The Garden Plot (2 page)

Lydia knew that Pru had a fear of heights. Just the thought of the London Eye—and dangling more than four hundred feet in the air in a see-through capsule—sent Pru’s head reeling.

“We’ll take them through the maze at Hampton Court Palace,” she had replied. A gardener needs solid ground.

Pru saw one more piece of mail … a payment? With her phone tucked between her ear and shoulder and Mrs. Wilson expounding on Toffee Woof-Woof’s penchant for weedy thickets, Pru ripped open the envelope with an SW3 post code and found one
piece of folded stationery:

“It’s dead,” shouted Pru to the piece of paper. “The cordyline is dead, and no amount of waiting for it to resprout will bring it back.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Oh, Mrs. Wilson, I’m very sorry, I was just trying to … I saw a … right, this afternoon. We won’t worry about the form right now.”

With a woof in the background, Mrs. Wilson gave Pru her particulars, which Pru, still standing at the front door, scribbled on the back of Sarah Richards’s envelope. A second after the call ended, a knock at the door startled her.

“Pru?” Jo called out. “Are you on the phone or are you talking to yourself?”

“A bit of both,” Pru said, opening the door. “I’ve lost Sarah Richards.” She waved the note in the air.

Jo shook her umbrella and closed it before stepping in. “That one with the dead cordyline who wanted you to string the tea lights for her summer barbecue? With the nephew who weeded out the delphinium you set out?”

“I did string the lights, and she still hasn’t paid her bill.”

“She isn’t worth it. You’ll get someone better to replace her.” Jo was Pru’s biggest cheerleader. “What about Damson Hill?”

“No,” was all Pru could bring herself to say.

“Bateman’s is looking for an intern. Think of it—Rudyard Kipling’s house and National Trust to boot.”

“I can’t be an intern, Jo, you know that. They don’t make any money. How would I live? If only I was fourteen, I could become a bothy boy.”

“If you were a boy. If there were bothies. If it were still the nineteenth century.”

Pru told Jo about Mrs. Wilson, whose garden—and dog—she would be meeting soon. “Once I clean up the shed, I might be able to design a proper town garden for her—you never know. It sounds like nothing has been done for ages. Tea?”

“God, yes. Cordelia had to shift her piano lessons to my flat this week while the pavement is repaired outside theirs, and my head is pounding from the scales.”

Jo’s daughter taught piano at home—or out of her mother’s home when necessary—while Cordelia’s longtime partner, Lucy, an architect, worked with a firm in London’s Docklands, once an abandoned industrial area along the Thames, but now teeming with expensive flats and high-end offices. Jo’s tiny flat suited her perfectly—she was, as Pru’s dad would’ve said, no bigger than a minute—but there was nowhere to escape the piano lessons. Pru thought Cordelia must have gotten her height from her father, Alan, who lived in Edinburgh.

Pru couldn’t imagine how she would have survived these months without Jo’s friendship, which had developed over her first few weeks in London. Jo the property manager acted as Pru’s main contact for the sublet. The people who held the lease on the house, the Clarkes,—were away; he was a history professor on sabbatical, Jo said. Jo’s name had been passed to Pru through the usual means—a friend at the Dallas Arboretum knew someone who had spent a year in London, and that person asked a friend in the city who knew about Jo from her own rental.

“Here’s my number,” Jo said on the first day, when they met at 72 Grovehill Square. “You ring anytime you need something.”

Pru had plunged into her voluntary internship at the Royal Horticultural Society Garden Wisley almost immediately after she arrived, and so, although she needed a great deal of help figuring out a new city in a new country, she had no time to ask for it. Early each morning for a month, she had made her way to Waterloo station—picking up a coffee and a roll on the way—to get a train to Woking. One of the gardeners at Wisley had kindly offered to collect her from the small station and drop her off again at the end of the day; otherwise she’d have been on her own for the four-mile walk—pleasant enough in summer, but not ideal in late autumn—or she would have been out the cost of a cab twice a day.

Arriving home each evening exhausted from a day working in the chill and rain, Pru ate sandwiches she bought at the rail station for dinner. After three days and nights of that and one splurge at the Cat and Cask, her local pub, she phoned Jo.

