pH, he learnt, was a number used to express degrees of acidity or alkalinity in solutions, formerly the logarithm to base 10 of the reciprocal of the concentration of hydrogen ions, but now related by formula to a standard solution of potassium hydrogen phthalate, which has value 4 at 15 degrees centigrade. Well, sod that for a game of soldiers, Ken thought. Why not just get a bag of bonemeal and a sack of compost and dig them in? But Ken was aware of this trait of his, a tendency to settle for the approximate, which one irate girlfriend called ‘just being incredibly fucking lazy’ – a description he had always cherished.
And so he read most of the instructions that came with his soil-testing kit, identified several key locations in the garden, and proudly pulled on his new gloves before digging small samples of earth and crumbling them into the test tubes. As he added drops of liquid, inserted the corks, and shook the contents up and down, he occasionally glanced towards the kitchen window, hoping that Martha would be tenderly amused by his professionalism. His attempt at professionalism, anyway. He left each experiment the required number of minutes, took out a little notebook and recorded his findings, then he went on to the next location. Once or twice he retested when the first result had been dubious or unclear.
Martha could tell he was in a jolly mood that evening. He stirred the fricassee of rabbit, decided to give it another twenty minutes or so, poured them each a glass of white wine, and sat on the arm of her chair. Looking down indulgently at an article about different types of gravel, he played with the hair at the nape of her neck, and said, with a cheery smile,
‘Bad news, I’m afraid.’
She looked up, uncertain where his remark might fall on a scale from gentle tease to full critical objection.
‘I’ve tested the soil. In places I had to do it more than once before I was confident of my findings. But the surveyor-general is now ready to report.’
‘Yes?’
‘According to my analysis, madam, there is no soil in your soil.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It is impossible to address deficiencies in the terroir, because there is no soil in your soil.’
‘You’ve said that. So what is there instead?’
‘Oh, stones mainly. Dust, roots, clay, ground elder, dogshit, catcrap, bird-droppings, stuff like that.’
He liked the way he had said ‘your soil’.
On another Saturday morning three months later, with the December sun so low that the garden would be lucky to get the slightest warmth or light, Ken came into the house and threw down his gardening gloves.
‘What have you done with the blackberry?’
‘What blackberry?’
This made him more tense. Their garden was hardly that big.
‘The one along the back wall.’
‘Oh, that briar.’
‘That briar was a blackberry with blackberries on it. I brought you two and personally fed them into your mouth.’
‘I’m planning something along that wall. Maybe a Russian vine, but that’s a bit cowardly. I was thinking a clematis.’
‘You dug up my blackberry.’
‘Your blackberry?’ She was always at her coolest when she knew, and knew that he knew, that she’d done something without consultation. Marriage was a democracy of two, except when there’s a tied vote, in which case it descends into autocracy. ‘It was a godawful briar.’
‘I had plans for it. I was going to improve its pH factor. Prune it, and stuff. Anyway, you knew it was a blackberry. Blackberries,’ he added authoritatively, ‘produce blackberries.’
‘OK, it was a bramble.’
‘A bramble!’ This was getting ridiculous. ‘Brambles produce bramble jelly, which is made from blackberries.’
‘Do you think you could check what we need to dig into the soil to help a clematis on a north-facing wall?’
Yes, he thought, I might very well leave you. But until then, forget it, change the subject.
‘It’s going to be a hard winter. The bookies are only offering 6-4 against a white Christmas.’
‘Then we must get some of that plastic fleece to protect what’s vulnerable. Perhaps some straw as well.’
‘I’ll pop along to the nearest stables.’ Now, suddenly, he wasn’t cross any more. If she got greater pleasure out of the garden, let her have it.
‘I hope there’s lots of snow,’ he said boyishly.
‘Is that what we want?’
‘Yup. Proper gardeners pray for a hard winter. Kills all the bugs.’
She nodded, allowing him that. The two of them had come at the garden from different directions. Ken had grown up in the country, and all through his adolescence couldn’t wait to get to London, to university, work, life. Nature for him represented either hostility or tedium. He remembered trying to read a book in the garden, and how the combination of shifting sun, wind, bees, ants, flies, ladybirds, birdsong and his mother’s chivvying made plein-air studying a nightmare. He remembered being bribed to supply his reluctant manual labour. He remembered his father’s vastly overcropping vegetable beds and fruit cages. His mother would dutifully fill the chest freezer with the superabundance of beans and peas, strawberries and currants; and then, each year, guiltily, while Dad was out, throw away any bags found to be more than two years old. Her kitchen version of crop rotation, he supposed.
Martha was a town girl, who thought nature essentially benevolent, who wondered at the miracle of germination, and badgered him to go on country walks. She had developed an autodidact’s zeal in recent months. He thought of himself as an instinctive amateur, her as a technocrat.
‘More bookwork?’ he asked mildly, as he got into bed. She was reading Ursula Buchan’s Wall Plants and Climbers.
‘There’s nothing wrong with bookwork, Ken.’
‘As I know to my cost,’ he replied, turning out his bedside light.
This wasn’t an argument, not any more; just an admitted difference. Martha, for instance, thought that it was only sensible to follow recipes when cooking. ‘Can’t make an omelette without breaking the spine of a cookbook?’ – as he had once, ponderously, put it. Whereas he preferred just to glance at a recipe to give himself ideas, and then wing it. She liked guidebooks, and used a map even when walking through town; he preferred an internal compass, serendipity, the joy of getting creatively lost. This led to various quarrels in the car.
She had also pointed out to him that, when it came to sex, their positions were reversed. He had confessed to a lot of preliminary bookwork, whereas she, as she once expressed it, had learnt on the job. He’d replied that he hoped he wasn’t meant to take that literally. Not that there was anything wrong with their sex life – in his opinion, anyway. Perhaps they had what was needed in any partnership: one bookworm and one instinctivist.
As he thought about this, he found himself with what felt to him like a monster erection, which seemed to have crept up unawares. He turned on his side towards Martha, and put his left hand on her hip in a way that could be interpreted as a signal or not, depending on mood.
Aware that he was awake, Martha murmured, ‘I was wondering about a trachelospermum jasminoides, but suspect the soil’s too acid.’
‘Fair enough,’ he murmured back.
It snowed in mid-December, first a misleading light softness that turned to water as it hit the pavement, then a solid couple of inches. When Ken got home from work a thick layer of white was holding on the flat leaves of the bay tree, an incongruous sight. The next morning, he took his camera to the front door.