Eden's Garden (14 page)

Her fingers paused over ‘create message’. But she didn’t want to irritate him unnecessarily, or provoke him into suspecting her of keeping a watchful eye on him. Or, heaven forbid, nagging. Joe didn’t do nagging. He was always complaining of being nagged by his mother and sisters even though their fussing over him seemed to Carys well meaning and very mild. And it wasn’t as if he actually lived with any of them any more.

She made the tea, aware of an uneasy clenching in her stomach. Maybe Joe was right. Maybe she was being unreasonable, expecting him to accept that she could abandon him for a couple of months. She began arranging bourbons next to custard creams and a fan of chocolate fingers on one of Mam’s favourite side plates decorated with roses. And that being so, maybe she was even more of a fool to think she could change him.

She couldn’t entirely put the blame on Joe. From the very beginning he had been clear about never wanting marriage, or children and the whole family thing. Each Christmas had been just the two of them. Popping in briefly to see his mother on Boxing Day and popping up to see Mam, equally briefly, on the day before New Year’s Eve. Carys swallowed, hard, the wobbles in her stomach redoubling themselves. Maybe, in his own mind at least, Joe had every right to be so hurt and so irritable with her.

Carys placed the tea and plate of biscuits on a tray. She couldn’t bear this uncertainty. She and Joe needed to talk about this. Not via email or text, but face to face. With complete honesty. All cards on the table. And then deal with whatever that might bring. At least the air would be clear between them. Tomorrow, she would ask Gwenan or Nia to make good that promise to look after Mam for a few days so she could go back to Chester.

A swell of strings made its way from Mam’s room, filling the entire house with sounds of lovelorn anguish. Mam, being slightly deaf, always had the sound turned up to an
ear-splitting
level that was inescapable in any room of the house. And her taste in screen heroines, being of the old-fashioned self-sacrificing kind, could seriously do Carys’ head in at the best of times.

Before she could make the arrangements to go back and see Joe, Carys realised, she needed to be clear what she was going to say to him. And for that, she needed to know in her heart exactly what it was she wanted.

Yesterday, this morning, an hour ago even, she could have said what she wanted without a moment’s hesitation. Now she found she was not so sure.

‘There you are, Mam,’ she said, placing the tray with tea and biscuits on the table at her mother’s side.

‘Thank you dear,’ said Mam, who had tears in her eyes and was clearly enjoying herself hugely. ‘Aren’t you having one?’

‘We’re nearly out of milk,’ said Carys, slightly hesitantly. ‘I thought I might just pop along to Low-Price, so we’ve got enough for the morning.’

‘Of course, dear,’ said Mam, her attention back on her film, with the aid of a custard cream and two chocolate fingers.

‘I won’t be long,’ said Carys. But already Mam was well away, vaguely waving a chocolate finger in her direction in reply.

Relieved, but still feeling slightly guilty (and hoping Mam didn’t investigate the contents of a fridge awash with cartons of milk), Carys grabbed her coat and bag and shot out into the fresh air. The streets of Pont-ar-Eden might not be the same as a walk on the beach, but at least she could be alone with her thoughts for a while. Time to clear her head, make her decision, and set herself on the course she must follow for the rest of her life.

Not that, Carys had a sneaking suspicion, this was going to prove easy. Especially with the familiar outlines of the Plas Eden estate looming over the village, everywhere she looked.

 Halfway down Plas Eden’s long, tree-lined driveway, David Meredith paused, set down the barrow of slate chippings next to another pothole, and stretched his aching back.

This definitely felt harder than it used to be, he considered ruefully. Just a few hours ago, he had felt full of energy. His leg hadn’t given him a single twinge as he’d made his way down to the kitchen to join Rhiannon for breakfast. Things, it seemed, were taking a turn for the better. He’d set to with a vengeance, tackling the list of the most urgent jobs with the exhilaration that he was at last returning to normal. Life could go on the way it always had done.

But he was only halfway through his first task, and already the exhaustion was creeping back. His bad leg felt as if a dozen red-hot pokers were stabbing inside the bone. Maybe Huw was right; maybe it really was time to call it a day, face the facts and let Plas Eden go.

David tipped the load from the wheelbarrow into the pothole, took hold of the ancient rake, and set to work again. It wasn’t just his accident. Long months of enforced inactivity had brought him face to face with uncomfortable realities that could be so easily buried beneath a busy life.

There was no escaping that he was no longer the boy who had taken over the running of Plas Eden. He was only five years away from forty. No great age nowadays, but he had to admit that even before he took to that ski slope, he’d been aware of his body slowing down. Only a little, but in the world of outward bound and adventure courses, a little was enough. The guys he had first worked with had long since moved on to less physically demanding roles in management, leaving the up and coming twenty-somethings to take their place.

