‘I’ll do you a deal,’ I offered. The anger in my voice was quite hidden.
‘What’s that?’ He was relieved. He thought he had got away with it. He had wanted this ever since he had started his love affair with Helen, and now he had it. He had to struggle to keep his excitement out of his voice.
‘Let me take your picture,’ I said. ‘With my old camera.’
He laughed. It was such a little thing. He would have sold his soul to sleep in Helen’s bed in her Docklands flat, and party with her smart friends all week, and then come home to me, complaisant, ignorant, in the country at weekends.
‘Now?’ he asked.
‘Now!’ I said gaily.
I fetched the heavy camera and saw the firelight reflected in a hundred little points on the brass fittings. I ducked under the hood and looked at Mark through the glass window. His image was inverted but I could recognise his expression. He looked like a little boy who has broken into a sweet shop at night. He looked ready to eat himself sick.
I slid in the treated glass, and pulled out the metal slide. I took off the lens cap and counted to sixty – there was only one lamp on, and the firelight. Then I capped the lens with that little half-turn and pushed in the slide and took the glass to develop.
‘Will you be long?’ Mark called. I heard the chink of the brandy bottle on his glass. ‘Are you coming to bed?’
I checked, I could not believe it, but it was true. He wanted to celebrate by having us both, both in the same day. He wanted to kiss me, and caress me while his skin still remembered her touch. He wanted to taste me while his tongue was still furred with the alcohol he had drunk in her bed. He wanted to come inside me, while his body was still sticky from her wetness. He was greedy for us both.
‘Don’t wait up,’ I said from my darkroom.
I printed two pictures. One for me and one for George Cozens. I pegged them on the line, and I looked, in that safe red light, from the picture of Mark to the pictures of the other two: of my baby and my dearest friend. Both dead.
Then I went to the sitting room and closed the door as quietly as Mark used to close it. I dialled George Cozens’ number and when he answered I said I was sorry to ring so late, but it was about the camera. His grandfather had taken very few pictures of people – did George know why that was?
He chuckled, a late-night whisky laugh. ‘Because they thought it would steal their souls, you know,’ he said. ‘Primitive peoples, odd superstitions.’
I nodded. ‘I thought so,’ I said. ‘And one more thing … What was the name of the tribe of Indians he photographed? When he did manage to get them to pose?’
George hesitated. ‘Let me see, they were called the … the … Ekondo tribe. But there’s not much about them in the books,’ he said. ‘They’re all dead now. They died soon after my grandfather’s visit.’
‘Yes,’ I said softly, thinking of the three pictures pinned in my darkroom. My baby, my friend, and now, beside them, the picture of my husband. ‘I thought they would be.’
The Garden
My husband is a great one for his garden. He never will let me touch a thing. His garden shed is as he wants it – just so – and he has a greenhouse too, with little plant pots made of orange plastic marching in rows down the staged shelves, which he paints with creosote. The smell of the chemical is like illness. It is coloured a bright green, like toilet cleaner. His greenhouse smells like a morgue.
Every winter he takes the motor mower to be serviced and the blades to be sharpened and made ready for the onslaught of the springing grass when the season opens. He prepares for it like a gamekeeper prepares for a pheasant shoot. All his winter season is directed to the moment when he can get out into the garden and cut it back. He checks the scything whip of the strimmer; he oils and sharpens the crocodile bite of the hedger. Then, on the first sunny day, he tells me he will be gardening all day.
‘I can’t wait!’ he says with his sharp little laugh.
He goes out with his blades and his sprays to work in the garden until teatime. When he comes in for his tea his hands are stained green with sap, like a butcher’s palms are reddened with blood. The soft new grass on the lawn is crushed down, the damp earth churned up, the hedge at the front of the house is split and torn, and the soft little corners of the garden where unexceptional plants had taken root and started to grow are laid bare: strimmed and whipped down to the root.
