The gardens of the King’s House ran down to the river Thames, gently sloping, occasionally terraced. The river split to form an island, shared by a little group of houses, of which Joanna’s was the biggest and best. The jetty, however, was seldom used. Oliver did not like the water, and Joanna mistrusted it. The garden was old; first established in the eighteenth century, used originally as an overflow for Kew Gardens, neglected and cosseted by turns. ‘What a pity you don’t like gardening,’ Oliver would say to Joanna. ‘Looking after a garden is like looking after children. Feed plants and they grow, neglect them and they suffer. It’s all rewards and punishments – with more than a dash of chance thrown in, in the form of weather. I’m sure you’d be good at it.’
But what Joanna liked was to sit out on a sunny morning, and breakfast at leisure, dressed in white as often as not, watching Oliver work: the garden and herself presently drifting into one: she the prize lily, a little past peak flowering perhaps, but still what the garden was all about: the culture and cultivation of beauty.
She liked to sit in the spring and summer and watch the pleasure boats go by, music approaching, passing, fading – while those who had the gift of life, the understanding of enjoyment, the privilege of friendship, went sailing by. Or so it seemed. Joanna did not doubt that on closer acquaintance the crews and guests aboard the yachts, steamers and launches were as vulgar and foolish as anyone else, as prone to anxiety, misery and jealousies as she: that the music masked a thousand discontents, and that the champagne moved to mock exhilaration, not necessarily the real thing: nevertheless the illusion was pleasant, there was no need to get too near. She did not grudge these river people the possibility of happiness, at least, and certainly admired their ambition to achieve it. ‘Such a lovely day! Let’s go on the river…’ Still, she had managed the lido, with Gerald and Angela: that was water and outing enough.
On the afternoon of that day, the day Joanna, her own resentments finally focused, had gone to Reading to have it out with Carl, Oliver, having finished with the rhododendrons, was weeding out the herbaceous borders. He worked with a hoe, standing to unsettle the shallow roots of the clover which crept up from the river bank in spite of all efforts to prevent it; or, occasionally, kneeling, with fork and trowel, to dig out plantains, patiently easing out the long, stubborn root, loosening soil and levering back and forth until they gave up, apologizing as he did so for thus putting paid to their best endeavours. His habit of talking to plants of all sorts, including weeds, and especially weeds he meant to destroy, quite irritated Joanna.
‘If you’re going to kill them, kill them,’ she’d say. Oliver would droop his lids over his soft brown eyes to mask his displeasure, giving him what she called his ‘I meant to please but now look’ spaniel look; his hippy look, of reverence to all things, gentle, kind and understanding; his Age of Aquarius look. Then she’d say, ‘I don’t know why you don’t just use weedkiller, like anyone else,’ just to incense him, to watch the pallor of determined sweetness give way to the pink of indignation, and then she’d laugh and he’d know she was teasing.
But these pleasures were over now. An expensive-looking pleasure launch of the kind Oliver least liked, being moulded in some kind of new fashion to give it rounded, bulbous lines, and in a colour Oliver knew to be called Whisper Pink, trimmed with Whisper Cream, its CD playing Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, cut its engine, its music, on the stretch of river which ran by the King’s House, slid slowly into the jetty and tied up. There were five young men on board, strangely dressed.
Oliver straightened up, and watched the five young men disembark and come towards him, up the garden path where the tiger tulips bloomed on either side. They smiled, but he knew they were not friendly: something about the tense way they held their necks; he knew at once that retreat would be more dangerous than standing ground, that to placate would be safer than to challenge. They were, he thought, in their mid-twenties. They talked and joked amongst themselves, halfway between yobbo and yuppy: yobbo down below, layers of ragged and chain-strewn trouser; up above, collar, tie and suit jacket. Their heads were apparently shaven, and they wore bowler hats.
‘Nice place you’ve got here,’ the leader said. His name was Jacko. He was blond and beautiful. ‘You the gardener?’
‘Yes,’ said Oliver, ‘that’s my trade.’
‘Got quite a bit of age to it,’ said the second in command. His name was Petie. He was dark and sulky. ‘This garden has.’
‘That is certainly so,’ said Oliver. ‘It was old when George Three bought it and renovated it for his mistress.’
‘Did he now?’ said Elwood, who was black and beautiful. ‘Those old geezers weren’t half naughty boys.’
And Haggie and Dougie, who were pale, thin and spotty, and didn’t fill their trousers or their suit jackets nearly as well as the other three, kicked a tulip or two out of the ground.
‘Pity to do that,’ said Oliver, mildly. ‘That’s quite a rare flower. A black tulip. Not my favourite, as flowers go, a black flower being unnatural, if you ask me, but some people like them.’
