by Gwyneth Rees
‘Are there many guests coming to your birthday lunch on Saturday?’ Ben asked Alex’s aunt politely.
‘Ten, I believe,’ she replied. ‘Six of them are staying the night though, so I’m afraid I’ve given you rather a lot of work, Mrs Daniels.’ She looked at the housekeeper, who was dishing out vegetables on to Alex’s dinner plate. ‘You must let me help in any way I can.’
‘Everything’s under control as far as the catering is concerned,’ Mrs Daniels responded briskly. ‘And Ben and I will have a last look over the gardens tomorrow, won’t we, Ben?’ She was speaking to Ben as if he was on her side in a way that Aunt Charlotte wasn’t, and I suddenly wondered if that was because she regarded both herself and Ben as servants, and therefore in the same camp. I noticed that she wasn’t drinking any wine, whereas Ben was. In fact, Ben, now that he was seated at the dinner table, seemed to have forgotten he was a servant and was acting more like an increasingly confident guest.
‘What about this competition I keep hearing about?’ Aunt Charlotte asked. ‘The best small garden, isn’t it?’ She was looking at Alex and me now.
‘Yeah, but I don’t know if we’ll win the prize,’ Alex said quickly, taking his plate of food from Mrs Daniels.
‘From what Ben tells me, it sounds like you’re in with a good chance,’ Mr Rutherford put in.
‘Ben wasn’t meant to tell anyone about the garden,’ I said, scowling at my brother. I was worried that Mr Rutherford and his sister would imagine the garden was so wonderful now that it would be an anticlimax when they saw the real thing.
‘All I said was that I’d seen it and it was looking really good!’ Ben protested.
‘Ben tends to exaggerate about things that I do,’ I warned them. ‘He always thinks they’re better than they really are.’
‘It’s like how you are with Chris, Dad,’ Alex said jokily. ‘You always think everything he does is perfect, don’t you?’
His father looked at him.
‘Is Chris your brother?’ Ben asked Alex after a second or two of silence.
Alex nodded, shoving a forkful of food into his mouth. ‘He’s in Italy this summer, painting.’
‘Do you miss him, Alex?’ Aunt Charlotte wanted to know, and nobody could miss the way she said it – as if it had just occurred to her that maybe Alex didn’t.
Alex looked at her for a moment. ‘Yes.’
And I knew that he was speaking the truth. I knew that he did miss his brother, even though he didn’t miss having to watch how well his brother got on with his dad.
The conversation moved on to history after that. Aunt Charlotte asked Ben if he would have liked to study history at university, if he’d had the chance. How she knew that he hadn’t had the chance, I wasn’t sure. She seemed to know a lot about Ben and me, so maybe Mr Rutherford had been telling her about us.
‘It looks like I’m getting the chance to study it further now anyway,’ Ben replied. ‘Mr Rutherford keeps lending me all his history books and offering me free tutorials afterwards!’
Aunt Charlotte laughed.
After dinner, while everyone was in the living room drinking coffee – or in Alex’s case, scoffing all the after-dinner mints – I went to the library to email Lou. As usual, there was a message from her waiting for me and I opened it eagerly. But I wasn’t prepared for what I read.
Dear May,
I am writing to ask you something that I want you to think about very carefully. Greg’s aunt and uncle know how much I’ve been missing you and they’ve said it would be fine if you came and stayed with us for the year that we’re here. You could go to school here and everything! Greg and I can pay for your flight and Greg’s uncle says he could help find Ben a job here if he wanted to borrow the money for the flight and come too. But even if Ben doesn’t want to come to Australia, I really hope that you will. Please think about it and let me know! I’m writing to Ben now to tell him all of this . . .
She signed off in her usual way with loads of love and kisses, but I hardly read the end part of the letter. Lou was inviting me to go and join her in Australia! I couldn’t believe it!
Just then Ben came into the room.
