The Watcher in the Garden (10 page)

“I will,” she said in a humble voice she had practically never used before.

At that moment the door of the house gave a click and opened and Jackson stepped into the courtyard carrying a tray. He put it on an iron table that stood against the wall, picked up table and all and carried it towards them. Catherine pushed her chair back a little and he put the table between them. There was a coffee pot, two cups and saucers, a silver sugar bowl and a plate of biscuits.

“There are two cups, Mr. Lovett,” he said as he stepped back. “When I looked out of the window I saw you had a visitor”—and he nodded to Catherine—“so I thought you'd be wanting the extra cup.”

“I'm sure we shall. Thanks, Bob.”

Catherine turned to him. “I'm dying for a cup of coffee. Thank you.” It was good to return to ordinary things like cups of coffee.

“Did you bring my pills, Bob?” Mr. Lovett was feeling about the tray.

“They're here. I'll give them to—er—Catherine, shall I? She can get the green one out and put it in your coffee.”

“Good idea. Will you, please, Catherine? Just one green one. And pour the coffee like a good girl.”

She did both and was filled with a pleasant sensation of being needed and trusted. There was no question of “Better let Diana do it.” She picked up the bottle and took out one green pill, dropped it in the cup of coffee and pushed it towards him. “It's there beside you on the tray,” she said, and his hand cautiously felt for the saucer and picked it up.

“Now, that's over,” he said as they drank their coffee. “And you'll feel much better when you go home, and perhaps you might even feel courageous enough to make some kind of general apology. And now tell me what else you've been doing.”

But there was something of more interest that she wanted to talk about, and she said, “What about Terry? Has he been in the garden again?”

“I suspect so. Conrad tells me now and then that all is not well.”

“Has he—do you know if he's done any damage?”

Mr. Lovett shook his head. “Bob Jackson goes round the garden fairly regularly, and sometimes there's the gardener. No, he won't do anything just yet.”

“When then?” She thought of the vicious tone in his voice as he spoke to his father.

“He won't do anything till something triggers him off. Violent action needs time to build up, and then a fuse to set it off.”

“Tell the policeman.”

“What could I tell him? The constable couldn't and wouldn't just sit here waiting to catch him. And even if he did, what could he charge him with? I don't prohibit people coming into my garden.”

“Why do they hate you so? Is it because you have more than they have?”

“I suppose, at bottom, that's the real reason. The old man's never been very successful, you see. He's not particularly intelligent, and he's lazy. I believe he has some fairly minor kind of war injury. They don't realize—” He stopped, and for the first time she saw his face fall into lines of bitterness. It seemed he was not going to say any more.

“What?” she said. “What don't they realize?”

He sighed, gave a small shrug and said, “They don't realize I'd gladly exchange one thing they have for everything I have.”

Up till this moment she had always felt that he was a rock that she clung to. For the first time she began to see that the friendship that had grown up between them might be a more even one than she had imagined. She should have known that he was as vulnerable as any other human being in ways that were not as straightforward as mere physical disability. To find out so unexpectedly that she could be necessary to him, even if it was only as someone to talk to, was to feel herself suddenly growing, somehow becoming a real person in her own eyes. She knew now what he meant by taking a pride in herself. She knew that what he had reluctantly said placed a burden on her that she was very willing to accept. It was time for her to act, and she said, as if she had not heard his last words, “What is the grudge they have against you?”

“Old Nicholson has a junk yard of old motor cars. You've probably seen it. Jackson says it's a very ugly sight. He's a mechanic, too, of sorts, and some people take their cars to him. He wants to buy a piece of my land to give himself a frontage on the major road. His house is on a dead end, you see. He thinks that if he had that he could put up one or two petrol pumps and make a better living.”

“You couldn't let him do that.” She saw in her mind's eye the big trees coming down, the petrol pumps standing, yellow and ugly, in their place along the road.

“I haven't let him do that, for a number of reasons, and he imagines I am deliberately standing between him and a good living. He is a great one for feeling put-upon and he's managed to persuade his son, to whom protesting is as automatic as breathing, that he's being victimized.”

“By you.”

“By me. But the garden is all I have. I am not more selfish than anyone else, but I need that piece of ground more than he does.” His voice was more charged with feeling than she had so far heard it, and she recognized that she had seen again the crack in his monumental defences. She knew now that she would protect him if she could. She thought of Terry and remembered the sensation of those eyes boring through the shop window into her back—the physical sensation of something bad. The old man would do nothing, ever. But Terry was a man of violence. She looked at Mr. Lovett's face, sunk now in lines of resignation and melancholy. He had called her a person of violence and perhaps she could match hers against Terry's.

“I'll try and talk to this Terry,” she said at last.

Mr. Lovett's reaction was instantaneous. He swung round to her and gripped her arm. “You'll do nothing of the kind. If I thought that what I said was at all likely to bring you into contact with that young man I'd have said nothing at all.” His tone was vehement, even angry.

Catherine was no longer afraid of him, and she said calmly, “You told me because I asked you. I had to know, didn't I?”

“Of course you didn't have to know. It's nothing to do with you, my dear girl, and you are not to become involved. Do you understand?”

Because he could not see her face she put her hand on his wrinkled, bony old one and said, “You see, Mr. Lovett, I am your dear girl and I'm going to be involved.”

Nevertheless, she had to promise him she would not go looking for Terry. This was as far as she would go and in the end he gave up protesting. It may even have been that he thought the risk a fair price for her rehabilitation, if that was what he was aiming at.

