Window Boxes

Kate smiled at him in the seminar. He was here to re-train but he smiled back- the real business of his life had always been love affairs.

            She seemed unsure of herself like a performer on stilts, stepping carefully between desks during the coffee break. He absorbed it all: red hair, suede jacket with fake fur lapels; coloured flimsies to protect her work like a sensible head-girl.  He watched her in the car park turning perfect circles in a new Volkswagen, perhaps part of a divorce settlement, and saw the trailing geraniums on the back seat.

            ‘You’ve been watching me,’ she said in the café.

            ‘Yes..’

            ‘I’m a shy, 48-year-old woman. Once I had lovely plaits like Hiawatha.’

He bought two more coffees and when she asked about him, said he didn’t want to talk about his past.

            ‘I know,’ she said, ‘ you don’t need to - there’s a kinship between us..’

            ‘Soul-mates,’ he said, covering her long fingers with his.

            ‘Has anyone ever looked after you?’ She was frowning at the maidenhair fern hanging from the ceiling. ‘That needs water.’

            ‘Well, I’ve been loved…’

            ‘That’s not what I’m asking.’

            He knew it was a leading question and shook his head.

They made love in a hotel built in an abandoned Victorian gravel pit. Rare trees and smooth beech trunks crept over the crater tip. Limb-like roots twisted in empty space.

            He wanted to make love immediately but she believed in pacing, she was a gardener and told him all the names. Then he had to learn them in Latin before they could do it again.

            The course ended and he went back to London and she moved out of her shared house and garden to a caravan - it turned out she was married. She told him she missed her morning cigarette when her hands had wandered over rosemary spires and shaken dead leaves free.  She still gardened, and crammed little painted pots full of seedlings on to every available ledge. The wooden steps leading up to her door were framed with cuttings from her old job at the nursery.

            The romance was claustrophobic but all the more exciting for its locked-in strangeness. He said it was like concentrate, powdered soup – the holidaymakers had left so it was just them and a site manager and the North sea. By day they watched muddy waves breaking on heaped shingle beaches. At night the red lights of the gas terminal twinkled above the waves.

            ‘I’ll always be grateful for this,’ she said. ‘I know the rules. You’re a transitional man. They never stay.’

            She no longer paced their love-making with visits to local saw mills and one-room museums. Her desire was outgrowing his. He rather missed their outings. Her caravan steamed up with plant-breath as more and more plants were brought indoors from the cold.

Over the prawn crackers her bemused, brown eyes sought his.

            ‘What do you want?’

            He wanted to get the hell out of it.

            ‘To go on seeing you..’

            ‘Seeing me? That sounds pretty vague. Don’t want another half-life relationship…’ Her lovely white hands kept stroking the leaves of the restaurant’s dragon tree. She plucked off a brown frond.

            ‘Do pull yourself together…’ he said

            ‘I hate it when you say that. And the way you keep saying thank you all the time as if I’m a customer.’

            ‘Nothing wrong with being polite,’ he said

            ‘Nothing at all,’ she said,  ‘if you’re talking to your mother!’

Kate moved in with him in London. Typical, he thought, as soon as things go wrong we start living together.

             She took over the garden, a tiny concrete patio which she filled with heliotropes and an ornamental cat crouching in the periwinkle. She brought her tangy-smelling, lemon geranium from the nursery. It crept out of the kitchen window and he cursed it when he pushed the sash up at night. When they lay together, her clean hair smelt sweetish of artificial apples.

            ‘Rapido-libido,’ she whispered. ‘Is that all you are?’

            When she said she didn’t want to see him, he put on his best pious expression and nodded wisely. It was a compliment to her to look more upset than he felt. She moved out, into a top floor flat on a neighbouring street.

            One night he put out a few experimental tubers. ‘Don’t buzz my intercom,’ she said. So he stopped drinking in a pub where he had to pass her front door on the way home drunk.

            She pulled her blinds down, yet the more she withdrew, the more people took  notice of her top-floor flat. Her window boxes were the best in a competitive neighborhood: trailing orange nasturtiums dangled against the Victorian brick, grape hyacinths sprung to attention.

            She took risks with variegated foliage and bushy, unnatural shrubs. One time he saw a child’s windmill stuck in the box and a naked Barbie doll peering through the petunias.  Later, he wondered how he’d react if he saw another pair of hands between the plants.

            He walked down her street two or three times a day to see her window boxes. He stopped with an old man who fed sparrows from his basement flat and they looked at the flowers together. He told himself these floral displays were far-reaching messages, smoke signals across the rooftops. Rain hissed on grey slate but her flowers shone. Once he got so worked up he felt a tear trembling on his eye-lid; but then he saw the blind move and hurried off.

            And then, with winter, her mood changed – one window box was withdrawn and the one that remained became, in miniature, a memorial garden. Two dwarf conifers were planted at either end and in the middle were cold, white, winter cyclamen. He buzzed on her intercom with a cutting from a magazine that he knew she’d like, but there was no reply. When he walked down the street he had a stomach-ache. One day, on his way to work, he saw that the conifers had turned brown and weeds, dropped from passing birds, had grown into tall grasses.