Pulse (8 page)

‘Afraid not. “Origin unknown”.’

‘That’s not a derivation, “origin unknown”.’

‘It says, “Possibly connected to a Romany word for money.”’

‘That’s most unsatisfactory.’

‘Sorry to be a spoilsport.’

‘Do you think that’s another national characteristic?’

‘Being a spoilsport?’

‘No. Inventing fanciful derivations and acronyms.’

‘Perhaps UK really stands for something else.’

‘Uro Konvergence.’

‘It’s not that late, is it?’

‘Maybe it doesn’t stand for anything at all.’

‘It’s an allegory.’

‘Or a metaphor.’

‘Will someone
please
explain the difference between a simile and a metaphor?’

‘A simile’s … more similar. A metaphor’s more … metaphorical.’

‘Thanks.’

‘It’s a question of convergence, as the prime minister put it. At the moment, the euro and the pound are miles apart, so their relationship is metaphorical. Maybe even metaphysical. Then they become close, like similes, and there’s convergence.’

‘And we finally become Europeans.’

‘And live happily ever after.’

‘Teaching them all about marmalade.’

‘Why didn’t you guys join the euro, as a matter of fact?’

‘We had the introduction, we just didn’t want the intromission.’

‘We were too fat to fuck at the time.’

‘Too fat to
be
fucked. By some lean and hungry Eurocrat.’

‘I think we should join on St Valentine’s Day.’

‘Why not Friday the 13th?’

‘No, it has to be the 14th. The celebration of both love and impotence.
That
’s the day we become fully paid-up members of Europe.’

‘Larry, do you want to know how this country’s changed in my lifetime? When I was growing up, we didn’t think about ourselves as a nation. There were certain assumptions, of course, but it was a sign, a proof, of who we were that we didn’t think much about who or what we were. What we was was normal – or is it “what we were was normal”? Now, this might have been due to the long overhang of imperial power, or it might be a matter of what you earlier called our emotional reticence. We weren’t self-conscious. Now we are. No, we’re worse – worse than self-conscious, worse than navel-gazing. Who was saying about that proctologist who told him to squat over a mirror? That’s what we’re like now – arse-gazing.’

‘Mint tea, another mint tea here, that’s the decaf. I’ve ordered two minicabs. Why the silence? Did I miss something?’

‘Only a simile.’

After that, we talked about holidays, and who was going where, and how the days were getting longer, apparently at the rate of one minute per day, a fact which no one disputed, and then someone described looking at the inside of a snowdrop, and how you lifted the head of the flower expecting it to be all white inside as well, only to discover a lacy pattern of the purest green. And how different varieties of snowdrop had different internal patterns, some almost geometrical, others quite extravagant, although it was always the same green, and of a vibrancy that made you feel spring was eager to arrive. But before anyone could say anything about or against that, there was a concerted and impatient hooting from the street.

Gardeners’ World

T
HEY HAD REACHED
the stage, eight years into their relationship, when they had started giving each other useful presents, ones that confirmed their joint project in life rather than expressed their feelings. As they unwrapped sets of coathangers, storage jars, an olive stoner or an electric pencil sharpener, they would say, ‘Just what I needed’, and mean it. Even gifts of underwear nowadays seemed more practical than erotic. One wedding anniversary, he’d given her a card that read, ‘I have cleaned all your shoes’ – and he had, spraying everything suede against the rain, dabbing whitener on an old pair of tennis pumps she still wore, giving her boots a military shine, and treating the rest of her footwear with polish, brush, rag, cloth, elbow-grease, devotion, love.

Ken had offered to waive presents this year, as his birthday fell only six weeks after they moved into the house, but she declined to be let off. So, this Saturday lunchtime, he gently palpated the two parcels in front of him, trying to imagine what they might contain. He used to do this out loud, but if he guessed right she was visibly disappointed, and if he guessed silly, disappointed in a different way. So now he addressed only himself. First one, soft: got to be something to wear.

