‘I think I slept the sleep of a man with nothing on his conscience. Or nothing that matters very much.’
He poured a cup of coffee from the pot and wandered out of the kitchen into the garden. Sam saw him looking intently at the tall grasses and she wondered what went on in that head of his. She’d just assumed he was a simple man – a bit of work, a few numbers that other people would find dull but that he enjoyed. She had always assumed that he might harbour a couple of suppressed memories from childhood at most.
But the way he stood, looking at the grass, his shoulders slumped and then, as if about to take action, tall again with both hands on his head as if he were solving a complex riddle. Sam tried to see the garden through his eyes, imagine what he was seeing and wondered whether her letting go had tied him up in knots. Something in his frame suggested anguish and she couldn’t bear to look any more. She turned away to sit at the kitchen table, her head in her hands, a diminutive shadow of her husband’s stance.
She waited, rooted to her chair, anxious and aware, an awareness that registered as a ragged pain in her heart, that she’d revealed so much of herself recently that he might just not like the woman he realised was his wife.
The kitchen clock had broken, perhaps it had become damaged in the move and she had just never sat still enough to notice it. The second hand made a good clean sweep of the face of the clock, only to get caught on the minute hand where it would make two or three attempts to free itself before rushing onwards again, faster for those initial seconds, making up for lost time. Sam studied the clock’s behaviour for a number of revolutions, marking her husband’s silence with this stifled attempt at time to battle on regardless. Gosh, Sam thought to herself, it was amazing just how much didn’t quite function properly when you stopped to examine it. She wondered, sitting there in the weirdly rhythmic pattern of her broken clock, whether it was better not to notice at all.
The silence of the kitchen was broken by the roar of the lawnmower, springing to life at the first attempt with none of its usual spluttered warning. Sam jumped but remained seated. She sighed heavily. This was inevitable, she thought, I am not an ant, I can’t hide away in the messy wilderness of my own back garden expecting to continue unbidden, unchecked. The sound sawed at her soul nonetheless.
The lawnmower stalled and started again. It stalled again. Sam wondered whether Danny was struggling to make it work and regretted now not draining it of fuel, or, better still, filling it with the wrong fuel so that it would splutter to a premature but conclusive death.
The front door slammed and she wondered, both hopefully and a little fearfully, if she had pre-empted the machine’s early demise with her thoughts. It was unlike Danny to give up on a task so quickly.
She could hear him go into the garage and then out again. He was busy in his activity, fixing the lawnmower perhaps, but he never stopped to check in on her. She deserved that. She’d been dishonest with him and now he was going to punish her. She wondered if there could be a reset.
Another twenty minutes passed before he came back inside. She looked up as he crossed the kitchen towards her. She cowered a little and a flash of confusion clouded his face before he reached a hand out towards her. She felt ashamed. Ashamed of her selfishness, her recklessness, but sad, too, that her garden, her beautiful wasteland, had come to such a sudden, painful end.
Danny took her by the hand and pulled her gently to her feet and led her to the kitchen door. He said nothing. He led her down the path that ran between the house and the garage but he stopped before they reached the lawn. She didn’t want to see it, but knew she needed to take her punishment bravely.
He stopped her and blocked her path and kissed her eyes closed. She kept them closed. He bent down and undid her laces, helping her to wriggle out of the first and then the second trainer. He led her forward once more, her eyes remained closed.
Sam felt the space around her, knew she was at the edge of the garden, her heels were on the stone slabs and her toes were on the grass. She could feel the shorn grass under her feet. It felt dry and scratchy with no trace of the softness of spring grass. She felt so sad for the end of her wilderness but so resigned to a barren garden that she imagined it brown and brittle permanently.
Danny tugged at her hand, gently pushing and pulling at her, inviting her with the kindest of manipulations to kneel and then lie down. Her eyes were still tightly closed. She trusted him. She’d always trusted him. The newly cut grass scratched at the back of her head. She felt a flash of irritation at his insistence. He let go of her hand.
‘Take a look, sweet pea.’
She opened her eyes and was immediately confused, she had such a clear vision in her head of the vista she expected that it took a few moments for her brain to assimilate the image around her. Her meadow was still there, all around her. She sat upright, bewildered.
She had been lying in a narrow strip of mown grass, surrounded by tall grass. The cut area fit her length perfectly. A coffin of grass. She could barely see Danny, he was next to her, lying in his own mown strip of grass, with just a narrow gap connecting them, allowing him to reach his arm out towards her. By lying down once again, she could hold hands with him.
She made a series of noises that conveyed something to him, puzzlement, and creeping, hopeful joy but she still found no words. She stood up to see if she could better understand what had happened to her garden. And then it was clear, a central path, opening up to two symmetrical mown boxes for them each to lie in. The two boxes were joined by a narrow gap through which they could hold on to each other. She lay down again and stretched her arm out once again into the channel to find his hand.
‘I love it.’ She lay still, symmetrically, so the tear that left each eye raced down her face and reached her ears at exactly the same time.
‘I love it too,’ he said, from his little grass box. He squeezed her hand.
