect woman, warped into a waking nightmare. He grabbed at
his hair and began twisting.

“Unbelievable,” Tilly said. “I think of my curved spine as a
private deformity.”

“You didn’t have surgery as a kid?” His voice sounded flat and
strangely normal. That was something, huh, to feel one way and act another. The
legacy of a lifetime of practice. He yanked his hand from his hair and buried it
in his pocket. Just-a-guy gesture. A regular, non-fucked-up guy gesture.

Tilly gave a sad smile. “Surgery wasn’t an option. My mother
freaked at the idea of me going under the knife, so I wore a spinal brace until
I turned eighteen. Big mistake now I’m a manual laborer.”

Of course, the spinal brace explained the posture. “Was it
painful?”

“Mostly just annoying.” She arched her back. “Although in the
summer the leather corset rubbed my hips raw.”

This time the urge to touch her was stronger and undeniably
carnal. James retreated to behind the table and clenched and unclenched his
fists.

The plane’s going to crash; you’re going
die. You deserve to die. You’re a letch.

“I hated the attention the brace brought.” Tilly stretched.
“It’s hard to be anonymous when you bend like a robot, but Sebastian protected
me well. That’s how we met—the local oiks were teasing me and Sebastian leaped
in. He has this thing about social injustice. Then he and Rowena built a pyre on
my eighteenth birthday, doused the brace with gasoline and pouff.” She threw up
her hands. “Burn, baby, burn. The best present a girl could wish for.”

And it came from Sebastian.
Fuck,
how could he, James, compete with the guy who had loved her at her most
vulnerable? He didn’t want to act like a jerk when he met this Sebastian
tomorrow, but even his name made James want to scratch off his own skin. And
Tilly used it constantly. What kind of a name was Sebastian anyway? It sounded
like a character from a Gothic novel.

“I guess we were both damaged teenagers,” he said.

“I guess so.”

“Here.” He reached for her gin and tonic. “Go sit with your
mother. I’m taking over the cooking as payment for the—” he gulped “—the
gardening lessons.”

Tilly hesitated and then took the glass. “I would argue with
you, but there’s little point, given that I loathe cooking. You sure about
this?”

“I can cook—you can’t.” Shit. Was that too honest?

“Amen, brother.” She toasted him and left the kitchen.

Don’t look at her waist, James, don’t look
at her waist.
But he did anyway.

James grabbed the edge of the table. Wasn’t this what he’d
wanted—to meet his fear head-on? But now the lines were fuzzy, blurred by desire
and jealousy. And Tilly’s asymmetrical waist. Images attacked him. First, he saw
Tilly ripping off her tank top to reveal a red satin bra, while a faceless man
called Sebastian reached for her breasts. Then he saw her lopsided back.

James pushed away from the table and smacked his hands on
either side of his skull. He needed to tear through the open back door, into the
golden light that reminded him of the Mediterranean evenings from the only
vacation he’d ever taken—twenty years ago. He had started the trip with a lover,
but after she grew tired of his excuses for avoiding the beach, he had finished
it alone.

He could leave now and Tilly would never know the whole ugly
truth about him. But he was falling, fast and hard, and even if he wanted to, he
couldn’t stop.

* * *

“Are you bonkers?” Rowena yelled over Monty. “You want
to unleash a stranger who doesn’t know a pair of secateurs from a chain saw on
Mother’s walled garden?”

“Pretty much,” Tilly yelled back.

“Quiet.” Rowena slapped her hands on her knees and glared at
Monty. “Or I’ll send you to the knacker’s yard.”

Monty stopped barking and cowered behind Tilly.

“If there’s one thing that pisses me off,” Rowena said, “it’s a
badly trained dog.” She patted Tiddly on the head, then Winks—or was it Winks,
then Tiddly? They had been sitting like onyx statues for the past five minutes,
ignoring Monty as he’d ricocheted from chipped terra-cotta urn to chipped
terra-cotta urn, spraying pee and barking. “Your mother spoils that animal. I
keep telling her, ‘Give me two weeks, Mrs. H, and I can lick him into
shape.’”

Two weeks. Tilly tottered as she craned to look up into the
clear, pale sky—a one-dimensional mural hanging so low it could, surely, fall
and crush her. At Creeping Cedars she could see only snatches of the sky through
the trees, but it felt vast and distant, like an ancient wonder. The sky over
Bramwell Hall was, to quote her mother’s new favorite adjective, nice, an
uncharacteristically bland word for her mother to lean on. After all, her mother
had taught Tilly words had power. But gazing up at the sky, Tilly understood.
Nice
was a word you used without investment, a
word that allowed you to hurry through, a word like
fine.
Tilly had used
fine
to deflect
every postfuneral how-are-you-doing question. After all, most people didn’t want
to be bogged down in truth. They wanted to express sympathy and move on.
Although she wasn’t sure that applied to James. His questions were heat-seeking
missiles, targeted to strike and explode.

Her mother, however, was sticking with
nice.
And humming “Onward Christian Soldiers” as she hobbled around
the house, recycling her possessions with color-coded labels that meant “keep,”
“give to the girls,” or “donate to the village jumble sale.” At the rate she was
working, her mother would have packed up forty years of her life in the next two
weeks. And Tilly, what would she be dealing with?

“Amazing what you can do in two weeks,” Tilly said. Monty
shoved his snout into the back of her knee. “Save a dog, save a garden.”

