Returning to Charles Darwin who, you will remember, I chastised in Chapter 1 for comparing his wife’s company to a dog’s: his reasons for marrying, you might recall, included the comforts from making a long-term commitment - children, for example. In theory, children require a full generation of twenty years, or in the case of Matthew and Lottie (and your own children, I’m sure) a lifetime of hard labour, but as soon as they fly the nest, a major reason for staying together disappears. Having a project, or in our case three projects – the house, the garden in Spain and the garden in London – gave us additional reasons to continue our partnership. These projects needed our joint attention since we were both investors in the land and in developing the site. It needed our joint articulation of the vision, what it would look like, who it was for and what we each wanted to get out of it. One of us could not have done it without the other. I couldn’t have built a house and he couldn’t have created a garden. Our skills were complementary and we needed each other.
To be sure, I have been the main beneficiary of our project to date. I have my garden; Stan still does not have his house. How he feels about that is difficult to gauge. On the surface he tolerates the uncertainty with a masculine silence, but underneath I wonder what he really feels about it all. Of course I’d like to believe that he thinks, ‘I love my wife so much. I’m so glad I did this for her and made her so happy.’
But it’s probably more like, ‘If anyone else asks how our house in Spain is going I’m going to…’
I know we are extremely fortunate and have little to complain about. I am under no illusion that it could all come crashing down upon us; that the good luck and opportunity life has offered us over the years could all get blown away on the winds of fate when the economy crashes again - or if Stan walks under a bus or if I get early Alzheimer’s. Then our London vegetables will decay to mush, the weeds will grow over our half-built house, our Persian garden will become unkempt, the hillside will throw herself down again upon the neighbour’s olive trees and there will be nothing we can do about it. One always needs to be mindful that we are not in charge. But we do our best to take care of our patch while we are here. Providing nature takes a benevolent view of our husbandry, she will leave us to get on with it.
I guess that’s what I’ve learned on this journey, that the house is just bricks and mortar, that our gardens need us to work in partnership with them and that my marriage is the most precious but fragile thing I have. To share my life with a man like Stan has been a privilege. I love him so much. But I’ve found that love isn’t something you should expect to happen, something to fall in and out of like sleep. It’s active, and working at this marriage, like creating the garden, has been one of the most effortful things I’ve ever done.
The garden thrives
Just before he presented us with our bucket of figs, Muscle Manuel told us a story.
‘The other day I was up here on site watering the new carob trees when these English women appeared.’
‘Really? What English women?’
‘I don’t know. There were four of them. They’d walked here.’
‘Walked?’
‘Yes. In their bikinis.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘No. They just turned up here in their bikinis.’
I suspect that bikini was the only word he knew for swimsuit.
‘They said they were staying somewhere nearby, somewhere above…’ He pointed vaguely at the hills to the east, ‘and they could see the garden from their pool and decided they needed to come down to see. So they walked down here.’
‘In the heat?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Well, I told them that you owned the garden and that it was new and then they went away.’
‘How bizarre.’
‘Not really,’ said Stan, turning his foot in the gravel. ‘The house is visible for miles around. And now the garden’s started to grow, people are curious. ‘If you build it, they will come.’
I had never thought it would attract attention so soon. But I suppose, just like The Farm in New Zealand, people can’t resist having a peek when they see something unusual.
We’re not a hotel open to visitors yet and may never be. But in twenty years time, if you’re out walking in your bikinis, call by and say hello. Walk through our cool courtyard and you will see the towering magnolias, stiff and constant. Stop to pick a fragrant frangipani for your hair as you tread along the cool marble and curl your toes down into the rills running with clear water. Walk down the steps from the courtyard and into the Persian garden, a tranquil square with four large beds and a sturdy, dark, myrtle hedge all around it. Walk down between the beds, feel the warm, pale grey granite pavement under your feet, sparkling in the sun.
Either side of the path are more gullies, where running water darkens the granite and makes a low, gurgling sound. Watch a fallen frangipani flower spin and falter in the current. Everywhere you turn, there are trees laden with fruit: oranges, pomegranates, figs, olives. Pick some. Brush your feet against the ground cover of rosemary, Santolina and thyme to release the scent.
