‘Where’s the boundary?’ he shouted to Janey. She turned to Antonio who gestured to Stan to follow him. Picking his way like a mountain goat across the crags, Antonio pointed to where the boundary ran, marked out by trees and rocks. Needless to say, there were no fences, hedges or walls, just a slight change in vegetation or colouring to show that, over the centuries, this piece of land had been worked differently from the piece of land adjoining it. How Antonio knew where our land ended and our neighbours’ began was a mystery.
The shape of the site was irregular. At times the boundary came close to the plateau, within 50m. At other parts, it dropped away, affording us the possibility of hillside, escarpment, drama.
‘Where would the garden be?’ I asked. He ignored me.
‘How big is this piece of land?’ Stan asked Janey.
‘Umm, well, I think Antonio said there are two pieces of land, actually, owned by two brothers but they’re selling them together,’ said Janey.
‘And in total they are…?’
‘Seventeen hectares, I think.’
That meant nothing to me. I worked in suburban proportions.
‘What’s that in old money?’ I asked Stan.
‘Well, a hectare is ten thousand square metres which is… a third larger than the new Wembley stadium. Think of it as one-and-a-half times a football pitch.’
‘What?’ I was incredulous.
‘And one hectare is 2.47 acres, so seventeen hectares is about… let’s see…’
‘Blimey! We only wanted half an acre, Stan. We can’t afford this.’
‘…About forty-two acres.’
‘Precisely. That’s eighty-four times more land than we wanted or can afford! This is ridiculous, Stan. Tell them we can’t possibly consider it.’
‘Well, hang on,’ he replied teasing. ‘We don’t know the price yet.’
I could scarcely believe my ears. Where on earth were we going to get the money, whatever the price?
Antonio chewed on a piece of grass, eyeing us with a caution born out of showing us several properties and seeing us fall for each one with increasing desperation. His lime-green eyes softened in the setting sun. Unnervingly, he also seemed to know what Stan and I were thinking.
‘You like?’
I grimaced and slapped him on the back, incapable of lying.
‘We like.’
He grinned too.
‘But tell him we can’t afford it, Janey.’ I walked off, trying to appear perfunctory, as if the whole proposal had now become ludicrous, impossible, out of the question.
But Antonio didn’t need Janey to translate. He saw right through me. He understood how excited we were and guessed that we’d probably move heaven and earth to find the money.
Stan looked at his watch.
‘We’d better leave now if we’re to make our flight.’
So we all piled back into the car with questions about the vendor, the length of time it had been on the market, whether there were other interested buyers and, of course, the price. I wouldn’t say I was squealing with delight, but Stan had to put his hand over my mouth.
However, we had only just set off and were perhaps 50 yards back onto the ridge, when Stan saw something and shouted at Janey to stop. There was a fork in the road we hadn’t spotted before. Down off to the right-hand side, below our drive, was another road that opened up below our property to what looked like a building site being developed by someone. Like ours, it had been flattened in preparation for the builders. We reversed and doubled back to get a better view. As we drove onto this new site below ours and looked up, we realised how close it was to where we would be building. This site was not part of ours. We would have neighbours 50m from our house, admittedly out of sight, but close enough to hear them flossing their teeth. What’s more, someone was planning to build on it.
‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘I thought this site was remote from anyone else.’
Stan drew a deep breath.
‘Could you find out a bit more about this small site?’ he asked Janey. ‘Who owns it, if it’s for sale, if they’ve already got planning permission, you know, the usual?’
‘Sure,’ she said and passed the questions on to Antonio, who said he’d enquire.
I got back into the car feeling deflated. The site was already way out of our price range, in another stratosphere, affordable only if you were Russian. If we had to think about buying this small piece of land too, just to prevent someone else building a house and keeping us awake at night flossing their teeth, that would surely bankrupt us. I felt something sag inside me. There was no way we could afford this magnificent piece of Andalusian heaven. And yet…
Announcing our find
The next morning back in London, we told the children. Well, not children – young adults, really. Matthew, twenty-two and Lottie, sixteen.
‘What’s it like?’
‘Well, it’s like a sort of upturned spoon…’
‘Huh?’
‘No, it’s more like where an alien spaceship would land…’ Stan chipped in.
‘What?’
‘There’s a ridge and then a panorama…’
‘What are you guys on?’
‘Look, I’ll draw it for you.’ Stan went off to get a pen.
‘No, it’s spectacular, really,’ I stammered. ‘It’s just…’
‘It’s just what, Mum?’
‘It’s just… ENORMOUS.’
‘How enormous?’
‘It’s gigantic, Matthew. The size of seventeen Wembleys.’
‘Wow,’ said Matthew who giggled and did a little dance around the kitchen.
‘Most of it is hillside that you couldn’t build on, but even the plateau that’s flattened and has planning permission is huge.’
‘Cool,’ said Lottie, grinning and turning back to watch TV.
‘I have no idea how we’re going to pay for it. We’ll have to remortgage this house, get a loan on our businesses, sell the piano and start busking at King’s Cross,’ I said to Matthew, who smiled to himself, warming to the idea of his parents investing heavily in his future fortune.
