* * *
—
ROSE LIVED IN A BUILDING on a street called The Pavement along the east edge of Clapham Common in south London. Her apartment was over two rival estate agents on either side of a gelato shop, and she had a bay window overlooking a paddling pool. “Rose on The Pavement” she was fond of saying, and it was also printed on her business cards. She worked as an independent landscape architect. Her niche was designing beautiful yet functional vegetable gardens. Her only regret was that her apartment on the fourth floor didn’t allow her to have one of her own. For eight years she’d been waiting for an allotment on Lorn Road, where allotments were in such high demand the waiting list was closed. “At least I’m on it,” she said. “Now I just have to figure out who to kill.”
Her apartment had a great view of the common and lots of dappled sunlight that filtered in through the trees. There were two rooms: a bedroom painted gray and a long open-plan living and dining room. Edith Wharton disliked the open plan, feeling it was forgetful of the individual uses of each room and contributed to a woeful loss of privacy. She deplored the widening of doorways into arches, referring to them as “yawning gaps.” But I thought Rose’s space was inspiring. The living room half was painted a dark ochre; the kitchen/dining half had many different paint splotches in various places because Rose was still trying to decide on a color and everything from pale pink to jade seemed to be under consideration. She asked my opinion as soon as I arrived, but I didn’t have one. All the colors seemed miraculous to me. To be honest, I didn’t even know one was allowed to paint rooms those colors. My family had always followed the “white makes a room look bigger” school of design, but I don’t know why that’s important. Sometimes you don’t want a room to feel bigger. Sometimes cozy is better.
Rose didn’t have a lot of furniture, but there seemed to be a comfortable place to sit wherever it was needed. There was a good long table for eating at one end of the room, and a Victorian daybed for resting at the other. She had a beautiful mission-style desk and a number of mismatched chairs she’d found at estate sales that nevertheless managed to look like they belonged together. Edith Wharton would have delighted in her commitment to good furniture over cheaper, mass-produced pieces.
Mainly Rose had books. Her shelves were tall and industrial and she’d carted them with her from place to place even though they were heavy and impractical. The books were shelved in roughly alphabetical order, sometimes three rows deep. She was the kind of person who had multiple copies of the books she loved most. That way, she said, she could always give one away.
The Victorian daybed doubled as a guest bed and I had doubts, at first. But then Rose pulled out a three-part screen to give me privacy from the kitchen end of the room and brought out an enormous armful of soft blankets and pillows. She helped me make up the bed and by the time she left me, I was more comfortable than I thought possible. It’s true I was jet-lagged, but I don’t think that fully explains the quality of sleep I enjoyed that night. I went to bed in one of Rose’s T-shirts, and in the morning she had a pair of jeans for me to borrow and a soft white sweater that was similar to something I had at home, but in gray.
After we met in the Landscape Architecture program, Rose and I discovered we’d briefly lived in New York at the same time, though Rose was more like Amber Dwight. They probably would have been friends. For example, Rose had grown two lemon trees in her tiny apartment bathroom because she was living above the canopy line and missed dappled sunlight. So she made it herself with the lemon trees, which had to be kept in the bathroom for the extra humidity.
“Wouldn’t a ficus have worked just as well?” I’d asked. “And you could have kept it in the living room.”
“First of all,” she said, “it was a studio apartment, so there wasn’t a living room. Second of all, lemons.”
But lemon trees are notoriously fussy. One of our professors in the program used to warn us about getting too attached to our plantings. Careful research into soil, drainage, and sun exposure was all part of the job, but if the plant didn’t thrive, we had to let it go. “It’s important to accept plant death,” he would say.
“Bullshit,” Rose said, and claimed nothing had ever died on her watch.
* * *
—
WE HAD COFFEE AND TOAST for breakfast and then Rose said we were going to visit a historical house. I feel about historical houses much the way I do about biographies: guilty I don’t enjoy them more. I might even say I’m allergic to them and other small museums. So much attention to the maintenance of so little invariably makes me gloomy. And if the person died in the house, all the worse. Rose wouldn’t tell me which one we were visiting.
“It’s a lesser-known gem,” Rose said as we walked. We turned into a square north of Fleet Street and she dropped the cigarette she’d been smoking. Her smoking started as a rebellion against the excessively healthy lifestyles of the other students in our graduate program, but the habit stuck. “I grow healthy vegetables,” she’d say. “It’ll balance out.”
There was a house on the corner with a blue plaque, but first Rose guided me toward a bronze statue near the middle of the courtyard.
“Hodge!” I said. Samuel Johnson’s cat. He sat on a thick book, a few empty oyster shells in front of him, and an inscription quoted Johnson: “a very fine cat indeed.”
“Rose, this is perfect!” I hugged her, surprising us both.
“The collection is thin, but I thought you’d like to see the garret where he worked on the dictionary.”
