The Winds of Change (12 page)

‘Winner gets a fifth of vodka!’ said Diane.

Mrs. Withers by pounding her mop a few times on the floor as if it were a gavel or divining rod, exclaimed, ‘Gin! Or mebbe brandy, or else that twelve-year-old whiskey Dick’s got.’ She leaned on her mop.

‘Whatever,’ said Trueblood. ‘We’ve got to have rules, though. We’ve got to narrrow it down or we’ll just waste time running through stupid names like Bubbles or Yellow Teeth.’

‘Funnily enough,’ said Jury, ‘I don’t think I’d ever have come up with Bubbles. Yellow Teeth, maybe, but never Bubbles.’ He was sitting in the window seat next to Vivian. He had taken up the chewing gum habit and his jaw sometimes worked overtime.

Melrose said, ‘Okay, the horse is Aggrieved, so let’s limit ourselves to some name that goes with it. Like Agitated, or something. We could really limit it by insisting the first two letters must be ‘A’ and ‘G.’ As I just said - ‘Agitated.’

‘Aggravated,’ said Vivian.

‘Is that your official entry?’ asked Theo.

‘So come on, everyone, put on your thinking caps!’ said Trueblood.

Diane, who had left her thinking cap in Oddbins, sighed. ‘There should also be the rule that you have to stick with your first choice,’ said Theo Wrenn Browne. He gave them his crimped smile.

‘We should write it down,’ said Jury, between chomps on his Juicy Fruit.

‘Good suggestion,’ said Trueblood, who rose to grab a half-dozen coasters advertising Adnam’s and started dealing them out. ‘You can write your name on the back. That way nobody will know whose name it is.’

Vivian looked mystified. ‘What earthly difference would that make?’

‘It’s the way it’s done.’

Theo Wrenn Browne said, ‘There should be a time limit.’
 

Mrs. Withersby cackled. ‘Time fer a drink, that’s y’r time limit.’

‘I’d say five minutes?’ Vivian suggested this. ‘Who’s going to time us?’

‘I shall,’ said Theo Wrenn Browne.

They sat quietly sipping their drinks and looking at their coasters. Vivian chewed her lip.

‘Three minutes you’ve got. Three minutes.’ Theo wrote on his coaster.

Jury was first to finish and tossed his coaster on the table. Now the rest of them wrote their choices and Theo Wrenn Browne brought down his hand. ‘Time’s up!’

Trueblood collected the coasters, shuffled them and handed them to Melrose. ‘You should do the honors. It’s your goat.’

Melrose set down his pint. ‘Right. I’ll just read them out, but any that don’t follow the rules are out of the running.’

‘What rules?’ said Diane, languidly smoking.

Melrose sighed. ‘Come on. The name has to begin with the two letters of Aggrieved’s name: ‘A’ and ‘G.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Diane.

Melrose cleared his throat: ‘First one, Agatha-very funny-’

‘Let’s not have a commentary’, said Trueblood. ‘Just read.’

‘Okay. Agatha.’

‘Agro.

‘Agape.

‘AG-a-pey, not A-Gape,’ Theo said testily.

Trueblood sighed. ‘Please shut up and let him get on with it!

‘Start again.’

‘Right: Agatha.’

‘Agro.’

‘Agape.’

‘Aglow.’

‘Agoat -’

Melrose stopped, looked round the table with narrowed eyes.

‘Agoat? Okay, whose is this?’

Jury chewed his gum.

‘Well, if you’re not going to take this matter seriously, there’s no point, is there?’ said Theo, even more testily.

‘I can tell you who’s not taking it seriously,’ said Jury, ‘and that’s your damned goat.’

So the goat remained nameless as Agatha jammed up her scone.

Melrose liked the goat’s calm manner. The only thing he’d ever seen as peacefully disposed to its surroundings was a manatee. If goats and manatees took over the world, they would render it slumbrous. How restful to rouse oneself only for a cabbage or a lettuce.

‘I don’t see,’ said Agatha, ‘why you need a goat; you’ve already got a horse.’

