The Photograph (5 page)

The wife wants decking too. She has been watching television gardening programs and knows what’s what in garden fashion, or thinks she does.

The wife will not get her decking if Elaine has anything to do with the matter. She will have to put it across to the wife that what is all very well for a semi in Birmingham will not do for a 1910 Surrey stockbroker holdout with Lutyens-style features and two acres of grounds. The grounds are a mess, but they have interesting bones. Elaine spotted the archaeological remains of what must once have been a Gertrude Jekyll-inspired sunken garden, complete with rill and fountain. She will have that restored.

Definitely no decking.

“You’re
so
judgmental,” says Kath. “Don’t be so disapproving. Be
nice
to me.” She has come rooting back, superimposing herself on the Surrey garden. She is just a face and a voice, like the Cheshire cat. She does this. She has said precisely that, many times before, head slightly tilted, fiddling with an earring.

Elaine sends her away.

No decking, and the water feature will be the restored Jekyll-style rill. None of your excavated pits lined with heavy-duty polystyrene. The wife will not have heard of Gertrude Jekyll but Elaine will blind her with science, and since this couple are paying rather a lot of money for Elaine’s name and know-how, and because she is not some fly-by-night television presenter but a highly esteemed doyenne garden-designer with major projects to her credit, along with various glossy publications, they will probably feel outflanked and start to doubt their own desires. In a few years’ time, they will be displaying the sunken garden, the woodland walk, and the wisteria pergola, and dropping Elaine’s name to the husband’s business associates, who won’t have heard of it but know a class job when they see one.

Elaine does not usually much care for her clients. She prefers them when they are the faceless apparatchiks of large corporations. The gardens of Appleton Hall, acquired by one of the big banks as a staff-training and conference center, were one of her most satisfactory commissions. No opinionated but unknowledgeable pair breathing down your neck and squabbling with each other about what they really wanted—just a businesslike brief, a budget, and get on with it. She is proud of the gardens of Appleton Hall—the parterre with the box hedging, the blue-and-silver border, the jewellike glimpses of surrounding landscape framed at the end of grass walks.

Elaine does not design gardens for suburban semis. The owners of suburban semis would not be able to afford her fees; there is a host, a multitude, of outfits around now which attend to the likes of them. Over her working life Elaine has seen garden design go from a rarefied activity catering only for the wealthy few, to a cottage industry available to anyone with a bit to spend on property embellishment. Gardening is a mania now, it seems. Time was, the nation’s gardeners were either obsessive specialists growing prize sweet peas in back gardens, or patrician experts presiding over bosky acreages. Nowadays, every house-proud couple knows their ceanothus from their viburnum.

Elaine is amused by this phenomenon. Her trade is now fashionable, instead of being either fuddy-duddy or elitist, depending on the perception. This is good for business, though she is well aware of bustling competition. But at sixty she is starting to wind down; she is being more choosy about commissions, she is capable of saying no when the job looks too problematic or too boring.

Once, she took everything she could get; that was when she was starting out, fresh from the years of learning plantsmanship, fresh from the time working for derisory wages in famous gardens to learn how it was done. She would design anything, back then: landscaping for a hotel forecourt, plantings for a new housing estate. She had to, as the most junior apprentice and general dogs-body for a slick little firm operating in one of the leafier parts of outer London.

Those years have been expediently glossed over in the CV that she supplies to prospective clients. Since then there have been bigger fish to fry, and her brochure lays them out for inspection. The brochure has had to be frequently updated. The first one of all was a fresh and innocent affair by comparison with the designer product of today. It was compiled with Nick’s help, tricked out with little decorative floral motifs done by a girl illustrator he knew, and printed by the people he used when he first set up the publishing house. Back in those heady early years of marriage, and of work: her work, his work.

Elaine is now on the last stretch of the drive home. She passes the junction with the road that leads to their old place, the house in which family life was carried on cheek by jowl with a small publishing business and an embryonic garden-design venture. The busy, cluttered place in which every room housed filing cabinets, someone sitting at a desk, stacks of books. The kitchen where Polly was enthroned in her high chair or crawled about on the floor while people made out invoices and answered the phone.