‘The thing I love,’ he continued, ‘is the total absence of green,’ said Danny from behind his curtain of grasses. Sam laughed, thinking he was joking, but she opened her eyes when he remained silent. She looked at the grasses immediately around her. He was right. There was almost no green. The sun had blanched the stems every colour of cream, gold and brown and the wildflowers added splashes of colour, red from poppies and powdery blue from cornflowers.
‘Red for sporty, yellow for theatrical, blue for academic,’ Danny chanted.
Sam frowned, not following his logic at all but squeezed his hand, feeling that sometimes loving him absolutely, without necessarily understanding him, might be enough.
‘My ideal garden.’
‘Chaos with a little bit of order?’ Sam asked.
‘Order, with a little bit of chaos,’ Danny insisted.
Sam wondered if the freshly mown grass beneath her would become green again now it had access to the sunlight. And rain was forecast, so it would probably need cutting again in no time at all.
‘Are we going to keep it like this then?’
‘Of course we are. For as long as you want. You’re the meadow expert. Though I might need to buy some garden shears. I cut our arm channel with the kitchen scissors this morning.’
‘Danny? I think it might be the nicest garden ever.’
‘Me too,’ he said and she wondered if behind the privacy of his grass curtain, he might be crying also.
‘Can you cope with me, Danny? Now you know a bit more about the tumbling bag of nerves that I am?’
Danny nearly laughed, a noisy smile escaped at least. ‘We probably both ought to talk a little bit more. You know, nothing too over-sharing, but it’s probably best that I know what’s going on in that head of yours sometimes.’
‘And what about your head, Danny? What should I know about what’s going on in there?’
‘Oh, there’s nothing much there you need to worry about. You know me. Nothing much that won’t fit into the rows and columns of a spreadsheet. No pivot tables, no macros. Just numbers.’
‘
That’s not quite true though, is it? You’ve kept stuff from me, which means you’ve filed our thoughts somewhere other than a spreadsheet. Otherwise I’d have found it easily enough marked, “Things I haven’t told my wife.” What else haven’t you been telling me?’
Danny listened to his wife’s voice, a sound that he loved more than any other sound on the planet and he looked up at the sky. It wasn’t a particularly beautiful sky, it was blue in places and white in others, but there was plenty of grey too. He looked up at the sky not because the view was irresistible, but because he didn’t want to open his mind to Sam.
‘Danny, is there more?’ she probed gently. She felt safe here, she thought she might be able to cope if there were more.
Danny closed his eyes and pictured his brain. Hundreds of drawers tightly shut. Padlocked even. He had the key now, he could open just one more for her, couldn’t he? He could see what happened, surely?
He shuddered, imagining the tsunami of thoughts tumbling out, unstoppable.
‘Danny? Trust me.’
Gingerly, he pictured himself turning a key, unlocking an un-shared thought. He rifled through the files, most of which he didn’t dare open, he didn’t particularly want to know what he’d stored away.
‘I like eggs,’ he said, suddenly, both gladdened and appalled by this revelation.
Sam laughed but stopped quickly when she heard the earnestness in his voice.
‘You do?’ she whispered, alarmed.
‘I love them.’
‘But I don’t understand. Why don’t you eat them then? Why do you say you hate them?’
‘Because I love them too much.’
Sam pulled a face of bewildered disgust, even though she knew he couldn’t see it. ‘Danny. You’re being weird.’
‘Oh Sam. I am weird. You don’t know the half of it.’
‘I’m beginning to think you might be right. Come on, talk to me about eggs – what’s going on there. Oh God. It’s not linked…’ she asked, horrified, not even daring to speak the fear that had leapt to the front of her brain.
‘No, don’t be silly. Of course not. This is not a fertility issue. I’ve never eaten eggs as long as I’ve known you.’
‘True. Do you remember how I used to tease you?’
‘You still do.’
‘And do you remember how I hid eggs in everything you ate to prove you weren’t allergic to them?’
‘Yes, that was a bit mean, not respecting me, not taking my word for it.’
‘But you word wasn’t truthful, Danny. You just didn’t like them! And now you tell me you do like them. What is going on, Danny?’ She squeezed his hand again, the small pressure reassuring him. She really didn’t mind about the eggs.
‘The thing is, Sam, it is hard to explain, but I find eggs very unreliable.’
‘Go on.’
‘They just can’t really be counted on. I love hard-boiled eggs, they’re my absolute favourite, but nine times out of ten, they’re just wrong. They’re too hard, they’re too soft. They’re so unpredictable. And don’t even get me started on poached eggs.’
‘This doesn’t feel insurmountable, Danny. You just have to be consistent, you can get pretty close if you use the same technique every single time.’
‘Not true. That’s not at all true. You can use exactly the same type and size of egg, you can measure everything exactly the same but sometimes they come out with the white uncooked and stringy, which is the worst, and sometimes they’re too hard. And whilst hard isn’t as repulsive, it always feels like the saddest waste of opportunity, because at some point in time, the egg would have been perfect.’
