“No money in gardens. No real money.”
“Skip away to Ireland, then. That Terry keeps asking’ you to do his garden, don’ he? An’ he’s hyper-rich. Sting him for a deadly sum, why don’ you? What’ve you gotta lose?”
This was a subject they had covered several times before. Julie, who was far more sentimental than she liked to pretend, had fallen for the dubious charms of Terry’s weekly epistles to the glories of dogs, gardens and rural life, which she stole as soon as Catherine had discarded them.
“I’ve told you,” Catherine repeated, “I’ll never go to Morne while Terry Devlin’s there.”
“But his letters he’s tryin’ to be friendly.”
“Ah, but why? That’s what you always have to ask why.”
“Goodness of his heart? Tryin’ to make amends for what he did toyer dad?”
“I think not.” She spoke in a tone of great certainty, but in truth she still couldn’t make up her mind about the letters, which arrived with unerring regularity every Tuesday and which she had come to read with rather more enjoyment than she liked to admit. Was Terry really trying to say sorry? Or was he completing the reversal of fortunes by taking a paternalistic and patronising interest in her welfare?
“Well, he can’ be all bad, not if he’s stinkin’ rich,” Julie declared with her own unanswerable logic. “Play him at his own game, I say. Take the jobi Get him to lay on the private plane, the cars, the whole bit. Make it champagne all the way. Take the money and Julie broke off abruptly and turned her head to some distant sound that Catherine had missed. “Someone callin’ for you, Cath.” Swivelling her chair, she added waspishly, “Well, well, if it isn’t your secret admirer.”
Catherine turned herself around and saw a man silhouetted against the french windows. Even before he began to walk towards them she recognised Simon’s lean upright figure and stifled a guilty sense of dismay.
Julie said in a low voice, “Mr. Dark Horse.”
“What?”
“Hidden depths. But murky, I’d say.”
“He’s been a good friend,” Catherine hissed reprovingly before calling out, “Hello, Simon.”
“I’m off then,” sang Julie and pushed herself rapidly away.
As Simon stooped to kiss Catherine on the cheek she caught the scent of his aftershave, which still managed to take her by surprise because it was so spicy.
“How are you, Catherine?”
As always he had brought flowers; as always they were white, exotic and almost certainly expensive.
“Thank you,” she said. “How lovely.”
“And .. . this.” He thrust a slim volume into her hand and said in a breathless excited tone, “I managed to find a copy!”
She couldn’t think what it was, and in the dark it was impossible to read the title. “Thank you.”
“It’s a new edition. They’ve taken out some of the minor works and added a few more in the name of revisionism. But it’s still got the best ones.”
She realised it was a book of poetry he’d talked about, and she in an unthinking moment had said she’d love to read it. “That’s very kind.”
“I hope you don’t mind me turning up out of the blue, without letting you know,” he said in his soft deferential voice.
“Not at all.”
It was almost nine and a Friday. Unless he was abroad Simon usually came on Sundays first thing in the morning and on Wednesdays in the evening. Before leaving he would punctiliously arrange the day and time for his next visit.
“So .. .” Catherine stalled immediately. For no reason she could ever identify conversation with Simon did not flow easily. “Why this unexpected surprise?”
“Have you spoken to Ben today?” he asked.
“No. But then he’s picking me up at nine tomorrow. I’m going home for the weekend.”
“Of course. I forgot.”
Simon was not someone to forget anything, however small, and this, along with his unexpected appearance, made her ask, “Nothing wrong?”
“No, no. I was just passing.” The attempt at casualness didn’t come off. “And .. . well, I’ve got a bit of news.”
“Good news, I hope.”
“Shall we go inside?”
“Simon! You’re making me nervous.”
“Nothing bad, really. It’d be nice to sit somewhere, that’s all. Shall I.. .?” He was offering to push her along the path.
They went to a corner of the smoking room, an airless box of a room in the style of an airport lounge with rows of chairs along the walls and bright overhead lights and coffee tables patterned with rings and cigarette burns. The place was empty except for a couple of girls puffing greedily under an anti-smoking poster.
Simon moved a chair round, positioning it at a precise angle to her wheelchair before sitting on the edge and leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. As always he was smartly dressed, wearing a light grey Italian suit with a deep blue shirt and silk tie. His dark hair was sleek and newly combed, his small rimless spectacles flawlessly polished, his tapered hands exceptionally white and soft-looking. She had long since guessed that he spent time grooming himself in the Gents before coming in search of her.
“Well?” she prompted lightly.
“First, how are you?” he asked, his eyes fixed hungrily on her face.
“How’s the physio going?”
“Oh, I’ve finally understood how one can be driven to kill. The physios are deaf to shouts of pain.”
He examined her face carefully to gauge her mood before deciding to smile. “But.. . progress?”
“It’s better than sitting on my bum all day.”
