The move was an excuse for ending the relationship. Like her, Jacobus was old. The new house was that much further away from his own home. It was going to be too far, too difficult to get there, and when he saw the new garden, four times the size of the other, he shook his head and apologized, it was too big a job for him, and anyway, the new garden was already what it was, an undulating showroom of mature specimens, a trophy gallery designed by the previous owners, with water features and delicate stone paths, a strange patch of woodland, and such a lawn, he confessed, as he had never hoped to find under his administration. He could not see where he would fit in the new scheme, he said. He was unsure of the steeply sloping grass terraces and beds, he preferred to tend flat ground where one knew one’s footing, and besides, with the mountain so close now, and the garden bound to be in shade for half the day, the growing conditions would be different from anything he understood. He didn’t trust himself to look after the place. Clare paid him a severance, bought him new tools for his own garden in Mitchell’s Plain, which she had never seen, and told him he must come to visit again once she was settled, knowing that he almost certainly would not.
The new man came recommended from her neighbour, Mr Thacker, a retired judge from London.
‘With a garden like this, you need someone coming most days of the week, just to be certain nothing gets out of hand,’ Thacker advised. ‘Adam has been doing my garden for the last four years, but mine is the only one he does, and it doesn’t take all day. He’s a good, honest chap. I’ll ask him. He could do yours in the morning and mine in the afternoon, when I’m playing tennis. I play tennis every weekday, you know, at the Constantia Club. The extra work would do Adam good, I’m sure, and not just the money, you know, but get him out of bed earlier and keep him off the gin, if gin is what he drinks. Honest enough, you know. Of course if you want to order plants from the garden centre I’d do it myself if I were you, or have your secretary do it. They’re inclined to skim off the top. But you must know that, being a local.’
‘I’ve never known anyone to skim off the top,’ Clare said, in a flash of white rage.
‘You didn’t know it, you didn’t know it is all,’ the judge said, shaking his head, wagging a finger. He promised to speak to Adam.
When she finally met him, a week later, Clare knew at once that Adam was no Jacobus.
‘What is your other name, Adam?’ she asked, showing him around the garden, which he seemed already to know.
‘Adam is my name,’ he said, his voice so quiet Clare had to strain to hear.
She tried again, in what she assumed was his mother tongue. ‘Adam is my name,’ he answered again, in English.
‘But your other name, your real name, what is your given name? What do you want me to call you?’
‘Adam is my own name,’ he said again, his voice firmer this time.
Clare remembered the family photos Jacobus had always produced — his neat wife, smiling children, Christmas gatherings and birthdays. Those had been taken in his own garden, so Clare had seen it in a way, knew it was a more modest version of the garden at her old house, but she had not been to see it in person, to meet the wife and children. An invitation had never been extended and she had not wanted to presume, she told herself. She had never said, I should like someday to see your garden, Jacobus.
It turned out that Adam’s brother, who had also been a gardener, and was now dead (He got very sick, he died, Adam said) had been the gardener for the previous owners of Clare’s new house, an elderly couple who had emigrated to live near their children in Vancouver. ‘I know this garden well,’ Adam reassured her. ‘I know what to do for it. You will see. I helped my brother when he was planting it for Mr and Mrs Mercer.’
‘There are some things I’d like to change, though,’ Clare explained. ‘I want a vegetable patch here,’ pointing to a place in the middle of the back lawn that seemed to get the most hours of sun, ‘and a herb garden next to the patio.’
Adam put his hands on his hips and surveyed the garden, whistling through his teeth. He looked towards the sun and up at the mountain and knelt down to touch the ground in one of the perennial beds. ‘This soil, it is not so good for those things,’ he said, shaking his head and crumbling a handful of earth.
‘But we can bring in new soil. We could hire a couple of other people to help, to prepare the new beds. I’m too old now to do it with you. I would have once. But I wouldn’t expect you to do it alone,’ she said, suspecting he saw more work than he wanted.
He shook his head again, rubbing the soil between his fingers, testing it on his tongue. ‘These things will not live well here,’ he said. ‘We should leave this garden as my brother made it. We should keep it like this. For now.’ He smiled up at her, a row of straight, bright teeth, and brushed his fingertips against his loose jeans. Without entirely knowing why, Clare hired him on the spot, thinking she would convince him of the possibility of herbs and vegetables in time.
Every weekday morning after that, Adam arrived at eight and Clare would watch as he weeded the beds, pruned, mowed the lawn — she had to invest in a lawnmower large enough to manage what she began to call her ‘Country Club’ — watered, fertilized, and managed the place with a ferocious energy. After a month Adam came to her looking apologetic. ‘It is too much just for mornings. You see, it is already overgrown.’
‘Could you go to full-time?’ She had heard of friends poaching other people’s staff, but was surprised to find herself doing it with such ease.
‘The judge has been very good to me,’ he said, jerking his head towards Mr Thacker’s property.
‘I could pay you more than what you receive now from him and me combined.’
‘No, no, it is not that.’ Adam looked away from Clare and she realized he was not trying to drive a deal; he was only being honest. ‘Maybe if we could have one other person, not every day, only two or three days a week. Ten days a month. And I could train him as my brother trained me and if there is more to do sometimes he could come in the afternoons when I am at the judge.’
‘Do you recommend someone?’ Clare asked, suspecting this might be the real ploy, to hire a relative or a friend. But Adam shook his head.
‘Most of the gardeners here, the ones I know, they are not so good. They do not work so hard like I do. Maybe the judge knows someone,’ he said and shrugged. ‘But it would be good, because I don’t want this nice garden of yours that my brother made to turn into a forest. It would be good to have one other person sometimes.’
Without wishing to, Clare went next door to Mr Thacker’s house the following week, to thank him for recommending Adam and to ask if he could make enquiries. She herself knew no one else in the neighbourhood, and had no friends with gardeners, or at least not any gardeners they could spare.
‘It’s no problem at all, Mrs Wald. I’m a member of the Horticultural Society. I’ll ask around,’ Thacker said, looking pleased to be asked. ‘Failing that, you could always enquire at the Botanical Gardens, see if they have any staff looking for extra work.’ He was walking her around his garden, which might have been an extension of her own, but almost half the size, packed with indigenous shrubs and trees, punctuated by colourful exotics that flourished in the microclimate. What looked extravagant and only remotely menacing on Clare’s own property was unseemly in Thacker’s tighter plot — too mannered, too ostentatious for such a small space, everything out of scale. The garden was as overstuffed and florid as the man himself.