Out Of The Winter Gardens

by David Rees

  I tried to be there when he wanted my company, and he roused himself sufficiently one afternoon to propose a game of tennis on the local courts. He administered a good sound thrashing—6-1,6-1.1 was surprised at his agility and anticipation; although he was middle-aged he could run faster than me, and he always seemed to know exactly where I was trying to place the ball and put himself in the right spot to whack it miles out of my reach. He was muscular and wiry—he had the physique of a much younger man. Or so I thought. How do I know, I then said to myself, what the body of a forty-five-year-old looks like? Or a twenty-five-year-old? Apart from the obvious signs like a fat stomach, you guess people’s age by their faces, not their bodies, which are almost invariably hidden by clothes.

  He enjoyed winning the game, the first thing, apart from the cooking, that he did enjoy that week. “The older generation isn’t on the way out yet!” he said, smiling.

  “You should take that as a general sort of motto,” I answered.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Adrian isn’t the end of the world.”

  “Oh.” His face clouded. “I should find somebody else, you’re saying. Well . . . maybe. Maybe not. It might do me some good to live on my own for a while.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He laughed. “What do you know about it?”

  “Nothing. But I was thinking of Mum. I reckon it hasn’t done her a lot of good just living all these years with Aunt Bridie. She’s still bitter . . . or so I guess; I don’t know for sure.”

  “You’re right. She should have found herself another man.”

  “In that case, so should you.”

  “Good God!” He grinned. “Sixteen-year-old advises father to find lover of same sex. What is the world coming to? Let’s talk about tennis; it’s not so embarrassing. You need practice, practice, practice. And your stance is quite wrong when you’re hitting a forehand drive; no wonder it goes into the net so often. Don’t face the ball; you need to put yourself almost ninety degrees to the right of where you usually stand.” He manoeuvred me into the correct position. “And wait, before you hit it, till it’s low; till it’s dipping. Take it on the middle of the racquet, then wham! It’ll sizzle over the net and kick up the chalk on the base-line.”

  “How can I possibly remember to do all that at

  once?”

  “If you practise enough it becomes instinct. Watch how Connors and Borg do it.”

  And so on, most of the way home.

  He didn’t mention Adrian much, though I guess he wanted to. He probably thought it unfair to burden me with that subject, but one evening he said I mustn’t think their life together had merely consisted of rows and ill-temper and Adrian contributing nothing. There had been some marvellous times. Moments of sheer magic. And he reminisced for a while about parties and mutual friends, holidays in California and the Greek islands, dancing at discos.

  “Discos?” I was surprised at my father indulging in something I thought only kids would be interested in.

  “Why not? You’re not past it when you get to the age of twenty! Disco’s the best kind of dance that’s ever been invented. Oh, how I used to hate it when I was a teenager doing foxtrots and sambas and quicksteps! Always afraid I was going to tread on the girl’s feet, or her dress, and feeling like an idiotic fool. Now . . . I can spend hours on the floor and relish every minute of it! Adrian’s a very good dancer; it was always fun with him.”

  “You danced . . . together?” The idea of men dancing with men and enjoying it was really weird. I know boys dance with each other these days and don’t get laughed at, but I’d always thought they did so because they were too shy to ask the girls.

  “Of course we danced together,” Dad said. He switched on the stereo and selected a record—Laura Branigan’s Gloria. Was it something that they said. . . or the voices in your head. . . Glory, Glor-i-a! He did a few steps, then shouted over the music, “Come on! Dance with me!” I started to giggle. “What’s the matter?”

  “With my father . . . it seems so peculiar!”

  “Why? Haven't you ever danced with your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Well . . . come on! The music will stop in a minute.” I joined in. “Good, good!” He was most approving. “A natural sense of rhythm. Better than mine.”

  Our performance continued for over half an hour, to the accompaniment of Abba, the Beatles, Donna Summer and Diana Ross. “Golden oldies,” Dad said. “They don’t make them like this any more. All that awful Punk and New Wave; can’t see anything in it.”

