Pulse

by Julian Barnes

  ‘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.’

  ‘A bramble!’ This was getting ridiculous. ‘Brambles produce bramble jelly, which is made from blackberries.’

  ‘Do you think you could check what we need to dig into the soil to help a clematis on a north-facing wall?’

  Yes, he thought, I might very well leave you. But until then, forget it, change the subject.

  ‘It’s going to be a hard winter. The bookies are only offering 6–4 against a white Christmas.’

  ‘Then we must get some of that plastic fleece to protect what’s vulnerable. Perhaps some straw as well.’

  ‘I’ll pop along to the nearest stables.’ Now, suddenly, he wasn’t cross any more. If she got greater pleasure out of the garden, let her have it.

  ‘I hope there’s lots of snow,’ he said boyishly.

  ‘Is that what we want?’

  ‘Yup. Proper gardeners pray for a hard winter. Kills all the bugs.’

  She nodded, allowing him that. The two of them had come at the garden from different directions. Ken had grown up in the country, and all through his adolescence couldn’t wait to get to London, to university, work, life. Nature for him represented either hostility or tedium. He remembered trying to read a book in the garden, and how the combination of shifting sun, wind, bees, ants, flies, ladybirds, birdsong and his mother’s chivvying made plein-air studying a nightmare. He remembered being bribed to supply his reluctant manual labour. He remembered his father’s vastly overcropping vegetable beds and fruit cages. His mother would dutifully fill the chest freezer with the superabundance of beans and peas, strawberries and currants; and then, each year, guiltily, while Dad was out, throw away any bags found to be more than two years old. Her kitchen version of crop rotation, he supposed.

  Martha was a town girl, who thought nature essentially benevolent, who wondered at the miracle of germination, and badgered him to go on country walks. She had developed an autodidact’s zeal in recent months. He thought of himself as an instinctive amateur, her as a technocrat.

  ‘More bookwork?’ he asked mildly, as he got into bed. She was reading Ursula Buchan’s Wall Plants and Climbers.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with bookwork, Ken.’

  ‘As I know to my cost,’ he replied, turning out his bedside light.

  This wasn’t an argument, not any more; just an admitted difference. Martha, for instance, thought that it was only sensible to follow recipes when cooking. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking the spine of a cookbook?’ – as he had once, ponderously, put it. Whereas he preferred just to glance at a recipe to give himself ideas, and then wing it. She liked guidebooks, and used a map even when walking through town; he preferred an internal compass, serendipity, the joy of getting creatively lost. This led to various quarrels in the car.

  She had also pointed out to him that, when it came to sex, their positions were reversed. He had confessed to a lot of preliminary bookwork, whereas she, as she once expressed it, had learnt on the job. He’d replied that he hoped he wasn’t meant to take that literally. Not that there was anything wrong with their sex life – in his opinion, anyway. Perhaps they had what was needed in any partnership: one bookworm and one instinctivist.

  As he thought about this, he found himself with what felt to him like a monster erection, which seemed to have crept up unawares. He turned on his side towards Martha, and put his left hand on her hip in a way that could be interpreted as a signal or not, depending on mood.

  Aware that he was awake, Martha murmured, ‘I was wondering about a trachelospermum jasminoides, but suspect the soil’s too acid.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ he murmured back.

  It snowed in mid-December, first a misleading light softness that turned to water as it hit the pavement, then a solid couple of inches. When Ken got home from work a thick layer of white was holding on the flat leaves of the bay tree, an incongruous sight. The next morning, he took his camera to the front door.

  ‘The bastards!’ he shouted back into the house. Martha came down the hall in her dressing gown. ‘Look, the bastards,’ he repeated.

  Outside there was only an oak tub half full of earth.

  ‘I’ve heard about the rustling of Christmas trees …’

  ‘The neighbours did warn us,’ she replied.

  ‘Did they?’

  ‘Yes, number 47 told us we should chain it to the wall. You said you didn’t like the idea of chained trees any more than chained bears or chained slaves.’

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sounds a bit pompous to me.’

  She put a towelling forearm through his, and they went inside again.

  ‘Shall we call the police?’

  ‘I expect it’s already heeled in somewhere in darkest Essex,’ he replied.

  ‘It’s not bad luck, is it?’

  ‘No, it’s not bad luck,’ he said firmly. ‘We don’t believe in bad luck. It was just some wide boy who saw it with snow on the leaves and was struck by a rare moment of aesthetic bliss.’

  ‘You’re in a very indulgent mood.’

  ‘Must be Christmas or something. By the way, you know that water feature you’re planning between the rose grove and the leaf display?’

  ‘Yes.’ She did not respond to his caricatural terminology.

  ‘What about mosquitoes?’

