Everything in the Garden

by Jo Verity

  ‘Hi,’ she shouted, dumping the bucket next to the sink. Tom wouldn’t be able to hear her above the music. She went into the hall and called again, ‘Hi, love.’

  He appeared, looking over the banister. ‘Where were you?’

  She pretended not to hear and returned to the kitchen. The unwashed breakfast things were still on the draining board. When they’d eaten their toast and drunk their tea, the day stretched ahead, dotted with achievable goals. There were seeds to plant, drawings to prepare, ironing to do, a bill to pay. She filled the kettle and began putting things out for lunch. Salad and milk from the fridge. Rolls from the bread bin. Butter. Salad cream. Two knives. Two mugs. At the same time she attempted to organise her undisciplined thoughts.

  She could tell Tom, ‘I planted two rows of carrots. And by the way, Maddy’s pregnant and Dad’s getting married.’

  Or she could give him the letters to read and make no comment.

  Or she could not say anything at all and carry on as though there had been no mail.

  Or she could destroy the letters.

  Or she could run away.

  Whoa.

  Or she could bury her head in Tom’s chest and let out the sob that was blocking her throat and making it ache. He would hold her and rock her and wait for her to tell him what was wrong. Then they would talk it through and the world would get back on track.

  2

  ‘How exciting.’ Sally grinned when Anna told her about Madeleine’s pregnancy and added, ‘Dirty old sod,’ when she heard about Dorothy Holton.

  Sally’s kitchen, where they now sat drinking strong coffee, reminded Anna of a show home on a new-build estate. Nothing cluttered the draining board or worktops. The wooden spoons were unstained. The toaster didn’t sit in a sea of crumbs and the saucepans were stacked in ascending size on the pot stand. Sally kept a tight rein on Bill and his possessions, too. If he left anything lying around for more than a few minutes, it went in the bin. In the early days of their marriage, several of his O.S. maps and countless vital bits of this and that had made the one-way trip and, having done such a good job on her husband, she had no problem in maintaining standards when the children came along.

  They discussed Anna’s concerns for her daughter. ‘I wish she’d come and talk to us. Or at least phone.’

  ‘And how’s poor old Tom dealing with it?’ asked Sally.

  ‘You know Tom. Throwing himself into work. And today he’s not speaking to me. As if it’s all my fault.’

  ‘Well, I think she’ll be fine. She’s a sensible girl,’ said Sally. ‘Despite the tattoos.’

  ‘And I didn’t get round to showing him Dad’s letter.’

  She hadn’t told Sally the whole story. Tom had cuddled and rocked her, as she had anticipated but, when he read his daughter’s letter, he’d started to cry. She found herself reassuring him with the platitudes that he was supposed to trot out to her. But he’d taken no comfort from them, accusing her of encouraging Maddy by meekly accepting whatever the girl threw at them. He rambled on, as if she were lost to them forever. He would not have been more distraught if Maddy had announced that she was terminally ill or had murdered someone. Anna hadn’t foreseen his extreme reaction and kept silent, hoping he would calm down, but he didn’t. He refused lunch and took a sandwich to his office for supper. Then he’d spent the night in the spare room and had been up since seven o’clock, digging.

  The Webbers’ kitchen was pink and tentative. Celia couldn’t resist tea-towels covered with sentimental slogans. China mugs, with curlicued handles, dangled from a mug tree. A tiny vase held a modest bunch of pinks. She made coffee too weak and tea too milky.

  ‘Will she keep the baby?’ asked Celia. And ‘When are we going to meet your father’s lady friend?’

  Anna had asked herself neither of these questions. From what Madeleine had written in her note – the mention of ‘grandparents’ and ‘auntie’ – she assumed that her daughter was intending to keep the child. But if she did give it up for adoption, what would her own position be? Would she have any rights? Genetically, she would always be the child’s grandmother but there must be thousands of grandmothers who had never cradled their grandchild. Who didn’t even know they were grandmothers. How sad. And how odd that she’d never thought of this before. Perhaps she and Tom were already grandparents. Had Maddy ever been absent long enough to have gone through pregnancy and given birth? She thought back through the three years since their daughter left home. No. The longest spell of non-contact had been when she was working in Greece, and that had only lasted three months. Although the possibility of being a grandmother to a child she’d never know only occupied her for a matter of minutes, it was a weight lifted when she could dismiss it.

