Marrying the Mistress by Joanna Trollope Page A

stage,and allowed it to dominate their lives as little children had once done, with an accompanying and irritating preoccupation with weather forecasts. When Guy offered to take her to law conferences in Europe, or even the Far East, her first reaction – even above that of a small, pleased excitement at the prospect of Paris or Tokyo – was whether the garden could manage without her for five or ten days. Suppose there was a late hard frost? Suppose the weather was unseasonably warm and dry and extra watering was required? Suppose she missed the apricots on the south wall being at just the perfect moment to pick? Once, Guy had insisted she come, to Stockholm, and there had been a freak hailstorm in their absence and all the early roses collapsed into sodden brown lumps of blighted petals. She’d been distraught.
    ‘But even if you’d
been
here,’ Guy said, in exasperation, ‘what could you possibly have done to save anything?’
    Nothing, she knew. She pictured the hailstorm, whipping round the cottage, battering the rose heads with icy pellets. Of course she couldn’t have done anything. She’d have been out there, miserable and impotent in the storm, but at least she’d have been there. It seemed impossible to explain to Guy that she had a sense of having let the garden down, failed it by not being there when it needed her. She could visualize how he’d look at her. He’d look at her as he’d looked at her so often over the years, trying and trying to see if she meant what she was saying, and – even more difficult – to see if he could understand.
    ‘I don’t,’ he said, ‘quite
get
it, about the garden. I see it’s a pleasure, a satisfaction. But I can’t see the hold it has on you. Is it—’ He paused.
    ‘Is it what?’
    ‘Animate
, to you?’
    She’d felt shy, suddenly. She felt she couldn’t admit to someone who spent his days up to his armpits in demanding, messy, human things, that the garden was alive to her in a way; that it did have, if not a personality, then at least a spirit. And that that spirit was fragile, but vital, and in her care, because she had made it, she had somehow summoned it out of the muddy broken-brick-littered dereliction that had been there when they came. She was afraid Guy would think – as she had always been afraid of him thinking – that she had abandoned reality and all its demands for something more insubstantial, more fantastical, which didn’t, in the end, have a comparable validity. Of course, it was ridiculous,
pitiful
, to say, ‘I can’t come to Tokyo because nobody waters the pots on the terrace quite like I do,’ but the awful thing was that that’s what she believed, what she felt, with great, instinctive strength. It was a matter of belonging, of feeling at home, at peace and necessary. Heavens, it was so important to feel necessary! She thought Simon understood that a little, always had. But Guy didn’t, Guy had never been in doubt about his own indispensability. And Alan – well, Alan didn’t think like that. Alan never arranged things, in his mind or his life, in relative order. He just took people, events, job opportunities as they came,on their own merits. If his mother wanted to spend her life in the garden and got ecstatic when her camellia flowered, well, fine, that’s what turned her on.
    The trouble – the acute trouble just now – was that it wasn’t turning her on. It was where she had fled when Guy had told her he wanted a divorce so that he could marry someone called Merrion Palmer, and instead of receiving and consoling her, the garden had lain around her quite inert, almost indifferent. She’d begun to dig – a vegetable bed, ready for her precise rows of carrot and parsnip and beetroot – in the hope that strenuous physical activity would not only distract her but restore to her a feeling that the world was still, after all, recognizable, and all she’d felt after half an hour was that it was utterly pointless, that