This last phrase baffled me at first, until I realised it had to be some sort of business-speak for being unable to find something. I caught her boyfriend’s eye and saw the trace of a smirk on his face, as much of one as he was confident of being able to get away with.
‘What about bark?’ he said, looking at me. ‘I heard someone on telly say bark’s a good alternative to slate. For beds. Just as neat, but less showy.’ I think that’s the longest speech I ever heard him make in all the time I knew him.
I nodded. ‘Bark might work,’ I said, though I still favoured traditional earth flower beds. But I found myself wanting to say yes to him, if only because she never did. I wanted to compensate.
‘Purple slate,’ she said flatly, as if neither he nor I had spoken. ‘And one of those plastic borders round the lawns, so we don’t have to keep trimming the edges. And at the back, I want a gravel crossroads—I’ve got a picture of one that I cut out of a magazine, I’ll show you—with a fountain or something in the middle. Maybe a statue. Something eastern to pick up a multicultural theme.’
The picture turned out to be of the Prince of Wales’ garden at Highgrove, which was more than big enough for the ‘gravel crossroads’ she described not to look ridiculous. If I gave her what she claimed to want, four tiny green squares would be all that was left of her lawn at the back. It would look absurd.
I was about to tell her this when I saw him shake his head as if to say there was no point. I should have left then and never gone back, and not only because of what happened later. It was clear she would be a nightmare client. I reminded myself that she was ill, and that I was there for his sake as well as hers. I sensed that he wanted me around. I have no idea, now, whether he did or not, whether he was indifferent to me and I blindly chose to believe otherwise, but at the time I thought he was silently pleading with me not to leave him alone to deal with her and her ludicrous unfulfilled wishes.
I suppose I was drawn to him because I knew how it felt to be unable to speak freely in your own home. He reminded me of how I used to be before I left home. My parents are evangelical Christian control freaks, expert emotional blackmailers, and I spent my childhood and adolescence pretending I was who they wanted me to be, stifling the person I really was because all my life I’d had this never-quite-articulated but very real threat hanging over my head: go against them on anything, however minor, and I’d do unimaginable damage to us all.
There’s no doubt that, on that day at Cherub Cottage, he and I entered into a conspiracy: us against her. Yes, we would give her what she wanted, but we both knew it would be awful, and, more importantly, we knew we were the clever ones and she was the dimwit. Not only did we know it but we enjoyed the knowledge. Despite what happened subsequently, I know I didn’t imagine it: he was as conscious of our secret, shared superiority as I was.
I agreed to redesign their gardens, and gave them my questionnaire to fill in. I gave it to all my clients, not caring if it seemed unnecessarily formal when mostly they had already described to me exactly what they wanted. Time and time again I found that being made to answer the questions helped people to form a clearer idea of what they were looking for, and it certainly made life easier for me.
She handed the questionnaire to him, didn’t even look at it. I arranged another appointment with them in a few days’ time, telling them I’d take measurements then. As the day approached, I found I was looking forward to seeing him again. When I arrived at the house, she wasn’t there. He was alone, apologetic and far more awkward than he had been last time. It was as if, without her there to keep us both in check, he was afraid to talk to me. When I asked where she was, he shrugged. ‘You can still measure,’ he said. He didn’t give me back the questionnaire, but instead handed me a few crumpled sheets of paper I didn’t recognise, covered in large sloping handwriting that leaned to the left.
I was surprised to see he had transcribed all my questions, as well as writing down his answers to them. ‘Why didn’t you write on the form I gave you?’ I asked him. He shrugged. His answers—and it was clear they were his, not hers—were short. In response to the question, ‘Who will use the garden?’ he had written, ‘Us’. To ‘What will they use it for?’ he had replied, ‘Sitting’. I nearly laughed when I saw his one-word answer to my longest, most expansive question: ‘Do you want to develop your garden all in one go or gradually year by year? How “instant” do you need your garden to be? How long are you prepared to wait for it to mature?’ Underneath his handwritten reproduction of my words, he had added just one of his own: ‘Quick’.
I measured up, as instructed, and when I came back inside he was waiting for me with a drink, a glass of red wine. He’d poured one for himself, too. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had to drive home, and thought it odd that he’d assumed without bothering to ask that I would want wine.
He led me into a lounge I hadn’t seen before. It had a horrible artificial look of ‘best’ about it. The carpet was mustard-yellow and the walls were gleaming white, as were the three leather sofas arranged in square-bracket formation in front of an obscenely large television set that seemed to devour all the space and energy in the room. Beside one of the sofas was a cube of a coffee table with mirrored surfaces, and beside another her dog slippers with their wretched red tongues, neatly aligned. Almost as big as the TV screen were three framed photographs, the lounge walls’ only decoration. ‘Not my doing,’ he said, seeing me staring at the pictures. I tried to disguise my distaste but I probably didn’t do a very good job. All three pictures were of him and her, barefoot, looking idyllically happy together against a background of unblemished white. Each had been blown up so that it covered most of a wall. In one, it looked as if the photographer had asked them to run towards the camera from a distance and then fall over: they were both laughing, their limbs entangled. In another her expression was solemn, her head coyly tilted, and his face was in profile, his lips on her cheek—a supposedly profound private moment, captured for ever, to be enlarged and stuck on the lounge wall to show off to guests: look how happy we are.
