Trespass (5 page)

It was more than abject. Anthony told nobody, not even his sister Veronica (or ‘V’ as he always called her), that what he longed for was to be the child he’d once been. It appeared that V – three years older than he was – was getting on perfectly well with her life, still moving obstinately forward, full of plans and projects, and not even particularly attached to her early memories. If he’d admitted that where he dreamed of being was in the old Hampshire dining room, aged ten or eleven, cleaning silver with Lal, V would have been stern with him. ‘Oh for God’s sake, Anthony. Cleaning silver! Of all pointless tasks. Have you forgotten how it tarnishes?’

He and Lal never minded about that. When it started to go brown, they just cleaned it again. They sometimes sang as they worked, he and Lal in perfect harmony. While V was known to be safely cantering around the paddock on her bay mare, Susan, or clamped in her room, making pencil drawings, with her nose pressed to her favourite art book,
How to Draw Trees
, they sang show tunes.

‘
The boat’s in! What’s the boat brought in?

A vio-lin and lay-ay-dy!
’

The silver object Anthony had adored most in the world at that time was one of Lal’s cream jugs. His careful hands traced the complicated contours of its handle, the delicate foliate sprays engraved on its sides. ‘Oh yes, that’s a poppet,’ Lal had cooed. ‘Georgian. About 1760, I think. Lovely little hoofed feet. Wedding present to me and Pa. You can have it when I’m dead.’

There had been a hundred other objects in that house which had given the boy pleasure. He liked to press a latticed silver cake-slice against his cheek, open and close the clever silver asparagus tongs. Oh yes, and hear the chime of the grandfather clock (‘Wm. Muncaster, Whitehaven, 1871’) in the hall, a sound he for ever associated with the school holidays, with a white Christmas tree in December or with a vase of sweet peas in July and the end of Latin and rugby for a long and blissful while. Lal would observe him listening to the chimes of the clock, observe him with her blue eyes the colour of the sky, and touch his face with her hand in its silver-cleaning glove. ‘That’s so dear,’ she would say. ‘The way you love the Muncaster.’

And he would smile and suggest another show tune, so that she wouldn’t see that he was giggling at the way she, who had come to England from South Africa and still spoke with an accent which flattened vowels and slid numberless sounds in strange and embarrassing directions, used the word ‘dear’.

Anthony thought that Lal would have understood his longing to be a boy again. In the last fifteen years of her own life, he’d observed her thoughts returning quite frequently to Hermanus, where her parents had owned a villa within sight of the sea and where, in the South African summer, meals had been served by black servants (‘houseboys’) on a fifty-foot verandah. She told Anthony that she’d grown to love England, her adopted country, ‘but part of me stays South African, you know? I can remember African stars. I can remember being smaller than a Canna lily.’

Anthony sat on at his desk as a slow twilight descended over Chelsea, and glared at his address book. He wondered whether, tonight, he was going to be brave enough to call one of the ‘boys’. Without enthusiasm, he turned the pages of the book, reading names and telephone numbers: Micky, Josh, Barry, Enzo, Dave . . .

They challenged him. Hungry, vigorous, wild, they were all, he felt, more alive than he’d ever been. The last one to visit his bed had been the Italian, Enzo, with solemn eyes and a lovely pout. He’d worn an expensive shirt, but his shoes had been dusty and down-at-heel. He’d showed off his cock,
presented
it for admiration, ropey and big in his hands, as though offering it at auction.

Then, whispering in Anthony’s ear, the boy had begun a stream of dirty talk, a continuous, low accompaniment of smut. Anthony had listened and watched. The light in his bedroom was doused to dull amber and the body of the boy appeared smooth and golden, exactly what Anthony liked, the buttocks fat, almost womanish.

His arms went round Enzo. He touched his nipples, stroked his chest. He began to feel it, the first choke of desire, but then the damned monologue drifted into Italian and now had no meaning for Anthony, just became irritating, and he told Enzo to stop talking, but the boy didn’t stop, he was a dirty-talk diva, a smut-salesman and he was keeping on going.

Enzo lay on the bed. Anthony knelt. He still wasn’t hard. But he thought the fat buttocks might do it, if he concentrated on them, stroked and kneaded them, parted the flesh . . . But no, really and truly what he wanted to do, suddenly, was to slap them. Wound the Italian boy. Wound himself. Because it seemed so base, so pitiful, this getting of boys – just to prove that he was still alive as a man. It was ridiculous. He’d moved away from the bed, tugged on his robe, told Enzo to get up and leave. Paid the promised cash, stuffing it into the pocket of Enzo’s leather jacket and the boy went out, sulky and offended. Anthony had sat in his kitchen for a long time, had sat without moving, listening to the hum of the fridge, to the traffic on the road, aware that he felt nothing; nothing except rage.

Now, he laid the address book aside. The thought of a boy – any boy – in his bed made him feel tired. His body was having difficulty enough with mundane, everyday things. The base of his spine ached from sitting all day at the back of the shop. To walk as far as Knightsbridge made his feet sore. His sight was deteriorating so fast, he could hardly read his own price tags, even with his glasses on. So why on earth did he imagine that it could suddenly be overwhelmed by ecstasy or caught unawares by love?

He imagined it because, somehow, he had to find the means to go on, to persist. And what better thing to furnish the future than love of some kind?

Anthony rubbed his eyes, poured himself a tumbler of dry sherry and began to gulp it. He got up and walked about among the
beloveds
in the near darkness. He caressed them as he passed, his hand reaching out and reaching out again. He knew that he just couldn’t, at this moment, envisage a future of any kind. All he could envisage, all he could see waiting for him – for the once celebrated Anthony Verey – was a slow and lonely decline.