  Of her three women friends at Pen Craig, Celia was the sweetest and from Anna’s point of view, was proving to be the least interesting. She looked like a Sindy doll which, in itself, would not have caused Anna’s thoughts to wander when she was in Celia’s company. If Sindy-Celia had discussed the French Revolution or deep-sea diving, it would have been intriguing, but she didn’t. She talked recipes, medical symptoms and hairstyles. OK, these matters deserved consideration but not to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes Anna hid when she spotted Celia coming towards the house, then, overcome by guilt, invited her round for coffee and a chat about pencil-pleats.

  It was only as she was leaving Number Two that the penny dropped. The Webbers had one child, Judith, whom they’d adopted as a six-week-old baby. They had been beneficiaries of an unwanted pregnancy and Celia was looking at it from another perspective.

  At first glance the Redwoods were an exception to Tom Wren’s Rule of Style-Consistency: ‘Once you find a style that suits you, why change it?’ Jenny and Peter chopped and changed constantly and, to guide them, they employed Giles (pronounced ‘Jeels’) de Courcey, Design Guru. Over the years their kitchens had been French Provincial, Swedish Cool, hi-tech Minimalist and now back to Provincial (Spanish this time). So, although their homes had all looked very different, their design rationale was consistent – every room must be eligible for the current edition of ‘Homes and Gardens’.

  ‘Will they marry before the baby arrives?’ and ‘You’ll have to make sure that this Holton person doesn’t do you out of your inheritance,’ were Jenny’s responses to the two items of news.

  Appearances meant everything to Jenny Redwood. As Peter climbed his professional ladder, Jenny saw to it that both his family and home befitted his status. From House Officer to Senior Consultant, each step up triggered a move, a makeover and a change of school. Anna was still surprised that the Redwoods had wanted to join the Pen Craig experiment. After all, with Peter’s money it was unlikely they would end their days, with other lonely strangers, in a third-rate geriatric home. But, after overhearing Jenny telling a friend that they were living in a ‘huge house in the country, with its own grounds,’ she understood a little better.

  Madeleine’s letter had not mentioned marriage, or even a putative father but, these days, neither were a pre-requisite to parenthood. She (the baby was certainly a girl) would surely look like Maddy or Flora. She and Tom would be closely involved in decisions about names, clothes, the books she read and the school she went to. But now Jenny had confused things by raising the spectre of a stranger in the family group. A man (Young? Old? Blonde? Dark? Tall? Short? Fat?) loomed up, waiting to usurp Tom’s position in the child’s life. And what’s more he would have a father and a mother, with equal claim to this grandchild. The baby had started to become part of the family in Anna’s calculations but already the family portrait needed a larger frame.

  Now there were three more people to fret about. Dorothy Holton, who was hell-bent on depriving her and her brother of their inheritance. Maddy’s lover, who wanted to muscle in on the child’s upbringing. And Tom, who was treating her as if she’d put Maddy up to the whole thing.

  Jenny was keen to turn the conversation to a function that she and Peter had at
tended in London, where they had been introduced to Lord Someone-or-Another. Anna wasn’t very good at the Royal Family, or the aristocracy, or the military if it came to that. She knew that the Duchess of Kent was the one who went to Wimbledon and that was as far as it went. Jenny’s preoccupation with the Establishment had long been cause for amusement. Mark Webber was convinced that the Redwoods were fully paid up members of the Tory Party. ‘They read The Telegraph and wear a lot of blue,’ he said, tapping his forefinger to the side of his nose.

  Sally had laughed ‘That’s not unusual if you’ve been brought up on a council estate and are desperate to bury your working-class roots. You might be the same if your father had been a milkman.’

