The Gardens That Mended a Marriage

by Karen Moloney

  Later, Stan burst into the hotel room sweating and beaming at his Nike iPod score. ‘Best ever’ it said and he flashed the little screen at me, which showed that he had run 17 kilometres at 5 kilometres per hour, it had taken him 1.5 hours and he’d burned 1,300 calories. He’d made it to the site and back and run a little more for good measure. The sun had been pouring its goodness on him and the clear air had been flooding his lungs with oxygen, making his heart pump loudly and the feel-good hormones rage around his body. He was on a happy high. If this was a sign of how this place would affect his mood, I wanted to move there right away. I’d never seen him so vibrant, so sexy.

  But that was five years ago and before the mierda hit the ventilador.

  CHAPTER FOUR: CONSULTING

  FOR some time I had been planning a trip to Spain with my mother, who had just turned eighty and whose sight was failing. I thought that visiting Colmenar to see the site and hear our plans might fortify her. Besides, I wanted to spoil her. After the life she’d led, I thought she deserved a good spoiling.

  For twenty-five years she’d followed her husband around the world, packing up every two to three years to move on to the next posting his military life required. She put us all into boxes and shipped us to our next home, unpacked us all, got us into school and settled us down, only to begin all over again when the next letter arrived. We lived, she claimed, in twenty-two houses in twenty-one years. Once, when I had an idle moment, I worked out that I’d attended thirteen schools, including kindergarten and university. All that moving was hard work for her. But even when we’d grown up and my parents had left the military life and settled, she still toiled. She ran a small nursery school; she supplied the local teashop with sponge cakes and tended the large garden in our family home. When my father died, she joined committees, ran societies, visited the sick and elderly.

  I offered to take her away somewhere where she could relax. As she was a bit of a Duchess and loved the highlife, we would stay in the best hotels, I would drive her everywhere so it would be easy on her legs and I would make all the decisions so she didn’t have to worry about anything. Worrying, you see, was her hobby. After eighty years she had become rather good at it. But I knew that if I put on my masterful voice and simply told her what was happening, where we were going and when, she would secretly love it and transform into a kind of giggly schoolgirl. Not that holidays with my mother were uneventful. Oh no. I knew to expect a few calamities.

  Five years previously, the two of us had headed off to Normandy together for a tour of the region’s gardens. At Dover, as our car approached the ferry checkpoint, I asked her to hand me her passport.

  ‘Hang on a second. I’m just going to check something,’ she said, opening it at the photo page.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  My mother never swore.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think it’s expired…’

  Then my mother did what she always does in a crisis: she went into shutdown. The blood drained from her face, she became speechless and catatonic and slid down in her seat, hyperventilating. Great! It was left to me to distract the nice customs officer with some jolly banter so he wouldn’t check the expiry date. He let us through without scrutiny. As a consequence, instead of looking around the beautiful gardens of Normandy, we spent much of our week queuing up at the Irish embassy’s passport office in Paris for an emergency replacement.

  The gardens of Normandy

  We had booked into a solitary château in the middle of Normandy. A proud grey stone manor, with turrets at the four corners, sitting above flat lawns and gravel paths. No luscious borders or shrubs or hedges around the house, just neat swathes of grass fanning out from the long, straight, poplar drive. Simple, elegant and perfectly French; but in the dark, slightly less navigable than one would wish. No lights, no curbs, no clues.

  The night we arrived we were invited by the avuncular owner to a restorative glass of local calvados before going to our rooms to unpack. After two or three glasses of this divine nectar, I sent my mother off to bed and excused myself to re-park the car, which I had left right outside the large carved oak front doors so that we could unload our suitcases. I was heading for the car park, not 50 metres away, where, more properly, my car should spend the night. In the pitch black, fortified by the calvados, I thought I knew perfectly well where the French lawn began and the château drive ended. But the next morning, as I strode out early to retrieve something from the car, I found deep rutted tyre marks through the perfect green grass circle in front of the house, scrapes of mud and divots under the sills of my car and two uprooted concrete posts flattened at the rear of my parking space. ‘Who on earth could have made such a mess?’ I thought to myself. Still avuncular by day, our host never mentioned it, bless him. But his patience must surely have been tried the morning we left.

