Growing Season

by Seni Glaister

  He sat down, logged on, and put his headphones on. In the last building he’d had his own office but when they moved, they had adopted an open plan arrangement regardless of position within the firm. This was designed to be progressive, removing hierarchical barriers and encouraging collaborative working but he knew it to be significantly less efficient for the company and considerably more stressful for the individual. He had found some crowdsourced research online that supported his theory and had even contributed to it in the hope that eventually senior management would understand that the most efficient strategy was to allow employees to work independently and to come together occasionally to pool ideas and reject or promote the best ones. For the time being though, he had to toe the line. Earphones weren’t encouraged as they were believed to contribute to a feeling of isolation, but his work was largely mathematical at the moment and he had demanded the right for white noise to help him focus on the job.

  He picked up from where he’d left off the previous day and as he scanned the rows and columns of numbers, he felt himself starting to relax. He loved the certainty of mathematics. As he scrutinised his work for patterns he could use to predict outcomes for a client, he allowed just these to flood the front of his brain and all those other bewildering issues, the issue of therapy, the issue of Peter’s barbecue and the issue of Sam and the knotweed, to gradually reduce in size until they were no longer of any significance.

  Chapter 21

  Sam had been looking at her empty flowerbeds and wondering, in despair, where to begin. Her confidence with Danny had been feigned to reassure him that the garden was in safe hands but today she felt overwhelmed by its barrenness. Looking at the sky and pulling on a jacket, she headed off down the path for a walk, hoping to clear her head and find inspiration amongst the lofty trees.

  Without hesitating, she stopped to spy on the big house and once again the gardener was at work. It was like a long drawn-out version of the childhood game, grandmother’s footsteps. Each time she looked he was working on a different part of the garden, as if suspended in time. Today, he was towards the house, his barrow beside him once more. The work looked relentless and there seemed little joy in it.

  She looked at the beds, admiring the richly worked earth and the tightly pruned shrubs. There was some warmth in the sun today and everything seemed poised to surge. She remembered the exchange she’d overheard. It seemed to her that both the gardener and the young woman were disappointed by the owner’s lack of ambition for the garden. She wondered if the gardener was dispirited by the futility of working for somebody who perhaps didn’t care.

  Sam felt a flicker of an idea and, emboldened, she turned and continued on the path, ignoring the turning that would take her through the woods and the stile that crossed to the first big field. Instead she continued downhill. Eventually she reached a small gate that took her out on to the road and now she turned right, using the pavement and stopping occasionally as cars came and went from the driveways that intersected the road that led to the village. She looked carefully at each house name. As she walked, the houses thinned out and the gates became larger and the driveways more oppressive.

  She discounted the houses she could see from the roadside and soon came to one that she believed must be the one she was looking for. The house name ‘Willow’s Fortune’ wasn’t displayed proudly in white paint on oak boards as with so many of the other homes. Instead it was engraved deeply into a large pink stone, which itself was inset into one of two sandstone pillars that cradled tall, wrought iron gates. The gates were firmly closed to cars but the matching pedestrian entrance was only latched and Sam went through, closing the gate carefully behind her.

  She walked up the gravel driveway. Neatly clipped box hedging bordered both sides and as she turned the corner she was welcomed by the front aspect of the large, white Georgian house. She was certain it was the house she had spied from the path and she looked around for the gardener, expecting him to be watching her and aware of her entrance.

  The front door was painted a glossy black, and the brass door-knocker shone proudly. She rang the bell and the door was answered very quickly by the young woman she had seen before. She wore the same black trousers and white shirt, and slippers on her feet. Once again her hair was scraped back from her face into a neat ponytail.

  The woman didn’t greet her but waited silently at the open door for Sam to explain herself.

  ‘I’m looking for the owner of the house. Is that you?’ Sam asked. A rumble of anxiety arrived deep in her belly, triggered by the lack of warm welcome. Now she was here, she wondered what on earth had prompted such boldness in the first place.

