*
The grandmother saw me as one of hers, as an Ornelis. She would set things right. She taught me to weed. I trailed after her down the garden paths. She moved with the majesty of an ancient galleon, veering from port to starboard and back again, pointing out herbs and plants in the border.
“House-leek wards off lightning. Let it stand …” “Our Lady’s Bedstraw — stuff your pillow with it and you’ll sleep like a log. Remember that. When people get old they have trouble sleeping …” “Feverfew brings down fever. Boil the flowers in milk and let it stand for half an hour.”
She seldom ventured into the vegetable patch. On Sundays after lunch the men and the women drifted apart, blurring the division between the families. Full-skirted aunts and cousins strolled about the paths, pausing now and then to sniff the sweet-smelling pelargoniums along the way. They asked for cuttings and the grandmother was munificent. Twigs and shoots were snipped off with secateurs. Elsewhere in the garden, well hidden behind a row of bushes, she already had a bed of seedlings ready for pricking out next year, when she would impress her relatives all over again.
Over the hedge the uncles sauntered past the rows of vegetables, caps pushed back on their heads, hands in their pockets, rolled-up sleeves baring pale biceps.
“Your leeks are looking good,” one of them called out, “but my peas are doing better.”
“There’s a fair amount of blight, Henri,” another commented.
“Weak strain,” he mumbled.
“Why don’t you spray them?”
“No poisonous sprays in my garden!” the grandmother shouted triumphantly from among the aunts on the other side of the hedge.
“No point in spraying. A weak variety, I tell you.”
One time he tried to get in her good books by sowing her name in cress along the hedge. Before the week was out the seeds had written “Andrea” in the soil. She was not overly impressed.
*
At the far end of the vegetable garden, which the grandfather had screened off from prying eyes with a row of beanstalks, rose an overgrown tangle of greenery.
“Aye-aye, what have we got here?” hooted one of the uncles. “What sort of wilderness is this?” They nudged each other. “Look, it’s a right jungle …”
Their stomachs heaved with suppressed laughter.
The jungle was mine. One day the grandfather had given me a patch to call my own. It was the size of the dining table, partly shaded by the hedge and the rowan tree.
“We’re going to do some sowing and planting, you and me,” he said firmly. “I will teach you.”
He raked one of the beds.
“Like so. Nice and level, like coconut matting. Watch.”
He drew himself up, hugged his arms to his chest, pressed his knees together and advanced rapidly across the turned-over earth with small precise stamps of his green rubber boots, like a human steamroller.
“Our own private path,” he said.
The smile he threw me then was the same routine smile he wore in the small, underexposed snapshot taken by Marcel thirty-odd years earlier. He is holding the rake upside down to draw a little furrow in the loose earth with the tip of the handle, working with the grace and concentration of a billiard player or a gondolier. He is kneeling on the loamy soil, not on the piece of old sacking he took to using in later years “against the damp”. In the old days he would not have sworn as he sank to his knees, nor would he have groaned between clenched teeth: “My bones have packed up completely.”
I knew the story. Bits of it had been fluttering around in my head for years. How they had beaten his kneecaps with iron pipes. How they had made him and the others hold wash tubs filled to the brim with water high over their heads, arms stretched, for hours on end. Whoever spilt a drop was whipped.
“They had it in for me, lad,” he always concluded. “They had it in for me, the swine.”
He fumbled in the wide pockets of his faded blue overall for a packet of seeds and tore it open. He placed one hand on the soil next to the furrow and peered in with his head close to the ground, frowning as if he were trying to read the newspaper without his glasses.
“If you just shake it gently it’ll trickle out nice and even. Watch. Watch carefully now.”
He grabbed me by the nape of the neck and pulled my head down until it was next to his. “See?”
I caught a whiff of old-man’s breath and unshaven skin. He did not release his grasp. One hand sprinkled the seed in the furrow, the other pressed me into the line of his expectations. He drew furrows in my soul and sowed hope for something vague, not for me, but for himself.
*
“Those big white bell-flowers, Andrea,” chirruped the aunts, hidden from view on the other side of the hedge, “what are they called?”
“Cape hyacinths. I can’t give you cuttings. You have to grow them from seed. It takes a lot of patience, and a lot of luck. They don’t normally do so well here. Too cold in winter.”
The aunts nodded admiringly. The grandmother did not mention that she used seed trays in the conservatory for them to germinate during winter. Some of the aunts had conservatories, too.
“The boy will be a great gardener one day,” joked the uncles. I joined in their laughter uneasily.
Ignoring me, the grandfather ushered the men towards the house.
I had planted my garden with irises and hibiscus, and had sown sunflowers. From the wet meadow verges I took wild spirea, and I bordered my allotment with tufts of lady’s cushion. I laid a curving gravelled path, over which I, reduced to thumb-size in my imagination, roved through my homemade jungle.
“You ought to sow some radish seed,” he said breezily, “for the kitchen. And chervil to put in the soup.”
The radish I sowed was lost amid the plants already thriving. Amid the young shepherd’s purse.
“Weeds!”
Amid angelica and foxglove.
“But they’re flowers …”
He pinched the flower out of the shepherd’s purse. “This stuff seeds itself all over the place.”
He glanced ruefully at the rampant water-mint along the hedge.
In no time my garden acquired the shape of a horseshoe, a bastion of wild leafy growth. In that wilderness I would crouch unseen, on hot days, when my mother called my name and I wanted to be impossible to find.
“Some gardener you are,” was his verdict.
The grandmother was amused by all this. A bitter contest was being fought over my head. Between his garden and hers. Between potatoes and hyacinths. The hyacinths won.
*
“My in-laws,” the grandmother sometimes remarked to Stella in the sewing room, “are the kind of people who think small. Us Ornelises, we think in terms of hectares.”
On Sundays she would destroy every potato shoot in sight with a jab of her heel or toe, as soon as the aunts’ backs were turned. And if anyone did notice she would smile archly, saying: “Ah well, better a stray spud than a stray grenade.”
Some days she was to be seen conducting a solitary inspection along the paths, her fingers black with soil. She would wipe the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand. Crouching by the water-mint I would watch her through a gap in the hedge as she took her final turn around the garden with her bucket and trowel.
*
Years later an old photograph tumbled from the pages of a recipe book I had claimed when the house was being cleared. It shows her bending over the soil with her legs apart. Her hair is pinned back behind her ears, a few stray curls fall over her eyes. Her skirt curves up at the back, offering an unintentionally frivolous glimpse of the lace trim on a petticoat.