“It means things at war with one another have reached some point of relaxation.”
“Ah!” said Murphy, nodding sagely, and then working it around in his mouth for a moment.
They were standing by an ornamental pond in the rear garden of Tynedale Lodge, following Melrose’s interview with the butler, Mr. Barkins. Melrose found it hard to keep from dropping the “mister” and calling him “Barkins.” He had had the foresight to bring a flat cap so that he could turn it around in his hands, occasionally squashing it, to make himself appear humble. He thought it was pretty rum that this oaf of a Barkins should have the privilege of hiring and firing staff. But Barkins clearly loved it, loved exerting what small measure of power he had in the household. As far as the new gardener, Ambrose Plant, was concerned, Barkins only thought he had the power. Oliver Tynedale was the one who had it after Jury had called him to explain what he wanted.
In the big, slightly chilly kitchen, Melrose had finally been invited to sit down and have a cup of coffee-elevenses, a brief respite from toil Melrose knew about only through the incessant visits of Agatha to Ardry End. Otherwise, he couldn’t tell a respite of toil from a tenner, nor, really, could his “staff,” a generalization he hesitated to use since, except for Martha, his cook, the only others were his butler, Ruthven, and his groundskeeper, Mr. Momaday. Ruthven did indeed work, but he didn’t toil. He carried out his duties as smoothly as an Olympic skater. On the other hand, Momaday was completely hopeless, walking all over the land with a shotgun broken over his arm, looking for something to shoot.
Melrose had thought about all of this in preparation for his morning interview with Ian Tynedale, which he thought was far more congenial than the one with Barkins. He’d be the first to admit he was lazy, but he didn’t care. Right now he was having his coffee at the long table where he supposed meals were taken by staff and he’d be one of them.
Sitting at the bottom of the table as Barkins was grilling the candidate for undergardener was a beautiful child with midnight black hair and skin so translucent one could almost see through it. She was eating a piece of bread and butter and keeping a close watch on Melrose. He wondered if this was the little girl named Gemma Trimm. No one had bothered telling him.
Barkins wondered how it was that if Mr. Plant had had as much experience as he’d said, he’d never been head gardener. Because, Mr. Plant had responded, he didn’t like administrative work. Barkins thought that an odd answer, but went to the phone and called the numbers given him, the recommendations Melrose had supplied. After a few minutes he was back, saying both of the previous employers had been most satisfied with his work. They were, of course, Marshall Trueblood and Diane Demorney.
“They were indeed effusive, Mr. Plant.”
Then Barkins asked him the usual boring questions as to why Mr. Plant had left these two satisfied employers. Mr. Plant had wanted to move to London, et cetera, et cetera.
The little girl had finished sizing him up (reaching her conclusions far faster than the butler) and had gathered up her strange doll and gone outside.
Barkins thought he would do with having a trial run for a week or two. Melrose had reacted with proper humility.
Which is why he was standing by the pond, at either end of which he had pointed out the gardener’s still-thriving hakonechloa and Rubrum grasses, the Rubrum’s sprays of delicate flowers still going strong in December. Then there was that New Zealand grass with its drooping flowerheads at the far end, over there. Melrose made much of these grasses, they being about the only thing he knew. “Hakonechloa” he had learned-as he had a few other gardening nuggets of wisdom-from Diane Demorney.
“Point out,” Diane had told him in the Jack and Hammer, “that hakonechloa is a must-have for every snob around who knows nothing at all about gardening-I certainly don’t, nor do I want to-point out that the name is simply on everybody’s lips.”
“But… what is it?”
“Some sort of grassy thing.”
“Well, but what does it look like?”
“Melrose, don’t be simple. How should I know? If it’s a grass, I expect it’s green. Tallish.” Her hand measured off air. “Look: when you don’t know a damned thing about a subject, you rattle off one or two esoteric bits that hardly anyone knows-”
“Well, hakonechloa won’t do, then. You said it was on everybody’s lips.”
“But people don’t know it’s on everybody’s lips, do they? One or two bits and then learn the Latin-I think it’s Latin-names for this or that and toss them in occasionally.”
