“Why should you do this?” she said in an unnatural voice. I opened the gate, but she made me go through first.
The swollen rusty-pink and skin-white buds of the plant were as bright as candles in the darkness of the van.
“Advertising,” I said with a salesman’s laugh. She frowned, reproaching me doubtfully. But when she saw the plant she said, “How lovely!”
My tongue raced. I said I had been thinking of the paved circle in the middle of the garden; the magnolia would stand there and flower before the trees shaded the place, and that it could be moved out of the tub wherever she wanted it in the garden later in the year.
“You mean that?” she said.
So I got out a trolley, put up a board, and wheeled the plant down from the van carefully. It was very heavy.
“Be careful,” she said. She opened the side entrance to the garden and followed me there.
“No muddy puddle now. It’s gone,” I boasted. It was a struggle getting the heavy tub in place and she helped me.
“You’ve got a gardener’s strong hands,” I said.
I looked around and then up at the trees. Her wide mouth opened with delight at the plant.
“How kind you are,” she said. “Duggie will love it.”
I had never been alone with her in this garden and, I remember, this was privileged ground. She walked around and around the plant as if she were dancing.
“It will be in full bloom in ten days,” I said. “It will cheer up the fig tree. It’s trying to bud.”
“This time of the year,” she said, despising it, “that tree looks like a chunk of machinery.”
A half-hour passed. We went back to the house and she thanked me again as I pushed the trolley.
“Leave it there,” she said. “I must give you some tea or a drink. How lucky I was in. You should have telephoned.”
In the sitting-room she laughed as she looked back at the plant from the window. It was, I realised, the first time I had heard her laugh. It was surprising not to hear Duggie’s voice. She went off to make tea and I sat in an armchair and remembered not to put my dirty hands on the arms. Then I saw my footmarks coming across the carpet to me. I felt I had started on a journey.
I noticed she frowned at them and the cups skidded on the tray when she came back with the tea.
I said apologetically, “My boots!”
Strange words, now that I think of it, for the beginning of a love affair; even she gaped at them as if they had given me away.
When she had only half filled my cup she banged the teapot down, got up and came across to squeeze my hand.
“Oh, you are so kind, kind,” she said and then stepped back to her chair quickly.
“You are a friend,” she said.
And then I saw tears were dropping down her cheeks. Her happy face had collapsed and was ugly. “I’m sorry to be so silly, Mr Ormerod,” she said, trying to laugh.
Ten shelves of Duggie’s books looked down, their titles dumb, but listening with all ears as I sat not knowing what to do, for, trying to laugh, she sobbed even more and she had to get up and turn her back to me and look out of the window.
“It’s all right,” she said with her back to me. “Don’t let your tea get cold. My husband wanted to put an urn there,” she said. “I suppose he told you.”
Duggie had not been able to control his drifting mind.
“This is the first time I’ve been in the garden since you were here last,” she said, turning round.
“By the way,” I said, “if you’re worrying about the shelter, I can tell you—I’ve looked up the records at the Town Hall. There were no casualties here. There was no one in the shelter.”
I did not tell her no records could be traced. Her tears had made my mind leap again.
“Why on earth did you do that?” she said, and she sat down again.
“I had the idea it was worrying you,” I said.
“No, not at all,” she said, shaking after her cry, and she put on an offhand manner and did not look at me.
“The shelter? Oh, that didn’t worry me,” she said. “The war was thirty years ago, wasn’t it? One doesn’t have to wait for bombs to kill people. They die in hospital, don’t they? Things prey on my husband’s mind. He’s a very emotional man; you mightn’t think it. I don’t know whether he told you, we had trouble with a young man, a tenant. It made Duggie quite ill. They flew him home from Kuwait.”
I was baffled. She had exactly reversed the story Duggie had told me.
She said with the firm complacency of a married woman, “He talks himself into things, you know.”
After she said this there was a question in her eyes, a movement like a small signal, daring me for a moment. I was silent and she began talking about everyday things, in a nervous way, and intimacy vanished.
She stood at the door and gave a half wave as I left, a scarcely visible wave, like a beckon. It destroyed me. Damn that stupid man, I thought when I got home and stood at the stove getting a meal together. The telephone rang and I turned the stove off. I thought the call was from my mother—it was her hour—but the voice was Sally’s, firm but apologetic. “You’ve left your trolley. I thought you might need it.”
O blessed trolley! I said I’d come at once. She said curtly she was going out. That, and the hope that she was not interrupting my dinner, were the only coherent, complete sentences she spoke in one of the longest calls I have ever had. On her side it was a collection of unfinished phrases with long silences between them, so that once or twice she seemed to have gone away—silences in which she appeared to be wrestling with nouns, pronouns, and verbs that circled round an apology and explanation that was no explanation, about making “that silly scene.” No sooner was she at the point of explanation than she drifted off it. It struck me that listening to her husband so much, she had lost the power of talking.
There was something which, “sometime in the future,” she would like to ask me, but it had gone from her mind. “If there is a future,” she added too brightly. Her silences dangled and stirred me. The manner was so like Duggie’s: it half exasperated me and I asked her if she would have dinner with me one day. “Dinner?” This puzzled her. She asked if I had had my dinner. The idea died and so did the conversation. What affectation, I thought afterwards. Not on my side: desire had been born.
