“Here, I plant my clematis; behind them, the scabious; above, the pyrethrums. My delphiniums and my columbines are already in place: for two years I haven’t had to bother about them… My galloping wisteria has died from phthisis. I’m going to replace it with those nice things that are sturdy and that always grow before anything else: nasturtiums and runner beans. What a huge comfort runner beans are for the wretched amateur! They grow tall, they knock down walls, they explode, they cover everything, they get completely out of hand and they don’t give you any trouble.”
The man in a hurry pours on the nitrogen; he is unrestrained with the potassium phosphate, he shoves on ammoniac citrate at fever pitch. His ideal solution is to be rid of the sad geraniums and begonias his forefathers grew, to achieve those herbaceous borders they have in England where the flowerings follow one another on the same ground; from week to week, a blue flower bed gives way to a yellow one, then pink, then white, like a series of fireworks, with luminous fountains sending up rockets.
There is nothing else he needs; the one thing he lacks is land; but nothing is harder than finding land to buy in Paris. Horticulturists sell everything, except land!
In the gazebo, Pierre arranges his tools around a crate that is the last remnant of an unfortunate attempt to grow crops in catalysed water the previous year; with the aid of phosphoric salts, Monsieur Priapet had promised him instant canna, early anemones and a plethora of radishes: it was a flop.
Alongside spades in the shape of a swan’s neck, hoeing forks and harrows, there were scarifying claws and shears for cutting the lawn that stood rusting, while a tiny, toothless rake lay among the labels, with shards of broken pots and bits of vegetable cloches that cracked when you walked over them. A box of Armenian specifica for speeding up the laying of hens’ eggs provided the final evidence of an attempt to fatten up chickens that was abandoned at an earlier period amid corpses of one-day-old chicks that had died from white diarrhoea.
Pierre uses sulphated mulch and screens to protect his irises and primroses.
“Let us consult my Amateur Gardener calendar. ‘February… prepare your soil…’ Done that. ‘Beware cutting lilac too soon…’ These people really do lack any enthusiasm. Why not protect rose bushes from greenfly now? (But the greenfly are also late)… ‘Sow foxgloves in March.’ Who cares! Let’s try and sow them in February and we shall see…”
Thus does Pierre interfere with the flowering and overtax the vegetation. Every morning he will come, nose to the ground and with wet knees, to keep an eye on the new growths. He’ll scratch with a blackened nail in order to encourage the little tip of the tulip, he’ll raise up the wilting hyacinth (even though he has had them sent over from Scotland, so that on finding themselves in Paris, they might get a good southern surprise). He watches the hole. He sprinkles, he soaks, he splashes rather than waters. No matter what, no matter when. The water leaks through the ceiling (he waters so early in the year that there are sometimes stalactites down below, in his study).
“Nature needs to be tamed, to be given an example of vigour!”
Pierre mops his forehead, glistening with beads of sweat unknown in the Garden of Eden. He turns round: Hedwige is there, looking at him, simultaneously severe and smiling.
“Sorry for keeping you waiting,” says Pierre ironically. “You see: I lingered in the garden.”
She stands there in formal black clothes (an afternoon dress with only a small length of skunk fur fitted snugly round her neck) silhouetted against a very pale blue sky, high above the horizon, a horizon that barely reaches halfway up her legs, as in portraits of the Spanish School.
“Don’t make fun of me,” she says. “I got up late.”
Having made up his mind not to criticize her, Pierre continues in the same tone of voice:
“It’s like my tulips. This year, nothing is getting up.”
“Nature has eternity ahead of her,” Hedwige replies.
“Yes, alas! With nature one always has the impression that autumn is missing the summer and that winter never seriously settles in until the moment when you might rightly expect spring to be arriving. So when will these tulips, which are a particularly tough variety from the north of the Zuider Zee, reveal their colours? They’re white ones; I chose them with you in mind, you who like white flowers, with a border of black tulips, to show them at their best.”
“I wonder, restless gardener, how you would manage if you had to wait nine months for a child? I mean, of course, wait for a woman who would be expecting… Indeed, perhaps you wouldn’t wait?”
Pierre went back to put on his leather coat, which he had hung on a nail so that he could do the gardening, wiped his muddy hands on the back of his dungarees and looked at his wife. Her face was a pale, parchment-like colour.
“Firstly, there can be no birth without union, no union without love and no love without excitement. A child, therefore, is something sudden, something that doesn’t wait. It’s a surprise that is the result of a collision. It’s the fruit of a sleepless night. It doesn’t settle at its mother’s breast as though it were at a picnic, it’s hurled out when you’re flat on your back like a seed about to burst. It starts by waking everybody up in the middle of the night, by causing the doctor and midwife to come running. It’s new wine which can’t bear being put in a bottle.”
“Seriously, what would you do?”
“You’ve caught me unawares. I’ve never thought about the question much. I think my reaction would be like anyone else’s.”
“I’m not sure about that.”
“Think of this tiny prospective creature, compressed in this narrow box; it has just one idea, which is to get out, to be born and to spin out its days in the lovely sunshine. Tiny things yearn for the gigantic; the bud craves the leaf; assets require interest: everything that lives aspires to growing taller, becoming larger and multiplying.”
“You see yourself as a grandfather already!” said Hedwige, bursting out laughing.
Pierre laughs too, happy at his wife’s gaiety, but he suddenly becomes thoughtful.
“So why are you telling me all this… today?”
“Only because I think it’s useful to think about things before doing them… so as not to regret them afterwards.”
“Regret them? Me, regret having a child? You’re joking.”
“I’m very serious.”
“Regret having something that would have its source in you! I think I would overflow with joy, I would celebrate it everywhere, it would be more important than anything! A child of yours, goodness me: what an acceleration of our existence!”
“I’m pregnant,” Hedwige replied quietly.
No sound, no lights shining near them. They were alone in this suspended garden, high above the ground, totally alone, facing one another and both of them suddenly feeling very lonely, doing their best to transform this new notion into a series of conventional settings (the belly, the outfit, the nursing home, the pram, etc.).
“Well,” Pierre said simply in a very low voice.
“Are you pleased?”
“I don’t know whether it’s pleasure, it’s… it feels strange.”
“Do you understand why I felt so weary yesterday? When I arrived at Saint-Germain I actually fainted.”
“Sorry!”
Pierre pulled himself together; he brought out a large red handkerchief and took his wife in his arms.
“Thank you,” he said, with tears in his eyes.
“Now, I’m going to ask you just one thing, Pierre…”