A Bit of Earth (14 page)

Judy could never decide which she liked better, the pink May blossom or the white. The same went for lilac; purple or white? But then why should one have to decide? Why, she wondered, had it been considered such bad luck to bring lilac into the house, also cow parsley? Both were supposed to portend a death, or even to cause one. She would look it up.

She knew that if she closed her eyes she would be instantly asleep.

She sat so still that the frogs in the pond returned to the surface, and remained there. A pair of goldfinches were
already feeding on the niger seed she had put on the bird table. She had bought it at the hardware shop for her own garden. It had seemed selfish not to bring some in her pocket and put it out here. Now she would feel it necessary to return regularly to replenish it. How warm the sun was. She would just close her eyes for a moment …

She felt a very slight chill, a shadow passing across her papers. She opened her eyes and a boy was standing there. For a moment she thought that he might be a shade of some sort, a ghost. He was very pale, and he must have come up to her so silently that the frogs had not noticed his approach and plopped back below the surface. Judy saw that if this were a ghost, it was one with rather grubby knees. He was wearing a school sweatshirt, the cuffs of which were frayed and hung in damp and stringy fringes around his bony wrists. His hair was a bit stringy around the ears too, in need of a good trim. He was carrying a long stick of bamboo.

‘Hello,' said Judy. The boy smiled. Judy knew that smile. It seemed to stop her heart for a moment. This, she thought, must be Susannah and Guy Misselthwaite's little boy.

‘Would you like to see the newts?'

‘Yes please.' She was glad to see that he hadn't come armed with a jam jar on a string. She could not possibly have condoned newt-catching, even temporary newt-catching, even for a school project. He led her down a very small path into the copse, ignoring the notices warning that this area was crumbling, and that there was a danger of further landslips, past some rather nasty azaleas, and then across a little stream where some of the pebbles were coated with a coppery deposit. Here was the pool.

‘Here,' said Felix, ‘this is where they live. Nobody knows except me.'

‘Thank you,' she whispered, ‘I shan't tell anybody.'

‘You have to keep very still, and then you will see them.' They squatted down and kept very still. There were oak leaves in the pool, water boatmen, some unusual-looking snails (she would have to look those up too) and there, with their tails looking as though they had been snipped from some of the fallen oak leaves, were the newts.

‘Wow,' she whispered, ‘I have never seen so many together before.'

‘Even my dad doesn't know they're here. I don't think anyone does.'

They watched in silence for a while as the newts went about their business.

‘When I was a little girl we sometimes had newts in a tank at school, but they are very rare now. I think we should leave them alone, don't you?' Judy was very against the modern practice known as ‘pond-dipping' whereby children were encouraged to scoop out anything they could, plonk it in some shallow plastic tray where the water temperature would quickly rise beyond that of the pond, leave the creatures there for as long as they liked, to be prodded and remarked upon, and then perhaps tip the water and most of its inhabitants back. Who knew what tinies might be left behind, their element evaporating for ever? ‘He who torments the chafer's sprite weaves a bower in endless night,' she told herself.

‘I'm not gonna catch them,' said Felix.

‘Neither am I.'

They watched the newts for some more minutes.

‘I've seen you in the garden before,' Felix told her.

‘Well, you are very clever,' said Judy, ‘because I have never seen you.'

‘I can climb very tall trees, and I know secret places, but I'm usually at school.'

‘Does anybody know you are here?' Judy couldn't stop herself from asking. Perhaps the boy had absconded from the After-School Club to find his dad. She had seen the children being shepherded (rather carelessly, she thought) from the school to the church hall by some students in nasty maroon polo shirts. Perhaps he was on the run from some team games, perhaps from some after-school bullies. You had to take your hat off to him really.

‘My dad is in charge of the garden,' Felix told her.

‘That's wonderful,' she replied. ‘It is such a lovely garden. I wasn't sure that anyone was in charge of it at all. He is certainly doing a very good job. What's his name?'

‘Guy,' said Felix.

‘My name is Judy Lovage. What's your name?'

