to stand guard on both sides. I thought as soon as I heard the street name that it was unusual and a little bit sinister. It made me think of a stern woodman, whatever one of those was. My reaction was too mild to be called a premonition-the most I can say is that I felt something I didn’t normally feel when I noted down clients’ addresses.
Woodmansterne Lane was the perfect place to live if you wanted privacy, she told me the first time I went to the house. She was obsessed with privacy, mentioned it constantly, whenever we met. On the wall by the front door there was an oval-shaped plaque with the words ‘Cherub Cottage’ painted on it. The name was her invention. For our first meeting, she wore a smart grey suit-the sort no primary school teacher needs to wear to work-with sheer black tights and enormous dog’s-head slippers that made her look utterly ridiculous.
I can still picture those dogs’ faces, as vividly as if they were in front of me. Each one had a red cloth tongue dangling diagonally from its mouth.
On my first visit to Cherub Cottage, I also met her partner. He was a pharmacist who said very little, but when she spoke, which she did ceaselessly, I could see him trying to gauge my reaction to her. He was better looking, better dressed and younger than she was. When I first met him he was twenty-six. He seemed to have no quirks of his own, though he tolerated hers without complaint. As I saw more of her, I realised how much he had to put up with: she would not allow any food to cross her threshold that didn’t come from Marks & Spencer; she forced him to redecorate their house from top to bottom every year, and new curtains and carpets every three years; she sent a tedious, self-aggrandising round robin letter to everyone they knew at Christmas, full of exclamation marks. Reading the one she sent me, I could hardly believe it wasn’t a parody. Some of her household appliances had names. The microwave was called ‘Ding’, the doorbell ‘Dong’.
During that first discussion the three of us had, I kept trying to include her partner and find out what he wanted Cherub Cottage’s garden to be, but whenever I succeeded in coaxing an opinion out of him, she automatically said, ‘No,’ and corrected him. From what I managed to glean from him, in between her negations, it seemed he was happy with things pretty much as they were. The front and back gardens they’d inherited from the previous owners of Cherub Cottage (or number 8, as it had been in those days) couldn’t have been more traditional: lush green lawns surrounded by flower beds on all sides. He said he wouldn’t mind if I filled the gaps in the beds, that he thought they ought to be fuller-that was the only adjective he could think of to describe what he wanted-but when I started to talk about a riotous, voluptuous planting plan, he nodded eagerly. ‘A cottage ought to have a ramshackle garden,’ he said, before she leaped in with one of her ‘no’s.
‘I don’t want it messy,’ she said. ‘Any flowers, I want them colour-coordinated and in rows, not sticking out all over the place. Can you pick up a pink and purple theme? Pink roses, and purple slate in the beds instead of dirt? I saw that in a magazine.’ She always said ‘dirt’ when she meant ‘earth’.
I was used to working with clients who valued my opinion, who looked to me for guidance, and I would have felt like a criminal if I’d taken her money in exchange for making her garden uglier. As tactfully as I could, I explained that I didn’t think purple slate would work. ‘That’s more suitable for very contemporary-looking houses,’ I said. ‘I know your house isn’t old, but it’s a country cottage first and foremost. I’m not sure we want to depart too much from the traditional-’
‘It’s not about what you want, it’s about what I want!’ she said, putting me in my place. ‘It’s
‘I chose you because you won that prize,’ she said. Then, pointedly, ‘I haven’t got
This last phrase baffled me at first, until I realised it had to be some sort of business-speak for being unable to find something. I caught her boyfriend’s eye and saw the trace of a smirk on his face, as much of one as he was confident of being able to get away with.
‘What about bark?’ he said, looking at me. ‘I heard someone on telly say bark’s a good alternative to slate. For beds. Just as neat, but less showy.’ I think that’s the longest speech I ever heard him make in all the time I knew him.