‘Lou wants us to go to Australia!’ I blurted out excitedly.
‘Huh?’ Ben looked puzzled as he came over and read my email. Then he sat down and accessed his own in-box to read the message she had sent him. His face was stony as he turned to look at me afterwards, which should have warned me what his response was going to be. ‘I can’t believe this!’
Then he started ranting. He went on and on about how he’d only moved here and taken this gardening job so that he could provide a better home for me and so that I could go to a better school. He said Louise knew that. He said there was no way he was going to throw all that away just so we could join her in Australia for a year – even if he didn’t mind getting into debt in order to pay for the flight! ‘And to come back to what exactly?’ he finished angrily. ‘No job! No home! No decent school for you! Back to where we started, in fact. Worse!’
‘Ben . . .’ I warned him. I had just noticed that Mr Rutherford was standing in the doorway. Goodness knows how much he had heard.
‘Charlotte and I are having a brandy,’ he told my brother. ‘We wondered if you’d like one too.’
‘Oh . . . no . . . thanks . . .’ Ben replied. ‘I think May and I had better be going now.’ He fumbled to shut down the computer. ‘We’ve got a busy day tomorrow.’
Mr Rutherford nodded. ‘You know, Ben, Mrs Daniels says that she’s very pleased with your work in the garden now. I don’t suppose she’s told you that, has she?’
‘No.’ Ben swallowed. ‘That’s good.’
‘And I’m very pleased too, of course.’
‘Thanks,’ Ben mumbled, flushing.
‘Let me know if you’re worried about anything, won’t you?’
Ben muttered something incoherent, looking more uncomfortable than I’d seen him look for a long time. I thought I knew why too. Ben couldn’t imagine having somebody like Mr Rutherford to take his worries to. Ben had never had that sort of a person in his life.
On the way home, Ben wouldn’t talk about Louise’s email. When I tried, he said the subject was closed. He said Lou had been selfish to suggest it and that he was going to tell her that when he wrote back to her. And he made me promise not to tell anyone else about it – especially not Alex. ‘I don’t want anyone thinking that we might not be here to stay,’ he said fiercely. ‘Because we are.’
But the next day, after we’d mowed the lawn and I was giving the benches their second coat of yellow paint, I couldn’t stop thinking about Louise’s email and I wondered whether to tell Alex about it, despite what Ben had said. I really wanted to talk it over with somebody, because the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to go to Australia. If Ben wouldn’t come too, then we couldn’t be a complete family there – but going to Australia wasn’t just about being a complete family and it wasn’t just about being reunited with Louise either, though that would be great. As far as I was concerned, more than anything else, going to Australia was about having an adventure!
I didn’t know much about Australia and I didn’t know anyone who had been there, but I did know that going there meant I’d be travelling on a plane for the first time and actually flying to the other side of the world. And I knew it meant getting to see kangaroos and koala bears, and lots more things that were different to the things we had here.
Alex was concentrating very hard on painting his green flower stems on to the wall. He was using a bigger brush than he’d used for the paintings themselves and he’d thinned out the paint quite a lot to make it go further, but he still wasn’t getting it done all that quickly. He said it was tricky painting straight on to the brickwork because the surface wasn’t flat.
‘Will it wash off OK, if your dad doesn’t appreciate having his wall painted?’ I asked Alex, still unsure whether or not to tell him about Louise’s email.
‘
I should think so – though we might have to buy more turps.’
We continued in silence until both the benches and all the flower stems were finished. Then we sat down on the grass to have a rest. Both of us had paint all over our hands, but we were too tired to care. Miraculously, Alex still had some lemon bonbons left and he held out the paper bag for me to take one. The bag had got green paint on it from Alex’s fingers, but fortunately the lemon bonbons inside were still entirely yellow.
‘Dad came to talk to me after I went up to bed last night,’ Alex said, before I could say anything about Australia.
‘Oh?’