‘Gardening gloves! Just what I needed.’ He tried them on, admired their mixture of flexibility and robustness, commented on the leather bands which reinforced the stripy canvas at key points. This was the first time they had owned a garden, and his first pair of such gloves.

His other present was some kind of oblong box; when he was about to give it a shake, she warned that some bits were fragile. He unpeeled the Sellotape carefully, as they saved wrapping paper for re-use. Inside he found a green plastic attaché case. Frowning, he raised its lid and saw a line of glass test tubes with corks in the top, a set of plastic bottles containing different coloured liquids, a long plastic spoon, and assorted mysterious dibbers and wodgers. Had he been guessing silly, he might have suggested an advanced version of the home pregnancy kit they had once used way back, when they were still hoping. Now he knew not to mention the comparison. Instead, he read the title of the handbook.

‘A soil-testing kit! Just what I needed.’

‘They really work, apparently.’

It was a good present, appealing to – what, exactly? – perhaps that small area of masculinity which modern society’s erosion of difference between the sexes had not yet eliminated. Man as boffin, as prospective hunter-gatherer, as boy scout: a bit of each. Among their circle of friends, both sexes shared the shopping, cooking, housework, childcare, driving, earning. Apart from putting on their own clothes, there was almost nothing one partner did that the other was not equally capable of. And equally willing, or unwilling, to do. But a soil-testing kit, now that was definitely a boy thing. Clever Martha does it again.

The handbook said the kit would test for potassium, phosphorus, potash and pH, whatever that was. And then presumably you got bags of different stuff and dug them in. He smiled at Martha.

‘So I suppose it will also help us work out what will grow best where.’

When she only smiled back, he assumed that she assumed he was referring to the contentious subject of his vegetable patch. His theoretical vegetable patch. The one which she said there was no room for, and anyway no need for, given the farmers’ market every Saturday morning in the nearby school playground. Not to mention the lead content likely to occur in any vegetables grown so close to one of the chief arterial roads leading out of London. He had pointed out that most cars nowadays used lead-free petrol.

‘Well then, diesel,’ she had replied.

He didn’t – still – see why he shouldn’t have a little square patch down by the end wall, which already had a blackberry on it. He could grow potatoes and carrots, perhaps. Or Brussels sprouts, which, he had once read, sweeten up as soon as the first hard frost hits them. Or broad beans. Or anything. Even salad. He could grow lettuces and herbs. He could have a compost heap and they could do even more recycling than they did already.

But Martha was against it. Almost as soon as they had made an offer on the house she started clipping and filing articles by various horticultural sages. Many were on the subject of How to Make the Most of a Tricky Space; and no one could deny that what owners of terrace houses like theirs ended up with – a long thin strip bounded by yellow-grey brick walls – was indeed a Tricky Space. The classier gardening writers tended to suggest that in order to Make the Most of it, you should break it up into a series of small, intimate areas with different plantings and different functions, perhaps linked by a serpentine path. Before and After photos demonstrated the transformation. A nook designed to catch the sun would give way to a little rose garden, a water feature, a place where plants were grown just for the colour of their leaves, a hedged square containing a sundial, and so on. Sometimes Japanese principles were invoked. Ken, who like most of the inhabitants of the street considered himself tolerant and open-minded in matters of race, told Martha that while the Japanese had many admirable qualities, he didn’t know why they should create a Japanesy garden any more than she should wear a kimono. Privately, he thought the whole notion poncey. Terrace for sitting out, preferably with barbecue area, plus grass, borders, veg patch – that was his idea of a garden.

‘Don’t you think I’d look good in a kimono?’ she had asked, turning the argument.

Anyway, she assured him, he was taking things far too literally. They weren’t going to have flowering cherries and koi carp and gongs; it was more a sensible way of interpreting a general principle. Besides, he liked the way she did salmon steaks with a soy-sauce marinade, didn’t he?

‘I bet the Japanese grow vegetables,’ he had replied, mock-grumpily.