  We had settled our bill before retiring and planned an early getaway. The Duchess had got up in the middle of the night for a pee and, washing her hands, had mistaken the various mechanical handles on the bathroom sink taps. When she finished washing her hands, instead of taking out the plug, she’d put it in and instead of turning off the water, had left it running. She went back to bed and as she slept, the sink slowly overflowed, water filled her tiled bathroom floor then spilled under the door and into her bedroom. When she awoke the next morning at 6am and put her feet down, her carpet was soggy.

  Never quite compos mentis in the morning, she panicked, went into her usual shutdown, took her packed bag out of the room and met me blank-faced in reception, shoes squelching slightly. She whispered nothing but ‘Good morning’ and we left without seeing anyone or saying a word. We must have been 30 kilometres down the road before she broke out of her catatonia and found the courage to tell me what had happened.

  ‘I think I may have left rather a mess behind.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mum?’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid I may have flooded my room.’

  ‘Flooded your room?’ I braked.

  After she told me the story, we talked it over and decided that nothing could be gained by returning and admitting what she had done. They would find out soon enough. These good people would at best just need to mop up, but at worst need to repair a fallen ceiling. They had our address and could send us a bill. We never heard from them, France has not declared war on England, so we presume we were forgiven.

  The autumn weather had been glorious. Between visits to the embassy, we had driven across to Giverny to see Monet’s floppy late garden. We headed for Versailles to pound the hard, dry steps of the parterre and admire the tall, formal hedges. It was there I discovered that French formality on a grand scale could be very calming.

  We visited Clos de Coudray’s themed gardens and discovered a small chapel dedicated to St Fiacre, the patron saint of gardens - and an Irishman. But our favourite garden was a little known Jekyll and Lutyens masterpiece, quite unchanged since it was created in 1898. Les Bois des Moutiers covers 12 hectares in a valley running down to the sea. In the soft, damp October afternoon the enormous hydrangeas bowed their heavy heads, worn out by a summer of keeping up appearances for the visitors. Blooms the size of footballs bent and stretched their stems to the ground like retired miners grown weary and overweight. There were massive cedars and yew hedges to protect us from the salty winds of the sea, casting a stillness and quiet into each square space, the original ‘garden’ rooms, with a unique character, a thoughtfully placed bench, an unusual colour theme, or a quirky planting scheme. It was like being inside out. Typical of the time, the garden had been planted with viburnums, azalias, rhodedendrons and camellias and left to mature, replaced with the identical variety when necessary. Quintessentially English, following tradition, maintaining order, in the middle of France.

  Down memory lane

  This holiday we were headed for southern Spain, not just because I wanted to show off what we had been doing on our site, but also because as a new bride with her first baby my mother had fol
lowed my father when he was posted by the Air Force to Gibraltar. At that time, there was very little accommodation on the Rock of Gibraltar for newly commissioned officers and their families, so they were billeted with a local couple who became lifelong friends and my godparents. My oldest brother was barely two when they arrived, a second brother came along shortly after and then I was born just before they left. The Montegriffos had a young daughter and another on the way, so the two mums spent their days strolling in the Alameda gardens with the toddlers, pushing prams and being pregnant. They spent their weekends driving across the isthmus into Spain and visiting La Linea, Tarifa, Ronda and for longer breaks they went in an old Hillman Minx to Seville, Cádiz and Málaga. So Andalusia was her old stomping ground. It must have been the most glamorous few years for the fresh young couple from Dublin.