Catherine had been lucky, her spinal cord was only partially severed. On a good day, which meant a day when the physios managed to goad her sufficiently, Catherine could manage one or two uncertain steps on callipers and crutches, rolling along like a caricature of a peg-legged sailor. The physios had promised that with ‘just’ a few more weeks’ work she’d be able to manoeuvre herself quite a distance, still with callipers and crutches of course, and on surfaces that were hard and level. For uneven surfaces however, pavements, shops, the outside world in general, wheels would have to remain what they termed the ‘chosen’ form of transport, at least for the moment. Either from ignorance or tact, no one had suggested how she was going to get around gardens yet.
“And the new callipers?” Simon asked conscientiously. As always he forgot nothing.
He listened to her report with a loyal smile, and she remembered how strained his smile had been when he’d started visiting her almost three months ago, how his cheek used to flutter so violently that he would turn away to hide it, and how very wearing she had found him in those days, with his overwhelming attentiveness, his intense desire to please. At some point, thank heaven, he must have puzzled over the tension he seemed to engender in her and finally understood that he must pull back a little, he must have realised that even the best-intentioned concern must have its limits, because as the weeks had passed he’d moderated his attention, or at least concealed it. He’d learnt to laugh with something like spontaneity, to give the appearance of being at ease, he’d learnt not to scrutinise her every move, though nothing, it seemed, could ever quite dislodge the watchfulness from his dark steady eyes. It was as though he felt the need to remain constantly alert to the dangers of misunderstanding or misjudgement.
At first she could only get him to talk about his social life, the films and plays he’d seen, the charity dos he’d attended. He took peculiar pride in these activities, he talked about the famous names he’d met, as though this proved his credentials as a gregarious member of a racy crowd, which only made her suspect that he was rather lonely, an impression borne out by his mention of numerous girlfriends, but no one in particular.
Having exhausted his social life the conversation would often flag, and once, when the silence had stretched out longer than normal and Catherine was feeling unusually irritable, she’d turned to the subj
ect she had been warned to avoid. She asked him about his background.
The effect had been unexpected. It was as though he’d been waiting for her question, had even prepared for it. With a slow nod and a glimmer of anticipation, he’d proceeded with solemnity to tell her that his paternal grandparents had been German Jewish immigrants, who’d settled in Manchester before the war. Simon’s father had been the youngest of their six children. Simon had lost contact with him years ago, but believed he was running a business up north somewhere. Simon’s mother was living with a sister who ran a clothes shop in Chigwell. His mother had grown up in Ilford in Essex, the daughter of a trade union official. She had gone to the Royal Ballet School on a scholarship and become a star of the Ballet Rambert - a fact Simon recounted with immense pride until she gave up the touring life to have Simon, her only child. She and Simon’s father had split up when Simon was four acrimoniously, Catherine gathered and Simon had lived with his mother in a small flat in Islington - ‘not the smart end’ until he won a place at the City of London School, when they had moved out to a flat in Manor Park. Reading between the lines, Catherine guessed that the move to Manor Park had been forced on them by lack of money, and that for Simon’s mother life as a jobbing dance teacher had been an unwelcome comedown.
In a further show of confidence, unprompted but not, she felt, unrehearsed, Simon had told her with a kind of offhand bravado that did not sit easily on him that he’d been unhappy at school, unhappy at university and only started to enjoy life when he’d qualified and begun to make money. “I realised money was the way out,” he’d declared. “The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.” He’d laughed, though she’d sensed that for him it wasn’t much of a joke.
Over the weeks, Simon continued to volunteer more particles of his history like precious gifts, given willingly but also with some anxiety as to how they would be received and safeguarded. She couldn’t imagine why he was so sensitive about his past. It couldn’t be his origins, not in an era when it was entirely fashionable to have poor immigrant grandparents, nor his schooling, which had taken him to Cambridge and a law degree. His parents, then? If so, Catherine guessed it was his mother, whose life story seemed to have stopped some ten years ago when she’d gone to live with the sister in Chigwell. Though Simon clearly loved and admired his mother, he never talked about her in the present tense, nor explained how she passed her time, except to say ‘quietly’. Catherine imagined Alzheimer’s or mental illness.
This, then, was the uncertain basis of their unlikely relationship:
medical updates, social reports and occasional confidences. She would have hesitated to call it a friendship, she wasn’t even sure why she’d let the visits drift on week after week. Possibly because he made few demands on her, possibly because for all his awkwardness she felt oddly comfortable with him. If she’d stopped to wonder why he should want to come and see her quite so often, she would have put it down to his nature, which would always search out some cause to which he could offer his rather dutiful brand of devotion.
Only once had he unnerved her. “Do you believe in fate?” he’d asked one evening. “I don’t mean in the Buddhist sense. Rather the coincidental sense. The belief that coincidence signals and determines our destinies.”
“That depends on the kind of coincidence. Nice ones, yes. Nasty ones, it’s all a horrible plot.”
“I mean certain .. . bonds. Certain connections. You don’t think they’re significant? That they indicate a predisposition for two people to meet?” He was strangely agitated, his voice breathy and rushed, his mouth jerking slightly as he talked.
“It all seems like chance to me, how people meet.”
“But take MS! You don’t realise, there’s no way you could know there’s a bond between MS!”
“There is?”
“I’ve never told you before!” He almost lost his nerve then. He said with a false laugh, “You’re going to think it’s stupid.”