‘And I haven’t a clue where I’ll put the garden!’ No one was listening.
Then Matthew asked how long it would all take to build.
‘Oh ages,’ I said with authority, having lived through several building projects.
‘Let’s say it will be ready for your eighteenth birthday party,’ Stan said to Lottie. ‘That’s two years away.’
My word ‘ages’, in retrospect, proved more prophetic.
A Moorish house
Several weeks later, even before we had finally scraped the money together and bought all three sites – those belonging to the two brothers, and the teeth-flossers’ site – who, I suspected, was their sister, Stan had already designed our house. There was no stopping him now.
‘Look,’ he said one evening, spreading the drawings onto the kitchen worktop. ‘What do you think?’
I held a saucepan of boiling peas in one hand and a colander in the other, pushed the hair back off my face with the back of my wrist and looked sideways through steam at the drawing he was showing me. I’m not as literate as he is when it comes to understanding plans, but I could certainly see an oval site with a large rectangular house on it.
‘Why didn’t you design an oval house?’ I asked, ‘following the contours of the plateau?’
‘Don’t be stupid. It would look like a fort.’
‘So? Aren’t forts to be found on the top of hills?’
‘Yeah, but in Mexico or Rajasthan, not Andalusia.’
‘Oh, sorry,’ I mumbled, ‘I must be getting my vernaculars confused!’
‘This house follows a traditional Moorish plan, with a large courtyard in the middle. It’s typical of the region, but will have a contemporary twist.’
‘Oh. OK. But…’
‘So,’ he carried on, ignoring me, ‘there are four sides and four wings: north, where we come in off the ridge, south
, ahead of us, west, on the right where all the living accommodation will be and east, on the left where the bedrooms will be.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘So that’s it.’ He looked at me briefly, rolled the drawing up, stuck it in his briefcase and went upstairs to do something on his computer.
‘What about the garden?’ I shouted after him. No reply.
That was it, then. Our house. Our dream home for us to live in together, to entertain our family and friends, to see each other off in our final years, to raise our grandchildren. There it was, a fait accompli. No discussion, no questions; done. Not even a mention of the garden.
Now I know that at this point that you may feel he’d been rather curt with me, walking away so readily. But I am not looking for sympathy. I wasn’t upset, not really. That’s how he is. You see, my husband didn’t storm off upstairs, disappointed that I hadn’t been more enthusiastic, because it isn’t in his nature to seek approbation. He hadn’t even escaped upstairs as swiftly as he could to avoid further challenges. He’d simply walked quite happily upstairs, knowing that he’d cracked it, and that was all that mattered.
He was very pleased with his design for the house. And he probably had reason to be. It was simple, nothing too flash, for he is a man with little vanity. It was in keeping with the local vernacular, with high-white-washed walls around the perimeter to keep out the sun, and a central courtyard in the local style, so it shouldn’t raise too many eyebrows with the planners. And the plan for a wing for living and a wing for sleeping was logical, just like him. Furthermore, in avoiding my whimsical temptation to echo the curves of the site by building curved walls, he had kept it relatively inexpensive. He was probably right. I’m sure it all worked perfectly.
But there was something inside me that was a bit narked. Building this house was my original idea, remember, and he was rolling it up and putting it in his briefcase. Furthermore, he seemed to have forgotten that my raison d’être for this entire venture was to create a new garden. This was my dream, my little bit of paradise in the sun, the place I would lark about, grow fat red tomatoes, hold gigantic parties for my enormous Irish family, the place I would soak in the sunshine for twenty more years until I finally dried up like a raisin and died happily one day in my deckchair by the pool.
I had wanted to relish the moment. I would have definitely put down my saucepan and colander to savour it. I would have pointed to this room or that and asked how and why he had made certain decisions. I would have kissed him when he told me where he thought my herbs and vegetables could go, and would have laughed when he explained why our bathroom was bigger than anyone else’s on the wing. I had wanted to feel involved and excited by his plans. This was our project, the thing we were doing together to save our marriage.
But he had informed me, shared the information with me. He was done. The opportunity for a moment of shared passion for our future together had passed. His dismissal of my part in this had irked me and I continued to feel irked for some time.
A family garden in Northern Ireland
I buried myself in my work that October: helping some Belgian engineers understand the importance of developing their emotional intelligence, writing articles for business magazines and speaking at a property conference in Belfast. Before my trip to Belfast, I’d had the foresight to build in a day to visit a friend in Armagh and then, before returning to the airport, visited Mount Stewart Gardens, owned by the National Trust, one of the 1001 gardens I had to see before I died. There I took solace in the sheer maturity of a garden over a hundred years old. Unlike our bare patch of canvas in Spain, this garden had been painted by several generations and gave a foretaste of what our garden in Spain might look like when we are long gone and our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids take it on. Mount Stewart, more than any other family-owned garden I have visited in the British Isles, is a testament to that family’s hard work and good taste.
