The Steep Approach to Garbadale (6 page)

Alban made a slightly shamefaced apology to the memory of his real mother one night, then started to call Leah ‘Mum’.

After being frightened of him - and even resenting his presence - he started talking to the old gardener, Mr Sutton, who let him chatter away while he worked, and sometimes let him help.

Cordelia came along. This incredible new, tiny thing; a sister. Amazing. He realised suddenly they were a family. Cory took up a lot of his parents’ time, leaving him even more free to continue exploring the garden. Mr Sutton only came to the gardens in the afternoon of some days now, because he was getting on. Alban had started making maps of the garden, naming parts and features, invoking his own lore. They had very nice long, hot holidays abroad, and short, cold ones in Garbadale. Lots of sunshine was all right, for a couple of weeks, but then they had sun, sea and sand at Lydcombe, too, and the plants and gardens abroad always seemed rather garish and obvious compared to home.

As for the rocky desolation of the steep slopes around the waterlogged grounds and rhododendron-choked gardens surrounding the grim grey walls of Garbadale House; that meant little to him and somehow he never felt comfortable there. He did his best to enjoy whatever any given holiday offered (his dad had tried to get him to understand this: appreciate whatever life throws up, make the most of
now
, because all things change, and sometimes not to the good), but most holidays were merely different, not better, compared to life at home. After the first few days of any time away, he always found himself longing for Lydcombe, and whenever they returned from holiday he’d run out into the garden, across the lawns, through the orchard and the echoing abbey ruins, sometimes all the way down to the river and the sea.

Mr Sutton got really,
really
old and went into a Home; two lads from the village both called Dave did some gardening stuff sometimes, but they weren’t interested in talking to a kid Alban’s age. They used to make jokes about the herb garden which he didn’t understand, and they didn’t seem to care about the garden the way Mr Sutton had, but that just left it more to him, he felt.

Later, he wished he’d stopped just once to think about what a wonderful, privileged,
graced
life he’d been living then.

What happened, when he was eleven and about to go to big school, was that his dad sat him down one day and told him they were leaving Somerset, leaving Lydcombe. His dad was joining the family firm. He would need to work in the company’s main office. They would still come back, of course they would, but they were off to the big city now: London! Well, Richmond, which wasn’t far away, and had good train connections with the centre. They’d sorted out a good school nearby where he could be a day pupil and everything.

They’d left Lydcombe. Another lot of people, some aunt and uncle and their children - he was supposed to know them, but he couldn’t remember meeting them - were going to live there now, now that his dad was taking up a new post in the family and working in London.

He felt betrayed, exiled, cast out. Richmond was a strange, crowded, busy place after Lydcombe. The house was only a little smaller, apparently, but much more vertical and far more ordered; fewer eccentric corridors, half-landings, erratic staircases and oddly shaped rooms. It felt tight and constrained after Lydcombe, as though the building was forever standing at attention, incapable of relaxing. The garden was supposed to be huge but this was nonsense; he paced it out and reckoned it was barely half the size of Lydcombe’s walled garden alone. His dad was out to work most of the time.

Being taken to films and shows in London made up for some of this, but not all. School, after a couple of awkward weeks, was actually a comfort. All he had to do was alter his accent a little - though it had never been especially West Country in the first place - and take up the challenge of one boy who was older and even bigger than he was, but slow. They shook hands after the fight, which he thought was slightly hilarious; very jolly hockey sticks. He enjoyed learning, enjoyed being one of the lads, enjoyed being taken to London (especially if it was just him and his dad) and being allowed to wander the streets and parks of Richmond with his pals, but he missed Lydcombe more - he realised one terrible night - than he missed his dead mother.

Now Lydcombe had become the place to go on holiday to, rather than the place to go on holiday from; a destination, temporary and somehow conditional. The first time they went back, he noticed that the half-dozen or so of Andy’s paintings that had been left behind, a present to the house and its new inhabitants, had all been shifted, consigned to bedrooms rather than left in public spaces. If Andy was bothered by this, he didn’t say.

He had visited the estate with his mum and dad and sister Cory every year since the great move to Richmond, sometimes stopping for a week or two, sometimes just staying overnight, but he could only barely remember Sophie. He thought they’d each been five the last time they’d met. He had a vague recollection of having made her cry.

