Growing Season

by Seni Glaister

  ‘Well?’ she said once they were inside again. ‘A walk to the woods?’

  Danny scrunched up his face in barely disguised disgust. ‘Walk to a wood? Why on earth would we do that? We’ve got a wood right here on our doorstep, haven’t we? How about we Google the top pubs in the area, jump in the car, and head for one of them? We could work our way through the list over the next couple of weeks. That might be a fun thing to do. Over a period of time we could survey all the pubs in the area. We could come up with our own scoring system and see if we agree with the published reviews.’

  Sam nodded encouragingly whilst silently dismissing the idea. ‘That’s a possibility too, but I was thinking you could do with the exercise. Now you’re living here you’re not going to the gym. It would be ironic if you were to drop dead of a coronary because you moved to the countryside.’

  ‘But a wood? I’m not sure woods are my thing.’ He looked quite frightened by the idea.

  ‘Perhaps not.’ Sam was disappointed. ‘It’s just something my friend Diana mentioned, she said it was particularly beautiful. It has 1,729 birch trees laid out and…’

  Danny, who had been fussing around the kitchen in an unfocussed frenzy of activity, stood stock-still. ‘One thousand, seven hundred and twenty-nine trees? You have got to be kidding me!’ he said, looking and sounding astounded.

  ‘I know it sounds crazy, it would be nearly impossible to count trees in a normal wood because they’re always so higgledy-piggledy, but in this one, all the trees are the same species and it is laid out formally apparently.’

  ‘Well, of course it must be a formal wood, one thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine is a really great number.’

  ‘I know; that’s one of the reasons I want to check it out. It must be huge, can you imagine? What kind of a nutter plants so many trees at once?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Danny shaking his head impatiently. ‘I don’t mean great as in huge, I mean great as in powerful, because one thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine is an extremely interesting number. This is not a coincidence. This is not an accident. This wood cannot have been planted by a nutter, it can only have been planted by a mathematician. I’d love to see this wood.’

  Danny was quite animated. He walked around the kitchen several times, looking for his wallet and the car keys but, in his excitement, failing to find either.

  ‘Well, great. Let’s do it,’ said Sam, jumping up to get her anorak before he changed his mind.

  ‘What I’m intrigued by is how it might be laid out. I imagine it must be a long narrow wood. That would be my first guess.’

  ‘We don’t really need to speculate, we’re going to look, aren’t we?’ said Sam, zipping up her anorak impatiently.

  ‘Nineteen trees planted in one direction, ninety-one in the other. That’s the obvious solution. Given that it is the largest number which is divisible by its prime sum of digits and reversal.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Sam loudly over her shoulder, looking for a pair of boot socks that she thought she’d left in her wellingtons.

  ‘But that would be a very narrow wood, wouldn’t it? Not really a wood, more of a corridor. But you know that’s not the only interesting thing about the number 1,729.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ The sarcasm was high in Sam’s voice but Danny, in his enthusiasm, failed to notice it.

  ‘It’s also the smallest number expressible as the sum of two positive cubes in two different ways.’

  Sam dropped the car keys into his palm and then handed him his wallet. ‘Compromise,’ she said firmly, ‘we’ll drive there and then go for a walk. We’ll look out for a pub along the way. I refuse to Google the pub first though. I don’t care if it’s in the top three or the bottom three, it will serve warm beer and adequate food if we’re lucky. Regardless, it will be our pub.’

  ‘OK,’ said Danny, puzzled.

  ‘And no more speculation about how the trees might be arranged.’

  ‘Really? That’s not interesting?’

  ‘Really. And no spreadsheets for the pub. Let’s just leave it all to chance.’

  ‘Weirdo,’ said Danny, with a broad smile. They left happily. Behind them the grass continued to grow. Beneath the earth, the yellow rattle fixed its own roots on to those of the grass, extracting the minerals and water for its own growth and holding the grass back to give itself a greater chance of survival. Above the earth the cornflowers, poppies and malopes pushed their growing tips through the damp soil, racing each other towards the light.