When he sees the devastation he has caused, even he can see that the garden looks a little bare. Then he seeks to fill the vacuum he has made.
‘What about one of these swinging chairs?’ he asks, showing me a catalogue full of bright plastic.
He thinks to buy me with toys.
‘For the patio?’ he says. ‘This one’s nice, and I could get these ornamental urns to match.’
He likes his garden furniture, does my husband. He likes things in the garden that do not loll or sprawl or fruit. He likes plastic statues coloured to look like stone, his flower pots as red as the original terracotta. He likes moulded concrete pots painted to the colour of sandstone. He likes wooden barrels that were never made to hold beer. He does not mind that nothing is what it pretends to be. He does not mind that nothing is real.
Last summer he bought a dinner table and six chairs for the patio. They looked as if they were made of wrought iron, forged and hammered by a man working with iron and fire, cooled in a hissing trough of water. But they were not metal, they were no element at all. At the first wind they were bowled over and blown across the lawn, breaking buds where they rolled, tossed about like a child’s discarded toys. They were plastic, they were all but nothing. Now, before he comes in from his garden, he stacks them one upon another like Tupperware boxes on a shelf, and he puts a stone on top to weigh them down.
I remember when he had no garden, when he was nothing more than a lad with an allotment. He took my eye when I stepped off the bus to go home. I was a young woman then, I worked in a shop that sold cards and pens and writing pads. A nice shop, as my mother pointed out to me, with nothing dirty to handle and nothing heavy to lift. Every evening when the bus dropped me at the stop and I started to walk home he would cycle past me, going from his allotment to his own home, where his mother was cooking his tea. Some days he wobbled unevenly with a bouquet of leeks clasped to his shirt. Some days he had a wickerwork basket brimming with new potatoes with the soil still clinging to their skins. In midsummer he embraced a marrow, in autumn he had his arm around the golden globe of a pumpkin. I noticed him because he seemed like a boy from the land itself, as if the allotment had grown him, brown-haired and brown-eyed and muddy-fingered, just as it grew these lush vegetables. And I thought, day-dreamy shop girl that I was, that his kisses might be sweet and strong like vegetables grown in good earth. That to love him might be to put down roots of my own.
It was me that first called out to him. He used to wobble slowly past me, as if he was thinking what he might say, how he might start a conversation. But it was me, a bit of a brazen girl perhaps, who said pertly enough: ‘When are you going to grow some flowers then?’
He stopped at once. ‘I don’t grow flowers,’ he said humbly. ‘I don’t see the point. You can’t eat flowers. Would you like some carrots?’
I laughed at that, but he did not mind. He smiled at my laughter and still he held out for me the earth-stained brilliant carrots with their thick green heads and their long slim orange roots. ‘I don’t cook,’ I said, inspecting them.
‘You can eat them raw.’
He took one and rubbed it carefully on the sleeve of his jacket. He held it to my mouth. I nibbled it, like a tempted rabbit, nibbled it gently and tasted the flavour, as sweet as fruit, and the delicious cold chunky texture. ‘It’s nice,’ I said, surprised.
‘I’ll bring you some peas tomorrow,’ he promised me, and then he was back on his bike and gone into the early summer twilight, leaving me with a carrot in my hand, which I ate on the way as I walked slowly home.
; He courted me with vegetables, he seduced me as if he came from the earth itself and its fruitfulness was a promise of what our life would be together. By the time he took me home to meet his mother – potato and leek pie – I was already his. I thought that I had found a man who would give me a sense of the earth hidden beneath the pavement, of the richness of a life which had been lost to me, a city-dweller. I thought that we would live off the land, I thought that life would blossom and fruit for us easily, like a paradise, a new Eden. I thought we would eat vegetables and drink water, and riot among grapes and soft fruits.
