The Garden Plot

by Marty Wingate

  After coffee, Pru rang the cabdriver and thanked Davina and Bryan profusely. Davina walked her to the door.

  “We’re very happy to meet you, Pru.” She paused. “We’ll let you know our choice just as soon as possible. I know you’ll understand that we’ve talked with a few others about the post.”

  “Of course you have—that’s the best way.” No, thought Pru, I didn’t want to hear that. “Now, you go on, I’ll just wait for the cab here. Thanks again.”

  Davina closed the door, and Pru stroked the badger knocker’s snout for luck. Her spirits soared.

  “Interviewing for the gardener post, are you?” said a crusty voice behind her. She turned to find someone who matched his voice perfectly, from Wellies to cap.

  “Yes, hello, I’m Pru. Are you Ned?” Pru remembered Davina mentioning “old Ned.”

  “I’m Ned, yes.” He looked kindly at her. “I hope they didn’t get your hopes up.”

  “No, I understand they haven’t made a decision yet,” Pru said.

  “They made a decision all right. Rang up the fellow this morning and offered him the post. Too bad they didn’t tell you about that.”

  Pru looked back at the closed door as if the badger knocker could verify this outrageous statement. “Someone else has taken the job?” she asked Ned, her voice suddenly high and reedy. “They’ve already filled the post?” She clamped her jaw tight in an effort to keep the tears away.

  Ned looked left and right, and then at his Wellies. “Well now,” he said, “I don’t know that for sure. It’s just something I might’ve heard.”

  “Why would they bring me down here if the job was filled? Who would do that—get someone’s hopes up?” She hammered Ned with questions that should’ve been directed at the Templetons. She had a fleeting thought to knock on the door and ask them, but the thought flew out of her mind as quickly as it had flown in—she was not one for confrontation.

  The cab turned into the drive, and the sound of the tires on the gravel caught their attention. Ned put his palm up as if to calm her. “I may have spoken out of turn,” he said. “Don’t pay me any mind. You have a safe journey. It was good to meet you.”

  Pru watched Ned wander off around the corner of the building. Her feet felt like lead as she dragged herself to the cab. She remembered nothing of the journey back to London.

  Boxgrove Manor

  Cannards Grave Road

  Hornblotton Green

  Somerset BA4 6SB

  4 October

  72 Grovehill Square

  Chelsea

  London SW3

  Dear Ms. Parke,

  I write to regretfully inform you that you have not been selected for the post of head gardener for Boxgrove Manor. Thank you for sharing with us your knowledge of the scientific, spiritual, and social history of our signature plant. We know your knowledge will help you in whatever post you do fill.

  We appreciate your interest in this post and wish you well in your future endeavours.

  Yours sincerely,

  Gerald Charles, curator

  Boxgrove Manor

  GC/cjw

  Chapter 6

  After the interview at Primrose House that had begun with promise and ended with heartbreak, and the rejection from Boxgrove Manor, Pru thought perhaps she wouldn’t check her email. Lydia seemed able to sense when she was at her weakest, and she didn’t think she could take another plea to return to Texas. But she did look and found two messages from Lydia and one from Marcus. Would she come “home”? Marcus wrote that he couldn’t put off the board much longer. His email had an even tone to it, and she was relieved that he kept his request on a strictly business level. Everyone remembered her and wanted her back, he wrote—her old crew, especially.

  Pru wrote one email to both of them, politely saying no thank you. She deleted it before sending, and started again. She wrote that things were going well in London, and she had no plans to return. She deleted that one, too. She started again, writing that she was unsure of her plans, and could they wait another week for an answer? Her heart sank when she reread it. She didn’t send it, but saved it as a draft.

  Midmorning Friday, optimistically hoping to be well clear of commuter traffic, Jo and Cordelia collected Pru for their trip to the country. Before she walked out the door, Pru made the typical last-minute survey of rooms within view: laptop off, windows closed, breakfast dishes left in the sink. She opened the front door and, somewhere behind her, heard a click. She held her breath.

