Summer Reruns: The Patch of Grass
"I’ll miss his cooking."
“She’s dug up Fred’s grass!” My wife was standing at the bedroom window, looking down into the garden next door. It’s the only view into the property we have, or anyone else, come to that. The house next door is the last of a row at the end of the village. Across the lane are fields; to the west and north of us are more fields. A high hedge surrounds its back garden, old and thickly interwoven. So it’s the view from this one window, or nothing. Which always suited me: we keep ourselves to ourselves here, within reason.
Margaret and her husband Fred moved into the house a few years ago, after retirement. Fred had been a banker; she was an accountant. Good pensions, and a house in the city to sell; you need that these days to be able to afford a house in North Norfolk. We had a few chats over the low wall between our houses in the front. “She’s so looking forward to a proper garden,” Fred told me. “We hadn’t much ground in Norwich, and gardening’s her passion.”
That was putting it mildly. The first year, Margaret rehabilitated the existing beds, front and back. Flowers and shrubs in the front; vegetables in the back. The old fruit trees were pruned, the herb garden in its chequerboard of bricks replanted, and several raised beds built for tomatoes and runner beans and courgettes. They renovated the old fruit cage, too, and cut back the raspberries and blackberries and currants. She was out in the garden from dawn to dusk, it seemed.
Friday’s my pub night, for a pint or two and a game of darts. I invited Fred along, not too long after they were settled in. “I’m keeping busy,” he told me, over the glasses of Woodforde’s. “I help Margaret in the garden a bit, and meals are my responsibility. I like to cook.” He swallowed a mouthful of beer. “It’s one of the things that brought us to this part of the county, all the fresh fish and seafood, and the local fruit and veg.”
“From the look of the gardens, you won’t need much of that,” I said. They’d given us a tour earlier that day.
“If Margaret had her way,” he said, “there’d be no grass at all. But you need some, in my mind. It sets off the beds, and I want a place to have tea in the garden, or sit out of an evening.”
Fred and Margaret settled into village life well, I have to say. Fred made raspberry jam and red currant jelly and donated jars and jars to the church to raise funds. Pickles and pies made their way to various fetes and raffles. We had them over for a meal occasionally, but Margaret was heavy going. She had one topic of conversation, and that was the garden. I like my flowers and vegetables too, but an evening of nothing but green-fly and companion planting and soil amendments isn’t my idea of good company. Fred did try to change the subject a few times, to the quality of the wine from the local vineyard or the barn owl he’d seen a few times up the lane, but Margaret always managed to bring it back to gardening. Obsessed, she was.
Still, visiting over morning coffee or afternoon tea didn’t take more than half an hour, and kept us on good terms. Margaret would natter on about her plans for more raised vegetable beds, and did I think she could grow figs up against the house wall? My wife, who keeps herself busy with the church and the Women’s Institute, humoured her, partly to be neighbourly, and partly with an eye on the ready source of donations. Fred and I managed a few quiet words about the darts team or the quality of smoked salmon from the smokehouse up on the coast. But every time we went to theirs, I swore the patch of grass where the chairs and table sat under the big oak tree grew smaller. He’d lost the battle to keep any other turf, except for narrow paths between the beds.
Some weeks ago, I went upstairs to close the bedroom window. We keep it open to catch the breeze, but we were leaving to visit our daughter and her family, and my wife had sent me up to close it and draw the curtains, she being busy folding laundry. Raised voices caught my attention. “Don’t be ridiculous!” Margaret was shouting. “I can’t leave the garden.”
“It’s one weekend,” Fred said. “My mother will only be ninety once.” There was an edge to his voice I hadn’t heard before.
“She might not even make it.” A nasty rejoinder. Fred’s mother, who lived in a care home in Oxfordshire, was failing. He’d told me at the pub one night. He was her only child, and all the family she had. Margaret and Fred had no children and her husband—Fred’s father—had died years before.
“You are so selfish sometimes, Margaret,” Fred snapped back. “Mother wants to see you. She knows it is likely the last time.”
“There is too much to do here. The fruit and vegetables will spoil if I leave. Go without me.”
