The Insistent Garden (8 page)

I glanced up at my watch. “I can't be too long.”

“We can be quick; the entrance is just over there.”

Dotty strode off towards the house, but I paused, unable to resist the elderly foxgloves nudging my sleeve. I eased off a seed head and slipped it into my pocket.

A pair of stone eagles sneered down at me over disdainful beaks when I reached the steps to the house.

“Wipe your feet before you come in,” said a voice from inside the entrance.

I rubbed my shoes across the doormat. Other people in
my
garden?

A woman's head poked out the dark interior, fierce and pale, and perched on a long neck. “Sign here,” she said without preamble.

The visitors' book lay on a table, its cramped pages only just visible in the dirty light. I wrote my name beneath a flamboyant ‘
Dotty Hands
,' then flicked through the book, smiling at the distinctive ‘
Hands
' signature cropping up on the previous pages, not once but several times — summer, autumn, winter and spring.

“That's fine,” said the fierce woman, pulling the book out of my hands and snapping it shut.

I waited, fretting that the ink was not quite dry, then made my way down the hallway towards the first room.

Oh, the first room. Goose pimples sprang up on my arms as I entered it, looking for a sign of Dotty. The first room was full. Packed from wall to wall with strange, unlikely things, it caused me to stand for a second in the doorway, gauging the intimidating fullness of it. Everything was everywhere: plaster dolls stared at me from empty sockets, a suit of armour watched me through a slit in its helmet, and a life-size mannequin, slumped in a chair, gazed sadly at the floor. I struggled to recognize some of the objects in the room: ancient clocks with forty hours on their faces, timber locks ripped from long discarded doors, bottles sewn from leather. I bent down to read some labels, all written in a shaky hand:
wax angel, donkey clamp, sky measurer
.

“Come on Edith, let's delve,” said Dotty reappearing at my side. Ducking to avoid a bunch of dried flowers nailed to the top of the doorframe, I followed her through a narrow entrance that led to the next room.

Slivers of sunlit garden seemed to pierce the darkness of the ground floor rooms and I couldn't help but look out of the window during Dotty's breathless descriptions of the artifacts. But I listened happily, fingering a dusty ‘don't touch' sign I found on the window ledge while absorbing the stories of the manor house: dinner guests too cold to hold their forks, secret marriage vows taken at the dead of night, and mischievous ghosts living inside the curtains.

Dotty knew everything: the name of every curiosity, the name of every room: ‘
Nadir
' glowing with Venetian lanterns, ‘
Zenith
' ticking with the sound of a thousand bracelet clocks, and ‘
Meridian
,' long, thin, ‘
Meridian
' running through the centre of the house like a lost corridor. Her commentary had a pace of its own, slow and detailed on the ground floor, gathering speed round the tiny medieval beds up on the first floor before reaching a peak on the approach to the attic. Following behind the trail of explanations, I felt rising claustrophobia as the hallways narrowed and steps heightened and by the time we reached the top of the house my throat was dry.

“This is the best bit, darling,” whispered Dotty, balancing on top of a high threshold. “The attic!”

A draft of nausea flushed my throat as I ducked down to enter the room. I tried to focus on the walls; the walls were dancing.

Dotty peered into my face. “Darling, you look pale.”

“It's the slope,” announced a man, emerging from the gloom. “Steepest floors in all of England.”

“Can't say I ever noticed,” replied Dotty sniffily.

“It only gets the sensitive ones,” said the man, jerking his jacket cuffs straight.

Dotty threw him a condescending glance, patted my arm and trotted off towards a massive iron contraption sitting quietly in the far corner of the room. I followed, trying to ignore the headache that was working its way down the side of my head. I felt disoriented: the sloping floor, the bright squares of sunlight dotting the walls, all disconnecting my mind from our guide's monotone voice that accompanied us across the room. We halted in the far corner and just as Dotty launched into an explanation of the strange machine in front of us the man cut in with a dramatic, “Sheets!”

Dotty and I turned as one.

“Sheets,” he repeated, then pointed at the ancient appliance in front of us, “The bane of the scullery maid's life.” He wiped a sticky-looking tongue across his lips. “A steel backbone was required to survive laundry day three hundred years ago. But this box mangle, as it was known, invented in 1785. . .”

My head throbbed. I looked over the man's shoulder, through the window and down into the garden. Shadows, thrown from the hedges, accentuated the shape of the borders and wide stone walls, invisible at ground level, were now thick lines on the earth. The attic seemed darker when I looked back at the man's face. He was still relishing the two-hundred-year-old details of the scullery maid's tortuous journey from the garden to the kitchen, dragging stones in a leather bucket, the burn in her shoulders as she heaved them up the stairs. . .

The floor yawned upwards. “Dotty, I have to go home.”

The magazine cover had suffered from friction in my pocket. Yet the details of the garden still looked sharp when I sat on my bed and pulled it out; the tree held onto its apples, the leaves still stuck to the grass. But now I knew what lay beyond the gate; I knew what cast a shadow on the lilies slumped in the bottom left corner. I turned the page over and re-read the last lines of the poem printed on the back.