  Since the mouse event, as Pru described it to herself, she had heard other noises from the basement. It was as if the mice were rearranging furniture—a slight shuffling, a scraping, tiny crashes. It happened most often just after Pru arrived home,—when she was standing in the hall looking at the post or sitting quietly with a cup of tea.

  It was getting on her nerves. Once, she had tried the door handle, even though she knew it was locked, and gone for a kitchen knife to see how easy it might be to spring. Just to check on things, she told herself—wouldn’t any responsible renter do the same? But the second she rattled the keyhole with the knife, her phone rang as if sounding an alarm. She dropped the knife, the noises stopped, and she never tried it again.

  She did broach the subject with Jo again one morning over a quick coffee at a place near Jo’s flat. “Do you think we should do something about it? Tell the Clarkes there might be mice?” she had asked.

  “What?” Jo looked alarmed at Pru’s suggestion. “You know, I believe that your neighbors might be doing some work in their basement—that’s probably what you hear. Once I thought someone was breaking in to the closet in my bedroom, and it turned out to be the fellow next door hanging a painting. It’s London,” she said with a laugh, “you can’t escape the noise.”

  Pru wasn’t convinced. “I’m sure the Clarkes wouldn’t want their possessions damaged. I looked around at the outside door, to see if there was anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Pru,” Jo said firmly, “don’t mess with that door.” She ordered another coffee and changed the subject, telling Pru about Cordelia’s latest doctor’s appointment. Pru tried to listen, but was disappointed—and disconcerted—by Jo’s lack of concern. Jo, who paid great attention to detail and who had walked Pru through the entire house upon her arrival, making sure everything worked as it should. Shouldn’t this worry her?

  Now, standing on her doorstep having just heard a door click shut, Pru thought carefully. She knew, just as everyone does, what sounds her house made, even one she’d been in for less than a year. She went down the list of possibilities, hoping to file the noise away in a safe category—the cracks and pops from the walls cooling in the evening, the rattle of the radiator in winter, the sound of a door out of plumb closing on its own. Yes, that’s it; she let out her breath. The door into the downstairs loo clicked shut on its own. Pru dismissed it from her mind and closed the front door.

  As Jo fought the traffic out of the city, Pru congratulated Cordelia on expecting and asked after Lucy, who, Cordelia said, was involved in a building project near the Olympic Park and would drive out after work.

  They cleared London on the M40, cut off to the ring road around Oxford and switched to the A44, ending up on smaller and smaller roads. Pru leaned her head against the window and looked out at the emerging fields and hedgerows. Just the sight of the country cleared her mind. She would put all her cares aside for the weekend.

  In May, the English hedgerows, decorated in the white flowers of hawthorn, guelder rose, and elder, looked dressed for a wedding, but early autumn held its own charms. Red haws, black berries from the elder, translucent red fruit from viburnum, and hips of the dog rose warmed up the roadside, just as a few leaves began to age to gold and red. The generous canopies of English oaks and beeches watched over fields planted with winter wheat. They drove past Blenheim Palace in Woodstock—the palace could be seen beyond the gate and down the drive, but Capability Brown’s enormous eighteenth-century landscape lay bey
ond … and beyond.

  Natalie and John Bennet-Smythe—Natalie was Jo’s cousin somewhere on her father’s side—lived near the village of Upper Oddington and offered their field each year for the autumn fête, which raised money for the village library. The tents were full of an assortment of goods: beaded jewelry, the Women’s Institutes’ jams and breads, a high-end jumble sale, a potter. Educational booths for Wild Britain, the National Trust, and Badger Care clustered on one side, and the tea and the beer tents anchored one end of the field. A bouncy castle and arts-and-crafts tables would keep the little ones occupied.

  The competition tent—prizes given for the best autumn fruit, the biggest courgette, and the most impressive decorative use of a wheat sheaf—stood at the top of the field. Jo told her that a few years earlier, the organizers had tried a competition for the prettiest pig, but a dodgy pen led to an escape by a crafty Gloucester Old Spots named Porridge. The chase through the tea tent resulted in a table full of cream cakes upside down in the grass, and since that time, the competitions had been confined to non-ambulatory entrants.