‘Felix Pieter Misselthwaite. Pieter is spelt in Swedish. My mum was half-Swedish.'

‘Yes,' said Judy. ‘Well, Felix Pieter Misselthwaite, I'm very, very pleased to meet you.'

She extended her hand and smiled. Felix looked at it for a second and then realised that he was meant to shake it. ‘I knew your mummy,' said Judy. ‘I thought she was very beautiful and kind.'

‘Really, did you really?'

‘Yes. We often saw each other in the library, where she worked.'

‘Oh,' said Felix.

Judy wished that she had something a bit more precise or detailed or meaningful to add.

‘She loved you very, very much,' she said.

‘I have to go now,' said Felix, and he ran towards one of the greenhouses where a silhouette that must have been his father was sitting very still.

When she got home and hung up her mac she guessed one of the reasons for Felix talking to her. Her favourite brooch, a turquoise enamel cat face, was pinned to the lapel. It must have been that, that and seeing her feed the birds; or perhaps it was just boredom or loneliness on his part, and a normal childish desire to impress and to share his important discovery of the newts. She hoped that she would see him again, and soon.

The next day, in fact, she went to the garden hoping to see him, but Felix wasn't there, or at least visible. She thought it was quite likely that he was hiding somewhere, amusing himself by spying on her. What a pity that she wasn't doing anything more interesting than marking the essays that she hadn't got through the day before. Max's essay seemed better on paper than when he'd read it out loud. Perhaps it was just his manner. He could do with some hints on presentation and delivery before he shuffled into the real world. She gave it 62 per cent. High marks indeed from her. She put it to the bottom of the pile and as she looked up, taking a big breath before the next one, there was Max himself off in the distance, standing on one of the little plank and chicken-wire bridges, looking at the stream. She could see that he was eating something, he must have
come here for a tea-time snack, but she couldn't make out what, something in a packet. From where she was sitting it looked as though his messy brown hair was a cap of autumn leaves. It cheered her to see him in the garden. He was probably just killing time, but even so. She briefly considered making the 62 per cent into 63 per cent or even 64, but thought better of it.

Max. What had been in his parents' minds when they'd named him? Judy figured that young people called Max had probably not been christened. Hard to imagine the vicar saying, ‘Max, I sign you with the sign of the cross …' and so on, but one never knew.

He was Max (not Maxim or Maximilian). A Max should be rakish and debonair. A Max should be in a tux and carry a neat little revolver. A Max should be somebody slick and mean and rich. Or a matinee idol, or Maxim de Winter. But here was this Max, Max Cooper. If Judy had brought her binoculars with her, or if she'd been hiding in the tree with Felix, she would have been able to see that he was eating a Mexican wrap. Max liked Tex-Mex food. He was a Pepsi Max sort of a Max. A portion of fries please. Regular, Large or Super-Max?

At school they had sometimes called him ‘Potato Man'; affectionately of course. He wasn't bullied, more tolerated, and sometimes accommodated. Max Cooper, born and bred in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, flat-footed and heavy-legged. At least at university PE was no longer compulsory, but it was bad luck for Max that being fit was now the thing.

Was he fit? He was not.

Although he had friends, he felt as though he would never be the hero who got the girl, rather the one dialling for pizza for everyone at 11.25 p.m. He would be the geek in the movie with a
panino
poised a hand's breadth away from his mouth when something amazing appeared on the screen, a well-intentioned but expendable nerd.

‘He's gonna get it!' the audience would think when the super-volcano blew its top or the aliens landed.

But maybe things can be changed, maybe destinies can be escaped. He didn't want to end up back in Shanklin. Max was headed, and nobody really knew this yet, for Newfoundland, or perhaps, you see he hadn't made his mind up, for somewhere just north of Seattle. Somewhere where nobody made jokes about Mini Coopers and Max Coopers.

‘You are still young.'

Thirty years on her sisters were still telling her that, just as they had done when what they saw as ‘a decent interval' had elapsed after Eduardo's disappearance and the loss of the baby.

‘You are still young.'