“You mean even if I’ve got the names wrong?”
Diane looked over her shoulder to the bar where Dick Scroggs stood reading the paper. She gave him the queen’s wave, meaning two more drinks. To Melrose she said, “I expect it will be wrong, but who cares, as long as it’s Latin.”
“But a gardener might know.”
Diane sighed deeply. “Even if he does, you just finesse whatever you’re looking at for something that doesn’t grow around there-a palm tree or something.”
“Diane, how could I mistake a plant or a flower for a palm tree?”
“Then say something that grows around a palm tree-at the base of it. He won’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’ll make two of us.” But Melrose had to admit he was enamored of the Demorney grasp of one-upmanship. “Okay-” He read from one of the three-by-five cards on which he was taking notes.
(“Notes! Lord,” Diane had said with a shiver.)
At first, Melrose had done what he thought to be the sensible thing, and gone to the little library, where he’d pulled down a book, slogged through it for a while and realized facts without color, without conversation, without nuance, were boring and hard to absorb. He had only two days before he returned to London, and knew what he needed was a crash course. He needed the gestalt of gardening-watching someone do it, hearing someone speak of it. To this end he had gone in search of Alice Broadstairs, who, along with Lavinia Vine, competed at the annual Sidbury Flower Show. The trouble with this approach, Melrose should have known, was that Miss Broadstairs was such a gardening enthusiast, she rattled on and on about her roses and orchids, covering entirely too much ground (literal and metaphoric), so that Melrose was bombarded by facts he couldn’t assimilate, and, more important, that would probably do him no good. He took notes, though, for among all of this fall of blossom was the odd bit that would help: a rose called Midsummer Beauty that was still brilliant in December; the Mahonia japonica, that he could remember because it rhymed; and Diane’s hakonechloa. He came, in other words, to realize that knowledge was style: it’s not what you know, it’s how you know it. Diane was the person for this, and she would be having lunch (the two olives) at the Jack and Hammer.
She had said, “Do something with mistletoe. Christmas is just around the corner, unfortunately.” Diane could only make it through the holiday season with a breakfast of eggnog.
“ ‘Do something’? I’m not decorating the garden.”
“I mean, look up one or two kinds of mistletoe and trot them out if you’re looking at a bush.”
“Doesn’t mistletoe grow on trees?”
Diane tapped her stirrer with its marinated olive gently on the rim of her glass. “I have no idea. Find out what kind, then.”
Melrose made a note on his card. “What if this house doesn’t have the kind mistletoe grows on?”
Diane rolled her eyes and ate her olive, after which she said, “Then you ask him why this kind of tree isn’t in the garden.” Languidly, she fixed a cigarette into her black holder. “You’re usually inventive. One must be able to turn things to one’s advantage. How was Florence?”
“Magnificent, absolutely magnificent.” Somehow, this galloping trip that had irritated him to death (except, of course, at the end) had turned in his mind to something gorgeous and fragile. “My favorite place was San Gimignano.” Not only did Melrose pronounce this correctly, but he managed to sound like a nat
ive when he blended that second “i” with the “y.” He had practiced a lot.
“Say that again.”
“San Gim-i’yan-o.”
“How fascinating. I love Italian names. ‘San Gimignano.’ Hmm.”
It annoyed Melrose that she pronounced it exactly right without any practice at all. For some reason, Diane was good at things like that.
“San Gimignano (he liked saying it) is about twenty miles outside of Florence. It’s like suddenly finding yourself back in the Middle Ages. The town’s famous for its towers. Once there were hundreds of them, so many you could walk across town on the rooftops.”
“I can hardly walk across town on the pavements.”
“I imagine this ‘tower’ business was a kind of ego thing. Oh, the towers permitted fortification-you know, pouring boiling oil down on your enemy-but I bet the whole idea got out of hand and everyone tried building a tower taller than his neighbor’s, so they just kept building taller towers.”
