Sky Garden

by Jenny Schwartz

  He pressed backwards, his knees giving out so that he sat abruptly on the window seat.

  Lanie could sympathize with his reaction, and smiled at him as he summoned his courage and sidled out with a polite and general, “Good afternoon”.

  By the time the tour group finally descended from the detailed tour, the television crew had returned and were setting up in the drawing room, with Velma watching.

  Nick glanced at Lanie. He seemed about to say something to her when one of the tour group interrupted.

  Janet, the white-haired woman from the loveseat, stood near him, insatiably curious. “Are you the presenter? What other shows have you done?”

  As they gathered in front of him, Nick’s reserved expression acquired a hint of panic. It was present in the stiffening of his shoulders and the widening of his eyes, and in the way he took a giant step backwards.

  By now, Lanie was on first name terms with the tour guide—Faroud—and she watched Faroud’s amused viewing of his group’s behavior. How twelve people could be a mob, she didn’t know, but somehow their enthusiasm for the museum had coalesced into intense interest about all happenings related to it. Their sense of ownership was obvious.

  Impelled by the same sense of mischief that lurked in Faroud’s smile, Lanie dived into conversation with him, leaving Nick to be interrogated on his plans for the rooftop garden. One of the women was an architect and concerned about the effect of the garden on the old Georgian house.

  Submerged in this floodtide of humanity, Nick battled on, but he shot Lanie a brooding look of betrayal.

  Finally, Faroud rescued him with a suggestion of afternoon tea, and the tour group stampeded as one body for refreshment.

  “I hope they have clotted cream.”

  Faroud smiled at Lanie and shook her hand. “Thank you.”

  “Any time.”

  “I’ll email you,” he said. “I’ll suggest to the boss that we add the Horry Museum to our London tour.”

  “That would be great.” Lanie saw the group to the door and waved them off. Rubbing her arms against the chill in the wind, she turned and bumped into Nick.

  He smelled of ocean-inspired cologne, but faintly. It was her nose bumping against his throat that let her learn his scent.

  She drew back hurriedly.

  “You abandoned me to those enthusiasts.”

  It was an accusation, but Lanie pounced on the last word. “That is exactly what they are. Enthusiasts.”

  “You need to learn to deal with fans,” Nelson shouted from the doorway.

  “You’re not helping,” Nick shouted back.

  A deep laugh came from the drawing room.

  “They don’t need me for this bit.” Nick took Lanie’s arm.

  She glanced down at his hand in surprise.

  “I hoped we could talk,” he said.

  Velma watched avidly. “I’ll look after things here. You pop into the kitchen. Make the man a pot of tea.”

  Lanie hesitated, but when she looked past Velma into the drawing room, she saw the television crew had all paused, a tableau of purposeful motion abandoned for curiosity—curiosity about her and Nick. “Tea sounds good.” Anything to escape.

  The production crew went back to their work.

  Nick started for the kitchen, but Lanie resisted, fascinated despite herself in how instantly the trio were reabsorbed in their work. From Nelson with his larger than life manner, and now, a quiet intensity, to the camerawoman and gopher, they were all professionals.

  “Problem?” Nick asked softly.

  “I hope not.” She shrugged, genuinely unsure. She’d resisted the roof garden and the filming of it on instinct and with reason. She was so scared of things developing out of her control. And yet, this production was the opposite of uncontrolled.

  “There are a few logistical things I want to discuss with you. Better in person than via email, and we fly out to Montreal tonight.”

  She blinked at him.

  He smiled down at her with a sudden lazy charm. “They do have gardens there. It’s not all snow. Although we’re calling the rooftop garden there a Snow Garden. We’re cheating a bit on that one. It’s a project I finished a year ago, so we can’t track its progress, but we have before and after shots, and we’re going to film it now as the snow melts and spring establishes itself.”

  He pushed open the kitchen door, holding it for her. “After Montreal, it’s on to Mexico. The Tokyo garden is wrapped up. Hong Kong is going to be a wall garden, so we can wait to film that. I have a dozen project schedules all feeding into one chaotic TV program plan—that Nelson then changes.”