He thought about Lal’s grave in Hampshire and the beech tree that grew nearby. He longed for the sound of Lal’s voice, for the touch of a certain silver cake-slice against his cheek.

He paused beside a gold-framed engraving of an Italian garden (‘
Li Giardini di Roma
, one of 30 plates by de’ Rossi from the originals by Giovanni Battista Falda, 1643–1678’). He stared for a long time at the ordered alleys and parterres and at the happy sepia people walking at leisure there, with the soft hills beyond.

‘V,’ he said aloud. ‘I need rescuing. I’m sorry, darling, but I think it’s going to have to be you.’

Veronica Verey was a garden designer. Her latest project – not yet completed – was a book about gardens in southern France. The book’s working title was
Gardening without Rain
.

Veronica lived with her friend Kitty in a fine old stone farmhouse, ‘Les Glaniques’, in one of those villages south of Anduze, in the Gard, where the 21st century hardly seemed to have arrived and where Veronica went about her life in a mood of robust contentment. She was getting fat (as a girl, both she and her pony, Susan, had been described as ‘chunky’) but she didn’t mind and Kitty didn’t mind. They went together to the market at Anduze and bought bigger clothes.

Kitty, the only child of sad parents who had spent their lives trying to run a guest house on the Norfolk coast, was a watercolorist, who made a barely adequate living and who now, in a passionate response to the quality of the light in this part of southern France, was teaching herself photography. Kitty hoped to contribute all the pictorial material to Veronica’s book. She had waking dreams about its thrilling title page, with their two names side by side:

Kitty felt that all her life, until she’d met Veronica, she’d been a kind of no one, a watery nonentity, her habit of quietness, of self-effacement, formed early, when she’d been told as a child to stay out of sight and sound of the clientèle of the guest house. Now, at last, in her late fifties, she’d become visible to herself. She loved Veronica and Veronica loved her and together they’d bought their house and made their extraordinary garden, and so Kitty Meadows felt as though she was beginning everything again: beginning it better. At the age where many of their friends were giving in or giving up, Kitty and Veronica were trying to start over.

The house was half a mile from the village of Sainte-Agnès-la-Pauvre. From its terrace, looking west, you could see the great blue-green folds of the Cévennes hills, dense as a rainforest. Moments spent on this terrace, sipping wine and eating olives, listening to the swallows, face to face with sunsets of blinding red, were, Kitty Meadows felt, like no other moments in her life. She tried to find a word to describe them. The word she came up with was
absolute.
But even this didn’t quite capture what she felt. One night, she said to Veronica: ‘Part of me would like to die right now, this is so beautiful.’

Veronica laughed. ‘Tell that part to shut up, then,’ she said.

They both knew that it was borrowed: the view of hills; even the sunsets and the clarity of the stars. Somewhere, they knew it didn’t belong to them. Because if you left your own country, if you left it late, and made your home in someone else’s country, there was always a feeling that you were breaking an invisible law, always the irrational fear that, one day, some ‘rightful owner’ would arrive to take it all away, and you would be driven out – back to London or Hampshire or Norfolk, to whatever place you could legitimately lay claim. Most of the time, Veronica and Kitty didn’t think about it, until, suddenly, they found themselves objects of derision, sneered at as
putains de rosbifs
by a group of youths in a café in Anduze, or they remembered the time when the mayor of Sainte-Agnès-la-Pauvre had accused them of ‘stealing’ water from the commune.

Water.

For the sake of the garden, they’d been too profligate with it, testing to the limit local agreements about the use of hoses. ‘You have behaved,’ said the mayor, ‘as though you believed that, as foreigners, you were not subject to the law, or else pretended that you didn’t understand it.’

Veronica – as furious as when she and Susan had been drummed out of a three-day event for cutting a corner on a hurdles course – protested that this wasn’t true. They knew the law perfectly well and had kept within it, never watering before eight in the evening. ‘I agree,’ said the mayor. ‘You have kept within it – just – but not within the
spirit
of it. Your lawn sprinklers were overheard to be turning at midnight.’

It was true. They liked listening after supper, to the lawn sprinklers, as to a homely snatch of music, imagining the nourishment this music was giving to the thirsty grass.

Now, they sat in silence on the terrace, sunk in worry, staring at the vivid green, staring at their beloved flower borders until the only points of light that remained in them were the white petals of the Japanese anemones in the purple dusk. Veronica said: ‘Well, I suppose this garden will fail now. Half the gardens I’ve designed in this region will fail. I suppose it was all futile. How can anybody garden without rain?’

It became the question, then, the only one: how can you sustain a garden with such a low rainfall?

Kitty got up and paced about. Then she said: ‘There are ways of conserving and getting water that we haven’t thought about. We have to explore every one. We have to put certain bits of engineering in place.’

One of the many things Veronica valued about Kitty was her quiet practicality. She herself was clumsy, often confused by how things worked in the modern world; Kitty was orderly and resourceful. She could fix objects that were broken. She could mend the lawnmower and rewire a lamp.

So it was Kitty who set about solving the water crisis. She had their well cleaned and restored and bought a new pump that brought water up from nine metres down. She instructed work to begin on a second well. She installed new gutters, with underground conduits leading to a new concrete
bassin
beyond the fruit trees. New piping conducted bathwater into green plastic butts. Kitty and Veronica laid down heavy mulch on every centimetre of unplanted earth. They took out the thirsty anemones and substituted prickly pears and agavés. When the heavy autumn rains came, they religiously laid out barrows and buckets and bowls on the lawn and tipped every extra drop into the
bassin.
And, as if to compensate them for all this, the following summer was cool and wet, almost like a summer in England, and the new
bassin
filled to its brim. They invited the mayor down to the house and drank pastis with him and took him round the garden and showed him all their arduous work. It seemed to amuse him: all this for a plot of land on which hardly any vegetables were grown!