There are some English gardens that lay out their history for you like a school text and bear the visitor down a chronological path, beginning with the Victorian creators in the garden’s first decade close to the house, then moving to the next phase of development a decade later a little further on and so on up until the latest twenty-firstcentury plantings and influences in far flung corners of the estate. In Mount Stewart however, it seems as if each generation of the family and head gardener had been given freedom to modernise any spare patch of garden with something contemporary. There is little order in this garden. So the long, wide, curving drives of brilliantly flowered rhododendrons so loved by Victorians are now punctuated by the Cordyline and Phormium and Trachycarpus fortunei preferred by the designers of today. The wisteria that bedecks the Edwardian pergola is under-planted with massive Gunnera and aloe. Even the glorious bay trees carved with care into domes of topiary, sit beside banana trees. I was very taken with the lassitude allowed and wondered what kind of a family gave each other both freedom and respect.
I suppose one of the benefits of gardening between the mild Irish sea and Strongford Loch is that some subtropical species will thrive, although there was not much there from the Mediterranean palette to inspire me, as it is far too wet. The Californian cypresses were magnificent, over a hundred years old and probably over a hundred feet high, and set off by the leopard-skin bark of the Eucalyptus globulus trees bending archly forward in the autumn wind. Pictures of the garden in spring show the wooded undergrowth in the thrall of hostas, wild garlic and carpets of bluebells. This is a generous garden, with gifts for everyone. But we have to thank for its mostly Edwardian feel a remarkable woman called Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the seventh Marquess of Londonderry (1878–1989). Described as clever, warm-hearted and captivating as a mother, she was also an outspoken and articulate supporter of women’s rights, earning a military DBE for founding the Women’s Legion, which gave service on a large scale during the First World War. She also edited and wrote several books and was a close friend of the Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, although how close was the subject of much speculation amongst the gossips of the era.
How she got time to make her mark upon this scenic spot in Newtownards is a mystery. But I took solace from the discovery that this woman’s hard work produced something worth treasuring. Had she fought with her husband over where the borders should go and how large the lawns should be, I wondered? And if so, had she found solace in the arms of Ramsay MacDonald? Or had the Marquis built the house and left gardening matters, very much a woman’s domain in Edwardian times, to his wife? I felt throughout that autumn that Stan’s focus on the house portended a bifurcation of our interests. Me - the garden, him - the house. Yet in both design and execution, they were inseparable. Yin and yang. He risked more than my goodwill to ignore the former.
Worried about water
‘Gardening requires lots of water – most of it in the form of perspiration.’ Lou Erickson
In November, we took the children to see their inheritance. Stan was still foolishly letting me organise these trips, and after a panic the night before when I couldn’t find any tickets or confirmation of e-tickets or get my reservation number recognised on the airline’s website, we bowled up at Luton airport at 6am fully expecting to be turned away because it was quite possible that I hadn’t actually bought any tickets at all. But the gods were feeling benign and the wonderful people at Easyjet found us in their computer. I had booked us all in, I’d just forgotten I had. By 12pm, on a sunny autumn day beneath a sky the colour of the sea, we were drinking San Miguel in Bar Belen in Colmenar with Peter, the project manager who Janey had recommended, and George, our dear friend and builder who lives half the year in Spain and had offered to help us get this project off the ground.
To describe George as a dear friend and builder seems like an oxymoron. If you have ever worked with builders, you will know that making and keeping them as friends seems quite improbable. You are more likely to kill them than kiss them. But George was special. We had known him a long time. He
had worked with us on many projects and had an unrivalled set of skills from plastering to plumbing to sorting out the electrics. We loved him and trusted him. Over time, his presence there proved invaluable to us.
The plan was to construct a simple building first, an almacén or farmhouse building, required simply to provide shelter and storage to work the land. An almacén has tools in it and maybe an olive press, but certainly no kitchen, bathroom and bedrooms, and no tennis court or swimming pool. Then once the almacén was built, we could kit it out as a house and apply for the building to be reclassified as a dwelling. Yes, I know this may seem bizarre, but it was accepted practice for anyone who wanted to build in the countryside, or campo, and it was the preferred route of the builders, developers, architects and planners who advised us. So we were to take it in stages, an almacén first, and then a house. This would mean putting up one wing first as a shell, then another, then turning it into a house with all the necessary fixtures, fittings and comforts. In the meantime, my plan was to get the garden started. We didn’t need any permissions for that.
As we discussed the interminable building schedules and limited choice of local contractors, I kept trying to get the conversation directed towards my main concern – water. Because the site sits high and dry above the few trickles in the riverbeds below, it is starved of water. In the trips we had made to the surrounding area during summer, the earth had been stubbornly brown, dusty and dry. But then the week before we arrived, most unusually, it had rained solidly for six days. Suddenly, the earth had sprung to life, perhaps believing spring had come early, and there was a faint green sheen across the whole area. How on earth was I to create a garden when the rainfall, possibly the lowest in Europe, was so erratic? It could choose to come all at once and then disappear for months. What kinds of plants would survive in that? Where on earth would I find water and how could I provide it for young plants when I wasn’t going to be there full time? I sat back and watched my husband discuss the issues he thought important, while thinking about my life-and-death issue: water. The children disrupted my gloom.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 4
