“Feel a bit — well — cooped up at home,” he said. “After all the hurly-burly of school. Thought I’d look up old Alan again. Get him to take me round some of the sights for a day or two. If it’s all right with you, dear.”
“Of course.” Stella smiled, shuddering faintly to herself. She remembered Tony’s old friend Alan and how he’d behaved at their wedding. “You go and enjoy yourself, Tony. Do you good to get away from the garden.”
He followed him all day Saturday, the pale pink scalp under the cropped hair unchanged since classroom days. He remembered how the boy used to sprawl back on his chair when reprimanded, digging the point of his pen deep into the back of his hand, and the light blue eyes that stared insolently into his own.
“So?” he’d say. “Gonna make me or something?”
Wayne Wilkinson.
There were tattoos now on the backs of his hands and a swastika glittered on his black T-shirt. Tony watched him from across the street, selling illiterate racist magazines. He observed him on the football terraces, jostling and spitting, screaming obscenities with his mates. He trailed him round the streets, saw him shoplifting. Finally he came to rest in the shadows outside a gay disco. Wayne and a group of others were operating a stakeout.
It was nearly three in the morning before the chance came. Wayne had set off alone behind a couple in blue denim, their heads bent, their hands linked.
The boy was so intent on keeping up with them that he knew nothing of Tony’s presence at all, until he felt the whip of the tie around his throat.
“Coffee, dear?”
“Lovely.”
Stella took the mug and sipped, lifting her face gratefully to the warm spring sunshine. A blackbird was singing in the apple tree.
“Oh, I do like sitting here,” she said. “All that work you put into it, Tony.”
Tony smiled. “Worth it, dear,” he said. “Even digging that huge great hole half the night, putting in the plastic liner — all of it. All worth it.”
His eyes followed the flashing Golden Orfes as they darted and turned in the clear, sparkling water. The purple irises were already tall and budding at the margins of the pool. Soon dragonflies would skim across the surface like threads of shot silk.
Clean, he thought. Clean and pure and washed. Couldn’t wish for a better place myself when my time comes.
The main project in the garden after that was the herbaceous border.
“Plenty of mulch, Mr. Minnifer,” advised the man at the garden centre. He’d become quite a friend of Tony’s by now. “That’s what herbaceous borders need. Lots of well-rotted manure, compost, anything like that. Anything you can get your hands on.”
“Oh, right,” said Tony.
He’d seen the woman on the lunchtime news. She was a member of a think tank on education. She was declaring there was no possible connection between the size of a school class and the quality of learning that took place.
“It just needs a bit of discipline by the teachers,” she said. The interviewer’s hair blew in the wind but her blond curls remained unmoved. “All it takes is competence.” Her voice reminded Tony of a cut-glass vase his mother had once owned.
It was almost too easy. Her address was listed in an old Who’s Who he picked up at a jumble sale.
He was waiting for her one warm evening as she drove towards the wrought-iron gates that led to her eighteenth-century manor house home. Seeing him step out of the bushes, she faltered and reached to wind up the window, but there was no time.
If there had been, she might have told him about her son, about how she’d just taken him to boarding school. But as the maximum number of pupils in a class at that school was twelve, this might not have helped her plight as far as Tony was concerned one little bit.
The lupins were splendid that year, and so were the delphiniums and peonies. When Stella brought her new friends Jane and Angus round one evening for a drink by the pool, Jane was full of envy.
“What I’d give for a husband like yours,” she said to Stella. “Angus—” she gave a little laugh. “Not much use in the garden, I’m afraid.”
Stella gazed at Angus thoughtfully. He was tall and fair, with warm, dark-brown eyes.
“Never mind,” she said. “Gardens aren’t everything in life, are they?”
It was perhaps soon after this that Tony Minnifer began to grow a little irritable. Somehow, even now, he still hadn’t achieved the fulfilling, satisfying, fun-packed early retirement that Golden Age: Golden Stage had promised.
He’d tried to make the world a better place, a cleaner place. And yet...
It was Wimbledon Fortnight, perfect weather for once. This would be the first year he wasn’t in the classroom, condemned to evening highlights while he still wearily marked exercise books.
He lay back on the sofa, trying to enjoy it. Surely he’d earned a rest.
“Not watching this, Stella?” he said. “Thought you liked tennis.”
“It’s my local history group,” Stella said. “We’re exploring the environment today. I might be a bit late.” She was gone.
Tony shrugged and turned back to the screen.
There was a new whiz kid this year, a teenage girl born in Eastern Europe, trained in Florida, her hair in bunches and a nasal twang of a voice that spat out insults through a mouthful of teethbraces.
The media loved her. By the end of the first day she’d collected a nickname and a clutch of fans who followed her everywhere, hoping for worse excesses. The newspapers had begun begging for someone to “Crush this kid.”
A challenge, Tony thought. Idly, he began working out how it could be done. A quick trip to London, mingle with the autograph hunters, then—
Better not. Kid like that would be surrounded by security. Shame, though.
The lawn would have been the place for her, smooth and green and velvety as the Centre Court itself.
There was one more, in October. But it wasn’t the same. It was almost as if he were just keeping his hand in.
The man had had to go, of course; a local builder responsible for buying up a perfectly harmless copse, grubbing up all the trees, dotting around some “Luxury Executive-Style Homes” — each completed by a triple garage and a stunted rhododendron bush — and christening the whole revolting result Woodland Way.
“I’ll woodland way him,” Tony promised himself, heaving the sack-covered heap out of the boot. The builder had been a hefty man and Tony wasn’t getting any younger.
“Under the new patio for you, I think,” he said to the builder. “See how you like the feel of concrete running over you.”
He slaved to get the patio finished by the weekend. Somehow the joy had gone out of it a bit; the purity. And where was Stella? She never seemed to be around now when he needed a bit of praise.
On impulse, he rang Angus and Jane and invited them to a barbecue, beginning to savour the notion of roasting meat on the patio.
“Yes, lovely,” said Jane, but her voice was listless. “Angus isn’t actually here at the moment, but I’m sure he’ll come along.”
“Good,” said Tony heartily. “Great.”
But, by the day of the barbecue, everything had changed.
Angus didn’t feel much like going, but he supposed one had to make an effort. He walked round to the Minnifers’ road and in at their front gate.
He sniffed. There didn’t seem to be any whiff of smoke from their back garden. Odd, that. Surely it was time to get the thing lit up.