The Red Book of Primrose House: A Potting Shed Mystery (Potting Shed Mystery series 2) (16 page)

On Friday morning, Pru was almost to Primrose House when she realized she hadn’t put her phone in her pocket. Fearing Christopher would try to check in and get no response—not the best way to start the weekend—she trooped back to her cottage. As she neared, she heard her phone ringing and raced to get there before it stopped.

“Hi,” she said, catching her breath.

“You aren’t directing the excavation, are you?” Christopher asked.

“No,” she said, laughing. “They’re pretty much on their own doing the terracing. I forgot my phone and just came to the cottage to get it.” She glanced at her weekend bag, sitting in the middle of the room all ready to go. “Ivy and Robbie are taking me to the station. I’ll be in at seven.”

“You’ll ring when you arrive at Charing Cross?”

“Of course I will.”

But he rang first, just as the train pulled into the station.

“I’ve been held up, and I didn’t want you to wait,” he said.

“I’ll get the Tube,” Pru said. “I can meet you at your flat.”

“Too many changes. Take a taxi.”

“But couldn’t I just go up to Leicester Square and then take the Piccadilly line…”

“Please take a taxi. I’m sorry I can’t be there to collect you, and I don’t want to imagine you traipsing about on the Underground.” He wasn’t all that fond of public transport, she knew, and his voice held a note of frustration. She thought it better to accommodate him.

“Yes, a taxi. To your flat?”

“There’s a pub just on the corner from my building—the Green Man—I’ll meet you there. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m quite good at entertaining myself.”

At the pub—a posh place with polished brass fixtures and wood waxed to within an inch of its old life—she settled into a booth with a pint of London Pride in hand, lucky enough to arrive between crowds: the after-work drinkers had left and the Friday-night partyers had yet to arrive. She kept her coat on for a while, but finally shed it and tried to nurse her beer along. About nine-thirty, the pub began to fill again, the noise level rose, and she noticed people eyeing her as she sat in a booth on her own. She got another pint. She was halfway through it when Christopher walked up, slid into the booth, and put his arm around her.

“God, I’m sorry to be so late,” he said. “I wanted to finish up a few things to have the weekend free, and it took longer than I expected.”

The lines on his face looked deeper than usual—a trick of the light or a reflection of how hard he’d been working. She reached up and tried to smooth out the furrow between his brows with her thumb.

“I’ve been fine, just sitting here thinking—pleasant thoughts,” she assured him.

His lips brushed her temple. She raised her chin and gave him a brief kiss, but thought better of it and kissed him again, lingering this time. He put his arm around her waist and his fingers felt for the hem of her sweater. The pub chatter receded; it was only the two of them. Until a burly fellow bumped the table as he passed.

She gave a small, embarrassed smile. “I can quite forget myself around you.”

He grinned and nodded toward her pint. “Same again?”

“No, that’s my second. Would you like some of it?”

“I wouldn’t mind. Cheers,” he said, and drank most of what was left.

She admired the right side of his face, which had progressed from the swollen, black-and-blue condition of the previous weekend to a mottled yellow-and-green. “Nice,” she said. “It looks like an impressionist painting of daffodils.”

Another kiss. Before they could go further, he asked, “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she said, hand resting lightly on his knee, “I am ready.”

They got out of the booth, and she turned to get her bag and coat. When she stood again, his hand rested on her bottom. “I’m glad you’re here,” he murmured as four women squeezed by them to take possession of their empty table.

“I’m glad, too,” she said.

A bitter wind whipped down the street as they walked to his flat; snow had been predicted. “I got the primroses planted this week,” she said, pulling her coat collar higher. “I can only hope that if it snows in Sussex, it covers them completely so they don’t freeze.”

“Will someone check on them?” Christopher asked.

“No, they must brave the elements on their own now.”