I was so busy staring at the photographs that I didn’t notice him approach me from the side, and when he tried to kiss me I sprang away from him, spilling some of my wine on the carpet. He ran to get stain remover. I recognised that run. It was me, thirteen years earlier, hearing my parents’ car an hour before I’d expected to, racing to my bedroom to hide the book I’d been reading: Riders by Jilly Cooper. I made it. By the time my father walked into the living room, I was back in my chair with Thomas Cranmer: A Life propped up in front of my face, my heart a bouncing boulder in my chest.
The stain remover did the job. Within seconds the drops of red were gone, but he kept spraying white foam on the carpet. He must have used nearly a whole can. I wasn’t close enough to him to hear it, but I knew what his heartbeat was doing.
He took his wine glass and mine through to the kitchen—a safe place, lino instead of carpet. His eyes were suddenly wary; perhaps he’d finally taken in what his state of high alert hadn’t allowed him to register sooner: he’d tried to kiss me and I’d rejected him.
‘Why do you stay with her?’ I asked. I knew it was an inappropriate question, but the atmosphere was so strained by that point that normal protocol no longer seemed to apply.
‘The pictures aren’t too bad,’ he said, as if they were all that had made me ask.
‘Is it because she’s ill?’
‘Ill?’
Something cold clutched at my throat. ‘She told me she was dying.’
He nodded. ‘She does that sometimes.’
That decided me. ‘I can’t work for you,’ I said. ‘For her.’ I wanted him to try to kiss me again.
‘You can’t pull out now. She wants you.’
‘I don’t care . . .’ I started to say.
‘I want you. I want to show you something.’
In a sort of trance, I followed him out of the room and upstairs, thinking that I would look at whatev
er it was and then leave. He took me into a box room with a skylight that wouldn’t have been big enough to fit a bed in. In the middle of the carpet there was a red and blue-painted model of a train with three carriages. Next to this was a chair and, around it, piles of what looked like superhero comics: Spiderman, The Incredible Hulk. Lined up against one wall were several pairs of Chelsea boots, black and brown.
A ghetto blaster stood on the windowsill, surrounded by towers of CD cases. ‘This room’s my den,’ he said. ‘That’s mine.’ He pointed to a picture on the wall. It was long and rectangular, the size and shape of a full-length mirror, and made me think of Soviet propaganda, though the words on it were French—‘Etat’ at the top and ‘Exactitude ’ at the bottom—printed in chunky masculine letters over the red, black and grey image of an enormous train emerging at speed from a tunnel.
‘It’s nice,’ I said, not sure how I was meant to respond. But when I said that, he smiled, and I was glad I’d lied. I thought the picture was awful—harsh, almost fascistic.
I did leave shortly afterwards, as I’d promised myself I would, but he and I both knew I would work on their garden as agreed. When I went back to the kitchen to retrieve my handbag, I noticed my questionnaire—the typed version I’d given them at our first meeting—under a pile of house and garden magazines. I could see it had been written on, that the handwriting was small and rounded, not large and left-leaning. He saw that I’d spotted it, and stuffed his hands in his pockets as I pulled it out and started to read. It wasn’t hard to work out what had happened: he’d been understandably appalled by her answers, so he’d copied the questions out again in order to be able to present me with a less offensive document. His thoughtfulness touched me. I think that was the moment I fell for him, when I saw what she’d written and realised how much effort he’d put into sparing my feelings.
To the question ‘How long will you be living in the house? Should I plan for five, ten, twenty years?’, she had answered, ‘I’m not psychic.’ Underneath ‘Do you need privacy? Any particular part of the garden?’ she had written, ‘We’ve got privacy. No part of our garden is overlooked. Surely this sort of generic questionnaire is bad for your business? Why don’t you tailor your questions to individual clients’ needs?’
In person she’d been rude, but this was worse. These were words she’d had a chance to think about, ones she’d committed to paper. She had saved her most cutting response for last. The final question was about the pH and texture of the soil, any micro-climates there might be in the garden, frost pockets, shelter, prevailing winds. Many of my clients didn’t have a clue about this sort of thing and wrote ‘Not sure’ or ‘Don’t know’, but I still felt the question was worth including, because sometimes people knew more than you expected them to, and it could be a big help to have this kind of information upfront.
Beneath my last question, she had written, ‘Get a life!’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘She doesn’t mean it.’
‘Is she always like this?’ I asked. Not at all inappropriate, I felt, under the circumstances.
