Outside, the barn owl, quiet now, alighted softly on a branch to take vigil. The night was clear and dry so she’d soon leave her watch-post to repeat her ghostlike rounds, her soft fringed feathers making no sound in the dark night air. Watchful, she waited, alert to the dangers around her, while all about her the unknowing creatures dropped their guard.
Chapter 2
Long after Sam had fallen asleep, Danny realised he was fully awake, unsure if he had slept or not.
It was 4 a.m. and it was still dark, and it would be dark for a while. Danny needed to pee. He lay in bed arguing with himself. If, he wondered, he gave in to his bladder’s demands now, would he be making a rod for his own back? Would he become a slave to his bodily functions, destined to never make it through the night without a bathroom visit? On the other hand, he reasoned, if he ignored the urgent pressure then perhaps he might give himself a whole different set of problems. Perhaps he’d stretch his bladder or cause some sort of infection. His wife had certainly suffered from those, but he wasn’t sure if men his age could get them too. But if it didn’t lead to an infection, might it lead to something much worse? How did cancers in that area begin? He knew that bladder cancers were more common in men than in women. Perhaps not relieving yourself might be causal? He sighed, a little disappointed in himself for allowing the argument to escalate so quickly and with almost no opposing defence deployed by the reasonable bit of his brain. Getting up as quietly as he could, he padded through the darkness to the bathroom.
He still wasn’t used to the house. It was so much bigger than their London flat, which he’d loved. It had been his bachelor pad for a few years before Sam had moved in. Not that he’d been that sort of bachelor. It wasn’t as if he were entertaining a whole host of women in there. But the flat had been his and he’d been proud of buying his first property while still in his twenties, something he’d achieved quite independently of the inheritance that had then accelerated the move to Broome Cottage. There was no doubt that marrying Sam and sharing his flat with her had been the best thing he had ever done. She was there, every night, in touching distance and he would never tire of watching her sleep or waking up to her next to him. But her approach to domesticity was more chaotic than his own. She had arrived with very little, but clutter seemed to be attracted to her, following her home uninvited and finding space amongst his own ordered possessions. She never got around to explaining the purpose of the things that appeared on shelves or, increasingly, on every available surface, but they gave her such pleasure that he taught himself ways of coping, largely by seeing if he could notice a new item before it had formally been introduced to him. He would memorise the precise layout of each room as he left and scan it against his mental register on his return, discerning what was new, what was no longer there, what had moved. Eventually, when space became an issue and he could no longer see his apartment for her curious baubles, he realised he needed a longer-term coping mechanism. He advanced his plan to buy a larger house.
Turning on the light, he nodded in approval. This new bathroom was well-finished. The house was old – hundreds of years old according to Sam, but it had been fully renovated before being listed on the market. The kitchen was brand new and fitted, carpets had been laid throughout and both the upstairs bathroom and downstairs cloakroom featured good quality fittings. These were in an old-fashioned style, Victorian he thought, and they looked classy. More importantly, the taps worked and didn’t drip, the shower (which Sam had upgraded before he arrived) was powerful and the heated towel rails were piping hot. It was a good bathroom. He was proud to own it. But he still wasn’t used to it.
He turned the main light off and flicked the light on above the mirror, scrutinising his face. He was tired; the skin under his eyes sagged a little. He peered in closer and examined a couple of very thin lines on the side of his nose, trying to establish if they were broken veins. When did that begin to happen, he wondered, surely not in his thirties? He was technically a young man still, wasn’t he? He pushed his hair back and looked at his hairline. That had definitely been creeping a little bit, there was certainly more forehead than he remembered. But he wore his hair quite long and it flopped forward so nobody was going to notice until there had been very much more retreat. He felt the top and back of his head, but it was ridiculous to try to ascertain if there was less hair there. Could he ask Sam? No, perhaps not. It was probably best if he didn’t draw attention to his slow decline. She was so vibrant and luminous. Her skin had an elasticity that suggested she would never be diminished by something as mundane as aging and he didn’t want to highlight her obvious superiority, in case it somehow weakened him in her eyes.