I was greatly, greatly disappointed. He worked during the day in a shop, just as I did. He worked in a big store, in the accounts department. His real life, the main part of his day, was ceaselessly calculating figures. His excitement was tracing an error in stock or a faulty bill. The allotment was only a hobby, inherited from his father. He had a great love of gardening, but it was not the careless fruitful love that I had hoped for. He liked to struggle with the earth and make it yield only what he ordered. He liked to fight with Nature and subdue it. He liked nothing except what was tamed and trained and trammelled. And in a little while I felt that he wanted me tamed and trained and trammelled too.
I grew thinner. Marriage did not suit me, as it turned out. I who had wanted to luxuriate in fruit and vegetables found that I lost my appetite when offered shop-bought bread and thin cuts of meat. I had hoped to be blessed, rich and fertile. I found that our life was thin and cool, arid. It was no surprise to me that we did not conceive a child. We planned for a child. We bought our house because it had a garden and stood on a new estate where other people with children would come to live. I gave up my job since it was too far for me to travel, and he liked me home in time to prepare his tea. And then we waited for the child.
He waited; not I. I knew that a man who saw himself in a continual battle against Nature would never find me fertile. I knew that a man who liked to cut and weed and hoe would never plant a seed in me. I did nothing to prevent it. I simply knew that it could not happen. And when it did not happen, I felt neither disappointment nor surprise. I felt myself slip into a sort of limbo while I waited to see what would happen next. But it was years ago that I started waiting to see what would happen next. And the answer was that nothing happened next. Nothing much changed at all – except the garden.
When he first bought this house it stood in a sea of churned earth where a wood had once grown. Corrugated tracks ran around it and the rubble from the builders cluttered the two corners that faced out from the housing estate to the woods. My husband paced out the boundaries and marked where his mud joined next door’s mud. He stuck little white stakes into the earth and measured up, he bought fence posts and fencing, so our churned earth would be separated from the other churned earth, and from the untouched woodlands behind the house. Nothing mattered more to him than he should mark out our land, defend it from the incursions of next door – whoever they might prove to be – and cleanse it of the anarchic influence of the woods.
But that first spring, while he measured and paced and staked, the garden flowered without him, it flowered despite him, and day after day I watched the woodland flowers creeping into the sun like fifth columnists from the old wood.
Snowdrops came first, with sharp determined spoonheads forcing their way through the mud. Then the knives of daffodil leaves sprouted blind thick leaves that swelled and swelled in the sunlight, pregnant with hidden blooms.
‘Someone’s gardened here before!’ my husband said indignantly. ‘They promised me that this was nothing but fields before they built the estate, but look here – there are bulbs all over!’
He went to telephone, to discover the price of a Rotavator to tear the earth away from the alien flowers, but they were too quick and cunning for him. While he argued with the shopmen and checked the catalogues, the rosettes of primroses threw out pale hairy stalks and Caerphilly cheese-coloured flowers, violets cropped in the shade of his new fence, and a thick carpet of vetch as blue as a midsummer night sky spread around the marking posts which were defining the site of his ornamental lily pond.
Nettles sprouted in thick green clumps, juicy with stings, and his garden gloves could not shield his burrowing hands from their rich malice. He came to tea with a face red and moist with anger. ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to them. We’ll see how they like a can of X.30.’
He made the poison at my kitchen sink, in my pastry bowl. I watched him as he handled the powder, dribbling in water in a measured dose. When I looked out of the window a breeze stirred the nettles and the forget-me-nots that had filtered among them, and they trembled and shrank back.
Next morning they were all brown and limp, rotting where they lay, like some mediaeval battlefield struck with plague. He had sprayed wildly with his pump-gun and the acid had eaten into the faces of the pansies. The primrose leaves were sere and yellow and the flowers brown as paper. He sprayed again the next night, and the night after, until the garden was sick to its secret heart and everything there was dead. Then, at last, was my husband finally happy and he dug a large hole for his lily pond and ordered the men with concrete to come and level the diseased soil in front of the patio doors and pour the concrete like molten lava to bury everything, so that nothing, not even the tiniest hidden root of a tenacious primrose, could survive.
