She planted the first of the roses the following winter, not long before Richard was born. They came bare-root from the nursery early in February. Richard was due in March.
Are you sure you should be doing that?
It was awkward, digging with that big belly sticking out in front of her.
Why don’t you wait till Billy comes? He can do that for you.
She thrust the spade into the ground again but the impact of it shot through her. She stopped, straightened, put one hand to her back, handed him the spade.
Charlie dug the holes then, two spits deep, and she unwrapped the plants from their hessian and newspaper wrappings, untied the strings and loosened the tangled roots, shaking out pieces of the still-damp soil of the nursery from which they had come. He put in a little muck at the base of the hole, as recommended in Sanders’ Encyclopaedia, and then she knelt and bent over her big belly and spread the roots across the broken soil and filled back in with a trowel. Then to the next, Rosa mundi to Charles de Mills. One after another, they planted the roses all that late winter’s afternoon. The day was one of those sudden mild ones, and they had noticed how the light lasted, how spring was on its way. As the sun lowered it caught the yellow patch of aconites beside the drive and made them shine.
Are we done now?
No, there’s one more. Roseraie de l’Hay. As the sun dropped it became cold. Her fingers froze even within the leather gloves. That pain came in her back again.
Later she would think that it might have been because of the roses that Richard was born two weeks early.
But it was a good moment for Richard to be born because Charlie had time for them. Wet weather, days of incessant rain, and Charlie was in the house. He built the fires in all the rooms, and for the first week or two her mother came to stay. She had barely needed her because Richard was an easy baby. He slept and woke and fed and slept, some separateness or containment to him, behind his blue eyes that would become bluer as the weeks passed. The house seemed a sure and safe place, with them all there and the lights on and the fire burning, and the rain outside. There was a man who had visited them just the day before she went into labour, someone who knew Charlie from India in the war, and he had left suddenly in the night. When he had left she had the notion that he had taken away some danger from them, that Charlie’s heavy winter mood had lightened. But perhaps that was only the effect of the baby coming. That he was happy, for those days at least. She remembered how his hands quivered as he first took the white bundle from the midwife, though they were such big hands that he might if he was more sure have cupped a newborn in one alone.
Then her mother left, and Charlie went back to his work after the rain had stopped, and she was alone in the house with the child.
They had been married almost two years. They had been wary of having children too soon. There had been so much to do, coming to the farm when Ralph needed them, establishing themselves, learning the life. Yet she had felt from day to day as she moved about the house and he moved about the farm that there was a space about them waiting to be filled.
She had thought that a child would fill the space but now he was there it seemed to her that the space had turned to water. That distance she had known between herself and the world, which had been the dry emptiness of the rooms where she had moved each day, the flat fields, the length of the gravel drive, had become a lake, a still grey lake. Now when she moved there was that slight resistance of water, and ripples spread out across the lake, slowly widening and smoothing, almost disappearing before they touched the shore. She woke in the night and fed the baby. She fed him again in the peace of the mornings when finally he slept quiet and long. In those formless lengthening spring days after he was born she had the sense that she, he, the two of them, were floating. An island had formed about them. And Charlie, for all his love, was a visitor to the island. He was one of those others, coming across, holding out his big hands with the smell of the mainland on them. He carried something from outside to her and the child, something separate, apart, that kept him apart in the present, that might yet have been a piece of the past.
Outside, on the shore that she could see from the window, holding the baby to see through as-yet-unseeing blue eyes, the gulls followed the plough. Even when the tractor was out of sight the birds made their trail in the sky beyond the young hedge, white over the brown soil. When Charlie came in the smell he brought with him was earthy and dark. The smell within the house it seemed to her was white.
In the whiteness, the baby slept. She watched, and saw his tiny being quiver all of a sudden as if he was not quite yet of this earth, not even of the island but of the air some inches above, between land and sky. Gravity seized him, deep in his guts, and he woke and cried.
Claire was up a ladder, tying a rose. Kumiko came and stood beneath. Put out her hand to the ladder to hold it steady.
It’s all right, she called down. I do this all the time.
The white rose had grown right across a bedroom window.
I just have to tie in this rose.
Claire had lengths of cut string in her pocket. She took one out and held it between her teeth. Once she had the offending stems in place she took off her gardening gloves and did the tying with bare fingers.
When she came down she stood back to look at it. Such a good rose, this one,
Madame Alfred Carrière. Isn’t that a nice name? Like someone you might know.
