The Insistent Garden

by Rosie Chard

  “Let’s go down.” Vivian said at last.

  ‘Down’ was the garden. Awaiting inspection.

  It was hot by the time we got outside and I held my hand over my eyes as I stepped across the threshold. Vivian set off immediately, striding along the base of the high wall, swallowed up by its vast shadow. I drifted in her wake; I knew the routine. First came what she liked to call ‘the reconnaissance,’ checking the whole length of brickwork during a march from the house to the back fence. Next the detailed study, several bricks below eye height fingered, rubbed, and tapped with rings. Finally, words of criticism would fill the garden, ‘crooked,’ ‘sloping’ and ‘rough’ rushing out of her mouth, like seeds shooting from an over-ripe balsam.

  With my body still oriented towards my aunt, I looked up at the house on the other side of the high wall. His house. A mirror image of my own, it gave no clue to its inside. No potted plants on the windowsills, no ornaments, not even a glimpse of a shelf. Nothing even hinted at how life might be spent on the other side of the wall. But as I scrutinized further, I did see something, a flicker of movement, high up. I stared up at the attic and saw it again, a tiny deflection in the glass. Then nothing.

  My breath had sped up by the time I returned to the slew of ‘rotten grout’ and ‘chipped edges,’ which had continued unabated at ground level.

  “Aunt Vivian, would you like some more tea?”

  “Yes. Three sugars.”

  I turned towards the house and looked again at my neighbour’s attic. The window was black, and still. I looked at my own attic. Black too. I had never been inside the room at the top of my house. I had never been allowed. “Three sugars,” barked Vivian, “And Edith, check if the post has arrived.”

  The postman’s uniform was visible at the end of the street when I looked out of the sitting room window. He traversed the horizon in a slow, lazy motion and by the time he reached the middle of my street I recognized all the idiosyncrasies of his walk, his shoulders tipped back at an angle as if invisible hands were pushing him up the hill and his feet plopped down in a soporific rhythm that only sped up as he approached my house. He lingered in the street, fiddled with the badge on his lapel and then pushed open the gate and made his way up the path. The slap of paper on the mat confirmed that something heavy had arrived.

  “I can get that,” said Vivian, beating me to the front door and picking up a package.

  I sidestepped her looming thighs, bent down and picked up a magazine that had skidded off the doormat and come to a halt beside the skirting board. “That’s lovely,” I said.

  “What’s lovely?”

  “This picture on the cover. . . a garden. . . S-n-o-w-s-h-i-l-l Manor, it says.”

  “Let me see that,” said Vivian. Her nails chiseled into the cover. “It must be a mistake.” Lilies went unnoticed. “We don’t want that junk, throw it in the bin.”

  I gripped the magazine that had been shoved back into my hands. “Could I just —?”

  “Throw it in the bin!”

  The empty kitchen echoed with the sounds of the house after Vivian had gone upstairs; a drawer was wrenched open one floor up; someone turned on the bathroom tap. I felt a bud of sadness as I dropped the magazine into the bin and watched it sink inside a bed of teabags, white petals stained brown. Cold porridge had already smeared the spine by the time I thought to grab a corner and pull it out. I tore off the front cover, folded it into a square and slid it into my pocket.

  4

  The attic. I couldn’t help thinking about the room at the top of my house. Some days I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Not down in the garden, but up here in my bedroom, late in the evening and flat on my back. This was my time, those precious minutes when light began to leak from the room and I could listen to the radio and stop being alone with other people and start to be alone with myself.

  The cracks in my ceiling had grown up with me. Years back they’d started, a faint hint of pressure of something with weight, which pressed down from above. Then they’d grown longer, those cracks, spreading out in all directions, thickening and splitting before they ran towards the window, seeking out light. Sometimes I tried to imagine the size of the room above me, that cold, edgeless, unexplainable void. Was there dust up there? Dust from skin. Dust came from skin. Vivian told me that the day she came upon me emptying the Hoover bag onto the bin. She told me — just so as I would know — that we shed our skins all day, everyday, everywhere. And hair. There was hair in that bag too, mostly black but some red and occasionally a trace of blond. What was inside the attic? I’d never dared ask, but the view, it would be good from up there.