  White tents with flapping edges already rose in the field when Jo pulled into the long drive and parked near the house around teatime, after a lunch stop along the way. Jo and her companions were met by Natalie, who gave Pru the basic layout of the house and showed them all to their rooms. Pru, in desperate need of a walk, glanced around the grounds as they passed by every window.

  The Bennet-Smythes kept up Grenadine Hall, which was built of that fine honey-toned Cotswold stone, by a combination of family money, John’s lucrative banking position, Natalie’s book editing, hiring out the gardens as a wedding venue, and hosting classes for the Royal Horticultural Society. They held four open days a year for the National Garden Scheme, but the £3 admission went straight to charity, not in their own pockets—although they were able to keep some of the £2 each for tea and cake, just to help cover costs.

  As it was a Grade II–listed building, they could do only so much, keeping the history deemed more important than installing a bathroom for every single one of the ten bedrooms—that would be considered a very American thing to do. The rooms that Jo, Pru, and Cordelia and Lucy occupied shared one enormous bathroom, in which they could’ve held a dance it was so large. It created a bit of a slumber-party atmosphere.

  Pru’s room overlooked the walled garden—she must remember to thank Natalie for the view—and beyond, she could see the Cotswold escarpment rising. Patches of oak woodland created dark spots against the fields, some of which displayed a light green contrast, while others reflected a tawny autumn tone. Farther to the right, she could see the tents. Pru stood at the window and contemplated the beauty and her deep longing to stay in her new home country.

  After poking around her room a bit, Pru stopped by Jo’s to say she was off for a walk.

  “Don’t you want to see the gardens?” Jo asked, which of course Pru did. They went down together so that Jo could introduce her to the gardener, Oliver, after which Jo retreated to the house for a nap and Oliver began Pru’s tour.

  Tall yew hedges lined the walks, and old roses with a few flowers still coming on climbed the walls of the house. They walked down to the walled garden, where, in Victorian times, fruits and vegetables had been grown for the kitchen. A few years ago, the Bennet-Smythes had turned it from flowers back to a kitchen garden, but because it was only Natalie and John in the house, most of the food grown they gave to the food bank in Stow-on-the-Wold, keeping out just enough for themselves and guests.

  The orangery had been restored, and now a modest assortment of figs and grapes occupied one wall. “We do well with the veg, but in here, we’re trying pomegranates,” Oliver said. “Natalie and John thought they could make grenadine syrup, bottle the stuff, and sell it.” They stood looking at the four drooping shrubs in pride of place against the warmest wall. “I’m not holding out hope,” Oliver said.

  Pru thought of the two large pomegranate shrubs growing in the Chelsea Physic Garden and mentioned them to Oliver. “We’re fair colder in winter than you are up in London,” he said.

  “Yes, but I don’t believe the fruit ever ripens even there,” she said. “They have an enormous olive tree, too, but it doesn’t fruit either. At least the big bay tree can be harvested.”

  “We keep our bay trees outdoors,” Oliver said, “but only for the summer and only in pots so we can slip them in here for the winter.”

  When they stepped outside, Pru had a view of a series of neatly clipped yew rectangles, each about ten feet high and a little longer. But they weren’t quite as neatly clipped as she first thought. She stood still and squinted; the sun came in at an angle and cast shadows over the deep green surface. Clipped in relief on each yew block was a … “Oliver, do I see horses?”

  He laughed. “I’m glad they’re starting to show. I started shearing them two years ago. Each block has a running horse on it.”

  “They’re delightful,” Pru said. “However did you come up with that idea?”

  “I visited a garden in Wiltshire once that had yew arches that were sheared to look like elephants,” Oliver said. “But the head gardener had done it without permission, and when the owners finally noticed, they made him smooth the surfaces out.”

  “You’d think we could have a little fun in the garden,” Pru said.

  “These yews have been here for ages, and so I had a ready canvas,” he said. “But I made sure to ask Natalie and John before I started. Fortunately, they have a sense of humor.”