“I know this sounds like a silly question, but I’ve had no time to explore,” Pru explained. “Where’s the nearest shop? I’m not looking for anything fancy.” Living in Chelsea meant that the surrounding shopping areas were filled with lovely, expensive food, clothes, coffee—all out of Pru’s price range as she had yet to make any money at all. The frenetic shopping energy of King’s Road, which cut across Chelsea and Kensington, made her nervous and was too far a walk for a quick shopping trip.

“Not to worry,” Jo said, taking things in hand. “Tomorrow I’ll take you around and we’ll find everything you need.” She was better than her word, showing Pru not just where to shop—the nearest Waitrose was two streets away, although Pru was on more of a Tesco budget—but also introducing her at Gasparetti’s, the Italian restaurant nearby. Pru fell in love with Gasparetti’s on her first visit and stopped by often, although her dinners consisted mostly of Riccardo’s minestrone with an occasional small plate of pasta.

By the time she finished her internship at Wisley, Christmas loomed, but she took a philosophical attitude about being by herself in London for the holiday. She couldn’t help but enjoy the sights and sounds—secretly pretending she lived in some version of Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
—and decided she wouldn’t mind being alone on the day. She hadn’t talked with Jo in a week or two, and so was disinclined to phone her and sound pitiful as the holiday approached.

“You’ll spend Christmas with us,” Jo said, ringing one day out of the blue. “Cordelia, Lucy, you, and me. Cordelia will play for us—oh, you’ll need a party piece.”

Pru arrived at Jo’s on Christmas morning with a bottle of wine, flowers for the table, and a printed-out copy of “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which she had tried to memorize, but she kept getting stuck on the bit about throwing up the sash.

Jo’s tiny flat had a tiny tabletop tree decorated with tiny exquisitely carved and painted wooden birds. Pru thought Jo might be a bird-watcher, but as it turned out, she had bought the entire tree, already decorated, from Selfridges in an after-Christmas sale a few years before, and only because it fit in her flat.

As the turkey roasted, the three women asked Pru to explain how Americans could eat a turkey for their Thanksgiving in November and then again just a few weeks later for Christmas. “But isn’t it the same menu?” asked Cordelia. Pru agreed that it did sound odd, but pointed out that Christmas dinners might be ham or beef, whereas Thanksgiving was always turkey.

Lucy and Cordelia supplied the Christmas crackers. Pru knew about crackers—they looked like toilet paper tubes covered in wrapping paper. The cracker was yanked apart by a person on either end, and with a
pop,
it broke open to reveal tiny gifts and
tissue-paper crowns inside. “You see,” said Jo to Pru, “you even us out. I wouldn’t have anyone to pull the cracker with if you weren’t here.”

They spent the rest of the evening wearing their crowns, drinking wine, playing with the toys, reading the jokes, singing carols accompanied by Cordelia, and presenting their party pieces. Lucy did a few magic tricks, during which the other three helped by paying no attention when the coin she was about to pull from behind Pru’s ear fell on the floor. Pru got through her poem with no hitches, and Jo sang a lovely rendition of “Flower of Scotland.” “There,” she said, “that’s for Alan.”

Pru spared a thought for Christmas the year before, which she had spent with Lydia and family. She missed Lydia—she missed having a girlfriend. She cherished the occasional dinners she and Jo shared, meeting for drinks or coffee, and certainly being included in Christmas, but had to remind herself during the long stretches of empty evenings that Jo was a busy woman and new friends were sometimes hard to work in.

After Pru had finished at Wisley, she acquired her first few business contacts in the gardening world, and Jo introduced her to several potential clients in the general Chelsea/Kensington neighborhood. Jo had the enviable position of being distantly related to the Bennet-Smythe family, who owned Grenadine Hall, a Grade II–listed house in Upper Oddington near the town of Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswolds where, unfortunately, they had no openings for a gardener, head or otherwise.

After a quick cup of tea, Jo left and Pru packed her preliminary client kit into the large canvas bag that rarely left her side: a few colored-pencil garden renderings made to look as if they were dashed off in a moment, when in fact Pru had labored over them, drawing not being her strong suit; notepad; pencils; pens; hand pruners, because you never knew when someone wanted to try you out by having you clean up a misshapen boxwood on the spot; and two pairs of gloves. When she stepped out, a shaft of sunlight hit her, and so she stored her slicker in the bag, too. She headed out to the bus stop.