  ‘No, it’s not. She’s not here.’

  ‘Are you expecting her back? I’d love to chat with her.’

  The young woman shook her head quickly. ‘No, I don’t expect to see her today. She is at work.’ The woman moved as if she was about to close the door but Sam, determined to remain courageous, spoke again.

  ‘I’m your neighbour, Sam.’

  The young woman opened the door wider and for a moment Sam thought she might be invited in. Instead the woman waited for further explanation, her eyebrows raised in question.

  Sam smiled. ‘I’ve just moved in and I know this probably sounds a bit strange but I have a garden for the first time in my life and I’ve spotted your gardener and wondered if I might chat to him about where to start. There’s nothing quite like seeking the advice of experts.’ Sam smiled again, but beginning to lose confidence, faltered. ‘I’d like to grow flowers. Flowers for my house,’ she said, hopefully.

  The young woman hesitated and for a moment her face looked like it might soften, but it quickly reset itself in hard, professional disdain.

  ‘That’s not possible. The owner of the house is a very private woman and she doesn’t care for visitors. The gardener is paid to tend to the garden here, not to offer advice to passersby. I suggest if you want help in your garden, you advertise locally. I am sure there are plenty of people who would be happy to help.’

  Sam was taken aback. The woman was younger than she was but spoke with absolute confidence. It was clear she spoke for her boss and it was clear too, that in doing so, she believed her visitor to be beneath her.

  ‘Sure,’ said Sam, half-heartedly. ‘Sorry for disturbing you.’ Inexplicably, she felt her eyes sting with tears as she turned to leave. The door shut behind her and Sam retraced her steps, acutely aware of the imposition of her visit, amplified by the sound of the gravel crunching under her feet.

  She chewed her lip as she walked. She had assumed, from the conversation she’d overheard, that they all wanted more from the garden and she had also thought, naively she now realised, that she could somehow fulfil that for them whilst learning about the garden herself. She felt embarrassed by her presumption now.

  She passed through the gate back on to the footpath and headed home. She felt foolish and sorry for herself but there was another more nagging concern. As she reached Broome Cottage she realised what it was. Her neighbour, Hattie, had visited with honest intentions too. She’d even baked a cake. Sam hadn’t just rejected her coolly, as the woman at Willow’s Fortune had done, she’d humiliated her and sent her away in floods of tears.

  Opening her front door, Sam remembered Hattie’s chewed fingernails and sore cuticles and wondered guiltily how much courage it had taken to come and ring on her doorbell that morning.

  Chapter 22

  That night, Danny lay in bed listening to his wife’s soft breath. She slept on her back with her head tilted slightly towards him. She’d been quiet during the evening and she was now frowning in her sleep.

  Danny knew Sam as well as he knew himself. He knew her worries, and he wished he could make them go away. He knew the pain she’d been through and he wished he could have borne it for her. He knew the hopes that had been dashed and he wished he could have kept them alive.

  He studied her face carefully. He knew her so well, it was true, but
meanwhile he’d kept secrets from her, the sort of truths that might make her hate him if she ever found out. He wondered whether she’d kept anything from him. He hoped so. It would make his own duplicity easier to bear.

  He moved on to his side and watched her face, wanting to smooth her frown away with the tip of his finger but knowing he’d wake her and then there would be two of them lying there, hurling their anxieties into the night.

  Knowing he couldn’t solve Sam’s, Danny flipped his attention back to his own worries, flicking through them one by one, as idly as if he were choosing a film to download. He couldn’t decide which one to focus on, they were all so compelling and deserving of the 3 a.m. limelight – truly the most cherished time for any anxiety to take a foothold.

  He thought about his career, something he often brushed past without scrutinising it carefully. It was easy to dismiss it as under control when in reality there were all sorts of obstacles lurking in the wings, capable of derailing his steady progress. There was Peter, for a start. Danny was certain now that Peter didn’t like him.

