The Savage Garden
Mark Mills
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's
imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,
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Copyright © 2007 by Mark Mills.
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The Library of Congress has catalogued the G. P. Putnam's Sons hardcover edition of this book as follows:
Mills, Mark, date.
The savage garden / Mark Mills.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4362-1508-0
1. College teachers—Fiction. 2. College students—Fiction. 3. England—Fiction. 4. Italy—Fiction.
5. College stories. I. Title.
Acknowledgments
My thanks, as ever, go to my inimitable agent and friend Stephanie Cabot for—well—being Stephanie Cabot;
to my editors Julia Wisdom and
Rachel Kahan for their enthusiasm, wisdom and guidance; and to my
wife, Caroline, for her tireless patience and encouragement.
I am also extremely grateful to Francis and Rachel Hamel-Cooke,
Anne O'Brien and Jane Hall, as well as Charles and Angela Cottrell- Dormer,
whose hospitality and generosity of spirit account for much
more of this book than they are probably aware.
For Caroline, Gus and Rosie
August 1958
LATER, WHEN IT WAS OVER, HE CAST HIS THOUGHTS BACK to that sunstruck May day in Cambridge— where it had all begun— and asked himself whether he would have done anything differently, knowing what he now did.
It was not a question easily answered.
He barely recognized himself in the carefree young man cycling along the towpath beside the river, bucking over the ruts, the bottle of wine dancing around in the bike basket.
Try as he might, he couldn't penetrate the workings of that stranger's mind, let alone say with any certainty how he would have dealt with the news that murder lay in wait for him, just around the corner.
HE WAS KNOWN, PRIMARILY, FOR HIS MARROWS.
This made him a figure of considerable suspicion to the ladies of the Horticultural Society, who, until his arrival on the scene, had vied quite happily amongst themselves for the most coveted award in the vegetable class at their annual show. The fact that he was a newcomer to the village no doubt fueled their resentments; that he lived alone with a 'housekeeper' some years younger than himself, a woman whose cast of countenance could only be described as 'Oriental,' permitted them to bury the pain of defeat in malicious gossip.
That first year he carried off the prize, I can recall Mrs. Meade and her cronies huddled together at the back of the marquee, like cows before a gathering storm. I can also remember the vicar, somewhat the worse for wear after an enthusiastic sampling of the cider entries, handing down his verdict on the marrow category. With an air of almost lascivious relish, he declared Mr. Atherton's prodigious specimen to be 'positively tumescent' (thereby