Danny knew he didn’t sleep enough, and it was beginning to show in his face. It needn’t impact on his career prospects – premature aging was a positive attribute in his line of work. Most of the successful partners could be mistaken for men ten years their senior. It wore you out, the constant counting and watching your back.
However, Danny was aware that long term sleep deprivation could impact on your physical heath and those were things that Danny needed to guard against. He knew that fatigue could be a symptom of cancer, but could it also be a cause? Poor sleep made you at risk to all sorts of diseases, he was sure, so it seemed very likely that cancer was one of them. Whether or not his bad habits were carcinogenic, he knew that there had been all sorts of studies that linked a lack of sleep with a poor outcome in life and Danny’s rational brain knew he needed to get a grip and tackle his insomnia. His irrational one, however, conspired quite forcibly to keep him awake.
Danny turned the light off and his sombre reflection in the moonlight looked just as terrifying as his yellowed face had under the glare of the bathroom light. Now, the dim shadows picked out his skeletal frame, peeling back the flesh and revealing the gaunt core of him. He looked like his father just before he died. He and his reflection stared at each other, and Danny wondered if his path was already inalterable.
Chapter 3
Now that Danny had also moved in to Broome Cottage Sam found herself having to adjust once again to a new persona altogether: that of a wife of a man who commuted, a man who departed early in the morning, taking the car and leaving her and her house entirely reliant on each other for company.
As she watched the rear lights of the car disappear down the drive, the red orbs losing their definition as they became consumed by the morning mist, she felt a pang of guilt. Danny now had to leave home two hours earlier to arrive at work at the same time, and all so he could enjoy the many benefits of countryside living she had promised him. In reality, it was unlikely he’d enjoy the house in daylight until early summer and even then, though she’d promised barbecues and stargazing, evening strolls and late-night cocktails, she knew he’d only really feel the benefit of country living at the weekends.
She glanced at the kitchen clock. It wouldn’t be light for another hour or so, and this sixty-minute pause stretched ahead of her like a yawn. Where Danny’s day had been shortened, her own days were now unfathomably long, and since she no longer had a job dictating how she spent her day, the many different things she could do with her time were overwhelming.
Sam thought fleetingly about the career she’d left behind in London. She missed it. She missed the dizzying forward momentum that came with a full workload and the sense of belonging that came with a shared purpose. But she didn’t miss the way it made her feel towards the end: the side glances and pity, the laughter that stopped when she walked in the room, the sense of rejection that came with being suddenly, unalterably different.
She shrugged away the flood of regret. This was better: small manual tasks that required no input from anyone else, jobs she could complete that made each day a little bit better than the last. These were the things that might make her feel whole again.
She climbed upstairs, her bare feet enjoying the carpeted treads. She had been busy at Broome Cottage since the removal vans had first arrived, finding a place f
or everything and ensuring the house achieved that fine balance of looking both lived in and orderly. She now admired her work but felt a little saddened by the way their entire London life had been so neatly absorbed by the spacious cupboards and plentiful shelves she now had at her disposal. In London, their small apartment had been bursting at the seams and her life had felt both interesting and complex. Books were piled on every available surface and vases weren’t allowed to exist as empty vessels, they’d been stacked or filled with other small items. Here, everything had a place yet their combined possessions left the house looking hungry for more.
She wandered into the smallest of the three bedrooms, which sat immediately at the top of the stairs. This room was positioned neatly between the master bedroom with its en suite bathroom to the left and the guest bedroom and family bathroom to the right. Though small, it was a nicely proportioned, airy bedroom and was perfectly positioned for a number of purposes. It would be impossible to escape the notice of any prospective buyer that it was within hearing distance of the master bedroom and next to the bathroom, making it ideal for anyone with their heart set on a bigger family.