  It was close to five o’clock by the time I’d made Vivian her fifth cup of tea, prepared supper and finished cleaning the stairs. A loose ear of wallpaper brushed against my hand as I heaved the vacuum cleaner onto the landing and switched on the light. I glanced up at the hatch in the ceiling that led to the attic, trying to remember if my father had ever climbed up there and opened it. He’d need something, a chair or a ladder. Then I noticed a spider’s web slung across the frame. Delicate and freshly spun, it could not be left.

  I hurried down the stairs and returned with a broom. It was heavier than I expected and the handle swayed as the bristles swished around the corners of the hatch. I swung it round and gripped the head — ignoring the bristles scratching my fingers — and knocked. Just once. Empty space reverberated back. I knocked again and then began to pace, up and down the landing, tapping out the dimensions of the room above. And all the time I listened — only with half an ear — but listened still for the sound of a key turning in the front door and coat hangers knocking their shoulders together in the cupboard under the stairs. But it was early yet. I continued knocking, stretching out my arms and standing up on my toes, pausing only to rub dust out of my eyes and catch a cough in the palm of my hand, and all the time feeling pleasure in the method, in the measuring of something unknown. But it was not too early yet. The tapping had distracted me and it was not until a shadow fell on my arm that I realized my father was standing behind me. “What are you doing?”

  His eyebrows were disheveled, the ragged brow of a man both fading and thickening.

  “Sweeping the ceiling.” I said.

  He looked up. “Why?”

  Hold his gaze. Hold his gaze and tell the truth. “I saw. . . a spider’s web.” I pulled a roll of grey web off the end of the broom and held it out to him. It stuck to my palm.

  “Why were you knocking?”

  “I was just wondering what was up there.”

  “There’s nothing up there.”

  The back of his neck looked prominent as he turned and walked towards the stairs: the high hairline, the white skin exposed above his collar and for a second, less than a second, I wanted to slap it, see if it went red. But my hand remained quietly by my side.

  The landing was quiet after he’d gone into his room, just the sigh of the bedsprings and the gentle rattle of the letterbox as a breeze crept into the hall. My thoughts returned to the attic. The room filled with nothing. Was his attic filled with nothing too? I’d never dared imagine the room at the top of my neighbour’s house, but the view, it would be good from up there.

  I tightened my cardigan across my chest, picked up the broom, hurried downstairs and slipped it back into the cupboard.

  34 Ethrington Street

  Billingsford,

  Northamptonshire

  July 24th 1968

  Dear Gillian,

  I’m here at last. ‘Best street in Billingsford’ the estate agent said but now I’ve got here it seems a bit of a dump. There was dog mess on my doorstep when I arrived and would you believe it, I was out of bleach. Got my own shop for the first time in my life and I’ve got no bleach. I’ve carried all my stuff upstairs into the flat but it’s chilly up there, one of those places that are cold even in summer, so I’ve got my heater unpacked and I’ll plug in the electric blanket after I’ve had my supper if it hasn’t warmed
up.

  The shop isn’t as big as I remembered it but there’s a cosy room at the back for kicking off my shoes when it all gets too much and who knows, if it all goes well, I might be able to build an extension one day and then really start living the life. At least I’ve got big shop windows, lots of room to display my goods and best of all I can see my customers coming. I’ve met a neighbour already. Chubby woman from over the road, she just couldn’t resist turning up for a look before I’d even got the open sign turned round. I think she was in the middle of her dinner — you should’ve seen her laugh — all tonsils and tapioca. But customers are customers and I must try my best to be nice, mustn’t I. Archie popped in to see me too. Do you remember him? A friend of my Raymond’s from long ago. He’s got older since I last set eyes on him (haven’t we all?) but he hasn’t let himself go to seed. Says he knows a girl who might be interested in a part-time job at the shop. I could do with a hand.

