Those who fear a storm breaking have it in their hearts to whip one up. So Joanna did, forthwith. She too had seen the press photograph of her own front door (or so she regarded it) closing upon the high heel of young Bethany, but shut her conscious mind to its significance, putting aside the yellow press with conventional murmurings of ‘rubbish’ and taking up The Times, who contented themselves with a ten-year-old library shot of her ex-husband at the opening of the May Gallery, the bearded face of Isaac in the background, just discernible. These things combined – the conscious, the barely conscious, the unconscious – to send winds both hot and cold, feverish and chill, through her mind to brew up a veritable hurricane. Well might she fear the lull before the storm.
Joanna paced her marble floor and then went out to find Oliver pruning and digging out rhododendron bushes.
‘I mean to sell this house,’ she said. ‘I hate it.’ The King’s House stood on the edge of the Thames, near Maidenhead. The river divided around it, to form an island.
‘It’s a very special house,’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I know. Some king kept it for his mistresses. Now it does for discarded wives.’
‘George the Third,’ he said, ‘had it renovated for Priscilla Evans. Part of the kitchens dates back to the sixteenth century.’
‘Oh, you would know,’ she said.
‘Yes I would,’ he said, ‘because I am interested in what goes on around me, not just what happens in my head.’
‘Does that make you better than me?’
‘No. Just different.’
Clip, clip went the secateurs, firmly and sharply. He took care not to bruise the wood he cut. She found his concern for the bush insulting.
‘I think it’s a very vulgar house,’ she said, ‘but you wouldn’t understand that. You think because it is old that justifies everything.’
It was true that the house was an uneasy mixture of the cosy and the elegant: much balconied, pink-washed outside, a nook-and-cranny effect inside, suggestive of weighty lovers chirruping at one another, peeking round corners. Successive purchasers had added marble floors and gold taps, and green watered-silk ruffled curtains of such expense Joanna had been reluctant to take them down, though only ever truly at home with crimson velvet curtains, round shiny mahogany tables and sideboards, patterned carpets and Chinese vases.
Oliver put down the secateurs and carefully brushed each small wound with bitumen paint.
‘All that trouble for a bush,’ she said. ‘I mean to put this house on the market, I’m not joking.’
‘I don’t think you’d be wise,’ he said. ‘It would be a lot of trouble for nothing. If you’re not happy here where would you be happy?’
‘Somewhere far far away,’ she said, ‘and don’t tell me wherever I go I’d have to take myself with me or I’ll scream.’
He laughed, and took up the spade and began to drive it into the stony ground beneath the largest of the bushes. His arms were bare; the muscles moved beneath brown skin.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said.
‘About what?’
‘I was talking to the bush,’ he said. ‘I’m digging it up. I’m apologizing.’
She fretted and tapped her foot.
‘Why are you digging it up anyway?’ she asked.
‘Because it’s old and keeping out the light from the others,’ he said, ‘and because purple rhododendrons very easily become a pest.’
‘Well anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m going down to the estate agents now.’
‘Look,’ he said, ‘this is a perfectly good house with a fine garden which had been allowed to go to rack and ruin and I’m just about getting it into shape again. I like it here very much.’
‘Well, I’m bored and lonely here,’ she said, ‘and since I pay, what I say counts.’
He raised his eyebrows.
‘You’re just in a bad mood,’ he said.
‘Of course I am,’ she said, scornfully. ‘And I’ll do what I want, when I want, with my own house, my own garden.’
‘Joanna,’ he said, ‘the garden can’t be yours. Gardens are like children, they belong to whoever takes care of them.’
‘Then stay round here and weed it for some other employer,’ she said. ‘Because it won’t be me.’
‘You need me, Joanna,’ he said, and put down his spade. ‘You have a very jealous nature. You’re even jealous of rhododendrons. Why don’t you help me dig them up? You’d feel much better.’
She looked at her long idle nails, her well-kept hands: she looked at his grimy and hardworking ones, no longer gardening, and felt better…
‘It isn’t in my nature,’ she said, ‘and besides, the air is full of radiation. Angela says it isn’t wise to be out.’
‘Perhaps I’d better come in then,’ he said, ‘or perhaps you’d better come under the bushes.’
And he would have pulled her under them there and then, and she would not have objected, or minded sharp stones against her back, her front, or twigs in her hair, or dirtying her purple dress, only the postman chose to come up the path at that moment, with a packet from the Maverick Enquiry Agency, which she could not ignore.
She left Oliver digging in the drifting outfall from Chernobyl and went inside, to read the report.
Fifteen minutes later she came out and said, ‘I’m going to see Carl right now.’
‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Because it’s all too much to be endured,’ she said.
‘Don’t go,’ he said, and had she been listening, had she really cared about him, she would have heard that tone in his voice which is used by bit-part film actors who know that a sudden fatal blow is about to fall, in the next few frames, and try not to show it. But she wasn’t listening; she didn’t care; she was going to see Carl.