Some of her roses, she said, were in the garden of the Empress Joséphine. She told the girl then about Joséphine’s wonderful garden. How Joséphine came from Martinique in the Caribbean, and how when Napoleon deserted her – she did not quite explain why, assuming that she had more knowledge of European history than a Japanese education would have given her, not thinking that she might know only the famous names, but not who they were or what they did – when Napoleon was gone, for whatever reason, she had her garden in France made exotic with plants from her tropical home and from all over the world. Joséphine made a life for herself, Claire said. As a woman must. She made the garden, and had plants brought to her from everywhere. Even when the French and the British were at war, ships came through carrying plants from places the British ruled, though the British Navy ruled the seas. And Claire showed her all the French roses in the garden and told her their names. Duc de Guiche, Duchesse d’Angoulême, Belle de Crécy, Comte de Chambord, Charles de Mills. She pointed out the roses gaily, as if there was a party of French courtiers all about them, some great colourful party at a château, music and fountains playing, perfumed courtiers flirting among the flowers, hiding behind the bushes she had made, shaped bushes that were the same dense dark green as the hedge. Not that all of these roses were in the garden at Malmaison, she said. Most of them had in fact been bred later, but bred in France and often from varieties that Joséphine had first brought to the country. They came to one with big deep pink petals. Zéphirine Drouhin, she said. Definitely not one of Joséphine’s. A much later hybrid. A bit vulgar for Joséphine, she tended to think.
The girl’s eyes were on her, listening, half a smile on her face. She knew she was going on rather. Her sons teased her for that, for rambling about her roses, and here she was, putting her nose to fine blooms like pink petticoats. Was that why the girl smiled? Despite herself, she was beginning to warm to this girl.
Since you’re here, perhaps you could help me carry the ladder in.
The ladder was too heavy for her. She had had Richard put it out. Last time she had the ladder out, it was days before she could catch Richard in a spare moment and get him to bring it in. That sort of thing happened too often, when there was only herself and Richard in the house, that things weren’t finished because Richard was too busy; the ladder lay abandoned on the lawn, and the grass beneath turned yellow for lack of sunlight.
How polite the girl was, carrying her ladder, listening to her talk about roses. They always said the Japanese were polite. She found herself saying things to her that she had
n’t expected to say, opening up a little eccentrically, so rare it was to have a sympathetic presence in the house. She was aware that sometimes she talked about her roses as if they were people. Women, always. It seemed to her that roses were feminine, even those that had men’s names. She had fallen in love with one or other of them, from time to time. Perhaps the more so because she lived in a world of men.
I was a Londoner when I came here, you know. I didn’t know the first thing about gardens. But it was something one could do, I suppose, when one was alone, when the boys’ father was out on the farm. I learnt from books at first, made a grand plan, planned it all on paper and planted it out, or had Billy plant it out for me, but then the boys came along, and then for some years I was too busy with them to do much more. It was only later, when I was on my own, that I really began to learn.
After he died, she might have said. As if something from him had passed on to her. The touch of the soil. Awareness of the weather each day as it dawned.
One learns, she said instead, as one goes along. She said it lightly, glossing over the memory of how hard the learning had been, how many mistakes and setbacks and losses, how many little lessons there had been, and how she had faced them, one after another, teaching, toughening herself as her hands toughened with the work. One plants, she said, and then one turns away. Things grow. Or don’t. And then one wonders why.
She would garden all of the day until she had no thoughts in her but her work. Go in at dusk, surprised once she was indoors at how late it was, because she hadn’t noticed as long as she was outside working. She would eat, run a hot bath, lie in it and scrub the dirt from beneath her fingernails. And when she went to bed and closed her eyes, her head was still full of the things she had done in place of the thoughts, her hands on the soil, the soil itself, the green piles of weeds she had pulled, the forms of roots, the anaemic whiteness of bindweed drawn up endlessly from deep underground.
One watched, she had said to the girl, and slowly, one learnt. One watched the bare soil to see the first leaf appear, uncurl and stretch and become itself, identifiably the leaf of that plant that one had planted and not some other; one watered, tended, transplanted; one watched to see it flourish. And when leaves discoloured one learnt then that there was too much water or too little, or that certain minerals were lacking in the soil, or that there was fungus or pest, just as Charlie had on the farm, Charlie who had walked the crops and plucked leaves and budding heads of grain and regarded them in the sunlight. One learnt the names of chemicals one could use, names that were as sonorous sometimes as the names of the plants, harsh modern chemicals at times, the kinds that they used on the farm, but then as she discovered the harm in them, going back to older remedies that the farmers would have scorned. And other small things one might do. How one might run one’s fingers up a tender red rose stem and crush the green bodies of aphids. Or scrape the scale insects from the hard undersides of bay leaves. Or go out at night with a torch and pick off caterpillars. One learnt that the mice had eaten the roots of the rhubarb through the winter. Or that it was the pigeons that had eaten the shoots of the beans – wishing then that Charlie had been there, to shoot the pigeons, the thought breaking through, that they might once again cut the breasts from the pigeons and fry them for supper on a bed of freshly picked salad. (And if they were to open the crops of the birds as they prepared them they would find shoots there, green as they had been torn from the plant, not yet digested.) One learnt that some plants were temperamental. Some that flourished in the summer could not take the cold of the Norfolk winter, the cold of the air or the wet of the soil, which was worse in some parts of the garden than others. One learnt where the frost pockets were, and where was most sheltered. One saw the plants that made it through and those that didn’t, the salvias that lasted only a couple of winters and found a third winter one winter too many. Some deaths were obvious. Some one could not fathom. A clematis, for example, could wilt all of a sudden over the course of a few gentle days of summer – or perhaps the problem was not wilt at all but only snails or caterpillars eating round the base of the stems.