David grimaced. Maybe it had been that sense of being left behind, of something to prove, that had sent him flying so recklessly down that Swiss ski slope in the first place. That, and impressing Rachel. God, just how clichéd could you get?

He paused in his raking to glance up at Eden, just visible between the trees. There had been other women, of course, over the years. But none who had shown the least enthusiasm for burying themselves in a family business in the back of beyond, where a trip to Tesco, some twenty miles away, was the height of local shopping.

So much for the lord and master of his own country pile being the object of every woman’s desire, he thought, placing the rake in the waiting wheelbarrow. At least not when the grand house turned out to be shabby and falling apart – unless inhabited by paying guests – plus one aunt and one disabled grandmother already firmly installed.

With Rachel, he’d thought it might be different. For one thing, she’d worked at the outward bound centre in Talarn and thrived on country life. He’d loved her energy, her laughter and her amazing ability to persuade the most terrified schoolboy to take that step backwards over the cliff and abseil to the ground. At twenty-five, Rachel had seemed unfazed by anything, even the endless attention that Plas Eden required.

But then Rachel had been offered the job in a Swiss ski centre. It was the chance of a lifetime, and only for a year or so. There had been a slight feeling of hurt, but he had hid it well. After all, they had the rest of their lives before them, what was the hurry? He should have known that long-distance relationships rarely work, and how quickly they would grow apart during the year. In the days before his accident, they’d scarcely been on speaking terms, his long-anticipated holiday a disaster even before true disaster struck.

David quickly pushed the thought out of his mind and gave the pothole a good stamping under his boots to bed in the slate.

‘Impossible,’ he muttered, shaking his head. It wasn’t only Rachel who had moved on. The friends he had kept in touch with from school and university had scattered far and wide, some in England, some in Europe, with at least one in Dubai. They had carved out careers and businesses for themselves, settling down with wives and children. A few were even divorced and on their second family. He’d been, considered David, to endless weddings in the past five years. But take away Plas Eden, and what had he achieved? Even Huw had built up a business empire of his own, with a smart new house, a wife and children and a holiday cottage in the south of France.

His leg was becoming unbearable. David cursed under his breath. He’d been warned that overdoing things too soon could set his recovery back. He just hadn’t believed it. He took the handles of the wheelbarrow and slowly began to make his way back towards the house. Without the responsibility of Plas Eden, he might at least be free. But to walk away would leave him with a terrible sense of failure: of having betrayed Dad and all the Merediths before him who had brought Plas Eden back from the brink, whatever it had cost them personally.

Besides, the thought of not being here, of never being able to come here again, left a deep emptiness inside. Even now, he couldn’t imagine life without the house and the tangled melancholy of the gardens. The statues whispering gently to each other in their little glade. And he would miss the silence. The lack of rush. The kite now circling round the hill on the seaward side; the owls calling to each other through the woods at night. The hedgehog that snuffled its way across the lawn after the cat food Rhiannon put out once the cats were safely ensconced indoors.

He paused as the distant gate clanged open, followed by the purr of an engine making its way ever so gingerly towards him.

‘Damn!’ The Adamsons were out for the day, heading for the top of Snowdon by train, and the next set of guests weren’t due to book in until this evening. The last thing he needed was Huw, back for another assault on the future of Plas Eden. Sure enough, a black four by four came into view and swerved around the worst of the potholes with a practised air, before drawing up beside him.

‘There really is no point,’ remarked Huw, lowering his windows with an impressive whirring sound. ‘The entire thing needs resurfacing.’

‘Well, at least this will ensure it doesn’t get any worse, for now,’ returned David, trying not to bristle at his younger brother’s tone.

‘The trouble is, as I’ve been saying for years,’ replied Huw, heavily, ‘just about everything needs to be re-done. The east wing really is falling apart at the seams, you know.’

‘It needs some work,’ conceded David.

‘A major overhaul, if you ask me. You said yourself, the number of guests in the holiday apartments has dropped off dramatically this year, which means you can hardly carry on as you are.’

‘I’m not intending to.’ David’s temper was not improved by the shooting pains now rippling up and down his bad leg, making him slightly nauseous. ‘Those were hardly normal circumstances.’

‘But they’re the circumstances we find ourselves in now.’ Huw pulled his Land Cruiser onto the verge beneath the trees and left it there, as if to emphasise the dire state of Eden’s drive.

The drive, thought David, doing his best to squash mounting irritation, might be suffering from the ravages of last year’s hard winter, but the Adamsons, at least, were viewing it as part of Plas Eden’s old-fashioned charm. And surely that’s what Land Cruisers were for?