I crossed to the spare room to get the suitcases from the closet, and by the time I’d done that Margaret was alone in the garden, already busy weeding. I closed the window, and went back downstairs to bring our freshly washed clothes up to pack.
We had a wonderful few days with the grandchildren, and, not wanting to leave before a final, special tea, didn’t arrive home until only the faintest of light still brightened the western sky. We had a cup of tea and went to bed, pleasantly exhausted. I was up first the next morning, and as usual went to shower and shave. When I returned to the bedroom, my wife was standing at the window. “She’s dug up Fred’s grass!”
“What?” I said. Looking out the window, I could see she was right. The chairs and table were gone, and where they had stood was a freshly-turned patch of earth.
“What does she think she can grow there?” my wife said. “It’s too shaded to be useful, surely?”
“Fred must have gone to see his mother,” I mused. “He’ll be livid when he returns to see this.”
But when I went out to our car to retrieve my wallet, which I’d inadvertently left in the glove box, Fred’s car was in next door’s drive. Odd. But maybe he’d decided to take the train. I’m surprised he could drag Margaret out of the garden long enough to drive him to the station, I thought, and went back inside to unpack.
Days passed. Two young men in a white van appeared one morning to build another raised bed where the grass had been. I wandered over, curious. “What will you plant here?” I asked, indicating the shade.
“Rocket and lettuce in the spring, or beets and carrots,” Margaret said. Well, I thought, they’ll all tolerate less light.
“I’m surprised Fred agreed,” I said mildly. “Where will we have tea now?”
“Oh, I thought in the front garden,” Margaret said, with a vague wave of her hand. “There’s space.”
Barely, and it was in the full sun in the afternoons. I pointed that out.
“We’ll get one of those big umbrellas when Fred returns.”
“When is that? He’s gone to see his mother, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. And she is far from well, so he may be some time.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “Now I’d best supervise the workmen.”
“Strange he wouldn’t take his car to Oxford,” my wife said later.
“Parking? It’s an expensive town.” I handed her a pre-dinner glass of wine.
“Perhaps.” We settled down to the wine and nibbles, and a discussion of what to buy the grandchildren for Christmas. Fred and Margaret were forgotten.
But Fred didn’t show up for darts that Friday, or the next. My wife, who’d gone next door to collect jam promised for the church, came back with a boxful and a report that Fred was still in Oxford. As he was a week later, and the week after that.
We’d never bothered to exchange mobile phone numbers; it wasn’t that sort of friendship, and after all, he lived next door. I grew mildly concerned, and then worried. The next time I saw Margaret deadheading flowers in the front garden, I went out for a word.
She barely looked up from her kneeler. “He’s left me.”
“Left you!”
She sat back on her heels. “Yes. His mother died. He stayed in Oxford to deal with everything, but he’s just told me he isn’t coming back.”
“Not even for his car?” What a stupid thing to say.
“Someone’s collecting it. And I’m to pack up his clothes and send them too.”
“I’m so sorry,” I murmured.
Margaret shrugged. “It happens. I’ll miss his cooking.”
Forty years of marriage and ‘I’ll miss his cooking’? No wonder he’d had enough, with her fanaticism about the garden and this attitude. I wondered if his mother had left him more money than he’d expected, and that had been enough for him to decide to leave. Good luck to you, mate, I thought.
“Can I have his mobile number?”
“I don’t know it,” she said. “I’ll give it to you later, shall I?”
When I reminded her a few days later, Margaret said he’d got a new phone, and she didn’t have its number. I let it go: we’d been neighbours who shared conversation and a pint, not truly friends. If he wanted to contact me, he knew my address, after all. I was asked a few times at the pub if I’d heard from him, but after me saying I hadn’t, the question was dropped.
Margaret doesn’t make jam or pies, but she gives the fruit to anyone who wants it, and the same with the vegetables. She’s still out in the garden from dawn to dusk. She’s growing thinner. Her groceries are delivered now; ready-meals and lots of cheese and salami and the like, nothing that needs preparation or much cooking. Sad, really.
“Fred was right to make the break when he did,” my wife says. She’s looking down at Margaret toiling away, digging carrots out of the raised bed where Fred’s patch of grass was. I join her at the window to watch.
Wondering, as more and more I do, if Fred ever left the garden at all.
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