  ‘We keep the water circulating. That way you don’t get them.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Electric pump. We can run a cable from the kitchen.’

  ‘In that case, I have only one more objection. Can we please, please, not call it a water feature? Waterfall, cascade, lily pond, miniature stream, anything but feature.’

  ‘Ruskin said he always worked better to the sound of running water.’

  ‘Didn’t it make him want to pee all the time?’

  ‘Why should it?’

  ‘Because it does with blokes. You might have to install a toilet feature next to it.’
/>   ‘You are in a sunny mood.’

  Probably it was the snow, which always cheered him. But it was also that he had secretly applied for an allotment, down between the water-purifying plant and the railway line. Someone had told him the waiting list wasn’t too long.

  Two days later, setting off for work, he shut the front door and stepped straight into a pile of earth.

  ‘The bastards!’ This time he said it to the entire street.

  They had come back and taken the oak tub, leaving him the soil.

  Spring was marked by a series of Saturday-morning visits to the local garden centre. Ken would drop Martha at the main entrance, then drive to the car park and spend longer than necessary lowering the back seat to make room for whatever compost, loam, peat, woodchips or gravel had been indicated by his wife’s latest reading. Then he might sit in the car a while longer, arguing that he wasn’t much help in choosing anyway. He was quite happy to pay for the loaded contents of the yellow plastic wagon that usually accompanied Martha to the cash desk. In fact, that seemed to him the perfect deal: he drove her there, sat in the car, met her at the desk and paid, then drove them home and paid again by risking a hernia lifting all the stuff out of the car and lugging it through the house to the garden.

  Doubtless it was something to do with his childhood, with toxic memories of trudging round nurseries while his parents chose bedding plants. Not that Ken believed in blaming his parents at this late stage: if they’d been gourmets and wine bores, he might have ended up a teetotal vegan, but still would have taken the responsibility for that condition. Even so, there was something about a garden centre – this purveyor of rus in urbe, with its tubs and planters and trellises, its seed packets and sproutlets and shrubs, its balls of twine and wire-ties wrapped in green plastic, its slug pellets and fox-discouraging machines and watering systems and garden candles, all those verdant aisles full of hope and promise, along which processed friendly people with peeling skin and sandals waving red plastic bottles of tomato fertiliser at one another – something about all this that really got on his tits.

  And it always took him back to his late adolescence, a time when for him fear and distrust of the world were about to turn into a hesitant love of it, when life was poised to lurch irretrievably in one direction or another, when, as it now seemed to him, you had a last chance to see clearly before being flung into the full business of being yourself among others, at which point things proceeded too fast for proper examination. But then, just back exactly then, he had specialised in seeing through the hypocrisy and deceit of adult life. True, his Northamptonshire village contained no obvious Rasputin or Himmler; so the great moral faultlines of humanity had to be mapped from the possibly unrepresentative sample of his parents’ friends. But this made his findings the more valuable. And it had pleased him to detect vice hidden in the seemingly innocuous, not to say beneficial, occupation of gardening. Envy, greed, resentment, the costive withholding of praise and its false overlavishing, anger, lust, covetousness and various other of the deadly sins he couldn’t quite remember. Murder? Well, why not? Doubtless some Dutchman had exterminated some other Dutchman to get his hands on a priceless corm or tuber or whatever they were called – yes, bulb – during the madness known as Tulipomania.

  And on a more normal, decently English scale of evil, he had noticed how even old friends of his parents became tight-lipped and mean-spirited during a tour of the garden, with many a ‘How did you get this to flower so early?’ and ‘Where did you track that down?’ and ‘You’re so lucky with your soil.’ He recalled one stout old bat in tweed jodhpurs who spent forty minutes on an early-morning examination of his parents’ half-acre, returning to issue only the prim bulletin of ‘You evidently had the frost rather earlier than we did.’ He’d read about otherwise virtuous citizens who travelled to the great gardens of England with concealed secateurs, and poacher’s pockets in which to stow their loot. No wonder there were now security cameras and uniformed guards at some of the country’s most sylvan and pastoral locations. Plant-napping was rife, and perhaps the speed with which he’d recovered from the theft of their bay tree hadn’t been anything to do with the cheery snow and the season, but because it confirmed one of the key moral discoveries of his adolescence.

  The previous evening they’d been sitting out on the recently delivered teak bench with a bottle of rosé between them. For once there was no inane music from a neighbour’s house, no wailing car alarm, no flight-path thunder; just a silence disturbed instead by some bloody noisy birds. Ken didn’t really keep up with birds, but he knew there’d been some major species-shifts: far fewer sparrows and starlings than before – not that he missed either of them; the same for swallows and stuff like that; the opposite for magpies. He didn’t know what it meant, or what was the cause. Pollution, slug pellets, global warming? Maybe that sly old thing called evolution. There’d also been an increase in parrots – unless they were parakeets – in many of London’s parks. Some breeding pair had escaped and multiplied, managing to survive the mild English winters. Now they were screaming from the tops of plane trees; he’d even noticed one clamped to a neighbour’s bird-feeder.

