‘Sorry, Sylvie,’ teases Alan, ‘John doesn’t hold with women in the potting shed.’ He pretends to be about to push her back out into the rain.
Sylvie takes her long hair in her hands and wrings out the water. ‘He’s an old sweetie, really, except that he deceives his wife.’
John’s eyebrows jerk upwards. ‘You little scamp. I never did.’
‘You did too. You told me yourself you’ve had that motorcycle and sidecar for thirty years, and your wife doesn’t know. Seriously, Alan, he keeps it in someone else’s shed, and his wife thinks he comes to work on the bus. He’s got no principles at all.’
John rolls up his newspaper and takes a playful swipe at Sylvie’s head. ‘I won’t be trusting you with any more secrets. Rapscallion. Anyway, a man needs secrets from his wife. Keeps him normal, keeps him sane. It’s privacy.’
Spontaneously, Sylvie plants a kiss on the top of John’s head, and he beams with embarrassment, pride and pleasure. She says, ‘I used to come in here when I was a kid, and he’d sit me on his knee and tell me stories.’
‘You used to pull my moustache and say, “Is it real? Is it real?” There’s water in the kettle, new boiled, by the way. D’you still take four sugars?’
Sylvie reproves him. ‘Oh John, I gave that up five years ago.’
A small white paw hooks around the bottom of the door, attempting to open it, and Alan says, ‘It’s Rover.’
‘Oh poor pussycat,’ says Sylvie, ‘I’ll let her in. She’s soaked, poor little thing, she’s pathetic.’
The cat is bedraggled, and frightened of the thunder. She is shivering and miaowing silently, her jaws opening and closing with poignant eloquence. John leans down and heaves her on to his knee, where he dries her with sacking. The cat purrs, and John explains, ‘She likes that, she does.’ The cat settles, drawing warmth from John’s thighs, and all of them sit in agreeable stillness, lulled by the purring, by the sounds of the rain, and the sipping of tea.
‘This is nice,’ says Sylvie, at last, ‘all together in the shed, safe and warm.’ A stray thought occurs to her, as stray thoughts do. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask, what do you boys do when you need a wee? I mean, you never use the stable loo, do you?’
John looks at her a little mischievously. ‘Compost heap. No point in wasting it. Nitrogen, see?’ and Alan adds, ‘It was one of John’s conditions of employment when I came up looking for a job.’
‘There’s water coming under the door,’ observes Sylvie, nodding her head towards a puddle by the threshold.
‘Might have to sit on the table. Can’t stand wet feet,’ grumbles John. ‘My old man, he got trench foot in the war, the first one, and he always told me, “Don’t never let your feet get wet. They’ll go white and spongy, and then the meat falls off.” It’s like when you leave a piece of chicken in a bowl of water. Bloody horrible.’
A whimsical idea occurs to Sylvie. ‘Does this shed float? I mean, we could be like Noah’s Ark. With the cat and everything.’
‘And George,’ adds John, in the spirit of fairness.
‘It’s really bucketing,’ says Alan, shivering with that delicious threat of wild weather in such a domesticated land.
‘It’s setting in all day,’ asserts John.
‘What’ll we do?’ demands Sylvie. ‘I swear we’re all going to drown.’
‘We’ll do what we always do,’ decides John. ‘We’ll drink tea, and then we’ll wash the green rims from off the top of the flowerpots.’
Alan groans. He suffers from the sudden and extreme weariness of the young man who is about to have to do something that bores him to death. This is worse than having to clean his room or put on a tie for the arrival of guests. ‘Let’s do “I wish”,’ proposes Alan. ‘Let’s say exactly what we’d rather be doing. Who’s going to start? Sylvie?’
She scowls at him sweetly. ‘I’m not starting. I’d feel stupid. Anyway, it was your idea.’
Alan pauses, and sighs. ‘I wish it was snowing instead of raining, and I was tobogganing down the seventeenth hole on the golf course, the one that’s almost vertical, with the snow hissing under the runners, and I’m steering by sticking my welly into the snow, and my cheeks are so cold that they ache above the bone, and there’s all the excitement of wondering if I can avoid the oak tree, and then I crash into the ditch on purpose, and just lie there spread-eagled, and one of my sisters comes up and drops a great big armful of snow on top of my head. You feel so happy.’ He sips at his tea, affected by his own vision. ‘But what really happens is that suddenly you’re just terribly cold and wet, and your mittens are so soaked that your fingers freeze, and you wish you’d never come out. Have you noticed how snow smells when it’s clogged up into ice on your mittens?’
Sylvie is struck unaccountably with gloom. ‘Do you ever get that feeling that you wish you were someone else?’
Alan looks at her sitting with her chin in her hands, and answers, ‘All the time.’
‘Me too,’ she says. ‘What about you, John?’ and John tells them, ‘I don’t want to be no one else. I just want something to happen. I don’t want to be a tree no more.’ He catches their puzzled expressions, and explains. ‘You take a sapling. It’s the first autumn, and the tree goes, “Blimey, that’s interesting, all me leaves’ve dropped off.” And then it’s spring, and the tree goes, “Well, stone me, all me leaves is comin’ back.” And then he gets his first bird’s nest, and he goes, “Well, in’t that a pleasure, to be so useful?” But then it’s fifty years later, and it’s all the same. He loses his leaves, and he thinks, “Oh, that again,” and then the leaves come back, and he goes, “Surprise, surprise, I don’t think,” and then he’s got a dozen bloody birds’ nests, and he goes, “The little sods.” Well … I’ve got like that. Over and over and over and over and over and over, same thing each day as I did last year on the same day. Every Thursday, I get home and the missus has done a cheese pie, and she says, “Cheese pie all right, love?” and I say, “Lovely,” and every Tuesday it’s macaroni, and every Sunday the daughter rings up and says, “’Ello, Dad, how are you?” and I say, “Not so bad. How’s yourself?” and I just feel like I want to jump off a high place into a lake, and feel that cold water cleaning out the dust. I got dust where my brain is. I got dust in my eyes. I got dust in my mouth. Just dust everywhere, an’ I’m getting old, I know I am, and I look back and think, “What? What? What?” And I think, “What happened, and why wasn’t you looking? You’re going to your grave, John, and you might as well not ever have lived.” You know what? I reckon I chewed on life, and never tasted it at all.’
Alan is speechless; he has never heard John, or anyone older than himself, come to that, acknowledging their own despair. Sylvie is stirred, she has tears in her eyes, and she protests, ‘Oh John. Why don’t you look at these gardens? How many other people have kept one place so beautiful for so long?’ She comes over and hugs him, kissing him on the cheek. He is touched but embarrassed, and he pats her on the upper arm. ‘You’re a sweet girl, Sylvie,’ he says. ‘You brighten things up. Do me a favour. Stay sweet. When I’m dead I want to lie in my grave and think about you being sweet, and wishing I’d been young at the same time as you.’
Sylvie pulls a disavowing face. ‘I don’t want to be sweet. I want to be fierce.’ She raises her two hands like forepaws, and growls.
John laughs. ‘You couldn’t help it if you tried. You’re sweet, and that’s that. Always were.’ John tips the dregs of his tea into a pot of cyclamen, and says suddenly, with impatience in his tone, ‘I’ll tell you what I really wish. I wish you two would get a move on and go out and do something.’ He looks up, pleased by their confounded expressions. He says to Sylvie, ‘He’s been meaning to ask you out.’