“Goodbye, Sissy,” Jeanie whispered into the smelly mouthpiece, but the pips were already sounding.
As Jeanie rolls the bike up to the phone box, her shopping bags swinging from the handlebars, she can see that something inside is different and when she opens the door she discovers that the telephone is gone and the back wall where it once hung is filled with books. Fat, gaudy paperbacks with creased spines. More are piled up on the concrete floor, bulging pages where the damp has got in.
At home, she lifts Julius’s mobile phone from his coat pocket when he isn’t looking and takes it up to the end of the garden. It’s charged, so she knows he must have been in the pub. Following the number on the card she has taken from the shop’s window digit by digit, she pushes the buttons. She doesn’t want to tell Julius what she’s doing, not until she can say that she actually has a job.
The following day, Jeanie stands at an open five-bar gate, beyond which is an old car and an overgrown lawn with a crazy paving path snaking to the front door of a bungalow. Paint is peeling from the woodwork and last year’s leaves are curled in the corner of the brown-tiled porch. The doorbell chime plays the start of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” The woman who comes to the door is wearing a flowered dress which reaches to her ankles, below which are flat sandals with leather bars over the big toes. She is younger than Jeanie expected, thirty maybe, with a jewel on the side of her nose that the sun catches, as though the woman were signalling.
“I recognize you,” she says when she sees Jeanie at the edge of the porch. “You’re one of the women who grow the vegetables. I work a few mornings in the deli.” Her dress moves as though a draught were coming through the house, and a young child emerges from behind her skirt. With a jangle of bracelets, the woman holds out her hand to Jeanie. “I’m Saffron,” she says, and Jeanie shakes it. “And this is Angel.” She hoists the child onto her hip, rucking up the girl’s oversize shirt, revealing chunky calves and thighs. Angel has yellow paint in her hair and on her fingers, and she smears it across Saffron’s neck, which is pale against the child’s hazelnut-brown skin. The woman leads Jeanie through the house, explaining how she bought the place six months ago with some money she was left by her father, who was an utter shit by the way, and how she thought she might knock it down and build something new but she’s become attached to it in the couple of months she’s been there. Jeanie remembers what Julius said about other people having the bank of mum and dad to fall back on. Saffron is still talking, explaining how Angel loves to run in a circle from one room to the next because each opens into another, and here’s the central courtyard which she’s thinking of glassing over. Without any embarrassment she says she wants to surround Angel with positive women, that’s why she wants a female gardener. Jeanie isn’t sure whether she should admit to not always feeling positive. They walk through the kitchen, the table cluttered with paints and paper.
Out through the french windows, Saffron puts Angel down—What names! Jeanie thinks—telling her that the garden feels like too much for her to tackle, she wouldn’t know where to start. She lived in Oxford before Inkbourne and she’s not yet sure about the country, but she wanted to be nearer her mother for Angel’s sake. “Well, for babysitting opportunities, if I’m honest,” she adds. “I’m doing a postgrad certificate in psychodynamic counselling at Oxford.” Jeanie doesn’t ask what this is; she’s too afraid that she’ll understand the explanation even less than the name of the thing. “It’s a lot of work, much more than I expected, and it’s hard to keep up with this one running around. It’s just me and Angel. Me and her father, it was a one-off thing, you know. Never saw him again.” Saffron laughs. All the information of her life spills so easily from her that Jeanie is both embarrassed and envious of her ability to be this unreserved. They stand on a patio made of concrete slabs and look down across the lawn. The grass has grown to full height, a stone birdbath in the middle has nearly disappeared, and overrun flower beds blend in on either side. The view takes Jeanie’s eye past a mature tree to the far end of the garden and the fields beyond, and then upwards to a line of oaks on a low ridge in the distance. The shadows of the clouds move across the hillside and there isn’t another house in sight. All is green and gold.
“It’s beautiful, yeah?” Saffron says. “But what should I do? Have it mowed? It’ll take for
