‘I know – I’m kidding. I’m just traumatised from looking out the window and seeing we were driving on the edge of some sort of death-drop.’
‘Yes, that freaked me out at first,’ Lily admitted. ‘It’s a long way down, huh?’
‘At least it holds the promise of certain death,’ Emily said. ‘You don’t have to worry about life-altering injuries.’
‘Always a bright side.’
‘Precisely.’ Emily grinned. ‘But please do try not to veer sideways, won’t you?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Lily smiled.
There was a moment’s silence before she began again. ‘Look, in all honesty, the property does need serious attention. The garden is so overgrown – some of the grasses and weeds are taller than me. And there are repairs needed. And I haven’t really had the chance to clean it properly…’
‘You really do want me to like this place,’ said Emily, placing her hand briefly over Lily’s. ‘Seriously, don’t worry. You’ve told me about it and it sounds beautiful.’
‘Well, it has potential at least.’
‘It’ll be fine. I won’t judge. I promise.’
‘I guess we’ll find out,’ Lily said, bumping slightly up the small, gravelled kerb. ‘This is it.’
‘What, this one?’ Emily said, pointing at her neighbour’s cottage.
‘No, that one.’
‘Oh. But you said… overgrown?’
Lily looked up properly and gasped. In place of the tangled mess that had filled the entire front garden, was a plot of flattened, slightly grassy, slightly muddy, ground. The path was clearly visible and from the looks of it had even been swept.
‘Oh, my god,’ Lily said. ‘It must have been Claude.’
‘Who’s Claude?’ Emily asked as they got out of the car.
‘Oh, he’s a friend of Frédérique’s – you know the guy who’s selling me the place? He said he’d bring his tractor over and – well – sort out the garden. But I didn’t realise he was doing it today.’ She glanced at her watch – it had been four and a half hours since she’d left, but even so the progress was astounding.
‘Wow, that’s nice of him.’
‘Ridiculously nice,’ Lily said, taking one of Emily’s bags from her as they walked up the path to the front door.
Inside, she inspected Emily’s face closely as her friend made positive comments about the I, the size and the potential of the place. ‘Really?’ she asked repeatedly. ‘You really like it?’
‘Darling, I like it for you,’ her friend said at last. ‘It wouldn’t be my bag, but I’m a lazy cow – you know that. If you say you can transform this into your dream property, I believe you.’
‘Thank you.’
They finally walked through to the kitchen, after she’d explained to Emily in probably too much detail, exactly what to expect. ‘I know I said it was a kitchen, but it’s really only a work in progress…’ she was saying, as they pushed into the room. ‘And you’ll see the back garden from the window and it’s a complete and utter… oh.’
She stopped so suddenly that Emily bumped into her and almost sent her flying.
‘Oops, sorry,’ her friend said.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just… I saw…’ She gestured to the window.
Rather than the tangled greener’ she'd used to view whenever she was at the back of the house, the back garden too had been flattened. The job was rudimentary – clearly done with a tractor that had left the grass cuttings in its wake and scored lines in the newly revealed ground. But for the first time Lily was able to see the 3,000 m2 of garden that stretched away from the back of her cottage. A line of fir trees signalled the end of her plot giving way to a wooded area through which – wherever there was a small gap – she could glimpse the lake beyond.
Propped in the corner, uncovered during the job no doubt, was a rather rusty cast-iron table and chairs.
‘Oh my god,’ Lily said again, ‘it’s beautiful. This is my garden. This is…’
Emily draped an arm around her friend’s shoulders. ‘It’s absolutely perfect,’ she said.
They were mid-coffee when there was a knock at the door. Lily went to answer and found Claude standing on her doorstep, smiling.
‘I just come to see if it is OK?’ he said in his broken English. ‘I know it is not pretty, yes? But there were many – how you say – sticks and trunks and it is very hard to cut. So I ’ave to use my biggest tracteur.’