Imaginative Experience (13 page)

Angie, checked in mid-flow, said, ‘How on earth did you know that, Peter?’, ignoring her new acquaintance’s query.

Peter said, ‘A chap told me, oh, ages ago. Because she couldn’t speak a word and was unlikely to understand, Mrs Patel was afraid to attend the clinic, so the Piper woman, who was going anyway, took her along.’

Deflated, Angie said, ‘Oh, really?’ Then, aware this was a social occasion, she laughed and said, ‘They must have looked pretty comical toddling off together, bean-pole Piper and tiny Patel, arm in arm I expect like a huge choc-ice.’

At which Janet, who up to now had sat silent, exclaimed, ‘That’s a thoroughly racist remark,’ and Tim, taking fright at this turn in the chat, hastily demanded a full report on their friends’ holiday.

I
T WAS AS THOUGH
someone deciding to till the garden had lost heart before they began. There was a fork, a trowel, a hand fork and a pair of secateurs, all brand-new; and in a paper bag a pair of gardening gloves with the price label still attached.

The earth in the beds round three sides of the oblong was grey and dead. Among residual stalks of last year or the year before’s annuals, not even a dandelion showed life. Julia forked the earth, turning it, breaking the gritty clods, digging as deep as she could, bending to extract bits of glass, snippets of Cellophane, rusty nails and plastic flower-pots which some foolish instant gardener had stuck in the borders, pot plant and all, leaving them to do or die, and die they had. Working the sterile earth she considered the glories of compost and farmyard manure and, as she dug, she vowed to rejuvenate this sad little London garden, surprise it, give it a shock.

The beds dug over, she fetched a broom and swept the paving between the beds. She noted with pleasure that it was not, as she had expected, of some cement composition but lovely Delabole slate. Sweeping the debris from the flower-beds into a heap, she shovelled it into a bin-bag. Then, taking the secateurs, she set to work on a wistaria clinging forlornly against the house. While pruning its excess of brittle tendrils with utmost severity, she dreamed of how in the spring the vine would bud and produce exquisite bunches of scented pea rather than waste its energies in a profusion of leaves.

She had left the dog in the street, partly because she hesitated to take it into her employer’s house, and perhaps too to see whether it might after all come to its senses and return to where it belonged. Twice as she worked she heard it bark, and at one moment growl loudly and savagely at some person, a man by the sound of his curses, but drowned in her thoughts and plans for the garden she did not pause to see what was up. Wearily at last in the gathering dusk she viewed her
oeuvre,
visualized the garden as it would be when she had planted it, the beds full of scented delights and between the flagstones cushions of aromatic herbs.

The dog barked again, calling her this time with impatient yelps. Reluctantly she went into the house, locked the french windows, put away the tools and, hitching on her coat, went out to the street. She was tired, but felt a lightening of spirit she had not experienced since Christy’s death. Gardening was therapeutic, she thought, and of course the dog was company. ‘I suppose I shall have to find you a name,’ she said to the animal as they set off together along the pavement.

Patel’s Corner Shop was still open. The dog waited outside; she went in.

‘Dog food?’ exclaimed Mr Patel. ‘You have a
dog?’

‘I seem to have.’

‘A dog! Well, well! Winalot or Chappie?’ Mr Patel’s rendering of the word Chappie was upbeat and seductive.

‘I had better have one of each, please.’

‘Do not spoil the brute.’ Mr Patel put two tins of dog food into a bag. ‘Mrs Patel has taken the children to visit her sister,’ he said.

‘Oh.’ What I would love to put on those poor flower-beds, Julia thought, is some real farmyard manure, and some of the compost we made, Giles and I—but how to get it?

‘You are tired? Pot of tea?’ Mr Patel broke in on her thoughts, leaning across the counter radiating affection and sympathy.

‘No, thank you, dear Mr Patel.’ Should she buy dog biscuits? She looked round the shop. ‘You don’t happen to know of a van I could hire, or a car?’

‘A car? A van?’ His voice rose.

‘Ours, I mean mine was smashed.’ (Oh bloody, bloody Giles.)

‘Of course, oh, of course.’ She was afraid he would mention Christy, but he said, ‘Insurance? They pay up?’

‘Not enough.’

‘Very bad, very bad.’

‘I need to go to the country.’ The need grew in urgency as she spoke. ‘I want to walk with the dog and I want to fetch real manure, compost.’

‘Compost? What is it?’

‘Stuff you dig into earth to make things grow, and breed worms.’

‘What for?’

‘Did I not tell you I am working on Mr Wykes’s garden?’

‘I think you clean the house,’ said Mr Patel.