  “You’re friends, aren’t you? Long term, not just for this project.” She filled the kettle.

  Nick sat at the table, at the corner near the coal stove. “Since school. Nelson’s won some awards for his documentaries, including one about slums. Human ingenuity fascinates him. He has a unique take on things. But after his last project—” Nick broke off.

  Lanie adjusted the kettle on the coal stove, then curled up in cook’s chair.

  Perhaps it was her lack of reaction that prompted him to continue. He was very self-contained, but most people felt a need to fill a silence.

  “Nelson was filming in refugee camps. He reckons half of what he filmed couldn’t be shown on television. There’s a point where people’s desperation is overwhelming. It got to Nelson. Especially the children.”

  She pulled her knees up, feeling cold out of sympathy. She felt ashamed, too. She’d judged the rooftop garden project, its television program, and Nelson, superficially. Selfishly. She hadn’t considered, at all, their motives and needs.

  But Nick didn’t seem to be sharing personal information to guilt her. He studied the apples piled near him on the table, reached out and rearranged them, stacking four into a pyramid. “So that’s why Nelson wanted a project like this one. Rooftop gardens. Science fiction, technical issues and social living, rather than heartbreak and despair.”

  The boiling kettle broke the second silence.

  Lanie swished hot water around inside the teapot, poured it out and measured in the tea. Then she added the just-off-the-boil water and covered the pot with a striped green and orange tea cozy. She sat opposite Nick at the table. “Do you have a timeline for our roof garden?”

  “Yes.” He straightened. “I’d prefer to be onsite, but that won’t always be possible. However, I will always be contactable by email if there’s a problem. I’ll send you the project schedule, tonight. You’ll see when the various trades will need access to the roof.” He watched her pour the tea. Steam rose in swirling patterns. “It will be disruptive. You’ve probably noticed that. I’m sorry about everyone trooping in to give estimates. But I’ve tried to arrange for the messy or noisy bits to happen as close together as possible.”

  She nodded, resigned. “Velma is organizing drop cloths for the hall.”

  “And in the elevator.” Nick sipped his tea. He drank it straight, no milk or sugar.

  Lanie stirred a single sugar into hers and a splash of milk. Then she cupped her hands around the mug for warmth. Almost unnoticed, she dropped her antagonism to the roof garden. Her barbed resistance melted away. “What is the story of your television program, its theme?”

  “Hope.” Nick put his mug down. “Recognition that life is challenging, that it throws up seemingly impossible obstacles, and yet, humans can alter their environments for the better. We’re not at the mercy of forces beyond our control. We can improve our world and include everyone in the improvements. That’s why there are such a range of roof gardens in the program, from the slum garden of Mexico City to this one above a museum, to the hospital recovery garden we just finished filming in Tokyo.”

  “But not everyone wants the world to be a better place,” she objected. “Some people just want to make sure they get the best of what is there, now, and to hell with everyone else.”

  “That’s short-sighted thinking.”

  She grimac
ed. “I doubt they care.”

  “True.” He studied her over his mug. “But you care. You look different dressed like this.”

  She froze. She’d forgotten that she wasn’t in her 1950s costume, wasn’t safe and remote.

  “You look beautiful dressed up. But like this, you look real.” That this was a profound compliment echoed in his voice, and his gaze held hers.

  “We had school kids through this morning. I can’t keep up with them in heels.” Even her babbling failed to distract him. He looked into her eyes and she fell into his.

  “Nick?” Nelson burst into the kitchen. “Oops.” He spun on his heel.

  Ridiculously, Lanie flushed. “Did you want a cup of tea?” She stood and refilled the kettle, replacing it on the stove.

  Nelson approached the table. “No, thanks. Nick, I thought a shot of you sitting in that big armchair near the fireplace. Now, I know you’re allergic to grand rooms…”

  Lanie turned around in time to catch Nick’s expression.

