Free Gifted and Talented by Wendy Holden Page A

office in the main entrance: Mugs, £5.99. Tea towels, £3.50. Postcards, 25p each or 80p for a set of four.
    Burying the urge to ask her whether this really was the best she could do, Richard went on his way. He was not going to get involved. No more than he was going to get involved in the forthcoming college council meeting.
    The thought of it was irritating, nonetheless. While he had been assured he need make only the most cursory appearances at official gatherings, just for the sake of the minutes, he had cursorily appeared at enough recently to know that nothing could safeguard him against the inevitable tedium.
    He entered the meeting room abruptly and sat down immediately, so swiftly that the others were still struggling respectfully to their feet while he opened his notebook and clicked his pen expectantly. They sank down again and there was a clearing of throats and a flutter of paper. The Bursar smiled round in avuncular fashion. ‘Shall we begin?’
    Outside in the gardens Diana was trying to stave off her worries about Rosie’s first day at school. Her stomach was rumbling with a mixture of tension and hunger. Her own breakfast had been scrappy, so intent had she been on making sure Rosie finished her cereal and ate her banana. Her nervousness about her own ‘proper’ first day had been subsumed in worry about her daughter’s, but Rosie had maintained her savoir-faire. ‘Of course it’s a much bigger school than my old one, Mum,’ she had said cheerfully to Diana’s tentative efforts to inure her to prospective shocks. ‘But more children means more people to make friends with, doesn’t it?’
    The rather dull, grey, heavy quality of the day pressed on Diana’s spirits. It was cold and rather sulky weather, the flipside of autumn’s dazzling copper-tinted face, the sort that might dissolve into heavy, relentless rain. Diana took a plastic bag from her pocket and spread it out on the path for a kneeler, wishing she had plastic to cover the whole of the rest of her too. Finances did not yet allow the purchase of the heavy-duty waterproofs she would surely need soon.
    She began pulling up some dandelions and thinking that, had she started a month or two later, the worst would have been over, weather as well as weeds. The dry winter frosts would have killed them off and in places it would have been as simple as turning over a spade. Now, of course, just after the fierce growth of summer, the weeds were at their most rampant. Settling on her knees, Diana tried to concentrate instead on the rewards of weeding – the clean dark soil, the piercing pleasure of feeling a well-anchored dandelion root finally give and slide out.
    And, of course, once the weeds were gone, she could really start on the ideas she had. Diana glanced over to the small circle of stagnant water, which might be a pond if it were cleared out and planted round the edge, the scabby, bald patches beneath the trees, which could be transformed with bluebells and cyclamen.
    The neglect of Branston’s gardens had its benign aspects; beneath the weeds and the crisp packets were the tiny, glowing petals of many an ancient species. She was surprised to see, this late in the year, a few scattered red and yellow bird’s foot trefoils, and even a couple of yellow tormentil, and that little purple one, the little circular flower head with turreted purple petals, called ‘self-heal’.
    She had already decided to create a wild-flower garden at Branston. Diana loved wild flowers, the names especially: viper’s bugloss, bats-in-the-belfry, priest-in-the-pulpit, hairy tare, frogbit, water soldier, policeman’s helmet. Lady’s bedstraw, once used as a mattress stuffing. Rest harrow, which is what grew if one rested one’s harrow, presumably. Periwinkle, or ‘joy-of-the-ground’, because it bound itself to the earth with nodes from the trailing stems. There was some in Branston’s garden and Diana crouched by it now, marvelling at the history of