When they reached his flat, she stood just inside the door, taking it all in. “I wasn’t able to get a good look at the place the first time I was here,” she said, referring to the dinner that his son, Graham, had cooked for them before she started at Primrose House.

Christopher took her coat. “Well,” he said, “here’s your chance.”

The furnishings—leather sofa and chairs, dark wood tables, and scant ornament—were decidedly masculine. Pru passed by a table with the only decoration in the room: three framed photos. She looked closer and saw an old photo of a couple with a young boy and even younger girl, one of Graham as a teenager, and a photo of her and Christopher taken at the hotel in Kent where they’d spent the weekend. In the photo, she was wearing the dress that Jo gave her—the one she’d brought along this weekend for their dinner at Gasparetti’s.
He’s going to think it’s the only dress I own,
she thought. The fact that it was true wasn’t the point.

Bookshelves covered half a wall, and she began perusing the titles. At least two shelves were taken up with natural histories of various parts of Britain. There was half a shelf of police-related titles—Pru wondered just how captivating
The Gathering and Analysis of Evidence
could be—another shelf of international thrillers, and, on the bottom shelf, several Harry Potter books,
The Hobbit,
The Lord of the Rings,
and a row of old, cloth-bound books with frayed edges and faded titles. She bent over to take a closer look.

“That’s Graham’s shelf,” Christopher said from behind her, “for when he visited. By the time I finished reading him
The Hobbit
, he was well able to read it back to me.”

Pru pulled out one of the old books, sat back on the sofa, and opened it.
“The Happy Return,”
she read.

Christopher smiled. “Horatio Hornblower—those were mine,” he said, “and I’ll give them to Graham when he’s settled. Have you read them?”

“No seafaring sagas for me—it was Pollyanna.”

“I don’t know it,” he said, shaking his head.

“No, you wouldn’t—they aren’t really boys’ books. And just as well you aren’t familiar with her,” Pru said, flipping a few pages. “I’ve been compared to her most of my life, and it’s become a bit tiresome.” She smiled. “But I still love the books. My sixth-grade teacher brought her copies into our classroom, and I read them all. I carried on so much about them that for Christmas that year, I got the whole set from my folks.” Her smile faded.

He sat down next to her. “Don’t feel guilty about being happy.”

“How’s Graham doing in Dubai?” she asked, switching the focus from her family to his.

He watched her a moment, took her hand, and went with the change of topic. “He’s busy and he likes his job, but it’s quite hot there, and he’s still not accustomed to that. We’ll give him a ring tomorrow, and you can say hello.”

“I’d like that,” she said. Christopher leaned back and pulled her after him. They sat quietly for a moment as she rubbed her cheek against the cloth of his shirt and he toyed with the top several buttons of her cardigan until he’d managed to undo them. She liked being there. A host of problems awaited her back at Primrose House, but she felt an incredible lightness in London, in this flat with Christopher’s arms around her and with his bed to look forward to.

“I need to freshen up a bit,” she said, sitting up. “We’re working far too many hours a day, and I came straight from the garden.”

“More manure?” he asked.

“Not today,” she said, laughing. “At least I don’t have to worry about that.”

“All right,” he said. “I’ll meet you in bed.”

She walked into the bedroom. He’d left a lamp on, and he had one arm stretched across the empty pillow. She heard his breathing, deep and regular. She clicked off the lamp and he stirred.

“Pru?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not asleep,” he mumbled.

“Of course you aren’t,” she said. She heard him snore lightly. She crawled into bed, displacing his arm just long enough to get under it so that she could snuggle her backside against him. He sighed, put his face against her neck, and went back to his regular breathing. She was awake only a few minutes herself, just long enough to listen to the sounds of life in the city—traffic, a distant siren—heard faintly through the double-glazed windows. It comforted her, and she realized that she’d been missing the energy and excitement of London.

She awoke to a pearly gray light in the flat and Christopher’s hand on her thigh. She turned onto her back and found him watching her, head propped up on his other hand. “I’ve dreamed of waking up and finding you in my bed,” he said.