What seemed odd transportation for a jobbing gardener moving from client to client through the day actually suited her. Pru found a patchwork of journeys on the Underground and buses to be the best transportation. All of her clients lived in central London, and many kept the necessary tools already—spade, fork, rake—which Pru need only augment. For particularly dirty or large jobs, she could give Sammy a ring. He would haul anything around, although his battered Mercedes truck looked as if it should be chucked in the tip along with whatever trash he was dumping.

Pru sized up the front entry at the Wilsons’ when she arrived. Two stone pots flanked the door; they contained the remnants of a summer planting of pelargoniums, perilously hanging on to life in powdery dry soil by a few leaves and a couple of optimistic, but unopened, flower stalks. Knowing there would be just cause for the name “Toffee Woof-Woof,” Pru took a second to wonder which would prompt the bigger outburst, the knocker or the bell.

She opted for the bell, and a barrage of barks greeted her from the other side of the door. Mrs. Wilson answered. Well-dressed in tweeds, she held back a caramel-colored terrier by the collar and said, “Oh, the bell always sets him off. He’s so much better with the knocker.”
Good start, Pru.

The town houses around Chartsworth Square had the usual two-up-two-down arrangement, including a hallway that led straight to the back door. Halfway down the hall, a door on the right opened to a combined sitting and dining room, and at the end of the hall, the kitchen. Stairs led straight up from the hall to two bedrooms and a bath. It was the same arrangement in Pru’s house, although flipped: the rooms were left of the stairs. As she followed Mrs. Wilson through the entry hall, she thought the Wilsons could easily have spread into the next town house over.

Pru dodged a maze of half-moon display tables with spindly legs, each one covered in framed photos, enameled boxes, and monogrammed letter openers. She caught bits of wording as she passed: “In great appreciation to Harry Wilson from his friends at the AASL” engraved on a gold plaque; “To Harry Wilson on the occasion of his first successful dig …” on an unrolled parchment scroll; and, on a silver-framed certificate, a pen-and-ink sketch of what looked like a Roman bust, and scrawled underneath, “To Harry—a prince of a …” Pru didn’t have time to decipher the illegible last word or the equally illegible signature.

Mrs. Wilson led her straight through to the back door and opened it. As they stood at the top of the outside stairs that led down to the garden, she waved her arm in presentation. “There! Isn’t it just awful?”

The back garden, as narrow as the house, and deep in that typical London fashion, was framed by brick walls. Near to the house, at the bottom of the stairs, a small flagstone patio gave way to lawn that had seen better days. Against the walls grew creeper vines, just starting to color up for autumn.

The lawn grew weedy as it receded, until at the back—the “bottom” of the garden—rose a mountain of ivy. On the left, a couple of bare white branches emerged from an unfortunate birch, and on the right, just visible above the sea of green, a small roof. The garden on the other side of the wall contrasted sharply: a tidy lawn with an oval
island bed full of shrub roses and climbers lining the walls.

“We haven’t had a moment to sort it out since we moved in last year, and I’m afraid it’s got the better of us now. Mr. Wilson, you see, is so very busy with work, and he didn’t want me to bother with this at all. ‘Just leave it, Vernona,’ he said, ‘don’t touch it,’ but I want to give him a bit of a surprise and get a good start on a proper garden, just like we had in Hampshire.”

“It’s a lovely space, and with good sun. May I take some snapshots today?” Pru asked, reaching into her canvas bag. “Once it’s cleaned up, I’d love to be able to make a garden for you. Would you like to see any of my designs, Mrs. Wilson?”

“No, certainly not; Victoria couldn’t say enough about you, wonderful American gardener. She said you transformed her rose arbor.” Yes, Pru remembered that rose arbor—a neglected climber with vicious thorns engulfing it, Pru had spent days untangling and pruning it back; she still had the scars to prove it.

“Shall we get down to particulars, dear? Let me write you a cheque now for £200, and we’ll say that’s for your visit today and a bonus, then we’ll begin your hourly wage when you get going—plus expenses, of course. Will that be sufficient? You can take a look at what you’re up against now, and get stuck in tomorrow.” Mrs. Wilson grabbed a diary off the small desk just inside the door and flipped a page. “Yes, you’ll need to do it tomorrow.”