Diane tapped her cigarette free of ash. “Sounds like Las Vegas. Now, tossing things like that name into conversation, well, it would stop everyone but the mayor of San Gimignano dead in his tracks.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning people don’t give much of a damn what you say. It’s the way you say it. Knowledge is presentation.”
Exactly. Melrose smiled.
Angus Murphy’s voice drew him back from the Jack and Hammer, saying, “Ya do seem t’ know y’r grasses, ah’ll say that. Come wi’ me.”
Melrose followed him to a bed of largish, flat-headed white perennials. “Achillea, this lot is. Hardy flower.” He looked even more narrowly at Melrose. “But you must know that, ah expect.”
He could not believe his luck! He was first out of the gate on this one. He knew only this species because he liked its common name. “This white one has always interested me: ptarmica, sneezewort, I believe it’s called.”
“That’s it, aye. Surprised you’d know that one-”
(So was Melrose.)
“-not got much to recommend it.”
“Now I’m rather partial to the A. millefolium Heidi (only because it was described as ‘fading beautifully’), but I don’t seem to see any in your garden…”
Murphy grunted. “Can’t get everything in, can ah? What’d ya do about fertilizing this lot?” They had moved to another bed of purple flowers Melrose couldn’t identify for the life of him. “Ya can see they’ve got pretty straggly.”
Melrose sighed and shook his head. “Yes, it’s quite sad when an entire bed falls into a state of desuetude.”
Murphy blinked. “State o’ wha’?”
“Desuetude. But, look, you can’t be everywhere, Mr. Murphy!” Melrose rang out cheerfully while flinging his arm out toward the sneezewort.
“Now, how d’ ya spell that?”
“Spell what?”
“That word begins with ‘des.’ ”
“Oh. ‘Desuetude’?”
Murphy was handing him a pencil stub and an empty seed packet. “Write it down there.”
Melrose managed to crowd the word onto the border. Then, for good measure, wrote détente on the other narrow border. The picture on the packet displayed a bright grouping of Michaelmas daisies. He handed the packet and pencil back with a smile. “You know, with Christmas coming in just a few days, I wonder you don’t have some mistletoe about.”
Murphy was practicing desuetude and not attending. Finally, he put away the seed packet and led Melrose into the greenhouse. “Got a rose ah’m foolin’ with ah want ya t’ see.”
The world of roses had managed to bar its doors against Melrose. He had not attempted to learn the hundreds of different kinds; he felt it could take a lifetime for any serious researcher to master the subject. Roses. Between Alice Broadstairs and Lavinia Vine, he had heard all he ever wanted to, as they were always cross-breeding, inbreeding, mutating to come up with a new species and beat each other out of the first prize at the Sidbury Flower Show. Roses ignited them.
“This here ’un. What d’ya think o’ this?”
The rose in question was an exquisite golden, peachy color. “Breathtaking,” said Melrose. It was, too. He just didn’t know its name.
“Nearly took the blue ribbon at the Chelsea Flower Show, this did.”
“What I’d like to see is the rose that beat it.”
Murphy chortled. “Tha’s a good’un. Now, what won, d’ ya guess? Come on, now,” he added when he saw Melrose hesitate.
Melrose simpered a bit as he said, “Probably one of those revisionist roses that Gertrude Jekyll and that lot were always coming up with. The Sissinghurst syndrome. You remember that, don’t you?”
It was clear Murphy not only didn’t remember, far more important, he didn’t know how to say it. His eyelids were stitched even closer as his fingers went to his pocket to draw out his stub of pencil and the seed packet. Thinking even harder, he drew out two. Melrose took them as Murphy said, “Both o’ them words.”
“ ‘Revisionist’? ‘Syndrome’?”
Murphy flicked his finger at the packets, a nod that told Melrose to get on with it.
Then, being thoroughly satisfied that Melrose had the collective wisdom of ten gardeners, Murphy went in to his lunch, Melrose declining the invitation in favor of a walk around the garden where he might pick up clues from the furrowed rows and seed packets that would give him future ammunition if he was grilled again.