It was an escape—she would be the first to admit it. A weekend away with no thought to what she’d left behind and only friends and entertainment to be had. Christopher did his best to be interested when they visited the Garden Museum. She explained the Arts and Crafts movement, how it related to garden design, and the importance of Hidcote Manor as a lasting example of the style.

She took him upstairs to the permanent exhibit of gardening through the ages. He did seem to enjoy the collection of old tools. A row of hand tools caught her eye, among them a few well-made grafting and budding knives—one with a mahogany handle, another Bakelite.

She noticed Christopher patting his pockets in the never-ending search for his reading glasses as he leaned over a case with several long, straight glass tubes, each about two inches wide. He turned slightly pink when he noticed her watching.

She looked down at the description. “It says they’re cucumber straighteners,” she said, trying not to laugh.

They walked over Lambeth Bridge and along the Thames to the Tate Britain. The pavement was clear, but a fine sifting of snow like powdered sugar remained on the branches of trees and the tops of evergreens. Later in the afternoon, Christopher left her at Jo’s, as he needed to check on a few things at the station.

At Gasparetti’s that evening, Riccardo greeted her with open arms and a kiss on each cheek. They were a happy gathering, despite the obvious discomfort of Cordelia, Jo’s daughter, who was quite pregnant and due in a week’s time. Cordelia and her partner, Lucy, had announced the pregnancy not long before Pru left London. In just a few short months, Cordelia’s tall, thin outline had morphed into something quite different. “I look like a whale,” she said, “and I can’t sleep at all.”

Pru thought Lucy looked as if she might be missing some sleep, too, but they kept up their sides of the lively dinner conversation, regardless. Cordelia told the story of how her father, Alan, who lived in Edinburgh, had shopped for an antique pram for his impending grandchild and had it completely refitted to be twenty-first-ce
ntury safe. Jo, a property manager with no knowledge of gardening but a great love of flowers, revealed she had a wealthy new client with a large town garden. Jo said she wished Pru still lived in London so she could design it. “And besides,” Jo said, reaching across the table to take Pru’s hand, “I miss you.”

Lucy was not drinking wine at the moment, in a show of moral support for Cordelia; that left to Jo, Pru, and Christopher the task of finishing off the second bottle of Chianti that arrived at their table, compliments of the house. That could have contributed to the laughter at Christopher’s version of his and Pru’s first lunch date: it had begun well, but quickly segued into an argument, and Pru had stomped away just as the server arrived with their meals, leaving Christopher with both plates of food.

“Subtle,” Pru said, checking Christopher’s small fridge the next morning when he returned from getting the newspaper. Inside, she’d found a carton of buttermilk. “Hoping I’d fix you some biscuits?”

A small smile. “Perhaps I got it just to hear you talk Texan.”

“You might oughta think twice about that,” she said, pulling him close and slipping into her best Texas accent, “ ’cause I can talk a coon right out of a tree.”

Late on Sunday afternoon, Pru and Christopher settled themselves into chairs in Westminster Abbey, waiting for the organ recital. Pru always felt the weight of the centuries when she walked in the Abbey—must be all the stone, and the famous people buried round them. The impressive sense of history gave her pause and put her troubles into perspective. Christopher rested an arm on the back of her chair. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly as contentment washed over her. Just as the organist got up to introduce a Handel organ concerto, she leaned over, lips to Christopher’s ear, and whispered, “I love you.” He grinned and gave her shoulder a squeeze as the music began.

Jo had sent a text early that afternoon to say Cordelia had gone into labor—speculating it had something to do with the lasagna the night before—and they were headed to hospital. And so, as they left the Abbey after the concert, Pru switched her phone back on in case there was news. It rang immediately. “The baby!” she exclaimed, gripping Christopher’s arm for a second before walking a few steps away to answer. She returned not a minute later, her face white as a sheet.