‘Your logic is impeccable. The reason I’ve got a goat is because I’ve got a horse. Horses need pals.’

‘You’re turning this beautiful house into a barnyard!’

‘It’s an idea.’ Melrose rattled back another page of his Times.

‘Your poor mother would be aghast!’

Melrose stared at her, then bolted from his chair like Secretariat out of the starting gate. ‘That’s it!’

Agatha fell back as if she’d just been punched. ‘What in the world are you doing? What’s the matter with you?’ To his departing back she called, ‘Where are you going?’

‘To see my goat!’

13

Soil?’ said Miss Broadstairs, later that afternoon to Melrose, who was stopped at her gate and looking into a garden which, even in the first days of March, was heady with scent, although he couldn’t locate its source. Something in that shrub? That vine? Emanating from the little greenhouse? In her winter garden were still vestiges of her summer-plants wrapped and staked or wearing straw collars, skeletal remains of borders and hedge, brown stems or sinister-looking black ones reaching out their twiggy fingers.

‘Soil?’ Alice Broadstairs said again.

Melrose had just that morning received a telephone call from Richard Jury, which had left him (but only after fifteen minutes of argument) committing himself to going to this place in Cornwall called Angel Food or something.

‘Angel Gate, for God’s sakes. Try to keep that straight, at least.’ This, from Richard Jury.

‘Why, yes, Mr. Plant, I can certainly tell you how to determine the condition of your soil.’ This, from Miss Broadstairs, who then launched into talk about clumping and alkalinity and acidity in a stiff wind of words that pushed Melrose back a few steps. Why was it, he wondered, that gardeners, unlike publicans or butchers or mechanics - in other words, a large part of the population - why was it that gardeners had to fly their answers at you with the dedication of kamikaze pilots? He cared nothing at all for clay and clumping, and as to shoving his fist in the earth down to his elbow? Melrose snorted.

‘I really don’t want to do that, Miss Broadstairs.’

Her laugh woke the cat Desperado, which hissed at Melrose (who would have hissed back had the cat’s mistress not been right there) and turned and turned as cats do, circling until they drop from sheer boredom. ‘But, Mr. Plant, if you want to garden, you must get your hands dirty.’ Gently, she whisked a lock of gray hair back to the bun from which it had escaped.

‘No, you see I’m thinking more along the lines of telling somebody else to do it.’

The utter stupidity of this remark caused even Desperado to look round again. The obvious question here would have been My dear man, how in the world can you tell somebody else if you know sod-all yourself? Eh? Only Alice Broadstairs didn’t use expressions such as ‘sod-all’ and, in her unrelenting kindness, would not ask a question that might embarrass Melrose, no matter how richly he deserved it.

‘I was thinking more of sod.’ Why was he continuing with these ridiculous questions? Was he even sure he meant sod? Jury had said ‘turf,’ but wasn’t that different from sod?

‘Oh, well, that’s quite another matter.’

He waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ He thought for a moment. ‘Have you ever come across a turf expert?’

She laughed. ‘No, I’m afraid that my garden doesn’t run to things so exotic.’ She clicked her shears several times as she looked around. ‘I don’t know anyone with such an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject.’

That gave him a brief chill. ‘Encyclopedic? There’s that much to know, is there?’

‘My goodness, yes. Have to go to school for that kind of expertise.’ She laughed her small laugh as she applied the shears to a bushy shrub of some sort wearing a straw collar that he supposed was there to protect it from frost.

‘Of some sort’ was the sum and substance of Melrose’s shrub acquaintance, even though he had spent some time as under-gardener at the Ryland house just this past December. A fat lot of good it had done him. His mind was like a sieve. ‘Perhaps the library ... ?’

‘I should try that if I were you. And there’s the Royal Horticultural Society. You could try there, too.’

Melrose stood around a few moments more. He looked at the brute of a cat, sprawled atop the stone plinth. ‘Desperado appears to have lost more parts of his person.’

‘Oh, yes, if you mean that bit of ear ... He will fight with Ada Crisp’s little dog. And how’s your goat, Mr. Plant? Is he getting on all right?’