He took a deep breath. ‘Things might change again. There was always going to be a drop-off in the holiday lets while the building work on the east wing was taking place. It might just be that it’s a good time to start upgrading the east wing.’

‘To do what? You said yourself the adventure holiday side of things isn’t possible for now. You’ve already ruled out going down the B&B road, and just continuing with straight holiday lets doesn’t made good business sense.’

‘There might be other possibilities. Solutions none of us have thought of yet, because we haven’t been looking.’

Huw was frowning. ‘There’s a recession on. It’s hardly a good time to start taking risks. Beddows are a reputable firm, and they know me. But they won’t hang around forever. And who else is likely to see the potential of a place like this? Especially in this economic climate.’

‘We’ve agreed we’d discuss it,’ said David. ‘All of us,’ he added, pointedly. He had still not forgiven his brother for his insensitivity towards Rhiannon. At least, he noted, Huw had the grace to turn an uncomfortable pink around the ears.

‘I’m just saying, there might not be much time.’

‘And Rhiannon?’ David demanded, rather more sharply than he had intended. ‘Don’t we at least owe her some consideration? Where do you think you and I would have ended up, if Rhiannon hadn’t come to look after us?’

‘There was Nainie.’

‘Nainie had just had her first stroke. Don’t you remember? It wasn’t bad, not like the one she had later. But who knows if the stress of having to cope with us two and Plas Eden might not have brought on a second stroke much earlier? Especially with that idiot Edmund ranting on at us every week or so. Without Rhiannon, you and I could have ended up Lord-knows-where, and Nainie could have spent the rest of her life in an old people’s home. We can’t just take everything from under Rhiannon. Especially not so soon after Nainie. She needs a bit of time to adjust and get her life back together again.’

‘I didn’t say she should just be thrown out. We can always buy her a cottage. There are plenty for sale at the moment in Pont-ar-Eden. Or even Talarn.’

Why did Huw make it sound as if this was a bargain hunt? A case of let’s pay off Auntie Rhiannon by beating down the price of a house to the lowest amount possible? And what, exactly, did he have in mind? Some pokey two-up, two-down terrace, with a cheap 1970s extension on the back and the smallest of gardens?

Despite being in the midst of a recession, the offer Beddows were proposing was astounding. Even when divided between them, it was still an eye-watering sum. And it wasn’t as if Huw had done badly out of the estate by being the second son, as it was. There had been a considerable amount set aside in their father’s will for Huw, more than enough for him to set up his first business and buy a substantial house.

For all he loved Plas Eden, there had been times over the years – particularly in the throws of a hellishly knotty problem with difficult tenants in the estate’s cottages, or attempting to keep control of builders – that it had crossed David’s mind that Huw had been given the better deal. The thought never lasted long. Given all the money in the world, he would still not exchange it for Eden, with all its problems.

David looked at his brother. Huw had been staying with a
pen-pal
in France, the day Rhiannon came to tell them about Mum and Dad. It had been hard enough, David remembered all too well, being in the familiarity of Eden, with Nainie and Rhiannon a constant presence. Heaven knows what it must have been like for a seven-year-old boy among strangers having to make the flight back on his own, knowing that Rhiannon, and the whole reality of the thing, was waiting for him at Manchester airport.

No wonder, David acknowledged to himself, Huw had buried his feelings ever since. Until maybe even Huw no longer knew what his deepest emotions really were.

‘I’m sure we can sort something out,’ he added, in a slightly gentler tone. ‘Come on, Rhiannon’s painting Buddug’s portrait in the courtyard. They’ll both be ready for a cup of tea by now.’

 

‘You really think I should apply?’ said Rhiannon, her pencil pausing in its scurry across the half-finished portrait in front of her, as she eyed her subject thoughtfully.

‘Of course. Don’t think; just go for it,’ replied Buddug Parry, taking this pause in proceedings to give her shoulders a quick wriggle and stretch the arm resting on a large, plastic, and decidedly un-picturesque, plant pot.

Dressed in loose trousers, a light-blue linen jacket and a straw sunhat, her brown curls riotously loose around her shoulders, Buddug was seated on the steps leading up to the fountain in Plas Eden’s little courtyard, surrounded by pink and blue sweet peas and the ramblings of purple clematis. The pot was, in fact, perfectly in place, having been pressed into service as a temporary substitute for Hodge, who had grown tired of gazing lovingly into Buddug’s eyes some twenty minutes ago (when the mini gravy bones ran dry) and was sprawled out in the last of the sunshine, excitably dreaming of squirrels.