  There are more family photographs of this period than of any other time. Several years ago I edited my father’s memoirs and mulled over countless boxes of pictures: small contact sheets, tiny prints, enlargements, all black and white, sharp focus, the strong Mediterranean light, some with straight white edges, some with frilly edges, yellowing cards, many with information on the back written in flowery, grey pencil. Like many families, they went mad when the first child was born and took photos of my eldest brother from 105 angles. My father was a keen amateur photographer and their landlord was Gibraltar’s first professional photographer. In the tiny flat they shared was a dark room – no more than a large cupboard – where the two young men would have spent hours developing photos of their beautiful young wives and children.

  There is one photograph of my mother from this time that I love. She’s standing tall and slim, wearing a short, light flannel wool jacket and long pencil skirt. She is slender and delicate. Her thick auburn hair curls around her shoulders, her lips are dark red. At her feet is her young son, her first born and she stoops forward tentatively, as if worried she will trip over him.

  These are the memory lanes I wanted to revisit with my mother. The Gibraltar years were amongst the happiest in her life and as she approached her final years, I wanted to tie the circle and take her back. Of course, it was also an excuse for us to visit lots of lovely gardens together: the Alhambra in Granada, the botanical gardens in La Concepción in Málaga, the Alameda in Gibraltar and to show off our own earthly paradise on our hilltop in Colmenar.

  The Duchess was a congenial travelling companion – intelligent, good-natured and appreciative. However, she had two irritating old-womanish habits: the first was to spend at least fifteen minutes before any outing rummaging in her handbag to assure herself she had everything and the second was to forget something, despite her thorough rummage. These habits will be familiar to anyone over fifty and need to be factored into the timetable.

  Landslide

  The Duchess and I set off for Luton airport one morning so early that not even the milkman had delivered his pints. The foxes were still trotting across the street as if they owned the place, which of course, in the dead of night, they do. In contrast, at 6 o’clock in the morning Luton is much like Oxford Circus at 6 o’clock on a late night closing shortly before Christmas. Once we hit Málaga, however, and that gentle Mediterranean sun began to work its magic on our faces, through our clothes and into our bones, we relaxed. My mission on that morning was to investigate a rather strange message Stan had received the day before in an email from Marcel, the local architect whose role it was to translate Stan’s design for the local planners and builders.

  Problem with neighbour, it read. Harvesting his olives unsafe due to construction work. Has agreed solution with Muscle Manuel. Please confirm you will pay for it.

  But Stan was in Boston to run a half-marathon and felt too far away to do anything useful, so he immediately emailed me.

  ‘Have contacted Marcel to ask what problem, what solution, how much? But would appreciate you finding out what’s going on.’

  Stan had been concerned from the start not to endanger any one of our neighbours, and had taken precautions before beginning the earth moving. In an experiment Stan and George had shoved a large rock off the top of the plateau to see how far it would roll. They watched in growing terror as it had fallen, rolled, fallen again, bounced and continued down the hillside, jumping and gathering lethal speed and momentum until out of view.

  ‘Fuck! Let’s hope there’s nobody working down there, Stan. They’re dead if they are.’

  So although the mountainside seemed pretty stable, he had instructed Muscle Manuel to hire a digger and sculpt a great horizontal ditch about 200m long across the length of the west slope with a retaining wall of large rocks to catch anything that might fall. Then, just to be safe, he had asked Muscle Manuel to put in a second ditch lower down to catch anything that failed to fall into the first. It was a double-ditch solution, and because the earthmovers hadn’t mentioned it wasn’t working, we thought that everything was fine. In fact, the earth moving had finished several months earlier, so getting word of a problem now seemed bizarre.

  As soon as my mother and I left the paved road and began winding our way up the dirt track that leads to the site, it became apparent what had happened. The road, normally a bit uneven but navigable, was this time deeply rutted, much more so than ever before; the damage was caused by heavy rains. Large rivulets of water had washed parts of the track away and we had to navigate this way and that across the ruts, grinding along slowly, rising our rear end here and ramming down onto our front sill there, rather like a pregnant woman negotiating her way across a toy-strewn living room, slowly and not without some peripheral jostle. Mother took on a look of numb terror and I was grateful the doctor had recently confirmed she still had strong bones, despite her worries about osteoporosis. Thank God also we were in a hired car – a solid German VW, for which we’d paid full insurance at the airport. As we wended our way slowly along the handle of the spoon, the Duchess tried her best not to appear afraid.