  All those years ago, when they met and got to know each other at the school gate, differences in politics and philosophies had been unimportant. Children were the focus of their lives. Their own careers were a backdrop to achievements in the classroom or on the sports field and discussions were about reading ages and swimming without armbands, graded music exams and nits. As they advanced in their professions, aspirations for their families diverged but, by then, friendships were established and they tolerated each other’s views. Most of the time.

  Anna had dropped a large pebble in the gossip-pool and the news was already rippling out. Sally, Celia and Jenny would be telling Bill, Mark and Peter. Then all their children would find out. Relieved that there had been no hint of disapproval of Maddy’s condition, she detected in herself stirrings of anticipation.

  Dorothy Holton was of less interest to them. Several of her friends’ parents had found new partners in later life. In theory this had to be a good thing and she’d spent part of the previous sleepless night analysing her own reaction. Frank Hill had been a lonely, sad man for six years, but that was as it should be because he was the guardian of the jagged hole in their lives which her mother had left when she died. If he married this Dorothy person, he could no longer be trusted to guard that hole. Indeed, it might start to seal up and leave no indication that Nancy Hill had ever been there.

  And, to be honest, it was embarrassing. Did these two old people find each other physically attractive? Were they having a sexual relationship? She thought of her father’s scrawny arms and the hair that burst out of his ears. She loved him despite these unlovely details but found it impossible to imagine that a stranger could find them anything less than repulsive. Her thoughts strayed to the woman. Did she have false teeth? Varicose veins? Thick, corrugated toenails? Shuddering, she’d gone downstairs to make a cup of cocoa.

  She began preparing lunch and switched on Radio Four as a distraction but it was hard to concentrate on Harris tweed manufacture when Tom kept pushing his way into her thoughts. She was useless at having rows and this wasn’t even a row, more a moat, filling with icy water. After years of practise, she knew what had to be done. She must cast a small fly, something innocent but tasty, and wait for him to bite. Then, ever so slowly, reel him in. It was a ridiculous charade but it was the surest way to get back to normal. This still left her with Maddy and her father to sort out but it wouldn’t be so bad if Tom were here, not off, sulking in the garden.

  From habit, she prepared enough lunch for two. She had no appetite and struggled her way through one sandwich, putting the rest in the fridge for later, then went outside. The hum and buzz of agricultural noises had stopped. Since they’d moved here, she’d learned that farmers are sticklers for routine and they would all be at home, eating their dinners. The sun beat down on her head and her scalp prickled with the heat. She should find a sun-hat then check the garden, but before anything else she needed to make friends with Tom.

  Voices came from behind the outbuildings. Tom and Bill were sitting on the edge of the empty swimming pool, legs dangling in the deep end. Bill, large in every dimension and with a huge head, made Tom appear undernourished. Between them stood a tray, bearing the remnants of a substantial meal and several empty beer bottles. Engaged in boisterous discussion, they didn’t notice her watching them from the shadows. They looked like a couple of schoolboys, up to no good and having such a nice time. This was going to be easier than she had imagined.

  They spotted her and Bill beckoned. ‘Anna. There you are.’

  ‘Were you looking for me, then?’

  ‘I thought I’d better get my own lunch,’ Tom confessed, pointing at the tray.

  ‘That’s fine. How did you get on with the digging?’

  ‘Almost finished.’

  ‘I’m afraid I lured him away,’ said Bill. ‘But we’ve not been wasting our time, have we?’

  Anna sat down next to Tom and he offered her a piece of the apple which he’d cut into quarters. She took it and kissed his cheek. Inclining his head towards her, no more than an inch or so, he let her know that they were friends again.

  Tom and Bill had been engaged in a favourite pastime. The disused swimming pool, a reminder of Pen Craig’s brief spell as a hotel, gave everyone hours of amusement. Bill, Tom and Mark had various hair-brained schemes for the redundant hole in the ground, while the Redwoods insisted that it be reinstated as a swimming pool.

  ‘Of course they’d consult Giles about the tiles,’ said Tom.

  ‘Don’t you mean Jeels about the teels,’ Bill corrected him and they yelped with helpless laughter.