  ‘Why are those birds so bloody noisy?’ He asked in a ruminative, fake-complaining way.

  ‘They’re blackbirds.’

  ‘Is that an answer to my question?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied.

  ‘Care to explain to a mere country lad? Why they need to be so bloody loud?’

  ‘It’s territorial.’

  ‘Can’t you be territorial without being noisy?’

  ‘Not if you’re a blackbird.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  Still, he supposed, humans were territorial too, and had tools and machinery to make the noises for them. He’d repointed the brickwork where the mortar had crumbled away, and put up trellises which heightened the party walls. He’d fixed rustic, woven-wood partitions between the various sections of the garden. He’d even paid someone to lay a winding flagged path and run an electric cable to the place where, at the turn of a switch, water would gush over large oval stones imported from some distant Scottish beach.

  Also that spring he improved the soil as and where indicated. He dug where Martha asked him to dig. He began what promised to be a long campaign against ground elder. He wondered if he loved Martha just as much as ever, or if he was merely performing a husbandly routine from which others were invited to deduce how much he loved her. He was informed that he was third in the queue for an allotment. He did vocal imitations of the experts on Gardeners’ Question Time until Martha told him it really wasn’t funny any more.

  He was disturbed by a knocking close to his ear. He opened his eyes. Martha had wheeled her yellow plastic wagon, stacked to the gunnels, down to the car park.

  ‘I even tried you on your mobile …’

  ‘Sorry, love. Didn’t bring it. Miles away. Have you paid?’

  Martha merely nodded. She wasn’t exactly cross. She half-expected his head to go AWOL as soon as they drew into a garden centre. Ken got out of the car and eagerly took over loading the boot. Nothing too herniating this time, anyway, he thought.

  Martha considered barbecues a bit vulgar. She didn’t use the word, but didn’t need to. Ken liked nothing more than the smell of meat cooking over whitened coals. She liked neither the event nor the equipment. He had suggested getting one of those small numbers – what were they called? – yes, hibachis, and actually, weren’t they Japanese inventions, and therefore appropriate to this little plot of God’s earth? Martha was faintly amused by yet another of his Japanese jokes, but unpersuaded. Eventually she allowed the acquisition of a sleek little terracotta item shaped like a miniature barrel standing on end; it was some kind of ethnic oven on special offer from the Guardian. Ken had to promise never to use barbecue lighter fuel with it.

  Now that summer had come, they were repaying hospitality received when the house had been in chaos. The sky was still light at eight when Marion and Alex
and Nick and Anne arrived, but the day’s heat, never extreme to begin with, was already beginning to disappear. The two women guests immediately wished they’d worn tights and not overdone the summery look, thinking it unhostly of Martha to have knowingly dressed against the evening’s chill. But since they’d been invited to eat outside, eat outside was what they would do. There were jokes about mulled wine and the Blitz spirit, and Alex pretended to warm his hands on the terracotta oven, nearly knocking it over in the process.

  While Ken fiddled with the chicken thighs, jabbing with a skewer to see if the juices ran clear, Martha gave their guests ‘the tour’. Since they were never more than a few yards away, Ken heard all the compliments to Martha’s ingenuity. Briefly, he found himself a disaffected teenager again, trying to assess the sincerity or hypocrisy of each speaker. Then his trellises were admired – praise he took as coming entirely from the heart. The next moment, he heard Martha explaining that the far end of the garden had been ‘just a mass of hideous brambles when we got here’.

  The light was beginning to fade by the time they crouched over their pear, walnut and gorgonzola starter. Alex, who clearly hadn’t been paying attention during the tour, said, ‘Have you left a tap on somewhere?’

  Ken looked at Martha but declined to take advantage. ‘It’s probably next door,’ he said. ‘Rather a shambolic household.’

  Martha looked grateful, so Ken thought it would be OK to tell his story about the soil-testing kit. He span it out rather, elaborating his self-portrayal as mad chemist, and holding off the punchline as long as possible.

  ‘And then I came in and said to Martha, “Bad news, I’m afraid. There’s no soil in your soil.”’

  There was a gratifying laugh. And Martha joined in; she knew that from now on this was going to be one of his stories.

  Feeling himself in credit, Ken decided to light the garden candles, yard-high towers of wax which blazed away and made him think vaguely of Roman triumphs. He also took the opportunity to turn off what he would always, in his own mind, refer to as the water feature.

  It was now on the colder side of chilly. Ken poured more red wine, and Martha offered a move indoors, which everyone politely refused.