But on the following day I saw her waiting in one of our greenhouses. She was warmer under glass. I had collected my trolley. That, for some reason, pleased her. She agreed to have dinner with me. “Where on earth are we going?” she said when we drove off.
“Away from the Nursery,” I said. I was determined to amuse her. “To get away from the thieves.”
“What thieves?” she said.
“The old ladies,” I said.
It is well known, if you run a nursery, that very nice old ladies sometimes nip off a stem for a cutting or slip small plants into their bags. Stealing a little gives them the thrill of flirtation. I said that only this week one of them had come to me when I was alone in a greenhouse and said, “Can I whisper something to you? I have a dreadful confession to make. I have been very naughty. I stole a snippet of geranium from you in the summer and it has struck!”
Sally said, “And what about old men? Don’t they steal?”
My fancy took a leap. “Yes, we’ve got one,” I said, “but he goes in for big stuff.”
There was a myth at our Nursery that when a box of plants was missing or some rare expensive shrub had been dug up and was gone, this was the work of a not altogether imaginary person called Thompson who lived in a big house where the garden abutted on our wall. Three camellias went one day, and because of the price he was somehow promoted by the girls and became known as “Colonel” Thompson. He had been seen standing on a stepladder and looking over our wall. I invented a face for the colonel when I told Sally about this. I gave him a ripe nose, a bald head, a drooping moustache; unconsciously I was describing Duggie. I went further: I had caught t
he colonel with one leg over the wall, and when I challenged him he said, “Looking for my dog. Have you seen my dog?”
Sally said, “I don’t believe you.”
This was promising. A deep seriousness settled on us when we got to the restaurant. It was a small place. People were talking loudly, so that bits of their lives seemed to be flying around us, and we soon noticed we were the quietest talkers there, talking about ourselves, but to our plates or the tablecloth, crumbling bread and then looking up with sudden questions. She ate very fast; a hungry woman, I thought. How long, she asked suddenly, raising a fork to her mouth, how long had I known my wife before we were married? Four months, I said. She put her fork down.
“That was a rush,” she said. “It took Duggie and me seven years.”
“Why was that?”
“I didn’t want to get married, of course,” she said.
“You mean you lived together?” I said.
“Indeed not. We might not even have married then,” she said, “but his firm was sending him to Mexico for three years. We knew each other very well, you know. Actually,” she mumbled now, “I was in love with someone else.” She now spoke up boldly, “Gratitude is more important than love, isn’t it?”
“Is that the question you wanted to ask me,” I said, “when you telephoned?”
“I don’t think I said that,” she said.
I was falling in love with her. I listened but hardly heard what she said. I was listening only to my desire.
“Gratitude? No, I don’t,” I said. “Not when one is young. Why don’t you go with him on his jobs?”
“He likes travel, I don’t,” she said. “We like each other. I don’t mind being alone. I prefer it. You’re alone, aren’t you?”
Our conversation stopped. A leaden boredom settled on us like a stifling thundercloud. I whispered, looking around first to be sure no one heard me, and in a voice I scarcely recognized as my own, “I want you.”
“I know,” she said. “It’s no good,” she said, fidgeting in her chair and looking down at the cloth. Her movement encouraged me.
“I’ve loved you ever since—”
She looked up.
“—since you started coming to the Nursery,” I said.
“Thank you, but I can’t,” she said. “I don’t go to bed with people. I gave that up when my daughter was born.”
“It’s Duggie?” I said.
She was startled and I saw the grimace I knew.
She thought a long time.
“Can’t you guess?” she said. And then she leaned across and touched my hand. “Don’t look so gloomy. It’s no good with me.”
I was not gloomy. That half wave of the hand, the boredom, the monotony of our voices, even the fact that the people at the next table had found us so interesting that they too had started whispering, made me certain of how our evening would end.
“Let us go,” I said.
I called a waiter and she watched me pay the bill and said, “What an enormous tip.” In our heavy state, this practical remark lightened us. And for me it had possessive overtones that were encouraging; she stood outside, waiting for me to bring the car with that air women have of pretending not to be there. We drove off and when I turned into a shopping street almost empty at this hour I saw our heads and shoulders reflected in the windows of a big shop, mocking us as we glided by: two other people. I turned into a street of villas; we were alone again and I leaned to kiss her on the neck. She did not move, but presently she glanced at me and said, “Are you a friend?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“I think I ought to like that,” she said. And she gripped my arm violently and did not let it go.
“Not at my house,” she said.
We got to my flat and there she walked across the sitting-room straight to the window and looked down at the long greenhouses gleaming in the dark.
“Which is Colonel Thompson’s house?” she said.
I came up behind her and put my arms round her and she watched my daring hands play on her breasts with that curiosity and love of themselves that women have, but there was a look of horror on her face when I kissed her on the mouth, a hate that came (I know now) from the years of her marriage. In the next hours it ebbed away, her face emptied, and her wide lips parted with greed.
“I don’t do things like this,” she said.