  Chapter 41

  The weather, talisman-like, played its part in Danny’s first real venture into the countryside, beyond the boundaries of his own small slice of it. Up until then, Danny had barely ever asked a favour of the elements, although he had recently begun to look at the weather forecast each time he thought about his new lawnmower lying idle in his garage. So perhaps it was Sam’s plea that was heard.

  Regardless, luck was on their side as they pulled up into a layby just at the outskirts of the birch wood. They had parked and pulled their boots on, leaving their shoes in plastic bags in the boot to appease Danny’s uneasiness at the whole excursion, but even out of the car, shoes stowed, wellington boots and coats on, they were hesitant, as if unsure how best to tackle this uncharted territory together. While they stood by the roadside, paused, the sun pushed its way through the clouds unexpectedly and bright shafts of sunshine immediately illuminated the woods as if from within. Strong shadows provided stark contrast between the bright white of the trees’ trunks and the dramatic darkness of the nooks and crannies that the sunlight failed to reach and the whole panorama, a collision of dark and light, amplified by a lampshade of luminous green from the new birch leaves above, brought the sheer majesty of the formal planting into vivid reality before their eyes. Sam gasped and Danny reached out and took her hand as they moved towards the first of the birch trees and then took a few paces into the woodland itself. Danny stood still and allowed his eyes to trace the tree trunks diagonally, helping him to get his bearings before sweeping his eyes in both directions, watching the patterns form in every direction.

  ‘This really is quite something,’ Danny said, marching confidently more deeply into the woodland. The trees were at their best, the impact long ago imagined by their architect now fully realised in a splendid display of regimented order, each trunk entirely hidden by the next or revealed in a trick of the eye that played havoc with the senses.

  The impact of these gorgeous pillars was compounded by the even carpet of green beneath them and the ceiling of green above them, each as vivid and constant as any artist could aspire to, but painted there not by any hand but by the bluebell foliage beneath and the still-crumpled new leaves above.

  ‘This was definitely planted by my kind of guy. And not as I’d imagined it at all. It’s broadly square, wouldn’t you say, sweet pea?’ Danny continued forward, checking and counting, trying to find the centre point. ‘And yet I can’t really see any out of line. So, either he’s been very clever in disguising a few extra, or perhaps it’s more like one thousand seven hundred and twenty-two. What do you think, Sam?’

  Sam had wandered off. The trunks of the trees were extraordinary. On each one the white bark was peeling back in layers like pencil shavings, revealing in places diamond-shaped fissures and the dark grey stretch marks of expansion. She felt herself absorbing the detail greedily, trying to commit to memory each tree’s own fingerprint. She was aware of Danny’s singular fascination but walked deliberately out of earshot, able but unwilling to verify her husband’s calculations.

  This wood was the opposite of the wood she had learned to love, its unruly sprawl dictated by each species’ own mad desire for growth, spurred on by its relentless search for sunlight. This wood had a power, too, but its potency seemed to be fuelled by consensus.

  ‘Ha!’ called Danny. ‘I found them!’ Danny was walking towards her, a broad grin stretching across his face. He looked strong, amongst the trees, Sam thought. ‘Seven
sneaky blighters planted in their own row, but on almost the same line so you’d barely know they were there. Clever. Forty-one trees on one axis and forty-two on the other, plus seven on their own. One thousand, seven hundred and twenty-nine. You were right.’

  ‘Phew, I was worried,’ said Sam.

  They held hands and walked out of the woods together, the bluebells springing up behind them unnoticed, so that, despite the impression the landscape had made on them, they made no lasting impression on the landscape at all.

  Chapter 42

  A shaft of sunlight found its way through the leafy canopy to the base of the beech trees, illuminating the tin kettle that swung above the fire around which Sam and Diana were seated. Sam had been pensive, breaking a twig into smaller and smaller pieces and feeding each piece in turn to the small flames that occasionally reached up to lick the kettle.

