Facing the Tank by Patrick Gale

Author:Patrick Gale [Patrick Gale]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007404940
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

22

Fergus was kneeling on a fertilizer bag in a corner of the Gardens of Remembrance. He stretched out to the back of the little rose bed before him and tugged up the last weed. He emptied a bucketful of compost around the bases of the bushes and dug it in with a hand fork. The soil was dry so he walked to a tap hidden along with a wheelbarrow and a dustbin in a spinney of laurels and brought back a bucketful of water which he tipped around the bed. The roses were fleshy pink monsters with a name like Passion Tiger or Lady Jayne. Planted by mistake, or through wilful ignorance on the gardener’s part of his request for something old fashioned and white, he had had to leave them there. The prospect of tearing out plants that had fed on one’s lover’s ashes was abhorrent. As the months passed and the bushes grew sleek and glossy, he had continued to tend them but did so with disgusted resentment, as a child might learn to tolerate a blooming stepmother in lieu of a finer, thinner creature who was no more. He cherished a secret desire that one day he would drive over the Roman Bridge, park the car at the gates and walk the bosky length of these gardens of cypress, rhododendron and mourning laurel to find Roger’s roses slashed to death by a vandal’s blade and trampled by an unwittingly discerning boot. He had grown half-used to the replacement of Roger with Passion Tiger as he had grown half-used to the substitution of dying lover by all-too-lingering parent.

Roger had been half Barrower. He had grown up in Liverpool where his father was a shipping clerk, but his mother had been a Barrower born. When the two men fell for the place during a day trip one summer then bought a house in Tracer Street it was thus a manner of homecoming. They had met in Liverpool. Fergus had almost finished a half-hearted training in an architect’s office and Roger was designing textiles in a cooperative while working as a waiter so as not to starve. They had shared a house in gentrified Toxteth where they ran a ‘design’ shop, selling wallpapers, fabrics and the occasional obelisk, all-purpose bust or marble-topped table to their largely academic neighbours. The business succeeded after a fashion, eked out by Fergus’ freelance architectural work, but after eight or nine years they were both tired of Liverpool. Barrowcester’s leafy precincts offered the perfect antidote to the Mersey. The cathedral city was also a perfect site for the interior design consultancy they had always hoped to set up. Since Barrowcester had become a commuter town there was an increasing number of Barrowers blessed with the money to redecorate their houses but neither the time nor the energy to do so themselves. These leaped on Fergus’ and Roger’s services, chequebooks waving in the wind, as did those keen to decorate themselves but greedy to buy from

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