The old house sends out signals, an unquenchable Morse code that is always to be heard around here. She is not thinking of the house, but nevertheless fragments of that time tumble haphazardly in her head, mixed with consideration of planting schemes for the Surrey mansion. A bog garden? Species roses for that long bank?
Hydrangea paniculata
against the walls? And, alongside, the thought that she must do a major supermarket shop tomorrow. Now, as the fragments tumble, Nick swings into focus, perhaps because she is approaching that pub that they used to go to of a Sunday lunchtime, way back. There he is still, sitting at one of those tables with fixed benches, on a summer morning, wearing a dark-green short-sleeved shirt, hair flopping, holding a pint mug which he waves around, in full flow about this new project.

“Roads,” he says. “Lost roads. Prehistoric, Roman, cattle roads. An entire series. Canals and railways have been done to death. The Lost Roads of Britain—how about that!”

Oliver is present. The other half of the firm—friend, crony, partner. He is silent, in this clip from that time. He sits there, also with beer mug in hand, in quizzical silence. Not surprising—Nick in full enthusiastic spate was not to be stemmed. Sensible, pragmatic Oliver, who looks at the bottom line and deals with the nuts and bolts of the business, leaving editorial flair to Nick. Good old Oliver. Dear Oliver, Elaine sometimes felt, when Nick was being especially wayward or perverse, when he was in obsessive pursuit of some probably unviable plan. For Oliver was there then to provide reassurance and solace and to suggest that it will all blow over, like as not, and if it doesn’t, well, we’ll get it sorted out. Sometimes the shifty thought used to come that she might be better off married to Oliver, and, occasionally, when being counseled by Oliver, she was distinctly stirred. But Oliver would never betray his friend, not by thought, word, or deed. And in the last resort, Elaine loved Nick, didn’t she?

“You’re not listening, sweetie,” he is saying, still waving the beer mug, looking directly at her. “You’re thinking about some blessed garden. I want you to think about roads.”

She is past that pub now and the Nick of then is effaced by the Nick of today, who may or may not be at home, and if he is, she thinks irritably, you can take it as read that it will not have occurred to him that he might check the fridge and make a trip to the supermarket. Not a bit of it. He will have spent the day swanning around—reading the papers, playing with the Internet, conceivably writing a few words of a review or one of his hack travel pieces—that is, if he has any work to hand at the moment, which he probably has not. While Elaine has driven a hundred miles and spent four hours acting with constraint and civility in the face of a couple of morons.

She goes through the village. She turns off onto the side road. The old house had neighbors. The new house—well, the new house of the last ten years—is elegantly isolated, folded into a particularly appealing valley, complete with stream and woodland. They had eyed it for years, she and Nick: a little Georgian building with several acres of grounds that Elaine itched to get her hands on. And then it came up for sale. She had commissions pouring in, she was buzzing with schemes; the time was ripe to take a risk.

In ten years, a garden matures. Those covetable grounds are now Elaine’s most prized creation. It is young, as yet; the pleached-lime walk is a mere stripling, the ginkgos have to grow, there is infilling to be done and mistakes to be rectified. And she would make no majestic claims for it; this is not Hadspen or Tintinhull or Barrington Court. But it is a statement of her taste and talent, it bears her signature, it is her showcase.

Past six, now swinging into the circular driveway in front of the house, she sees that everyone has gone home. Only Nick’s Golf is parked there. During the day, there is quite a lineup of cars. Sonia, Elaine’s personal assistant, drives from her home ten miles away. Three times a week there is Liz, who deals with the paperwork Sonia hasn’t time for. The red pickup belongs to Jim, who does the heavy garden work. And then there are the relays of horticultural students serving their apprenticeship in the workshop of a master, just as Elaine herself once did. The current apprentice is Pam, who is a little northern butterball, sturdy as an ox, and exuberantly sociable, which makes her good front-of-house material on Saturdays, when the garden is open to the public. Then, all hands are needed to patrol the grounds and to man the sales area, where plants are on offer, along with a judicious selection of garden implements, seeds, gift-shop paraphernalia, and books—not least a complete display of Elaine’s own publications. On those days, the paddock next to the driveway becomes the visitors’ car park. Sometimes Elaine herself is on hand in the garden to be graciously responsive to queries and compliments. Initially, she found this stimulating and good for the ego. Nowadays, she gets rather tired of being asked if this or that is an annual or a perennial, and how to prune a rose. She tends to retreat to the house and leave customer relations to the students, who enjoy it.

