He led her to the blinds at the south end of the studio and, as he raised them and neatly cleated the cords around the brass hooks, she could not help but think that he had somehow fashioned himself quite an idyll here in this remote part of the English countryside; a life that was somehow better, more bountiful and more tranquil, a life almost from a far distant age; a life so very different to that of a teacher in a sink-estate school in some God-forsaken part of the West Midlands. A life not filled with abusive and threatening adolescents, eager to make wry and sly comments about the size of her breasts; a life missing the heavy pollution of the industrial heartland of a country long since blighted and ruined by that same industry; a life not barren and childless; a life that would not soon end; a life, an existence, not dulled and blunted by morphine in some well-meaning but anonymous and cold hospice bed.
As he drew the final blind up to its limit and tied it off, she gazed in wonder; it was huge, it must be a hundred yards long and the full width of the house and that was at least thirty or forty yards wide, she thought. Although the garden was devoid of flowers, there were still small privets sculpted into spheres, like oversize, verdant footballs on stalks; in patches across the lawn, mown in that distinctive English style and which lay behind a Yorkstone paved patio, she could discern the first shoots of what she supposed were clumps of snowdrops, tulips, daffodils, the first dawning of a spring to come; a spring she feared she might not live to see. All around the edge of lawn was bare earth, the flower beds, most likely for perennials, she assumed, but at regular intervals across the lawn, there were brick or stone planters, raised beds which might provide a home for the shorter, less imposing annuals. She could faintly hear, though the windows excluded most of the extraneous noise from without, the sound of gently trickling water over pebbles. Peering intently towards the far reaches of the garden, she made out a fountain, a waterfall, which seemed to grow out of the very hedge which formed the southern boundary of this garden and which flowed in pebble-filled channels into a small, irregularly-shaped pond, dooted with sparse patches of algae and the remains of the previous summer's water-lilies.
"Oh, it must be so beautiful when the flowers bloom," she said. "It is so big, so unlike my twenty by twenty patch of concrete slabs and a few pots of busy-lizzies and begonias in Wolverhampton. I envy you!"
"Actually, it is slightly bigger then you might first imagine," he said. "The fields to my left and to the right are also mine; the one on the left provides somewhere for Rory to run and play, fetch sticks and balls, hopelessly point at pigeons and shit, the one on the right is home to my vegetable garden, the greenhouses and cloches for soft fruit in the summer and tomatoes, my tool sheds and the weatherings for my hawks. That hedge, which you see at the edge of the lawn is but the first of many. All the way down to the stream, which you cannot see from here, there are small mini-gardens, about half the size of the one in front of you, enclosed by hedges all around but with narrow openings through which you can walk from one to another, like a maze. The first, beyond the hedge that you can see, is the rhododendron garden, a small lawn surrounded by mature rhododendron bushes and the occasional azalea, which is my favourite space in the spring when they all come into bloom; beyond that there is the 'Tea-Party' garden, a simple lawn where you can lie and partake of tea and scones in the summer sun, like Alice, and which has narrow access to a shed, largely hidden by laurel, which stores the table and the chairs, I usually play the 'Mad Hatter'; then there is the butterfly garden, which has nothing but buddleia bushes with but a single, winding path and which in summer attracts so many butterflies, bees and wasps that it is a macro-photographer's wet dream; beyond that is the 'wild garden', full of so-called weeds, wild flowers and herbs and a small pond, for frogs, newts and the occasional hunting heron, fed by a culvert from the brook, and thence to the small footbridge across that stream which marks the southern limit of my demesne.
"Before you start praising me for my invention, for my creativity, the previous owners of this property built this garden and its wondrous spaces over a period of some fifty years, almost their entire married life, I merely bought it; the garden was what I fell in love with. Although I have made a few small changes over the years that I have been here, the concept and the execution remain theirs and theirs alone, although perhaps it now belongs to Lucjusz, who works so hard to maintain it. He talks of it as though the garden were a child, to be nurtured, cared for, loved; the child that he and Ania lost so soon into their marriage and, in part I think, led to their flight from Wroclaw, the Poland of their birth. Perhaps, in this, he is not so very wrong."
She had begun to feel emotional, menopausal, as soon as he began to speak of the garden, the quiet tone of his voice, his obvious love of the space which lay around him but, at his observation of Lucjusz's deep feeling for the garden, the tears welled up in her eyes and she could not staunch the flow which now streamed down her cheeks and onto her lips.
"Oh, forgive me, it's but the change," she stammered. "It's such a cussing nuisance, fucking up your life just when you think you've got it all straight, all sorted. Just when you think that you've made peace with that son of a bitch, God, you find that he's consigned you to ten years of hot flushes, mood swings undreamt of, even with PMT, and uncontrollable tears!"
"No need to apologise," he said. "When you get to my age, the only women that you know are menopausal; you get used to it!"
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