Bread and Chocolate by Philippa Gregory

Author:Philippa Gregory [Philippa Gregory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2000-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Garden

My husband is a great one for his garden. He never will let me touch a thing. His garden shed is as he wants it – just so – and he has a greenhouse too, with little plant pots made of orange plastic marching in rows down the staged shelves, which he paints with creosote. The smell of the chemical is like illness. It is coloured a bright green, like toilet cleaner. His greenhouse smells like a morgue.

Every winter he takes the motor mower to be serviced and the blades to be sharpened and made ready for the onslaught of the springing grass when the season opens. He prepares for it like a gamekeeper prepares for a pheasant shoot. All his winter season is directed to the moment when he can get out into the garden and cut it back. He checks the scything whip of the strimmer; he oils and sharpens the crocodile bite of the hedger. Then, on the first sunny day, he tells me he will be gardening all day.

‘I can’t wait!’ he says with his sharp little laugh.

He goes out with his blades and his sprays to work in the garden until teatime. When he comes in for his tea his hands are stained green with sap, like a butcher’s palms are reddened with blood. The soft new grass on the lawn is crushed down, the damp earth churned up, the hedge at the front of the house is split and torn, and the soft little corners of the garden where unexceptional plants had taken root and started to grow are laid bare: strimmed and whipped down to the root.

When he sees the devastation he has caused, even he can see that the garden looks a little bare. Then he seeks to fill the vacuum he has made.

‘What about one of these swinging chairs?’ he asks, showing me a catalogue full of bright plastic.

He thinks to buy me with toys.

‘For the patio?’ he says. ‘This one’s nice, and I could get these ornamental urns to match.’

He likes his garden furniture, does my husband. He likes things in the garden that do not loll or sprawl or fruit. He likes plastic statues coloured to look like stone, his flower pots as red as the original terracotta. He likes moulded concrete pots painted to the colour of sandstone. He likes wooden barrels that were never made to hold beer. He does not mind that nothing is what it pretends to be. He does not mind that nothing is real.

Last summer he bought a dinner table and six chairs for the patio. They looked as if they were made of wrought iron, forged and hammered by a man working with iron and fire, cooled in a hissing trough of water. But they were not metal, they were no element at all. At the first wind they were bowled over and blown across the lawn, breaking buds where they rolled, tossed about like a child’s discarded toys. They were plastic, they were all but nothing.

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