  “I need a drink,” I said, eventually.

  “The young have no stamina,” he shouted, as I went into the kitchen and poured myself an orange juice; but, despite what he said, he was sitting in an armchair when I returned, puffing and panting.

  These moments of relief from his general mood of sadness and depression were rare, however. There were times when he didn’t want me around at all, so I took myself off to swim, or went to Miranda’s house, or just walked about the streets. In the mornings he worked, or tried to, but the noise of the typewriter clacking away was infrequent. “I can’t really do anything positive,” he said. “My mind isn’t on the job. If he’s killed that, I’ll go out and kill him!” He looked as if he meant it.

  “Killed what?” I asked.

  “Being able to write, of course! How else can I earn my living if that’s gone? I’m supposed to finish this book by September, but . . . I don’t know . .

  One day when he was out grocery shopping, I went into Adrian’s room and tried to play the harp— plucking one string at a time and listening to the note fade, then brushing my fingers rapidly to and fro in waterfalls of jangling discords. I hadn’t any idea of how to produce a real tune, but I loved the quality of the sound—rich, fruity, mellow: it conjured up visions of gold-coloured wine, ancient castles, Irish chieftains, or dancers on a stage against a romantic misty backcloth of swans and lakes and mountains. Or something more indefinable, like sunlight, or the restless yearnings I felt in myself the evening I had wandered about the streets and walked all the way home along the edge of the sea. I wished the harp would just simply play itself, as it does in Jack and the Beanstalk, and give a perfect performance.

  I looked up and saw Dad standing in the doorway, watching. In my concentration I had failed to listen for his return from the supermarket. “I thought . . . I thought for one moment Adrian was here,” he said, stammering slightly. “But I realized, half way up the stairs, that he wouldn’t be making those peculiar noises.”

  “I’m sorry. You told me not to touch it.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. Now. But I’d rather you didn’t when I’m in the house, if you don’t mind. It. . . hurts.”

  I saw Miranda most days, and occasionally in the evenings. One night we went to the cinema, some stupid horror film: it was my suggestion; I thought if she really freaked out she’d want my arm round her, or my hand to hold. A friend at school had told me of this old trick. It paid off, very satisfactorily; and on the way home we found ourselves crossing the grass of the cliff top—I didn’t organize it and neither did she, but that was where our footsteps took us. After about ten minutes she said “I think I’d better go home.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want you getting carried away.”

  “Where to?” There seemed to be an almost infinite number of possibilities.

  “Don’t be daft!” She walked to the road. I followed. “You aren’t exactly the shy, backward type,” she said, when I caught up with her.

  “I’ve never done anything . . . sensational . . . with a girlfriend,” I said. “If. . . girlfriend’s the right word to use.”

  “I guess it is.”

  “I’m glad . . . you think I’m not the shy, backward type.”

  “I think . . .” She took a deep breath. “I think you’re incredibly handsome, if you actually want to know.”

  “Thank you.” My voice sounded faint, and my h
eart began to beat very quickly.

  “The sort to take advantage of all the girls.”

  “I admit . . .I’d like to. With you.”

  She laughed. When we were outside her house, she gave me a peck on the cheek, and said “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I went home, feeling quite pleased with the world. We had, in fact, become close friends over the past few days. I’d told her about the situation with Dad— everything. She wasn’t shocked, as I’d more or less expected, but kind and sympathetic. A girl she knew at school was in a similar predicament, or at least had lived since the age of three with her mother and her mother’s female lover. Maybe it wasn’t as uncommon as I’d thought; I’d imagined my position was unique. My father, Miranda said, sounded interesting, quite unlike her own dad who, though he was the same age as mine, was really old—he spent all his spare time smoking his pipe and watching the telly. Boring! She’d read several of my father’s books and enjoyed them, but she hadn’t known he lived just round the corner. Perhaps she could bring them to the house and ask him to autograph them for her. I didn’t encourage this idea; I’m not sure why—perhaps because in her company I felt I was a normal teenage kid, whereas with Dad I felt very different: acting, or trying to act, an adult part in an off-beat script, the lines of which were still foreign to me. I just wasn’t the same person, I thought. Though which was the more real me was a question I didn’t bother to pursue; maybe because I was happy in both roles. Both, at least, were more worthwhile than the boy who played about at Alresford station and stopped trains from being derailed.

