The Sunlight on the Garden (15 page)

‘I like what grass there is.'

‘York stone. That would be fine.'

He ignored it. He stared at her hands as they now rested one on either knee, as though preparatory to departure. They were beautiful hands, the nails carefully manicured, natural in colour as he liked nails to be.

When she was leaving, she said: ‘I was serious about the garden. I'd love to put in some work on it.'

‘I do have a chappie who comes in from time to time.'

‘Why go to that expense? I'd do it for nothing.'

He watched her from his upstairs bedroom window as, mounted on a ladder, she sawed at a branch. Her hair, brown streaked with gold, was dishevelled about her shoulders, and there were patches of sweat, dark on light, staining the cotton of her blouse under the arms. Her energy and strength overwhelmed him. All around her were the severed branches of privet and cotoneaster. They looked almost black against the yellowish green of the long grass that she had said she would mow the coming day.

He went down and joined her. From the ladder, looking down at him, she said: ‘Oh, I do wish you'd have that lawn paved. You could have two urns with flowers in them. You could even have a fountain. Oh, do!'

He shook his head, smiled. ‘Nope. I like it as it is.'

‘Oh, you are obstinate!'

‘Yes. Yes, I am.' He laughed.

She spoke of the tenants below her. ‘It's odd how noise rises. I hear that thump-thump-thump late into the night. When I last complained, he – the man – called me a fucking bitch and then slammed the door on me.' A few days later she spoke again of them. When they had their parties, they wedged the front door open. It was so dangerous, anyone could slip into the house. ‘I'll just have to find somewhere else to live.'

Soon after that, he was in bed with a summer virus. He wheezed, coughed and expectorated, now sweating and now shivering. She had called round unexpectedly with two rosebushes and had stared at him, in his pyjamas and slippers, his forehead shiny with sweat, as he had opened the door to her. Then she was all concern. She demanded a thermometer, which he had difficulty in locating in a bedside drawer, and, having peered down at it, at once told him: ‘You must get to bed. It's over a hundred.'

‘Oh, one doesn't give in to a temperature. I feel fine.'

‘You look ghastly.'

Eventually he gave in both to the temperature and to her with a feeling of voluptuous relief. She dosed him with aspirin, brought a bowl of chicken soup and a pot of yoghurt up to his room on a tray, and announced that, having gone home to see to one or two things, she would return to spend the night.

‘Oh, but that's not at all necessary! One can manage perfectly well.'

Again she insisted. Then, so far from continuing to oppose her, he suddenly gave in. with an upsurge of joy that took him by surprise.

‘I'm going to be terribly busy the next few days. I must do some house hunting.' She was cleaning the silver, some of it tarnished to almost black, that his daily, who was in fact a weekly, never had either the time or the inclination to tackle.

‘So you're really set on a move?'

Vigorously she rubbed at the side of an entrée dish now rarely used. She nodded, her hair falling forward to screen her face. He wanted to put out a hand to feel the thickness of that hair, his fingers lifting up strands of it and then letting them fall over forearm and palm. ‘What else can I do? Things can't go on as they are. I hardly slept a wink last night. And when I was coming up the steps behind him yesterday, he just shut the door in my face. Deliberately. No doubt about it.'

‘He sounds an absolute little shit.'

‘Not little. He's even taller than you are. And huge. He plays rugby in his spare time.' Again she rubbed vigorously. ‘The trouble is that everything in this area's so expensive. Even a bed-sitter with its own kitchen and bathroom. I'll have to look farther afield. Someone said that Bow might be worth a try.'

‘
Bow
!' He was appalled. ‘ But that's miles away.'

‘Yes, I know. If I went there, I'd have to find another job. I couldn't make that long journey from Bow to Kensington each day.' The implication was obvious to him. She could not each day make that long journey from Bow to him.

‘I have an idea.' He said it on an impulse. Once said, he could not withdraw it. ‘How about your taking up residence here?'

‘
Here
?' She stopped buffing the dish. Her face was radiant as she turned it up to him. ‘Are you being serious?'