‘You will come back, won’t you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said.
‘Please. I . . . I promise, I won’t touch you again.’ He blushed.
I thought about his ‘den’, the ghetto she’d confined him to in a house that was otherwise hers, and about my bedroom as a child, the tapestry slogans on the walls, stitched by my mother: ‘Jesus is the silent listener to every conversation’, ‘Seven days without prayer makes one weak’. I suppose I was looking for someone whose pain matched mine. I was doing the same thing years later when I met Aidan, when I had even more pain to find a match for.
Against my better judgement, I kept them on as clients. The next few times I went to Cherub Cottage, she was there, and he was as he had been the first time I’d met him—full of confident knowing smiles at her expense. I tried not to meet his eyes but it was hard. I couldn’t believe he was the same man who, in her absence, had behaved like a gauche schoolboy. I’d started to have sexual fantasies about him by then, ones that involved far more than sex. In my idealised version of our story, fate had given me a clear mission: I was the only person who could save him from her. If I let him down, he’d never escape her clutches or the confines of his petty, constrained life with her.
Over the next few weeks, I worked on designs for their garden. She’d said at our first meeting that she wanted ‘something eastern’, which turned out to mean a large granite Buddha on a plinth that she’d seen in a catalogue. I didn’t try to talk her out of it. If she wanted the centre-piece of her small Lincolnshire garden to be a fat stone man sitting on a pillar, that was her choice.
Work started in March 2000 and took a month. I got landscapers in to help me, which at first she protested about. ‘I thought you were going to do it all yourself,’ she said, and I had to remind her that I’d told her I did only the design and the planting. I never challenged her about her lie, and she didn’t refer again to her made-up terminal illness.
Whenever I had a moment alone with him, I badgered him about leaving her. I told him I’d wanted to respond when he’d tried to kiss me, but I couldn’t, because he wasn’t available. Sometimes he said he understood, other times he lunged at me, saying, ‘Come here,’ and trying to grab me, but I wouldn’t let him touch me. I told him if he stayed with her he’d be a prisoner for the rest of his life, whereas if he left her he could have me. He couldn’t leave her, he said, which only made me more determined. I was convinced no one besides me would ever be able to liberate him; I had to try harder. I started wearing revealing clothes to work, making sure he caught glimpses of my cleavage, wearing short skirts and bending over when he was standing behind me so that he could see my underwear. I wanted him to know what he was missing.
By this point, I was too involved to see the difference between love and an unhealthy obsession. It was a battle between good and evil as far as I was concerned: I was good and she was evil, and I had to win if I wanted to save him. I played dirty without giving it a second thought, trying to bribe him, bringing money into it. I told him how much I earned—more than a primary school teacher—and that financially he’d be better off with me than with her, all the while congratulating myself on my virtue for refusing to have sex with him. Guessing that she either couldn’t have children or didn’t want them in case they disturbed her perfect white living room, I told him I wanted to have his children. That didn’t make him leave her but it made him cry. ‘I can’t,’ he kept saying. ‘I just can’t.’
The garden was finished one day while they were both at work. It looked dreadful, but it was exactly what she’d ordered: regimented pink flowers, purple slate, gravel crossroads, eastern deity. They owed me twenty-three thousand pounds, give or take some small change. She got back from work first, saw it and burst into tears. ‘I hate it,’ she said. ‘It’s disgusting.’
That I had not been expecting. When I asked her what the problem was, she said, ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t look like I imagined it would. I hope you don’t think I’m paying for this!’ She started weeping, got back into her car and drove away. I had no choice but to wait for him. When I told him what had happened, he raised his eyebrows, as if at a minor inconvenience, and said, ‘She’ll come round. Don’t worry, you’ll get your money.’
‘Damn right I will,’ I said. ‘You signed the contract.’
‘What will I do when you’ve gone?’ he said. He took me in his arms and clamped his lips on mine.
I pulled away and said, ‘We need to talk. Properly.’ Finally, I thought, he’s realised he needs to leave her.
He was the blushing boy again. I hadn’t mentioned my religious upbringing to him so far; now I was going to use it to my advantage. I’d suffered eighteen years of it, so the least it could do was help me now, I thought. I told him I was a Christian, that I was gagging to go to bed with him, but I couldn’t persuade myself it was all right to go to bed with someone who had a partner. I wit
tered on about marriage being sacrosanct, adultery an unforgivable sin, all the things I’d heard my parents say. He wasn’t married to her, but they lived together as man and wife—I told him that from my point of view it amounted to the same thing.
I didn’t mean a word of it. I was using sex, or rather the promise of sex, as leverage to make him leave her for me.
‘Are you saying you want to marry me?’ he asked, looking as if the idea was hurting him, scorching his brain. I hadn’t been, but only because it hadn’t occurred to me. I read the truth in his eyes and I knew I was right: he’d proposed to her, perhaps several times, and she’d said no.
The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Page 27