The next day she came to me; on the third day she pulled me back as I was getting out of bed and said, “Duggie’s coming home. I have something bad to tell you, something shameful.” She spoke into my shoulder. “Something I tried to tell you when I telephoned, the day you came with the plant, but I couldn’t. Do you remember I telephoned to you?
“I told a lie to Duggie about that young man, I told Duggie he attacked me.” She said, “It wasn’t true. I saw him and his girl at night from my bedroom window going into the garden with their arms round each other, to the end of it, under the trees. They were there a long time. I imagined what they were doing. I could have killed that girl. I was mad with jealousy—I think I was really mad. I went out into the garden many nights to stop them, and in the afternoons I worked there to provoke him and even peeped into their window. It was terrible. So I told Duggie. I told him the boy had come up behind me and pulled at my clothes and tried to rape me. I tore my blouse to prove it. I sent a cable to Duggie. Poor Duggie, he believed me. He came back. I made Duggie throw the boy out. You know what happened. When the boy was killed I thought I would go out of my mind.”
“I thought you said Duggie was ill,” I said.
“That is what I’m ashamed of,” she said. “But I was mad. You know, I hated you too when Duggie brought you in to do those stones. I really hated anyone being in the garden. That is why I made that scene when you brought the magnolia. When you came to the door I thought for an awful moment it was the boy’s father coming for his things; he did come once.”
I was less shocked than unnerved. I said, “The real trouble was that you were lying to yourself.” I saw myself as the rescuer for a moment.
“Do you think he believed you?” I said.
She put on the distant look she used to have when I first met her, almost a look of polite annoyance at being distracted from her story. Then she said something that was true. “Duggie doesn’t allow himself to believe what he doesn’t want to believe. He never believes what he sees. One day I found him in the sitting-room, and he started to pull a book out of the bookcase and closed it with a bang and wiped his eyes. ‘Dust,’ he said. ‘Bad as Mexico.’ Afterwards I thought, He’s been crying.”
“That was because he knew he was to blame,” I said.
I went to my window and looked at the sky. In the night he would be coming across it.
“What are we going to do?” I said. “When shall I see you? Are you going to tell him?”
She was very surprised. “Of course not,” she said, getting out of bed.
“But we must. If you don’t, I shall.”
She picked up her dress and half covered herself with it. “If you do,” she said, “I’ll never see you again, Colonel Thompson.”
“He’ll find out. I want to marry you.”
“I’ve got a daughter. You forget that. He’s my husband.”
“He’s probably got some girl,” I said lightly.
The gentleness went out of our conversation.
“You’re not to say that,” she said vehemently. We were on the edge of a quarrel.
“I have got to go,” she said. “Judy’s coming home. I’ve got to get his suits from the cleaners and there are some of yours.”
My suits and Duggie’s hanging up on nasty little wire hangers at the cleaners!
We had a crowd of customers at the Nursery and that took my mind off our parting, but when I got back to my flat the air was still and soundless. I walked round my three rooms expecting to see her, but the one or two pictures stared out of my past life. I washed up our empty glasses. Well, there it is, I thoug
ht cynically. All over. What do you expect? And I remembered someone saying, “Have an affair with a married woman if you like, but for God’s sake don’t start wanting to marry her.”
It was a help that my secretary was on holiday and I had to do all the paperwork at night. I also had my contract for re-planting the square the council had neglected and did a lot of the digging myself. As I dug I doubted Sally and went over what I knew about her life. How did she and Duggie meet? What did they say? Was Sally flaunting herself before her husband, surprising and enticing him? I was burned by jealousy. Then, at the end of the week, before I left for the square at half past eight, I heard her steps on the stairs to my office. She had a busy smile on her face.
“I’ve brought your suits,” she said. “I’m in a rush.” And she went to hang them in their plastic covers on the door, but I had her in my arms and the suits fell to the floor.
“Is it all right?” I said.
“How do you mean?” she said.
“Duggie,” I said.
“Of course,” she said complacently.
I locked the door. In a few minutes her doubts and mine were gone. Our quarrel was over. She looked at me with surprise as she straightened her skirt.
Happiness! I took one of our girls with me to the square and stood by lazily watching her get on with her work.
After lunch I was back at the Nursery and I was alarmed to see Duggie’s bald head among the climbing greenery of our hothouse. He was stooping there, striped by sunlight, like some affable tiger. I hoped to slip by unseen, but he heard me and the tiger skin dropped off as he came out, all normality, calling, “Just the man! I’ve been away.”
I gave what must have been the first of the small coughs, the first of a long series with which I would always greet him and which made him put concern into his voice. I came to call it my “perennial hybrid”—a phrase that struck him and which he added to his vocabulary of phrases and even to his reflections on coughs in general, on Arab spitting and Mexican hawking.
“I came over to thank you for that wonderful magnolia. That was very kind. I missed it in flower but Sally says it was wonderful. You don’t know what it did for her. I don’t know whether you have noticed, she’s completely changed. She looks years younger. All her energy has come back.” Then in a louder voice: “She has forgotten all that trouble. You must have seen it. She tells me she has been giving you a hand, your girl’s away.”
The Pritchett Century Page 53