‘He asked me about what I said at dinner – about Chris. He said he didn’t realize I thought that he thought that everything Chris did was perfect.’
I looked at him. ‘So what did you say?’
‘I said that since Chris was pretty perfect, it was OK with me.’
‘But it’s not OK with you,’ I pointed out.
‘That’s what Dad said. He said it clearly wasn’t OK and that, in any case, nobody was perfect – not Chris, not me, not him, not anyone. He said he loved me just as much as Chris, but that maybe it wasn’t always as easy to show me he loved me because I was always arguing with him. So I said he was the one who was always arguing with me and disapproving of me and stuff. And he said he didn’t disapprove of me and that if he sometimes seemed to be nagging me about what I did and what I ate and everything, it was only because he wanted the best for me.’
‘I told you that,’ I said, sticking my finger in my mouth to dislodge the chewy sweet from my back molar.
‘So I told him that he nagged all the time, not just sometimes,’ Alex continued. ‘And he said that was because he cared about me all the time, not just some times. So I said I was fed up with how he always had to have the last word in every argument.’
‘You really said that?’
He nodded. ‘I said that Chris reckoned it was easier just to let him have the last word, but that I didn’t see why I should!’
‘Wow!’ I exclaimed, hardly believing that Alex had found the guts to say all this – and wondering too if he wasn’t exaggerating what he’d actually said, just a bit.
‘Then Dad laughed and said that maybe I was more like him than Chris was and maybe that was why we argued more.’ Alex grinned suddenly. ‘I’d never thought of that!’
‘Neither had I,’ I admitted, ‘but it makes sense!’
‘Come on!’ Alex said, jumping to his feet and seeming full of energy all of a sudden. ‘Let’s get cleaned up. Then we can hang my paintings!’
‘They look amazing!’ I announced as we stood back to look at his paintings once they were up on the walls. ‘They make the whole garden look really cool!’ I thought about what my mates from school would think if they could see our garden, and I knew that even they would think it was cool. It was much more than cool though. Suddenly it seemed to have a personality all of its own.
‘The paintings do make the garden look different,’ Alex agreed. ‘It’s . . . it’s . . .’
‘It’s itself,’ I said firmly.
He nodded as if he knew what I meant. ‘It’s sort of like a trendy outdoor art gallery as well as a garden, isn’t it?’ he said.
I smiled. ‘I think it’s time we showed it to your dad,’ I told him.
‘Now?’ Alex looked uncertain.
I nodded. ‘Right now, while the sun’s still out. Let’s give him a private viewing before we invite anybody else.’
As Alex and I went up to the house to find his father, I knew this was going to be the difficult bit – explaining that we’d taken Chris’s canvases and oil paints to help decorate the garden. But to my surprise, when it came to it, Alex did most of the talking – he hardly left any of it to me.
‘That stuff isn’t cheap, you know,’ Alex’s father said, frowning. He hadn’t interrupted while Alex told him everything, but now he was looking very stern and I could see that he was on the brink of losing his temper. ‘It’s not meant to be played around with. And in any case, you shouldn’t just take things that don’t belong to you.’ It was obvious that he had no idea that his younger son had any talent for art and he was clearly seeing this as nothing more than an irresponsible prank.
‘I know we should have asked you, Dad,’ Alex said in a nervous voice. ‘I’m sorry – but we really wanted it to be a surprise.’
‘And we haven’t just played around,’ I added quickly. ‘Why don’t you come and see?’
As the three of us walked in silence along the path that led to the walled garden, I remembered the first time I’d walked here, the day after Ben and I had arrived. That was before I’d met Alex properly and before we’d become friends. It was the garden that had introduced us, I thought now. It was the garden that had made us friends.
I unlocked the garden door and went in ahead of Alex and his father to check that everything was still how it had been when we’d left it. There was no reason why it shouldn’t be – it was just that now the garden was complete, it seemed to have taken on a slightly magical quality as far as I was concerned. And magic was unpredictable.