“My answer is no.
N-O.
”

Tilly longed to retaliate with,
God, you
sound as imperious as your mother,
which would be a stupid,
self-defeating thing to do.

A flurry of birdsong erupted in The Chase and died. The air
hung leaden and still, the day already a scorcher, which was nothing to smile
about. Heat in England meant non-air-conditioned misery as everything, including
tempers, became dry and brittle. Worse, her mother would draw the curtains to
banish the sun, and Woodend would be sealed in stale darkness.

The church bells pealed out their Sunday morning tune, and
Tilly sighed. Her mother would be waiting for a lift to Matins, cardigan
buttoned, reading glasses in one pocket, a pound coin for the collection in the
other. But rushing Rowena was like snuggling up to a copperhead and saying,
“Give us a kiss.” Tilly remained quiet, silence the only weapon she had
left.

When Rowena spoke, her voice was low and steady. “Clearly you
have forgotten the tantrum Mother threw when I forgot to shut the gate, and
bunnies chomped on every…fucking…plant. What you’re proposing makes Peter Rabbit
look like a founding member of the gardening club. You let a novice within sixty
feet of the walled garden, and Mother will take me off speed dial faster than
you can say, ‘Boycott French cheeses.’”

“Rowena, love—” Tilly maintained eye contact, despite the
thunder flies swarming over her chest. Minute invaders that didn’t bite or
sting, thunder flies could tickle you into madness, as they were threatening to
do to Tilly at that very moment. “Your mother’s pride and joy is more wasteland
than garden these days. But if I could restore it, well—” Tilly gave up and
scratched manically “—she doesn’t have to know it was me, does she?”

The quick movements of Rowena’s green eyes betrayed her: She
was thinking. Time for Tilly’s ace. “She might even call on your actual birthday
this year.”

“Okay, Ms. Clever Clogs. And suppose your protégé kills the
David Austin roses?”

“I’ll call your mother and fess up. Either way, you win.”

Rowena’s eyes grew wide and sparkly, like a child at a
pantomime. She fanned out her long-tiered skirt and released it; crinkled silk
swished around her psychedelic Wellington boots. Wellies, in this heat? “You
mean I swipe your role as Ms. Goody Two-Shoes, and you become the slutty,
cannabis-growing, non-grandchild-producing daughter.” Rowena tugged a flaccid
elastic band from her wrist, grabbed her hair and bunged it into a fat ponytail.
“I might even be forgiven, twenty years late, for flying out of my bedroom
window after sniffing glue and flattening Mother’s favorite rhododendron.
Brilliant. I absolutely adore this plan. Go.” She waved Tilly off. “Destroy the
walled garden with my blessings.”

“Thanks,” Tilly said. “You’re a doll. Pimm’s at one, by the
way, and lunch at two, cooked by your soon-to-be sous-gardener.”

“A new man in the village.” Rowena twirled the end of her
ponytail. “And one who likes to cook. Is he sexy?”

Tilly shrugged. “He has ni— His eyes. There’s something about
his eyes.”

Rowena tossed her ponytail over her shoulder. “You’re telling
me he has
nice
eyes? Hardly a hunk endorsement.”

James, a hunk? Not exactly, but he was sexy. Sort of. Tilly
concentrated on untangling the dog lead from around her legs, relieved, for
once, that Monty had tied her in knots.

* * *

“You do know your stealth bomber’s rubbish.” Tilly
yanked the paper plane from the box hedge and handed it back to Sebastian.

“At least it made a landing. Which is more than can be said for
your alien astro blaster.” Sebastian nodded at the remnants of paper plane
dribbling from Monty’s jaw.

“Enemy interception,” Tilly said. “How can a girl predict
that?”

A warm thrill flickered in her gut, then disappeared—tucked
away but waiting. Tomorrow morning she and James would attack the walled garden,
and nothing could darken her mood. Not a diseased breast, not a brooding
ex-lover, not a dog that was moving on from eating paper planes to crunching on
a stinky rabbit carcass. James had been right about one thing: She needed to
garden. Actually, he’d been right about many things, such as how crappy she was
at cooking. Although she did feel bad that he was stuck in the kitchen preparing
Sunday lunch for a gaggle of people he didn’t know. But, as he had explained
over and over—and over—why should she trawl through hell with a task he could
complete effortlessly?

“I win!” Isaac bounced with more energy than any person had a
right to exhibit on a hot day. “My Saturn V went the farthest. I win!”

Archie continued to pound a flattened daisy with the toe of his
sneaker. Tilly had yet to find his Spitfire, which had nose-dived into the
spirea on its maiden voyage. She suspected Archie had intended this to happen.
After all, she had watched him bowl; he had his father’s targeted aim.

Archie should have been in school, but his housemaster had
proposed “special dispensation” in the form of a weekend with his dad.
Evidently, Fiona and Sebastian had told the children about the pregnancy the
previous Sunday night, and Archie had fallen into the deepest funk, dragging his
misery around school like leg irons.

Sebastian screwed up the stealth bomber and thrust it into the
pocket of his cargo shorts. He had circled his son all morning, trying too hard,
creating fancy paper planes when he might have done better with a stack of
two-folds-and-off-you-go paper darts. He had lost Archie’s attention hours ago.
A rare day together and father and son were communicating through glares and
grunts, dealing with a crisis by steaming in opposite directions.