Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman

part of my mystery’

‘Don’t be silly.’

Why did I love white in a garden? No doubt some of the books that passed over my desk offered explanations of the white period in a gardener’s history. Picasso had had a blue one, and plenty of print had been devoted to analysing it. Perhaps white gardens revealed an unconscious yearning for purity. More likely, the fat, innocent buds butting their way through chocolate earth, the tender, reliable goodness of a garden, provided a direct contrast to what took place in the world. Yet any fool can tell you that it is not the answers which are significant, but the garden itself. My white beauties traced pathways over rotting fences and spread their cool canopies over tired city soil. It may be true that I was gripped by the longing for clarity and resolution that white suggests, which I could not explain to Nathan, but it was the visible beauty that was the real point.

Nathan stood up. ‘I’m going indoors.’

‘Would you like to go for a walk? I can do this another time.’

‘No. I know you want to tackle the moss. I might take myself off for a stroll.’

‘Fine.’

I refilled the bucket at the outside tap, poured in disinfectant then got down on my hands and knees and began to scrub. The disinfectant was astringent and clean-smelling and made my skin tingle. Nathan moved about inside the house. He washed something up, made a phone call, and then I heard the bang of the front door.

The scrubbing brush was new and bit hard into the moss. A swathe of freshly minted stone flag appeared. A cheap substitute for limestone, this stone had been imported from India, hewed from hot, dusty plains. It was old and some of the flags had fossils imprinted on them. A foamy leaf. A fishbone of fern.

I traced the fern with a wet finger. Nature produces her enormous variety from only ten basic patterns: the whorl, the spiral, the crystal, the branch, etc. I learnt that while I was a student at Oxford. I loved that piece of information. I found Nature’s strictness reassuring – and I was the woman who still cherished a silver medal engraved ‘Rose Uttley: for Tidiness and Not Being Late. Form 3’. I liked the notion of such order, such simplicity. It was one of the reasons I had married Nathan.

Etc., etc.

I finished the patio and embarked on the garden furniture. It was hard work and I grew pleasantly warm. Every so often I looked up – just for the pleasure of looking – at the green and brown of the waiting garden. When we had moved in, forty-five feet of bleak, leached London clay, tangled with briars and rubbish – the same imaginative estate agent had called it ‘a mature prospect’ – had greeted me. ‘Try me,’ I fancied it was saying. ‘I dare you.’

The fountain was situated at the bottom and the water fell out of a pitcher, held by a woman in drapery, into a brick pool into which I had piled stones collected with Sam and Poppy on Hastings beach. I saw in it an amorphous, eternal quality. Things changed, but they also remained the same.

My eyes travelled over the lilac, which was old and woody. Yet it had that pregnant look about it – so, too, did the roses, the leaf clumps from which the black and white poppies would emerge, and my treasured tawny verbascum. Everything, in fact. Spring was coming. Once again, the cycle had travelled back to the beginning, ready to start again.

Chapter Four

On Monday, the group reverberated with the Charles Madder scandal. All over the building phones rang, lawyers were consulted and journalists chewed over evidence. The atmosphere was shrill and rancorous and, I suppose, we were too.

The smell of bad coffee from the vending machines was particularly offensive. Someone had spilt a cup over the red carpet just outside my area. It left a dark stain, like blood, over which I had to tread.

By Tuesday, the furore was less intense. It was reported that Charles Madder had resigned as a minister to spend more time in cherishing his constituency. The consensus among his constituents was that he had had it coming. Only one person was reported as saying that he was a good and decent man. The ship sailed on, leaving polluted water, and the ex-minister’s wife, Flora Madder, drowning in shock and distress. ‘Don’t be woolly,’ said Minty, when we queued for lunch in the canteen and I expressed sympathy for her. ‘A wife must know if her husband is straying. As for the undeclared interests, it’s collusion, surely. She’s in it up to her neck too.’ She checked herself. ‘Don’t look like that, Rose. You know as well as I do that sometimes the nice explanation will not do.’

I was used to Minty’s cynicism, but it was not like her to be quite so harsh. ‘If you mean human beings are never straightforward, well, yes,’ I said.

She flushed and it was then I realized that she must be having an affair with a married man. I felt a stab of… what? Complicity? Not exactly – more curiosity, but not, I think, envy. Relief, too, that her choice was not my business. Mine had been made.

I looked at her hard. Her heightened colour made her look young and hopeful. ‘And what are you up to, Minty?’

She grabbed a fat-free yoghurt. ‘Nothing.’

Long ago, I had settled on what I wanted. Put crudely, my ambitions were to be a good mother, a Good Wife (to Nathan, of course), and have my career. I wanted others in my life to nurture. Not very grand, certainly not earth-shattering, some might say boring. Convenient? Yes and no. We have to choose something, opt for some species of shelter – and I found those ambitions immensely absorbing, ever changing.

As she often reminded me, Minty was different. She was bold and, to Ianthe, shocking in her outspokenness – her gender was not a problem. She was courageous and upfront – ‘I want to go places.’ She had no family to speak of – ‘Who wants one?’ – and hated the idea of children: ‘Why put a millstone round your neck?’ She chose her role models from Hollywood and television. She did not take drugs but reckoned you had to be good-looking to get on. She liked sex, and rated presentation and PR. It was a generation thing, she argued, a mentality thing.

Sometimes Minty seemed as old as time. Sometimes she was the child in a sweet shop, desperate to try out all the sticky humbugs and gobstoppers. And why not? She had flown in from another planet and she fascinated me. At twenty-nine, smart, sharp, glossy, free-ranging, she was as different from me at that age as it was possible to be.

‘I hate my bust.’ This was the first of several intimacies she had dropped during our first lunch together after she joined the office. ‘It’s the kind that promises much, but delivers little. But I use it all the same.’

‘I see.’ Any shortfall in Minty’s breasts would be made up for by her mixture of honesty and greed. ‘Men are easily led,’ she said also, and her dark eyes flashed subversive knowledge. ‘Easy, easy. Especially if you tell them there are no ties.’

‘But where are they led to?’ I asked.

She fixed me with that unblinking, comforting gaze.

By Wednesday, Charles Madder was regulated to page five, it was on, on with the news, and the atmosphere had changed to shock and something must be done: the daily paper now focused on a medical scandal. As a result of acute lack of funding a hospital porter with no medical qualifications had been acting as the triage nurse in a Cornish hospital’s A &E department. A woman had died as a result of his ignorance. The journalists shed their rancour and became the nation’s social conscience, the exposers of society’s ills.

On Thursday…

On Thursday, Minty arrived – unusually – more than an hour and a half late. She was wearing a floaty skirt, a tight Lycra top, and kitten heels in glace pink. She looked dewy and flushed but, also, curiously determined. Apologies, Rose.’

It was copy day, time was extra tight and the phone had not stopped ringing, mostly with authors and publishers complaining about unfair treatment. They all had to be placated. ‘You might have phoned.’

‘I said I was sorry.’

I was not angry often, but when I was, I was. ‘Go and check with Steven that the pages are OK this week.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ Minty hung up her jacket.

‘What?’