The Gardens That Mended a Marriage

by Karen Moloney

  ‘I’m bored, Mum. Can we go up to the site now?’

  ‘Not just yet.’

  ‘Can I have a plate of chips, then?’

  The men finally turned to my topic of interest. Stan had found out that town water, which was already installed across the ridge by pipe, was very expensive and, having paid far more for the land than we had wanted, we were trying to cut costs. Town water was also troublesome and unpredictable (the government of Andalucía turned it off when reservoirs ran low) and the pipes were liable to leak. So Stan, Peter and George were considering other sources. First, whatever clear water fell out of the sky as rain, no matter how infrequent, would need to be collected and stored. That was for free, so it would be wasteful not to. Next they discussed the slope on the roof and how water could be directed through drainpipes and gullies to four water-storage tanks that Stan had placed, one at each corner of the plateau. From these, I hoped, I would be able to run taps and pipes to the garden around the house.

  ‘That’s going to be expensive,’ Peter suggested and suddenly the price went up by €1000.

  Next, in the interests of the planet, Stan had specified a grey-water recycling system to preserve the outflows from sinks, baths, showers and the washing machine. Provided we didn’t use too many noxious chemicals to wash our bodies, dishes and clothes, this water could be filtered and would help nourish the plants on the plateau as well. Everything else would have to look after itself.

  Finally, there was brown water. I don’t need to explain this, do I? It’s the stuff that’s so foul it needs to sit in a septic tank for three years before men in breathing apparatus come to empty it.

  We explored the only other viable water source, which was to drill for a well. On the west side of the site there might be water, but it was a long way down in the valley and such a distance from the house that it would require a pump the size of the Blue Mosque to get it up. Alternatively, on the other side, the east, there was another small arroyo. This was closer to the plateau but down a hill so steep that it would also take a lot of pump action to raise it to the garden. Just when I thought it was safe to order another round of drinks, they decided that well water was worth exploring, so they agreed to get the diviner to look for water and the price went up by another few thousand euros.

  For sanitary reasons, we would have to use town water in the house and courtyard to drink, cook and wash, which is metered but clean. Stan seemed worried that the pressure wouldn’t be sufficient to give us proper drench showers, so he discussed with Peter how to pump the town water above head height and they agreed to additional electrical power, probably costing additional euros, although by this stage I had given up counting and was feeling a bit queasy.

  ‘What if there’s a black-out the night we arrive when we’re all desperate for a shower and a meal?’ Stan asked, for he had heard that power cuts were common.

  ‘Then we need a generator,’ replied Peter, and the price went up another four thousand. I stopped listening.

  Water, the essence of life! My mind wandered. I was imagining that our terraces would run with it, leaves would bulge with it, flowers would ooze it, even the tiny hairs on the skin of an almond would be rigid with water. Some plants, cacti for example, or cucumbers, are mostly water. It was essential to give my garden vigour. Water is to a garden what love is to a marriage.

  ‘Mum, can I have another Coke?’ I could see Lottie was already wired.

  ‘No. We’re leaving shortly.’

  ‘But Mum…’

  Finally the conversation ran its course, the items on the agenda were all ticked and everyone could see that we were burning to get up to the site. We paid and left. Before we got into our cars, Peter held up a modest red-plastic key fob with two small keys on it that he had collected from our solicitor.

  ‘You’ll need these to undo the padlocks on the chains across the drive.’ He passed them to us casually.

  ‘Stan!’ I yelled excitedly and snatched the keys off Peter. ‘Look, look. The keys. Our keys. Oh boy!’

  Finding our way

  We got into Peter’s car, the children jumped in with George and we set off in convoy like an excited school outing. As we knew that the site was the opposite end of town, we aimed straight for the middle, towards the town square, then turned upwards towards the church at the top of the hill, where we knew we could pick up the road out of town that led to our site. But the streets were narrower and taller than we remembered and we squeezed through them like toothpaste through a tube. Within minutes we were lost and twice we had to turn around in small piazzas. At one point, George scraped his wing mirror and didn’t look too happy. After three abortive revolutions of the main square, we returned to the Bar Belen to rethink our approach. It couldn’t really be this difficult, could it? The Bar Belen was here, our site was across the other side. We’d tried going through the middle and that didn’t work, so we set off in another direction, skirting round the east side of town instead of through it. George kept flicking V-signs through his windscreen at us every time we had to stop and rethink our route.

  ‘Are you sure this is right?’ Peter asked.

  ‘I haven’t a clue,’ Stan replied. ‘I’ve only ever been brought here by Janey and she got lost each time. To be honest, I’m guessing.’

  We found ourselves back at Bar Belen a second time, confused.

  ‘What if we try to go east, round the other side of town?’ suggested the increasingly impatient Matthew.