Martha’s interest in gardening had come as a surprise to him. When they had first met, she owned a window box in which she grew a few herbs; later, when they moved in together, they acquired access to a shared roof terrace. Here she kept a few terracotta planters with chives, mint, thyme and rosemary, some of which, they suspected, were stolen by their neighbours; also the bay tree her sentimentally interfering parents had given them as an augury of marital good fortune. It had been repotted a couple of times, and now stood immoveably outside their front door in a thick wooden tub.

Marriage was a democracy of two, he liked to say. He had somehow assumed that the garden would be decided upon much as the house had been, by a process of reasoned yet enthusiastic consultation in which requirements were enunciated, mutual tastes considered, finances estimated. As a consequence, there was almost nothing he actively hated in the house, and much he approved of. Now he found himself silently resenting the catalogues of teakware that arrived, the horticultural magazines piled on Martha’s bedside table, and her habit of shushing him when
Gardeners’ Question Time
was on the radio. He would eavesdrop on matters of leafcurl and black spot, some new threat to wisteria, and advice about what to plant beneath an elder tree on a north-facing slope. He didn’t feel threatened by Martha’s new interest, just found it excessive.

pH, he learnt, was a number used to express degrees of acidity or alkalinity in solutions, formerly the logarithm to base 10 of the reciprocal of the concentration of hydrogen ions, but now related by formula to a standard solution of potassium hydrogen phthalate, which has value 4 at 15 degrees centigrade. Well, sod that for a game of soldiers, Ken thought. Why not just get a bag of bonemeal and a sack of compost and dig them in? But Ken was aware of this trait of his, a tendency to settle for the approximate, which one irate girlfriend called ‘just being incredibly fucking
lazy
’ – a description he had always cherished.

And so he read most of the instructions that came with his soil-testing kit, identified several key locations in the garden, and proudly pulled on his new gloves before digging small samples of earth and crumbling them into the test tubes. As he added drops of liquid, inserted the corks, and shook the contents up and down, he occasionally glanced towards the kitchen window, hoping that Martha would be tenderly amused by his professionalism. His attempt at professionalism, anyway. He left each experiment the required number of minutes, took out a little notebook and recorded his findings, then he went on to the next location. Once or twice he retested when the first result had been dubious or unclear.

Martha could tell he was in a jolly mood that evening. He stirred the fricassee of rabbit, decided to give it another twenty minutes or so, poured them each a glass of white wine, and sat on the arm of her chair. Looking down indulgently at an article about different types of gravel, he played with the hair at the nape of her neck, and said, with a cheery smile,

‘Bad news, I’m afraid.’

She looked up, uncertain where his remark might fall on a scale from gentle tease to full critical objection.

‘I’ve tested the soil. In places I had to do it more than once before I was confident of my findings. But the surveyor-general is now ready to report.’

‘Yes?’

‘According to my analysis, madam, there is no soil in your soil.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘It is impossible to address deficiencies in the
terroir
, because there is no soil in your soil.’

‘You’ve said that. So what is there instead?’

‘Oh, stones mainly. Dust, roots, clay, ground elder, dogshit, catcrap, bird-droppings, stuff like that.’

He liked the way he had said ‘your soil’.

On another Saturday morning three months later, with the December sun so low that the garden would be lucky to get the slightest warmth or light, Ken came into the house and threw down his gardening gloves.

‘What have you done with the blackberry?’

‘What blackberry?’

This made him more tense. Their garden was hardly that big.

‘The one along the back wall.’

‘Oh, that briar.’

‘That
briar
was a blackberry with blackberries on it. I brought you two and personally fed them into your mouth.’

‘I’m planning something along that wall. Maybe a Russian vine, but that’s a bit cowardly. I was thinking a clematis.’

‘You dug up my blackberry.’

‘
Your
blackberry?’ She was always at her coolest when she knew, and knew that he knew, that she’d done something without consultation. Marriage was a democracy of two, except when there’s a tied vote, in which case it descends into autocracy. ‘It was a godawful briar.’

‘I had plans for it. I was going to improve its pH factor. Prune it, and stuff. Anyway, you knew it was a blackberry. Blackberries,’ he added authoritatively, ‘produce blackberries.’

‘OK, it was a bramble.’