  As events turned out, that was the last time I saw Miranda for almost a year.

  Next morning, Dad seemed to have regained some of the energy he had when I first met him. He bustled around, hurrying through breakfast, and said he had to go out on an important errand. When I asked what it was, he told me, with a rather mysterious smile, that I’d have to wait and see. I went to Miranda’s, but her mother said she was at the hairdresser’s and wouldn’t be back for a couple of hours. I decided to continue my wanderings round the streets.

  It’s difficult to say why I liked those streets so much. There was nothing particularly individual in their atmosphere; they looked the same, I imagine, as any other collection of roads in thousands of other places where fairly well-to-do people live in detached and semi-detached houses built in the nineteen thirties. The appeal was something to do with the gardens. I’ve never really done any gardening—Mum and Aunt Bridie were always content to leave ours as a desert, so they didn’t instil into me or Nic much information about shrubs and plants—and perhaps because ours was such a perpetual wilderness (dandelions and ground elder were the chief examples of its produce), I got interested in other people’s. I like a garden in which you can’t see the edges, where trees hide fences, or walls are covered in clematis and jasmine, so you think it goes on for ever; and little paths meander away into the shadows and give the illusion of some secret, magical world hidden behind escallonia bushes or the forsythia hedge: Bournemouth was full of gardens like this. I imagined they belonged to people I’d like, content to let flowers and humans and things be themselves and do what they wanted to do. Someone who tolerated hollyhocks, shasta daisies, hydrangeas and red hot pokers sprawling out comfortably all over the place probably also tolerated kids sprawling out comfortably all over the place. The gardens I hate are those with plastic gnomes and no plant more than about one foot high—rigidly square creations in which you see fences more than the flowers, full of nothing but antirrhinums and salvias and pansies. The owners, I guess, are square rigid men and women who bully their kids into being exactly like themselves. Our neighbour at Alresford, Mrs Eggins, invariably refused to give us our ball back if Nic or I knocked it over the fence in a cricket game, and her garden was an eyesore. She had a flower bed with the words Welcome to Alresford spelled out in purple petunias. Her children were just like her and the garden—nasty. As for Mrs Tope, whose garden led down to the railway embankment—she’d plant plastic daffodils in February, and tie red plastic balls on her apple trees in August, so the passengers on the train would think her flowers and her fruit were so well cared for that they appeared before any else’s. She was crazy. As for the chaos of our own garden, I think it was a reflection of the fact that since Uncle John died and Dad left home, neither Mum nor Aunt Bridie have cared much about anything or anyone.

  On my way home that morning I decided that the best garden in the whole district was at 8, Watcombe Road. As I was staring at its flowers and lily pond, a boy about the same age as myself came out of the front door of the house, carrying a surf board. He stared back—a long, lingering look not suspicious or hostile, but, like mine, just curious. Dad’s garden was pretty good too, I thought, as I walked along the Overcliff Drive.

  He was listening to a record—the Beethoven fourth piano concerto; much healthier than Mahler—but he turned it off when I appeared. “We’re going away on a little trip,” he said. He was grinning, and he had an air about him of suppressed excitement.

  “Where to?” I asked, imagining he’d say Salisbury Cathedral or Stonehenge.

  “Amsterdam.”

  “Amsterdam! But . . . that’s in Holland!”

  “Oh, eleven out of ten! My son isn’t just a pretty face!”

  “But . . . I haven’t got a passport. Or any money. And . . . I’ve never been abroad.”