  ‘The thing is, Diana,’ she said, eventually, ‘my marriage is a complicated thing and your birch tree wood confirmed that.’

  ‘You went? I’m delighted!’ Diana beamed with pleasure.

  ‘We went, and yes, it’s a beautiful wood. Regimented and peculiar, but sombre like tombstones.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that, like one of those vast burial grounds you get a glimpse of from the window of a fast-moving train.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  Sam smiled and then shook her head sadly. ‘Danny loved it.’

  ‘He liked the precision?’

  ‘Oh yes, he loved the precision, but more than that he loved the maths. He walked up and down excitedly, talking in tongues. One thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine is a magical number, apparently. I have never seen him so animated. He actually said he thought that the countryside might finally make sense to him.’

  ‘And that surprised you?’

  ‘Well, it’s such a narrow representation of the countryside, isn’t it? One wood that a mathematician had a bit of fun with thirty years ago? It hardly feels like Danny is embracing the true breadth and bounty of nature.’

  Diana was quiet for a moment before asking, ‘Are you in danger of wanting him to experience the countryside through your eyes, not his? Beauty is subjective, you must allow him to find its allure for himself.’

  Sam nodded. ‘You’re probably right, but I realised how different we were, in that wood, we’re polar opposites. He couldn’t have been more excited to find that order, it was a homecoming for him. In the meantime, I am most at home here, in the chaos of it all. I realised, to my shame, that he had probably found it harder moving here than I’d ever made allowances for. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own world, I’ve barely given his response a second thought. And yet he’s always thinking of me. Gosh, I can be incredibly self-centred sometimes. I won’t even let him cut the grass at home, which is all he really wanted to do.’

  ‘Perhaps next time your husband is feeling frightened by the wildness of the countryside, mention Fibonacci,’ Diana said, mysteriously.

  ‘Fibonacci?’

  ‘Your husband will know him, I expect,’ Diana continued kindly. ‘Go easy on yourself, Sam. You’re preoccupied, not self-centred.’

  ‘You’re right. I am.’ Sam threw a cone into the fire and watched it flare, its resin fuelling the flame. ‘My mind is so full, all the time. I have so much to process but Danny and I don’t really talk. Not about the things that matter. But it’s a hard habit to break. If you’ve grown up being taught to subsume your feelings in order to reflect well on your parents, you soon learn to hide it all. If only my mother had taught me to yell out loud on a stormy night, I might not have retained so much resentment. It’s all there, somewhere, still inside me. I fear it’s sitting where my womb was. I haven’t ever found a way to expel it. And I am beginning to worry that Danny’s just the same. He’s had to deal with so much sadness already and I always thought it was such a credit to him that he was able to carry on with this indefatigable strength. He has this inner force, propelling him ever onwards and upwards but now, I wonder…’

  ‘If he’s dealt with it?’

  ‘Exactly. Perhaps his sadness is sitting somewhere deep inside him too.’

  ‘So perhaps you’re not polar opposites?’

  ‘No, I think we might be as different as we are the same.’

  ‘Do you think it’s time for both of you to yell out loud on a stormy night?’ suggested Diana, kindly.

  Diana prodded the fire and dropped a number of pine cones into the flames. The flames leapt high, engulfing the pine cones and the surrounding timber. A spiral of steam escaped from the spout of the kettle. It seized the wood smoke and the dust and there they all danced unabashedly in the spotlight of sunshine for their audience of two.

  Chapter 43

  Sam wanted to talk to Danny about their differences but she couldn’t find the words. Without meaning to, she found herself once again turning to her blog for solace and conversation and there, the words arrived unbidden. She had been writing, uninterrupted, for about an hour. Her fingers were flying across the keyboard and she’d been mouthing the words to herself as she typed, as if she were dictating out loud although her fingers moved almost quicker than her brain. She was trying to temper her anger, to retreat from the fury, but it was hard. Her readers were still commenting on her last post, pestering her, poking her, nagging her for more. She tried to block them out and focus instead on some of the things she’d learnt from the woods. The words toyed with her, as if appearing in her peripheral vision, and she wrote furiously before they escaped her sight altogether.