  ‘Beautiful countryside,’ she murmured grasping the armrests and, ‘Gosh, is that the site?’ now clinging on to the edge of her seat.

  I had warned the Duchess that the place was a mess, the building was half-finished, and mentioned the almond trees that had been half-buried by the bulldozers and told her not to worry about them. They looked in distress but we were replacing them. Then I told her not to fall down the well or into the septic tank. As she turned the colour of its contents, we parked up and I strode over to the western edge to look down on the dykes. My worst fears were confirmed. It wasn’t the earth moving that had caused the problem months earlier. It wasn’t even any large, heavy rocks that had fallen more recently. It was simply that the rains of the previous weeks had washed large amounts of the loose scree down into the retaining ditches, filling them up and spilling over onto the land below. It was more like an avalanche, as opposed to a rock fall. The force of the water pounding onto the fine dusty shale must have made it heavy enough to slip. Muscle Manuel was nowhere to be seen and the site didn’t look worked on that day, so I phoned Stan and told him.

  ‘Was there any slippage from the top of the platform?’

  ‘No, it seems to be the loose stuff on the side of the mountain that’s shifted downwards.’

  ‘Are you sure? Not the edge of the tennis court?’

  ‘No, the platform is intact. A few more cracks have appeared on the top, but nothing seems to have given way.’

  ‘How much has fallen?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. I don’t know, but enough to have covered parts of the first ditch and tumble over the top and down to the second.’

  ‘Were the ditches breached?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Did the big rocks, the retaining walls, give way?’

  ‘I can’t tell, they’re covered in the shale. I don’t think so, it just looks like they filled up and the earth slipped down and over the top.’

  ‘How much has fallen onto the farmer’s land below?’

  ‘Well, I can’t really
see, but some big rocks are down there and I think they’re new, but there’s no landslip onto his olive groves.

  ‘Good, that’s something.’

  ‘What shall I do?’

  ‘There’s nothing you can do if Muscle Manuel’s not there to talk to. There’s an angle of thirty-five degrees, beyond which land will slip. I think that may be the problem. This is the first year the soil has laid on the side of the mountain and it hasn’t settled or bound yet. We’re going to have to plant some ground cover or hope weeds and grasses colonise it quickly in the spring. Don’t worry, I’ll talk to Muscle Manuel next week about other solutions, but we can’t upset the neighbours and we certainly don’t want anyone to be put at risk.’

  We said goodbye and I remembered how masterful he can be, how demanding and reassuring at the same time. It would work itself out, I reflected, even if we had to pay the farmer some compensation. After all, our land had slipped onto his and we were at fault. I put my phone back in my pocket and turned to Mother, who had been listening. She had turned white, the colour of boiled asparagus.

  ‘Is everything all right, dear?’

  ‘Yes, Mum. We just nearly killed a neighbour, that’s all.’

  That was the wrong thing to say to a woman whose sense of humour had deserted her somewhere back along the handle of the narrow spoon. She looked about to slip into a terrorised stupor, so I made light of it and cajoled her into walking the site with me, pointing out what plants were going here and there, distracting her with questions like, ‘What’s the name of that yellow shrub you had in your last garden? I thought we could plant one over by the house there. What do you think?’

  She made some appropriate noises and said all the right things. I’d like to think she was impressed with the scale of the project and the beautiful views, but I’m probably mistaken. Knowing my mother’s ability to overreact, what she was actually thinking was, I’ve raised a heartless, irresponsible vandal who is sure to kill several people in this dangerous venture which will, without doubt, end in tears and possible bankruptcy.