She had wondered when people would stop saying that to her. Now she realised that nobody had said it to her for a very long time. It had turned into ‘but you aren't old', which meant, of course, that they thought she was. She was way past childbearing age now, but she had her nephews and nieces. She knew that at some point, a long time ago, her sisters must have been saying that it would soon be too late for her. She could have put it crudely, and told them that she'd had her fair share of offers. The university was
teeming with unattached and recently detached men, as well as many who pretended that they were; but now Judy had succeeded in erecting such a barrier of aloofness and impenetrable tranquillity around herself that she was quite safe.

The 1970s had not surprisingly been the worst, full of threats. The 1980s had been pretty bad at times. There was still the twice-yearly horror of the departmental parties, but these were now much more sober affairs.

At one, probably Christmas 1976, a colleague from the History department, Martyn Swatridge, had tried to kiss her. He had either been an early pioneer of designer stubble, or perhaps just a bit of a slob. One minute she had been talking to him, standing closer than she would ever have chosen, the music being so loud. They had been discussing Hardy's poetry. Then suddenly he had lunged at her and clamped his bristly maw onto hers. It had felt like a giant beech nut, and before she could push him away, his tongue had started making horrible little lizard darts at her. She had run to wash her face and rinse out her mouth. He had stood outside the bathroom door for some time saying, ‘Aw, Judy, Judy' in a way that she supposed was meant to be appealing. It seemed that he had mistaken her disgust for reserve or inexperience. There had followed several months of what nowadays would be viewed as harassment or even stalking. This only ceased when his passions were transferred to and, to Judy's great relief, returned by a Medieval History post-grad. Eventually he had married this unfortunate young woman, finding her, at least at first, to be infinitely malleable and bullyable.

The thing that upset Judy most about the whole business
was that she loved Hardy's poetry. Now whenever she read any of it she had to concentrate very hard not to think of this incident. When she trod beech mast underfoot, or cracked open a nut and found a tiny insect inside, she still thought of him. She found that pistachios were the most likely to contain some other life form, some poor little white worm, meant to be born in Persia, waking up in England. She suspected that she got more than her fair share of these.

Now at parties she mostly talked to the departmental secretaries and made it her business to look after anybody new. Good old Judy. But she left early. Men kept their distance. She was too tough a nut to crack now, and perhaps too old.

Judy found that whenever she was out, she would soon start longing to be home again. She had been in her little house for so long, renting it at first, and now she owned it. If Eduardo ever came back he would find her sleeping in the same room. Then the walls had been purple and scarlet. Now they were white, the only room in the house where colour did not reign. There was such comfort to be had in staying in one place, shutting your own front door, following the seasons in your own little garden, growing the same and some new varieties in your own little greenhouse year after year, watching your lilac tree grow, worrying that each storm might deal its fragile boughs a fatal blow. Strange that some woods were so much softer than others.

That morning she had been woken by a strange new bird noise, you couldn't have called it a song. She had been quite unable to identify it. It had sounded just like a parrot, or even several parrots, but small ones, probably parakeets. She had once seen them flying wild in Richmond Park. Now
perhaps they had reached this neck of the woods. Should one be pleased? It would be hard not to be. She could imagine the local paper's reaction – foreign interlopers … economic migrants, asylum seekers … scrounging off British bird tables – and what would her garden birds think? She had wood pigeons on twenty-four-hour patrol, a pair of jays, goldfinches, and all the other usual garden visitors. There was no crisis in the house sparrow population in her garden. She supposed that the pecking order would have to be revised. And the languages of birds … would South American-born parakeets twitter in a different tongue to their London-born relatives? She often wished that she had studied Zoology rather than History of Art, or some environmental science that involved field trips to the seaside and knowing the names of different types of marine algae and rare birds. What larks, eh? She contented herself with organising the School of Humanities version of a field trip, their annual jaunt to the Jane Austen Society's AGM and summer picnic. She was pleased that these events were not among those that attracted Professor Martyn Swatridge. He was now much too busy with the higher business of the university.