Since then their paths had contrived not to cross, even though Lydcombe was her home. Sophie was the child of Uncle James and his first wife, not Uncle James and Aunt Clara, so she was away a lot staying with her birth mother in Spain.

The first time he worked out the implications of this, he thought how weird it must be. Having two mothers wasn’t weird - he was used to that - but having two mothers who were each still alive. That
was
bizarre. It was only when he began asking other kids about this sort of thing that he started to realise it wasn’t that strange at all. Adults were definitely strange though.

He’d started taking charge of the garden at Richmond almost without noticing, from when he was about twelve. They had a gardener who came in, and he hung around with him a lot, asking questions, helping out and doing some of the spade work and the other heavy-lifting stuff that hurt Mr Reynolds’ back. He grew to love the work, love the horti lore, the vast hidden store of knowledge that seemed to exist behind every leaf and blade and petal and sod.

Kew Gardens was not far away. He went there first with his parents, one cool, misty autumn day, in a bad mood for some forgotten reason and really not wanting to be there at all, or anywhere with them (Cory came too, all simpering and sweet for a change, as if sensing his mood and deliberately trying to provide a contrast), but he was reluctantly impressed with the trees and shrubs and the stately, towering confection of the Pagoda looming through the haze. Then came the glasshouses. Those he was quietly stunned by, their smell and heat and pressing humidity containing a whole, fragrant, fabulous world of riotous greenery - plants from everywhere, dreamlike caricatures of plants, some almost night-marish, as though from alien worlds, all flourishing luxuriantly here under a grey English sky. Jets, also from all over the world, roared overhead in the murk every few minutes, on their way into Heathrow. He had to lean over and peer at labels as casually as he could, not wanting to show how deeply impressed he was, how much this was meaning to him. He already knew he’d be coming here a lot.

When he was asked what he wanted to do for his summer holidays in ’84 - he was fourteen and had been invited to come and stay with various outposts of the family, from Garbadale to the States to the Far East - he said he’d like to go to Lydcombe and work in the garden.

By the end of that first summer he’d already almost started to think of the place as his home again. The house itself was all very well, but it was the estate, the gardens, the plants - flowers, shrubs, trees and vegetables, even the differing species of grass on the lawns and meadows, as well as the animal life that they supported - that fascinated him.

An interest in horticulture was a bit naff, as his school pals had taken some satisfaction in telling him, and in a way he knew they were right. But there you were. He just found all this green, supposedly boring stuff utterly spellbinding. God help him, he was a teenager who got a real kick out of growing vegetables.

 
‘So, sitting on a rubber ring are we, Alban?’ Uncle James asked. ‘Pass the peas.’

‘Oh, my poor boy,’ Leah said, for perhaps the fifth time, from the other side of the table. There was a comforting smile on her face and a small, sympathetic groan in her voice.

‘Muuum,’ Alban said, glaring at her. Leah just smiled more widely. Alban passed the bowl of peas towards the head of the table. ‘Actually, it’s a cushion, Uncle,’ he told Uncle James.

God, this was embarrassing. He was horribly aware he must have sounded like a little child calling Leah ‘Mum’ like that. Not even just ‘Mum’, but ‘Muuum’, the sound all stretched out just as though a little kid had said it. He glanced down the table at Sophie, to see if she was smirking or giggling or anything, but she was just helping herself to more potatoes.

‘You poor lad,’ Aunt Clara said, brusquely. ‘Got to be careful round horses.’ Clara was a large, florid lady, prone to wearing smocks and headscarves. Alban didn’t think he’d ever seen her with her - sometimes disquietingly orange - hair worn down.

‘Doc says there’s no permanent damage,’ Andy said. Alban’s dad had insisted on being present when the doctor had examined him. That had been kind of embarrassing, too, though Andy had been very sympathetic. And it had been a young, female doctor. That had been
excruciatingly
embarrassing.

‘Family line secure then, is it?’ Uncle James asked Alban’s dad. Uncle James was a sort of nouveau fogey. He wore lots of waist-coats, those yellow check shirts real farmers rarely wear, and corduroy trousers, all of which helped bulk out his already slightly oversized frame. He had thick curly black hair, rosy cheeks and a nicely developing paunch.

