I just have to tie in this rose.
Claire had lengths of cut string in her pocket. She took one out and held it between her teeth. Once she had the offending stems in place she took off her gardening gloves and did the tying with bare fingers.
When she came down she stood back to look at it. Such a good rose, this one,
Madame Alfred Carrière. Isn’t that a nice name? Like someone you might know.
Some of her roses, she said, were in the garden of the Empress Joséphine. She told the girl then about Joséphine’s wonderful garden. How Joséphine came from Martinique in the Caribbean, and how when Napoleon deserted her – she did not quite explain why, assuming that she had more knowledge of European history than a Japanese education would have given her, not thinking that she might know only the famous names, but not who they were or what they did – when Napoleon was gone, for whatever reason, she had her garden in France made exotic with plants from her tropical home and from all over the world. Joséphine made a life for herself, Claire said. As a woman must. She made the garden, and had plants brought to her from everywhere. Even when the French and the British were at war, ships came through carrying plants from places the British ruled, though the British Navy ruled the seas. And Claire showed her all the French roses in the garden and told her their names. Duc de Guiche, Duchesse d’Angoulême, Belle de Crécy, Comte de Chambord, Charles de Mills. She pointed out the roses gaily, as if there was a party of French courtiers all about them, some great colourful party at a château, music and fountains playing, perfumed courtiers flirting among the flowers, hiding behind the bushes she had made, shaped bushes that were the same dense dark green as the hedge. Not that all of these roses were in the garden at Malmaison, she said. Most of them had in fact been bred later, but bred in France and often from varieties that Joséphine had first brought to the country. They came to one with big deep pink petals. Zéphirine Drouhin, she said. Definitely not one of Joséphine’s. A much later hybrid. A bit vulgar for Joséphine, she tended to think.
The girl’s eyes were on her, listening, half a smile on her face. She knew she was going on rather. Her sons teased her for that, for rambling about her roses, and here she was, putting her nose to fine blooms like pink petticoats. Was that why the girl smiled? Despite herself, she was beginning to warm to this girl.
Since you’re here, perhaps you could help me carry the ladder in.
The ladder was too heavy for her. She had had Richard put it out. Last time she had the ladder out, it was days before she could catch Richard in a spare moment and get him to bring it in. That sort of thing happened too often, when there was only herself and Richard in the house, that things weren’t finished because Richard was too busy; the ladder lay abandoned on the lawn, and the grass beneath turned yellow for lack of sunlight.
How polite the girl was, carrying her ladder, listening to her talk about roses. They always said the Japanese were polite. She found herself saying things to her that she hadn’t expected to say, opening up a little eccentrically, so rare it was to have a sympathetic presence in the house. She was aware that sometimes she talked about her roses as if they were people. Women, always. It seemed to her that roses were feminine, even those that had men’s names. She had fallen in love with one or other of them, from time to time. Perhaps the more so because she lived in a world of men.
I was a Londoner when I came here, you know. I didn’t know the first thing about gardens. But it was something one could do, I suppose, when one was alone, when the boys’ father was out on the farm. I learnt from books at first, made a grand plan, planned it all on paper and planted it out, or had Billy plant it out for me, but then the boys came along, and then for some years I was too busy with them to do much more. It was only later, when I was on my own, that I really began to learn.
After he died, she might have said. As if something from him had passed on to her. The touch of the soil. Awareness of the weather each day as it dawned.
One learns, she said instead, as one goes along. She said it lightly, glossing over the memory of how hard the learning had been, how many mistakes and setbacks and losses, how many little lessons there had been, and how she had faced them, one after another, teaching, toughening herself as her hands toughened with the work. One plants, she said, and then one turns away. Things grow. Or don’t. And then one wonders why.
She would garden all of the day until she had no thoughts in her but her work. Go in at dusk, surprised once she was indoors at how late it was, because she hadn’t noticed as long as she was outside working. She would eat, run a hot bath, lie in it and scrub the dirt from beneath her fingernails. And when she went to bed and closed her eyes, her head was still full of the things she had done in place of the thoughts, her hands on the soil, the soil itself, the green piles of weeds she had pulled, the forms of roots, the anaemic whiteness of bindweed drawn up endlessly from deep underground.
One watched, she had said to the girl, and slowly, one learnt. One watched the bare soil to see the