‘Fine, just fine.’ Did he really want to be the sort of person who was asked How’s your goat?

‘They’re quite wonderful creatures, aren’t they?’ she said. ‘So intelligent.’

‘Do you think it might know something about turf?’

Miss Broadstairs laughed until she was bent in the middle, not difficult for her as she was quite thin. She finally stopped and ran a finger under a watery eye. ‘Well, they’re wonderful company for horses, I hear. How’s your horse?’

That was better. How’s your horse? suggested all sorts of colorful things about an owner. Riding through woods on a misty morn, show jumping four and five hurdles, galloping across fields-that sort of thing. ‘Aggrieved couldn’t be better. He doesn’t seem to mind it at all, not racing. He is a racehorse, you know.’

‘Why, no, I didn’t.’ Miss Broadstairs shoved more loosened hair back from her nice, plain face, a face like a pancake. ‘And are you going to enter him in one?’

It always made Melrose feel puffed up to talk about his horse and horseracing. He added the scene to his repertoire, this time seeing himself on Aggrieved at Newmarket or Newbury, lengths ahead of the others, an image dimmed by the fact that Melrose was six feet tall. ‘No, I don’t think so, at least not at the moment. But Aggrieved seems quite content just having me ride him around, or just grazing.’

‘How nice. Now, this friend of yours -’
 

‘What friend?

‘Tell him that he must test the soil for alkalinity and -’
 

Oh, that friend.

On and on her words were coming straight at him, zzzzzzzOOOOOOOMMM-! Got him in one!

‘Many thanks, Miss Broadstairs. I’m off to the library.’

14

The librarian, Miss Twinney, was helpful, suggesting various gardening books, although gardening as such was too broad a subject. Miss Twinney couldn’t help him much when it came to soil, she said. That was perhaps too narrow a subject. Soil, sod and loam. ‘Loam’ was a favorite word of his and he mouthed the word silently as he read about its rich properties.

It occurred to him that the rudiments of soil behavior might be found in the children’s section. Melrose knew this to be true: if you wanted the basics, look in children’s books.

Back in that section, at the rear of the library, he pulled out and perused Dirty Debbie, whose book jacket showed a small, black-haired girl with a spade, watched by an assortment of barnyard animals in much the same way he was being watched at that moment by a little girl of perhaps seven or eight with bobbed mouse-colored hair, wearing pink dungarees. She was folded into one of the overstuffed chairs, in one of those acrobatic positions only children can manage.

Pretty soon she got up and, under the pretext of selecting another book, came to stand beside Melrose and run her finger over the spines of the ones nearest him.

Melrose had never been able to pin down any reason for his effect upon children. It was not Richard Jury’s effect. No, for Jury children would rush into burning buildings. For Melrose they wouldn’t bother to blowout a match. He seemed to bring out their combative spirit. They couldn’t do enough for Jury; they couldn’t do enough to Melrose.

The child with skin like cotton candy and very large brown eyes pulled on his sleeve and said, ‘You’ve got my book, I think.’

He looked down at her. ‘Your book? I believe this’ - and he turned it face out - ‘is the library’s book. Not yours. You do not have exclusive rights to it.’

‘I only meant I was reading it.’

‘Oh, really? How much have you read?’

‘Half.’

‘Half?’ Melrose consulted a page near the beginning that showed Debbie digging a hole with her dog, Boots. ‘What’s her dog’s name?’

She screwed her mouth around, thinking. ‘There wasn’t any dog in the part I read.’

‘You said half, didn’t you?’ He started to sneer, but decided he should act like a grown man.

‘That’s right. Just not that half. I read up to the dog and then after the dog. But I didn’t read the dog part.’

Miffed, he asked her, ‘What’s your name?’

She slewed her eyes from him to the book. ‘Debbie.’ He sighed. Naturally.

‘It’s my birthday.’

‘Is it? My. How old are you?’

‘Seven and a half.’

‘You can’t be because birthdays don’t come in halves.’

She scoured his face with a bristly look. ‘I have one every half of a year.’

‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous.’