The following evening I attended my regular book group meeting at the Royal Society of Arts. The chosen book was Treading Lightly, about the Australian Aboriginal people’s reluctance to mess with nature. Nothing could have been better aimed at making me feel guilty. We’d been messing with the mountain, that’s for sure, and now it had come back to punish us. The book had appealed to us - a set of professional city women - on a primal level. Through the evening and long into our second and third glasses of wine, we spoke wistfully about the distance we had travelled from the earth compared to our tribal brothers and sisters who still lived on it and by it. They knew the sound that roots make when they curl deep in the ground, the feel of sand daubed on the face, the taste of sour water.
I walked to the tube afterwards with one of the group members; we were discussing how acts of carelessness can rebound. Under the yellow lights of Old Street, in a benign misty rain, settling on our shoulders, we passed through the invisible barrier of etiquette into a cocoon of confidence. I’d told her about the damage we’d inflicted on our mountain and she told me about the divorce she was going through. She had woken up one morning to find a note from her husband, saying he no longer loved her, had found someone else and was moving out. He’d be home later to collect his things. The blow had come from nowhere. Without any sense of bitterness, she told me how she had struggled to cope with the temptation to lash out, to sink into self-pity, to turn sour. Then she told me something that had helped her.
‘I was told a story once,’ she said, ‘about a little boy who cruelly tied a rock onto the end of a piece of string and on the other end he tied a small fish he had caught. Then he threw the string into the river. The rock sank to the bottom but the fish was tied to the other end of the string above it and no matter how hard it tried, it couldn’t swim away. A wise old priest watched him but said nothing. Back in the village that night, he told the boy that in the morning he should return to the river and free the fish. When morning came, the boy returned to the river and freed the fish, but the rock stuck to his fingers and he carried it for the rest of his life.
‘I didn’t want to carry any rocks around in my heart,’ my friend said when she finished telling her story. ‘So I have forgiven my husband.’
That summed up where we were, really. We’d messed with the mountain and it was repaying us by chucking rocks down onto the olive groves below. But I wasn’t carrying any rocks around with me for this. Stan broadened the plateau in good faith. He pushed the soil off the edge to make a space so I could create a bigger garden, in the same way that a lover smoothes a sheet on the bed for his woman to lie down beside him. It was meant well. The mountain will forgive us, I told myself. It just may take time.
Several days later we called Jennie. She recommended we plant big patches of Aptenia, a rapidly growing ground cover with pink and orange blooms, which knits its roots together over large areas and should hold the soil. ‘The problem with seeds,’ she said, ‘is they will be washed away in the rain. All your work will come to nothing. Everything will grow in places you don’t want it to grow.’ But she told us that if we persevered with several hundred young plants a few centimetres high and costing less than a euro each, we should be able to achieve a decent cover by next summer. That seemed fine in theory, but if the mesh had already been laid across the soil, how the hell were we going to poke our fingers through to plant Aptenia a few centimetres high? Impossible. It wouldn’t work. It would have to be seeds.
To add to our troubles, the solicitor emailed us to say that the neighbour had demanded €7000 compensation for damage to his olive groves. €7000! We couldn’t imagine that a few rocks tumbling onto trees could cause that amount of damage. We needed to see for ourselves. So we packed a few garden tools, some strong boots and planned to check out the neighbour’s claims.
A treasured tool and a hairnet
Over the years, a gardening tool acquires the properties of a musical instrument. Cellists, in particular, talk about their instrument like a mistress. They carry it, clutch it, embrace it, stroke it, caress it for hours each day. Over the years, they say, she responds: bends, yields and grows into them as we grow into our partners over a lifetime of accommodation.
So it was with my Felco 6, a small, unassuming pair of secateurs, my first proper gardening tool, a gift from my business partner of nearly twenty years, a man who put quality first in everything he did. Among his gifts to me over the years were Sabatier knives that I treasure, and a diamond steel knife sharpener. He also insisted – against my instincts, for we were a young, impoverished business at the time – that we invest in leather Corbusier office chairs, the best office furniture one could buy, and not a day passed that I didn’t appreciate them.
‘These are the best secateurs in the world,’ he announced as he presented me with them. They slipped into my hand effortlessly like a silver cigarette case slips into the silk-lined pocket of a cashmere overcoat. Those Felco secateurs remained with me for twenty years in my various sheds, pocketed safely in my garden apron, laid down beside my gloves on the garden wall as I stopped for a cup of tea or glass of beer. Only the previous summer I had parceled them off to the Felco factory in a Jiffy bag for a service and they were returned within five days sharpened, oiled and moving without resistance. I stood in the kitchen, having opened the envelope, took them in my hand and squeezed them for that familiar feel of red plastic and steel like the hand of my husband, fingers knitted together into a comfortable resistance.
Then one December morning at the security line in Luton airport, the lady at the X-ray machine with the face of a prison warder took them off me and chucked them into a large waste bin on top of a pile of cheap scissors, nail files and letter openers. I should have known they would be confiscated. What had I been thinking? Their shiny red handles glowed above the pile of sharp objects and cried out ‘Don’t leave me!’ and I turned away with tears in my eyes. There was nothing I could do.