  “In the States,” Pru said, “there’s a garden with an entire hunt scene clipped out of box.”

  “And I thought we were fanatics.”

  Pru thought about the overgrown yew hedge at Primrose House and wished she’d had the chance to suggest it be clipped into a series of rolling waves or perhaps as busts of famous Romans.

  Romans on her mind, Pru asked Oliver about finding artifacts in the garden.

  “I suppose there could be something a few feet down, like at Chedworth,” Oliver said. “But here, we just turn up Victorian refuse—the fields are full of broken crockery and the like. If they were finished with it, they just chucked it off the edge of the garden. Makes you wonder if everything we throw out will be important artifacts in a few hundred years. Imagine the fun they’ll have excavating our rubbish tips.”

  Pru returned to the house to find Jo drinking tea in the kitchen with Natalie. Jo suggested it might be time to switch to wine, so they took a bottle out to the terrace where Cordelia joined them with a glass of water. They caught the last of the light just as Lucy arrived. She went immediately to Cordelia, asking how she felt and insisting she drink a glass of milk.

  Over dinner, an enormous chicken-and-pasta casserole with a salad and roasted aubergines—that is, eggplants—on the side, they mostly avoided talk of the London murder, which the Bennet-Smythes had heard about from Jo. Instead, Natalie and John entertained them with stories of the early years of their marriage, which they spent on a foreign-service posting on the island of Corfu, not a bad spot to be assigned, everyone agreed.

  At a lull in the conversation, Jo said in a careful voice, as if afraid of disturbing the room’s equilibrium, “Pru, I spoke to the Clarkes, and they don’t want you to worry a bit. They won’t be coming back early; you’ve still got another month in the house. They are both quite chatty people,” she said, “especially Pippa—the stories she can tell. I told them your business was really picking up, Pru, and they were quite interested, asking all sorts of questions about the Roman tiles. I did have to tell them about the murder, though. They were shocked.”

  “I don’t see how a month will make a difference in my prospects,” Pru said, “but thanks. Have they been buying antiques?”

  “Antiques?” Jo echoed. “Wouldn’t we all like to be in Italy buying antiques?” she asked, as if it was a good joke. She seemed about to go on, but Natalie, who had gone into the kitchen, came back with sticky toffee pudding, which distracted ev
eryone.

  Later, as they all pitched in to clear the table, Jo said, “Lucy, you might know the fellow Pru’s sublet from. He’s a history professor at University College and took a sabbatical year.” She set dishes down in the sink. “Clarke, Archie Clarke.”

  Lucy’s architectural knowledge spanned the centuries; she designed modern buildings, but occasionally taught the history of architecture at University College London where her book, Porticos, Verandahs, and Loggias: The Architectural History of Outdoor Ceilings, was a text. “Archie Clarke.” Lucy thought for a moment. “Yes, I might have heard the name.”

  Pru set aside any worry about the Clarkes’ returning, at least for the moment. “Lucy,” she said, “we’re off to Chedworth on Sunday. I know they don’t have any gardens there, but will we see mosaics in the rooms?”

  They returned to the table to gather up the scattered knives, forks, and spoons, and Lucy began to explain the general arrangement of a Roman Britain villa. “See here,” she said, taking a few leftover knives and arranging them on the almost-empty table. “The house was usually situated around the atrium, and then outside that was another area called the peristylium—both were outdoor, inner courtyards.” She added a few extra spoons at each end. “And there might have been wings of rooms along the sides.”

  “I’m sure there were gardens at Chedworth,” Pru said. “It’s too bad the National Trust wouldn’t hire me to re-create what they might have been.” She couldn’t help it. She longed for a place to actually put to work what grew in her head.

  The next morning, after a late breakfast—light fare in anticipation of all the fine treats at the Women’s Institute booth and in the tea tent—Pru, Jo, and Natalie wandered out to the fête. Cordelia was experiencing just a touch of morning sickness, and Lucy, dutiful partner, stayed by her side ready with a small plate of cream crackers.