That the collection was thin was, to me, the root of its charm. Most of the original furnishings were dispersed after his death, and the room set up as the library had probably been, according to a notice, his bedroom, so there was no bed to see. Johnson took nearly nine years to complete the dictionary, though he’d claimed he could finish it in three. It was finally published in 1755, and until the completion of The Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, it was the preeminent dictionary in English and still ranks as one of the greatest achievements of scholarship ever produced by one person. We stayed more than an hour, a record for me, and had lunch at a nearby pub.
When we started back to her apartment, I got a text from Vanessa. It was a picture of the chalkboard in their kitchen, on which someone had written “May Rulz!” Vanessa texted, “Colby wrote it. They loved the Lego sets. You now have coolest friend status.”
I showed Rose. “Is that your friend in New York?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Is she the one who always wears outfits? You know, matchy-matchy.”
I thought she probably meant Lindy. “No. That’s my friend in Connecticut.” It was true, Lindy’s style would not have been to Rose’s liking. But when people are asked what is most important to them in a friendship, the top two answers are consistently loyalty and kindness. “She has good reasons for wanting to appear put together,” I said, and started to put my phone away.
“Aren’t you going to text her back?” Rose asked.
I pulled my phone back out and Rose watched while I typed, “I’ve never been praised with a misspelling before. I feel cool.”
Vanessa sent back the nerd face emoji and Rose laughed.
Two women about our age passed us just then walking arm in arm. Rose noticed them, too. She dropped her cigarette in the gutter—it’s still hard for me to watch her litter—and took my arm. I had never walked that way with a friend. I wasn’t sure if it was a block or two arrangement, but our arms stayed linked the rest of the way home.
* * *
—
THE JUNE WEATHER was glorious, but Rose and I didn’t do a lot the next couple of days. I can’t remember another time when I’ve been as content to spend so much time inside. It’s true I didn’t have my own clothes, but I also loved her apartment. It seemed like a space that was completely in tune with the person who lived there. Nothing was ar
ranged for anyone else’s benefit, and yet it was easy to be comfortable. Rose kept asking if I was bored and I kept saying no. We made tea and read books and talked. I stared for hours out the front windows, happy to watch the huge black crows hopping around the bright blue edge of the paddling pool. Rose never smoked in the apartment, so when she went downstairs to have a cigarette, I had the place to myself. I probably enjoyed too much pretending it was mine. Rose worked on her drawings and blueprints and once a day we took a long walk in Clapham Common, a thousand-year-old city park with three ponds, a Victorian bandstand, and so many beautiful open-growth trees I couldn’t pick a favorite.
“You’re sure you’re not bored?” Rose asked once again on one of our walks. I noticed a banner featuring happy children digging in the dirt. Community gardening posters always feature children, but in my experience it’s the old people who do all the work.
I pointed to it. “If I am, I’ll volunteer.”
“Do you want to see the Tower of London? Most people want to see the Tower of London.”
We slowed down to watch an old woman with a walker lean over to raise a bent lily and carefully prop it among its peers.
“I do not want to see the Tower of London,” I said.
“Do you want to meet some of my friends? I could host a dinner party.”
“Please don’t.”
“But you’re sure we’re not being slothful?”
I told her avarice, envy, pride, lust, and wrath harm others, and gluttony is bad for your health. But sloth is just a willingness to move slower than others and that’s not a crime. I’ve always thought despair should be the seventh deadly sin instead.
“Okay, I agree,” she said. Nevertheless, she dragged me into the bandstand as we passed and took a picture of me leaning against one of the red painted columns. “There,” she said, showing me her phone. “Now you can say you’ve done something touristy.”
Rose collected her mail when we got back to the building. “For you,” she said, handing me a postcard and raising her eyebrows.
This time the image was an aerial view of the campus gardens in summer. “You’ve made it beautiful here,” Leo had written. “I hope you won’t forget.”
* * *
—
MY BAG ARRIVED THE FOURTH NIGHT, not within the twenty-four-hour period suggested, but I didn’t care. The air- line called at ten o’clock to say the bag had been found and would be delivered within the next two hours.
“Will you be awake?” the woman asked.
“What if I’m not?”
“Then we make arrangements to deliver it tomorrow. We cannot leave the bag at the door. You must receive it.”
I asked if she could guarantee the two-hour window.
“I can guarantee that it is in a car on its way to you.”
Rose went to bed and I stayed up reading, hoping for the best. A few minutes before midnight, I heard the buzzer. The driver spoke with a Russian accent.
“Are you the bag seeker May Attaway?”
“I am.” I tried to buzz him up, but he didn’t open the door. His voice came through the speaker again.
“I can’t come up. I’m afraid you have to come down.”
I slipped on my shoes and coat and took the elevator. Outside the front doors of Rose’s building there was a man in a driver’s cap standing beside Grendel. I thanked him.
“I’ll need you to prove your identity,” he said, and made a sound that seemed like a sneeze, but it ended in a giggle.
“Really? But you brought the bag to this address, which is the address I gave the airline, and here I am. Who else wants a suitcase at midnight?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“I don’t have my wallet. I’ll have to go back up.”
“Is there something unique in the bag you can name?”
