The Insistent Garden (24 page)

Toughen up.
The cracks in my ceiling seemed to have grown when I lay in bed that night. Why must I hate a person I had never met? How
could
I change things? I pulled the sheet up beneath my chin, and as I perspired with anxiety, wrestling a strange internal desire for something undefined, I imagined toxic guilt seeping out of my body onto the sheets beneath me.

39

The sun was pulling a gold line onto the rooftops by the time I reached the top of Adlington Street. I was late getting to most of my destinations these days as Vivian had introduced what she grandly called the ‘house list' into my life and my natural scheduling, based on sights and sounds and smells, had been replaced by a crisp page of chores that threw off any natural calibration of time. She'd bought paper for this very purpose, exposing the rarely seen innards of her handbag and spending her own money on a notebook, which sat on the kitchen table and silently regulated my day. It had a life of its own, that list, the way it shrank to almost nothing during the day as I crossed out each chore, then reverted to its original length during the night. But one chore made me happy. With the heels in my household wearing thin I'd been back to the cobbler's and so on to the bookshop several times since my first meeting with Harold.

I stood at Harold's gate for a long time, wondering what this place had meant to my mother. I tried to imagine her inside the room, feeling the spines of the books as she tidied the shelves, not thinking about her work but trying to decide which book my father would like, or which words would make him sit back in his chair and listen. Suddenly, a figure loomed out of the dark: Harold, dragging a bag of rubbish around the side of the house.

“Edith! You scared me.”

“Sorry, I was hoping to catch you before —”

“Wednesday's early closing,” he said. He lifted up the dustbin lid and dropped in the bag, which huffed out the scent of decomposing fruit as it collapsed downwards. “Would you like to go for a drink? The pub's not far. Loosen us up a bit?”

“I don't think so, I —”

“Or get a hamburger, there's a Wimpy at the bottom of the hill.”

I paused. Where
was
I on the list? “Yes, yes, I'd like that.”

The cafe was almost empty when we arrived, just a man in a raincoat sitting alone at a corner table and two children by the counter, machine-gunning each other with straws.

“What are you having, Edith? My treat.”

“A hamburger, please.”

“And chips?”

“Oh. . . yes.”

“Can I interest you in a Pepsi to wash it down?”

“Yes, but I can get that.”

“'Salright.” Harold waved in the direction of the counter and a waitress appeared beside our table; her pen hovered above a small pad held in her hand. I felt overwhelmed by the size of her collar, so white, so frilly, and it seemed to point as she talked, first at Harold, then at me. She jotted down our order, pulled out a carbon copy and slipped it beneath a large plastic tomato that sat in the middle of the table. Harold leaned forward — I could smell something — and briefly touched my hair. “Rather like hers,” he said.

“What
is
this? “I said quickly, lifting up the fruit and sniffing the stalk.

“Edith,” said Harold, “You have been in a Wimpy bar before, haven't you?”

“I. . . no.”

He leaned back on the bench. “There's ketchup in there. Generally appreciated for its ability to disguise the taste of the burger.” He smiled. “You didn't come to the shop to buy a book, did you?”

“What happened to all my mother's friends?” I said.

He leaned towards me. “I didn't know any of them personally but I saw quite a few at her funeral.”

A hundred questions poured into my head, uninvited. “You were there?” I said.

“Yes.” He removed his hat and laid it on the bench beside him. “I nearly didn't go, there was this woman —”

“Vivian.”

“Yes, I think that was her name; a bit on the hefty side I remember. . .” He paused. “Anyway, she was extremely unfriendly when I called your house. She sounded like I'd woken her from a nap or something, grumpy as hell, but in the end she told me the address.”

The plastic on the bench stuck to the bottom of my legs as I shifted in my seat. “What address?”

“The crematorium, on Primula Drive.”

“Who was there?”

“Well, the grumpy woman of course, she stood guard at the door — enormous elbows as I recall, and I'll never, ever forget that handshake and — is she a relation of yours?”

“She's my aunt.”

“Sorry, I didn't mean to —”

“She sort of lives with us now.”

“What do you mean ‘sort of '?”

I sighed. ‘She used to come and stay with us once a week, but lately she's starting coming some weekends too.”

“Doesn't she have a home of her own?”

“Yes, she does.”

“What about a husband? Children?”

“She never married.”

“So why does she keep visiting? Why not just move in?”

“I don't know. She hardly talks to me. Except when she wants something done.”

“Sounds like she's staking out her territory.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing. Don't listen to me.” Harold pursed his lips. A blob of ketchup had dropped from the plastic tomato onto the back of his hand and he wiped it with his napkin as if it were an open wound. “Not much fun having her around then?”

“You don't have to love your relatives,” I said.

He looked startled. “No.”

A meaty smell wafted between us as the waitress arrived and placed two plates on the table.

“That was quick,” said Harold.

“Had them half done,” said the waitress guiltily. “Watch the plate, it's hot.”

“Please tell me more,” I said, opening out the napkins and laying Harold's knife and fork beside his plate. “Did you speak to any of her friends?”