  She was angry with her mother. It needed to pass. And in order to allow it to pass, she needed to give it voice. She needed to find a way to express this anger, in order to quell it. She blocked all extraneous noise out and focussed in, realising as she wrote that of course she mustn’t temper it, she must tease it out. As she wrote, she wondered if she’d find the courage to write this next piece under her own name.

  Since moving to Broome Cottage, Danny had taken to removing his shoes when he came into the house, so she simply hadn’t heard him climb the stairs swiftly, two treads at a time, and he was standing over her before she’d had time to log out or shut down the laptop.

  ‘Hello, my love. Glad to see you’re writing. Let me have a peek?’ He put a hand on each of her shoulders and dropped his head down parallel with her own to look at the screen.

  Sam could feel the colour rise in her cheeks and she leant forward, tipping the screen down a few inches and mumbling apologetically, ‘It’s really nothing yet, I’d much rather you didn’t.’

  ‘Oh come on, Sam. Let me be that person for you, the person that reads your first drafts and gives you the encouragement you need. I’m your biggest fan.’ He nuzzled into her further and playfully motioned to open the laptop screen up again.

  ‘No, Danny.’ Sam snapped, closing her laptop completely. She swung around, surprising him. ‘You can’t.’ The laptop was closed but it was still logged on. Behind her, it buzzed a couple of times. There was a pause before it buzzed again, three more times in quick succession.

  ‘What are you up to?’ he asked, his suspicion only aroused by her secrecy.

  ‘Just answering email,’ she said, opening her eyes as wide as she could, hoping her challenge would cow him. Her laptop buzzed again a couple more times and the constant nagging of the machine was now impossible to ignore.

  ‘Who gets that many emails?’ said Danny, genuinely curious and with such great faith in his wife that, expecting nothing remotely nefarious, he pushed open the lid and watched in awe as the notifications in the top right corner delivered message after message. His eyes swept to the Word document that occupied most of the screen and he started reading.

  ‘Sam?’ he said, confused now. She pushed her chair back and left the room.

  Danny continued to read.

  Much later, he came downstairs. Sam had made some soup and it was now bubbling on the stove. She had laid the table and was sitting at it, staring into space. Danny drew up anothe
r chair at the table.

  ‘What was that you were writing?’

  Sam said nothing. She didn’t know where to begin.

  ‘There’s so much you haven’t been telling me, Sam. I thought you were writing fiction and then I read on and realised you were publishing your feelings, your very most private thoughts. I cannot tell you how useless that makes me feel. If you had secrets to share, I could have been there for you. I should have been there for you.’

  ‘You were there for me when it counted, Danny. You were there for me when I was ill. But you didn’t have to keep being there for me. At some point I had to take responsibility for my own recovery and I’m not quite sure how it happened but writing that blog was part of that.’

  ‘That was a blog. Open to the public. Anyone could read it?’

  Sam looked apologetic. ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it looks like people were reading it.’

  ‘Yes. In their thousands. Tens of thousands.’

  ‘Anyone we know?’

  ‘I somehow doubt it, Danny. And I didn’t use my own name to write it.’

  ‘Oh. That makes it better.’ There was a question mark in his voice, as if he wasn’t sure if that were true.

  ‘I’m sorry, Danny.’

  ‘But I don’t understand why you hid it from me, Sam? I assume you were writing your true feelings… but, all that… all that anger.’

  ‘Pretty much my true feelings, yes. But maybe I dramatised it a bit for effect. The angrier I was, the more attention my blog got. And don’t get me wrong, I was angry. I’m still angry.’

  ‘I had no idea. I always thought you dealt with it so well. You were such a brick. I wish you’d told me. I feel so stupid.’

  Sam, who already felt a little liberated by the revelation, tried to explain her actions. ‘But you’re so together, so on it, Danny. I didn’t want you to think you had a weak wife. I wanted you to think of me as happy and carefree, not demonic.’