Gifted and Talented Read Online Free PDF Page A

had been able to afford none of them.
    Rosie’s nanny and expensive private school, it turned out, had been similarly beyond his pocket. Ditto her oboe lessons with the LSO and Saturday classes at the Globe. That last now seemed especially ironic; that Rosie had gone for acting classes, given the show her own father was putting on.
    All on credit. Their entire lives had been an illusion so that Simon could keep up appearances. He had always been aspirational; lately, imperceptibly, it had gone up a gear. She had been too busy doing nothing to notice.
    But doing nothing had been exhaustingly busy. The hair appointments, the lymphatic drainage facials, the lunches, the personal trainers, the clothes. Simon had wanted her to look a certain way: that glossy, yummy-mummy way. She had gone along with it; Simon was not the kind of person you said no to. He was vital, energetic, a showman. She had always been much more retiring.
    Well, she had been well and truly punished for her passivity now. After years of sleepwalking, she had been rudely awakened. Simon was bankrupt, the London house sold and Rosie withdrawn with dizzying speed from her expensive private school. In what seemed no time at all, Diana was what she had never imagined being: a penniless single mother.
    Simon had disappeared to Australia with his mistress, leaving Diana with Rosie. And thank God for Rosie. Thank Him, too, for the gardening course. Diana had started it initially as something to do that wasn’t shopping. All her neighbours had employed contract gardeners to maintain the patch that sat behind each tall, stuccoed slice of town house and connected to the private garden square beyond.
    The gardeners were a focus of intense competition, one neighbour losing no opportunity to remind everyone else that her particular horticulturalists also did Buckingham Palace. And that the Queen’s acres were inferior in various ways. Diana, despite all this and probably because of it, wanted to do her own planting and weeding. Simon had tried to talk her out of it but on this one point she had been adamant. And found, to her surprise, not only that she enjoyed it, but that she was good at it. She had passed her first few exams with flying colours.
    Before events had got in the way, she had planned to take her studies even further, way out into the upper reaches of garden design, into water features, even building. She had had no definite ideas about actually working as a gardener then, but events had got in the way and it was while flicking through a gardening magazine in the dentist’s – her last ever visit to the smart private one, but her teeth, if nothing else, would be ready to face whatever lay ahead – that Diana had seen the modest advertisement: GARDENER WANTED. BRANSTON COLLEGE.
    The judder of excitement she felt cut through even the fear of the approaching filling. She had, in happier days, visited the ancient university town and remembered the glossy college gardens strung along the shining river like jewels on a necklace. Gardeners would be fighting to work there, but perhaps this was only a junior position and she might have a chance. An ability to garden was, anyway, her only saleable skill. She had to throw her cap – and gardening gloves – into the ring.
    A university town had obvious benefits too. Renting a house there would be cheaper and safer than amid the unknown dangers of London’s unloved fringes. There would also, presumably, be good schools. And, after what had happened, it would not be hard to say goodbye to the capital.
    Diana went immediately to the local library and booked a slot on one of the computers. She was surprised to find that Branston College, which she had imagined all mellow stone and herbaceous borders, was one of the modern ones. It looked, in fact, like a multi-storey car park. And it was hard to get an idea of the garden, as pictures of it were so few.
    Nothing daunted and, determined to land the job through sheer