‘The bastards!’ he shouted back into the house. Martha came down the hall in her dressing gown. ‘Look, the bastards,’ he repeated.
Outside there was only an oak tub half full of earth.
‘I’ve heard about the rustling of Christmas trees…’
‘The neighbours did warn us,’ she replied.
‘Did they?’
‘Yes, number 47 told us we should chain it to the wall. You said you didn’t like the idea of chained trees any more than chained bears or chained slaves.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sounds a bit pompous to me.’
She put a towelling forearm through his, and they went inside again.
‘Shall we call the police?’
‘I expect it’s already heeled in somewhere in darkest Essex,’ he replied.
‘It’s not bad luck, is it?’
‘No, it’s not bad luck,’ he said firmly. ‘We don’t believe in bad luck. It was just some wide boy who saw it with snow on the leaves and was struck by a rare moment of aesthetic bliss.’
‘You’re in a very indulgent mood.’
‘Must be Christmas or something. By the way, you know that water feature you’re planning between the rose grove and the leaf display?’
‘Yes.’ She did not respond to his caricatural terminology.
‘What about mosquitoes?’
‘We keep the water circulating. That way you don’t get them.’
‘How?’
‘Electric pump. We can run a cable from the kitchen.’
‘In that case, I have only one more objection. Can we please, please, not call it a water feature? Waterfall, cascade, lily pond, miniature stream, anything but feature.’
‘Ruskin said he always worked better to the sound of running water.’
‘Didn’t it make him want to pee all the time?’
‘Why should it?’
‘Because it does with blokes. You might have to install a toilet feature next to it.’
‘You are in a sunny mood.’
Probably it was the snow, which always cheered him. But it was also that he had secretly applied for an allotment, down between the water-purifying plant and the railway line. Someone had told him the waiting list wasn’t too long.
Two days later, setting off for work, he shut the front door and stepped straight into a pile of earth.
‘The bastards!’ This time he said it to the entire street.
They had come back and taken the oak tub, leaving him the soil.
Spring was marked by a series of Saturday-morning visits to the local garden centre. Ken would drop Martha at the main entrance, then drive to the car park and spend longer than necessary lowering the back seat to make room for whatever compost, loam, peat, woodchips or gravel had been indicated by his wife’s latest reading. Then he might sit in the car a while longer, arguing that he wasn’t much help in choosing anyway. He was quite happy to pay for the loaded contents of the yellow plastic wagon that usually accompanied Martha to the cash desk. In fact, that seemed to him the perfect deaclass="underline" he drove her there, sat in the car, met her at the desk and paid, then drove them home and paid again by risking a hernia lifting all the stuff out of the car and lugging it through the house to the garden.
Doubtless it was something to do with his childhood, with toxic memories of trudging round nurseries while his parents chose bedding plants. Not that Ken believed in blaming his parents at this late stage: if they’d been gourmets and wine bores, he might have ended up a teetotal vegan, but still would have taken the responsibility for that condition. Even so, there was something about a garden centre – this purveyor of rus in urbe, with its tubs and planters and trellises, its seed packets and sproutlets and shrubs, its balls of twine and wire-ties wrapped in green plastic, its slug pellets and fox-discouraging machines and watering systems and garden candles, all those verdant aisles full of hope and promise, along which processed friendly people with peeling skin and sandals waving red plastic bottles of tomato fertiliser at one another – something about all this that really got on his tits.
And it always took him back to his late adolescence, a time when for him fear and distrust of the world were about to turn into a hesitant love of it, when life was poised to lurch irretrievably in one direction or another, when, as it now seemed to him, you had a last chance to see clearly before being flung into the full business of being yourself among others, at which point things proceeded too fast for proper examination. But then, just back exactly then, he had specialised in seeing through the hypocrisy and deceit of adult life. True, his Northamptonshire village contained no obvious Rasputin or Himmler; so the great moral faultlines of humanity had to be mapped from the possibly unrepresentative sample of his parents’ friends. But this made his findings the more valuable. And it had pleased him to detect vice hidden in the seemingly innocuous, not to say beneficial, occupation of gardening. Envy, greed, resentment, the costive withholding of praise and its false overlavishing, anger, lust, covetousness and various other of the deadly sins he couldn’t quite remember. Murder? Well, why not? Doubtless some Dutchman had exterminated some other Dutchman to get his hands on a priceless corm or tuber or whatever they were called – yes, bulb – during the madness known as Tulipomania.
And on a more normal, decently English scale of evil, he had noticed how even old friends of his parents became tight-lipped and mean-spirited during a tour of the garden, with many a ‘How did you get this to flower so early?’ and ‘Where did you track that down?’ and ‘You’re so lucky with your soil.’ He recalled one stout old bat in tweed jodhpurs who spent forty minutes on an early-morning examination of his parents’ half-acre, returning to issue only the prim bulletin of ‘You evidently had the frost rather earlier than we did.’ He’d read about otherwise virtuous citizens who travelled to the great gardens of England with concealed secateurs, and poacher’s pockets in which to stow their loot. No wonder there were now security cameras and uniformed guards at some of the country’s most sylvan and pastoral locations. Plant-napping was rife, and perhaps the speed with which he’d recovered from the theft of their bay tree hadn’t been anything to do with the cheery snow and the season, but because it confirmed one of the key moral discoveries of his adolescence.
The previous evening they’d been sitting out on the recently delivered teak bench with a bottle of rosé between them. For once there was no inane music from a neighbour’s house, no wailing car alarm, no flight-path thunder; just a silence disturbed instead by some bloody noisy birds. Ken didn’t really keep up with birds, but he knew there’d been some major species-shifts: far fewer sparrows and starlings than before – not that he missed either of them; the same for swallows and stuff like that; the opposite for magpies. He didn’t know what it meant, or what was the cause. Pollution, slug pellets, global warming? Maybe that sly old thing called evolution. There’d also been an increase in parrots – unless they were parakeets – in many of London’s parks. Some breeding pair had escaped and multiplied, managing to survive the mild English winters. Now they were screaming from the tops of plane trees; he’d even noticed one clamped to a neighbour’s bird-feeder.
‘Why are those birds so bloody noisy?’ He asked in a ruminative, fake-complaining way.
‘They’re blackbirds.’
‘Is that an answer to my question?’
‘Yes,’ she replied.
‘Care to explain to a mere country lad? Why they need to be so bloody loud?’
‘It’s territorial.’
‘Can’t you be territorial without being noisy?’