The Last Garden in England(5)

“That bad?” he asked.

“In some places it’s been dug over entirely, but others are just wild. There are four morello cherry trees that look as though they haven’t been properly dealt with in thirty years. And then there’s the bottom of the garden. It’s all a mess, and there’s one garden room I can’t even figure out the theme of.”

“Sounds as though you’ve got your work cut out for you,” he said.

“I do. The place must have looked beautiful even just five years after Venetia finished it.” Except she doubted Venetia Smith ever saw her work come to fruition. As far as Emma knew, she’d never come back to Britain once she left.

“I’m sure it was.” The line went muffled, and she could tell Dad had done his best to cover the microphone on his mobile. She braced herself for the moment he came on again and said, “Your mum wants to speak to you.”

Before she could give some excuse—she was tired, she needed to get dinner on—she heard the shifting of the phone from one hand to the other and Mum came on. “Have you heard anything from the foundation?”

“Hello, Mum. I’m doing well, thanks for asking.”

“We’re waiting on pins and needles here, Emma. You need that head of conservation job,” said her mother, ignoring her.

“Need” wasn’t the way Emma would put it, but she tried her best to shove her annoyance aside. Mum wanted the best for her, and to Mum a stable job at the prestigious Royal Botanical Heritage Society was the best a girl from Croydon without a university degree could hope for.

“I don’t know yet. They said they’d call if I progressed into the next round of interviews,” she said.

“Of course they’ll want to bring you in again. They couldn’t find anyone better to head up their conservancy efforts. And you could have a steady paycheck for once in your life.”

“I have a steady paycheck,” she said. Most of the time.

“Didn’t you spend last summer chasing down that horrible couple who refused to pay you?” her mother asked.

It would have been more accurate to say that her solicitor chased the couple who’d refused to pay the last half of her fees and tried to stick her with a bill of ￡10,000 for rare plants and hardscaping they’d insisted she work into their garden’s design.

“They paid in the end,” she said with a sigh, remembering the legal fees that had cut into the money she’d recovered.

“After you threatened legal action.”

“That doesn’t happen very often,” she said.

“Admit it, love. Turning Back Thyme is a good little business, but it isn’t exactly paving the streets with gold.”

“Mum—”

“If you took the foundation job, you could finally buy a house. Prices aren’t so bad if you go far enough south of the Thames. You could have your own garden, and you could be so much closer to your father and me instead of roving all over the place,” said Mum.

“I like moving around,” she said.

“Your father and I didn’t pay all of those school fees for you to be homeless,” her mother pushed.

“Mum! I’m not homeless. I live where I work. Besides, if the foundation offered me the job—which they haven’t even done second interviews for—I’d still have to figure out what to do with my company. That isn’t an easy decision.”

“You could sell it.”

“Mum.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?”

The denial didn’t come as fast as it should have. She loved Turning Back Thyme, but owning a business alone was hard. She lived with the near-constant stress of wondering if this was going to be the year things came crashing down. A few bad jobs—or a stretch of no work—and it wouldn’t just be her livelihood on the line, but her entire crew’s.

If all she had to do was design, it would be heaven, but it was so much more than that. She was also accounting, HR, payroll, marketing, sales all rolled into one. Some days she’d stumble from working on a site to a night spent over her laptop, processing the piles of digital paperwork that came with running a small business. Then she’d fall into bed, only to wake up with a gasp from the recurring nightmare of logging in to the business’s bank account only to find a ￡75,000 overdraft.

It was days like that—and conversations like this—that made her wonder if she was kidding herself that she could do this for the rest of her life.

Clearing her throat, she said, “I need to make dinner and get ready for tomorrow.”

“You have so much potential, Emma.”

I didn’t raise you to dig around in the dirt all day.

You were supposed to be better than this.

You threw everything away, Emma.

What a disappointment.

Emma couldn’t unhear those words thrown at her during every single fight they’d had when Emma had turned her back on university and chosen this life. A life that Mum, who had risen above her working-class roots, hadn’t wanted for her.

“I need to go, Mum,” she said lamely.

“Send us photos of the house you’re staying in,” her mother said, her tone shifting to cheerfulness now that she’d gotten her shots in.

“And the garden, too!” her father shouted in the background.