‘Yes. Of course. Why not? You know the room. It's dark and not all that comfortable. But, being in the basement, it has it own entrance. And its own loo and shower.'

‘What more could one want? Oh, that's wonderful. Do you really mean it?'

‘I wouldn't have suggested it if I didn't.'

‘I won't be any trouble.'

‘I'm sure you won't.'

‘But what rent would you want? Rents here are so high. I wonder if I could afford it.'

‘Nothing.'

‘Nothing?'

‘Nothing.'

He put out a hand and patted her shoulder.

Gradually she brought in possessions of her own, to replace pieces that she carried up to the loft. At first these replacements were from her former flat. Then they were from Portobello Road, or from car boot sales. To these last she began by travelling long distances by public transport. Then, after a few weeks, he urged her to take his car whenever she wished. It was a battered but still beautiful old Daimler, which he himself now rarely used. Sometimes he would accompany her, telling her that something that she fancied was rubbish or advising her to buy this or that chair, table or picture.

One day, he had pointed to a bedside table. ‘That's a good piece. Sturdy. Handsome. Victorian.'

She laughed. ‘Like you.' She walked round it, examining it. Then she asked the price. ‘ Oh, gosh!'

‘Let me buy it for you.'

‘Oh, no! I couldn't agree to that.'

‘Of course you could. You've done so many things for me.'

From then on he would often buy objects for her. They always had to be things that he, as well as she, liked.

‘You're so good to me.'

‘Well, you're so good to me.'

He meant that. She would shop for their meals and cook them, load and empty the dishwasher and the washing machine, iron his shirts, even clean his shoes. Above all, each weekend she worked in the garden. Sometimes that bothered him. It was no longer the garden, overgrown and for the most part shaded, that once he had loved. He found its present order finicky; he hated the sight of once soaring branches now reduced to raw stumps by amputations with an electric saw that she had badgered him into buying. Once it was high summer, it was difficult to find somewhere to sit where the sun did not scorch him.

When he grumbled about that to her, she said: ‘Well, you could always get an umbrella.'

‘Yes, I could always do that.'

‘There's a sale at Habitat. Perhaps they have one. I'll have a look next time I'm passing that way.'

She found the umbrella, he paid for it.

‘I feel so old this morning.'

They were sitting at breakfast in the kitchen, she dressed for work and he, as so often, in pyjamas and dressing gown. ‘
Old
? You certainly don't look it.'

‘I'm twenty-seven today.'

‘
Today
? Why on earth didn't you tell me? We could have had a little party. At all events let me take you out to dinner.'

‘Sweet of you. But some friends have arranged something for me. Nothing grand. Just a few people round for drinks and a buffet supper.'

It did not offend him that he had not been invited. He preferred it that she kept her two existences – her one with him, her other of work and friends – in rigorous parallel, never allowing the lines to waver, much less converge.

‘I must think what to give you as a present.'

‘Oh, no, please! You give me so much already.'

He shook his head. ‘I'll think of something.'

Later, sitting out in the only corner of the garden where there was now any shade, he tried to do that. A digital camera? A briefcase to replace her scuffed one? Something for her to wear from Harvey Nicks? Then he decided that, no, he would give her some money. Money was always what people really preferred. Fifty? He stared up into the branches above him. No, no, make it a hundred. Later, he bought a Monet card of water lilies at Givenchy – rather hackneyed, he thought, but never mind – and placed two fifty pounds notes inside it.

When she returned from work, he had the envelope ready. She looked tired, he thought. There were shiny, bruise-like shadows under her eyes, and the eyes themselves were dull.

She opened the envelope. Then she looked up. The eyes suddenly caught fire. ‘Oh, you are a darling! How can I thank you?'

‘Buy something you want.'

She laughed. ‘I wouldn't buy something I
didn't
want.'

‘Are you in a hurry for your party?'

‘Not really. But I want to have a shower before I change.'

‘I have some champagne in the fridge.'

‘Oh, I can always find time for champagne.'

After he had poured out the champagne and raised his glass to her, he said: ‘A busy day?'