  Danny had been invited to Peter’s family barbecue for the last three years. Within their office, Peter’s barbecue had become a bit of an institution. Peter had successfully managed that delicate blending of work and home life that some people navigated seamlessly whilst others, Danny included, would like to separate with yellow and black ‘do not cross’ tape. In fact, if Danny had his way, he would pay particular attention to ensuring his home life had an impenetrable exclusion zone clearly marked all around it.

  Not being invited to Peter’s barbecue was fine, Danny didn’t particularly mind. He didn’t need to like his colleagues, he just needed to respect them. But the exclusion did bother him because he wasn’t sure why this had happened. Peter and Danny were peers, and in all likelihood, they’d continue to be at a similar grade for many years before one of them was elevated above the other. So why had Peter now rejected Danny’s company?

  Danny flipped over to face away from Sam. The curtains were closed but he could make out a sliver of night sky between them. It was dark, but not pitch black; a curious colour that was neither one thing nor another.

  Having discarded a number of possible causes for Peter’s sudden aloofness, Danny alighted on the obvious one. Peter had three small children. He had passport pictures of them in a little fold-out frame on his desk. They were present in Peter’s workspace environment but not embarrassingly so. Other colleagues had taken their commitment to paternal excellence further, posting their own portraits in crayon on their pinboards, with the nauseatingly inoffensive, carefully spelt out letters of early expressions of love. ‘I heart daddy’, this sort of thing. Ironic, wasn’t it, that by the time the children were old enough to express a more sophisticated understanding of their familial pull, they no longer felt it strongly enough to write it down, and even if they did, the words would never find the public prominence of a shared office wall. Which was a shame, Danny thought; it would be certainly be more interesting: ‘Dear dad. Despite the fact you let me down from time to time and I’m increasingly suffering from overwhelming shame whenever you are in the same room as my friends, I realise that you are a good role model, making the right choices to ensure my own career is as easy on me as yours has been on you. If I recoil from you now, rest assured, it is only in recognition of my future self, not the physical revulsion you must sometimes suspect. P.S. Thanks for the tenner.’ Now, Danny thought, that sort of transparency would be interesting.

  Peter’s children were still small and malleable, and probably made very few demands on their father. Peter was the sort of dad that did his bit. He took a bit of time off for the carol service, left early for parents’ evening (parents’ evening? What on earth did they discuss at a parents’ evening? Danny wondered. The children were barely out of nappies). He was a good example of the new breed of dad, still privately certain that his children were best cared for by their full-time mother whilst being careful not to refer to babysitting when he meant fathering.

  Danny let these thoughts drift around his head, finding their own nooks and crannies to fester within his brain. He was a long way from falling back to sleep, but his heartbeat was quite calm and the thoughts weren’t spiralling out of control. Glancing at the clock, he calculated that he could maintain this status for an hour or more without it impacting on his well-being.

  Danny allowed his attention to stay focussed on Peter. Peter should feel superior to Danny, shouldn’t he? He’d fathered three children whilst enabling his wife the luxury of a decade or more at home to launch them confidently into the world with the best possible start in life to cushion them from future blows. Peter couldn’t feel threatened by Danny’s lack of family, could he? In fact, hadn’t Danny always been the one to enthusiastically uphold Peter’s right to dip out of a meeting to watch a nativity play? Hadn’t he suggested they avoid half term week for a conference, so that the dads wouldn’t have their family time compromised? Thinking about it, Danny felt quite indignant that not only should Peter like him, he should be grateful to him.

  Danny looked at the clock again. Eight minutes had passed. Eight minutes was enough to spend on Peter and his progeny, surely.