Sam sat at the desk and opened and closed the empty central drawer absent-mindedly. The furniture was well made and the mechanism was of good quality and the drawer slid open and closed silently in a most satisfying way. Next to the desk was a heavy filing cabinet, made of light oak, its pair of matching keys, guarded for transit with a bit of blue tape, still hung together from the top lock. The filing cabinet was solid and perhaps designed for bigger lives than theirs, but she could imagine filling up the drawers over time, watching the files become designated by her tightly printed capital letters, spelling out the nooks and crannies of a future that could not yet be named or anticipated.
When unpacking the huge delivery boxes, she had simply put the box files from their London flat into the top drawer of the filing-cabinet, but she realised now that sorting these more definitively was a job that would happily absorb an hour before she left the house for an exploratory walk. Sam had resolved to make walking part of every day and idly wondered whether Danny might ever soften on his determination not to get a dog.
Warily, Sam eyed her laptop, which sat on the top of the desk. She had paused when she had come to pack it, and she wished she’d had the courage to leave it behind her in London. Perhaps she could have thrown it melodramatically into the skip with all the other detritus that she didn’t want any part of anymore. Better still, she could have hurled it into the Thames as they’d crossed the bridge on their journey south. But the logical part of her brain had won, telling her that the physical laptop wasn’t the issue, it was merely a symbol, so she’d capitulated and brought it with her.
Ignoring the laptop, which seemed to glower from the desktop, silently insisting on attention, she resisted the urge to plug it in. Instead, she retrieved her own box file from the top drawer and began to sort the paperwork into separate piles on the grey carpet. Systematically, she shuffled the papers into the compartments of her life: one, the largest, for the letters, bills and documents that related to her health; one for receipts and guarantees; another for her driving licence, theory test and car documentation, a final pile for the paperwork associated with her academic career. This pile, the second largest, was surprising in its bulk considering she never felt she’d achieved anything much, but she’d kept her school reports for a number of years and she had her GCSE and A Level certificates in stiff card envelopes to protect them which added a little heft to the pile. Her degree was represented by a single certificate which seemed a rather flimsy portrayal of what was her greatest accomplishment to date. Sam had received a top degree from a respected university (not a top university, but one that usually won an impressed nod of approval whenever she mentioned it) and she’d worked very hard for her result. She’d eschewed the parties and club scene in favour of extra courses, and she’d worked diligently for three years, anxious not to waste the opportunity her parents had afforded her. And despite her admirable work ethic, she’d still had fun, met Danny, fallen in love and set herself on a course for life that seemed immutable now.
She looked up at the big cork notice board that had been fixed to the wall above the desk. From where she was sitting, its emptiness looked like longing. So far, the only embellishment she’d made to the board was a pinned strip of four identical pictures, showing herself and Danny squeezed into a photo booth, pressed cheek to cheek and giddy with happiness. Their clear-sighted younger selves showed no inkling of the impending set-backs on the horizon, instead, they both just grinned at her, their assumption of more good things to follow blazed unapologetically in both sets of eyes. The photos looked sad, pinned up on the board on their own and Sam dithered for a while, holding her certificate in both hands and wondering whether she could pin it up there too. But of course she wouldn’t. Her degree was better than Danny’s and it would look like she was showing off, something she really didn’t deserve to do considering how well his career had progressed and how little she’d actually managed to achieve since abruptly ending her own. She shuffled the certificate to the bottom of her education pile and continued sorting out the many small mementos of her inconsequential adulthood.
When she was happy with the distribution, she transferred each pile of papers into its own cardboard file. Her medical papers needed two. The years immediately after marrying Danny, she could see quite clearly, measured her greatest failures, and the file was bigger, substantially bigger, than the sum of any successes. Sam was perversely pleased by these metrics. She liked to see what she had, and hadn’t, done with her life so far and was amused by the neatness of her filing and the conclusions she had drawn. It was better, she thought, to know these things about herself and to file them away in a light oak drawer with a small key to lock it up, than to have them rattle around in her head, jeering or making her doubt or misremember. It had always felt important to her that she gave Danny the impression that she was as organised and as systematic as he was. She smiled at the idea, but her smile vanished quickly, replaced not quite by a frown but certainly by an instinctive correction. As if anyone could even aspire to be as organised and systematic as her husband.