Andy just smiled. Alban’s dad was normal in comparison; thinner, with straightish black hair already going grey. He had a kind-looking face with crinkly bits round his eyes that usually made it look like he’d spent his life smiling, but which occasionally - if you caught him just sitting alone, staring into space the way he did sometimes, and he hadn’t noticed you - made him look very sad, until he realised you were there.

‘You’ll be fine, won’t you, darling?’ Leah said, still smiling across at Alban. Alban’s mum was slight and pale but with the sort of cheerful character people usually associated with somebody twice her size. She had luxuriant quantities of curly blonde hair which she called her crowning glory. Also, as more than one of Alban’s school pals had pointed out to his intense discomfiture, she had - for her age - great tits.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he muttered. He bent over his plate and started removing the fat from the edges of the pork chops.

‘Hope you weren’t doing a Geldof in front of my little girl, Alban,’ Uncle James said, slathering apple sauce over his plate.

‘Sorry, Uncle?’

‘Swearing, like that Geldof guy. It’d only be natural, after getting kicked in the nuts like that; can see that, but I’m just hoping you managed to constrain your profanities from my little girl’s ears.’

‘James, please,’ Sophie said, rolling her eyes.

Sophie’s father made a show of turning round in his seat to look behind him at the dining-room door. ‘Somebody else come in?’ he asked, frowning mightily. ‘Somebody called “James”?’

‘Dad, Da, Pater, Papa,’ Sophie said through tight lips, glaring at him.

‘Oh! It’s me!’ Uncle James said, turning back. ‘Sorry, daughter.’

‘You’ll be glad to hear I didn’t have any spare breath to swear, Uncle,’ Alban told him. He glanced down the table. ‘Your daughter’s delicate ears were unpolluted.’

Sophie snorted. (‘Dear, really,’ her mother said. ‘You sound like a horse.’)

‘I can swear fluently in three different languages,’ Sophie said brightly, ‘Mother dear, Father darling.’

Uncle James was shaking his head. ‘Geldof geezer. Really. What was that group he used to be in? The Boomtown Cats?’

‘Rats,’ Alban said.

‘Oh, quite,’ agreed Uncle James. ‘Couldn’t believe it when he started swearing like that. On television.’

‘Dad, it was a
month
ago,’ Sophie protested. ‘Can’t you leave it? Anyway, he did it, it worked; he
got
people to give him their “fookin money”. And “fook the address”.’ She widened her eyes, lowered her voice and made a reasonable impersonation of an Irish accent as she pronounced the last three words. Cory, Alban’s minuscule but massively annoying eight-year-old sister, made a shocked peeping noise. Alban, laughing involuntarily, nearly choked on a mouthful of pork.

‘Now that’s
enough
, young lady,’ Uncle James said, suddenly serious and going rather red, pointing his fork at Sophie. ‘This is the dinner table.’

‘How much did you give to Live Aid, Daddy?’ Sophie asked. Alban would have sworn she fluttered her eyelashes.

‘That’s not really your concern, frankly,’ Uncle James told his daughter, and smiled.

‘Well,’ Sophie said emphatically, ‘I gave all the money I’d saved to go skiing last year.’

‘You mean all the money that I gave you to go skiing.’

‘It doesn’t matter where it came from,’ Sophie said emphatically, ‘what matters is where it went.’

‘Well bully for you. Hope the Ethiopians sent you a thank-you note. Now I’d like to get on with my dinner, if that’s all right with you.’

Sophie made a growling noise and stared at her plate.

‘Sophie, dear. Are you sure you won’t try one of the chops?’ Aunt Clara asked suddenly.

‘Mum,’ Sophie said, exasperated, ‘I’m a vegetarian!’

‘Yes, I know, dear. But they’re awfully good.’

Sophie just rolled her eyes. Her gaze caught Alban’s, and they shared one of those rueful
parents, eh?
smiles.

 
Back to Tango’s unlocked flat (these people live the US sitcom dream, where friends just wander into your apartment. Ha ha). From the living room, a voice Fielding doesn’t recognise is saying,