‘Be sure you take yours, Harri,’ Minty added.
It took Annie a second to grasp what Minty was getting at. She circled a finger as she thought it out. ‘Ah, US border control?’
Harri clicked too. ‘Good point. Doubt you can fly with compost and seeds in your hand luggage.’
Everyone was smiling, but Annie’s heart pumped harder at the thought of being processed at the airport.Sixty-eight hours, her brain repeated.
Minty hurried them away, telling them to enjoy their picnic, saying it would be warm in the cactus house.
They left the couple enjoying the view from their pew and made their way to the door of the first glasshouse.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Glass Houses
‘Okay, top three favourite glass books?’ said Harri.
They had closed the doors behind them and were crunching slowly across dry white stones, taking in the long, red-brick raised beds topped with soil from which twisted the gnarled limbs of grape vines bursting with tight purple buds that spread out across the wall and up into the glazed roof.
‘Glass books?’ Annie repeated.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘Gee, okay. Let me think for a minute.’ Annie made her way along the path between the planted beds. Melons and gourds had been trained to clamber up wire supports suspended from the glasshouse’s ceiling. They were still small but had the look of vigorous seedlings bursting with strength for their long sprint to the ceiling.
‘There’s uh…’ She swam a hand in the air, thinking. ‘The Brontës’Glass Town, of course.’
‘Ooh, nice one!’
‘And theCharlie and the Chocolate Factorysequel?’
‘The Great Glass Elevator?’ Harri tried.
‘I never read it though.’
‘Then it doesn’t count,’ smirked Harri.
‘I readThe Glass Blowersby Daphne du Maurier last summer. That definitely counts!’
‘Yep.’
‘And…’
Harri folded his arms in triumph, lifting his chin.
‘Cinderella,’ she said, defeating him.
‘I’ll allow it.’
More easy smiles, boots softly scuffing stones, amid the rich green new-life smell that only happens in temperate greenhouses this time of year.
‘This must be what Minty was on about,’ Harri said, stopping in the middle of the greenhouse where, on a plastic potting tray with raised sides, lay stacked coir pots next to a mound of fresh black compost, two trowels and unopened tomato seed packets.
‘Gardener’s Delight,’ read Annie, lifting one of the packets as she came close to Harri’s side. ‘Go ahead,’ she urged him. ‘Get sowing.’
‘You can do one for my Mam, if you want?’ said Harri, laying down the picnic basket. ‘I’ll take it home to her for you.’
Someone, Harri assumed it was Leonid, Izaak’s gardener husband, had left a notice with neatly written instructions which they followed now, working together to fill two pots, pressing two tiny tomato pips into the soft compost before covering it and adding a fine sprinkling of water from a little plastic can. Harri read aloud the rest of Leonid’s sign.