  “Well, it’s high time you did go abroad,” he said. “Your education has obviously been sadly lacking in a few basic essentials. Now, you don’t have to worry about money, and as for a passport, we’ll go to the post office after lunch and get you one of those temporary ones. You need a photograph, so we’ll have to pop into that booth at the station and take some mug-shots.” Amsterdam! “Where will we stay?” I asked. It was bewildering . . . mad!

  “In a hotel. It’s all booked—I went to a travel agent in Southbourne this morning. Tomorrow afternoon at four p.m. we fly from Heathrow.”

  “Fly! In an aeroplane!”

  “Well, it isn’t on a bat’s back.”

  “But I will be terrified!”

  “Statistically, it’s more probable that you’ll be killed in a road accident.” He brushed off my objections with a wave of the hand. I was beginning to learn a lot more about him, I decided with some alarm; he was a man who evidently liked doing wild things on the spur of the moment, and when he’d got an idea fixed in his head he bullied other people to go along with him. Was leaving Mum a sudden whim? Did Adrian get bullied? The depressed, hurt, unhappy dad of the past few days was easier to deal with than this. “The flight only takes an hour,” he said. “You’re no sooner up in the air than you’re coming down again. You’ll wish it wasn’t so quick.”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  “Will you really be terrified?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm. Well, it can’t be helped. It’s all settled.”

  “How long are we going for?” I asked.

  “A week.”

  “A week! That means . . . as soon as we get back, I’ll have to go home.”

  “You can stay in this house for as long as you like. I’m . . .” He grinned, shyly. “I’m tremendously pleased you’re here . . . It should have happened ages ago. And often.”

  “I think so too.”

  “I’m sorry about that. Adrian . . . Oh, never mind about Adrian.”

  “He didn’t want me?”

  “Er . . . no. Every time I suggested you should come and stay, he created a tantrum. Anyhow, your mother wouldn’t have let you. It’s only because you’re growing up she agreed.”

  “He was jealous, I suppose.”

  “Was?” He sighed. “I guess was is right. He won’t come back.”

  I walked about the room, agitated, trying to absorb all the information of the past few minutes. Until just now the only things occupying my mind were Bournemouth’s gardens, and when Miranda would return from the hairdresser’s. “Should I phone Mum,”
I asked, “and tell her what we’re doing?”

  “Why?”

  “Won’t she worry?”

  “More likely to worry if she does know what we’re doing. Besides . . . I seem to remember a clause in the divorce papers that says neither she nor I can whisk you out of the country without the other’s consent. Probably written into it in case one of the parties tries to kidnap you. So . . . I’d better ask you . . . would you like to come to Amsterdam with me? We must make sure the whole thing is voluntary on your part.” He laughed.

  I laughed too. I was already captivated by his mood, and beginning to feel butterflies of excitement myself. Amsterdam! “Of course I’d love to come,” I said. “God! Wait till I tell Nic about it! He’ll be green with envy!”

  “We’ll have to get busy then; we’re off at nine o’clock tomorrow morning on the London train from Pokesdown. You can put all your dirty clothes in the washing machine this afternoon; you don’t want to get stuck for a week with only one pair of clean knickers. Lunch first.” He removed the Beethoven, and replaced it with Irene Carra singing Fame, turned it up full blast and discoed out to the kitchen.

  I followed him, and shouted over the din “Why Amsterdam?”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not Paris or Rome?”

  “Often been to Amsterdam. It’s beautiful! Canals and old houses and plenty of interesting things to do. You’ll love it.” He opened the fridge door, and took out some celery and a plate of tuna fish. “Help yourself; that’s all there is today. Mike . . . I decided I needed a break. I need to get out of this house . . . get away from here.” He shook his head. “Too many memories. I can’t work; I just . . . Turn that damn thing down, will you? I can’t hear myself speak. In fact, turn it off.” I did so. “I just sit in my study,” he said, “and look at the sea. I don’t even see the sea when I look at it.”