  I’ll write again soon. I know you’ve always said you wouldn’t touch a telephone with a barge pole but it would make life easier if you could bring yourself to get one. By the look of this place, I think I’m going to be writing a lot of letters.

  Jean

  5

  Vivian’s departure was almost as eventful as her arrival. Her belongings never seemed to fit back into the case, and there was always a scene: pressing in that final girdle, forcing the zip. Yet I always volunteered to sit on top of the suitcase — and occasionally she let me — from where I could watch my aunt from a new angle while she shuffled round me, every last bit of air forced out and the objects beneath my legs quietly crushed.

  A heavy silence hung about the house after the case had been heaved into the taxi and the back of Vivian’s head had receded from view. Only youths passing the gate animated what was left of my morning. I’d hear them coming — squeaking, screeching, screaming and squealing. They’d pour down the street in groups, pennies of colour flickering behind the front hedge, before disappearing down the hill. They chased paper; they yanked the backs of sweaters; they left crumbs. Occasionally the hedge got damaged, a body shoved through, nothing to grab. Then they’d be gone, leaving only the smell of cigarette smoke drifting through my keyhole. That was the hardest part. They’d never see me, never think to wave. Was I invisible? — my skin the colour of the house.

  I didn’t leave my home very often. I didn’t want to. I’d get our food at the Co-op, buy the occasional stamp and visit the dentist if my teeth hurt. The rooms of the house were quiet while my father was at work and those hours were bare. There was only one place to which I could go.

  “How was your day, sweetheart?”

  “Tiring.”

  “Fancy a cuppa?”

  “With sugar?” I touched the hand that had come to rest on my shoulder.

  “Two spoonfuls coming up.”

  I sat at a kitchen table in the house on the other side of mine. Archie lived here. After seventy-five years, he’d forgotten that ‘Archibald Bishop’ was inked onto his birth certificate and offered up Archie to anyone who asked. And ask they did, for Archie was a local hero, producer of the town’s largest vegetables and holder of the Billingsford Horticultural Cup.

  I loved Archie’s kitchen. I loved the consistency of it. Although his attempts at tidying freshened it occasionally, most parts never changed. Books teetered permanently on the corner of the table, the slivers of dry soap that dotted the draining board never grew any smaller and the bread bin, loaded with dry crusts and crumbs would never, ever close. Fruit flies constantly hovered above the bowls of over-ripe peaches on his sideboard in stationary clouds, yet the hands on the clock always seemed to move faster beneath Archie’s roof. This was the place I came when I could, sometimes twice a week, and sometimes, when the clock ticked coldly in my own kitchen and clouds hung like grey sacks in the sky, three times a day. I’d climb over the low wall between our two gardens after my father left for work, weave my way between Archie’s flowerbeds and tap on his kitchen window. This was the place I came when I needed to shake off my own home and I would sit at his table and drink tea and talk about his garden and think about nothing.

  “Don’t mind a chipped cup, do you?” Archie said.

  “Not in the slightest.”

  He filled the kettle and lit the gas. His lips accidentally whistled as he blew out the match.

  “Nice tune.” I flipped open a seed catalogue.

  “Edie, have you seen the new amaryllis?” he said, leaning over my shoulder and planting a finger on the page. Archie loved to talk in Latin. Nectaroscordum siculum slipped off his tongue like seeds spilling from a sack and Allium sphaerocephalon dropped into his sentences as if they were the commonest words in the world. He couldn’t abide unidentified plants. He found it impossible to enjoy the chocolate scent of Cosmos until he had memorized its complete botanical name and gained no pleasure from the touch of Stachys leaves rubbed across his cheek until he’d researched the plant’s entire family. Reports of new discoveries sometimes flew into my garden when my father was out; a triumphant, ‘It’s a cousin of Myrtle,’ cutting into my thoughts as I watched my father walk up the street to work or an indignant, ‘They’ve re-classified Hollyhocks,’ chasing me up the road on my way to the shops.