  His warning frown vanished as soon as he saw her watching. He stood. “Thanks for the tea.”

  “Anytime.”

  He paused, looking down at her.

  Suddenly her casual, meaningless response vibrated on the air. It was an invitation, an acceptance that he had a place in her life. Anytime. The width of cook’s chair separated them. It was no distance at all. She could stretch out her arm and touch him.

  He nodded. “I’ll remember.”

  She remembered to breathe when the kitchen door closed behind him.

  Chapter 6

  The late evening email from Nick confirmed he’d be in London the next day. “Eleven o’clock. I’ll come straight to the museum. I won’t be jetlagged, this time.” A promise.

  Lanie glanced up from her phone, smiling, aware that she felt excitement, not dread. The “invasion” of the roof garden hadn’t been the disaster she’d feared. Mrs. Smith had been right. The noise and activity had added energy to the museum, and stirred Lanie into new life. She still searched the political news for hints of evil. Well, there were lots of those. She was looking for perversion; an enjoyment of corruption, suffering and death.

  She inhaled sharply, pushing those thoughts aside to refocus on Nick’s message. She could guess, but she wasn’t going to, at how much his messages had played a part in hooking her interest in the here and now, and not some imagined Edwardian past or her obsessive scary monster hunt.

  I won’t be jetlagged, this time, he’d written.

  And she wouldn’t be so scared and defensive.

  If she was to use a garden metaphor, she felt like a baby fern frond, uncurling from its tight uncertainty about facing life. Even her muscles were looser these days. Come evening, the nape of her neck no longer ached with tension.

  She stretched sensuously within the comfort of old yoga clothes. The hum of evening traffic returning people to their homes drifted up to the rooftop where she sat outside, catching up online with family and friends. If she didn’t, she knew they’d descend on her. Giving her the space she’d requested, didn’t mean they left her alone. They hovered as electronic specters, letting her know that they were there for her; waiting till she was ready to resume her old life.

  But Lanie wouldn’t be returning to the theatre.

  Her parents had probably guessed as much. Perhaps they’d accepted the loss of her old life before she had. Her dad’s growing collection of Edwardian song sheets and plays suggested an attempt to support her career change. They had seen, while she was still grieving it, that she couldn’t return “home” to the theatre. For her, it would be forever tainted.

  In the last traumatic year, she’d changed, and over the last few weeks, as spring advanced and the roof garden took shape, she’d come to accept that the change was permanent. There was peace in that, peace in giving herself permission to release her guilt that the old Lanie was gone forever.

  She’d learned too violently the dangers of analyzing people to ever return to doing so for entertainment. Her stage act had been mediumship, or rather, revealing how the tricks of it worked. Like so many psychic acts—and salesmanship—it relied on cold reading. You guessed and read people’s responses. Yes or no? Right or wrong? Then you focused attention on your accuracy and skimmed over your mistakes.

  Clothing, hair styles, body language and speech patterns all gave clues as to personality. As a performer, you said things that seemed personal, but could apply to a lot of people; and you dangled open-ended statements that encouraged people to apply them to their own lives. You mixed compliments with apparent insight, stroking egos so that people felt special.

  It could make you cynical.

  Lanie hadn’t been. Once, she’d enjoyed the energy of the act. She’d enjoyed how people marveled, “ahh’d” with understanding as she’d shown the mechanisms of her “mediumship”, and then, had gone out entertained and still believing a little bit in magic. She hadn’t wanted to steal wonder from their lives.

  But that was the past. She couldn’t perform when she worried about the secrets strangers hid. Secrets were devastating. It wasn’t ghosts that haunted people. It was secrets. And when secrets wailed out of their locked chests, like all the troubles released by Pandora, they devastated lives.

  She was proof of it, her life constrained by one final secret: the knowledge that out there lurked a serial killer’s voyeur, that he might be watching her, and that she, in turn, was hunting him.

