Osian asks me a question, but something else has snagged my attention. “Sorry, what?”
“I was asking you about the name,” he says, offering me a buttered slice of rye bread with tiny seeds of something like aniseed. “But I can see you’re miles away.”
“Sorry, I was only looking around.”
He starts buttering another slice of bread for himself. “Is this your favourite word?”
“What word?”
“Sorry. You said it ten times this morning.”
“Sorry.”
“Eleven.” He takes a huge bite, chews, then drinks the last of his tea.
“It’s been pointed out to me that I start saying sorry when I’m…”
When I’m nervous or feeling vulnerable. My university boyfriend called it one of my ‘tells’. If I started replying ‘sorry’ to every question, it meant I was scared or worried. Even back then when I was not even twenty, when life seemed simple, I had this one big worry. My lifelong fear of looking like a joke, like the deluded ordinary girl with extraordinary dreams. Remember her? The sixteen-year-old girl who really believed she could get Prince Charming.
“You’ve disappeared again.” Osian’s voice brings me back to the terrace outside the café. “What’s taken your attention?”
To cover my thoughts, I get up and walk towards the five or six steps that lead down to the gardens. “See this low wall?” I ask him, pointing. The steps down to the garden curve around a low wall which seems to have blue stones. Why would anyone build a wall with blue stones?
“The one behind the ivy?” he asks, following me. When he reaches the curtain of ivy, he drops into a crouch and grabs one of the branches to push it away. The wall behind is indeed blue.
“Wait,” I say, moving for a closer look. Of course, he’s in my way and unless I want to drape myself over him to peer at the tiles, I have to step around him into the flowerbed. Lifting my leg high over some dead bushes, I walk right up to the screen of ivy and rub dirt and decades of mud and gunk from one tile.
“This is ceramic tiling. Fired in a small kiln.” I scan around. “It’s unusual in this kind of outdoor usage. Victorians never used tiling like this; it’s more Art Nouveau.”
“Which means…?”
“There has to be a reason for putting them here. The question is, what?”
He glances up at me. “If you had to guess?”
“Then, I’d say there’s bound to be a more decorative detail somewhere further along.”
“You think there might be something else hidden under the ivy?” He’s curious but also doubtful.
“This place has a…” I try to explain. “I don’t know how to say it, but you felt it in your orchard of wellbeing. A purpose that can’t be ignored. It wants to be discovered. And it’s the same here. As if the original design of this park wants to come back to life.”
“Here, take my hand.”
Osian’s words startle me. He’s moved out of the flowerbed and is offering a hand to help me climb back out. His attention is on the land, not on the tiled wall.
“So?” he asks when we’re both back on the terrace and have poured more tea. “What do you think about a tractor?”
I pause with the cup halfway to my mouth. “Tractor?”
“I mentioned earlier.”
He did? I must have been miles away.
“To clear all the privet and pull up any dead trees in my patch, I’ll need a tractor. So if you like, the tractor can clear everything for you in three days.”
A tractor. Yes, that might work. “Once I have a map for them so they know what to dig up and where to stay clear. Yes, that would work.”
“We’ll need trucks too, for all the waste,” he says.