“Yes, I already did that. I have a copy of Emily Post’s guide to etiquette. It should be right on top.”
“Let’s take a look.” He was wearing a gold silk tie and a nice suit. The driver’s cap was a little grubby, as if part of a different uniform, and on the street behind him he’d left his car running. He giggle-sneezed again, then lowered Grendel to the pavement and opened the zipper gently. He peeked inside, then closed the bag and handed it to me.
“Very good. Here you go.” Another sneeze.
“Thank you,” I said again. “And thank you for driving out at night. You have a cold.”
“No, no. We did you the disservice. And everyone wants the bag immediately.”
“Is that right?”
“I don’t mind. I like putting people back on track. Good night!” He hurried back to his car and disappeared. I went back upstairs and was in bed before it occured to me that the car had been very fancy for a messenger. A Jaguar? It seemed at least possible I’d received some divine help.
London Plane (Platanus acerifolia)
The London plane tree arose as a chance hybrid between two foreign trees, possibly at Oxford, in about 1670. One parent is the Oriental plane, P. orientalis, from Turkey; the other is the American sycamore, P. occidentalis, from the eastern United States.
The bark is smooth and grayish brown and peels off in puzzle-shaped pieces to reveal a tan or pale green trunk beneath. The reason for this unusual adaptation is the bark’s lack of elasticity; the outer layer cannot expand as rapidly as the tree inside it. Trees take in oxygen through their bark as well as their leaves, so it turns out this bark shedding allows the plane to thrive in air pollution. For this reason it is planted in cities all over the world.
While I applauded my father’s embrace of such an adaptable tree—not to mention his perseverance and cunning; this tree sheet was folded into an outside pocket of Grendel—the fall foliage of the plane is notably unspectacular and the abscission, or leaf drop, is late and sudden, a torment to landscapers. I know what Blake thinks of the ones we already have on campus, and I didn’t want to be responsible for adding another.
Pilgrimage
At dinner the next night I told Rose about my friendship-themed gift ideas, the honey pot and my latest: fridge magnets with Eudora Welty’s “Friendship is inherently a magnet” on them. She ran to find her copy of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations so we could flip through the quotes on friendship and find some more.
“‘I would have friends where I can find them,’” she read, “‘but I seldom use them.’ Emerson.”
“Coasters,” I said. “No one ever uses coasters.”
“Yes! Perfect. ‘How few of his friends’ houses would a man choose to be at when he is sick.’ Samuel Johnson.”
“One of those tissue box cozies.”
“Yes.”
“I would happily stay here if I were sick,” I said.
“You are welcome, in any state, any time.”
I thanked her.
“You okay?” she asked.
I nodded.
“Are you going to tell me about that postcard?”
I smiled. “He’s a good friend.”
“Hmm, I don’t think that’s the whole story.” She squinted at me. “May, do you have a garden?”
“I have the whole university.”
“I mean at your house.”
I said I’d planted some things over the years, but nothing had thrived.
“Exactly,” she said. “What about that yew you planted? How’s it doing?”
“It’s getting tall.”
“Hold on. Where was that cutting from again?”
“Fortingall.”
She stared at me.
“In Scotland,” I added.
“I know it’s in Scotland. May, why aren’t you going up there to see it? You have to go see it.”
“I don’t know. I came to see you.”
“How can you be this close and not go up there?”
I didn’t know, by which I mean I was surprised the idea hadn’t occurred to me.
Rose was muttering under her breath, something about pilgrimages being important. “You have to go,” she said again.
“Would you come with me?”
“Really?”
I nodded.
Rose tilted her head and waited, giving me a chance to back out. When I nodded again, she jumped up. “Let me check.” She looked at her schedule on her phone. “I’d have to bring some work, but yes, I could do it.”
I don’t know how to explain it, but suddenly we had wind in our sails. I changed my return flight while Rose booked us a flight to Scotland and found a place for us to stay. “May, the Fortingall Hotel is right next to the churchyard where the yew is!” she called out, still on the phone.
I arranged a rental car while she packed a bag (including, among other things, her gardening gloves and a trowel because she never left them behind) and we were ready to go by midnight. A detour, and yet I’d never made a decision so quickly in my life.
* * *
—
WHEN JAMES BOSWELL, Johnson’s friend and eventual biographer, wanted to deepen his friendship with Johnson, he proposed they travel together. They went to the Western Isles of Scotland, remote and difficult terrain where they often had to sleep in tents, and once, a cave. The endeavor made our cushy Scottish plans seem trivial by comparison, but the concept was sound.
Rose and I flew from Stansted to Glasgow, then drove north to Perth. I adjusted to driving on the left more quickly than I thought I would, and thanked my mother for her good training. We followed the A9 to Ballinluig, then took the A827 west to Aberfeldy. From there we took the B846 to reach Keltneyburn, then turned up the single-track Glen Lyon road to reach Fortingall. It was a long and exhausting journey, but if Menelaus was blown off course on his way home from Troy because he hadn’t made sufficient sacrifices to the gods, I was getting off easy.
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