And then, she had said, and then one wonders why. The girl was waiting for her to say more, her eyes wide, her little rounded hands open at her sides. If she had said any of that, how could she be expected to understand? She saw that she was not making conversation easy for this girl, who her son was in love with, who seemed really a pleasant enough girl and had come such a way across the world to see him, and was probably about the age that she herself had been when she first came here to live. Hardly any older than she was herself when she married Charlie, she too coming from elsewhere, though only from London, not so far but it too another world, in a way. But this girl seemed so sure in her youth. Open. Carefree. She could see why Jonny liked her so. She did not know that she had ever been so free.
It was late in November when Charlie died. Richard was ten years old. The roses she had planted so soon before he was born were tall bushes, with red hips on them and still a sprinkling of yellow leaves. The hedge stood above her head. Yew grew so much faster than one thought. Or perhaps it was time that went so much faster. Billy had given the hedge a last trim in September so that its lines were sharp for the winter. Now he wanted to clear the borders beneath it, rake out the debris and cut back the dead herbaceous growth. Billy always wanted to make the garden tidy and straight. Let’s leave it for the moment, Billy, she said, when she saw him wheel out the barrow with the shears and the rake. She could not bear that year to see the plants disturbed. After all, the dry stalks and seed heads looked so beautiful when there was a frost. She had noticed, in previous years. She had seen the magical appearance of the garden in the first frosts and then regretted Billy’s pruning, the logic that said that it must all be cut down and covered over. She had never put voice to her thought before. Let’s leave it, at least until the year’s turned. She wanted it still, time stayed; even a day like this one, with the sky so grey and the garden so limp and brown.
Billy stood behind his barrow. But we’ll be needing to mulch, madam.
Yes, of course we will. She spoke crisply now, as if his words had woken her up. She knew that she must learn to be crisp on everything. It was up to her, everything up to her, now that Charlie was gone. Let’s wait till February, she said, that won’t be too late, will it? And she had the thought, wasn’t there perhaps a purpose to all this dead stuff anyway, that it was cover against the winter?
Billy took his time. She could see how he was considering her, her youth and her predicament, her inexperience in the face of all that was so shockingly set before her. It was Billy who had first found him, who had brought the fact and the dog home. Who had placed his coat over the body, which was why he was wearing Charlie’s coat now, since she had given him one of Charlie’s coats to replace that one. And the hat he wore, had that been Charlie’s too? She was no longer sure. Tweed caps long worn had a way of blurring into sameness. Sometimes it seemed that Billy shared more with her than anyone now. His face was red from the cold, a dewdrop glistening on his nose. But Billy had been to war, the first one if not the second. There were things Billy knew more of than she. No, madam, don’t reckon as that’ll be too late. And he started to wheel the barrow back.
But, Billy—
Bent to the barrow, he stopped, looked up.
As you’re here now, then you might just rake up the leaves from the lawn.
There were so many leaves. He had raked the lawn already, only a week or two before, but it was covered again. The leaves must go on falling until all of the trees were bare.
In the fields Charlie had prepared, the winter wheat was growing.
The stalks came up fine at first, like hairs from the brown tilth. When she stood close in the field she could barely see them, but only from a distance and where there was an undulation or a dip in the surface and the colour accumulated into a green sheen. As the days passed and the crop grew, it angered her. The emerging green was so sharp. Not
hing in the landscape should be so sharp and bright this time of year. This was a time of grey and brown and ochre. Black, even. It angered her that the stalks germinated and came up so bold when everything else died back around them. That a man could have sown and not stayed to see his seeds grow.
It was wrong. There was cruelty in it, in planting then. He should have waited until the spring. Or if he was to do what he was to do, not planted at all.
She asked Billy if they had always put in the wheat in October. Billy was old and knew these things.
Billy shrugged. Well that’ll depend, madam. Depend on when harvesting’s done. When there was only horses doing the work, harvesting might not be finished till November. If there’s wheat still standing then you won’t be drilling, will you?
No right to it. No wrong. Only practicality.
That was what she must learn. Practicality. Put the pain aside. She must find a man to do the work that he would have done. A man to manage the farm. Talk to him like a man, walk the growing fields with heavy feet, though the green hurt her eyes.
One learned, she had said to the girl, as one went along. And when things went wrong, one wondered why and learned some more. So much she had had to learn, and so quickly. There should have been a fallow time, a long fallow time when nothing changed and nothing grew. But the world had been impatient about her, the farm, the men asking her questions, making demands even though she could see the hesitancy, the difficulty in them each time they came to the door. And the boys kept growing. Richard grew out of his clothes and Jonny grew into them; Richard’s clothes bought large for growing room but soon become too small, passed on to Jonny who was a much smaller build anyway and on whom they seemed to wear out before they ever quite came to fit.
Harvest Page 3