Once she had finished, two documents were left unaccounted for on the carpet. Sam labelled a file ‘career’ and dropped the P45 and a signed leaving card into it. She barely glanced at these chronicles, the testaments to the conclusion of a career that had fleetingly seemed so promising.
Sam glanced up at the curtainless window. The sky had lightened since she last looked, taking on a wash of cool, bright light that beckoned her invitingly. She stood and stretched and using the sole of her bare foot, pushed against the bottom drawer. It slid shut, carrying with it Sam’s successes and failures, and closing itself tightly with a gentle but reassuring thud.
Chapter 4
Danny, meanwhile, had entered the very specific realm of the commuter, a whole new component of the day in which he was neither quite at work or at home, but nor was he at leisure. He was now a bona fide suburbanite.
He sat on the train, watching the view race away behind him. The train was already crowded but it was still early and his fellow passengers, united by a collaborative hum of determined concentration, were thankfully quiet. Danny had felt engulfed by a sense of calm as soon as he’d secured a window seat near to the door. Though he had barely glanced at his laptop it was open on the table in front of him, creating a respectful frontier between him and his neighbours. The knowledge that there was now no need to move again until they pulled into the mainline station allowed him to imagine closing his eyes for an hour. This was his preferred seat and whenever possible, he resolved, he would always occupy it.
Danny had undergone a number of similar practice journeys before exchanging contracts on Broome Cottage. He’d trialled the prospective commute on each workday morning and evening at peak rush hour to ensure the vast amount of time he was going to commit to this journey would be commensurate wi
th the benefits. Whilst calculating the cost (in both time and money) he’d worked on the assumption that he would make this journey between 1,440 times and 2,400 times, depending on the vagaries of the property market. It was entirely possible that he would spend the equivalent of 300 working days sitting on this train. He had methodically measured the cost of this time and weighed it up against the likely rise in the value of the house he was going to buy. He knew somewhere, in a part of his brain he chose not to access too often, that there were other incalculable tariffs that should be factored in, but for the purpose of this exercise he’d restricted himself to those levies he felt qualified to identify and name.
After his practice journeys, Danny felt he had begun to grasp the small nuances that identified travel patterns on different days of the week and though he knew that the months ahead would be filled with incremental improvements to optimise his journey, he already felt his preparation had been vindicated by his ability to position himself at exactly the right point on the station platform to secure this seat. Trains were refreshingly predictable and so too, it appeared, were the commuters.
As it transpired, Danny’s move to the countryside had him arriving earlier to his desk than those years where his journey had him zigzagging London for a few short, but intense, miles from Battersea. Granted, this feat had only been accomplished by getting on a train earlier than strictly necessary, but the rewards were manifest.
Arriving earlier had been an unpredicted benefit of moving much further away from the office. Danny’s work could only properly begin when he was at his desk, logged on, with a fierce frown on his forehead to ward away the frivolous conversations that tended to cluster and tangle like weeds in a riverbed, slowing down the onward journey of fruitful productivity. The idlest of chat happened in the small kitchen while people loaded the fridge with their Tupperware boxes full of home-made lunch (salads, grilled chicken breasts, chickpeas and other healthy options associated with a successful career) and while his colleagues made themselves their first coffee or tea of the day. These puerile, nebulous interactions were hard for Danny to navigate and the constant sharing and swapping of news of how they’d spent their hours since they’d last spoken was particularly baffling. The sheer banality of the conversation could send Danny’s pulse racing and he was constantly on guard, prepared to deflect any attention that might swing, scimitar-like, towards him.
Growing Season Page 2