“Try me.”
As so often before, she felt that it took an enormous effort of faith for him to voice his more private thoughts. “My family,” he said at last with a gasp. “When they came over from Germany well, their name was Gartenbauer!” He watched eagerly for her reaction.
Catherine got half way there. “Garden. Garden-something.”
“Garden builder!”
“Oh.” Now she was beginning to see. “You mean like me.”
He nodded happily, with a wide almost ecstatic grin. “Both of us garden builders!”
“But you became Jardine?” she asked, more to move the conversation along than from any real curiosity.
“Oh, my grandfather was all for anglicising the name to Garden, but my grandmother thought something French-sounding would be more distinguished.”
“Coming from Germany, was your grandfather interned during the war?”
She had startled him completely. “Yes,” he whispered, and again the strange ecstasy came over his face. “Yes .. . You knew.”
“I guessed.”
“That’s what I mean you’re intuitive.”
“I wish,” she said, making light of it. “Most of the time my intuition is precisely nil.”
“But there’s intuition between MS, isn’t there? That’s what I mean a bond. Garden builders!”
She smiled and looked away.
“I can’t talk to anyone like I talk to you, Catherine.” When she looked back, his eyes were hard and bright and needy.
“What about girlfriends? Isn’t there someone special?”
A defensiveness came over his face. “No one special, no.”
“One day, though.”
“I don’t know. I think my standards are too high.”
“Ah, women don’t suit pedestals. Too easy to topple off. I come off mine almost instantly. With Ben I think it was the third time we met when he found me picking some rough bits off my feet.”
With that, the strange intense moment had passed.
Watching him now, though, she saw the same tension in him, like a charge of electricity.
“So, what’s this news?” she asked.
He sat upright and fixed her with his dark damp eyes. “I wouldn’t bother you with this, not tonight, but I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from anyone else. I couldn’t bear it if you thought the wrong thing, Catherine. I really couldn’t bear it.”
It was the hint of supplication in his voice that always jarred slightly, the invitation to be liked. She smiled quickly to reassure him.
“You see, I wouldn’t want you to hear anything that wasn’t entirely ..
. accurate.”
She urged him forward again with a nod.
“The thing is ... with enormous regret ... I’ve made the decision to leave RNP. The fact is that Ben and I have ceased to pull in the same direction. In fact, it’s been wrong for a long time. It’s got to the stage where we’d be better off on our own. I’m deeply sorry, Catherine. Believe me.”
He had spoken in the hushed tones of someone imparting momentous news, and Catherine found herself replying with equal gravity. “I’m sure Ben will be very sorry to lose you.”
The dark eyes did not leave hers. “Obviously, if there had been any way of avoiding it, I would have moved heaven and earth. You know that. Heaven and earth, Catherine.”
“These things happen.”
“It wasn’t lack of trying.”
“No, I understand.”
“Really?” His anxious gaze searched her face, looking for confirmation or reassurance. “And I’d like you to know that it was no split-second decision. It’s been obvious to me for a long time that it couldn’t be made to work. But of course I wasn’t going to do anything while Ben couldn’t get away, while he was needed here with you.” His voice trembled slightly, his expression softened, as though the very mention of her was enough to move him. “But now that he’s back at work, now he’s travelling again, I feel that I have no choice, I can’t leave
it any longer.”
“It’s good of you to have waited. I’m sure Ben’s very grateful.”
“Good of me?” He recoiled fastidiously at the suggestion. “It wasn’t a question of good. It was the right thing to do, Catherine, from every point of view. The right thing.”
She thought what a strange unfathomable person he was, so racked by the proprieties of life. There were moments when she felt in awe of his old-fashioned rectitude.
“But now,” he stated with a break in his voice, ‘the time has finally come. I do hope you understand, Catherine. Believe me, if there’d been any other way .. .”
“You must do what you must do, Simon.”
He gave his odd breathy laugh, which seemed to jump out of his throat at the most incongruous moments. “I have to say Ben’s pretty angry about it.”
“He probably needs time to get used to the idea.”
“I’d like to think so, Catherine, I really would, but he’s saying that I’m in breach of our agreement, that I’m not leaving him enough time to find someone else. But that’s absolutely not true. I’m following the terms of our agreement to the letter. I want you to know that, Catherine. You have my word.” He examined her face again, searching for whatever it was he feared to find there. “He’s also accused me of leaving him in the lurch. He says I couldn’t have chosen a worse time.”
“There’s a lot on?”
“Nothing unusual. No, what he’s complaining about is money. Saying we’ve got no money. But it’s simply not true!” he argued vehemently. “Completely the opposite! Catherine -I’ve been working flat out for the last four months to get us out of the woods, and now we’re there. We’re actually there. He’s talking nonsense.”
“When you say there .. .?”
“Oh, the extra loans have been paid off, the extra overdrafts we took out in March. And we’ve enough left over to make up our back pay.”
Catherine prompted cautiously, “But there was a bad patch?”
“Yes, but way back in the winter. Now .. . well, we haven’t made a packet this financial year, but we haven’t done badly either. I don’t know what he’s on about, Catherine, I really don’t.”
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