She sighed. ‘Yes. And so many people complaining and snapping and being disagreeable. The elderly are the worst.'

‘Beware of the elderly!'

‘Was that tactless of me? Sorry.'

He shook his head. ‘Being old is a battle. So, inevitably, we dinosaurs come out spoiling for a fight.'

There was a silence. She sipped at her glass, then gulped at it. She held it out, tipped it to one side as though she were about to empty its contents on to the floor, and then leaned forward. ‘May I ask you something?' All at once, she looked taut and pale.

‘Of course. Anything'

‘Perhaps I shouldn't. Perhaps it will spoil things.'

‘Don't be silly. Go ahead.'

She pondered, licked her lower lip. Then she raised her head and stared at him. ‘ The thing I want to know …' She stopped, frowning, as though she had forgotten what the thing was.

‘Yes? What do you want to know?''

‘Well … Is it true what my mother told me?'

‘What did she tell you?'

‘That – that you're my father?'

He burst into laughter. ‘Oh, did she tell you that?' He shook his head. ‘ No, I'm afraid it's just not true. I've no idea who was your father but it certainly wasn't me. Yes, of course, we were lovers during most of my time in Bucharest. But I couldn't have been your father. It was physically impossible.'

‘You mean you never …?'

‘Oh, we went to bed! Often. But …' He shrugged, picked up his glass. ‘Well, I just wasn't capable of fathering a child – anyone's child.'

When he had given her the explanation, she put both hands over her mouth and stared at him. Then her whole body was convulsed with a paroxysm of weeping. ‘I always believed … always …
always
…'

He got up, bent over and put an arm round her heaving shoulders. ‘What does it matter? I
think
of you as my daughter. That's what matters. My dream daughter. My adopted daughter.'

The weeping stopped as suddenly as it had begun. She smiled through her tears. She looked up at him. ‘Do you mean that? Really mean that?'

‘Of course. Of course I do! Your arrival in my life has meant so much to me. Before that, there were often times when I thought that it was pointless to plod on and on. The long, dusty road had begun to have so few pleasures for me. But now …' He laughed. ‘But now I'm perfectly happy to continue along it in your company.' He extended a hand to his glass and then raised it. ‘To Ana. To my adopted daughter. To our life together. All happiness, dear Ana.'

He raised the glass to his lips.

From then he would often introduce her to guests or to people met by chance when he and she were out to together: ‘I don't think you've ever met my adopted daughter Ana, have you?' Some of those people failed to realise that he was being jocular.

She rarely spoke of that other life in which he had no part. He wondered if she spoke to the people in that other life about her life with him. He doubted it. There were occasional references to her colleagues at work – the two women doctors, always so busy and nervy, the one male one, always so lethargic, the practice nurse whose husband had mysteriously killed himself, a fellow receptionist from Uganda, the patients, most of whom she found tiresome in one way or another. There was a cousin, who lived with her partner and a large brood of children – he could never work out how many – in a house out in Teddington. And then there was Henry. ‘My friend' – that was how she usually referred to him. ‘ Tonight I'll be out with my friend.' ‘My friend wants me to go to a disco with him.' ‘ My friend has lent me the latest Ruth Rendell.'

Just to hear her say ‘My friend' irritated him. Why couldn't she just refer to him by his name?

Once he said: ‘I'd like to meet your friend some day'

She shook her head: ‘ Oh, I don't think you'd have anything in common. What would be the point?'

‘As you wish.'

That July there was a heat wave. He entered the basement kitchen to fetch some ice for his first Martini of the evening and there she was in only brassiere and knickers, ironing a flimsy, pale-yellow dress. She had told him that she and ‘ my friend' were going out to dinner. She was in no way disconcerted at his seeing her so scantily clothed. She smiled up to him: ‘Gosh, it's hot today, isn't it? Even this kitchen is hot. Usually it's the one cool room in the house.' She licked a forefinger and briefly touched the base of the iron. He forced himself not to look too closely at her. He jerked at the ice-tray.