‘Well, that just doesn’t seem a big enough problem to stop you eating eggs altogether. You’re a ludicrous excuse for a human being.’
‘It’s my brain, Sam. If you could see inside my brain you’d know just how big a problem that is. As a young man, before I met you, I spent a good few weeks trying to get a hard-boiled egg to turn out perfectly every time. I weighed the eggs, I measured the water. I had a chart. It should have been science, but it was just voodoo. It was all too unpredictable. I had to give up.’
Sam lay quietly, watching the sky make its tiny adjustments to its colour and depth, small strokes from east to west, micro changes all for her. She thought about her husband. She wondered exactly what did go on in that brain of his.
‘Have you heard about Prince Charles?’ she asked him.
‘In what context?’
‘In the context of hard-boiled eggs.’
‘No. I can’t say I have.’
‘Apparently, though this could be an urban myth…’
Danny interrupted her, ‘I don’t really think of the royals as urban…’
‘A palatial myth perhaps…’ Sam corrected.
‘Better,’ said Danny.
‘Apparently his butler cooks him a range of eggs, five I think, every morning. He adds them to the boiling water at intervals and then he sets them out in front of the prince in order.’
‘How does he know what order they went in?’ asked Danny, picturing the process a royal butler might use to guarantee consistency.
‘I don’t know, he must mark them, do you think? With a pencil perhaps? One to five? Anyway, the prince then begins with the middle egg, three it must be if that’s the system they’re using.’
‘Or C,’ posed Danny, deciding with certainty that he would use letters not numbers in case the numbers were confused with minutes.
‘Or C, certainly. He starts at egg 3 or egg C and then if it is a bit too runny he moves to the right, and tries egg 4 or even 5 but if it’s too over-cooked he moves to the left, to egg 2 or 1.’
‘That actually is genius,’ said Danny, admiringly. ‘A bit wasteful though,’ he added, imagining himself using a similar system and immediately dismissing it for fear of profligacy.
‘Well, perhaps the butler isn’t so fussy and eats the rest. I’ll be your butler. I mean, cooking five eggs might be a bit excessive, but three might work. And I’ll eat the ones you don’t eat.’
‘You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you?’ Danny asked, knowing with certainty that she would.
‘I’d do that for me. I love eggs. I’m happy to eat two to every one of yours.’
Sam paused. ‘But there’s another way.’
‘There is?’
‘You could just accept that one of the joys of eating a hard-boiled egg is that sometimes they are perfect and sometimes they’re not. The random nature of the hard-boiled egg is part of the experience.’
Danny considered this. ‘But I always feel so let down.’
‘Life isn’t perfect, Danny. It will let you down from time to time. And it’s going to feel out of control, mostly. And mostly it is – we can only control a tiny bit of it.’
‘That’s all I’m asking for. A bit of control.’
They were silent for a while.
‘How long are we going to lie here?’ Danny asked.
Sam looked up at the sky, it continued to change and shift, but not decisively, just little adjustments nudging it quietly across her field of vision.
‘Until it rains or we get old and die.’
Danny looked up at the sky. There was no sign of rain.
‘OK, sweet pea. I can live with that.’
Have you read Mr Doubler Begins Again? The uplifting novel from Seni Glaister, which Marian Keyes called ‘Extremely charming’.
Click here to find out more.
Acknowledgements
The non-collaborative, solitary nature of writing is the point for me. It’s the thing I do alone: selfishly, quietly, indulgently. It’s its own retreat.
However, whilst a writer can work alone, an author really can’t. There is so much more to it than the words. From the minute I’ve finished my bit, it’s very much a team effort and having worked amongst the good folk of UK publishing for most of my adult life, I’m more thankful than ever for the wealth of experience, dedication, professionalism and ho
pe that is applied to each new manuscript and at every stage of its onward journey.
I love my team at HQ – they are serious about everything they do, including partying, which is a prerequisite. Sadly, though, I’ve been very careless with my editors over the years. I’ve recently managed to lose yet another, but working with Clio Cornish was a complete joy and I am very grateful to her for the passion and skill she applied to both this book and, before this, to Mr Doubler Begins Again.
Having worked with Clio on my last novel, I would have been devastated to lose her before the ink had even dried on this one, had it not been for the knowledge that Growing Season would fall into the temporary custody of Lisa Milton. To be a successful publisher you really do need to be good with words and good with people… and Lisa is great with both.
My greatest thanks must always go to my family. My husband pointed out that in my first novel the children were absent; in my second, the children were unlikeable and in the third the children were unwanted. This is as good a place as any to remind my husband and children that I couldn’t and wouldn’t write about them, but if there’s a personal cry amongst the pages, it’s a cry for the freedom of self-determination that I would wish for them all.
My four children all inspire me in different ways but I’ve dedicated this book to Poppy and Millie who continue to amaze me… they already seem to know so much. I’d love to think I was still close to the prow of our rowing boat, keeping vigil, but these girls are already sitting with their hands on the tiller, nudging us all in the right direction.
My final thanks and love goes to Jon. None of this would make any sense or be any fun without him.
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower
22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Growing Season Page 29