  So this time we headed in the opposite direction, down the east side of town, skirting the houses clinging to the edge. We sank into a valley, then turned sharp right and scrunched gears into first in order to ascend up a steep back road and into the sky. It was a roller coaster. I didn’t envy Peter driving. We couldn’t go too slow or the car would stall, or too fast because the road was single-file and bent. I clung on to the armrest as we raced up a hill. We were almost at the top when a tractor appeared above us and we had to slam on the brakes and reverse to let him pass. We pulled in next to a muddy enclosure that smelled foul. There were bales of hay and bits of fencing and barrier roped together. Down below us in the yard were a few skinny, filthy goats. I closed my window and changed my mind about buying the local goats’ cheese later in the grocery store.

  When we hit the church at the top of the town, we knew we were on the right road. We breathed more freely and I wound down the window. Everywhere was washed in a golden light, like an ageing varnish on an oil painting. Even the white marble mountains looked veneered. Turning off the road onto the dirt track that winds to the site, I was amazed at the green haze across everything after just one week of rain. As we rounded the bend and got our first view of the site, I grasped Stan’s hand. It truly was spectacular. I wished the children had been in our car so I could have seen their faces.

  Of course, when we parked on the plateau, they bounced out of George’s car like dogs let out for a walk. They rushed from edge to edge, wagging their tails, looking at all the views and asking for us to explain where the house would go, and the garden and the tennis court and swimming pool, and because they still couldn’t grasp the enormity of seventeen football pitches, they asked us to point out - down in the valleys below - where our land began and ended.

  Stan had had the foresight to print off some aerial photos of the site from Google Earth so we could see the hilltop, and we’d received the topographical survey with the three sites mapped onto it in the post from our Spanish solicitor, so it was a little easier to identify exactly what we had bought and where the boundaries lay. Nonetheless, that feeling of not being quite sure where we ended and others began stayed with us, although it mattered little.

  ‘So is that ruin down there on our land or not?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘Peter says it’s not.’

  ‘But these plans show part of the site up to that point where the river divides…’

  ‘No, it goes the other way, dropping behind that row of trees….’

  ‘No, it
doesn’t. According to this, our boundary skirts around the front of the ruin by those boulders.’

  And so it went on. Turning the map around. Pointing to a white-washed stone here, a marker tree there. None of us had a clue, really. Boundaries can be a critical matter in an overcrowded city – the subject of millimetre measurements. People sue each other – no, kill each other – in disputes over a few extra inches. But here no one cared. It wasn’t as if we were going to install a chain-link fence around the boundary or plant a Leylandii hedge. Besides, marking the boundary in any way at all would break up the landscape in a way that wouldn’t look right. Too neat. Too English. Too defensive.

  ‘What the hell,’ Matthew concluded, as Stan finally gave up on mapping out his inheritance. ‘It’s all ours anyway, Dad. Thanks.’ I may have been mistaken, but I think he had a lump in his throat as he turned away.

  House vs. garden

  There was something niggling away at me. Watching Stan walking about, marking the territory with his arms in wide arcs, indicating where the four wings of the house would go, I began to feel that his concern was for the building above anything else. He’d forgotten that we were also creating a garden – my dream garden. He was busy explaining the design for the house - his design - and had, quite frankly got carried away. In recent weeks I’d noticed from the drawings he emailed to me that the house was becoming bigger and bigger and now took up practically the whole plateau. There was scarcely room for a garden, just a shelf, really, around the rim, the selvedge on a piece of fabric, barely enough space for a few shrubs. I didn’t know what he expected me to do. Garden on the steep escarpments down the side? That would mean abseiling down with my trowel and trug and though I had envisaged quite an active retirement, vertical gardening was not on my bucket list. This was going to be hard. I glanced across at him, knowing that sooner or later he and I would have to have a difficult conversation. I just didn’t know how soon it would be.

  ‘Who’s for a walk around the boundary?’ Stan asked us all, sounding rather like a Scoutmaster.

  ‘I thought we’d given up bothering about where the boundary lies,’ Matthew remarked.

  ‘Yeah, but this is a chance to map it out. We can lay stones around it like the locals do.’

  ‘How long will it take?’ Lottie enquired.

  ‘About an hour and a half.’

  There was a long silence as we thought about it. If we agreed, we’d be hot, bothered and dusty, and we were already thirsty. If we declined, it could sound as if we were not interested. Even George reined in his enthusiasm and stayed uncharacteristically quiet.

  ‘I think I’d like to save that for another visit,’ I offered diplomatically.

  ‘I want to venture down this road, though,’ I added, pointing to the hidden fork that had led us to the teeth-flossers’ site we’d had to buy. ‘I’d like to look up at our property from the south end.’

  To be honest, I wanted to get away, to stabilise, to think. Just how big this building would be had left me in a quandary. Where was the space for the garden?

  Thankfully, no one wanted to accompany me, so I set off down the gradually sloping access road that runs around the east side below our site. Stopping where the flossers’ house would have been built, I looked up, sighed and felt relieved at the proximity we had averted. At least they’d sold us a flattened site, and just possibly this 20m by 20m square could have held a garden. It was carved into the mountain on three sides and would offer excellent protection from the west winds on the fourth. Perhaps I could grow vegetables here? It was a little way from the house, and would need steps carved into the mountain to get up and down from it. I’d have to carry heavy bags of soil and tools… no, maybe not.