  She couldn’t help smiling. ‘I expect you’ve told Bill our news.’

  ‘News?’ asked Bill.

  ‘I thought you must be celebrating.’ She indicated the bottles. ‘We’re going to be grandparents.’ She put her hand on Tom’s knee and rested her head on his shoulder. ‘Aren’t we, love?’

  Bill, with bruising enthusiasm, slapped Tom on the back. ‘Congratulations. Brilliant. Flora or Maddy?’

  Tom, with no alternative but to fill in the details, relaxed a little, as if the act of speaking about it lanced a suppurating boil. In no time at all, Bill was anticipating the fun they would have with train sets, Meccano, tree houses and go-carts. (No mention of dolls’ houses, tea parties and dressing up, but Anna let it go). Tom didn’t say a great deal but they were making some progress if he was able to contemplate grandparenthood without crying or digging.

  Bill opened another bottle and raised it in the air. ‘Here’s to the first Pen Craig baby.’ Then he held it out towards her. ‘D’you know, I never thought I’d envy a man who was sleeping with a granny?’

  She stared at him. Already flushed from the beer and the sun, he turned a deeper shade of red. His eyes held hers for longer than they should and she looked away. Tom, tidying up the debris from their picnic, didn’t seem to notice.

  Mumbling something about ironing, she hurried back to the house, her anger mounting with each step she took. How dare he look at her like that? They’d known each other for twenty years and she really didn’t need him to start looking at her.

  By the time she reached the kitchen she was furious and Bill replaced Tom on her list of ‘bloody men’. But it was complicated. It was possible for her to discuss her concerns about Maddy and her father with Tom. (Well, she would be able to talk to him about her father once she had told him about her father.) But there was no way she could tell him about Bill’s lingering look. Bill was his best mate. They had been easy with each other from the day they first met, at the school carol concert. Peter was proving to be a social climber and Mark was, perhaps, a little too straightforward but Bill was a satisfying combination of anarchist and softy, with enough of the dreamer about him to balance the scientist. Now, out of the blue, he had given her one of those looks.

  Anna had never gone in for flirting, preferring to earn a man’s admiration by engaging him on equal terms. Politics, music and the arts – she could hold her own. And as for sport, she knew more about cricket than most of her male acquaintances. Her father had seen to that. While her female friends fluttered eyelashes and giggled, she discussed the merits of the squad selected to tour Australia.

  So when Bill had given her that lingering stare, she was shocked.
Casting her mind back, she wondered whether she had overlooked any signs of his increasing attention. Through the endless meetings and discussions as the plans for Pen Craig reached fruition, had she done anything to give him the impression that she might welcome his advances? Definitely not. No. Bill was out of order.

  She stood in the utility room, folding the towels for the umpteenth time, holding them to her nose. The worst thing about the winter was the need to dry laundry in the house. People became recognisable by the smell of the detergent clinging to their clothes. When washing dried in the open air it smelled of nothing, the best smell of all.

  Tom came in and caught her with her nose in his boxer shorts. ‘I won’t ask.’ He bent to take off his boots and, while he was doubled up, mumbled an apology. She fondled the back of his head in a kind of benediction.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she suggested, wanting to have him to herself for a couple of hours. Talking would be easier while they walked and she needed to gauge how he was coping with the baby bombshell. Then, at the right moment, she would tell him about her father.

  She pushed Bill Davis to the back of her mind.

  3

  They walked up to the wood and along the ridge, taking the footpath back down through the trees and into the valley. They stopped for a drink at ‘The Lion’ in Cwm Bont and here she showed him her father’s letter. He assumed that it had arrived in the morning mail and she didn’t disabuse him.

  After his wife’s death Frank Hill, whom Tom had always liked and respected, remained in Bath, still living in the house where Anna had grown up. When they were raising their own family it had been ideal. Bristol was near enough to allow frequent and informal visits, yet far enough away to prevent interference from either side. The girls loved going to see Frank and Nancy and, when they were old enough, they had been able to get themselves there by train or bus. In fact, the first time Maddy ran away she’d headed straight for Grandma Nancy.