‘What happens to them?’ I asked her.
‘They get recycled.’
Then, with a heavy heart, I walked away, hoping that a keen gardener at the recycling company would spot my Felco secateurs in the pile, bring them home, show them to his wife and say, ‘These are the Stradivarius of secateurs. This is truly a gift.’ But they’ll probably be melted down for scrap.
When we arrived on site the news was disappointing. Muscle Manuel told us he’d had ‘a neighbourly conversation’ with the man who was suing us. The rock fall hadn’t been such a major concern at first, apparently. But when he’d ‘mentioned it to his solicitor’ the stakes inevitably began to rise and he was sorry, but you know how things get when the lawyers become involved. Yes, we know! But who in their right mind ‘mentions’ things to their solicitor just casually? Certainly not where we come from! Picking up the phone and calling them usually starts at £250 per hour, so we tend not to do anything ‘casually’ at all when it comes to lawyers. Anyway, our neighbour’s lawyer suggested that compensation of €7000 would put right the loss of fifty trees. Fifty trees? He had to be joking. There weren’t even fifty trees on his plot.
Stan and I walked past the west wing over to the edge of the plateau with Muscle Manuel and looked down. From up there, we had a pretty good view of his land below ours, below the two safety dykes we had dug to catch everything that fell. The ground sloped steeply away from us, but everything looked perfect: blissful mountainside with healthy trees groaning under the weight of swelling olives, no damage at all. There were ten or so old black stumps in his grove that had been dead a long time, but no visible rocks or stones or fallen trees or even evidence of damaged bark. In fact, the dykes, especially the second dyke, caught all the loose debris, or so it appeared from above. We took a walk below the mountain so that we could look up at his land from the track beneath. But again, could see no damage. So, what exactly, we wanted to know, was our €7000 for? And the €1500 to our solicitor for a couple of letters?
An hour later, when Marcel eve
ntually arrived on site, it seemed that the knock-on effect of this complaint was causing us even greater trouble. Marcel had just been to the town hall. Apparently, the neighbour’s lawyer, in pursuing his claim for compensation for the olive trees, had started digging around in the town hall’s planning department and had looked closely at what we were building. When he discovered the size of the foundation slab, even though we had been granted permission for it, he brought it to the attention of the opposition party, who began to use our ‘oversized’ building as a political volleyball in local debates. There was a council election coming up in March and any ammunition with which to attack the socialists, currently in power, was useful. Wealthy Brits who, with the agreement of the planners at the town hall, had possibly ‘stretched the regulations’ were a soft target.
‘Oh Christ. What are we supposed to do now?’ Stan asked, leaning back against a cement mixer.
‘The best thing to do,’ said Marcel, shifting his gaze to the ground and scuffing around some stones with his trainers, ‘is to cover the rest of the slab with soil.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The other half. The half we haven’t built on yet. The east wing. Carry on with this half but cover up the rest of the foundations so if the helicopters fly over, they will not see it.’
‘Are you serious? Whose idea was this?’
Marcel crossed his arms and pulled his chin into his neck. He still didn’t catch Stan’s eye. ‘The planner and I agreed that we should cover the slab with soil for the meantime and sit quietly until the election is over.’
Bewildered, angry, frustrated, we retired to the bar in the town square for a couple of San Miguels and some tapas to make sense of this news.
‘Maybe we’ll be able to laugh about this one day, but right now I just want to kill every member of the Planning Department,’ said Stan, wiping the beer off his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘Oh dear.’
‘The builders never do what I ask.’
‘No.’
‘We’ve reverted back to the original plan of half the house – which was what we were going to build anyway!’
‘Mmm.’
‘We’ve got a slab I didn’t sanction that cost us €40,000 we didn’t have in the budget and that we’re now going to bury with soil!’
‘Yes.’
‘And we’ve had to revert back to my simple plan of rolls of fencing to stop the mountain slipping, which, if it had been installed two months ago when this problem started, could have saved us a gigantic lawyer’s bill.’
I tucked into the stuffed egg.
‘It’s just so frustrating. I’ve sent five emails to Marcel in the past month, none of which he has replied to.’
‘Mmmmmm.’
‘In the UK he’d be accused of professional negligence!’
‘You’re right,’ I said, wiping a drip of oil from my mouth with a hard, thin napkin. He looked up at me and inclined his head.
‘Are you taking me seriously?’
‘Yes I am. Now have some anchovies.’
We hadn’t eaten for eight hours. Troops can’t march on empty bellies and I suspected we were preparing for war.
‘What the fuck are we supposed to do now?’ he continued.
‘I don’t know.’
‘And what happens when the town hall elections are over and our people lose and are shifted out of power? Do we have to start the whole thing over again?’
‘Who knows…’
‘Perhaps they want us to bury the rest of the house as well!’