He bit into his burger. “Sorry,” he mumbled, “a bit starving.” He swallowed. “It was a long time ago, I can't remember any names but I do know we weren't welcome. That woman, the aunt — I'm sorry, Edith, but I have to be honest, she behaved abominably, she swept us out of the place like a pile of old junk, it. . . well, it hurt.”

“Who else was there?”

He put his burger back down on the plate. “Let me see, there was a middle-aged man whose hands smelt of soil, honestly, I remember that clearly because he sat down beside me and passed over a hymn book and there were some others, couples mostly, about your mother's age. . . and of course, making the most almighty racket, there was you.”

Me. I wasn't prepared for this. For so long I had conjured up this scene from the sidelines. I was the one who watched, who recorded the events, I never imagined for a moment I would actually be there.

“And my father?” I said, picking a morsel off the side of my bun.

Harold looked awkward. “He wasn't really there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, how to put it? His body was there, the shirt ironed, and his hair combed, but he. . . his spirit was somewhere else.”

“So I was alone?”

He wiped a spot of grease off the corner of his mouth and tried to smile. “Yes, I suppose you were.”

Page thirty-seven felt thicker than page thirty-eight. And it was loose. So loose that it escaped its binding and slipped onto my lap when I turned it over. But it was not a page at all. It was a note.

Darling Wilf.
I love you,
Miriam
.

I clamped my hand across my mouth just in time to catch the spoonful of tears running down my cheeks. I ripped off the top half of the note and threw it on the floor, then I slipped the bottom half into my pocket and rushed upstairs. A ruler of moonlight fell onto my sheets when I sat on my bed with the note on my knee. With a shaky hand I picked up a pencil and wrote a new first line.

Darling Edith
.

40

My father was back. Two weeks had passed since he had approached me in the garden, two whole weeks free of pauses, free of long, lingering looks, but now he was back, hovering awkwardly in my part of the garden, his shadow lying on top of my hands as I weeded the soil. The oak tree framed his head when I turned to look up; a branch seemed to grow out of his ear. “Is there something —?”

“No.”

To be suddenly so immobilized was hard. I watched an ant rush across the soil. Then I sensed movement; my father's shoulder brushed mine and he knelt down beside me, picked up the trowel and rammed it into the earth. He had a deft touch. First he slid a dandelion out of the ground and shook the roots naked and then he smoothed the hole away as if it had never been. I glanced at his face, his eyebrows apart, cheeks relaxed and saw what could be mistaken for a smile on his lips.

I did not hear Vivian coming at first. A puff of dust registering in corner of my eye was the only sign that someone had entered the garden. It could have been the wind. My father and I turned to look at her together; the branch now seemed to be sprouting from my aunt's cheek. “Wilf. . . what are you doing?”

My father dropped the trowel as if it was hot. “Nothing,” A classic denial, a small boy's word.

“Looks like you were helping her.”

I looked away. A massive pair of knickers shimmied on the washing line behind him, twisted by invisible hips into a display of wind-blown spite.

My father got to his feet and looked at his sister, his face empty of expression.

“Looks like you were helping her,” Vivian said again.

I forced my attention back to the line; a pair of trousers batted the knickers. Then I looked at Vivian, whose lips were horribly pursed. “I don't like what's happening in this garden,” she said. “It takes up too much of her time. And where do all these plants come from?”

“Archie,” I said.

“Why am I not surprised?” She edged round the dead dandelions before stepping onto a patch of newly planted perennials. I watched, silent on the outside, as she moved across the ground, crushing a plant beneath her feet. Then she pulled a tissue from her pocket, gently, almost too gently, reached to the ground and wiped mud from the back of her heel.

I gazed at my father. It must be possible to speak without speaking. But he turned away without meeting my eye. Then, crushing the head of a bedraggled survivor with the tip of his shoe, he walked towards the back door.

That night, I tried to see what my smile looked like in the bathroom mirror. My lips curved obediently up, my front teeth emerged but the shape of my face remained the same. Then I tried out a laugh, but my throat only gurgled and the edges of my eyes screwed up like creases in a handkerchief that has been in a pocket too long.

I studied the parts of my face: the tight cheeks, the grey mole to the right of my nose and noticed an eyelash that was bent inwards. I moved closer to the mirror to straighten it. My mother's face was there somewhere. The downward slant at the corner of my eye must be hers. The straightness of my hair: inherited from my mother, it had to be. And the way my lips parted when my face muscles relaxed was what had made my mother so distinct, I was sure of that. I moved closer. What had made my father fall in love with my mother? I shivered. My father was incapable of love.

41

A slow, dripping dread preceded outings with Vivian. Originating deep in the pit of my stomach, it would start the moment I woke up, continue over breakfast and reach a peak as I pulled my jacket off its hanger. My aunt spurned the greetings of passers-by whenever we walked down the street, responding to the nodding heads of neighbours with a clipped smile and to the raised hats of elderly gentlemen with a well-glazed stare. We rarely walked together. My attempts to remain beside her were always thwarted by her abrupt surges of speed, yet if I slowed down I'd be instantly scolded. The entire event was guaranteed to be miserable from start to finish and on a nippy day in May, as I rushed to keep up, I felt relieved, yet concerned, to spot a diversion ahead.