A Bit of Earth (8 page)

‘Shall we dine in or out tonight?' What Guy would really have liked was room service, but he had the feeling that not much would be forthcoming.

‘Out,' said Felix. ‘Maybe there will be a chip shop café.'
‘I'd say that's very likely.'

They put on their cagoules and headed out into the rain.

An hour later they were back, full and happy with the taste of old, cheap fat on their lips, and many butties under their belts. Felix had fistfuls of leaflets from the hotel lobby. Now what should they do? Guy turned on the TV. Nothing at all worth watching. It was half past six. Still too early for bed.

‘Fancy a bath in a hotel bathroom?' he asked Felix.

‘Maybe tomorrow, Dad. I'm going to make a list of all the things I want to do on holiday.'

Guy's spirits seemed to rise, and his heart to sink at the same time. The list would contain things that Felix had spotted that were far too old for him, or that Guy was too inadequate to cope with. Susannah, he remembered with a pang, had always been the one to make a ‘To Do' list on holiday.

‘Couldn't we just go for walks and muck about on the beach?' he said feebly.

Felix was already sifting through the leaflets. He had spotted yet more in a folder on the bedside table.

‘Pan for Welsh Gold,' he read out loud.

‘We could do that,' said Guy. That sounded fine.

‘Pony Trekking … Mountain Adventure Centre … The King Arthur Ex, um, something.'

‘Experience,' said Guy. ‘I thought King Arthur was Cornish.'

‘Maybe he went pony trekking,' said Felix. ‘Paintball,' he went on, ‘I'd love to do paintballing. Please, Dad, I saw it on TV. It's really cool.'

Didn't Felix realise that they just weren't the paintball type?

‘We'll see,' said Guy.

‘Can we go to that place with machines by the beach?' said Felix. ‘I've always wanted to go in one of those.'

‘Um, I think you have to be twelve or something,' said Guy.

‘Some of those kids in there looked my age.'

‘I expect they just weren't very tall,' said Guy.

‘Dad!'

‘Maybe.' Guy unfolded the OS map and spread it out on the bed. ‘Come and look at this. Now this is where we're staying. These tracks are footpaths … We could walk in a big circle, start here, it's just by the beach, then along this path, this is a waterfall. Looks like a big one too. Then if we carry on up here, I don't think it'll be too tricky for us, we should get a really great view. Then along here… This tells you how high up you are, and how close these pinkish lines are to each other tells you how steep …' His voice trailed off. How he loved looking at OS maps. He really could spend the rest of his life doing it. You could really lose yourself in one. Look at it for hours and hours. Imagine being one of the people who first drew them … There were so many walks that he and Felix could tackle, of course he would have to make some allowances for Felix's little legs.

He looked up from the map. Where was Felix? Oh, asleep. Asleep in his clothes on top of the bed. Guy found Felix's pyjamas. He thought that he had packed two pairs, but he could only seem to find the blue and green stripy bottoms and the top of a pair that Uncle Jon had sent from Australia, a print of jolly kangaroos in boxing gloves
holding flags. He managed to get Felix undressed and into the crunchy hotel bed (did he detect a waterproof sheet?) without really waking him. Then what to do? Guy could eat the complimentary Highland Shortbread biscuits, or make himself a cup of tea in the little stainless-steel pot. He could watch TV with the sound turned down. He could take a bath and then watch the rain falling on the balcony. He opened the doors very slightly, just so that he could hear the sound of the sea.

The next morning it was still raining. They had the hotel breakfast, and by eight forty-five were all ready to go. Guy wondered how to fill the impossible hours. They walked along the sea front. Nothing was open yet.

‘I think the rain might be stopping,' said Felix.

‘Maybe,' said Guy. They found the terminus of a steam railway and spent a long time looking at the timetable. If they rode all the way to the end of the line and back three times it would use up the whole day. The first train left in less than an hour. They walked back along the sea front and found that a baker's had opened. They bought cartons of juice and Chelsea buns. They ate them on the train, waiting for it to go. They waited and waited. Eventually it went. Soon they were crossing an estuary, then into the woods and heading for the mountains. Felix had picked up leaflets about all the little steam railways in North Wales. There were enough for them to go on a different one each day. It seemed like a good enough plan to Guy.

Erica was delighted with her postcard. She didn't even realise that it was the only one they'd sent to someone in England: ‘We have been on a different train but eaten the same cakes every day. It has rained a lot. From Felix.' Guy hadn't signed it. They also sent cards to their few relatives. Guy thought that it would create an impression of coping. He was in contact with them all so rarely that he had to improvise the addresses.

At last the week was over and they could go home again, back along the A5, a small, errant bead on a broken necklace of caravans, MPVs and SUVs.

After Susannah had gone, most things stayed the same in the house, not by design but by omission. The pictures that Felix had most recently done at nursery, optimistic sunbursts and skyscapes of pinks and reds stayed up on the walls until the Blu-Tack hardened and they slipped, corner by corner. At seven, Felix pulled them all down in irritation. The bags of work he brought home from school – worksheets on weighing and measuring; handwriting books; pages and pages of tedious (and in Felix's case always correct) numeracy problems; poems; more art; cookies baked at school and sent home wrapped in paper towels; one bag even contained a baby tooth lost at morning play, safe inside a margarine tub, never to be collected by a tooth fairy – these would stand in the hall for ever.

It was now three years since Susannah had died. From a distance you might not think that Guy had changed at all. His clothes were the same, just even more faded and washed. His curly hair, once the colour of wet sand, was now threaded with grey and white, and had the overall look of dry sand beyond the high-tide mark. But if you watched
him walk you would detect more of a stoop, a slower pace. He no longer looked much like somebody who was 6 ft 1. There was something even more meandering about him now.