Descend from the Persian garden towards the southern edge, walk through a row of Cycas and palms, tall enough now, but one day some of them will tower above you. Saunter through terraces of olive and almond trees awed by their beneficence.
Continue off the platform. Go down the steps at the far southern end and turn towards a curious assortment of small statues. Saints. All placed beside the path where perhaps, if you need to, you could ask for their intercession. Your stride will take you down to the southwest, onto a path that leads towards a large, stunning artwork. You’re not sure what it is. As you approach, you realise it’s a shard of pale blue glass, the width of a man’s outstretched arms, 4 metres high, pocked and pitted by the sun, jaggedly stabbed into the hillside, put there as an ironic testament to the damage we did. But then move along the path and you walk into a meadow of flowers, alive with bees and insects, the legacy of how hard we worked to repair the damage. Wander further down the path and find the sun streaming across a stone sculpture, shaped like a human heart, with dark red chambers you can climb inside and curl up in, a gift from Stan to me and me to him. Further on, a steel curtain reflects the sun like the aluminum casing on a spaceship. You will shelter from the shock of it all under a spreading oak, a mature benevolent protector. Sit on the bench beneath the oak and let your eyes drift across the valleys to rest here and there on a farmhouse or a herd of goats. Above you may even hear the rummaging of a wild pig. Peace descends.
You may nod off in the gentle heat. In your dreams you fly across the gardens of the world. After a while, you are roused by the gentle footfall of an old couple padding slowly up the hillside towards you. They look familiar. They stop here and there to pick a few berries or break off a branch that obstructs the path. They are both wearing wide-brimmed hats, and although you can’t see their eyes, you suspect that they look at each other and smile from time to time. In the shimmer of the dusty heat, they pass noiselessly by, making their way slowly back up the hill.
Somewhere above you, between St Fiacre and St Christopher, as the track turns upwards again and inclines more steeply towards the plateau, he reaches out to take her hand and they disappear into the Persian garden.
AFTERWORD
FINALLY, I have an answer for my publishing friend. He wanted to know how a bookstore would categorise this book: gardening, travel, leisure and lifestyle, mind-body-spirit? I had promised him I would go away and think about it.
I had thought at first it was a book about gardening, but now that it’s finished, it doesn’t sit as comfortably on the gardening shelves as I intended. My passion for gardens should be evident, but so too is my ignorance in the practical matters of horticulture. It’s not a travel book either, for any decent weekend newspaper will cover the territory I’ve visited in far greater depth and detail. Nor is it about project management because, as you h
ave read, in our grand design to celebrate our daughter’s eighteenth birthday in our new house in Spain, we have failed to complete either on time or on budget. Like many others caught in the Spanish planning limbo, our situation is unclear, and our daughter may be forty years old by the time she moves in. We may even have a hotel, who knows?
Those who frequent bookstores, having read this far, might assign this book to the shelves marked Memoir. But I beg to differ. There is a phantom shelf at the back of the bookstore, around which the spirits of humans from the beginnings of time mingle and browse. That shelf is called Love Stories.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to my husband, mother, children and all the characters in the book for allowing me to write about them.
Thanks to my friends in publishing for helping me navigate their industry: Duncan Bamford, Sarah Beal, Tina Betts, Linda Cassells, Colin Midson, Kate Quarry, Jenny Parrott.
Thanks to friends for reading or egging me on: Barbara Cafferky, Caroline Clayton, Catherine Colley, Lynn Davis, Pauline Donnelly, George Lamb, Dee McClean, Tina Stevens, Karen de Villiers.
And to Jan Woolf and Ruth Boswell at Muswell Press for a great publishing job.
This book has been set in
Minion Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach.
It is an updated version of his Minion,
which was released by Adobe
in 1990.
Copyright
First published in 2014
by Muswell Press Ltd, London N10 2LD
This ebook edition first published in 2014
All rights reserved
© Karen Moloney 2014
The right of Karen Moloney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
Photographs by Karen Moloney
Cover design by [email protected]
Text design by Hand & eye letterpress
ISBN 978–0–9575568–6–7
The Gardens That Mended a Marriage Page 26