When she first started opening the garden, three years ago, the idea was that Nick would come into his own. Nick, after all, is nothing if not sociable and enthusiastic. The enthusiasm could surely be channeled into visitor reception and salesmanship, or at the very least, car-park duties. And indeed, to begin with Nick was all compliance. He hung about the terraces, treating middle-aged women to dollops of boyish charm; he swept little parties off to the stream garden to display the primulas; he manned the till in the shop and added everything up wrong, but nobody minded because he was so patently a beguiling amateur. Jim took over the car park after Nick directed a BMW into the boggy bit at the bottom, where it stuck fast. And in due course Nick’s commitment to Saturdays withered and died. Elaine remonstrated, tight-lipped. “Sweetie, they keep asking me what this is called or whether that will grow on acid soil, and I haven’t got the foggiest idea. The girls do it much better. And we all know I can’t do money, don’t we?”

Oh yes, she knows that. You cannot successfully keep a small publishing house afloat without a degree of business acumen. You must be able to gauge what will sell and what will not; you need to balance risk and costs and profit margins. You require a certain facility with figures, an aspect of the activity that Nick found distinctly tiresome. He tended to avert his eyes, for the most part. When Hammond & Watson eventually crashed, despite Oliver’s best efforts, the warehouse was full of unsold stock, authors and suppliers were owed, and what had started out as an enterprising small imprint with a name for topographical and travel writing had become a liability.

It took a year to sort out the mess. Nick was chastened but buoyant. Never mind. It was good while it lasted. And he had plenty of useful contacts now, lots he could do in travel journalism, stuff for the Sundays, maybe guidebooks, that sort of thing: “Listen, Oliver, what if we—”

“No,” said Oliver. “Count me out, this time round. No hard feelings. We had a run for our money.”

To Elaine, Oliver said, “Sorry. I should have been able to keep things under control. I feel I’ve let you down.”

Since when, she had thought, has anyone kept Nick under control? I too should have seen the red light. From now on, there will be changes. She had felt older, harder, and, in some odd way, exhilarated.

She collects her papers and clipboard from the back of the car. She goes into the house.

Windows open to the summer evening. Music filtering from somewhere. Nick is in the conservatory with a drink in his hand and something emollient on the stereo. After his taxing day.

Elaine goes into the office. Sonia has left a pile of letters for her to sign. There is another tray of letters and faxes that she must read. She gathers these up. She puts her notes from today into the appropriate file.

In the kitchen, Pam and Jim have both left scrawled messages on the blackboard. Pam has finished tidying up the long border, but needs instructions about the box hedging and those fuchsia cuttings. Jim says the tractor mower has packed up again; he’s called in the mechanic and let’s hope he comes in time to get the grass done by Saturday.

Elaine walks through into the conservatory, where the plumbago is a sight to behold. Beyond, the garden is glorious in the evening sunshine. Elaine is able to pay only token respect; her head is jangling from her day and her focus is on Nick, positioned precisely as she had anticipated. He has not heard her enter, but catches sight of her as she sits down.

“Hi! You’re back. I didn’t realize.”

“Naturally not. Do you think you could turn the music down a notch?” She starts to go through the mail.

Nick does so. He gets up to refill his glass, then has a sudden thought. “Drink?”

She nods.

“We’re out of that nice Australian white you got. Let’s get some more.”

“Thank you for reminding me,” says Elaine.

The touch of frost in the air is apparent to Nick. He gives her a wary glance. “Poll rang. Says she’ll call back.”