Up close there were changes too. His eyebrows had become two bars of white strands, etiolated seedlings left too long on a windowsill. His glasses, which predated Susannah, gold-rimmed and round, and once ubiquitous in academia, now marked him out as terminally past it. The lenses had a slightly misty milkiness which he didn't notice, so used was he to the cracked old glass of the greenhouses.

It would never have occurred to him to replace them. Susannah had made him an appointment and had planned to be there to supervise the choosing of the new frames; but after she had gone the date was forgotten. Reminders, new appointments, and then jaunty ‘It is a long time since you last had your eyes checked' letters from the optician's lay unread on the hall floor with the free papers and the pizza and fried chicken delivery leaflets. Once the drifts started to impede the opening of the front door Guy would sweep them up, like so many autumn leaves, and put them in a box in the garage for recycling. They might stay there until the end of time.

There were two entrances to the garden. The first, the official entrance, was hard to find. You followed a mean little path behind the Geography building. There were signs to Astronomy, to the administration building, to the staff club, to the theatre and gallery, and to the departments of everything, but nobody had ever bothered with one to the botanical garden. The path behind the Geography building ended in a slough of pebbles, that after heavy rain would become just a pool. (Guy suspected an underground stream there, running towards the one that flowed through the garden.) Then if you managed to cross this, there was another path, made from cinders and clinker from the fires that had once failed to warm the first students' halls of residence. This cinder path led to the greenhouses where Guy worked, planting out seedlings, measuring sepals and calyxes, noticing the tiniest of variations in the most minute of details, and where Erica sometimes worked, busy with experiments of her own. She also spent rather a lot of time on other projects of her own devising, such as scooping potentially toxic berries
from a pond, or watching pairs of goldfinches. She and Guy also worked in the corner of the sixth-floor lab that was theirs, and of course he had lectures to give and there were students to see; but the numbers enrolling on Botany modules were in decline. Guy tried not to think about it too often. If he had, he might have realised that his so-called Department of Botany was withering and in danger of being cut down completely.

The path continued past the greenhouses, several of which were now abandoned, and should, if Health and Safety came down there again, be made inaccessible with ribbons of red and white tape and copious notices warning of the dangers of broken glass and uneven floors. On very cold nights the greenhouses suffered more cracks. It might not be long before a huge bough from one of the oaks destroyed them all. The glass would splinter into the earth, but the poppies and the chickweed, the teasels and vetches would soon make good the damage, like the microscopic mesh of blood cells that work swiftly to cover and then heal a wound.

Beyond the greenhouses you could choose one of several paths. You could carry straight on and find some grassy banks and an orchard. The trees were neglected and now bore little fruit, and what there was fell into the uncut grass to be eaten only by wasps, squirrels and badgers. Susannah had collected apples for crumbles, pies and chutneys (so popular with her father), but the apples were all cookers, and so of no use to Felix or Guy or Erica, none of whom did much cooking.

The other paths led to little wooden bridges (although ‘bridge' perhaps was too grand a word for them). They were constructions of once sturdy beams, nailed together and
made slightly less treacherous by sheets of chicken wire. The stream ran several feet deep after heavy rain, but in high summer, or in the now common times of drought, it was reduced to a shallow (but still pleasingly noisy) few inches. On the other side of the stream was an open grassy area, which Guy thought of as the meadow. Many years back the garden's designer had called it a lawn. There was a huge hollow stump of an oak, beneath which dwelt the badgers. Then behind the meadow were the terraces of collected plants, the botanical specimens and trees; Californian nutmegs and maidenhair trees, crimson, yellow and golden maples, several cabbage trees (
Cordyline australis
) and Spanish daggers (
Yucca gloriosa
), smoke trees and sumacs, and a precious white camellia with almost blue-tinged flowers, which Guy had planted. The inventory would have gone on for many pages, but even Guy and Erica didn't know exactly what was in the garden. So many parts had become overgrown, and some slopes were becoming forbiddingly treacherous or too swampy for adults' heavy feet. Snowy, the university cat, was one of the few beings to know every inch of it.

If you walked the length of the meadow you would come to a series of ponds, fed by the stream, and beyond these to a completely wild area of woods that ended abruptly in a fence and the gardens of the road where Erica lived.

You could follow one of two steep paths up the terrace, and whichever you took, you would find yourself at a wire mesh fence and a gate into the car park of the university doctors' surgery. The gate was never locked (it should have been) but almost nobody knew about it. The fence was covered by a climbing, rambling plant, which in late
autumn revealed itself to be a Chinese gooseberry. The fruits were almost as round as apples, and as hard as stones, but were, none the less, kiwis.

Guy wasn't actually in charge of the garden, and he had no dealings with the committee that was. The grounds staff came in occasionally to cut the grass of what had once been the lawn. The garden was so tucked away, and invisible from the university buildings, that hardly anybody went there. Why waste resources on something of no commercial use or public relations value?

Now that he was seven and in the Juniors, Felix went straight to the garden after school, knowing that his dad would be there. Each day he hoped to meet Snowy, who was very friendly. Felix would climb a tree, or just sit still until he and Guy spotted each other, or sometimes he would walk around, tapping things with a bamboo stick. It looked as though he were practising for a future as a blind person. He wasn't the sort of child to slash at things.

‘Dad; we could make one of those bamboo forest things, like in France. One of those mazes. Do you remember that one, Dad? It's in the photos …'