  But nothing else felt pressing. Danny wondered if Peter ever lay in bed worrying about him. Whether the pressure of work was enough to rattle him as it rattled Danny or if Peter sailed through life, oblivious to the little concerns that could derail Danny if he gave them any room to smoulder. Danny’s coping strategy had always been to closely examine only the things he could analyse scientifically and resolve them through the structure of process. Everything else he locked away firmly, determined to leave it there, with no further scrutiny. Now, as Danny lay watching the minutes tick by, he wondered what to do with Peter and the barbecue. Peter, his barbecue, his wife and three children were not obliging by immediately becoming a resolvable problem. Danny thought some more. Empathising with those unlike him had never been a skill Danny had honed but he was aware that perhaps he needed to look at the issue from Peter’s perspective. Perhaps, whilst he had decided that Peter was not a threat, Peter in the meantime had come to the opposite conclusion.

  A further two more minutes had passed but Danny felt he had made progress. Now it seemed clear. He was a threat to Peter. And as such Danny needed to rise to the challenge, not evade it. He needed to compete with Peter at work, respond to the duel that Peter had declared by not inviting him to his barbecue. He and Peter were colleagues, not friends. That was the distinction. He didn’t need Peter as a friend, he didn’t need friends at all. They only let you down.

  Danny tried to fall asleep.

  Chapter 23

  Sam’s ability to mask her worries was the product of her upbringing.

  Her mother came from a long line of mothers who did not think it was tasteful to share one’s anxieties or, as she would prefer to describe them, weaknesses. When facing the randomly spaced hurdles of adolescence, Sam had learned to deal with her own problems quietly, stoically and privately while other girls flexed their teenage angst noisily all around her. But the events of the last few years had tested even Sam’s resilience. At the point that her head was full to bursting with a lifetime of things unsaid, she’d needed to write her blog to deal with the overflow. But of course, this wasn’t something she could ever risk her mother encountering – let alone Danny, who shared her mother’s suspicion of emotional outbursts. So when she had started writing her blog it had been an easy decision to adopt another character to front her public display of outrage.

  And it was an obvious decision to adopt a façade in the shape of an old university friend, the sort of person who would have discarded her own mother alongside her decorum.

  She clicked on Libby’s profile picture and a new window popped up, magnifying the image. Sam looked at the third of Libby’s face visible under the brim of the big felt hat. Libby had never been conventionally pretty, but she had a handsome, strong face and the eighteen-year-old Sam had
certainly found Libby’s conviction attractive.

  To add to her mystique, Libby had vanished, inexplicably, at the end of her first year of university but nobody but Sam had seemed particularly perturbed by, or interested in, her absence. Sam had asked a number of people where Libby had gone, but nobody either knew or cared which had surprised Sam as Libby had made such an indelible impression on her. Libby had been a supernova in Sam’s life, her orb of light could only have been extinguished fully or it would still be visible, of that Sam was certain. She had always assumed that Libby must have died that first summer and, though she had no proof of her hunch, she assumed she could only have died a tragic, poetic death.

  Had Libby lived, she might well have written an angry blog but Sam doubted very much she would have allowed it to become her sole source of comfort, as Sam had.

  Now, sat in her study, Sam felt sickened by herself. She’d lost two hours to browsing on the internet. The comments that had come in during the night included one from a woman who suggested she examine her commitment to her faith while looking for a cure for her childlessness. The woman had quoted Genesis 11:30, reminding her that God had repaid Abraham’s faithfulness by granting him a son and suggesting that she and her husband try to truly put the Lord first in their lives. ‘That old chestnut,’ Sam had thought, at first, and was about to respond glibly but she’d clicked on the next comment and the next, finding a barrage of accusation and judgement and a bitter argument between the childless, the childfree and the mothers and the fathers who thought both categories of women were failing in their duty to men, to God or to each other. There were so many angry people out there and she was sickened that she’d actively gone out of her way to invite them in. Now she spent too much time in their company, in a vicious cycle for which she was solely responsible. A cycle that saw her first fuelling their fire and then stoking it, whilst all the time watching the resulting drama in voyeuristic horror.