She did not go looking for Terry, but she went often to the news-agent's and hung about reading sections of the paperbacks that lined the walls. Occasionally she even bought one to justify her endless browsing. When she heard the roaring of motorbikes, mainly on the week-ends, she made a point of checking on them. It was hard to recognize anyone inside the helmets, but once or twice she had a feeling that she had seen Terry pass by. The feeling came always when a group of three or four went up the road, often at high speed. When she experienced these feelings she noted the day and time, the direction they were travelling and the number of bike riders there were. Little by little she began to build up the hint of a behaviour pattern.

She went frequently to Mr. Lovett's garden, often without his knowledge. If Mr. Lovett suspected she was there at any time he said nothing. Unlike her own family, he respected her privacy. And he had her promise. She went at varying times of the day or night, though late at night, when she had to leave home by stealth, was an eerie time she did not much care for. She saw the garden change from winter to spring to early summer once again. She learned to know it through the scents of the various flowers, of the trees and of the marshy plants surrounding the pools almost as well as she did through the sight of her eyes. On most of the occasions when she went, the peace of the garden enfolded her as it always had done, and she knew that all was well. But once or twice she knew as soon as she climbed in through the fence that the air was jangled with a turbulence that had nothing to do with the wind. On those occasions she walked quietly, keeping out of sight as much as possible, and her heart would beat faster as she penetrated deeper into the garden. On these occasions she knew that her time for visiting the garden had coincided with Terry's. More than once she saw him there, standing against a tree, or sitting concealed among the bushes. Once, as she was about to step on to the wooden bridge that led the path across the top of the waterfall, she glanced down towards the pool. Then she stepped back hurriedly, for he was standing there beside it, quite still, with his head bent and arms folded, gazing down into the water. She was able to watch him for a time, unknown to him. She saw the lank, fair hair, half-heartedly curling where it touched the shoulders. She saw the broad shoulders themselves, and even in repose their width and strength were obvious to her. The feet, in rubber shoes, were long and thin, but firmly on the ground, supporting muscular legs. His presence, dominant and dark, filled the open space about him. He showed no sign of being afraid that he would be discovered. But after she had been watching for perhaps ten minutes he began to move. He lifted his head and looked about and she saw again the pale skin of the cheeks stretched over prominent bones, the narrow mouth and jutting jawbone. He looked slowly round the pool, lifted his head and seemed to look straight at her. She held her breath. She knew he could not see her. His gaze shifted, he turned and without a sound moved out on to the path and disappeared among the bushes.

She did not move for a long time, but watched in case he should, after all, circle back to where she was. She knew he had not seen her, but she knew, too, that he was quite well aware that she was there. It would not be long now before she was face to face with her enemy. She was afraid, and she was not very sure what she would do when she met him, but she felt a pull towards him that she did not like and could not understand, and sooner or later it would bring her to him.

 

In a way it was the search for a workable plan that drove Terry almost daily to the garden. The motive, as yet scarcely acknowledged, even to himself, was attack, not defence, and its object was Mr. Lovett. Sometimes he was away with his gang. More often he was in the garden. His gang came when he summoned them and stayed away when he didn't. It was a kind of accolade to be Terry's pal, but it had its penalties, too. Joe had not wanted to apply for the job of gardener's boy when, some time later, Terry told him to do so. He did not care for gardens, knew nothing about gardening and was allergic to regular work. But Terry ordered it and it was done.

“You're supposed to want to learn about gardening,” Terry told him. “You're not supposed to know.”

So, in due time, the defences were infiltrated. For the present Terry came as quietly as Catherine to the garden and watched—and waited. It had taken him quite a long time to realize Mr. Lovett was blind. Everyone knew he was a kind of invalid, but the blindness, only revealed by the unusually thick glasses he had worn at first, had developed slowly and no one except his intimates, and they were few, had known that he finally discarded the last pair because he could no longer see at all. When at last it was clear to Terry he filed the knowledge away in his memory and knew that the tide was flowing his way.

He cared nothing for gardens, but this one was important to him and he thought it necessary to feel at home in it. When he allowed himself to be, he was as sensitive as Catherine to mood and atmosphere, and at once he knew that he had stepped into something alien to him, something he did not understand. He imagined he felt hostility, and went cautiously, treading softly and withdrawing into himself as much as he could. Quite soon he knew that Catherine came to the garden too. At first he thought she was one of the children from a neighbouring house, slipping through to save the long walk round, but he found that his eyes followed her involuntarily when she was visible and she came far too often to be one of the local children. Long before he learned who or what she was, some part of him registered her presence. Always the knowledge gave him a small jolt, as if a nerve had been twanged. She was something too insignificant to be afraid of, yet he never knew she was there without feeling uneasy. He began to resent her presence, and because it was not yet the time for him to take any positive action there was nothing he could do about it.

But she was not always in the garden. He knew she lived in the district and there were other ways of dealing with the situation than confronting her in the garden they had both begun to haunt.

 

In the end it was in the newspaper shop that she confronted him. He was there when she went in, standing with his back to the bookshelves, almost as if he had been waiting for her. She came to a dead stop and walked up to him. She had not known what she was going to say. She had not intended to say anything. But when she stood facing him the words came.

“I knew I should meet you one day.”

He stood quite still, looking at her. She felt a sudden need to pull some sign of emotion from that deadpan face. But he said, “Yes,” as if it were a fact known to him, too. Then he said, “You're often in old Lovett's garden, aren't you?”

“So are you.” She would never forget he was the enemy, and her instinct was to attack, not defend.

“We should go there together sometime.” He seemed to find his own remark mildly funny.

It did not seem funny to her, and she said sharply, “I go there because I like to be alone.” He made no reply to this and after a pause she said, “Why do you go there?”

“That would be telling, wouldn't it?”

It was a remark calculated to annoy, but he had not bargained on her temper. “Don't be childish,” she said loudly, and the woman behind the till suddenly looked up. Catherine saw with satisfaction the sudden colour flare in his face.