‘But I am working in his garden, too, did I not tell you?’

‘You did not.’

‘I thought I had.’

‘Stick a notice,’ suggested Mr Patel, pointing towards his notice-board. ‘I will not charge and I will enquire, but this compost, does it smell?’

‘Not much, but manure might.’

Mr Patel sighed. ‘I will write a notice. Now pot of tea?’ he suggested.

Julia shook her head. ‘Thank you and bless you, but I must go back and feed my new chum.’

‘Pedigree Chum!’ Mr Patel exclaimed. ‘I have that too, is excellent.’

‘Another time.’ Julia thanked him and went on her way, the dog trotting beside her. Because it did not occur to her that she might be followed, she failed to notice Maurice Benson who, snooping until she had let herself into the house where she lived on the top floor, retraced his footsteps to the Corner Shop and engaged Mr Patel in conversation and presently, to keep Mr Patel sweet, made one or two purchases.

Perambulating the shop he came to a halt by the notice-board and began reading the cards. As he read Mr Patel came up behind him, opened the case and pinned a new notice on the board.
Wanted to Hire, Car or Van.
Maurice Benson read it, and put two and two together. The telephone number he observed was the same as on several other cards, presumably the number of the shop. Mr Patel would take messages and pass them on to people wise enough to cherish their privacy like Julia Piper. Having selected a few items, Maurice returned to the counter to pay. Mr Patel took his money and gave change. ‘I see someone wants to hire a car or van,’ Maurice said. ‘I’d be interested. I have a car which does not earn its keep.’

Mr Patel said, ‘Oh, yes?’

‘I’d be ready to rent it, or drive it for that matter for whoever—’

Mr Patel said, ‘Oh yes?’ again.

‘So how do I get in touch?’

‘The person is already suited.’

‘But I just saw you pin the notice on the board, the person can’t be,’ said Maurice.

‘The person is,’ said Mr Patel.

‘But I just saw—’

‘In India it is custom to keep all notice-boards full. It is old custom, good for custom.’

‘Do you mean to tell me that half your notices are bogus?’

‘Bogus?’

‘Fake.’

Mr Patel laughed, not trusting Maurice Benson.

‘So no kittens neutered in need of a home?’

‘Kittens? Yes, sir, there are kittens, you want a—’

‘What about the goat?’

‘No goat.’ Mr Patel laughed again. ‘Is joke. You want Kit-e-kat?’

‘No, I do
not,’
said Maurice Benson.

Mr Patel watched him leave the shop and, later that evening, when Mrs Patel had returned from visiting her sister, he telephoned Julia Piper and offered her the use of his van.

T
HERE WAS NO RADIO
in Mr Patel’s van; the windscreen wipers creaked across and across, sluicing the rain with a noise both soothing and monotonous.

The dog sat upright and anxious at first, but presently settled to lie across the seat with his jaw pressed warmly on Julia’s thigh; with London behind her, her thoughts yet stayed with the little garden so starved of attention and the first aid she planned for it.

She found herself comparing it with the only garden she knew well, her mother’s, and the work she and Giles had shared during arduous but agreeable hours of labour.

Long before planting the camellia hedge, the cost of which had so startled the village, there had been the weeding and trenching, raking and levelling of the entire area to Giles’s design. She had worked with him willingly, for it took her out of the house and the proximity of Clodagh’s constant demands and nit-picking criticism. Even so, propped on a sofa, her broken leg in plaster, Clodagh had overseen their activities shouting suggestions and directions through the open french window, her strong voice carrying, as Giles said, ‘as through a loud-hailer’, a remark which had made her laugh.

From time to time he would leave her at work to chat with Clodagh or, with the excuse that he had an idea for the book he was writing which must be noted before he forgot it, he would go to his room where once, needing to go to the lavatory and passing his open door, she had seen him asleep, sprawled on his bed, and been too soft-hearted to rouse him, excusing him for he sat up late keeping Clodagh company when she was, she said, in pain and sleepless. At that period she had judged Giles a kind and caring man to be so good to her difficult mother.

Labouring together, they had made the compost heap, a mountain of grass cuttings, weeds, newspaper, kitchen rubbish, tea leaves, autumn leaves, potato peelings, even old socks. Giles tested its degree of fermentation with a long metal stave, saying, ‘Next year, when this is properly rotted, we will spread it on the garden. It will be rich and friable. But this year she must buy dung.’ Clodagh had cavilled at the cost of farmyard manure and its pungent smell. Was that the time Giles had a row with Clodagh, a row which woke her in the night? Was it that row or another which, erupting again next day, caused Giles to say, ‘I could murder the old bitch and bury her in the compost heap’?