What fortitude the Soul contains,
That it can so endure
The accent of a coming Foot
—
The opening of a Door
—

10

My body behaved normally as I made my father a cup of tea. My hand was firm as I turned on the tap and my fingers were steady as I spooned in the sugar.

“It's been a hot day,” I ventured.
I'd walked on a chamomile lawn,
couldn't he see that?

“Are all the tools clean?” He spread his newspaper out on the kitchen table.

“Yes.”
Cosmos petals had tickled my fingers.

“Fish defrosted?”

“Yes.”
Ruby peonies had been edged with gold.

“Bathroom bin emptied? It smelt bad yesterday.”

“Yes.”
Heliotrope had reeked of sherbet.

He shook his newspaper vertical, ending the conversation with a wall of stories. I glanced at the headline, ‘
APOLLO
6:
SHAKY DRESS REHEARSAL
,' then flipped the tea towel over the oven rail and stepped outside.

Selecting a spot of dry-looking grass, I sat down and surveyed my back garden. Cement dust had powdered a skirt onto the hawthorn bushes closest to the high wall and the branches were ragged here, chipped off by the tip of the spade and trodden on by the feet of the ladder. Wild grasses grew in the leftover wedge of ground outside the back door. The Little Meadow, I called it. I liked to sit here when my father was at work and run my fingers along the grass stems, which shed their seeds at the slightest touch. A low brick wall ran down the west side of our plot. Archie's garden lay on the other side; a place of great order. His vegetables stood to attention like an army awaiting orders. I could see neat rows of sweet corn lording it over marrows so fat they looked like overweight slugs abandoned in the sun. Tomato plants, gangly with produce, filled the next row. ‘The kings of broken promises,' Archie called them, already displaying fruit, so potentially delicious, yet never to ripen beneath the overcast Billingsford skies. Just looking at them overwhelmed me. I envied the control he had over his garden, over his life. I wanted something like that. My own life, wringing out cloths, scraping out mortar, was out of my hands.

I returned to my spot on the grass and settled my buttocks into the waiting imprint. My thoughts returned to Snowshill. To the army of gardeners who deadheaded flowers, who snipped at twigs, who controlled nature. A seed head tapping my elbow brought me back to the present. The air was thick with specks and balls of fluff. I plucked a dandelion head from beside my shoe, and blew out the time. One o'clock collapsed half the globe. Two o'clock sent a handful of seeds into the bucket of my skirt. Three o'clock launched a sheet of transparent umbrellas up into the sky while four o'clock, stubborn four o'clock, detached the final clump, which dropped straight onto the soil.

It was not one o'clock that marked the moment. Two and three o'clock passed unnoticed. It was at four that I knew what I was going to do.

I was sitting alone at the kitchen table when my father returned from work. He took off his jacket, spread his newspaper out on the table and turned to the crossword, running his fingers through his hair, speckling the paper with dandruff — white dots on black squares. He eyed me suspiciously as I read the first clue upside down.

“Would it be alright if I grew some flowers in the garden?” I concentrated on the line where his forehead met his hair. His pencil remained suspended above six down. I could hear the clock tick and secretly, inside my mouth, I counted the seconds, one, two, three, four. . .

He looked up. “Flowers?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

I fingered my skirt beneath the table. “I thought it'd be nice to make a flower garden behind the house. A small one, I could clear some of the weeds and —”

“No.”

His breathing seemed louder when he dabbed a letter into eleven across. I gazed at the crossword, feeling a bud of nausea as my brain turned round the clue,
Bloom's melancholy toll
. Eight letters.

The sky was a square. Seen through my bedroom window its edge was fixed, yet its contents were moving. Objects often passed through my square of sky, travelling from somewhere to somewhere else. Clouds drifted through. Birds flew through, too fast to see. Pieces of the garden passed through: leaves scuffed up from below, handfuls of dust angling faces towards the sun. Once or twice a year snow rushed through. And once or twice a lifetime a petal floated through. And once, just once, a large stick went through my square of sky.

Parts of the garden were moving, all on their way to somewhere else. The only static object was me.

11

No, no, no
. . . A single word beat a rhythm in my head. Even swishing the mop round in an exaggerated circle failed to clear my father's words from my mind and I felt tired and irritable by the time it nudged the doormat and shifted it to one side. My nostrils twitched as, amidst the smell of mildew and disinfectant, I saw something on the kitchen floor. A sliver of dirt had collected in a gap beside the skirting board, brown, moist, and host to a line of tiny seedlings. Squatting down, I saw more: a row of pale stalks starved of chlorophyll and tiny roots, feeling their way into cracks in the linoleum. A miniature garden had grown in my kitchen without my knowledge, seeds germinating as I prepared the supper, seedlings fattening while I washed the dishes, and whole families quietly dying as I folded up the tea towels. I stood up, faintly aware, just faintly, of a new idea gathering in my mind.