And I knew then, as they wiped out the life for yards around the house, that I had been mistaken in him. ‘What would happen next’ was nothing more than this realisation. He was not a lad enriched with the earth, warm from the vegetable bed. He had looked like that to me in the seductive dusk of a summer evening; but I had been wrong. He had never been a young man who would bring me the richness of the earth, I would not be able to grow old with him and mellow like the bloom on an autumn grape. I had not lived the life I had hoped for, I would not have a future that would bring me joy. My husband had looked like a lad as sweet as a plum but he had become a middle-aged man who suspected richness, who was afraid of life. He liked killing the flowers; he liked crushing the life out of the earth. He watched them pouring the concrete into the marked squares with vindictive joy.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere!’ he said. He was delighted.
He has never encouraged me to garden. In our marriage the world is divided into those things which are my work, and those things which belong to him. It is more orderly thus. The money he earns is his, of course. He gives me cash every Monday for the shopping and once a fortnight he takes the household bills to the kitchen table and writes out cheques to cover them. It is my job to put the cheques in the envelopes and make sure that they are posted.
The car is his, owned and driven and maintained by him. When I drive it he tells me what I am doing wrong and where it should be parked. He tells me which lane I should be in, and whether or not it is safe to reverse. When it makes a rattley noise he names parts of the engine which might be causing that noise. He takes it to the garage and they pretend to listen to him, and nod in agreement. Then they do whatever they want and send him an enormous bill, which he pays without regret. He knows about cars and how to drive because he is a man, just as I do not know because I am a woman.
The television is his; he watches every night from teatime till bedtime, the remote control is on the arm of his chair, he changes the programme without discussion, and I know, without ever being told, that there are some programmes that he must see, that must not be interrupted even by a remark. I sit in silence and my face is turned towards the screen but I do not always see the pictures.
The whole lounge is his, for I never sit there alone. Actually, I never sit down for very long during the day; even my dinner is a sandwich I eat while I am working.
But my husband is a great one for his chair. He dominates the room from his place by the fire and the television, with the coffee table conveniently close and the magazine rack to hand. It is his own chair, a special chair where no-one else sits, and as well as this chair, he
has his own place at the kitchen table, at the head of the table furthest away from the sink and the oven. He has his own side of the bed, beside the bedside table and his reading light. The bathroom is his because he controls how it should look. It is tiled and plain, he cannot abide clutter in the bathroom. We have small bath towels, he says large thick towels are a pointless extravagance, copied from American films. I am allowed one brand of bath salts, which must be put into a special jar that sits on the side of the bath, one jar only. I cannot have oils and salts and foam. I have to choose one product and stick with it. He does not want disorder in the bathroom.
It is his garden, of course, and his garage.
In this division of goods I own nothing but somehow I am responsible for it all. I keep his special chair clean, Hoovering up crumbs from the interstices of the cushions. I polish his television screen carefully to make sure there are no distracting smears. I clean his bathroom, taking care with the underside of the toilet seat which he will see when he lifts and leaves it up; changing the empty rolls for fresh toilet paper, changing the towelling top and the towelling mat around the base twice a week, for men are careless in these trivial matters and it is often spattered with his urine. I clean the bedside table where he sometimes leaves his torn toenails. I buy him a new toothbrush when his old one is squashed. I clean the bath every day and the sink where he leaves a light line of shaving foam and stubble. And it is my task to throw away his old razor blades, which he leaves greasy and still spitefully sharp on the windowsill.
The cooker is mine, I suppose. The sink, the larder, the fridge, the Hoover, the mop, the kitchen cupboards, the washing machine, the tumble dryer. The electricity to run these goods is his – I must be frugal with his supply. Washing must dry on the rotary washing line that grows like a bleak espaliered tree from the concrete slab outside the back door.
Bread and Chocolate Page 10