Thirty-two
Hunkered down over a flowerbed, where a seed packet picturing a bouquet of bluebells was stuck to a marker, Melrose heard a voice:
“Those aren’t bluebells in there.”
Quickly, he turned. It was the little girl who’d been sitting at the kitchen table. Here she was sitting on a board that had been squeezed between the sturdy branches of a beech tree. “No? This seed packet says bluebell.”
“I changed the seed packet with those ones.” She pointed toward another flowerbed.
“Why did you do that?”
Moving her doll (dressed in an impossibly long frock) to her other side, she said, “Because I’d rather have bluebells in there than the other stuff. Benny switched the packets for me.”
“Oh. I thought bluebells were wildflowers, anyway.”
She considered that. “Not around here, they aren’t.”
This all seemed perfectly logical. “And who is this garden marauder, Benny?”
“My friend. He makes deliveries for Mr. Gyp, who’s really nasty. I’m not eating meat anymore. Benny brings books, too, from the Moonraker, Mr. Tynedale likes me to read books to him. I mean I read parts of books. Little bits. Right now we’re reading a book about a man named Gatsby. I really like the big eye. Do you want to sit down? I’ll move Richard.”
Melrose had always considered he had a quick mind, but he was having trouble processing all of this information. Yet she appeared to think it was all in a day’s talk. “Thank you, I think I probably need to sit down.” When he’d hoisted himself up beside her-there was just barely room if she held the doll on her lap-he decided to take her information from the top. “If you can read The Great Gatsby, you must be an excellent reader.”
The eyes she turned on him were killingly honest. “Parts, I said. Little bits.”
“Well, the little bit about the eye. I don’t remember that.”
“It was on a sign of a doctor who makes eyeglasses. Mr. Tynedale says it’s like the eye of God. But I don’t think so.” She leaned backward into empty air, so that her black hair nearly touched the tree roots. She went on, from her almost-upside down position: “It’s probably Cyclops.”
Melrose was even more surprised. “Are you referring to The Odyssey?”
“It’s by Homer. I don’t know his last name. It’s a really good story.”
“It is indeed. Did you read it in translation or just stick to the original Greek?”
When she did not bother answering, Melrose said, “Mr. Tynedale must be an excellent man if he ha
s you doing all this reading of books that even adults don’t often tackle.”
“He is. He’s very excellent. You can help baptize him.”
Melrose had a startled moment before he realized she was now speaking of her doll and not the excellent Mr. Tynedale. Then, of course, he still had to stumble over the “him.” “Him?” He regarded the doll. “I assumed your doll was a ‘her.’ ”
“No, he’s not. See?” She pulled back the long gown and pointed toward the torso, the joined legs and undisclosed sex. “It’s smooth, see. Nothing’s there.”
“You don’t happen to know the Crippses, do you?”
“No.”
He was surprised at her rather sophisticated acceptance of this sexual ambiguity. “Well, but it could be a girl, couldn’t it? On the evidence we’ve got?”
“It could be a girl, but I don’t want him to be. His name’s Richard.
When I thought he was a girl I was going to name her Rhonda. I was on the Rs. I was waiting for Benny to come, but you’d do just as good.”
So attendance at the baptism was not an honor conferred but a need for assistance. “Were you going to do it now?”
“We might as well since we’re not doing anything else.”
“Excuse me, you might not be, but I have that load of dirt-” he pointed to a wheelbarrow full and waiting “-to take around to the bedding area out front. I’m your new undergardener.”
She scratched her ear and looked at him, not entirely unlike the way Angus Murphy had looked at him. It was that sizing him up, waiting to catch him out look. He gave in. “Okay.”
“Come on!” She shoved herself off the board, and so did he, glad to leave it. Off she ran between the hedge and the sneezewort to the pond where Melrose and Angus Murphy had stood and considered grasses. She turned and ran backward with a shout to him to hurry.
Before the pond with its sinister goldfish, she jumped from one foot to another as if she had to pee. When he arrived by her side, she thrust the doll (in its too-much-handled frock) toward Melrose.
The Blue Last Page 21