  Moving on down to the south end of the platform, I couldn’t help stopping for a wee behind a bush. New pills from the doctor had made me want to go more often and the nearest loo was back in the Bar Belen. I felt like a dog marking its territory, but in a perverse way, it was good to leave something of myself behind. It was a claim I dared to stake, still not believing we had actually bought this place, but not sure what to make of it.

  If there wasn’t going to be much of a garden up on the plateau, I vaguely thought we might create a series of terraces down off the south rim, so that’s where I was headed. The house was going to be built on a direct north-south axis. Visitors would arrive from the north, move through the courtyard, out the other side onto the plateau and towards the sea to the south. Rounding that edge off with some carved terraces that enticed the visitor would, it seemed to me, add an ambivalent punctuation mark and invite all who got that far to explore further off the plateau. We could plant some interesting ground cover, something that would cling to the steep angle and entice curious visitors over the side. But looking up at the plateau from beneath, it seemed precipitous. The diggers would have quite a job to make concentric terraces, for the terrain rose so steeply and inconsistently, it was unlikely that anyone could terrace here without their diggers falling over on their side. So that was out of the question. Where was I going to be able to garden? I plonked down onto a boulder and fell into a mild melancholia. Hadn’t my marriage always presented me with these complications? His passions, being stronger in general than mine, whether for the colour of a brick path, the length of a vase stem or whatever, overrode any interest I might express. And I, normally assertive – in business, at any rate – let them override me by remaining silent. Each time I fell into a grudging torpor, I was complicit in my own subjugation, and therefore deserved to be ignored. I sat in the dusty heat, stewing. Picking off a seed head that had clung to my shorts, I thought of all the times I had been overruled, overridden, overrun, and an ugly resentment built in my breast.

  There was a noise on the road and I looked up to see Stan walking down towards me. He walked with a stiff gait, snapping off twigs of dry thistle as he came down the path. He approached where I was and sat on the next boulder. After a few sideways glances in my direction, he knew something was up.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m just wondering if we could terrace this southern end,’ I explained, trying to look thoughtful and constructive.

  He looked up at the edge of the escarpment and his brow started to furrow.

  ‘You don’t want to do too much down here.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’ll have your hands full with the garden above on the platform.’

  ‘What garden?’ I spat - the words coming from a deeper place.

  ‘What do you mean ‘what garden’?’ he asked, stunned. ‘All the space around the swimming pool and the edge of the tennis court…’

  ‘That’s not a garden. You’ve planned such a big house there’s nothing left around the edge. I’ll be gardening on a… fringe!’ I exploded. Fringe was probably not the most elegant word to describe what I meant but was all that I could summon up under the circumstances.

  He looked at me as if I had slapped him. Then he turned away.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I blurted. ‘I know you’re trying to create a beautiful house for us and I know you’re excited about the dimensions and you want to maximise the living space for us all. I know all that.’

  He looked downcast.

  ‘But I need a garden, Stan, and there’s no space left. I can’t garden over the edge – it’s too steep.’

  He turned away.

  ‘We have to share the plateau. Can’t you make the house smaller?’

  A silence fell between us and muffled the life in the valley. As the sun cracked seed pods of broom, crickets clicked their wings and the sonorous buzz of occupied bees rose and fell all around, neither of us heard a thing except our own heartbeats.

  He was thinking. Share the plateau? How could he do that? It would mean reducing the size of the house to make room for more garden and he’d spent weeks getting the dimensions right. He’d even sent the plans to the builders to start costing the works. He couldn’t change the design now.
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  I wandered off and sat down on another rock. How stupid I had been. Once again I had shared my concerns with him far too late. Stan moves very swiftly from decision to action. I should have remembered that from the time he tore up the lawn in Dartmouth Park and graveled over it before I could object. Why had I been so reluctant to raise this issue of space for the garden with him when I could see he was designing the house too large? Was it because he was like an oil tanker once he got going and it would be too difficult to slow him down? Was I too scared of him, scared that he might shout at me and make me feel stupid? Surely I wasn’t intimidated by my own husband? Or maybe I had just prevaricated as usual, going at my own pace, a pace considerably slower than his, until it was too late.

  He looked up.

  ‘Why didn’t you say something when I sent you the drawings?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I couldn’t tell from the drawings… they’re really hard for me to read on the computer. It wasn’t till we got here today that I could see…’

  He looked down at his hands and furrowed his brow again. Some moments passed. He looked off into the distance. Then down towards the oak tree. Then he leaned over to pick up a stick and began drawing in the earth. Something remarkable was about to happen, something that would change the course of events more dramatically than either of us realised. He drew a line and then scrubbed it out. Then he sketched out a rectangle with a large oval around it and looked at it for almost a minute. Then he drew a triangle across the oval. I said nothing. He stared at these incomprehensible lines for a while, got up and walked about looking up at the slope above us. Then he sat down again.