But everything was in its place – no painting had fallen off the wall and no bird had accidentally flown against the painted flower stems and smudged them.
‘All right, you can come in,’ I called out – and Alex brought his father inside.
Mr Rutherford stared. He stared first at the far wall where the four sunflower paintings were facing him. Then he looked at the corner flower bed with its real yellow roses – and the painting of the rose that hung on the wall just above them. He looked over the rest of the garden, taking it all in, but his eyes quickly returned to the paintings.
Alex visibly tensed as his father went over to examine them more closely and I prayed that Mr Rutherford was going to say that he liked them. But before he could say anything at all, Alex started to speak. ‘They’re not as good as Chris’s, I know, but he’s older than me and I’m only just starting out. And you don’t know how good you might get until you try, do you?’
Mr Rutherford turned to face him then. ‘Alex, I think these paintings are brilliant. I had no idea you could paint as well as this.’
The look of happiness on Alex’s face right then was better than anything I could have imagined. And that’s when I realized that what mattered most to Alex – at least for now – was what his dad thought of his paintings, regardless of whether or not they were masterpieces.
Aunt Charlotte was delighted with our garden when we took everyone to see it on Saturday morning. She loved the paintings of the sunflowers and said that she would put the one we were giving her as a birthday present on her wall as soon as she got home. Mr Rutherford was full of compliments about the garden too and Ben, of course, pronounced it totally perfect. But unexpectedly, the person who was most delighted was Mrs Daniels.
‘It’s just like it was in my Geoffrey’s day!’ she exclaimed. ‘He always liked to keep a neat garden, did my Geoffrey.’ And she spent a good half an hour wandering around admiring everything except Alex’s paintings, which I got the feeling she didn’t really think belonged there, since her only comment was to say that she didn’t know what her Geoffrey would make of them.
‘I expect he’d turn in his grave, wouldn’t he?’ Ben quipped, but luckily Mrs Daniels wasn’t near enough to hear.
Mr Rutherford was though, and he gave my brother the sort of look he generally reserved for Alex when he was getting a bit above himself.
Aunt Charlotte’s guests were due to arrive throughout the morning in time for her big birthday lunch, which was scheduled for two o’clock on the terrace at the back of the house. Ben and Mr Rutherford had already carried two tables outside, which they had placed end to end with a huge white tablecloth covering them, and it was Alex’s and my job to take out all the chairs. The gardens were also going to be open to the public all weekend, which meant that people could just walk up the drive and wander round the grounds if they
wanted to. Mr Rutherford was a bit worried that people might end up gawping at his guests as they ate, but Mrs Daniels said that from past experience, people generally came in small numbers and tended to stick to the front of the house and the rose gardens. In any case, she had made two signs saying PRIVATE PARTY, which she had already propped up at the ends of both paths leading to the terrace.
Our walled garden was open to the public too now, and the judges who were inspecting all the small gardens – including one other walled one in a neighbouring village – were scheduled to look at ours at four o’clock this afternoon.
‘I hope it doesn’t rain,’ Alex said. But it didn’t look like it was going to. The sky was blue with only a few white clouds, and it was forecast to remain fine all weekend.
Throughout the morning, Ben and I helped Mrs Daniels as the guests arrived. Ben took any bags upstairs to people’s rooms, in between doing last-minute things in the garden, and I helped by serving people tea and biscuits. Mrs Daniels said she felt like she was running a hotel and I could tell that what she really wanted was to be outside, showing people the gardens. She managed to do quite a bit of that in between her housekeeper’s duties, which was a relief to Ben because when anybody asked him what a particular plant or flower was called, he rarely had a clue.
Then, just before midday, a taxi pulled up with a guest in it who I recognized.
She came inside and stood in the hallway, letting Mrs Daniels fuss around her. She was being fussed over more than the other guests because she was blind.