In answer, Dougie and Haggie tore up handfuls of daffodils, and Oliver didn’t mind that so much. They were more or less over and he’d been going to move them, in any case, to some less-overlooked patch of ground where they could deteriorate in peace and wait for their replanting in the autumn. But he pretended dismay, since that was what they wanted.
‘Can I help you fellows?’ he asked, wondering where Trevor was. Trevor would sometimes come out in the mornings with a cup of coffee, and sit on a stone wall in the sunshine and talk about the minutiae of his life with his lover – he was having an up-and-down relationship with a masseur at a nearby health farm – and Oliver would listen patiently and respond constructively. If Trevor looked out of the window and saw the young men he might, with any luck, call the police.
‘Is the missus out?’ asked Jacko.
‘The missus is out,’ said Oliver, ‘but the master’s in,’ half a truth being in his book better than no truth at all, albeit in the circumstances any lie might have been justifiable. Those capable of knocking off the heads of black tulips, in passing, were in Oliver’s eyes quite capable of knocking off human heads.
‘That’s a lie and a half,’ said Jacko. ‘The mistress is out as we very well know – and what a naughty boy you are, Oliver, young enough to be the lady’s son – and the master ain’t here neither.’
‘If you know,’ said Oliver, brightly, ‘then why ask me?’ and was quite pleased with his own courage. He’d said the same thing, at the age of four – according to his proud mother – to his teacher when asked what three and two made. ‘If you know, why ask me?’
Jacko took out his fob watch and looked at it, and took off his hat to reveal a topknot of golden curls, and nodded to Elwood, who opened his briefcase and took out a length of bamboo pipe. Petie took out a dart from the yellow child’s lunch box he carried, and Petie carefully handed the dart to Elwood who put it in the hollow tube and blew the other end, hard and sharp, and it landed in the back of Oliver’s hand, the one that was carrying the trowel.
‘Ouch!’ he said, and dropped it, and Jacko, Petie, Elwood, Dougie and Haggie counted to five in unison and Oliver felt numbness running up his arm and down to his heart. He noticed the sudden quietness of his whole body, as it stopped beating. He thought, this is what it must be like for a fuchsia killed by frost; when water turns to ice, and that was all he thought.
Trevor was coming out to meet the lads. He had seen the gleam of yellow hair when Jacko took off his hat, and the flash of handsome male profiles, and wanted to know what was going on. He feared no evil on his own home ground.
But they were bending over Oliver, whoever they were, and turned their smiling faces towards him, and one said, ‘It can only be Trevor, the man’s man,’ and he detected in their smiles something which made him shiver. ‘Better get in the house, Trevor, before it’s you as well,’ so he did. He walked smartly back into the house and locked the back door and slammed shut the stainless steel mesh shutters on the windows from the security console. He watched through the mesh but they did not come after him, and he was affronted, as well as relieved. It seemed he was no business of theirs. Instead, they picked up Oliver and carried him shoulder high into the garage, which had once been a barn. Trevor thought they were singing something.
He did not call the police. He had enough trouble with the police. They followed him when he went out shopping, just waiting for him to go where they assumed he was going, to the public convenience that is, the better to pounce and get him for some disgusting act or other, which he would never perform, but they quite happily invent.
After five minutes Haggie reappeared and looked over the garden in a puzzled kind of way. He called to his friends, ‘What’s a shitty rose look like anyway?’ and Petie came out and wrenched a branch off a rose bush, and went back into the garage, Haggie following.
After ten minutes or so all five men appeared again, without Oliver; marched down to the launch moored at the jetty, boarded it, and left in the direction of Reading. Trevor went out to the garage and found Oliver hanging as Joanna was later to find him. The back of his hand had been scratched by, presumably, thorns from the rose branch. A few petals lay on the floor. Oliver’s boots had been pulled off and tossed aside. Out of custom, Trevor put them neatly together. On the floor, beneath the hanging body, brushed by Oliver’s hair, lay a single card from the Tarot pack. Trevor recognized it as the Hanged Man. Trevor had had his fortune told often enough to know that the card was supposed to signify innocence and the overcoming of difficulties by sheer good luck, but he had always taken leave to doubt it; the Tarot pack in his opinion was more sinister than its diviners would often allow. In this case he could see the card signified what he had always suspected: death by hanging because you didn’t look out. And above, below, and to the left and right of the signifier, the Hanged Man in person, were the four Queens. Oh, kinky, thought Trevor: what is going on?
He said goodbye to Oliver in the same spirit as Oliver would say goodbye to doomed weeds and went to sit in the kitchen. He opened the shutters. There seemed no point in keeping them closed. He would wait until Joanna came home and let her decide whether or not to call the police. If she did, he could explain the delay as the general inefficiency and stupidity of the man they insulted him by supposing him to be. He tried to call his friend Jamie but the line was dead. That did not surprise him.
He assumed Joanna would understand the significance of the four cards, and he was right.