  “It looks fragile.” I touched the photograph with the tip of my finger. “Oh no, that’s misleading, that stem could hold up a horse.”

  He pulled in a chair, swiped a lanky eyebrow with the back of his hand and settled his elbows onto the table. “So, Edie, what have you been up to today?”

  “I’ve been helping my father with the wall and —”

  “Say no more, sweetheart, I saw the brick delivery. Can’t see where they’re going to go but I’m sure he’ll find a spot.”

  “He always finds a spot.” I examined the angle of his eyebrow, arched but not judgmental. “I want to tell you something,” I continued. “I saw this photograph.”

  “What photograph?”

  “A photograph of a garden.”

  “Where’d you see that?”

  “In a magazine that came in the post.”

  Archie’s elbow shifted closer to mine. “Tell me about this garden.”

  “It was a place called Snowshill.”

  “Go on.”

  “I know it sounds strange, but there was something about it, something. . . that I really liked.”

  Archie smiled. “I know that place, it’s not so far from here. Built by an absolute nutter, Charles I think his name was, but he had a good eye, his collection of. . . what d’ya call it, bits and bobs and, well, stuff, is brilliant, and the garden, . . . you’d love it.”

  The kettle whistled, a high insistent cry that made me feel sad for a second. I watched Archie’s back as he stood up and spooned tea leaves into the pot. The curve in his spine distorted the squares on his shirt and his narrow frame struggled to support the apron pinned round his waist. “You eating alright, Archie?”

  “Me? Oh, yes, I stuffed myself stupid on these yesterday. Want one?” He pushed a bowl of raspberries towards me. “They’re whoppers this year.”

  Juice flooded my mouth. “Delicious.”

  “There’s more.” He nodded towards the corner of the room where a red-stained box propped open the pantry door.

  I glanced at my watch. “Maybe, next time.”

  “So,” said Archie, pulling a cozy down over the teapot and leaning back in his chair, “how did it go with Jean up at the shop? She was keen to see you when I mentioned you might be looking for a job.”

  I turned the tea strainer over in my fingers. “I didn’t go.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No, not at all.” I measured his expression. “She would have found someone else by now, wouldn’t she?”

  “Edie,” he dragged his chair closer, “It would be good to get out of your. . . you know, your routine.”

  “I thought it would be difficult, what with everything I have to do in the house and my father —”

/>   “You didn’t tell him, did you?”

  I looked down at the Amaryllis, blood red petals. “No.”

  Archie laid his hand on my arm, the touch of a feather. “There’s no rush, sweetheart. Something else’ll turn up.”

  I felt my head nod. It hadn’t been so long since I’d left school. After a few weeks of disorientation and wrung-out anxiety, I could still picture the cleverest girls as they marched down the corridors on that last day like conquistadors, wiping out their lockers and squeezing long, lingering hugs into the shoulders of their teachers before striding down the front steps in the direction of distant university towns without looking back. The rest — mooching around the foyer with the hounded look of those soon forced to make a decision — had swapped notes on jobs that everyone had heard about but no one could confirm, then dissolved out of the building as if the last ten years had never been.

  The careers office was unlocked when I’d tried the door. Job leaflets — welders, nurses, cooks — stuffed so carelessly into their holders excited yet scared me, dog-eared promises encased in shiny red covers. I was about to put one into my pocket when I’d remembered the fish fillets we were having for dinner. They had to be defrosted before they could be put into the oven.

  6

  I liked to be in certain parts of the house when no one was about. Not just any part. Certainly not in the kitchen, where chores always waited for me — a saucepan soaking in the sink, rubbish pushing up the lid of the bin — and definitely not in the living room, where the air was always cold and the gravy-coloured sofa smelt of old flannels, but here, beside the front door. I liked to crack it open and see if anything was happening in the street. It wasn’t easy. Our front garden had long since ‘got away,’ as Archie liked to describe it. Vague memories of a lawn came to me occasionally, but now a mass of tangled shrubs pressed against the edge of the house like an extra wall.