She had laughed; one laughed easily when attracted to the person who made the joke. ‘When
she
is rotted,’ Giles had said, ‘mine will be the richest, most friable compost in the county,’ rolling the Rs in the word ‘friable’ so that for days they giggled at the mention of compost. (’Here, put this with the compost;’ hoots and toots of silly laughter.) Temporarily then they were united against Clodagh, not only by the irritation caused by her bossiness but by a joke shared. That was before Giles, catching her unaware on the day Clodagh had been taken to the hospital by Madge Brownlow to have her cast removed, had tripped her, forced her to the ground (by the compost heap) and raped her.

Driving through the night in Mr Patel’s van, Julia shivered as she remembered the cold ground on her back and retched, her mouth filling with bitter saliva at the recollected taste of Giles’s blood when she bit the hand which stifled her screams.

Madge Brownlow, returning with her mother released from plaster, had turned about and taken Giles to the hospital to have the wound stitched. ‘No, I would not recognize the bitch,’ Giles had said. ‘All I know is that it bit me for no reason.’ Clodagh said, ‘Make sure he has an anti-tetanus injection, Madge.’

‘I must be out of my mind to even dream of it,’ Julia said to the dog. ‘I can’t go back there, however good the compost.’ The dog sat up yawning and yowling and peered through the windscreen, for day was breaking; they had come a long way. ‘OK,’ Julia said. ‘You want to pee, I want to pee.’ She stopped the van, switched off the engine and, getting out, discovered that the rain had stopped and they were at the top of a hill by a wood in a stretch of country she had never seen, but which reminded her of some place she had fleetingly known a long time ago. And her mother had not been there.

So who had she been with?

A robin sang from the top of a bush, establishing its territory. They jumped a ditch and walked through trees still dripping with rain until they reached a clearing, where she stopped and listened. Far away a cock crowed; in a field by the wood a cow coughed and another tore at the grass with its long harsh tongue. In the wood a startled pheasant cack-cacked.

‘What’s that?’ she had asked.

‘Just a pheasant.’ He had held her hand. She had had to reach up, her head barely level with the man’s knee. ‘Come on,’ he had said, ‘not much further. We are nearly there.’

‘Where’s there?’ she had asked.

And he had answered, ‘Home. My home. Your home, now.’

‘Goodness, what a funny thing to remember,’ Julia said to the dog. ‘That was my
father
! It was his home, or had been, but not mine for more than five minutes. Or five days, perhaps? He had run away with me,’ she told the dog. ‘It was lovely and exciting, frightening, too, but he got bored and sent me back.’

The dog raised front paws against her thigh to stare up at her face. She stroked his head. ‘I can’t remember it properly,’ she said, ‘but I am hungry, let’s find somewhere to have breakfast.’ She turned and went back through the wood and presently, driving on, saw a sign that said:
Bed and Breakfast.
Turning in at a gate, she stopped at a farm where she asked whether she could have the breakfast without the bed? The woman was agreeable and sat her at a table by a window, the dog at her feet, to wait for bacon and eggs, mushroom, tomatoes, toast and coffee.

The woman asked, ‘Would your dog like something?’

Julia said he would and the woman said, ‘We give ours lights and biscuits, that do?’ Later, watching him eat, she said, ‘Nice dog, bit of a lurcher. My husband likes lurchers; you wouldn’t want to part?’

And Julia exclaimed, ‘Oh, no!’ When they were alone she said to the dog, ‘So that’s what you are, a lurcher. I shall have to find you a name now I know what you are.’

Back in the van, feeling a need to tramp across country, she headed west towards Dartmoor humped heavy on the skyline, its sombre autumn colours presaging winter but still streaked orange and rust by dying bracken. Climbing the slopes up narrow twisting lanes she stopped at a high point, parked the van in a disused quarry and, with the dog beside her, set off walking. At first it was enough to breathe the air, watch a cloud’s shadow racing along the side of the hills, spot buzzards wheeling, note clumps of gorse in flower, catch the eye of shaggy ponies who looked up snorting as she passed and black-faced sheep who stood their ground to stamp their feet at the dog, and listen to the roar of a river in spate charging towards the pewter-coloured sea in the distance. But watching the dog bouncing and leaping in the bracken, whose colours complemented its coat, she was reminded as she had been earlier in the wood of that half-forgotten incident in her childhood. There had been a dog, a springer spaniel. The man who was her father had said, ‘Look how lively he leaps,’ as he tried to distract her attention, for she whimpered with fatigue. He had said, too, ‘We are nearly there. Oh, do shut up. It won’t be long now.’