  Unconsciously, she flicked back to the image her cousin, Stella, had sent her yesterday. The screen of Lanie’s phone was too small to show the painting in its full glory, but it remained evocative.

  “It’s you, Lanie,” Stella had written. “Wearing London and loneliness. Don’t get lost, chickie-babe.”

  Her theatre designer cousin had a unique manner of expressing concern.

  It had taken Lanie a day to come to terms with the shock of the surreal painting with the haunted central figure and the blue color palette, but now she had an answer, one to reassure Stella.

  The evening light filtered the harsh edges off the rawness of the roof garden taking shape around her. Lanie held up her phone and took photos. “Can’t be lonely in a garden, Stella. My sky garden is coming to life.”

  It truly was.

  Tomorrow, Nick would find the roof changed. He mightn’t have been there, but his detailed plans and quietly forceful personality had driven the project on unbelievably fast. A safety rail, black and unobtrusive, enclosed the roof space and drainage had been altered, checked and double-checked. Last Tuesday’s storm had helped with the latter. Work had begun on garden beds and built-in benches.

  It was like a stage set, and she was peeping behind the scenes, seeing how the magic was built and maintained. Nick’s design went beyond maximizing space. She recalled his meticulous plans, overlaying them mentally on the skeleton of the garden that surrounded her.

  Nick aimed to evoke a mood, one of relaxed charm that invited people to linger. In that, he’d captured her sense of the Horry Museum. It was a space outside of time, an evocation of life viewed through nostalgia. The roof garden would be a place of escape.

  More practically, the layout served to direct attention from one area to another, blocking out awareness of observation from surrounding buildings and luring the visitor to admire the treetops in the square or attractive skyscapes of landmarks on the horizon. Privacy and openness, shelter and freedom. Withdrawal and celebration of living in London. In a garden, you couldn’t draw the curtains.

  The project had been less intrusive than she’d feared. Rather than carry the building materials through the museum and up in the elevator, the first task had been to rig a hoist off the outside staircase and the materials were raised by an electric winch. As a result, no one used the kitchen entrance, for fear something might drop on their heads, but that was a small price to pay for saving the hall from dirt and scratches.

  Visitors to the museum didn’t suspect the work that was goin
g on above their heads. Lanie was debating whether she should mention it on the museum’s website. Somehow she’d found herself inveigled into sending Nick daily photos of progress, and those photos could be used on the museum’s website to showcase the roof garden’s development.

  But she was reluctant to share them. She sent them to Nick with wry observations on the work and the weather—wet, mostly. In turn, he’d ask questions or describe what he’d been working on in Mexico: a community garden in the slums, planted to provide food for the soup kitchen and herbs to sell, and with an eye to water scarcity. It was very different to the Horry Museum. In his photos, the sun was crystal bright, giving everything sharp edges and bold color.

  She called one up on her phone and saw three children planting tiny seedlings that Nick had said were peppers. They must have known they were being photographed because they’d all turned to look up at him. Lanie smiled involuntarily. Those smiles were wide and proud. The children were like the volunteers at the museum: everyone liked to be involved in something bigger than themselves, and appreciated for their efforts.

  She put her phone down and pushed her hands into the pockets of her thick cardigan. Today had been fine. She sat on a kitchen chair she’d carried out from the flat, and had her feet propped on the lowest rail of the low concrete rim of the roof. She was looking west, into the setting sun, but the light was muted. Soft gold, like reflected firelight, blurred the edges of buildings and roofs, and tinted orange the soft spring green of the treetops in the square. It provided an illusion of warmth.

  To her left, in the pigeon cote on the adjacent building, the cooing of the birds before they settled for the night provided a companionable soundtrack to her thoughts.

  And as instinctively as the birds returned to their home, her mind circled around and returned to the puzzle that was Nick.

  He was returning home, tomorrow, but he didn’t seem to regard England as home. Nothing in their email exchanges gave her a sense of where he belonged. It wasn’t that she expected everyone to have a fixed address, but people tended to have a place that they hitched their identity to.