And so we continued, him ranting, me making encouraging noises and trying to get some food into him, thinking, as my mother would have done, that a fuller stomach might calm his bile. I felt like the parent of a two-year-old trying to avert a tantrum. But, in truth, he had every reason to be angry. We had been unfortunate with the neighbour, possibly egged-on by Muscle Manuel, ill-advised by Marcel, in the wrong place at the wrong time in a political campaign, and severely out of pocket. These misfortunes would try a saint’s patience, and we were mere mortals.
‘And there’s another thing I haven’t told you,’ Stan said, wiping the olive oil off his chin.
‘What’s that?’
‘You know Old Rodrigues, who owns the site right next to ours?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he says he’s getting on a bit and wants to sell us the site if we’re interested.’
‘You already told me. I thought we were interested. It would give us a bit more privacy and he’s looked after it well. There are some fine olive trees on it…’
‘Well, anyway, he’s asking a ridiculous price. I told him we’re not paying €40,000 for it.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said if we didn’t buy it, he was going to put a dog kennel on it.’
‘What? Like the one across the valley?’
‘Yes. Exactly. The one with twenty dogs that bark night and day. The ugly one with the corrugated roof and rubbish all round it. Just like that one. Right at our front gate.’
‘Well, I suppose he’s entitled…’
‘Oh, come on, Kaz. This is just another attempt to hassle us. I’m fed up with it.’ He looked so dejected I could have cried. We needed to rebuild our strength.
‘Have another anchovy.’
We returned to the site next day to have a proper look at the netting Muscle Manuel had been asked to lay over the hillside. But there was no netting anywhere to be found, not on the hillside, not rolled up in the courtyard, not stored in the shell of the building. With more rain forecast, the risk of further slippage was a possibility. We remained highly vulnerable. When Stan had last been over he had gone with George to the local builders’ merchant and chosen a fine wire mesh that came in rolls, like chain-link fencing. The idea was that the end of a roll could be staked at the top and thrown off the edge like a roll of carpet, then staked further down to keep it in place. We needed fifty of these 2m wide 25 m long rolls and Stan had ordered them while standing at the counter. He knew that they had been delivered because he had checked. But where were they?
Muscle Manuel arrived.
‘Where are the fifty rolls of wire mesh, Muscle Manuel?’
‘The stuff was no good. I sent them back,’ he said.
‘You sent them back?’
‘The chain link was too small and nothing would grow through it. I have a better wire.’
And he showed us a sample of a much wider steel mesh, wide enough for a tree trunk to grow through, not chain-link fencing but the industrial-strength sheets they throw over motorway viaducts, the stuff my mother had thought we needed.
‘How much does that stuff cost?’
Muscle Manuel showed us a quote that was five times the price of the mesh from the builder’s merchant in Colmenar.
‘You’re taking the piss,’ Stan muttered under his breath. ‘We’re not made of money. We’re planting a few grasses through it, not a bloody arboretum.’
So we went back down to Colmenar and reordered the original fifty rolls of chain-link fencing from the builder’s merchant. Muscle Manuel would have to pin it down to the mountain the following week. So, if we returned in a month’s time, we could plant the hillside to stop it slipping further, hopefully before the winter rains arrived. Or that, at least, was the plan.
It was late afternoon before the builders shut down their machines, tidied up, got into their trucks and vans and waved goodbye. After the bad feeling with Muscle Manuel on site over the mesh, it felt good to be alone. As the sun began her descent behind the mountains, we stood there, not knowing quite what to do.
‘You know,’ Stan said looking dubious, ‘we could help nature along a little bit.’
‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
‘Well, we could do the work of the wind and the rain and spread some seeds around.’
‘How?’
‘Come on. There’s about half an hour before the light goes.’ And with that he strode off
with a plastic bag in his hand. I made a half-hearted attempt to follow him, but gave up after a few paces and stopped in the middle of the path. To the west, the clouds were indigo blue, gathering on the horizon, their upper outline etched with silver. To the east the haze of a hot day cooling at dusk. I looked west into the sunset. As the low light illuminated the tall grasses, they shuddered in the faint breeze, lighting the landscape with a dazzle. Three feet above the ground, their stately seed heads gave a nobility to the dry earth from which they grew, a promise of life, a kernel of primitive protein. Suddenly I got it. Running down the path after him I shouted ‘Wait for me.’
The author in her element
Land slip
Re-seeding the hillside
The hillside recovered
Granite arrived on site
View from the myrtle hedge
The garden taking shape
Persian garden paved and maturing
Olive and almond terrace with rosemary
The author and the Duchess collect supper from the London garden
We broke off heads of wild fennel, pods of broom, anything that looked as if it had a seed in it. We snatched whole dried flower heads, thistles, shrubs with dead cotton-wool blooms – anything that might colonise the hillside. We snuffled about under almond and olive trees like dogs in search of truffles. We gathered handfuls of shrunken nuts and pits and carried them back up to the plateau, working quickly now because the light was fading. We shoved seeds in where we could, scattering them across the top of the scree. But our reach didn’t extend more than a few metres below the top. It was a pathetic effort, really. But we worked like men possessed, or more like women desperate to get pregnant in their years of dwindling fertility.
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 13