I nodded. ‘Bark might work,’ I said, though I still favoured traditional earth flower beds. But I found myself wanting to say yes to him, if only because she never did. I wanted to compensate.
‘Purple slate,’ she said flatly, as if neither he nor I had spoken. ‘And one of those plastic borders round the lawns, so we don’t have to keep trimming the edges. And at the back, I want a gravel crossroads-I’ve got a picture of one that I cut out of a magazine, I’ll show you-with a fountain or something in the middle. Maybe a statue. Something eastern to pick up a multicultural theme.’
The picture turned out to be of the Prince of Wales’ garden at Highgrove, which was more than big enough for the ‘gravel crossroads’ she described not to look ridiculous. If I gave her what she claimed to want, four tiny green squares would be all that was left of her lawn at the back. It would look absurd.
I was about to tell her this when I saw him shake his head as if to say there was no point. I should have left then and never gone back, and not only because of what happened later. It was clear she would be a nightmare client. I reminded myself that she was ill, and that I was there for his sake as well as hers. I sensed that he wanted me around. I have no idea, now, whether he did or not, whether he was indifferent to me and I blindly chose to believe otherwise, but at the time I thought he was silently pleading with me not to leave him alone to deal with her and her ludicrous unfulfilled wishes.
I suppose I was drawn to him because I knew how it felt to be unable to speak freely in your own home. He reminded me of how I used to be before I left home. My parents are evangelical Christian control freaks, expert emotional blackmailers, and I spent my childhood and adolescence pretending I was who they wanted me to be, stifling the person I really was because all my life I’d had this never-quite-articulated but very real threat hanging over my head: go against them on anything, however minor, and I’d do unimaginable damage to us all.
There’s no doubt that, on that day at Cherub Cottage, he and I entered into a conspiracy: us against her. Yes, we would give her what she wanted, but we both knew it would be awful, and, more importantly, we knew we were the clever ones and she was the dimwit. Not only did we know it but we enjoyed the knowledge. Despite what happened subsequently, I know I didn’t imagine it: he was as conscious of our secret, shared superiority as I was.
I agreed to redesign their gardens, and gave them my questionnaire to fill in. I gave it to all my clients, not caring if it seemed unnecessarily formal when mostly they had already described to me exactly what they wanted. Time and time again I found that being made to answer the questions helped people to form a clearer idea of what they were looking for, and it certainly made life easier for me.
She handed the questionnaire to him, didn’t even look at it. I arranged another appointment with them in a few days’ time, telling them I’d take measurements then. As the day approached, I found I was looking forward to seeing him again. When I arrived at the house, she wasn’t there. He was alone, apologetic and far more awkward than he had been last time. It was as if, without her there to keep us both in check, he was afraid to talk to me. When I asked where she was, he shrugged. ‘You can still measure,’ he said. He didn’t give me back the questionnaire, but instead handed me a few crumpled sheets of paper I didn’t recognise, covered in large sloping handwriting that leaned to the left.
I was surprised to see he had transcribed all my questions, as well as writing down his answers to them. ‘Why didn’t you write on the form I gave you?’ I asked him. He shrugged. His answers-and it was clear they were his, not hers-were short. In response to the question, ‘Who will use the garden?’ he had written, ‘Us’. To ‘What will they use it for?’ he had replied, ‘Sitting’. I nearly laughed when I saw his one-word answer to my longest, most expansive question: ‘Do you want to develop your garden all in one go or gradually year by year? How “instant” do you need your garden to be? How long are you prepared to wait for it to mature?’ Underneath his handwritten reproduction of my words, he had added just one of his own: ‘Quick’.
I measured up, as instructed, and when I came back inside he was waiting for me with a drink, a glass of red wine. He’d poured one for himself, too. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I had to drive home, and thought it odd that he’d assumed without bothering to ask that I would want wine.
He led me into a lounge I hadn’t seen before. It had a horrible artificial look of ‘best’ about it. The carpet was
